INTRODUCTION 1 I IT has been a custom for nearly one hundred years to denounce the Eighteenth Century; and one of the loudest accusers is Carlyle. He was, to be sure, more deeply interested in that period than in any other, and he devoted to it the most brilliant and elaborate of his historical studies. But he did not approve of it. Whatever he disliked was to him characteristic of the Eighteenth Century; whatever he liked was an exception to it. He calls it 'the sceptical century'; 'opulent in accumulated falsities'; 'swindling,' 'spendthrift'; 'unheroic, godless'; 'a time of quacks and quackery'; 'unbelieving '; 'mechanical'; 'prosaic'; 'selfish'; 'trivial'; a decrepit, death-sick Era of Cant.' This clamor has flown from mouth to mouth, and reverberates even to the present in well-worn epithets and vain repetitions of criticism. Johnson's time is still spoken of as the Age of Doubt; the Age of Reason; the Age of Pseudo-classicism, or of Artificiality; with other nicknames of a like sort. Nicknames are perhaps never quite fair; they exaggerate, caricature, or disparage, but they never tell the whole truth, and often not the most important part of it. 6 During such leisure, then, as we find for the study 1 References are often given to the Life (Dr. Hill's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson; to Misc. (Johnsonian Miscellanies, edited by Hill); to Lett. (The Letters of Samuel Johnson, edited by Hill); and to the Lives (Johnson's Lives of the Poets, edited by Hill). of Johnson's time, it will be better to forget the nicknames and denunciations, and to contemplate with open mind some of the great achievements of that age; nor will it be necessary to look for them far beyond Johnson's circle. It was the time when Reynolds and Gainsborough were painting portraits full of inexhaustible beauty and charm; when Goldsmith was creating his exquisite masterpieces in genre; when Burke was expressing his noble thought in classic eloquence; when Gibbon led forth the gorgeous but fading pageant of ancient Rome. Little or none of their essential greatness do these achievements owe to mere Reason, or Doubt, or Pseudoclassicism. More notable than these are the deeds, opinions, and character of Johnson, together with his portrait from Boswell's hand. Modern haste and prejudice have done much to warp our notions of Boswell and Johnson. A passing glance at Boswell's masterpiece, an amused impression of Macaulay's brilliant caricature, are about the sum of the common ignorance of Johnson. To most men he is a ponderous, uncouth, slovenly figure, gruff, ill-mannered, absent, unapproachable, unconsciously funny, blurting out his prejudices in unwieldy periods, and chiefly celebrated for sitting up late, drinking infinite tea, and writing an obsolete dictionary. And if aught else beside, he is a hide-bound Tory and Jacobite, hating all Whigs, Scots, French, and Americans, puffed up with insular pride, indifferent to the beauties of nature, to the arts, to all the finer things of life; venting himself in pedantic bombast and prosy moralistic abstractions, which have long since been relegated to the rubbish-heap of literature. There is but one way to understand a great portrait, whether it be the work of pencil or pen. Sit down patiently and open-mindedly before it; return to it from time to time; consider it familiarly, as if it were in the flesh-as if, for example, you were yourself living in Johnson's time; imagine yourself in his place, or him in yours. Then the merely grotesque and whimsical traits begin to fade, the superficial and illusory veil is slowly withdrawn, as a living man comes forth to meet us, full of life, strength, charm, and even of kindness and affection. He may indeed become what he has already been for many-the advisor, consoler, and intimate friend. There lives, for example, in a large American city, a busy man of affairs, who has essentially educated himself through years of deepening familiarity with Boswell's Life of Johnson. Since early manhood he has found for his scant leisure no other literary companion so responsive. At the age of thirty-one Stevenson wrote to a friend that he was reading Boswell 'daily by way of a Bible; I mean to read Boswell now until the day I die.'1 Sir Leslie Stephen said: 'I had the good fortune when a boy, to read what is to me, I must confess, the most purely delightful of all books— I mean Boswell's Life of Johnson. I read it from cover to cover, backward and forward, over and over, through and through, till I nearly knew it by heart.' 'On his deathbed,' says his biographer, he suffered little pain. He could see a friend almost every day. He was surrounded by the tenderest love and devotion, and he still could read.' Here follows a considerable list of authors. Then, when other books failed, he fell back upon the old, old story. Need I name it? He told his nurse that his enjoyment of books had begun, and would end with Boswell's Life of Johnson.' 3 II 3 92 It is commonly said, after Macaulay, that Johnson lives only in Boswell, while his own books are dead, 1 Letters 2. 133. 2 Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, p. 39. |