THE POWER OF DR JOHNSON

Press, 2 December 1978, Page 15

THE POWER OF DR JOHNSON

lamuel Johnson. By Walter Jackson Bate, Chatto anil Windus. 646 pp. >36.45.

(Reviewed by Mervyn Palmer)

W. Jackson Bate, Lowell Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, had already etsablished himself as an outstanding biographer 0< literary figures with his studies of Keats and Coleridge. The new j'ography of Samual Johnson is his second major contribution to Johnsonian studies and there can be little doubt that it will be remembered os one of the great biographies of the twentieth century.

There are those who say that Johnson is remembered only because Bosweli wrote about him. The Boswell biography remains a significant landmark in the history of English literature and continues to stand apart as a series of fascinating records of encounters between the biographer and his subject, and conversational encounters between that subject and other men of the times. It is natural that Boswell should have written about the Johnson he knew, but the friendship was between Boswell and a much older man and the extent of the contact betweep them is surprisingly limited. Walter Bate turns the searchlight on to every part of the life of Samuel Johnson. He explores the relationships that grew between Johnson and many men and - women who inhabited the several worlds in which he moved. Not only does he once more turn the old soil from which our partial knowledge of Johnson has sprung, but he a’so sifts and riddles the material, applying to it his remarkable blend of academic, disciplines which permit him to explore with competence the inner reaches of a complex personality. He complements the rich material of Boswell with close studies of Johnson’s parents, teachers, youthful friends, and particularly, those models cf his early life. Cornelius Ford and Gilbert Walmesley. He pays close; attention to the marriage with Elizabeth (Tetty) Porter and he relates the later life of his subject against the closely researched background of Henry and Hester Thrale and their children whom Johnson “adopted” as his family. A masterly and rather merciless uncovering of the mindless rejection of the ageing and ailing Johnson by Hester Thrale, olaces her account of him as a main secondary source in proper perspective.

Johnson’s right to be regarded as a powerful literary figure, and not

merely as a man who talked a lot and wrote a little, is returned to him. Bate illustrates throughout the biography those qualities that give enduring magnificence to the best of Johnson’s prose. He reminds us that Johnson tackled his major literary works when there was an absence of precedent for ensuring success in the tasks undertaken. The “Dictionary” is an astonishing feat when compared with its parallels in France and Italy. “The Lives of the Poets” paved a new way for the development of critical biography which, 200 years later, seems to reach a high point in this exhaustive study of the man who loved most of all to write biographical works.

Bate forces us to reconsider dur views where we have been influenced to believe that Samuel Johnson set himself up as supreme judge of the Englisb poets. If his “sentences” were too often harsh and opinionated according to current appraisal, we have to recall the models, or the absence of them, that Johnson had to draw upon. Literary giants Such as Pope and Swift knew well how to pen with bitter ink. In his most sensitive and skilled penetration of the mind of Samuel Johnson and of the inner forces that moved him, Professor Bate stresses the significance of a relatively early poetical work, “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” This revelation of . an “. . .

inner landscape of the mind. . .”15 seen to be less a middle-of-life summary by Johnson of what had gone before and more a central statement that remained relevant to ail that was to come in his later life. Appreciating this work, we may understand better Johnson’s bursts of feverish creativity, his long periods in the grip of indolence, his natural tendency to radiate in company and the curse of those deep-of-night fears of being alone that are associated with the more profound and prolonged periods of the most terrible depression. Bate is fascinated by Johnson’s struggles with the ill-fated drama’ “Irene.” He also draws much upon the half-biographical tale of “Rasselas” for clues to the character of his subject, but he weaves through the whole biography those significant strands that he finds woven through “The Vanity Of Human Wishes."

For Samuel Johnson, there was to be no final discovery of the universal “truth” that would bring deep spirtual calm. The development of a moral philosophy that was profound and influential was unaccompanied by any resolution of great personal doubts and by any soothing of the darkest inner fears. Johnsonian essentialism at the personal level remained strictly within the walls of reason. One wonders what might have occurred had his explorations catapulted him over those walls of reason into the nomrational state of sudden enlightenment. As it was, Johnson was destined to live to his last day with what he described as . the general disease of my life. . ." and Professor Bate confirms that . he was to remain by his own definition a ’pilgrim’ until the end.”

Analysis of the political Samuel Johnson serves to warn the reader against the -generalisations we have been too ready to make about the man, for the focus is upon a careful review of Johnson’s political persuasions associated accurately with eighteenth century political terminology.

This is immaculate history drawn together in a graceful literary style that will win the general reader as readily as it will impress the scholar. It is doubtful that even Samuel Johnson, who often declared that he rarely read a book from end to end, would find the 600 pages of text a word too long. For anyone joining the Johnsonians, or for that matter the anti-JOhnsonians, failure to possess Walter Jackson Bate’s biography will lead inevitably to defeat in combat.