DR JOHNSON

Evening Star, Issue 21968, 2 March 1935, Page 20

DR JOHNSON

CONTENTED WITH LIFE HIS SURVIVAL IK BOSWELL AN ENGLISH TRIBUTE It is 150 years since Dr Johnson died, writes J. B. Firth, in the 4 Daily Telegraph.’ All the Johnsonian societies are marking the event, and a memorial service in St. Paul’s Cathedral will be followed by a banquet in the Barbers’ Hall, by Cripplegate. Apart from these gregarious celebrations many a cheerful glass will be raised to the immortal memory of one whose fame still goes bravely swinging round the world. Nothing can ever stop it now. The knowledge would have rejoiced his heart. He loved recognition. He held his head more proudly and—l suspect—lurched with a mightier stagger after King George 111. had been so gracious to him in the Queen’s Library. The King’s compliments he accepted without foolish demur. 44 It was not for me,” he said, 44 to bandy civilities with my Sovereign.” In the same spirit to-day his holy and convivial Shade will accept our pious homage. It is good to remember on this head one of Boswell’s stories. While taking tea one day with Johnson and Mrs Desmoulins the conversation turned on the world’s inadequate recognition of Johnson’s merits. Why had he not been called, they asked, to some great office, or why had he not attained great wealth? The old man—it was the year before his death— “ flew into a violent passion and commanded us to have done.” “I never have sought the world,” he said; “the world was not to seek me. It is rather wonderful that so much has been done for me. All the complaints which are made of the world are unjust. I never knew a man of merit neglected; it was generally by his own fault that he failed of success.” OF NO USE. Neither office nor great wealth would have been of much use to Johnson. Office he would certainly have bungled; wealth would have meant to him a more frequent surfeit of oysters for his cat, Hodge; larger allowances for the rather quarrelsome menage of decayed gentility which he maintained in his own house, and more bountiful largesse for the beggars in Fleet street and the Strand. Johnson had reason to be well satisfied Vith life. He had fought his way out of deep poverty to fame _ entirely by his own genius and application. He had the friends he needed and the friends he desired. The best minds of his day came to be proud to match their wits, their scholarship, their criticism with his. Burke, Garrick, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Windham, Adam Smith, Robertson, Burney—what a company! And for more than twenty years Boswell to record the talk! Mrs Thrale, too, the brightest, cleverest woman of her day, was his faithful, adoring, and long-suffering hostess. Above all there was The Club—where in his later years all the company vied in their attention to him. What more had life to give, when once he had settled his account with Lord Chesterfield ? True, he left ho one to carry on his name. But that did not trouble him. “ I never wished,” he once told Mrs Thrale, “to have a child.” Yet one can never be sure. Many have uttered the like sentiment aloud in order to quiet the cry of the heart within. Skip a generation after _ Johnson’s death, and see in what estimation he was held. By Charles Lamb and his friends, for example, when they gathered to talk books and play whist in the Temple. “In general,” wrote Hazlitt, “ we were hard on the moderns. The author of the 4 Rambler ’ was only tolerated in Boswell’s 4 Life ’ of him,” THE SAME STORY. Crabb Robinson’s witness in 1843 is the same. “ I ought,” he writes “ perhaps to be ashamed to confess that in my youth I was much better acquainted with the ‘ Rambler ’ than with the ‘ Spectator.’ But warm admiration of Johnson has been followed by almost disgust, which does not, however, extend to the Johnson of Boswell.” But the locus classicus on this question of liking or disliking Johnson is in 1 Cranford,’ where Miss Jenkyns tried to crush Captain Brown—an enthusiast for the * Pickwick_ Papers,’ at that moment appearing in monthly parts—by reading to him a chapter from 4 Rasselas.’ The captain was not impressed. “ Miss Jenkyns drew herself up with dignity, and only replied to Captain Brown’s last remark by saying with marked emphasis on every syllable: 4 1 prefer Dr Johnson to Mr Boz.’ 41 It is said—l won’t vouch for the fact—that Captain Brown was heard to say, sotto voce: 4 D n Johnson.’ ” For a full century the general verdict has agreed with Captain Brown. The 4 Rambler ’ long since rambled off into the night. 4 Rasselas ’ for most of us is unreadable. The 4 Lexicon ’ is only remembered by those who speak of Johnson as 44 the lexicographer.” The 4 Journey to the Hebrides ’ has blossomed into a second spring, but mainly because the idea of Dr Johnson 44 hiking ” in the Western Isles is so deliciously incongruous and his adventures are soi entertainingly told. As stylist and master of the written word Johnson is dead beyond revival. But the Johnson of Boswell—ipse ipsissimus the real man himself—is as eternal as the Boswell of Johnson. They are inseparably associated for all time. The memorial service will indeed celebrate them both. And let no man put them asunder.

HIS MONUMENT. Several references to St. Paul’s appear in Boswell, but it is never mentioner by the doctor, though he lived so close. No, it is always Boswell who goes to St. Paul’s to worship in the pages of the ‘ Life ’ —and always on Easter Sunday morning—and then, tho service over, the edified Boswell walked down' Ludgate Hill and along Fleet street to call on his idol in Johnson’s court or Bolt court and engage him in talk. The doctor preferred his own seat in St. Clement Danes. He never gave St. Paul’s a ‘Rambler ’ as Addison once gave Westminster Abbey a ‘ Spectator.’ Yet St. Paul’s holds his monument, and a shocking bad monument it is. Who, indeed, is this great, bullocking fellow displaying vast expanses of bare chest, and arm in Roman style, and reading from a scroll? Who, indeed? It is hot Johnson. Johnson, of course, would have been mightily indignant had his “ lapidary inscription ” been in any other language than Latin, but here, too, Dr Parr was quite at his heaviest and worst. Eleven hundred guineas of public subscription have rarely been worse expended than on this luckless monument by Bacon. What I would respectfully suggest, therefore, to the Johnson societies is that they should persuade the Dean

and Chapter of Westminster Abbey to allow Dr Johnson, not a monument, huh a bust near his grave. It was there, in Poet’s Corner, that his friends and contemporaries expected his monument to he placed. Whether it was that the Abbey authorities recoiled—as well they might) before an early glimpse of Bacon’s monstrous statue—l do not know. But if they had foreknowledge of that work I can well understand how gladly they waived their prescriptive right, when the Dean and Chapter of St. Faul’a resolved that they, too, would begiif to embellish the vast and hitherto empty spaces of their cathedral with statues. I would plead for a -bust of Johnson near where he and Garrick lie in the last sodality of the dust. BUSTS OF JOHNSON. A grave and dignified memorial busf of Johnson stands in Lichfield Cathedral, done by Sir Richard Westmacott* but where is Nollekens’s bust, which Chantrey, the sculptor, declared to bo “ the finest head our friend ever produced”? He admired it, in fact, so much that at Nollekcns’s sale he instructed “ Rainy Day Smith ” to buy it for him. This bust presented Dr Johnson without his wig and wearing thick and heavy locks which much displeased him* for Johnson, with sound good sense* insisted that all persons should be portrayed as they are seen in company. Where this Nollekens’s bust now i| I do not know. Nor may it be procurable even for so hallowed a purposo as that which I have mentioned. If not, a bust of the authentic Johnson, taken from one of his familiar portraits and executed by_ a sculptor expressly commissioned to give it a likeness which is like, would be, I think, the most appropriate tribute that could be offered to Johnson’s memory in the London which he loved.