Samuel Johnson should be best known as the father of modern literary criticism. Before him, there were mostly what we would today call works of literary theory, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s “Art of Poetry”, which explained the nature of literature. That had mostly been the case in literary studies since antiquity. Commentary was reserved for the Bible and the works of theologians. Johnson, on the other hand, made observations about the author and about lines within the texts of Shakespeare and all the other major poets in English in the century before he wrote so as to make the texts more accessible and therefore pleasurable for the reader and so led to the false conclusion that criticism was a parasitic discipline that lived off the literature upon which it commented rather than was the application of the personality, wisdom and wit of the commentator to make these secular texts come alive by providing comments on them.
Today, Johnson is perhaps best known as the subject of what is generally acclaimed as the best biography ever written: James Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”. It should be said, though, and not to take anything away from Boswell’s work, that the largest and liveliest part of that work consist of Johnson’s conversations, full as those were of intriguing and original observations about politics, people, religion and culture, that Boswell hurried home to copy down after they were uttered at one or another of the salons that Johnson attended, often with other members of what were known as Johnson’s circle, those including Oliver Goldsmith, the playwright and poet; Sir Joshua Reynolds, the painter; and David Garrick, the actor and former student at a school for boys that Johnson had run in his younger days so as to support himself and his wife while he tried out a career in letters, that meaning to write for publication, which was a chancy career both then and now. It should be remembered that Johnson was not known as “Dr. Johnson” until much later in his career when, already illustrious as a literary personage, the title was awarded to him as an honorary one in recognition of his services to literature, he having earned many years before an M. A., no mean feat in its time.
The recognition was well deserved. Johnson was master of a variety of forms of literature: the essay, the play, the novel, travel literature, literary commentary, biography, and even poetry, though that might be the weakest of his efforts, suitable only for graduate students who have to know the range of his work. Indeed, I would go so far as to claim that Johnson was a one man Enlightenment, in that his own work paralleled much of what was going on in France at the same time among their intellectual class. Johnson’s efforts, however, are better described as an anti-Enlightenment because they were in the service of a profoundly Conservative sense of religion and politics as well as a Conservative sense of the nature of the human condition which can remain reliable for all those who today want to consider themselves Conservatives without that just meaning giving more money to the rich and being cruel to the poor. I want to begin my own commentaries on Johnson by considering one of his less known works, the biography which he entitled “The Life of Richard Savage”.
In that work, Johnson launches his readers into a tragedy, perhaps based on Euripides’ “Medea”, because it concerns a mother who abandons a child out of a malice no one can understand or credit, including the father of the child, who wishes it no ill will, though Johnson’s interest in this very melodramatic story is less the fateful events which set it into motion than what happens to the child when that person is an adult, his insistence on reclaiming his claim on his birth fortune more important to him than what he might otherwise do with his life, given his talents, that unwholesome disposition foretold by the way he haunts his mother when he finds out, as a young man, that that is who she is. This tale of baleful and exaggerated emotions is not told in dialogue but in the very turgid and balanced prose style for which Johnson is justly famous and which he deploys throughout his writings, none of them comic, all of them, at the least, strikingly sad.
By way of introduction to a tragedy told in full in less than fifty pages of prose, Johnson provides an introduction that shows what a sad sense he has of life, and how that might be considered a statement of a profoundly Conservative point of view. I quote the first paragraph in full so my reader can get a sense of how muscular the prose is, not flabby, though every bit as truthful as Polonius’s advice to Laertes. Johnson is as sentences as those of Polonius, though less optimistic. This rhetorical style is no longer admired, but it supplies the moral lesson Johnson wishes to draw about the miseries of human life right at the beginning of a story filled with deep and even unplumbed emotions.
It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature o fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of hapiness; and that those whom the splendor of their rank or the extent of their capacity have placed upon the summits of human life have not often given any just occasion to envy those who look up to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturallyliable to fatal miscarriages; or that the natural lot of mankind ismisery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe.
So Johnson is saying that great generals are more likely to suffer greater defeats than the rest of us and we are all more aware of the divorces of Hollywood stars than we are of divorces in general. True enough, but there is a deeper point here, which is that social class, always a preoccupation of an English writer, is not as important as it is cracked up to be because we are all subject to the misfortunes that are part of the human condition, and so do not think that improving your social class will make that much of a difference. The important things in life happen to everyone, and those include the truly perverse emotions and ill fortune that will plague the subject of this biography. Making life a bit more pleasant will not make it benign, only ease the pain.
This view is profoundly different from the Liberal view that would attempt to and continues to try to replace it. To the Liberal, money or social class does make a difference in that private wealth or government supplied services can make it possible for any person to become a hero in his or her own life, become someone who pursues great goals that accomplish astonishing results, whether of creativity or entrepreneurship or of science, whereas people without such resources will inevitably lead a life of simple drudgery. While the Liberal sees the freedom of the spirit made possible or released by money, Samuel Johnson sees the misery inherent in the human condition that afflicts all of the classes, even if it is better to be prosperous because that allows a person to be, at the least, comfortable, if not venturesome. And the false pursuit of a fortune which, in fact, Richard Savage had been wrongfully denied, Johnson never leaving any ambiguity about the justness of Savage’s cause, led Savage into a distorted and futile life, as his story shows, and that leads to the best joke of the biography. Johnson says: . That is, of course, what Johnson himself had done.
And so Richard Savage becomes what we would today call a literary celebrity. He produces plays and essays and memoirs, including declamations against his mother, that let everyone know his story, and he spends his time drinking and carousing, waiting for others to pick up the bill, and getting himself into scrapes, even up to and including a murder charge, that people for whom he is a favorite get him out of. He is at the mercy of his patrons and yet he continually disappoints them. He is like Norman Mailer was in the not too remote past, though not nearly so gifted. Mailer wrote about himself, doing foul things, like stabbing his wife, for which his friends had to find an excuse, and vouching for a murderer sentenced to life in prison because of the lifer’s literary talent, only for the lifer to murder again when he gets out. Something of a scalawag and irresponsible, but charming and talented nonetheless.
Johnson shows that Savage is not only illustrious but that he has what we might consider a complex character in that he is not dominated by any single motive, and so an example of a type, as would have been true in Ben Johnson or even Shakespeare except that in Shakespeare the characters get away from the author and so become far more than the theory of types would allow. Othello is not just his ambition and Brutus is not just a Stoic Roman doing his duty, though they are those things as well. Savage, for his part, is garrulous, mean-minded, creative, irresponsible and so many other things, shifting from one to the other even if doing so a bit more than most people do, either then or now.
More than that, and this is key, Johnson shows Savage to have a complex rather than just a multi-faceted character. What that means is that Savage profits from reflecting on his character so as to change what will be its dominant themes, most importantly in recognizing that his lament about his mother’s injustice to him can become a source of income, and a badge to carry around so that he might be recognized as a singular figure. This is not enough to make him introspective, but it is enough to give him internality, a depth of self if not of self-awareness, and so a very modern sort of man, just the sort of man coming into prominence at the time of the Enlightenment.
And, as befits a tragic hero, Richard Savage has a fatal flaw of character which, as Johnson explains, is the same sort of flaw that most people share, though not in such an exaggerated degee.
[Savage] imputed the slowness of [the sales of his works] to other causes; either they were published at a time when the town was empty, or when the attention of the public was engrossed by some struggle in Parliament, or some other object of general concern; or they were by the neglect of the publisher not diligently dispersed, or by his avarice not advertised with sufficient frequency. Address, or industry, or liberality, was always wanting; and the blame was laid rather on any person than the author.
The consequence of this flaw is very Dantesque in that the punishment fits the sin. Savage lives a very modern kind of nightmare. He is down and out in London, his fortunes rising when he has money to spend because of his pension from the Queen or the largesse of friends, but he goes through that money very quickly, never putting any aside, and is back on the streets, sleeping or eating where and when he might, until his next bit of good luck, never settling down to the quiet and secure life that most people want, Samuel Johnson believes, and that most people can manage by budgeting their expenses. Instead, Savage is constantly reminded of his misfortunes, which he blames for the whole of his life on the people who have not been gracious enough when offering their charity, and so are spurned. Savage is blind to his own actions as having caused his distress. He is clearly defective, but that does not remove the poignancy from his condition, or the sense that this need not have been, his suffering apparent to all who run into him. This is the way he lives out his life, ever reminded of the precariousness of his fortune, something he may justly lay at the feet of his mother’s malice, but now the result of his own imprudence. No beggar is worse off in that a beggar is not reminded regularly of a descent into squalor. This is what can happen to a man of the city who has no refuge, no place or people to take him in because he rejects them all. Savage has internalized the lack of rootedness that is a danger to every urban dweller, especially in a London where people regularly rise up only to be drawn down by drink or other misfortune. Johnson’s view of life is very bleak.
Savage dies in Newgate prison, a debtor. Johnson gives a good deal of attention to a plan Johnson and his friends had concocted to take care of Savage, perhaps because Johnson was one of the main benefactors, whereby the benefactors would provide him with a living if he would make his way to and stay there. But that didn’t work out because by the time he got to Bristol he had already run out of money and his friends had to send more. He took up residence in Bristol but led the same sort of life he had led in London: charming benefactors and then making them weary or no longer willing to give away money, Savage looking ever more threadbare and so ever less welcome in their homes despite the fact that his wit and charm do not seem to have run out and so staying in attics in dilapidated inns.
Savage seems a test case for the unworthy poor that would become a staple in the Conservative theory of the poor. You cannot do much to help them because they will not keep their end of the bargain. They will be profligate with the funds you provide and ask for ever new handouts because the only one with an investment in their success is their benefactors, not the person who is willing to throw away money and expect a handout in return and who will blame the benefactors for their fate, never being grateful or responsible to the benefactors. Liberals may think charity is best exercised when people do not need to be appreciative of it, but conservatives want to be thanked, and so they are fanciful in their portrait of the poor as unworthy. Ronald Reagan thought welfare queens drove up to the welfare center in their Cadillacs to scam some more money away from respectable citizens. Don’t be taken in by false charity. Poor people aren’t nice.
Johnson, however, did not have that view. First of all, Savage had had enough advantages so that he could have made something stable out of his life. He suffered from a character flaw more than from poverty. The dynamics of begging that Johnson observed-- a person getting ever more seedy and unattractive-- hold up well enough, but Johnson was never cruel. He, famously, did not want to deprive the poor of their gin, however much it contributed to their degeneration, because gin was one of the few avenues of solace that they possessed. Rather, this biography is a lament for a man of talent and wit who could not build a stable life for all of that. He was enough like Johnson, whose own house was filled with hangers on who could not make it on their own, for Johnson to feel genuine sympathy. It is just that Johnson was more of a student of the peculiarities of the human character and of how people in the roles of beggar and benefactor behave than he was a social reformer who offered programs rather than insights into the human character.
The best comparison to make for Richard Savage is to the title character of Denis Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew”, which was written in the 1760’s or 1770’s, though not published until the Nineteenth Century. some years after Samuel Johnson’s work, which was published in 1744, and so the inventor of this sub-genre of the maladroit and doomed failure. Rameau’s nephew is also a hanger on, this time in Paris intellectual society rather than the intellectual society of London. He gives music lessons rather than writing literature. Like Richard Savage, he leads a scattered life, poorly dressed, living where he can, wondering why the A-List dinner parties are no longer open to him. But unlike Savage, who seems to suffer some kind of personality deficit while still maintaining an ambition to make a name for himself, the younger Rameau is a contrarian cynic. He denies that there are great people who deserve their reputation, which is as good a refutation as there can be that there is some justice in the social order. He thinks that most work, such as giving music lessons, is mostly a scam to get money from people by flattering the parents of his students. And most of all, he has a complex personality of the sort that is likely to turn up in a cosmopolitan city where some people live by their wits and their contacts rather than by their talents, the real wealth of these people their ability to refract their circumstances through themselves and turn that, so they think for a while, to their own advantage, only to find that people come to see them as frauds, as not true to some inner core other than their appearances, and so the flotsam that rises out of the miasma of cities. The discovery of such a personality is supposed to be the invention of the French Enlightenment, elaborated not only by Diderot, but also Beaumarchais and De Clos, but I have suggested that it is also explored by Samuel Johnson for his own purposes, which are to see how fragile is a person’s situation in society rather than just how fragile or duplicitous is a personality, as well as for how people can work to accommodate as well as to spurn such a resolutely unpleasant fellow.
Samuel Johnson gets the last word. Diderot writes a comedy about grandiosity. His protagonist is a complicated clown, but a clown nevertheless. Johnson, on the other hand, is writing about the pathetic life of someone who could have led a better one if he had not been so impaired by his upbringing or whatever psychological abnormality he suffered from. Diderot is sophisticated about human personality but Johnson is more full of sadness about what the human condition can hold.