Читать книгу The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - James Boswell - Страница 203

[1069] ‘Harry Mackenzie,’ wrote Scott in 1814, ‘never put his name in a title page till the last edition of his works.’ Lockhart’s Scott, iv. 178. He wrote also The Man of the World, which Johnson ‘looked at, but thought there was nothing in it.’ Boswell’s Hebrides, Oct. 2, 1773. Scott, however, called it ‘a very pathetic tale.’ Croker’s _Boswell, p. 359. Burns, writing of his twenty-third year, says: ‘Tristram Shandy and the Man of Feeling were my bosom favourites.’ Currie’s Life of Burns, ed.1846. p. 21.

[1070] From the Prologue to Dryden’s adaptation of The Tempest.

[1071] The originals of Dr. Johnson’s three letters to Mr. baretti, which are among the very best he ever wrote, were communicated to the elegant monthly miscellany, The European Magazine, in which they first appeared. BOSWELL.

[1072] Baretti left London for Lisbon on Aug. 14, 1760. He went through Portugal, Spain, and France to Antibes, whence he went by sea to Genoa, where he arrived on Nov. 18. In 1770 he published a lively account of his travels under the title of A Journey from London to Genoa.

[1073] Malone says of Baretti that ‘he was certainly a man of extraordinary talents, and perhaps no one ever made himself so completely master of a foreign language as he did of English.’ Prior’s Malone, p. 392. Mrs. Piozzi gives the following ‘instance of his skill in our low street language. Walking in a field near Chelsea he met a fellow, who, suspecting him from dress and manner to be a foreigner, said sneeringly, “Come, Sir, will you show me the way to France?” “No, Sir,” says Baretti instantly, “but I will show you the way to Tyburn.”’ He travelled with her in France. ‘Oh how he would court the maids at the inns abroad, abuse the men perhaps, and that with a facility not to be exceeded, as they all confessed, by any of the natives. But so he could in Spain, I find.’ Hayward’s Piozzi, ii. 347.

[1074] Johnson was intimate with Lord Southwell, ante, p. 243. It seems unlikely that Baretti merely conducted Mr. Southwell from Turin to Venice; yet there is not a line in his Journey to show that any Englishman accompanied him from London to Turin.

[1075] See ante, p. 350, note.

[1076] The first of these annual exhibitions was opened on April 21, 1760, at the Room of the Society of Arts, in the Strand. ‘As a consequence of their success, grew the incorporation of a Society of Artists in 1765, by seccession from which finally was constituted the Royal Academy [In Dec. 1768].’ Taylor’s Reynolds, i. 179. For the third exhibition Johnson wrote the Preface to the catalogue. In this, speaking for the Committee of the Artists he says:—‘The purpose of this Exhibition is not to enrich the artist, but to advance the art; the eminent are not flattered with preference, nor the obscure insulted with contempt; whoever hopes to deserve public favour is here invited to display his merit.’ Northcote’s Reynolds, i. 101.

[1077] Hawkins (Life, p. 318) says that Johnson told him ‘that in his whole life he was never capable of discerning the least resemblance of any kind between a picture and the subject it was intended to represent.’ This, however must have been an exaggeration on the part either of Hawkins or Johnson. His general ignorance of art is shown by Mrs. Piozzi (Anec., p. 98):—‘Sir Joshua Reynolds mentioned some picture as excellent. “It has often grieved me, sir,” said Mr. Johnson, “to see so much mind as the science of painting requires, laid out upon such perishable materials: why do not you oftener make use of copper? I could wish your superiority in the art you profess to be preserved in stuff more durable than canvas.” Sir Joshua urged the difficulty of procuring a plate large enough for historical subjects. “What foppish obstacles are these!” exclaims on a sudden Dr. Johnson. “Here is Thrale has a thousand tun of copper; you may paint it all round if you will, I suppose; it will serve him to brew in afterwards. Will it not, Sir?” to my husband who sat by. Indeed his utter scorn of painting was such, that I have heard him say, that he should sit very quietly in a room hung round with the works of the greatest masters, and never feel the slightest disposition to turn them, if their backs were outermost, unless it might be for the sake of telling Sir Joshua that he had turned them.’ Such a remark of Johnson’s must not, however, be taken too strictly. He often spoke at random, often with exaggeration. ‘There is in many minds a kind of vanity exerted to the disadvantage of themselves.’ This reflection of his is the opening sentence to the number of the Idler (No. 45) in which he thus writes about portrait-painting:—‘Genius is chiefly exerted in historical pictures; and the art of the painter of portraits is often lost in the obscurity of his subject. But it is in painting as in life; what is greatest is not always best. I should grieve to see Reynolds transfer to heroes and to goddesses, to empty splendour and to airy fiction, that art which is now employed in diffusing friendship, in reviving tenderness, in quickening the affections of the absent, and continuing the presence of the dead.’ It is recorded in Johnson’s Works, (1787) xi. 208, that ‘Johnson, talking with some persons about allegorical painting said, “I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.”’ He bought prints of Burke, Dyer, and Goldsmith—‘Good impressions’ he said to hang in a little room that he was fitting up with prints. Croker’s Boswell, p. 639. Among his effects that were sold after his death were ‘sixty-one portraits framed and glazed,’ post, under Dec. 9, 1784. When he was at Paris, and saw the picture-gallery at the Palais Royal, he entered in his Diary:—‘I thought the pictures of Raphael fine;’ post, Oct. 16, 1775. The philosopher Hume was more insensible even than Johnson. Dr. J.H. Burton says:—‘It does not appear from any incident in his life, or allusions in his letters, which I can remember, that he had ever really admired a picture or a statue.’ Life of me, ii. 134.

[1078] By Colman—‘There is nothing else new,’ wrote Horace Walpole on March 7, 1761 (Letters, in. 382), ‘but a very indifferent play, called The Jealous Wife, so well acted as to have succeeded greatly.’

[1079] In Chap. 47 of Rasselas Johnson had lately considered monastic life. Imlac says of the monks:—‘Their time is regularly distributed; one duty succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity…. He that lives well in the world is better than he that lives well in a monastery. But perhaps every one is not able to stem the temptations of publick life; and, if he cannot conquer, he may properly retreat.’ See also post, March 15, 1776, and Boswell’s Hebrides, Aug. 19, 1773.

[1080] Baretti, in the preface to his Journey (p. vi.), says that the method of the book was due to Dr. Johnson. ‘It was he that exhorted me to write daily, and with all possible minuteness; it was he that pointed out the topics which would most interest and most delight in a future publication.’

[1081] He advised Boswell to go to Spain. Post, June 25 and July 26, 1763.

[1082] Dr. Percy records that ‘the first visit Goldsmith ever received from Johnson was on May 31, 1761, [ten days before this letter was written] when he gave an invitation to him, and much other company, many of them literary men, to a supper in his lodgings in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street. Percy being intimate with Johnson, was desired to call upon him and take him with him. As they went together the former was much struck with the studied neatness of Johnson’s dress. He had on a new suit of clothes, a new wig nicely powdered, and everything about him so perfectly dissimilar from his usual appearance that his companion could not help inquiring the cause of this singular transformation. “Why, Sir,” said Johnson, “I hear that Goldsmith, who is a very great sloven, justifies his disregard of cleanliness and decency by quoting my practice, and I am desirous this night to show him a better example.”’ Goldsmith’s Misc. Works, i. 62.

[1083] Judges, v. 20.

[1084] Psalms, xix. 2.

[1085] Psalms, civ. 19.

[1086] Boswell is ten years out in his date. This work was published in 1752. The review of it in the Gent. Mag. for that year, p. 146, was, I believe, by Johnson.

[1087] He accompanied Lord Macartney on his embassy to China in 1792. In 1797 he published his Account of the Embassy.

[1088] It was taken in 1759, and restored to France in 1763. Penny Cyclo. xi. 463.

[1089] W. S. Landor (Works, ed. 1876, v. 99) says:—‘Extraordinary as were Johnson’s intellectual powers, he knew about as much of poetry as of geography. In one of his letters he talks of Guadaloupe as being in another hemisphere. Speaking of that island, his very words are these: “Whether you return hither or stay in another hemisphere.”’ Guadaloupe, being in the West Indies, is in another hemisphere.

[1090] See post, April 12, 1776.

[1091] ‘It is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction.’ The Idler, No. 58. See also post, under March 30, 1783, where he ranks the situation of the Prince of Wales as the happiest in the kingdom, partly on account of the enjoyment of hope.

[1092] Though Johnson wrote this same day to Lord Bute to thank him for his pension, he makes no mention to Baretti of this accession to his fortune.

[1093] See ante, p. 245. Mrs. Porter, the actress, lived some time with Mrs. Cotterel and her eldest daughter. CROKER.

[1094] Miss Charlotte Cotterel, married to Dean Lewis. See post, Dec. 21, 1762.

[1095] Reynolds’s note-book shows that this year he had close on 150 sitters. Taylor’s Reynolds, i. 218.

[1096] He married a woman of the town, who had persuaded him (notwithstanding their place of congress was a small coalshed in Fetter Lane) that she was nearly related to a man of fortune, but was injuriously kept by him out of large possessions. She regarded him as a physician already in considerable practice. He had not been married four months, before a writ was taken out against him for debts incurred by his wife. He was secreted; and his friend then procured him a protection from a foreign minister. In a short time afterwards she ran away from him, and was tried (providentially in his opinion) for picking pockets at the Old Bailey. Her husband was with difficulty prevented from attending the Court, in the hope she would be hanged. She pleaded her own cause and was acquitted. A separation between them took place.’ Gent. Mag. lv. 101.

[1097] Richardson had died more than a year earlier,—on July 4, 1761. That Johnson should think it needful at the date of his letter to inform Baretti of the death of so famous a writer shows how slight was the communication between London and Milan. Nay, he repeats the news in his letter of Dec. 21, 1762.

[1098] On Dec. 8, 1765, he wrote to Hector:—‘A few years ago I just saluted Birmingham, but had no time to see any friend, for I came in after midnight with a friend, and went away in the morning.’ Notes and Queries, 6th S. iii. 321. He passed through Birmingham, I conjecture, on his visit to Lichfield.

[1099] Writing to Mrs. Thrale from Lichfield on July 20, 1767, he says:—‘Miss Lucy [Porter, his step-daughter, not his daughter-in-law, as he calls her above] is more kind and civil than I expected, and has raised my esteem by many excellencies very noble and resplendent, though a little discoloured by hoary virginity. Everything else recalls to my remembrance years, in which I proposed what I am afraid I have not done, and promised myself pleasure which I have not found.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 4.

[1100] In his Journey into Wales (Aug. 24, 1774), he describes how Mrs. Thrale visited one of the scenes of her youth. ‘She remembered the rooms, and wandered over them with recollection of her childhood. This species of pleasure is always melancholy. The walk was cut down and the pond was dry. Nothing was better.’

[1101] This is a very just account of the relief which London affords to melancholy minds. BOSWELL.

[1102] To Devonshire.

[1103] See ante, p. 322.

[1104] Dr. T. Campbell (Diary of a visit to England, p. 32) recorded on March 16, 1775, that ‘Baretti said that now he could not live out of London. He had returned a few years ago to his own country, but he could not enjoy it; and he was obliged to return to London to those connections he had been making for near thirty years past.’ Baretti had come to England in 1750 (ante, p. 302), so that thirty years is an exaggeration.

[1105] How great a sum this must have been in Johnson’s eyes is shown by a passage in his Life of Savage (Works, viii. 125). Savage, he says, was received into Lord Tyrconnel’s family and allowed a pension of £200 a year. ‘His presence,’ Johnson writes, ‘was sufficient to make any place of publick entertainment popular; and his approbation and example constituted the fashion. So powerful is genius when it is invested with the glitter of affluence!’ In the last summer of his life, speaking of the chance of his pension being doubled, he said that with six hundred a year ‘a man would have the consciousness that he should pass the remainder of his life in splendour, how long soever it might be.’ Post, June 30, 1784. David Hume writing in 1751, says:—‘I have £50 a year, a £100 worth of books, great store of linens and fine clothes, and near £100 in my pocket; along with order, frugality, a strong spirit of independency, good health, a contented humour, and an unabating love of study. In these circumstances I must esteem myself one of the happy and fortunate.’ J. H. Burton’s Hume, i. 342. Goldsmith, in his Present State of Polite Learning (chap, vii), makes the following observation on pensions granted in France to authors:—‘The French nobility have certainly a most pleasing way of satisfying the vanity of an author without indulging his avarice. A man of literary merit is sure of being caressed by the great, though seldom enriched. His pension from the crown just supplies half a competence, and the sale of his labours makes some small addition to his circumstances; thus the author leads a life of splendid poverty, and seldom becomes wealthy or indolent enough to discontinue an exertion of those abilities by which he rose.’ Whether Johnson’s pension led to his writing less than he would otherwise have done may be questioned. It is true that in the next seventeen years he did little more than finish his edition of Shakespeare, and write his Journey to the Western Islands and two or three political pamphlets. But since he wrote the last number of The Idler in the spring of 1760 he had done very little. His mind, which, to use Murphy’s words (Life, p. 80), had been ‘strained and overlaboured by constant exertion,’ had not recovered its tone. It is likely, that without the pension he would not have lived to write the second greatest of his works—the Lives of the Poets.

[1106] Mr. Forster (Life of Goldsmith, i. 281) says:—‘Bute’s pensions to his Scottish crew showing meaner than ever in Churchill’s daring verse, it occurred to the shrewd and wary Wedderburne to advise, for a set off, that Samuel Johnson should be pensioned.’ The Prophecy of Famine in which Churchill’s attack was made on the pensioned Scots was published in Jan. 1763, nearly half a year after Johnson’s pension was conferred.

[1107] For his Falkland’s Islands ‘materials were furnished to him by the ministry’ (post, 1771). ‘The Patriot was called for,’ he writes, ‘by my political friends’ (post, Nov. 26, 1774). ‘That Taxation no Tyranny was written at the desire of those who were then in power, I have no doubt,’ writes Boswell (post, under March 21, 1775). ‘Johnson complained to a friend that, his pension having been given to him as a literary character, he had been applied to by administration to write political pamphlets’ (Ib.). Are these statements inconsistent with what Lord Loughborough said, and with Boswell’s assertion (Ib.) that ‘Johnson neither asked nor received from government any reward whatsoever for his political labours?’ I think not. I think that, had Johnson unpensioned been asked by the Ministry to write these pamphlets, he would have written them. He would have been pleased by the compliment, and for pay would have trusted to the sale. Speaking of the first two of these pamphlets—the third had not yet appeared—he said, ‘Except what I had from the booksellers, I did not get a farthing by them’ (post, March 21, 1772). They had not cost him much labour. The False Alarm was written between eight o’clock of one night and twelve o’clock of the next. It went through three editions in less than two months (post, 1770). The Patriot was written on a Saturday (post, Nov. 26, 1774). At all events Johnson had received his pension for more than seven years before he did any work for the ministry. In Croft’s Life of Young, which Johnson adopted (Works, viii. 422), the following passage was perhaps intended to be a defence of Johnson as a writer for the Ministry:—‘Yet who shall say with certainty that Young was a pensioner? In all modern periods of this country, have not the writers on one side been regularly called hirelings, and on the other patriots?’

[1108] See ante, p. 294.

[1109] Murphy’s account is nearly as follows (Life, p. 92):—‘Lord Loughborough was well acquainted with Johnson; but having heard much of his independent spirit, and of the downfall of Osborne the bookseller (ante, p. 154), he did not know but his benevolence might be rewarded with a folio on his head. He desired me to undertake the task. I went to the chambers in the Inner Temple Lane, which, in fact, were the abode of wretchedness. By slow and studied approaches the message was disclosed. Johnson made a long pause; he asked if it was seriously intended. He fell into a profound meditation, and his own definition of a pensioner occurred to him. He desired to meet next day, and dine at the Mitre Tavern. At that meeting he gave up all his scruples. On the following day Lord Loughborough conducted him to the Earl of Bute. The conversation that passed was in the evening related to me by Dr. Johnson. He expressed his sense of his Majesty’s bounty, and thought himself the more highly honoured, as the favour was not bestowed on him for having dipped his pen in faction. “No, Sir,” said Lord Bute, “it is not offered to you for having dipped your pen in faction, nor with a design that you ever should.”’ The reviewer of Hawkins’s Johnson in the Monthly Review, lxxvi. 375, who was, no doubt, Murphy, adds a little circumstance:—‘On the next day Mr. Murphy was in the Temple Lane soon after nine; he got Johnson up and dressed in due time; and saw him set off at eleven.’ Malone’s note on what Lord Bute said to Johnson is as follows:—‘This was said by Lord Bute, as Dr. Burney was informed by Johnson himself, in answer to a question which he put, previously to his acceptance of the intended bounty: “Pray, my Lord, what am I expected to do for this pension?”’

[1110]

‘In Britain’s senate he a seat obtains

And one more pensioner St. Stephen gains.’

Moral Essays, iii. 392.

Johnson left the definition of pension and pensioner unchanged in the fourth edition of the Dictionary, corrected by him in 1773.

[1111] He died on March 10, 1792. This paragraph and the letter are not in the first two editions.

[1112] The Treasury, Home Office, Exchequer of Receipt and Audit Office Records have been searched for a warrant granting a pension to Dr. Johnson without success. In 1782, by Act of Parliament all pensions on the Civil List Establishment were from that time to be paid at the Exchequer. In the Exchequer Order Book, Michaelmas 1782, No. 46, p. 74, the following memorandum occurs:—“Memdum. 3 Dec. 1782. There was issued to the following persons (By order 6th of Nov. 1782) the sums set against their names respectively, etc.:—Persons names: Johnson Saml, LL.D. Pensions p. ann. £300. Due to 5 July 1782, two quarters, £150.”

This pension was paid at the Exchequer from that time to the quarter ending 10 Oct. 1784. ‘It is clear that the pension was payable quarterly [for confirmation of this, see post, Nov. 3, 1762, and July 16, 1765] and at the old quarter days, July 5, Oct. 10, Jan. 5, April 5, though payment was sometimes delayed. [Once he was paid half-yearly; see post, under March 20, 1771.] The expression “bills” was a general term at the time for notes, cheques, and warrants, and no doubt covered some kind of Treasury warrant.’ The above information I owe to the kindness of my friend Mr. Leonard H. Courtney, M.P., late Financial Secretary to the Treasury. The ‘future favours’ are the future payments. His pension was not for life, and depended therefore entirely on the king’s pleasure (see post, under March 21, 1775). The following letter in the Grenville Papers, ii. 68, seems to show that Johnson thought the pension due on the new quarter-day:—

‘DR. JOHNSON To MR. GRENVILLE.

‘July 2, 1763.