Perdurable Johnson
James Engell
Shake eare, Johnson remarks, “long outlived his century,” the rough proof of a classic mentioned by Horace. Johnson himself is now entering his fourth. What explains the
amina of his reputation? Why do skeptical and re less readers, even more than docile and traditional ones, develop a life-long passion for his writing? e relevance of his radical power continues to surprise. Of all authors in English not regarded chiefly as poets or noveli s, Johnson remains the mo popular and mo profound. And no other writer’s life, in so far as it is known by fa and not fueled by eculation, has fascinated readers more.
His varied record as an author remains a onishing, hardly believable. He ands as one of a handful of superb poet-critics con antly read and consulted. e Lives of the Poets is widely regarded as the greate single work of criticism in English. His moral writings, primarily in the Rambler, Idler, and Adventurer, depi a complex, modern ethical universe. His wit, uniting rength of mind with happiness of language, is quoted almo as o en as Pope’s work, which itself falls second only to Shake eare’s. Johnson’s conte philosophique or fi ion Rasselas, written in one week fir to raise money for his ill mother and then to defray the co of her burial, has never gone out of print. Translated into dozens of tongues, it sells thousands of copies every year. His Di ionary proves him the greate lexicographer in English, or any language. Given the texts and scholarship available to him, his edition of Shake eare permanently elevates Johnson in the ranks of all succeeding commentators and editors, who continue to draw on remarks in his Preface as well as on observations and notes attached to individual plays. e broad, brilliant imitations of the Roman satiri Juvenal, London and e Vanity of Human Wishes, offer trenchant social, political, and personal attacks, yet in the Vanity Johnson cuts satire short in order to create enduring wisdom literature. He di ills Juvenal’s bile and Pope’s emetic into a bittersweet liquor. Possessing the verbal sharpness of Pope, as well as the moral outrage and scathing redu ionism of Swi , Johnson foregoes exercising them fully. In ead, he turns them to a meditation on the inadequacy of any human
irit to meet its own case, be its own god. Johnson is also one of the mo intriguing and accurate of travel writers. A
Journey to the We ern Islands of Scotland forms the perfe companion to Boswell’s Tour. 5

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Sermons Johnson wrote ill find hearing in services. e five volumes of the Hyde edition of his letters refle his place in the highe company of either familiar or formal corre ondents. e twenty-seven Parliamentary Debates, almo a half million words, reveal Johnson as an acute political journali . He writes eeches that for decades everyone would credit to Pitt the Elder, Walpole, and others as model orations rivaling the be of ancient performances. Johnson translates the French version of Father Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, some of it ex tempore while propped up in bed, as well as later rendering part of Sallu into English. Working early in his life with the Harleian Miscellany, he becomes the cataloguer and annotator of some 35,000 titles from that extraordinary private colle ion. His tragedy Irene, performed in 1749 some twelve years a er its composition, runs nine nights at a time when three recovered all co s.
“Goldsmith,” he said, “was a man, who, whatever he wrote, did it better than any other man could do” (Life). Yet, what Johnson produced as a Latin epitaph for Goldsmith, a writer whose career and fame he secured by recognizing the genius latent in the manuscript of e Vicar of Wakefield—that Goldsmith le scarcely any yle of writing untouched and touched nothing that he did not adorn—could serve as his own with more ju ice. Au en identifies Johnson as her favorite prose author—for contemporary poetry she remarks that she would not mind being called Mrs. George Crabbe, and Crabbe is, not coincidentally, another writer whose career Johnson promotes. A young Mary Woll onecra meets and admires Johnson (she invokes him o en in her work). So does Frances Burney, and the admiration becomes mutual. Later in his life, at Oxford, he makes a toa to shock, “Here’s to the next insurre ion of the negroes in the We Indies,” knowing that insurre ions were murderous and bloody. Elsewhere he asks, “How is it that we hear the loude yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” and writes a court brief in behalf of a man threatened with slavery to argue that slavery is illegal in Scotland. Johnson becomes a proto-abolitioni . In youth he considered law as a career. Later, in helping Robert Chambers compose the Vinerian law le ures, Johnson emerges as a significant if gho ly legal authority. “ e law is the la result of human wisdom a ing upon human experience for the benefit of the public.” Oxford does not confer on him the degree L.L.D., but rather Do or of Civil Law.
His learning—va and varied, not re ri ed to literature and hi ory—is comparable to Milton’s or Coleridge’s. Adam Smith would declare that “Johnson knew more books than any man alive,” and Smith was no friend. Yet, Johnson writes a yle open and accessible to the entire literate culture, now as well as then. His language retches but doesn’t baffle the mind. Citation, reference, and pedantry were in his day common and increasing, but he applies learning to the business of living more than to the di lay of knowledge. Aside from editorial work on Shake eare and Crousaz’s commentary on Pope’s Essay on Man, his pages harbor few notes, all short.

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By force of chara er and conversation, in refle ion and repartee, as well as through the unning gi s of Boswell—who ent fewer than 400 days in his company, not the years many suppose—Johnson becomes the subje of a brilliant biography, the enduring touch one for that kind of writing. Among the fir to realize that modern fi ion would increasingly portray the fabric of daily life, his own condu and work lay the groundwork for life writing that has rong affinities with the novel. Boswell the biographer learns much from Johnson.
Of all this any attentive or scholarly reader is probably aware. It is a precarious thing to propose, but if generations of readers in various walks of life continue to cherish his thought and language for more than cultural authority, clubable familiarity, and sound bites veneered with age (“trumping life with a quote,” as Heaney puts it), those readers discover and return to him because they recognize in Johnson a refusal to narrow his focus, a desire to regard literature as a source of delight—“tediousness is the mo fatal of all faults.”
e unweathered appeal of his writing does not re in providing refinement for learned journals or seminars any more than his own life acquires its la ing intere by offering a caricature of his person for a quip or cartoon. A rong, multi-dimensional individual invites caricature, and for contra ed minds the temptation to reduce a larger figure becomes hard to resi . Every generation entertains its superficial Johnson, Great Cham, Ursa Major, High Church and Tory persona, its Macaulay-in ired way of cramming an eagle in a pigeon hole. As with all such tags, those applied to Johnson contain some truth, but accepted as the truth they are false.
e endless accumulation of details impervious either to a general consideration of persi ent human concerns or to an allied interpretation of perennial literary debates is an undertaking Johnson a ually dete s. He belongs more to the common reader than to the common scholar. Common scholars realize this lea . What he says of the reception of Gray’s “Elegy” expresses his sentiment: “I rejoice to concur with the common reader, uncorrupted with literary prejudices.” Johnson seems always to keep in mind that his reader might well be poor rather than rich (yet intere ed in learning and art), and employed in gainful business rather than research. To make Johnson the province of professors or the property of editors betrays his own efforts. His authorial aims are to increase happiness by rendering vivid a sober though entertaining account of human ethical motives, faults, and successes; to advocate redu ion of undeserved inequality and inju ice; and to engage both his audience and himself in a que for virtue and self-knowledge. He values what can be put to use and for this reason admits, “the biographical part of literature is what I love mo .” It “gives us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use,” or, as he puts it in Idler 84, what is “mo easily

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applied to the purposes of life.” Perhaps the advertisement to the Lives of the Poets sums it up be : “the hone desire of giving useful pleasure.”
“QUID FACIAM?”
Johnson’s achievement grew from the odyssey of his own self-examined life checkered by, as Aeschylus calls it, “what is fated.” Tubercular infe ion in infancy and early childhood le his face scarred for life, with sight and hearing both impaired. As a child or in adolescence (we do not know which), he suffered smallpox, which further disfigured him. Time in his father’s bookshop, as well as early acquaintance with his cousin Cornelius Ford, secured precocious learning. But a er thirteen months at Oxford, poverty forced him to leave. His only sibling, a brother, seems to have committed a serious, perhaps a capital offence, and then died young. ( e only reference we have to him from Johnson comes years later in a single diary entry immediately following a prayer for their mother, who had ju died: “ e dream of my Brother I shall always remember.”) As a young teacher founding his own school, Johnson failed financially, though he formed a life-long bond with one pupil, David Garrick, who later helped produce and a ed in Irene. Johnson’s varied friendships tended to la , for he was loyal. Years later he ood at Garrick’s grave during the funeral, as Richard Cumberland reported, “bathed in tears.”
Depression hit Johnson hard in his early twenties and again in his mid fi ies. He feared for his sanity, and there is clear evidence that soon a er he le Oxford he seriously contemplated suicide. Boswell’s biography largely leaves out this private fear and fa . Johnson felt, during these two periods of his life, that rational self-control might disintegrate. He was experiencing mental dissociation and depression so severe that he might not recover. Later, He er rale said that in his diligent udy of medicine he “had given particular attention to the diseases of the imagination, which he watched in himself with a solicitude de ru ive to his own peace, and intolerable to those he tru ed” (Anecdotes). A er completing more than a decade of gi ed jobwork, much of it for the Gentleman’s Magazine, he can, in retro e , be seen as one of the mo famous anonymous authors in English. Lord Che erfield’s promised patronage of the huge Di ionary proje paid him nothing, but did prompt one of the mo dignified and acerbic letters of retort in the language. Not until Johnson was forty did any significant work, e Vanity of Human Wishes and Irene, appear under his own name.
As a young man he was grateful to think that any woman might find him attra ive, but his seventeen-year marriage, however devoted at times, was rained and childless. Elizabeth Porter, twenty years his senior, died when he was forty-two, and he never remarried. His grief remained for years. “He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and intere ; from the only

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companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the pa or anticipate the future” (Life).
He ruggled continually again what he identified as melancholy, escapism, procra ination, and guilt, exacerbated by what He er rale called “vain hopes of performing impossibilities.” “No disease of the imagination,” claims Imlac in Rasselas, “is so difficult of cure as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then a interchangeably upon us, and so o en shi their places that the illusions of one are not di inguished from the di ates of the other.” In middle age Johnson fought successfully— and certainly feared—incipient alcoholism. (“Ab inence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”) Beset by what has variously been diagnosed as Tourette’s Syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or simply nervous tics that he could not suppress even in familiar company—Pope said these habits made the young Johnson “a sad e acle,” and they didn’t improve—he later also suffered insomnia and acute loneliness. If he found some comfort in the church and in the belief that the crucifixion of Jesus redeems humankind, he also found no easy re in religion but in ead, o en, a rebuke to his own habits. He rarely attended services, something for which he criticized Milton severely. Inner confli chara erized his inner life. One diary entry simply reads, “Mens turbata. is a ernoon it snowed.” Shortly before he died, he burned at lea two quarto volumes of private writing. Some infrared reading of a long-buried London ash heap would reveal secret thoughts that he carefully recorded but then ju as deliberately de royed.
His own efforts at self-knowledge involve self-imposed guilt. “Know yself,” written in 1772 a er enlarging and corre ing the Di ionary, eaks about “one punishment, for the mo impenitent . . . I find myself ill fettered to myself . . . my heart is illiterate, and my mind’s rength an illusion. What then am I to do? Let my declining years go down to the dark? Or get myself together . . . and hurl myself at some task huge enough for a hero?” (original in Latin, trans. John Wain). As if he had not already performed several such tasks— but he was never satisfied with himself. His personal life presents a series of ruggles that he does not always resolve but at lea endures, o en by humor, and by finding a way to endure he gives hope to anyone facing similar trials.
A MIND OF LARGE GENERAL POWERS
In conversation he can “talk for vi ory” and vie with opponents for the la word, but his essays rarely take the vantage of personal superiority. While articulated in an uncommonly superior way, their ru ure grows from a felt moral commonality. e Rambler essays engage generation a er generation of readers because their author has read then corre ed his own reading by experience, because he continues to learn and corre apparently even

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as he writes, turning on himself, and because he grapples with difficulties unfolding on the page that prove as hard for him to resolve as for his readers. He becomes a sympathetic though persi ent and tough-minded inquisitor, interrogating others and at the same time asking himself if the critical refle ions and ethical judgments by which one lives possess that quality without which all else—learning, wealth, prizes, degrees, privilege—becomes empty chatter or, as he calls it, cant. at quality is hard to define, but if any single word represents it, perhaps the be choice is hone y, including being hone with one’s self. e desire to achieve this quality—and it mu be achieved, any dolt can express an opinion—he approximates in his thoughts on the Lives of the Poets, the critical and biographical work culminating his career and drawing on almo every other kind of writing he pra iced. He remarks in April 1779 that he was composing the Lives “I hope in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion of Piety.” By this he means not cultivating religious thought alone, or even primarily religious devotion, but family experiences, scholarly learning, arti ic creativity, civic re onsibility, and personal integrity, all dedicated toward living life ethically, not by receipt but by trial and effort. Such hone y is a form of modern heroism.
Johnson’s hone y, coming from observation, reading, and painful self-corre ion, is literary (expressed in language drawn in part from reading), religious, and traditional, but also experiential and at times remarkably uneasy about tradition. As it was for the Royal Society, the general motto of the Rambler, from Horace, is “take nothing on authority,” Nullius addi us jurare in verba magi ri. Chara eri ically, Johnson in the Life of Dryden later remarks, “Reason wants not Horace to support it.” Even an authority warning again authority is no genuine argument again —or for—authority. Johnson recognizes a changed world in which force, wealth, and ation, while powerful and at times commanding deference, can no longer and unchallenged. ey mu pass te s of empirical scrutiny or else perish: “We have done with patronage.” “No man was ever great by imitation.” “Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.” His own Irene helps to persuade him that imperial tragedy has little future on the age. He reje s the critically revered dramatic unities of time and place. For him, the heroic ceases to mean prowess in arms and romance, exploits in sex and violence. In ead, it points to the individual, independent mind attempting to renovate known truths, e ablish new knowledge, and improve personal and in itutional condu .
Yet, more than renovating known truths, Johnson’s thought unearths private truths about ourselves we would rather not face, exposes the evasions we pra ice, and adds this twi : the more sophi icated and resourceful we are, then the more elaborate, successful, and even pleasing are the self-delusions we pra ice. e benevolent, wise, benign, and thoroughly mad A ronomer in Rasselas, one of the mo psychologically compelling chara ers in English fi ion—he might by another name be plucked from

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the pages of Dickens—demon rates this humanely analytic power of Johnson’s writing, but only if we realize that the ory is about ourselves. ankfully, by the end of the tale, the A ronomer appears at lea partially rehabilitated by the friendship, conversation, and support of Nekayah, Pekuah, Rasselas, and Imlac.
In many atements Johnson advocates reason, but he never discounts the inadequacy of reason, riven with error and pun uated by mortality, to meet its own predicament. Errors of government and war, errors of intelligence, errors of parenting, errors of filial duty, errors of ingratitude and loyalty alike, errors of temptation to power or de air— these he has experienced intimately, and they become his theme from “ e Young Author” through e Vanity of Human Wishes, the moral essays, and Rasselas. e mo common phrase in his poetry comprises but two words: “in vain.” As if this inadequacy were not enough, something worse intervenes. e world rewards genial mediocrity with a comfortable place, or higher, more regularly than it recognizes merit that has only merit to recommend itself. Without personal favor, prejudicial group support, financial advantage, and concerted networks of advancement—all of which average talent frequently enjoys—superior accomplishment finds it hard even to appear equal. Furthermore, such accomplishment raises resentment, o en seems a rebuke (because occasionally it is), and plants the seeds of envy: “Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.”
Beyond the world of literature—formal literary udy was ju beginning to shape itself into a particular, professional branch of knowledge that would, for better or worse, increasingly be associated less with the older sense of literature or letters as all knowledge conveyed in language and more with individual arti ic expression and critical opinion— Johnson a ively pursues intere s in chemi ry, agriculture, commerce, manufa uring, navigation, and technology. He writes prefaces and advertisements for books on, among other subje s, geography, trigonometry, medicine, geometry, and foreign trade. He
udies medical diagnoses and advances. A main motive for his travel to the extremities of Scotland, then considered remote and primitive, is intense curiosity about an oral culture barely surviving. He concludes that he has arrived too late to witness its vitality. Johnson gra s the place and o en unfair fate of indigenous populations and, de ite his opposition to the American Revolution (urged by his close friend Henry rale, a member of parliament, to write again it), he is of no imperial mind. Idler 81 for Saturday, November 3, 1759, excoriates Europeans, and for their treatment of native North Americans calls both the French and English “the sons of rapacity.” White settlers and their armies are fa turning a missionary religion into hypocrisy. One of Johnson’s political pamphlets, oughts on the Late Transa ions Re e ing Falkland’s Islands, meditates how frequently and with what facile calculation many leaders urge war, and how readily many unthinking citizens follow them.

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Readers perusing the full run of Ramblers may be surprised to see how many he devotes to marriage, courtship, and dome ic affairs, presenting, for his time, a surprisingly even-handed treatment of gender. In Johnson’s chara ers and personae there is no particular di ribution of wisdom between the sexes. If Imlac seems wise (and a little weary), Nekayah can be wise, too, yet fresh. Johnson chides Milton for “something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings. . . . He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.” Johnson notes cau ically that Milton “diligently su ained” the “superiority of Adam” over Eve, both “before and a er the Fall.”
Anyone who claims a new angle on Johnson mu temper self-advertisement with an incalculable debt to generations of writers and teachers who have worked to present him fully. e task, then, is not so much to reveal a e s of Johnson that no one has ever recognized—that verges on arrogance. e difficulty is to keep in play and give to a ive memory a comprehensive account of all his thought. Few have done this. It is difficult for at lea two related reasons: fir , the re less fertility and surprisingly unorthodox nature of that thought—surprising even to Johnsonian eciali s—enmeshed, as many of its particulars are, in a world that at times seems di ant and alien, at other times weirdly familiar; and, second, the resulting temptation to simplify and reduce Johnson’s thought, to dome icate and label it, compounded by the inevitable process of intelle ual amnesia that infe s humani ic more than scientific learning.
Such a fragile hold on colle ive learning possessed by any generation Johnson re e s and emphasizes. “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.” Or, “No place affords a more riking convi ion of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.” In facing rather than finessing or denying these fa s, he attains impersonal rength— rength of intelle , not personality—and this e ablishes his paradoxical authority. Paradoxical, because his authority is, in the end, not personal, but based on an extraordinary ability to see, admit, and express obje ively the complex process of human reality, of the individual inner life confronting a global presence at times so discomfiting or, at the lea , so relatively impervious to any one person’s exi ence, that we end much of life alternately seeking and reje ing that reality in, as Fro phrases it, “a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Johnson’s admiration of Shake eare and his explanation for that playwright’s continued popularity re on Shake eare’s arti ic adherence to this broader reality, reality perceived imaginatively yet without illusion. Shake eare presents “the ability of truth.” His dialogue “seems scarce to claim the merit of fi ion,” and “even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life.”
To apprehend such an encompassing reality and then to make sense of it from the andpoint of almo any compartment of knowledge is rare. It does not chara erize

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the mind that ecializes, however brilliantly, in one field because it can never hope to excel in any other. Rather, it has a capacity to turn intelligence almo anywhere. So, in the Life of Cowley, Johnson does not define genius as it’s usually under ood—an individual of supreme gi s in one career or endeavor. In ead, “ e true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular dire ion” (emphasis added). Such a mind could pursue myriad other dire ions with di in ion.
It is, mo ly, a lo art of judicious criticism carefully to balance positive qualities of a writer again flawed or deficient ones. Yet, every critic who exercises this (Johnson on Shake eare, Coleridge on Wordsworth) realizes that here there is no immunity: all writing is subje to such an assay, a conclusion expressed by the olde of critical proverbs, even Homer nods. “For faults and defe s every work of man mu have,” says Johnson of Paradise Lo , and “it is the business of impartial criticism to discover” them. A fully disintere ed criticism, which does not exi except as an ideal approached asymptotically, though an ideal worthy of emulation rather than of sophi ical scorn, will look at every detail and will su e , then recognize, and finally excoriate, as be it can, its own pre-judgment. Prejudice is present at the outset of every critical a .
We sometimes are by wishful affinity and identification seduced into patching over the cracks in our idols. Johnson makes some summary judgments that betray a lack of imagination and prescience. His dismissive verdi on Tri ram Shandy is one example.
e violent preference he expresses for Richardson over Fielding reveals something almo prudish. Few critics berate Shake eare for puns, yet Johnson does so severely. His impatience forecloses appreciation of Lycidas and of the pa oral mode generally. His under anding and reje ion of Hume as an athei is inaccurate, and this misconception colors his entire approach to Hume’s thought. Johnson usually belittles romances as fanta ic, even corrupting, but he cannot “cure” his own long-time addi ion to them, and romance imagery o en animates his writing, for example, at the beginning of e Vanity of Human Wishes. e Life of Milton is at times patently unfair. Johnson’s initial letter to He er rale on hearing about her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi is harsh and without sympathy. (He makes amends, as he usually does, this time in another letter four days later.) Johnson realizes that Burke thinks more deeply in judgment and in a more complex manner than he does about many matters and all political ones. Burke is the only person he declines to debate. Taxation No Tyranny seems child’s play next to Burke’s On Conciliation with the Colonies. Johnson thinks it takes more arti ic imagination to animate and imitate the complexity and cellular ru ure of reality than it does to create fantasy. (“ e basis of all excellence is truth.”) But were he alive in a later century he might look with intere on the creations of Lear, Carroll, Clarke, Bradbury, Stapledon, Tolkien, Lessing, and Pullman.

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LANGUAGE ALLIED TO LIFE AND MANNERS
Johnson realizes that mundane language will not conjure up reality or lived experience with intere or credibility. Such usage only deepens verbal ruts. Yet, he gra s that no convention can simply be ignored. e ruts may be avoided but not the road. e admixture of convention with innovation, the avoidance of ock phrases coupled with the ingenious neologism, by these the language is preserved and refreshed. e Di ionary is in a uality the work of many hands; the examples that Johnson sele s from “the be writers” evince his predile ion for usage that marries the common and familiarly accepted with the newly normative drawn from authors of ecial talent. Like Chaucer before him (Johnson once proposed a life of Chaucer and an edition of all his writing), he under ands that language cannot be fixed; it alters as common usage alters but also becomes a sharper medium through which to see the world when resourceful writers both li en to the crowd and have its ear. For that reason he turns to those writers as authorities and, by doing so, vicariously makes himself one. Shake eare employs more words than any other poet; Milton comes second; Milton colle ed three volumes of notes for a Latin di ionary; Johnson wrote a two-volume folio one of English; Coleridge was the in iring grandfather of the Oxford English Di ionary (his grandson was its fir editor). It is more rare than commonly assumed for poets and critics to consider works, words, and world fully in concert.
Above all, Johnson keeps in mind and heart the paramount weight of common human experience. If class, gender, race, or privilege create divisions in national or global society, and if those divisions are accepted by habit tacitly, or by oppression unwillingly, then common humanity—and ju ice, even truth—become driven asunder, too. Once separated and divided, intere s tend to polarize, self-magnify, and repel by increasing degrees. e common is lo in favor of a partial good that to its limited participants and fa ions seems greater. As a morali , Johnson knows few compeers. His early illness, poverty, and relative obscurity taught lessons no syllabus could secure, no monograph enhance, no theory magnify.
Because the arts can, at their be , not only express but a ively create and extend sympathy and the evolution of a humane irit, and because they are not quantitative, repeatable, and iterative, not “demon rative and scientific,” their pra ice attains an amalgam of thought, feeling, intelligence, and experience unobtainable in science, and approximated only ab ra ly in social science. Yet, Johnson, championing this unique
rength of the arts—of theater, poetry, music, fi ion, and visual representation—also knows that, concomitantly, the arts cannot eje pretense, po uring, pandering, gossip, and envy. He has the courage to realize that, over time, the self-intere ed qualities of the arts, and of arti s and critics, can subvert their own produ ion. Fame may accompany

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high mediocrity for a few decades, but what survives a few lifetimes or centuries does not begin by thinking foremo of current trends or levers of publicity. Coteries die, and the opinions of cliques dissipate.
He believes, passionately, in human progress. As a morali he could remark that the cure for human ills is more palliative than radical, and that to keep humankind in a middle ate and prevent it from sliding downward was about as much as could be expe ed. But when examining hi ory and in itutions he insi s that permanent, colle ive gains are a ual. Admiring Shake eare, Johnson yet talks of “the barbarity” of Queen Elizabeth’s age, which cannot extenuate how Shake eare “sacrifices virtue to convenience.” Petrarch’s age is “rude and uncultivated.” e manners of the midseventeenth century “were so tinged with super ition” (Cowley). Johnson ates that the war in heaven found in Paradise Lo “is, I believe, the favorite of children, and gradually negle ed as knowledge is increased.” In A Journey he praises omas Braidwood’s school in Edinburgh for the deaf and dumb and refle s, “It was pleasing to see one of the mo de erate of human calamities capable of so much help: whatever enlarges hope, will exalt courage; a er having seen the deaf taught arithmetic, who would be afraid to cultivate the Hebrides?”
Johnson puts his belief dire ly: the duty of a writer is to make the world better. How that is to be done, exa ly along what lines, he never prescribes. ere is no sy em. Criticizing Shake eare for lack of moral care, he yet admits, “he that thinks reasonably mu think morally.” So, from Shake eare’s “works may be colle ed a sy em of civil and economical prudence,” and “a sy em of social duty may be sele ed.” Colle ed and sele ed but not prescribed. Johnson the morali becomes Johnson the explorer, renovating known truths but pushing their limits and discovering through them previously uncharted paths that examine the self. He realizes that the comfort of knowing those truths grows treacherous without the balla of self-knowledge. More than with the conditions of his life, difficult as they could be, his mo heroic ruggles are with himself. He er rale noted the three books he would never tire of: Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Don Quixote, lonely figures, each surviving with belief in something larger than the self, but each beset by loss, doubt, even delusions.
De ite his prizing of general truths and regard for what he called “the common reader,” Johnson does not eschew archival scholarship if it serves a larger, meaningful interpretive framework. He ransacks sources for whatever he writes, particularly evident in the Lives. When younger, he subtitles the Introdu ion to the Harleian Miscellany “An Essay on the Origin and Importance of Small Tra s and Fugitive Pieces.” His recall of writers is so exa and exa ing that John Hawkesworth confesses to him, “You have a memory that would convi any author of plagiarism in any court of literature in the world.” While Johnson reje s detailed scholarship simply as an end in itself,

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he contends that minute learning can be turned to conditions of “the living world.” In short, knowledge a ively inve ed with a degree of relevance will produce mo value. What is desired is “the accuracy of a learned work” coupled with “the facility of a popular” one (Cowley).
THE CHOICE OF LIFE
A main endeavor of Johnson’s writing te s the antinomies of the moral imagination. (Burke fir uses the phrase “moral imagination” a half dozen years a er his friend dies.)
ese antinomies are not flat contradi ions or oppositions. More like Blake’s contraries, they exhibit a vacillating difference of convi ion between a ivities and positions that are equally plausible and equally necessary, and whose tension mu therefore be regulated because it can never be settled. No hope germinates or survives without imagination, but some hopes are vain, some grow inflated, even harmful. Progress depends on discontent, but gnawing dissatisfa ion eals away happiness. Cowley conje ured that he’d be happier if he removed to an island in the Americas. He “forgot, in the vehemence of desire, that solitude and quiet owe their pleasures to those miseries, which he was so udious to obviate; for such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labour and re , hurry and retirement, endear each other; such are the changes that keep the mind in a ion; we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit” (Rambler 6).
ese antinomies mark the ru ure of e Vanity of Human Wishes where, repeatedly, at crucial jun ures, verse paragraphs begin, “Nor,” “But,” “Yet.” In “Refle ions on the Present State of Literature,” Johnson candidly remarks, “Whatever may be the cause of happiness, may be likewise made the cause of misery.” In Rasselas Nekayah advises her brother, “Flatter not yourself with contrarieties of pleasure. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice and be content. . . . No man can at the same time fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.”
Yet, exploring these moral antinomies presents no closure. e concluding chapter of Rasselas is “ e Conclusion in Which Nothing Is Concluded.” Even on some matters in which Johnson proclaims, with barely concealed scorn, that tendencies of the imagination can and ought to be kept in check, he later finds himself differing from his own earlier convi ion, or giving into those tendencies himself. In Idler 11 Johnson excoriates the idea that genius flows or is impeded by the seasons as if it were a blindly animate process, like sap rising in the sugar maple, and warns that to believe this “is no less dangerous, than to tell children of bugbears and goblins. . . . is di in ion of seasons is produced only by imagination operating on luxury. . . . He that shall . . . exert his virtues, will soon

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make himself superior to the seasons.” Milton’s vigor of composition surfacing only half the year, Johnson, again on his high horse, denigrates by saying, “ is dependence of the soul upon the seasons, those temporary and periodical ebbs and flows of intelle , may, I suppose, ju ly be derided as the fumes of vain imagination” (Milton). Johnson then quotes—of all texts!—Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, to the effe that the skies,
ars, and heavens may exert influence on us but “a wise man may resi them.” en, in 1781, in a letter tellingly filled with Miltonic echoes, Johnson admits, “I thought myself above assi ance or ob ru ion from the seasons, but find the autumnal bla s sharp and nipping and the fading world an uncomfortable pro e .”
e benevolent A ronomer in Rasselas was mad for believing that he controlled the seasons, rain, and sun, but Johnson himself finally admits that to insi the reverse, that we can control, completely, the effe of the seasons on us, is itself an antinomy of imaginative folly, too. What he says in Rambler 184 about the world being under the total guidance of a benevolent power, where apparent evil contributes to the larger calculus of good, he virtually mocks, more than two decades later, in comments on Pope’s Essay on Man. One of Johnson’s favorite Rambler themes is how the life of an author almo inevitably differs from the wisdom of that author’s works. “ e teachers of morality,” says Imlac, “discourse like angels, but they live like men.”
e extent to which Johnson yokes or puts in close proximity the words “disease,” “dangerous,” “re less,” “hunger,” “vain,” and “imagination” is extraordinary. Yet, he says in full praise, “Milton had that which rarely fell to the lot of any man—an unbounded imagination, with a ore of knowledge equal to all its calls” (JM II, 165). e balance mu always be adju ed, the exception found. Even in loyal friendship lurks deception: “Friendship has no tendency to secure veracity” (Pope). Richard Savage, Johnson observes, “lulled his imagination with . . . ideal opiates,” but later warns, “nor will a wise man presume to say, ‘Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage.’”
“Where then shall Hope and Fear their obje s find?” How can anyone settle these antinomies? ey resi resolution. eir moral tension remains, and all re onses are, if relied on blindly, doubtful. Some are de ru ive. Imlac advises Nekayah, “Do not entangle your mind by irrevocable determinations.” For Johnson, faith is one answer (“Nor deem religion vain”), but it is neither easy nor comfortable. Fau finally says, Verweile doch! Yet in Johnson the cry never comes; the re less desire may be for knowledge, it may be for vanity, fame, sex, power—for any wish or desire, but it never ceases. Johnson’s deeper psychological theme identifies a modern Fau who cannot even find a Mephi opheles with whom to bargain. is is a worse predicament. Colle ively, his protagoni s, examples, and personae seek anything that can be desired, illu rated particularly in Vanity and Rasselas. And yet, not to desire is, for all but the

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18 A Monument More Durable an Brass
cloi ered adepts of a rare enlightenment, inhuman and impossible. Rasselas lives in an apparent utopia: “All the diversities of the world were brought together  .  .  . and its evils extra ed and excluded”—“Every desire was immediately granted”—the happy valley. ( e adverb immediately is not so innocent or inviting as it seems.) Why would the prince grow re less and wish to escape its walls and mountains? e entire world he mu use as a comparison with his incomparable ate waits outside. It is usually not recalled that Imlac at fir tries to deter Rasselas from leaving. When, some years later, the prince returns, having witnessed so many moral antinomies in others, he yet seems unable to escape his own: we look ahead to a time when “he could never fix the limits of his dominion, and was always adding to the number of his subje s.” By what method is not mentioned. e antinomies of the moral imagination prove as hard to escape as the happy valley itself.
is consideration of the bind—at times the trap—that individuals, se s, and even whole nations (“by darling schemes oppress’d”) create for themselves in negotiating the antinomies of the moral imagination makes all the more urgent its concomitant presence in Johnson’s thought: the free agency of the human irit, the effe ive power of individual resolution and hard work. By this free agency all advances in learning, science, technology, trade, and ju ice occur. Observing the determination of Rasselas to breach the walls of the happy valley, Imlac, rather than counseling de air, gives encouragement: “Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.” Even the A ronomer seems able by efforts of his own will, assi ed with aid and compassion from others, to di erse many of the thick mi s clouding his reason.
If it is countered to this emphasis on will and benevolence that Johnson believes in social subordination, several things might be said. Yes, he does, though no society has yet in pra ice devised an order without some form of subordination, de fa o if not de jure. ese orders vary from the evil to the tolerable. Aside from deference to hereditary monarchy, moderated by the settlement of 1714, Johnson advocates little in the form of a sy em of subordination e ablished by birth or wealth. He reje s the racism, sexism, and ethnic hatred pra iced by many Europeans and Americans of his day and even now. He supports significant social and economic mobility. It is Boswell, defending race slavery and ari ocratic privilege, who con antly brings up “subordination.” Boswell o en inje s it as Johnson’s “favorite topic.” e implied reader of e Vanity of Human Wishes, the moral essays, Rasselas, and the Lives of the Poets remains the common reader, the reader whose only qualification is literacy. Johnson’s intended audience owns no
ecial privilege. His sympathy favors no ation. He gives to the poor and houses the homeless, several under his own roof for years. De ite his criticism of religious poetry, He er rale relates, “When he would try to repeat the celebrated Ecclesia ica pro Mortuis . . . beginning Dies irae, Dies illa, he could never pass the anza ending thus,

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Tantus labor not sit cassus [May such suffering be not in vain], without bur ing into a flood of tears.”
Dedicated in gratitude to the memory of Mary Hyde Eccles. For her generation and for po erity she cared intelle ually, materially, and personally to rengthen and support a central arch of civilization: learning, libraries, and books, the presentation and preservation of original texts and manuscripts. Few eighteenth-century scholars of academic reputation match the quality of her research, archival discoveries, and publications. Her critical work prompts the grateful thanks of scholars and readers. Her personal and intelle ual encouragement endeared her to every life she touched.

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Donald and Mary Hyde in their library at Four Oakes Farm. Photograph. MS Hyde 98 (2001)

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