IT STRETCHES CREDULITY to write of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) as a comic. Most people would think of him as the antithesis: solemn, even sententious, severe, judgmental, strongly opposed to frivolity in manners, censoring jokes on a wide range of subjects—religion, the clergy, especially bishops, sinfulness, and, above all, death. There were four reasons why, on the face of it, comedy had little part in his life. First, he was by nature somber, suffering throughout his life from what he called “a vile melancholy.” Second, his health was poor for, though he was immensely strong and lived to the age of seventy-five with his chief faculties intact, he was a victim of numerous ailments, causing at times pain, distress, and even incapacity, spasms, twinges, aches, and convulsions, daily reminders of mortality. Third, he was painfully aware both of his capacities and of the psychological weaknesses which preventedhim from making full use of them. To him, this was sinful, and he saw his life as a permanent sin. Diary entries and prayers, especially on great feasts of the church when he reviewed his life (and his birthdays), show his despair at curbing his faults and doing energetically what he ought to do. His actual achievements he saw as minor, and he was forever conscious of remissness, perpetual sloth, and failure. Finally, he had a fear of death which amounted to an obsession, and a terror of hell at times amounting almost to mania. There were dark and deep corners in his personality he dreaded to explore.
Yet the fact remains that Dr. Johnson contrived to get an enormous amount of fun out of life, and to provide fun for a vast range of other people. They crowded around him to hear what he had to say; primarily, no doubt, to gather wisdom and guidance but also in the comfortable knowledge that he would give them cause to laugh periodically. The eager silences in which he held forth to all-attentive listeners were punctuated by great shouts and barrages of laughter. There is endless testimony to the power, frequency, volume, and infectiousness of his laughter. He would often say, Mrs. Thrale records, “that the size of a man’s Understanding might always be known by his Mirth.” She adds,
His own was never contemptible. He would laugh at a stroke of Absurdity, or a Saillie of genuine Humour more heartily than I almost ever saw a man, and though the Jest was often such as few felt besides himself, yet his Laugh was irresistible, & was observed immediately to produce that of the Company, not merely from the notion that it was proper to laugh when he did, but purely for want of Power to forbear it.
Johnson himself, though freely admitting his melancholy, also boasted of his humor. In 1775, James Boswell (his well-known biographer) records him saying, “It is wonderful, Sir, how rare a quality good humour is in life. We meet with very few good-humoured men.” Boswell mentioned Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Bennet Langton, and Topham Beauclerk (all founding members of Johnson’s Literary Club), “but none of whom he would allow to be good humoured.” Langton was “muddy,” Beauclerk was “acid,” and so on. “Then, shaking his head and stretching himself at his ease in the coach, and smiling with much complacency, he turned to me and said: ‘I look upon myself as a good-humoured fellow.’ “ But this Boswell would not allow.
No, no, Sir, that will not do. You are good natured, but not good humoured. You are irascible. You have not patience with folly and absurdity. I believe you would pardon them, if there were time to deprecate your vengeance: but punishment follows so quick after sentence, that they cannot escape.
Johnson, however, defended his good humor. And indeed, Boswell, like Mrs. Thrale, gives many instances of it: Sir John Hawkins, a rather dour person himself (“an unclubbable man,”as Johnson put it), who nonetheless wrote a good and useful Life of Johnson, insisted, “In the talent of humour there hardly ever was his equal.” Hawkins thought that only Shakespeare’s Tarlton was his equal. Hawkins wrote, “Gesticular, mimicry, and buffoonery he hated, and would often huff Garrick for exercising it in his presence, but of the talent humour he had an almost enviable portion.” Hawkins says, “it was ever of that arch and dry kind, which lies concealed under the appearance of gravity.” He had a talent for imitative satire, making fun of the more pretentious style of essay writing. As an instance, Hawkins quotes his “meditation on a pudding,” which is not found in his Complete Works, but was evidently given on various occasions, once during his tour of the Hebrides.
Indeed it is likely that Johnson’s greatest explosions of fun went unrecorded, for explosions they were, difficult to put down in words, or even to remember the gist of them. They occurred quite spontaneously, when something struck Johnson as irresistibly funny. Then he would go on fantasizing and laughing, until exhausted. All really funny talkers have this gift: Sydney Smith particularly, Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton. Mark Twain had it too and Alexander Woollcott. Stephen Spender and Barbara Skelton insisted Cyril Connolly had it, on rare occasions, when the word for it was “magnificent,” but I only heard faint echoes of this gigantic gift. Sir Isaiah Berlin had it, and I heard him: but the trouble was, once he got really going on a line of fantastic humor, he began to speak so fast, and his accent became so impenetrable, that the sense wasdifficult to grasp, though his evident delight in his fun was so furious that you laughed all the same.
That Johnson had this gift, which amounts to a kind of genius, is clear, for Boswell was able to reconstruct one instance of it, at least in part. It took place in the room of Sir Robert Chambers, the eminent lawyer, in the Temple. Chambers said he had that day drawn up Bennet Langton’s will. Langton had no son but three sisters, whom Johnson always referred to, unkindly, as “the three Dowdies.” Langton was determined they should get his property instead of his nearest male cousin, and the will made this certain. So, said Chambers, Langton was very pleased with himself and the day’s proceedings. The incident suddenly struck Johnson as hilarious:
He now laughed immoderately, without any reason that we could perceive, at our friend’s making his will. He called him “the testator,” and added: “I daresay he thinks he has done a mighty thing. He won’t stay till he gets home to his seat in the country. . . . He’ll call up the landlord of the first inn on the road; and, after a suitable preface upon mortality and the uncertainty of life, will tell him that he should not delay making his will; and here, Sir, will he say, is my will, which I have just made, with the assistance of one of the ablest lawyers in the kingdom (laughing all the time). He believes he has made his will, but he did not make it. You, Chambers, made it for him. I trust you have more conscience than to make him say“being of sound understanding”—Ha, ha, ha!—I’d have his will turned into verse, like a ballad.
Embarrassed, Chambers was glad when they left his room. He did not get the joke, wills being “mighty serious things” for lawyers. But “Johnson could not stop his merriment and continued it all the way till we got without the Temple-gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter, that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion and in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts.” Boswell concludes that he “sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch.”
There was another occasion of Johnsonian hilarity, occasioned by one of his comic fantasies, recorded by Fanny Burney (later Fanny Burney D’Arblay, the novelist and diarist). Staying the weekend at the Thrales’ house at Streatham, she was astonished to find that Johnson, “this great and dreaded lord of English literature,” could display “a turn for burlesque humour.” Next morning at breakfast, the talk again flowed “copiously,” with Johnson urging her to write a comedy for the stage. Suddenly, she and Mrs. Thrale noticed
that Johnson, see-sawing in his chair, began laughing to himself so heartily as to almost shake his seat as well as his sides. We stopped . . . hoping he would reveal the subject of his mirth, but he enjoyed it inwardly, without heeding our curiosity—till at last he said he had been struck with a notion that Miss Burney “would begin herdramatic career by writing a piece called Streatham.” He paused, and laughed yet more cordially, and then suddenly commanded a pomposity to his countenance and his voice, and added: “Yes! Streatham—a Farce!“
It is true that Johnson cannot with any regard to truth be called a comic writer. There are jokes in The Idler and The Rambler, but they are like plover’s nests or the quotations from Horace in Mr. Gladstone’s speeches—you have to be shown them. On the other hand, his talk abounded with humor, whether he was being didactic, argumentative, abusive, censorious, singing praises, or calling down the wrath of the gods. And the humor too was of many kinds: verbal wit, gentle pleasantry, outrageous buffoonery, or sheer abuse.
The sayings of Dr. Johnson, which are memorable or at any rate remembered, amount to at least a thousand by my reckoning. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations lists 276, which puts him fourth after Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, and Kipling. In a useful compilation of Sayings of Doctor Johnson, by Brenda O’Casey (for Duckworth), there are 768. They raise the question: What is comic, or what is humor? For many have no apparent power to make us laugh. But almost all make us hug ourselves with pleasure: we are glad they were spoken, and jotted down. For neatness, profundity, or aptness, pith, and force, they are an unrivaled collection. They make the Pensées of Pascal, or the sayings of Montesquieu or Cardinal de Retz, Montaigne, Madame du Deffand, Nicholas Chamfort, or Voltaire, seem by comparison meager.
Some of the best make you think: Is this true? And after thinking about them you conclude that, true or not, you are glad they were said. Thus: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” “A man will turn over half a library to make one book.” “No man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money.” “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.” “Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.” “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.” “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” “There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there. So what the boys get at one end, they lose at the other.” “We would all be idle if we could.” “I wonder that women are not all Papists.” “Sir, the insolence of wealth will creep out.” And in this group there is an obscure and delightful remark I love to quote: “Sir, among the anfractuosities of the human mind, I know not if it may be one, that there is a superstitious reluctance to sit for a picture.” There are few people, perhaps none besides Johnson, who can work a word like “anfractuosity” into a speech at a convivial gathering. What does it mean? Why, tortuous.
Many of Johnson’s sayings are harsh criticisms or sheer abuse. If we delight in them, it is because we are not their object; or because the person deserved it; or just for the joy of hearing a harsh thing said neatly or elegantly or with punch, or with inventive malice. He was asked to give an exampleof “coarse raillery” among Thames boatmen, and produced: “Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods.” To a man of limited intellect in a tavern: “Sir, I have found you an argument, but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.” Of Bet Flint, a Hogarthian woman known in Fleet Street: “She was generally slut and drunkard—occasionally whore and thief.” Of the politician Dudley Long North he said: “He fills a chair.” Of Prime Minister Shelburne: “A mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet.” There were certain people—writers, public performers, what we would call celebrities—who attracted his arrows. Of the actor and playwright Samuel Foote: “Foote is quite impartial. He tells lies of everybody.” The actor Thomas Sheridan he dismissed thus: “Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in nature.” He had a word to say in praise of Thomas Gray’s Elegy, but of the poet himself he remarked, “Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.” Two other poets who attracted his censure were Samuel Derrick and Christopher Smart. Asked which was the better, he answered, “Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” After abusing Rousseau, “a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years,” he was asked if he was worse than Voltaire, and replied, “Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.”
Two men, for personal reasons, drew down his wrath in prodigious quantities. One was Lord Chesterfield, who promised help and patronage when Johnson began his dictionary, but in practice did nothing. Johnson joked, “This man I thought had been a Lord among wits, but I find he is only a wit among Lords.” He castigated his famous Letters to his son, teaching behavior in society, summing the work up thus: “They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master.” When his Dictionary appeared, and Chesterfield sought to share the credit for it, Johnson wrote him a public letter of reproach, one of the finest letters ever written, denouncing the whole system of literary patronage as practiced in the eighteenth century: “Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?”
He had even harsher things to say about, and to, James Macpherson, who claimed credit for Ossian and was exposed by Johnson as a fraud. When Macpherson threatened violence, Johnson responded, “I will not desist from detecting what I think a cheat from any fear of the menaces of a ruffian.” And he had another word to say on the wretched man’s ideas of morals: “If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our Spoons.”
Did Dr. Johnson have it in for the Scots? It seems so, both as individuals and in general. He had a flaming row with Adam Smith, and he repeatedly attacked David Hume as an atheist: “I do not know indeed whether he has first been a blockhead and that has made him a rogue, or first been a rogue andthat has made him a blockhead.” He wrote fairly of Scotland when he went there, and thanks to Boswell made some good Scotch friends. But he could rarely resist a dig. “Mr. Ogilvie observed, that Scotland had a great many noble wild prospects. Johnson: ‘I believe, Sir, you have a great many. Norway too has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospects which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!’ “ This is a typical Johnsonian sally, making expert use of repetition and rising to a crescendo. But he was equally effective in his short, pithy remarks, notably on the Irish. Of their prodigious noble wild prospect, the Giant’s Causeway, asked if it were worth seeing, he said: “Worth seeing? Yes. But not worth going to see.” And: “The Irish are a fair people. They never speak well of one another.” He went for the French too: “The French are a gross, ill-bred, untaught people. A lady there will spit on the floor and rub it with her foot.” And: “A Frenchman must always be talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not. An Englishman is content to say nothing, when he has nothing to say.” As for Americans, he asked, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” He said, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.”
There were times when Dr. Johnson appeared to be critical of women, at least outside their sphere: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well. But you are surprised to find it done at all.” And on the subject of legal arrangements: “Nature has given womenso much power that the law has very wisely given them little.” But Johnson liked female company, more so in many ways than men’s. “If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.” He clearly liked sex. He told David Garrick, “I’ll come no more [backstage at your theatre], David, for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.” This is Boswell’s decorous way of putting it. John Wilkes said the actual words used were “do make my genitals to quiver.” But if easily aroused, Johnson believed ideas were at the heart of physical sex: “Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.”
We know a lot about his preferences in women. He liked a firm mind: “Poll [Carmichael] is a stupid slut. I had some hopes of her at first, but when I talked to her tightly and closely, I could make nothing of her. She was wiggle-waggle and I could never persuade her to be categorical.” He liked them spotless: “I have often thought that if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or cotton. I mean stuffs made of vegetables substances. I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean.” He believed in marriage, and thought a man should marry “first, for virtue; secondly, for wit; thirdly, for beauty; and fourthly, for money.” He thought bachelors aged badly: “They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious.” It is true “marriage has many pains,” but “celibacy has no pleasures.” On the other hand a second marriage was a risk, “thetriumph of hope over experience.” In choosing a wife, a man was not a good judge. When Boswell asked, “Do you not suppose that there are fifty women in the world, with any one of whom a man may be as happy as with any one woman in particular?” Johnson replied, “Ay, Sir, fifty thousand.” He said, “Marriages would be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor.” Yet he did not dispute that marriage was difficult: “Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.”
But if Johnson viewed marriage with some misgivings, he spoke out unreservedly on behalf of friendship. “There is in this world no real delight (excepting those of sensuality) but exchange of ideas in conversation.” And “the happiest conversation [is] where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments.” Friendship arose “when you come close to a man in conversation.” That took time. “John Wesley’s conversation is good, but he is never at leisure. He is always obliged to go at a certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk, as I do.” Moreover, the cult of friendship in conversation demands vivacity, which “is much an art, and depends greatly on habit.” So: “I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and [who] does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.” Friends were a “necessity of life.” “Sir, I look upon every dayto be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.” For “acquaintance may broaden into friendship.” “If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.”
So death was the enemy, of friendship as of anything else. When Boswell asked, “But is not the fear of death natural to man?” Johnson replied, “So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.” He laid down: “To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege. But to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack.” In the year of his death, he said, “I struggle hard for life. I take physic, and take air. My friend’s chariot is always ready. We have run this morning twenty-four miles, and could run forty-eight more. But who can run the race with death?“ Friends were very loyal to him in his last weeks. But he wondered, “I know not whether I should wish to have a friend by me, or have it all between God and myself.” His last words were “iam moriturus“—now I am about to die. The pithy phrase was with this “good-humoured man” till the last, and since then, as at the time, his sayings have been preserved and repeated, and have conveyed much excellent senses, and made us laugh, outwardly and, perhaps more important, inwardly.