7.

Dr Johnson’s Prescription

Hurdy and JA explained that, as well as our selection of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, we would be studying Dr Samuel Johnson’s Preface to his edition of the Complete Works.

At first this seemed a curious choice, a work of secondary as opposed to primary literature, but, to me at least, it proved inspired. Johnson crafted supremely balanced sentences; he would teach us how to write while at the same time introduce us to some of the central questions of literary criticism. He would show by example how to punctuate a complex sentence; he would teach us not to be afraid to have our own opinions about the books we read, so long as we supported them with a forceful and well-supported argument.

What makes a work of art into a classic? Johnson said that it required endurance for more than a hundred years. ‘A good test,’ said JA. ‘It means that no one will be obliged to read the collected poems of Trumbull Stickney.’ We assumed that he was making up the name; decades later, after the arrival of the Internet, I stumbled across the fact that there really was such a poet, a young American who had failed the test.

Why is Shakespeare so great? Because, Johnson told us, he holds a mirror up to nature. ‘Remember, though,’ said JA, ‘that when you see your pimpled faces in a mirror you do not see them in the way that I see them as I am looking at you now.’ For a moment, I was puzzled. He could not have meant that when we look in a mirror we fail to see our own ugliness and that the corollary was that Shakespeare represents the world without the ugly bits. Then a classmate who was brighter than me teased out his meaning: ‘A mirror shows us our image in reverse – you know, like mirror writing – and it only has two dimensions, but gives the illusion of three, so was Johnson saying that Shakespeare’s plays are true to life without being realistic?’ ‘Exactly,’ – Adams was pleased – ‘nobody in real life speaks in blank verse, but that does not prevent Shakespeare from reflecting life, just as an opera can mirror life, even though no one, so far as I am aware, goes through life singing arias.’

He went on to explain about the history of dramatic rules, the fact that in Dr Johnson’s time English criticism was dominated by French theory, notably that of Voltaire, who in turn was influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics, which argued that you shouldn’t mix tragedy and comedy, high style and low, and that the action of a play should obey the three unities of time, place and action. Voltaire called Shakespeare a barbarian for including jokes and a comic Gravedigger in Hamlet and for veering between verse and prose, lyricism and banter. This was what Johnson was arguing against. ‘Let’s take a close look at the following splendid sentence,’ said JA:

Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

Granted, this was not a simple sentence; you had it to read it slowly, pausing one beat for the commas and two for the semi-colons; Johnson made me into an admirer of the semicolon, that now almost lost punctuation mark which, when used correctly, is grammatically no different from a full stop, but rhetorically so subtle and useful because it is only a half-stop, not a full period, in your train of thought.

JA explained that ‘sublunary’, literally beneath the moon, simply meant the real everyday world. He then asked us to think about Johnson’s phrase at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend. ‘All Shakespeare’s plays are in fact tragi-comedies. Discuss.’ That would be the kind of examination question for which we should be prepared, he warned us, as he distributed copies of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, together with a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In the foreground it showed a ploughman ploughing and a shepherd shepherding; on the sea, ships sailing. It took us a while to locate a pair of legs sticking out of the water towards the bottom right-hand corner. Nobody had noticed the fallen Icarus, who had flown too close to the sun and burned his wings made of feathers secured by beeswax. Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

Life goes on. A tragic hero may be the centre of his own world, but he is not the centre of the world. The tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy of everyday life will always be with us. The Porter will get drunk as the King is being murdered in Macbeth; the Gravedigger will make bad jokes as Hamlet meditates upon the skull of the dead jester Yorick; King Lear needs a Fool to prick his ego. Comedy in tragedy. In The Winter’s Tale, Mamillius dies and does not, like Hermione, come magically back to life; at the end of Twelfth Night, Antonio is left alone, betrayed by his beloved Sebastian. Tragedy in comedy. Holding up a mirror to life. At the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend. On the eve of the day when we buried my father, it was the ‘wrap’ party for Magic Circus. I went along for a few minutes, but could not revel. Instead, I drove to an empty church and practised my funereal reading of Horace’s ode for his dead friend Quintilius:

praecipe lugubris

cantus, Melpomene, cui liquidam pater

vocem cum cithara dedit.

Teach me the saddest song,

O Tragic Muse, blessed by your father with the gift

Of voice so sweet in lyric song.

I was the mourner at the very moment when my friends were revellers.

JA looked rather like Dr Johnson himself, especially when he twisted his ankle and came into class with a hefty walking stick that he periodically banged on the floor, trying to stimulate a class of seventeen-year-old boys into an argument about literary form. Above all, he wanted us to learn from Johnson the art of clear thinking and forceful expression. He suggested that Dr Johnson was the most lucid writer of critical prose in the English language, with the possible exception of William Hazlitt (‘his true successor – Johnsonian in intelligence but a Radical as opposed to a Tory – well worth making his acquaintance’). ‘When you write your essays, you could do worse than follow Johnson’s example – this is Boswell’s account of his literary craft’:

Sir Joshua Reynolds once asked him by what means he had attained his extraordinary accuracy and flow of language. He told him, that he had early laid it down as a fixed rule to do his best on every occasion, and in every company: to impart whatever he knew in the most forcible language he could put it in; and that by constant practice, and never suffering any careless expressions to escape him, or attempting to deliver his thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner, it became habitual to him.

JA assumed we would know that James Boswell was Johnson’s biographer; if we didn’t, we were expected to find out for ourselves. Like all great teachers, he directed us well beyond the set syllabus. With no Internet, no personal phones and only three television channels, there was all the time in the world to devote to reading. We were taught to weed out our own careless expressions and to find examples of forcible language in extracts from Johnson’s other writings, such as an essay in The Rambler where he proposed that

The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative … the armies of pain send their arrows against us on every side, the choice is only between those which are more or less sharp, or tinged with poison of greater or less malignity … The great remedy which heaven has put in our hands is patience, by which, though we cannot lessen the torments of the body, we can in a great measure preserve the peace of the mind.

Reading and writing as palliative care, as education in the patience that eases the troubled mind: this was an idea, JA suggested, that Johnson found in the classical philosophy of Stoicism, especially the letters of Seneca. In Shakespeare, he would have encountered many characters who have to learn patience. King Lear pleads for it, while in Twelfth Night Viola associates it with a love that dare not speak its name:

She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i’th’bud,

Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

But is it really a good idea to bottle up your emotions in this way? Wasn’t Malcolm right to tell Macduff to let his feelings out when hearing the news that his wife and all his children have been slaughtered by Macbeth’s henchmen?

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak

Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

We were beginning to learn that every time a character in Shakespeare gives you an idea, another character elsewhere in Shakespeare will give you the opposite idea. Sometimes, you even get contradictory ideas in adjacent lines. Like Mark Antony himself, I was bewitched by Cleopatra’s contrariness:

That time? O times!

I laughed him out of patience, and that night

I laughed him into patience, and next morn,

Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed,

Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst

I wore his sword Philippan.

Into patience and out of patience. Putting on each other’s clothes. Cleopatra laughs and hastes Antony to his wine in the first half of the play, then buries her beloved in the second, climaxing (in several senses, we persuaded ourselves) when she makes her agony into an ecstasy.

JA had passed the baton of teaching Antony and Cleopatra to Hurdy. The classroom joker thought he was ripe for testing. ‘Is the sword Philippan a phallic symbol, sir?’ ‘To judge from the later line, The soldier’s pole is fallen, you’re probably right,’ replied Hurdy, ‘but we should remember that Freud said that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar – when I was at Cambridge, I was a great fan of E. M. Forster, who was living next door in King’s College, and I wrote to him asking whether the tree in Howards End was a symbol of England and he replied very politely with the suggestion that I might consider the possibility that the tree was meant to be a tree.’

Dr Johnson loved his female friends, especially Hester Thrale, who comforted him in his darkest hours, but he was a man of his time, so it is not surprising that he had a low opinion of what he called Cleopatra’s feminine arts. Just as he had a low opinion of Shakespeare’s relentless wordplay. A quibble, he wrote in the Preface,

is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible … A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.

Passages such as what JA called ‘the expostulation upon the quibble’ taught us that it was acceptable to criticize Shakespeare. And equally acceptable to disagree even with a critic as lofty as Johnson. His opinions were always his own. He made no pretence at objectivity. He was as fulsome in praise as he could be excoriating in criticism:

The arguments by which Lady Macbeth persuades her husband to commit the murder, afford a proof of Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature. She urges the excellence and dignity of courage, a glittering idea which has dazzled mankind from age to age, and animated sometimes the housebreaker, and sometimes the conqueror; but this sophism Macbeth has for ever destroyed, by distinguishing true from false fortitude, in a line and a half; of which it may almost be said, that they ought to bestow immortality on the author, though all his other productions had been lost:

I dare do all that may become a man,

Who dares do more, is none.

The indecorous juxtaposition of the housebreaker and the conqueror as exemplars of courage was quintessential Johnson. He wanted none of Voltaire’s classical rules of art. The only authority he accepted was that of his own experience.

Since Johnson endured lifelong illness and dejection himself, he took the view that literature should not shy away from dark matter. He told Boswell that

If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything. The sacred writers (he observed) related the vicious as well as the virtuous actions of men; which had this moral effect, that it kept mankind from despair.

Though he was a dedicated Christian, who wrote many heartfelt prayers and religious meditations, by sacred writers he did not mean the authors of the Bible or the early theologians. He meant the great secular writers, among whom he never doubted that Shakespeare was the greatest. Conversely, he loved nothing more than to launch thunderous denunciations of bad writing and ill-thought argument. In this, said JA, he in certain respects anticipated the only other literary critic who was regularly cited with an academic title, Dr F. R. Leavis. ‘Who’s Dr Leavis?’ asked a boy who rejoiced in the name John Milton. ‘Some people think he’s God,’ replied JA. An Oxford man, he was always a little suspicious of the earnest Cambridge-educated Leavisites of his generation who devoted themselves to the messianic creed of literature as the discipline that uniquely cultivated the felt life of both the individual and society. He granted that such passion for literature was admirable, but, with his voracious reading and catholic taste, he had no time for Leavis’s policing of ‘the canon’, his absurd suggestion that Hard Times was the only decent novel of Charles Dickens and that ‘the Great Tradition’ of the English novel consisted exclusively of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘the poor old boy sees himself as the victim of some strange Marxist conspiracy with Raymond Williams as chief commissar.’

‘Dr Johnson was a contentious old noddy,’ Adams opined in class one day, before launching into an account of a book review in which the ‘good doctor’, as he called him, had eviscerated a second-rate moralist called Soame Jenyns. He quoted a remark from the review that has stayed with me to this day.

In 1755, the Lisbon earthquake destroyed an entire city in five minutes. It took the lives of about thirty thousand people. This was hard to reconcile with the idea, preached from every pulpit in the Western world, of a beneficent God. We knew about this from Voltaire’s Candide, which was one of our A-Level French texts. The catastrophe makes a fool of the character of Dr Pangloss, who claims that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Across the Channel in England, the earthquake prompted the gentleman author Jenyns to pen A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. The argument was essentially the same as that of Dr Pangloss. Building on Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (‘Whatever is, is right’), Jenyns proposed that inequality is inevitable, that poverty is a blessing because it makes us appreciate small things, and that sickness is a good thing because it makes us value health. Thus, says Jenyns,

The universe resembles a large and well-regulated family, in which all the officers and servants, and even the domestic animals, are subservient to each other, in a proper subordination: each enjoys the privileges and perquisites peculiar to his place, and, at the same time, contributes, by that just subordination, to the magnificence and happiness of the whole.

Since the universe is a well-ordered machine of this kind, it must follow that God ordained the Lisbon earthquake for some beneficent purpose.

Dr Johnson, JA told us, thought that this was, if we would pardon the expression, bollocks. The consummate professional, always struggling to earn a living by his pen in Grub Street, he hated the slack argumentation of amateurs such as Jenyns. He nailed the contradiction at the heart of the Free Enquiry. Jenyns had written that

Happiness is the only thing of real value in existence, neither riches, nor power, nor wisdom, nor learning, nor strength, nor beauty, nor virtue, nor religion, nor even life itself, being of any importance, but as they contribute to its production. All these are, in themselves, neither good nor evil: happiness alone is their great end, and they are desirable only as they tend to promote it.

Johnson agreed that we are all in search of happiness, though – in one of the glorious put-downs that led his opponent to describe him as a brute – he remarked that Jenyns’s pompous phrasing of the idea may serve to show how the most common notion may be swelled in sound, and diffused in bulk, till it shall perhaps astonish the author himself. Besides, the question that needed to be asked was whether Jenyns’s book itself promoted human happiness.

What is the purpose of writing? To assist readers (and writers, who are always their own first readers) in the pursuit of happiness:

The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it: and how will either of those be put more in our power by him who tells us, that we are puppets, of which some creature not much wiser than ourselves manages the wires.

Jenyns’s argument that suffering – whether individual pain or the Lisbon earthquake – is part of some divine plan puts into the reader’s head the idea That a set of beings unseen and unheard, are hovering about us, trying experiments upon our sensibility. That, in the words of Gloucester in King Lear,

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods:

They kill us for their sport.

Physical pain: putting us in agonies, to see our limbs quiver. Mental illness: torturing us to madness, that they may laugh at our vagaries. Digestive disorders: sometimes obstructing the bile, that they may see how a man looks when he is yellow. Road traffic accidents: sometimes breaking a traveller’s bones to try how he will get home. Starvation: wasting a man to a skeleton. Obesity: and sometimes killing him fat for the greater elegance of his hide. How can a reader possibly be made happy by the thought that the gods are pulling our strings in these ways? The argument is a recipe for depression, not happiness. Dr Johnson therefore concluded that Jenyns’s Free Enquiry is not good for our health.

JA singled out that phrase The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. He suggested that we should use it as a yardstick in judging every book we read. I’ve stuck by it all my life (with the proviso that sometimes, as in a diary, the only intended reader is the writer). It is a standard that licenses one to cast aside unfinished any book that is not offering either enjoyment or mental fibre.

The enjoyment can be taken for granted. All sorts of people read all sorts of books for pleasure. But can writing really enable us to endure the pains of life? That was Johnson’s great hope.

He had much to endure. Among his ailments were: aphasia, asthma, bronchitis, dropsy, emphysema, gout, insomnia, madness (bouts of), melancholy, near-blindness, nervous tics, nightmares, sarcocele, scrofula, scurvy, smallpox, stroke, sweats and almost certainly Tourette Syndrome. Disease produces much selfishness, he wrote late in life, A man in pain is looking after ease. Among his prescriptions for finding ease were: bloodletting, Cantharides (tincture of), cold bathing, country air, the elastication of bodily fibres, electricity, opium, the royal touch, rue, tea, the waters of Bath. And above all, reading and writing.

For Dr Johnson, literature was a form of therapy, a means of survival, a prescription against despair.

Mr Adams looked rather like Dr Johnson …

Public domain image from the author’s collection