A resting-place – where the reader may take refreshment, and where vexed matters are resolved
The picture that emerges here of Sam’s early experience of London is at odds with the most famous of his sayings – ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ There is evidence that Sam, who spoke these words with more than a trace of his native Staffordshire accent, was sometimes tired of London; his first few years in the city made him homesick for the West Midlands, and in old age he liked to withdraw periodically to quieter places. But he uttered this judgement in 1777, when Boswell wondered if living full-time in the city might dampen appreciation of its ‘exquisite zest’, and by then he had been in London forty years; piqued by Boswell’s doubts, he was saluting the place that had been the backdrop for all his success. In any case, what he meant by these words was a little different from what we now understand. In 1777, London was Europe’s largest city, having within living memory surpassed Constantinople, and, given Britons’ lack of awareness then of the world beyond Europe, it was assumed to be the largest city in the world. As such, it was a symbol of the possibilities of urban life. Whoever asserted its inexhaustibility was applauding its role as a temple of commerce, invention and art.
When today’s crapulent hacks recycle Sam’s remark, it lacks this particular resonance, and I’m tempted to argue that it is untrue: when one is tired of London, one is simply tired of London, and most people who have lived or worked there will know that feeling, even if they have also savoured the city’s charms. But the line has become so well-known that it obliterates pretty much everything else Sam said – or, more importantly, wrote – on the subject. ‘More importantly’, that is, because we can be confident that what he wrote was what he thought at that moment, whereas his sayings are inevitably a little warped by the people who recorded them. It’s not that we should reject the quotations attributed to him; many are too richly attested for that to be necessary, as well as too good to be given up. Yet what he wrote should take precedence. There we can find plenty more evidence of his delight in London’s social and cultural inexhaustibility, but there are hints in his letters that an occasional retreat from the city was essential to his continuing appreciation of it.
Another possible objection to Sam’s celebrated aphorism is that it appears to confine itself to male experience. But while it’s true that at the time Sam was writing (and speaking), man could certainly mean ‘the male human being’, often it was used simply to denote ‘a person’, without any implications of gender. Even if it was no longer natural to write of Adam and Eve, as the preacher John King had in the sixteenth century, that ‘The Lord had but one pair of men in paradise’, an author generalizing about humankind would refer to the behaviours and attitudes of men. It was the norm to use he where an author might now prefer he or she, s/he or a less cumbersome singular they – the last of which is of course guaranteed to incense those guardians of the galaxy who otherwise go by the name of grammar pedants. (While this is not the place to present a sustained case for singular they, I make no apology for having used it in these pages.) More to the point, although Sam’s aphorisms often look gender-specific, they rarely need to be interpreted that way: ‘If a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it’, ‘Men are seldom satisfied with praise introduced or followed by any mention of defect’, ‘There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given him something peculiar to himself.’
This is also the place to observe that, if some of Sam’s most celebrated remarks are far from being his best, some of his best are commonly misunderstood. A perennial favourite is ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’, which is trotted out by cynics eager to make the case that any flicker of patriotic sentiment is contemptible. Sam had something more specific in mind: the feigned love of country so often used to cloak the self-interest of tycoons and cheapjack politicians. It’s not that all attachment to one’s homeland is corrupt and boneheaded; rather, the most noxious individuals will claim, in moments of extremity, that the destructive things they’re doing must be performed for their country’s good, and that those who want to stand in their way are traitors. Exploited thus, the notion of patriotism has nothing to do with affection or a commitment to certain principles one thinks are embedded in one’s community. Instead, it’s a psychopath’s excuse for violence – and here it seems apt to add the judgement of Isaac Asimov’s character Salvor Hardin, a diplomat and master of the morally charged epigram, that ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’