From a Review of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Fraser’s Magazine, 1832.

IN a world which exists by the balance of Antagonisms, the respective merit of the Conservator and the Innovator must ever remain debatable. Great, in the meanwhile, and undoubted, for both sides, is the merit of him who, in a day of Change, walks wisely, honestly. Johnson’s aim was in itself an impossible one; this of stemming the eternal Flood of Time; of clutching all things, and anchoring them down, and saying, Move not!—how could it, or should it, ever have success? The strongest man can but retard the current partially and for a short hour. Yet even in such shortest retardation, may not an estimable value lie? If England has escaped the blood-bath of a French Revolution; and may yet, in virtue of this delay and of the experience it has given, work out her deliverance calmly into a new Era, let Samuel Johnson, beyond all contemporary or succeeding men, have the praise for it. We said above that he was appointed to be Ruler of the British nation for a season: whoso will look beyond the surface, into the heart of the world’s movements, may find that all Pitt Administrations, and Continental Subsidies, and Waterloo victories, rested on the possibility of making England, yet a little while, Toryish, Loyal to the Old; and this again on the anterior reality, that the Wise had found such Loyalty still practicable and recommendable. England had its Hume, as France had its Voltaires and Diderots; but the Johnson was peculiar to us.

    If we ask now by what endowment it mainly was that Johnson realized such a Life for himself and others; what quality of character the main phenomena of his Life may be most naturally deduced from, and his other qualities most naturally subordinated to, in our conception of him, perhaps the answer were: The quality of Courage, of Valor; that Johnson was a Brave Man. The Courage that can go forth, once and away, to Chalk-Farm, and have itself shot, and snuffed out, with decency, is nowise wholly what we mean here. Such Courage we indeed esteem an exceeding small matter; capable of coexisting with a life full of falsehood, feebleness, poltroonery, and despicability. Nay, oftenet it is Cowardice rather that produces the result: for consider, Is the Chalk-Farm Pistoleer inspired with any reasonable Belief and Determination; or is he hounded on by haggard, indefinable Fear,—how he will be cut at public places, and “plucked geese of the neighborhood” will wag their tongues at him a plucked goose? If he go then, and be shot without shrieking, or audible uproar, it is well for him: nevertheless, there is nothing amazing in it. Courage to manage all this has not perhaps been denied to any man or to any woman. Thus, do not recruiting sergeants drum through the streets of manufacturing towns, and collect ragged losels enough; every one of whom, if once dressed in red and trained a little, will receive fire cheerfully for the small sum of one shilling per diem, and have the soul blown out of him at last, with perfect propriety. The Courage that dares only die is on the whole no sublime affair; necessary indeed, yet universal: pitiful when it begins to parade itself. On this Globe of ours, there are some thirty-six persons that manifest it, seldom with the smallest failure, during every second of time. Nay, look at Newgate: do not the offscourings of Creation, when condemned to the gallows, as if they were not men but vermin, walk thither with decency, and even to the scowls and hootings of the whole Universe give their stern good-night in silence? What is to be undergone only once, we may undergo; what must be, comes almost of its own accord. Considered as Duelist, what a poor figure does the fiercest Irish Whiskerando make, compared with any English Game-cock, such as you may buy for fifteen-pence!

  The Courage we desire and prize is not the Courage to die decently, but to live manfully. This, when by God’s grace it has been given, lies deep in the soul; like genial heat, fosters all other virtues and gifts; without it they could not live. In spite of our innumerable Waterloos and Peterloos, and such campaigning as there has been, this Courage we allude to, and call the only true one, is perhaps rarer in these last ages than it has been in any other since the Saxon Invasion under Hengist. Altogether extinct it can never be among men; otherwise the species Man were no longer for this world: here and there, in all times, under various guises, men are sent hither not only to demonstrate, but exhibit it, and testify, as from heart to heart, that it is still possible, still practicable.

  Johnson, in the eighteenth century, and as Man of Letters, was one of such; and, in good truth, “the bravest of the brave.” What mortal could have more to war with? Yet, as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even, such was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand what it is to have a man’s heart, may find that, since the time of John Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English bosom than Samuel Johnson now bore. Observe too that he never called himself brave, never felt himself to be so; the more completely was so. No Giant Despair, no Golgotha-Death-dance or Sorcerer’s-Sabbath of “Literary Life in London,” appalls this pilgrim; he works resolutely for deliverance; in still defiance steps stoutly along. The thing that is given him to do he can make himself do; what is to be endured he can endure in silence.

  How the great soul of old Samuel, consuming daily his own bitter unalleviable allotment of misery and toil, shows beside the poor flimsy little soul of young Boswell; one day flaunting in the ring of vanity, tarrying by the wine cup, and crying, Aha! the wine is red; the next day deploring his down-pressed, night-shaded, quite poor estate; and thinking it unkind that the whole movement of the Universe should go on, while his digestive-apparatus had stopped! We reckon Johnson’s “talent of silence” to be among his great and too rare gifts. Where there is nothing farther to be done, there shall nothing farther be said: like his own poor blind Welshwoman, he accomplished somewhat, and also “endured fifty years of wretchedness with unshaken fortitude.” How grim was Life to him; a sick Prison-house and Doubting-castle! “His great business,” he would profess, “was to escape from himself.” Yet towards all this he has taken his position and resolution; can dismiss it all “with frigid indifference, having little to hope or to fear.” Friends are stupid and pusillanimous and parsimonious; “wearied of his stay, yet offended at his departure”: it is the manner of the world. “By popular delusion,” remarks he with a gigantic calmness, “illiterate writers will rise into renown”: it is portion of the History of English Literature; a perennial thing, this same popular delusion; and will—alter the character of the Language.

  Closely connected with this quality of Valor, partly as springing from it, partly as protected by it, are the more recognizable qualities of Truthfulness in word and thought, and Honesty in action. There is a reciprocity of influence here: for as the realizing of Truthfulness and Honesty is the Life-light and great aim of Valor, so without Valor they cannot, in anywise, be realized. Now, in spite of all practical shortcomings, no one that sees into the significance of Johnson will say that his prime object was not Truth. In conversation, doubtless, you may observe him, on occasion, fighting as if for victory;—and must pardon these ebulliences of a careless hour, which were not without temptation and provocation. Remark likewise two things; that such prize-arguings were ever on merely superficial debatable questions; and then that they were argued generally by the fair laws of battle, and logic-fence, by one cunning in that same. If their purpose was excusable, their effect was harmless, perhaps beneficial: that of taming noisy mediocrity, and showing it another side of a debatable matter; to see both sides of which was, for the first time, to see the Truth of it. In his Writings themselves, are errors enough, crabbed prepossessions enough, yet these also of a quite extraneous and accidental nature; nowhere a willful shutting of the eyes to the Truth. Nay, is there not everywhere a heartfelt discernment, singular, almost admirable, if we consider through what confused conflicting lights and hallucinations it had to be attained, of the highest everlasting Truth, and beginning of all Truths: this, namely, that man is ever, and even in the age of Wilkes and Whitefield, a Revelation of God to man; and lives, moves, and has his being in Truth only; is either true, or, in strict speech, is not at all?

  Quite spotless, on the other hand, is Johnson’s love of Truth, if we look at it as expressed in Practice, as what we have named Honesty of action. “Clear your mind of Cant”; clear it, throw Cant utterly away: such was his emphatic, repeated precept; and did not he himself faithfully conform to it? The Life of this man has been, as it were, turned inside out, and examined with microscopes by friend and foe; yet was there no Lie found in him. His Doings and Writings are not shows, but performances: you may weigh them in the balance, and they will stand weight. Not a line, not a sentence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends to be. Alas! and he wrote not out of inward inspiration, but to earn his wages: and with that grand perennial tide of “popular delusion” flowing by; in whose waters he nevertheless refused to fish, to whose rich oyster-beds the dive was too muddy for him. Observe, again, with what innate hatred of Cant, he takes for himself, and offers to others the lowest possible view of his business, which he followed with such nobleness. Motive for writing he had none, as he often said, but money; and yet he wrote so. Into the region of Poetic Art he indeed never rose; there was no ideal without him avowing itself in his work: the nobler was that unavowed ideal which lay within him, and commanded, saying, Work out thy Artisanship in the spirit of an Artist! They who talk loudest about the dignity of Art, and fancy that they too are Artistic guild-brethren, and of the Celestials,—let them consider well what manner of man this was, who felt himself to be only a hired day-laborer. A laborer that was worthy of his hire; that has labored not as an eye-servant, but as one found faithful! Neither was Johnson in those days perhaps wholly a unique. Time was when, for money, you might have ware: and needed not, in all departments, in that of the Epic Poem, in that of the Blacking Bottle, to rest content with the mere persuasion that you had ware. It was a happier time. But as yet the seventh Apocalyptic Bladder (of PUFFERY) had not been rent open,—to whirl and grind, as in a West-Indian Tornado, all earthly trades and things into wreck, and dust, and consummation,—and regeneration. Be it quickly, since it must be!

  That Mercy can dwell only with Valor, is an old sentiment or proposition; which, in Johnson, again receives confirmation. Few men on record have had a more merciful, tenderly affectionate nature than old Samuel. He was called the Bear; and did indeed too often look, and roar, like one; being forced to it in his own defense: yet within that shaggy exterior of his, there beat a heart warm as a mother’s, soft as a little child’s. Nay, generally, his very roaring was but the anger of affection: the rage of a Bear, if you will; but of a Bear bereaved of her whelps. Touch his Religion, glance at the Church of England, or the Divine Right; and he was upon you! These things were his Symbols of all that was good, and precious for men; his very Ark of the Covenant: whoso laid hand on them tore asunder his heart of hearts. Not out of hatred to the opponent, but of love to the thing opposed, did Johnson grow cruel, fiercely contradictory: this is an important distinction; never to be forgotten in our censure of his conversational outrages. But observe also with what humanity, what openness of love, he can attach himself to all things: to a blind old woman, to a Doctor Levett, to a Cat “Hodge.” His thoughts in the latter part of his life were frequently employed on his deceased friends; he often muttered these or such-like sentences: “Poor man! and then he died.” How he patiently converts his poor home into a Lazaretto; endures, for long years, the contradiction of the miserable and unreasonable; with him unconnected, save that they had no other to yield them refuge! Generous old man! Worldly possession he has little; yet of this he gives freely; from his own hard-earned shilling, the half-pence for the poor, that “waited his coming out,” are not withheld: the poor “waited the coming out” of one not quite so poor! A Sterne can write sentimentalities on Dead Asses: Johnson has a rough voice; but he finds the wretched Daughter of Vice fallen down in the streets; carries her home, on his own shoulders, and like a good Samaritan, gives help to the help-needing, worthy or unworthy. Ought not Charity, even in that sense, to cover a multitude of Sins? No Penny-a-week Committee-Lady, no manager of Soup-Kitchens, dancer at Charity Balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged man: but where, in all England, could there have been found another soul so full of Pity, a hand so heaven-like bounteous as his? The widow’s mite, we know, was greater than all the other gifts.

  Perhaps it is this divine feeling of Affection, throughout manifested, that principally attracts us towards Johnson. A true brother of men is he; and filial lover of the Earth; who, with little bright spots of Attachment, “where lives and works some loved one,” has beautified “this rough, solitary Earth into a peopled garden.”