IT is as unpardonable not to know Samuel Johnson in his various moods as an essayist as it would be to pretend to love his prose style as we may love that of Addison or Irving, Earle or Fuller. He was a great man, and in the eighteenth century a great writer. He will always remain a great man—virile, full of virtus, daring to be himself at any cost, including the actual experience of misery verging close on starvation; fierce in the assertion of his right to count for a unit in creation and not to be overborne by any one, gentle or common, noble or ignoble; yet under this fierceness so tender that from the depths of his sympathy for the suffering of others we may judge how deeply he himself must have suffered under—

  We can see his sensibility still more plainly when he writes Lord Chesterfield: “The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind.” That rebuke, the proudest which struggling merit ever administered to the vanity of fashionable culture, we could not wish to have been other than it was. From the time Homer learned to describe the insolence of the suitors of Penelope at meals, by his own experience in living on scraps from lordly tables, to the Augustan Age when Horace and Virgil were obliged to buy permission to become immortal at the price of the meanest sycophancy to power;—from the very beginning of literature until Teutonic individuality met the pride of aristocratic power in the Teutoburgerwald and with naked breast bore it backward,—there was never the match of that reply from this plebeian “son of John” to his lord. When in the time of Tacitus, the German ancestors of the remote and unknown English “John,” who begot the original “Johnson,” waded the Rhine bare-legged through broken ice, making their way towards Rome, they were preparing the world for the coming of this heroic soul, fitted by the anguish of deep and long-continued humiliation for the pride of this answer. To be “humble with the humble and haughty with the proud” is the highest of the merely human virtues, but it is truly assumed in the mythology of the race which produced the “Johnsons” that human virtues belong to “Midgard,”—the “middle yard,”—a condition of soul in which the celestial and infernal powers are forever blent,—not in harmony, but in the keen struggle of hand-to-hand fighting. We would be above or below humanity not to love Johnson for the pride of his poverty, but no genius of Carlyle, Taine, or Macaulay can change by eulogy the law under which the human soul acts in doing its creative work. Complete self-forgetfulness, the absorption of the artist in his art, is the first necessity of great creative work, and for Dr. Samuel Johnson, whether in Grub Street poverty or as the flattered author of the Dictionary and the “Great Cham of Literature” in his day, complete self-forgetfulness was never possible. The panoplied dignity he asserted against Chesterfield stiffens his essays and robs them of the grace which, if they only had it, would make them the great intellectual masterpieces of the eighteenth century. Among the great intellects of England in that century, none was stronger than Samuel Johnson, but in the Kingdom of Heaven in literature where the sweetness of Addison and the tender love of Thackeray for all goodness are the highest laws, he that is least is greater than he. Yet when we see this uncouth and almost absurd figure coming from the wilderness of Grub Street garrets, in the rusty camel’s-hair of his threadbare coat, shambling towards the twentieth century, mumbling to himself and making strange gestures as he approaches, we would be unworthy, indeed, of his sacrifices, if we did not uncover and do him the deepest reverence as to the John the Baptist of a new dispensation in literature—a dispensation which the journalist Franklin illustrated when at table he pledged the trade lords of Philadelphia in water gruel and told them that those who could live on it needed no man’s patronage. Samuel Johnson made that possible. To realize what it means to literature, we have only to read Dryden’s prefaces and the average “dedication” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In modern times no greater work has been done for the world than that which accomplished the revolution from such conditions. It made Truth possible for genius, and set so high a standard of manhood in literature, that no man of real intellect dares now to be openly the sycophant of Vanity, Folly and Falsehood—even when these hold all the avenues of preferment, and demand subservience as the price of advancement.

  Owing this and more to Samuel Johnson, we ought to thank Heaven for him and to read his Rambler and Idler essays, his “Rasselas,” his poems, his biographies, and his Dictionary too, to learn what manner of man he was in the realities back of the unequaled portrait Boswell has left.

  When once or twice in a century heaven sends a Man on earth to show us what manhood means, we cannot learn too much of him. And Samuel Johnson was a Man.