CHAPTER XII
Johnson and the Art of Conversation

Chapters like this usually begin with a lament. The age of conversation, it is proper to begin, is gone, gone with the harpsichord and the minuet and the long, leisurely evenings when the bluestockings discussed literature and the theory of equality. The rush of modern life, one continues, has killed conversation, even as the penny post has killed the art of letter-writing. In all this there is much false sentiment and false implication. It is foolish to assume the existence of a time when talk was universally clever and wise. There were dullards even in 1780. Cards and dancing, then as now, were sought as a relief from thinking, and serious talkers were not seldom voted a nuisance. No doubt they often were. The bluestockings, as we have seen, sometimes bored even themselves. The reputation of the age for conversation depended upon a few.

It is difficult to recover a sufficient body of this conversation upon which to base an opinion. It is a much easier thing to read about than to get at. Plenty of essays on conversation have been preserved—no manual for young ladies was without one—but the talk itself is not so easy to find. We have Chesterfield’s advice to his son on how to shine in conversation, but the record of Chesterfield’s own discourse is little better than a collection of puns and bits of repartee, mere flotsam and jetsam. Cowper wrote a long and rather dreary poem on colloquial happiness, but where is Cowper’s conversation? Fielding, too, wrote an essay on the subject, but it is a rather priggish affair (for Fielding), and the perusal of it only fills us with regret that we must take this poor substitute for the brilliant chatter that went on about the punch-bowl. The scraps of talk casually embedded in works on other subjects, the anecdotes, jests, and bons mots have lost with time much of their flavour and significance, and give us no adequate notion of the distinctive opinions held by their authors, no grounds for large general conclusions about them, and no conception of the general strain of their talk. There is no steady light from these flashes of eloquence and wit. At most they make us regret what we have lost. Thus there is every reason to suppose that the conversation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a model of brilliance; but the collection of his sayings recorded by Moore is quite lacking in the grace of reality. These good things are without a foil; they need arrangement; they are mere ornaments adorning nothing, a little heap of unset gems.

To all this there is but one exception, the grand exception of Boswell’s record of Johnson. Perhaps the chief distinction of that record is that it gives us not only the high lights in the conversation, not only its exciting moments, but its very longueurs (as Horace Walpole objected), its ineptitude, its occasional inconclusiveness. There is, therefore, something by which the wit of it all is set off. It has the ring of vitality. It is to the everlasting credit of Boswell that he let us see the worst of Johnson’s talk, that, in the words of Hannah More, he ‘mitigated none of his asperities,’ but gave us the heaviness as well as the wit and the rudeness as well as the depth. We hear the voice of Johnson, not a mere quotation of his words.

But in spite of the obvious faults of Johnson’s talk, it is difficult to speak of it without a continuous and perhaps offensive use of superlatives. Age could not wither Johnson. Instead of impairing his memory, time enriched it. The pomposity of his written work never impedes his quickness of wit in conversation. He was, to be sure, fond of parading that pomposity of style for the amazement and amusement of his hearers, and it is scarcely true to say that he used one style in writing and another in talking. It would be nearer the truth to say that, as he grew older, he tended to introduce more of the ease of his talk into his written work. Sentence after sentence from the Lives of the Poets might be cited to show the almost colloquial ease of his later manner, and significant parallels might be drawn. Yet it is certain that conversation gave more scope to that aptness of homely illustration which was his most entertaining gift. Posterity is right in preferring Johnson’s conversation to his writings, for while it lacks nothing in the stream of thought and finish of style that distinguish his writings, it is distinctly superior in mother wit.

In the heat of conversation Johnson had a stimulus which he never felt in writing, the joy of personal contention. He admittedly regarded conversation as a contest, and was frankly contemptuous of the type of man who, like Addison or Goldsmith, was always at his best when he was arguing alone. Of two men talking, Johnson asserted, one must always rise superior to the other. For himself he had too much pride to be contentedly submerged by the conversation of others. Rather than be worsted, he would strike below the belt, or, in the words of Boswell, ‘toss and gore several persons.’ He had a rough and ready way of escaping from difficulties. When Mrs. Frances Brooke requested him to look over her new tragedy, complaining that she herself had no time to revise it, since she had ‘so many irons in the fire,’ the sage replied, ‘Why, then, Madam, the best thing I can advise you to do is to put your tragedy along with your irons.’ ‘If your company does not drive a man out of his house, nothing will,’ he said to Boswell because the Scotsman had ventured to defend the Americans. When he got the floor—and by the use of such methods he got it very often—he was not inclined to abandon it, and the conversation became a monologue. Goldsmith, who so often had the right in dispute and was, indeed, one of the wittiest opponents Johnson ever had, complained that he was ‘for making a monarchy of what should be a republic.’ Even Boswell admitted that in Johnson’s company men did not so much interchange conversation as listen to what was said. But, whatever lofty notions of conversation we may cherish, it may be questioned whether it can ever be a republic. If the flow of talk is to get anywhere, if it is to reach a conclusion, it must be confined within a rather narrow channel or it is certain to dissipate itself. Johnson hated spattering talk. He censured Goldsmith because he was always ‘coming on without knowing how he was to get off,’ and asserted that he could not talk well because he had made up his mind about nothing. ‘Goldsmith,’ said he, ‘had no settled notions upon any subject; so he talked always at random.’ It was not so with Johnson. He saw his conclusions and drove straight towards them, scattering his opponents or knocking them on the head if they impeded him.

But it would be a mistake to infer that Johnson was a sort of conversational head-hunter, or the ourang-outang of the drawing-room whom Macaulay depicts, alternately howling and growling and rending his associates in pieces before our eyes. If we have any respect for the consistent testimony of his contemporaries, we shall come to realize that he talked somewhat unwillingly. He had to be drawn out. ‘He was like the ghosts,’ said Tyers. Nothing annoyed him more than to be shown off. At the famous Wilkes dinner, to which he had been taken simply that he might contend with a worthy opponent, he was so angry when he realized what had happened that he took up a book, ‘sat down upon a window seat and read, or at least kept his eye upon it intently for some time,’ exactly as upon the very different occasion of his first meeting with Fanny Burney.

Because of this lack of pliability in Johnson, Boswell deserves far more credit than he has ever received for his success in making him talk. Boswell, though not a profound thinker, was of a mind curious and alert. He is entirely misjudged by those readers—if, indeed, they are ever readers—who join Macaulay in thinking him a fool. Boswell said foolish things, to be sure, and asked the foolishest questions, as what proportion of their wages housemaids might properly spend on their attire, how hogs were slaughtered in the Tahiti Islands, and what Dr. Johnson would do if he were shut up in a tower alone with a new-born baby; but under the silliest of them there is always a keen experimentalist, an amused observer tickling a giant with a straw. Boswell introduced a valuable amount of friction into Johnson’s life, arranged that he should meet men whose views were wholly opposed to his own, carried him off to dine with Whigs, got him to call on Lord Monboddo (who held the most offensive opinions about primitive man), introduced him to General Paoli, and to Beattie and Sir Adam Fergusson (of the infamous race of Scots), and dragged him across all Scotland to Mull and Icomkill. No one else so mastered the art of managing Johnson as this same wily Scot. Mrs. Thrale could not do it. Neither Goldsmith nor Dr. Taylor could do it. Topham Beauclerk might perhaps have done it, had he thought it worth while. Fanny Burney had the subtle combination of grace and ability which appealed to Johnson, but was lacking in force. When she attempted to show Johnson to her ‘Daddy Crisp,’ or to engage him in conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Greville, her failure was conspicuous. The great man’s placid self-absorption gave a deeper offence than any tirade could have done.

Johnson had at times so serene a manner that, in an affable moment, he declared to Boswell that ‘that is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm, quiet interchange of sentiments.’ Such is the general strain of his conversation at Streatham, as recorded by Miss Burney.[408] Here we detect a playfulness, even a frivolity, of manner which is a pleasant contrast to the more professional tone with which Boswell has familiarized us. There is in it no hint of dress parade. It is a very human conversation, containing most of the faults that disgrace our own. Johnson gossips. He talks of the weather; he talks of his friends behind their back—what true comrade ever failed to do that?—and will even indulge in a bit of scandal. He talks of Sheridan’s marriage with the beautiful prima donna, Elizabeth Linley, and of Goldsmith’s fracas with his Welsh publisher, Evans; and censures or defends Garrick or Foote as the mood impels. There are even moments when he emulates Goldsmith and makes himself a laughing-stock for the delectation of his friends.

This feature of the Johnsonian manner, which might almost be compared with Goldsmith’s fondness for the rôle of fool, has been generally overlooked. One may doubt whether even Boswell was more than dimly aware of it. Yet there can be little doubt that Johnson enjoyed assuming and playing a part. He was certainly not a bear, but he enjoyed playing the bear, and hugged his victims to death that the world might laugh. It was his peculiar misfortune to play the rôle too well, as it was Goldsmith’s misfortune to play the fool too well. Again, Johnson was assuredly not at heart a pompous man; yet he could in a moment assume pomposity and drop into the rôle of Gargantua. But he sometimes created such consternation in the part that the world did not dare to laugh. Thus, in the trite old illustration of his remark about Buckingham’s Rehearsal, he revised the crisp sentence, ‘It has not wit enough to keep it sweet,’ into the crazy pomposity of, ‘It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.’ It is amazing that Macaulay and the world of readers after him could delude themselves into thinking that Johnson was seriously attempting to improve this sentence. It was, on the contrary, a pose worthy of Laurence Sterne. It was a favourite device of a true humourist putting forth a caricature of himself. Instances of it could be multiplied indefinitely. Remarking on the morality of the Beggars’ Opera, for example, he said, ‘It may have some influence for evil by making the character of a rogue familiar, and in some degree pleasing’; then with the familiar shift of style, ‘There is in it such a labefactation of all principles as to be injurious to morality.’ Gibbon and Cambridge, who were present, could regard this stylistic somersault as an attempt at critical dignity, and even Boswell felt that he must smother his mirth. Fanny Burney, had she been there, would, I imagine, have smiled confidently in Johnson’s face, for she appreciated this aspect of his talk better than others. It is to her that we owe Johnson’s delicious criticism of his pensioners, and, in particular of the mysterious Miss Poll Carmichael: ‘I could make nothing of her; she was wiggle-waggle, and I could never persuade her to be categorical.’

But however dull the eighteenth century may have been in apprehending this type of humour, it did full justice to the more serious side of Johnson’s conversation. It was chiefly impressed, as every age must be, with the scope and versatility of the man’s mind. It is of course the merest platitude to remark that Johnson’s conversation is characterized by breadth of interest and accuracy of information; yet, like many platitudes, it is essential to an examination of the subject. It is most significant of the man and of the age in which he lived—so far removed from the narrowness of our own age of specialization—simply to turn the pages of Boswell’s Life and note the number of topics upon which Johnson talked with that easy mastery which distinguishes the scholar and philosopher from the promiscuously well-informed man of the world. Take, for example, the topics touched upon in a dozen consecutive pages of the book, chosen at random; evidence for supernatural appearances, the Roman Church, the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, the Royal Marriage Bill, the respect due to old families, the art of mimicry, the word civilisation (‘shop’ was evidently not an excluded topic), vitriol, the question, Was there one original language? the relation of Erse to Irish, the rights of schoolmasters, in the infliction of punishment, the Lord Chancellors, the Scotch accent, the future state of the soul, prayers for the dead, the poet Gray, Akenside, Elwal the heretic, the question, Is marriage natural to man? (it seems that it is not), the philosophy of beauty, swearing, the philosophy of biography, the proper use of riches, the philosophy of philanthropy. Here surely is a sufficiently varied list. But no mere enumeration can give any notion of the novelty of Johnson’s thinking. His remarks are no echo, no quotation. They are the natural up-welling of an original mind, showing us that Johnson was a philosopher; but they also reveal a fund of accurate detail and an ability to quote chapter and verse, showing us that Johnson was a scholar. These two offices may be quickly illustrated from the topics enumerated above. When Boswell introduced the subject of the future state of the soul, he made the highly conventional observation that ‘one of the most pleasing thoughts is that we shall see our friends again.’ Whereupon Johnson replied:

There is Johnson the philosopher. Five minutes later, Boswell was saying, ‘I have been told that in the Liturgy of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, there was a form of prayer for the dead,’ to which Johnson replied, ‘Sir, it is not in the liturgy which Laud framed for the Episcopal Church of Scotland; if there is a liturgy older than that, I should be glad to see it.’ There is Johnson the scholar.

It would be rash to assert that Johnson was always on safe ground, and ludicrous to assert that he was always right. He enjoyed a random shot at the truth as well as any other man whose chief interest is in the vitality of his thinking rather than in the literalness of his conclusions; but it was a diversion which he seldom permitted to others, and a tendency in himself which was generally restrained by the specialists about him. Here we have a truly formative element in the social life of the time.

But no man of the eighteenth century could hold his hearers simply by the display of a wealth of information. Brilliancy of manner was as indispensable as breadth of mind. ‘Weight without lustre is lead,’ wrote Lord Chesterfield. No good talker was without a superficial attraction. Garrick was noted for the histrionic quality, Beauclerk for acidity, and Goldsmith for Irish humour. Johnson’s conversation, from the inner fire of it, was for ever sparkling into wit and epigram. Yet he never made the mistake of serving his friends with nothing but epigrams, which is very like serving one’s guests with nothing but hors d’œuvres. Epigram stimulates the appetite, but does not satisfy it, and will not do for a steady diet. It is with Johnson, however, something more than a mannerism. It was the form that lent itself best to the expression of his critical faculty. An examination of Johnson’s literary criticism will reveal the fact that his method is prevailingly sententious and summary. He was impatient of a long and slow development of thought, nor did he ‘wind into’ a subject, like Burke. In reading the Lives of the Poets, we do not feel that matters are gradually illuminated, but that they are revealed by sudden flashes. If his criticism offends, it is usually because it is a final pronouncement and is too summary to be adequate. When he attempts an orderly criticism of details, the method, though more elaborate, is usually less satisfying. He is at his best when he is most crisp and dogmatic: ‘If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?’ ‘Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.’ ‘His page,’ he says of Addison, ‘is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour.’ The value of Johnson’s criticism consists in such sentences as these, not in longer passages of sustained comment like the analysis of Gray’s Bard.

Now whatever charm or power there is in such a method is found also in Johnson’s conversation. There is the same pointed style, the same finality of tone, and often the same irritating quality: ‘No man,’ said he of Goldsmith, ‘was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.’ ‘That man [Lyttelton] sat down to write a book to tell the world what the world had all his life been telling him.’ ‘All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.’ ‘In republics there is not a respect for authority, but a fear of power.’ Many profess to dislike such an epigrammatic style as this; but I incline to think that those who protest most loudly against such dicta are those who are least capable of thinking them out. At any rate, if they accomplished no more, such statements gave something to attack, and the desire to demolish is of the very soul of conversation.

Those who are offended by such a conversational method might attack it more effectively by pointing out that it was often employed to startle rather than to instruct. Johnson felt the normal human desire to shock people, and indulged to the full his transitory moods. ‘Rousseau,’ he would exclaim, ‘is a very bad man. I should like to have him work in the plantations!’ ‘I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.’ In a fit of petulance he even quoted with approval the ridiculous remark, ‘For anything I can see, foreigners are fools.’ There is no deliberation in such words; it is, in truth, hardly fair to quote them. At any rate, they are entirely misleading when taken out of their setting; for it is the charm of conversation that it is not deliberate, and that a talker may dare to have a prejudice as well as an opinion. A good talker will ‘paint a man highly’ for the mere love of painting. Voltaire and all free talkers with him are guilty of the same excesses. Madame Necker tells us that in listening to Voltaire it was necessary to distinguish the statements that were truly characteristic of the man from those which were dictated by the passing mood and were no more than the vérité du moment. It is the peculiar office of conversation thus to give the whole man, with all his faults upon his head, all his lapses from sense and self-consciousness, all his irrationalities and inconsistencies: it is these things that show that he is human. It was Johnson himself who remarked that in conversation ‘you never get a system.’ Let us be grateful that it is so. A ‘unified’ person, a man whose mind is governed by a system, cannot converse; he can only lecture. His thoughts flow like a canal, not like a river. He is really the most limited of men, for he must live within his system as he lives within his income. It is the glory of Johnson’s conversation that you cannot make a system out of it. For a system you must go to the Rambler or The Vanity of Human Wishes.

But this is not to say that Johnson had no conversational principles or that he uttered thoughts merely because they were novel. His ‘stream of mind’—to use one of his own phrases—was free, but it was not therefore without a very definite trend. Like a stream again, he drew constantly upon his sources, certain general conclusions about life, which really control his conversation. He himself declared that general principles were not to be had from a man’s talk, but from books. Certainly this dictum does not apply to his own talk, for general principles are obvious enough in it. It is quite evident that we are listening to a man who has made up his mind about life and about what is worth while. If, unlike Goldsmith, he talked well in public, it was because, like Imlac, he had thought well in private. It is his constant custom to bring the casual topic immediately into the realm of general principles, and thus the talk about a particular subject becomes a philosophy of it. Boswell realized this, and introduced topic after topic in order to get it cleared up once for all. ‘I wished to have it settled,’ he says, ‘whether duelling was contrary to the laws of Christianity.’ He always felt that Johnson could have settled the whole matter of necessity and freewill, if only he had been willing to talk about it. Of a lady talking with Johnson of the resurrection body, he naïvely remarks, ‘She seemed desirous of knowing more, but he left the question in obscurity.’ Such is his confidence in his master’s method.

It is always profitable to delve through Johnson’s talk to the philosophy that underlies it; but not unfrequently he spares us the trouble by enunciating the principle himself. Thus when the subject of gaming arose, he pronounced as follows:

Whether this doctrine be economically sound I do not know; but it is plainly a doctrine. He delighted in such formulation of principles. Thus when Hume’s statement that all who are happy are equally happy was quoted to him, he replied with a definition of happiness:

In like manner, he deduced principles of æsthetics from a teacup, and demolished the theory of equality by inviting the footman to sit down and dine.

But Johnson’s conversation is more than a reductio ad principia, as it is more than epigram and more than information. Philosophic in method, it was creative in effect. It fertilized other minds, and attained to new life long after it was uttered and forgotten. Johnson cannot be measured by one who reads only his writings, but he can be measured by one who reads only his conversation. Thus his work is linked with that of men who have accomplished more by the spoken word than by the written thought, so that, on the one hand, it has its place in the history of table-talk, like that of Selden and Coleridge, and, on the other, typifies the relation of society and letters at its best. By the dynamic force of his conversation Johnson developed men, he woke in them powers of which they did not know themselves to be possessed, and raised them to higher levels of attainment than his own. Men listened to him with rage or with wonder, as the Hebrews to a prophet and the Romans to a Sibyl, and they scoffed or recorded according to their mood. Of much of this Johnson was, fortunately, unconscious. He regarded his books as his chief influence upon the world. ‘Now, Sir,’ said he, ‘the good I can do by my conversation bears the same relation to the good I can do by my writings that the practice of a physician retired to a small country town, does to his practice in a great city.’ But Boswell saw more clearly. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘his conversation seemed more remarkable than even his writings.’ When, in 1776, Boswell returned to Johnson’s side, he felt at once the electric force. ‘I felt myself elevated as if brought into another state of being,’ he wrote; and said to Mrs. Thrale, ‘I am quite restored by him, by transfusion of mind.’ The cynical will of course dismiss this as a spasm of hero-worship; but it is more than that. No one will be inclined to accuse Edmund Burke of worshipping Johnson, yet he remarked: ‘To the conversation of this truly great man I am proud to acknowledge that I owe the best part of my education.’ Orme the historian remarked that in conversation Johnson gave one either ‘new thoughts or a new colouring.’ Testimony of an even more striking character may be quoted from Reynolds. Speaking of his own Discourses on Art, Reynolds said:

Those who heard the conversation of Johnson may be said to have witnessed literature in the making. At any rate, Johnson’s talk became literature by the simple fact of being recorded. It is the best example that can be given of the fusion of the literary life with the social, and brought to bear the same kind of influence which the salons were trying to exert. It was destined to give Johnson his distinctive place in the literature. It was regarded, and properly, by Boswell as constituting the peculiar value of his Life of Johnson, and as it was the chief inspiration, so it remains the chief attraction of that remarkable book.