than trial by jury, the punctilious code of the duel, by which a man, if insulted, might vindicate his courage and so his honor. A man who refused this test was looked upon with a certain degree of ignominy. If, to be a consistent Christian, a man must interpret every text of the Bible literally, if he must hate his father and mother, if he must give to everyone that asketh of him, if he must never go to law with a fellow-Christian, if he must never kill, either in war or peace, he must regard most of the tests that secular society offers him as evils. But Johnson was not a literalist. With the great mass of stanch Christians he believed that the follower of the gospel could consistently defend his own life, and what should be still more precious to him, his wife, his family, his country, his honor. Civilized communities tried to offer such a man a civilized means of doing so. A man of character and responsibility would abide by its terms. No doubt these principles are no longer applicable to the duel, for it is no longer an accepted test. Nor is there any evidence that Dr. Johnson would revive it. But if the reader discovers that he wavered more than once on the general principle I have outlined above, he will have discovered more than I have.

A more thoughtful man than Boswell has accused Johnson of "loose talk" on another subject. It regards the way eighteenth century England treated its criminals. A great number of crimes besides that of murder were punishable by death. The forger of a note, the thief of some shillings, like the assassin of a whole family, was led in a procession through the streets, a disorderly crowd of curiosity-seekers tagging after him, to the public gallows, and there hanged before the mob. Dr. Johnson was a humane man, but he wished for a reasonably stable state of society and was willing to see it maintained by the punishment and, if necessary, even by the death of the offender. But the execution of a petty criminal, surely, was not necessary. The poor fellow did not need to die. Such disproportionate penalties still further hardened the callous and led the weak, by sympathy with the victim of injustice, into sympathy with his crime. Unfortunately, English laws did not grow more merciful in Johnson's day. But the administration of the law took a new

turn. The procession was given up and the gallows removed from its commanding position in the public street to the comparative quiet of the prison yard. Again, let us remember that Dr. Johnson was, in his own way, an honest as well as a humane man. To remedy the injustice of disproportionate punishments by hiding them away was not to his mind. As for just ones, he had an understanding above that of most men, of the dullness, the daily grind of the hopelessly poor. He would not deprive them of any relief or pleasure, however distasteful to more fortunate men, until he could furnish them with better. And he had not much hope for better. He did not begrudge them in their hunger the smell of their ill-ventilated kitchens; himself, a total abstainer for most of his life, he did not begrudge them their gin. He would not take from even the most sordid murderer perhaps the only gleam of prominence and importance he would ever have; nor, if a man must be hanged, rob the dull multitude of their brutal holiday. He would make life as congenial as possible to the grossest of men. "The public," he exclaimed peevishly, "was gratified by a procession, the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?" Many things may be wrong about this reasoning; it may be based on false assumptions; it may leave some important matters wholly out of account; but could anything be more consistent with itself?

There are a few other points on which we need to guard ourselves against forming too hasty impressions of Johnson from Boswell's lively and picturesque representation of him. What man really is at all like his mimics? And Boswell was, often consciously, sometimes in spite of himself, a mimic. Even in the manner of expression he and Johnson bore no real resemblance. Boswell assumed an air of seriousness to which he was not entitled and for its sake often suppressed a relish of life that was in him. Johnson was serious, but the stress of his feeling sharpened his seriousness into something keen and penetrating. He was intense, and he was a wit. Very rare are the times when Johnson was merely facetious. When a man is lively, wit is an irresistible plaything to cut with. When he is angry, indignant, passionate with moral principle, teased

into uneasiness, as Johnson often was, wit is his readiest, keenest weapon. But whether in sport or in earnest, wit is always too sharp, too pointed, to be confounded with mere chatter. It always has something to say.

In some few matters, Johnson was dictatorial and dogmatic, but that is far from meaning that he was altogether pleased with himself or confident of his opinion. Cardinal Newman has somewhere suggested that we seldom take the trouble to say, "I am sure of anything, if no doubt of it has ever crossed our minds." And, we may add, the more positive we are in our words, the more evidence we give of our own uncertainty. Johnson's doubts were many. He had faith that God was infinitely good, but what could so imperfect a being as man know about the nature of infinite goodness? So, Johnson wearied himself trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. The differences of opinion among Christians unsettled him. Even the differences among different world religions did not leave him in peace. "You do not know," he once said, "what a Brahmin has to say for himself." He relished honest men, thinking men, the free exchange of genuine opinions, and yet there was no more than the simple truth in his confession: "Every man who attacks my belief diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy."

There was one belief of which Dr. Johnson was so sure that he could afford to be complacent about it: "All rebellion," he once said with a smile, "is natural to man." But he himself had gradually learned not to be rebellious. He had fought his own way as much as any man. But how impossible that way would have been, had there been no laws, no constituted authorities, no money and no right to earn it and retain it, no mutual respect and deference, no feeling that a wife and children had any share in the respect due to the husband and father! Johnson had no great illusions about any particular wisdom in law-makers, about any inborn superiority in men of rank. He never courted them. He was sometimes intolerably vexed with them. But the man who climbs a peg in a social scale should respect the scale; the man who accepts support

1

from civilized society should give it his support in return. Johnson's whole theory of society, his theory of subordination as he calls it, amounts pretty much to this: As long as men mean to enjoy all the conveniences of laws and kings and parliaments, of customs and social distinctions, let them pay for what they get by a square and manly loyalty. After all, this is not the theory to gratify a George III. It seems to make very honest company with the doctrine that all government depends on the consent of the governed.

There were an astonishing number of people in the London of Johnson's day, who, to quote his own phrase, “hung loose upon society." To the vices of these the dissipated, the vagrant, the hand-to-mouth poor-Dr. Johnson was always lenient. How lenient appears best in Mrs. Thrale's anecdotes of him. It was another and very different class which caused him all his exasperation and made him sometimes harsh in speech. They were the men and women so comfortably off in mind and body that they never understood, they never tried, they only pretended, to understand the struggles of life, the temptations of poverty, the conflict with one's own doubts and passions, the stuff of which character and heroism are made. They considered themselves virtuous whenever they "felt good." They lazily trusted to impressions rather than to honest facts and hard-earned experience. Their very sentimentality prevented them from making true allowance for other men, because they never entered with intelligence into other men's minds and circumstances. They said to themselves, "I cannot bear to think such and so," and then thought as they pleased. This habit of mind Dr. Johnson denounced as cant, and yet some of his dearest friends, such as Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, were full of it.

There was another class of men, always few in number, and fewer than ever in the eighteenth century, of whose force and strength Dr. Johnson had no inkling; men so full of imagination and their own sense of beauty, and so eager to express it in sound or picture or words, that they could not if they would see the mere circumstances about them at all clearly and justly. The music of such men meant nothing to him; their pictures next to

nothing; he was too much of a reader not to be interested in verse as well as prose, but what we usually think of today as a poetic imagination meant very little. When he wrote of poets, as he often did, he brought to his task uprightness of character and much practical good sense. He described them as husbands, fathers, neighbors, citizens, engagers in the transactions of life; he tested their logic and consistency; he noted in their verse those passages that chanced to fit helpfully into the collected practical wisdom of the world. But, after all, he was but a lame critic. Like them, perhaps like all great men, he was astonishingly limited on some sides. Like them, he had an overpowering inner impulse. But his impulse, unlike theirs, drove him steadily on toward an understanding, an allowance, an acceptance of the actual workaday world, with its competitions, its discussions, its misunderstandings and reconciliations, its unforeseen good luck and bad. In that sort of world he made a place for himself. There he preserved his sense of obligation, his generosity, and his independence. There "he dogmatized and was contradicted and in this conflict of opinions and sentiments he found delight."

Let us beware of trying to run off with the fruit of another man's experience, second-hand. Eighteenth century London is not our problem, nor Dr. Johnson's temperament, the temperament we have to adjust to life. Every new situation makes its own challenge and the essence of every virtue consists in our earning it for ourselves. But another great buffeter with life, Sir Walter Raleigh, has said: "For conversation of particular greatness and dignity, there is nothing more noble and glorious than to have felt the force of every fortune." Perhaps some of that greatness and dignity we may find in the conversations of this volume.