BY EDMUND GOSSE.

It is exactly one hundred years ago since Dr. Johnson wrote his last letter to Lucy Porter, in which he announced to her that he was very ill, and that he desired her prayers. Less than a fortnight later, on the 13th of December, 1784, he was dead. All through the year his condition had given his friends more than anxiety. The winter of 1783 had been marked by collapse of the constitution; to the ceaseless misery of his skin was now added an asthma that would not suffer him to recline in bed, a dropsy that made his legs and feet useless through half of the weary day. It is somewhat marvellous that he got through this terrible winter, the sufferings of which are painfully recorded in his sad correspondence. It is difficult to understand why, just when he wanted companionship most, his friends seem all to have happened to desert him. Of the quaint group of invalids in mind and body to whom his house had been a hospital, all were gone except Mrs. Desmoulins, who was bedridden; and we may believe that their wrangling company had never been so distasteful to himself as to his friends. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, as we know, had more or less valid reasons for absence, and Boswell, at least, was solicitous in inquiry. We must, however, from whatever cause, think of Johnson, who dreaded solitude, as now almost always alone, mortified by spiritual pains no less acute than his physical ones, torturing his wretched nights with Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, and with laborious and repeated diagnosis of his own bodily symptoms. It is strange to think that, although he was the leading man of letters in England, and the centre of a whole society, his absence from the meetings of his associates seems scarcely to have been noticed. It was not until in February he was relieved that he allowed himself to speak of the danger he had passed through. Then he confessed his terror to Lucy Porter, in the famous words, “Pray for me; death, my dear, is very dreadful; let us think nothing worth our care but how to prepare for it;” and asked Boswell to consult the venerable physician, Sir Alexander Dick, as to the best way of avoiding a relapse.

Boswell felt it a duty to apply not to Dick only, but to various leading doctors. In doing so he reminded them, with his extraordinary foppishness, of “the elegant compliment” which Johnson had paid to their profession in his Life of Garth, the poet-physician. The doctors, with one accord, and thinking without doubt far more of Johnson himself than of Garth, clustered around him with their advice and their prescriptions, and the great man certainly received for the brief remainder of his days such alleviation as syrup of poppies and vinegar of squills could give him. Mrs. Boswell, encouraged by a more favorable account of his health, invited him down to Auchinlech in March. He could not venture to accept, but he was pleased to be asked, and recovered so much of his wonted fire as to fancy, in a freak of strange inconsistency, that he would amuse himself by decorating his London study with the heads of “the fathers of Scottish literature.” To Langton, who—as Johnson justly thought, with unaccountable “circumduction”—had made inquiries about his old friend through Lord Portmore, he expressed a hope of panting on to ninety, and said that “God, who has so wonderfully restored me, can preserve me in all seasons.” It is very pathetic to follow the old man through the desolate and wearisome months: nor can we easily understand, from any of the records we possess, why he was allowed to be so much alone. On Easter Monday, after recording without petulance that his great hope of being able to go out on the preceding day had been doomed to disappointment, he goes on to say, “I want every comfort. My life is very solitary and very cheerless.... I am very weak, and have not passed the door since the 13th of December.”

Bright weather came in May, and Johnson went to Islington for a change of air. Boswell came back to town, and the sage was able to go to dinner-parties day after day, without at first exasperating his symptoms. In June he went to Oxford, on the famous occasion when he told the people in the coach that “Demptster’s sister had endeavored to teach him knotting, but that he had made no progress;” and at Oxford, as we know, he talked copiously, and with all his old vivacity. No doubt, though Boswell does not like to confess it, the constant dissipation, intellectual and mildly social, of those two summer months was mischievous to the frail revival of his health. At the dinner of the Literary Club, June 22, every one noticed how ill he looked. Perhaps the true cause of this was a secret chagrin which we can now appreciate, the final apostasy of Mrs. Thrale from his friendship. At all events, Reynolds and Boswell were sufficiently frightened to set their heads together for the purpose of getting their old friend off to Italy. We are divided between satisfaction that the inevitable end did not reach the old man sociable in the midst of strange faces and foreign voices, and bewildered indignation at the still mysterious cabal which wrecked so amiable an enterprise. If Lord Thurlow was shifty, however, other friends were generous. Dr. Brocklesbury, the physician, pressed Johnson to become his guest that he might the more carefully attend upon him. From Ashbourne, whither he had been prevailed upon to go, he kept this last-mentioned friend well posted in the sad fluctuations of his health, and we see him gradually settling down again into wretchedness. His mind recurred constantly to the approaching terror. To Dr. Burney he writes in August, “I struggle hard for life. I take physic and take air; my friend’s chariot is always ready. We have run this morning twenty-four miles, and could run forty-eight more. But who can run the race with death?” Reflections of this class fill all his letters of that autumn; and in October he sums up his condition in saying to Heberden that “the summer has passed without giving him any strength.” It is strange that still no one seemed to notice what is plain to us in every line of his correspondence, that Johnson was dying. With himself, however, the thought of death was always present; and even in discussing with Miss Seward so frivolous a theme as the antics of a learned pig, Johnson was suddenly solemnized by recollecting that the pig had owed its life to its education. One hardly knows whether to smile or to sigh at the quaint and suggestive peroration: “The pig, then, has no cause to complain; protracted existence is a good recompense for very considerable degrees of torture.” To protract existence was now all Johnson’s thought, and he set his powerful will to aid him in the struggle. His only hopes were those which his strength of will supplied him with. “I will be conquered,” he said, “I will not capitulate.”

It was not till he reached London in November that he consented to capitulate. The terror of death was now upon him, indeed. “Love me as well as you can,” he wrote to Boswell; “teach the young ones to love me.” On the 8th of November he closed the diary of his symptoms—his Ægri ephemeris—now become worse than useless. His suffering, dejection, and restless weakness left his brain, however, unclouded, and less than a week before the end he corrected an error in a line from Juvenal which Dr. Brocklesbury had carelessly recited. The chronicle of the rapid final decline is given with great simplicity and force by Hoole in that narrative of the last three weeks of the life of Dr. Johnson which he contributed to the European Magazine in 1799, and which Mr. Napier has reprinted in one of the many appendices to his invaluable edition. At last, exactly a year after his original attack of asthma, the end came at seven o’clock in the evening of Monday, the 13th of December.

Devoid, as it is, of all the elements of external romance, there is perhaps no record of the extinction of genius which attracts more universal interest than this death of Samuel Johnson. So much of frivolity or so much of cant attends most of us even to the tomb, that the frank terror, expressed through a long life by this otherwise most manly and courageous person, has possessed a great fascination for posterity. The haunting insincerity of verse, particularly of eighteenth-century verse, had extracted even from Johnson, in the pages of The Vanity of Human Wishes, the usual rose-colored commonplace about death being “Kind Nature’s signal for retreat;” but he completely cleared his own mind of cant, even though a little clung about his singing robes. Boswell has given us an extraordinary instance of his habitual and dismal apprehensions in the celebrated conversation in 1769, which started with a discussion of David Hume’s supposed indifference to the idea of death. Not less familiar are the passionate asseverations with which Johnson startled Mrs. Knowles and Miss Seward in 1778 by repeating again and again that to exist in pain is better, far better, than to cease to exist altogether. These and other revelations of Johnson’s conversation have perhaps led us to exaggerate his habitual terror. There are, at least, instances to be drawn from less hackneyed sources which display his attitude towards eternity less painfully. Of these perhaps the most remarkable is that recorded in the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, when, on a calm Sunday afternoon, sailing from Ramsay to Skye, Johnson delivered himself of a little homily. The text was a passage from The Cypress Grove of Drummond of Hawthornden, which Boswell had happened to quote. Drummond had said that a man should leave life as cheerfully as a visitor who has examined an antiquary’s cabinet sees the curtain drawn again, and makes way to admit fresh pilgrims to the show. Johnson stripped the conceit to the skin, as he was in the habit of doing:—

“Yes, sir, if he is sure he is to be well after he goes out of it. But if he is to grow blind after he goes out of the show-room, and never to see anything again, or if he does not know whither he is to go next, a man will not go cheerfully out of a show-room. No wise man will be contented to die if he thinks he is to go into a state of punishment. Nay, no wise man will be contented to die, if he thinks he is to fall into annihilation, for however unhappy any man’s existence may be, he would rather have it than not exist at all. No; there is no rational principle by which a man can die contented, but a trust in the mercy of God, through the merits of Jesus Christ.” The baldness of this statement, the resolute contempt of the author of it for the mere dress and ornament of language, throw not a little light upon the reason why, after the lapse of a hundred years, we still listen with so quick an interest and so personal an affection to all that is recorded of Johnson’s speech. The age in which we live cannot be entirely given up to priggishness and the dry rot of sentiment, so long as any considerable company in it are wont to hang upon Johnson’s lips, without being offended by his jocular brutality, his strenuous piety, or his unflinching enmity to affectation. Of course a class still exists, perhaps it never was more numerous than it now is, whose nerves and lungs can endure the strong light and tonic air of Johnson’s vigorous genius, and who rejoice to think that no one ever tamed their tiger-cat. To these such an anniversary as the present, not needed to remind them of one who is almost as real to them as any of their own relations, is yet valuable as giving them a landmark from which they may look back and judge the effect that distance has upon the apparent and relative size of such a figure. This can be the only excuse, in a brief note such as this must be, for dealing with facts and personages which are the absolute commonplaces of literary history. We may know our Boswell by heart, and be prepared to pass a searching examination in Rasselas and in the Rambler, and yet be ready to listen for a moment with surprise to the voice which reminds us that a century has passed away since the great pontiff of literature died.

How then does the noble and familiar figure strike us in looking backward from the year 1884? In “constant repercussion from one coxcomb to another,” have the sounds which he continued to make through a career of stormy talk ceased to preserve all their value and importance for us? How does he affect our critical vision now that we observe in relief against him such later talker-seers as Coleridge, De Quincey, and Carlyle? To these questions it is temperament more than literary acumen which will suggest the replies; and the present writer has no intention at this particular moment of attempting to forestall the general opinion of the age. His only object in putting forth this brief note is to lay stress on the curious importance of temperament in dealing with what seems like a purely literary difficulty. The personality of all other English writers, in prose and verse, even of Pope, even of De Quincey, must eventually yield in interest to the qualities of their writing. In Dr. Johnson alone the writings yield to the personality, and in spite of the wonder of foreign critics such as M. Taine, he remains, and will remain, although practically unread, one of the most potent of English men of letters.

Must we not admit now, at the close of a century, that it is practically impossible to read him? Among the lesser men that surrounded him, there are many who have outstripped him in literary vitality. In verse he lags far behind Gray and Collins, Churchill and Chatterton; nay, if the Wanderer were by Johnson and London by Savage, the former would possess more readers than the latter now attracts. In prose, who shall venture to say that Johnson is the equal of Fielding, Smollett, Hume, Goldsmith, Gibbon, or Burke? We know that he is far less entertaining, far less versatile and brilliant, than any one of these. The Discourses of his direct disciple Reynolds are more often read, and with more pleasure, than those essays of The Rambler from which their style was taken. As a dramatist, as a novelist, Johnson ranks below Douglas Home, below the inventor of Peter Wilkins. For years he labored upon what was not literature at all, for other years on literature which the world has been obliged, against its will, to allow to disappear. When all is winnowed away which has become, in itself, interesting only to scholars, there remains The Vanity of Human Wishes, a gnomic poem of tedious morality, singularly feeble in the second joint of almost every recurring distich; Rasselas, a conte in the French taste, insufferable in its lumbering machinery and pedantic ethics; the Lives of the Poets, in which prejudice, ignorance, and taste combine to irritate the connoisseur and bewilder the student. Such, with obvious exaggeration, and with wilful suppression of exceptional facts, the surviving literary labors of Johnson may be broadly described to be. The paradox is that a Johnsonian may admit all that, and yet hold to it that his hero is the principal Englishman of letters throughout the rich second half of the eighteenth century. In this Johnson is unique. Coleridge, for instance, was much more than a writer of readable works in prose and verse; but let an age arrive in which the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and the Biographia Literaria are no longer read or admired, and Coleridge will scarcely be able, on the score of his personality alone, to retain his lofty position among men of letters. Yet this is what Johnson promises to succeed in continuing to do. No one will ever say again, with Byron, that the Lives of the Poets is “the finest critical work extant,” but that does not make Johnson ever so little a less commanding figure to us than he was to Byron.

Let us consider for one moment the case of the unfortunate tragedy of Irene. There are very few of us who are capable of placing our hands upon our bosoms in the open sight of heaven and swearing that we have ever read it quite through. The Mourning Bride still counts its admirers, and even Cato, but not Irene. Who among the staunchest and strongest Johnsonians can tell what hero it was that confessed, and upon what occasion,

without peeping furtively at the text? Nevertheless Irene lives and always will live in the memory of men. But while other dramas exist on the strength of their dramatic qualities, this of Johnson’s lives on the personal qualities of the author himself. It is not the blank, blank verse, nor the heroine’s reflections regarding the mind of the Divine Being, nor the thrilling Turkish fable, nor the snip-snap dialogue about prodigies between Leontius and Demetrius, that preserves the memory of this tragedy. It is the anecdote of how Walmsley asked, melted by the sorrows of Irene, “How can you possibly contrive to plunge her into deeper calamity?” and how Johnson answered, with a reference to his friend’s office, “Sir, I can put her into the spiritual court!” It is the eagerness which George III. expressed to possess the original MS. of the play. It is the monstrous folly which made Cave suppose that the Royal Society would be a likely body to purchase the copyright of it. It is the screams of the audience at Drury Lane when they saw Mrs. Pritchard with the bowstring round her neck. It is the garb in which Johnson insisted on dressing to look on at the performance, in a scarlet waistcoat, and with a gold-laced hat on his head. It is the tragedian’s unparalleled frankness about the white silk stockings. These are the things which we recall when Irene is mentioned, and if the play had been performed in dumb show, if it had been a ballet, an opera, or a farce, its place in literary history would be just where it is, no higher and no lower. Such is the curious fate which attends all Johnson’s works, the most interesting of them is not so interesting as the stories which cluster around its authorship.

This personal interest which we all feel in the sayings and doings of Johnson is founded so firmly on his broad humanity that we need not have the slightest fear of its cessation or diminution. The habits of thought and expression which were in vogue in the eighteenth century may repeat themselves, as some of us expect, in the twentieth, or our children may become more captious, more violent, more ungraceful in their tastes than we are ourselves. The close of the preface to the Dictionary may cease to seem pathetic, or may win more tributes of tears than ever. The reputation of Johnson does not stand or fall by the appetite of modern readers for the Life of Savage or even for the Letter to Lord Chesterfield. It depends on the impossibility of human beings ever ceasing to watch with curiosity “the very pulse of the machine” when it is displayed as Johnson displayed it through the fortunate indiscretions of his friends, and when it is on the whole so manly, wholesome, brave, honest, and tender as it was in his. There will always be readers and admirers of what Johnson wrote. Let us welcome them; but let us not imagine that Johnson, as a great figure in letters, depends upon their suffrages. The mighty Samuel Johnson, the anniversary of whose death both hemispheres of the English-speaking race will solemnise on the 13th of this month, is not the author of this or that laborious contribution to prose or verse, but the convulsive invalid who “see-sawed” over the Grotius, the courageous old Londoner who trusted his bones among the stormy Hebrides, the autocrat of the Literary Club, the lover of all the company of blue-stockings, the unequalled talker, the sweet and formidable friend, the truculent boon-companion, the child-like Christian, who, for all his ghostly terrors, contrived at last “to die contented, trusting in the mercy of God, through the merits of Jesus Christ.” If the completed century finds us with any change at all of our feelings regarding him, it is surely merely this, that the passage of time is steadily making his faults seem more superficial and accidental, and his merits more striking, more essential, more pathetical and pleasing.—Fortnightly Review.