AN UNPUBLISHED JEU D’ESPRIT.

By Sir Joshua Reynolds.

PART I.

JOHNSON AGAINST GARRICK.

Johnson and Sir J. Reynolds.

REYNOLDS.—Let me alone, I’ll draw him out (aside). I have been thinking this morning, Dr. Johnson, on a matter which has puzzled me very much; it is a subject that I daresay has often passed in your thoughts, and though I cannot, I daresay you have made up your mind upon it.

Johnson.—Tilly fally, what is all this preparation? what is all this weighty matter?

R.—Why, it is a weighty matter; this subject I have been thinking upon, is Predestination, and Free will, two things, which I cannot reconcile together, for the life of me. In my opinion, Dr. Johnson, free will and fore knowledge cannot be reconciled.

J.—Sir, it is not of very great importance, what your opinion is upon such a question.

R.—But I meant only, Dr. J., to know your opinion.

J.—No, sir, you meant no such thing; you meant only to show these gentlemen that you are not the man they took you to be, but that you think of high matters sometimes, and that you may have the credit of having it said, that you held an argument with Sam Johnson, on predestination, and free will; a subject of that magnitude, to have engaged the attention of the world, to have perplexed the wisdom of man, for these 2,000 years; a subject on which the fallen angels who had not yet lost all their original brightness find themselves in wandering mazes lost. That such a subject could be discussed in the levity of convivial conversation, is a degree of absurdity beyond what is easily conceivable.

R.—It is so, as you say, to be sure; I talked once to our friend Garrick on this subject, but I remember we could make nothing of it.

J.—Oh noble pair!

R.—Garrick was a clever fellow, Dr. J.; Garrick, take him altogether, was certainly a very great man.

J.—Garrick, sir, may be a great man in your opinion, as far as I know, but he was not so in mine; little things are great to little men.

R.—I have heard you say, Dr. Johnson——

J.—Sir, you never heard me say, David Garrick was a great man. You may have heard me say that Garrick was a good repeater of other men’s words,—words put into his mouth by other men; this makes but a faint approach towards being a great man.

R.—But take Garrick upon the whole; now in regard to conversation——

J.—Well, sir, in regard to conversation I never discovered in the conversation of D. Garrick any intellectual energy, any wide grasp of thought, any extensive comprehension of mind; or that he possessed any of those powers to which great could, with any degree of propriety, be applied.

R.—But still——

J.—Hold, sir, I have not done—there are to be sure, in the laxity of colloquial speech, various kinds of greatness. A man may be a great tobacconist, a man may be a great painter, he may be likewise a great mimick: now you may be the one, and Garrick the other, and yet neither of you be great men.

R.—But, Dr. Johnson——

J.—Hold, sir. I have often lamented how dangerous it is to investigate, and to discriminate character, to men who have no discriminative powers.

R.—Garrick as a companion, I heard you say—no longer ago than last Wednesday, at Mr. Thrale’s table——

J.—You tease me, sir. Whatever you may have heard me say, no longer ago than last Wednesday, at Mr. Thrale’s table, I tell you, I do not say so now; besides, as I said before, you may not have understood me, you may not have heard me.

R.—I am very sure, I heard you.

J.—Besides, sir, besides, besides—do not you know—are you so ignorant as not to know that it is the highest degree of rudeness to quote a man against himself?

R.—But if you differ from yourself, and give one opinion to-day——

J.—Have done, sir, the company are tired, you see, as well as myself.

T’OTHER SIDE.

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Gibbon.

Johnson.—No, sir, Garrick’s fame was prodigious, not only in England but over all Europe, even in Russia. I have been told he was a proverb; when anybody had repeated well he was called a second Garrick.

Gibbon.—I think he had full as much reputation as he deserved.

J.—I do not pretend to know, sir, what your meaning may be by saying he had as much reputation as he deserved; he deserved much, and he had much.

G.—Why, surely, Dr. Johnson, his merit was in small things only; he had none of those qualities that make a real great man.

J.—Sir, I as little understand what your meaning may be when you speak of the qualities that make a great man: it is a vague term. Garrick was no common man: a man above the common size of men, may surely, without any great impropriety, be called a great man. In my opinion, he has very reasonably fulfilled the prophecy which he once reminded me of having made to his mother, when she asked me how little David got on at school, that I should say to her, that he would come to be hanged, or come to be a great man. No, sir, it is undoubtedly true that the same qualities, united with virtue, or with vice, make a hero or a rogue, a great general or a highwayman. Now Garrick, we are sure, was never hanged, and in regard to his being a great man, you must take the whole man together. It must be considered in how many things Garrick excelled in which every man desires to excel, setting aside his excellence as an actor, in which he is acknowledged to be unrivalled; as a man, as a poet, as a convivial companion, you will find but few his equals, and none his superior. As a man he was kind, friendly, benevolent, and generous.

G.—Of Garrick’s generosity I never heard; I understood his character to be totally the reverse, and that he was reckoned to have loved money.

J.—That he loved money nobody will dispute; who does not? But if you mean by loving money he was parsimonious to a fault, sir, you have been misinformed. To Foote and such scoundrels, who circulated those reports, to such profligate spendthrifts, prudence is meanness, and economy is avarice. That Garrick, in early youth, was brought up in strict habits of economy, I believe, and that they were necessary, I have heard from himself; to suppose that Garrick might inadvertently act from this habit, and be saving in small things, can be no wonder, but let it be remembered at the same time, that if he was frugal by habit, he was liberal from principle; that when he acted from reflection, he did what his fortune enabled him to do, and what was expected from such a fortune. I remember no instance of David’s parsimony, but once, when he stopped Mrs. Woffington from replenishing the teapot; it was already, he said, as red as blood; and this is doubtful, and happened many years ago. In the latter part of his life, I observed no blameable parsimony in David; his table was elegant, and even splendid; his house both in town and country, his equipage, and I think all his habits of life were such as might be expected from a man who had acquired great riches. In regard to his generosity, which you seem to question, I shall only say there is no man to whom I would apply with more confidence of success, for the loan of £200 to assist a common friend, than to David, and this too with very little, if any, probability of its being repaid.

G.—You were going to say something about him as a writer. You don’t rate him very high as a poet?

J.—Sir, a man maybe a respectable poet without being an Homer, as a man may be a good player without being a Garrick. In the lighter kind of poetry, in the appendages of the drama, he was, if not the first, in the very first class. He had a readiness, and a facility, a dexterity of mind that appeared extraordinary even to men of experience, and who are not apt to wonder from ignorance. Writing prologues, epilogues, and epigrams, he said he considered as his trade, and he was what a man should be, always, and at all times, ready at his trade. He required two hours for a prologue or an epilogue, and five minutes for an epigram. Once at Burke’s table, the company proposed a subject, and Garrick finished his epigram within the time: the same experiment was repeated in the garden, and with the same success.

(To be continued.)