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Samuel Johnson’s politics

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Since we all know that Samuel Johnson was a Tory, and since we all know what a Tory is, we at once know a great deal about Johnson. We know, for instance (to quote a highly regarded modern literary history), that he was “blindly conservative”; that when he “could not stem the rising tide of democracy,” he “turned shuddering from such corruptions to fly … to the impartial protective authority of the throne.” Given that Johnson was a Tory, we can immediately deduce the essential facts not only about his political opinions, but about his critical principles, which must have been authoritarian, his religion, which must have been “High,” his morality, which must have been prescriptive, and many other things. It is very useful to know all this a priori, for it saves us the trouble of having to read what Johnson actually wrote on these matters.

The foregoing is perhaps not too exaggerated a parody of the reasoning behind much Johnsonian commentary in the past. Recently, it is true, some parts of the amazing structure of myth that the nineteenth century (chiefly) erected around the figure of Johnson have begun to show signs of crumbling. It is growing harder for even the laziest undergraduate to continue to believe what the older histories of literature tell him, that Johnson was a pompous dogmatist in morality, an incompetent blunderer in criticism, and a maker of mechanical and pedantic verse. This change has come about because modern critics (including such formidable and diverse ones as Eliot, Leavis, and Edmund Wilson) have actually read Johnson and discovered the reality to be very different from the legend. But the old version of Johnson’s political position still persists; and since it constitutes (I believe) the framework of the whole structure, fragments of the rest of the myth cling tenaciously to it and continue to give trouble.

In fact, the myth of Johnson the blind and frightened political reactionary can easily be shown to be as unsubstantial as the myths of Johnson the dogmatic critic and Johnson the academic versemaker. Even a casual reading of Johnson’s writings reveals much that simply cannot be reconciled with the theory of his bigoted and unbending Toryism. According to that theory, for example, we are supposed to believe that Johnson wrote his pamphlets of the 1770’s—The False Alarm, Taxation No Tyranny, and the rest—as a partisan Tory in support of the repressive Tory government of George III. Holders of this doctrine must be surprised to find Johnson saying, in the next-to-last paragraph of The False Alarm, “Every honest man must lament” that the question under discussion in the pamphlet “has been regarded with frigid neutrality by the tories.” Again, one of our firmest assumptions is that Johnson and the Tories were the implacable enemies of the Whig Sir Robert Walpole. It is therefore strange to find, in a division of the House of Commons in 1741 on a motion calling for the dismissal of Walpole, the Tory members deliberately rescuing Walpole from defeat, and Johnson, in a note appended to his report of the debate, vig­orously defending their action. Of Lord North, generally regarded as the chief instrument of George Ill’s “Tory” policies, Johnson said that he was “a fellow with a mind as narrow as a vinegar cruet,” and when North’s ministry left office, Johnson’s epitaph was “Such a bunch of imbecility never disgraced a country.” It is taken for granted that Johnson’s Toryism must have included a fervent devotion to monarchy. Yet when one collates the various references to monarchs in his writings, one gets the impression that his opinion of the institution was, to say the least, unenthusiastic. “Kings,” says Johnson, after commenting that Frederick the Great was fortunate in encountering a variety of “forms of life” during his youth, “without this help … see the world in a mist, which magnifies everything near them, and bounds their view to a narrow compass …. I have always thought that what Cromwell had more than our lawful kings, he owed to the private condition in which he first entered the world.”  “Liberty,” said Johnson, “is, to the lowest rank of every na­tion, little more than the choice of working or starving” 6-the perfect anticipation of a favorite Socialist slogan of the 1930’s.

Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   March 2023

 

 

 

an intellectual adventure

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“My father never judged people by what they wore, how much they earned or what school they attended. He wanted to know if someone was an intellectual. By that, he meant someone who read books and thought about ideas. That was his kind of person.”

— Judith Colp Rubin, eulogy for Ralph Colp Jr., MD, November 2008

 

i In my first two brief therapy sessions with Dr. Ralph Colp Jr. at Columbia University, he asked me some standard questions for a psychiatric interview and I shared with him in general some of the problems and anxieties I was having, such as feelings of frustration in dating and romantic relationships and with my job.

In our third session, I said something which I can’t recall precisely — something along the lines of I am not just a bored, frustrated office worker living a life of quiet desperation; I have a rich intellectual life.

“Tell me about them,” he said. (I seen to recall that I had mentioned books.)

I told Dr. Colp that I was reading Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection and — as has been the case with me through my life; there are books that come along, so to speak, that overwhelm me — about how Resurrection overwhelmed me on so many levels: the story, the writing; the underlying moral and human questions addressed. I think I said something to him about how I had always thought that I would be likely to prefer Dostoevsky (whom I had already read) to Tolstoy, and here I was bowing at the altar of Tolstoy.

As was usual, Dr. Colp did not say all that much. But he was never a passive listener, never cold, bored, or indifferent (He was simply reserved and very thoughtful.) I could tell that this “disclosure” by me had him thoroughly engaged and was giving him a truer picture and appreciation of me. It was another level for us to connect deeply on: the intellectual or “thought” sphere.

A few sessions later, I said something to Dr. Colp that I knew he appreciated very much as feedback. I could see and sense it. I told him, “I can feel the interest [in me, his as a therapist] on your part. That in itself, that alone, is therapeutic.”

 

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Dr. Colp’s whole life was that of an intellectual. I realize now, at this stage of my life, that this is now, and has always been, true of me. It has given my life meaning and purpose, and whatever achievements or value it has involved or amounted to.

At some point, much later, I told Dr. Colp that I had been reading Samuel Johnson’s essays and that they were a revelation for me: the depth of penetrating insight, the practical wisdom that one could take away from them. (Dr. Colp once complimented me with having the gift of “rapid insight.”)

Dr. Colp belonged to a reading group. He told me that my comments about Johnson were illuminating. He said that a man in his reading group had once said, “The only reason that Johnson is of any interest is the book Boswell wrote about him.”

I told Dr. Colp that (I had already read Boswell’s biography, about which I had talked at length with Dr. Colp) Johnson’s own writings assuredly were well worth reading.

“I guess he was wrong,” Dr. Colp said of the past remark. He always welcomed the opportunity to learn something new.

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I told Dr. Colp once, ruefully, that I had bought quite a few expensive books, including multivolume sets of the works of writers such as Whitman and Parkman. (And a multivolume set: The British Empire Before the American Revolution by Lawrence Henry Gipson, which I still have not gotten around to reading. Dr. Colp told me that he had been told that it was a great read). I felt rueful because I had “overbought” and would probably never be getting around to reading most of the books. My appetite was bigger than what I could consume.

“You’ll get around to reading them,” Dr. Colp said emphatically. I wondered if that was true, but I felt better about my indulgences.

 

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Right now, I am having a sort of intellectual adventure. I love to map out such intellectual endeavors for myself, and then try to follow through on them. I am reading Samuel Johnson’s works in the Yale Edition. They are splendid books, superbly edited and annotated, and beautifully produced. There are twenty-three volumes, of which I own all but two.

I probably won’t read them all. I have already read, in their entirety or in part, Johnson’s Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, many of the essays (which are a must), a portion of his Lives of the Poets, and other miscellaneous writings by Johnson.

Johnson is, I would suspect, not in fashion nowadays, and his style is often said to be dated. His political views would probably be regarded as retrograde. He has typically been portrayed as a stodgy Tory conservative, if not an arch-conservative. This is simplistic and amounts to making Johnson a caricature (as Boswell has been accused of having done.) Books such as Donald Greene’s The Politics of Samuel Johnson (which I have read) demonstrate this. I think it is more accurate to say that Johnson was a contrarian who hated political cant and what today might be called liberal smugness.

 

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So why go through this self-appointed intellectual task, this “journey” of plowing through Johnson’s works? Because there is so much to be learned — so much that I am learning as we speak — from him, both from his writings, the excellence of which I can only hope to emulate; and his deep thoughts, which cause me, in the words of Charles Darwin (Dr. Colp’s alter ego), to “think energetically.”

The other books can wait.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   January 2020