On men and manners, at least on the men and manners of a particular place and a particular age, Johnson had certainly looked with a most observant and discriminating eye.His remarks on the education of children, on marriage, on the economy of families, on the rules of society, are always striking, and generally sound.In his writings, indeed, the knowledge of life which he possessed in an eminent degree is very imperfectly exhibited.Like those unfortunate chiefs of the middle ages who were suffocated by their own chain-mail and cloth of gold, his maxims perish under that load of words which was designed for their defence and their ornament.But it is clear from the remains of his conversation, that he had more of that homely wisdom which nothing but experience and observation can give than any writer since the time of Swift.
If he had been content to write as he talked, he might have left books on the practical art of living superior to the Directions to Servants.Yet even his remarks on society, like his remarks on literature, indicate a mind at least as remarkable for narrowness as for strength.He was no master of the great science of human nature.He had studied, not the genus man, but the species Londoner.Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant with all the forms of life and of all the shades of moral and intellectual character which were to be seen from Islington to the Thames, and from Hyde Park Corner to Mile-End Green.But his philosophy stopped at the first turnpike-gate.Of the rural life of England he knew nothing; and he took it for granted that everybody who lived in the country was either stupid or miserable."Country gentlemen," said he, "must be unhappy; for they have not enough to keep their lives in motion;" as if all those peculiar habits and associations which made Fleet Street and Charing Cross the finest views in the world to himself had been essential parts of human nature.Of remote countries and past times he talked with wild and ignorant presumption."The Athenians of the age of Demosthenes," he said to Mrs.Thrale, "were a people of brutes, a barbarous people." In conversation with Sir Adam Ferguson he used similar language."The boasted Athenians," he said, "were barbarians.The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing." The fact was this: he saw that a Londoner who could not read was a very stupid and brutal fellow: he saw that great refinement of taste and activity of intellect were rarely found in a Londoner who had not read much; and, because it was by means of books that people acquired almost all their knowledge in the society with which he was acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of the strongest and clearest evidence, that the human mind can be cultivated by means of books alone.An Athenian citizen might possess very few volumes; and the largest library to which he had access might be much less valuable than Johnson's bookcase in Bolt Court.But the Athenian might pass every morning in conversation with Socrates, and might hear Pericles speak four or five times every month.He saw the plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes; he walked amidst the friezes of Phidias and the paintings of Zeuxis: he knew by heart the choruses of Aeschylus: he heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the streets reciting the Shield of Achilles or the Death of Argus: he was a legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance, revenue, and war: he was a soldier, trained under a liberal and generous discipline: he was a judge compelled every day to weigh the effect of opposite arguments.These things were in themselves an education, an education eminently fitted, not, indeed, to form exact or profound thinkers, but to give quickness to the perceptions, delicacy to the taste, fluency to the expression, and politeness to the manners.All this was overlooked.
An Athenian who did not improve his mind by reading was, in Johnson's opinion, much such a person as a Cockney who made his mark, much such a person as black Frank before he went to school, and far inferior to a parish clerk or a printer's devil.
Johnson's friends have allowed that he carried to a ridiculous extreme his unjust contempt for foreigners.He pronounced the French to be a very silly people, much behind us, stupid, ignorant creatures.And this judgment he formed after having been at Paris about a month, during which he would not talk French, for fear of giving the natives an advantage over him in conversation.He pronounced them, also, to be an indelicate people, because a French footman touched the sugar with his fingers.That ingenious and amusing traveller, M.Simond, has defended his countrymen very successfully against Johnson's accusations, and has pointed out some English practices which, to an impartial spectator, would seem at least as inconsistent with physical cleanliness and social decorum as those which Johnson so bitterly reprehended.To the sage, as Boswell loves to call him, it never occurred to doubt that there must be something eternally and immutably good in the usages to which he had been accustomed.
In fact, Johnson's remarks on society beyond the bills of mortality, are generally of much the same kind with those of honest Tom Dawson, the English footman in Dr.Moore's Zeluco.