Johnson, as Mr.Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in Boswell's books than in his own.His conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in manners.When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions.As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became systematically vicious.All his books are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears front his mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in which nobody ever thinks.It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which he wrote.The expressions which came first to his tongue were ******, energetic, and picturesque.When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese.His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs.Thrale are the original of that work of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the translation; and it is amusing to compare the two versions."When we were taken upstairs," says he in one of his letters, "a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie."This incident is recorded in the journey as follows: "Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson translated aloud."The Rehearsal," he said, very unjustly, "has not wit enough to keep it sweet" then, after a pause, "it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction."Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the manner, though vicious, is natural.Few readers, for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke.But a mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive.And such is the mannerism of Johnson.
The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point them out.It is well known that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the king's English.His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his harsh inversions so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers, all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public have become sick of the subject.
Goldsmith said to him, very wittily, and very justly, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson.Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style.His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, betrayed him under every disguise.Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia.The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house of her relations, in such terms as these: "I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused wildness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla informs us, that she "had not passed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph; but had danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the gratulations of applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love." Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a worse grace.The reader may well cry out with honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a 'oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under her muffler." [It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very close resemblance to a passage in the Rambler (No.20).The resemblance may possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism.]
We had something more to say.But our article is already too long; and we must close it.We would fain part in good humour from the hero, from the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read Boswell's book again.As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson.There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds.There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear.In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the hugh massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick.We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion.To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity!
To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most durable.The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.