The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [11]
His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.75
Many of Johnson’s conflicts were with people or things or ideas for which he seems secretly to have nursed an affinity, even a craving. For instance, in the Life Boswell frequently discusses Johnson’s relationship with alcohol. The friend of Johnson’s youth the Birmingham surgeon Edmond Hector, ‘who lived with him in his younger days in the utmost intimacy and social freedom’, told Boswell that Johnson ‘loved to exhilarate himself with wine’.76 On his arrival in London in 1737, however, Johnson ‘abstained entirely from fermented liquors: a practice to which he rigidly conformed for many years together, at different periods of his life’.77 Meeting his old acquaintance Oliver Edwards in 1778, Johnson spoke frankly about his fitful use of alcohol: ‘I now drink no wine, Sir. Early in life I drank wine: for many years I drank none. I then for some years drank a great deal.’78 By March 1781, however, Johnson was drinking once more, as Boswell discovered when he went to dinner at the Thrales:
He [Thrale] told me I might now have the pleasure to see Dr. Johnson drink wine again, for he had lately returned to it. When I mentioned this to Johnson, he said, ‘I drink it now sometimes, but not socially.’ The first evening that I was with him at Thrale’s, I observed he poured a quantity of it into a large glass, and swallowed it greedily. Every thing about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never was any moderation; many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink wine, it was copiously. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.79
The inability to be moderate meant that Johnson might reel from extremity to extremity – in this case, from abstinence to bingeing – and part of the justification for the episodes of surrender (Johnson said that he drank ‘to get rid of myself, to send myself away’) was that they made possible another act of resistance.80 That Johnson had a strong appetite for alcohol seems clear: ‘I have drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it. University College has witnessed this.’81 That he took a secret pleasure in the effects of alcohol, while fearing that weakening of conscious rational control which intoxication brings in its wake,82 and fearing also to let those effects be publicly visible, is also suggested by his intermittent habits of solitary drinking.83 But the most striking feature of Johnson’s attitude towards alcohol is the way it reveals a structural feature of his personality which was also an element in his moral philosophy, namely the need from time to time abruptly and utterly to deny that to which you feel drawn.
We can see this in Johnson’s mental life, as well as in his physical existence. One of the great structuring antagonisms in the Life is that which exists between Johnson and the man whom, in 1762, Boswell had hailed as ‘the greatest Writer in Britain’, David Hume.84 Johnson was outspoken in his disdain for Hume’s sceptical philosophy: ‘Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.’85 However, in the same conversation Johnson discloses that Hume is the image of his own earlier self, for ‘Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through