The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [15]
Even Johnson’s juvenile Toryism has in it a trace of contrariness, since it is capable of being construed as a sturdy rejection on Johnson’s part of the political attitudes common amongst the young: ‘all boys love liberty, till experience convinces them they are not so fit to govern themselves as they imagined.’115 So in this respect the movement in Johnson’s political opinions traced the common course, only in reverse. In later life, Johnson could be moved to the strident Jacobitism and anti-Hanoverianism of his youth only by egregious Whiggery – as happened, for instance, on 17 September 1777, over dinner with his friend Dr John Taylor of Ashbourne.116 Provoked by Taylor and moved by ‘the spirit of contradiction’, Johnson rewound the years and vigorously re-entered the vivid Jacobitism of his earlier days.117 But one suspects that, for Johnson, the political substance of the conversation was only a pretext which allowed him once again to reap the emotional and intellectual benefits which, for him, flowed from intellectual collision.
To feel a strong and strengthening flow of opinion may be to feel both stronger and simpler than, in reality, you are. Johnson’s defiant and energetic simplicity of manner was the product of habit and will, as he explained to Reynolds:
Sir Joshua Reynolds once asked him by what means he had attained his extraordinary accuracy and flow of language. He told him, that he had early laid it down as a fixed rule to do his best on every occasion, and in every company; to impart whatever he knew in the most forcible language he could put it in; and that by constant practice, and never suffering any careless expressions to escape him, or attempting to deliver his thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner, it became habitual to him.118
This relentless disciplining of the self in the direction of care, forcefulness and premeditation suggests a congenital deficit of those qualities. Boswell tells us that Johnson’s mind was naturally ‘gloomy and impetuous’, and given to melancholic anxiety: ‘To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason, the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal apprehension; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgement.’119 But if the exercise of soundness and vigour of judgement is displayed as the deliberate remedy for an underlying ailment, then nothing is more likely than that it should follow so closely upon, and even appear to coincide with, ‘dismal appre-hension’.120
Johnson’s religious faith also lends itself to being construed not as the straightforward fruit of a fundamental conviction, but rather as the antagonist that Johnson employed against an underlying scepticism. That he was not originally of a religious disposition was something which Johnson frankly confessed to Boswell:
‘I fell into an inattention to religion, or an indifference about it, in my ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in which we had a seat, wanted reparation, so I was to go and find a seat in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I used to go and read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till my fourteenth year; and still I find a great reluctance to go to church. I then became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh