The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [2]
She gave me this, I gave her that;
And tell me, had she not tit for tat?
I gave three huzzas, and we went briskly in.1
‘Cato’s soliloquy’ is, of course, the famous speech from the coda to Joseph Addison’s immensely popular play in which, on the point of being defeated by Caesar’s forces and contemplating suicide, Cato the Younger is persuaded by the arguments advanced by Socrates in the Phaedo concerning the immortality of the soul:
It must be so – Plato, thou reasonest well –
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
’Tis the divinity that stirs within us:
’Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.2
It is typical of Boswell that his recollection of this high-minded and improving speech should be followed immediately by an intimation of a more earthly kind of future happiness, in his extemporized song about a sexual encounter with a ‘pretty girl’. The pages of his London journal oscillate between moments of pious, hopeful sobriety –
I went to Mayfair Chapel and heard prayers and an excellent sermon from the Book of Job on the comforts of piety. I was in a fine frame. And I thought that God really designed us to be happy. I shall certainly be a religious old man. I was much so in youth. I have now and then flashes of devotion, and it will one day burn with a steady flame.3
– and episodes of debauch, occasionally furtive –
I was really unhappy for want of women. I thought it hard to be in such a place without them. I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour [i.e. a condom]. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak.4
– occasionally more uninhibited, as in his consummation of his liaison with the actress he refers to as ‘Louisa’:
A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked me if this was not extraordinary for human nature. I said twice as much might be, but this was not, although in my own mind I was somewhat proud of my performance.5
However, beneath the varied surface of Boswell’s London life there lies a common denominator. Boswell’s piety and profligacy are both informed by the self-dramatizing, self-regarding quality of his character. In this respect Boswell’s journal is not a record of his actions, nor even a record of the impressions that his actions made upon himself. It is rather the transcript of his appreciation of actions undertaken with more than half an eye to their eventual reception and remembrance.6 Boswell’s London life was a dramatic performance, and metaphors of the theatre run insistently through his journal entries, perhaps most strikingly in this encounter with Louisa: ‘When I came to Louisa’s, I felt myself stout and well, and most courageously did I plunge into the fount of love, and had vast pleasure as I enjoyed her as an actress who had played many a fine lady’s part.’7 It would be hard to find a more concentrated example of Boswell’s performative idea of character, so perfectly parallel are its reflecting planes of performance and reception.
Into this strange worldof dissoluteness, fantasyand delusion walked Samuel Johnson. At the time, Boswell recorded Johnson’s arrival with these words:
I drank tea at Davies’s in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr. Samuel Johnson, whom I haveso long wishedto see. Mr. Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’ However, he said, ‘From Scotland.’ ‘Mr. Johnson,’ said I, ‘indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’ ‘Sir,’ replied