The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [268]
‘Thus have I written, only to tell you how little I have to tell. Of myself I can only add, that having been afflicted many weeks with a very troublesome cough, I am now recovered.
‘I take the liberty which you give me of troubling you with a letter, of which you will please to fill up the direction. I am, Sir, your most humble servant,
‘Johnson’s-court, Fleet-street, ‘SAM. JOHNSON.’
London, March 4, 1773.’
On Saturday, April 3, the day after my arrival in London this year, I went to his house late in the evening, and sat with Mrs. Williams till he came home. I found in the London Chronicle, Dr. Goldsmith’s apology to the publick for beating Evans, a bookseller, on account of a paragraph in a news-paper published by him, which Goldsmith thought impertinent to him and to a lady of his acquaintance. The apology was written so much in Dr. Johnson’s manner, that both Mrs. Williams and I supposed it to be his; but when he came home, he soon undeceived us. When he said to Mrs. Williams, ‘Well, Dr. Goldsmith’s manifesto has got into your paper;’ I asked him if Dr. Goldsmith had written it, with an air that made him see I suspected it was his, though subscribed by Goldsmith. JOHNSON. ‘Sir, Dr. Goldsmith would no more have asked me to write such a thing as that for him, than he would have asked me to feed him with a spoon, or to do anything else that denoted his imbecility. I as much believe that he wrote it, as if I had seen him do it. Sir, had he shewn it to any one friend, he would not have been allowed to publish it. He has, indeed, done it very well; but it is a foolish thing well done. I suppose he has been so much elated with the success of his new comedy, that he has thought every thing that concerned him must be of importance to the publick.’ Bo swell. ‘I fancy, Sir, this is the first time that he has been engaged in such an adventure.’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, I believe it is the first time he has beat; he may have been beaten before. This, Sir, is a new plume to him.’
I mentioned Sir John Dalrymple’s Memoirs of Great-Britain and Ireland, and his discoveries to the prejudice of Lord Russel and Algernon Sydney. JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, every body who had just notions of government thought them rascals before. It is well that all mankind now see them to be rascals.’ BOSWELL. ‘But, Sir, may not those discoveries be true without their being rascals?’ JOHNSON. ‘Consider, Sir; would any of them have been willing to have had it known that they intrigued with France? Depend upon it, Sir, he who does what he is afraid should be known, has something rotten about him. This Dalrymple seems to be an honest fellow; for he tells equally what makes against both sides. But nothing can be poorer than his mode of writing: it is the mere bouncing of a school-boy. Great He! but greater She! and such stuff.’
I could not agree with him in this criticism; for though Sir John Dalrymple’s style is not regularly formed in any respect, and one cannot help smiling sometimes at his affected grandiloquence, there is in his writing a pointed vivacity, and much of a gentlemanly spirit.
At Mr. Thrale’s, in the evening, he repeated his usual paradoxical declamation against action in publick speaking. ‘Action can have no effect upon reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument. If you speak to a dog, you use action; you hold up your hand thus, because he is a brute; and in proportion as men are removed from brutes, action will have the less influence upon them.’ MRS. THRALE. ‘What then, Sir, becomes of Demosthenes’s saying? “Action, action, action!”’ JOHNSON. ‘Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of brutes; to a barbarous people.’
I thought it extraordinary, that he should deny the power of rhetorical action upon human nature, when it is proved by innumerable facts in all stages of society. Reasonable beings are not solely reasonable. They have fancies which may be pleased, passions