The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [5]
It was not the first time that Johnson had been drawn to everything which he seemed himself not to be. In the early 1750s, before he knew Boswell, he had also formed an improbable friendship with Bennet Langton’s college acquaintance Topham Beauclerk:
Johnson, soon after this acquaintance [with Bennet Langton] began, passed a considerable time at Oxford. He at first thought it strange that Langton should associate so much with one who had the character of being loose, both in his principles and practice; but, by degrees, he himself was fascinated. Mr. Beauclerk’s being of the St. Alban’s family, and having, in some particulars, a resemblance to Charles the Second, contributed, in Johnson’s imagination, to throw a lustre upon his other qualities; and, in a short time, the moral, pious Johnson, and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk, were companions. ‘What a coalition! (said Garrick, when he heard of this;) I shall have my old friend to bail out of the Roundhouse.’ But I can bear testimony that it was a very agreeable association.21
This is not just a case of, in our well-worn phrase, opposites attracting. At the end of his life, sick, and provoked by Boswell to think about what might be the fate of one’s friendships in the afterlife, Johnson replied ‘with heat’: ‘How can a man know where his departed friends are, or whether they will be his friends in the other world? How many friendships have you known formed upon principles of virtue? Most friendships are formed by caprice or by chance, mere confederacies in vice or leagues in folly.’22 No doubt great allowance must be made for the extremity of the moment. Nevertheless, we are here far from any Montaignean extolling of ‘amitie’,23 and Johnson’s awareness of the complexity and possible impurity of the motives to friendship is germane to any consideration of his association with Boswell.
An incident from early in the friendship between the two men sheds light on the curious quality of what held them together. Once again, as was so often the case, Boswell launched the exchange by being provoking:
I teized him [Johnson] with fanciful apprehensions of unhappiness. A moth having fluttered round the candle, and burnt itself, he laid hold of this little incident to admonish me; saying, with a sly look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, ‘That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.’24
A tendency to self-torment was a characteristic the two men shared.25 In his journal, Boswell admonished himself to remember that he was subject to melancholy and low spirits.26 And writing to the Revd Ralph Churton in 1792 on the subject of Johnson’s view of the unhappiness of human life, Boswell linked the subject and the biographer: ‘his “morbid melancholy” may have made life appear to him more miserable than it generally is. But the truth, Sir, is as you have judiciously observed, that I myself have a large portion of melancholy in my constitution…’27 It was surely for this reason that Boswell chose the persona of ‘The Hypochondriack’ – that is to say, one afflicted by ‘melancholy, hypochondria, spleen, or vapours’ – for the series of essays he contributed to the London Magazine in the late 1770s and early 1780s, and also why he would write of himself in the very first of those essays that ‘I have suffered much of the fretfulness, the gloom, and the despair that can torment a thinking being.’28 As for Johnson, Richard Brocklesby’s analysis of his mental condition, sent in a letter to Boswell in December 1784, emphasizes how Johnson’s undoubted intellectual powers did as much to unsettle as to steady the precarious balance of his mind. Johnson ‘often expressed the feelings and uncertainties of his mind’ to Brocklesby, so this is no superficial or cursory opinion:
He had the most logical apprehensive, and book informed vigorous Mind, that I have ever known, but withal, his views of Nature and of the Universe and of all the various objects to contemplate which Philosophy invites an unfetterd, speculative mind, were narrow, partial