The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [6]
William Bowles concurred: ‘It is very well known that in the latter part of Dr. Johnson’s life he became much dejected with gloomy apprehensions respecting his reception in a future world.’30 The object of Johnson’s melancholy was futurity, but its cause may have been more earthly. The Revd William Adams ascribed it to the resumption of alcohol: ‘The History of his Melancholy about 20 years before his death, which was indeed dreadful to see, I am not enough acquainted with: but I always conjectured it to be owing to the sudden transition from water drinking, which was his Habit invariably for 15 years or more, to drinking Wine, in which by his own Account he indulged himself very liberally.’31 But, whatever the cause, and whatever the object, it was the case that Boswell and Johnson were both prey to melancholic self-torment.
In the company of the other, each may have been distracted from this tendency in himself by the display of the same quality in his friend. Hence, perhaps, Johnson’s enigmatic ‘sly look’ – the moth’s name might with equal propriety have been Johnson. To escape from the self by contemplating an image of the self may seem paradoxical. Nevertheless, it may be psychologically plausible, and furthermore it resonates with the complexities of Johnson’s attitude towards the self – Johnson who could on the one hand write essays enforcing the principle of ‘cognosce te ipsum’ (know thyself) as enshrining ‘all the speculation requisite of a moral agent’, but who also confessed to Reynolds that the ‘great business of his life… was to escape from himself ‘.32 Friendship satisfied both imperatives by providing distraction as well as indirect introspection. To be in the company of Boswell was like viewing the head of Medusa in a mirror: through reflection, the harmful could become useful. Friendship, alongside all its moral benefits and social pleasures, might also serve as one of those techniques for the ‘management of the mind’ which Johnson thought so necessary, and which he believed could be obtained by ‘experience and habitual exercise’.33 In this respect, Boswell was the most useful of Johnson’s friends, the man who played the part of psychological lightning rod perhaps better, certainly for longer, than had either Richard Savage (his companion during his early days in London) or Beauclerk. But this utility did not necessarily make him Johnson’s dearest friend.34 There is no mention of Boswell in Johnson’s will – an oversight which roused anger and disappointment in friends of Boswell such as William Johnson Temple and Mary Adey.35 To Mrs Piozzi, Johnson asserted that it was Dr Taylor of Ashbourne who was ‘better acquainted with my heart than any man or woman now alive’.36 It was to Bennet Langton – not to Boswell – that the dying Johnson tenderly quoted Tibullus’ line ‘Te teneam moriens deficiente manu’ (‘When I expire, let my trembling hand hold yours’): a gesture which is saturated with a sense of strong yet delicate friendship.37 And it was Langton who informed Boswell of the strength of Johnson’s feeling for Topham Beauclerk: ‘His affection for Topham Beauclerk was so great, that when Beauclerk was labouring under that severe illness which at last occasioned his death, Johnson said (with a voice faultering with emotion,) “Sir, I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save Beauclerk.” ‘38
The stubborn trace of instrumentality in Boswell and Johnson’s friendship – the uneasy feeling repeatedly awakened in the reader of the Life of Johnson that each man to some extent pursued his own goals by means of the other – is most vivid in those