The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [9]
Yet it was also a principle not exclusively aggressive, since it existed in Johnson in close conjunction with other, milder, emotions. As David Garrick’s description of Johnson’s way of wit suggests – ‘Johnson gives you a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you, whether you will or no’ – there was a roughness even in his affection, a thread of violence woven through his gambolling.58
But contradiction or ‘dexterity in retort’ for Johnson was much more than a foible of character.59 His great dictum that ‘Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth’ installs the fact and experience of contradiction as the virtuous centre of any search for the true. Towards the end of his life, he cited this understanding of the value and purpose of contradiction as almost the summation of his philosophy: ‘In short, Sir, I have got no further than this: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.’60 Not all Johnson’s friends, even the closest of them, shared this understanding of the utility of contradiction, but Johnson was adamant in defence of it, as he showed in a revealing exchange with Langton:
He however charged Mr. Langton with what he thought want of judgement upon an interesting occasion. ‘When I was ill, (said he) I desired he would tell me sincerely in what he thought my life was faulty. Sir, he brought me a sheet of paper, on which he had written down several texts of Scripture, recommending christian charity. And when I questioned him what occasion I had given for such an animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this, – that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation. Now what harm does it do to any man to be contradicted?’ BOSWELL. ‘I suppose he meant the manner of doing it; roughly, – and harshly.’ JOHNSON. ‘And who is the worse for that?’ BOSWELL. ‘It hurts people of weak nerves.’ JOHNSON. ‘I know no such weak-nerved people.’61
Johnson well knew how a veneer of courtesy can conceal indifference or even malice. That knowledge guided his pen when he composed the famous letter reproving the Earl of Chesterfield for his failures as a patron, and it is the source of that letter’s peculiar power as a piece of writing: a mordant unmasking of unmeaning civility which nevertheless employs many of the literary tropes of courtliness, such as indirection and classical allusion – tropes discredited and disdained in the very act of being set to work.62
This Johnsonian suspicion of courtesy must have strengthened his belief in the virtue of frank opposition. Nevertheless, it was a policy which took its toll on the practitioner, as well as on the recipient. Johnson’s unstinted admiration for Burke, notwithstanding the gulf between their politics, seems in part to have been based on how Burke roused Johnson:
And once, when Johnson was ill, and unable to exert himself as much as usual without fatigue, Mr. Burke having been mentioned, he said, ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.’ So much was he accustomed to consider conversation as a contest, and such was his notion of Burke as an opponent.63
But the cost of combativeness was, for Johnson, nothing in comparison to the reassurance it supplied, as he revealed in his response to the controversy caused by his political pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny (1775): ‘His Taxation no Tyranny being mentioned, he said, “I think I have not been attacked hard enough for it. Attack is the re-action; I never