“We sat some time in the summer-house, on the outside wall
of which was inscribed, `Ambulantis in horto audiebant vocem Dei;’
[Genesis 3:8: “They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.”]
and in reference to a brook by which it is situated, `Vivendi recte qui prorogate
horam, &c.’ [Horace, Epistle I.ii.40: “He who puts off the hour of
right-living is like the bumpkin waiting for the river to run out…”: I said to Mr. Young, that I had been told his
father was cheerful. ‘Sir, (said he,) he was too well-bred a man not to be
cheerful in company; but he was gloomy when alone. He never was cheerful after
my mother's death, and he had met with many disappointments.’ Dr. Johnson observed
to me afterwards, ‘That this was no favourable account of Dr. Young; for it is
not becoming in a man to have so little acquiescence in the ways of Providence,
as to be gloomy because he has not obtained as much preferment as he expected;
nor to continue gloomy for the loss of his wife. Grief has its time.’ The last
part of this censure was theoretically made. Practically, we know that grief
for the loss of a wife may be continued very long, in proportion as affection
has been sincere. No man knew this better than Dr. Johnson.”
Johnson is harsh, though he had the tact not to censure
Young fils to his face. Like Boswell,
we sympathize with Johnson, whose wife, Hetty, had died in 1752. He never
stopped grieving. In his “Life of Young,” Johnson writes of deaths that may
have inspired “Night Thoughts”:
“That
domestic grief is, in the first instance, to be thanked for these ornaments to
our language it is impossible to deny. Nor would it be common hardiness to
contend that worldly discontent had no hand in these joint productions of
poetry and piety. Yet am I by no means sure that, at any rate, we should not
have had something of the same colour from Young's pencil, notwithstanding the
liveliness of his satires. In so long a life causes for discontent and
occasions for grief must have occurred. It is not clear to me that his Muse was
not sitting upon the watch for the first which happened.”
After quoting “Grief has its time,” James says Johnson was
“well aware / It was himself he spoke for.” James extends his sympathy: “Others
must / Be granted full rights to a long
despair / Fueled by the ruination of their trust / In a fair world.” This
represents a wise maturity we encounter in Johnson and a few other writers and
thinkers but seldom in our lives. James recounts meeting an elderly woman at a book-signing. She asks him to dedicate the book to her and her sweetheart
killed in World War II.
“Utmost concision, even in a rage;
Guarding the helpless from experiment;
Stalwart against the follies of the age;
The depth of subtlety made eloquent –”
“These were the qualities of Johnson’s mind
Even the King felt bound to venerate…”
At this point, James recalls the serendipitous meeting on
Feb. 10, 1767, in the King’s Library, of Johnson, the great lexicographer, and
King George III. Boswell tells us the King asked Johnson for his assessment of
the comparative worth of the libraries at Oxford and Cambridge, the writings of
Warburton, Lyttleton and Hill, and the general state of letters in England. The
King urged Johnson to “continue his labours” at writing. Johnson replied that
“he had pretty well told the world what he knew” and he thought “he had already
done his part as a writer.” The King is gracious: “I should have thought so
too….if you had not written so well.” James concludes his poem like this:
“These were the qualities of Johnson’s mind
Even the King felt bound to venerate,
Who entered through the library wall to find
The rumpled, mumbling sage, alone and great.”
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