'The Sound of Drums and Trumpets in a Battle'

BOSWELL: “But may not a man attain to such a degree of hope as not to be uneasy from the fear of death?” JOHNSON: “A man may have such a degree of hope as to keep him quiet. You see I am not quiet, from the vehemence with which I talk; but I do not despair.”

This dates from the Age of Heroic Conversation. No twaddle. Get right to the important things. The occasion was tea at the home of the Rev. Williams Adams, Johnson’s tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford, and his lifelong friend. The date was June 12, 1784. Johnson was seventy-five years old and would be dead in six months. Like Philip Larkin, he was haunted by thoughts of death, though Boswell adds after the exchange above:

“[L]et it be remembered, that Johnson’s temperament was melancholy, of which such direful apprehensions of futurity are often a common effect. We shall presently see that when he approached nearer to his aweful [sic] change, his mind became tranquil, and he exhibited as much fortitude as becomes a thinking man in that situation.”

I’m impressed not so much by Johnson’s formidable sensibility – he was extraordinary by any measure – but by how close his contemporaries were to his average. Their lives were shorter than ours, likelier to be blighted by disease, less materially prosperous. Yet how rarely we hear the note of aggrieved entitlement that characterizes our age. Largely this can be explained by the centrality of religion in their lives and the solace it provided. What do we have to take its place? Boswell goes on:    

“From the subject of death we passed to discourse of life, whether it was upon the whole more happy or miserable. Johnson was decidedly for the balance of misery: in confirmation of which I maintained, that no man would choose to lead over again the life which he had experienced. Johnson acceded to that opinion in the strongest terms.”

In Boswell’s account of the evening, Johnson, as he often does, returns to the theme of hope: “We are for wise purposes ‘Condemn’d to Hope’s delusive mine,’ as Johnson finely says.” Then Boswell enters into his text, not into the tea at Adams’ residence, lines from a poem by Dryden:

“When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat;

Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;

Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay:

To-morrow’s falser than the former day;

Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blessed

With some new joys, cuts off what we possessed.

Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,

Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;

And, from the dregs of life, think to receive

What the first sprightly running could not give.

I'm tired with waiting for this chemic gold,

Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.” 

Cozenage: “the practice or habit of cozening; cheating, deception, fraud.” Chemic: “of metal: produced by alchemy; counterfeit.” (Both OED). Boswell writes:

“It was observed to Dr. Johnson, that it seemed strange that he, who so often delighted his company by his lively and brilliant conversation, should say he was miserable. JOHNSON: ‘Alas! it is all outside; I may be cracking my joke, and cursing the sun. Sun, how I hate thy beams!’ I knew not well what to think of this declaration; whether to hold it as a genuine picture of his mind, or as the effect of his persuading himself contrary to fact, that the position which he had assumed as to human unhappiness, was true.”

Boswell adds a footnote after “his mind”: “Yet there is no doubt that a man may appear very gay in company, who is sad at heart. His merriment is like the sound of drums and trumpets in a battle, to drown the groans of the wounded and dying.”