'He Was Loyal to Sanity'

“Literary value is not demonstrable and is a matter of consensus or ‘opinion,’ but a persisting consensus approaches certitude.” 

Call it naïveté, but I want to believe the late Jeffrey Hart’s carefully phrased assertion in his essay “Samuel Johnson as Hero” (2000). I can’t prove to you that Dr. Johnson is a great writer the way I can prove the square root of four is two. Literature will never be a science. Literary judgments will never approach axiomatic certainty. But generations of thoughtful readers find truth and beauty in his work, more than 230 years after his death. In Johnson we see a tormented man gifted with an enormous capacity for compassion and love – a rare mingling of human qualities. Hart recalls:

 

“Johnson had a sensibility that could not bear to read of the death of Cordelia in King Lear. That moment seemed to him a sort of hole in the universe, like the death of his wife.”

 

That such a moral being should possess literary acumen seems almost unfair to the rest of us. Johnson earns his opinions, always rooted in lived experience, not theory. We can learn from his example before spouting off. Hart quotes Boswell on Johnson’s capacity for “heroic laughter”:

 

“Johnson could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till he got without the Temple-gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet ditch.”

 

I would love to see a painting of that scene. Johnson would have made for strange company, especially at first, but we are accustomed to overlooking disgracefully self-centered behavior by artists. With Johnson there’s no need. He is the most human of writers, meaning he can be difficult but we forgive him. Hart writes:

 

“The heroism of Johnson ultimately consists of the fact that, for all the dark pathways of his imagination, he was loyal to sanity. He was often ill, melancholy, in debt, perhaps half-mad, but when he sat down at his desk to be ‘Samuel Johnson,’ he spoke in the style of normality.”

Hart’s prose is clean and forceful, and never huffs and puffs. He celebrates Johnson as man and writer, and reminds us to be grateful that such a person graced our cruel and dangerous species:

 

“Though he was a stern moralist, Johnson was also an exemplar of charity in the old sense of the word, caritas. His Fleet Street menage was a sort of zoo: the blind Mrs. Williams; the negro servant, Francis Barber; Hodge the cat; and the quack, Dr. Levitt, who very likely ministered, perhaps with narcotics, to Johnson’s neuroses. Boswell writes persuasively: ‘His generous humanity to the miserable was almost beyond example.’”

 

Hart reminds me of Dick Davis’ “With Johnson’s Lives of the Poets” (Devices and Desires, 1989):

 

“He wrote these quick biographies

To be instructive and to please;

In them we find

 

“Among judicious anecdotes

The apt quotation that denotes

A taste defined

 

“And wrested from this record of

His irritable, captious love

For failed mankind—

 

“From fear, from his compassion for

Insanity, the abject poor,

The world’s maligned.

 

He laboured to be just, and where

Justice eluded him his care

Was to be kind.

 

“Read generously—as once he read

The words of the indifferent dead.

Enter his mind.”