'The Same Indignant and Sarcastical Mode'

One of my favorites among the conversations recounted by James Boswell occurs on this date, February 15, in 1766. Boswell has just returned from the Continent after his three-year Grand Tour, ostensibly studying law at Utrecht, more often dallying with a Dutch girl and celebrity-gawking at Rousseau and Voltaire. Boswell and Dr. Johnson are meeting at the Mitre Tavern, renewing the unlikely pair’s friendship that had started in May 1763.

BOSWELL: “I having mentioned that I had passed some time with Rousseau in his wild retreat, and having quoted some remark made by Mr. [John] Wilkes, with whom I had spent many pleasant hours in Italy.” Johnson replies (“sarcastically”): “It seems, Sir, you have kept very good company abroad, Rousseau and Wilkes!”

 

BOSWELL:  “My dear Sir, you don’t call Rousseau bad company. Do you really think HIM a bad man?”

 

JOHNSON. “Sir, if you are talking jestingly of this, I don’t talk with you. If you mean to be serious, I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been. Three or four nations have expelled him; and it is a shame that he is protected in this country.”

 

Here, Boswell feebly argues that Rousseau’s intentions were good, a line of reasoning mustered to defend Lenin and other criminals. Johnson replies:

 

“Sir, that will not do. We cannot prove any man’s intention to be bad. You may shoot a man through the head, and say you intended to miss him; but the Judge will order you to be hanged. An alleged want of intention, when evil is committed, will not be allowed in a court of justice. Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his [penal] transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations.”

 

When Boswell asks if Rousseau is as bad as Voltaire, Johnson observes: “Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.” I find Johnson’s argument definitive, though Flann O’Brien supplied an equally convincing refutation. Was Boswell merely baiting his friend, hoping to elicit good copy for his biography? Hard to say, though he may have been perfectly sincere. Boswell was a lawyer and enjoyed arguing. Though the greatest of biographers, his mind was at once less acute and more conventional than Johnson’s. Though conflicted, Boswell approves of his friend:

 

“The roughness, indeed, which sometimes appeared in his manners, was more striking to me now, from my having been accustomed to the studied smooth complying habits of the Continent; and I clearly recognised in him, not without respect for his honest conscientious zeal, the same indignant and sarcastical mode of treating every attempt to unhinge or weaken good principles.”

 

I’m reminded that Randall Jarrell also had wise things to say about Rousseau. The excerpt is quoted in No Other Book: Selected Essays (ed. Brad Leithauser, 1999):

 

“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”