'Conditionally, If It Were Lawful'

Another foul-tempered screed written by someone unhappy with – well, everything. His tantrum is omnidirectional but his favorite punching bag seems to be children and the family. You know, “sentimentality,” “bourgeoise values.” I’ll speak as one man, for no one else: without my wife and sons I too would have drifted selfishly, uncommitted to anything, terminally ungrateful, making others miserable, contributing nothing, not even to myself. I need an implicit vow of responsibility to others to keep me focused. I thought of Dr. Johnson writing in his diary: 

“March 28, 1753. I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty’s death, with prayer and tears in the morning. In the evening I prayed for her conditionally, if it were lawful.”

 

That Johnson loved his wife, Elizabeth Porter Johnson (1689-1752), known to him always as “Tetty,” seems indisputable. When they married in 1735, he was twenty-five and she was forty-six. Tetty is said to have told her daughter after first meeting Johnson, “That is the most sensible man I ever met.”

 

Sniggering began almost immediately after the wedding. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate notes that when older women married younger men in eighteenth-century England, the male partner was judged “an unaggressive type of man—rather mousy, dependent, perhaps slightly infantile. Certainly the idea of such a marriage did not fit one’s notion of Johnson, with his huge, unwieldy frame, his immense physical strength, his courage and rhinocerine laughter, his uncanny incisiveness of mind.” Yet Johnson told his friend Topham Beauclerk: “It was a love marriage upon both sides.”

 

Macaulay’s portrayed Tetty as “a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces.” His verdict was influential and remains so, particularly among those offended by Johnson’s eminence. Defaming a man in matters of love and sex is a favorite tactic of the petty and unimaginative.

 

Johnson composed the inscription on Tetty’s tomb: Formosae, cultae, ingeniosae, piae – “beautiful, elegant, talented, dutiful.” John Hawkins says in his 1787 biography of Johnson: “The melancholy, which seized Johnson, on the death of his wife, was not, in degree, such as usually follows the deprivation of near relations and friends; it was of the blackest and deepest kind.” In 1764, twelve years after his wife’s death, Johnson wrote in a diary:

 

“Having before I went to bed composed the foregoing meditation and the following prayer, I tried to compose myself but slept unquietly. I rose, took tea, and prayed for resolution and perseverance. Thought on Tetty, dear poor Tetty, with my eyes full.”

 

The closing phrase in the excerpt from Johnson’s diary quoted above, “If it were lawful,” Is explained by John Wain in his Johnson biography:

 

“Johnson’s version of the Christian religion did not admit of any notion of rushing naked and howling into the presence of the Creator. He seems to have envisaged a majestic decorum even in one’s supplications for mercy. The Church of England dis not have a precise ruling on whether the dead could still benefit by the prayers of the living or whether, having lived their lives and reaped their reward, they were beyond reach. And since there was no definite line laid down by orthodoxy Johnson declined to take the decision on himself. His prayers for Tetty, though doubtless fervent, were ‘conditional.’”