On September 1st, 1773, Boswell, Johnson and their servants set out on horseback for the crossing to the island of Skye.
It grew dusky; and we had a very tedious ride for what was called five miles; but I am sure would measure ten. We had no conversation. I was riding forward to the inn at Glenelg on the shore opposite to Sky, that I might take proper measures, before Dr Johnson, who was now advancing in dreary silence, Hay leading his horse, should arrive. Vass also walked by the side of his horse, and Joseph followed behind: as therefore he was thus attended, and seemed to be in deep meditation, I thought there could be no harm in leaving him for a little while. He called me back with a tremendous shout, and was really in a passion with me for leaving him. I told him my intentions, but he was not satisfied, and said, ‘Do you know, I should as soon have thought of picking a pocket, as doing so.’
BOSWELL. ‘I am diverted with you, sir.’
JOHNSON. ‘Sir, I could never be diverted with incivility. Doing such a thing, makes one lose confidence in him who has done it, as one cannot tell what he may do next.’
His extraordinary warmth confounded me so much, that I justified myself but lamely to him; yet my intentions were not improper. I wished to get on, to see how we were to be lodged, and how we were to get a boat; all which I thought I could best settle myself ? I however continued to ride by him, finding he wished I should do so.
Next morning, the quarrel is made up. Johnson owns that he spoke in passion, Boswell that he took it too hard, and they set out in a boat for Skye.
In most of The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson it is Johnson who is the star, Boswell the roadie, Johnson the sage, Boswell merely his amanuensis. It is clear who is dependent on whom. Yet in this incident, the roles are suddenly reversed.
This is depression at work, a condition almost always marked by the fear of abandonment. (Whether early experiences of abandonment ’cause’ depression can be left moot.) It is dusk, a bad time (Lowell’s ‘skunk hour’) in the daily mood pattern. Johnson maintains a ‘dreary silence’ and ‘seems to be meditating’. All in all, if I am right, he is in an extremely vulnerable state. Boswell’s sudden, unexplained departure fills him with fear and enrages him. Their friendship has given him not the least ground to suppose that Boswell will behave unpredictably (‘one cannot tell what he may do next’). In that phrase we hear the formless panic of depression.
Although the rage subsides, he is still angry later that night.
Sir, had you gone on, I was thinking that I should have returned with you to Edinburgh, and then have parted from you, and never spoken to you more.
Neither man invokes depression under its 18th century names (‘spleen’, ‘hyponchondria’) to account for this incident. And obviously there are other possible readings of Boswell’s account. What makes me more confident of mine, however, are two Latin poems Johnson composed later that week.
The first is an Ode to the Isle of Sky. (I quote the English versions made later.)
And yet to climb the hilly heath,
Or search the hollowed cave beneath,
Or count the white waves as they flow,
Affords no cure for mental woe.The storms that shake the troubled soul,
‘This thine, Almighty, to control;
And, as thy wise decrees dispose,
The tide of passion ebbs and flows.
A second Ode, a few days later, is addressed to Hester Thrale.
Whether she sooths her husband’s toils,
Or spreads her fond maternal smiles,
Or with a book the hours beguiles
Her fancy to regale;May she of me be mindful found!
May faith with mutual faith be crowned!
So shall the shores of Skie resound
The gentle name of Thrale.
He wishes to know that when they are separated, he and this woman on whom he has come to depend so much, that he is not gone from her mind, that their ‘mutual faith’ is sustained.
This sequence of moods, feelings and actions on the Tour shows one way in which Johnson’s depression is woven into the texture of his everyday experience. We are so accustomed to thinking of him as a granitic block that to imagine him as needy and dependent requires some adjustment. Needy and dependent, however, he certainly was, a fact about him recognised more clearly by women – Fanny Burney, Hester Thrale – than by men. Johnson names and knows what ails him, and is familiar with many of its effects. Perhaps by ‘passion’ he meant, not just strong emotion, but also the effects of illness, and means Boswell to pick this up. If so, Boswell didn’t.