In 1776, Boswell inveigled Johnson, a Church and King man all his life, a Whig-hater, into meeting someone worse even than a Whig, the famous radical, John Wilkes. (The way Boswell entraps his lion and gets him into the ring makes very good reading: in the Everyman edition of the Life it’s Vol II 46-56. ) Wilkes had done almost everything possible to offend a Tory like Johnson, finagling a parliamentary career, joining the Hellfire Club, speaking up for the American colonists, even writing a pornographic parody of Pope’s Essay on Man. Six years earlier, he had been imprisoned for ‘sedition and impiety’, charges which depended to some extent on that pornographic poem. When by virtue of imprisonment he was prevented from taking his seat as the member for Middlesex, there was a popular agitation: liberty was imperilled cried Wilkes’ supporters.
Johnson was stirred by this case to write a pamphlet (‘The False Alarm‘) in the course of which he says of Wilkes:
The character of the man I have no purpose to delineate. Lampoon itself would disdain to speak ill of him, of whom no man speaks well.
But six years on, these opposites meet over dinner and get on well.
What do the great Tory and the famous radical find in common? Wilkes, renowned for his charm, helps Johnson to the good things on the table (“Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange; – or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest.”) They discuss and compare the actors Foote and Garrick. Wilkes makes two jokes about Scotland, one involving a quotation from Shakespeare, the other from Milton, with a little wry self-deprecation thrown in. Then they move on to discuss the correct translation of a line in Horace’s Art of Poetry.
What they have in common is literature. Time and again in the Life literature serves to bring people together, to allow them to form estimates of one another, to learn from one another and to make communication both precise and pleasurable. It’s the integument that binds together writer, scholar, clergyman, soldier, actor, painter, politician, landed gentleman and those few women like Anna Seward and Mary Knowles who gained a seat at the table
I am struck by the way in which literary conversation was a means of promoting and preserving a value which Johnson held high – civility. For us, that tends to translate as ‘manners’ and those are often thought superficial. But for Johnson, a breach of civility could and did have serious moral consequences. This is clear from an episode in the following year, in which Boswell plans another meeting of opposites, but bungles and blurts it out.
. . . at breakfast, I unguardedly said to Dr Johnson, “I wish I saw you and Mrs Macaulay together.” He grew very angry; and after a pause, while a cloud gathered on his brow, he burst out, “No, Sir; you would not see us quarrel, to make you sport. Don’t you know it is very uncivil to pit two people against one another? . . . No man has a right to engage two people in a dispute by which their passions may be enflamed, and they may part with bitter resentment against each other.”
Catharine Macaulay was another like Wilkes, A Whig too liberal for the orthodox Whigs, author of a multi-volume History of England and a brilliant conversationalist. Who knows what might have happened? At any rate, this time Boswell finds himself in the moral soup. Johnson is like everyone chockful of contradictions. His imperiousness and bullying are notorious. But so is his ‘kindness’, not only acts of benevolence but a social quality which regulates and checks hostile emotions. There’s the famous reply when Boswell asks him why, when he complains how little he gets out of social meetings, he continues to attend them: “Kindness must be kept up.” A man so intensely aware of the danger and darkness in human life will reach for its alleviations – civility, which promotes kindness, and which flourishes when readers discuss literature.
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