insolence of Power, and the Temptations of the animal Passions, appear to have been a constant theme of Mr Johnson’s meditations at this period of his Life, and may reflect upon his own unhappy Situation. But finding himself now no more successful as a Tragedian, than formerly as a Schoolmaster, he at length established a connection with the Gentleman’s Magazine where he earned his Bread as a low writer of Translations, Reviews, Catalogues and Commentaries over the ensuing decade. Throughout these years he knew great Poverty, and his Union with Mrs Johnson is rumoured to have been at Times interrupted.
The spirit of Discontent, if not of Subversion, is revealed in his Imitation of Juvenal’s Third Satire on Rome, which he published anonymously as ‘London’ in 1738; and his Pamphlets in prose and verse directed against the Ministry. In 1744 he published through Mr Dodsley a remarkable Apologia for the Life of the notorious Mr Richard Savage, the self-styled Volunteer Laureate and claimant to the Rivers title, a man renowned equally for his Poetry and his Profligacy.
Mr Johnson’s familiarity with this Gentleman and his London haunts, at the very Nadir of his misfortunes, may indicate something of his own Circumstances. The Performance is executed with both Tenderness and Rigour, as if the Author was to some degree at War with his own Nature and Outlook in the judgement of his unhappy Friend. The Work, though cast in the ephemeral genre of commercial Biography, has received Praise in many quarters including the Approbation of Mr Henry Fielding (whose History of Tom Jones: A Foundling now lies before the World); and it may be counted among the most Successful and Diverting that Mr Johnson was destined to produce.
Disappointed in his literary Prospects, disheartened in his political Hopes, and perhaps embittered by his personal Affairs (but we make no Windows into the human Heart), Mr Johnson threw himself at last into the harmless drudgery of his English Dictionary, for which he undertook a contract in 1746, with a Chimerical fervour, and established himself on Credit at Gough Square with Mrs Johnson who steadily sought refuge from the World in Novels and Medicines. Turning once more to his favourite Juvenal, Mr Johnson now imitated the Disillusion of the Tenth Satire, in his poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, which he is believed to have composed while Walking in the country lanes of Hampstead in a delusory Attempt to escape the Toils of the City which had so fatally ensnared him.
The last concussion to his Hopes occurred this spring, when his long meditated Tragedy of Irene was mounted in Drury Lane by his Friend Mr David Garrick (one of the truly distinguished sons of Lichfield), to be received only with a Tepid expression of Politeness by the Town. The fatal Illness that now struck him down, at the age of Forty, may perhaps be assigned as much to Weariness and melancholy of Mind, as to premature Decay of his ungainly and damaged Body.
He remained throughout a devout and convinced Christian, and found that Solace in Heaven which he could not find in the World. Perhaps he composed an Elegy for himself, and for his Grub Street familiars such as Mr Savage, when he wrote in The Vanity of Human Wishes:
Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes,
And pause a while from Letters, to be wise;
There mark what Ills the Scholar’s Life assail,
Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron and the Jail.8
When Johnson first came to London in 1737 he was twenty-seven years old; and Savage (as far as we can tell) was nearly forty. Johnson was young, unknown and untried; Savage was ageing, experienced and disreputable. We have to begin to imagine a relationship of mentor and pupil between the two men that is unlike almost anything in Johnson’s later career, or in that part of it recorded by Boswell. Savage can be seen as a sort of urbane Mephistopheles, Johnson as a youthful Faust.
The friendship lasted at most only two years, but it seems to have been of great emotional intensity. When they eventually parted, in July 1739, Johnson says that he had ‘Tears in his Eyes’. It is invariably said by Johnson’s own biographers that the man who was weeping was Savage, not Johnson; thereby suggesting that Johnson was relatively unmoved. But this may not be the case. Johnson himself draws special attention to the moment of parting by making it one of the few places in his Life of Savage where he deliberately introduces himself as part of Savage’s story. He emphasises the pathos of the moment with unusual explicitness.
Savage had resolved to abandon London for rural Wales to live frugally, and salvage his writing career. ‘Full of these salutary Resolutions, he left London, in July 1739, having taken Leave with great Tenderness of his Friends, and parted from the Author of this Narrative with Tears in his Eyes.’1
Tears in whose eyes? The sentence is curiously ambiguous, or deliberately so: the punctuation suggests Savage’s eyes, but Johnson’s dramatic introduction of himself in the final clause seems to claim the tears as his own. It is almost as if Johnson was impelled as a friend to bear witness to his own tears; but was embarrassed as a biographer to admit them in public This embarrassment at the strength of his feelings for Savage, when he later looked back at it, provides us with a first clue to the whole story.
When Johnson came to correct the second edition of the Life in 1748, he noted carefully in the margin next to the ‘Tears in his Eyes’ an explanatory phrase: ‘I had then a slight fever.’ This seems to imply that Johnson was indeed recalling his own tears and emotion at losing Savage, but he felt awkward doing so, and subsequently wished to dismiss them as mere physical weakness, as temporary illness. But in this sense his whole intimacy with Savage may have been something of a young man’s fever. It was hectic, intense, continually menaced by Savage’s poverty and instability, and by Johnson’s own struggles to establish himself professionally in London. Johnson seemed to conceive of their time together as something dreamlike, tidal like the River Thames; a friendship of arrivals and departures in the great city.
In his poem London, Johnson invests just such an imagined parting with a strange, solemn ritual of kissing the ground, bathing the whole moment in a bright silvery light, reflected from the shining water, of romantic intensity:
While Thales waits the Wherry that contains
Of dissipated Wealth the small Remains,
On Thames’s banks, in silent Thought we stood,
Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver Flood:
Struck with the Seat that gave Eliza birth,
We kneel, and kiss the consecrated Earth …2
Nothing could be further from the atmosphere of Boswell’s familiar tale of Johnson and young David Garrick riding to London to seek their fortunes in March 1737. Here, by contrast, is the touch of brisk heroic comedy like a picaresque adventure out of a Fielding novel. ‘Both of them’, says Boswell, ‘used to talk pleasantly of it’, and embellished it suitably as the years went by.
They were cheerful, poor, devil-may-care. Garrick would say that they had only one horse between them, and ‘rode and tied’ – that is, each one riding ahead in turn, tying up the horse to a tree or gate, and walking on till the other overtook and performed the next relay, as if they were gypsies. Johnson would add that his total finances were ‘two-pence half-penny’. Garrick once mockingly challenged this in Boswell’s hearing: ‘Eh? what do you say? With two-pence half-penny in your pocket?’ – Johnson: ‘Why yes; when
