Stories of Authors, British and American Part 2

VI

DR. JOHNSON AND CHARLES LAMB

Between Johnson and Lamb there would seem to be little in common. The ponderous old philosopher, "tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans," presents a picture very dissimilar to that of the stammering Lamb whom Coleridge has well called the "gentle-hearted Lamb." And yet there are many points of similarity.

Perhaps the most striking resemblance is in respect to their generosity. The unfailing testimony of all their friends is that neither could restrain the impulse to give. The celebrated De Quincey is led to characterize Lamb's munificence as _princely_, while Procter, one of his younger friends, simply says, "he gave away greatly." On the other hand, the testimony in regard to the generosity of Johnson is equally strong. He was so open-hearted that he could not trust himself to go upon the street with much money in his purse.

Neither Lamb nor Johnson believed in the modern methods of attending to charitable giving through the mediation of boards and committees.

Each violated the commonest precepts of a coldblooded political economy. If want and suffering were depicted upon the face of the mendicant, that was enough to call for the open purse. What if the beggar did look like a thief or drunkard? He might spend the money for gin or tobacco, but what of that? "Why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?" was Johnson's indulgent plea. This stern moralist so much enjoyed giving that he doubtless would have regretted the pa.s.sing of laws prohibiting the beggar from plying his vocation in public. So too would the genial Elia, who obeyed his own precept of "give and ask no questions."

While returning to his lodgings after midnight Johnson would often drop pennies into the hands of poor children sleeping on the thresholds and stalls, to furnish them with the means for a breakfast.

This was done at a time when he was living on pennies himself.

"Reader," pleads Elia in his _Praise of Chimney Sweepers_, "if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny--it is better to give him a twopence." And then Lamb describes the choice and fragrant drink, _Saloop_, the delight of the sweep, a basin of which together with a slice of delicate bread and b.u.t.ter will cost but a twopence. As we read the description we have no hesitancy in believing that the "unpennied sweep" frequently became a pennied sweep after the gentle Elia had pa.s.sed by.

Goldsmith once remarked that to be miserable was enough to insure the protection of Johnson. This generous quality of mind filled the house of Johnson with a queer a.s.sortment of pensioners. Had Lamb's home life permitted, equally full of the needy and homeless would it have been.

In 1796 occurred the terrible tragedy that we may permit Lamb himself to describe in his letter to Coleridge,--"White, or some of my friends, or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to s.n.a.t.c.h the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from which I fear she must be moved to an hospital.... My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.... G.o.d Almighty have us well in his keeping!" Lamb a.s.sumed the tender care of his sister, and his watchfulness and loving care are more beautiful than the most charming essay he ever wrote.

But this condition at home prevented that generous open-hearted hospitality so characteristic of Johnson. As it was he contributed to the support of several. For a long period he gave thirty pounds a year to his old schoolmistress. Telfourd relates that when Lamb saw the nurse who had waited on Coleridge during his last illness, he forced five guineas on her. Equally impulsive was his manner toward Procter, whom he one time noticed to be in low spirits and imagined the cause to be lack of money. "My dear boy," said he suddenly turning toward his friend, "I have a quant.i.ty of useless things, I have now in my desk a--a hundred pounds--that I don't _know_ what to do with. Take it."

Some years ago when comparing these two men a Mr. Roose wrote in concluding his paper: "We are all familiar with Johnson's huge, ungainly form, arrayed in brown suit more or less dilapidated, singed, bushy wig, black stockings, and mean old shoes. A quaint little figure, Lamb comes before our vision, in costume uncontemporary and as queer as himself, consisting of a suit of black cloth (they both affected dark colors), rusty silk stockings shown from the knees, thick shoes a mile too large, s.h.i.+rt with a wide, ill-plaited frill, and tiny white neckcloth tied in a minute bow."

It is pleasant to fancy these two originals being brought into personal contact. Nor is it hard, for all the tokens to the contrary, to imagine Elia taking the grand, humane old doctor into his embrace (a huger armful than his beloved folios), sitting up with him o'

nights, as he did with them, delighting in the humor of his conversation, which was said by a contemporary to be unequaled except by the old comedians, in whom Lamb's spirit found diversion; piercing to heights and depths in his nature which Boswell never revealed to him; while Johnson, it may safely be inferred, would have loved this "poor Charles," in whom Carlyle could perceive but so slender a strain of worth. But had they met at all, it would have been on equal terms.

Goldsmith maintained with difficulty, though he did maintain, his att.i.tude of independence towards the colossus of his age. Charles Lamb, without any difficulty and without the show of a.s.sertiveness, would have maintained it better. Lamb, who from earliest manhood refused to knock under to the threatening intellectual arrogance of Coleridge; who shook Wordsworth by the nose instead of by the hand with the greeting, "How d'ye do, old Lake Poet!"--his stammering voice might have broken with impunity on the doctor's weightiest utterances with the absurdest quips and twists of speech of which even he was capable. Yet both were of wayward nature, and had they met might not have coalesced.

Lamb would have understood Johnson better than Johnson would have understood the whimsicalities of the witty clerk. At one time while discussing authors with friends Lamb said,--"There is Dr. Johnson: I have no curiosity; no strange uncertainty about him."

Johnson's restraint in the use of alcoholic drinks is in contrast with Lamb's indulgence. But Johnson's intemperate tea-drinking makes him one with Lamb in his struggle with tobacco. In writing to Coleridge for advice on smoking, Lamb asks: "What do you think of smoking? I want your sober _average noon opinion_ of it.... May be the truth is, that _one_ pipe is wholesome, _two_ pipes toothsome, _three_ pipes noisome, _four_ pipes fulsome, _five_ pipes quarrelsome; and that's the _sum_ on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason."

And Telfourd tells us that when Parr saw Lamb puffing like some furious enchanter, he asked how he had acquired the power of smoking at such a rate. Lamb replied, "I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue."

VII

THE DEATH OF DR. JOHNSON

By common consent Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ takes first place as a biography. Some critics go so far as to say that the excellence of the biography is to be accounted for by the deficiency in the character of Boswell; that Boswell was such a blind and whole-souled wors.h.i.+per of Johnson that he exposed the faults of his subject with the same zeal with which he published the virtues. This may be true. Whether true or not, it is not an altogether bad quality. Many of us think that the biographies of our modern men of letters would have more vivacity and lifelikeness were they to contain an occasional glimpse of the hero when he is not on the parade ground. The biography of Tennyson by his son, Lord Hallam, would be far more convincing had the son given us occasional pictures of the poet when he was not at his best. But, perhaps, it is too much to hope that a reverent and admiring son can give the world a vital, impartial, and comprehensive life of his father.

Boswell has given us a full account of Johnson's last days. The gruff old lexicographer had lived a robust life; he had faced many temptations, and had not always retired from the conflict victorious.

On the whole, however, he had lived an exemplary life, but like many another good man he had a dread of dying; he feared he might not meet the last foe as worthily as a man of his character and reputation should. But this was a groundless fear. For when the last illness was upon him, he asked his physician to tell him plainly whether there was any hope of his recovery. The doctor first asked his patient whether he could hear the whole truth, whatever it might be. Upon hearing an affirmative reply, the physician declared that in his opinion nothing short of a miracle would restore health.

"Then," said Johnson, "I will take no more physic, not even my opiates; for I have prayed that I may render up my soul unclouded."

A brother of Boswell's wrote the following letter concerning the last hours of Johnson:

"The Doctor, from the time that he was certain his death was near, appeared to be perfectly resigned, was seldom or never fretful or out of temper, and often said to his faithful servant, who gave me this account, 'Attend, Francis, to the salvation of your soul, which is the object of greatest importance:' he also explained to him pa.s.sages in the Scripture, and seemed to have pleasure in talking upon religious subjects.

"On Monday, the 13th of December, the day on which he died, a Miss Morris, daughter to a particular friend of his, called, and said to Francis, that she begged to be permitted to see the doctor, that she might earnestly request him to give her his blessing. Francis went into the room, followed by the young lady, and delivered the message.

The doctor turned himself in the bed, and said, 'G.o.d bless you, my dear!' These were the last words he spoke. His difficulty of breathing increased till about seven o'clock in the evening, when Mr. Barber and Mrs. Desmoulins, who were sitting in the room, observed that the noise he made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, and found he was dead."

This account, together with several others given by various friends, a.s.sures us that the death of Johnson was trustful and tranquil. It is another ill.u.s.tration of that beautiful dispensation of nature which, as a rule, makes death a mere slipping away, a falling asleep. The Francis who is mentioned in the letter is the faithful negro servant whom Johnson so generously provided for in his will. In making his will the doctor had asked a friend how much of an annuity gentlemen usually gave to a favorite servant, and was told that in the case of a n.o.bleman fifty pounds a year was considered an adequate reward for many years of faithful service:

"Then," said Johnson, "shall I be _n.o.bilissimus_, for I mean to leave Frank seventy pounds a year, and I desire you to tell him so."

This generosity was too much for the equanimity of Sir John Hawkins, one of the executors of the will, who, when he found that this negro servant would receive about fifteen hundred pounds, including an annuity of seventy pounds a year, grumbled and muttered "a caveat against ostentatious bounty and favor to negroes." But however much the Sir Johns may grumble, we cannot think the less of Johnson for his kindness in remembering a faithful and deserving servant.

Johnson's refusal to take either wine or opiates recalls that in an age in which the use of alcoholic drinks was very common he was an uncompromising foe to wine, and that he was, in his latter years, loud in his praise of water. "As we drove back to Ashbourne," says Boswell, "Dr. Johnson recommended to me, as he had often done, to drink water only. 'For,' said he, 'you are then sure not to get drunk; whereas if you drink wine, you are never sure.'" And this was not the only matter in which he was in advance of his contemporaries, and of most of ours too. Johnson liked satisfying food, such as a leg of pork, or veal pie well stuffed, with plum pie and sugar, and he devoured enormous quant.i.ties of fruit, especially peaches. His inordinate love of tea has almost pa.s.sed into a proverb,--he has actually been credited with twenty-five cups at a sitting, and he would keep Mrs. Thrale brewing it for him till four o'clock in the morning. The following impromptu, spoken to Miss Reynolds, points its own moral:

For hear, alas, the dreadful truth, Nor hear it with a frown: Thou can'st not make the tea so fast As I can gulp it down.

VIII

GRAY WRITES THE ELEGY

Recently I was conversing with a practical man of affairs who had just returned from his first visit to Europe. Art galleries had proved tiresome and Westminster Abbey had bored him. But there was one place that he had determined to see and see it he did.

"What place was that?" I asked.

"Stoke Pogis," was the reply.

Is not this answer indicative of the att.i.tude of thousands who can never forget the exquisite charm cast over their youth by the melancholy beauty of the _Elegy in a Country Church-yard_? If fame was the end of General Wolfe's ambition, he was wise in saying that he would rather have written the _Elegy_ than be able to take Quebec on the morrow; for of all English poems the _Elegy_ is the most popular and widely known; it is the flower of the "literature of melancholy."

The _Elegy_ is the glorification of the obscure; therein lies its popularity. The most of us are obscure. The _Elegy_ flatters us by suggesting that we might have swayed the rod of empire or "waked to ecstasy the living lyre," if we had had the chance,--or, what we think is more likely the explanation, if we had not had a saner insight into the values of life than the Miltons and Cromwells.

Stoke Pogis is always a.s.sociated with the name of Gray. It is a village, if such it may be called, between London and Windsor Castle.

The church is "on a little level s.p.a.ce about four miles north of the Thames at Eton. From the neighborhood of the church no vestige of hamlet or village is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly artificial, like a rustic church in a park on a stage. The traveler almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, cheerfully habited, make their appearance, dancing on the greensward."

Gray and his mother, the father having died in 1741, went to Stoke Pogis in 1742. At West End House, a simple farmhouse of two stories, Gray lived for many years. In the autumn of 1742 was begun the _Elegy in a Country Church-yard_. The common impression is that the whole poem was written at Stoke Pogis, but this is not the truth. It is better to say that it was begun in October or November at Stoke Pogis, continued seven years later at the same place and at Cambridge, and finished at Stoke Pogis on June 12th, 1750. It is interesting to note that in each case an impetus was given to the composition of the poem by the death of a friend. Several months before the poem was begun in 1742, West, a friend whose death made a very deep impression upon the sensitive nature of Gray, had pa.s.sed away; and on October 31 Jonathan Rogers, an uncle of Gray's, died at Stoke Pogis; and when the poem was next taken up Gray was mourning the death of his aunt. In commenting on this subject Mr. Gosse writes,--"He was a man who had a very slender hold on life himself, who walked habitually in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and whose periods of greatest vitality were those in which bereavement proved to him that, melancholy as he was, even he had something to lose and to regret."

On the 12th of June, 1750, Gray wrote to his friend, Horace Walpole,--"Having put an end to a thing whose beginning you have seen long ago, I immediately send it to you. You will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an end to it: a merit that most of my writings have wanted, and are like to want." Walpole was naturally delighted with the poem--so delighted, in fact, that he handed it about from friend to friend and even made ma.n.u.script copies of it.

This caused some embarra.s.sment to the poet. In February, 1751, he was annoyed to find that the publisher of the _Magazine of Magazines_ was actually printing his _Elegy_ in his periodical. So Gray immediately wrote to Walpole: "As I am not at all disposed to be either so indulgent or so correspondent as they desire, I have but one bad way to escape the honor they would inflict upon me: and therefore am obliged to desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately (which may be done in less than a week's time) from your copy, but without my name, in what form is most convenient for him, but on his best paper and character; he must correct the press himself, and print it without any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in some places continued without them." On the 16th of February, only five days after this letter was received, _An Elegy wrote in a Country Church-yard_ appeared as a large quarto pamphlet, anonymous, price sixpence.

From the very first it achieved great popularity. Magazine after magazine published it without giving the author any compensation.

Gray was soon hit upon as the author. Unfortunately, the success of the poem gave no increased income to the poet. Dodsley, the publisher, is said to have made about a thousand pounds from the various poems of Gray, but Gray had the impractical idea that it was not dignified for a poet to make money from poetry.

In view of this lack of compensation for his poetic writings, it is very gratifying to know that during the latter days of his life Gray enjoyed the emolument arising from his holding the chair of Modern Literature and Modern Languages at Cambridge. This paid him 400 pounds a year, and did not require much work, as the office was a sinecure.

One of the biographers points out that this promotion was brought about inadvertently through the riotous living of Gray's great enemy, Lord Sandwich. Professor Lawrence Brockett, the inc.u.mbent of the chair of Literature at Cambridge, dined with Lord Sandwich at Hinchinbroke.

He became so drunk that in riding home to Cambridge he fell from his horse and broke his neck. At once five obscure dons made brisk application for the vacant place, and Gray, sensitive and lacking the arts of the politician, did not expect the place. But the author of the _Elegy_ was no longer to be neglected. He soon received a letter highly complimenting his work and offering him the professors.h.i.+p. Gray accepted and was summoned to court to kiss the hand of the monarch, George III. The king made several complimentary remarks to Gray.

Afterwards when the poet's friends asked Gray to tell them what the king had said he replied that the room was so hot and he so embarra.s.sed that he really did not know what the king had said.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere; Heaven did a recompense as largely send: He gave to misery--all he had--a tear, He gained from Heaven--'twas all he wished--a friend.