Mr. Gopnik and Dr. Johnson

Can't tell you how much I enjoyed Adam Gopnik's essay about Samuel Johnson. Here's an excerpt:

Johnson's political philosophy, a combination of authoritarian politics, charitable impulses, anti-imperialism, and Christian faith, was forged on the streets and in the garrets and through that life as a grinder in the seventeen-thirties and forties; despite what some biographers have suggested, it was not dreamed up afterward, in comfort. His was a hungry man's hard-hearted view of life, more like Merle Haggard's conservatism than like his later friend Edmund Burke's. The self-classified reformers, Johnson insisted, are in pursuit of only their own narrow interests, not those of the common people. He loved to tell the story of challenging Mrs. Macaulay, "a great republican," to prove her sincerity about social equality by asking her footman to dine at her table. ("She has never liked me since. Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.") Life is hard, and there is little that government can do to make it easier. No one was less paternalistic, or puritanical, about the poor and their pleasures than Johnson: give them all the gin and fairgrounds they want, they have little enough else, God knows. ("Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer.") In the two sets of occasional essays that he wrote in the seventeen-fifties--"The Rambler" and "The Idler"--a pet theme is that government, good and ill, is at a remove from actual life. As he wrote, in lines that he sneaked into his friend Oliver Goldsmith's poem "The Traveller," "How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which law or kings can cause or cure."

There was no cure for the human condition, he thought, not least his own. He was a prisoner of compulsions. A monster of a man, with a huge and powerful frame, and a blunt bulldog head set above it, he could pick up warring street dogs and toss them aside like kittens, and once beat an insolent publisher senseless with a folio volume. Yet since his youth he had suffered from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even Tourette's syndrome, which became aggravated with the years. Walking down a London alley, he had to touch every post with his cane, and, if he missed one, would go back and start over; he constantly spoke to himself, repeating half-audible incantations under his breath, and would sit in a reverie for hours, muttering and whistling; when he peeled an orange, he always had to keep the peel in his pocket.

Still, the pill of life could be sweetened--above all, with friendship. Johnson made a religion of social life: he ate with friends every night, adored his small circle of intimates, and eventually insisted that "the Literary Club" they formed was the best club in the history of mankind. (Goldsmith, Reynolds, and Burke were charter members.) "My life is one long escape from myself," he said, and he ran to the table to get away. There are few finer moments in his conversation than his descriptions of the consolation of fast coaches bearing pretty women, and, especially, good food in well-run taverns:

There is no private house, (said he,) in which people can enjoy themselves so well, as at a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so much desire that every body should be easy; in the nature of things it cannot be: there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests; the guests are anxious to be agreeable to him. . . . Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome: and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are.

Johnson was often a sad man but never a secluded one. He dreamed not of solitude but of becoming the good-humored, well-mannered, "sophisticated" man for all seasons that was always his beau ideal. The matchless pleasure of reading Boswell's book lies in the run of Johnson's normal conversation; his common sense on lawyering and doctoring, on publishing and soldiering. A sailor in a boat is a man in jail with a chance of being drowned. Fame is a shuttlecock, which must be struck at both ends to be kept up. It is affectation to pretend to feel the distress of others as much as they do themselves. A lawyer is expected to make the best case he can no matter what his own opinion. (Will a lawyer then become a liar because he is expected to lie for his client? "Sir, a man will no more carry the artifice of the bar into the common intercourse of society, than a man who is paid for tumbling upon his hands will continue to tumble on his hands when he should walk on his feet.") To imply that this worldly wisdom served merely to conceal his struggle is to miss what he was struggling for--which was, always, to "endeavour to see things as they are, and then enquire whether we ought to complain." (Though, he added, "whether to see life as it is, will give us much consolation, I know not.")

After a discussion of Dr. Johnson's private sexual weakness (he was a masochist), Gopnik makes a profound observation:

We love Johnson for his humanity, and what makes us human is the contest between our desires and our doctrines.

I like that. It's also why, no matter how mistaken I may find one's doctrines and off-putting I may find one's desires, if there's good-hearted humanity in them, I'd much rather share their company than sit with people who agree with me.