Flesh in the Age of Reason (28 page)

Why was Creation so ‘full of calamity’? Stupidity, ignorance, greed and tyranny must all shoulder some blame – affording in turn some
prospect of remedy (hence his incendiary toast: ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies’). But most evil was woven into the very fabric of the post-lapsarian world. For Johnson subscribed to Original Sin – ‘the natural depravity of mankind’ – and grudgingly respected Mandeville’s cynical realism. Asked by Lady Macleod whether man was naturally good (as held by Shaftesbury, Addison and other enlightened thinkers), he snapped, ‘No, Madam, no more than a wolf,’ an echo of the Hobbesian
homo lupo lupus
, which she found ‘worse than Swift’ – a response that must have been a sore point with Johnson, since he reviled the Dean’s misanthropy (‘a life wasted in discontent’), surely seeing too much of himself in that fellow Christian pessimist.

‘When an offer was made to Themistocles’,
Idler
readers were told, ‘of teaching him the art of memory, he answered, that he would rather wish for the art of forgetfulness.’ Johnson sympathized: consciousness – of how reality was more to be endured than enjoyed – was indeed a millstone. Johnson was melancholy because the world gave him every reason to be.

True. Yet that was not the whole truth, and not all who trod life’s treadmill sank into his intermittent paralysis of the will. Johnson himself recognized that his despondency was not normal; he saw himself as sick, alluding frequently to his ‘diseased mind’. So what disease did he have? Various commentators have asserted that his disturbances had an organic seat – and in his
Dictionary
Johnson himself favoured physical aetiologies, defining melancholy as ‘a disease, supposed to proceed from a redundance of black bile’. Modern physicians have diagnosed Johnson as suffering from cerebral palsy, epilepsy, De La Tourette’s syndrome, or, echoing contemporaries, St Vitus’s Dance. It is important, however, not to lose sight of the fact that Johnson himself denied that his tics and mannerisms were somatic. Asked why he made such gestures, he answered: ‘from bad habit’ – a view borne out by Sir Joshua Reynolds, a member of the Club who wrote a ‘Memoir’ of Johnson after his death. He judged that ‘Dr Johnson’s extraordinary gestures were only habits in which he indulged himself at certain times. When in company, where he
was not free, or when engaged earnestly in conversation, he never gave way to such habits, which proves that they were not involuntary.’

In truth, Johnson’s trouble was basically psychological. He knew the causes well enough. ‘Johnson’s own sense of the working of the human imagination’, Walter Jackson Bate has written, ‘probably provides us with the closest anticipation of Freud to be found in psychology or moral writing before the twentieth century’; as an anatomist of the psyche, Johnson was profoundly perceptive. Few paid greater tribute to desire, or saw more clearly that deprivation and frustration reduced people to endless yearning, and that longings themselves festered. How alarmingly did imagination build crazy castles out of its own fictions! How the rationalizing mind masked its true intentions (‘we are seldom sure that we sincerely meant what we omitted to do’)! No wonder he dreaded the tyranny of dreams, warning Mrs Thrale that she should make her son tell her his dreams: ‘the first corruption that entered into my heart was communicated in a dream.’ When she tried to draw out of him what it was, he rejoined: ‘Do not ask me,’ and walked away in agitation.

Attuned thus to the psyche’s undercurrents, it is not surprising that Johnson had some inkling of how he was his parents’ child: ‘I have often heard him lament’, wrote Frances Reynolds, ‘that he inherited from his Father, a morbid disposition both of Body and Mind. A terrifying melancholy, which he was sometimes apprehensive bordered on insanity.’ Problems lurk here: how far was Johnson blaming his father, identifying with him, or excusing himself? Moreover, it is not certain that, however bumbling, henpecked and distant, Michael Johnson was particularly melancholy. But Johnson resented his lack of the right start in life, his physical handicaps being compounded with social inferiority: ‘when I was beginning in the world,’ he insisted to Fanny Burney, ‘I was nothing and nobody.’

It cannot have been a sunny childhood. His parents, recalled Johnson, had little pleasure of each other. They were old when he was born – his father 54, his mother 40 – and remote, and three years later a younger brother, Nathaniel, came along: Johnson’s silence about Natty speaks volumes.

Johnson resented his father’s slide from affluence and, like Gibbon, loathed being paraded by him like a performing seal for his precocious talents. Later in life, he was overtaken by guilt towards his father, in his seventies performing an extraordinary act of atonement. ‘I was disobedient,’ he explained to Boswell, refusing to help at his father’s bookstall:

Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remembrance of it was painful. A few years ago, I desired to atone for this fault; I went to Uttoxeter in very bad weather, and stood for a considerable time bareheaded in the rain, on the spot where my father’s stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory.

And he found his mother petty, impossible to satisfy and punitive. She it was who warned him about hell before his third birthday, and, as he told Boswell, ‘Sunday was a heavy day to him when he was young. His mother made him read “The Whole Duty of Man” on that day.’ Longer-lived and more demanding, his mother was less easily exorcized. Once installed in London, Johnson did not once make the journey back to Lichfield in the nineteen years which remained of her life. On hearing she was dying, he did not speed to her bedside but plunged into writing
Rasselas
, exculpating himself by earmarking the proceeds for her funeral. If he felt love for her, it was clearly a devotion overlaid and warped by other emotions; not once in his diaries and prayers did he call her ‘dearest’, though commonly using the term for his female friends. His unresolved relations with her may have influenced his choice of a wife twenty-one years his senior, and led to his habit of filling his house with such dependants as the blind and grumpy Anna Williams, surrogate parents to care for by way of penance.

Johnson was preoccupied by idleness. It had of course been yoked with melancholy in medicine and culture ever since Antiquity, and the Church held sloth (
acedia
) to be one of the deadly sins. Johnson’s experiences were doubtless coloured by such traditional associations, but they also deviated from the mainstream in important ways. If the
Rambler
and
Idler
followed Addison and Steele in painting a sick
parade of the idle rich, it was in a completely different register that Johnson’s mental health was threatened. Idleness was not having nothing to do, but being unable to face having to do too much, under the unforgiving rebuke of the text Johnson had engraved on his watch and doubtless also on his mind: ‘that night cometh, when no man can work.’ Johnson was no Chesterfieldian man of leisure, with time on his side, enjoying a balanced diet of recreation. Quite the reverse; in the prime of life, pride and poverty had driven him into gargantuan projects, writing the parliamentary reports and reams of other journalism for the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, compiling his
Dictionary
, producing whole magazines single-handedly, churning out the lives of the poets and editing Shakespeare. His daily bread was monstrous toil, menial, grinding, against the clock; the lexicographer was indeed a drudge. Mutinying against the humdrum, tedious and burdensome, and with few personal comforts, Johnson’s psyche was sorely tempted by idleness.

And he fought such seductive sirens. ‘To have the management of the mind’, he told Boswell, ‘is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.’ But could he attain it himself? It was a dilemma he dramatized through the character of ‘Sober’ in the
Idler
. A man of ‘strong desires and quick imagination’, ‘Sober’ seeks solace in ‘love of ease’, particularly in ‘conversation; there is no end of his talk or his attention;… for he… is free for the time from his own reproaches’. The cameo pictured no Horatian happy mean in sight for the subject of this obvious self-portrayal. ‘Sober’s’ desires and imagination ‘will not suffer him to lie quite at rest’, but rather leave him ‘weary of himself ’. Above all, he cannot bear to be alone with his thoughts. For ‘there is one time at night when he must go home, that his friends may sleep; and another time in the morning, when all the world agrees to shut out interruption. These are the moments which poor Sober trembles at the thought.’ Johnson precisely.

Fleeing from toil, left to his own devices, his conscience would begin corrosive self-accusations, arraigning himself for shillyshallying, wasting his life, and sinking into vacuity. Thus the temptations
of escape from daily despair ended in further paralysis. ‘My indolence, since my last reception of the Sacrament,’ he confessed to his diary on 21 April 1765, ‘has sunk into grosser sluggishness, and my dissipation spread into wilder negligence…. A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year.’ Self-reproach became the signature of his life. His diary for 7 April 1776 reads: ‘My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time.’ And resolutions of reform littered his pilgrim’s way like accusing signposts ever since, as early as his twentieth year, he had chivvied himself: ‘I bid farewell to Sloth.’

Johnson dreaded idleness so powerfully because it handed a blank cheque to the demons of imagination. The ‘vacancies of life’ thereby activated the old peripatetic principle that ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, crowding the unoccupied brain with ‘vain imaginations’.

Johnson was obviously perturbed by the content of the phantasms streaming into his head. Soon after Tetty’s death he referred to being ‘depraved with vain imaginations’ (sexual fantasies). Beseeching God to ‘purify my thoughts from pollutions’, he was relieved to find at Easter 1753 that at church he was not ‘once distracted by the thoughts of any other woman’. Over the years he was to brood guiltily on the past, and wishfully about the future: ‘no mind is much employed upon the present,’ reflects Imlac in
Rasselas
, ‘recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.’

But Johnson’s terror did not lie simply in
what
he imagined, but in the very act of surrender to intrusive fictions and fantasies. Driven by the ‘hunger of imagination’, he dreaded succumbing to a never-never land of wishes. Open the sluice-gates to the fancy and he would drown in make-believe. At times he feared such a fate was actually overtaking him, as his self-control began to buckle: ‘I had formerly great command of my attention,’ he wrote in 1772, ‘and what I did not like could forbear to think. But of this power which is of the highest importance to the tranquillity of life, I have for some time past been so much exhausted.’

The mad astronomer episode in
Rasselas
is Johnson’s imaginative
exploration of this doom. The sage’s solitary fantasizings about the heavens have turned monstrous, his yearnings for knowledge have swollen into
idéees fixes
: ‘All other intellectual gratifications are rejected,’ explains Imlac,

the mind, in weariness of leisure, recurs constantly to the favourite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth. By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time despotic. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish.

Johnson was thus haunted by dread that his ‘mind corrupted with an inveterate disease of wishing’ would cease to be under his control, in defiance of God’s command.

The dread of fantasy supplanting reality, the rule of reason overthrown by the dictatorship of delusion, was not, of course, uniquely Johnsonian – far from it. He was, among other things, introspecting within a paradigm of insanity brought into focus and prominence by Locke’s
Essay concerning Human Understanding
(discussed in
Chapter 4
). Madness, as
Chapter 18
will explore, had traditionally been regarded as stemming either from constitutional imbalance of the humours, particularly black bile, from ruling passions or from diabolical possession. Locke, by contrast, contended that it was essentially a question of intellectual
delusion
, the capture of the mind by false ideas concatenated into a logical system of unreality. Because knowledge sprang from sensations, ideas accurately reflecting reality had to be gradually pieced together out of fragmentary sensations, and were hence at best probable and provisional. The scope was huge for mistaken sensations or false associations, warped by fear, hope or other passions, to occlude the mind with error. While not using precisely his terminology. Johnson endorsed Locke’s view that madness was essentially ‘in the mind’, being consequential upon ‘voluntary delusion’. The sleep of reason allowed the fancy to spawn monsters. It was a prospect which tallied with his traditional Christian sense of human frailty, and his distrust of egoism, pride and presumption:
‘There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate this attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command.… All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity.’

It was precisely this despotism of imagination which haunted Johnson. Indulging idleness to escape the gloomy round would prove but a leap out of the frying pan. Impressed early in life by
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, he knew the wisdom of Burton’s adage, ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’, advising
Rambler
readers that ‘that mind will never be vacant, which is frequently recalled by stated duties to meditations on eternal interests’. Otherwise a descent was in the offing: ‘Idleness produces necessity, necessity incites to wickedness, and wickedness again supplies the means of living in idleness.’