Celestial wisdom: Dr Johnson as a poet

 I write therefore I am alive.

Samuel Johnson

Johnson was a critic, biographer, lexicographer and moral essayist as well as a poet who wrote satires, odes, verse drama and verse prayers.  Most of the works in this massive volume, The Complete Poems of Samuel Johnson (ed. Robert Brown and Robert DeMaria, Routledge, 982p, £168/$260), are translations from Greek and Latin.  He also wrote three great English poems: “London”, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet”.

In his Preface to the Dictionary, Johnson recalled that his work was not written “in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow”. He frequently wrote by candlelight when he was half-blind, and when his head and body were constantly shaking with involuntary tics.

His method of writing verses was amazing.  He said that “when composing, I have generally had them in my mind, perhaps fifty at a time, walking up and down in my room; and then I have written them down, and often, from laziness, have written only half lines.  I remember I wrote a hundred lines of ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ in a day.”

The editors of this brilliant, impressive volume follow the same format for each work:  an introductory section on composition and publication, the text, model, sources and context.  The original Greek and Latin texts appear with their translations on the left side, Johnson’s versions on the right, and the concise, helpful footnotes at the bottom of the page.  Unfortunately, this expensive heavyweight 3½-pound tome is tightly bound and, even when pried open, has inner margins that are difficult to read.

Four minor poems deserve notice.  Johnson’s witty, compressed satire on the mediocre playwright Colley Cibber begins with tributes to the Roman emperor glorified by Virgil, and to the English poet who glorified the Tudor queen.  Johnson then ironically shifts to the philistine Hanoverian monarch and the hack who was born to flatter him:

Augustus still survives in Maro’s strain,

And Spenser’s verse prolongs Eliza’s reign;

Great George’s acts let tuneful Cibber sing;

For Nature form’d the Poet for the King.

Caustic criticism that wounds the sensitive writer and destroys his promising work is a recurrent theme.  The scribbler’s only recourse is to flee into obscurity and renounce the hope of fame:

The pamphlet spreads, incessant hisses rise,

To some retreat the baffled writer flies,

Where no sour criticks damn, no sneers molest,

Safe from the keen lampoon and stinging jest;

There begs of heav’n a less distinguish’d lot;

Glad to be hid, and proud to be forgot.

Johnson’s translation from Book 6 of the Iliad, after Andromache has begged the doomed Hector not to risk his life in war, is one of the most poignant passages in Homer:

Swifter than Lightning to the fight he flies;

Andromache looks back with weeping eyes,

Then sought the Palace where the menial train [handmaidens]

Shed floods of tears, and sympathiz’d in pain.

With doleful cries their living lord they mourn

Nor from the battle look for his return.

The final speech of Johnson’s only play Irene, which failed on stage (he confessed “I thought it had been better”), could prophesy the tragic end of the overreaching President Trump:

So sure the Fall of Greatness rais’d on Crimes,

So fix’d the Justice of all-conscious Heav’n.

When haughty Guilt exults with impious Joy,

Mistake shall blast, or Accident destroy;

Weak Man with erring Rage may throw the Dart,

But Heav’n shall guide it to the guilty Heart.

In 1930, T. S. Eliot gave a definitive judgment of Johnson’s “London” (1738) and “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749): “To my mind the latter is the finer poem; but both of them seem to me to be among the greatest verse Satires of the English or any other language; and so far as comparison is justifiable, I do not think that Juvenal, his model, is any better.”

Viewing the Latin poet as both a moralist and a wit, Johnson said, “the peculiarity of Juvenal is a mixture of gaiety and stateliness, of pointed sentences [sharp epigrams] and declamatory grandeur.”  Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal’s Satires 3 and 10 are recreations rather than strict equivalents.  He called  them “a kind of middle composition between translation and original design, which pleases when the thoughts  are unexpectedly applicable, and the parallels lucky.”  He was so saturated in Latin poetry and knew these satires so well that he “could compose his imitation without reference to a printed text”.  In “London” he attacks the physical dangers and violence, in the largest city of Europe (population 600,000), which seem much the same as in our time:

Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,

And now a rabble rages, now a fire. . . .

Some frolick drunkard, reeling from a feast,

Provokes a broil, and stabs you for a jest.

Another perfectly balanced couplet describes the malign fate of an outcast: “Spurned as a beggar, dreaded as a spy, / Live unregarded, unlamented die.”  He capitalised the theme of the poem, written when he was impoverished and struggling to make his way in Grub Street: “This mournful truth is ev’ry where confess’d, / SLOW RISES WORTH BY POVERTY DEPREST.”

“Vanity” opens with grandeur: “Let observation with extensive view, / Survey mankind, from China to Peru.”  Peru in the western hemisphere was associated with the gold of the Incas.  China in the eastern hemisphere represented the wisdom of an ancient civilization.  Vain hopes are compressed into a couplet with five verbs that become increasingly indistinct and impossible to realise, and encapsulate the huge arc of ambition and disappointment: “Delusive Fortune hears th’ incessant call, / They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall.”  A key passage alludes to Johnson’s own lifelong illness and depression:

Should no Disease thy torpid veins invade,

Nor Melancholy’s phantoms haunt thy shade;

Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,

Nor think the doom of man revers’d for thee.

The greatest passage, based on Voltaire’s History, portrays the tragic rise and fall of the powerful Swedish warrior-king Charles XII (1682-1718).  After several notable victories, he invaded Russia (like Napoleon and Hitler after him) and was decisively defeated by Czar Peter the Great.  After exile in Turkey, Charles returned to battle.  Looking over a parapet during an assault on an obscure fortress in Norway, he was shot through the head by a Danish sniper.  Johnson suggests that his triumphs proved futile:

His fall was destin’d to a barren strand,

A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;

He left the name, at which the world grew pale,

To paint a moral, or adorn a tale.

The cruelest lines describe the great English general, the Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), and Johnson’s satiric predecessor Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), whom his servants had exhibited for a penny: “From Marlb’rough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow, / And Swift expires a driv’ler and a show.”  But their pathetic decay after what we’re very long lives in the eighteenth century—aged 72 and 78—were physical defects, not moral failures, and did not diminish their military and literary achievements.

The bitterly pessimistic theme of the poem, “Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy, / And shuts up all  the passages of joy,” is answered in the conclusion when Johnson advises men to cultivate love, patience and faith, and submit to the divine will:

These goods for man the laws of heav’n ordain,

These goods he grants, who grants the pow’r to gain;

With these celestial wisdom calms the mind,

And makes the happiness she does not find.

But religious belief did not calm Johnson’s troubled mind nor allow him to achieve peace and happiness.  He feared damnation, felt profound misery and deep despair.  He had no conception of a benevolent and merciful God who would offer the sinner salvation.  His own attempt to discover joy in religion was the vainest wish of all.

Robert Levet, a member of Johnson’s household, died aged 76 two years before his benefactor.  Johnson’s friends disliked Levet, but he defended the doctor who’d worked among the London poor by stating, “he is a brutal fellow, but I have a good regard for him; for his brutality is in his manners, not his mind.”  The vital core of the elegy, “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” (1782), alludes to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:26, where the master berates the servant for burying the talent (or coin) he was given instead of using it to the fullest.  Johnson, who always feared he had not properly used his intellectual and literary talents, praises Levet for “the single talent well

employed.”  In the last quatrain Levet’s vital link between life and death is suddenly and painlessly broken, and his soul ascends directly to heaven:

Then, with no throbs of fiery pain,

No cold gradations of decay,

Death broke at once the vital chain,

And freed his soul the nearest way.

Johnson hoped (in vain) to have Levet’s sudden and painless death, so different from Marlbrough’s and Swift’s agonies, that led the good man to salvation.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, published his biography Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Basic Books) in 2008.

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