It was not the first time that Johnson had been drawn to everything which he seemed himself not to be. In the early 1750s, before he knew Boswell, he had also formed an improbable friendship with Bennet Langton’s college acquaintance Topham Beauclerk:
Johnson, soon after this acquaintance [with Bennet Langton] began, passed a considerable time at Oxford. He at first thought it strange that Langton should associate so much with one who had the character of being loose, both in his principles and practice; but, by degrees, he himself was fascinated. Mr. Beauclerk’s being of the St. Alban’s family, and having, in some particulars, a resemblance to Charles the Second, contributed, in Johnson’s imagination, to throw a lustre upon his other qualities; and, in a short time, the moral, pious Johnson, and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk, were companions. ‘What a coalition! (said Garrick, when he heard of this;) I shall have my old friend to bail out of the Roundhouse.’ But I can bear testimony that it was a very agreeable association.21
This is not just a case of, in our well-worn phrase, opposites attracting. At the end of his life, sick, and provoked by Boswell to think about what might be the fate of one’s friendships in the afterlife, Johnson replied ‘with heat’: ‘How can a man know where his departed friends are, or whether they will be his friends in the other world? How many friendships have you known formed upon principles of virtue? Most friendships are formed by caprice or by chance, mere confederacies in vice or leagues in folly.’22 No doubt great allowance must be made for the extremity of the moment. Nevertheless, we are here far from any Montaignean extolling of ‘amitie’,23 and Johnson’s awareness of the complexity and possible impurity of the motives to friendship is germane to any consideration of his association with Boswell.
An incident from early in the friendship between the two men sheds light on the curious quality of what held them together. Once again, as was so often the case, Boswell launched the exchange by being provoking:
I teized him [Johnson] with fanciful apprehensions of unhappiness. A moth having fluttered round the candle, and burnt itself, he laid hold of this little incident to admonish me; saying, with a sly look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, ‘That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.’24
A tendency to self-torment was a characteristic the two men shared.25 In his journal, Boswell admonished himself to remember that he was subject to melancholy and low spirits.26 And writing to the Revd Ralph Churton in 1792 on the subject of Johnson’s view of the unhappiness of human life, Boswell linked the subject and the biographer: ‘his “morbid melancholy” may have made life appear to him more miserable than it generally is. But the truth, Sir, is as you have judiciously observed, that I myself have a large portion of melancholy in my constitution…’27 It was surely for this reason that Boswell chose the persona of ‘The Hypochondriack’ – that is to say, one afflicted by ‘melancholy, hypochondria, spleen, or vapours’ – for the series of essays he contributed to the London Magazine in the late 1770s and early 1780s, and also why he would write of himself in the very first of those essays that ‘I have suffered much of the fretfulness, the gloom, and the despair that can torment a thinking being.’28 As for Johnson, Richard Brocklesby’s analysis of his mental condition, sent in a letter to Boswell in December 1784, emphasizes how Johnson’s undoubted intellectual powers did as much to unsettle as to steady the precarious balance of his mind. Johnson ‘often expressed the feelings and uncertainties of his mind’ to Brocklesby, so this is no superficial or cursory opinion:
He had the most logical apprehensive, and book informed vigorous Mind, that I have ever known, but withal, his views of Nature and of the Universe and of all the various objects to contemplate which Philosophy invites an unfetterd, speculative mind, were narrow, partial and much confined. His Religion was the true $$ [superstition] of Plutarch, which narrowed the wonderful powers of his judgement and made his extraordinary talents of Mind continually at war with each other, so that in his later days his Philosophy seemed to draw his mind one way and his Religion byassed him to the contrary, and this may have occasioned that continual perplexity, and doubts, and fears, in which the greater portion of his life was passed…29
William Bowles concurred: ‘It is very well known that in the latter part of Dr. Johnson’s life he became much dejected with gloomy apprehensions respecting his reception in a future world.’30 The object of Johnson’s melancholy was futurity, but its cause may have been more earthly. The Revd William Adams ascribed it to the resumption of alcohoclass="underline" ‘The History of his Melancholy about 20 years before his death, which was indeed dreadful to see, I am not enough acquainted with: but I always conjectured it to be owing to the sudden transition from water drinking, which was his Habit invariably for 15 years or more, to drinking Wine, in which by his own Account he indulged himself very liberally.’31 But, whatever the cause, and whatever the object, it was the case that Boswell and Johnson were both prey to melancholic self-torment.
In the company of the other, each may have been distracted from this tendency in himself by the display of the same quality in his friend. Hence, perhaps, Johnson’s enigmatic ‘sly look’ – the moth’s name might with equal propriety have been Johnson. To escape from the self by contemplating an image of the self may seem paradoxical. Nevertheless, it may be psychologically plausible, and furthermore it resonates with the complexities of Johnson’s attitude towards the self – Johnson who could on the one hand write essays enforcing the principle of ‘cognosce te ipsum’ (know thyself) as enshrining ‘all the speculation requisite of a moral agent’, but who also confessed to Reynolds that the ‘great business of his life… was to escape from himself ‘.32 Friendship satisfied both imperatives by providing distraction as well as indirect introspection. To be in the company of Boswell was like viewing the head of Medusa in a mirror: through reflection, the harmful could become useful. Friendship, alongside all its moral benefits and social pleasures, might also serve as one of those techniques for the ‘management of the mind’ which Johnson thought so necessary, and which he believed could be obtained by ‘experience and habitual exercise’.33 In this respect, Boswell was the most useful of Johnson’s friends, the man who played the part of psychological lightning rod perhaps better, certainly for longer, than had either Richard Savage (his companion during his early days in London) or Beauclerk. But this utility did not necessarily make him Johnson’s dearest friend.34 There is no mention of Boswell in Johnson’s will – an oversight which roused anger and disappointment in friends of Boswell such as William Johnson Temple and Mary Adey.35 To Mrs Piozzi, Johnson asserted that it was Dr Taylor of Ashbourne who was ‘better acquainted with my heart than any man or woman now alive’.36 It was to Bennet Langton – not to Boswell – that the dying Johnson tenderly quoted Tibullus’ line ‘Te teneam moriens deficiente manu’ (‘When I expire, let my trembling hand hold yours’): a gesture which is saturated with a sense of strong yet delicate friendship.37 And it was Langton who informed Boswell of the strength of Johnson’s feeling for Topham Beauclerk: ‘His affection for Topham Beauclerk was so great, that when Beauclerk was labouring under that severe illness which at last occasioned his death, Johnson said (with a voice faultering with emotion,) “Sir, I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save Beauclerk.” ‘38