In him were united a most logical head with a most fertile imagination, which gave him an extraordinary advantage in arguing: for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. Exulting in his intellectual strength and dexterity, he could, when he pleased, be the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation; and, from a spirit of contradiction and a delight in shewing his powers, he would often maintain the wrong side with equal warmth and ingenuity; so that, when there was an audience, his real opinions could seldom be gathered from his talk…57
Yet it was also a principle not exclusively aggressive, since it existed in Johnson in close conjunction with other, milder, emotions. As David Garrick’s description of Johnson’s way of wit suggests – ‘Johnson gives you a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you, whether you will or no’ – there was a roughness even in his affection, a thread of violence woven through his gambolling.58
But contradiction or ‘dexterity in retort’ for Johnson was much more than a foible of character.59 His great dictum that ‘Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth’ installs the fact and experience of contradiction as the virtuous centre of any search for the true. Towards the end of his life, he cited this understanding of the value and purpose of contradiction as almost the summation of his philosophy: ‘In short, Sir, I have got no further than this: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.’60 Not all Johnson’s friends, even the closest of them, shared this understanding of the utility of contradiction, but Johnson was adamant in defence of it, as he showed in a revealing exchange with Langton:
He however charged Mr. Langton with what he thought want of judgement upon an interesting occasion. ‘When I was ill, (said he) I desired he would tell me sincerely in what he thought my life was faulty. Sir, he brought me a sheet of paper, on which he had written down several texts of Scripture, recommending christian charity. And when I questioned him what occasion I had given for such an animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this, – that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation. Now what harm does it do to any man to be contradicted?’ BOSWELL. ‘I suppose he meant the manner of doing it; roughly, – and harshly.’ JOHNSON. ‘And who is the worse for that?’ BOSWELL. ‘It hurts people of weak nerves.’ JOHNSON. ‘I know no such weak-nerved people.’61
Johnson well knew how a veneer of courtesy can conceal indifference or even malice. That knowledge guided his pen when he composed the famous letter reproving the Earl of Chesterfield for his failures as a patron, and it is the source of that letter’s peculiar power as a piece of writing: a mordant unmasking of unmeaning civility which nevertheless employs many of the literary tropes of courtliness, such as indirection and classical allusion – tropes discredited and disdained in the very act of being set to work.62
This Johnsonian suspicion of courtesy must have strengthened his belief in the virtue of frank opposition. Nevertheless, it was a policy which took its toll on the practitioner, as well as on the recipient. Johnson’s unstinted admiration for Burke, notwithstanding the gulf between their politics, seems in part to have been based on how Burke roused Johnson:
And once, when Johnson was ill, and unable to exert himself as much as usual without fatigue, Mr. Burke having been mentioned, he said, ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.’ So much was he accustomed to consider conversation as a contest, and such was his notion of Burke as an opponent.63
But the cost of combativeness was, for Johnson, nothing in comparison to the reassurance it supplied, as he revealed in his response to the controversy caused by his political pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny (1775): ‘His Taxation no Tyranny being mentioned, he said, “I think I have not been attacked hard enough for it. Attack is the re-action; I never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds.” ‘64 The need for a rebound, for the ‘collision of mind with mind’, was a matter not just of confirming the vigour of the initial impulse from Johnson.65 For it was also through such emphatic encounters that the self came to know and to enjoy both itself and the external world – this for Johnson was the ‘medicine of correction’.66 This is the key to understanding what for Johnson was at stake in his defiant misreading of Berkeley’s philosophy:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’67
There could be nothing more disingenuous, however, than Johnson’s acquiescence in what he must have been aware was Boswell’s travesty of the propositional content of Berkeley’s philosophy, and nothing more sophistical than his assertion that kicking a stone constituted a refutation of that philosophy.68 (Berkeley never contended that our perceptions of solidity were false, simply that it was not clear how one could move beyond such perceptions reliably to infer the presence of material substance.)69 So it was natural for Johnson to prefer chastisement over encouragement as a motive to improvement, be it educational or spiritual.
It was a strand of character which could also take less sombre forms. A melancholy Johnson, wandering through Paris in the company of the brewer Henry Thrale and his vivacious wife, and suddenly mindful of the absence of his own, dead, wife (who would he thought have taken pleasure in the magnificence of the city and its palaces), resolved his own indifference before splendour, not into any stoicism, but rather into a consequence of his emotional isolation: ‘Having now nobody to please, I am little pleased.’70 Energetic interaction was for Johnson a mode of being, not just in the sense of being a settled disposition of character, but more deeply because it allowed him to discover the contents and trace the boundaries of his own mind. Take this fragment of conversation between Boswell and Johnson on the subject of respect:
JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, we know very little about the Romans. But, surely, it is much easier to respect a man who has always had respect, than to respect a man who we know was last year no better than ourselves, and will be no better next year. In republicks there is not a respect for authority, but a fear of power.’ BOSWELL. ‘At present, Sir, I think riches seem to gain most respect.’ JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir, riches do not gain hearty respect; they only procure external attention.’71