The distinction between respect and attention is a fine insight. It is forged by the heat of contradiction (‘No, Sir…’), and draws other fine distinctions in its wake, for when Boswell introduces the subject of ‘riches’ to the conversation, Johnson’s imagination moves from politics to money and his language is suddenly impregnated with fiscal figures (‘gain’, ‘procure’) – figures which, in their own suggested gradations of worth, capture and express something of the difference between genuine respect and mere attention which Johnson wishes here to convey. The practice of desyn-onymization – the careful separating out of the different shades of meaning between words which custom has confused – was plainly as central to Johnson as it would later be to Coleridge.72 This is why the the Dictionary is the pivotal work in Johnson’s canon, and why also Boswell’s praise of Johnson’s writings, as furnishing ‘bark and steel for the mind’, is deserved.73 Combativeness contributed powerfully to these achievements.
But, inaddition to these external collisions, for Johnson the cardinal principle of conflict also possessed a more intimate aspect, expressing itself asan internal war ofcontraries. This was a’conflict ofopposite principles’of which, asBoswellrecords, Johnsonhad’Muchexperience’.74 Boswell’s famousimage for Johnson’s mind presents it to us as the site of unremitting struggle:
His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.75
Many of Johnson’s conflicts were with people or things or ideas for which he seems secretly to have nursed an affinity, even a craving. For instance, in the Life Boswell frequently discusses Johnson’s relationship with alcohol. The friend of Johnson’s youth the Birmingham surgeon Edmond Hector, ‘who lived with him in his younger days in the utmost intimacy and social freedom’, told Boswell that Johnson ‘loved to exhilarate himself with wine’.76 On his arrival in London in 1737, however, Johnson ‘abstained entirely from fermented liquors: a practice to which he rigidly conformed for many years together, at different periods of his life’.77 Meeting his old acquaintance Oliver Edwards in 1778, Johnson spoke frankly about his fitful use of alcohoclass="underline" ‘I now drink no wine, Sir. Early in life I drank wine: for many years I drank none. I then for some years drank a great deal.’78 By March 1781, however, Johnson was drinking once more, as Boswell discovered when he went to dinner at the Thrales:
He [Thrale] told me I might now have the pleasure to see Dr. Johnson drink wine again, for he had lately returned to it. When I mentioned this to Johnson, he said, ‘I drink it now sometimes, but not socially.’ The first evening that I was with him at Thrale’s, I observed he poured a quantity of it into a large glass, and swallowed it greedily. Every thing about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never was any moderation; many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink wine, it was copiously. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.79
The inability to be moderate meant that Johnson might reel from extremity to extremity – in this case, from abstinence to bingeing – and part of the justification for the episodes of surrender (Johnson said that he drank ‘to get rid of myself, to send myself away’) was that they made possible another act of resistance.80 That Johnson had a strong appetite for alcohol seems clear: ‘I have drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it. University College has witnessed this.’81 That he took a secret pleasure in the effects of alcohol, while fearing that weakening of conscious rational control which intoxication brings in its wake,82 and fearing also to let those effects be publicly visible, is also suggested by his intermittent habits of solitary drinking.83 But the most striking feature of Johnson’s attitude towards alcohol is the way it reveals a structural feature of his personality which was also an element in his moral philosophy, namely the need from time to time abruptly and utterly to deny that to which you feel drawn.
We can see this in Johnson’s mental life, as well as in his physical existence. One of the great structuring antagonisms in the Life is that which exists between Johnson and the man whom, in 1762, Boswell had hailed as ‘the greatest Writer in Britain’, David Hume.84 Johnson was outspoken in his disdain for Hume’s sceptical philosophy: ‘Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.’85 However, in the same conversation Johnson discloses that Hume is the image of his own earlier self, for ‘Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote.’86 Johnson’s vehement rejection of Hume is thus to some extent the child of their proximity: ‘He would not allow Mr. David Hume any credit for his political principles, though similar to his own; saying of him, “Sir, he was a Tory by chance.” ‘87 So the areas of vigorous dissent – for instance, Johnson’s denial that beauty can be resolved into utility, which is an implicit reproof of Hume’s argument in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)88 – need to be placed alongside areas of substantial (although unacknowledged by Johnson) agreement between the two men: on, for instance, the harmlessness of luxury,89 or the tendency to exaggerate the merit of antiquity at the expense of modernity,90 or why it was that more importance was rightly attached to female chastity than to male.91
The vigour of Johnson’s repudiation of Hume springs from his uneasy consciousness of partial closeness. It is a doubleness of relation which is wonderfully distilled into the central episode of this strand of the Life of Johnson, namely Johnson’s response to Boswell’s appalled but fascinated account of Hume’s persisting in rejecting the consolations of Christianity on his deathbed:
I mentioned to Dr. Johnson, that David Hume’s persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much. Johnson. ‘Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man, who had been at no pains to inquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right.’ I said, I had reason to believe that the thought of annihilation gave Hume no pain. Johnson. ‘It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than that so very improbable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going (as, in spite of his delusive theory, he cannot be sure but he may go,) into an unknown state, and not being uneasy at leaving all he knew. And you are to consider, that upon his own principle of annihilation he had no motive to speak the truth.’92
The complicating but submerged circumstance which enriches this moment beyond being merely a denial of Hume’s deathbed composure is the fact that in discrediting Hume’s unshaken irreligion Johnson employs a version of Hume’s own argument against miracles (namely, that it is always much more likely that men will lie in their own interest than that anything which falls outside the customary course of nature should occur).93 In reproving Hume, Johnson also echoed him. It is a moment which captures the passionate ambivalence underlying Johnson’s declarations of attachment or rejection, which typically emerged from a background of powerfully divided sentiments.94