His life was a success story. Today few people appear to us to have been more solidly established, but this is because his great contemporaries wrote of him when he was in his sixties and older. For more than two-thirds of his life he went through hell. He was reduced so low in means and spirit that at least twice he contemplated suicide, was twice arrested for debt, and was twice on the verge of insanity. It was only when he accepted a small pension from the state and met the Thrales, that he enjoyed any degree of security. Grant him every quality with which we associate his name—honesty, brilliance, perseverance, originality and often kindness—but the greatest of all is that which is generally ignored, his indomitable courage in working his way upwards through an inhospitable world in which envy, snobbishness and malice combined to keep a good and great man locked into the humble position from which his social superiors considered that he should never have emerged.
This biography is written with intense admiration. Professor Bate loves the man, and with reason. He makes us love him too. He has adopted Johnson's own method in writing the Lives of the Poets, "biography united with specific critical analysis of the writer's works and of the tone and character of his mind." Thus the book contains the main facts of Johnson's life culled from the abundant primary sources and studies like James L. Clifford's Young Samuel Johnson, but he is careful not to draw too heavily on them (for instance, there is no record here of Johnson's historic meeting with Flora Macdonald in Skye), and he will often prefix Johnson's best sayings with the words "well-known" or "famous," as if apologizing, unnecessarily, for treading trodden ground. Always returning to Johnson's character and writings, he makes us live and grow with his genius. There are excellent chapters on the Dictionary, on The Vanity of Human Wishes, on the Rambler and Rasselas, the edition of Shakespeare, on Johnson's religious and political principles, on his attitude to contemporary society, and constantly, with a psychoanalyst's perception, on his states of mind, which ranged from schoolboy exhilaration to a despair that few men can have experienced.
Professor Bate writes easily; perhaps this means that he reads easily. His book is well engineered, its pistons are well oiled. It runs fast and smooth on rubber tires. It attracts on the first page, and continues to attract for 600 more, partly because it is about Dr. Johnson, and partly because it is written by W. Jackson Bate. He has caught something of Johnson's own wisdom and manner. "There is enough pride in the human heart to prevent our seeking the acquaintance of those by whom we are certain to be neglected." "With every sentence one writes, one part of the divided self is dragging another to the bar of self-judgment." Such ideas are worthy of Dr. Johnson himself, newly minted and expressed with a conciseness that demands and deserves a second reading. He is an analytical writer, a scholar careful of his facts, a thinker who conveys thought concretely, a biographer who can vary pace, like a stream which now runs bubbling over pebbles, now flows deep and slow, now moves onwards to a little waterfall. He has the art to compel attention, to make his reader feel what he feels, and to induce him to want more from the person who proves himself best qualified to tell it. It is a didactic book, in the best sense. Without preaching, it instructs. It lets down bucket after bucket into a deep pool, bringing each in turn brimming to the surface.
And what a pool! Professor Bate is insistent that Samuel Johnson should not be regarded as a mere coiner of a quotable phrase. He regrets that Boswell's Life and Mrs. Thrale's Anecdotes should have stamped him as a faiseur de paradoxe (though he does not use the term) to the neglect of his written achievement. Constantly he brings us back from what Johnson said to what Johnson wrote. Johnson spun his talk from the surface of his experience: he delved into it for his writing. But his talk was compulsive. His friends flung subjects at him like bait to fish, as Plato did to Socrates. What did Dr. Johnson think about a second marriage? "It represented the triumph of hope over experience." What did he think about marital conversation? "A man is generally better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks Greek." Pressed to say whether Herrick or Smart was the better poet, he replied, "There is no settling the point of precedence between a louse and a flea." Or his definition of wit: "The unexpected copulation of ideas." Or the tedium of people who talk about the weather: "You are telling us that of which none but men in a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant."
I must not anthologize Professor Bate's reluctant anthology, for this is biography in its truest sense, one man's view of another's life and mental development. It is not always free from special pleading. How, for example, does he treat Johnson's strange marriage? Grotesquely, he married a woman of small intelligence, many years older than himself, who later took to drink. Did he marry her for money? Professor Bate thinks not. But he needed her money desperately, and spent it foolishly, and before the first year was up, separated from her to live "as a kind of adult waif." Later he returned to her, from duty, one imagines, not from love or desire, but was inconsolable when she died, with remorse. Was his affection for Mrs. Thrale wholly genuine? "Her learning," he once said, "is that of a schoolboy in one of the lower forms." C.E. Vulliamy in his biography of her describes her as "A dreadful, garrulous old woman," and Mr. Thrale as a dull and inarticulate man who enjoyed good cooking. In Professor Bate's eyes, Johnson adored both. Was it sycophancy, for the sake of a comfortable bed and regular meals? He does not explore these alternatives. He always takes Johnson's side. He describes the Thrales as "a real family, one that could at least help fill his heart." Johnson was capable of gratitude, and prided himself on good manners, which made some of his friends laugh. But he could say different things to different people, and though he subjugated himself to "immense self-flagellation" (Professor Bate's words), he could crush others with sulphuric reprimand. How can he be blamed, after so harrowed a youth and so difficult a middle age, for seeking security and comfort at the cost of a little compromise and flattery? Though he hammered falsehood and insincerity, he was not himself immune to either. After reading so splendid an apologia as this, one can excuse and even welcome a touch of arrogance and selfishness in so great a man.