Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
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I have restrained the rage of the Dog Star, and mitigated the fervours of the Crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto refused my authority …’15
These confidences, too, are delivered in the dark, in the Astronomer’s turret, during a midnight storm. It was perhaps Savage who first gave Johnson the theme for Rasselas: that ‘dangerous prevalence of the imagination’ which Imlac discovers in the most interesting of human minds. Among those is the Poet himself, who must be acquainted with ‘all the modes of life’, who must commit his claims ‘to the justice of posterity’ and who must write ‘as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind’.16
Of all the versions of the night-walks which we have, it is that by Sir John Hawkins, with his direct knowledge of young Johnson from the mid-1740s, which most sharply emphasises the subversive political nature of their talks. Boswell consistently derides Hawkins’s accounts, not merely because he is the chief rival biographer, an amateur and musicologist, and so gratifyingly full of factual errors and ‘solemn inexactitudes’. For Hawkins, himself a lonely and awkward personality, gives an altogether rougher, darker, more emotionally unstable picture of the young writer finding his path than Boswell’s hero-worship will allow.
Hawkins’s youthful Johnson is never a comfortable figure, never a natural Tory clubman. He is anxious, self-doubting and obsessive. His politics, like his whole personality, are fierce and to some degree disruptive. Boswell could never be easy with this. Hawkins sees immediate common political ground between the two outcasts. ‘They had both felt the pangs of poverty, and the want of patronage: Savage had let loose his resentment against the possessors of wealth, in a collection of poems printed about the year 1727, and Johnson was ripe for an avowal of the same sentiments.’17
They both shared, according to Hawkins, ‘the vulgar opinion, that the world is divided into two classes, of men of merit without riches, and men of wealth without merit’. Hawkins also says that Savage’s ‘principles of patriotism’ – the semi-subversive Opposition to the Whig Government and the Hanoverian Crown – shaped Johnson’s political outlook during their talks, and may even have made him run the risk of Jacobite treason. ‘They both saw with the same eye, or believed they saw, that the then Minister meditated the ruin of this country; that Excise Laws, standing Armies, and penal Statutes, were the mean by which he [Walpole] meant to effect it; and, at the risk of their liberty, they were bent to oppose his measures …’18
Hawkins’s evident disapproval of this youthful radicalism makes it all the more convincing as evidence. It is exactly these political themes that Johnson does go on to address in his earliest, anonymous poetry and prose, up to the age of thirty-five. In the satire London, it takes the form of a general charge of political corruption against those in power:
Here let those reign, whom Pensions can incite
To vote a Patriot black, a Courtier white;
Explain their Country’s dear-bought Rights away,
And plead for Pirates in the Face of Day …19
In the pamphlet Marmor Norfolciense (1739) – viz. ‘The Stone of Norfolk’ – it becomes a specific attack on the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (whose estates lay in that county), and Hanoverian rule. As a recent critic, Thomas Kaminski, has observed, here ‘we find a Johnson unknown to the readers of Boswell – a rabid, harsh opponent of the ruling government, a critic not only of a party but of the King’.20 And in the Latin pastiche ‘prophesy’, attached to the pamphlet, which Johnson translated as the poem ‘To Posterity’, we meet a baleful vision of complete national subversion, the land overrun by alien redcoat soldiers, and the entire British population ready for rebellion:
Whene’er this Stone, now hid beneath the Lake,
The Horse shall trample, or the Plough shall break,
Then, O my Country! shalt thou groan distrest,
Grief swell thine Eyes, and Terror chill thy Breast.
Thy Streets with Violence of Woe shall sound,
Loud as the Billows bursting on the Ground.
Then thro’ thy Fields shall scarlet Reptiles stray,
And Rapine and Pollution mark their Way …
Then o’er the World shall Discord stretch her Wings,
Kings change their Laws, and Kingdoms change their Kings.21
So Hawkins’s night-walk is that of romantic, political malcontents. The two men are penurious, angry, to some degree sinister. The walk has a wintry atmosphere, chill and discomforting, with even a hint of cloak and dagger. Like Boswell, like Reynolds, like Murphy, Hawkins also says he is telling the story directly as Johnson described it; only as something that happened frequently, perhaps over many months.
Johnson has told me, that whole nights have been spent by him and Savage in conversations of this kind, not under the hospitable roof of a tavern, where warmth might have invigorated their spirits, and wine dispelled their care; but in a perambulation round the squares of Westminster, St James’s in particular, when all the money they could both raise was less than sufficient to purchase for them the shelter and sordid comforts of a night cellar. Of the result of their conversations little can now be known, save, that they gave rise to those principles of patriotism, that both, for some years after, avowed.22
Hawkins’s suspicions would have been further darkened had he known – or had he suspected that Johnson knew – that Savage, many years previously, had actually been arrested and questioned on a charge of treasonable, Jacobite publication; and that for some months he was the subject of Secret Service reports.23 Whether young Johnson knew this then, or later, will soon become a leading question about their friendship.
For Johnson himself these night-conversations in London with Savage were a transforming experience. They shaped his idea of the city itself, his politics, and his whole notion of the writer’s task and situation. That Savage appeared both poor and outcast must have struck him as bitterly ironic and yet curiously glamorous. Here was a brilliant, strange and enchanting man, who had known all the leading writers of the day – Sir Richard Steele, Colley Cibber, Alexander Pope, James Thomson – and moved in circles close to Parliament and the Court. Yet he was reduced to the back streets, he voiced subversive politics, and he befriended someone as obscure and socially inept (not to say monstrous) as Johnson himself.
Savage needed company and talk, needed them with something approaching desperation, to act out his own life and his extensive fantasies. This soon became clear to Johnson. In this too there was at once a common bond. Both men dreaded solitude, and Savage had found a remedy with which Johnson instantly identified. Talk held off the terrors and depressions of loneliness.
‘His Method of Life particularly qualified him for Conversation, of which he knew how to practise all the Graces,’ wrote Johnson appreciatively. ‘His Language was vivacious and elegant, and equally happy upon grave or humorous Subjects. He was generally censured for not knowing when to retire, but that was not the Defect of his Judgment, but of his Fortune; when he left his Company he was frequently to spend the remaining Part of the Night in the Street, or at least was abandoned to gloomy Reflections, which it is not strange that he delayed as long as he could …’24 This could be Johnson writing of himself. One can begin to see how sympathetically two such men might meet, as Cave’s offices emptied at Clerkenwell, or the taverns closed along the Strand.
So when Johnson came to write Savage’s Life in 1743, he put Savage’s night-walking at the heart of the story of his literary career. He did it so powerfully that he created a legend, almost an eighteenth-century archetype, of the Outcast Poet moving through an infernal cityscape, the ‘City of Dreadful Night’, in which his eye alone witnesses the horror, filth and misery that the rich and powerful have created as they slumber, uncaring.
To achieve this, Johnson does something extraordinary. He completely withdraws himself from the story. He never makes a single mention of himself as Savage’s night-time companion. The