Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/49

Rh to have been a social man, though doubtless he was one of those men who are never so frankly and easily social as when they have a pen in the hand. Yet only one fragment of his conversation has been preserved. ‘Mr. Collins, of Magdalen College,’ says Hearne, ‘tells me that Mr. Joseph Addison of their College (who was afterwards Secretary of State) used to please himself mightily with this prologue to a puppet-show: “''A certain king said to a beggar, What hast to eat? Beans, quoth the beggar. Beans? quoth the king. Yea, beans, I say, and so forthwith we straight begin the play''.”’ This is all that has been rescued of the talk of a wit and a scholar during twelve years of social converse.

Johnson’s talk was remembered and recorded by many of those who had to do with him. His lightest sayings had a quality about them, an appositeness and a sincerity, which often stamped them even upon the laziest imagination. If they sometimes seem more wonderful to the recorder than they seem to a later and less excited audience, that is because they had all the force of a massive character behind them when they were spoken, and not less because they were always opportune, and took a great part of their meaning from circumstances which we cannot perfectly recreate. Boswell is fuller and more accurate in his accounts than any other of the chroniclers. But the work that he did was not peculiar to him, and if he had never written, Johnson’s conversation would still be known to us for a live and luminous thing.

There is no meaning in the facts of life till the mind begins to play upon them. The most exact historian is often surprised, and (if he be a very stupid man) perturbed, to find that the convincing and vivid parts of his