Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/55

Rh what he meant, for she understood and put on record several similar reproofs. Here is one of them: ‘I was saying to a friend one day that I did not like goose; one smells it so while it is roasting, said I. “But you, Madam (replies the Doctor), have been at all times a fortunate woman, having always had your hunger so forestalled by indulgence, that you never experienced the delight of smelling your dinner beforehand.” “Which pleasure,” answered I pertly, “is to be enjoyed in perfection by such as have the happiness to pass through Porridge-Island of a morning.” “Come, come (says he gravely), let’s have no sneering at what is so serious to so many: hundreds of your fellow-creatures, dear Lady, turn another way, that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge-Island to wish for gratifications they are not able to obtain: you are certainly not better than all of them; give God thanks that you are happier.”’

These retorts, to Boswell and to Mrs. Thrale, show Johnson as he was, unfailingly serious and sympathetic and imaginative about the great elemental things. Boswell had not thought deeply about death, Mrs. Thrale had not experienced poverty or imagined it in its effects; Boswell was argumentative, like a Scottish philosopher, on death; Mrs. Thrale was flippant, like a fashionable lady, on poverty—hence the fierceness of Johnson’s replies.

It would be easy to show how each of the biographies of Johnson is limited and coloured by the predilections of the writer, and by the nature of his, or her, relationship to the great man. Johnson’s talk, even though it be faithfully recorded, loses most of its value when it is taken out of its setting. No one says all that he thinks in talk. He selects only what has some relation to the