Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/71

Rh at that time life in the country, and she is able to exhibit the sage of Fleet Street in new and unfamiliar attitudes. Johnson rode on Mr. Thrale’s old hunter, which must have been a strong and trustworthy beast, for its rider was heavy and short-sighted. He would follow the hounds fifty miles on end, but would never own himself either tired or amused. His comment on this much-esteemed sport is worthy of the author of Rasselas and The Vanity of Human Wishes. ‘I have now learned,’ said he, ‘by hunting, to perceive that it is no diversion at all, nor ever takes a man out of himself for a moment; the dogs have less sagacity than I could have prevailed on myself to suppose; and the gentlemen often call to me not to ride over them. It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.’

Some of the sayings set down by Mrs. Thrale are a valuable commentary on Johnson’s published opinions. He objects, for instance, in his Preface to Shakespeare, to the extravagant importance often given by the drama to the passion of love; and adds, ‘Love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him.’ This is a hard saying, not quite true perhaps either of Shakespeare or of life. Johnson may have been thinking of the excesses of the Heroic drama. But whenever he is betrayed into a too emphatic statement, the corrective may commonly be found elsewhere among his words and works. A lady at Mrs. Thrale’s house said one day that she would make him talk about love; and took her measures accordingly, deriding the novels of the day because they