Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/75

Rh guessed at; they were inspired by the circumstances of the case, and are as various as the incidents of human life. No such searching ordeal has ever been applied to any human character with the same result. Everything that Johnson said in conversation during the later part of his life was liable to be recorded for posterity. A merely clever man, talking for reputation, would have crumpled under the test; Johnson has emerged from it unscathed. His truth and his humanity were a match for all they met; so that to lose a year of his commentary on life is to lose a year, not of talk, but of life itself. There is a strange reality about his slightest recorded remark. All the little artifices of mutual self-deceit vanish at his approach. No one ever felt more keenly the death of a friend or relative. ‘The death of my mother,’ he wrote, ten years before it happened, ‘is one of the few calamities on which I think with terror.’ Yet he would not permit others to speak extravagantly of their losses; ‘for,’ said he, ‘we must either outlive our friends, you know, or our friends must outlive us; and I see no man that would hesitate about the choice.’

What is the virtue of even the most trivial stories concerning Johnson? Their power does not depend on anything exceptional in thought. His verdicts express common tastes, and seem to add value to the facts of every day. He took a gloomy view, sometimes, of the prospects of children when they should come to full age. But girls were less displeasing to him than boys; ‘and he loved (he said) to see a knot of little misses dearly.’ One of the most characteristic of the pictures of him is given us by his friend Edmund Malone, who called on him in his lodging, a year or so before his death. ‘I found him,’ says Malone, ‘in his arm-chair by the