January 12, 2007

SAMUEL JOHNSON: HUMOR AND HUMAN NATURE

        Staring down at the reader of Horsefeathers is a portrait of Samuel Johnson along with the Marx Brothers. We are among the legion of admirers of the great man. Juxtaposing his portrait to one of the Marx brothers indicates how much we appreciate Johnson's humor. His friend, Hester Thrale said: "No man loved laughing any better, and his vein of humor was rich and apparently inexhaustible." Our favorite modern biography of Johnson, by W. Jackson Bate has a chapter (27) called Humor and Wit. Like Groucho, Johnson possessed both verbal wit- ("A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on its hinder legs. It's not done well; but you're surprized to find it done at all." On who was the better poet, Christopher Smart or Samuel Derrick: "There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.")-and physical humor: Boswell describes being called to Johnson's bedside "and to my astonishment he took off Lady MacDonald leaning forward with a hand on each cheek and her mouth open--quite insipidity on a monument grinning at sense and spirit. To see a beauty represented by Mr. Johnson was excessively high. I told him it was a masterpiece and that he must have studied it much. "Ay," said he."

        There was much, much more to Johnson than his humor, and a new essay by Theodore Dalrymple, highlights Johnson's multifaceted character and his introspective acuity. Yet by omitting the centrality of humor in Johnson's life, Dalrymple misses the key character trait that helped Johnson confront the darker aspects of human nature. We would argue that humor was the lens through which Johnson's realistically conservative view of human nature was filtered and made bearable. Johnson didn't need to escape into utopian fantasies, as did his contemporary, Rousseau, and all of Rousseau's totalitarian descendants. Instead he could laugh at human nature, deploying humor, often against himself. Johnson's conservatism has little in common with the conservatism of contemporary politicians who, as much as liberals, believe government can transform the human condition- just for slightly less expenditure of money. Contemporary politicians of all parties who believe that everyone welcomes freedom and democracy would do well to read Johnson. It would help rein in their foolish ambitions. Horsefeathers believes no literary work written in the years since Johnson's age surpasses The Vanity of Human Wishes in its understanding of human nature. Through all his personal difficulties, Johnson's humor was the leavening that allowed him to compress into a couplet the dark insight "How small of all that human hearts endure/that part which laws or kings can cause or cure."

        It is worth reading (see below) all of Dalrymple's article; then move on to W. Jackson Bate who gives us information about Johnson's youth that is absent from Boswell. Dalrymple clearly loves Johnson, the man, and writes accurately that "...Johnson was a man of the Enlightenment. He had a great interest in the experimental sciences, for example, and placed a high value on reason. But he was also acutely aware of the limits of the Enlightenment. He could hold irreconcilable dilemmas in his mind without giving way to nihilism or irrationalism. He was profoundly anti-Romantic: his Life of Savage ends with an implicit denunciation of the Romantic notion that the possession of talent excuses a man from the demands of the moral life or social existence:

"This relation [the biography] will not be wholly without its use if . . . those who, in confidence of superior capacities or attainments, disregard the common maxims of life, shall be reminded that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible...'

In his censure of disregard for the common maxims of life, Johnson displays his deep though flexible conservatism, a conservatism not of the mulish kind opposed to all possible change (Johnson invariably praises advances in knowledge and industry, for example), but of the kind that believes that most men, instead of reasoning from first principles on all occasions, need the aid of the accumulated wisdom of custom, precept, and prejudice most of the time if they are to live a moral life in reasonable harmony and happiness with one another. Johnson criticizes Dean Swift, in his brief biography of him, for his willful and self-conscious eccentricity. “Singularity,” he says, “as it implies a contempt of the general practice, is a kind of defiance which justly provokes the hostility of ridicule; he, therefore, who indulges in peculiar traits, is worse than others, if he be not better.” Note that Johnson does not deny the possibility of betterment, nor does he believe that the best path has always been found already. But he denies that deviation from the common path, for reasons of vanity, is a virtue; on the contrary, it is a vice. We might have had fewer social problems today if this view had had more currency..."
        Even if we had just as many 'social problems' we'd have had far more laughs.
        See the rest of Dalrymple's essay here.