Britain is a very changed country; it has changed morally. It might be said that its people's sense of china pearl jewelry what life is all about has altered more in the last fifty years than it did in the previous 250, beginning in 1709, when Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield. Yet one of the things that hasn't changed is the popularity of the nation's most popular word: "nice." When I was growing up, everything worth commenting on could probably be described either as "nice" or, controversially, "not nice." My mother would invite me downstairs for a "nice cup of tea" before I went off to school to be taught lessons by "that nice teacher of yours." At the same time, Prime Minister Edward Heath, who had "a nice smile," was "not being nice to the unions." Tony Blair seemed "very nice" at first, but he wasn't very nice to his friend Gordon Brown. "Nice try," my old headmaster would say if he read this very paragraph, "but your diction could be nicer."
In his Dictionary of the pearl beads English Language, Johnson does not yet recognize the power of "nice" as the catch-all term for British near-approval, but he produces one of his little gems in defining the word: "It is often used to express a culpable delicacy." It may be time to observe that Dr. Johnson, neither by his own definition nor by ours, could ever properly have been described as nice. He lacked culpable delicacy to the exact same degree that he lacked good manners, an easy disposition, a sunny outlook, a helpful quality, an open spirit, a selfless gene, a handsome gait, or a general willingness to pearl strand put his best foot forward in greeting others. If niceness was the only category known to posterity, we would long since have lost Johnson to the scrofulous regions of inky squalor, for he could be alarmingly rude.
At his height he was pleased to savage everybody who came within goring distance: he put down lords, ladies, friends, and biographers, and would not have hesitated to "talk for victory" in the face of a five-year-old child. His needs were gigantic and gigantically exposed. Like so many authors, but none so much as him, he had no idea how he could sometimes sound to other people, enlarging himself at every turn, propagating his own reputation in such a way as merely to extend, as Johnson admitted himself in one of his own essays, "the fraud by which [such authors] have been themselves deceived." Johnson's writing tended toward the promotion of ideals of human conduct that he himself could never attain. But he fails most signally on the lower ground, the ground of niceness, toleration, selflessness, never setting the world at a distance from himself the better to contemplate it, but rather roughing the world up every time it got too close. He wanted to show his greatness and wanted nobody much to delay him.
Johnson started the habit early, being a font of arrogance and ill-attendance with his tutor when still an undergraduate at Oxford. When the Reverend Jordan, a senior fellow at Pembroke College, confronted Johnson with his absences, the young boor was something less than apologetic: "I answered I had been sliding [skating] in Christ-Church meadow. And this I said with as much nonchalance as I am now talking to you." His friend Mrs. Thrale noted that "he laughed very heartily at the recollection of his own insolence."
This early report is given by Peter Martin in a lively new biography, a book well seasoned with good stories, most of which do not seek always to show the Doctor in a better light. (This was a habit of James Boswell's that has not been adhered to by the biographers coming after him, nor, it might be said, by those immediately preceding him. Sir John Hawkins appears to have rather enjoyed offering the reader a comprehensive tour of the Doctor's warts.[*]) Martin is sympathetic to Johnson and equally sympathetic to the truth about him. He has hitherto written excellent biographies of both Bos-well and Edmond Malone—two of the Doctor's brightest satellites—and he turns to Johnson with a strong and nuanced sense of how he was, as much as anything, the figment of a great many busy pens, not least his own.
Our hero often saw the world, or the world of literature anyhow, as scarcely being worthy of him, but what we see from the new books by Martin, Jeffrey Meyers, and David Nokes is a Johnson constantly in a state of application to the business of authorship. Anyone who cares about that subject, or who perhaps has a continuing experience of its joys and displeasures, will find the three-hundredth-anniversary turn toward Johnson's brilliance as an author quite welcome, for he has been too long covered in anecdotage and too long unread by the public.
But I am not yet done with his bad character. He left Oxford like a wounded bear, the injury being pride—he lacked the money to continue his studies or gain his degree—and spent time in Birmingham with Edmund Hector, a friend from his school days. Hector spoke of Johnson there being "withdrawn, heedless, or neglectful," talking to himself in "peevish fits," a habit of emotional insolvency he carried into his marriage with the famous Tetty. He was very often away from her for many months at a time, subjecting her to woes and neglect, contempt and poverty, while he made a fuss over other women and better minds. At the same time, as a reviewer, he could be nearly psychotic in the scale and brutality of his dispraise, not only calling books and individuals to account but molesting them unawares and pounding them into dust.
The great moralist wanted for nothing as a great reviewer in the Age of Reviews, except for shame of course, arguing in one place against the "elation of malignity" while himself wielding what Martin calls "the club of Hercules" in a one-man Colosseum of hostility, violence, intemperance, and abuse. Besides Alexander Pope, it is hard to think of an author of his period who so enjoyed the terrible spectacle of other people's dullness, or who invested more anger in his moment to shine. It was an aspect of his daily life commented on by Mrs. Thrale, who, despite all her kindness to him in old age, suffered a barrage of blame and derision:
She protested that helpful as he was with Queeney and later the other children, he was insufferably opinionated in advising her how to bring them up.... At first, she felt it was all worth it because she and her husband saw themselves as saving him; later, she chafed under a "perpetual confinement" that was "terrifying in the first years of our friendship, and irksome in the last." She insisted that after her husband's death in 1782, she could scarcely bear his capriciousness and roughness in the house.
