Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
The slave of sunshine and of gloom.
Tir’d with vain joys, and false alarms,
With mental and corporeal strife,
Snatch me, my Stella, to thy arms,
And screen me from the ills of life.55
How far can we really take these verses as an expression of personal emotion? Perhaps the very fact that they exist (and are so rarely quoted) itself suggests something not usually recognised about Johnson’s sensibility: his gloomy longings for physical tenderness in a world of ‘ills’. Hawkins did not believe him ‘susceptible of amorous emotion’, but accepts there was one ‘romantic passion’ in his early youth; and admits that Molly Aston was the one ‘danger’ and that Johnson always spoke of her with ‘rapture’.56
Boswell mockingly dismisses the ‘Stella’ poems as a serious expression of Johnson’s feelings.57 He argues that since in old age Johnson could ‘condescend to trifle in namby-pamby rhymes, to please Mrs Thrale and her daughter’, so in earlier years he may have jokingly composed such pieces.58 But this reveals Boswell’s own limitations of portraiture. It is precisely to Mrs Thrale, and not to Boswell, that Johnson spoke openly about Molly Aston.
Hester Thrale gives us a penetrating female view of Johnson’s psychology. From the time she met him in 1765, she entered more deeply into his confidence than any other woman in his life. Her Anecdotes (1786) provide a continual revelation into the hidden side of his emotional nature: his tears, his guilts, his regrets, and his sudden storms of feeling. Such glimpses appear in numerous tiny incidents, like the time that Johnson came fretfully back from seeing Hester’s son to school, suddenly immersed in memories of his own adolescence. ‘“Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered my heart was communicated in a dream.” “What was it, Sir?” said I. “Do not ask me,” replied he, with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation.’59
Mrs Thrale knew about the tensions in Johnson’s marriage, and affirms Elizabeth’s knowledge and jealousy of Molly Aston. Johnson’s own romantic feelings are lightly, but clearly indicated in a story he told Mrs Thrale of meeting a Gypsy fortune-teller while out walking in the country with his wife. The Gypsy read his palm, and in so doing reduced Elizabeth to tears. ‘Your heart is divided, Sir, between a Betty and a Molly: Betty loves you best, but you take most delight in Molly’s company: when I turned about to laugh, I saw my wife was crying.’ Johnson added gallantly, ‘Pretty charmer! she had no reason.’ But the significant thing is that he told such a story to Mrs Thrale at all. He was admitting deep and divided feelings, even long afterwards.60
It was only Elizabeth’s sudden injury (a torn tendon), and financial desperation, which finally brought him back to London and his marriage in 1740. There was also a chance to get Irene staged. These considerations shape the rest of the much-tested relationship: Elizabeth confined more and more to bed, drinking, reading and taking opium pain-killers; Johnson working hard, supporting and indulging her like an invalid, but emotionally withdrawn. The bedroom is no longer shared.61
The tone of the letter written at the end of January 1740, in which Johnson promises to return to Elizabeth, expresses a great deal. He is penitent, affectionate and guilty: ‘You have already suffered more than I can bear to reflect upon, and I hope more than either of us shall suffer again. One part at least I have often flattered myself we shall avoid for the future our troubles will surely never separate us more.’
He continues contritely: ‘I still promise myself many happy years from your tenderness and affection, which I sometimes hope our misfortunes have not yet deprived me of.’
But there is some uncertainty about her resentment: ‘I hope You do not think so unkindly of me as to imagine that I can be at rest while I believe my dear Tetty in pain.’
Moreover there is a defensiveness about his own dalliance with Molly Aston, which surely hides resignation at the fact that his princess had once again eluded him: ‘Be assured, my dear Girl, that I have seen nobody in these rambles upon which I have been forced, that has not contributed to confirm my esteem and affection for thee …’ But he ends with a gallant flourish: ‘I am, my charming Love, Yours, Sam Johnson.’62
It is interesting that Boswell slides over this whole separation, does not quote from the letter, and once again only refers to the friendship with Molly Aston retrospectively, at a much later date, in 1776: ‘the lady of whom Johnson used to speak with the warmest admiration … who was afterwards married to Captain Brodie of the navy.’63
From then on the marriage slowly petrified. Elizabeth was increasingly ill, or drunk. She at first took some part in Johnson’s journalistic work, reading and researching for him, but this soon tailed off. Her dowry was spent, her family relations (except Lucy in Lichfield) alienated from her, her husband sunk in hack-work. Some time in the mid-1740s she began to visit the country village of Hampstead for her health, and by 1748 she had almost permanent lodgings there. Johnson visited her on some evenings and at weekends.
She did not manage to attend the first night of Irene, Johnson’s final bid as a dramatic poet, in February 1749. Perhaps this was a relief to both of them. Garrick’s vicious caricature of her dates from this final stage of the marriage: ‘very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behaviour.’64 Yet it is the emotional disappointment of the entire marriage which is partly reflected in this sad parody of Johnson’s longed-for princess.
At Hampstead, Elizabeth was attended on by a young widow, Mrs Desmoulins, an old friend of the Lichfield circle, whom Johnson had brought south to be her companion. In old age she was cross-questioned by Boswell about the relations between husband and wife. What he discovered was omitted from his biography, and filed separately under the Latin heading Tacenda – to be held back in silence.
What Mrs Desmoulins said was this. Elizabeth drank heavily, using the excuse that she was not well; was usually in bed asleep when Johnson appeared; and had refused for years to have sexual relations with him. Johnson would retire to a separate bedroom, and when in bed would call in Mrs Desmoulins to talk with him. Presently she would lie on the bed, on top of the sheets but with her head on the pillow next to his. He would then cuddle and fondle her in an amorous way, before sending her abruptly out of the room.
To Boswell’s further, insistent questions and demands for detail (he was expert in every physical nuance of such encounters), Mrs Desmoulins would only reply that Johnson ‘never did anything that was beyond the limits of decency’.65 Boswell never established what young Mrs Desmoulins had thought those limits were; but the picture – tender, tragic, ludicrous – is clear enough.
It was at exactly this period, walking alone in the lanes of Hampstead outside his wife’s lodgings, that Johnson composed his greatest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. And it was now, as I have suggested, that his fictional biography might have ended, at the age of forty, in an apoplexy brought on by hard work, lack of recognition, frustration and misery.
It is against the background of this marriage, this longing for companionship, and this frustrated ‘dream of princesses’, that Johnson’s friendship with Savage has to be reconsidered.