Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
that Johnson knew – that Savage, many years previously, had actually been arrested and questioned on a charge of treasonable, Jacobite publication; and that for some months he was the subject of Secret Service reports.23 Whether young Johnson knew this then, or later, will soon become a leading question about their friendship.
For Johnson himself these night-conversations in London with Savage were a transforming experience. They shaped his idea of the city itself, his politics, and his whole notion of the writer’s task and situation. That Savage appeared both poor and outcast must have struck him as bitterly ironic and yet curiously glamorous. Here was a brilliant, strange and enchanting man, who had known all the leading writers of the day – Sir Richard Steele, Colley Cibber, Alexander Pope, James Thomson – and moved in circles close to Parliament and the Court. Yet he was reduced to the back streets, he voiced subversive politics, and he befriended someone as obscure and socially inept (not to say monstrous) as Johnson himself.
Savage needed company and talk, needed them with something approaching desperation, to act out his own life and his extensive fantasies. This soon became clear to Johnson. In this too there was at once a common bond. Both men dreaded solitude, and Savage had found a remedy with which Johnson instantly identified. Talk held off the terrors and depressions of loneliness.
‘His Method of Life particularly qualified him for Conversation, of which he knew how to practise all the Graces,’ wrote Johnson appreciatively. ‘His Language was vivacious and elegant, and equally happy upon grave or humorous Subjects. He was generally censured for not knowing when to retire, but that was not the Defect of his Judgment, but of his Fortune; when he left his Company he was frequently to spend the remaining Part of the Night in the Street, or at least was abandoned to gloomy Reflections, which it is not strange that he delayed as long as he could …’24 This could be Johnson writing of himself. One can begin to see how sympathetically two such men might meet, as Cave’s offices emptied at Clerkenwell, or the taverns closed along the Strand.
So when Johnson came to write Savage’s Life in 1743, he put Savage’s night-walking at the heart of the story of his literary career. He did it so powerfully that he created a legend, almost an eighteenth-century archetype, of the Outcast Poet moving through an infernal cityscape, the ‘City of Dreadful Night’, in which his eye alone witnesses the horror, filth and misery that the rich and powerful have created as they slumber, uncaring.
To achieve this, Johnson does something extraordinary. He completely withdraws himself from the story. He never makes a single mention of himself as Savage’s night-time companion. The two Hogarthian figures, joined in their companionable talk, who appear again and again in the memoirs, never once appear in Johnson’s original account. Savage is essentially, and one might say symbolically, alone.
Johnson places this description or evocation of the Outcast Poet at a pivotal moment in his own narrative. It is set in 1737, immediately after the publication of Savage’s poem ‘Of Public Spirit’ (including an extract in the Gentleman’s Magazine), and at the time that Johnson himself first arrived in the city and became aware of Savage’s work (though this fact is studiously omitted).25
The theme of Savage’s poem is also dramatically relevant. It considers how far the State is responsible for the poor, incapacitated or underprivileged in society; and in particular whether the Whig policy of expatriation – forcible emigration to the new colonies in North America and Africa – can be morally justified. Is this ‘out-casting’ of men from their native homes and families, a true expression of ‘Public Spirit’?
Rising above his own situation, like the true poet, Savage touches on this general issue of social justice, which Johnson summarises with angry force:
The Politician, when he considers Men driven into other Countries for Shelter, and obliged to retire to Forests and Deserts, and pass their Lives and fix their Posterity in the remotest Corners of the World, to avoid those Hardships which they suffer or fear in their native Place, may very properly enquire why the Legislature does not provide a Remedy for these Miseries, rather than encourage an Escape from them. He may conclude, that the Flight of every honest Man is a Loss to the Community …26
But Savage, here presented by Johnson as the spokesman for the oppressed, goes much further than this. He attacks the whole notion of colonisation itself.
In historical terms of the early eighteenth century this is a truly radical position. Savage runs directly counter to the prevailing maritime, trading and enterprise culture of commercial exploitation, which Walpole’s administration notoriously represented, with support for such institutions as the South Sea Company and the East India Company. Again, Johnson’s summary is forceful and angry: ‘Savage has not forgotten … to censure those Crimes which have been generally committed by the Discoverers of new Regions, and to expose the enormous Wickedness of making War upon barbarous Nations because they cannot resist, and of invading Countries because they are fruitful; of extending Navigation only to propagate Vice, and of visiting distant Lands only to lay them waste.’27 Ever afterwards, this anti-Imperialist stance became Johnson’s own.
In his poem Savage is specific about colonial exploitation. To illustrate this, Johnson does something new in literary biography. He quotes extensively from the poetry and begins to integrate these quotations into the texture of his prose narrative by placing them in careful footnotes. These quotations are, technically, a new biographical device, because they bring us an impression of Savage’s own voice, of Savage actually talking to the reader (and of how he talked to Johnson). It is the biographer’s answer to the novelist’s most powerful mode of verisimilitude: direct speech.
The quotations perform the role of ‘authentic’ monologue, a mode which would normally imply that very fictionalisation which Johnson had dismissed as a legitimate means of historical truth. By taking them from Savage’s own poetry, Johnson gives them textual authenticity: these are his own words, they are not invented, but they strike us in his own voice, they are what he actually said. Moreover, by using extracts, Johnson effectively reanimates Savage’s work.
Savage’s lines paradoxically work much better as fragments of contemporary reported speech than as more formal and extended passages of mid-eighteenth-century poetry. That is, compared to the best of Pope or Thomson they are weak; but compared to some of the diffuse, first-person narratives of Defoe or Eliza Haywood they are vividly alive. As a critic, Johnson knew that ‘Of Public Spirit’ was a slapdash performance – ‘not sufficiently polished in the Language, or enlivened in the Imagery, or digested in the Plan’.28 But as a biographer he knew it was deeply expressive, and conveyed one aspect of Savage’s fantastic idealising power with great intensity.
Savage’s two main targets are the East India trade in silks, spices, hardwoods and other luxury goods; and the West African trade in black slaves. Both produce their own kinds of oppression, and make outcasts of men powerless within their system. In India he sees this primarily as a cultural oppression, in which the indigenous populations are simply subdued by the Western traders, who care nothing about native laws, customs or religions. He calls on the colonisers to be more respectful, more just, more generous:
Do you the neighb’ring, blameless Indian aid,
Culture what he neglects, not his invade;
Dare not, oh! dare not, with ambitious View,
Force or demand Subjection, never due.29
In Africa, he recognises with horror a trade in human bodies that is both indefensible in itself and cruel and hypocritical in its operation. The great Whig merchants, so much of whose personal wealth, houses, estates and even servants are drawn directly or indirectly from this trade, defend themselves with the cry that ‘while they enslave, they civilize’.30