Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
he undertook a contract in 1746, with a Chimerical fervour, and established himself on Credit at Gough Square with Mrs Johnson who steadily sought refuge from the World in Novels and Medicines. Turning once more to his favourite Juvenal, Mr Johnson now imitated the Disillusion of the Tenth Satire, in his poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, which he is believed to have composed while Walking in the country lanes of Hampstead in a delusory Attempt to escape the Toils of the City which had so fatally ensnared him.
The last concussion to his Hopes occurred this spring, when his long meditated Tragedy of Irene was mounted in Drury Lane by his Friend Mr David Garrick (one of the truly distinguished sons of Lichfield), to be received only with a Tepid expression of Politeness by the Town. The fatal Illness that now struck him down, at the age of Forty, may perhaps be assigned as much to Weariness and melancholy of Mind, as to premature Decay of his ungainly and damaged Body.
He remained throughout a devout and convinced Christian, and found that Solace in Heaven which he could not find in the World. Perhaps he composed an Elegy for himself, and for his Grub Street familiars such as Mr Savage, when he wrote in The Vanity of Human Wishes:
Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes,
And pause a while from Letters, to be wise;
There mark what Ills the Scholar’s Life assail,
Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron and the Jail.8
When Johnson first came to London in 1737 he was twenty-seven years old; and Savage (as far as we can tell) was nearly forty. Johnson was young, unknown and untried; Savage was ageing, experienced and disreputable. We have to begin to imagine a relationship of mentor and pupil between the two men that is unlike almost anything in Johnson’s later career, or in that part of it recorded by Boswell. Savage can be seen as a sort of urbane Mephistopheles, Johnson as a youthful Faust.
The friendship lasted at most only two years, but it seems to have been of great emotional intensity. When they eventually parted, in July 1739, Johnson says that he had ‘Tears in his Eyes’. It is invariably said by Johnson’s own biographers that the man who was weeping was Savage, not Johnson; thereby suggesting that Johnson was relatively unmoved. But this may not be the case. Johnson himself draws special attention to the moment of parting by making it one of the few places in his Life of Savage where he deliberately introduces himself as part of Savage’s story. He emphasises the pathos of the moment with unusual explicitness.
Savage had resolved to abandon London for rural Wales to live frugally, and salvage his writing career. ‘Full of these salutary Resolutions, he left London, in July 1739, having taken Leave with great Tenderness of his Friends, and parted from the Author of this Narrative with Tears in his Eyes.’1
Tears in whose eyes? The sentence is curiously ambiguous, or deliberately so: the punctuation suggests Savage’s eyes, but Johnson’s dramatic introduction of himself in the final clause seems to claim the tears as his own. It is almost as if Johnson was impelled as a friend to bear witness to his own tears; but was embarrassed as a biographer to admit them in public This embarrassment at the strength of his feelings for Savage, when he later looked back at it, provides us with a first clue to the whole story.
When Johnson came to correct the second edition of the Life in 1748, he noted carefully in the margin next to the ‘Tears in his Eyes’ an explanatory phrase: ‘I had then a slight fever.’ This seems to imply that Johnson was indeed recalling his own tears and emotion at losing Savage, but he felt awkward doing so, and subsequently wished to dismiss them as mere physical weakness, as temporary illness. But in this sense his whole intimacy with Savage may have been something of a young man’s fever. It was hectic, intense, continually menaced by Savage’s poverty and instability, and by Johnson’s own struggles to establish himself professionally in London. Johnson seemed to conceive of their time together as something dreamlike, tidal like the River Thames; a friendship of arrivals and departures in the great city.
In his poem London, Johnson invests just such an imagined parting with a strange, solemn ritual of kissing the ground, bathing the whole moment in a bright silvery light, reflected from the shining water, of romantic intensity:
While Thales waits the Wherry that contains
Of dissipated Wealth the small Remains,
On Thames’s banks, in silent Thought we stood,
Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver Flood:
Struck with the Seat that gave Eliza birth,
We kneel, and kiss the consecrated Earth …2
Nothing could be further from the atmosphere of Boswell’s familiar tale of Johnson and young David Garrick riding to London to seek their fortunes in March 1737. Here, by contrast, is the touch of brisk heroic comedy like a picaresque adventure out of a Fielding novel. ‘Both of them’, says Boswell, ‘used to talk pleasantly of it’, and embellished it suitably as the years went by.
They were cheerful, poor, devil-may-care. Garrick would say that they had only one horse between them, and ‘rode and tied’ – that is, each one riding ahead in turn, tying up the horse to a tree or gate, and walking on till the other overtook and performed the next relay, as if they were gypsies. Johnson would add that his total finances were ‘two-pence half-penny’. Garrick once mockingly challenged this in Boswell’s hearing: ‘Eh? what do you say? With two-pence half-penny in your pocket?’ – Johnson: ‘Why yes; when I came with two-pence half-penny in my pocket, and thou, Davy, with three half-pence in thine.’ It became a favourite party piece, and passed into the Boswellian legend.
They took their ‘precepts of economy’ from an Irish painter, dined once a day at the Pine-Apple Coffee-house in New Street off the Strand for eight pence, and paid formal visits on ‘clean-shirt-days’ only. When Johnson first applied for literary work at a bookseller’s in the Strand, the proprietor Mr Wilcox ‘eyed his robust frame attentively’ and then suggested he take a job as a vegetable porter in Covent Garden.3
But these picturesque details, lovingly gathered by Boswell, mask a much bleaker truth. Johnson was a failed schoolmaster, who had spent most of his wife’s inheritance, and gone off to London with a teenage pupil in a desperate last attempt to recoup his fortunes. Garrick had a definite plan: to apply to Lincoln’s Inn, and if that failed to stay with his actor-brother Peter. He was also due to inherit a legacy of a thousand pounds, sufficient to make him independent.
Johnson, by comparison, was adrift in the capital. He had the unfinished manuscript of his tragedy Irene, and an idea of applying to the Gentleman’s Magazine for hack-work (it had been refused previously, in 1734). He also carried a kindly but useless letter of recommendation from his friend Gilbert Walmsley to the headmaster of Colson’s Academy, a fellow native of Lichfield. Omitting Johnson’s personal circumstances, Walmsley wrote: ‘Mr Johnson [is] to try his fate with a Tragedy, and to see to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French. Johnson is a very good scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a fine tragedy-writer. If it should any way lie in your way, doubt not but you would be ready to recommend and assist your countryman.’4
This left out a good deal about the difficulties of Johnson’s character and circumstances.
The young Johnson of Lichfield may have been ‘a very good scholar and poet’ potentially, but so far his professional achievements in either field had been minimal. At twenty-seven he had published nothing except some desultory essays in the Birmingham Journal and a pedestrian translation of Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia. The translation had been dictated