Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
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
The black servant – especially as coach-driver, table-waiter or personal valet – was a familiar feature of eighteenth-century London smart society. Johnson himself later took on a black manservant, Frank Barber, originally as a wild and illiterate teenager, who promptly ran away to sea. But this was one of Johnson’s spiritual reparations: he took infinite trouble to trace him, buy him out of the service, educate him, provide for him and his family, and eventually made him an inheritor in his will, so he became virtually an adopted son, ending his days in ease in Hampshire, corresponding genially with Boswell. Savage saw this enslavement with acute revulsion, which suggests at some level a personal identification:
Why must I Afric’s sable Children see
Vended for Slaves, though form’d by Nature free,
The nameless Tortures cruel Minds invent,
Those to subject, whom Nature equal meant?31
The clue to this identification may lie in the word ‘cruel’, which Johnson discovered had an almost talismanic significance for Savage’s personal mythology. But the political implications for Savage of such colonial and imperial attitudes were frankly apocalyptic. The imperial London through which they walked, like Cassandras in the night, might be destroyed by its own unjustly subject peoples. The wheel of fortune and of power would turn round; the outcasts would occupy the inner seats of power:
Revolving Empire you and yours may doom;
Rome all subdued, yet Vandals vanquish’d Rome:
Yes, Empire may revolve, give them the Day,
And Yoke may Yoke, and Blood may Blood repay.32
These parallels with the decline and fall of Rome were particularly significant to Johnson, because they were to lead him to the satires of the second-century Roman poet Juvenal, as a new model for his own poetic persona in London.
Savage and Juvenal were always closely connected in Johnson’s mind as critics of a corrupt, materialist, urban society. Savage roamed through London as Juvenal once roamed through Rome; and Johnson followed both.
With the publication of his poem ‘Of Public Spirit’ in June 1737, Johnson is able to present Savage as he first perceived him. He is the spokesman for the outcast, the oppressed, the ‘sons of Misery’.33 He is even the spokesman for the daughters of misery, the prostitutes of the city, the ‘beauteous Wretches’ who the ‘nightly Streets annoy, / Live but themselves and others to destroy’.34 Savage stands out against social injustice. ‘He has asserted the natural Equality of Mankind, and endeavoured to suppress that Pride which inclines Men to imagine that Right is the Consequence of Power.’35 He writes with ‘Tenderness’.36
It is against this heroic moral background that Johnson carefully places his portrait of the Outcast Poet. In biographical terms it is a close-up, or a montage of street scenes, animated and visualised. It is written with great force and anger, with almost poetic power.