Misanthropy Read online

  Preston quite rightly argues that Johnson falls into a specific category, that of the religious and benevolent misanthropist.15 His distinctive misanthropy shares neither the profound contempt of La Rochefoucauld nor the unappeasable rage of Saint-Simon. Its sources are different in kind, apparently more philosophical. One might argue, here, that one need go no further than Johnson’s greatest work, Rasselas, and its wistful, haunting, lapidary first lines:

  Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas prince of Abissinia.16

  In the beginning of Rasselas lies its irrefragable end: what the story itself will do is lay bare the mechanisms, the logic that leads to the inevitable conclusion. As Rambler 203 puts matters, ‘It is not therefore from this world, that any comfort can proceed … that hope only is rational, of which we are certain that it cannot deceive us’ (R 203, vol. v, p. 295), by which Johnson means religious hope. Both Rasselas and his great poem The Vanity of Human Wishes are intended as objective, even exhaustive demonstrations of the inexorable structure of deception and undeception. The second title makes the whole point clear. As Boswell said, the poem comprises a string of ‘instances of variety of disappointment’ (LJ, p. 139).

  In effect, Johnson sets out from the Pindaric apopthegm, ‘wrapt in error is the human mind’ (R 151, vol. v. p. 37). But he was thinking of a specific kind of error, the error produced by the ceaseless demand of desire. For ‘we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit’ (R 6, vol. iii, p. 35). ‘The mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it’ (Rambler 2, vol. iii, p. 9). After satisfaction, desire is resurgent in a different form. Thus we hasten on from experience to yet another hope or expectation. The object of desire, once attained, is insufficient, and the fulfilment of desire invariably breeds an ensuing disappointment. Since the satisfaction of desire turns to dust between the fingers, life becomes ‘a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment’ (LJ, p. 754). We can see, then, why, in Johnson’s view, to ‘repress the swellings of vain hope’ should be the immemorial task of the moralist (R 29, vol. iii, p. 160). ‘Every desire is a viper in the bosom’ (LJ, p. 336). But why should this view necessarily make for misanthropy? First, intellectual powers are no proof against the ‘swellings’, which are imperious. Arriving at a knowledge of the structure of experience does not mean that one no longer falls prey to it. Secondly, the structure is in fact intrinsic to morality itself. Even morally, we ‘see more than we can attain’: moralists cannot live up to their precepts, ‘and those who raise admiration by their books, disgust by their company’ (Rambler 14, vol. iii, pp. 76, 78–9). In any case, as Rambler 87 insists, no one can bear to listen to moral advice, because of the strain in their desire that can only be satisfied by a belief in their own superiority. Thirdly, in general, the vanity of human wishes breeds envy, affectation and dissimulation, fallacies and impostures, and delusions about oneself and others. Everyone envies everyone else, in the belief that others are getting more satisfaction than they are (see Rambler 128). This is the circle we are doomed to tread, and it means that the world remains unchanged and, it seems, unchangeable. Indeed, the desire to alleviate misery is caught up in the same structure of hope and disappointment, and only breeds more misery in its turn. But fourthly, and most tellingly, according to ‘The Young Author’, hopes are illusory because the person who hopes trusts his fate ‘to human kind,/more false, more cruel than seas or wind’.17 It is human beings themselves who invariably fail to live up to what they seem to promise.

  The quintessential human folly, then, is the refusal of ‘immediate ease for distant pleasures’ (R 2, vol. iii, p. 99). The natural flight of the human mind is not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. This might sound likely to lead to an attitude of Carpe diem. But that is not remotely Johnson’s bent. Quite the reverse: he remained committed to ‘the severest and most abstracted philosophy’ (R 18, vol. iii, p. 99). If any ‘ease’ is to be found, it is religious (naturally, since the logic is that of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or). The present spells displeasure. One is ceaselessly driven to hope, Johnson wrote, precisely because the present moment is ‘irksome’ (quoted LJ, p. 263). Those who give up on the hopelessness of hope and ‘look no further than the present life’ are misguided, for it is one only of ‘vanity and vexation of spirit’.18 In general, any compliance with the motion of ‘life merely sensual’ is a downward descent, and ‘every source of pleasure is polluted’ (Rambler 7, vol. iii, p. 38; 203, vol. v, p. 293). This chilly disdain for the senses fed into Johnson’s style. Boswell asserted that ‘his example has given a general elevation to the language of his country’ (LJ, p. 159), and ‘elevation’ was indeed the Johnsonian manner. He cast his knowledge and experience into great, weighty, marmoreal, abstract concepts, seldom if ever making any sensuous appeal to his readers. Significantly, when he tries to evoke a terrestrial paradise, as in Rambler 33, the language is stock, clichéd, dead, inert. It is also significant that, while a select few loved The Rambler, it had only a limited readership, because of its unrelenting gravity, the absence from it of ordinariness, the life of the senses, any attachment to the visible, material world, Johnson’s lack of interest in what bluestocking Catherine Talbot called ‘the living manners of the times’.19 He hankered after a ‘disembodied state’, supposing that it meant that one would be able to see ‘with more extent’ (LJ, p. 544). It is this ‘larger vision’ that he appears to aspire to in his prose.

  Johnson fiercely and insistently rebutted any notion that the ‘state of the body’ might at all determine the ‘faculties of mind’ (R 117, vol. iv, pp. 262–3). The whole of Rambler 117 is devoted to mocking the idea. Yet he had good reason to ignore the behaviour of his own body, if only through the resources of language and thought. Boswell supposed that Johnson’s judgement stood at the centre of his being like a gladiator in an arena, with wild beasts assailing him that he knew he must drive back to their den. Mrs Thrale possessed fetters and padlocks that she asserted after his death had been for Johnson. It is far less likely that they played a part in any sexual practices than that they were the result of his fear of onsets of uncontrollable insanity. (Johnson would have associated them in the first instance with lunatic asylums).20 He was afraid he might need forcible restraint. He himself said that he wanted protection against ‘lust’, ‘pollutions’, ‘wickedness’, ‘sinful habits’, ‘sensuality in thought’ and ‘vain longings of affection’.21 He stopped drinking precisely because he knew that otherwise he might not stop drinking – at all. Though he had as little faith that relations between the sexes generally worked out as, later, did Jacques Lacan,22 his amorous inclinations were ‘uncommonly strong and impetuous’ (LJ, p. 1375). He was a man of immense, indeed, Boswell thought, gargantuan appetites. But they were unlikely to be satisfied, as Johnson well knew, and as he made clear in ‘To a Young Lady on her Birthday’: ‘With his own form acquaint the forward fool,/Shewn in the faithful glass of ridicule’ (P, p. 36). He was writing, of course, of himself.

  In other ways, too, Johnson’s body was for him increasingly an extraordinary and finally a tragic burden; this is partly why we continue to find him so arresting. He told others that he was born almost dead, and immediately developed a lesion on the buttock. It was a tiny harbinger of things to come. The young Johnson was ‘much afflicted with the scrophula, or king’s evil’, a tubercular infection of the lymph glands, which disfigured ‘a countenance naturally well formed’ and permanently affected his hearing (LJ, p. 31). He was also blind in one eye, which left him very near-sighted. He particularly suffered from ‘a vile melancholy … which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober’.23 Boswell thought that his melancholy disposed him to a poor view of physical life. But it was equally his body that d
isposed him to melancholy. If he was subject to ‘a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery’, it was inseparable from overwhelming physical symptoms, ‘an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience’. The ‘baleful influence’ of this ‘dismal malady’ persisted throughout his life, and ‘all his enjoyments’ were but ‘temporary interruptions’ of it (LJ, p. 47). He had frequent cramps, and endured protracted bouts of prostration or sheer sloth. He fell victim at various times to gout, palsy, asthma, emphysema and chronic dropsy, especially in his later years. Sleep was a major problem. ‘I pass restless and uneasy nights’, he said, ‘harassed with convulsions of my breast, and flatulencies at my stomach’ (LJ, p. 890). This was quite typical. He was bled from early childhood, and subsequently underwent a lifetime of phlebotomy, including inept and distressing attempts to bleed himself. Towards the end, he was bleeding himself so clumsily and inordinately that he needed friends to patch him up (while also subjecting himself to an ‘increasingly ghastly, farcical drama of drugs’).24

  In addition, his body behaved in very peculiar ways. ‘Such was the heat and irritability of his blood’, wrote Boswell, ‘that not only did he pare his nails to the quick; but scraped the joints of his fingers with a pen-knife, till they seemed quite red and raw’ (LJ, p. 121). He was frequently overtaken by involuntary tics and mannerisms, ‘convulsive starts and odd gesticulations’ (LJ, p. 68), and emitted the oddest noises. When he laughed, his companions thought he was having a fit. (‘He laughs like a rhinoceros’, said Tom Davis, LJ, p. 637). He had a peculiar, untidy way of dressing, with numerous ‘slovenly particularities’ (LJ, p. 281). People remarked on his bizarre carriage: ‘When he walked the streets, what with the constant roll of his head, and the concomitant motion of his body, he appeared to make his way by that motion, independent of his feet’.25 It ‘was like the struggling gait of one in fetters’, said Boswell, adding that ‘when he rode, he had no command of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon’ (LJ, p. 1398). Those who did not know him and had not spoken to him sometimes ‘concluded that he was an ideot’ when they first met him (LJ, p. 107). He was easily made fun of: the schoolboys at Johnson’s private academy at Edial used to peep through a keyhole at the ‘awkward and tumultuous fondness’ of his sexual approaches to Mrs Johnson (LJ, p. 71). David Garrick, at that time a pupil, was later given to mimicking a pre-coital Johnson running round the bed: ‘“I’m coming, my Tetsie, I’m coming, my Tetsie! Ph! Ph!” (blowing in his manner)’.26 Alexander Pope thought that his body made of Johnson a ‘sad spectacle’.27 For his own part, he wrote of his ‘constitutional unhappiness’ (LJ, p. 233), and said ‘I am often, very often, ill’ (LJ, p. 150).

  It is not hard, then, to understand why Boswell saw Johnson’s spirit as ‘grievously clogged by its material tegument’ (LJ, p. 571). Thought and writing were his means of escaping the body, but the flight from the body also bred misanthropy. His own body being so obviously unendurable – or so the anti-misanthropic case might run – Johnson took the only means at his disposal to transcend it. However affected we might be by his ordeals, we can nonetheless see quite clearly what is problematic in his misanthropy. The logic of Johnson’s philosophy is epicurean: give up on unrealistic hopes, will o’the wisp notions, and cultivate the moment, in a modest knowledge of its and one’s own limitations, and the limits to desire. In contemporary terms, enjoy. But Johnson’s body did not make that possibility available to him. Indeed, to settle for the moment was the ultimate nightmare, for it would have meant accepting the lumpish, uncoordinated, trouble-ridden thing he carted round with him as all there was, his only truth. So Johnson chose religion and misanthropy together. But, though his predicament may move, even awe us, it need not incline us to share his austere logic, or the conclusions to which it leads him.

  *

  Smollett is a different case. His is above all a picaresque misanthropy, a misanthropy towards which the picaresque novel from its Spanish origins (Lazarillo de Tormes, Quevedo’s The Swindler, Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache), through Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus and Lesage’s Gil Blas to Defoe and Smollett himself, repeatedly tends, particularly in three of its recurrent features: the experience of a range of different social strata; an emphasis on the worldly education provided by travel or the journey along the road; and, most pungently of all, the idea of ‘the school of hard knocks’. In the picaresque, truth and reality are literally beaten into the hero. In Smollett’s greatest achievement in the genre, Roderick Random, Roderick journeys from Smollett’s native Scotland to London, to the West Indies (thanks to the navy), to France, to Germany (thanks to the French army), then to Flanders, and so back to London. Along the way, he runs the full social gamut: beaux and belles, smugglers and soldiers, bluestockings, prudes and whores, country squires and Scots villagers, homosexual noblemen with ministerial influence, naval officers, surgeons and ordinary seamen, footmen, highwaymen, little businessmen and ‘fine gentlemen’ (or coxcombs)28 – and, to round it all off, a destitute writer, who tells him the dismal truth about the world of hacks, authors, booksellers and publishers. The lesson Roderick must at length learn is that treachery, knavery, artifice, fraudulence, cowardice, resentment, vengefulness, faithlessness, heartlessness, skulduggery, false witness, rank injustice, want of charity and peremptory and reasonless hostility are prevalent everywhere. The simple and ‘milky disposition’ cannot but live at their mercy (RR, p. 390).

  In this fashion, Roderick Random seeks ‘to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world’, and ‘to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience, as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind’ (RR, p. 5). Scoundrels rise to the top, by infamous practices, while merit is almost never rewarded. The emotional perversions – wanton ingratitude, the enmity of ill-doers, pleasure in inflicting quite unnecessary suffering, the desire to be superfluously cruel to those one has already casually or involuntarily wounded – insistently seize hold of people. Senseless and sometimes fatal violence flares routinely. Roderick’s world is one of casual slap, slash, smash and bang where people cannot but do each other damage. When Roderick’s confederate Bragwell goes randomly kicking hungry, down-and-out whores in London early one morning, he merely affords a rather extreme example. Seldom does anyone care about the pain inflicted on anyone else. Rather, from the start of the novel, innocence and candour fall ‘miserable victims to rigour [hard-heartedness] and inhumanity’ (RR, p. 10). When, as a bleeding, destitute victim of a robbery, Roderick finds himself in a strange village, none of the inhabitants has kindness enough ‘to administer the least relief’ (RR, p. 214). But Roderick himself is not exempt from his own strictures. Smollett cunningly and increasingly makes this clear in his protagonist’s treatment of his quondam schoolmate, companion, benefactor and valet, Strap, whom he not only ruthlessly exploits, but whose ear, for instance, he may twist so violently that Strap ‘roar[s] hideously with the pain’, sending Roderick into ‘an immoderate fit of laughter’ (RR, p. 352). The reasons why Roderick arrives at the familiar misanthropic desire to retire ‘to woods and deserts, far from the hospitable haunts of man’ (RR, p. 243) are clearly multiple. By the end of the novel, they are sufficiently strong for him to opt, if not for the desert, at least, for pastoral retirement.

  In Roderick Random, the progress through the classes and across the nations and the immersion in brutality seem intended to lend the protagonist’s manifold, profound and various disgusts a certain authority. The same is true of Smollett’s much later Travels Through France and Italy. The book is made up of letters about the novelist’s own trip abroad. But it also makes clear how far, for him, the picaresque was not just a literary genre, but his way of understanding and imagining the world at large. Critics have seen the Travels as prejudiced, and the more slighting passages about the French and Italians obviously seem to bear this out.
National vanity is above all what characterizes the French.29 They are slothful, volatile, affected and prattling, natural lightweights who have at best been preposterously educated. But they are also insidiously corrupt. The licentious gallantry of the Niçois, for example, is mere porcheria, piggishness. Indeed, France is so bad as to be ‘the general reservoir from which all the absurdities of false taste, luxury, and extravagance have overflowed the different kingdoms and states of Europe’ (TFI, p. 52). Anyone travelling there will be ‘imposed on’. But this is hardly surprising, since poverty has reduced ‘all the common people’ to ‘thieves and beggars’ (TFI, p. 174).

  The Italians fare no better at Smollett’s hands. They punish transgressions against the church, he says, but pardon flagrant crimes. They have a ‘jealous and vindictive temper’ (TFI, p. 230) and are ‘treacherous and cruel’ in revenge, which they take all too seriously (TFI, p. 244). They, too, impose on visitors. Frenchwomen get off comparatively lightly in the Travels, at least insofar as they are slightly less ‘ridiculous and insignificant’ than Frenchmen (TFI, p. 90). But Italian women are ‘the most haughty, insolent, capricious, and revengeful females on the face of the earth’ (TFI, p. 231). There are also occasional sideswipes at other nationalities. Smollett tells us, for example, that ‘the German genius lies more in the back than the brain’ (TFI, p. 240). To make of the Smollett of the Travels merely a good old British Euro-hater, however, is to ignore the account of the abominable England he quits. London, the Dover road, Kent Street, Southwark, the ‘beggarly and ruinous’ suburbs (ibid.): the capital and its environs are in many respects as bad as the worst of Europe. Thus, when, in perhaps the most arrestingly nauseous passage in the book, in Letter V, Smollett lists disgusting habits around the world, he equally includes English derelictions along with the rest. The English abroad repeatedly turn out to be as repulsive as the locals. Smollett is not partial. This is the travelogue not of a xenophobe, but of a misanthropic picaro.