Albion (44 page)

Bust of Sir Christopher Wren by Edward Pierce, c. 1673

Yet Hogarth was equally capable of composing individual portraits which are suffused with a certain homeliness or intimacy of response; the portrait heads of his servants are sufficiently well known but, in his representations of
Captain Thomas Coram
or
The Graham Children
, the expressions and gestures of the subject manifest Hogarth’s extraordinary alertness to the springs of human character. It has always been said of him that he specialised in the English face, with
The Shrimp Girl
as one of the more notable examples, but this abiding interest is connected with what has been called Hogarth’s “rugged individualism” of style and manner
¹⁹
as well as the “homely simplicity”
²⁰
upon which the English prided themselves. He is preoccupied with the trajectory of the living character, and with the practical expression of life itself beyond the range of authority and theory. England is a biographical nation.

CHAPTER 43

The Fine Art of Biography

The extant portraits
of Samuel Johnson, no less than five of which were executed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, have created a familiar compound image of the scholar with intense and serious gaze, deeply preoccupied or deeply troubled by some inner vision. More circumstantial detail is supplied by contemporaries who have remarked that “his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible.” At a later date “down from his bedchamber, about noon, came, as newly risen, a huge uncouth figure, with a little dark wig which scarcely covered his head, and his clothes hanging loosely about him.” His clothing was often dirty, his shirt collar and sleeves unbuttoned, his stockings around his ankles. James Boswell noted that “he is very slovenly in his dress, and speaks with a most uncouth voice.” Fanny Burney has left the most interesting account, however, with her observations that “He is tall and stout; but stoops terribly; he is almost bent double. His mouth is almost constantly opening and shutting as if he was chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers, and twisting his hands. His body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down; his feet are never a moment quiet; and, in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion.” His curious gait meant that he was a constant object of amusement to children or to the “mob.” He would “zigzag” across the London streets, often colliding with people without realising that he had done so, and he had an obsessive habit of knocking every post with a stick; if he missed one, he would retrace his steps and give it a tap. He would suddenly come to a halt in the middle of these thoroughfares, and raise his arms above his head in a spasmodic movement; before crossing any threshold he would whirl about, twisting his body before making a sudden stride or leap. He enjoyed rolling down hills and climbing trees.

This is not a diversion but, rather, an example of biographical description in the English manner. Here is Samuel Johnson, for example, upon the life of Jonathan Swift:

He thought exercise of great necessity, and used to run half a mile up and down a hill every two hours. . . . He was always careful of his money, and was therefore no liberal entertainer, but was less frugal of his wine than of his meat. When his friends of either sex came to him in expectation of a dinner, his custom was to give everyone a shilling that they might please themselves with their provision. At last his avarice grew too powerful for his kindness; he would refuse a bottle of wine, and in Ireland no man visits where he cannot drink.

Johnson himself believed that biography, the history of character in the world, was a noble and salutary pursuit. “I have often thought,” he once wrote, “that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.” Whether he would have praised Boswell’s
Life
of him in these terms is an open question; but his own
Lives of the English Poets
amply fulfils his principles. “Biography,” he wrote, “is of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life.” He told a gathering of friends in the Mitre public-house “that he loved the biographical part of literature most,”
¹
and once explained to Boswell that “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” This emphasis upon usefulness partakes of the English spirit, but Johnson’s preoccupation with individual life and character is also of English provenance.

In an essay for
The Rambler
he proposed that biography was an extension of imaginative literature since “all joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of imagination, that realises the event, however fictitious, or approximates it, however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate.” The biographer will “conceive the pains and pleasures of other minds” but must also “excite” them in the act of imaginative re-creation. This dictum has profoundly affected the course of the English imagination, even as it arises naturally out of it. The novel and the biography are aspects of the same creative process. In fact it might be suggested that the greatest writers are those, like Johnson, who effortlessly transcend the limitations of genre; their writing, whatever temporary form it takes, is of a piece. If his poetry becomes a “just representation of general nature,” then so must his life of Milton or of Dryden.

But there is a further refinement to Johnson’s art, in those passages where he fashions his prose in the image of his subjects. When in his life of Milton he exclaims upon “these bursts of light and involutions of darkness; these transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of invention,” he is translating within his own style the idiom and cadence of Milton’s verse. In a less elevated mode he notes that “the death of Pope was imputed by some of his friends to a silver sauce-pan, in which it was his delight to eat potted lampreys”; he employs here the delicate and familiar imagery of Pope’s satires to make his own point. The collusion of style is also evidence of further intimacy, since Johnson is drawn into autobiography by the pressure of biography. He re-creates himself in passages ostensibly dedicated to others. He identifies himself with Richard Savage, the destitute young dramatist and poet with whom he walked the streets of London at night in endless conversation. When he writes of the wild and penniless Savage that “His mind was in an uncommon degree vigorous and active. His judgement was accurate, his apprehension quick and his memory so tenacious that he was frequently observed to know what he had learned from others in a short time, better than those by whom he was informed,” he is also limning a self-portrait. When he wrote of the scientist Boerhaave, he was also engaged in an act of self-definition. “There was, in his air and motion, something rough and artless, but so majestic and great at the same time, that no man ever looked upon him without veneration.” There were less happy resemblances, however, and in his account of William Collins’s mental decline there is a suggestion of his own incipient madness. Collins “languished some years under that depression of mind which enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the knowledge of right without the power of pursuing it”; this is the composition of one who desired to be tied and whipped, and whose own depression of spirits was heavier than many other men could bear.

All the pity and sympathy of his nature, therefore, went out to the bereft Savage. Indeed his entire description of the young outcast, this uncommon writer thrown away destitute into the alleys and doorways of London, is an image of Johnson as he might have been or might one day become. He wrote his friend’s life when he was himself an impoverished hack in the employment of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, often forced to wander the streets at night for want of settled lodgings. And so when Johnson writes of Savage that “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,” he writes about himself as eloquently as he writes about Savage. The associations and affiliations are formed. When in the same life-story he declares that Savage was “disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life only that he might be swallowed by its quick-sands or dashed upon its rocks,” he is outlining the entire plot of Smollett’s
Peregrine Pickle
with more than a little seasoning of
Tom Jones
. A common language creates a common vision of the world; this is the English imagination at its primary and pre-eminent work.

In his absorbing study of Johnson and Savage
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage
, Richard Holmes noted that literary biography is a hybrid art and amplified the argument by suggesting that this mixed and mingled form—this essentially English form—helped to create the romantic sensibility. He surmised that Johnson’s naïve romanticism
²
seized upon Savage as an outcast poet, and that he had “glimpsed in the back streets the first stirrings of the new Romantic age.”
³
It is only another step then to claim, as Mr. Holmes does, that biography itself “is essentially a Romantic form”
⁴
which, in the eighteenth century, “became a rival to the novel.” It is perhaps more appropriate to suggest that it incorporated the novel, just as it manifested certain tendencies which come under the rubric of “romanticism.” Like the language, and the culture, it assimilates anything.

In truth English biography was, from the beginning, a collection of fictional or dramatic episodes united by a commentary of a didactic or homiletic nature. The twin deities of “Fortune” and “Fate” were invoked in medieval narratives, while North’s preface to his translation of Plutarch’s “Lives”— one of the key influences upon the development of the native tradition—reveals the moral aspect of biography in the typically English injunction that “it is better to see learning in noble mens lives than to reade it in Philosophers writings.” The perception was extended by Fielding in his novel
Joseph Andrews
, in which he remarked that “examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.” The pragmatic dimension of biographical study is here made explicit, and that practicality helps to explain the love of biography among English rather than French or Italian readers. With its approximation to fact it is considered to be an instructive and useful art, implicitly opposed to the fanciful and useless—if entertaining—allurements of fiction.

There has never been any distinction between “fiction” and “fact,” however. Just as early biographies followed the tragic pattern of the drama’s “wheel of fortune,” so the early novelists insisted upon the basis of their fictions in true sources and authentic reports. It is appropriate that a dramatist, Thomas Heywood, proposed to write “the Lives of all the Poets, foreign and modern,” while Thomas Fuller’s
Worthies of England
(1662) promised a narrative “interlaced with many delightful stories.” Izaak Walton’s
Lives
maintain the hagiographical tradition of medieval biography; his accounts of Donne and Herbert, Hooker and Wotton, resemble threnodies or laments, and he did not scruple to invent lengthy conversations in order to transmit the nobility or sanctity of his subjects. More’s Richard III reverses the equation by constructing an almost wholly inaccurate report of that monarch as false and malevolent. More’s son-in-law, William Roper, in turn fashions a biography of More which proposes him as a secular saint and martyr. Cavendish’s biography
The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey
is filled with imprecations to Fortune—“O madness! O foolish desire! O fond hope!”—while Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
thoroughly exemplifies the English tradition in its combination of improbable anecdote and broad theatricality.

If the eighteenth century witnessed the first flowering of the novel, it was wholly appropriate that it should also have nurtured the more extensive development of prose biography. They grew up together in an act of symbiosis. There were volumes entitled
The History of the lives of the most noted
highway-men, footpads, house-breakers, shop-lifts and cheats
as well as
The lives
of the most eminent persons who died in the year 17
——; the
Biographica Britannica
was begun, and the seventeen volumes of John Nichols’s
Literary
Anecdotes of the Seventeenth Century
were completed. It is also highly appropriate—indeed it is fitting and significant—that Samuel Johnson himself has been made more generally known to posterity through Boswell’s biography rather than through any of his own books or essays.

Yet we must pause before we cross the threshold of this great work, and examine Boswell’s practice of mingling representative fact and selective fiction. In his advertisement to the second edition of the
Life of Johnson
Boswell compares his narrative with that of Homer’s
Odyssey
: “Amidst a thousand entertaining and instructive episodes the HERO is never long out of sight; for they are all in some degree connected with him; and HE, in the whole course of the History, is exhibited by the Author for the best advantage of his readers.” Boswell less resembles the writer of the verse epic, however, than the novelist. He is concerned with his subject’s important actions but also with “what he privately wrote, and said, and thought”; he wishes to display “the progress of his mind and fortunes,” like any fictional hero, principally by dwelling upon “innumerable detached particulars.” Boswell admired Rembrandt and Vermeer in this respect, noting “with what a small speck does the painter give life to an eye!” He quotes Johnson himself to the effect that the biographer must examine “domestick privacies and display the minute details of daily life.” The biographer thereby congratulates himself that Samuel Johnson “will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived.” But when he states that “I have spared no pains to ascertain with a scrupulous authenticity” the facts of the matter, and that “I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly,” we may recall Daniel Defoe’s similar protestations in the prefaces to his fictional accounts. There are indeed scholars who have dismissed Boswell’s
Life
as a work of the imagination, but of course it is only in the imagination that writing lives. The imagination is the secret of Boswell’s art.