Flesh in the Age of Reason (30 page)

Johnson gave up the medically prescribed opiates on his deathbed, to pass over with his mind clear.

Religion thus made the mind a jewel of infinite price, confirming Johnson’s intuition that whatever he was, he was it through his mind. But he also knew only too well that ‘of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful is the uncertain continuance of reason’. And it was religious terrors precisely which raised those storms that risked his reason. With what enormous pathos of other possible lives unlived we find him writing: ‘If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman, but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation.’

Johnson had a truly remarkable memory; no one read more widely and loved conversation and controversy. It was through the breadth and depth of his mind that he vindicated his existence to himself. Famously, when Oliver Goldsmith suggested that his Club should be broadened on the ground that ‘there can be nothing new among us: we have travelled over one another’s minds’, Johnson was indignant, retorting: ‘Sir, you have not travelled over
my
mind, I promise you.’ Johnson thus represents the putative triumph of mind over body, but one which never freed itself from the paralysing fear of extinction.

*

The life of James Boswell offers an interesting pendant to that of his hero. The son of a pious Presbyterian mother and a domineering, authoritarian father, Boswell, like Johnson, had etched onto his infant imagination a Calvinist message of human sinfulness and divine punishment, from whose terrors he desperately tried to escape.

Seeking diversion, he came to London in his early twenties, aspiring to be a man of fashion, a man of the world, a man of letters. The tensions between his early indoctrination and his emancipatory aspirations explain his repeated bouts of frantic sexual release and the worsening drinking problem recorded in the journals he kept from the 1760s. He suffered nineteen bouts of the clap up to his death – indeed, he probably died of complications from those disorders.

In a man sprung from an ancient Scottish family, enjoying some professional success and blessed with a fragrant wife, such recklessness surely suggests that Boswell was driven by compulsive psychological forces, and by an equal compulsion to record his experiences. Returning to London, for instance, in November 1762, he made a beeline for his previous partners, but they had all flown. So he had to look elsewhere, as he confided to his journal on 25 November – only this time he meant to take precautions, going into amatory battle ‘in armour’, that is, wearing a condom:

I was really unhappy for want of women… I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak. I gave her a shilling and had enough command of myself to go without touching her. I afterwards trembled at the danger I had escaped.

This was only the beginning of a career, too extensive to chronicle here, devoted to whoring, accompanied by that passion for alcohol celebrated in his published essays. ‘I do fairly acknowledge that I love Drinking,’ he wrote in one of his journalistic efforts, ‘that I have a constitutional inclination to indulge in fermented liquors, and that if it were not for the restraints of reason and religion
I am afraid I should be as constant a votary of Bacchus as any man.’ It was, in fact, alcoholism which hastened his death.

Like Johnson, Boswell was tortured by a fundamental fear of death. He sought reassurance of any kind from anyone. He harassed the dying David Hume. The sceptical
philosophe
’s calm at his impending demise from liver cancer drove Boswell ever more distraught: he wanted to see in the unbeliever the fear which gripped himself. In vain he tried to make Hume reveal some spark of faith. At the sceptic’s imperviousness, Boswell became increasingly desperate:

I… felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr. Johnson’s noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections during the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms.

The thought of somebody dying without dread was unbearable.

Boswell was irresistibly drawn to public executions. Such solemn occasions called to mind the reality of death – they were meant to – yet they were also fascinating to him. With voyeuristic horror, he felt compelled to see what actually happened as living human flesh became a lifeless corpse. Afterwards, he would be driven to drinking and whoring in hopes of obliterating these sights and their phantoms from his mind.

Desperately seeking escape from the lessons of his upbringing and hoping to reinvent himself, Boswell wrote himself endless instructions, telling himself who to be. Basically, he wished always to be Boswell, the sum total of his moments of consciousness – there lay the proto-Romantic in him – but he was never certain of his own nature for long. Insecure in his hold on his identity, he sought figures from whom he could draw strength and other qualities which would define and enhance him. ‘Be vigorous. Be Temple,’ he adjured himself (Temple was a close friend). And he had many such models, who were remarkably various. Johnson was to the fore. But so were Addison, Steele, Shakespeare, Isaac Walton, Donne and Demosthenes (we remember
Cornelius Scriblerus’s wishes for his son). Nor did he confine himself to actual persons – over and again, Boswell cast himself in fictional roles. Now he was the hero of a novel, now ‘a morose don’ or an amorous Spaniard, now a man of pleasure, a castaway, an officer on campaign, or even Prince Hal. Above all, Captain Macheath, the highwayman hero of
The Beggar’s Opera
, exercised a perennial fascination over him. A prisoner whom Boswell visited on the eve of his execution was described as ‘just a Macheath. He was dressed in a white coat and blue silk vest and silver, with his hair neatly queued and silver-laced hat, smartly cocked.’ The hanging the next day of this dashing figure so depressed Boswell that he could not sleep alone, and he shared a bed with his friend Erskine. But Macheath, if not the felon, was to rise again in the person of Boswell, who, for an evening, styled himself ‘Macdonald’ and took two streetwalkers to a tavern. Partly facetiously, but seriously as well, Boswell thus tried on a wardrobe of togs and accessories, so as to make his mark as a player on the stage of life.

Another form of instruction was the ‘Inviolable plan’ Boswell wrote out to curb the terrible bout of melancholy he suffered on arrival in Utrecht: ‘Learn
retenue
. Pray do. Don’t forget in Plan… Read your Plan every morning regularly at breakfast, and when you travel, carry it in trunk. Get commonplace book… The more and oftener the restraint, the better. Be steady.’ Under the instructions of Johnson, he told himself that control was paramount: ‘what may be innocent to others is a fault to you till you attain more command of yourself. Temperance is very necessary for you, so never indulge your appetites without restraint.’

Boswell wanted to make a gentleman of himself, but also knew that this was a role, and he recognized the near impossibility of carrying it off. One consequence was that on beginning to write a newspaper column, he styled himself
The Hypochondriack
. Hypochondria spelt that supersensitivity of mind and feelings which gave Boswell his sense of superiority, and would thus make him part of an élite authorized to comment on the human condition.

Just as Johnson suffered from the ‘black dog’, Boswell, too, had long
periods in which his mind was dominated by depression. Whereas Johnson, however, advocated fighting it, Boswell was more inclined, characteristically in the newer age of sensibility, to wallow and glory in it, as proof of membership of the fashionable culture of suffering and supersensitivity. Johnson was moralistic about melancholy, Boswell, by contrast, self-revelatory. In one extraordinary essay, he confessed that, though he was in the depths of depression, he would share it with his readers, so as to relieve himself, demonstrate his candour – or maybe even help them understand their own condition:

The Hypochondriack is himself at this moment in a state of very dismal depression, so that he cannot be supposed capable of instructing or entertaining his readers. But after keeping them company as a periodical essayist for three years, he considers them as his friends, and trusts that they will treat him with a kindly indulgence….

Instead of giving this month an essay published formerly, of which I have a few, that after a proper revision I intend to adopt into this series, I have a mind to try what I can write in so wretched a frame of mind; as there may perhaps be some of my unhappy brethren just as ill as myself, to whom it may be soothing to know that I now write at all.

In Boswell may be seen the new intense, introspective, self-revelatory identity of the late Enlightenment. The imperfections of self are no longer, as in Johnson, being fought, but are being exposed and, perhaps, enjoyed.

The life of the historian must be short and precarious.

EDWARD GIBBON

As well as being the author of the monumental
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, which appeared in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, Edward Gibbon was the historian of a different, but no less taxing, subject: himself. His
magnum opus
complete, he soon turned autobiographer – indeed, several times over, for he produced six different drafts of his memoirs, and several further fragments besides, between 1788 and 1793. Had he not been cut off prematurely by death at the age of 56 in the following year, the autobiography might well have proliferated, becoming ever more unfinished, out-Shandying
Tristram Shandy
. The historian of Rome evidently found imagining himself trickier than appraising an empire.

Why? As a historian, Gibbon stated himself honour-bound to present his life, both to himself and to the supposed public, so as to meet the scholar’s criterion of ‘naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of more serious history’. But he was evidently also intent upon crafting a psychologically gratifying version of the self, painting a canvas which presented a favourable, even flattering, face to the world which made sense to its author of his own existence. It was to be warts and all, but the warts had to be good ones. Not least, Gibbon felt obliged, at the outset, to justify so vain an undertaking as autobiographizing: what made man unique in Creation, he explained, were the powers of memory and the recognition of one’s wider place in time and space, within the grand scheme of things:

Our imagination is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which Nature has confined us. Fifty or an hundred years may be alotted to an individual; but we stretch forwards beyond death with such hopes as Religion and Philosophy will suggest, and we fill up the silent vacancy that precedes our birth by associating ourselves to the authors of our existence.

Gibbon the author needed to situate himself amid ‘the authors of [his] existence’: to know his place – ‘beyond death’ included – helped to transcend it. By contributing to commemoration, autobiography was an assertion of the dignity of man, or a proper expression of self-esteem. Such a sentiment could have come from Johnson and, like him, Gibbon believed that one of the duties and privileges of the classically educated man lay in enlarging the mind, soaring above the vulgar immediacy of the here and now and triumphing over mortality.

Unlike Johnson, however, Gibbon was a man of the Enlightenment, specifically an unbeliever. Whereas the former’s sense of self was gloomy – and rightly so, he would have insisted, given man’s fallen state – the latter was disposed, temperamentally and philosophically, to optimism, albeit an optimism cloaked in the defensive and distancing self-mockery which was second nature to the ‘lord of irony’. Adopting an upbeat stance justified the course of a far from conventional existence. The brave or strained cheerfulness of the
Memoirs
attempted to digest a rather wayward life into a coherent teleology, a well-constructed drama with a beginning and a middle (if the end was judiciously left open). In justifying the ways of Gibbon to the world, the author of his being wished to convey the sense that, against the odds, the pieces had all fallen into place. Apparent false starts and dead ends all had their reward, nothing had been wasted. The ‘all is for the best’-ism of Pope’s
Essay on Man
–

All Nature is but art unknown to thee
All chance direction which thou can’st not see –

was here applied to the historian’s life, with the autobiographer arrogating to himself God’s position of narrative omniscience. Young
Gibbon blundered his way through his early years, but some higher destiny (if scripted only by a picaresque sense of artistic form) was guiding him through the vicissitudes of things. Deceptive in informality and irony, this was autobiography in the mock-heroic, Olympian mode, with the author standing back from himself, in the autumn of life, objectively to vindicate his existence.

The autobiographer’s task was in this case made simpler yet more taxing by the fact that Gibbon could not be of public interest except as the author of the
Decline and Fall
– he was hardly a man known for military or amatory conquests or for memorable opinions
à la
Johnson – he was a poor conversationalist – and a parliamentary career which involved not a single speech would have had little more than curiosity value. What any reader would want to know was what fitted him to write such a sublime work. He had the sense to recognize that therein lay the mystery and fascination of his life.