Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

society, scorned it. And in his literary work, as in that ofSwinburne, there are many prayers. One of the forms of composition he used a lot was prayers, in which he asked God forgiveness for how little he had tolerated, for all the foolish and crazy things he had done in his life. . . . But all of this, this examination of Johnson’s character, we will leave for another class, because Johnson’s private life is revealed, not by him—he tried to hide it and never complained about it—but by an extraordinary character, JamesBoswell, who devoted himself to visiting Johnson and writing down on a daily basis all of his conversations; and in this way he left behind the best biography in all of literature, according toMacaulay. 11 So, we will devote our next class to Boswell’s work and to examining Boswell’s character, which has been widely discussed, criticized by some and praised by others.

CLASS 10

    SAMUEL JOHNSON AS SEEN BY BOSWELL. THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY. BOSWELL AND HIS CRITICS.
    MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1966
    Dr. Johnson was already fifty years old. He had published his dictionary, for which he was paid 1,500 pounds sterling—which became 1,600 when his publishers decided to give him one hundred more—when he finished. He was slowing down. He then published his edition of Shakespeare, which he finished only because his publishers had received payments from subscribers, so it had to be done. Otherwise, Dr. Johnson spent his time engaged in conversation.
    It was around this time that Oxford University, from which he had not been able to graduate, decided to make him a doctor,
honoris causa
. He founded a club, over which he presided like a dictator, according to the biography by James Boswell, and after the publication of his dictionary he found he was famous, well-known, but not rich. For a while, he spent his life in poverty but “with pride of literature.” According to Boswell’s account, he appears to have overdone it. In fact, he had a certain tendency toward idleness; for a time after the dictionary was published, he did almost nothing at all, though he was probably working on the Shakespeare edition, as I mentioned. The truth is, in spite of his numerous accomplishments, he had a natural tendency toward idleness. He preferred to talk rather than write. So, he worked only on that edition of Shakespeare, which was one of his last works, for he received complaints, and satirical responses, and this made him decide to finish the work, because the subscribers had already paid.
    Johnson had a peculiar temperament. For a time he was extremely interested in the subject of ghosts. He was so interested in them that he spent several nights in an abandoned house to see if he could meet one. Apparently, he didn’t. There’s a famous passage by the Scottish writer, ThomasCarlyle, I think it is in his
Sartor Resartus
—which means “The Tailor Retailored,” or “The Mended Tailor,” and we’ll soon see why—in which he talks about Johnson, saying that Johnson wanted to see a ghost. 1 And Carlyle wonders: “What is a ghost? A ghost is a spirit that has taken corporal form and appears for a while among men.” Then Carlyle adds, “How could Johnson not have thought of this when faced with the spectacle of the human multitudes he loved so much in the streets of London, for if a ghost were a spirit that has taken a corporal form for a brief interval, why did it not occur to him that the London multitudes were ghosts, that he himself was a ghost? What is each man but a spirit that has taken corporal form briefly and then disappears? What are men if not ghosts?”
    It was around this time that the Tory, conservative, government—not the Whig, liberal—decided to recognize Johnson’s importance and grant him a pension. And the Earl of Bute was commissioned to discuss the issue with Johnson. 2 This was because the government did not want to offer it to him directly because of his reputation and the many statements he had made against pensions and other things of that nature. In fact, his definition of a pension, which appears in his dictionary, is famous; it says a pension is an allowance received by a state mercenary, generally for having betrayed his country. And as Johnson was a very violent man, they didn’t want to grant him a pension before having consulted with him. There was a legend, or story, that Johnson had an argument with a bookseller and felled him with a blow, not with a cane but with a book, a