50. Boswell's bugbear: Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bertram Hylton Davis
For many of us Sir John Hawkins has long been an invisible character in the wings about whom Boswell, on the stage, makes rude remarks. Our hearts leaped up when we heard of this edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson. But alas! B. H. Davis has given us only a ‘processed’ Hawkins: abridged and in modernised spelling. I would rather have done my own abridging.
We must not blame Mr Davis for not doing what he did not attempt, or perhaps was not allowed, to do. The disappointment remains. If this venture helps to discourage (what is long overdue) a new edition of the full text, it will be a disaster.
Mr Davis labours in his introduction to defend Hawkins from Boswell's charge of ‘dark, uncharitable conjecture’. He thinks Hawkins's account of Johnson's marriage ‘forthright’ and Boswell's ‘sentimentilised’, and adds that the marriage ‘was not an ideal one’.
I cannot recall anyone who said it was, but I do not know on what evidence Hawkins can be pronounced, in this matter, ‘closer to the truth’ than Boswell. Neither biographer had ever seen Johnson and Tetty together.
Hawkins, without using the opprobrious word, gives us to understand that his marriage was purely mercenary. It may have been. But how could Hawkins know something about another man's heart which many a man does not perfectly know even about his own?
So with his more notorious comment on Johnson's expressions of grief for Tetty's death: ‘If this fondness was not dissembled, it was a lesson he had learned by rote’. It is, I suppose, just possible that a very queer man should be dissembling – and more possible that he might be deceiving himself – in private prayers and jottings intended for no eye but his own. But again, Hawkins has no evidence: he is merely ‘inclined to think’.
It is the same throughout. Like all the great denigrators – like Tacitus, Saint-Simon, and Strachey – Hawkins relies heavily on suppositions which cannot be either verified or refuted. ‘It is conjectured’, ‘Can it be supposed?’ ‘We must doubt’, are the staple of his logic.
Even a confession of ignorance can be used to insinuate nastiness: ‘How far his conversations with Savage might induce him to delight in tavern society, which is often a temptation to greater enormities than excessive drinking, cannot now be known’.
In many such passages one almost feels that Hawkins was born before his time. With Freud to help him, with neo-Georgians for readers and some great Victorian for his victim, might he not have been a popular author?
All this may suggest a positive enmity to Johnson on Hawkins's part, but my diagnosis would be different. Admittedly there was much in Johnson that displeased him: his earlier politics, his indolence and procrastination, the disorder of his life and dress, his legacy to his servant Frank (Hawkins seems never to have met Hodge, his cat), his promiscuous charities. Johnson's unwearied indulgence to the quarrelsome lame dogs who made his household is, for Hawkins, ‘pusillanimity’; his vulnerability by comparison, a weakness of nature. In a word, ‘Johnson could not be said to be a staid man’.
Hawkins was eminently staid: Boswell mentions ‘the rigid formality of his manners’. But his feeling towards Johnson is not hatred; it is tranquil disapproval de haut en bas.
This disapproval extends to almost everyone Hawkins mentions with the exception of Cave and Thrale. Cave is odd, because Hawkins regards professional authorship as a sort of prostitution, and one might have supposed that if those who write for periodicals are prostitutes, editors must be procurers.
It was, presumably Cave's ‘staidness’ that redeemed him. What Hawkins could not bear were people like Fielding and Smollett – or Goldsmith, whom he calls an ‘idiot’ for using an interview with a nobleman to advance his brother's interests instead of his own.
Hawkins, then, is as pure a specimen of the cold prig as we are ever likely to meet: but his book is very well worth reading. Partly for a vein of comedy which the author never suspected, but partly also on less discreditable grounds.
He has, after all, a great deal to tell us. He records the famous speech beginning ‘As soon as I enter the door of a tavern’. He gives us Johnson's reply to the baronet who said that, if his circumstances allowed, he would have settled £500 a year on him: ‘Sir, if the first peer in England were to make me such an offer I would show him the way downstairs’.
He has preserved the schoolboy's opinion that oracles ceased when the monasteries were dissolved. And he has valuable information to give us about the Ivy Lane Club, the possible theological background of Johnson's prayers for the dead, his later religious history (he read Nonconformist divines) and his last illness.
Contemporaries censured Hawkins for writing like a lawyer. It would be truer to say that his style, especially in the earlier pages, smells more of the 17th and the 18th century: the same long sentences sometime recalled to the main road with a recapitulatory ‘I say’.
Yet every now and then he strikes out something good – Johnson's ‘disquisitive propensity’, a playhouse ‘encircled with an halo of brothels’, Johnson ‘where he had reason to expect learning never showed mercy to ignorance’, and ‘the succession of knave to knave and fool to fool is hereditary and interminable’. Once, by an astonishing anticipation, we reach pure Macaulay: ‘the deep-mouthed rancour of Pulteneny and the yelping pertinacity of Pitt’.
Like all Johnsoniana the book leaves us with an increased respect for both Johnson and Boswell. For Boswell, because he is so incomparably the best of reporters: for Johnson, because he comes so unmistakably through them all. How many other men in all history have his double reality – real to our intellect (we believe him to be historical), but also as real to our imaginations as Mr Pickwick or Mr Woodhouse?