Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

And mark what Deeds adorn, or shame the Night!

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This is from the key poetic document of Savage’s career, the long visionary poem The Wanderer (1729), part meditation and part confession. Here, in its third canto, Savage describes such a night-pilgrimage through London. The young poet is guided by the Virgilian figure of ‘the Hermit’, a sage who has retired from the fret and folly of city life, to read poetry and philosophy in a cave and contemplate the wild beauty of Nature. This is one of Savage’s recurring fantasies of himself, as Johnson eventually came to understand.

The Hermit points out the glittering, delusive dissipations of the West End, as Savage must have instructed Johnson during their own nocturnal pacings round the squares of Mayfair:

Yon Mansion, made by beaming Tapers gay,

Drowns the dim Night, and counterfeits the Day.

From lumin’d windows glancing on the Eye,

Around, athwart, the frisking Shadows fly.

There Midnight Riot spreads illusive Joys,

And Fortune, Health, and dearer Time destroys.

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Against this glimpse of shadow play of aristocratic revelry the Hermit points out the solitary light from a garret window, which signals the ‘patriot’ poet hard at work, perhaps at the other end of the Strand, somewhere near Grub Street. For him, true wealth is not a handsome building, a property speculation, but an intellectual construction, a mental tower of learning and independent intelligence:

A feeble Taper, from yon lonesome Room,

Scatt’ring thin rays, just glimmers through the Gloom.

There sits the sapient BARD in museful Mood,

And glows impassion’d for his Country’s Good!

All the bright Spirits of the Just, combin’d,

Inform, refine, and prompt his tow’ring Mind!

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One may suspect, like Boswell, that Savage’s poetry was more improving than his conduct on such occasions. His Hermit, to say the least, is an idealisation. For it was on just such a night-walk, ten years before, that Savage had been involved in a brawl in a whorehouse, and killed a man and injured a woman, five minutes from St James’s Square in Charing Cross. As Johnson later observed, ‘The reigning Error of his Life was, that he mistook the Love for the Practice of Virtue’.

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When Johnson himself came to describe such night-walks in his own poem London (May 1738), he was much less dreamy and elevated. Indeed he was bitingly realistic, and we see again the big man with the cudgel. He seems to make some unmistakable reference to Savage’s less poetical exploits:

Prepare for Death, if here at Night you roam,

And sign your Will before you sup from Home.

Some fiery Fop, with new Commission vain,

Who sleeps on Brambles till he kills his Man;

Some frolick Drunkard, reeling from a Feast,

Provokes a Broil, and stabs you for a Jest.

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The irony here may be deeper than it first appears. Because this may be Savage himself speaking. There is considerable evidence that this passage, and indeed much of the poem, is a dramatic monologue written partly in Savage’s own voice. The whole of London may be partly Johnson’s attempt to render, in verse, the impact of Savage’s long conversations through the night. In this sense the poem could be considered as Johnson’s first version of Savage’s biography.

Certainly it seems true that Johnson first discovered in their night-walks the new form of intimate life-writing. It was to be like an extended conversation in the dark, taking ordinary facts and anecdotes, and pursuing them towards the shadowy and mysterious regions of a life, at the edge of the unknown or unknowable.

Johnson’s early impressions of these night-walks continue to be modified, in a complex way, by the other friends who recollected them. Arthur Murphy, a genial Irish playwright nearly twenty years Johnson’s junior, turned them into a piece of delightful comedy. Moving them even deeper into the West End, to the edge of Hyde Park, he added picturesque details of time and money, and with his playful turns of phrase seems to conjure up the witty outlines of a sketch that might have been written long after by Peacock or G. B. Shaw. (It should be read, perhaps, in a light Dublin brogue.)

Johnson has been often heard to relate, that he and Savage walked round Grosvenor Square till four in the morning; in the course of their conversation reforming the world, dethroning princes, establishing new forms of government, and giving laws to the several states of Europe, till, fatigued at length with their legislative office, they began to feel the want of refreshment; but could not muster up more than fourpence halfpenny.

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The ‘fourpence halfpenny’ is, of course, a spurious comic exactitude. Yet there is something about Murphy’s whole scenario, with its gracious absurdities, that carries a curious literary conviction. Why is this?

It is, surely, that Murphy has captured or suggested a premonition of the high, elegant, philosophic comedy of Johnson’s Rasselas (1759). The destitute Savage talking to Johnson about giving laws to Europe is not unlike the deluded Astronomer telling Prince Imlac that he has been secretly assigned the universal regulation of the weather. ‘… The sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the Dog Star, and mitigated the fervours of the Crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto refused my authority …’

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These confidences, too, are delivered in the dark, in the Astronomer’s turret, during a midnight storm. It was perhaps Savage who first gave Johnson the theme for Rasselas: that ‘dangerous prevalence of the imagination’ which Imlac discovers in the most interesting of human minds. Among those is the Poet himself, who must be acquainted with ‘all the modes of life’, who must commit his claims ‘to the justice of posterity’ and who must write ‘as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind’.

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Of all the versions of the night-walks which we have, it is that by Sir John Hawkins, with his direct knowledge of young Johnson from the mid-1740s, which most sharply emphasises the subversive political nature of their talks. Boswell consistently derides Hawkins’s accounts, not merely because he is the chief rival biographer, an amateur and musicologist, and so gratifyingly full of factual errors and ‘solemn inexactitudes’. For Hawkins, himself a lonely and awkward personality, gives an altogether rougher, darker, more emotionally unstable picture of the young writer finding his path than Boswell’s hero-worship will allow.

Hawkins’s youthful Johnson is never a comfortable figure, never a natural Tory clubman. He is anxious, self-doubting and obsessive. His politics, like his whole personality, are fierce and to some degree disruptive. Boswell could never be easy with this. Hawkins sees immediate common political ground between the two outcasts. ‘They had both felt the pangs of poverty, and the want of patronage: Savage had let loose his resentment against the possessors of wealth, in a collection of poems printed about the year 1727, and Johnson was ripe for an avowal of the same sentiments.’

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They both shared, according to Hawkins, ‘the vulgar opinion, that the world is divided into two classes, of men of merit without riches, and men of wealth without merit’. Hawkins also says that Savage’s ‘principles of patriotism’ – the semi-subversive Opposition to the Whig Government and the Hanoverian Crown – shaped Johnson’s political outlook during their talks, and may even have made him run the risk of Jacobite treason. ‘They both saw with the same eye, or believed they saw, that the then Minister meditated the ruin of this country; that Excise Laws, standing Armies, and penal Statutes, were the mean by which he [Walpole] meant to effect it; and, at the risk of their liberty, they were bent to oppose his measures …’

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Hawkins’s evident disapproval of this youthful radicalism makes it all the more convincing as evidence. It is exactly these political themes that Johnson does go on to address in his earliest, anonymous poetry and prose, up to the age of thirty-five. In the satire London, it takes the form of a general charge of political corruption against those in power:

Here let those reign, whom Pensions can incite

To vote a Patriot black, a Courtier white;

Explain their Country’s dear-bought Rights away,

And plead for Pirates in the Face of Day …

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