Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson

Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson

Johnson composed his elegy 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levett' (1783) only a year before his own demise (DeMaria, 1994). It is one of his most piercing works, and holds a special place in his canon. Coming very late in his writing life, the elegy condenses many of the concerns of his periodical essays, fiction and verse. It is not simply a powerful act of compression, a final summation of a lifetime's wisdom: one or two familiar Johnsonian themes are delicately adjusted, and for once we hear him speak in a public voice of a domestic companion. Experience of old age has scarcely softened his central theme of the vanity of human wishes. We are told in no uncertain terms that we are 'condemn'd to hope's delusive mine', and the generality and weight of the line are wholly familiar to his readers. Even so, there is something in these stanzas that I feel only in a handful of his most private and heart-rending letters and prayers. It is as though all that is condensed in his petition 'let my life be useful, and my death be happy' (Rogers, 1995) is re-cast in the third person and in the past: Levett's life was useful, his death was happy. One could call this quality 'emotion' or 'experience', but it would be inadequate and misleading to rest there, and words like 'directness' and 'personal' are hardly sufficient in themselves. All these qualities may be found in Johnson's most magisterial prose, if one is open to finding them. In this poem, though, we observe the human situation not 'with extensive view', as from an icy peak, but narrowly and at ground level. We are used to Johnson uttering grim truths about human kind with compassion for individual men and women, but here a valued companion of many years is reviewed with 'affection's eye'.

No action in his life became him like the leaving it. His death makes a kind of era in literature (Rogers, 1995). Piety and goodness will not easily find a more able defender, and it is delightful to see him set, as it were, his dying seal to the profession of his life, and to the truth of Christianity. So wrote Hannah More of her friend Samuel Johnson in 1785, and literary historians have generally agreed with her, even without knowing it, in calling his times 'the Age of Johnson'. For More, Johnson's death and the era whose limits it reveals are characterised by a religious faith strongly operating in both the private and the public spheres. 'Literature', here, is meant as Johnson defined it in the Dictionary, 'Learning; skill in letters', a sense derived from the Latin that was slowly fading from use even as she wrote. The power of invention that Johnson believed to be the heart of poetry, and that would soon become the hub of literature understood as creative or imaginative writing, is not the ...