Técnicas y procedimientos metaficcionales

quarrel or contest’ - a definition less immediately suggestive of a competitive ‘match’ (and not exemplified with a quotation from Browne, but only with one fi-om Joseph Glanvill). More problematically, there are terms that exercise the author of the notes to Christian Morals which do not appear in the Dictionary. ‘Eluctation’ and ‘bivious’, both of which are glossed in the notes, do not appear in either the first or fourth editions. There is no entry even in the fourth edition for ‘phylactery’, though here in Christian Morals the note provides a detailed explanation: ‘A phylactery is a writing bound upon the forehead, containing something to be kept constantly in mind. This was practised by the Jewish doctors with regard to the Mosaic law’ {CM, 86). The same is true o f ‘funambulatory’, ‘pinax’, ‘tetrick’, ‘parallaxis’,

‘quodlibetically’, ‘ergotism’ and ‘choragium’i they are defined here in the notes, but fail to make any appearance even in the fourth edition of the Dictionary. Johnson’s failure to include these words in the first edition is not grave, but their absence from the fourth edition is more curious. Clearly these are quite unusual words; yet Johnson appears disposed in the Dictionary (as I shall illustrate in Chapter Four) to take Browne’s use of a word as sufficient reason for its inclusion. If he had glossed these words in his own edition of Christian Morals, why did he not incorporate them in his revised Dictionary! One possible answer is that the notes and definitions were not his.

In an attempt to remedy the uncertainty over the authorship of the notes, O M Brack has argued that, regardless of the punctuation of the title- page, there are good reasons for accepting them as Johnson’s. He claims that ‘It is the nature of these annotations that clearly demonstrates Johnson’s

authorship’, citing their style and range of knowledge as evidence.^ His article does not deal with all the issues I have mentioned, but it is for the most part persuasive. He makes a credible case for accepting that the notes were Johnson’s, even if they were not advertised as such. Some of them certainly feel Johnsonian; the cadences sound like his, and so does their erudition.^ If one does accept his authorship, a number of them appear striking. For instance, the mystic Jean Baptiste van Helmont and his alchemist associate and guide Paracelsus are dismissed as ‘wild and enthusiastick authors of romantick chymystry’ - strong language, perhaps reflecting Johnson’s dislike of unempirical Paracelsianism (CM, 122). There is an implicit criticism of Pope’s classical learning when Browne mentions Cato and the note observes that the Cato in question is Cato the Censor ‘who is frequently confounded, and by POPE amongst others, with Cato of Utica’ (CM, 66). Geographical nicety seems important; Browne points out that life’s seas are rough and one should not suppose one is ‘sailing from Lima to Manillia, when you may ... sleep before the wind’ - to which the note runs ‘Over the pacifick ocean, in the course of the ship which now sails from Acapulco to Manilla, perhaps formerly from Lima, or more properly from Callao, Lima not being a sea­ port’ (CM, 64). To question scientific practice, knowledge of history and knowledge of geography is not simply to correct a text’s errors, but rather to insinuate one’s own wisdom and prejudices into its frame. In this case, the notes, if they are indeed Johnson’s, make gestures reminiscent of the Dictionary's famous moments of bias and predictive of some of the

^ Brack, ‘Samuel Johnson Edits for the Booksellers’, 15.

’ As for instance in this note (see CM, 132): ‘Bellisarius, after he had gained many victories, is said to have been reduced, by the displeasure of the emperor, to actual beggary: Bajazet, made captive by Tamerlane, is reported to have been shut up in a cage. It may somewhat gratify those who deserve to be gratified, to inform them that both these stories are FALSE.’

peculiarities of his later edition of Shakespeare.

Particularly arresting is the note to the opening of section nine of the second part of Browne’s work. In this section Browne argues that a person’s physical appearance is an index of his nature. He begins;

Since the brow speaks often true, since eyes and noses have tongues, and the countenance proclaims the heart and inclinations; let observation so far instruct thee in

physiognomical lines, as to be some rule for thy distinction, and guide for thy affection unto such as look most like men (CM 127).

The note reads: ‘This is a very fanciful and indefensible section.’ ‘Fanciful’, as I shall suggest later in this chapter, is a loaded word where Johnson is concerned. As for ‘indefensible’, it is an adjective which carries unambiguous moral weight; it is clear that the author of the note disapproves of Browne’s belief in the exotic doctrine of physiognomy. In the Dictionary

‘physiognomy’ is defined as ‘the art of discovering the temper, and

foreknowing the future by the features of the face’. In other words, it is little better than astrology. And Johnson, familiar with seventeenth-century thoughts on the subject from Burton and probably from Jonson’s The Alchemist^ was doubtless troubled by physiognomy’s popularity among his own contemporaries, its fashionable status owing much to Chesterfield’s insistence on the importance of observation and the understanding of appearances.* Browne’s acceptance of such a voguish, insubstantial practice was characteristic of a generous credulity that Johnson found it hard to accept in him. If it is Johnson’s, this criticism is of a piece with other remarks of his; the indictment of Browne’s ‘fanciful’ moments is rooted not only in his own

See for instance his letters of 10 March 1746 and 18 January 1750, in The Letters of Philip

Dormer Stanhope 4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, 6 vols (London, 1932), III,

740; IV, 1492-5. Johnson complained that Chesterfield’s letters ‘teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master’ {Life, I, 266).

empiricism, but also in his recognition that a doubting, religiously underpinned empiricism is what allies him with Browne and assures his sympathy towards him.

However, the notes to Christian Morals do not compare, even at their most suggestive, with what the biographical part of the edition has to offer in terms of insights into Browne, Johnson, and the affinity between the two. This affinity is apparent in the flashes of autobiography that colour the Life. Johnson salutes his old Oxford college, of which Browne had himself been an alumnus. Yet he goes on to suggest that a ‘scholastick and academical life’ offers ‘more safety than pleasure’ (CM, 12). This is perhaps an act of recoil on Johnson’s part, as he remembers his own experience of academia during his truncated stay at Oxford, a time of more pleasure than safety. He derides what he refers to as ‘the reciprocal civility of authors’ (CM, 10), a condition of the Grub Street world in which he had once had to toil, and mentions - thinking, perhaps, not just of Browne, but also of himself-the ‘troublesome irruptions of scepticism, with which inquisitive minds are frequently

harrassed’ (CM, 44). There are some characteristically Johnsonian conceits: Browne’s career serves as the occasion for an oblique recollection of his own, and in depicting an author ‘panting for fame’, determined to ‘enter the lists’, he conjures a somewhat chivalric image of authorship (CM, 8). It is an image Johnson uses elsewhere; in Rambler 93 he suggests the author be

considered as a kind of general challenger, whom every one has a right to attack; since he quits the common rank of life, steps forward beyond the lists, and offers his merit to the publick judgment’ ?

The competitive nature of the image seems more appropriate to the highly

contentious literary marketplace within which Johnson worked than it does to the more gentlemanly, or at any rate less commercial, world of letters where Browne was able to operateJohnson’s several references to literary politics - to ‘that exuberant applause with which every man repays the grant of perusing a manuscript’,** or to the ease of conveying a book to the press and ‘plead[ing] the circulation of a false copy as an excuse for publishing the true’*^ - reflect tellingly on manuscript culture, and on its manners and practices. This capacity to find a foretaste of his own society in the social situation of Browne is a symptom of biographical sympathy. The model for Johnson’s ‘sympathetic’ biography is the Life of Savage. Clearly, Johnson knew Savage and did not know Browne, which meant that he commanded very different resources in writing the two lives. But the Life o f Savage establishes Johnson’s habit of discriminating between a writer’s public and private lives - indeed, of recognizing the need for such a distinction - and understanding his subjects as people rather than merely as authors.

Furthermore, it enforces a sense that the errors and quirks of the past can be an education useful to one’s understanding of the present. Paul Fussell has argued that

There is abundant autobiographical meaning in the Lives but it is not really so singular and personal as it might appear. To

Isobel Grundy suggests that the reference to Browne entering the lists connotes something ‘public, formalized, ostentatious; Johnson often places the contests of both wits and beauties in this chivalric and unreal setting’. See Isobel Grundy, Samuel Johnson and The Scale of

Greatness (Leicester, 1986), 111.

' ' CM, 7. The words recall Johnson’s more celebrated remark - perhaps triggered by his reluctance to look over the manuscript of a new play by Frances Brooke - that ‘Praise is the tribute which every man is expected to pay for the grant of perusing a manuscript’ {JM, 11,

192) and the observation that ‘A man, who is asked by an authour, what he thinks of his work, is put to the torture, and is not obliged to speak the truth’ (Life, 111, 320).

CM, 8. This of course refers to the circumstances of Religions publication. But it may also serve, at least obliquely, as a reminder of the chicanery of Pope, who seduced Curll into issuing an edition of his letters in order that he might have reason to issue an edition of his own, Johnson’s account of this appears in Lives, 111, 155-160.

the very end he [Johnson] remains faithful to his root conception of writing as an elucidation of general human nature/^

He has also claimed that ‘It is the pre-eminence of delusion and energetic self-destruction in human affairs that is the great theme of the Lives'}^ Certainly, the Life o f Browne reflects a tendency to see the writer as an individual and yet at the same time a representative of general humanity. Literary practice, and indeed the whole business of life, repeats itself across generations - or so Johnson seems to say. In the light of which, can he have failed to derive some slight amusement from the fact that one of his Lichfield teachers, who died not long after he left his care, and of whom his one surviving recollection is that he ‘published a spelling-book, and dedicated it to the UNIVERSE’, rejoiced in the name of Thomas Browne?

Johnson’s Life o f Browne is not the product of especially diligent research; its interest lies not in the facts it rehearses, but in what it makes of them. It contains little information that is not in Andrew Kippis’s entry in the Biographia Britannica (1748), and reproduces a substantial part of the life written by Browne’s intimate John Whitefoot for the 1712 Posthumous

Works. Johnson’s inclusion of a sizable extract from Whitefoot reflects his customary reliance on others’ material, a habit visible not just in his early lives but in later efforts - the most notable example being the life of Edward Young. Johnson’s use of Whitefoot can be interpreted as an example of authorial sloth or as a mark of respect for his predecessor’s account, but it should be recalled that he believed strongly in the principle that the

Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life o f Writing (London, 1972), 278. Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life o f Writing, 264.

Life, 1,43.

observations of an eye-witness are always the best record of a man’s character/^ It is also possible to conclude that for Johnson, what mattered about writing a life of Browne was not to assemble a new set of hard-won facts, but rather to insert his altogether more valuable critical insights into a pre-existent factual structure.

Johnson’s lack of research shows particularly in one omission. Like both Kippis and Whitefoot before him, he appears unaware that Browne testified before Sir Matthew Hale in a trial of witches held at Bury St Edmunds in March 1664. Browne’s deposition is reproduced, as indirect speech, in the anonymous account of the trial published in 1682, which appears in the catalogue of Harleian Miscellany.'® It seems he argued that ‘in Denmark there had been lately a great Discovery of Witches’ and that the behaviour of the accused tallied with what had been witnessed elsewhere, inasmuch as the accused’s fits were

Natural,... but only heightened to a great excess by the subtilty of the Devil, co-operating with the Malice of these which we term Witches, at whose Instance he doth these Villanies.’’

Called as an expert witness, Browne lent weight to the prosecution, though not to the extent implied in some accounts. The defendants were hanged, and Browne has been censured for his part in this.^° What matters here, though, is not what Browne thought or said, but rather how it was subsequently

interpreted.

See for instance Life, II, 166, where Johnson, complaining of the weakness of Goldsmith’s life of Parnell, pronounces that ‘Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him’.

Catalogus Bibliothecae Harleianae, 5 vols (London, 1743-5), IV, 737.

A Tryal of Witches, at the Assizes held at Bury St Edmonds for the County of Suffolk; on

the Tenth day of March, 1664. Before Sir Matthew Hale Kt (London, 1682), 41-2.

It is unclear whether Johnson knew of the Bury St Edmunds trial. He was certainly familiar with the figure of Sir Matthew Hale; in the Life of Johnson, Boswell records Johnson mentioning him on three separate occasions, and Hale is frequently quoted in the Dictionary. Gilbert Burnet, whose History o f his Own Times Johnson owned, wrote a life of Hale. This life, the tone of which is little short of encomiastic, omits any account of the Bury St Edmunds trial, but Burnet’s publisher, William Shrowsbury, was also the publisher of works by and relating to Hale, and in a catalogue of these, which appears at the end of Burnet’s account, one of the listed items is A Short Treatise touching Sheriffs Accounts, to which is added a Tryal o f

Witches, at the Assizes held at Burey St Edmonds, for the County o f Suffolk 10 th o f March, 1664. before the said Sir Matthew Hale, Knight?^ One wonders that Shrowsbuiy did not alert Burnet to this document; or wonders, if Burnet was perhaps aware of it, why it failed to influence his account. Even if Johnson knew Burnet’s life of Hale, there is no guarantee that he saw Shrowsbury’s advertisement, but he would appear to have known plenty of Hale from other sources. His copy of Hale’s The Primitive Origination of Mankind is bound with his copy of Burton’s Anatomy o f Melancholy, which was, according to Boswell’s report of Dr Maxwell’s account of Johnson, ‘the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise’.^^ Discussing witchcraft with a dinner companion on his trip with Boswell to Scotland, Johnson remarked that ‘wise and great men have condemned witches to die’.^^ The footnote in the Hill-Powell edition of Boswell reads: ‘Johnson was thinking of Sir Matthew Hale for one.’ One

Gilbert Burnet, The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (London, 1696), 102.

Life, II, 121.

might perhaps add: ‘And Sir Thomas Browne.’ In his Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy o f Macbeth (1745), Johnson deals with the subject more fully. He explains that ‘The reality of witchcraft or enchantment

... has in all ages and countries been credited by the common people, and in most by the learned themselves’. In Shakespeare’s age it was ‘not only unpolite, but criminal, to doubt it’.^^ Johnson considers witchcraft the feeble superstition of a less enlightened age, and indeed the statutes against

witchcraft - in force continuously since 1563 - were repealed when he was a young man, in 1736.^^ But in the Obset'vations on the Tragedy o f Macbeth he dwells on the subject for a thousand words, and it is clear that even as it repels him it also intrigues him.

Such generalizations usually stem from a specific factual source. Naturally, a close familiarity with the work of both Browne and Hale is no guarantee that Johnson was aware of the way in which the two men’s paths had fleetingly crossed, but the absence from Johnson’s account of this

episode means the absence of the one detail of Browne’s life which was liable to be held against him by later generations. Joseph Towers, writing two years after Johnson’s death, claimed that

The principal fault of Johnson, as a biographical writer, seems to have been, too great a propensity to introduce injurious reflections against men of respectable character, and to state facts unfavourable to their memory, on slight and insufficient grounds/*

Towers perhaps exaggerates, but it is true that where Johnson found material detrimental to his subjects’ reputations, he was not slow to include it, and if

Yale, VII, 3,6.

See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline o f Magic (London, 1971), 449-50,

Joseph Towers, An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr Samuel Johnson, in

The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson, ed. O M Brack, Jr and Robert E. Kelley (Iowa