a conformer to the innocent ways of the
world: and once, when some Quaker was denouncing the vanities of dress,
he broke out, "Oh, let us not be found when our Master calls us,
ripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from
our souls and tongues! . . . Alas, sir, {135} a man who cannot get to
heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a
grey one." Though he practised some severities, such as fasting,
himself, he was altogether opposed to an austere view of life: was no
friend, he said, to making religion appear too hard, by which he
thought many good people had done harm. Though he walked with
enthusiastic reverence on any ground trodden by saints or hermits, yet
he was quite clear that retirement from the world was for ordinary men
and women both a mistake and a crime; and he regarded with special
distrust all "youthful passion for abstracted devotion." The
Carthusian silence was, of course, particularly obnoxious to the master
and lover of talk. "We read in the Gospel," he said, "of the apostles
being sent to preach, but not to hold their tongues." We all like to
find reasons of religion or philosophy in justification of our own
pleasures: and no doubt one hears the personal prejudices of the lover
of society as well as the serious thought of the student of life in the
warmth with which he denounces solitude as "dangerous to reason without
being favourable to virtue," and declares that "the solitary mortal is
certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad."

But real as the social element in Johnson {136} was, and important as
the remembrance of it is for a corrective of the too solemn portrait of
him for which Boswell gives some excuse, it never got the mastery of
him. In the ordinary way the life of the pre-eminently social man or
woman gradually disappears in a dancing sunshine of sociability. The
butterfly finds crossing and recrossing other butterflies in the airy,
flowery spaces of the world such a pleasant business that it asks no
more: above all, it does not care to ask the meaning of a thing so easy
and agreeable as day to day existence. The pleasures and the business
that lie on life's surface, the acquaintances and half friends that are
encountered there, are enough for it: and the crowded empty days glide
by as easily and as imperceptibly as a boatful of dreaming idlers
drifting on unawares till the pace suddenly quickens for a moment,