thought, that sayings of this sort are
mere commonplaces, will never understand Johnson: he may give up the
attempt at once. The true commonplace is like the money of a
spendthrift heir: his guineas come and go without his ever thinking for
a moment where they came from or whither they go. But Johnson's
commonplaces had been consciously earned and were {169} deliberately
spent; he had made them himself, and when he handed them on to others
he handed himself on with them. Taine may perhaps be excused; for it
may require some knowledge of English to be sure of detecting the
personal flavour Johnson gave to his generalizations: but the
Englishman who misses it shows that he has mistaken the ornaments of
literature for its essence and exposes himself to the same criticism as
a man who cannot recognize a genius unless he is eccentric. Johnson
could break out in conversation as well as in his books into a noble
eloquence all his own; such a phrase as "poisoning the sources of
eternal truth," rises spontaneously to his lips when his indignation is
aroused. His free language disdained to be confined within any park
palings of pedantry. Some of his most characteristic utterances owe
their flavour to combining the language of the schools with the
language of the tavern: as when he said of that strange inmate of his
house, Miss Carmichael, "Poll is a stupid slut. I had some hopes of
her at first: but when I talked to her tightly and closely I could make
nothing of her; she was wiggle waggle, and I could never persuade her
to be categorical." He was the very antipodes of a retailer of other
men's thoughts in other men's words: {170} every chapter of Boswell
brings its evidence of Johnsonian eloquence, of Johnsonian quaintness,
raciness, and abundance, of the surprising flights of his fancy, of the
inexhaustible ingenuity of his arguments and illustrations. No talk
the world has ever heard is less like the talk of a commonplace man.
Yet the supreme quality of it is not the ingenuity or the oddness or
the wit: it is the thing Taine missed, the sovereign sanity of the
Johnsonian common sense. Bagehot once said that it was the business of
the English Prime Minister to have more common sense than any man.
Johnson is the Prime Minister of literature; or perhaps, rather, of
life. Not indeed for a time of revolution. For that we should have to
go to some one less unwilling to "disturb the system of life." But for
ordinary time