The root of the disagreement between Johnson and Swift?

Samuel Johnson's dislike of Jonathan Swift's work is famous. Jackson Bate offers the reasonable explanation that what Johnson saw in Swift was a dark reflection of himself--the self he could have been had he let his satiric bite run free rather than constantly attempting to check it and temper it with religious belief. Bate writes,

The Life of Swift strikes the modern reader as the only hopelessly biased Life. Here we can only try to remember Johnson's lifelong fear, especially after the breakdown in his fifties, of the powerful satiric bitterness of his own nature, and his dread--a dread with which he was constantly living--of falling into the anger and the sense of emptiness about life that he associated with Swift.

I suspect Evelyn Waugh may have played a similar role--a sort of "there but by the grace of god"-style role model--for satirically inclined interwar writers.

Bate's position is convincing, and it conforms to what we know of Johnson and of Swift (even as it does nothing to lessen the wish that their lives could have overlapped, giving them an opportunity to meet). But perhaps the explanation is simpler? Perhaps, it's rooted in a simple disagreement about the proper way to approach a hill?

As we saw on Friday, Johnson is documented as a hill-roller: in his fifties, while on the trip to Scotland with Boswell, he took a wistful roll down one, to the amusement (and, presumably, brief worry) of all around. Swift, on the other hand--well, let's let Leo Damrosch, author of last year's excellent biography, tell it:

Swift . . . became convinced that exercise was beneficial, in an era when medical theory discouraged it, and most people avoided it. At Moor Park, as he told Deane Swift long afterward, he would work for two hours and then take a break by running up to the top of a nearby hill and down again. "This exercise he performed in about six minutes; backwards and forwards it was about half a mile."

Oh, I'll admit it seems silly: Could two such great minds as these truly be set at odds by such a silly difference? Could a preference for rolling rather than running down a hill really be enough to cause Johnson to cast Swift beyond of the pale of his appreciation?

Perhaps not--but then, perhaps we should remember what Swift's friend Gulliver learned about the origins of the ongoing conflict between Lilliput and Blefuscu:

It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

Suddenly that hill is looking more like a mountain, isn't it?

Samuel Johnson gets silly

At the end of a too-long, too-busy work week, what better than to share too instances of Samuel Johnson being utterly silly? In case you haven't realized it from my Twitter feed, I've been immersed in Johnson the past ten days or so, going from Boswell to W. Jackson Bate's 1975 biography, and both are a reminder that Johnson is always more varied, more multifarious, than whatever impression is most recent in your mind.

And one of the ways he surprises is by being silly--physically silly. To wit, a moment at the top of a hill during his tour of the Hebrides with Boswell, as related by Bate, via the years-later memories of Johnson's companion that day, Bennet Langton:

Johnson, delighted by its steepness, said he wanted to "take a roll down." They tried to stop him. But he said he "had not had a roll for a long time," and taking out of his pockets his keys, a pencil, a purse, and other objects, lay down parallel at the edge of the hill, and rolled down its full length, "turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom."

Johnson was fifty-five at the time.

This one is even better. At conversation with the Reverend Alexander Grant, Johnson mentioned that Joseph Banks had recently sent back reports of a strange animal called a kangaroo. Then,

In order to render his description more vivid, Johnson rose from his chair and [in the words of Grant], "volunteered an imitation of the animal. The company stared . . . nothing could be more ludicrous than the appearance of a tall, heavy, grave-looking man, like Dr. Johnson, standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.

May your weekend be suitably bouncy.

Turning to Johnson

From W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson: A Biography:

Because he was so susceptible to symbols, his impulse had always been to deny their power over the imagination and to try to put them at arm's length. The dignity of human nature required this if one was to remain a "free agent." Typical was the way he would dismiss the effect on us of the seasons ("imagination operating on luxury"). But now, in many ways, he was changing--not changing in his character but in what he said or admitted.

As November came to Litchfield, which he could reasonably doubt that he would ever see again, he felt the poignance of autumn as never before. One of Horace's odes especially (IV, vii) haunted him--the one in which the large revolving changes of nature, destroying and re-creating, are contrasted with the hopes and destiny of short-lived man. Before Johnson left Litchfield he translated it into English verse. The snows of winter--the ode begins--are melting as spring returns. The fields and woods are again green. But the human being, after entering his own winter, will not return. He will be like those millions of others who have entered the night--"ashes and a shade." The ode, in its clear-eyed existential honesty and mellow acceptance, typifies what Johnson had prized in Horace when he was a boy at Stourbridge--a union of qualities he had associated with Cornelius, who had seemed to the half-blind, half-deaf, awkward youth such a model of grace and classical acceptance of fact. Of the many translations of this famous ode, none catches the spirit of Horace more closely. At moments it is even more condensed than Horace. "Each revolving year," says Horace, "each hour that snatches the day, bids us not to hope for immortal life." Johnson wrote, "The changing year's successive plan / Proclaims mortality to man." Yet this is balanced by a flourish of stoic gaiety that goes beyond Horace. "Who knows whether the gods," asks Horace, "will add tomorrow's time to the sum of today?" In Johnson this becomes: "Who knows if Jove who counts our score / Will toss us in one morning more?"