Samuel Johnson

MR. LONGFELLOW’S volume,¹ made up of a biography of some one hundred and fifty pages, and a series of lectures, sermons, essays, and addresses, selected with excellent judgment from the mass of Mr. Johnson’s manuscripts and printed writings, should not only be a very precious one to those who have heretofore been well acquainted with this thinker and his thoughts, but it should attract to him a host of fresh readers.

Samuel Johnson was born in Salem, Mass., October 10, 1822. An active, daring boy, but studious withal, “ Salem great pasture” and the beaches of the town and of Marblehead, four miles away, were among the most efficient of his early tutors. Among these Mr. Longfellow also ranks the East India Museum, questioning whether it did not give the first impulse to his Oriental studies. More certainly, we find here the beginning of his interest in geology and mineralogy, an interest which continued through his life. We also note the omen that he was born in the very house where Bowditch, the astronomer, first saw the light. His home nourished his youth with his life-long satisfactions, — music, and flowers, and books, and “a simple, rational piety of the Unitarian stamp.” It was a home of strong affections, and it was the only home that Johnson knew until his father’s death, in 1876; for he was never married, and the duties of his manhood did not oblige him to relinquish it. Entering Harvard at sixteen, he was graduated in 1842. Mr. Longfellow’s earliest recollection of his friend is on “ class-day ” of that year, when he read the class oration, a fact which proved that his studious habits had not, cut him off from the sympathy and admiration of his fellow-students. His letters home are full of warm affection, and characterized by moral earnestness. One of the first records his admiration for Henry Ware Jr.’s sermon on the Personality of God, — the sermon in reply to Emerson’s famous Divinity School Address of 1838, with which Johnson was soon to find himself in perfect sympathy. Forty years later he recalled the Moral Philosophy of Jouffroy and Cousin’s criticism of Locke as among the rarest satisfactions of his college life. He entered the Divinity School in the autumn of his graduating year. There Mr. Longfellow met him, and their friendship of forty years began. The Transcendental movement was in full career. Emerson’s Nature and the great Address, Walker’s lectures on Natural Religion and Parker’s sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity, had been given to the world. Johnson, his biographer assures us, was a Transcendentalist by nature. “ He instinctively sought truths by direct vision, not by processes of induction. . . . But his Transcendentalism, which was later to become a carefully weighed rationale of thought, was, however, nature, a perception, a sentiment, an unargued faith.” Moreover, it took on a decidedly mystical form, of which certain letters afford ample evidence. A brief poem of these days gives us a glimpse of his mind. The poem is called Sickness.

The sickness which so deeply colors these lines compelled him, in May, 1844, to leave the school and go abroad. In 1845 we find him back again in Cambridge, and graduating in the following year. Some of his rarest hymns were written in these days; it was at this period he compiled, in connection with Mr. Longfellow, that Book of Hymns which Theodore Parker used to call “ The Book of Sams.”

The virtual excommunication of Theodore Parker by the Unitarians was then a recent consummation. The chivalry of Johnson’s nature, even more than his agreement in opinion, compelled him to go outside the camp with him, sharing his reproach. And so his “candidating” was no holiday affair. To his sympathy with Parker he added sympathy with the antislavery movement.

Johnson’s first regular preaching was to a new society in Dorchester. His political outspokenness broke up this connection after some two years of faithful service. Ecclesiasticism had for him no charms. “ I do not desire to sustain the churches,” he writes, “ false aggregations as they are for selfish and temporary purposes.” Indeed, already he had become jealous of all organized bodies. “Johnson is a man of the desert,” said Emerson to Bartol. He was, and he was not. He would have no invasion of his individuality by organized bodies. But his human sympathies were ever warm and deep. He worked with various societies, — the Free Religious, the Antislavery, and so on. He bound himself to none.

In 1853 he took charge of a new society in Lynn, to which he had for some time been preaching. It was a “ Free Church,” withdrawn, at his instance, from the Unitarian communion. He did not “ administer the sacraments.” But he was not a preacher, merely. He knew his people well, and was often in their homes, a radiant, joyful presence, and in their sorrow a voice of tender consolation. He worked hard in winter, but he knew how to rest in summer. He had a passion for the mountains and the sea. He was an untiring walker, He went abroad with geologic bag and hammer. He made up a cabinet of minerals, but his excursions brought him better things than these : crystalline clearness for his thought, and images of beauty for its illustration.

Early in his ministry at Lynn we find him working at certain ’ Eastern Lectures,’ which grew at length into the bulky volumes on the Religions of India and China, and that on Persia, uncompleted at his death, — alas for him and for us ! But these deeper studies did not obscure for him the concrete aspects of the time. The antislavery struggle was progressing, and no phase of it escaped his vigilance. The inadequacy of Mr. Longfellow’s biography and the papers following is on this side of Johnson’s character and work. It may he doubted whether the noblest passion of the time found upon any other lips a more lofty expression. Here and there in the letters is a passage that brings back to us the man ; his impassioned presence is again before us, and we hear his ringing words. For example, " Who shall dare be silent even for a day, while the nation is persecuting its prophets, and sending its saints to the scaffold, — while the public conscience seems to be drugged and stifled almost beyond rousing; and to look with a kind of vacant unconcern upon insidious processes by which the national legislature is being turned into a court of inquisitorial powers, and the national judiciary into mere machinery for the swift destruction of inalienable liberties! ”

in 1859 we find him and John Brown together, and a letter to Mr. Longfellow gives the impression made upon the peace-loving preacher by the man of war. In 1860 he again visited Europe, this time with Mr. Longfellow for his companion. He was absent fifteen months. It was mainly a play-time, but some work was done. The Book of Hymns was made over into Hymns of the Spirit, in a damp chamber of the “ Pension Besson,” at Nice ; and there, too, Johnson wrote several of his most beautiful devotional pieces.

Johnson’s letters from Europe are delightful reading. Though often dealing with hackneyed themes, they do it always in his own manner. Returning to his work in Lynn and to his home in Salem, the old duality engrossed him,— political interests and Oriental studies. To the problems of reconstruction he brought the standard of ideal justice. But its application was no easy matter. Right or wrong, his opinions were always his own. His correspondence with various friends from this time onward, as before, takes form and color from everything that is most vital in the passing days, — questions of education and reform, the labor agitation, the advance of science and its criticism on his Transcendental doctrines. Ever an affluent correspondent, his letters show how various were his reading and his thought. Some of his most notable letters are addressed to R. H. Manning, a man of business and affairs, living in Brooklyn, N. Y., whose sturdy protests from the standpoint of science frequently put him on the defensive, but never dull the edge of his regard. In the particular results of science no one rejoiced more heartily than he, but he was not in the least disposed to exchange its standpoint for his own. To convict other men of atheism was never his delight. He much preferred finding essential theism implicated in their negations; and he could detect an earnest thinker, and admire him, under whatever mask. Thus, for the writings of John Morley he had great respect and admiration. In 1870 his ministry at Lynn was ended. Two years later he published the first volume of his Oriental Religions, that upon India, and in 1877 that upon China. Mr. Longfellow has done admirable justice to these wide and careful studies, still leaving the impression that the student’s best reward was in his work. These books could not be popular ; they made too heavy a demand upon the reader’s time and his attention. So much reading, so much patience, so much meditation, went to their preparation that they yield their charm only to those who approach them with an earnestness akin to Johnson’s own. For such the charm is great, and grows with each return to their abounding wealth.

We should like nothing better than to follow closely upon Johnson’s track along the course of letters that reveal him in the final decade of his life; to go with him to North Andover, whither, in 1876, he retires to live on the ancestral farm ; to share the interests of study and affection that engross him there; to note how clearly, in that seclusion, he hears the various voices of the time and flings out his response. “ Ever a fighter, so one fight more,” we seem to hear him say, as the gauntlet of positivist, materialist, or supernaturalist rings at his feet, and he goes forth in letter or address to meet them, with real joy of battle.

We have but narrow space in which to speak of the essays and addresses that make up the greater part of Mr. Longfellow’s volume. They do not fully represent Johnson. His genius was so various, his range was so wide, that this was not to be expected. Knowing well the quality of his average preaching, we crave some fuller sign of that, and also some of his prophetic utterances in the times that tried men’s souls. That these last would have a historic rather than a present and permanent interest seems hardly a sufficient reason for their entire exclusion. But what we have embraces many aspects of his thought and style. The first three papers are upon Florence, The Alps of Switzerland and the Alps of the Ideal, and Symbolism of the Sea. These show the poet side, the fancy and imagination of the man. They also show how impossible it was for him to rest content with the mere outside of things. The Florence would be overrich in style, were it not for the underlying substance of the thought, which, like Titian’s men and women, can carry off any magnificence. This idealist was a realist as well. His eye and ear were marvelously sensitive to their respective pleasures. He was microcosmic as well as macrocosmic. Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise are described with loving faithfulness. And as he saw these wonders of art, he saw the wonders of nature minutely ; yet the multitude of parts did not obscure the whole. But what is most notable in these essays is that Florence, the Alps, and the Sea all bring to him his own of thought and aspiration. They show his interest in men, his passion for all noble liberties of body and of mind, his faith in popular government, his subordination of all things to the ethical.

The three papers next following these are on Fulfillment of Functions, Equal Opportunity for Woman, and Labor Parties and Labor Reform. These have none of the warmth and color of the preceding papers. The description of Channing’s style, “a naked thought,” applies to them; but the thought is a Damascus blade. Johnson, never passionate, is naturally impassioned. By the earnestness of his conviction he “makes the cold air fire.” It would be hard to find a nobler, calmer, sterner criticism on our educational, industrial, and political methods than the Fulfillment of Functions, a demand that men shall make the acceptance of their limitations a road to victory and peace. The papers on The Law of the Blessed Life, Gain in Loss, The Search for God, Living by Faith, and The Duty of Delight report the most ideal and spiritual aspects of his mind. His insight, his faith, his ethical nobility, shine out on every page. They are none of them so lofty that they do not touch the humblest things with their illumination. Whatever be our science and philosophy, we see not what escape there is from the moral exigency of The Search for God. Here are abiding principles, let part what may.

A long and elaborate essay upon Transcendentalism, fitly concludes the book. It was a late production, written in full view of the criticism of Spencer, Lewes, and their school upon the Transcendental system. It is Johnson’s completest rationale of the philosophy which underlay the whole of his career. America has furnished no other statement at once so full and compact of this philosophy. But it may be doubted whether it combats the criticism of Spencer and his school as completely as it does that of Locke; whether the ideas which Johnson considers necessary do not so appear to us because they have been plowed into the mind by an experience of half a million years, hereditarily transmitted and confirmed. Mr. Frothingham wrote to Johnson, on the publication of this essay, “ If this is Transcendentalism, I am a Transcendentalist.” And as respects its fundamental idea, no scientist or evolutionist is debarred from saying as much. For this idea, fundamental to every word of Johnson’s protest against materialism, evolution, positive science, is that thought cannot be the product of things ; that evolution, which he does not deny, involves an infinite element at every step. There can be no production of a greater by a less.

In all of Johnson’s writings, certain words appear with a frequency that is significant. They are Mind, Spirit, Law, Unity, Substance, Permanence, Right, Freedom, Duty, God. They indicate the continental masses of conviction and enthusiasm, joy and peace, around which the tides of lesser things swept back and forth, and left them steadfast and immovable. To these words we must add two others which as frequently recur : Limitations and Disciplines. He saw that, rightly apprehended, Limitations are Disciplines ; that only by respecting them do we arrive at freedom and abiding peace. He spoke these things out of the depth of a profound experience of sorrow and of joy.