A Tory for Our Time

...A Whig, to him, was "someone who lacked the proper feelings of reverence for the past and respect for tradition...

...So there is a job to be done, at the level of humble usefulness, in presenting a picture of Johnson as he actually was instead of as he is thought of...

...Contributor, "National Review," "Nation" If, at times, John Wain's biography of Samuel Johnson lays one open to the sort of nagging explication that sitting next to a Wagner fanatic at a performance of Das Rheingold can provide, this is merely the debit side of the author's enthusiasm and it is more than compensated for by an abundant credit side...

...To those people who were so inclined, who were eager to squeeze a world in among all of the egalitarian and democratic abstractions, he was wont to remark: "Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig...

...Acknowledging that many people consider Johnson "an 18th-century ancestor of the typical modern Conservative," Wain observes that while this stereotype, like all stereotypes, has its core of truth, it nevertheless "obscures many finer and more humane points of [Johnson's] thinking: his opposition to colonialism and to every form of exploitation...

...it collapsed after a short, tubercular history...

...his insistence that the real test of any civilization lies in its treatment of the poor...

...You may talk in this manner...

...My dear Sir," he told Boswell, "clear your mind of cant...

...Wain launches his study of the Good Doctor by smashing an apology across its bow, an exercise in face-lifting made necessary, in his view, by an intellectual climate currently inhospitable to the word "conservative...

...He hailed from the provincial city of Lichfield, where his father had run an impecunious bookshop...

...This immensely learned man took note, always, of the myriad thresholds at which the intelligent fellow doffs his knowledge to proceed upon instinct, or upon the customs and habits that are inherited from centuries rather than arrived at by reason...

...taken as a group, they were "shallow opportunists who had not been forced into bruising contact with the realities of existence...

...In London he worked Grub Street for years...

...Yet whatever sympathy Johnson lavished on the past did not derive from an aristocratic inheritance...

...his hatred of the slave trade...

...His friends included such disreputables as the poet Richard Savage, along with such luminaries as David Garrick, both of whom he entertained in taverns (a tavern chair he thought "the throne of human felicity...

...The job does, to a certain extent, need doing...

...Johnson, in Wain's phrase, believed in "reasoning out everything that concerns conduct and the management of life...

...In Johnson's opinion, thought, and the language that supports thought, must relate to the visible, the actual, world-or if it does not, then the dissociation must be candidly admitted...

...it is the mode of talking in society...

...The standard literary portrait of Johnson is, of course, Boswell's, and, as Wain notes, Bos-well was "a sentimental Romantic Tory of a very different stripe" from his subject...

...You may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant...

...Grasp the trunk hard only, and you will shake all the branches...

...Nonetheless, many of these were in Johnson's opinion flagrantly unsuited to regulate either their own destinies or the affairs of nations-as he suggested in his pamphlets of the 1770s...

...No institution would hire the unprepossessing young scholar, so he and his wife resorted to founding their own school...

...His concern," says Wain, "was not only with words but with the things that words were formed to express...

...he wishes to prove, too, that this Toryism reflected the crystal clarity of Johnson's thought, his determination to distinguish the real from the unreal, the genuine from the imagined-a determination resulting from what can best be termed Johnson's bedrock common sense...

...That men he looked up to for their qualities as poets, or cabinet-makers, or companions he also considered unfit to be MPs was not a source of confusion to him...

...but don't think foolishly...

...Indeed, perhaps no more pleasant pastime exists than following an intelligent man as he descants on a genius who has contributed to the arc of his own thinking...

...his pleas for a more merciful penal system...

...Wain's ultimate purpose, however, extends beyond showing that Johnson's was a humane Toryism...

...In crossing those thresholds Johnson never grumbled, and he never tripped...

...Johnson's Toryism was rooted in this kind of common sense, and informed by a profound realization of the many accommodations exacted from our imaginations by human existence...

...In every milieu, in every walk of life," Wain informs us, he found "people worthy of his respect and emulation...

...Deeper questions were left to the operations of fate and faith...

...As his mentor Cornelius Ford had told him, "Grasp the leading praecognita of all things...

...He recognized no contradictions whatever, being disinclined to carry ideas in practice to their logical conclusions...

...His brief tenure at Oxford he owed to the fleeting kindness of a patron...

...He dressed for the better part of his life like a beggar and suffered from what may have been a spastic condition (one admirer who sought Johnson out mistook him for a kept idiot, until the kept idiot turned from the window to be introduced...

...Thus, despite his respect for the vast tradition of Western learning and his belief in the necessity of highly complex and stable social structures as a means of regulating life's complexities, Johnson disliked intellectual systems for their want of any sort of correspondence to the world: In fact, he disapproved of intellectual speculation per se...

...There are few ways," he said, "in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money...