Johnson on Savage: The Life of Mr Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson

Johnson’s triumph is the handling of the condemnation speech of the Judge, Mr Justice Page. Francis Page was a notorious ‘hanging judge’ (also caricatured by Henry Field in Tom Jones, 1749), and on the West Country circuit there was a popular song, ‘God in his rage made old Judge Page’. But no authentic record exists of his summing-up in this case. Johnson simply invents it. For this Johnson could claim the classical authority of Tacitus, who invents the speeches of his heroes at signal moments. But he does better than this, by claiming that this ‘eloquent harangue’ is exactly ‘as Mr Savage used to relate it’. (p.24). He transforms Judge Page’s judgement into an theatrical comedy, as Savage afterwards used to perform it for admiring friends. The judge’s grim appeals to the ‘Gentleman of the Jury’, are farcically turned to Savage’s advantage.

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Up to this point in the biography, Johnson appears largely in the role of Savage’s advocate, skillfully pleading his case, plangently emphasising his misfortunes, and thunderously attacking his enemies. It is a brilliant rhetorical performance. The reader is wonderfully gripped and impressed, even if not entirely convinced. But from the moment Savage is pardoned in 1728, and his fashionable ‘golden’ period of social success and patronage begins, a subtle change starts to steal over Johnson’s narrative. (p-32)

Melodrama shifts to satire, increasingly at Savage’s expense. A note of black comedy creeps in, and Savage’s outrageous behaviour towards Lord Tyrconnel points towards something incorrigeable and profoundly damaged in his nature. He luxuriates in the wealthy patronage, but also exploits it shamelessly and thoughtlessly. He causes chaos in Lord Tyrconnel’s apartments; he orders about his servants; he brings cronies back to the house late at night, and drinks his cellars dry of their best wines. Having given him a collection of valuable books, stamped with his own arms, [Tyrconnel] had the mortification to see them, in a short time, exposed to sale upon the stalls, it being usual with Mr Savage, when he wanted a small sum, to take his books to the pawnbroker, (p.41)

As Savage repeatedly fails to take control of his life, there is a new note of philosophical reflection. Imperceptibly, advocacy gives way to moral enquiry. Savage’s character, rather than his brazen claims, gradually becomes Johnson’s central concern, and he sees him embarked on a never-ending Dantesque treadmill of self-deception. ‘He proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at least forgetting it to amuse himself with phantoms of happiness, which were dancing before him; and willingly turned his eyes from the light of reason, when it would have discovered the illusion, and shown him, what he never wished to see, his real state.’ (p.52)

The episodes of the Volunteer Laureateship, the publication of the obscene poem The Progress of a Divine’, and the disastrous quarrel with Tyrconnel mark a steadily downward trajectory. Now black comedy is shifting towards a more human and universal tragedy. Johnson himself seems to move closer to the narrative surface. We become increasingly aware, if only subliminally, of Johnson as the shrewd eyewitness. He is the sympathetic companion, but the also undeceived judge of character Observing Savage’s mixture of professional pride and childlike vanity as a poet, he recalls with a painful smile. ‘He could not easily leave off, once he had begun to mention himself and his works; nor ever read his verses without stealing his eyes from the page, to discover in the faces of his audience, how they were effected by any favourite passage.’ (p.103) Such a remark could only have been made by someone who had spent, and perhaps endured, many hours in Savage’s company.

Johnson’s presence as the anonymous observer, or unnamed ‘friend’ increases throughout the penultimate part of the biography that covers Savage’s return, in the winter of 1737–8, to the lonely and humiliating poverty of Grub Street (p.70).

Many incidents begin to reflect Johnson’s own experiences at Lichfield and Oxford, such as the shameful time well-meaning friends left him a pair of boots at his college door when he was a poverty-stricken undergraduate. Savage’s friends also humiliated him with good intentions. Savage ’came to the lodgings of a friend [clearly Johnson] with the most violent agonies of rage; and, being asked what it could be that gave him such disturbance, he replied, with the utmost vehemence of indignation, ‘that they had sent for a tailor to measure him.’ (p.83)

Savage’s love of conversation, his hunger for company, and terror of loneliness are also, hauntingly, those of the isolated and depressive young Johnson. ‘He was generally censured for not knowing when to retire; but that was not the defect of his judgement, but of his fortune: when he left his company, he was frequently to spend the remaining part of the night in the street, or at least abandoned to gloomy reflections, which is not strange that he delayed as long as he could; and sometimes forgot that he gave others pain to avoid it himself.’ (p.102)

This whole section is dominated by the bleak image of the night-walks which they shared for several months in 1738–9. Here Johnson’s great elegiac summary of Savage’s harsh misfortunes and missed opportunities, is written in a tragic register that is quite unlike anything that has proceeded it. ‘On a bulk, in a cellar, or in a glass-house, among thieves and beggars, was to be found the author of the Wanderer, the man of exalted sentiments, extensive views, and curious observations; the man whose remarks on life might have assisted the statesman, whose ideas of virtue might have enlightened the moralist, whose eloquence might have influenced senates, and whose delicacy might have polished courts.’ (p.70)

Johnson is also more and more present in the precision, deliberation and authority of his style. In a favoured rhetorical device (technically known as ironic chiasmus, or reversal of terms) he repeatedly gives Savage generous praise with one hand, only to withdraw it regretfully with the other. ‘He was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never be communicated to his money.’ (p.74) This gesture of reversed and suspended judgement, like a musical motif, begins to dominate the entire biographical composition. The delicate, almost trembling fluctuation between praise and condemnation, love and mockery, sympathy and reproach, becomes a central truth of the Life. It also expresses Johnson’s generous, but essentially tragic view of human nature.

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In the final section of the biography, Johnson makes a last brilliant adjustment to the tone and angle of his narrative. It is clear that he disapproves of Savage’s delusory scheme to ‘retire’ into rural Wales, and live off the subscription organized by Pope, until he has re-written his failed play Sir Thomas Overbury. But his account is subtly and sympathetically pitched. It begins in a gentle satire of Savage’s dreamlike ideas of country life, ‘of which he had no knowledge but from pastorals and songs’, and where he fondly imagined that ‘the melody of the nightingale’ was to be heard ‘from every bramble’. This seems unavoidably like the echo of an actual conversation they had. (p.82) But it ends in the bleak reporting of a nightmare, with Savage ill, penniless and friendless in Bristol, sleeping in the garret of an ‘obscure inn’ by day (probably drunk); and slipping out by night - again that theme of obsessive night-walking - only to avoid creditors and restore ‘the action of his stomach by a cordial.’ (p.90).

Yet once in the debtor’s prison, Johnson tenderly shows many of Savage’s strongest qualities reasserting themselves: his wit, his stoicism, his inexhaustible interest in those around him (even the lowest inmates working in the prison kitchens). His seductive charm also seems miraculously sustained, and Johnson gravely reports how Savage makes a final conquest of his kindly gaoler, Mr Able Dagge. We may be sure that Mr Dagge also came to believe he was ‘the son of the late Earl Rivers’.

In a surprising and effective move, Johnson for the first time uses long quotations from three of Savage’s own letters to bring us most closely into his company. This is the section that Johnson re-wrote all night in January 1744 against his publisher’s deadline, and shows how the prospect of immanent execution - as he later remarked in another context - wonderfully concentrates the writer’s mind.

The first of these letters is to a Bristol friend, Saunders; the last evidently to his publisher, the faithful Edward Cave; the middle one is anonymous, ‘to one of his friends in London’. In each we hear Savage’s own voice, and experience his fantastic and violent shifts of mood - resignation, followed by fury, pride, bitterness, insouciance, despair, charm, enigmatic mystery. The changes are so volatile, so swift and so extreme, that one might almost think one was witnessing actual changes in Savage’s personality—or identity. No doubt Johnson intended his readers to reflect on the psychological implications of that too.

It is possible that the confidential and touching middle letter, to the unnamed ‘friend in London’, was actually to Johnson himself. It has a stoic piety that Johnson would have admired. It also seems to make an unmistakable, rueful, smiling reference to their previous argument about the charms of rural life, and the amiable delusion of birds singing from every bramble.

Typically, Savage finds a delightful way of proving that young Johnson was wrong, and that he - Savage - was telling the truth all along. ‘I thank the Almighty, I am now all collected in myself; and, though my person is in Confinement, my mind can expatiate on ample and useful subjects with all the freedom imaginable. I am now more conversant with the Nine than ever, and if, instead of a Newgate-bird, I am allowed to be a bird of the Muses, I assure you, Sir, I sing very freely in my Cage; sometimes, indeed, in the plaintive notes of the Nightingale; but at others in the cheerful strains of the Lark.’ (p.95)

The end, when it comes, is swift but enigmatic. The dying Savage has one more secret to impart, but moving his hand ‘in a melancholy manner’, fails to tell it to his kindly gaoler - or to his attentive biographer. Johnson’s elegant summary of Savage’s extraordinary mixture of vices and virtues maintains its tender, ironic balance to the last. Although, not quite to the last. The final appeal is made directly to the reader’s sympathy, to his heart, in what became Johnson’s most celebrated biographical peroration. ‘For his life, or for his writings, none who candidly consider his fortune, will think an apology either necessary or difficult…Those are no proper judges of his conduct, who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty; nor will any wise man presume to say, “Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.”’ (p.105)

There is in fact one more paragraph, which concludes with a more severe and conventional verdict, bringing the two words ‘genius’ and ‘contemptible’ into irreconcilable contact. But against this, Savage’s friend and advocate later wrote dismissively in the margin of his own 1748 copy: ‘Added’.

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The biography was an immediate and dazzling success. It became the book of the season, the talk of the London coffee-houses, and the subject of ecstatic reviews. The monthly Champion was representative: This pamphlet is, without flattery to its [anonymous] author, as just and well written a piece of its kind I ever saw…It is not only the story of Mr Savage, but innumerable incidents relating to other persons and other affairs, which renders this a very amusing and withal a very instructive and valuable performance…The author’s observations are short, significant and just…His reflections open to all the recesses of the human heart.’ Johnson would particularly have liked that last phrase.

The reaction of the fashionable painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, was typical of contemporary readers. He was delighted by the picturesque elements of Savage’s story, and even more by Johnson’s wonderfully shrewd comments and reflections. He did not question the historical truth of Savage’s claims, but was simply gripped and mesmerized by its human drama. Reynolds told Boswell that ‘upon his return from Italy he met with it in Devonshire, knowing nothing of its author, and began to read it while he was standing with his arm leaning against a chimney-piece. It seized his attention so strongly, that, not being able to lay down the book till he had finished it, when he attempted to move, he found his arm totally benumbed.’

Although anonymous, it would be true to say that the publication of the Life of Richard Savage in 1744 made Johnson’s name, and determined him to continue as a professional author in London. He was 35, and from henceforth he began to sign his own books and poems. Within three years he was able to agree the contract for the Dictionary, with a substantial advance payment of £1,575 from a syndicate of London publishers, and take the famous house in Gough Square. A second edition of the Life of Savage was also published by Cave in 1748, and his greatest poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ followed in 1749. No doubt Savage would have been pleased by all this, and made one of his famous, hat-doffing bows to his young protegee.

Johnson’s further reflections on Biography and Autobiography appear in three short essays, which are appended to this edition. In Rambler No. 60, ‘On the Dignity and Usefulness of Biography’ he made the first great modern defence of the form (1750). He argued both for its intimate nature, and its universal appeal, and enshrined these in some notable aphorisms. ‘More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral’, (p.114). He also raised the question of how far we can believe in autobiography; and suggested the particular value of literary biography, with its emphasis on inner imaginative drama. ‘The gradations of a hero’s life are from battle to battle; and an author’s from book to book.’ (p.126)

In after years Johnson often talked to Boswell about the nature and appeal of biography. In 1763, the year they met, he boasted that ‘the biographical part of literature is what I love most.’ Later in 1772, clearly thinking back to his time with Savage, he gave it as his opinion that ‘nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.’ But later still, in 1776, talking with Thomas Warton at Trinity College Cambridge, he added that even biography based on personal intimacy was ‘rarely well executed…Few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him’. However, he never revived the question of the historical truth of Savage’s claims in Boswell’s hearing.

Yet, right or wrong, Johnson had done something normally associated with much later 20

century biography. He had made Savage’s childhood and adolescence a determining factor in his adult struggles. Whether genuinely a rejected child, or a brilliant obsessive fraud, a tragic self-deluded impostor, Savage was defined by a ‘lost’ childhood identity. It would of course be anachronistic to talk of Freudian insights in an early 18

century text. But Johnson’s treatment of Savage’s obsession with his ‘Cruel Mother’ always repays further reading.

Beyond the historical controversy, it can be seen to yield remarkable psychological insights. Johnson noted, for example, that when the actress Anne Oldfield (with whom Savage may have had an affair) died in 1730, ‘he endeavored to show his gratitude in the most decent manner, by wearing mourning as for a Mother.’ (p.15). He also observed that throughout his adult life Savage should be ‘considered as a child exposed to all the temptations of indigence’, (p.53). His final appeal is not for formal justice, but for the warmth of human understanding.

In a longer perspective, one can see that Johnson had championed English biography as a virtually new genre. He had saved it from the medieval tradition of solemnly extended hagiography, or the lifeless accumulations of 17

century biographical Dictionaries. He had shown that it was not ‘compiled’, but narrated, argued and brought dramatically alive. He had also raised it above those commercial compilations of scandalous anecdote, that were still so much in vogue, like Theophilus Cibber’s Lives of the Poets (1753, 200 poets packed like sardines into 5 volumes).

He had separated it from gossip and cheap romance, and redirected it towards ‘the Lovers of Truth and Wit’. By introducing the subject’s own writings - poetry, essays, letters - into the narrative, he had made it more scholarly and authentic. Nor was it any longer dependent on classical models and the lives of the great and eminent - as those by Plutarch, Tacitus, or Suetonius. Instead it had absorbed several popular and indigenous English forms - the Newgate confession, the sentimental ballad, the courtroom drama, even the Restoration comedy of manners.

Moreover English biography was no longer necessarily about fame and success. It could take obscure, failed and damaged lives, and make them intensely moving and revealing. Biography was an act of imaginative friendship, and depended on moral intelligence and human sympathy. Biography had become a new kind of narrative about the mysteries of the human heart.

Many years later Johnson is reported to have told Boswell, ‘that he could write the Life of a Broomstick’.

Johnson made minor corrections to The Life of Richard Savage in the second edition of 1748, and reduced the footnotes in the subsequent editions of 1775 and the definitive edition incorporated into The Lives of the Eminent English Poets of 1781. (See Select Chronology) The text used here is based on the 1781 edition, with some modernizing of capital letters and punctuation.

SELECT CHRONOLOGY (#ulink_eecf7853-2847-5522-a3ad-63dca162461d)

AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE OF MR. RICHARD SAVAGE, SON OF THE EARL RIVERS (#ulink_93b5ea27-ad72-5540-8d63-709dab10c302)

It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy, in those who look up to them from a lower station: whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or, that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent or more severe.

That affluence and power, advantages extrinsick and adventitious, and therefore easily separable from those by whom they are possessed, should very often flatter the mind with expectations of felicity which they cannot give, raises no astonishment; but it seems rational to hope, that intellectual greatness should produce better effects; that minds qualified for great attainments should first endeavour their own benefit; and that they, who are most able to teach others the way to happiness, should with most certainty follow it themselves.

But this expectation, however plausible, has been very frequently disappointed. The heroes of literary as well as civil history, have been very often no less remarkable for what they have suffered, than for what they have achieved; and volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives and untimely deaths.

To these mournful narratives, I am about to add the life of Richard Savage, a man whose writings entitle him to an eminent rank in the classes of learning, and whose misfortunes claim a degree of compassion, not always due to the unhappy, as they were often the consequences of the crimes of others, rather than his own.

In the year 1697, Anne, countess of Macclesfield, having lived for some time upon very uneasy terms with her husband, thought a publick confession of adultery the most obvious and expeditious method of obtaining her liberty, and therefore declared that the child, with which she was then great, was begotten by the Earl Rivers. This, as may be imagined, made her husband no less desirous of a separation than herself, and he prosecuted his design in the most effectual manner; for he applied not to the ecclesiastical courts for a divorce, but to the Parliament for an act, by which his marriage might be dissolved, the nuptial contract totally annulled, and the children of his wife illegitimated. This act, after the usual deliberation, he obtained, though without the approbation of some, who considered marriage as an affair only cognizable by ecclesiastical judges; and on March 3rd was separated from his wife, whose fortune, which was very great, was repaid her, and who having as well as her husband the liberty of making another choice was in a short time married to colonel Brett.

While the Earl of Macclesfield was prosecuting this affair his wife was on the 10th of January 1697–8 delivered of a son; and the Earl Rivers, by appearing to consider him as his own, left none any reason to doubt of the sincerity of her declaration; for he was his godfather and gave him his own name which was, by his direction, inserted in the register of St Andrew’s parish in Holborn but, unfortunately, left him to the care of his mother, whom, as she was now set free from her husband, he probably imagined likely to treat with great tenderness the child that had contributed to so pleasing an event. It is not indeed easy to discover what motives could be found to overbalance that natural affection of a parent, or what interest could be promoted by neglect or cruelty. The dread of shame or of poverty, by which some wretches have been incited to abandon or to murder their children, cannot be supposed to have affected a woman who had proclaimed her crimes and solicited reproach, and on whom the clemency of the legislature had undeservedly bestowed a fortune, which would have been very little diminished by the expenses which the care of her child could have brought upon her. It was therefore not likely that she would be wicked without temptation; that she would look upon her son, from his birth, with a kind of resentment and abhorrence; and, instead of supporting, assisting, and defending him, delight to see him struggling with misery, or that she would take every opportunity of aggravating his misfortunes, and obstructing his resources, and, with an implacable and restless cruelty, continue her persecution from the first hour of his life to the last.

But, whatever were her motives, no sooner was her son born, than she discovered a resolution of disowning him; and in a very short time removed him from her sight, by committing him to the care of a poor woman, whom she directed to educate him as her own, and enjoined never to inform him of his true parents.

Such was the beginning of the life of Richard Savage. Born with a legal claim to honour and to affluence, he was, in two months, illegitimated by the Parliament, and disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life, only that he might be swallowed by its quicksands, or dashed upon its rocks.

His mother could not indeed infect others with the same cruelty. As it was impossible to avoid the inquiries which the curiosity or tenderness of her relations made after her child, she was obliged to give some account of the measures she had taken; and her mother, the Lady Mason, whether in approbation of her design, or to prevent more criminal contrivances, engaged to transact with the nurse, to pay her for her care, and to superintend the education of the child.

In this charitable office she was assisted by his godmother, Mrs Lloyd, who, while she lived, always looked upon him with that tenderness which the barbarity of his mother made peculiarly necessary, but her death, which happened in his tenth year, was another of the misfortunes of his childhood; for though she kindly endeavoured to alleviate his loss by a legacy of three hundred pounds, yet, as he had none to prosecute his claim, to shelter him from oppression or call in law to the assistance of justice, her will was eluded by the executors and no part of the money was ever paid.

He was, however, not yet wholly abandoned. The Lady Mason still continued her care, and directed him to be placed at a small grammar-school near St Alban’s, where he was called by the name of his nurse, without the least intimation that he had a claim to any other.

Here he was initiated in literature, and passed through several of the classes, with what rapidity or with what applause cannot now be known. As he always spoke with respect of his master, it is probable that the mean rank, in which he then appeared, did not hinder his genius from being distinguished, or his industry from being rewarded; and if in so low a state he obtained distinction and rewards, it is not likely they were gained but by genius and industry.