Johnson's Life of Savage and Lockean Psychology

Johnson'szyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Life of Savage and Lockean P sychology T IM O T H Y E R W IN Com passion is often the only wayXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA the indigent can have access to us. Bishop Butler For all its moving observations on the human condition, the L ife o f Savage is something of a chronological muddle, mistaken about the progress of the career it recounts. Readers who follow the keen moraliz­ ing commentary offered during the period of Savage’s life which John­ son calls the golden part also learn from the editorial annotation that the two poems which in large part prompt the commentary are not taken up in the ordering in which they were printed.1 The distinction makes an interpretive difference, because Johnson traces a negative moral progress that depends upon the order of the career. When Johnson tells us that the biography is concerned to give the history of the poetry (54) and the history proves false, the sympathetic logic of the narrative comes to rest upon an unsuspected fiction. The twenty-odd pages devoted to the privi­ leged interval during which Savage writes some of his best work, includ­ ing The W anderer, only to turn afterwards to his most notorious poem, The B astard, are clearly pivotal and yet cannot have taken place as related. Whatever its reasons, whether Johnson was hurried or confused, 199 200 / ERWIN the lapse poses a formal problem and provides some unusual grounds for speculation. Not surprisingly, a sense that the narrative is in part an accidental one has provided some of the best studies of the biography with a point of critical departure. Very often the criticism seeks a generic solution by exploring the fictional or tragic aspects of the work,I 2 aspects there to be found, since literary biography was still a relatively young genre and newer genres find their rules where they may. What the following pages will argue, however, is that the norms shaping the narrative and com­ mentary are mainly philosophical, that the biography is modeled after Locke’s moral psychology of choice, and that the golden part approxi­ mates what Locke calls the state of liberty. Far from being an undifferen­ tiated scene of error, the central episode presents us with a calculated exchange, sacrificing accuracy for the sake of a large gain in philosophi­ cal character. Johnson recast the rather unprepossessing subject matter of Savage’s life as a writer, including a murder conviction and royal pardon, in order to fashion from it a parable of failure and forgiveness. The biography enacts a second trial, as it were, urging readers to pardon Savage as he had been pardoned before, not now by following royal example, but by carefully considering his, and implicitly our own, stray­ ing from the Lockean route to happiness. In this view the work becomes a much more pointed and intentional object than many of its critics would allow; one can only hope that the temerity of the position, nearly enough to make one want to call it back, is balanced by interest and common-sense. I We might begin by seeking in the world behind the work what Hans Robert Jauss calls the “horizon of expectations,”3 the prior works that the ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA L ife o f Savage engages. Certainly one of the works looming largest on the social horizon of the biography is the D unciad, a work that from the point of view of its victims embodies an elitist and brutally satirical attitude toward authorship. Through the example of Savage, it seems to me, Johnson means to correct that attitude. When the L ife o f Savage is set within the crowning achievement of Johnson’s career, the Lives o f the P oets, we lose its shadowy Popean context in the critical brilliance of the L ife o f P ope. But the earlier biography is wholly unlike any of the later ones: Savage lived his life as melodramatic legend in the making, and his career is definitely not the stuff of which, say, the L ife o f G ray would be made. The raw material to be worked was the scandalous history...