Johnson's Art of Anecdote

Johnson's A rt of A necdote R o b ert F o lken fliktsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA JS^ODERN CRITICISM of biography is still filled with a priori conceptions which would look highly questionable if applied to the novel, drama, or poetry. Samuel Johnson’s biographies seem to have suffered particularly from this tendency. The greatest obstacle to the understanding and evaluation of Johnson’s art of anecdote, for example, is judging it by Boswellian standards. In an article which has recently been praised as an “excellent essay dealing with the ineffectiveness of Johnson’s use of anecdotes to delineate per­ sonality,”1 the most influential critic of Johnson’s biographical an­ ecdotes, Clarence Tracy, says that "too often they seem to have been dragged in more out of respect to the paper value of minute facts than with any understanding of their biographical possibilities.”2 We soon learn that Tracy’s harsh judgment of Johnson rests on a Boswellian norm: It is clear that, for all his theoretical emphasis on minute facts and the evanescent aspects of personality, Johnson made no more than a feeble effort himself in his various biographies to perceive the man entire and in action in the Boswellian man­ ner.3 The biographies by Johnson and Boswell are very different in in­ tention, form, and tone as well as scope. They are exemplars of separate biographical traditions: the concise prefatory biography and the amply documented life-and-times; and they are the prod­ ucts of totally different minds. The differences between them point to the necessity of seeing what Johnson himself was trying to do. In Johnson’s biographies there are indeed a certain number of de­ tails which do not seem to make an immediately apparent contri­ 171 Ra c is m in t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y bution to the delineation of the subject. The isolation of such an­ ecdotes is due, however, to more than a theoretical commitment to "minute facts.” Johnson’s love of anecdotes fuses aesthetics and morality.4 The delineation of the subject was for Johnson only one function of the anecdote in his work. His didactic intentions are one of the sources of such isolated anecdotes. In his praise of anecdotes and private details in ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA R a m b ler, No. 60, Johnson empha­ sizes the personal usefulness to the reader of the detail as well as its function in giving a picture of the whole man: There are many invisible circumstances which, whether we read as enquirers after natural or moral knowledge, whether we in­ tend to enlarge our science, or increase our virtue, are more important than public occurrences.... Thus the story of Melancthon affords a striking lecture on the value of time, by inform­ ing us, that when he made an appointment, he expected not only the hour, but the minute to be fixed, that the day might not run out in the idleness of suspense; and all the plans and enterprises of De Wit are now of less importance to the world, than that part of his personal character which represents him as "careful of his health, and negligent of his life."5 The detail thus may become separable from its context, a nugget of knowledge whose value to the reader does not always depend on its context in the subject’s life. In fact Johnson’s love of anecdotes, and his musing that writers may in time forego all "preparation and connexion and illustration,” would seem to imply that certain details have just such an independent value. There is another kind of isolated anecdote which occasionally appears in Johnson’s biographies. Tracy mentions Johnson’s re­ mark that he learned of Pope’s friend Cromwell only "that he used to ride a-hunting in a tye-wig,” and says, "This fact is left to speak for itself whatever its message may be, for Johnson cannot use it in creating a picture of the man.”6 But here Johnson’s technique is not that of the novelistic or dramatic biographer, but that of the philosophical biographer. He presents in passing and with rueful...