Johnson and Garrick

Ian McIntyre

One of the most important functions of biography is to test received opinion - to go back over what earlier writers have had to say and see how well it stands up in the light of one's own research. When I began to think about a new life of David Garrick, there had not been a substantial biography in this country for forty years; the most recent Life in America went back to the late 1970s. Research, does not, of course, turn up only new material. It also sometimes turns up old material that has been overlooked or forgotten - an obscure volume of memoirs published in a provincial city perhaps, or, just occasionally, an astonishing treasure-trove like the Boswell papers in the loft of an Irish castle.

A Lichfield audience does not need to be told that writing about Johnson - especially popular writing about Johnson - is particularly rich in received opinion. Take, for example, a loose phrase like 'the Johnson circle', which conjures a picture of a group of people who enjoyed each others company, shared many of the same views and spent a lot of time together. All very cosy and chocolate-boxy. But of course it wasn't like that. There were, in fact, many different circles, they were seldom concentric, and it was by no means always the case that those who were thrown together in this way actually liked or admired each other. Consider the number of candidates who were put up for the club and blackballed. Consider what Johnson thought of Sir John Hawkins. Consider the story of Edward Gibbon, the historian, who wrote in his memoirs that he could not hear without emotion the compliment paid to him by Sheridan 'in the presence of the British nation'. Sheridan had been speaking in Westminster Hall during the trial of Warren Hastings; when he was asked, by a fellow Whig, how he came to refer in the speech to Gibbon's 'luminous philosophy', Sheridan replied in a half whisper, 'I said voluminous.'

The particular piece of received opinion I wish to examine this evening is the one that presents two of Lichfield's most famous sons as life-long bosom friends. My belief is that the relationship between them was always complex and sometime uneasy. There was about eight years between them and Johnson had left the grammar school two years before Garrick became a pupil there. How well the families knew each other we don't know. Garrick's first biographer, Davies, had no first-hand knowledge of his parents and acknowledged his indebtedness for some of the detail of Garrick's early life to someone who, as he put it, 'has long honoured me with his friendship and patronage.' We know, therefore that Johnson viewed Garrick's father as, 'a man of amiable disposition, much respected for his affable demeanour and agreeable conversation.’ Mrs Garrick, we are told, 'though not beautiful in her person, was very attractive in her manner; her address was polite, and her conversation sprightly and engaging; she had the peculiar happiness, wherever she went, to please and to entertain.’

We also know that, 'though restrained in their circumstances, Captain Garrick and his wife were welcome to the best families in Lichfield.' They were on friendly terms with Gilbert Walmsley, the registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court. A wealthy bachelor at that time, he was very much a patron of promising young men, and it is a reasonable guess that Johnson and Garrick saw something of each other at his house.

Then when Johnson opened his school, Garrick and his brother George became his first pupils. Garrick was rather a cheeky boy, and a considerable show-off. When his father came home after a long spell of garrison duty abroad Garrick's greeting was, 'I suppose, sir, I have a good many bothers and sisters at Gibraltar?' He had a keen sense of ridicule, and was a good mimic; Johnson clearly provided him with as rich a supply of raw material as our present Prime Minister does to Rory Bremner.

Johnson was recently married, and Garrick's unsparing descriptions of Tetty are well known - ' very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the use of cordials.' On another occasion he called her 'a little painted poppet; full of affectation and rural airs of elegance.' Garrick and his fellow pupils used to listen at the Johnsons’ bedroom door, and peep through the keyhole, and years later, at the height of his fame, the manager of Drury Lane did not need to be asked twice to perform one of his favourite party pieces. In its broader versions, it was reserved for occasions when only men were present. Garrick would give grotesque impersonations of the fond pair, ' the lady thinking he delayed too long to come to bed,' her shambling lover puffing and blowing and uttering cries of, 'I'm coming, my Tetsie, I'm coming, my Tetsie.' There was an alternative comic routine, in which Johnson, deaf to Tetty's urgings that he should come to bed, sits at work on a tragedy, pausing occasionally to regale her with some of the better lines. Totally absorbed in composition, and short-sighted into the bargain, he mistakes the bed-clothes for his own shirt-tails, and begins to stuff them into his breeches, exposing the increasingly hysterical Tetty to the chill night air.

Then, on this day in March 1737, this oddly-assorted pair set out for London together to make their fortune. Garrick was originally intended for the law, but that didn't last long. Nor did the venture on which he and his elder brother Peter embarked together as wine merchants. He was badly stage-struck, and all his energies were increasingly directed towards the theatre, both as a writer of farces and as an actor. Once he got his foot in the door, his rise was meteoric. Among those who flocked to see him was Alexander Pope. 'I am afraid the young man will be spoiled,' he said, 'for he will have no competitor.'

Sam Johnson had plenty of competitors, and for many years was little more than a hack. In the early 1750s, partly as a relief from his work on the Dictionary, partly because, as always, he needed money, he had been writing a series of twice-weekly periodical essays which he called The Rambler.

Number 200 in the series resembled an exchange between the agony aunt in a modern newspaper and one of her disgruntled correspondents. The correspondent was called Asper, and Johnson has him describe the miseries he has endured during a recent morning visit to his friend Prospero - 'a man lately raised to wealth by a lucky project, and too much intoxicated by sudden elevation, or too little polished by thought and conversation, to enjoy his present fortune with elegance and decency.' It is an entertaining piece of writing, but a remarkably bitter one, and most of Johnson's readers would have immediately understood that Asper's friend lived in rather fine houses in Southampton Street, off the Strand, within easy walking distance of Drury Lane Theatre:

When I told my name at the door , the footman went to see if his master was at home, and, by the tardiness of his return, gave me reason to suspect that time was taken to deliberate. He then informed me that Prospero desired my company, and shewed the staircase carefully secured by mats from the pollution of my feet. The best apartments were ostentatiously set open, that I might have a distant view of the magnificence which I was not permitted to approach; and my old friend receiving me with all the insolence of condescension at the top of the stairs, conducted me to a back room, where he told me he always breakfasted when he had not great company.

…Breakfast was at last set, and as I was not willing to indulge the peevishness that began to seize me, I commended the tea; Prospero then told me, that another time I should taste his finest sort, but that he had only a small quantity remaining, and reserved it for those he thought himself obliged to treat with particular respect.

While we were conversing upon such subjects as imagination happened to suggest, he frequently digressed into directions to the servant that waited, or made a slight enquiry after the jeweller or silversmith; and once, as I was pursuing an argument with some degree of earnestness, he started from his posture of attention, and ordered, that if Lord Lofty called on him that morning, he should be shown into the best parlour.

Now this is all very funny, but it is also very painful, and it shows Garrick in a very poor light. Garrick, on the other hand, may well have thought it a poor return for a considerable act of friendship he had performed only two years previously when he had put Johnson's tragedy on at Drury Lane. The production had not been untroubled, and Garrick's efforts to tweak Johnson's stiff, pseudo-classical text into shape for the stage led to some heated exchanges. Garrick called in Johnson's friend the Reverend Dr Taylor to mediate, and he took the full force of the author's indignation. 'Sir,' he said, 'the fellow wants me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may have the opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his heels.'

On the first night, Johnson made his appearance in one of the side boxes. He had discarded his customary brown suit, and was resplendent in a scarlet waistcoat braided with gold and a gold-laced hat. One of Garrick's wheezes for geeing up the action misfired rather badly. In the fifth act, the heroine meets her death by strangulation, and it seemed to Garrick that the effect would be heightened if this happened on stage. Just as the two turbaned mutes made as to tighten the bow-string round her neck, however, there was an outbreak of hissing from the gallery, and cries of, 'Murder!' Mrs Pritchard, the actress in question, made several attempts to deliver her dying lines, but then gave up, and made her exit still very much alive. The following night, she was carried off to meet her end less publicly.

James Boswell, who knew both men very well, was not above trying to make mischief between them, but did not always trigger the response he was hoping for. On one occasion, for instance, as he tells us in the Life, 'I slyly introduced Garrick's fame, and his assuming the airs of a great man.' Johnson would have none of it. 'Sir,' he replied, 'it is wonderful how little Garrick assumes…. Consider, Sir; celebrated men, such as you have mentioned, have their applause at a distance; Garrick has it dashed in his face, sounded in his ears, and went home every night with the plaudits of a thousand in his cranium. Then, Sir, Garrick did not find, but made his way to the tables, the levees, and almost the bed-chambers of the great…If all this had happened to me, I should have had a couple of fellows with long poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that stood in the way.'

Johnson was, of course, in his perverse way, perfectly capable of taking the opposite side of the same argument. After Garrick had retired from the stage , he was summoned to perform before the King and Queen, and was mortified by what he thought was his unenthusiastic reception. The matter was still being discussed in Mrs Thrale's drawing room a month later. A man called Seward was holding forth. 'He has been long accustomed,' he said, 'to the Thundering approbation of the Theatre, that a mere very well, must necessarily and naturally disappoint him.'

'Sir,' said Johnson, 'he should not, in a Royal apartment, expect the hallowing and clamour of the one shilling gallery. The King, I doubt not, gave him as much applause as was rationally his due.'

Nobody better understood Johnson's attitude to Garrick than that shrewd observer of human nature Joshua Reynolds. Johnson, he once told Boswell, 'considered Garrick to be, as it were, his own property. He would allow no man either to blame or to praise him in his presence without contradicting him. Reynolds' indeed, made this the theme of the two very entertaining dialogues which he wrote towards the end of his life. In the first one he represents himself as trying as he put it, 'to bring Johnson out.'

REYNOLDS. Garrick was a clever fellow, Dr Johnson. Garrick, take him altogether, was certainly a very great man.

JOHNSON. Garrick, Sir, may be a great man in your opinion, as far as I know. But he was not in mine. Little things are great to little men.

REYNOLDS. I have heard you say, Dr Johnson-

JOHNSON. Sir, you have never heard me say that Garrick was a great man. You may have heard me say that Garrick was a good repeater - of other men's words - words put into his mouth by other men. This makes but a faint approach towards being a great man.

REYNOLDS. But take Garrick upon the whole. Now in regard to conversation-

JOHNSON. Well, Sir, in regard to conversation, I never discovered any intellectual energy, any wide grasp of thought, any extensive comprehension of mind, or that he possessed any of those powers to which great could, with any degree of propriety, be applied.

REYNOLDS. But still-

JOHNSON. Hold, Sir, I have not done. There are, to be sure, in the laxity of colloquial speech various kinds of greatness. A man may be a great tobacconist, a man may be a great painter, he may be likewise a great mimic. Now you may be one and Garrick the other, and yet neither of you be great men.

REYNOLDS. But, Dr Johnson-

JOHNSON. Hold, Sir, I have often lamented how dangerous it is to investigate character, to men who have no discriminative powers.

REYNOLDS. But Garrick as a companion, I heard you say, no longer ago than last Wednesday, at Mr Thrale's table-

JOHNSON. You tease me Sir. Whatever you have heard me say, no longer ago than last Wednesday, at Mr Thrale's table, I tell you I do not say so now. Besides, as I said before, you may not have understood me; you misapprehended me; you may not have heard me. [Reynolds was extremely deaf.]

REYNOLDS. I am very sure I heard you.

JOHNSON. Besides, besides, Sir, besides, - do you not know - are you so ignorant as not to know - that it is the highest degree of rudeness to quote a man against himself?

In the second dialogue, which he calls T'Other Side Reynolds imagines Johnson in conversation with Gibbon. 'Garrick's fame was prodigious,' Johnson asserts, 'not only in England but all over Europe. Even in Russia I have been told he was a proverb; when anyone repeated well, he was called a second Garrick':

JOHNSON. I do not pretend to know, Sir, what your meaning may be by saying that he had as much reputation as he deserved. He deserved much and he had much.

GIBBON. Why surely Dr Johnson, his merit was in small things only. He had none of those qualities that make a real great man.

JOHNSON. Sir, I as little understand what your meaning may be when you speak of the qualities that make a great man. It is a vague term. Garrick was no common man. A man above the common size of men may surely, without any great impropriety, be called a great man. In my opinion he has very reasonably fulfilled the prophecy which he once reminded me of having made to his mother: when she asked me how little David went on at school, that I should say to her that he would come to be hanged or come to be a great man. No, Sir, it is undoubtedly true that the same qualities, united with virtue or with vice, make a hero or a rogue, a great general or a great highwayman. Now Garrick, we are sure, was never hanged, and in regard to his being a great man, you must take the whole man together. It must be considered in how many things Garrick excelled in which every man desires to excel. Setting aside his excellence as an actor, in which he is acknowledged to be unrivalled, as a man, as a poet, as a convivial companion, you will find but few his equal and none his superior…..

The formation of the famous Club was also the source of some friction between Garrick and Johnson. The original idea for it came from Joshua Reynolds, and what he mainly had in mind was a convivial forum where Johnson could sound off without interruption. Garrick had been abroad, and according to Boswell, hearing about it from Reynolds on his return, he said, 'I like it much, I think I shall be of you.' Johnson had other ideas. 'How does he know we will permit him?' he enquired. 'The first Duke of England has no right to hold such language.' Mrs Thrale says that Johnson threatened to blackball Garrick if he were proposed, and Hawkins's version is that he said, 'He will disturb us by his buffoonery.' Garrick was elected in the end - but only in 1773, nine years after the Club was first established.

Johnson, of course, when he was not 'talking for victory', very often talked simply for effect, or to amuse. Mrs Thrale, holding court in her drawing room one day early in 1779, remarked that Wilkes and Garrick were two of the oldest men of their ages she knew. 'Nothing is so fatiguing as the Life of a Wit,' she declared. 'They have both worn themselves out by being eternally on the rack to give entertainment to others.' Johnson was always quick to seize an opportunity to build on somebody else's contribution, and liked nothing better than to embroider or fantasize. 'David, Madam,' he said, 'looks much older than he is; for his Face has had double the Business of any other man, -it is never at rest,- when he speaks one minute, he has quite a different Countenance to what he assumes the next; I don't believe he ever kept the same look for half an Hour together in the whole course of his Life; and such an eternal, restless, fatiguing play of muscles, must certainly wear out a man's Face much before its real time…'

Johnson did not know it, but as he spoke, his old pupil was afflicted by something much more serious than the 'fatiguing play of muscles'. Before the month was out, Garrick was dead. The fact is, I think, that Johnson, with his profound fear of death, had not wished to believe that Garrick was mortally ill. The evidence is in something written by Mrs Thrale: 'No arguments, or recitals of such facts as I had heard would persuade Mr Johnson of his danger.'

Garrick's funeral was as richly magnificent as anything Garrick had ever devised at Drury Lane. The writer Hannah More looked down on the closing act of the spectacle from the gallery at Westminster Abbey, and noted that Johnson's face was bathed in tears. Shortly after the funeral, he sent a card to the great actor's widow. 'Dr Johnson presents respectful condolences to Mrs Garrick, and wishes that any endeavour of his of his would enable her to support a loss, which the world cannot repair.' If there was a delicate hint there that he stood ready to edit Garrick's works and write his life, Mrs Garrick did not take it. Possibly she feared the critical rigour of her husband's old mentor.

It remains one of the great, tantalising might-have-beens of English biography.