The Road to Character

Brooks introduces Samuel Johnson, born in Lichfield, England in 1709. Johnson’s father was a poor bookseller. Johnson contracted tuberculosis as a baby, which left him blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and gave him smallpox that scarred his face. In an attempt to treat him, doctors cut into his neck glands. The operation went wrong, leaving him physically monstrous with bad scars. In defiance of his physical disabilities, he refused help from others. He also resisted self-indulgence, a trait he felt sick people were prone to.

Johnson was given a strict, classical education in a school that used physical punishment to discipline its students. All in all, however, he mostly educated himself. He read voraciously through all his father’s books and committed hundreds of passages and authors to memory. At 19, his mother inherited a small amount of money to pay for him to attend Oxford for a year. While there, he was rebellious and lazy, but was recognized as having a brilliant mind.

While at Oxford, Johnson became a Christian. He read a book by William Law that made him warier of self-indulgence and convinced him that worldly things don’t satisfy the heart. Knowing that he was smart, he focused on the parable of talents from the Bible and believed that God was strictly watching him to make sure he made use of his abilities.

After one year at Oxford, Johnson returned to Lichfield with no money left. He fell into depression. He appalled everyone because he couldn’t control his body motions, and he had tics and compulsive behaviors. He was so ugly and his behavior so obscene that many people thought he was the village idiot. He tried to teach, but his students didn’t respect him. To many people’s confusion, he married a beautiful woman, Elizabeth Porter, who seemed to understand his inner virtue.

In 1737, Johnson moved to London and settled on Grub Street. He scraped by as freelance journalist, writing for anyone and on any subject. In 1738, the House of Commons passed a law that forbade magazines to publish parliamentary speeches. Johnson wrote and published fictionalized speeches that let the public know what was going on in The Gentleman’s Magazine. The speeches were so eloquent that even the original speakers didn’t protest to them, and often they were misquoted as the speaker’s own words.

Johnson was living an unstable life that depended on whatever flashed through his mind. He had neither steady work nor family. He feared his imagination which confronted him with the demons of jealousy, self-hatred, and false hope. He fought these demons violently. When he wrote, he produced huge amounts of work, but was never proud of any of it. But through writing, he constructed a coherent worldview that gave his character stability and wholeness.

Johnson was part of a community of artists and thinkers who practiced an intellectual form of heroism and studied the great works of the Western canon. He hung out in taverns. In conversation, he would often switch sides in a debate to emphasize the controversy. Similarly, his writing had a conversational style, alternating between point and counterpoint.

Johnson was a dualist, which means he believed paradoxes and contradictions captured life’s true complexity. In whatever he wrote about, he always saw the good linked with the bad. He pursued knowledge through life experience and tested his observations in reality. For instance, when he heard someone drowned in a certain spot in the river, he jumped in to see if he could survive.

Johnson didn’t believe that politics or social change could solve human problems. He also wasn’t a huge believer in science and let his mind roam over many interests instead of devoting himself to one logical system. He believed that each individual had their own particular complexity and dignity. To him, the biggest human problems were moral problems.

Today, literature is understood in aesthetic terms, but Johnson saw literature as a force for moral improvement. Although he wrote for money, he strove for the ideal of honest writing. He thought lowly of human nature but was sympathetic to it. Instead of hoping to cure his vices, he learned to live with them instead and tried to relieve the pain they caused.

Johnson was known for his shrewd observations about human vice. In his moral essays, he examined pain, and in so doing, removed some of its power. He observed that many vices lead to their own extinction, but that sorrow only leads to more sorrow. He suggested activity as a defense against sorrow. His writing was geared toward planning strategies for confronting one’s weakness. For instance, he used pride to prevent himself from envying someone else.

Johnson used rigorous self-examination to transform his life. The essayist Michel de Montaigne was also intent on finding his way toward self-understanding and moral virtue but did it in a different way. Montaigne was raised by a wealthy, loving family on an estate near Bordeaux. His home life was comfortable, but his public servant role was difficult as he attempted to mediate the religious civil wars going on at the time. He planned to study Roman historians and write works on high policy.

Over time, Montaigne grew to believe he was living life wrong in some essential way. When he retired, he discovered his mind was fragmented, skipping from one thought to the next in an erratic manner. He grew depressed and set out to examine his suffering in writing. He realized how hard it was to control one’s mind or body and decided most suffering came from people’s inability to grasp their inner complexity. He used writing as a means for self-integration.

Johnson observed things outside himself, gaining self-awareness indirectly. Montaigne, on the other hand, examined himself, hoping to arrive at the true nature of all human beings generally. He constantly revised his manuscripts, giving the impression that his project was easy. In reality, it was an original and intense attempt at self-revelation and honesty. He undertook this project of self-knowledge in privacy, hoping to gain self-respect rather than approval from the public.

Montaigne ended his career because he felt the need to cultivate inner depth and self-respect. His cheerful attitude about his faults charms readers; he admits to all his drawbacks and never gets defensive about them. He discovers that the things people strive for are actually fragile and finite. In his writing, he never claims to be right about anything.

One day, Montaigne was injured in a horse collision. When he was being carried inside, he tore at his clothes in agony. Once inside, however, he rested and enjoyed the “sweetness” of letting himself go. He realized that no one has to learn how to die, they have only to let nature do it for them. This attitude is reflected in his writing, which always has a calm tone, never giving in to either jubilance or despair.

Brooks notes that people who are passionate and demand a lot of themselves don’t like Montaigne. They think his attitude is nihilistic, disliking that he avoids conflict, has few aspirations, and is emotionally distant. In his writing, he proposes that low expectations lead to happiness. However, he has a higher vision of good which is based on friendship. Friendship, for Montaigne, with its way of holding all things in common, is at the peak of a perfect society.

Both Montaigne and Johnson were humanists: they used literature to heroically discover the great truths of the human mind. However, Johnson’s approach is about struggle and stern self-demand, while Montaigne’s is about self-acceptance and geniality. Montaigne was a calming presence while Johnson roused people into moral ardor. Brooks expresses that he admires Johnson over Montaigne because, coming from suffering, Johnson had to work harder to mold himself than Montaigne, who was naturally genial.

In 1746, Johnson signed a contract to put together an English dictionary. He combed through thousands of books to find quotes that contained each definition. He threw himself into the tedious work as a way to calm himself. All in all, he defined 42,000 words and gave 116,000 illustrative quotes. Meanwhile, his wife, whom he called Tetty, fell ill and passed away.

The dictionary made Johnson famous and financially stable. He spent the rest of his life socializing with artists and thinkers such as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. He even socialized with lords and high-class figures but mostly lived with the lower class, often taking indigent and oppressed people under his care. He also ghostwrote for other people, such as when he helped an old sailor near death write up his life’s observations on sailing. He also wrote a biography of 378,000 words called The Lives of Poets.

Johnson never achieved peace like Montaigne did. He was plagued by despair and shame. However, he had great character, and was known as an excellent conversationalist. He developed a consistent point of view in which he turned his adolescent rebelliousness toward confronting his own faults. This self-combat redeemed him, and his brutally honest writing helped him confront his demons. For him, every experience was a chance to either degrade or improve himself.

Before his death, Johnson recalled a time when his father asked him to man his bookstand in the market, and he had refused out of shame. He returned to the spot of the bookstand in his old age and rebuked himself for his shameful refusal. As his death approached, he increasingly feared damnation. He carried around a note reminding himself not to sin. Before dying, he asked to be taken off opium because he didn’t want to meet God “in a state of idiocy.”

Johnson is an example of human wisdom. From a chaotic childhood, he developed an integrated way of seeing and judging the world that was more emotional than it was intellectual. Although he was born one of the world’s outcasts, he had a tremendous capacity for hard work and sympathy. He wrestled with himself honestly, saw through his motives and thoughts, and was sensitive to the world around him. When he died, the nation mourned the loss of someone irreplaceable.