To print this article open the file menu and choose Print. Click here to return to previous page Article published Sep 3, 2014 The great Dr. Samuel Johnson AS I SEE IT By Marcus Goncalves Almost 230 years ago, the world lost Dr. Johnson, as Samuel Johnson was known, a man of all seasons. Johnson was not only a British writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic and biographer; he was also an editor and lexicographer extraordinaire. But he has always been remembered, with the help of his biographer James Boswell, for greatness of spirit, mind, character, conduct, and art. Such is his great magnanimity, his piety and eloquence, so overwhelmingly obvious and affecting to those who know his writings, that it is with some difficulty that I write about him, as opposed to quoting from him. Although English is not my first language, I have tremendous respect and admiration for Johnson, probably passed on to me by one of my favorite professors in graduate school at Boston University, Dr. Aeschliman. I am not sure if there has been any critic after Aristotle that has carried more weight than Johnson, and I would be inclined to apply to Johnson himself the description that he gave to Sir Thomas More: "the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced." Cardinal Newman recognized Johnson's "great vigor and recourse of intellect" united with "a rare common sense and a conscientious regard for veracity." G. K. Chesterton used to say that Johnson was immortal because he "judged all things with a gigantic and detached common sense." C.S. Lewis went as far as to maintain that there are three great, inimitable, unique, authoritative voices in the history of Western moral culture, which everyone deeply acquainted with it thinks he knows: those of Socrates, Jesus, and Johnson. Johnson's character in early childhood, however, is striking. Not only was he so determined as a child that he persisted, or so the story goes, in attending church on his father's shoulders, he was likewise so self-assertive, particularly perhaps with women, that he actually beat his school teacher for following him protectively at a distance. Johnson was, nevertheless, an exceptionally intelligent and gifted man but surprisingly enough an uncouth character who had bad manners and an unsightly personal appearance. Nonetheless, he was especially admirable because he was the first English author to make a living entirely from his own writing rather than being subsidized by any patron. His "Letter to Lord Chesterfield" rejecting Chesterfield's patronage is a masterpiece and a sort of literary declaration of independence. One only needs to read a few of Johnson's works to realize that he could have had no idea of the political enormities and nightmares that lay in the future, in the much heralded "age of progress and rationality" foretold by French philosophers of the likes of Voltaire and Rousseau, whom Johnson so despised for their impiety and hardheadedness. While the works of authors such as Dostoyevsky and Kafka speak to a later world unknown to Johnson, his insights on the matters of morals and virtues go deeper, for this reader, than theirs, perhaps due to his profound Christian views. A writer as unsentimental and without illusion as they, Johnson at the same time maintains that our deepest and most important struggles are usually not with our environment or our fellows, but with ourselves.