Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Stagnation)

"Do not suffer life to stagnate. It will grow muddy for want of motion."—Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas (1759)

I can’t begin to tell you how impatient I feel when I read, say, Norman Podhoretz going on about how George Orwell would have become a neoconservative if he’d only managed to live a few more years, or the Democrats saying Jesus would stump for every clause in whatever 1,000-page health-care bill Congress ever manages to cobble together. How do they know?

And so, even though I’m grateful to Eliza Gray for reminding me that today is the tricentennial of the birth of Samuel Johnson, I’m a bit put out by her Wall Street Journal essay last week, whose title gives the flavor of the piece pretty baldy: “Samuel Johnson and the Virtue of Capitalism.”

There’s much to celebrate in Dr. Johnson’s life and career, little of which makes it into Ms. Gray’s ruminations. So, if you’ll allow me:

* He was an indefatigable man of letters who wrote poetry, a novel, biographical essays, and a most idiosyncratic dictionary (a sample entry, on “politician”: “1. One versed in the arts of government; one skilled in politicks. 2. A man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.”)

* He joined a group—called, simply, “The Club”—that featured some of the most dazzling intellects of his or any time, including Edmund Burke, Joseph Banks, Joshua Reynolds, and Edward Gibbon.

* He was a larger-than-life figure whose accomplishments and quirks made him the subject of what is now considered the first great biography in English, by younger friend James Boswell.

Ms. Gray does, it is true, consider aspects of Johnson’s career that are sometimes overlooked, such as his 1753 work, The Adventurer. But I have several major problems with her contention that Johnson was a conservative:

* The meaning of the term, along with “liberal,” has changed over time. Joan Hoff Wilson titled a biography Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive. What changed was not Hoover, but the times, which had grown so dire that they now called for unprecedented action. If the times and the terms altered so fundamentally in one century, how can we expect a stable political identity across the three centuries since Johnson's birth?

* Does Johnson’s private life fit what many in the conservative movement would regard today as a traditional lifestyle? I don’t think so—not from reading Hester Thrale, a younger lady friend of his, who wrote that he said “a Woman has such power between the Ages of twenty five and forty five, that She may tye a Man to a post and whip him if She will.” Lest there be any ambiguity about the point, she added helpfully: “This he knew of him self was literally and strictly true.”

* Even if you can come up with a meaningful definition of “conservative,” Johnson’s positions don’t fit snugly along the ideological spectrum. For a full scorecard of these positions, please see the discussion here.

* Again, even if you accept Gray’s belief that Johnson was a conservative, she doesn’t explain how he came by his belief. Along these lines, I think I might be able to point to how his thinking evolved.

It all traced back to his multi-year struggle to stave off starvation, then to his famous clash with the Earl of Chesterfield. In a powerful letter, Johnson took Chesterfield to task for his tardiness: “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?”

If Johnson believed in the free market, as Ms. Gray believes, much of this would owe to the tangled relationship with the earl. Rather than depending on a single patron—someone who, in those times, ran the strong possibility of being a spendthrift, and maybe even corrupt in the bargain—Johnson may have felt that selling his services openly to multiple users—a free market, if you will—was a method to circumvent a deferential society without completely undermining it.