That knowledge guided his pen when he composed the famous letter reproving the Earl of Chesterfield for his failures as a patron, and it is the source of that letter’s peculiar power as a piece of writing: a mordant unmasking of unmeaning civility which nevertheless employs many of the literary tropes of courtliness, such as indirection and classical allusion – tropes discredited and disdained in the very act of being set to work.62

This Johnsonian suspicion of courtesy must have strengthened his belief in the virtue of frank opposition. Nevertheless, it was a policy which took its toll on the practitioner, as well as on the recipient. Johnson’s unstinted admiration for Burke, notwithstanding the gulf between their politics, seems in part to have been based on how Burke roused Johnson:

And once, when Johnson was ill, and unable to exert himself as much as usual without fatigue, Mr. Burke having been mentioned, he said, ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.’ So much was he accustomed to consider conversation as a contest, and such was his notion of Burke as an opponent.63

But the cost of combativeness was, for Johnson, nothing in comparison to the reassurance it supplied, as he revealed in his response to the controversy caused by his political pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny (1775): ‘His Taxation no Tyranny being mentioned, he said, “I think I have not been attacked hard enough for it. Attack is the re-action; I never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds.” ‘64 The need for a rebound, for the ‘collision of mind with mind’, was a matter not just of confirming the vigour of the initial impulse from Johnson.65 For it was also through such emphatic encounters that the self came to know and to enjoy both itself and the external world – this for Johnson was the ‘medicine of correction’.66 This is the key to understanding what for Johnson was at stake in his defiant misreading of Berkeley’s philosophy:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’67

There could be nothing more disingenuous, however, than Johnson’s acquiescence in what he must have been aware was Boswell’s travesty of the propositional content of Berkeley’s philosophy, and nothing more sophistical than his assertion that kicking a stone constituted a refutation of that philosophy.68 (Berkeley never contended that our perceptions of solidity were false, simply that it was not clear how one could move beyond such perceptions reliably to infer the presence of material substance.)69 So it was natural for Johnson to prefer chastisement over encouragement as a motive to improvement, be it educational or spiritual.

It was a strand of character which could also take less sombre forms. A melancholy Johnson, wandering through Paris in the company of the brewer Henry Thrale and his vivacious wife, and suddenly mindful of the absence of his own, dead, wife (who would he thought have taken pleasure in the magnificence of the city and its palaces), resolved his own indifference before splendour, not into any stoicism, but rather into a consequence of his emotional isolation: ‘Having now nobody to please, I am little pleased.’70 Energetic interaction was for Johnson a mode of being, not just in the sense of being a settled disposition of character, but more deeply because it allowed him to discover the contents and trace the boundaries of his own mind. Take this fragment of conversation between Boswell and Johnson on the subject of respect:

JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, we know very little about the Romans. But, surely, it is much easier to respect a man who has always had respect, than to respect a man who we know was last year no better than ourselves, and will be no better next year. In republicks there is not a respect for authority, but a fear of power.’ BOSWELL. ‘At present, Sir, I think riches seem to gain most respect.’ JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir, riches do not gain hearty respect; they only procure external attention.’71

The distinction between respect and attention is a fine insight. It is forged by the heat of contradiction (‘No, Sir…’), and draws other fine distinctions in its wake, for when Boswell introduces the subject of ‘riches’ to the conversation, Johnson’s imagination moves from politics to money and his language is suddenly impregnated with fiscal figures (‘gain’, ‘procure’) – figures which, in their own suggested gradations of worth, capture and express something of the difference between genuine respect and mere attention which Johnson wishes here to convey. The practice of desyn-onymization – the careful separating out of the different shades of meaning between words which custom has confused – was plainly as central to Johnson as it would later be to Coleridge.72 This is why the the Dictionary is the pivotal work in Johnson’s canon, and why also Boswell’s praise of Johnson’s writings, as furnishing ‘bark and steel for the mind’, is deserved.73 Combativeness contributed powerfully to these achievements.

But, inaddition to these external collisions, for Johnson the cardinal principle of conflict also possessed a more intimate aspect, expressing itself asan internal war ofcontraries. This was a’conflict ofopposite principles’of which, asBoswellrecords, Johnsonhad’Muchexperience’.74 Boswell’s famousimage for Johnson’s mind presents it to us as the site of unremitting struggle:

His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.75

Many of Johnson’s conflicts were with people or things or ideas for which he seems secretly to have nursed an affinity, even a craving. For instance, in the Life Boswell frequently discusses Johnson’s relationship with alcohol. The friend of Johnson’s youth the Birmingham surgeon Edmond Hector, ‘who lived with him in his younger days in the utmost intimacy and social freedom’, told Boswell that Johnson ‘loved to exhilarate himself with wine’.76 On his arrival in London in 1737, however, Johnson ‘abstained entirely from fermented liquors: a practice to which he rigidly conformed for many years together, at different periods of his life’.77 Meeting his old acquaintance Oliver Edwards in 1778, Johnson spoke frankly about his fitful use of alcohol: ‘I now drink no wine, Sir. Early in life I drank wine: for many years I drank none. I then for some years drank a great deal.’78 By March 1781, however, Johnson was drinking once more, as Boswell discovered when he went to dinner at the Thrales:

He [Thrale] told me I might now have the pleasure to see Dr. Johnson drink wine again, for he had lately returned to it. When I mentioned this to Johnson, he said, ‘I drink it now sometimes, but not socially.’ The first evening that I was with him at Thrale’s, I observed he poured a quantity of it into a large glass, and swallowed it greedily. Every thing about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never was any moderation; many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink wine, it was copiously. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.79

The inability to be moderate meant that Johnson might reel from extremity to extremity – in this case, from abstinence to bingeing – and part of the justification for the episodes of surrender (Johnson said that he drank ‘to get rid of myself, to send myself away’) was that they made possible another act of resistance.80 That Johnson had a strong appetite for alcohol seems clear: ‘I have drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it. University College has witnessed this.’81 That he took a secret pleasure in the effects of alcohol, while fearing that weakening of conscious rational control which intoxication brings in its wake,82 and fearing also to let those effects be publicly visible, is also suggested by his intermittent habits of solitary drinking.83 But the most striking feature of Johnson’s attitude towards alcohol is the way it reveals a structural feature of his personality which was also an element in his moral philosophy, namely the need from time to time abruptly and utterly to deny that to which you feel drawn.

We can see this in Johnson’s mental life, as well as in his physical existence. One of the great structuring antagonisms in the Life is that which exists between Johnson and the man whom, in 1762, Boswell had hailed as ‘the greatest Writer in Britain’, David Hume.84 Johnson was outspoken in his disdain for Hume’s sceptical philosophy: ‘Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence.