Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.’85 However, in the same conversation Johnson discloses that Hume is the image of his own earlier self, for ‘Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote.’86 Johnson’s vehement rejection of Hume is thus to some extent the child of their proximity: ‘He would not allow Mr. David Hume any credit for his political principles, though similar to his own; saying of him, “Sir, he was a Tory by chance.” ‘87 So the areas of vigorous dissent – for instance, Johnson’s denial that beauty can be resolved into utility, which is an implicit reproof of Hume’s argument in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)88 – need to be placed alongside areas of substantial (although unacknowledged by Johnson) agreement between the two men: on, for instance, the harmlessness of luxury,89 or the tendency to exaggerate the merit of antiquity at the expense of modernity,90 or why it was that more importance was rightly attached to female chastity than to male.91

The vigour of Johnson’s repudiation of Hume springs from his uneasy consciousness of partial closeness. It is a doubleness of relation which is wonderfully distilled into the central episode of this strand of the Life of Johnson, namely Johnson’s response to Boswell’s appalled but fascinated account of Hume’s persisting in rejecting the consolations of Christianity on his deathbed:

I mentioned to Dr. Johnson, that David Hume’s persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much. Johnson. ‘Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man, who had been at no pains to inquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right.’ I said, I had reason to believe that the thought of annihilation gave Hume no pain. Johnson. ‘It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than that so very improbable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going (as, in spite of his delusive theory, he cannot be sure but he may go,) into an unknown state, and not being uneasy at leaving all he knew. And you are to consider, that upon his own principle of annihilation he had no motive to speak the truth.’92

The complicating but submerged circumstance which enriches this moment beyond being merely a denial of Hume’s deathbed composure is the fact that in discrediting Hume’s unshaken irreligion Johnson employs a version of Hume’s own argument against miracles (namely, that it is always much more likely that men will lie in their own interest than that anything which falls outside the customary course of nature should occur).93 In reproving Hume, Johnson also echoed him. It is a moment which captures the passionate ambivalence underlying Johnson’s declarations of attachment or rejection, which typically emerged from a background of powerfully divided sentiments.94

The internal tension in Johnson’s opinions and character is nowhere more clear than in his politics. In recent years the subject of Johnson’s political beliefs has become freshly controversial, with Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill arguing for a strong and enduring Jacobite commitment against those who see more nuance and equivocation in Johnson’s politics.95 There is no doubt that Johnson was raised in a milieu which was strongly Tory, even Jacobite.96 His father, Michael Johnson, was as Boswell tells us ‘a zealous high-churchman and royalist, and retained his attachment to the unfortunate house of Stuart, though he reconciled himself, by casuistical arguments of expediency and necessity, to take the oaths imposed by the prevailing power’.97 Staffordshire, the county where Johnson grew up, was a stronghold of Tory sentiment, and in 1712, when only three years old, Johnson, ‘the infant Hercules of toryism’, had heard that darling of the High Church faction Henry Sacheverell preach in Lichfield Cathedral when at the wildest height of his popularity.98 In his youth Johnson would inveigh against George II as ‘unrelenting and barbarous’ with such vehemence that bystanders would be startled.99 Throughout his life he missed no opportunity to deride with ‘rough contempt’ that watchword of Whiggism, liberty,100 and to exalt whenever possible the contrasting virtue of subordination, which he believed ‘tends greatly to human happiness’.101 He consorted with and gave succour to confessed Jacobites such as William Drummond.102 And Boswell, in a comment which has encouraged in some quarters feverish speculation about whether or not Johnson could have been ‘out’ in the ‘45, ponders the significance of the gap in Johnson’s publications in the years 1745 and 1746:

It is somewhat curious, that his literary career appears to have been almost totally suspended in the years 1745 and 1746, those years which were marked by a civil war in Great-Britain, when a rash attempt was made to restore the House of Stuart to the throne. That he had a tenderness for that unfortunate House, is well known; and some may fancifully imagine, that a sympathetick anxiety impeded the exertion of his intellectual powers: but I am inclined to think, that he was, during this time, sketching the outlines of his great philological work.103

Boswell’s calming supposition, that Johnson in fact spent the months of the ‘45 planning the Dictionary, is surely salutary. For there is much evidence to complicate the simple picture of Johnson’s political opinions which I have just sketched. In the first place, it is clear that Johnson’s political ideas were not static throughout his life, but moved steadily away from the emphatic Toryism of his youth. London: A Poem, published in 1738, was, like Marmor Norfolciense (1739), impregnated with anti-Walpolean sentiment; but later in life Johnson would praise Walpole as a ‘fixed star’, comparing him to his benefit with the elder Pitt.104 Despite his tenderness for the Stuarts, Johnson seems never to have entertained very cordial feelings towards the Nonjurors, seeing them as hypocrites, denying to them the power of reasoning, and himself refraining from ever entering a Nonjuring meeting-house.105 Johnson’s comment on the unexpectedness of his pension – ‘Here, Sir, was a man avowedly no friend to Government at the time, who got a pension without asking for it’ – hints at the migration of his political sentiments towards reconciliation with the fact of the Hanoverian dynasty.106 Like many others of his generation, Johnson seems eventually to have subscribed to the sane doctrine that a claim to the throne, questionable at its first assertion, might nevertheless improve over time as a result of successful, settled, tenure:

Talking of the family of Stuart, he said, ‘It should seem that the family at present on the throne has now established as good a right as the former family, by the long consent of the people; and that to disturb this right might be considered as culpable. At the same time I own, that it is a very difficult question, when considered with respect to the house of Stuart. To oblige people to take oaths as to the disputed right, is wrong. I know not whether I could take them: but I do not blame those who do.’ So conscientious and so delicate was he upon this subject, which has occasioned so much clamour against him.107

In the same vein, when Johnson fancifully supposed the existence of a club ‘to drink confusion to King George the Third, and a happy restoration to Charles the Third’, he was in no doubt that this club ‘would be very bad with respect to the State’.108

There is a similar weighing of contrary benefits and evils evident in Johnson’s conversation in 1783 with General Oglethorpe about the Glorious Revolution. Oglethorpe maintained that government ‘is now carried on by corrupt influence, instead of the inherent right in the King’, to which Johnson replied, ‘Sir, the want of inherent right in the King occasions all this disturbance. What we did at the Revolution was necessary: but it broke our constitution.’109 But inherent right may not be the only kind of right, particularly in the mind of one who was able to balance political necessity and consequent destructiveness. Johnson was of course and famously a great friend to subordination, but he was too wise to believe that even that virtue could be carried to an extreme without harm, as he revealed in a celebrated exchange with Sir Adam Fergusson:

Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough. When I say that all governments are alike, I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head.