statue which (but for the
roll with a Greek inscription upon it) would appear to be that of a
retired gladiator meditating upon a wasted life. They are still more
astonished when they see under it an inscription indicating that it
represents Johnson. The statue is by Bacon, but is not one of his best
works. The figure is, as often in eighteenth-century sculpture,
clothed only in a loose robe which leaves legs, arms, and one shoulder
bare. But the strangeness for us is not one of costume only. If we
know anything of Johnson, we know that he was constantly ill all
through his life; and whether we know anything of him or not we are apt
to think of a literary man as a delicate, weakly, nervous, and probably
valetudinarian sort of person. Nothing can be further from that than
the muscular statue. And in this matter the statue is perfectly right.
And the fact which it reports is far from being unimportant. The body
and the mind are inextricably interwoven in all of us, and certainly in
Johnson's case the influence of the body was obvious and {111}
conspicuous. His melancholy, his constantly repeated conviction of the
general unhappiness of human life, was certainly the result of his
constitutional infirmities. On the other hand, his courage, and his
entire indifference to pain, were partly due to his great bodily
strength. Perhaps the vein of rudeness, almost of fierceness, which
sometimes showed itself in his conversation, was the natural temper of
an invalid and suffering giant. That at any rate is what he was. He
was the victim from childhood of a disease which resembled St. Vitus's
Dance. He never knew, Boswell says, "the natural joy of a free and
vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling
gait of one in fetters." All accounts agree that his strange
gesticulations and contortions were painful for his friends to witness
and attracted crowds of starers in the streets. But Reynolds says that
he could sit still for his portrait to be taken, and that when his mind
was engaged by a conversation the convulsions ceased. In any case, it
is certain that neither this perpetual misery, nor his constant fear of
losing his reason, nor his many grave attacks of illness, ever induced
him to surrender the privileges that belonged to his physical strength.
He justly thought no character so disagreeable as that of a
valetudinarian, and was determined not to be one {112} himself. He had
known what