One imagines it would take something significant to prick up the questioning ears of an alcoholic, gambling womanizer who suffered from seventeen cases of gonorrhea in his lifetime. Thus, when James Boswell professes to be startled by the friendship his friend, mentor, and worship-object Samuel Johnson had for poet Richard Savage, a reader is clued into the fact that this had to be out of the normal or expected.
"Richard Savage," Boswell writes, "a man of whom it is difficult to speak impartially, without wondering that he was for some time the intimate companion of Johnson; for his character was marked by profligacy, insolence, and ingratitude…by associating with Savage, who was habituated to the dissipation and licentiousness of the town, Johnson…was imperceptibly led into some indulgence which occasioned much distress to his virtuous mind." (1)
A more contrasting "companion" could not be better found for Johnson, but Johnson himself makes it impossible for us to ignore their friendship. Though in 1744 he had begun crafting his literary reputation with his excellent poetry, the publication that year of An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage revealed a genius for non-fiction prose which would blossom with his periodicals, commentaries on Shakespeare and the poets, and of course the Dictionary. The biography is detailed, probing, and, in laying bare Savage's considerable quantity of personality flaws, apparently painfully honest…or is it?
Wanting to read a notable sampling of Johnson's writing to mark the three hundredth anniversary of his birth, this writer was struck by the dualistic characters of Savage and Johnson and their correspondence to the psychological consistency of human beings described by Sigmund Freud in 1923's The Ego and the Id. Using Johnson's own text and my own information about the parties drawn from modern critical writings and Boswell's Life, three considerations on approaching Savage took rigorous form. For the three central figures of the biography each represent a Freudian concept. Richard Savage is one, of course, and his alleged mother Countess Anne Macclesfield who lurks through the work as a shadowy antagonist. But the third is almost out of sight in the text, even though he may be the most significant figure involved. For it is a viable contention from a Freudian point of view that Samuel Johnson, in Savage, was actually writing about himself, using his friend as a figure of displacement and self-examination. Dr. Patrick Cruttwell described Savage as "not best thought of either as biography or as criticism. It is really an elegy, almost a poem." (2) If so, it is Johnson's elegy for both a man he considered a true friend and a portion of his own self which he worked to subjugate so to give him the strength and discipline to become one of the greatest English writes of all time.
Richard Savage: A Failing of the Oedipus Complex
By Johnson's account, of which the questionability will be discussed more appropriately in part three, Richard Savage was born the illegitimate son of Countess Anne Macclesfield and Earl Rivers. Macclesfield, following her divorce, disowned the boy and sent him off to live with his nurse Mrs. Lloyd (3), and Rivers passed the rest of his life not knowing his offspring, being told on his deathbed that Savage was already dead. (4) Savage therefore grew up without a father and with an affectionate woman whom he would before long discover (according to Johnson) was not his mother. (5)
Savage therefore had no chance in his definitive childhood years to experience and resolve the Oedipus Complex. To summarize Freud, the Complex occurs when a child is just commencing their development. In every human being is the id, the inner self of desire, emotion, instinct, and unconscious thought…every possible conception a person can imagine. Humans also each possess an ego, the outside self of intellect, reason, and conscious thought which is always visible to the external world. But while the id is fully formed from birth, the ego develops through perception. In the Oedipus Complex, our most basic need, the need for love, causes a small boy (in the cases of Savage and Johnson) to desire his mother, whom he perceives feeds him, nurtures him, and showers him with parental love, and feel opposed to, even murderous of, the father he perceives to be as similar to him. The Complex resolves when a boy chooses to reject the desires he has for his mother and further identify with his father as another man. This may at first appear to be an absolute triumph of the ego, recognizing their common nature through perception, but closer examination reveals the desires of the id still intact but transformed. The child still feels affection for his mother, since he perceives that the father he imitates holds the same affection, and also still feels separate from his father through recognition that he is still unalike from him, indeed must be unalike, for a father has certain prerogatives a son cannot have, parental responsibility and sexual relations with the mother to name just two. The instrument of resolution is actually a part of the ego which progresses deep into the unconscious called the superego, or ego ideal, which is responsible for the healthy human personality, for an uncontrollable id would bring about destructive pain through a constant pursuit of pleasure, but a firmly dominant ego would lead to a complete repression of emotions just as disastrous to the psyche. (6)
The job of the superego is to take our infinite capacity for thought, emotion, and desire and channel it into a reasonable form (an object, as Freud would say) which is acceptable in both our self-perception and the perceptions of others. The id is incapable of perceiving, including the perception that others perceive the world as we do and thus perceive us. The ego, based in perception, is weaker because it does not possess such a wide range of thoughts. The only way the ego can maintain equilibrium with the id is to create new venues for the same emotions which are intellectually sound. The superego, an unconscious part of the ego which sometimes manifests itself as the guilt-stricken prick of conscience, takes our desires and uses intelligence to make alternatives which to quote Freud tell the id, "Look, you can love me, the ego, too. I am just like the original object." (7)
Not only does the superego resolve the Oedipus Complex in this fashion, it also shapes human morality and society. By establishing attachments to two elders whose behaviors in the world are perceivable, it gives a child a model to imitate and learn proper conduct and values from. Freud felt that our notion of God came from the superego, not wanting our desire to be like our parents to grow too powerful, to create an all-powerful being whose goodness and overarching rules gave us notions of morality and restraint. However, we then hit upon the scenario of where masses of people believed this, and the individual id sees these masses as rivals for the affection of his all-powerful "father," for they are his children, too. Thus the superego goes to work again by, as it did with the Complex, using our perceptions of similarity to others to turn jealousy and hatred into identification and empathy. By learning to fit in, stable society is formed, and a person's perceptions of how they are different from the others in society leads to personality and identity. (8) (9)
However, maturing with such disadvantages, Richard Savage was not able to properly experience the Oedipus Complex as Freud intended. His perceptions gave him no father to imitate and a mother who did not love and nurture him but instead attempted to keep him mired at the bottom of existence. During a period where he constantly sought to make contact with Macclesfield and was just as constantly rejected (10), Savage likewise searched for a father figure and found one in Sir Richard Steele, the famed essayist. (11) Steele gave Savage, a writer of some talent, the idea that one could make a living by his pen, but Steele was also an impecunious man who lived with his finances in a day-to-day state of uncertainty and knew how to use shock value to get people to notice him and, more importantly, assist him. (12) Worse, Steele, who knew Savage's history, told him "that the inhumanity of his mother had given him a right to find every good man his father." (13) Savage would keep these principles to heart even after dissolving his ties with Steele (14), but he still had little sense of self-identity as yet.
Using his education and Steele's example, Savage, still trying to make contact with the evasive Anne Macclesfield, began a literary career. His first noticeable work, going by the principle "write what you know," was a tragedy on the life of Sir Thomas Overbury, a nobleman ultimately executed when he tried to interfere with a powerful woman's divorce. (15) Colley Cibber's company staged the play and Cibber insisted Savage portray Overbury although the writer had no desire to be an actor. (15) However, unbeknownst to Savage, an opportunity would soon come which would give him the chance to act before a vast public and create the identity he was searching for.
During a drunken night out with friends, Savage got into an altercation at an inn which ended in him stabbing a man to death. In the trial, Savage chose to defend himself, and the reluctant actor now revealed an eloquence and gift for words as he pleaded and argued for leniency (16)…the fictional step towards identity by equating himself to a man who stuck to his principles despite a rich divorcee's persecution now resulted in a real step being taken. Savage decided that without a father and with a mother bent on his destruction, the only person who could save him was himself. From his murder trial until the end of his life, Richard Savage consciously chose to be beholden to no one. If life and society gave him no proper compass (apart from Steele), he would live in society on his own terms.
This began with Savage finally making a break from Anne Macclesfield who, according to Johnson, used her influence to ensure that Savage, convicted of murder when the judge summarized against him (17), was denied leniency. (18) Saved from the gallows only by a last-minute plea from the even more powerful Countess of Hertford (19), Savage decided that from then on he would deal with Macclesfield the way she dealt with him. Dropping his earlier behavior of filial love and submission, he now threatened "to harass her with lampoons, and to publish a copious narrative of her conduct" (19) unless she paid him off. Anne's younger relation Lord Tyrconnel thus became Savage's patron.
Richard Savage now entered his "golden period," (20) possessed with a stream of money, a burgeoning career as a poet and pamphleteer, and the friendship of other writers and nobility alike, including his patron Tyrconnel, who received him into the family estate. Savage should have been set for life. Unfortunately, his subsequent behavior would be a perfect Freudian case study of what happens when a person fails to resolve the Oedipus Complex and thus develop a superego. Savage's life as Johnson describes it fits in perfectly with the workings of an uncontrolled, self-centered, non-perceptive id.
Among other qualities, the id is responsible for our desire of pleasure or erotic drive (21), but in Freud's ideas on the maladjusted personality, love can become hatred when a weakened ego's perceptions of others lead the id's wide range of thoughts to decide that the "other" is too similar and equal to us, making us paranoid that in society, a choice between us and our equal for anything—job, romantic partner, resource allocation—will be uncertain and possibly lead to the other working towards our destruction. (22) The excessive id also leads to cruelty, because lack of a superego and underdeveloped ego creates a person who "cannot fully understand how others are oppressed by pain." (23) Cruelty stems from a desire for mastery and fears of self-possession being lost (24), and in an effort to preserve our self-determination we can end up not caring whom we hurt. Savage's desire for an individual, unfettered existence led to a rapid development of a cruel streak in his nature, most often in his writing poetry which attacked others who had at one time been his friends. (25)
However, the ultimate effect of Richard Savage's failed resolution of the Oedipus Complex was that, without a superego, he had a pronounced lack of empathy. Without a model for moral conduct and a lack of good perceptive identification, Savage gave little thought to the feeling of others and of any moral considerations. Crutwell says Savage is "concerned with a man maniacally bent on self-destruction;" (26) this is true in the sense that by giving in to the urges of his id, Savage set himself up for a life of constant devastation to himself and his friends.
There were two main ways Savage's pronounced id thwarted a healthy life, psychological and otherwise, for him. First, Savage lived in opposition to Johnson's principle that happiness can only be found in virtue, that men have peace of mind when they know they act well even when their plans go awry. (27) Without a moral compass, Savage refused to learn anything regarding virtuous behavior and placed his happiness in the temporal, and when one avenue of happiness failed, he would pick himself up and try it again, being none the wiser and unable to judge that his behavior was bringing him misery. In Johnson's words, "He proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at least forgetting it, to amuse himself with phantoms of happiness, which were dancing before him; and willingly turned his eyes from the light of reason." (28) Savage could not learn from his behavior because he could only see his point of view on any subject, and Savage at times becomes a recitation of him repeating his tactics with diminishing returns. Johnson's examples include Savage continually milking his story for sympathy (29), writing sycophantic poetry in hopes of reward (30), spending the money his patrons gave him in rapid bursts and falling quicker into debt, a la Steele (31), and most significantly, always ascribing his state to the machinations of others while never abandoning the practice of accepting their hospitality. (32)
This was Savage's second failing of the id. He could not recognize that people from Lord Tyrconnel to Alexander Pope to Johnson himself took him into their intimacy because of his virtues as a wit, an inventive writer, a great man to have for a party, and when the mood struck him (as it admittedly did on many occasions) a generous friend. (33) When Savage began his associations with the British elite following the murder trial and Tyrconnel's patronage, he hadn't actually done anything of literary significance—a few poems no one much cared for and a play which came and went. Obviously, there were some good qualities, some promise these people recognized in Richard Savage which made them want to associate with him. (34)
These qualities were of little lasting impact in a man whose massive id and lack of superego convinced him that he was on his own, that since his parents had turned their backs on him he had a right to turn his back on the world, and as compensation should expect every good man to be his father. Those who befriended Savage became not allies but victims, as he constantly spent their money, threw their homes into disarray with his drunkenness and irregular hours, and stuck them with every bill he accumulated. (35) He went so far as to reject offers of assistance which would have curbed his chosen manner of living, even going so far as to turn down a man who would have lent him money simply because the man wanted to meet him at nine in the morning! (36) Savage's ego was also no help: Johnson claimed that part of Savage's writing ability came from being a keen student of human nature, but he admits Savage mostly observed the flaws and follies of nobility and successful writers, as if building up ammunition and argument for his misfortunes (37)…it is as if Savage's studies of his friends led to a preordained, id-devised conclusion. "I was of noble birth and I'm just as great a writer as they are, but they're successful and I'm not…but they have failings of their own, so why should I bother to correct anything in myself which they don't like?" Savage would continually use his pen, as aforementioned, to criticize and attack his associates; he may have been trying to knock them off the pedestals he saw in his mind. Johnson's claim that people were afraid of Savage's pen (38) appears over the top. More likely they were annoyed and irritated, with fears only that he might persecute them as he persecuted Anne, whom he did finally attack in print with his poem "The Bastard." (39) Even indirectly, Savage's work struck out for his own individuality against others; he developed a sympathy for colonies in his last, "public" poetry, seeing these new outposts as enthralled to more powerful beings as he was. (40) Savage also possessed a desire for exhibitionism, speaking out on any topic which might get him noticed, not caring who he offended in the process, even when he had no knowledge of the topic. (41)
Johnson ultimately offers some mild criticism of Savage's other friends, saying that since his work did them no personal injury, they should have ignored it. (42) In effect, he argues that people with healthy personalities should be lenient to others' destructive behaviors. This opinion was shared by Johnson's esteemed colleague and Savage's greatest patron, Alexander Pope, whose genuine regard for Savage's poetry kept him in the Savage corner for years. Following Tyrconnel's withdrawing of patronage, unable to tolerate Savage's flagrant behavior and insults anymore (43), Savage's friends decided to make a last-ditch effort to help him by sending him out of London with strict monetary controls so he could rewrite the Overbury tragedy and other works and thus re-establish his reputation. This marked a total curtailing of his freedom, but Savage agreed because Pope framed the scheme in a psychologically-appealing manner: he convinced Savage that if he devoted himself to his career he would be able to make money and live his life "without any dependence on those little creatures which we are pleased to call the Great." (44) It was a perfect feeding of the id's vanity, and Savage bit.
However, as events quickly proved, Richard Savage was beyond help. Stuck in Wales, completely beholden to others (he at one point grew angry that a tailor not of his choosing came to measure him for clothes (45)), his efforts to write drama and poetry gave way to a growing bitterness and resentment. Savage reached his threshold when Pope wrote a letter for him to Tyrconnel's friend Sir William Lemon, an epistle of admittance and forgiveness to bring Savage's other great advocate back into his camp. (46) From the first, Savage disliked the idea "that any man should presume to dictate a letter to him" (47), but when he read Pope's carefully crafted words of "sentiments entirely opposite to his own," (48) his id broke free in a blatant assertion of his own power in revolt against everyone trying to tell him what to do, even when they clearly knew what was good for him better than he knew it himself. Fueled by his id's desires, Savage wrote his own blatantly derogatory letter to Tyrconnel (49), then refused to let more experienced dramatists edit and correct his tragedy for suitability for the stage. (50) Either one of these actions could have saved him, but Savage's determination to live an individual existence, once unleashed from a temporary check, overpowered whatever reason he had left. Finally, Savage was arrested for his spiraling debts and sent to Newgate Prison.
Paradoxically, prison was the perfect environment for Savage. Under the humane treatment of the keeper, Savage had his own room, a constant supply of food, privileges for time outdoors, and most of all, the ignorance of his benefactor, allowing him to retreat from the world for writing and thought. (51) As Johnson says, "he suffered fewer hardships in prison than he had been accustomed to undergo in the greatest part of his life." (52) But his newfound "freedom" got the better of him one final, disastrous time. Savage determined to write a poem where he would deride everyone whom he thought put him on the path to incarceration, and then put his name to it against, as always, the judgment of his friends. (53) This act of self-assertion ultimately led to Pope breaking from him. In Johnson's account, Savage's health rapidly failed knowing he had lost his last champion, and predictably, Newgate's keeper had to pay for the burial after Richard Savage, a slave to the id, finally died.
Samuel Johnson: The Triumph of the Superego
Richard Savage's self-centered life and death stand, as Boswell truly said, at complete opposition to that of Samuel Johnson, a man whose high-minded approach to his writing ability, devotion to his friends, and ingrained reverence mark every page of his life story. Yet when Johnson set up residence in London, he and Savage embarked on that puzzling intimacy which led them, two indigent writers, to "wander together whole nights in the streets…not at all depressed by their situation, but in high spirits." (53) Furthermore, for all of Savage's chronicling of his vices and horridness, Johnson keeps arguing that Savage possessed virtues as well, notably in a warm final summary full of regarding praise mixed with shameful admittance that his life was not as it should have been. (54) Johnson's portrait was so well-rounded that critics could not decide if he was making an attack on Savage or a defense, a lampoon of his character or an apology for it. (55) This close bond with his subject makes it all the more puzzling at first glance that Johnson absented himself from Savage apart from one anonymous reference. (56) Puzzling, that is, until the biography is put into the context of Johnson's own life and Freudian analysis-based character. For in 1744, Samuel Johnson was going through a defining turning point which would mark the rest of his existence, and the 35 year-old writer, recognizing this, knew that he now had an opportunity like no other to examine his own self and prepare for what was to come. An Account of the Life of Richard Savage is, in the last reading, as much about its author as its subject.
Unlike Savage, Johnson grew up in a nuclear family which, though financially precarious, was personally stable; he loved and respected his parents very much. His mother gave him an intensive religious instruction, but his father, a bookseller who always had the classics on hand, was prone to fits of melancholy. (57) One might assume that it was from Michael Johnson that Samuel took both his rigorous, logical, Latin-influenced writing style and a habitual gloomy temperament which, combined with Sarah Johnson's impressing of faith, gave him a mental state dialectically different from his future friend.
Freud claims that we all have a drive for death within us to balance our drive for life and sex, and while the latter is situated in the id, the former is produced by the ego, which perceives that life comes from nothingness and will return to nothingness, and so wishes to hasten us along to the logical conclusion. (58) Johnson's environment also made him a great candidate for belief in God as an all-powerful figure who determines a moral standard we must live up to or face eternal condemnation for, the gist of Sarah Johnson's personal character. Filled with a significant devotion to God and Christian ethics which marked his life, Johnson, whose traditional family prompted a normal resolution of the Oedipus Complex, early on began to show signs of an expansive superego. A reading of his prayers and meditations is based around a recurring theme of Johnson criticizing himself, resolving to do better, even looking at his behavior and saying "This is not the life to which Heaven is promised." (59)
Johnson arrived in London in 1737 and soon after met Savage, eleven years his senior. Through his own process of psychological identification, Johnson must have seen a man very similar to himself. The implication on the very first page of Savage that the accomplished, when they fall, fall harder because they have more to lose (60), suggests that Savage was, if not on the exact same intellectual level as Johnson, had some form of learned knowledge comparable to Johnson's literary expertise. When Johnson describes Savage as a man who "it being in no time of [his] life any part of his character to be the first of the company that desired to separate" (61), the future co-founder of the Literary Club and incomparable conversationalist could easily have been painting a picture of himself. Also like Savage, or at least the Savage he writes of, Johnson was clearly above the norm in writing, speaking, and persuasive argument…and was not yet recognized as such by this point. In truth, there were two similarities in their personae which Johnson was quick to seize upon, the first of which was completely true: both were poor men who had turned to writing "by necessity." (62)
Johnson had not deliberately set out to be a man of letters. His ambitions were to obtain a degree from Oxford and become an educator, but the family's financial straits forced him to leave before graduation (63) and attempts to set up his own school or find employment as a teacher or translator came to naught. (64) Inspired by his lifelong friend David Garrick, Johnson accompanied him to London with, like Savage, a tragic drama, but it initially failed to get produced and Johnson was stuck. By this time, he also had a wife, Elisabeth, almost double his age and to whom he was as devoted as to his mother. (65) Needing money, he picked up his pen and became a regular contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, and quickly began to cultivate a reputation. (66) Savage was a man in the same position who already had a measure of fame, and Johnson was in all likelihood attracted to a man who was proof that success could be had this way (if not permanent success), while Savage may have seen this rising star as a young protégé whom someday he could sponge off.
However, there was another similarity between Johnson and Savage which may only have existed in Johnson's mind. A man of sharp intellect would have been quick to perceive at least some of the flaws in Savage's character, but Johnson would have been accepting of these drawbacks, as later he would forgive the weaknesses of friends such as Boswell and Topham Beauclerk, because he considered himself just as flawed. Johnson was well aware of temperamental and immoderate streaks in himself. On a more exterior level, he could overeat and drink too much to the point where he would have to force abstentious behavior on himself. (66) Within, he had a streak for argument and, mildly, a belief in the superiority of his convictions which paralleled Savage's own inflated ego and often led him to insult his friends. (67) More significantly, Johnson, as a man in the prime of his life, not unreasonably found some sexual dissatisfaction with a wife well past child-bearing age. When Boswell places a final reminiscence of Johnson's years with Savage near the end of the Life, stating that Johnson "owned to many of his friends, that he used to take women of the town to taverns, and hear them relate their history" (68), his delicate language towards the man he idolized, coupled with the ensuing declaration that "in his combats with [his propensities], he was sometimes overcome" (69), speaks to a period of adulterous gratification which would obviously have shaken the senses of such a devout psyche.
Savage was a disagreeable man who could indulge in heavy drinking and illicit sex, and he died before his time a friendless figure in prison. This was 1743, by which time Johnson's poem "London," political reporting, and various essays had won him the attentions of Pope and other luminaries. (70) He was rising just as Savage had once risen, but his unforgiving superego warned him that continuing in similar behaviors could result in just as great a fall. At the same time, Johnson had a generosity of spirit which made him love the personable Savage, and he wanted to give a man of some virtue his dignity, for Johnson was a man who hated easily, but unlike Savage striking out carelessly at the world, his hatred was turned in towards himself. In most people, Freud theorizes, the anger comes from the instability of the ego, trying to please the conventions of the outside world, the relentlessness of the id, and the superego which is frustrated by having too much information from perceptions to deal with and the fact that the id will always be larger than the ego and so manifests out of the unconscious as guilt. (71) In most people the ego turns against the superego by directing its self-hatred onto an external object (72), as Savage was want to do. But Johnson's superego was so mighty as to keep his anger firmly directed at himself. When he saw the end come for a man he believed shared his flaws, conflicting emotions must have been flowing through him.
Thus upon close examination, Savage is revealed to be a complex document with a mission under its surface: Samuel Johnson's attempt at self-exorcism and catharsis.
The first crucial passage comes when Johnson writes of Savage's tendency to lampoon and criticize his friends in his writing: "man may change his principles, and that he, who was once deservedly commended, may be afterwards satirized with equal justice, or that the poet was dazzled with the appearance of virtue, and found the man whom he had celebrated, when he had an opportunity of examining him more narrowly, unworthy of the panegyric which he had too hastily bestowed." (73) Johnson's implication is one which the critics missed: every man and situation can be praised and blamed depending on subjectivity and nothing else. Thus Johnson, considering the whole picture, would not use his biography to attack Savage or otherwise write an encomium. He was writing things as they were, a characteristic of his style which would carry on through his life, according to the Oxford History of English Literature: he shared in his observations of life "neither Pope's readiness to prescribe remedies nor Swift's to proclaim despair." (74)
Savage's growing submission to his id as his name becomes more famous, Johnson goes on, both prompted that boldness of his pen and led him to consider himself as having triumphed over his obstacles. "Superiority of fortune," Johnson says, "has a natural tendency to kindle pride, and that pride seldom fails to exert itself in contempt and insult." (75) It is the first time in the text he condemns Savage, whom he hitherto depicted as a victim. This sudden reversal makes sense when one sees that Johnson was condemning the root of all his perceived failings: the pride that made him argumentative, made him dominate the conversation, and worst of all, made him flout the commandments of the lord by sleeping with women not his wife. Savage was a man of destructive pride and irresistible erotic (in the Freudian sense) energy. In Savage, Johnson saw the shadows of his own soul extrapolated to a terrifying level. He is not being merciless to Savage, but merciless to the inner desires he hated and feared in himself.
The guilty man is thus driven to repentance, and repentance comes when Johnson comes to the scandal of Savage's "The Progress of a Divine," a poem written in response to a singular religious controversy he had no personal stake in (76) and in Cruttwell's words "a thoroughly unpleasant poem" with "a strong taste for sadistic sexual fantasy." (77)
Johnson splits hairs that the poem was not obscene but merely introduced obscene topics in order to educate the public to avoid licentiousness (78), but it is not left to the reader to judge. Apart from some stanzas of "The Wanderer" (79), Johnson never quotes Savage's poetry. This sounds odd in the biography of a poet, but Johnson's assertion is that he is dealing with Savage as a biographer, not a critic, and literary analysis in this case falls beyond the scope of his mission. (80) He suffices by describing the poetry as accomplished and touched by artistic genius, though his one bit of commentary following actual quotation mixes admiration with a judgment that there was little logic involved in composition, comparing it to "a heap of shining materials thrown together by accident." (81) This is a generous and necessary action on Johnson's part, for excessive criticism of the one accomplishment of Savage's life would have thrown doubts on the validity of his deserving to have his life written at all, and Johnson can thus elegize his friend without backing himself into a critical corner.
But back to "The Progress of a Divine." Johnson states flat-out that for a non-obscene poem, it is still bad enough that Savage's "conduct cannot be vindicated," but he asserts Savage "never intended to repeat the provocation; and that, though, whenever he thought he had any reason to complain of the clergy, he used to threaten them with a new edition of The Progress of a Divine, it was his calm and settled resolution to suppress it forever." (82) Now how could Johnson have known this for a fact, especially if Savage kept dropping hints he would revive and expand the poem and would prove to break literary promises by writing attacks against Macclesfield even after she arranged for him to be paid not to? It may have been an instance of Savage's guilt, but his lack of a superego and declared refusal to learn from his mistakes suggest he never knew the meaning of the word "guilt." No, when Johnson resolves to suppress forever a description of sexual depravity, he is quietly speaking for himself and his own intention to suppress his basest instincts. He displaces his penitence onto Savage.
All of this being said, there is no greater instance of displacement then found in the concluding pages of Savage. After Savage's death and a physical description, Johnson devotes three paragraphs to a summary of Savage's virtues: a man of judgment, perception, and excellent memory who devoted his life to acquiring knowledge through study, close conversation, and observations of human nature. (83) Johnson's future editor Birkbeck Hill would say "much of Johnson's own character is described" (84) in this passage. There is enough in the composition of Savage to suggest Johnson's friend really did have these attributes, though, as Johnson subsequently admits, "it cannot be said, that he made use of his abilities for the direction of his own conduct" (84), for as he earlier said, Savage "was not a good man but a friend of goodness." (85) A man who possessed great mental gifts and understood virtue but could not practice it: such a man is worthy of Johnson's concluding sentence, "that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible." (86)
This is a warning both for the general public and Johnson himself. Freud believed that man was more moral than he actually knew, for since morality was the product of the unconscious superego, it was very hard to recognize one's own worth. (87) Johnson's superego was a castigator and condemner, not given to praise its master. Johnson felt his knowledge, wit, and genius, however good, were a blessing from God not to be abused, and negligent and irregular behavior on his own part would render them meaningless if he ended up in the damnation, so the final summation is crouched in language not actually condemning Savage, for Johnson has no wish to condemn himself. He wrote Savage as a reassurance that he could still be saved if he worked at foiling the worst attributes he shared with Savage, and that early passage hinting at the piece's objectivity is actually a plea: Johnson does not want us to praise or blame Savage because he did not want praise or blame himself from outside parties. He hoped they saw him as a man trying to live life as best as he could, in constant improvement, and would not judge but accept and forgive.
There is of course an argument against such an interpretation: as previously said, the biography's composition plays up Richard Savage's good qualities enough to imply he truly did possess virtue equivalent to his vice. However, the text is also written with a strong thoroughness and exhaustive chronicling of Savage's deeds, anecdotes of striking particularity being inserted every so often. At about the halfway point of the book, Johnson includes one story of Savage winning in court again, this time when he was accused of sedition: the sheer exactness of the charge "made Mr. Savage's vindication easy; for he had never in his life seen the place which was declared to be the scene of his wickedness, nor ever had been present in any town where its representatives were chosen." (88) In other words, the more particular the details, the less they apply to Savage. Samuel Johnson wrote about Savage with an astounding psychological probity, even claiming to know his exact intentions…in most cases, such probity can only come when you are writing of your own self.
In the end, though, this writer can point out one passage where Johnson was writing about Savage and no one else. In his commentary on "The Wanderer," that one moment of actual literary criticism, Johnson calls it an illustration of Savage's "first great position, 'that good is the consequence of evil.'" (89) Now this might be seen as a Voltaire-level excuse for any form of behavior, but for Johnson, from this reading of The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, he might have been giving Savage credence, for in inspiring Johnson's own variation of exorcism and catharsis, providing him an appropriate vehicle to explore and come to terms with his mental turmoil, Richard Savage's morally substandard life may have done Samuel Johnson much good. His subsequent literary output, while philosophically deep and intellectually profound, never again touched on such naked emotion.
Anne Macclesfield: Misogyny Misconstrued
There is a final point to be made in examining Savage which is minor compared to the struggles of its two protagonists, but is still significant. Samuel Johnson utilizes his pen to vilify Countess Anne Macclesfield as a person of unqualified despicability.
In Johnson's account of her behavior, Macclesfield conceived Savage with Earl Rivers as an instrument to secure her divorce from Lord Macclesfield, whom she loathed (90), for bearing a child outside of marriage was the easiest proof of adultery you could obtain. Macclesfield achieved her goal, but did so by flagrantly flying in the face of propriety by using two different men and giving birth to a son she did not want. Without a sufficient maternal instinct, it makes psychological sense that Macclesfield's unconscious guilt over her affair led her to displace her anger onto the concrete object of her deeds: Richard Savage himself. Her unwillingness to acknowledge or support Savage is psychologically true up to this point, but Johnson then tells of how she deceived Rivers into thinking Savage was dead, cheating him out of an inheritance she could not even touch herself. (91) This is doing evil for the sheer pleasure of evil, the mark of a sociopath.
Johnson's language is suitably full of invective. Anne Macclesfield, rather than loving her son, "would take every opportunity of aggravating his misfortunes…and with an implacable and restless cruelty continue her persecution from the first hour of his life to his last." (92) Then, when Macclesfield obstructs Savage's plea for clemency after his murder conviction, Johnson describes her as taking pleasure "that the life, which she often endeavoured to destroy, was at least shortened by her maternal offices." (93)
For anyone acquainted with Johnson, this misogynistic character assassination does not fully add up for two reasons. First, whatever Johnson may have thought about the intellectual capacities of the opposite sex (the famous quote about Mrs. Montague's essay on Shakespeare need not be quoted here), he loved women. His devotions to his mother and wife have already been described, and later he would equally revere Hester Thrale and Fanny Burney, among others, after Elisabeth's death. To despise a woman so vilely was not in his nature unless she gave sufficient cause.
Which leads to the second reason: as Johnson was intelligent enough to perceive the vices of Richard Savage's character, he had to have known that Savage's claim to be Macclesfield's son was in the end inconclusive at best. James Boswell, still pondering the Johnson-Savage friendship as he crafted his Life, researched the case on his own, utilizing his own vocation as a lawyer, and discovered that there was never any birth like Savage's described in the registry Johnson named, and that in her adultery trial Macclesfield actually mounted a defense against her character, rather than submit to carrying the stigma of an unfaithful wife. (94) Boswell did not want to say so with assurance, for his own regard for Johnson left him reluctant to determine Johnson was fooled by Savage (95), but if Johnson was correct in describing Savage's keen intelligence, it would not be beyond his bounds to pose as the son of Macclesfield and Rivers (whom Boswell felt actually did die at his birth) in pursuit of riches and aspirations. (96) If this were the case, it would further explain why Macclesfield was so obstinate against Savage—she was annoyed by him and a little afraid of him, as anyone would be of a man who pressed his way into your house declaring himself to be your son (97)—and why Savage was so quick to be jealous and hurtful to his patrons: he knew that despite his claims, he was not of their standing, and was actually jealous that they had the life he wanted.
The question remains, then, that if Johnson was aware Richard Savage was not Anne Macclesfield's son, why then would he turn the countess into a figure of scorn? The answer, this writer feels, lies in Savage's conversation with Macclesfield following the murder trial, when he decided he would rely solely on himself from then on in all matters of life. Until then, he had played the part of the loyal, loving son who just wanted maternal affection and acknowledgement and been, in his mind, rebuffed, persecuted, and nearly sent to the grave by her. Now Savage turns threatening, promising his "mother" he will use his newfound notoriety to publicly make her life miserable unless she gives him what he wants. In effect, he is acting exactly the way he though she acted towards him. Even Macclesfield's finally giving in was not enough for Savage, for his writings ultimately spread his story of her birthing and treatment of him across the country, an act of psychological cruelty which, since she was in all likelihood not his mother, is extremely difficult to forgive. (98)
If Savage is in the end a metaphor for Johnson, so Macclesfield becomes a metaphor for the id and all the destructive instincts within. By Johnson's account, Savage is neither particularly good nor bad until he uses Macclesfield's techniques against her. From then on, he falls into the spiral of pride, arrogance, and hatred which results in his poverty and death. The malicious portrait is not meant to be of Anne herself but of the id's unceasing drive, and Johnson paints it in shades so black that when Savage begins copying them, the stakes are unmistakably clear. Anne Macclesfield was not a villainess, but a convenient representative for the contrary and sinful urges Samuel Johnson was trying to suppress in himself.
The final concern, then, is how Johnson selected her to be his construct for the worst of humanity. In terms of the author's personal convictions, Macclesfield was the most flagrant sinner Savage had reason to know in his life before the murder trial. She had divorced her husband and had a child with another man. Johnson believed in the principle of subordination and the sanctity of marriage. (99) No matter how unhappy she was, Macclesfield had a duty to stand by her husband. Her moment of self-possession made it convenient for Johnson to use her boldness as the starting point for worse depravity.
Near the end of Richard Savage's life, a friend noticed his fine clothes had been reduced to rags and left him the gift of an outfit at a coffee house. Savage was so stung by this that he refused to enter the establishment until the clothes were removed, satisfying his pride. (100) Similarly, Samuel Johnson famously rejected a pair of shoes someone anonymously left him to replace his own worn-out possessions during his final, desperate days at Oxford. (101) For all this writer knows, that might have been enough for Johnson to identify with Savage, empathize with him, try to give a representative of all struggling literary men a decent legacy, and in turn use his own brilliance to make what appeared to be a sensational biography a riveting portrait of a soul in turmoil, trying to find redemption, even if in the process he had to knowingly defame a decent woman's character to keep such a personal confession crouched in obscurity.
Little wonder, then, that Johnson responded to Boswell's questions about the writing of his first prose masterpiece, "I wrote forty-eight of the printed octavo pages of the Life of Savage at a sitting; but then I sat up all night." (102) Such an artistic work of psychological self-examination would keep even the strongest and steeliest of men awake in created darkness.
Footnotes and epilogue coming soon!
