Not many people, I imagine, still read Dr. Johnson for pleasure or instruction, though he was once the favorite reading of the educated in the English-speaking world and his complete works found in practically all private libraries. He contrived to be a moralist without moralizing; he was an incomparably greater psychologist than Freud, having no ax to grind and no sect to found; and he was humane and charitable without sentimentality. No wonder that he is not in fashion. We prefer mental contortions, self-justifications, evasions, rationalizations, and all the other methods of avoiding the truth about ourselves, to his discomfiting clarity of mind.
He had a peculiar gift for saying things that were both startling and obvious. As he himself put it, we have more often to be reminded than informed. Although his prose style would no doubt strike many people (if they read it) as too formal—we prefer expletives and the demotic now—he says things that are strikingly apposite a quarter of a millennium after he wrote them. On practically every page of his essays, of which he wrote several hundred, scratched out with quill pen rather than merely tapped on keyboard onto a screen, you find things that are as true and pointed today as they were when he wrote them. I doubt that much of what we write will stand the same test in a further quarter millennium; but then it is the illusion of every age that it is having the last word.
In order to test my contention that there is something to be learned (or reminded of) on practically every page of Johnson, I took down my copy of The Idler, the weekly essays that he wrote between April 1758 and April 1760. Here, for example, is the opening of his essay on political credulity:
Credulity, or confidence of opinion too great from the evidence from which the opinion is derived, we find to be a general weakness imputed by every sect and party to all others, and indeed by every man to every other man.
In other words, I have reason, you have prejudice.
