Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BRIAN YOUNG

‘It is a proof of the regard of God for the happiness of mankind, that the means by which it must be attained are obvious and evident, that we are not left to discover them, by difficult speculations, intricate disquisitions, or long experience, but are led to them, equally by our passions and our reason, in prosperity and distress.’ Bodies of men, he insisted, subordinated individual interests to the public good, ‘consistently with the greatest happiness of Mankind’. Marriage, ‘a vow of perpetual and indissoluble Friendship’, was a model of Christian virtue. Although the husband was to exercise authority over his wife, this was not to ‘tyrannize’, since tyranny in marriage, as in politics, naturally provoked rebellion. This classic exercise in Augustan homiletics concludes appropriately: ‘Thus Religion appears, in every state of life, to be the basis of happiness, and the operating power which makes every good intention valid and efficacious. And he that shall attempt to attain happiness by the means which God has ordained, and shall leave His Father and His Mother, and shall cleave unto his Wife , shall surely find the highest degree of satisfaction that our present state allows; if, in his choice, he pays the first regard to virtue, and regulates his conduct by the precepts of religion.’ 10 The sermon was not actually written by Taylor (both of whose childless marriages were monetarily profitable), but by Johnson; it effectively enunciated what the literary scholar Howard Weinbrot called ‘spousal Whiggery’. 11 As an exercise in theodicy the sermon would not have persuaded either Voltaire, in Candide, or indeed Johnson himself, in Rasselas , both novels written in the pivotal year 1759, the ‘Year of Victories’, just under halfway through what contemporaries had no means of knowing would be the Seven Years’ War. 12 According to Richard Whatmore, this was effectively the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment, at least in England. Among his cast of Cassandras is John Brown, a Newcastle clergyman whose popular polemic An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times was somewhere between a clerical and a secular jeremiad; Brown would eventually take his own life, an unusual choice among the clergy at any

10 Samuel Johnson, Sermons , ed. Jean Hagstrum and James Gray (New Haven, Conn., 1978), pp. 4, 6, 8-9. 14, 15. 11 Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘Samuel Johnson’s Practical Sermon on Marriage in Context: Spousal Whiggery and the Book of Common Prayer’, Modern Philo logy 114 (2016), 310-36. 12 Candide and Rasselas appeared alongside the first volume of Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , on which literary context, see a fine study by Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh, 2007).

73