That Mr. Greene has, quite evidently, read Johnson is a valuable contribution to the common welfare. The gloom of prejudice around the Great Cham is illuminated with reason, not punctuated with giggles. Instead of teasing a monster, Mr. Greene considers an author. The cartoon figure, inhaling tea, erupting insults, and exuding bigotry, is replaced by lucid glimpses of Johnson’s powerful intellect articulating that British political genius which in his own day achieved its most characteristic expression. He would, of course, have been the first to deny that genius any but a mythical existence, such was his attention to reality.
Reality for Johnson was God, man, death and salvation. The rest was pastime. Politics, which he understood, and card-playing, which he did not, were occupations of the waiting room. So was making money, and the making of dictionaries. No cynic, however, Johnson encouraged all such diversions, and practiced some of them superbly. Their precarious impermanence led him neither to final melancholy rejection nor to irremediable frenzied addiction, though he well understood both temptations.
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