The emperor of common sense.(Samuel Johnson: The Struggle)(Samuel Johnson: A Biography)(Book review)

Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, by Jeffrey Meyers (Basic, 400 pp., $35)

Samuel Johnson: A Biography, by Peter Martin (Harvard, 608 pp., $35)

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ENGLISH writer, opera producer, and all-round high-culture panjandrum Jonathan Miller once scoffed at his fellow countrymen for their refusal to take deep thinking seriously. An Englishman's idea of an intellectual, Miller sniggered, was Samuel Johnson. (Asked to name someone he considered an intellectual, Miller offered Boileau.)

This low opinion of Johnson is widely shared amongst the cerebral portion of humanity. I was once slapped down across a dinner table by Roger Scruton when I ventured a Johnsonism. "Johnson had his opinion, no doubt," murmured the philosopher as he turned away, his manner suggesting that I might as well have quoted Paris Hilton at him.

The scoffers have a point. Johnson was no intellectual in the modern sense (which was not current in his time, and does not appear in his great Dictionary). He established no theory, built no system, started no movement. The fascination of Johnson is not in his ideas about society, politics, or even literature, but in his singular character, in his deep understanding of human nature, and in the peculiar vigor and clarity with which he expressed himself.

With the tercentenary of Johnson's birth looming (September 2009), we may expect more books about him. Here are two fine ones by seasoned and capable scholars. Much of the material in them is of course the same, but their methods of approach have a few interesting differences.