TEXT D Visitors to St. Paul
Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk round the space under the arch
to come up a statue which would appear to be that of a retired armed man
meditating upon a wasted life. They are still more astonished when they see
under it an inscription indicating that it represents the English writer, Samuel
Johnson. The statue is by Bacon, but it is not one of his best works. The figure
is, as often in eighteenth-century sculpture, clothed only in a loose robe that
leaves arms, legs and one shoulder bare. But the strangeness for us is not one
of costume only. If we know anything of Johnson, we know that he was constantly
iii all through his life; and whether we know anything of him or not we are apt
to think of a literary man as a delicate, weakly, nervous sort of
person①. Nothing can be further from that than the muscular statue.
And in this matter the statue is perfectly right. And the fact which it reports
is far from being unimportant. The body and the mind are closely
interwoven in all of us, and certainly in Johnson’s case the influence of the
body was extremely oblivious. His melancholy, his constantly repeated conviction
of the general unhappiness of human life, was certainly the result of his
constitutional infirmities. On the other hand, his courage, and his entire
indifference to pain, was partly due to his great bodily strength. Perhaps the
vein of rudeness, almost of fierceness, which sometimes showed itself in his
conversation, was the natural temper of an invalid and suffering giant. That at
any rate is what he was. He was the victim from childhood of a disease that
resembled St. Vitus’s dance. He never knew the natural joy of a free and
vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling walk of one
in irons. All accounts agree that his strange gestures and contortions were
painful for his friends to witness and attracted crows of starters in the
streets. But Reynolds says that he could sit still for his
portrait to be taken, and that when his mind was engaged by a conversation the
convulsions ceased. In any case, it is certain that neither this perpetual
misery, nor his constant fear of losing his reason, nor his many grave attacks
of illness, ever induced him to surrender the privileges that belonged to his
physical strength②. He justly thought no character so disagreeable as
that of a chronic invalid, and was determined not to be one himself. He had
known what it was to live on four pence a day and scorned the life of sofa
cushions and tea into which well-attended old gentlemen so easily slip. According to the passage, which is NOT true to Johnson.’
A．He once did not have enough money to live on. B．He lived singly in the past. C．He was a littlie cynical. D．He received little care from his friends.