A Bit of Beastliness

Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience. Suppose a thousand black slaves were sacrificed to the black-beetle; suppose a million maidens were flung into the Nile to feed the crocodile; suppose the cat could eat men instead of mice--it could still be no more than that sacrifice of humanity that so often makes the horse more important than the groom, or the lap-dog more important even than the lap. The only right view of the animal is the comic view. Because the view is comic it is naturally affectionate. And because it is affectionate, it is never respectful....[T]he two extravagances which exist on the edges of our harassed and secretive society to-day are cruelty to animals and worship of animals. They both come from taking animals too seriously: the cruel man must hate the animal; the crank must worship the animal, and perhaps fear it. Neither knows how to love it. --G. K. Chesterton

"Why," said he, "because at the end of a great civilization the air gets empty, the light goes out of the sky, the gods depart, and men in their loneliness put out a groping hand, catching at the friendship of, and trying to understand, whatever lives and suffers as they do. You will find it never fail that where a passionate regard for the animals about us, or even a great tenderness for them, is to be found there is also to be found decay in the State."
"I hope not," said I. "Moreover, it cannot be true, for in the Thirteenth Century, which was certainly the healthiest time we ever had, animals were understood; and I will prove it to you in several carvings."
He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, saying, "In the rough and in general it is true; and the reason is the reason I have given you, that when decay begins, whether of a man or of a State, there comes with it an appalling and a torturing loneliness in which our energies decline into a strong affection for whatever is constantly our companion and for whatever is certainly present upon earth. For we have lost the sky." --Hilaire Belloc

The Quest for Health

"He [Samuel Johnson] told me [Fanny Burney] that he was going to try what sleeping out of town might do for him. 'I remember,' said he. 'that my wife, when she was near her end, poor woman, was also advised to sleep out of town; and when she was carried to the lodgings that had been prepared for her, she complained that the staircase was in very bad condition, for the plaster was beaten off the walls in many places. 'Oh,' said the man of the house, 'that's nothing but by the knocks against it of the coffins of the poor souls that have died in the lodgings!' He laughed, but not without apparent secret anguish, when telling me this."

Every (Blog)Post Is a Ghost

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words ‘Under it my genius is rebuked’. This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.

. . .

Now this awe is not the result of an inference from the visible universe. There is no possibility of arguing from mere danger to the uncanny, still less to the fully Numinous. You may say that it seems to you very natural that early man, being surrounded by real dangers, and therefore frightened, should invent the uncanny and the Numinous. In a sense it is, but let us understand what we mean. You feel it to be natural because, sharing human nature with your remote ancestors, you can imagine yourself reacting to perilous solitudes in the same way; and this reaction is indeed ‘natural’ in the sense of being in accord with human nature. But it is not in the least ‘natural’ in the sense that the idea of the uncanny or the Numinous is already contained in the idea of the dangerous, or that any perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of ghostly dread or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already understand them. When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them. Most attempts to explain the Numinous presuppose the thing to be explained—as when anthropologists derive it from fear of the dead, without explaining why dead men (assuredly the least dangerous kind of men) should have attracted this peculiar feeling. Against all such attempts we must insist that dread and awe are in a different dimension from fear.

--from The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis.

"It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." --Samuel Johnson, reported by James Boswell.

Samuel Johnson On The American Revolution

"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"--Samuel Johnson, 1775.

But mark you, in the original Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson had put in an anti-slavery clause, that was removed at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia; their support was deemed essential. Samuel Adams said to Ben Franklin, "Mark me, Franklin, if we give in on this issue, there will be trouble a hundred years hence; posterity will never forgive us." In slightly less that those hundred years, we had the Civil War.

10 Books A Day: #59

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections From The 1755 Work That Defined The English Language...Samuel Johnson, ed. Jack Lynch...Levenger Press

Rasselas, Prince Of Abyssinia...Samuel Johnson...Oxford University Press

The Letters of Samuel Johnson Volume I: 1731-1772...Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford...Princeton University Press

The Letters of Samuel Johnson Volume II: 1773-1776...Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford...Princeton University Press

The Letters of Samuel Johnson Volume III: 1777-1781...Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford...Princeton University Press

Selected Prose and Poetry...Samuel Johnson, ed. Betrand H. Bronson...Rinehart & Co, Inc.

A Johnson Reader...Samuel Johnson, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr. & George Milne...Pantheon Books

Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson...Hesther Lynch Piozzi...Pocket Classics

A Dr. Johnson Chronology...Norman Page...G. K. Hall & Co.

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage...Richard Holmes...Vintage International

Samuel Johnson...W. Jackson Bate...Harcourt Brace

Book Count: 758 .

Johnsonia

A few more words about Samuel Johnson, and I am done.

Dr. Johnson's peculiar mannerisms were always a subject of comment, and they often seemed beyond his control. A series of spasms or grimaces would cross his face (tics, we would call them now), as well as compulsive gestures (as shown in Joshua Reynolds early portrait of Johnson above), and a constant rolling of the legs even when standing still. He obsessively had to touch every post he passed in the street, and went back if he missed one. At one point in his life he saved all his orange peel. I think all these symptoms, coupled with his social difficulties and hard to control temper, might lead now-a-days to a diagnosis of Aspberger's Syndrome.

This demeanor of his (and his slovenly clothes) led the artist William Hogarth, when he saw him at the writer Samuel Richardson's house, to suppose Johnson an "ideot" who had been put in Richardson's care. But when Johnson stalked forward to join in Hogarth and Richardson's discussion and took up the subject with eloquence and learning, Hogarth was astounded and really thought the "ideot" had been "inspired", that is, taken over by a spirit!

Johnson also had the habit of checking the bookshelves in whatever house he visited, sometimes to the extent of becoming oblivious to his hosts. He once told Boswell that when he was at any gathering and the talk turned to society, he would "abstract" himself and think of "Jack the Giant-Killer", one of the children's chap-books from his youth.

Johnson was an amateur physician and "chymist", at a time when most scientific knowledge could be attained by one man. He had a laboratory set up at his lodgings, and Boswell would sometimes be greeted by the chemical stinks of one of his experiments. When Johnson had a stroke, he quickly made some Latin verses to test whether his mind had been impaired (one of his greatest fears). He found that they were poor, but that he knew they were poor; he concluded his critical faculties were undamaged.

Johnson may well have been at least partially a model when Arthur Conan Doyle was creating Sherlock Holmes. Certainly Watson ends his tribute to his friend after his supposed death at Reichenbach Falls by calling him "the best and wisest man I have ever known." This is exactly how Boswell concludes his famous biography of Johnson.

And now to finish my own work with the words Johnson used to Boswell in a fit of pique when his friend had been unusually persistent in his questions: "Sir, you have only two subjects of conversation, yourself and me; and I am heartily sick of both!"

Samuel Johnson: One Of My People, Part II

After the publication of the Dictionary, Johnson entered what became the most famous stage of his life. Universities scrambled to honor him with degrees; it is from this time on that he became "Doctor" Johnson. The government honored him with a pension: it was this, not any money he might have made from selling his work, that allowed him to live an easier life. He began to be courted by society; Henry Thrale, a rich brewer, and his wife, Hesther, had him as a regular guest in their home, and the prescence of the literary lion lent the middle class family a certain cachet.



For all this, Johnson remained largely unchanged. When a lady asked him how he came to define a fetlock as a horse's ankle, he replied, "Sheer ignorance, madame." When another lady commented that she approved that he had left out the naughty words, he replied slyly, "What, my dear, you went looking for them?" Johnson's clothing and manner changed little with his new-found status. He was usually poorly and casually dressed and his manners, picked up while bolting his meals when he coul get them, caused adverse comment. Hesther Thrale remarked that it was a disgusting spectacle to see him eat "plum pudden".



Still, he was highly respected for his wide-ranging intelligence and as a moral philosopher. And he not only talked the talk, he walked the walk. Even before his success and pension, he was taking care of a stable of unfortunates: a poor spinster, a blind lady, an indigent physician who treated the even poorer for next to nothing. A special case was Francis Barber, an emancipated slave that was given into his care. Though "Frank" acted as a servant to him for many years, Johnson was in many ways his foster-father, paying for his wedding and making him his sole heir on his death. Johnson even bought oysters himself for his cat Hodges; oysters at the time were extremely common food eaten by the very poor, and he was afraid Frank would be embarrassed to be seen purchasing them. (At the time of the American Revolution, Johnson said that no-one was calling louder for liberty than the American slave-drivers). Johnson always had care and sympathy for the marginal and outcast of society.



But he also moved in the very highest circles of society. He engaged in controveries with the likes of Lord Monboddo, a sort of proto-Darwinist, and Adam Smith, the economist; he exposed the literary fraud of James McPherson's Ossian and investigated the Cock Lane Ghost. Joshua Reynolds, the age's pre-eminent painter, David Garrick, the pre-eminent actor, Oliver Goldsmith, the novelist and playwright, Edward Gibbons, the pre-eminent historian, were all members of The Literary Club, of which Johnson was the star ornament, and a personal friend of each. And into the middle of this came James Boswell.



Boswell was everything Johnson was not. He was young, aristocratic, well-dressed, dissolute, and Scottish. Johnson at that time had a well-known "animadversion" to the Scotch, and this made their first meeting a little awkward. However, Boswell was persistently pleasant and persevered, and soon they were getting along well. Boswell was trying to find his own way in the world, and felt that Johnson had the steadiness and gravitas he needed. Boswell was constantly asking him for personal advice, and questions about Johnson's early life, and even hypothetical questions to see how he would react. Boswell went so far as to take him on a journey to Scotland, which largely modified the older man's views. Boswell wrote it all down in his journals.



So it went to the end of Johnson's life. He wrote a little and talked a lot. He was a famous rambler, liked tea and lemon "squash", and loved his cats (there is now a statue of his cat, with the famed oyster shells, in London; people put coins in the shells: the money is collected to help stray cats). After his death Boswell composed and published his monumental "Life Of Johnson", that fixed the character of Johnson in the public mind forever and became a high water mark in biography. The next generation of writers, the Romantics, rejected his classical, orthodox views, however, and did much to foster the image of him as "The Great Bear", blinkered, ugly, and stilted, that still persists to this day.



But I would like to leave you with another image of Samuel Johnson, one that won my heart. A good friend of his, one Bennett Langton, recalled how, in Johnson's old age, they were walking at the top of a steep hill behind Langton's house. Johnson suddenly turned, looked at the slope, and announced that he was determined to take a roll down it. Despite all his friend could say to dissuade him, he emptied his pockets of anything that could fall out or hurt him, declaring he hadn't had a good roll in a long time. Then he laid himself parallel to the hillside and rolled all the way to the bottom.

Perfect Casting For Samuel Johnson

English actor Jim Carter, who played George Fox in The Madness Of King George, and also appeared in The Way We Live Now on PBS.

Samuel Johnson: One Of My People

Samuel Johnson's reputation in the historical and literary world seems to follow the pattern of his personal life; first there is the awareness of a gruff, imperious surface that on greater acquaintance reveals deep, even tender, concerns. Born to a poor bookseller and his wife who were already past prime child-bearing age, he was sent to nurse with a local woman who unfortunately passed along a tubercular infection of the lymph glands known as scrofula along with her milk. This scarred him and left him with poor eyesight throughout his life, but he declared that what he lacked in acuity of sight he had to make up with precision of observation, and that this led him to his analytical turn of mind.

Despite this misfortune he grew up tall and strong, if ungainly, and like many children of older parents he developed a precocious intellect. After a few years in a "dame school", being taught to read and write, he became largely an autodidact, learning mostly from reading the stock in his father's failing bookstore. Under the influence and example of a rich, intellectual uncle, Cornelius Ford, he attended Oxford for nine months, but when the uncle passed away and money became tight he left without graduating. During the time of his education he was honored for being more learned than all his schoolfellows if a little lazy, and a habit of pride and independence that he had were only deepened by his obvious poverty among his collegiate fellows.

He returned home to further family tragedy. His only brother, Nathaniel, appears to have committed suicide, though this was hushed up for shame. Johnson puttered around at home, helping with the family business and trying to make a living with his pen, but the distance between his hometown of Lichfield and the cultural center of London made this difficult. At the age of 25 he astonished his family and history by marrying the widow Elizabeth Porter, who was 46. Monetary reasons have been adduced, but he himself declared that it was a "love match", and that "Tetty" as he called her saw past what he saw as his own failings and flaws to the worth underneath.

He used most of her money to establish a school at Edial with himself as the primary teacher; educational efforts have been the desperate fallback for learned people for a long time. The school was never very successful, and when it failed Johnson decided it was time to set off for London to try to earn a living by his pen in earnest. He set off walking (to save coachfare) accompanied by his favorite and last remaining pupil, David Garrick. Garrick went on to become the greatest actor of the age, and Johnson began the tough climb up the ladder of success as an author.

This was a particularly hard time for Johnson. When he first arrived and asked a prominent publisher for help and advice, he was told (as the man looked at his gigantic stature) to get a pad for his back and take a job as a porter, or moving man. Johnson took any writing job, mostly as a journalist, writing articles to supply grist for the weekly journals and digests. Many nights he didn't have the money for a room and walked the streets until morning. Tetty was established in a house in the suburbs and most of the money went to support her. Eventually Johnson landed the job of reporting on the speeches of Parliament; since rules at the time precluded anyone from outside being present, only the names of the speakers and the gist of their arguments were given him; he would then write up the speeches as they ought to have been, and many a Member was astonished to find the eloquence attributed to them that they scarce could dream of.

Essays for The Idler, poetry, biographies, all added to his growing fame. He still had sometimes to take purely practical jobs, and one was cataloging the contents of a vast private library that was going up for sale; when the broker who hired him found him reading one of the volumes to ascertain its value berated him for wasting time, Johnson in anger felled him with the weighty volume. His life on the street made him ever ready to defend himself physically as well as in debate; he often carried a cudgel as a walking stick through the streets in case he was set upon by hired ruffians from someone he might have angered.

His literary chops being established, he felt it was time to cement his position with some great work. And he settled on a project that had bedevilled the book world for some time: to produce the first complete general dictionary for the English language. It took him more than a decade to produce, with the aid of a dozen assistants and none of the patronage of the wealthy to encourage him. During the period of its' compilation Tetty died, his father and then his mother passed away (he wrote the short novel Rasselas to pay for her funeral); when Lord Chesterfield, to whom Johnson had applied for help and been ignored, tried to attach his name to the project, Johnson sent him a letter coldly rejecting any such connection as now unnecessary, since anyone he could have pleased by his success was gone, and "I am grown solitary." The age of patronage heard its' death knell, and "Dictionary" Johnson was born.

Coming soon (I hope), Part Two: Success and Boswell