Johnson Fest

 

 

My own private Samuel Johnson Festival costigitates phantasmagorically in tribute to Robbie Coltrane whose finest hour was surely as the good doctor in Blackadder.

Meanwhile, with any number of notes from which to select a theme for a further episode here, the latest is one made of,

Words which convey ideas of dignity in one age, are banished from elegant writing or conversation in another, because they are in time debased by vulgar mouths, and can be no longer heard without the involuntary recollection of unpleasing images.

 

I don't know if Wordsworth's Daffodils is taught to 14 year-old boys these days but one can hear the barely-suppressed snigger going round the classroom at,

A poet could not but be gay,

I remember 'groovy' in the 1980's being used to mean 'old-fashioned' when in the 60's it had meant 'fashionable' but in that case the word could refer to the same thing appropriately at different times but with contrary connotations,

but I had a problem with 'righteous' at a poetry club meeting a few years ago and couldn't hear it without the involuntary recollection of unpleasing images that wouldn't have troubled Dr. Johnson and probably didn't trouble many in the meeting either.

I can't hear 'righteous' without hearing 'self-righteous' in it. Some of us have become more ironic and self-conscious and would hardly dare to think of ourselves as 'righteous' but for Johnson, and many still now, I'll wager, righteousness is still something to aspire to or at least offer the appearance of.

For him, piety is a virtue, religion unconditionally accepted as a good thing, the abuses it is put to and responsible for not having been generally recognized by 1751. But every age has its orthodoxies. We had thought the pursuance of some objective 'truth' was a good thing until the Age of Trump and Boris Johnson aligned us with previous tyrannies that accommodated no account of what was what beyond their own. 

Another idea that goes unquestioned in Johnson's essays is that fame and reputation are desirable and to be admired. The world is a competitive place and, time and again, taking part in it competitively rather than retiring from it are implicitly what he recommends. The Selected Essays almost have a train of thought of their own, developing from one theme to the next, so only half way through them, he might yet find in his own period examples corresponding to those of Gerald Ratner, Boris, Trump and the still unravelling Liz Truss whose pursuits of fame and glory was vain and in vain. The vanity so much that they won't ever conceive of the contempt that so much of the world held them in.

 

But none of that is Samuel Johnson's fault. He tries his best, sometimes stuck in the quagmire of attitudes that he couldn't be entirely blamed for then. He worries at human nature and identifies its absurdities, knowing that many of them are his, too, as we all might, not necessarily the happier for it but with the satisfaction of having expressed it.