Samuel Johnson Book Reviews

Samuel Johnson by Isobel Grundy Book Summary

Johnson’s predominant position in the recent Oxford Book of Aphorisms, duly noted by reviewers, can have surprised no one. That Johnson dealt in axioms is itself axiomatic. The talking Johnson of legend had always an aphorism on his lips (‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’; ‘no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures’). A listener exclaimed, ‘ “How he does talk! Every sentence is an essay.” ’ In this matter there appears to be no discrepancy between the spontaneous talker, the lexicographer, and the premeditating moralist (‘Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures’; ‘Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul’), or the critic (‘Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature’; ‘Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason’; or again ‘To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only shew the narrowness of the definer’). In every kind of expression, it seems, Johnson’s mind struck off, freely and magisterially, a continual succession of these freshly-minted, portable specimens from the store of wisdom within.

Everybody can recognize these still current coins; to give them their right name is harder. Axiom, as Johnson defines it, suggests too strongly a proposition in logic; epigram for him implies verse as well as ‘terminating in a point’. Adage and saw, like proverb, suggest the triteness of something inherited, not coined; precept (a ‘rule authoritatively given; a mandate; a commandment; a direction’) suggests the dead hand of dogmatism: all these smack of Polonius rather than Socrates. Generalization (absent from the Dictionary) has been generally disapproved, from Blake through Virginia Woolf (quoted below) to rearguard actions mounted by various scholars to defend Johnson from the charge of generalizing. Apophthegm, which the Dictionary applies to something not only ‘remarkable’ and ‘valuable’ but also ‘uttered on some sudden occasion’, would do for his conversational sallies but not his written ones, unless by a very unwarrantable assumption about his methods of composition. Writers on Johnson have mostly preferred aphorism to maxim, probably because it sounds more dignified. The Dictionary refers from aphorism to maxim, from maxim to axiom. Although Johnson’s definitions recognize shades of difference between maxim (‘a general principle; a leading truth’) and aphorism (‘a precept contracted in a short sentence; an unconnected position’), the varying shades are all embraced in the stylistic habit which I mean to discuss. It involves distilling much thought into a small space; it carries with it an assumption of authority or an air of being the last word on the subject; it risks shading into truism, and also risks antagonizing instead of edifying its audience: from instruction, as Johnson wrote of Milton, we may ‘retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation’.

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