By Greg Clingham
This better half presents a special creation and consultant to the works and lifetime of one of many key figures in English literary historical past. The resource of unending time-honored aphorisms, the compiler of the 1st nice dictionary in English, the best of essayists, and essentially the most precise characters and conversationalists in our literary tradition, Johnson is the following surveyed in his entirety. Chapters at the significant works, his existence, dialog, letters and demanding reception look along clean thematic essays, a chronology and a consultant to additional studying.
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Extra info for The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
Example text
Boswell once asked Johnson what he should think of a person who was accustomed to using the Latin tag non est tanti - that is to say, "it is not worth while," why should I be bothered? Johnson answered with an aggressive trenchancy of speech directly proportional to all he could not sufficiently rationalize in writing: "'That he's a stupid fellow, Sir . . ' When I, in a low-spirited fit, was talking to him with indifference of the pursuits which generally engage us in a course of action, and inquiring a reason for taking so much trouble; 'Sir, (said he in an animated tone) it is driving on the system of life'" {Life, iv, 112).
What he said of the difficulty of definition in the Dictionary is true of the difficulty of thinking itself for Johnson: "kindred senses may be so interwoven that the perplexity cannot be disentangled, nor any reason assigned why one should be ranged before the other. When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive series be formed of senses in their nature collateral" (Greene, pp. 316-17). There were too many possible thoughts, too many considerations branching out at the same time, for any one train of consecutive reasoning wholly to contain the truth.
And yet, notwithstanding Johnson's exemplary self-knowledge, they also connect with his own sense of personal weakness and waste. " Johnson lived for seventy-five years, but often he thought in vain of the time he had wasted and of how small a proportion of his life he had spent in the act of real artistic creation: It is said by modern philosophers, that not only the great globes of matter are thinly scattered thro' the universe, but the hardest bodies are so porous, that, if all matter were compressed to perfect solidity, it might be contained in a cube of a few feet.