`Substantial Literary Nourishment'

Imagine a place and time when a father, packing his son’s luggage for a journey overseas, includes four volumes of Idler and Rambler essays. I often carry Johnson when I travel, for the reassurance of the familiar on alien turf, but even I pare him down to a single volume, and sometimes substitute a compact Boswell, the Oxford or Everyman’s edition. Not so for John James Ruskin, an English wine merchant packing for little John in the eighteen-thirties. In his peculiar memoir, Praeterita, that son, John Ruskin, notes that “had it not been for constant reading of the Bible, I might probably have taken Johnson for my model of English.” He goes on to recall his early travels:

“On our foreign journeys, it being of course desirable to keep the luggage as light as possible, my father had judged that four little volumes of Johnson – the Idler and the Rambler – did, under names wholly appropriate to the circumstances, contain more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable compass. And accordingly, in spare hours, and on wet days, the turns and returns of reiterated Rambler and iterated Idler fastened themselves in my ears and mind; nor was it possible for me, till long afterwards, to quit myself of Johnsonian symmetry and balance in sentences intended, either with swordsman’s or paviour’s blow, to cleave an enemy’s crest, or drive down the oaken pile of a principle.”

Later in the same paragraph Ruskin writes:

“I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms…”

I also value Johnson’s sentences because they are “just, and clear,” and it was Johnson who helped school me in such values. Dead almost 224 years, he remains the mentor I’ve never had in the flesh. In his life of Thomas Gray, Johnson says he “rejoice[s] to concur with the common reader” regarding Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” that it “abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” That’s the great beguiling strength of Johnson, who coined the phrase “common reader,” adopted by Virginia Woolf. He was a great writer, perhaps a genius, whose dimensions we recognize as human, our own. He is us, only more so. I echo what Ruskin says of him:

“…Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune…”