That
mouthful “conglobated,” I suppose, is the giveaway. The Irish poet P.J.
Kavanagh is quoting Dr. Johnson’s Journey
to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). The passage appears in “Dis-conglobated,” an essay first published
in the Spectator in 1984 (beware of the
online typos), and I read it in People
and Places: A Selection 1975-1987 (Carcanet, 1988). The OED defines conglobated as “gathered into a ball, rounded,” which reminds me of
making meatballs, but the OED tells us
Wordsworth had another use in mind in The
Excursion: “conglobated bubbles undissolved.”(I keep dropping the “l” and
turning it into the verb form for a central African nation.) Johnson seems fond
of this peculiar word, as he used it in his 1756 review of Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley, Containing Some
Arguments in Proof of a Deity: “Matter being supposed eternal, there never
was a time when it could be diffused before its conglobation, or conglobated
before its diffusion.”
I
learned of Kavanagh through his friendship with C.H. Sisson, whom I take to
have been a man not easily befriended. I’ve not yet spent much time with
Kavanagh’s poems but he has a knack for the learned-but-light newspaper or
magazine squib – feuilletons, as we say down at the bowling alley. In “Dis-conglobated,”
he has just read Johnson’s Journey
for the first time while in Italy, and now is reading Rasselas and Walter Jackson Bate’s biography. Kavanagh, born in 1931,
undertook his first reading of Johnson in his fifties, well into middle age.
Johnson wrote for adults, though many of us first encounter him when we have
barely left childhood. Kavanagh is duly impressed and he effortlessly gets Johnson:
“I
had thought of Johnson as a master of the massive, usually incontrovertible, generalisation.
His curiosity, and humility before the facts, came as a surprise . . . For
although I knew that Johnson was physically afflicted I had not known the
extent of the psychological impediments he had to surmount. He is a hero of
self-creation, and his methods—his `measures’—must be of great interest.”
Back
in London, Kavanagh attends a Johnson exhibition at the Arts Council,
apparently in observance of the two-hundredth anniversary of the lexicographer’s
death. He’s impressed by the quantity of prayers Johnson wrote and preserved,
and notes, “. . . surely Johnson is unusual in the amount, and the care he
took. It must have to do with his love of accuracy, he wished to make the
formulation exactly measure up to the emotion, and the need.” Kavanagh then
quotes lines from “The Vanity of Human Wishes”:
“Still
raise for Good the supplicating Voice,
But
leave to Heav’n the Measure and the Choice.”
Though
he lauds Johnson’s “love of accuracy,” Kavanagh misquotes the poem,
substituting “God” for “Good” – an understandable slip, one missed by multiple
editors. What follows is the full passage from Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, quoted earlier by
Kavanagh. Ostensibly, Johnson writes of travel writing, but broader
applications are encouraged:
“He
who has not made the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require rigorous
accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from
certainty of knowledge, and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of
objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many
particular features and discriminations will be compressed and conglobated into
one gross and general idea. To this dilatory notation must be imputed the false
relations of travellers, where there is no imaginable motive to deceive. They
trusted to memory, what cannot be trusted safely to the eye, and told by guess
what a few hours before they had known with certainty.”
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