'Your Grief Shall Be Matured to Veneration'

The gift of consolation grows in importance as we age. Losses accumulate with accelerating frequency. We know more people who have died, and more of their survivors. To console those who have lost a loved one requires more than the will to be nice or admired for our thoughtfulness. Tact is essential, and no presumption that we know how the bereaved feels or ought to be feeling.

A Scotsman, James Elphinston (1721-1809), was a friend of Dr. Johnson’s. His translations are used as epigraphs for thirty-six of Johnson’s Rambler essays in the revised, corrected edition of 1752. According to Boswell, Johnson judged Elphinstone “a worthy man” – high praise. On this date, Sept. 25, in 1750, Johnson begins a letter he is writing to Elphinstone, whose mother has recently died:

“You have, as I find by every kind of evidence, lost an excellent mother; and I hope you will not think me incapable of partaking of your grief.”

Johnson’s own mother was still alive and would die at age ninety in 1759, when he was forty-nine. He wrote The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia in a week in order to pay for the funeral expenses. Johnson urges Elphinstone to shun self-indulgence and emulate his mother virtues:    

“The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation. The greatest benefit which one friend can confer upon another, is to guard, and excite, and elevate his virtues.”

Watch how Johnson paces his letter. He waits until nearly finished before suggesting a course to action – not to relieve grief but to perpetuate his mother’s memory:  

“There is one expedient by which you may, in some degree, continue her presence. If you write down minutely what you remember of her from your earliest years, you will read it with great pleasure, and receive from it many hints of soothing recollection, when time shall remove her yet farther from you, and your grief shall be matured to veneration.”

The meaning of the word “consolation” is forever changed by Geoffrey Hill’s usage in stanza CXLVIII of The Triumph of Love (1998):

“So – Croker, Macsikker, O’Shem – I ask you

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad

and angry consolation. What is

the poem? What figures? Say,

a sad and angry consolation. That’s

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry

consolation."