'No Great Moral Advance Discernible'

“Yesterday I settled for rereading Boswell, starting halfway through, at the year 1772, when Johnson was sixty-three.” 

One of the advantages of returning to a familiar book, especially a “large, loose, baggy monster” like the Life of Johnson, is the sensation of reentering at almost any point and feeling at home. There’s no disorientation. When I’m between books, uncertain what to read next, or just on a whim, I can pick up Boswell, Burton or Browne and resume the conversation. I can even pretend I believe in bibliomancy. A few novels, too, permit this – Moby-Dick, for instance.

 

The dabbler quoted above is Alec Guinness in the fourth of his journal/memoirs, A Positively Final Appearance: A Journal 1996-98 (1999). The man who played Henry Holland in The Lavender Hill Mob, Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers and everyone in Kind Hearts and Coronets was well-read, bemused and deeply civilized, seldom stuffy. He reads George Herbert, Trollope, Henry James, R.S. Thomas and Anthony Powell – even Charles Doughty. Here he continues the Boswell/Johnson passage:

 

“Some of the letters Boswell quotes are ponderous and slow things up, [Agreed: Boswell overdoes it with letters. One suspects he was padding.] but there is so much wit, kindness and John Bullish commonsense that one’s heart is constantly warmed.”

 

Which is one reason we return to certain books – that human warmth.

 

“Except when it comes to Johnson on corporal punishment, when he is quoted in conversation about his firm conviction that complete submission  of the young must be beaten in to them: a chilling idea, like breaking the spirit of horses or forcing wild animals in circuses to cowering obedience.”

 

Again, agreed. Johnson was a man of his time. His understanding of human nature extended to children. Of course, corporal punishment was still common in my public schools in the sixties. In September, when I attended my fifty-first high school reunion, I spoke with a phys. ed. teacher who once smacked me on the back of the head with a pair of sneakers. No resumption of hostilities. This time he appeared sober. Guinness continues:

 

“I read that Johnson piece last night and today, shifting some books, opened Montaigne’s Essays at a paragraph on ‘Affection of fathers for their children.’ It was probably written about a hundred and ninety years before Johnson’s statement. Montaigne says, ‘I have never seen caning achieve anything except making souls more cowardly or maliciously stubborn.’”

 

Guinness observes “no great moral advance discernible” between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries – or subsequently, we might add.