To presume to be a moralist is a risky undertaking. Accusations of hypocrisy and high-falutin’ busy-body-ism are inevitable. Take the evisceration by Leslie Stephen, editor of The Dictionary of National Biography and Virginia Woolf’s daddy, of The Rambler in his 1873 biography, Samuel Johnson:
“The wit and
humour have, indeed, left few traces upon its ponderous pages, for The Rambler marks the culminating period
of Johnson’s worst qualities of style. The pompous and involved language seems
indeed to be a fit clothing for the melancholy reflections which are its chief
staple, and in spite of its unmistakable power it is as heavy reading as the
heavy class of lay-sermonizing to which it belongs.”
We will on
occasion read the judgment of a critic or common reader and think: “What the
hell is he talking about? Is he reading what I’m reading?” I barely recognize Johnson’s
finest periodical essays in Stephen’s description. Johnson’s proclivity for
Latinate diction has been exaggerated but hardly seems like a fault. Are his prose
and thought serious? With a vengeance, our contemporaries are likely to conclude
– that’s assuming they ever read Johnson. Here’s the man himself in The Rambler on November 15, 1751,
speaking in the persona of Dicaculus:
"I soon
found that wit, like every other power, has its boundaries; that its success
depends upon the aptitude of others to receive impressions; and that as some
bodies, indissoluble by heat, can set the furnace and crucible at defiance,
there are minds upon which the rays of fancy may be pointed without effect, and
which no fire of sentiment can agitate or exalt.”
Who said
moralism and wit are incompatible? In his 1974 biography, Samuel Johnson, John Wain weighs in:
“Johnson’s
writing could hardly have been more ‘pompous and involved’ than that of the
many sociologists, political theorists, literary critics, who have in our time seemed
‘charismatic’ to the young: and where shall we find a more dusty, inky word
than that?”
Almost half
a century later, people are still using “charismatic” with a straight face.
I love it when he goes "full Johnson" on the reader, reveling in his "faults" and rubbing it in. "Oh, you think I'm sesquipedalian, do you? I'll show you sesquipedalian ..." then laying it on thick. He is perfectly conscious of what he's doing, and in the many of the humorous numbers of The Rambler, the stylistic mannerisms are part of the joke.
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