'Originality, Learning, Acuteness, Terseness of Style'

Samuel Johnson: “Coxcombs and blockheads always have been, and always will be, innovators; some in dress, some in polity, some in language.” 

John Horne Tooke: “I wonder whether they invented the choice appellations you have just repeated.”

 

Johnson: “No, sir! Indignant wise men invented them.”

 

It sounds like a high-toned vaudeville routine, with Johnson’s crankiness exaggerated for humorous effect. We can thank Walter Savage Landor for the comic touch, though not all of his 174 Imaginary Conversations are amusing. If Landor has a contemporary reputation, it’s for being at least as hotheaded as William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle. He published his major prose work in five volumes between 1824 and 1829, with a sixth volume added later. Tooke (1736-1812) was an English politician and amateur philologist. Most of his conversation with Johnson is devoted to the latter subject:

 

Johnson: “There are faults committed by pedants for the mere purpose of defending them.”

 

Tooke: “Writers far removed from pedantry use expressions which, if we reflect on them, excite our wonder.”

 

Johnson: “Better those than vulgarisms.”

 

In the conversation between Archdeacon Julius Hare and himself, Landor says, “Poetry was always my amusement; prose, my study and business.’” During his life, Landor was better known for his poems, and he remains the leading epigrammist in the language between Ben Jonson and J.V. Cunningham. In 1849, on the occasion of his seventy-fourth birthday, Landor wrote his own epitaph, later titled “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher”:

 

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.

Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art;

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”  

 

Reading Imaginary Conversations almost a decade ago was a landmark in my life. It reminds me of several books I love but would never try to foist on other readers – Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, for instance, and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. They are simply too eccentric, too unlike what contemporary readers expect of a book, for many to find them even palatable let alone bookishly seductive. The appropriate readers will find their way to such books. Consider what so seasoned a reader of Imaginary Conversations as Hazlitt wrote in his review: 

 

“This work is as remarkable an instance as we have lately met with of the strength and weakness of the human intellect. It displays considerable originality, learning, acuteness, terseness of style, and force of invective — but it is spoiled and rendered abortive throughout by an utter want of temper, of self-knowledge, and decorum.”

 

Landor was born on this date, January 30, in 1775 and died in 1864 at age eighty-nine.

 

[A very silly adaptation of Landor’s fictional conversations between historical figures was Steve Allen’s television series Meeting of Minds (1977-81), in which Theodore Roosevelt, Cleopatra, Thomas Paine and St. Thomas Aquinas sat around a table and chatted.]

 

[Robert Graves in the second paragraph of Goodbye to All That (1929) writes: “Swinburne, by the way, when a very young man, had gone to Walter Savage Landor, then a very old man, and been given the poet’s blessing he asked for; and Landor when a child had been patted on the head by Dr Samuel Johnson; and Johnson when a child had been taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne for scrofula, the King’s evil . . .”]