'So Many Delicate Aphorisms of Human Nature'

“We should hesitate to name any writings which would afford so large and so various a selection of detached passages complete in themselves. . . . We should be at a loss to name the writer of English prose who is his superior, or, setting Shakespeare aside, the writer of English who has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature.” 

Who is James Russell Lowell describing? Ben Jonson? Dr. Johnson? Swift? Once you become aware of the potential for aphoristic prose, that melding of terseness with density of meaning, you find it in unlikely places, even in long-form writers like George Eliot and Tolstoy, as Gary Saul Morson reminds us. We might think of an aphorism as the prose counterpart to an epigram, that other form mastered by Walter Savage Landor, the writer Lowell describes.

 

R. Brimley Johnson uses the passage quoted above as the epigraph to Aphorisms, the collection of Landor’s maxims he edited in 1896. Of all the books I’ve proselytized for over the years, Imaginary Conversations is the one with fewest converts. Landor published his 174 dialogues in five volumes (with a sixth volume added later) between 1824 and 1829, and most of Johnson’s selections are taken from that work.

 

This, for instance, is drawn from “Southey and Porson”: “Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are: the turbid look most profound.”

 

“Pericles and Aspasia”: “There are writings which must lie long upon the straw before they mellow to the taste; and there are summer fruits which cannot abide the keeping.”

 

“Hare and Landor”: “But prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.”

 

“Southey and Porson”: “Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful.”

 

“Alfieri and Salomon”: “Humour is wit appertaining to character, and indulges in breadth of drollery rather than in play and brilliancy of point. Wit vibrates and spurts; humour springs up exuberantly, as from a fountain, and runs on.”

 

And  note this exchange between Dr. Johnson and John Horne Tooke (1736-1812), the English politician and philologist:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Landor is one of literature’s irascible old men, along with Thomas Carlyle, but he can’t be written off as merely an ill-tempered crank. 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.”

 

Landor died on September 17, 1864 at age eighty-nine.

[R. Brimley Jonson (1867-1932) was an English critic and editor. He quotes Lowell’s essay on Landor collected in Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (1891). I see that Johnson published a book provocatively titled Moral Poison in Modern Fiction (1922).]