Resumo de Life Of Johnson

Imagine the following:You have been assignedthe task of bird-doggingthe country's most notable literary figure and recording every bon mot that drops from his oracular lips--before the age of tape recording.You have to remember every conversation word for word, who said what to whom and whom will youoffend by putting it in print. Add to the task your origins in an inferior culture (Scotland)--at least from your literary meister'spoint of view--and you have the masochisitic format of James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.

f it isn't there already, the words "He deferred" (in Latin) should etched on Boswell's tombstone. His Life of Johnson shows him doing so in salons, in the coffee house, in church, even in his own country which the great man condescended to visit.Fortunately, Boswell's deferring to Dr. Johnson yielded rich rewards for usbecausethe great man expressed himself as ifhe knew his words would be etchedin marble someday; thus,Boswell's biographyis replete with Latinisms.Juvenal, in particular, was close theheart of the man who would create our first dictionary.The Norton Anthology, in my day, a Dr. Johnson in its ownright,includedhis , "The Vanity of Human Wishes," a translation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire and emblematic of the good doctor's gift for lacerating the mores and morals of his day, just as Juvenal had done injaded and degenerate first centrury Rome.

But don't expect to find any of our modern obsessionspandered to by Mr. Boswell. Of sex there is no mention. None. Nada. Even the most gender neutral reader will wonder at some point about the omission of any mention ofJohnson's single male status in a culture where marriage was a cornerstone of society. Imagine all you want; Mr. Boswell will not abet you with either innuendo or speculation. There are number of female friends with whom the doctor shared a love of litarature and lofty gossip: Mrs.Thrale, in particular, stands out as one who could parse Pope or dissect Dryden with relish.

For the modern poet reading Boswell's Lifethere may appear to be an absence of poetry. The rigors of iambic pentameter are only the first of the strictures imposed by the eighteenth century upon English verse. Even more stultifying for some twentieth century taste is the constraint on the imagination. Whole realms of the psyche are off limits to Johnson as he takes the reader through a world of contemporary poets and translators quite a few of whomare to be found ony in the dustbins of literary history. At one point Pope is criticized by the doctor for having allegedly written the following:

Can sins of moment claim the rod
Of everlasting fires?
And that offend great Nature's God
Which Nature's self inspires?

n other words if nature gives us desires contrary to our moral law, God must be behind it. The conviction that there is a right and a wrong--in literature, law, art, and, above all, religion--pervades Boswell's Life so muchthat it makes the perceptive reader sit up and wonder if, indeed, here us something we can afford to turn our backs on.

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