A Little History of Literature (14 page)

That loathing is apparent in the story of the third voyage. Gulliver travels to Laputa (Spanish for ‘the whore’), which is a scientific utopia. Swift despised science, which he thought unnecessary and contrary to religion. Here he pictures the advanced scientists of his age as geeks, pointlessly labouring, for instance, to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. The third book also contains the Struldbrugs, who live forever, and decay forever, suffering an eternity of pain and mental infirmity. They fall to pieces but can never die. The travels are becoming progressively more horrible.

The fourth book is the most perplexing. Gulliver travels to Houyhnhnm Land, the pronunciation of which represents the neighing of a horse. In this country the horse rules and humans are excrement-spraying, mindless filthy apes called ‘yahoos’. Horses, given that they consume grain and grass, have less offensive bodily wastes – something that George Orwell suggested, plausibly, lies behind Swift's strange vision of what is bearable or unbearable in life. Of course horses have no technology, no institutions, no ‘culture’ and no literature. Nor do they in Houyhnhnm Land. But this, apparently, is the nearest to ‘utopia’ that Swift will allow us to come. He does not have a lot of hope for mankind.

Gulliver's Travels
, like Robinson's travels, open the way for innumerable novels to come over the following centuries, in their innovative blendings of the real and the fantastic. For everyone they are the best place to start your own voyage of discovery into the wonderful world of fiction.

CHAPTER
14

How to Read

D
R
J
OHNSON

The first literary critic most of us will encounter is our English teacher in the classroom. Someone, that is, who helps us understand, or better appreciate, the more difficult and finer points of literature. Literature is made by ‘authors’. Literary criticism involves something connected, but different: ‘authority’, or ‘the person who knows better than we do’.

The subject of this chapter is Samuel Johnson (1709–84). He is commonly known as ‘Dr Johnson’, following the example of his admiring friends and contemporaries. Why do we also choose to call him that? We don't, for example, talk about ‘Mr Shakespeare’ or ‘Miss Jane Austen’. We call him ‘Dr Johnson’ for the same reason that in our schooldays we call the teacher ‘Miss’ or ‘Sir’. They are in charge. They have the authority. They know things we don't (yet). ‘Doctor’, literally, means one who has knowledge. Interestingly, the first real job Dr Johnson had was schoolteaching – the chalk in one hand, the cane in the other. In a sense he never put those schoolteacherly instruments down. He was never slow to thrash bad literature, or bad thinking about literature. His pugnacity is one of the things that makes him endearing.

Literature, as we have seen, goes as far back (via epic and myth) as humanity itself. Samuel Johnson is the first great critic of English literature and he, like the ‘discipline’ he represents, came much later in the day when the machineries of literary production had reached an advanced historical stage. Dr Johnson is very much a product of the eighteenth century – an age which prided itself on its social sophistication and ‘polish’. Literary people of that century liked to see themselves as ‘Augustans’ – named after the high-point of classical Roman culture under the ‘golden age’ of the Emperor Augustus, whose achievements they aimed to copy. It was in the eighteenth century that our great institutions (Parliament, the monarchy, the universities, business, the press) took on their modern form. And, among all that, what we now call the ‘book world’ came into being. Johnson would, in his glory years, rule over that book world. One of his other names was ‘the Great Cham’ (cham being another word for ‘khan’, or ‘king’).

We know Johnson very well as a person. He was the subject of a biography (itself a fine work of literature) written by his young friend and disciple, James Boswell (1740–95). From Boswell's pages an endearing and vivid portrait emerges. Consider, for example, Boswell's recollection of his first meeting with the great man, tucking into his dinner like a wild animal:

The two men went on consume two bottles of port wine at their first meeting. Lifelong friendship proceeded from that merry point.

Samuel Johnson was born in a small provincial town, Lichfield, the child of a bookseller (of rather advanced years for the trials of fatherhood). As a boy he suffered from a disease called scrofula,
which destroyed much of his eyesight. But he could read phenomenally well, even though he had to lean so close to the light that he sometimes burned his hair on the candle he was reading by.

Largely self-educated, Sam was reciting the New Testament at three and translating from the classics at six. At nine years old, he picked up a volume of
Hamlet
from his father's shelves while sitting in the family's basement kitchen. The words on the page induced a hallucinatory vision of Elsinore and ghosts. It terrified him. He threw down the book, and rushed into the street outside, ‘that he might see people about him’. His long love-affair with literature had begun. It would, thereafter, be the most important thing in his life.

During his childhood his family teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. But an unexpected bequest allowed Samuel to go to Oxford University. The money, however, ran out and he was obliged to leave without a degree (his doctorate would come, fifty years later, as a mark of public esteem). On his return to Lichfield Samuel married an elderly widow with money. He was, in the circumstances, a good husband and his wife Tetty's wealth enabled him to set up a school. It attracted only three pupils. On his wife's death he took off with one of those pupils (later to be the famous actor, David Garrick) on what he liked to call the ‘best road’ in life – that leading to London. He went on to establish himself in the literary world, commonly known as ‘Grub Street’ after a street in the poor London district of Moorfields, inhabited by ‘maggot-like’ hacks who earned their living by their pen. Johnson too made his way without benefit of patrons (whom he despised) or private income. He was a professional writer, proudly independent. He paid his own way.

Johnson wrote fine poetry, in a neo-classical manner; he was a great prose stylist; he wrote a novel,
Rasselas
, which was dashed off in a few days to earn the money to provide a decent funeral for his mother. (It's surprisingly good, given the sad circumstances.) Johnson's views on the human condition were always profoundly pessimistic. It was, he believed, a situation ‘in which much is to be endured, and little enjoyed’. His gloom is magnificently expressed in his long poem,
The Vanity of Human Wishes
(the title says it
all). But, despite his depressed view of things, he believed that life should be lived with courage, as he lived his.

For all his many achievements, it is as a literary critic that Johnson is most revered. As a critic he brought two things to the understanding and appreciation of literature. One is ‘order’, the other ‘common sense’. His common sense is legendary. It is vividly depicted in a conversation which he had with Boswell, while walking, on the then fashionable view (put into circulation by the philosopher Bishop Berkeley) that matter does not exist and that everything in the universe is ‘merely ideal’. Imaginary. Boswell observed that, logically, the theory could not be refuted. Johnson responded by violently kicking a large stone which stood in their way and exclaiming, equally violently, ‘I refute it thus!’

He adopted the same common-sense attitude in his literary judgements. He loved, said Johnson, to ‘concur with the common reader’. It is not the least attractive thing about him that he never talks down to us. It's also interesting to note that – an unusual thing among literary critics – he had great respect for young minds. In another conversation, Boswell asked what Johnson (the former schoolmaster) thought were the best subjects for children to learn first. Johnson's reply was that it did not matter: ‘Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both.’

Johnson's most enduring achievement is the order and manageable shape he brought to the appreciation of literature. It took the form of two vast monumental works: his
Dictionary
and his
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets
. Approached by a group of booksellers, he embarked on the research for his
Dictionary
in 1745 – still unaided by any patron, and single-handed. It would take him ten years to complete and would ruin what was left of his eyesight. On its completion he was awarded a government pension of £300 a year – appropriately, since the dictionary was a service to the English nation and people.

When it was published the two-volume
Dictionary
was the size of a small coffee table. It is famous for the eccentricity and wit of many of its definitions (for example: ‘
Patron
. Commonly a wretch
who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’). But the underlying principle was more ambitious, something indicated by the full description given on the title page:

Johnson did not merely offer ‘definitions’, he traced how the meanings of words evolved over time and how they contain within themselves all sorts of ambiguities and multiple meanings according to where, when and how they were used. He demonstrated this complexity with some 150,000 historical examples.

Take an example from the very ‘best’ writer of all, and the text that so struck the nine-year-old Samuel. In
Hamlet
, as the drowned Ophelia is being buried, Gertrude throws something into the open grave, with the comment ‘Sweets to the sweet. Farewell!’ But what is she throwing? Chocolates? Biscuits? Sugar cubes? No, fresh flowers. For the Elizabethans, the adjective ‘sweet’ primarily indicated what one could smell with the nose, not what one could taste with the tongue, which is how we generally use it now. This earlier usage, among others, is the kind of thing recorded by Johnson. The major point Johnson makes in the
Dictionary
is that language – particularly the language writers use – cannot be set in stone. It is a living, organic, ever-changing thing.

Johnson's other
magnum opus
(great work) is his
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets
, published in 1779–81. Again, the title page is illuminating:

The point he makes with his selection of fifty-two ‘most eminent poets’ is that an appreciation of literature requires a separation of
the worthwhile from the less than worthwhile. There are, in the vaults of Britain's and America's great national libraries, many millions of books which classify as ‘Literature’. How, in the limited time available to us in a human lifetime, should we choose what is worth reading? Critical assistance can supply a ‘curriculum’ (what is prescribed for us to read at school) and a ‘canon’ – the best of the best.

But does this mean that we should always agree with literary critics – submit, meekly, to their authority? Certainly not. Imagine a classroom of thirty students tackling an algebra equation. However difficult the sum there will be one correct answer. Imagine, however, an English lesson being asked ‘What is
Hamlet
, the play, about?’ There should be a whole range of different answers, from ‘The best way to appoint a king’ to ‘In what circumstances is suicide a proper decision?’ It would be a disaster if every member of the class simply parrotted what someone else had said or thought.

There is a complicated line from taking literary criticism on board, weighing it, and then going on to form your own opinions. Johnson understood that. Literary works, he once said, must be batted about like shuttlecocks in a game of badminton. The last thing one wants is consensus. We can even disagree with Johnson himself. He revered Shakespeare and edited the plays (editing is one of the most useful things a literary critic can do). Johnson believed that Shakespeare was a genius. It was Johnson's admiration, expressed everywhere in his edition of and commentary on Shakespeare, which established him as the greatest of the nation's writers. But he also believed that the author of
Hamlet
often lacked sophistication and polish – he was sometimes ‘untutored’, even primitive. He lacked something that Johnson and his contemporaries valued above all things: ‘decorum’. Shakespeare's work was the result of the uncultivated age in which he lived. Most of us would strongly disagree. That is a privilege that Johnson, the most generous and open-minded of literary critics, allows us. He gives us the tools to make up our own minds.