Dr Maugham and Dr Johnson

[From A Writer’s Notebook, Doubleday & Company, 1949, p. 359:]

I can read everything that pertains to Dr. Johnson and almost everything that pertains to Coleridge, Byron and Shelley.

[From Books and You, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940, p. 32-33, 36-37:]

Then I should like you to read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. I am going to deal with Doctor Johnson later on, but here I must note that, speaking of this book, he said: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” Doctor Johnson was an excellent critic and a very wise man, but here he talked nonsense. Gulliver's Travels has wit and irony, ingenious invention, broad humour, savage satire and vigour. Its style is admirable. No one has ever written this difficult language of ours more compactly, more lucidly and more unaffectedly than Swift. I could wish that Doctor Johnson had said of him what he said of another: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” He could then have added a third to his pairs of adjectives: virile but not overweening.

[...]

The figure of Doctor Johnson towers over the eighteenth century, and he has been accepted as representing the English character, with its sterling merits and unhappy defects, at its best. But if we have all read his biography, so that we know him more intimately than we know many of the people we have passed our lives with, few of us have read any of his writings; and yet he produced one work at least which is in the highest degree enjoyable. I know no better book to take on a holiday or to keep at one’s bedside than Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. It is written with limpidity. It has pungency and humour. It is full of horse sense. Though sometimes his judgments startle us – he found Gray dull and had little good to say of Milton Lycidas – you delight in them because they are an expression of his own personality. He was as much interested in the men he wrote of as in their works, and though you may not have read a word of these, you can hardly fail to be diverted by the shrewd, lively and tolerant observation with which he portrays their authors.

[From The Summing Up, The Literary Guild of America, 1938; xii, 35-37; xiii, 41-42; xlvi, 174-75:]

To my mind King James's Bible has been a very harmful influence on English prose. I am not so stupid as to deny its great beauty. It is majestical. But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us. Those hyperboles, those luscious metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I cannot but think that not the least of the misfortunes that the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life of our country Is that this work for so long a period became the daily, and with many the only, reading of our people. Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national sensibility. The plain, honest English speech was overwhelmed with ornament. Blunt Englishmen twisted their tongues to speak like Hebrew prophets. There was evidently something in the English temper to which this was congenial, perhaps a native lack of precision In thought, perhaps a naive delight in fine words for their own sake, an innate eccentricity and love of embroidery, I do not know; but the fact remains that ever since, English prose has had to struggle against the tendency to luxuriance. When from time to time the spirit of the language has reasserted itself, as it did with Dryden and the writers of Queen Anne, It was only to be submerged once more by the pomposities of Gibbon and Dr Johnson. When English prose recovered simplicity with Hazlitt, the Shelley of the letters and Charles Lamb at his best, it lost it again with De Quincey, Carlyle, Meredith and Walter Pater.

[…]

There is a great difference between the magniloquence of the Jacobean writers, who were intoxicated with the new wealth that had lately been brought into the language, and the turgidity of Gibbon and Dr Johnson, who were the victims of bad theories. I can read every word that Dr Johnson wrote with delight, for he had good sense, charm and wit. No one could have written better if he had not wilfully set himself to write in the grand style. He knew good English when he saw it. No critic has praised Dryden's prose more aptly. He said of him that he appeared to have no art other than that of expressing with clearness what he thought with vigour. And one of his Lives he finished with the words: 'Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.' But when he himself sat down to write it was with a very different aim. He mistook the orotund for the dignified. He had not the good breeding to see that simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.

[…]

I have written few pages that I feel I could not improve and far too many that I have left with dissatisfaction because, try as I would, I could do no better. I cannot say of myself what Johnson said of Pope: 'He never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor quitted it by despair.' I do not write as I want to; I write as I can.
[…]
It Is very hard to discover the exact point where the Idiom one has formed to express
oneself has lost Its tang. As Dr Johnson said: 'He that has once studiously formed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.'

[…]

One of the minor sages of Chelsea has remarked that the writer who wrote for money did not write for him. He has said a good many wise things (as indeed a sage should) but this was a very silly one; for the reader has nothing to do with the motive for which the author writes. He is only concerned with the result. Many writers need the spur of necessity to write at all (Samuel Johnson was one of them), but they do not write for money. It would be foolish of them if they did, for there are few avocations in which with equal ability and Industry you cannot earn more money than by writing.

[Preface to Liza of Lambeth, Heinemann, The Collected Edition, 1934:]

An author has the right to be judged by his best work: he is prudent to make the task of selection as light as possible. If his only means of livelihood is his pen he is forced sometimes to write to make money, and it is unlikely, though not inevitable, that under these circumstances he will write anything that has merit. We know, of course, that Dr Johnson wrote Rasselas at great speed in order to earn money to bury his mother, and though it may be read now only by the student it remains one of the monuments of English literature. But I suppose he had long had the theme in mind and financial necessity was not the motive of his writing it, but the goad that led him to surmount his native lethargy.

[From Trio, Doubleday & Company, 1950, p. 48:]

1. Medium close shot of Somerset Maugham.
Mr. Maugham: Mr. Know-All, I believe, is a story of my own invention, but I shouldn’t like to have to go into the witness box in a court of law and take my oath on it. I think I might venture to make use of a phrase of Dr. Johnson’s, and say that if a story is good, it’s unlikely to be new, and if it’s new, it’s unlikely to be good. The fact is, we story tellers, like the hero of a celebrated poem, have come too late into a world too old.

[From Up at the Villa, Vintage Classics, 2004 [1941], ch. 9, p. 118:]

'Clear your mind of cant. That's what Dr Johnson said, and damned good advice it was.'
She opened her eyes wide.
'What on earth do you know about Dr Johnson?'
'In the leisure moments of an ill-spent life I've read a good deal. Old Sam Johnson is rather a favourite of mine. He had a lot of common sense and he knew a thing or two about human nature.'
'You're full of unexpectedness, Rowley. I would never have thought you read anything but the sporting news.'
'I don't keep all my goods in the shop window', he grinned.

[From The Vagrant Mood, Doubleday & Company, 1953 [1952], pp. 135-36, 142-43, 149, 153-54:]

I desire to treat only of the manner in which Burke wrote without paying any more attention than can be helped to the matter of which he wrote. It is evident that the two can never be entirely separated, for style must be conditioned by the subject of discourse; a grave, balanced and deliberate manner befits an important theme, but has a grotesque effect when it is applied to a trivial one: contrariwise a gay, sparkling way of writing is ill suited to those great topics of which Dr. Johnson remarked that you could no longer say anything new about them that was true or anything true about them that was new. […] It is for the historian, the divine and the essayist to acquire and maintain a settled style and it is no accident that in this country the most splendid monuments of the English language have been produced by such essayists as Sir Thomas Browne, Dryden, Addison and Johnson (for Rasselas, though purposing to be a work of fiction, is in effect an essay on the vanity of human wishes), by such divines as Jeremy Taylor, and William Law, and by such historians as Gibbon. Among these Edmund Burke holds an eminent place.

[…]

For my part I think it more likely that the special character of Burke's settled manner must be ascribed to the robust and irresistible example of Dr. Johnson. I think it was from him that Burke learnt the value of a long intricate sentence, the potent force of polysyllabic words, the rhetorical effect of balance and the epigrammatic elegance of antithesis. He avoided Johnson's faults (small faults to those who, like myself, have a peculiar fondness for Johnson's style) by virtue of his affluent and impetuous fancy and his practice of public speaking.

[…]

Edmund Burke was born in Ireland, in 1729, the son of an attorney, a profession then held in small respect: Johnson once remarked of someone who had quitted the company that "he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney.

[…]

Much of this dirty business [of the Burke family, in which Edmund was an accomplice] was not known till Sir Philip examined the papers at Wentworth Woodhouse, but enough leaked out gravely to discredit Edmund. Dr. Johnson was a shrewd judge of character and he retained his affection for him till his death. He valued Burke's intelligence, his knowledge, his amiability and his benevolence, but there are passages in Boswell which suggest that evenhe doubted his honesty.

[…]

The antithetical style is vastly effective, and if it has gone out of common use it is doubtless for a reason that Johnson himself suggested. Its purpose is by the balance of words to accentuate the balance of thought, and when it serves merely to tickle the ear it is tiresome. Oddly enough it is just on this account that Coleridge, comparing Johnson's use of it with that of Junius, condemned Johnson: "the antithesis of Junius," he said, "is a real antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more than verbal." It became a trick of phraseology, and with Macaulay, who was the last writer of eminence to practise it, an exasperating trick.

[From Points of View, Vintage Classics, 2000 [1958], “Prose and Dr Tillotson”, pp. 103-4:]

There are two ways of writing English prose, the plain and the ornate. The greatest examples in our literature of the latter are, of course, Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor in Holy Dying. No one would be so foolish as to deny the beauty of their respective styles. To describe that of either as brilliant would be to depreciate it. In a different class, you might add Dr. Johnson and Gibbon. Here opinions are divided. There are persons of discrimination who have nothing bad enough to say of them. The truth is, they are a drug, which, when you have once acquired a taste for it, you can hardly do without any more than the addict can do without his dope. Whatever their pomposity, their grandiloquence, you read with the same intense, increasing and amused delight.

[From Books and You, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940, p. 22:]

I close with a quotation from a letter of Doctor Johnson’s to Miss Thrale. “They who do not read,” he writes to her, “can have nothing to think, and little to say.”