The Boundless Chaos of a Living Speech

In a poignant little essay on sleep in “The Idler” of November 25, 1758, Samuel Johnson remarked that “in solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert. The end in both is forgetfulness of ourselves.”Johnson knew whereof he spoke: Almost all of his many literary ventures, from the colossal “Dictionary of the English Language” to his pioneering biographies of poets and his sprightly and scintillating essays – not to mention his poems, prayers, journals, travel accounts, his novel or his sprawling Shakespearian commentaries – seem to have been prompted by a horror of the self and a passionate desire to achieve “the nectar of oblivion.” This impossibly erudite, overbearing, tender, and anguished man lived in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with himself which only disciplined labor could allay but never completely still.James Boswell with customary shrewdness noted this motive. In his biography, he stated that Johnson had to be “engaged in a steady continual course of occupation, sufficient to employ all his time for some years; and which was best preventive of that constitutional melancholy which was ever lurking about him, ready to trouble his quiet.” For all his boisterous bonhomie and clubbable exuberance, Johnson knew that work, even the “drudge’s” work of lexicography, was the only sure defense against his indwelling demons.This year marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of “A Dictionary of the English Language.” So pervasive has been the influence of this heroic work that it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine the world without it. When Johnson set about his lexicographical toils in 1747, no English dictionaries worthy of the name yet existed. Johnson himself was properly daunted. How even begin to broach what he rightly termed “the boundless chaos of a living speech”? And he went on to confess of his ambitious plan that “I am frighted at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Caesar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade.”His “Plan of a Dictionary,” together with his prefaces to the finished work in its successive editions, his history of the English language, and his “Grammar of the English Tongue,” have now been collected in the latest superb volume of the Yale edition of his works under the title “Johnson on the English Language” (Yale University Press, 548 pages, $85), edited by Gwin Kolb and Robert Demaria Jr.The Yale edition, of which some 15 volumes have appeared over the last half-century, progresses – if that is the word – with a glacial slowness like some revived mastodon sluggishly emerging, limb by drowsy limb, from the ice. I come from a long-lived family and can just hope to hang on long enough to see the remaining volumes, and especially Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” finally appear.In his very thorough plan for the dictionary, which he circulated in the hope of attracting patrons, Johnson laid out the principles he would follow. He would grapple not only with the various levels of signification attached to each term but with orthography and pronunciation – vexed matters in the 18th century – and with syntax and etymology as well.The effort would be difficult enough with rare or obscure words, but the chief obstacle lay in the abundance of simple everyday English words, and especially such verbs as “take” or “put” with their semantic shifts and well-nigh promiscuous affinities for prepositions that modified meaning (“take on,” “take off,” “take out”: The list seems endless). In the end, Johnson gave the primary sense of “take” as “to receive what is offered” but went on for five large triple-columned pages to distinguish no fewer than 134 different nu ances of the verb.In his advertisement to the fourth edition of the “Dictionary,” which appeared in 1773, Johnson admitted that “perfection is unattainable” but added, “I have left that inaccurate which never was made exact, and that imperfect which never was completed.” In fact, Johnson’s inaccuracies and downright errors were notorious in his own day, and he was often teased for them. Once, at a dinner party in Plymouth, a lady demanded of him how he could have given so inaccurate a definition of the word “pastern” (he’d termed it “the knee of an horse”) to which Johnson replied, “Ignorance, Madam, ignorance.” When the same lady pressed him with food, Johnson “rose up with his knife in his hand, and loudly exclaimed, ‘I vow to God I cannot eat a bit more,’ to the great terror of all.”This anecdote comes from a delightful new account titled “Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 278 pages, $24), by Henry Hitchings. As much a biography of the dictionary as of its compiler, the book is arranged by lexical entries, beginning with “adventurous” and concluding with “zootomy.” The gritty day-to-day work of lexicography, even in Johnson’s stupendously disordered Gough Square garret, with his “staff” of scruffy downand-out hacks and his resident cat Hodge (whom he liked to feed fresh oysters), wouldn’t lend itself to thrilling narrative. Mr. Hitchings gets around this by light-footed hopping among unexpected entries, and the result is both entertaining and informative.I’ve loved Johnson’s writings and – presumptuously enough – Johnson himself, as he comes through in the biographies of Boswell and Walter Jackson Bate, for as long as I can remember. He’s an author who inspires such perennial affection. In “On First Looking Into Bate’s Life of Johnson,” from his 2003 collection “The Calligraphy Shop,” the American poet Ben Downing praised Johnson’s “peerless prose / with its lapidary dominoes / augustly toppling, clause after clause” but went on to pay more fervent homage to the deep and stubborn goodness of his life, what the poet nicely termed his “fine solicitudes.”The prose and the fine solicitude are inseparable. Johnson may be, after Shakespeare, the only author to have grappled with the sheer totality of the English language. The Augustan balance of his prose conceals an underlying voracity, an extraordinary lexical appetite, chastened and held in check by the cadenced discipline of his language.The beauty of that language is a moral beauty,hard won out of a lifelong struggle with the world and with himself. That’s one good reason for the fondness he inspires: In giving us words he defines how we might live.eormsby@nysun.com

The Boundless Chaos of a Living Speech

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