|
The Mitre Literary
Review is printed at the University of St Andrews in the United
Kingdom.
ROBERT
O'BRIEN
Editor
MATTHEW BELL
Associate Editor
ANDREW CUSACK
Publisher
CONTACT:
literaryreview@yahoo.com
|
|
|
A R T I C L E
The
Meaning of 'Aardvark'
250 years ago, Johnson published his
Dictionary, a work of genius and prejudice writes Robert
O'Brien.
When
the London bookseller Robert Dodsley put the idea of an English
dictionary to Samuel Johnson, the great man of letters paused,
considered the proposition, and said, ‘I believe I shall not undertake
it.’ His response was a wise one. An equivalent project in France had
kept busy forty academic hands for forty long years. What was being
proposed for England was a work by one man, without a university degree
or position, to be completed in three years.
There was no comprehensive dictionary in the
language, - only one by Nathan Bailey in 1721 which pathetically
defined a mouse as ‘an animal well known’, revised after complaint to
‘a small Creature infesting houses’. Something more satisfactory was
needed, and the task – proposed previously to Addison and then Pope –
fell to Johnson, who in 1755, after nine years, produced a dictionary
of 40,000 words, advertising itself ‘etymological, analogical,
syntactical, explanatory and critical’. He would define mouse as ‘the
smallest of all beasts; a little animal haunting houses and corn
fields, destroyed by cats.’ Much better.
Though 40,000 words is a fraction of the OED and
indeed even less than Bailey’s earlier dictionary, Johnson’s word-hoard
was far beyond a mere improvement. It was a giant leap in
classification, schematically distinguishing between the senses of
every word. Being a masterpiece of English prose, with definitions so
pithy and correct that many are borrowed still by modern lexicographers
(def. ‘a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge’), it remained the
standard well into the nineteenth century. Only the philology of that
century – which showed many of Johnson’s etymologies to have been
fanciful – enabled the creation of a dictionary that surpassed it.
The work was a triumph of scholarship, though
admittedly with ‘a few wild blunders and risible absurdities’
(corrected in the 2nd edn.). It earned him the nickname ‘Dictionary’
Johnson, and the reputation as England’s foremost man of letters,
living outside the universities and surviving on commercial success
rather than a fellowship. However, the adulation was not universal. The
dictionary did not go down well in Scotland, and a St. Andrews
theologian and classicist called Archibald Campbell attacked ‘our
English Lexiphanes, the Rambler’, ‘the great corrupter of our taste of
language’, and his personal, political, and national dictionary. But this was
in its way a tribute, for the Dictionary was a personal work – not the
product of an institution, as were the 1612 Vocabolario of the Academia della
Crusca, or the 1694 Dictionnaire
of the Académie française. Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755
was the work of an individual animus
and it shewed forth the man.
The dictionary is famous for its succinct
definitions and array of quotation, the latter chosen judiciously to
illustrate the former. In search of exemplary usage, Johnson borrowed
and defaced his friends’ books, and proclaimed that he had ‘extracted
from his philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable
facts; from chemists complete processes; from divines striking
exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions’. The result was
that those authors selected as exemplary became with Johnson
‘authorities’ (the dictionary was an important step in
canon-formation), and their example, for good or ill, standardised
‘good’ English usage. This act of codification made English a bit more
like Latin and Greek, and a bit less wild and organic.
Johnson was, however, criticised for airing his
prejudices in a work of supposed scholarship, as when he famously
defined Whig, ‘the name of a faction’, in contrast to Tory, ‘One who
adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical
hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig’. An innocuous
word like oats became an opportunity to needle the Scots (especially
Archibald Campbell), which he took up willingly: ‘oats. A grain which
in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the
people.’
Besides such cameos, the dictionary shows the
prejudice of its age by ignoring mediæval literature in its
quotations. ‘I have fixed Sidney’s work for the boundary beyond which I
make few excursions’, wrote Johnson is his Preface. Shakespeare got in,
as furnishing ‘the diction of common life’, but Johnson thought the
English language was shown in its purity in Hooker, the King James
Bible, Bacon, Raleigh, Sidney, and Spenser (all canonical works of
early English Protestantism). Johnson’s authorities were
post-mediæval but pre-Restoration. Quoting Spenser, he called
them ‘the wells of England undefiled,
… the sources of genuine diction.’ Pre-sixteenth century texts
did admittedly lay largely unedited, in dispersed (if not destroyed)
monastic libraries and great private collections, but still his
canonical dictionary cut England yet further adrift from its
mediæval heritage.
Such a literary approach, basing English usage on
great writers, differs from the practice of Johnson’s modern OED
successors, but Johnson thought the lexicographer’s role was not to
reflect common usage but to ‘correct or proscribe’ where he found
linguistic ‘improprieties and absurdities’. As he explains in his fine
Preface, he was not seeking to record the language but to improve it.
Curiously, Johnson cited ‘no author whose writings
had a tendency to hurt sound religion and morality’, and famously when
congratulated by some ladies on excluding all the ‘naughty’ words,
replied unsparingly, ‘What, my dears, then you have been looking for
them?’ It has been pointed out to me that the ladies either did not
find, or did not consider sufficiently naughty, the entries for ‘piss’
and ‘fart’. Consistent with his method of definition followed by
illustration, the latter was accompanied by a quotation from Swift:
As when we a gun
discharge,
Although the bore be
ne'er so large,
Before the flame from
muzzle burst,
Just at the breech it
flashes first;
So from my lord his
passion broke,
He farted first, and then
he spoke.
But for many the relative conservativism of the
dictionary was not a virtue, and so as a symbol of her rebelliousness
Becky Sharpe tosses a copy from her carriage at the beginning of Vanity Fair.
I encourage all to take a brief look at the fine
facsimile of the 1755 first edition, in two enormous volumes in the
dictionary section of the University Library. The modern reader can
certainly still enjoy Johnson’s magnum
opus, though some definitions are abstruse, such as,
notoriously, ‘Net: Anything
reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between
the intersections.’ As his biographer Boswell comments, critics found
this guilty of ‘obscuring a thing in itself very plain.’ eye.
Dr. Johnson's St Andrews Lament
Samuel Johnson and his Scotch companion James Boswell embarked for
Scotland ‘in the autumn of the year 1773’, and their excursion was
written up by Johnson as A Journey
to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). This classic travel
book contains a fascinating entry for St. Andrews.
The Scottish tour provided for Johnson what has been
called ‘a realm of experience foreign to the Enlightenment illuminati
of London and Edinburgh’. Johnson said simply, ‘I saw a quite different
system of life.’
Shades of the Scottish past darkened in distinct
bands as Johnson and Boswell journeyed north – beyond Inverness was ‘a
much harsher world’, which manifested itself both in difficulty of
travel and in the destruction wrought by the Highland clearances, which
had swept away the ancient Gaelic speaking culture that had existed
from the Highlands to the Islands of Scotland.
|
| "St. Andrews seems to be a place eminently
adapted to study and education... exposing the minds and manners of
young men neither to the levity and dissoluteness of a capital city,
nor to the gross luxury of a town of commerce, places naturally
unpropitious to learning." |
|
But Johnson began his tour in the civic Scotland of the east coast,
passing from Edinburgh to St. Andrews, and then to Aberdeen. If the
northern regions revealed a half-forgotten Gaelic past, St. Andrews was
a relic of Catholic Scotland, formerly pious, learned, and grandiose.
Johnson found a cathedral ruined, locals carrying
away its stone for their own houses, the whole site cluttered with
rubbish, and a mad old woman living in a hole – but he saw beyond its
decay and demise, that it had been once ‘a spacious and majestick
building, not unsuitable to the primacy of the kingdom.’
The university itself was in a parlous condition,
entering its eighteenth century slump. Neither flourishing nor utterly
ruined (as were the churches), Johnson saw the university ‘pining in
decay and struggling for life’. As for numbers, against our six
thousand, at the time of Johnson’s visit there were one hundred
students – St. Mary’s divinity faculty capable, but not holding, fifty;
and fees were £10 for poorer students.
|
| Boswell recorded that “Dr Johnson's
veneration for the Hierarchy is well known. There is no wonder then,
that he was affected with a strong indignation, while he beheld the
ruins of religious magnificence. I happened to ask where John Knox was
buried. Dr Johnson burst out, ‘I hope in the high-way. I have been
looking at his reformations.’” |
|
Though Johnson considered the town ‘a place
eminently adapted to study and education’ still a sense of unease
remained in his memory after the visit’s accidental pleasantries – he
notes excellent hospitality – had been enjoyed. What are today admired
as romantic ruins – the cathedral, the castle, St. Mary on the Rock –,
Johnson saw, with greater insight, as ‘mournful monuments’ to a lost
civilisation. (Incidentally, the one really impressive remain, St.
Rule’s Tower, they completely overlooked.)
Dr. Johnson concludes summarily: ‘The kindness of
the professors did not contribute to abate the uneasy remembrance of an
university declining, a college [St. Leonard’s] alienated, and a church
profaned and hastening to the ground.’
Robert O'Brien, the
editor, is a magistrand (fourth-year) who will begin teaching at
Downside Abbey School in the autumn.
|
T H E M I T R E
L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
|
|
|
