Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, Defining 'Italian Opera')

“An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.”—English man of letters Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), in Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) (“Hughes”)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on ‘Knowledge Without Integrity’)

“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”— English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Socializing)

“Sir, I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.”—English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) quoted by James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

That comment from Dr. Johnson should be borne in mind when we try to calculate the losses incurred by the widespread isolation in the days after the COVID-19 outbreak.

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Zealotry and Credulity)

“Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots; of men, who, being numbered, they know not how nor why, in any of the parties that divide a state, resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow.”— English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), “Political Credulity,” in The Idler, June 17, 1758

This Day in Irish History (Death of Oliver Goldsmith, ‘Sublime, Vivid, Versatile’ Writer)

 Apr. 4, 1774— Even friends of Oliver Goldsmith sometimes despaired of his follies, and on his deathbed—after the former medical student took a “fever powder” that only worsened his condition—he was asked by his attending physician whether his mind was at ease.

“No, it is not,” he answered simply.

Hopelessly improvident, despite churning out a near-endless stream of poems, plays, essays, and travel pieces, Goldsmith nevertheless won the affection and admiration of an influential London circle of writers, artists, and actors. In no small measure, the efforts of this grief-stricken group ensured that his best writing would survive amid all the hack journalism that want obliged him to pour out.

I first became aware of Goldsmith in the mid-1970s when watching a PBS broadcast of his rollicking farce She Stoops to Conquer, starting Juliet Mills, Tom Courtenay, Ralph Richardson, and Brian Cox.

That comedy, which made Goldsmith the toast of the London theater scene when it premiered the year before the playwright’s death, was, legend has it, the result of an incident in his own life that gave his friends no end of laughter: he was hoodwinked into believing that a private country home was a local inn, and did not discover the mistake until after he had ordered the head of the household about.

Gullibility may have been the least of his faults. “Eager to shine in company,” summarized New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson in 1960, “he made large, sweeping assertions that had no basis in fact and left other people dazed. In an age that took conversation seriously, he was a notorious rattlebrain.”

Taking careful notes of all of this was James Boswell, who, in his famous biography of Goldsmith’s friend Samuel Johnson, offered this unforgettable mini-portrait:

“His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman. Those who were in any way distinguished, excited envy in him to so ridiculous an excess, that the instances of it are hardly credible. When accompanying two beautiful young ladies with their mother on a tour in France, he was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him; and once at the exhibition of the Fantoccini in London, when those who sat next him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with some warmth, ‘Pshaw! I can do it better myself.’”

That improvidence I alluded to earlier? Much of it derived from Goldsmith’s drinking and gambling—a situation only worsened by his propensity to claim sums for his work that did not match his boasts.

The son of an Anglo-Irish rural Protestant clergyman, Goldsmith may well have felt the need to promote himself in an urban environment like London that was only beginning to warm to Irish transplants, and especially among accomplished friends like Johnson, actor David Kean, and painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Indifferent about his medical studies while attending Trinity in Dublin, he shortly began to cast aside any notions of maintaining his own practice.

In addition to She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith’s other most heavily read works are the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and the melancholic poem “The Deserted Village” (1770), which anticipated the Romantic Movement in its tribute to the pastoral mode—or, in this case, a pastoral setting destroyed by the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and by legislation enclosing fields that ended up pushing peasants into cities for survival. 

As I demonstrated in this blog post from last year, he also assailed the "man  of wealth and pride" just as the Industrial Revolution began in earnest in England.

But, as I discovered in researching this, Goldsmith was an accomplished essayist. Although Boswell saw signs of him having “studiously copied the manner of Johnson, though, indeed, upon a smaller scale,” he strove for a more casual writing style than the great man of letters. His notable essays include “A City Night-Piece” and “An Essay on the Theatre.”

In his preface to the 12-volume General History of the World From the Creation to the Present Time (1764), Goldsmith advocated for historians to write as clearly as possible:

“A plan of general history, rendered too extensive, deters us from a study that is, perhaps, of all others, the most useful, by rendering it too laborious; and instead of alluring our curiosity, excites our despair.”

After Goldsmith’s death, Samuel Johnson and some friends received permission to honor him in Westminster Abbey. Johnson’s verses (translated from Latin to English) pay tribute to his friend in this way:

“Of all the passions,
Whether smiles were to be moved or tears,
A powerful yet gentle master;
In genius, sublime, vivid, versatile,
In style, elevated, clear, elegant—
The love of companions,
The fidelity of friends,
And the veneration of readers,
Have by this monument honored the memory.”

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Distractions Created by Evil Men)

“Every whisper of infamy is industriously circulated, every hint of suspicion eagerly improved, and every failure of conduct joyfully published by those whose interest it is that the eye and voice of the publick should be employed on any rather than on themselves.”—English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), originally published in The Rambler, No. 76, Dec. 8, 1750 [How bad men are reconciled to themselves], republished in Samuel Johnson: Selected Works, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Stephen Fix, and Howard Weinbrot (2021)

Samuel Johnson was born nearly a century and a half before Sigmund Freud, but in the above quote the English essayist shrewdly anticipated, from an ethical and religious perspective, what the founder of psychoanalysis termed “projection,” or the habit of attributing to others what are faults of one’s own.

This defense mechanism did not die with Johnson, or with Freud for that matter. Instead, it continues to be practiced, with various degrees of adroitness, in the political sphere.

One Presidential candidate, however, employs projection compulsively, and he’s been doing so since he first burst on the political scene.

Five years ago, CNN senior political analyst John Avlon analyzed how that candidate did so. What is so extraordinary is not the degree to which this politician tries to throw others off his scent (perhaps, given a revelation of the last few days, quite literally off his “scent”), but rather the eagerness with which so many of this individual’s diehard supporters fall for his instinctive acts of desperation.

(Dr. Johnson's relevance to current events—and, specifically, to the politician discussed above—is also stressed in Jeff Kaplan’s post on the “Conflict of Interest” blog, which contains this quote from James Boswell’s great biography of the older English writer: “It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.”)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on ‘The True Art of Memory’)

"The true art of memory is the art of attention. No man will read with much advantage, who is not able, at pleasure, to evacuate his mind, or who brings not to his author an intellect defecated and pure, neither turbid with care, nor agitated by pleasure. If the repositories of thought are already full, what can they receive? If the mind is employed on the past or future, the book will be held before the eyes in vain." —English man of letters Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Idler #74 (Sept. 15, 1759)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Kindness)

“Kindness, at least actual, is in our power, but fondness is not.”—English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), 1782 letter to James Boswell, quoted by Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Gratitude)

“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.”—English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

The image accompanying this post is a portrait of Dr. Johnson by his friend, the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792).

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, With a Word Worth Reviving)

“OPINIATOR. n.s. [opinionatre. French.] One fond of his own notion; inflexible; adherent to his own opinion.”—English man of letters and pioneering lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Dr. Johnson could not have imagined the exponential rise of this group over the past 265 years. It now encompasses not just the politicians, printers, and coffeehouse city chatterers of his own days, but now an entire pundit class, bloggers, and social-media users so numerous as to be impossible to estimate.

(Portrait of Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds.)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Knowledge and Integrity)

“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”— English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709 -1784), The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)

The portrait of Dr. Johnson accompanying this post was painted by his good friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on ‘Incitements to Forsake Truth’)

“There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are to be avoided, and so many present gratifications obtained, by craft and delusion, that very few of those who are much entangled in life have spirit and constancy sufficient to support them in the steady practice of open veracity." —English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709 -1784), Rambler #96 (February 16, 1751)

(Portrait of Dr. Johnson by his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds.)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on What ‘Human Hearts Endure’)

“How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” -- Samuel Johnson’s (originally anonymous) contribution to Oliver Goldsmith, “The Traveller, or, A Prospect of Society, A Poem” (1765)

(Portrait of Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds.)