By Proper Preparatives

Boswell had a problem. He came back to London in 1763 with the express purpose of meeting Samuel Johnson (of course there were the bars and the whores and food too. One can be hungry for more than one thing, yes?) Boswell's first trip to the capital of the not-so-long United Kingdom had been as a college runaway, aged 19. On his return he was a respectable young Scots gentleman with a degree and an allowance. What he didn't have was a proper introduction arranged. He'd tried before he left Edinburgh, but the mutual acquaintance had quarreled with Johnson and they weren't speaking anymore. Then Boswell made friends with a part time actor and full time bookseller named Thomas Davies and Boswell had his way in; Davies knew Johnson, Johnson was coming for tea. Mister Boswell meet Mister Johnson. (There was a slight complication. Johnson liked to grouse about all the Scots coming down to London -- think of a New Yorker meeting tourists from Texas -- and this reputation made Boswell justly nervous. He asked the bookseller not to mention Scotland. Mischievously Davies of course did just that. Boswell said, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." Said Johnson, "That, Sir, I find, is what a great many of your countrymen cannot help.")

The phrase "proper introduction" now strikes the ear with the same antique and hollow ring as "betrothal" and "prithee." Does anyone outside of a Trollope novel still make a proper introduction in the sense required? Yes, the requisite third party still asks A to meet B, etc., but I can't imagine too many places where it is now unthinkable that A should just walk right up to B and say "Howdy, friend." Perhaps I am just too American and cannot see clearly beyond our limited shores, but other than a business meeting or a gathering of the Austen Society, I cannot think of a circumstance where my permission would be asked to introduce a stranger. For Boswell, this sort of thing was de rigeur. If he wished to know Johnson, and he very much did want, he had to be introduced, properly. The process, simple as it seems, was necessary in Boswell's mind if he was to be received as a gentleman. He had no reason to know that rigid as Johnson was in support of Church, State and the general right way of things, he made a point of talking to everyone just alike and was as happy to meet an honest man in a bookshop or a tavern as in a rectory or a palace, and he was as happy to count a printer's apprentice his friend as the future 9th Laird of Auchinleck. In this, if in nearly nothing else Johnson was a true democrat. It's true, Samuel Johnson believed in maintaining formalities and respecting station and the rest, but only in so far as it promoted civility and the maintenance of Christian civilization -- as Samuel Johnson defined both. Conviviality was if not his highest aspiration -- mustn't forget Heaven, ever, for fear of Hell -- certainly his most fervent hope. Once properly acquainted, he was as likely to call a Baron a blockhead as he was to treat a beggar like a lady, and so ultimately an example to Boswell as to us. With Johnson informality was earned by affection and respect assumed, and woe betide the pretentious, the rude, and the cruel. True he could be and was accused himself of being all three at times, as indeed he was, but no man was quicker to repent or at least apologize, sincerely.

I've noticed that the people who whinge at modern informality tend to be the same people who use "whinge." I recognize that snobbery isn't a specifically European fault, but it is hard to think of how it might be sustained in a country like ours where wealth, at least since the Gilded Age has tended to accumulate not in property but in vulgar heaps of ugly stuff. From Mrs. Astor's grotesque ballroom to the boneyard of  Hearst's California castle to Jeff Bezos' dick-rocket, American money tends to be spent. What gets hoarded up and passed down here seems to be religious paranoia, tax evasion, bad manners and worse politics. More true than not now of most places in the great Capitalist West I should think. Our cultural influence has rarely been to the good, even if our principles are sound. The refinements that are assumed to come from generational wealth, brutal boarding schools, and benevolent management of one's tenantry don't seem to have survived anywhere but maybe Windsor Castle and Romance fiction. 

Like all nostalgia, the longing for manners past hilariously assumes not just money in the pockets of one's ancestors but also statistically unlikely pedigrees. Just as all mad men once thought themselves Napoleon, all the reincarnated white women I meet turn out to have been Cleopatra. One might assume a similar element of fantasy in the Daughters of the American Revolution, say, or at least a touching if easily anticipated disappointment in the elderly white subscribers to Ancestry.com. Of course all Irish Americans for instance are descended from Kings, but my great grandma took in wash, and so sweet lady, did yours. American ancestry is for hobbyists, and not likely to end in heraldry, and the cult of good manners in America is and has always been largely peopled by ladies whose grandpas spit on the floor. If you are wondering, I have next to no idea who or where I come from beyond the great grandmother I knew or the other I wish I did as she smoked a pipe. Heaven or Hell or history is welcome to the rest. As for civility, I'm for it. On the other hand, etiquette is interesting to me only so far and in the way say dressage might be, as all affectations of nicety may be made interesting in the hands of a great novelist. Otherwise? Use the fork to hand, honey, and no, you can't have a pony.  

I do consider myself an unapologetic anglophile. I am prepared to back that up that claim to start with my library, my Union Jack collapsible umbrella, and my Brit Box subscription (Vera!). I am not however of the "Wasn't it a lovely war?' school, or worse, "Oh, how I miss the Raj!" Just because I fancy reading the novel of manners and don't mind a Lord here or a Lady there doesn't mean I am anxious to return to the class system that was probably a major contributing factor to my folk getting one-way steerage tickets on that boat out of Bristol, or Liverpool, or wherever it was from which they fled. (And no, I don't care.) I love English literature. England? I already live in Seattle. Of rain I don't need more, thanks. For the fields of Eaton or healthy hikes in the Lake District I do not long. I was snubbed once in a London theater by a couple of queens passing down my row. I said something cheerfully inane and had back nothing but a long look down narrow noses. I was thrilled. There's that done, thank you, I remember thinking. Doesn't mean I'm eager to explore the possibility further.

The formality of Johnson's day, of his conversation, and his prose has a charm distinct from the subject at hand. Things with Johnson were done, as best he was able, just as he thought they ought. Addressing even his friends as, "Sir," lends much of what Johnson says a quaint and combative note much in keeping with his reputation, but there's respect there too. His wits were quick, his voice loud, and his manners not always of the best, but his heart was good. His appreciation of form, his reverence of tradition, and his deep fear of Hell, meant that even his meanest impulse was usually followed by repentance and he always regretted hurt. On the page he is if anything even more mindful of doing good while doing well. He believed in an ordered universe as surely as ever did Newton, but again like Sir Isaac, he lived very much in the hope of Heaven and unlike the great physicist Johnson had little confidence in getting there. This I think is the key to reading Johnson's essays, his letters, and his poetry, if it is most obvious in his prayers. He would earn his meager living by his pen. He would always give his God, his King, and his country good service if he could. That established, in his public performance he never hoped less than to be entertaining as well as instructive, readable as well as right. 

His vocabulary and erudition are daunting. His style sometimes stately to the point of being slow-going. His sentences are as rich as hung meat and he serves them up with relish and assumes all the time necessary to make and to take in what he's made. I would argue though this is not the hindrance one might assume. Rhythm is not lacking and neither is music, neither is humor or wit. He sees the world darkly but he looks at it straight. What he says is not always happy and seldom cheerful, but it was almost always worth saying. It is all worth reading. If he rolls when other walk and can not be brought to dance, it does not make his company less good. From him might be learned much, and not just by his example. I am the better when I read him, now I know him a little. He is, as Boswell took such pains to prove, loveable. Bears ought not to be tamed, their majesty and fascination is in their nature, we do them no service in wishing them other than they are. They needn't dance to be entertaining. Even loving them is possible -- at a respectful distance.

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As addendum to the gush above, I would add just a note on another kind of introduction, namely those made at the front of books. To my mind a proper introduction to the popular edition of a classic book -- meaning an edition that's meant to be read rather than studied in pursuit of a grade or a degree -- requires just the thing usually lacking; warmth. Perhaps I am needy. Certainly the idea is quaint. But like the "proper introduction" required for Boswell's comfort, I want some enthusiasm and at least the suggestion of friendly feeling for all parties concerned; in this case author, book, and reader. Expertise is good, but less important to me than perhaps it ought to be. In an introduction I would rather be encouraged than lectured. My luck, at least with recent editions of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, would seem to have run out. 

And now I would indulge in exactly the nostalgia I so often mock. Oh, to live in the days of the great Men of Letters (but with penicillin!) My favorite edition of Boswell's big book is edited and introduced quite lightly and well by Augustine Birrell (1850 - 1933), Liberal Party politician, sometime unfortunate Secretary for Ireland, invariably charming essayist and gentleman of letters. Along with gents like George Saintsbury (1845 - 1933), and Edmund Gosse (1849 - 1928), writers like Birrell wrote critical introductions just as they wrote personal essays, letters to the Times, and their memoirs: sharply, briefly, often bemusedly, with enviable confidence and ease, and without any thought to offend or discourage either the shades or the new reader. Such men were in the business of encouraging as much as criticizing. Of the three I mention only Saintsbury I think taught. I bring that up because we seem to be living very much in the time of the professors, at least in so far as introductions.* This is understandable. Economically publishers can only hope their reissues end up on required reading lists. Some like Norton seem to assume no other than than the swot and the drudge will ever read Candide again. Nonetheless I mourn the passing of the literary journalist, the leisured library man, and the introductions meant to be read without a highlighter and straight through.

Of the two best unabridged editions of Boswell's Johnson I found to recommend, one paperback and the other in hard covers, I would encourage the reader to skip either introduction. Both are deadly dull, longer than they ought to be, and with less light and emotion than a graduate lecture on the chemical properties of florescence. In forty-one closely printed pages the paperback Professor manages to share no unseemly enthusiasm for either author or subject, suggest no better reason for reading the book than for regularly eating fiber, and could easily convince the reluctant to avoid the 18th Century entire if its academic proponents write no better than this. The hardback Professor evidently comes from the same hard place. Alas.

The fourth definition in Johnson's Dictionary of the word introduction is, "To bring into writing or discourse by proper preparatives." The introductions I mean the reader to avoid seem to believe that preparative to reading a classic the reader be already bored and not a little lost. They have not so much made a way as erected hurdles. These may serve to get students jumping, but anyone looking to amble or stroll would do better to go well around.

*A happy exception being NYRB which goes determinedly against the trend by hiring professional writers rather than professors to introduce their reissued classics, bless 'em.