A few last remarks, and then I'm hanging up my lariat. Getting too old for this wrangling. But here is a letter (which I'm sure most of you must know) from Samuel Johnson to Lord Chesterfield, one of the masterpieces of prose. Lord C. never gave Dr. Johnson a dime during all those years he was working in poverty, and then tried to horn in on his fame. It's well to remember that Johnson was a commoner writing to a great lord, and indeed he does employ some of the conventional deferences and submissive gestures, with devastating irony. The serene anger and contempt of this prose, the dignity, are beyond praise. I should add that although Chesterfield was a cynical arrogant sonofabitch, he did have a taste for good writing and had the nerve to display Johnson's letter in his drawing room for his guests to read.
I'm typing it out from memory, so there may be a few small errors, and I don't follow Johnson's punctuation or use of capitals.
My Lord,
I have been lately informed by the proprietor of The World that two papers, in which my dictionary is recommemded to the public, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honor, which, being very little accustomed to favors from the great, I know not well how to receive or in what terms to acknowledge.
When upon some slight encouragement I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered like the rest of mankind by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself "le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre," but I found my attendance so little encouraged that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had first addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could, and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever little.
Seven years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficuties of which it is useless to complain, and brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I had never had a patron before.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love and found him a native of the rocks.
Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind, but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.
I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed should I conclude it, if less be possible, with less, for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope
in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation, my Lord,
Your Lordship's most humble,
most obedient servant,
Sam. Johnson
(I don't know if all those paragraphs and salutations will print out correctly--I lack the skill to make them do so.)
I don't think I need to go into much detail about it, but
this is a masterpiece of rhetoric and prose rhythm, and it is the rhythm, more than anything, that has kept it in my memory for 50 years or so. Of course some phrases and sentences do fall into one metrical line or another by sheer accident, but there is no meter, obviously--this is all rhythm; of course Johnson is very attentive to the sounds of vowels and consonants, and to the various rhetorical structures, but they are inseparable from the rhythms. One gorgeous example is that triple phrasing that narrows at the
end to monosyllables: "but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it." Hard for prose to be more expressive than this. You will all hear the rhymical delicacy and power of these sentences, but there is obviously no meter. Meter is a rhythm too, of course, but abstract, very regular and repetitive, not like the rhythms of the real world and of living things, and almost immediately boring until it is brought into close contact (I almost wrote close combat) with words, with speech. A good verser has that rhythm so deeply in his ear that he can play endless variations on it without losing it. It's something like the way Billie Holiday could sing, her expressiveness and personal emotion sometimes making the words come a fraction before the beat or a fraction late-- but the beat is always there. And you realize that you are not hearing the beat AND the phrases (unless you are listening analytically for them), but as in verse, you're hearing one thing, that is different from either, that arises from their constant dueling and dancing. Does that make sense? Here is another passage, this time in verse. As marvelous and poetic as Johnson's letter is, it cannot get the kind of complexity and expressiveness that great poetry can, as he would have been the first to admit, being no mean poet himself. This is Frost, and he is so confident and masterly, so "in the zone," that he can even leave one line metrically "defective" and use that "defect" to tremendous effect. It's worth taking the time to copy out the whole thing. I won't comment on its many beauties; you will all hear, I think, how rich and natural the rhythms are, how like real speech, how varied, how full of tone, some lines with perhaps seven strongly stressed syllables, some with only three or four, and yet hear under it all the meter, continuous, always perfectly there (except in the one line where he doesn't want it), and finally the two things making the one thing, the whole sound of the poem.
"OUT, OUT--"
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap--
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand,
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart--
He saw all spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off--
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then--the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little--less--nothing!--and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
The long sentences winding through and over the lines, and
then the series of very short ones, and the heartbreaking enjambments, the pauses placed just right, ah God, don't get me started. (And please don't think that the other people,
those in the last line-and-a-half, are indifferent or not
suffering deep grief.)
I don't imagine that this settles the theoretical question of meter and rhythm, or verse and speech, but it's a lot of food for thought.
Farewell.
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