CA News No. 30, June 2004

Latin Quotation and Classical Allusion in Boswell's Life of Johnson
David Purdie & John Davie

This is a shortened abstract of a paper read to the CA's meeting at Warwick (April 2003). We believe it may be the fIrst to address the subject of the usage and utility of Classical quotation and allusion in what is, by general consent, the greatest biography in the language. The subject is, we concede, not in the direct mainstream of classical scholarship but is, rather, in an eddy of that great current -an eddy in which we may examine how knowledge of the classical world and of the works of its great writers swirled around two of the greatest figures of 18th Century English letters, and how their command of the field was used to vivify one of the literary landmarks of the neo-classical age.

It was on 16th May 1791- some 213 years ago- that there was published, in the city of London, The Life of Sam. Johnson LL.D, by James Boswell Esq. We have utilized the standard scholarly edition, that of Geo. Birkbeck Hill of Oxford (1887) as revised and augmented by Laurence Powell (6 vols, 1934-60). We have not covered Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) which comprises one vol. of Hill / Powell.

In overview, we have identified a total of 162 direct Latin quotations from the classical period. These comprise: one each from Suetonius, the younger Pliny and from Sallust; two from Martial's epigrams; sixteen from Ovid - most frequently from the Metamorphoses; nineteen from the Satires of Juvenal; forty-three from Vergil - comprising 26 from the Aeneid, 10 from the Eclogues and 7 from the Georgics; and finally no fewer than seventy-nine from Horace - 27 from the Odes, 22 from the Epistles, 19 from the Ars Poetica, 10 from the Satires and one from the Epodes. Corinthian as Johnson and Boswell may have been in life, in quotation they were Horatian.

Classical quotations and allusions pepper the book - and they pepper it both literally and metaphorically. They spice up many a conversation at Dinner in such homes as those of Henry Thrale, Sir Joshua Reynolds or at the Mitre Tavern, where Johnson and Boswell were wont to dine and sup. They enlivened debates among members of "The Club", the Literary Club founded by Johnson in 1764 and which contained such luminaries as Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Boswell himself, Edward Gibbon and Oliver Goldsmith. Classical references are scattered upon this great literary tapestry not at random but with forethought - sometimes malice aforethought - and usually with high relevance and accuracy. In the parlance of today, they are used as precision-guided munitions with a precise target and an equally precise intention either to avoid, or indeed to cause, collateral or civilian casualties.

One does not have to proceed far into The Life to encounter the Latin language. In Birkbeck Hill's edition we find the dedicatee to be Benjamin Jowett no less - he of the great translation of Plato's dialogues, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and Master of Balliol. He is described as "Johnsonianissimus", which sounds like an outrageous neologism until one finds that it has a Boswellian provenance, being used by him to describe Edmund Malone, his great friend and collaborator in The Life and, incidentally, one of the great editors of Shakespeare.

To find regular Latin quotation in the text is, of course, no surprise. Johnson (1709-1784), though not a formal academic classical scholar, was everything but. Thoroughly grounded in Latin and Greek grammar and usage at Lichfield Grammar School and at home by his father, Michael Johnson, a bookseller, he was regarded as something of a classical prodigy during his two years at Pembroke College, Oxford. He came up with his father and, through the recollections of a fellow freshman, Wm. Adams -himself later Master of Pembroke - Boswell provides a superb vignette of the elderly bookseller father and his large, awkward, 19-year-old son meeting his tutor, Mr Jorden, for the first time. Young Samuel sat silent until, without warning, triggered by something in the conversation, he suddenly quoted Macrobius! Before Johnson left Oxford he had, as a set exercise, translated and composed into Latin hexameters Alexander Pope's "Messiah - a sacred Eclogue in imitation of Vergil's Pollio". Messiah was an attempt by Pope - published in the Spectator in 1712 - to encompass the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah within the confines of a Vergilian eclogue - specifically the celebrated Eclogue IV, in which the child heralded by Vergil is thought by some commentators to be the Christ and by others to be the infant son of Gaius Asinius Pollio, who, as consul in 40, had preserved Vergil's Mantuan farm from sequestration after Philippi. Such was the quality of Johnson's Latin that Pope himself is reported by Sir John Hawkins in his Life of Johnson to have observed, "The writer of this poem will leave it as a question for posterity whether his - or mine - be the original." Praise indeed.

Johnson's attachment to, and borrowings from, classical literature characterized his entire career and enlivened his personal discourse both in debate and in private conversation. His poem London, for example, published anon in 1738, was "In imitation of the third satire of Juvenal" just as his later work "The Vanity of Human Wishes" was based on the tenth. He wrote Latin prose and verse for all occasions, one example of which must suffice for many: his epitaph for his great Irish friend Oliver Goldsmith. Olivarii Goldsmith, poetae, physici, historici, qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit. A classic epitaph indeed: terse, concise, loving - and accurate. It adorns his grave.

But to return to The Life. Boswell opens up on the very title page with a Horatian quote to encompass the grand design of the book - which we must remember caused an absolute sensation with its reportage of actual conversation. Although reported speech is as old as Thucydides, the notion of reporting the writings and conversation of the subject was wholly new - indeed it was socially revolutionary.

The Horatian quote on the title page was from the Satires: quo fit ut omnis / votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella / vita senis (Whereby the whole life of the old (great) man may be laid out as upon a votive tablet). Given Johnson's classicism, it is as well that in JB he had a biographer himself well trained in the Latin language, literature, and culture. Boswell could trade quotations with Johnson, and his pen did not falter over the Latin as he wrote up in his Journal the notes, recollections and critiques which were later to comprise The Life.

One instance will illustrate the depth of his classical training at the High School of Edinburgh and later at that city's University. Boswell was a lawyer, and to be elected to the Faculty of Advocates in those days, a dissertation in Latin was required upon a legal subject. Boswell's thesis, submitted in 1766 and entitled "de supellecte legata", was on the somewhat prosaic subject of the heritability of domestic furniture. He made the mistake of sending it to Johnson, who marked it, metaphorically, Gamma Minus and replied, not uncivilly, to the author "Your Latin wants correction", proceeding to point out several alleged solecisms in the text. Boswell replied with vigour, defending his grammatical accuracy and citing examples from Vergil, Ovid and even the Juris civilis Fontes - the ancient preserved fragments of Roman civil law - in support of his case. In summary, in Classics as in so much else, these two were simply made for each other. Indeed, just as Horace famously described Vergil as dimidium animae meae, so did Boswell regard his great friend - and subject.

The quotations come in several groups and, indeed, sizes. First, there are the Latin substitutions for English where the Latin word simply appears without warning - and is gone. Farrago appears, italicized to indicate its Latinity, the word not yet having formally entered English. Sufflamina, Johnson roars to Thos. Wharton, Fellow of Trinity, who is outpacing him on an evening walk back to Oxford from Ellsfield. This Latin imperative, Wharton later told Boswell, came from his mouth with "peculiar grace". Meaning "put out your drag chain", its only appearance in literature is in Walter Scott's Kenilworth.

Phrases appear without translation, reminding us of the assumed classical training of a key sector of the readership of the Life: a quasi-private code for the intimates and the upper social set. Indeed, this is reminiscent of the usage of Greek by Cicero in his letters to Quintus and to Atticus. For example the words genus irritabile vatum from Horace's Epistles - the fretful tribe of poets - appears in the middle of discursive text, thereby sparing the tribe yet further irritation.

Debate was, of course, Johnson's great forte - and brave or incautious was the man who engaged him on anything but the strongest ground. In May 1769, following a typically robust set of exchanges over dinner, Boswell breakfasts with him. Johnson: Well, Sir, - we had good talk. Boswell: Yes, Sir, you tossed & gored several persons.

The analogy of SJ and a bull was well made. On one occasion, mordant criticism of Garrick's poetry by Johnson is reported by Boswell to the great actor and impresario - himself a former pupil of Johnson at his short-lived school at Edial. Boswell quotes Horace's line from the Satires: faenum habet in cornu -" he has hay on his horns" - describing the ancient practice of thus marking a beast as dangerous if provoked. Aye, said Garrick - still smarting from the goring - he needs a whole mow of it.

There is a clear tendency for Latin to be used as a multiplier. By this we mean that when a truly powerful effect is required, Latin is loaded into the text and fired off with its usual high compression charge. Thus, when describing his greatest friend the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson turns again to Horace and to his great opening salutation to Maecenas in the Odes: O et praesidium et dulce decus meum (You (Maecenas) who are both my stronghold and my sweet glory). A second compliment paid to Reynolds - the dedicatee of the Life - was from Albius Tibullus who, as Suetonius tells us, was sent young by envious Death to the Fields of Elysium. In perhaps one of the finest couplets describing true amicitia in the classical canon, the dying Johnson thus addresses his friend - soon to be his literary executor:
te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora,
te teneam moriens deficiente manu.
May it be you that I see at the coming of my last hour,
And you, at the end, that I hold with weakening arms.

There are, however, liberties taken with classical texts to suit the purpose of the moment. For example in his last illness - probably congestive cardiac failure (the dropsy of the 18th Century) - Johnson says to Boswell "I will be conquered by this illness - I will not capitulate." Boswell comments that this attitude exemplified "invictum animum Catonis", the unconquered soul of Cato - adjusting Horace's famous line in Odes II: praeter atrocem animum Catonis - the fierce - as David West has it - the unbending soul of Cato. A touch of wry humour here, too, since Horace has just previously spoken of great leaders: non indecoro pulvere sordidos -begrimed with honourable dust - an exact description of Johnson's general appearance - especially when travelling.

And sometimes, Latin is used in absentia. In other words English is used where the recipient would normally have expected, especially from Johnson, the Latin. This may constitute a none too subtle hint that the target's grip on the Classics, at that time a sine qua non of a truly educated man, was weak. Thus, in the famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, surely one of the greatest barbs of literature, rejecting His Lordship's belated offer of assistance with his Dictionary (1755), SJ says pointedly to him: "Seven years, my Lord have now past since I waited in your outer rooms, or was repulsed from your door: Is not a patron one who looks with unconcern upon a man struggling for his life in the water and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The shepherd in Vergil grew at last acquainted with Love - and found him a native of the rocks." Here it would seem that the relevant quotation would have been Nunc scio quid sit amor, from the 8th Eclogue where Damon reflects how his feelings have been cruelly abused. Chesterfield, himself fully conversant with Vergil, would not have missed the Johnsonian missile - which certainly did not miss his Lordship.

On Friday April 17th 1778, Johnson, walking with Boswell in Butcher Row, was accosted by a Mr Edwards who had been up with him at Pembroke. Back at Johnson's lodgings at Bolt Court, Edwards, a man otherwise totally obscure, provided Boswell with the splendid observation that he had tried very hard to be a philosopher, "but that cheerfulness was always breaking in". Johnson, reflecting back nearly fifty years, recalled a drinking session with Edwards in Oxford's Porch Hall public house when Edwards had quoted an Eton scholar's admired exercise, in which he had been required to describe, within a single Latin line, Christ's first miracle at the wedding at Cana of Galilee: Vidit et erubuit Iympha pudica Deum, composed the Etonian, which itself has been finely rendered:
The virtuous Water, aw'd by power Divine,
Beheld its God -and blushed itself to Wine.

Sadly, the young Etonian was closer to plagiarism than to poetry. The line is a barely altered lift from one of Crashaw's epigrammata sacra, on the same subject of "Aquae in vinum Versae", obviously consulted by the lad - and which ends: Nympha pudica deum vidit et erubuit.

The foregoing are but a few examples from a treasure house of quotation and allusion in our greatest biography. We trust that they may encourage others to revisit the work and to examine for themselves how, in the late 18th Century, the quilted opulence of a great English text might be augmented and adorned, as Horace himself advises in the Ars Poetica, by purple patches - sewn upon a patchwork broad.

Postscript:
One of us (DWP) once gave, before a Rugby Club dinner, a Grace which attracted the censure of a C of E Canon present. The text had run:
We thank thee, Lord, for Jesus kind - who turned the
water into wine. We thank thee, too, for all these men -
about to turn it back again.
The following year, faced with the same task - and the same Canon - he conspired with his present co-author (JND) to turn the Grace itself into a more classical - and hopefully more acceptable - form. It ran;
gratias tibi agimus, Domine, Christo pro bono
aquam qui in vinum vertit et pro his omnibus
mox reversuris.
"Better"? The canon was asked.
"Much better."