Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

mentioned it, and this is what led Johnson to devote his last years almost exclusively to conversation. Johnson almost stopped writing, besides the edition of Shakespeare, which he had to do because the publishers were demanding it. Now, this can be explained in a certain way. It can be explained because Johnson knew he liked to converse, and he knew that the gems of his conversation would be recorded by Boswell. At the same time, if it appears that Boswell had shown Johnson the manuscript, then the work would have lost a lot. We have to accept the fact, true or false, that Johnson was unaware of what it contained. But this would explain Johnson’s silence, the fact that Johnson knew that what he said would not be lost. Now, [Joseph] WoodKrutch, an American critic, has wondered if Boswell’s book reproduces Johnson’s conversations exactly, and he reaches the conclusion, in a very believable way, that Boswell does not reproduce Johnson’s conversation as a stenographer would have done, or a recording, or anything like that, rather that he produces the
effect
of Johnson’s conversation. 17 In other words, it is very possible that Johnson was not always as epigrammatic nor as ingenious as he is presented in the work, though undoubtedly, after meetings at his club, his interlocutors retain memories much like that. There are sentences, in any case, that seem to be coined by Johnson.
    Somebody said to Johnson that he could not imagine a more miserable life than a sailor’s, that to see a warship, to see the sailors crowded together, sometimes whipped, was to see the nadir, the lowest depths of the human condition. And Johnson answered, “The profession of sailors and soldiers has the dignity of danger. All men feel ashamed at not having been at sea or in battle.” This is in tune with the courage we feel in Dr. Johnson. And statements like this can be found on almost every page of the book. Again, I recommend you read Boswell’s book. Now, it has been said that the book is full of “hard words,” of “dictionary words.” But we mustn’t forget that words that are difficult for the English reader are easy for us, because they are intellectual words of Latin origin. On the other hand, as I have said more than once, the common words in English, the words of a child or a peasant or a fisherman, they are of Germanic, Saxon origin. So a book likeGibbon’s—for example,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
—or the works of Johnson, or Boswell’s biography, or, in general, the English books from the eighteenth century, or any contemporary intellectual English work—let’s say the work ofToynbee, for example—abound in “hard words,” in words that are difficult for the English (that demand some culture on the part of the reader), but they are easy for us because they are Latin words, that is, Spanish. 18
    In the next class we will talk about James Macpherson, about his polemic with Johnson, and about the origins of the romantic movement, which begins, we should never forget, in Scotland before any other country in Europe.

CLASS 11

    THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. THE LIFE OF JAMES MACPHERSON. THE INVENTION OF OSSIAN. OPINIONS ABOUT OSSIAN. POLEMIC WITH JOHNSON. REAPPRAISAL OF MACPHERSON.

    WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1966
    I am going to end this class ten minutes early today because I have promised to give a lecture on Victor Hugo. So, please forgive me, and it so happens that today we will be talking about the romantic movement in which Victor Hugo played such a large part.
    The romantic movement is probably the most important movement in the history of literature, perhaps because it was not only a literary style but also a lifestyle. In the last century, we hadZola, the naturalist. And Emile Zola is inconceivable without Hugo, the romantic. We still have people who are nationalists or communists, and they are those things in a romantic way, even if they claim to have socio-economic or whatever other motives. I said there is a romantic lifestyle. For example, one famous case would be Lord Byron. Byron’s poetry was excluded—unjustly in my mind—from a famous anthology of English literature published some years ago. But Byron still represents one romantic type. (Byron, who goes to Greece to die for the freedom of that country against the oppression of the Turks.) We have poets with romantic destinies: one of the greatest poets in the English language,Keats, dies of tuberculosis. One could say