I rejoice to concur with the common reader
Has any literary blog been more consistently enjoyable recently than Anecdotal Evidence? Today’s post on letters, Beckett, and eulogies was great. But I really appreciated Kurp’s post on a recent experience with a book by Virginia Woolf:
What ambushed me in The Common Reader, before I could get to the Swift essay, was Woolf’s page-and-a-half, two-paragraph introduction, which I can’t remember having read in many years. She acknowledges the source of her title as Johnson, and proceeds to make good, solid sense:
There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s “Life of Gray” which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their qualities; it defines their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.
The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.
Great stuff.
Incidentally, you can find large chunks of Johnson’s Lives on Project Gutenberg. By the way, if you’re looking for Lives at Amazon.com, check out Amazon’s concordance feature.
November 14th, 2006 09:20
[...] Even when I’m not blogging — which is, increasingly, always — I’m still erecting that rickety fabric. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately, from Bate’s Johnson: Three books of which he never tired, said Mrs. Thrale, were Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Don Quixote. “Alas,” he would say, “how few books there are of which anyone can possibly arrive at the last page” and “Was there ever anything written by mere man” that one could wish longer than these three books? He would have gone on reading them, he would never exhaust them, because here — as in no other works — his identification was almost complete. These three wanderers — one a castaway, one a pilgrim, and one on an impossible quest — were prototypes of what he felt to be his own life. [...]
February 24th, 2008 11:34
[...] You must stay awake Paint me a small railroad station then The Gandhi of modern Indian literature I rejoice to concur with the common reader Who invented the modern short [...]