“Languages are the pedigree of nations.” Samuel Johnson’s thought is noble. The more authoritatively so, in that the profound pronouncement about language is issued by the greatest of dictionary-makers. Not—it has at once to be added—the maker of the greatest dictionary, for he was a lesser great man than Johnson (not quite the same as a less great man than Johnson), being the man who gave himself and us the New, later the Oxford, English Dictionary: the indispensable James A. H. Murray. His teamwork comprehended that a language is itself a team. Not that the members of the team always see eye to eye.

“New English Dictionary originally A(n) Historical English Dictionary: Murray and Bradley unable to agree.” There’s scrupulosity for you, or for them: the exacting counterclaims of A and An preceding the H of Historical. (I owe this delighting item to the supreme compendium of central eccentricities, Geoffrey  Madan’s Notebooks.) Murray’s dedicated story has been touchingly told by his granddaughter K. M. Elisabeth Murray, as Caught in the Web of Words. The Word Wide Web. Her piety, the respectful love of one’s ancestors, is beautifully pertinent, even as it is within the world of Johnson, for whom piety was sovereign. A language is itself ancestral. Moreover, “It is incident to words, as to their authours, to degenerate from their ancestors.” Up to a point, Lord Copper (he being a degeneration from the Iron Duke)—but only up to a point, since fortunately words, like descendants, are sometimes an improvement upon their ancestors. Scholarship, too, is ancestral, including Johnsonian scholarship, now most lovingly and livingly bent upon his work in the latest addition to the comprehensive Yale edition, Johnson on the English Language.¹

For Johnson, renovation was the best, perhaps the only enduring, form of innovation, so his own words always bear repeating. “Languages are the pedigree of nations”: the thought is all the more generous because of its amplitude as to what a pedigree most truly is. Pedigree here is not the preserve or preservation of a class (Debrett’s Peerage, say, or the Almanach de Gotha, or even Crockford’s Clerical Directory), but— in widest commonalty spread—it is a body constituted of a most capacious constituency: all those who enjoy the humanity of a particular tongue, in the full knowledge that possessing some such tongue is what mankind, of whatever nation, shares. The great and continuing surprise that is Samuel Johnson is seldom more of an amazement than when he, one of the greatest of Englishmen and (in Thomas Carlyle’s understanding) “The Hero as Man of Letters,” puts in its place England’s snobbishness. All the better than never to have found himself tempted by it.

To think of language is always to revert to how someone—perhaps oneself, perhaps one of the many greater others—once used words in an endeavor to characterize the nature of words. So the present writer (an odd locution, that, as though all the other writers were past and absent, whereas they crowd the mind, they are the tip of everybody’s tongue)—the present writer trusts that it is not idle recycling that makes him now say again what was said in introducing a collection of essays on “The State of the Language”: that the meaning of a word is neither a matter of opinion, nor a matter of fact, neither subjective nor objective, but an exercise of communal judgment. Which is why the meaning of a word can neither be conclusively settled by recourse to a dictionary nor be even provisionally agreed without recourse to a dictionary. A language is a body of agreements (not opinions or facts but agreements, judgments that are at once personal and impersonal, individual and social), agreements not only between people who are alive but also between those who are alive and those who are dead. It is by courtesy of the dead that we are able to communicate at all, and this is one of the many reasons why those of us who are (for now) alive should treat with courtesy the dead. “The communication/ Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” This, T. S. Eliot saw and showed. Beyond even this, there is the acknowledgment that the living can have no language other than thanks to communication with the dead. Thanks, then, to the dead.

Thanks, though, here and now, first and foremost, to the consummate and consummating editors of Johnson on the English Language: Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria, Jr. Their cooperation—with one another and with Johnson—is magnificent. Their erudition is immense and yet measured, deep and yet crystalline. Such is their mastery that when at one point there has to be appended to a sentence of Johnson’s (“It has been asserted, that for the law to be known, is of more importance than to be right”) a single editorial word (“Untraced”), the respectful reader wants to register in the margin !*?!*. Untraced, by these editors? Then for “Untraced,” read “Untraceable.” And take a small further pleasure in the fact that the originator of so trenchant an apothegm (“for the law to be known …”) is not known.

These editors love Johnson, entirely and unsentimentally, so it is characteristic of their annotations to be tinged with something of the sly banter that Johnson himself likes to introduce into his scholarly commentary. As for instance when (notably and notoriously) he defines the lexicographer as “a harmless drudge.” It was good of Johnson not even to be able to imagine the unlovely ways in which, on the contrary, a lexicographer—by abdicating his responsibilities as a trustee or even (the prison-house of language) a “trusty”—might be actively harmful. As when Webster’s glimpsed that what it could most valuably sell (dictionary-wise) was the pass, and promptly proceeded to throw up its hands and in the towel. Everything is on the go, so anything goes. But a dictionary should not be a work of deference, a deference-book, whether the patron before whom it seeks to bow and scrape be the upper classes or the lower masses.

But back to banter. When, in his Preface to the Dictionary, Johnson says that he has “omitted all words which have relation to proper names,” the editors straightfacedly put him in his places: “There are rare exceptions to this rule: e.g., Grubstreet and Lichfield.” Enough said. Again, Johnson in the Preface acknowledges that on occasion he has taken an affectionate liberty, not adhering invariably to his decision “to admit no testimony of living authours” when it comes to the illustrative quotations that are the soul and heart of the body of his Dictionary: he has “departed from this resolution” on occasion, but only “when some performance of uncommon excellence excited my veneration, when my memory supplied me, from late books, with an example that was wanting, or when my heart, in the tenderness of friendship, solicited admission for a favourite name.” The editors relish this humanizing touch, and they let us know (in a commentary that endearingly reports without comment) who these lucky ones are, who gained a privileged admission to the Dictionary in 1755: David Garrick, Charlotte Lennox, Samuel Richardson, William Law, and—last but not least—Samuel Johnson… . Fair enough; such favoritism stands in need of no forgiveness.

If annotations, notes, are what Johnson once called them in editing Shakespeare, “a necessary evil,” seldom can the maximizing of their necessariness and the minimizing of their evil-effects have been so adeptly effected as in this edition. Throughout the commentary, the most illuminating use is made of the Dictionary itself, its definitions and its illustrative quotations. The editors are at one with Johnson’s own judgment when it comes to overdoing as against underdoing the assistance that annotation aims to be: “it is rather to be wished that many readers should find more than they expect, than that one should miss what he might hope to find.” Or, in the flat-tongued level-headed terms of the twentieth-century genius who has much in common with Johnson, the fellow poet-critic William Empson: “it does not require much fortitude to endure seeing what you already know in a note.”

Gwin Kolb is senior to Robert DeMaria, Jr. One can be confident that DeMaria, a first-rate self-abnegating scholar, would be prompt to pay tribute to his senior. Kolb’s editing of Rasselas, earlier in the Yale edition, was exemplary, and now it is a moving fact that exactly fifty years have passed since two men—one James H. Sledd and one Gwin J. Kolb—published an enduring book (now marshaled anew within this edition), Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book (1955). DeMaria is a great success as a successor.

But of what exactly does Johnson on the English Language consist? The answer is simple, though some of the decisions cannot have been easy: “Johnson’s writings on the English language that are part of his work on A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).” Which means Johnson’s original Proposal (The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, 1747); then (from within the Dictionary) the Preface, “The History of the English Language,” and “A Grammar of the English Tongue.” Then there is ancillary material: Johnson’s later Preface to the first abridged edition (1756), and his Advertisement to the fourth folio edition (1773). And finally, two appendixes of manuscript material for the earliest stages: a facsimile and transcription of “A Short Scheme for compiling a new Dictionary of the English Language,” and a facsimile of the fair copy of the Plan.

In terms of the editorial achievement, the glory is resourcefulness, the deft providing of so much germane textual and contextual material. It is to be hoped that the editors are now finding time to bask and glow and even purr. And in terms of Johnson’s achievement, the glory here is his Preface, a heartwarming and heartbreaking realization of all the inescapable recognitions by him along the arduous way, as well as the maturing recognition of him (as “Dictionary Johnson”), with his tasks inevitably impossible of entire fulfillment, yet with the triumphs as well as the fallings short and the falling foul. For Johnson fell foul of the far-from-fair Lord Chesterfield, most patronizing of all those whose patronage proves to be merely airy. Not that a patron would necessarily have been any better than a pretender to patronhood. Johnson owed singularly little to Lord Chesterfield in the end. (In the beginning, in his original Proposal, Johnson had in a way proposed to him—Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments). But we owe a great deal to Chesterfield, for without him and his crass retrospective condescension in the public prints, we should never have been able to take to heart and to mind one of the greatest letters ever written.

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 labours, 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 obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick 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 favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should 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.

It must sometimes be permissible to bite the hand that hasn’t fed you, a hand moreover that had taken it on itself to pen some lordlinesses for the papers, purporting to be in Johnson’s interests but in fact self-flattery and flummery and flim-flam.

The decisions as to editorial policy cannot have been easy, not least because of a massive contingency: “The body of the Dictionary falls outside the scope of the Yale Edition because of its vast size.” Johnson himself surmounted countless obstacles, but his editors cannot surmount the one that is inseparable from his achievement’s having proved gigantic.

This fact, like the policy decision editorially, is not of Kolb and DeMaria’s making, but it is likely to have a special poignancy for them, different from that which it must have for us. There cannot but be something profoundly saddening, discomposing even, about the fact that “The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson” does not include—could not accommodate, or could not accommodate to its own nature—one of his greatest works. For, as the editors say, “In Johnson’s life of writing no work is more important than his Dictionary.” To feel a pang (many a pang) is not to question the large Yale decision, for it is true that, although an annotated edition of the Dictionary is not an impossibility, it would be immense—and, even if it were possible, would not constitute at all the same kind of enterprise as is accomplished in the existing twenty-five volumes of the edition. Nothing should lessen our pleasure in, and our gratitude for, what Johnson on the English Language brings home to us. That not everything is now within our grasp is a tragic truth of exactly the kind that Johnson never averted his eyes from—or his heart or his head. For the Preface abjures even the hope of perfection, or of completeness even, in any such matter as the making of a dictionary. Some such truth has to be faced by the makers of an edition. Incompleteness is all. The Vanity of Human Wishes … But if anyone were to grumble that Johnson on the English Language is Hamlet without the Prince, one retort might be that, even without the Prince, Hamlet would retain within itself enough amazing realizations of creative genius to rebuke any ingrate.

But then there is a second contingency, or rather a secondary one. For Johnson on the English Language does not bring together all that Johnson valuably had to say on the English language. The editors are characteristically honest and clear about this. Their brief is Johnsonian lexicographia:

In planning the Yale Edition, the editors agreed to give some of Johnson’s “philological” writings to other volumes, reserving his writings relating to the Dictionary for the present one. The Plays of William Shakespeare has its own volumes; the Rambler and Idler have theirs; and many, but not all, of Johnson’s shorter essays on various “philological” or literary subjects appear in yet another volume.

All of which means that the title, Johnson on the English Language, though in no way misleading within the large-scale edition in which it figures, would have had to proffer something further if this were a free-standing volume. There is a distinctly useful and modest book from the old days: The Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson, arranged and compiled by Joseph Epes Brown (1926). Its section of Johnson on the English language has its own comedy, in that Johnson’s caveats about our tongue prove to be so many as to make you find yourself wishing to issue a warning against caveats. The page-numbers are duly marshalled for Johnson’s fervid glowerings:

– the Spenserian stanza unsuited to the genius of the English language
– the sonnet unsuited to the nature of the English language
– blank verse unsuited to the nature of the English language
– Pindaric ode unsuited to the nature of the English language
– the unfitness of our language for smooth versification
– so much inferior in harmony to the Latin
– our language having little flexibility our verses can differ very little in their cadence

What, nothing that the English language is suited to? Well, there is an entry:

– the affluence and comprehension in our language shown in our poetical translations of the Ancients

But not even the English language would be given an easy ride when Johnson was in the saddle.

His Preface pays all due honor to the language; nevertheless, it comes finally to rest with—or rather in—a somber majesty. A mighty sequence of unpropitiatory bringings to mind—the momentum of Johnson’s clauses has often been likened to great crested waves of the sea—sweeps forward through If … if … if, all then bidden to be still:

If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed, and comprised in a few volumes, are yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated knowledge, and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians, did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied criticks of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their work, were obliged to change its oeconomy, and give their second edition another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

This very last sentence of the Preface, which does bring itself to rest upon the earned word praise, succeeds in redeeming itself from egotism (I, thrice) by the conviction of its plight: plight of the kind that is given, and plight of the kind that is suffered. The editors illuminatingly evoke for us the long tradition within which Johnson speaks so (the lexicographer’s pains, taken in both senses), and this without in any way lessening the personal pathos of this, a conclusion in which almost everything is concluded and included.

It had been powerfully otherwise that the Preface had opened. Its first paragraph spoke of “those who … ,” its second paragraph then narrowing to “the dictionary maker; whom …”; the third paragraph at once narrowed and swelled to have as its first word the first person: “I have, notwithstanding this discouragement, attempted a dictionary of the English language.” With what unobtrusive skill Johnson then moved further into I, even while distancing himself from it: the fourth paragraph has I as its second word, the fifth paragraph as its ninth word, the sixth as its fourteenth word… . The sense of self, and of its relation to all that is not self, fares forward.

It is never vaunting, Johnson’s dedication of himself. An elegiac intensity suffuses his words as he nears the end of the Preface: “In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to the honour of my country.” Johnson came to this asseveration by way of asking what remains (one answer, within his living prose, then being the word remains itself):

If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.

I hear, behind Johnson’s intrepidity, the tragic courage of Sarpedon before battle, in the face of death, and then I hear too the comic courage that Pope brought to Sarpedon’s speech when he fashioned it anew for his Clarissa, joining the cast of The Rape of the Lock. (“Clarissa: A new Character added in the subsequent Editions, to open more clearly the MORAL of the Poem, in a parody of the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus in Homer.”) Given, in life, this inescapability, and that one, and yet another,

Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid;
What then remains, but well our Pow’r to use,
And keep good Humour still whate’er we lose?

What then remains? To use our power well, and to keep good humor still. Johnson did these, in his very own way.

And for the Yale editors, what remains? Well, there remain—though this is an Irish way of putting it—those missing three volumes, XI-XIII. It was tempting fate when long ago someone allocated to The Lives of the Poets three volumes of which one was numbered XIII. Fate can read Roman numerals.

In 1959, volume I of the Yale edition, Johnson’s Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, was reviewed by a young enthusiast who signed himself C. B. Ricks. He saw that the enterprise was worthwhile, expansive, and expensive (of scholarly effort and time, and of a bookbuyer’s resources). But the young sprig could never have foreseen that, all but half a century later, there still wouldn’t be to hand the volumes that constitute Johnson’s greatest achievement as a literary critic.

Meanwhile, at a bend in the river (the Isis), Yale is apparently being overtaken by Oxford. For next year there will pass the post Roger Lonsdale’s masterly edition of The Lives of the Poets, to be published by Oxford University Press. Where, currently, are you, Yale?