A Bit Of Elegance

After reading Rasselas a while back it struck me as a good scheme to keep my Oxford Authors compendium of various works by the Great Cham at hand for dipping into when I needed the balance of an elegant sentence or two or three to right my own - balance, not sentences. Following this scheme in a relaxed fashion I've just finished the abridgement of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in that selection and I must say it served its purpose. Whatever magisterial judgement Sam Johnson is passing on whatever aspect of life has happened to catch his eye, you can be sure it will sound great and, somehow, that's enough.

But it would be a mistake to assume that sounding great is what Doc Johnson means by 'elegance'. The word obviously has resonances for him that we've lost something of over the centuries. Here he is on his Journey in Aberdeen reflecting on the learning of Boethius: The first race of scholars, in the fifteenth century, and some time after, were, for the most part, learning to speak, rather than to think, and were therefore more studious of elegance than of truth. Whilst Johnson's elegance is seen as distinct from truth, it has the heft to, at least in some sense, weigh against it in some kind of balance. And does so for more than a century in relation to a kind of scholarship for which Johnson has some respect. 

Anyway, it seems we could do with a bit of elegance here and now, and more than a bit of Johnsonian wisdom.