SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. 136

Report by Alan Brien The usual prizes were offered for excerpts from Johnson on Boswell, Pope on Johnson, Goethe on Eckermann, General Gordon on Lytton Strachey, or Zola on Angus Wilson. • 'DIE subject I believed would take his revenge on his biographer by a malicious use of the biographer's methods without, however, being untrue to his own character. This balance was extremely difficult to achieve, and none of the competitors succeeded in capturing it completely. John Digby scratched Strachey with his own poison pin by pointing out that " the author of all these confident audacities, it appeared, was himself endowed with a voice nothing more than a high-pitched nervous squeak," but it is impossible to imagine the General writing such phrases as " the Cultivated Imp of English Biography, the memorialist with his eye to the keyhole."

D. L. L. Clarke caught the thinly veiled sneer of Pope and his habit of making a compliment to someone else an even greater implied compliment to himself.

" Doubting his having a humour of pedagogy (for he had conclu- sive distemper and a trailing foot) I but sought him a competence and some leisure for writing. He first showed his talent, and a nice discernment, by doing into Latin verse my Messiah. But it was his London which first came beneath my notice, as how could it fail, appearing on the same day in 1738 ? Without attaining the highest flights, he already revealed a Critick's eye who might play Juvenal to the age's Horace."

No one attempted Goethe, and almost everyone produced a super- ficial resemblance to Johnson. But more is needed for true Johnsonese than a barrage of Latinisms. Johnson's prose is like a great weighted wheel that turns slowly through downright condemnation, sinking into faint praise, then on to congratulation before rising again to detailed summing-up. And surely the Doctor would have included some anecdotes of Boswell which would have given us the other side of those memorable cross-examinations ? A. M. Sayers got very near the right tone of voice with " he usually showed a proper respect for authoritative opinion, but at times he displayed frivolity when frivolity was inappropriate and would be led into ridiculotit speculations. The most heterodox ideas .engaged his fancy and he would press them on his auditors, often with the laudable object of ensuring final refutation ; but on some occasions, one would suppose, like a child at the menagerie, with the mischieyous intention of provoking the lions to roar." Pauline Willis, too, realised, as so many other entrants did not, that Johnson's most effective device was to illuminate suddenly an abstract discussion with a vivid and picturesque comparison. " He has all the outward manners of a gentleman and, alas, shows sometimes the behaviour that is apparent in leeches, the animal to which all mankind owes a certain gratitude because of its powers to abstract rheum from the body. The leech, when it is gorged, drops to the ground, there to wait for its system to deal with its recent meal. Not so Mr. Boswell."

The Gordon entries were probably the most difficult to judge. It was hard to decide just how acute and articulate the General would have been. A very good answer from H. A. C. Evans was, perhaps, rather too-well written for its author though it represented a fair summary of his probable reaction :

" Having been educated privately, as we have seen, and thus denied the benefits of the healthy rough and tumble of school life, he always set greater store by intelligence than character. A ' high- brow ' of the notorious ' Bloomsbury Set,' he always adopted an attitude of sneering hostility towards the deeper things or life, and especially towards the Great War and the Allied Leaders, on the few occasions when he condescended to notice them at all. This attitude is aptly illustrated in the handful of trivial books he left behind, impertinent essays about the Mighty Dead, written in a carping ' smart-aleck ' style of denigration that made them ' best-selfers in the unbalanced days of the Nineteen-Twenties but which a more mature judgement has happily relegated to their proper place.

" So he died, this son of a General, a bearded hermit of fifty-two, with the voice of a eunuch yid the feline instincts of a cruel woman. We can but believe that, in the infinite and all-wise mercy of God, he will receive his due reward."

None of the Zola entries was really convincing in style and content. Maurice Cranston contributed an entertaining and acute criticism of Wilson's milieu but its careful double-entendr6 read more like Gide than Zola. Still it is worth quoting for its own sake. " Angus Wilson nous presente le monde proustien de Londres (ce que s'appelle en anglais the wrong set ') qu connait fort bien. II cherche en resolvant la double question des goats sexuels et des milieux sociaux, le fil qui conduit mathernatiquement d'un homme a un autre homrne."

I award a prize of two pounds to G.B.A. for his verse critique which mixes poison and scholarship into an individual draught, and another. to R. Kennard Davis for a fierce military onslaught on Strachey. I also award a consolation prize of one pound to D. L. L. Clarke, part of whose entry I quoted above.

PRIZES (G. B. A.)

Pope on Dr. Johnson Irene even Garrick could not give, Still less inferior mummers, strength to live, But to his other verse none can refuse Some gleams, though broken, of th'authentick muse.

London, 'tis true, fell, overpower'd by Fate, Destroy 'd, still-born, by reason of its date, But in sage wit and grace of number'd lines The Vanity of Human Wishes shines.

When prose his powers employ 'd, the funeral pyre

Lent not The Abissinian Tale its fire,

But Ramblers marched with fine, majestic pace, And Idlers saunter'd with more easy grace.

Lives of the Poets their expression found In judgement faulty and in taste unsound, But everlasting honours none can grudge

The studious Dictionary's self-named drudge.

In all, his greatness may not be denied, With learning, piety and wit allied Who left the soul of Britain poorer when he died.

(R. KENNARD DAVIS)

General Gordon on Lytton Strachey ." Blessed is the man that bath not sat in the seat of the scornful " (Ps. 1, v. 1). " They grin like a dog and run about through the city " (Ps. 59, v. 6). See also Ps. 14, v. 1, " The FOOL hath said in his heart " !

This young man, who has never smelt powder, nor known what it means to trust one's life to a strong arm, a keen eye, a cool head and a clean heart ; this scoffer, lounging on sofas in Cambridge or Bloomsbury, with his brain turned " through philosophy and vain deceit " (Col. 2, v. 8) ventures to mock at the humble instruments of a Providence Whom he does not recognise ! Put this elegant blasphemer with his curled beard to face a rabble of Chinese fanatics ; take him from his dinner-parties to endure the sand and thirst of the Sudan ; then let him sneer if he can !