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Perhaps when the last word is said, the greatest conversationalist is the one who comes nearest to the truth of things. And the truth comes from hard, honest, fearless thinking. Johnson's conversations, in the last analysis, live on, not because of their word order, but because of the originality of their thought. Asked about the proper training for children, Johnson remarked that a gentle bringing-up is better than a hardy and rugged one. Someone has rightly commented, Here, at a moment's notice, are ideas of infantile hygiene being thrown off, that go far beyond the purview of the eighteenth century. It was ninety-two years after this conversation that Herbert Spencer was to rediscover, and state at considerable length, the doctrine that Johnson here condenses into two or three sentences — and in the England of 1861, Spencer was considered almost impossibly advanced (Esme Wingfield-Stratford, Good Talk [London: Lovat Dickson, 1936], p. 223). |
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