Conversations

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1865)

            One of the things that keeps living languages alive is their accommodation of linguistic change, one feature of which is semantic change, that is, change in the generally accepted meanings of words.  In our tongue the process is particularly robust, and there is not the damnedest thing grumpy old English professors can do about it—except, of course, write grumpy blog posts.  If you frequently use dictionaries—as all intelligent readers do (a group necessarily including readers of this blog)—it is a good idea not merely to take notice of definitions.  Quite as informative, often, are etymologies.  These days any reader with a smart phone can have pocket access to the entire Oxford English Dictionary, the Rolls Royce of word-books, and thus, in effect, can read a mini-history of any word in our mother tongue.  Change being an immutable feature of the Heraclitean universe, if you will indulge the paradox, even dead languages undergo semantic change.  Imagine how Cicero would respond to a query as to whether one could find his declamations on Catiline'a conspiracy on video.

            So I am definitely on board with semantic change.  I also recognize the reality that the change is likely to exhibit ethical decay.  It was with more imagination than linguistic science that Sir Walter Raleigh derived the word world from wear-olde, that which “groweth worse as it groweth older.”  But many ordinary words like boor, knave and harlot began life without pejorative connotation.  Right now I am worried about the moral fate of the word conversation, which in its common usage means “oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas.”  A crucial part of this definition is exchange.  Within the last few years I have noticed—first in academic-speak and then in the speech of ordinary mortals—a new meaning of the word.  We are getting more and more important conversations, long-overdue conversions, national conversations, and conversations we absolutely need to have.  In recent weeks I have participated, sort of, in several such conversations having to do with race and race relations in America.  They have varied considerably in quality.  The best of them were lectures, the less good harangues, but  none of them was a conversation—not if a conversation involves the significant participation of at least two people.  We may regard them as “imaginary conversations,” though not of the sort to which I now turn.

            Consider dialog(ue), another English word apparently yearning to breathe free.  The obvious meaning of this word is an oral exchange between two speakers.  I recently have noted that if an important conversation is important enough it may require that dialogue be turned into a verb.  “We have to sit down and dialogue about this.”  This usage may become common, though for the time being “dialogue” still retains a literary and more specifically theatrical suggestion.  But a good deal of ancient literary dialogue, including that of the drama, is not exactly what we would call conversation.  Imagined dialogues have more prominently been the vehicle of “important conversations” about politics, law, ethics, and religion.  Think about Plato, Cicero, and Boethius for starters.

            For dialogue you will recognize as actually conversational, you may have better luck with modern authors.  My latest delivery from the Library of America included three volumes of novels by Elmore Leonard, one of several recent authors I had thus far neglected.  The precision with which he captures the way certain Americans talk to each other is astonishing, though not less so than the ingenuity of his plots.  But only one author known to me actually built a literary career on imaginary conversations.  For that is the generic title—Imaginary Conversations—of several volumes of dialogues written by Walter Savage Landor.  There are many people for whom the name Landor (1775-1865) may be new.  He is, in my view, among the most important of little-known British literary figures.  His biographer Sidney Colvin, who in his youth knew him,  put it thus: “Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little.”  Landor was a brilliant man of enormous energy, and a very remarkable classical scholar, a large portion of whose poetical compositions were in Latin.  He was an advanced political thinker and a wellspring of personal virtues sometimes concealed by rebarbative impulses that repeatedly brought serious trouble upon him.  He was kicked out of various distinguished places, such as Rugby School, Trinity College, Oxford, and (in a sense) his family home and England itself.  He was a passionate supporter of the oppressed peoples of southern Europe, first the Greeks smarting beneath their Muslim Ottoman occupiers, then the Italians abused by their own petty Christian tyrants left around from the Middle Ages.

            He knew many of the giants of the English literary world over the course of a very long career.  (He published his last book sixty-nine years after he had published his first.)  Many of his most productive years were spent abroad, especially in Italy; and it was there in the 1820s that he undertook the enormous work of the Imaginary Conversations.  Years ago by luck I came into possession of the great edition of Landor’s English works, ten of the sixteen volumes of which are devoted to them.  He throws together unlikely conversation partners from many ages and civilizations, though the first he ever published (1823) featured Englishmen personally known to him: the poet Robert Southey and the great classical scholar Richard Porson.  The subject of their conversation was the poetry of Wordsworth—presumably his early poetry, given that Porson died in 1808.

            One imaginary conversation of particular current interest is that between the British parliamentarians Samuel Romilly and William Wilberforce (vol. 5: 126-138) supposedly in the first decade of the nineteenth century.  Both of these men, and especially Wilberforce, were animated by reforming zeal, and among the most burning issue on Wilberforce’s mind was the suppression of the slave trade, which (as knowledgeable European statesmen knew) was by constitutional arrangement to cease in the United States in 1820.  European slavers knew they had better make hay while the sun shined, incurring the disgust as well as the bitter opposition of reformers.

            I must say the slightest word about Landor as a poet.  One specialty of his was the four-liner, a kind of poetic epigram.  Two of those written in old age as he faced the abyss are likely to impress any reader in a similar situation.  The most famous, the supposed testament of an aged philosopher, goes as follows:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

The image of “warm[ing] both hands before the fire of life” is a beautiful statement of the enthusiasm with which he had thrown himself into so many causes, controversies, loves and labors.  And that now waning fire is the occasion of another of his mini-masterpieces, a strangely one-sided “conversation” the full meaning of which is perhaps clearer to the eavesdropper-reader than to the poet-participant.

Death stands above me, whispering low

I know not what into my ear;

Of his strange language all I know

Is, there is not a word of fear.