Transactions 1981 [antikvár]

JOHNSON AND THE PARTICULAR EAR *Robert Robinson'JTHE voice is unmistakeable, even to those whose acquaintance with it comes no closer than a book of quotations. " What, is it you, you dogs? I'll have a frisk with you ", " Sir, your wife, under the pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods " 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?", " When a butcher says his heart bleeds for his country, he has in fact no uneasy feeling". Unmistakeable, not simply because it is the voice of Johnson, but unmistakeable because in its uniquely human reverberation. it is the voice of one individual reachine out to another, confident that that otherin all his own individuality, in all his separatenesswill be there.But that was a long time ago. Ever since communication became an industryever since communication became communications, and conversation dwindled into something people listed as an interest, alone with stamp-collecting or keeping ferretsabove all, since the spoken word was taken into public ownership by the media and beean to fill the universe with a sort of roaringever since that time, confidence that there is an individual to talk to has waned in exact proportion to confidence that it is an individual who is talking.Some general voice seems to have dispossessed an immense variety of voices. Though Johnson spoke forcefully, thoueh he spoke, as he said, for victory, he nonetheless spoke as thoueh his voice were one amone many, as though he recognised that someone else would always be there to speak after him. To Johnson, speech was as various as the individuals who used it, sneech was understood to be one of the principal ways in which a human beine identified himself, and what was saideven when it wasn't very interesting had a special force because it belonged to someone, it was always someone's private property. Now that speech is produced in bulk, in studios, in front of microphones and* Presidential Address delivered to the Society in Guildhall on 19 September 1981.6