1 - Extraordinarily ordinary

Summary

When the painter William Hogarth visited the novelist Samuel Richardson one day, “he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man.” Yet suddenly the retard began to talk. Such was the power of his eloquence that Hogarth then looked at him with astonishment “and actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired” (Life, i, 146-47). This was Samuel Johnson, a great man who looked like an idiot. External appearances may not matter, but there is something symbolic here. For Johnson was indeed a man ever beset by a sense of discrepancy and paradox.