>Max Sawicky wrote:
>>
>> As Samuel Johnson said, what was good was not original,
>> and what was original was not good. Or something like
>> that.
>More like that (but still just from memory), from a book review. He
>said the book contained much that was new and much that was true,
>but that which was true was not new, and that which was new was
>not true.
>It was partly from the good Doctor that I imbibed my deep distrust
>of "originality," though he wouldn't go along with the even stronger
>statement of the distrust in Pope (as I would).
I was impressed with Chaucer's introduction to his Canterbury Tales. He apologizes for its originality.
IMO there is an interesting switch in Western thought from a suspicion of originality to the flaunting of originality as a good in itself. I always thought it was a feeling in the past of a Golden Age and anything now or about to be can only be a deterioration, whereas in more modern times, at least since the Romantics, there is Progress, where things may get better and better than they were in the past.
But maybe this is getting too far from economics and politics.
-- Homines id quod volunt credunt.