George Orwell, 'Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool':
"Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except
survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion."
"... A new history of The Spectator is published by David Butterfield (on sale today) and its first chapter underlines a point I’ve been thinking about a lot over these past few weeks. R.S. Rintoul, who set up The Spectator in 1828, feared there would never be a proper commercial market for a magazine that rejected partisanship, and that cared as much about art, books and ideas as economics and foreign affairs. But it worked..."
१८२८ ते २०२०... ह्या मासिकाच्या दीर्घायुष्याची दाद दिली पाहिजे कारण कोणत्याही भारतीय भाषेत एवढे काळ (कदाचित एखादे वर्तमानपत्र सोडून) काय टिकले आहे? साप्ताहिक किंवा मासिक तरी नक्कीच नाही.
इतिहासकार टॉम हॉलंड:
"... For Rintoul, as it had been for Addison and Steele, the great enemy of journalism was dullness. Today’s Spectator, almost 200 years on, still manifestly subscribes to that conviction. It is evident in its patronage of writers who have variously drunk themselves to death or gone to prison for possession of cocaine; in the surge of sex scandals that, during the editorship of the current Prime Minister, added so hugely to the gaiety of the nation; in its willingness to probe the limits of what liberal opinion in Britain today regards as acceptable, and to do so in a tone of satire that Swift might well have enjoyed..."
आता ह्या स्पेक्टेटराचा आणि मराठीचा १९ व्या शतकात कसा संबंध आला ते पहा.
टॉम हॉलंड :
"... The magazine has always cast a certain wistful gaze back at the 18th century. This is evident enough from its title. To launch a new publication back in 1828 was no less a leap of faith than it would be today — but to call it The Spectator was a gesture of self-confidence so lavish that it might have seemed to verge on the conceited. The original Spectator, founded in 1711, was a daily publication which, despite folding after a year, had come to be enshrined over the course of the 18th century as a supreme model of English prose.
As David Butterfield describes in his history of the magazine, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the men who had written the essays which constituted The Spectator’s daily offering, were admired by even the most exacting critics. ‘Who ever wished to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison.’ This decree, coming from the robustly Tory Dr Johnson, was praise indeed for a man who had ranked as a most notorious Whig. To call a magazine The Spectator, then, was to follow in the footsteps of giants...."
विष्णुशास्त्री चिपळूणकर:
"...उदाहरणार्थ, इंग्लिश भाषेत पहा. हित जे ग्रंथकार आजपर्यंत झाले त्या सर्वात आडिसन याची प्रमुखत्वाने गणना आहे.… व जोवर या पृथ्वीवर इंग्लिश राहील तोंवर वरील ग्रंथकाराचे लेख बुडायचे नाहीत असा खात्रीचा अभिप्राय मोठमोठ्यांनी प्रदर्शित केला आहे…"
आडिसन म्हणजे Joseph Addison!
