The word genius seems a strange one to apply to Boswell. Macaulay has had his hour of authority with most of us, and, unluckily for him and for us, the worst passages in his Essays are often better remembered {38} than the greatest chapters in his History. It has proved his ill-fortune as well as his glory to have written so vividly that the mind's eye will still see what he wrote clear before it, though twenty years may lie between it and the actual sight of the printed page. At his worst he is like an advertisement hoarding, crude, violent, vulgar, but impossible to escape. The essay on Croker's Boswell is one of those unfortunate moments. It is, unhappily, far better known than its author's article on Johnson written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and its violence still takes the memory by assault. No one forgets the disgusting description of Johnson, or the insults heaped upon Boswell. Least of all can anybody forget the famous paradox about the contrast between Boswell and his book. As a biographer, according to Macaulay, Boswell has easily surpassed all rivals. "Homer is not more decidedly the first of Epic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere." And yet this same Boswell is "a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect"; and, strangest of all, only achieves his amazing success by force of his worthlessness and folly. "If he had not {39} been a great fool he would never have been a great writer."

Macaulay was the most self-confident of men. But, though he set his opinion with assurance against that of any other critic, there was one verdict he respected, the verdict of time. He would not have been astonished to hear that in the eighty years since his essay was written the fame of Boswell's book has continually increased. But few things that have happened since then would have surprised him more than to be told that, in a volume published only fifty years after his death and in part officially addressed to his own University of Cambridge, a Professor of English Literature, one of the two or three universally acknowledged masters of criticism, would be found quietly letting fall, as a thing about which there need be no discussion, a sentence beginning with the words: "A wiser man than Macaulay, James Boswell."

It may be well, before speaking further of Johnson, to say something about the man to whom we owe most of our knowledge of him, the most important member of his circle, this same James Boswell. Like all good biographers, he has put himself into his book; and we know him as well as we know Johnson, as we know no other two men, perhaps, in the history of the world. It cannot be denied {40} that, when we put his great book down, it is not very easy to follow Sir Walter Raleigh in talking of him as a wise man, or even as a wiser man than Macaulay. If Boswell and Macaulay were put into competition in a prize for wisdom, no ordinary examiners would give it to Boswell. By the only tests they could apply, Macaulay must far outstrip him. The wisdom which enabled Macaulay to render splendid services to the State and to literature, and gave him wealth, happiness, popularity and a peerage, is as easily tested, and, it must be confessed, as real, as the unwisdom which ended in Boswell dying the dishonoured death of a drunkard, and leaving a name of which his descendants felt the shame at least as much as the glory.

But there are other tests, and though their superior value may be doubted, they ought not to be altogether ignored. Macaulay, who knew everything and achieved so much, spent his whole life in visible and external activities—talking, reading, writing, governing; and was admired, and, indeed, admirable in them all. But of the wisdom which realizes how essentially inferior all measurable doing, however triumphant, is to being, which is immeasurable, the wisdom which is occupied with the ultimate issues of life and death, he had apparently as little as any man who ever lived. He seems {41} always to have been one of those active, hurrying, useful persons who—

"Fancy that they put forth all their life
And never know how with the soul it fares."

Whatever can be said against Boswell that cannot be said. Of this inner wisdom, this quietness of thought, this "folie des grandeurs" of the soul, he had a thousand times as much as Macaulay. He could not cling to it to the end, he could not victoriously live by it and make it himself; but he had seen the vision which Macaulay never saw, and he never altogether forgot it. Every man is partly a lost soul. So far as Boswell was that, he knew it in all the bitter certainty of tears. So far as Macaulay was, he was as unconscious of it as the beasts that perish. And the kingdom of wisdom, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is more easily entered by those who know that they are outside it, than by those who do not know that there is such a place and are quite content where they are.

But these are high matters into which there is no need to go further. It is necessary, however, to say a little more about Boswell's character and abilities. He and Johnson are now linked together for all eternity; and everybody who takes an interest in Johnson is interested in Boswell too. It ought to be {42} much more than interest, and in all true Johnsonians it is. Without Boswell, we should have respected Johnson, honoured him as a man and a writer, liked him as "a true-born Englishman," but we could not have known him enough to love him. By the help of Boswell, we can walk and talk with him, dine with him, be with him at his prayers as well as at his pleasures, laugh with him, learn of him and disagree with him; above all, love him as we only can love a human being, and never a mere wise man or great writer. No Englishman doubts that Boswell has given us one of the great books of the world. But before we realize its greatness, we realize its pleasantness, its companionableness. The Life of Johnson and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides may be taken for practical purposes as one book; and it has some claim to be the most companionable book in the world. There is no book like it for a solitary meal. A novel, if it is good for anything, is too engrossing for a dinner companion. It is impossible to put it down. It interrupts the business of dining and results in cold food and indigestion. A book of short poems—the Odes of Horace, the Fables of La Fontaine, the Sonnets of Shakespeare or Wordsworth—is much more to the purpose. One may read an Ode or a Sonnet quickly and then turn {43} again to one's dinner, carrying the fine verse in one's mind and tasting it at leisure as one holds good wine in the mouth before letting it pass away into forgetfulness. But poetry is not for every man, nor for every mood of any man: and the moment of dinner is not with most men the moment when they appear most poetic either to others or to themselves.

But is there any time which is not the time for Boswell? He does not ask for a mood which may not be forthcoming: he does not demand an attention which it is inconvenient to give. We can take him up and lay him down as and when we will. And he has everything in his store. If we are seriously inclined and wish to have something to think about when we turn from the book to the dinner, he is full of the most serious questions, discussed sometimes wisely, almost always by wise men, the problems of morals and politics, of religion and society and literature, such questions as those of liberty and necessity in philosophy, liberty and government in politics, the English Church and the Roman, private education and public, life in the country and life in the town. Or if we wish, not for problems of any kind, but just for a picture of life as it was lived a hundred and fifty years ago, there is nothing like Boswell's pages for variety, intimacy, veracity and, {44} what is the great point in these matters, lavishness of detail. His book is sown with apparently, but only apparently, insignificant trifles. What and how Johnson ate, his manner in talking and walking, the colour and shape of his clothes, the size of his stick, all these and a thousand similar details we know from Boswell, and because Boswell had the genius to perceive that they accumulate upon us a sensation of life and bodily presence, as of a man standing before our eyes.

So, again, with the many little stories he tells which no one else would have told. Who but he would have treasured up every word of that curious meeting in April 1778, between Johnson and his unimportant old friend Edwards, the man who said that he had tried to be a philosopher, but "cheerfulness was always breaking in"? Yet it is not only one of the most Boswellian but one of the very best things in the whole book. It exactly illustrates what was newest in his method. In an age of generality and abstraction he saw the advantage of the concrete and particular, and put into practice the lesson his master could only preach, "Nothing is too little for so little a creature as man." So the total-abstaining Johnson and the bibulous Reynolds and Boswell will each come before us exactly as they were: and we are amused as we picture {45} the confusion of Reynolds's distinguished parties where the servants had never been taught to wait, and make a note of the progress of social manners as we sympathize with Johnson at Edinburgh throwing the fingered lump of sugar out of the window. Some people, again, like Mr. Gladstone, are fond of observing and discoursing upon the changes of taste in the matter of wine: and such people will find in Boswell almost as much to interest their curiosity as Johnson's own fellowship of tea-drinkers. The drinker of champagne will have to accept the mere modernity of his beverage, which finds no place in Johnson's famous hierarchy: "Claret for boys, port for men, brandy for heroes." Or, once more, if our meal ends in tobacco, we may please ourselves by contemplating the alternate, but never contemporaneous, glories of snuff and tobacco, and note the sage's curious, but strictly truthful, account of the advantages and disadvantages of smoking. "Smoking has gone out. To be sure it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity has gone out." Or if we demand a keener relish for our meal than these {46} quiet joys of observation, there is of course the whole store of Johnson's sallies of wit, the things we all quote and forget and like to have recalled to us.

For all these reasons Boswell's book, stuffed full of matter, and such matter as you can take up and lay down at pleasure, is the ideal companion for the man who dines or sups alone. Provided, of course, that he has some tincture of intellectual tastes. Those whose curiosity is only awakened by a prospect of the "sporting tips" will not care for Boswell. For, though the book moves throughout in the big world, and not in an academic groove, it still always moves intellectually. It asks a certain acquaintance with literature and history and the life of the human mind. The talk may, indeed, be almost said to deal with all subjects; but it tends mainly to be of the kind which will come uppermost when able men of a serious and bookish turn congregate together. It requires leisure, and that sense of the value of talk which has grown rarer in the hurry of a generation in which the idlest people affect to be busy, and those who do nothing at all are in a bustle from morning till night. Johnson was never in a hurry, especially in the later days, when he had done his work and was enjoying his fame. Mrs. Thrale says that conversation was all he {47} required to make him happy. He hated people who broke it up to go to bed or to keep an appointment. Much as he delighted in John Wesley's company, he complained that he was never at leisure, which, said Johnson, "is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk as I do." The world has perhaps grown a more industrious place since those days, though nobody yet has managed to put so much into twenty-four hours as Wesley did. Anyhow the conditions that made for such talk as fills Boswell's pages are no doubt less common to-day: and perhaps it only lingers now in some rare Common Room at Oxford or Cambridge, where the evil spirit of classes and examinations has been strictly exorcised, or in an exceptionally well-chosen party at an exceptional country house, or in the old dining societies of London, such as Johnson's own, "The Club," of famous memory. Its modern rarity may, however, only make it the more precious in a book, and it is certainly not the least important element in the popularity of Boswell's work.

That work has always been praised from the day of its appearance. Lord Thurlow, then Chancellor, wrote to Boswell of the Tour to the Hebrides, which is essentially, though not formally, its first instalment, that {48} he had read every word of it, because he could not help it: and added the flattering question, "Could you give a rule how to write a book that a man must read?" Scott, a little later, spoke of it as "without exception the best parlour window book that ever was written." Six editions were issued within twenty years of its appearance, a strong proof of popularity in the case of a voluminous and expensive book. And the praise and popularity have gone on growing ever since. But the strange thing is that the man who wrote it has commonly been treated with insult, and even with contempt. The fact is at first sight so inexplicable that it is worth a little looking into. A man who has done us all such a service as Boswell, who has by the admission even of Macaulay utterly out-distanced all competition in such an important kind of literature as biography, would naturally have been loaded with the gratitude and admiration of posterity. Yet all fools and some wise men have thought themselves entitled to throw a scornful stone at Boswell.

The truth is that Boswell was a man of very obvious weaknesses, the weaknesses to which every fool feels himself superior, and of some grave vices of a sort to which wise men feel little temptation. And, unfortunately, he conquered neither. Rather they conquered {49} him, and made his last years a degradation, and his memory one which his friends were glad to forget. After the death of Johnson in 1784, followed in 1789 by that of Mrs. Boswell, whom Johnson once justly and generously described as the prop and stay of her husband's life, he had no one left to lean on. And he was not a man strong enough to stand alone. But it is time to insist that, when all this has been confessed, we are very far from having told the whole truth about Boswell. The fact is that justice will never be fully done to his memory till Macaulay and some others have been called up from their graves to do penance for their arrogant unfairness. Carlyle did something, but not enough; and he stands almost alone. Yet after all, considering what we owe Boswell, if there be any blindness in our view of him, it surely ought to be blindness to his faults. We have heard enough and to spare of his vanity, his self-importance, his entire lack of dignity, his weakness for wine and worse things than wine. But we have heard very little, far too little, of the kindness and genuineness of the man's whole nature, the warmth of his friendships and the enthusiastic loyalty of his hero-worship, of the reverence for religion and the earnest desire after being a better man, which, though often defeated {50} by temptation, were profound and absolutely sincere.

The notion that a man who does not practise what he preaches is necessarily insincere, always called forth an angry protest from Johnson. "Sir," he broke out at Inverary to Mr. M'Aulay, the historian's grandfather, "are you so grossly ignorant of human nature, as not to know that a man may be very sincere in good principles without having good practice?" No doubt this was a doctrine which Boswell heard gladly: and Johnson may himself have been influenced in his zeal for it by his consciousness that, as he said when enforcing it on another occasion, he had himself preached better than he had practised. "I have, all my life long, been lying till noon: yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good." But, however that may be, he is plainly right in the broad issue. Practice is the only absolute proof of sincerity: but defect in practice is no proof of insincerity. Certainly, no Christian can doubt that the struggling, even though falling, sinner is in at least as hopeful a condition as the complacent person whose principles and practice are fairly conformable to each other because both live only the dormant life of respectability and {51} convention. However, no one in his senses will try to make a hero or a saint out of Boswell. He was, as has been already said, vain, a babbler, a wine-bibber, a man of frequently irregular and ill-governed life. But to judge a man fairly as a whole, you must set his achievements against his failures, and include his aspirations as well as the weakness which prevented their being realized. He may also reasonably ask to be tried by the standard of his contemporaries. If this larger and juster method of judgment be adopted, the unfairness with which Boswell has been treated becomes immediately obvious. After all vanity is more a folly than a crime, and pays its own immediate penalty as no other crime or folly does. The other faults of Boswell, especially drinking, were only too common in a century at the beginning of which Johnson remembered "all the decent people at Lichfield getting drunk every night," and at the end of which the most honoured and feared of English Prime Ministers could appear intoxicated in the House of Commons itself. Drunkenness has not deprived Pitt of the gratitude of England, and we may well be determined that, if we can help it, it shall not deprive Boswell. It is not his vices but his virtues that are notable and unusual. What was extraordinary in his or any other day was {52} the generous enthusiasm which made a young Scotch laird deliberately determine that he would do something more with his life than shoot wildfowl or play cards, made him throw himself first with a curious mixture of vanity and genuine devotion to a noble cause into the Corsican struggle for liberty, and then, vain of his birth and fortune as he was, place himself at the feet, not of a duke or a minister, but of a man of low origin, rough exterior, and rougher manners, in whom he simply saw the best and wisest man he had known. That is not the action of either a bad man or a fool; and assuredly Boswell—in the essence of him—was neither the one nor the other.

The truth is that he had the strength and the weaknesses of a man of mobile and lively imagination. He would fancy his wife and children drowned or dead for no better reason than that he was not by them; he would dream of being a judge when he had scarcely got a brief, and imagine himself a minister when he had no prospect of getting into Parliament. Other people experience these day-dreaming vanities, but they do not talk or write about them. Boswell did; and we all laugh at him, especially the fools among us: the wiser part add some of the love that belongs to the common kinship of humanity wherever it puts off the mask, the love of which we feel {53} something even for that gross old "bourgeois" Samuel Pepys, just because he laid out his whole secret self in black and white upon the paper. Moreover, Boswell's absurdities had their finer side. The dreamer of improbable disasters and impossible good fortunes is also the dreamer of high and perhaps unattainable ideals. Shall we count it nothing to his honour that, instead of sitting down contentedly among the boon companions of Ayrshire, he aspired to read the best books in the world, to know the wisest men, and in turn to do something himself that should not be forgotten? And note that those aspirations were in large part realized. His intellectual tastes always remained among the keenest of his pleasures: he numbered among his friends the most famous writer of his day, the greatest poet, the greatest painter, the profoundest and most eloquent of all English statesmen; and before he died his apparent failure in personal achievements was transformed into the success that means immortality by the production of a book which after the lapse of a century has many more readers than the works of his great friends whose superiority to himself he would never have dreamed of challenging.

And what did these great men think of him? Did the people who knew him think him altogether a fool? If the magistrates {54} of his native county had thought him merely that they would hardly have chosen him their chairman. Nor would the Royal Academy who filled their honorary offices with such men as Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gibbon, have given them Boswell as a colleague if they had thought him altogether a fool. Reynolds, again, who was his friend through life, and left him 200 pounds in his will to be expended on a picture to be kept for his sake, was not a man who took fools for his friends. Burke, who at first doubted his fitness for election at "The Club," became a great admirer of his wonderful good humour, and received him on his own account and without Johnson as a guest at Beaconsfield, where neither fools nor knaves were commonly welcomed. The whole story of the tour to the Hebrides shows the regard felt for him, as himself and not only as the son of his father or the companion of Johnson, by many of the most distinguished and cultivated men in Scotland. Johnson, the most veracious of men, says of him in Scotland: "There is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect"; and on another occasion he declared that Boswell "never left a house without leaving a wish for his return."

But the most complete refutation of the worthlessness of Boswell is of course the {55} friendship and love he won from Johnson himself. Assuredly, the standard of Johnson, in whose presence nobody dared to swear or talk loosely, was not a low one either morally or intellectually; yet we find him saying that he held Boswell "in his heart of hearts"; perhaps, indeed, he loved Boswell better than any of his friends. "My dear Boswell, I love you very much"; "My dear Boswell, your kindness is one of the pleasures of my life"; "Come to me, my dear Bozzy, and let us be as happy as we can." This is the way Johnson constantly wrote and spoke to him. And this was not merely because Boswell was "the best travelling companion in the world," or even because he was, what Johnson also called him, "a man who finds himself welcome wherever he goes and makes new friends faster than he can want them," but also for graver reasons. Johnson said once that most friendships were the result of caprice or chance, "mere confederacies in vice or leagues in folly," but he did not choose that his own should be of that sort. Beauclerk is the only one of his friends who was not a man of high character. His feeling for Boswell was not a love of vice or folly. He saw Boswell at his best, no doubt: but that best must have had very real and positive good qualities in it to win from Johnson such a remark as he {56} makes in one of his letters: "Never, my dear sir, do you take it into your head to think that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both of my love and my esteem; I love you as a kind man, I value you as a worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary piety. I hold you, as Hamlet has it, 'in my heart of hearts.'" And there is a still more remarkable tribute in the letter to John Wesley giving Boswell an introduction to him "because I think it very much to be wished that worthy and religious men should be acquainted with each other." Nothing can be more certain than that Johnson would not have written so often in such language as this of a man who was what Macaulay thought Boswell was. Well may the foolish editor of Boswell's letters to Temple, who takes Macaulay's view, talk of the difficulty of explaining how it came about that Boswell formed one of a society which included such men as Johnson and Burke. The truth is that on his theory and Macaulay's it is not explicable at all.

Less explicable still, on that view, is the admitted excellence of Boswell's book. Carlyle dismissed with just contempt the absurd paradox that the greatness of the book was due to the imbecility of the author. That is a theory which it would be waste of time {57} to discuss. But it may be worth while to point out that other and more rational explanations of Boswell's success are also insufficient. His book is acknowledged to have originated a new type of biography. It was felt at once, and has been increasingly felt ever since, that Boswell is so direct and personal that beside him all other biographers seem impersonal and vague, that he is so intimate that he makes all others appear cold and distant, so lifelike that they seem shadowy, so true that they seem false. Now this has commonly been attributed to his habit of noting down on the spot and at the moment anything that struck him in Johnson's talk or doings; and to his perfect willingness to exhibit his own discomfitures so long as they served to honour or illustrate his hero. In this way people have talked of his one merit being faithfulness, and of his work as a succession of photographs. Now it is true enough that his veracity is a very great merit, and that no one was ever so literally veracious as he. But no number of facts, and no quintessence of accuracy in using them, will ever make a great book. Literature is an art, and nothing great in art has ever been done with facts alone. The greatness comes from the quality of mind that is set to work upon the facts. Consequently {58} the secret of the success of the Life of Johnson is to be found in the exact opposite of the assertion of Macaulay. For the truth is that the acknowledged excellence of the book is in exact proportion to the unacknowledged literary gifts of its author.

The law for all works of art and literature is the same. The fact is nothing unless the artist can give it life. Life comes from human personality. Ars est homo additus naturae. Art, that is, is nature seen through a temperament, the facts seen by a particular mind. The landscape into which the painter has put nothing of his own personality is fitter for a surveyor's office than for a picture gallery. The portrait which gives nothing but the sitter's face is as dull as a photograph. Two portraits of the same man, two sketches of the same valley, not only are, but ought to be, quite different from each other. Nature, the facts of the particular face or scene, remain the same for both: but the two different artists, each bringing their own personality, produce different results, when the face or scene has become that composite mixture of man and nature, fact and mind, which is art. And this is as true of all books which are meant to be literature as of painting or sculpture. The story of Electra is, broadly speaking, the same for Aeschylus, Sophocles, {59} and Euripides: but each contributes to it himself, and the result differs. Virgil's tale of Troy is not Homer's: Chaucer gives us one Troilus and Cressida, and Shakespeare another: the fable of the Fox and the Goat takes prose from Phaedrus and poetry from La Fontaine. So Pope's Homer is not Homer, the thing in itself, the unrelated, absolute Homer, but Pope additus Homero; and it is not Euripides pure and simple which is the true account of certain beautiful modern versions of Euripides, but Euripidi additus Murray.

It may be objected that these are all instances from poetry, where the truth aimed at is rather general than particular. And this distinction is a real one. The truth of the Aeneid is its truth to human life as a whole, not its accuracy in reporting the words used on particular occasions by Dido and Turnus, neither of whom may have ever existed. History and biography are, undoubtedly, on a different footing in this respect, just as the artist who calls his picture "Arundel Castle" or "Windermere" is not in the same position of freedom as the painter of an "Evening on the Downs." But the law of homo additus naturae still remains true in this case as in the other, though its application is modified. It is true that a {60} man who pretends to give a representation of Arundel is not justified in adding to it a tower 800 feet high just because he happens himself to have a fancy for towers. But what he has to add, if his work is to be art at all, is the emotional mood, the exaltation, depression, excitement, or whatever it may be, which Arundel stirred in him, and by means of which he and the scene before him were melted into that unity of intensified life which is born of the marriage of nature and man and is what we call art. The next day another man takes his place, and the result, though still Arundel Castle, is an entirely different picture. So in the case of books. The same Socrates is seen in one way when we get that part of him which could unite with the personality of Xenophon, and in quite another when the union is with Plato. The English Civil War marries one side of itself to Clarendon, and another to Milton; and both have that relative truth which is all art wishes for, and which is indeed a greater thing, as having human life in it, than any absolute truth in itself which, if it were discoverable, would be pure science, as useful perhaps, but as dead, as the First Proposition of Euclid. The greatness of literature depends on the degree in which the dead matter of fact belonging to the {61} subject has been quickened into life by the emotional, intellectual and imaginative power of the writer. And this is true of historical and biographical work as well as of poetry.

That is the point to be remembered about Boswell, and to be set against his detractors. His book is admittedly one of the most living books in existence. That life can have come from no one but the author. It is the irrefutable proof of his genius. Life and power do not issue, here any more than elsewhere, out of folly and nonentity. The Life of Johnson is the result of the most intimate and fertile union between biographer and his subject which has ever occurred, and it gives us in consequence more of the essence of both than any other biography. Boswell brought to it his own bustling activity and curiosity from which it draws its vividness and variety: he brought to it also his warm-hearted, half-morbid emotionalism from which it derives its many moving pages: he brought to it his reverence for Johnson, which enabled him to exhibit, as no other man could, that kingship and priesthood which was a real part, though not the whole, of Johnson's relation to his circle. We see Johnson in his pages as the guide, philosopher and friend of all who came in his way, the intellectual and spiritual father of Boswell, the master of his {62} studies, the director of his conscience. Nobody else in that company saw as much of the true and great Johnson as Boswell's loving devotion enabled him to see; and when he came to write the life he put himself into it, with the result that the portrait of Johnson as posterity sees it, will never lose the halo of glory with which the Boswellian hero-worship crowned it for all time.

This was the all-important homo additus naturae part of Boswell's work: the setting his subject in the light of his own imaginative and emotional insight. But there was more than that. Boswell had not only the temperament of the artist: he had an artist's craftsmanship. The Life makes four large octavo volumes, each of some 500 pages, in the great Oxford Edition by Birkbeck Hill: and the Tour to the Hebrides makes a fifth. That is a big book: yet so perfect an artist is Boswell, that scarcely once for a single page in all the five volumes is the chief light turned in any direction except that of Johnson. Anybody who has even read, much more anybody who has written, a book of any length knows how difficult and rare an achievement it is to maintain perfect unity of subject, never to lose the sense of proportion, never to let side issues and secondary personages obstruct or conceal the main business in hand. {63} There is nothing of the kind in Boswell. Under his hand no episode is ever allowed to be more than an episode, no minor character ever occupies the centre of the stage. Whoever and whatever is mentioned is mentioned only in relation to Johnson. Many great men, greater some of them than his hero are brought into his picture, but it is never upon them that the chief light is thrown. All the other figures, whoever they are, are here but attendants upon Johnson's greatness, foils to his wit, witnesses to his virtues, his friends or his foes, the subjects or victims of his talk, anything that you will in connection with him, but apart from him—nothing. All that they say or do or suffer, is told us only to set Johnson in a clearer light. The unity of the picture is never broken. And that is the same thing as saying that Boswell is not merely what every one has seen, a unique collector of material: he is also what so few have seen, an artist of the very highest rank.

This is seen, too, in another important point. The danger of the hero-worshipping biographer is only too familiar to us. His book is usually a monotonous and insipid record of virtue or wisdom. The hero is always right, and always victorious, with the result that the book is at once tedious and incredible. But Boswell knew better than {64} that. He was too much of an artist not to know that he wanted shadows to give value to his lights, and too much a lover of the fullness and variety of life not to want to get all of it that he possibly could into his picture. Like all great writers, there was scarcely anything he was afraid of handling, because there was scarcely anything of which he was not conscious that he could bend it to his will and force it to take its place, and no more than its place, in his scheme. Consequently, he has the courage to show us his hero, now wrong-headed and perverse, now rude almost to brutality, now so weak that the same resolution is repeated year after year only to be again broken and again renewed, now so gross and almost repulsive in his appearance and habits that it requires all his greatness to explain the welcome which well-bred men and refined women everywhere gave him. Nothing better shows the greatness of Boswell. He was not afraid to paint the wart on his Cromwell's nose, because he knew that he could so give the nobleness of the whole face, that the wart would merely add to the truthfulness of the portrait without detracting from its nobleness. The vast quantity of material which he brought into his book and the complete mastery which he maintained over it, is shown by the fact {65} that few or no biographies record so many ridiculous or discreditable circumstances about their hero, and yet none leaves a more convincing impression of his greatness.

The notion, then, that the man who wrote the Life of Johnson was a fool, is an absurdity. If the arguments in its favour prove anybody a fool it is not Boswell. Nor is it even true that Boswell, like some great artists, escaped apparently by some divine gift from his natural folly just during the time necessary for the production of his great work, but at all other times relapsed at once into imbecility. We know how scrupulously accurate he was in what he wrote, not only from his candour in relating his own defeats, but from the many cases in which he confesses that he was not quite sure of the exact facts, such as, to give one instance, whether Johnson, on a certain occasion, spoke of "a page" or "ten lines" of Pope as not containing so much sense as one line of Cowley. Therefore we may take the picture he gives of himself in his book as a fair one. And what is it? Does it bear out the notorious assertion that "there is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion or society which is not either commonplace or absurd"? One would sometimes imagine Macaulay had never read the book of which he speaks with such {66} confident decision. Certainly, except as a biographer, Boswell was not a man of any very remarkable abilities. But, in answer to such an insult as Macaulay's, Boswell's defenders may safely appeal to the book itself, and to everybody who has read it with any care. Will any one deny that not once or twice, but again and again, the plain sense of some subject which had been distorted or confused by the perverse ingenuity of Johnson "talking for victory" comes quietly, after the smoke has cleared away, from the despised imbecility of Boswell? Who gives the judgment which every one would now give about the contest with the American colonies? Not Johnson but Boswell; not the author of Taxation No Tyranny, but the man who wrote so early as 1775 to his friend Temple: "I am growing more and more an American. I see the unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their Assemblies; I think our Ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate war." Who was right and who was wrong on the question of the Middlesex Election? Nobody now doubts that Boswell was right, and Johnson was wrong. Which has proved wiser, as we look back, Johnson who ridiculed Gray's poetry, or Boswell who sat up all night reading it? The fact is that Boswell was undoubtedly a {67} sensible and cultivated as well as a very agreeable man, and as such was warmly welcomed at the houses of the most intelligent men of his day.

The old estimate, then, of James Boswell must be definitely abandoned. The man who knew him best, his friend Temple, the friend of Gray, said of him that he was "the most thinking man he had ever known." We may not feel able to regard that as anything more than the judgment of friendship: but it is not fools who win such judgments even from their friends. We may wonder at the word "genius" being applied to him; and if genius be taken in the stricter modern sense of transcendent powers of mind, the sense in which it is applied to Milton or Michael Angelo, there is of course no doubt that it would be absurd to apply it to Boswell. But if the word be used in the old looser sense, or if it be given the definite meaning of a man who originates an important new departure in a serious sphere of human action, who creates something of a new order in art or literature or politics or war, then Boswell's claim to genius cannot be questioned. Just as another member of "Johnson's Club" was in those years writing history as it had never been written before, so, and to a far more remarkable degree, Boswell was writing {68} biography as it had never been written before. Gibbon's Decline and Fall was in fact a far less original performance, far less of a new departure, than Boswell's Life of Johnson. Boswell's book is in truth what he himself called it, "more of a life than any work that has ever yet appeared." After it the art of biography could never be merely what it had been before. And in that sense, the sense of a man whose work is an advance upon that of his predecessors, not merely in degree, but in kind, Boswell was undoubtedly and even more than Gibbon, entitled to the praise of genius.

Let us all, then, unashamedly and ungrudgingly give the rein to our admiration and love of Boswell. There is a hundred years between us and his follies, and every one of the hundred is full of his claim upon our gratitude. Let us now be ready to pay the debt in full. Let us be sure that there is something more than mere interest or entertainment in a book which so wise a man as Jowett confessed to having read fifty times, of which another lifelong thinker about life, a man very different from Jowett, Robert Louis Stevenson, could write: "I am taking a little Boswell daily by way of a Bible; I mean to read him now until the day I die." And not only in the book but in the author too. Let us be {69} sure with Carlyle that if "Boswell wrote a good book" it was not because he was a fool, but on the contrary "because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth: because of his free insight, of his lively talent, above all of his love and childlike open-mindedness." In the particular business he had to carry through, these qualities were an equipment amounting to a modest kind of genius. They enabled him to produce a book which has given as much pleasure perhaps to intelligent men as any book that ever was written. Let us be careful whenever we think of Boswell to remember this side, the positive, creative, permanent side of him: and not so careful as our grandfathers generally were, to remember the other side which ceased to have any further importance on that night in May 1795 when he ended the fifty-five years of a life in which he had found time for more follies than most men, for more vices perhaps, certainly for more wisdom, but also for what most men never so much as conceive, the preparation and production of a masterpiece.

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CHAPTER III

THE LIVES OF BOSWELL AND JOHNSON

These two men, then, are for ever inseparable. They go down the centuries together, Johnson owing most of his immortality to the genius of Boswell, Boswell owing to Johnson that inspiring opportunity without which genius cannot discover that it is genius. There were other men in Johnson's circle, whom he knew longer and respected more; but for us, Boswell's position in relation to Johnson is unique. Beside him the others, even Burke and Reynolds, are, in this connection, shadows. They had their independent fields of greatness in which Johnson had no share: Boswell's greatness is all Johnsonian. We cannot think of him apart from Johnson: and he has so managed that we can scarcely think of Johnson apart from him. No one who occupies himself with the one can ignore the other: in interest and popularity they stand or fall together. It may be well, therefore, before going further, to give the bare facts of both their lives; dismissing Boswell first, as the less important, and then devoting the rest of the chapter to Johnson.

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James Boswell was born in 1740. He came of an ancient family, a fact he never forgot, as, indeed, few people do who have the same advantage. His father was a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Auchinleck. The first of the family to hold the estate of Auchinleck, which is in Ayrshire, was Thomas Boswell, who received a grant of it from James IV in whose army he went to Flodden and shared the defeat and death of his patron. The estate had therefore belonged to the Boswells over two hundred years when the future biographer of Johnson was born. His father and he were never congenial spirits. The judge was a Whig with a practical view of life and had no sympathy with his son's romantic propensities either in religion, politics or literature. A plain Lowland Scot, he did not see why his son should take up with Toryism, Anglicanism, or literary hero-worship. When James, after first attaching himself to Paoli, the leader of the Corsican struggle for independence, returned home and took up the discipleship to Johnson which was to be the central fact in the rest of his life, his father frankly despaired of him, and broke out, according to Walter Scott: "There's nae hope for Jamie, mon. Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, mon? He's done wi' Paoli—he's off wi' the {72} landlouping scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon? A dominie, mon—an auld dominie: he keeped a schule, and cau'd it an acaadamy." Well might Boswell say that they were "so totally different that a good understanding is scarcely possible." Beside disliking Paoli and Johnson, Lord Auchinleck cared nothing for some of Boswell's strict feudal notions, had the bad taste to give his son a step-mother, and to be as unlike him as possible in the matter of good spirits. Scarcely anything could interfere with the judge's cheerfulness, while Boswell was always falling into depressions about nothing in particular and perhaps indulging in the "foolish notion," rebuked by Johnson, that "melancholy is a proof of acuteness." But in spite of their differences the father and son managed to avoid anything like a definite breach. Boswell was sincerely anxious to please his father, and was constantly urged in that direction by his great mentor: and after all the judge went some way to meet his singular son, for he paid his debts and entertained both Paoli and Johnson at Auchinleck. The latter visit was naturally a source of some anxiety to Boswell and it did not go off without a storm when the old Whig and the old Tory unluckily got on to the topic of Charles I and Cromwell: but all {73} ended well, and Boswell characteristically ends his story of it, written after both were dead, with the pious hope that the antagonists had by then met in a higher state of existence "where there is no room for Whiggism."

Full of activities as Boswell's life was, the definite facts and dates in it are not very numerous. He was sent to Glasgow University, and wished to be a soldier, but was bred by his father to the law. No doubt he gave some early signs of intellectual promise, for which it was not thought the army provided a fit sphere, for the Duke of Argyle is reported to have said to his father when he was only twenty: "My lord, I like your son: this boy must not be shot at for three-and-sixpence a day." He paid his first visit to London in 1760; and, having heard a good deal about Johnson from one Mr. Gentleman, and from Derrick, a very minor poet, he at once sought an introduction, but had to leave London without succeeding in his object. He was equally unsuccessful when he was in London the next year, during which he published some anonymous poems which would not have helped him to secure the desired introduction. The great event occurred at last in 1763. The day was the 16th of May and the scene the house of Davies, the bookseller. "At last," says Boswell, "on {74} Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,—he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, 'Look, my Lord, it comes.'"

So, with characteristic accuracy and characteristic imagination, begins his well-known account of his first meeting with his hero, and the storms to which he was exposed in its course. But all ended satisfactorily, for when the great man was gone, Davies reassured the nervous Boswell by saying: "Don't be uneasy, I can see he likes you very well." A few days afterwards Boswell called on Johnson at his Chambers in the Temple, and the great friendship which was the pleasure and business of his life was definitely begun. Yet it is worth remembering, if only as an additional proof of Boswell's biographical genius, that, according to the calculation of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, when all the weeks and months during which Johnson and Boswell were living within reach of each {75} other are added together, they amount to little more than two years. And of course this includes all the days on which they were both in London, on many, or rather most, of which they did not meet.

A few months after the first meeting, Boswell went by his father's wish to Utrecht to study law. But before that the friendship was got on to a firm footing, and Boswell had had the pride and pleasure of hearing Johnson say, "There are few people whom I take so much to, as you." A still stronger proof of Johnson's feeling was that he insisted on going with Boswell to Harwich to see him out of England. This was the occasion on which he scarified the good Protestants who were with them in the coach by defending the Inquisition, and invited one of the ladies who said she never allowed her children to be idle to take his own education in hand; "'for I have been an idle fellow all my life.' 'I am sure, sir,' said she, 'you have not been idle.' 'Nay, madam, it is very true, and that gentleman there,' pointing to me, 'has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow where he continued to be idle. He then came to London where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht where he will be as idle as ever.' I asked him privately how he could expose me {76} so. 'Pooh, Pooh!' said he, 'they know nothing about you and will think of it no more.'" When he was not engaged in these alarums and excursions or in reproving Boswell for giving the coachman a shilling instead of the customary sixpence, he was occupied in reading Pomponius Mela De Situ Orbis. How complete the picture is and how vivid! It once more gives Boswell's method in miniature.

He seems to have stayed at Utrecht about a year, afterwards travelling in Germany, where he visited Wittenberg, and sat down to write to Johnson in the church where the Reformation was first preached, with his paper resting on the tomb of Melanchthon. It is noticeable that, though he had only known Johnson a year, he already hoped to be his biographer. "At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend, I vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy: and, if you die before me, I shall endeavour to do honour to your memory." He was also at this time in Italy and Switzerland, where he visited Voltaire and gratified him by quoting a remark of Johnson's that Frederick the Great's writings were the sort of stuff one might expect from "a footboy who had been Voltaire's amanuensis." Nor did this {77} collector of celebrities omit to visit Rousseau, the rival lion of the day, between whom and Voltaire the orthodox Johnson thought it was "difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity." But as far as Boswell's records go, he never said such violent things of Voltaire as of Rousseau, whom he called "a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society and transported to work in the plantations." Boswell, however, was an admirer of the Vicaire Savoyard, and said what he could in defence of his host, in return for the hospitality he had enjoyed at Neuchatel, with the usual result, of course, that Johnson only became more outrageous.

In 1765 Boswell made the acquaintance of another distinguished man with whom his name will always be connected. Corsica had at that time been long, and on the whole victoriously, engaged in a struggle to free itself from the hated rule of Genoa. The leader of the Corsicans was a man of high birth, character and abilities, Pascal Paoli, who had acted since 1753 at once as their General and as the head of the civil administration. Both the generous and the curious element in Boswell made him anxious not to return from Italy without seeing something of so interesting a people and so great a hero. Armed with introductions from Rousseau {78} and others and with such protection as a British Captain's letter could give him against Barbary Corsairs, he sailed from Leghorn to Corsica in September 1765. His account of the island and of his tour there, published in 1768, is still very good reading. He soon made his way to the palace where Paoli was residing, with whom he at first felt himself in a presence more awe-inspiring than that of princes, but ventured after a while upon a compliment to the Corsicans. "Sir, I am upon my travels, and have lately visited Rome. I am come from seeing the ruins of one brave and free people: I now see the rise of another." The good sense of Paoli declined any parallel between Rome and his own little people, but he soon received Boswell into his intimacy and spent some hours alone with him almost every day. One fine answer of his, uniting the scholar and the patriot, is worth quoting. Boswell asked him how he, who confessed to his love of society and particularly of the society of learned and cultivated men, could be content to pass his life in an island where no such advantages were to be had; to which Paoli replied at once—

"Vincit amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido."

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Well might Boswell wish to have a statue of him taken at that moment. Even Virgilian quotation has seldom been put to nobler use. Like all the great men of the eighteenth century, Paoli was an enthusiast for the ancients. "A young man who would form his mind to glory," he told Boswell, "must not read modern memoirs; ma Plutarcho, ma Tito Livio." His own mind was formed not only to glory, but also to what so often fails to go with glory, to justice and moderation. Nothing is more remarkable in the conversations with him recorded by Boswell than his good sense and fairness of mind in speaking of the Genoese. Even in the excitement of Corsica, Boswell did not forget Johnson. He says that he quoted specimens of Johnson's wisdom to Paoli, who "translated them to the Corsican heroes with Italian energy"; and, as he had written to his master "from the tomb of Melanchthon sacred to learning and piety," so he also wrote to him "from the palace of Pascal Paoli sacred to wisdom and liberty." Boswell was received with great honour in Corsica, no doubt partly because he was very naturally supposed to have some mission from the British Government. He left the island in December and arrived in London in February 1766, when his intimacy with Johnson was at once resumed, in spite {80} of the visits to Rousseau and Voltaire which drew some inevitable sarcasms from the great man. He soon, however, returned to Scotland, where he was admitted an Advocate in the summer of 1766.

Johnson thought he was too busy about Corsica, and wrote to him: "Empty your head of Corsica, which I think has filled it rather too long." But this was in March 1768, when Boswell's Account of Corsica had already been published. It sold very well, a second and a third edition appearing within the year. Gray and other good judges spoke warmly of it and it seems that a French translation as well as two Dutch ones were made. It caused so much stir and aroused so much sympathy in England that Lord Holland was quite afraid we were going to be "so foolish as to go to war because Mr. Boswell has been in Corsica." After this it was less likely than ever that Boswell would forget that island. Motives of vanity combined with his genuine enthusiasm to keep him full of it, and he replied to Johnson's monition: "Empty my head of Corsica! empty it of honour, empty it of humanity, empty it of friendship, empty it of piety! No! while I live, Corsica and the cause of the brave islanders shall ever employ much of my attention and interest me in the sincerest {81} manner." It seems from his letters to Temple that he found these outbursts a great deal easier than living in a manner worthy of a friend of Paoli. But he did more than talk. He wrote to Chatham to try to interest him in Corsica, and received a reply three pages long applauding his generous warmth; he brought out a volume of British Essays in Favour of the Brave Corsicans, sent Paoli Johnson's Works and, what was more substantial, forwarded a quantity of ordnance, to buy which he had managed to raise a subscription of 700 pounds. His desire to be a well-known man now began to receive some gratification and he frankly confesses his pleasure at having such men as Johnson, Hume and Franklin dining with him at his chambers. Nor will any reasonable man blame him. His snobbishness, if it is to be so called, was always primarily a snobbishness of mind and character, not of wealth or rank.

Nothing else of importance occurred to him in these years. He was much occupied with the great law-suit about the succession to the Douglas property, on which he wrote two pamphlets and was so sure of the justice of his view that he once dared to tell Johnson he knew nothing about that subject. He was with Johnson at Oxford in 1768 and they were already talking of going to the Hebrides {82} together. The next year, 1769, saw the conquest of Corsica by the French to whom the Genoese had ceded their claims. The result was that Paoli came to London, where he lived till 1789, and Boswell was constantly with him. In this year he did at least one very foolish thing, and at least one very wise one. He made himself ridiculous by going to the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford and appearing in Corsican costume with "Viva la LibertÀ" embroidered on his cap. He also took the most sensible step of his whole life in marrying his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, on November 25. She never liked Johnson, and her husband had the candour to report an excellent sally of hers at his and his sage's expense: "I have seen many a bear led by a man; but I never before saw a man led by a bear." But though, as Boswell says, she could not be expected to like his "irregular hours and uncouth habits," she never failed in courtesy to him: and he on his part was unwearied in sending friendly messages to his "dear enemy" as he called her, and was well aware of her importance to her husband. The event unhappily proved his prescience; for after her death in 1789, Boswell's downward course was visibly accelerated.

After Boswell's marriage there was no {83} communication between him and Johnson for a year and a half, and they did not meet again till March 1772, when Boswell came to London, and stayed some time. The next year he came again, and, by Johnson's active support, was elected a member of "The Club," a small society of friends founded by Reynolds and Johnson in 1764. At first it met weekly for supper, but after a few years the members began the custom of dining together on fixed dates which has continued to the present day. Among the members when Boswell was elected were Johnson and Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and Garrick. Gibbon and Charles Fox came in the next year, and Adam Smith in 1775. In 1780 the number of members was enlarged to forty which is still the limit. "The Club" has always maintained its distinction, and a recent article in the Edinburgh Review records that fifteen Prime Ministers have been members of it, as well as men like Scott, Tennyson, Hallam, Macaulay and Grote. The first advantage over and above pride and pleasure derived by Boswell from his election was the acquaintance of Burke, which he had long desired and retained through life. Burke said of him that he had so much good humour naturally that it was scarcely a virtue in him.

In the autumn of that year, 1773, Johnson {84} and Boswell made their famous tour to the Hebrides. They, in fact, went over much more than the Hebrides, seeing the four Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Aberdeen and Glasgow, besides many less famous places. Johnson says they were everywhere "received like princes in their progress," and though no doubt hospitality was freer in those days when travellers were few and inns poor, yet the whole story is a remarkable proof of Johnson's fame and Boswell's popularity. The University Professors vied with each other in paying civilities to Johnson, the town of Aberdeen gave him its freedom, and among their hosts were magnates like the Duke of Argyll, Lord Errol and Lord Loudoun, who "jumped for joy" at their coming, and great men of law or learning like Lord Monboddo and Lord Elibank.

By this time all the important events in Boswell's life were over except the publication of his two great books, the Tour to the Hebrides and the Life of Johnson. During all the ten years which Johnson still had to live, except 1780 and 1782, the two friends managed to spend some time together, and when they did not, the friendship was maintained by correspondence. Boswell's father died in 1782, and Boswell came into possession of the estate, {85} worth 1,600 pounds a year. Johnson and Boswell took more than one "jaunt" in the country together, visiting Oxford, Lichfield and other places. They were at Oxford together in June 1784; but Johnson was then evidently failing. On their return to London, Boswell busied himself with the help of Reynolds in trying to get Johnson's pension increased, so that he might be able to spend the winter abroad. Johnson was very pleased on hearing of the attempt, saying, when Boswell told him, "'This is taking prodigious pains about a man.' 'O, sir,' said Boswell, 'your friends would do everything for you.' He paused, grew more and more agitated, till tears started into his eyes, and he exclaimed with fervent emotion, 'God bless you all.' I was so affected that I also shed tears. After a short silence he renewed and extended his grateful benediction, 'God bless you all, for Jesus Christ's sake.'" Those were the last words Boswell heard under Johnson's roof. The next day they both dined with Reynolds, and on July 2 Boswell left London, to see Johnson no more. Johnson died on the 13th of December 1784.

Fitful and unsuccessful legal and political ambitions occupied a large part of Boswell's later years. He made some approaches to standing as a candidate for Ayrshire in 1784, {86} and again in 1788, was called to the English Bar in 1786, attached himself to Lord Lonsdale, and hoped to enter Parliament for one of his boroughs, but seems to have got nothing out of his connection with that insolent old bully but a certain amount of humiliation and the Recordership of Carlisle. That unimportant office was the only substantial reward he received from all his long suit and service in the antechambers of law and politics. Whatever he achieved he owed to literature and the friends his love of literature had brought him. It was not the laird or the lawyer, but the friend and biographer of Johnson whom the Royal Academy appointed in 1791 to the complimentary office of their Secretary for Foreign Correspondence. And those last years, while they brought him disappointment in everything else, saw him take definite rank as a successful author. The Tour to the Hebrides was published in 1785, and sold out in a few weeks. The third edition was issued within a year of the appearance of the first. It was followed by the publication of Johnson's famous Letter to Lord Chesterfield and of an account of his Conversation with George III, and finally in 1791 by the Life itself. A second edition of this was called for in 1793. Boswell only lived two years more. He died on May 19, 1795. He left two sons, Alexander, {87} who became Sir Alexander, was the principal mover in the matter of the Burns Monument on the banks of Doon, and was killed in a duel in 1822; and James, who supplied notes for the third edition of his father's great book, and edited the third Variorum Shakespeare, known as Boswell's Malone, in 1821.

Such were the main outlines of the life of the biographer. We may now turn to those of the life which he owes his fame to recording. They are in most ways very unlike his own. Samuel Johnson was very far from being heir to a large estate and an ancient name. He was the son of a bookseller at Lichfield, and was born there on the 18th of September 1709, in a house which is now preserved in public hands in memory of the event of that day. His father's family was so obscure that he once said, "I can hardly tell who was my grandfather." His mother was Sarah Ford, who came of a good yeoman stock in Warwickshire. She was both a good and an intelligent woman. Samuel was the elder and only ultimately surviving issue of the marriage. A picturesque incident in his childhood is that his mother took him to London to be "touched" by Queen Anne for the scrofula, or "king's evil," as it was called, from which he suffered. He must have been one of the last persons to go through this curious {88} ceremony, which the Georges never performed, though the service for it remained in the Book of Common Prayer for some years after the accession of George I. The boy made an impression upon people from the first. He liked to recall in later life that the dame who first taught him to read brought him a present of gingerbread when he was starting for Oxford, and told him he was the best scholar she had ever had. Afterwards he went to Lichfield School, and at the age of fifteen to Stourbridge. At both he was evidently held in respect by boys and masters alike. Probably the curious combination in him of the invalid and the prize-fighter which was conspicuous all through his life, already arrested attention in his boyhood. He played none of the ordinary games, but yet, as we have already seen, was acknowledged as a leader by the boys, and his abilities were the pride of the school. He already exhibited the amazing memory which enabled him in later life to dictate to Boswell his famous letter to Chesterfield rather than search for a copy, and to confute a person who praised a bad translation from Martial by a contemptuous "Why, sir, the original is thus," followed by a recitation not only of the Latin original which it is not likely he had looked at for years, but also of the translation which he had only read {89} once. So on another occasion when Baretti, who had read a little Ariosto with him some years before, proposed to give him some more lessons, but feared he might have forgotten their previous readings, "Who forgets, sir?" said Johnson, and immediately repeated three or four stanzas of the Orlando. To the lover of literature there is no possession more precious than a good verbal memory, and this Johnson enjoyed to a very unusual degree all through his life. But it is worth noting that he was entirely free from the defect which commonly results from an exceptional memory. He always thought and spoke for himself, and was never prevented from using his own mind and his own words by the fact that his memory supplied him abundantly with those of others. His scholarly friend Langton annoyed him by depending upon books too much in his conversation, and one of his compliments to Boswell was, "You and I do not talk from books."

After he left Stourbridge he spent two years at home in desultory reading, "not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient writers, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod," the result of which was that when he went up to Oxford, the Master of his College said he was "the best qualified for the University that {90} he had ever known come there." His College was Pembroke, of which he became a Commoner (not a Servitor, as Carlyle said) in 1728. The Oxford of that day was not a place of much discipline and the official order of study was very laxly maintained. It seems not to have meant much to Johnson, and he is described as having spent a good deal of his time "lounging at the College gates with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit and keeping from their studies." Most good talkers find the first real sphere for their talent when they get to the University, and the best of all was not likely to be an exception, nor to resist that strongest of the intellectual temptations. But he did some solid reading, especially Greek, though he seemed to himself to be very idle, perhaps because his standard was so high that he used to say in later life, "I never knew a man who studied hard." So when he confesses the imperfections of his Greek scholarship, and other people exaggerate his confession, it is well to remember the reply made by Jacob Bryant when Gifford in an argument quoted Johnson's admission that "he was not a good Greek scholar," "Sir, it is not easy for us to say what such a man as Johnson would call a good Greek scholar." A man whose remedy for {91} sleeplessness was to turn Greek epigrams into Latin was at any rate not ignorant of Greek.

Johnson was prevented by his poverty from getting the full advantages either out of the life or the studies of Oxford. His want of shoes prevented his attending lectures, his pride forbad him to receive doles of help, the friend, said to be a Mr. Corbet of Shropshire, on whose promises of support he had relied in going to Oxford, failed him, his father's business went from little to less; with the inevitable result that he had to leave Oxford without a degree. This was in December 1729. But he had made an impression there, had a strong affection for his College, and liked going to stay there in the days of his glory. His usual host was one Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke, who had once been his tutor but told Boswell that the relation was only nominal; "he was above my mark." When he left Oxford he returned to his Lichfield home, where his father died two months later, leaving so little behind him that all that Johnson received of his estate was twenty pounds. He seems to have remained at Lichfield, where the poverty of his family did not prevent his mixing with the most cultivated society of a town rich in cultivated people, till 1732, when he became an usher in a school at Market Bosworth. He hated this monotonous drudgery {92} and left it after a few months, going to live with a Mr. Warren, a Birmingham bookseller of good repute, whom he helped by his knowledge of literature. While in Birmingham he did a translation of a Jesuit book about Abyssinia, for which Warren paid him five guineas. In 1734 he returned to Lichfield, tried without success to obtain subscribers for an edition of the poems of Politian, and offered to write in the Gentleman's Magazine. It is difficult to see how he supported himself at this period: perhaps he was helped by his mother or by his brother who carried on the bookselling business till his death a little later. Anyhow it was just at this time that he took a step for which poverty generally finds the courage more quickly than wealth. He married Elizabeth Porter at St. Werburgh's Church, Derby, in July 1735. Mrs. Porter was a widow twice his age and not of an attractive appearance; but there is no doubt that Johnson's love for her was sincere and lasting. To the end of his life he remembered her frequently in his prayers "if it were lawful," and kept the anniversary of her death with prayers and tears. Eighteen years after she died he could write in his private note-books that his grief for her was not abated and that he had less pleasure in any good that happened to him, because she could not share {93} it: and in 1782 when she had been dead thirty years, and he was drawing near his own end, he prays for her and after doing so, noted "perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me."

This was the inner truth of the relation between Johnson and his elderly wife, but it was natural and indeed inevitable that the world, the little world of their acquaintances, should have been chiefly alive to the humorous external aspect of the marriage, and one does not wonder that Beauclerk, whose married life was a scandal following on a divorce, should have enjoyed relating that Johnson had said to him, "Sir, it was a love marriage on both sides!" Johnson's own account of the actual wedding is singular enough. "Sir, she had read the old romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the slave of caprice; and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was fairly out of her sight. The road lay between two hedges, so I was sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should {94} soon come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in tears."

Mrs. Johnson was the widow of a Birmingham draper, and brought her husband several hundred pounds, part of which was at once spent in hiring and furnishing a large house at Edial near Lichfield where Johnson proposed to take pupils. But no pupils came except David Garrick and his brother, the sons of an old Lichfield friend, and the "academy" was abandoned after a year and a half. The lack of pupils, however, was perhaps a blessing in disguise, for it enabled Johnson to write most of his tragedy Irene, with which he went to London in March 1737. His pupil, David Garrick, went with him to study law, and when Garrick was a rich, famous and rather vain man, Johnson, who liked to curb the "insolence of wealth" once referred to 1737 as the year "when I came to London with twopence half-penny in my pocket; and thou, Davy, with three-halfpence in thine." Nothing came of this first visit to the capital. He lived as best he could, dining for eightpence, and seeing a few friends, one of whom was Henry Hervey, son of the Earl of Bristol, of whose kindness he always retained an affectionate memory, so that he once said to Boswell, "If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him." In the summer he returned to Lichfield, and finished his {95} tragedy, after which he brought his wife back with him to London which was his home for the rest of his life. Efforts to get Irene performed were unsuccessful, but he soon began to write regularly for the Gentleman's Magazine, of which he held so high an opinion that he looked "with reverence" on the house where it was printed. To this he contributed essays and was soon employed to write the Parliamentary Debates which, in the days before reporters, were made up with fictitious names from such scanty notes as could be got of the actual speeches. There is a story of his being, many years later, in a company who were praising a famous oration of Chatham, and were naturally a good deal startled by his quietly saying, "That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street." He continued to do this work till 1743 when he became aware that the speeches were taken as authentic and refused to be "accessory to the propagation of falsehood." But, while engaged in it, he had had no scruples about taking care "that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it."

A much more important matter than this hack-work was the publication of his London, a poem in imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. This appeared in May 1738. He got ten guineas for it, which he was in no position to despise; but he also got something {96} much more important, an established name in the world of letters. Every one talked of him, and Pope, who published his "1738" in the same year, was not only generous enough to inquire about him, and to say when told that the author of London was some obscure man, "He will soon be dÉterrÉ," but also to try to get him an Irish degree of M.A. This was in view of some attempts Johnson made to escape from dependence on journalism for his daily bread: but they were all unsuccessful, and till he received his pension his only source of income was what his various writings produced. In such circumstances he naturally wrote many things of quite ephemeral interest which call for no mention now. Perhaps the only prose work of permanent value he produced in these years was the life of his mysterious friend, Richard Savage. This curious volume appeared in 1744. The subject of it died in 1743. He and Johnson had been companions both in extreme poverty and in the intellectual pleasures which in such men poverty is unable to annihilate. Mrs. Johnson seems to have been out of London at this time, and the two struggling men of letters often passed nights together, walking and talking in the streets and squares without the price of a night's lodging between them. Johnson's account of {97} his friend did not fill his pocket, but must have contributed something to his fame as it was very favourably criticized. It was the occasion of Reynolds first becoming acquainted with his name. He was so interested by the book that, having taken it up while standing with his arm leaning upon a chimney-piece, he read the whole without sitting down and found his arm quite benumbed when he got to the end.

"Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." Johnson had now been seven years in London, but had not yet found the way to do anything worthy of his powers. If he had died then, only the curious and the learned would have known his name to-day. A single satire in verse would never, by itself, have had the force to push its way through the ever-increasing crowd of applicants that besiege the attention of posterity. But the next year, 1745, is the literary turning-point of his life. Before it was over he had begun to deal with two subjects with which much of his remaining life was occupied, and on which much of his fame depends. He had published a pamphlet upon Shakespeare's Macbeth which won the praise of Warburton, for which Johnson always felt and showed his gratitude ("He praised me at a time when praise was of value to me"); and, if Boswell is right, he had begun to occupy {98} himself with the idea of making an English Dictionary. Thus, poor and obscure as he was in those years, sick with deferred hope as he must have been, he had in fact laid the foundation-stones of the authority and fame he was soon to enjoy as the Editor of Shakespeare and above all as "Dictionary Johnson." Now at last he began to do work worthier of his powers. The "Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language" was published in 1747 and in the same year he wrote the admirable Prologue for the opening of Drury Lane Theatre, of which his pupil, David Garrick, more fortunate than the master with whom he had come to London, was now become manager.

Two years later Garrick produced the long-delayed tragedy of Irene. It is not a great drama, as Johnson well knew, at least in his later years. There is a story of his being told that a certain Mr. Pot called it "the finest tragedy of modern times," to which his only reply was, "If Pot says so, Pot lies." But this hardly has the genuine ring about it. Even Garrick's talent and friendship could not make Irene a success, but the performance brought Johnson a little welcome profit and enabled him to sell the book to Dodsley for a hundred pounds. In the same year, 1749, a more lasting evidence of his poetic powers was given {99} by the appearance of The Vanity of Human Wishes, another Juvenalian imitation, but freer and bolder than the first. From 1750 to 1752 he was writing The Rambler, a sort of newspaper essay which appeared every Tuesday and Friday. He wrote it almost entirely himself, and almost always at the last moment, when the printer was calling for it. No one will now wonder that it never had a large circulation as a periodical, for it usually exhibits him at his gravest, and many of the essays are scarcely distinguishable from sermons. But that age had grave tastes and few temptations to intellectual frivolity. We have seen that the idlest sort of reading Johnson could think of for a boy was "voyages and travels"; novels he does not mention, indeed there were then very few of them; plays he rather strangely ignores: newspapers, as we now know them and suffer by them, he of course could not so much as conceive. The Rambler had no sixpenny magazines of triviality, no sensational halfpenny papers, to compete with it, and it pursued an even course of modest success for its two years of life. The greatest pleasure it brought Johnson was the praise of his wife, who said to him, "I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this." That was just the discovery a good {100} many people beside his wife were making about Johnson in those years: with the result that when The Rambler appeared as a book, it sold well and had gone through twelve editions by the time Boswell wrote its author's life.

Three years after the cessation of The Rambler and, unhappily, also three years after the death of his wife, with whom it would have been his chief happiness to share his success, the great Dictionary appeared. It may safely be said that no single Englishman has ever accomplished a literary task of such vast extent. The mere labour, one might say the mere dull drudgery, of collecting and arranging the materials of such a work is enormous. Nor could any literary labour bring with it greater temptations. Johnson's success is not more due to his learning and powers of mind than to the good sense which never failed him and the strong will which he could generally exert when he chose. He pleased himself at first, as he tells us in his Preface, "with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature"; but that, of course, was where the danger lay. A man of an equally strong love of literature and a weaker will would have allowed himself to be swept away by the indulgence of curiosity, and the luxury of desultory reading; but Johnson soon saw {101} that these visions of intellectual pleasure were "the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer"; and that, if he was to do the thing he had undertaken to do, he must set stern limits, not only to the pleasures of study, but also to the delusive quest of unattainable perfection, which is the constant parent of futility. He realized, as so many men of letters have failed to realize, that "to deliberate whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end and perhaps without much improvement"; and instead of attempting the impossible and achieving nothing, he was wise enough and modest enough, by attempting only the attainable, to place himself in a position to achieve all that he attempted.

The praise he deserved was somewhat slow in coming, as is commonly the case with the greatest literary achievements. But though, as he sadly says in the last words of his great Preface, most of those whom he wished to please had sunk into the grave, and he had therefore little to hope or fear from praise or censure, yet he was always and before all things a human being, and only a creature above or below humanity could have been insensible to the pleasure of the new fame, the new authority and the new friends which his {102} Dictionary gradually brought him. Before many years had passed the "harmless drudge," as he himself had defined a lexicographer, had become the acknowledged law-giver and dictator of English letters; he had gathered round him a society of the finest minds of that generation, he had received a public pension which secured his independence, he had begun the long friendship which gave him a second home for more than fifteen years. These things did not all come at once—he did not know the Thrales till 1764 or 1765—but the true turning-point in his career is the publication of his Dictionary. He was still poor for some years after that, and still much occupied in the production of hack-work: but he was never again obscure and was soon to be famous. Within a year after the appearance of the Dictionary he had issued his Proposals for an Edition of Shakespeare, the second in time and perhaps in importance of his three great works. His new position secured him a good number of subscribers and he intended to publish it the next year, 1757; but the interruptions of indolence, business and pleasure, as he himself says of Pope, usually disappoint the sanguine expectations of authors, and the book did not in fact appear till 1765.

Neither Shakespeare nor idleness had {103} occupied the whole of the intervening years. From 1758 to 1760 he produced a weekly paper called The Idler, of the same character as The Rambler. In 1759 he wrote his once famous story Rasselas to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. It was written in the evenings of a single week. Good judges thought that, if he had known how to make a bargain, he ought to have received as much as four hundred pounds for this book, which was translated into most of the European languages; but he did not in fact receive more than a hundred pounds for the first and twenty-five for the second edition. By this time he could visit Oxford, from which University he had received the degree of M.A. when his Dictionary was on the eve of publication: and another sign of the position he was beginning to occupy is that we find Smollet writing of him in 1759 as the "great Cham of literature." More substantial evidences followed in 1762 when George III was advised by Bute to grant him a pension of 300 pounds a year, an income which must have seemed boundless affluence to a man who had never known a time when five pounds was not an important sum to him.

Next year came the event which was even more important to his fame than the receipt of the pension was to his comfort. In 1763 {104} he met Boswell for the first time. Fortune now began to smile upon him in good earnest and evidences of his established position and prosperity follow each other in rapid succession. "The Club" (its proper and still existing name, though Boswell occasionally calls it The Literary Club) was founded in 1764 and provided him for the rest of his life with an ideal theatre for the display of his amazing powers of talk, though it appears that he was not in his later years a very regular attendant. The next year, 1765, was probably the year in which he first met Thrale, the great brewer, and his clever and ambitious wife. No event contributed so much to the happiness of his after years. Thrale was a man of character and understanding, and was not without scholarly tastes. He at once saw the value of such a friend as Johnson, lived in the closest intimacy with him for the rest of his days, and named him executor in his will, which gave Johnson an opportunity such as he always liked, of mixing in business, and incidentally also, of saying the best thing that ever was said at the sale of a brewery. He appeared at the auction, according to the story told by Lord Lucan, "bustling about with an inkhorn and pen in his button-hole, like an excise-man; and, on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the {105} property, answered, 'We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.'" The brewery was sold for 135,000 pounds to Mr. Barclay, the founder of the present firm of Barclay & Perkins, who now put Johnson's head on the labels of their beer bottles. But it was not so much on the silent and busy Thrale himself as on his wife, a quick and clever woman fond of literary society, that the visible burden, honour and pleasure of the long friendship with Johnson fell. Till the breach caused by her second marriage just before he died no one had so much of his society as Mrs. Thrale. She soon became "my mistress" to him, an adaptation of his from the "my master" which was her phrase for her husband. And for him, too, Thrale was "my master." A somewhat masterful servant, no doubt, to them both, but he loved them sincerely and was deeply grateful for their kindness. He lived at their house at Streatham as much as he liked, and had his own room reserved for him both there and at their London house. At Streatham he sometimes remained for several months, and it is chiefly there that Boswell's only rival, Fanny Burney, saw him. It may be said that the Thrales' house was more of a home to him than anything else he ever knew: it was at {106} least the only house since his childhood in which he ever lived with children. There in the garden or in the library he studied and idled and talked at his ease; there many of his friends gathered round him; there his wishes were anticipated and his words listened to, sometimes with fear, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with reverence, always with affection and almost always with admiration. Well might he write to Mrs. Thrale as he did in October 1777: "I cannot but think on your kindness and my master's. Life has upon the whole fallen short, very short, of my early expectation; but the acquisition of such a friendship, at an age when new friendships are seldom acquired, is something better than the general course of things gives man a right to expect. I think on it with great delight. I am not very apt to be delighted."

Johnson had now become a comparatively prosperous man, and the lives of the prosperous have a way of producing little to record. He received many honours and compliments of different sorts. Dublin University made him LL.D. in 1765, he had his well-known interview with George III in 1767, the Royal Academy appointed him their Professor in Ancient Literature in 1769, and in 1775 he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. But the only events {107} of any special importance in the last twenty years of his life were the publication of his Shakespeare in 1765, his journey in Scotland with Boswell in 1773, and the writing of his last and most popular book, The Lives of the Poets. This he undertook in 1777 and completed in 1781. Its easier style, pleasant digressions, and occasional bits of autobiography, represent the change that had come over Johnson's life. He was now a man at ease and wrote like one. For the note of disappointed youthful ambition which is only half concealed in the earlier works it substitutes an old man's kindliness of retrospect. Matters of less importance in these years were the publication of his Journey to the Western Islands, of the Prologue to Goldsmith's Good-Natured Man and of his political pamphlets, The False Alarm, Falkland's Islands, The Patriot, and Taxation no Tyranny. But none of these things except the Lives of the Poets occupied much of his time, and his principal occupation in his old age was talking to his friends. He travelled a good deal, often visiting Oxford, his old home at Lichfield, and his friend Taylor's house in Derbyshire. In 1775 he went to France with the Thrales, and even in his last year was planning a tour to Italy. But by that time the motive was rather health than pleasure. He had a {108} paralytic stroke in 1783 and lost his powers of speech for some days. One of the doctors who attended him was Dr. Heberden, who had cured Cowper of a still graver illness twenty years earlier. His strong constitution enabled him to recover rapidly, and within a month he was paying visits in Kent and Wiltshire. But he had other complaints, and never again knew even that modest measure of health which he had once enjoyed.

The inevitable loss of friends, that saddest and most universal sorrow of old age, joined with illness to depress his last years. Beauclerk died in 1780, Thrale in 1781, Levett and Mrs. Williams, two of the humble friends to whom his charity had given a home in his house, in 1782 and 1788. He was left almost alone. Yet the old courage and love of society asserted itself to the last, and he founded a new dining club the year before he died. But it was too late. The year 1784 opened with a prolonged illness lasting for months, and though in the summer he was well enough to get away to Oxford with Boswell once more, all could see that the end could not be far off. It came on the 18th of December 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20th. Burke and Windham, with Colman the dramatist and Sir Joseph Bankes the President of the Royal Society, were among the {109} pall-bearers, and the mourners included Reynolds and Paoli. Seldom has the death of a man of letters created such a sense of loss either in the public at large or among his friends. Murphy, the editor of Fielding, and biographer of Garrick, says in his well-known essay that Johnson's death "kept the public mind in agitation beyond all previous example." Those great men, then, who attended his funeral represented not merely themselves and his other friends but the intelligence of the whole nation, which saw in the death of Johnson the fall of one of the mighty in the moral and intellectual Israel.