VOL. I. ABBEY—EYRE.
VOL. II. FAED—MUYBRIDGE.
VOL. III. NAPIER—YOUNG.
  Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is, as we all know, a unique biography; it has no rival. Its unchallenged supremacy has a special significance from the position which Johnson himself retains in literature. For as it must be admitted that his work has been but little read since his own day, and that by far his greatest performance, the compiling of a dictionary, has in its nature nothing of an artistic appeal, it may well be supposed that the literary men of this age find more to stir the imagination in the lives of the great figures of the nineteenth century, in the romance of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and at a later date of the Pre-Raphaelite group, in the peculiar simplicity of Wordsworth, the splendour of Tennyson, and the fervid passion of Browning. And yet we have for Johnson a more intimate place which is all his own. It is because we know him better. Subsequent biographers, Lockhart, Froude, Trevelyan—to mention But if the mere extent of our knowledge of Johnson determines the greatness of Boswell, there is yet some particular appeal besides, some special charm that wins us in Boswell's 'Johnson.' When we come to think of the nature of Boswell's value for so many people, we shall find that it depends not altogether upon the completeness of his method or his capacity for giving expression to it, but also upon an interest which exists apart from any structural or artistic quality. The 'Life of Johnson' is one of those rare books which have by nature a certain universality. It exists not for one but for every generation. It is not for the cultured alone nor for the uncultured, nor yet, if he exists, for the normal person. It is everybody's book. And this is a fact which requires explanation. It would be easy if we were merely seeking to distinguish that which has a special value or quality from what is merely commonplace, if we simply wished to determine the peculiar flavour and virtue of the work, to find a number of reasons why the book we are speaking of should have a special value among biographies. The careful art of the writer, the vividness of the scenes he depicts, his unrivalled humour, the mere form of what he presents, including as it does all that he meant by biography, the interest we feel in the distinguished men who play, as it were, the minor parts of the drama—all these are responsible in their several degrees for the pleasure we derive from Boswell's 'Johnson.' But to account for its universality we must look elsewhere—to the simple human interest felt by everyone in two such characters as Johnson and Boswell. A biography may be written about an interesting man by a dull one or about a dull man by an interesting one; and interest in either may be satisfied by reading it: even when both the men are dull some pleasure may be obtained from a biography by one who is interested in the psychological phenomenon of dullness. The 'Life of Johnson' may be read with pleasure, and even with something more than pleasure, because both Johnson and his biographer are supremely interesting men. There may be some of Boswell's readers who have pleasure from his magnum opus, for the treatment, ..... In presenting the literary portrait of a man there can be no greater error than to indulge in controversy. It is an error which one may make very readily, for we have all at heart the love of battle; moreover, it is easy to contradict another, and difficult to give a whole picture of one's own. And in the case of Boswell there is matter for controversy particularly obvious and particularly inviting. Distinguished men have formed entirely different conceptions of his character and used the pen with more energy than wisdom to support their views. It seems clear now that Boswell has been widely misunderstood. We are confronted at the outset by a sort of popular paradox. Not only Lord Macaulay, but most of Boswell's contemporaries and most of his editors, have thought of him as nothing more than a fool—they have supposed with the poet Gray, 'Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance.' No one has ever denied that the 'Life' is a good book. No one after Modern criticism has done much to raise the besmirched name of the biographer, but has managed at the same time to envelop his character in a sort of generous obscurity. 'Boswell,' Professor Raleigh has boldly exclaimed, 'was a genius.' The Boswellian student will probably agree: but in agreeing we must be cautious not to confuse our ideas about Boswell's character; to say that a man is a genius is not to say that he is unaccountable for his actions, or even of necessity to imply that he is mad. The genius is often more complex than other men, but not more incomprehensible. It is possible, if we like, to look behind the veil that is drawn between humanity and a particular human being. We can see in a genius not less than in others the meaning of all the names which we use to describe life, of love and sympathy, greed and egoism, hate, fear, joy, and the rest; of all the qualities that form for better or for worse what we call character, what it is to be kind or cruel, vain or modest, false or true. Nor, when we say that Boswell is a genius, do we preclude the possibility of his being a fool. Boswell was indeed a fool, as is easy enough to show; but he was not, as was long supposed, a stupid fool. We do, however, mean something by the term Two questions therefore are to be asked especially with regard to a genius: First, in what way was the conflagration peculiar? Secondly, what were the substances present in abnormal quantity which caused the peculiarity? It is intended that these two questions shall be answered with regard to Boswell in the course of this general inquiry concerning his psychology. It is held that Boswell was a genius; it must be explained in what his genius consisted, and how, in the end, this abnormal essence dominated the whole man and inspired the great work of his life. ..... James Boswell was born in Edinburgh on October 29th, 1740. He came of an old Scottish stock, and his ancestors, if not eminent, were at least distinguished men and proud of being the Lairds of Auchinleck. Of his mother we know but little; she was, however, a woman of 'almost unexampled piety and goodness.' Lord Auchinleck, his father, figures occasionally BOSWELL'S FATHER in the various authorities for Boswell's 'Life,' and we can get a very good picture of him. Scott gives the following account:
The Laird, as is evident from the account in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' of Johnson's visit to Boswell's home, held his opinions with that conviction which admits of no discussion. A story of him is related by Scott that when challenged by Johnson to explain the utility of Cromwell's career, he very curtly remarked: 'God, Doctor, he gart kings ken they had a lith Boswell seems to have summed up the situation at
The problem of youth is one of selection. Not many of us accept for ourselves the whole of our inheritance. Of the influences of our early years there are some which we reject; and the judgments which we make about the problems that affected us when young, differ as a rule from those about other questions which come upon us only in maturer years. In youth we must either love or hate—there is no indifference; and so in youth very often are formed the prejudices of a lifetime. Thus it was with Boswell. It was inevitable that the inflexible, hard-headed old judge, and the gay, clever son, should agree very ill. The latter contrived to be in many ways the exact antithesis of his father, and he had the courage of his opinions. It is remarkable, when we think of the violence of the old Whig's political views, that in 1745 Boswell 'wore a white cockade and prayed for King James.' The advances of an uncle it is true were able to purchase his political sympathies, and for the In the uncongenial atmosphere of home Boswell learnt, no doubt, to dislike instruction and to mistrust what he was told about the way to live, about manners in the old use of the word. There is, however, the trace of a pious mother's influence in the respect which Boswell always showed for religion and for principles. To know what he thought right or wrong was always of importance to him, however slight the relation to his practice of these moral decisions. It is possible indeed that he could never have been better than a tyro in the art of living: but the close-fettered days of this unfortunate childhood must be partly responsible for the fact. When the term of his education at home was accomplished, Boswell very properly went to school at Edinburgh. We have reason to complain, if we may complain at all, that we can know nothing of Boswell's school life. It is idle to conjecture what it was like. We may only suppose that school was to him a place of comparative freedom, and that to his schoolfellows his presence there was a valuable source of merriment, and perhaps also an occasion of maliciousness. From school Boswell went by a natural sequence to Edinburgh University: he was barely seventeen years old when the change took place. It was at Edinburgh University, at Hunter's Greek class, that Boswell met his lifelong friend William Temple. Temple is distinguished as the grandfather of an archbishop. Beyond this his life has no considerable distinction; and beyond the fact that he was Boswell's friend it has no peculiar interest. His eminence in the immediate affairs of this world may be rightly judged from the unembellished statement that, after his ordination in 1766, he remained a country parson, first at Mamhead, near Exeter, and later at St. Gluvias, in Cornwall, for his entire life. It is a curiously undecorated career for one who obtained so large a measure not merely of Boswell's friendship, but of his admiration. A sad mischance has denied us at least the gratification Temple, as we see, is not entitled to the fame of Letters; but it is important to realise, since he was the greatest friend both of the young and the old Boswell, that though he had not the qualities that deserve success, and had not the good fortune that may bring it by chance, he had, however, a certain distinction. There are other reasons for Boswell's preference. If neither Temple nor Boswell was a successful man, yet they both desired success in a quite extraordinary degree, and in the early days of their friendship at Edinburgh this was a strong link. They perceived, no doubt, that they were unlike the majority of students, and concluded they were better than the rest. They looked forward to brilliant careers and elegant fame, to the respect of princes and the friendship of the ingenious. Boswell lived for the greater part of his life in a palace of boyish dreams where Wishes became Destiny, and it is fair to suppose that Temple at the Scottish University shared this luxury of anticipation. He, too, could look back to the Edinburgh days and consider if he were becoming 'the great man, as we used to say.' And in later life the link held firm; for neither of them was 'the great man' in the sense that he intended. If they were companions in hopeful optimism when young, they were equally It might be supposed that any friend of Boswell would play the part of the strong man. He might not have the capacity of Dr. Johnson for sweeping away cobwebs and for discouraging complaint, but one would expect to find him upon the same platform. Temple, however, did not take this attitude. On the contrary it was Boswell who encouraged Temple. Not once but many times we find in the letters that Temple has told the tale of his evil fortune in tones of despondency, and Boswell tries to present the circumstances in a more favourable light. Boswell perhaps did not do this very well. Neither the cheerfulness of optimism nor the consolation of philosophy is sufficient for the occasion; and it may be doubted whether the philosophy advocated by Boswell was anything more than an affectation of indifference. But it does him credit that he should have made the attempt to console, and at the same time displays the weakness of Temple's character. Certainly this was not the kind of man to exert a strong influence. Boswell seems to have regarded him in the light of a father confessor with whom a certain ceremony is to be performed, and is reproved and forgiven by a natural sequence, which adds nothing but pleasure to the agreeable duty of confession. Temple expostulates in the rÔle of parson when the conduct of It is clear that Boswell had no moral respect for Temple; it was not in search of guidance that he told stories of his profligacy, but simply because he liked to tell them. Boswell, as his friend remarked, mounted the hobby-horse of his own temperament; this was his perennial and unfailing interest, and the irrepressible delight which he had in his own feelings and performances found an outlet in the 'Letters to Temple' and in many amusing passages in the 'Life of Johnson.' Boswell no doubt was capable of self-revelation without encouragement, and it is difficult for this reason to tell how much sympathy he had from his friend. Temple wanted to hear from Boswell; he asked him to write, and praised his letters. But his mild disapproval was probably genuine. When he In brief, we may describe Temple as a refined and well-intentioned creature, but hardly wise and not courageous. His marriage was so much a failure that ..... The date of the first of Boswell's letters to Temple is July 1758. In 1763 he met Johnson. In the five years between these dates we see Boswell in a number of characteristic lights. The period from eighteen to twenty-three is commonly held to mark a special change and development in a man's character. In Boswell's, however, we do not see this very strongly. As he grew up he did fewer, no doubt, of the wild things of youth. But he seems hardly to have become older in the ordinary way, until towards the close of his life. He was always to the world the gay, good-humoured, sociable being, with a strong vein of fatuous buffoonery, that we see in these early years. A great difficulty in rightly understanding Boswell's life lies in this fact. It seems impossible at times to realise that this was a serious man; he appears to find the world and himself such a preposterous joke. And yet if he saw to the full the humour of living, he felt too very keenly that it was an important matter, that there were real standards. No one has valued more the opinion of others about himself, and no one The course of Boswell's life during this period of five years may be briefly followed in chronological order. In 1758 he was at Edinburgh University, and it is from there that his first letter to Temple is dated. The summer vacation was spent on the Northern Circuit with his father and Sir David Dalrymple, afterwards also a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Hailes. In November 1759, he entered Adam Smith's class for Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University. In 1760 he paid his first visit to London, and in the spring of 1761 returned to Edinburgh, where he resided until the close of 1762; he then went for the second time to London. It was upon this second visit that he met Dr. Johnson. It is characteristic of these years that he did not quite know what he was or what he wanted. He was posing now in one guise and now in another, wondering the while what his serious purpose might be. At Edinburgh University he seems to have wished to appear an intellectual cynic. He writes to Temple:
The inference is clear; the subito furore obreptus type of conduct is a great change from a sedate indifference. He often adopted the rÔle of the wise counsellor. His letters to Temple are full of excellent advice. It is always hard to be quite certain that Boswell is serious, but it is probable that he was sincere enough in this. He was ready always with sympathy and kind actions for his friend, and we may conjecture that besides wishing to appear wise beyond his years he thought that Temple could best be served by the commonplace advice of the old to the young. But it is pre-eminently as the promising young littÉrateur that we see Boswell in these years. He became acquainted with many interesting people, who were attracted, no doubt, by a clever young man, fond of literature and appearing less ignorant than most young men. Lord Hailes, Lord Kames, and Dr. Robertson were numbered among his friends. Even Hume took notice of him: 'We talk a great deal of genius, fine learning, improving in our style, &c., but I am afraid solid learning is much wore out. Mr. Hume, I think, is a very proper person for a young man to cultivate an acquaintance with.' Boswell was not eighteen when he wrote these words. They Among Boswell's friends of the aristocracy of letters were several younger men. Charles Dilly, the publisher, who was afterwards host at the famous dinner when Dr. Johnson met Jack Wilkes, was a native of Edinburgh; and George Dempster, who became M.P. for the burghs of Fife and Forfar in 1762, was, like Boswell, a member of the Select Society; it was he who afterwards appeared as the disciple of Hume and Rousseau, and of whom Johnson said, 'I have not met with any man for a long time who has given me such general displeasure.' A greater friend than either of these, and one who had far more influence in forming the literary tastes of Boswell, was the Honourable Andrew Erskine. This lively young gentleman was both soldier and writer. His interest in literature was not of a very creative order: he edited, however, in 1760 and 1761, two volumes of a 'Collection of Original Poems by the Rev. Mr. Blacklock and other Scotch Gentlemen,' to which both he and Boswell contributed; in 1764, he published a farce in two acts, and in 1773 he issued a poem of twenty-two quarto pages intended 'to expose the false taste for florid description which prevails in modern poetry.' He appears to have had The early tastes and tendencies of Boswell in literary matters are connected with several influences of a different nature. There was always a strong instinct of rebellion in Boswell, and with him it found expression in sympathy for those whom the world rejected. Some of his friends among those who sought favour of the Muses were therefore less successful and less respectable than the distinguished members of the Select Society, the learned and the grave. Several of these friends were connected in various ways with the stage. Acting was not supported as an art in Edinburgh, nor countenanced as a profession, at the time when Boswell was an undergraduate at the University. But he came in contact with a Mr. Love who, it would seem, was the first to encourage his sympathy with the drama. Mr. Love had been connected at one time with Drury Lane Theatre; fortune cannot have favoured him greatly, since he left London for Edinburgh; and there after fruitless attempts to practise private theatricals he became a teacher of elocution. It was in this last capacity that Boswell met him. The lessons of Mr. Love were apparently of some MR. LOVE use to Boswell; for Dr. Johnson said in commendation of his English accent, 'Sir, your pronunciation is not offensive'; and Miss Burney too speaks approvingly. Mr. Love became the great friend of Boswell after Temple had proceeded to the University of Cambridge. He is mentioned in the first of the 'Letters to Temple' as the only other confidant of Boswell in a matter of the heart; and in the next letter he is called his 'second-best friend.' Boswell says of him: 'He has not only good taste, genius and learning, but a good heart.' He must in any case have been a man of singular virtue, for it was he who persuaded Boswell to keep a diary. 'I went along with my father to the Northern Circuit and was so happy as to be in the same chaise as Sir David Dalrymple the whole way. I kept an exact journal, at the particular desire of my friend Mr. Love, and sent it to him in sheets every post.' So was the habit of 'memorandising' begun. Boswell was destined no doubt to form that habit; it was the most vital factor in his method of biography; and it was besides a complete expression in itself of that inner secret which, by a magic touch, was to marshal the soul of a glorious man before the eyes of us all. The wheel of Fate might have turned ever so little differently for Boswell and altered the whole course of his mortal existence; but if it were still to be Boswell, there When Boswell went to Glasgow he made friends with another actor in depressed circumstances. 'The merchants of Glasgow,' Dr. Rogers tells us, 'tolerated theatrical representations, obtaining on their boards such talent as their provincial situation could afford.' Boswell evidently took an interest in the Glasgow theatre. One of those who sought a livelihood there was a certain Francis Gentleman, a native of Ireland, and originally an officer in the army. 'This amiable gentleman sold his commission in the hope of obtaining fame and opulence as a dramatic author.' He obtained neither, and became an actor; and so he qualified to be the friend of Boswell, who entertained him, and 'encouraged him to publish an edition of Southern's "Tragedy of Oroonoco."' To Boswell it must have been a double pleasure to play the patron and to read the dedication of the volume addressed to himself. Mr. Gentleman thought well of the man who had befriended him, and the dedication ends thus: But where, with honest pleasure, she can find Sense, taste, religion, and good nature joined, There gladly will she raise her feeble voice Nor fear to tell that Boswell is her choice. On his return to Edinburgh Boswell became more DAVID ROSS AND THE STAGE than ever concerned with the ill-favoured art of the drama. 'The popular prejudice against theatricals,' says Dr. Rogers, 'was a sufficient cause for our author falling into the opposite extreme; he threw his whole energies into a movement which led, six years afterwards, to a theatre being licensed in the capital.' He became associated in this movement with a Mr. David Ross, the most important save Garrick of his actor friends. Ross, too, was acquainted with misfortune, yet not without earning some kind of celebrity. When he made his first appearance at Drury Lane, 'he was approved by a polite and distinguishing audience, who seemed to congratulate themselves on seeing an actor whom they imagined capable of restoring to the stage the long-lost character of the real fine gentleman'; and his first success was followed by a considerable measure of popularity at Covent Garden. He must have been a good actor, for Garrick is said to have been jealous of his reputation. It was the 'fine gentleman' we may suppose that Boswell particularly admired. 'Poor Ross!' he exclaims at the time of his death; 'he was an unfortunate man in some respects; but he was a true bon-vivant, a most social man, and never was without good eating and drinking and hearty companions.' These qualities were no doubt to Boswell the highest recommendation. And he seems besides to have found Ross, though irregular habits, as we are told, may have interfered with his advancement, was evidently a man of some talents and some enthusiasm, and eventually he succeeded in starting a theatre in Edinburgh. He had some respect, it would appear, for Boswell's talents; for on the occasion of his first performance in the capital of Scotland, he requested Boswell to write a prologue which the actor himself was to recite. Boswell can hardly have seen much of Ross in later years, but the friendship between them was preserved, and Boswell was chief mourner at the actor's funeral in 1790. One other friend of Boswell's in these early years must be mentioned here. Actors may have had particular qualities which made them attractive to him, but Boswell in any case had always a sympathy with misfortune which was mere good-nature; he had at the same time an interest in the shady walks of life, in human nature exhibited under stress of adverse circumstances, and in an added poignancy to the performance of intellect when spurred by poverty. These feelings may account for his friendship with ..... It was as a poet that Boswell was to make his dÉbut in literary performance. Besides his contributions to the collections edited by Erskine, he published in 1761 two longer poems, 'An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady' and 'An Ode to Tragedy.' The latter was apparently a serious attempt at poetry; The 'Elegy' also was intended to express a serious vein. It would be an error to suppose that Boswell meant to be satirical; but he evidently saw that he might be laughed at as extravagant, and published it without alteration, introducing some prefatory letters to ridicule its sentimentality. In 1762 he published, apparently at his own expense, 'The Cub at Newmarket, a tale.' This, as he states in the preface, is the story told in doggerel verse of his visit to the Jockey Club at Newmarket. He had been taken there when in London by Lord Eglinton, and was discovered in the coffee-room while in the act of composing. The Cub at Newmarket is, of course, himself. Lord Eglinton afterwards introduced him to the Duke of York, to whom Boswell, not unwillingly we may suppose, read out his poem. It He was not of the iron Race, Which sometimes Caledonia grace, Though he to combat could advance— Plumpness shone in his countenance; And Belly prominent declar'd That he for Beef and Pudding car'd; He had a large and pond'rous head, That seemed to be composed of lead; From which hung down such stiff, lank hair, As might the crows in Autumn scare. But besides being a somewhat light-headed poet, Boswell was anxious to appear as the 'young Buck.' 'The Epistle of a London Buck to his Friend' is the title of one of his publications in the 'Collection of Original Poems.' There is also a confused story of a club he formed in Edinburgh called the 'Soaping Club,' which existed apparently for Bacchanalian purposes; Boswell was the king of the Soapers and wrote some verses about himself: Boswell is pleasant and gay, For frolic by nature designed; He heedlessly rattles away When the company is to his mind. 'This maxim,' he says, 'you may see, We never can have corn without chaff'; So not a bent sixpence cares he, Whether with him, or at him you laugh. Boswell does women adore, And never once means to deceive, He's in love with at least half a score; If they're serious he smiles in his sleeve. He has all the bright fancy of youth, With the judgment of forty and five; In short, to declare the plain truth, There is no better fellow alive. Stories about 'frolic' (to use Boswell's word) are not as a rule very laughable, and we are perhaps too apt to consider them as merely childish and contemptible when they fail to amuse us. The exact atmosphere of the moment which accounts for its merriment is forgotten too often and seldom reproduced, and we are left cold after a recital of such behaviour as we may suppose the Club of Soapers to have indulged in. In Boswell's character there was a large vein of buffoonery which is apt when recounted by anyone but himself to appear stupid enough. But in reality it seems to have contained a true sense of the incongruous, and had at least the success of making people laugh. What an incomparable moment that must have been when Boswell, as one of the audience There is nothing very brilliant about Boswell's comic verses, but it is curious that those we have quoted should represent the facts so closely: So not a bent sixpence cares he Whether with him or at him you laugh; these lines express exactly the social principle which Boswell adopted. He had no objection to men laughing at his oddities so long as they laughed good-humouredly. He wished to find gaiety in every company, and it is just to say that he brought more than his share of mirth regardless of dignity. There are many other instances of these self-portraits, anonymous sometimes, but easily to be recognised. We can hardly do better than illustrate Boswell's life by his own words about himself, because upon this subject he found it necessary, when he had anything to say, to say it truthfully. In another early literary venture, the correspondence between Erskine and Boswell, which these two young gentlemen published, there is a letter of Boswell's containing an account of the author of the 'Ode to Tragedy,' which he had published anonymously; he thus describes himself:
The 'Letters between the Honourable Andrew Erskine and James Boswell, Esq.' are the most remarkable in some ways of these early literary ventures. The letters were evidently written from the first with a view to publication. They are completely frivolous, but attempt to be satirical and amusing. Boswell and Erskine wish to appear as two young men of society who are budding poets and have brilliant wit. They hoped, perhaps, to take the world by storm like the Admirable Crichton and his friend Aldus. The result, if far from brilliant, is certainly clever and amusing. The rÔle which Boswell played in this theatrical performance may be illustrated by some passages of his own letters. He was before everything else the knight of chivalry—a chivalry which was occupied
It is conceivable of course that Boswell imagined that he had the fourscore millions; there is evidence which might suggest a misconception of this kind. And it is even possible that he entertained at some time the dream of becoming Pope. But that at all events is not meant to appear. It is meant as the froth of youthful gallantry. There is no deception. We are not expected to suppose that Boswell was like this: we are expected merely to be amused at the pose. He represents himself also as the bon-vivant. There are allusions to splendid feasts and there is an 'Ode to Gluttony.' The poet is always very much to the fore, and his behaviour is supposed to be
Perhaps the most significant passages in these letters are where Boswell plays the cynic:
Boswell represented himself in the letters to Erskine very much as he affected to be in real life—the gay young wit with a serious background, the jolly good fellow and at the same time the budding genius, and finally, the cynical philosopher, such as he alludes to in the first letter to Temple. The whole picture is exaggerated and laughed at: yet we feel very often that the laughter has a hollow ring. It is the laughter in reality of one who wishes to protect himself from ridicule by jesting at his own expense. The real In another letter he says:
The sentiment about his dead ancestors is a flash of the true Boswell as bright and real as anything in Pepys' Diary. The pleasure which the thought gave him and the pleasure he had in imparting it to another cannot be concealed by the forced levity of the ending. The friendship of Boswell with Erskine was responsible for yet another publication; these two with George Dempster collaborated to criticise some dramatic performances in 'Critical Strictures on Mallet's "Elvira."' This brochure ..... In London no doubt Boswell enjoyed himself very well, and Edinburgh seemed a dull town by comparison. In May, 1761, Boswell writes:
This passage from a letter to Temple explains very well the attitude of Boswell towards the world at the age of twenty-one. He is the gay, frank, talkative, amusing, sociable young man, frivolous if you like and a little unrestrained in his affections, extravagant one would rather say in that matter as in others, but quite without malice. The profession to which for a time he aspired was that of a soldier. In the Guards, no doubt, he would be able to enjoy just that kind of life which attracted We hear so much in the letters to Temple of Boswell's amusements that it is easy to lose sight altogether of a less frivolous side to his life. It is safe at least to conjecture that he read a good many books at this time; in the rÔle of a young littÉrateur he would naturally keep up with the books that were coming out; we know that he read Johnson and Hume and Harris, and, from the knowledge of literature that he always showed, we may infer that he read much else besides. The law studies he took seriously at this time.
This is hard work for one at a University! And especially for one of Boswell's temperament. There is The truth is that Boswell was very far from being idle; he had great energy, and often applied himself to something which interested him with fervent industry; he was irregular no doubt, as are very many people who work in this way. An indication of the channel into which his industry was to be turned is provided by that journal (and what pains it must have cost!), which he began to keep while travelling with Lord Hailes and his father; and at the same time he was made aware of the existence of Dr. Johnson as a great writer in London, began to read his works, and also no doubt to feel, as he afterwards said, that 'highest reverence for their author, which had grown up with my fancy into a kind of mysterious veneration, by figuring to myself a state of solemn elevated abstraction, in which I supposed him to live in the immense metropolis of London.' Boswell also seems to have been deeply interested in religion even during these early years. While at Glasgow University his views underwent a violent revolution, most distressing to his parents, and he became for a short time a Roman Catholic. There is no reason to suppose that Boswell was in any way frivolous when he took this decisive step. He clearly It is probable that Boswell was in earnest both about the young lady and about his religion. But since, in order to be entirely respectable, it is often necessary to give a hypocritical consistency to our fickle inclinations, we are not thought to be serious if we do not affect to be constant. We can assume, in the case of most people, from a sort of faith they hold in the durability of sentiment, and a desire which they have to prove by a time test the depth of their emotion, that the feelings which do not appear to endure are trivial and shallow. In Boswell's case we cannot make this assumption; though he affected much, he yet had real and vivid feelings; but since they could never be wholly dissociated from the pleasure which they gave him, they were both various and contradictory; he could be grave and sedate at one moment and gay and boyish the next, yet really feeling something both of the gravity and the gaiety of living; he could be almost in the same breath either the romantic lover or the indifferent cynic, and yet feel something both of the romance of love and of the aloofness which has tasted often enough the joys and sorrows of life; he forgot more quickly than most men, but did not care This volatility of Boswell, exhibited especially in his sexual inconstancy, was in itself but a phase of an innate and irrepressible candour which, in spite of a lifelong desire and struggle for respectability, showed itself very often to his friend Temple in the 'Letters,' and not infrequently also to the general public. In all that he wrote we find passages of amazing frankness about matters which most men would prefer to conceal. He was absurdly vain, he was childishly sanguine, he was often both foolish and ridiculous, and he tells us all about it as a matter that should interest us as well as him. 'Why,' he says, '"out of the abundance of the heart" should I not speak?' The light of truth led him into strange paths. He was a formalist and yet he was sometimes known to fail in formalism through an aversion to insincerity; when his enemy Baretti came, by chance, into the room where he was being entertained by a friend, Boswell refused to greet him; he could even be flagrantly rude in company. To be entirely respectable and conventional, to be the man of the world, the gentleman of society, that is what Boswell wanted most in life; and that he never could become, because there was in his nature a further consciousness, which was not to be subdued, And so beside the sentimentality, the self-deception, the respectability, which he so often exhibited, we see the germ of self-knowledge, of honesty, of truth, which developed and was ultimately expressed, almost by chance as it seems, in a supreme biography: for it is the candour of Boswell far more than any other single factor, the natural instinct to record what he observed both of himself and of others, the honesty in observing and the truthfulness which he had as an artist in recording, that distinguishes his literary work. Herein lay the essence of his genius. The story of Boswell's life is the story of a struggle between influences and ambitions which led him towards the commonplace, and the rare qualities grafted deeply within him, which bore him steadily in an opposite direction. The triumph of the latter involved no doubt the unhappiness of Boswell, but it also involved the production of a great work of art; and this achievement has won for its author a unique place among distinguished men; he is famous beyond any fame that he dreamed of attaining and failed to attain.
'The accident,' says Professor Raleigh, The comedy opens by Tom Davies announcing the eventful news in farcical manner.
Boswell, who at once became nervous, had only time Eventually, when he went away, Davies made some encouraging remarks: 'Tom Davies followed me to the door; and when I complained to him a little of the hard blows which the great man had given me, he kindly took upon him to console me by saying, "Don't be uneasy. I can see he likes you very well!"' The evidence that Johnson liked him very well was not very convincing, we may suppose, to Boswell. But he called upon Johnson a week later. In the account of Boswell's first visit to Dr. Johnson's house there is one instructive passage:
Clearly Boswell was good at saying what he thought—the remark about Garrick and the question as to the morality of Johnson's habits, so early in their acquaintance, show this; he is himself amazed, at a It is easy enough indeed to see why the two became friends. Boswell was attractive to Johnson in more ways than one. His outspokenness was happily blended with more gentle softening qualities, which made it modest and appealing rather than over-confident and repelling. He expressed, by his 'light pleasantry to soothe and conciliate him'—and also, we may suppose, by something respectful in his manner—a frank admiration for Johnson. And though some may say that this attitude—flattery one might almost call it (for it is something very near to that)—is repulsive to them, there are very few people in practice who, when it is managed with sufficient dexterity, do not find in it something peculiarly pleasant. Johnson certainly liked to have admirers,
There is nothing unpleasant about this attitude: on the contrary it is a very desirable civility. It must be remembered, too, that Boswell with all his good-humoured gaiety and pleasant social qualities could be, and often wanted to be serious. And the conversation of Johnson was very often, at least during the latter end of his life, of a serious nature. Morality, human beings, literature, these were his great subjects; religion and politics were discussed, but less often. Boswell was interested in the same things; if with him more than with most men his own case was the mainspring of all interests, this made him not less, but rather more, attentive to all questions dealing with right and wrong and the motives of men; and But there is another reason which made him an extremely suitable companion for Johnson. What Johnson loved best in conversation was to 'buffet' his adversary; this mode of proceeding has, however, the obvious disadvantage that it prevents people talking, and also may possibly offend them, a result which Johnson himself held to be inexpedient. Boswell, fortunately, was little affected in either way. Nothing, it is evident, could prevent him talking, and it took a great deal to offend or even to hurt him. He was so divinely good-humoured! For the moment, sometimes, he might be annoyed; but it very soon blew over, and there was no malice in his nature to irritate a wound. The consequence of this was that Johnson was often rude, which pleased him, and sometimes went too far, which made him really sorry, so that his kind-hearted nature liked the object of his brutality the better for having injured it. Of the attraction of Dr. Johnson for Boswell we need hardly speak. The little that has been said already about Boswell's strange personality and desires is almost sufficient explanation. We must not think that he attached himself to Johnson with any particular object. 'To suppose,' said Malone '(as some of his detractors have suggested), that he attached himself to Dr. Johnson for the purpose of writing his life, is to know nothing of the author and nothing of The friendship which grew up between these two men, who were so different, was not wholly without the shadow of romance. The relations between them were of the kind that parents would wish to exist between father and son. A great deal of affection on both sides there certainly was. The journey together which they took to Harwich on the occasion of Boswell's departure for the Continent
There is a note of regret in the paragraph, which, as anyone can see, is perfectly genuine. But Boswell's attitude was much more complicated than one of mere affection. The friendship was of that complementary order where each person contributes something which the other lacks, so that they have a natural need each of the other. Johnson liked Boswell for his youth and freshness; Boswell worshipped Johnson for his strength. ..... Dr. Johnson, if he was by far the most important, was by no means the only great man who was to become Boswell's friend. The paternal graciousness admitted of two years to be spent on the Continent, years that were to be devoted to diligent study in the University of Utrecht. Boswell turned them to the best advantage. The parting was propitious; his friend of the past few months accompanied him to the quay-side and Boswell was launched for the Continent by the great literary dictator. That the excellent advice of the moralist and the command of a father were neglected made little difference to the success of the lively young man. Utrecht was frankly a dull place, and there were several gay spots to be visited. Boswell fulfilled his destiny by amusing the best society, and made acquaintances among distinguished men. The capital of Prussia was visited, and the English ambassador Sir Andrew Mitchell was assailed and surrendered. The courts of Saxe-Gotha and Baden were the sphere of the young Scotsman's wit. Philosophers were among his honoured objects of attachment. The youthful Bozzy called upon Voltaire at Ferney, and became almost the friend of Rousseau. Lord Mount Stuart desired him for a travelling companion. The greatest achievement, perhaps, and the most characteristic was the capture of the notorious Wilkes; and intimacy with him was not unfitting, for the two were much alike in their irresponsible levity. But all this was no more than the tinkling of a BOSWELL ON THE CONTINENT cymbal before the booming of an heroic drum. Boswell determined to visit the Island of Corsica. Corsica was at this time the scene of a romantic struggle. Tired of the heavy yoke of the Genoese republic, the islanders were in a state of rebellion and were fighting under the flag of Liberty. Their leader was an admirable figurehead, one General Paoli, a zealous and disinterested patriot, a capable soldier and a wise politician. The Byronic furore of a later date for an oppressed people would have found a suitable object in the Corsicans and their national idol. For the mind of Boswell in search of the heroic they had a special appeal. A letter of introduction to Paoli was solicited from Rousseau, and with this the light-hearted young man stepped bravely forth with the bravery of ignorance, to be the first Englishman of his generation to visit those distant and uncivilised shores. The event was properly considered to be worthy of notice in the English Press, and the requisite information as to Mr. Boswell's movements was supplied from time to time by the pen of Mr. Boswell himself. The visit of Boswell to Corsica was a complete success. He travelled in the rÔle of explorer, but was treated as an unknown political force. Men of many wiles sought behind an ingenuous and good-natured simplicity a deeper significance when there was none such to be found; Paoli, who hoped for His own social qualities were perhaps of even greater service to him. He exercised to the full his invaluable talent for bringing good cheer to his companions. In the journal which he afterwards published, the 'Tour to Corsica,' there is an admirable account of an evening spent with the Corsican peasants which shows what an acceptable guest the good-humoured and lively Boswell must have been.
There is a natural good fellowship or social instinct, a splendid enjoyment in the company of others, revealed in this story: it is a quality that pleases everybody. To Paoli he was agreeable besides for other reasons. He had a real enthusiasm and taste for literature, which the intellectual world understood and appreciated readily enough. Hume writes of Boswell's return from Paris, in the company of ThÉrÈse Le Vasseur. He calls him, 'a young gentleman, very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad'; and afterwards refers to his literary tastes: 'He has such a rage for literature that I dread some event fatal to our friend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who was first married to Cicero, then to There is a certain extravagance suggested by this which is very characteristic of Boswell. He produced almost the expectation that he would do something odd. This in itself is not to every one an attractive quality; but it is one which combined with others may bring an added charm. Boswell had great generosity of a certain kind which was more than sufficient to excuse anything that might be tiresome about him; he had an unabashed admiration and real respect for great men. He was also able and was not unwilling to capture the hearts of men by repeating things that would please them; as he relates that he did upon his visit to Voltaire, by repeating the dictum of Johnson about Frederick the Great: 'He writes just as you might suppose Voltaire's footboy to do, who has been his amanuensis. He has such parts as the valet might have, and about as much of the colouring of his style as might be got by transcribing his works.' 'When I was at Ferney,' Boswell records, 'I repeated this to Voltaire, in order to reconcile him somewhat to Johnson, whom he, in affecting the English mode of expression, had previously characterised as 'a superstitious dog'; but after With such pleasant qualities Boswell won the esteem of the General of the Corsicans. Paoli not only treated him with the courtesy due to a distinguished and possibly a useful stranger but entertained him with the spontaneous enjoyment of friendship. The intimate relations which sprang up between Boswell and Paoli were, as we may judge from Boswell's own account, very similar to those already in existence between himself and Johnson. The taste for the heroic may be satisfied easily. Even about the scamp Wilkes in exile there was a glamour which appealed to the imaginative young Bozzy. But for the real Boswellian admiration something more was required—the portentous possession of the 'solid virtues.' The probity of Paoli could never be in question. He appears to have been a simple character with a noble disinterestedness and the honesty of the Mediterranean sun. His interest was Corsica, and, if we may believe Boswell, there was hardly a thought of self in the matter. In this he was perhaps not different from the greater part of his countrymen; but he had besides enthusiasm a wise moderation and self-control, a knowledge of men and a military ability which gave him an authority of the most absolute kind over the Corsicans. His power The opinions of Boswell in any case are clear enough, and we may read a few specimens from the 'Tour in Corsica.'
Here is a candid unpretending hero-worship. If it eludes the virtue of moderation it escapes the vice of mediocrity. In this is its capacity for greatness. For the moment there is nothing very great about it, but it has a most desirable effect for good in Boswell:
The example made for a genuine modesty in the admirer (though it is doubtful if Boswell was ever suspected of being modest); the Boswell who was 'ambitious to be the companion of Paoli' was willing to deserve the honour of that companionship:
The expedition to Corsica was, as we have said, a complete success. To visit the island, to observe the manners of the heroic peasants, and to become the friend of Paoli were admirable undertakings at that time, and under those circumstances. But it was in England that Boswell was to triumph. He was launched upon society with the Éclat of an interesting The early fame of Boswell came not from Johnson, but from Paoli and Corsica. It is a fact worth remarking, because Boswell's connection with Johnson is so much the more important for us, that we are apt to forget that he can have had another title to renown. He was 'Corsica' Boswell and 'Paoli' Boswell, as Dr. Birkbeck Hill remarks, long before he became famous as 'Johnson' Boswell. Boswell himself fully appreciated the situation. He felt that he had accomplished something of which he could be justly proud. He knew himself to be in the public eye. 'No apology shall be made,' he writes in the preface to his book, 'for presenting the world with "An Account of Corsica." It has been for some time expected from me; and I own that the ardour of publick opinion has both encouraged and intimidated me.' Johnson wrote him a letter which he quoted without permission in the 'Tour to Corsica'—'Come home and expect such a welcome as is due to him whom a wise and noble curiosity has led where perhaps no native of this country ever was before.' He said no doubt what he really felt. When Boswell returned to England in 1766 he became therefore, quite naturally, the champion of Corsican liberty. But this was only one phase of the It was in 1768 that the first literary work of any magnitude which Boswell produced, 'An Account of Corsica, the journal of a tour to that island; and memoirs of Pascal Paoli,' was published. The title explains exactly the scope of the book. The account of Corsica is historical; the journal is in its method much like other books of travel, except for the biographical part which deals with Paoli. Of the historical part of the book there is nothing particular to be said: it is, as Johnson remarked, 'like other histories.' 'Your History,' he told him, 'was copied from books; your Journal rose out of your own experience and observation.' The chief interest of the book is that it is the earliest example of Boswell's biographical method. The memoirs that we have here of Paoli aim at giving a picture of a man in much the same way as does the 'Life of Johnson.' The question as to what exactly was Boswell's method will be discussed later; but we are reminded here that the man who preserved the conversations of Paoli and 'came in upon him without ceremony while he was dressing,' in order to see how he conducted himself before his valet de chambre, was becoming an adept in his own peculiar art. A great charm of the Journal, also prophetic of the future, lies in the perfect frankness with which Boswell discusses his own feelings. 'We retired to another room to drink coffee. My timidity wore off. I no longer anxiously thought of myself; my whole attention was employed in listening to the illustrious commander of a nation.' Or again, 'I enjoyed a luxury of noble sentiment. Paoli became more affable with me. I made myself known to him. I forgot the great distance between us and had every day some hours of private conversation with him.' Boswell realised that a Journal is delightful only if it is quite informal. We have a pleasing sense of inconsequent freedom when we read in the Journal several pages quoted from the 'First Book of the Maccabees.' But it is not irrelevant to Boswell's purpose. It occurred to his thoughts; and that is a sufficient justification, whether it seem ludicrous or incongruous or ponderous, for its inclusion. There is no scene in the 'Tour in Corsica' which comes up to the best in the 'Life of Johnson,' but there are several descriptions, such as that quoted above, when Boswell played the pipe and sang 'Hearts of Oak,' which are really artistic and pleasing. The book, at all events, had the effect of amusing people and it gave them an interest in Corsica too. Boswell had good accounts of it on all sides. 'My
There is nothing deserving particular remark in an author's desire for literary fame. But it is remarkable that a man should proclaim it to the world as Boswell did. The common ideal of an artist supposes that his work should be, in the first place, the expression of his own personality; an expression because to him it is necessary to reproduce in some form what he sees and feels: it is for himself and himself The ambition which Boswell had, and which he expressed so freely, is peculiar in some ways for the end desired, but it is not essentially different from that of other artists.
The nature of the desire for fame which he had is revealed to us by Boswell in this curious passage. It does not compromise his character as an artist. Boswell's ideal of the literary man's position is well expressed in one of the letters to Temple:
It is amusing to think of Boswell in this rÔle. Already we may see the great contest in his life between natural candour and commonplace ambition—the charm of the 'Tour to Corsica' was the charm of candour, and it was dangerous to dreams of future greatness in the sphere of public affairs. Boswell understood that to gain respect he must be more serious. But this he never was able to be; it was his nature to be extravagant. He had a mind which in some respects was wholly unconventional, and though he tried sometimes, he could never entirely repress his A most notable piece of Boswell's buffoonery was in connection with the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-on-Avon in 1769. He attended this festival dressed as an armed Corsican chief. This perhaps was not particularly odd; the form of rejoicing which the company indulged in was a 'Mask.' It is dangerous even so, and hardly decent, to blow the personal trumpet so loudly. Boswell, however, was not content merely with the public advertisement of his connexion with Corsica; he wrote to the London Magazine Frolics of this kind naturally deprived Boswell of the respect which he desired for himself as a man of letters. The 'Tour to Corsica' was an admirable beginning to a literary career; he had then the chance of founding the reputation he wanted as a person of weight, a man whose judgment must be accounted of some importance by the world at large. His writings about Corsica had been widely read and his views had found general sympathy. Moreover the popular poetess, Mrs. Barbauld, had paid homage in verse to his fame as an explorer. But by such behaviour as this at Stratford these hopes were frustrated. And to him, though perhaps not to us, this was the tragedy of his life. The portion of Boswell's career which we have been relating up to this point gives rise by natural sequence to the discussion of one or two interesting questions about his personality. We must know the part played in the main theme by his peculiar qualities. We must notice how they seem to assist or to impede his particular faculty for biography. Allusion has already been made to the reasons for which Boswell was attracted by two great men, Dr. Johnson and General Paoli. We must see now in general the reason of that intimacy which he took care to cultivate with a large number of distinguished men. Boswell, there can be no doubt, liked men in some way because they were distinguished. We must remember that the judgments of the world were always very real standards to him. If a man were great, he must be somehow good; and to be the friend of such a man, that was good too. It is not that Boswell judged of characters wholly by success. We may see that as he grew older he judged them more and more by the Johnsonian morality. He grew less tolerant of And yet he was probably always as he was in the early years far more tolerant than Johnson. There is an instructive passage also in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' about Hume. Johnson was talking about Hume's infidelity: 'He added something much too rough, In these early years Boswell was glad to make a friend of any particularly intelligent person, and his acquaintances included characters widely differing—Hume and Rousseau, Johnson and Lord Hailes, Wilkes and Paoli. Boswell clearly had pleasure in the society of them all; he did not, like Johnson, condemn them to a place beyond the range of his acquaintance; these men were specimens of human nature worthy to be studied; he saw some good in all of them. There is a characteristic passage in the 'Life' about the meeting of Johnson and Wilkes which illustrates the attitude:
He looked upon men much as we look upon works of art, distinguishing that which, as art, has merit, and crediting with a certain value every design or idea which has been executed well, but attaching ourselves more particularly to a few rare objects which have some special significance or appeal for our own nature. Johnson and Paoli had this appeal for Boswell. Wilkes and Hume attracted him more because they were interesting individuals for whom, though he really disapproved of them, he might retain some slight affection because they were representative men. He might dislike the things they represented, but like them in spite of this: like them, one might almost say, for representing something. With Hume, for instance, he had a considerable friendship at one time. He was of course, an individual to be studied; to Temple, Boswell related his conversations much as he recorded those of Johnson and Paoli. But he did not see him merely because he Interest and affection: these, then, are real motives with Boswell for seeking as he did the company of distinguished men. The question, however, of a further motive—of the snobbishness in Boswell's nature—still remains. Boswell himself was well aware of a certain 'propensity in his disposition,' of a particular pleasure from the society of the great and a desire which he had to form friendships among them; he knew too that his behaviour was condemned by many of his contemporaries. In the 'Tour to the Hebrides'
This defence is characteristic of the manner in which Boswell consistently treated the world. 'Curiosity,' said Mrs. Thrale, 'carried Boswell farther than it ever carried any mortal breathing. He cared not what he provoked so as he said what such a one would say or do.' Boswell, besides this, was essentially a snob. To have pleasure in the company of distinguished men, not only from a sense of the good qualities they have, but from a feeling that their greatness adds to one's position in the esteem of mankind, that is to be a snob. Boswell had this feeling; he freely admitted it. 'Now, Temple,' he writes, 'can I help indulging my vanity? Sir David Dalrymple says to me in his
'The great man' because he kept the company of great men—that is what he says, and it is snobbish. His enjoyment of 'the society of men distinguished by their rank or their talents' depended partly upon that. He considered this to be a legitimate way of acquiring fame. The absurdity of Boswell's behaviour in this respect seems all the more ridiculous from the fact that it was unnecessary. When he returned from Corsica he had obtained, as we remarked above, a position of
Then follows an account of Boswell's plan for his
This letter illustrates much of Boswell's attitude towards the great, and it will be necessary to refer to it again in that connection; it shows, at least, how earnestly Boswell desired the friendship of the great man, and what a thrill of pleasure those letters from Chatham must have given him. However much we may dislike this propensity of Boswell's disposition, while admitting that it is unpleasant in itself, although we would not and could not have Boswell without it, there is no reason to see in much of it a blacker vice than merely the ignorance of how to behave. And it was connected as we have shown with feelings not entirely selfish. But of the flagrant self-advertisement to which we have referred above no such agreeable things may be said. It is condemnable without compensation as an obtrusive egoism and foolish vanity. It must be written ..... We are forced to wonder, and it is important that we should decide, whether in spite of his immoderate self-centredness Boswell was capable of acting without considering his own advantage in the interest of others. Had he, in the first place, any real care for the cause of Corsican liberty? It is often far from easy to discover what Boswell's feelings were, because the balance between sentiment and expression was with him very ill-adjusted. By prolonged study of the Boswellian extravagances we may come to perceive, as we think, how much Boswell really felt; but even so it is hardly possible to explain any valid reason for judgments of this nature. Boswell was often guilty of extravagance; but it would be as false to believe that he felt none of the zeal he talks about so easily, as to believe that he felt as much as he says. He undoubtedly exaggerated, but he probably never made an absolute misstatement. There is a passage of great enthusiasm for the Corsicans in a letter to Johnson: Boswell had in fact a real generosity of character; he GENEROSITY hated anything mean, and expressed himself as anxious to cure his own 'narrowness.' He could be kind to his friends and was willing to lend money. He was interested as a lawyer in the decisions of the courts and readily bestowed his sympathy. On behalf of a certain Dr. Dodd, a divine who was under sentence of death for forgery, he wrote to Dr. Johnson: 'If for ten righteous men the Almighty would have spared Sodom, shall not a thousand acts of goodness done by Dr. Dodd counterbalance one crime?' And Dr. Johnson afterwards used his pen in Dr. Dodd's service. On another occasion he appealed for his friend's assistance in the case of a Scotch schoolmaster—a client of Boswell's, who had been 'deprived of his office for being somewhat severe in the chastisement of his scholars': Boswell in his letter to Johnson seems to have at heart both the interests of the schoolmaster and the principle of corporal punishment. For his friend Temple he more than once went out of his way to obtain some favour. He treated his tenants with the greatest consideration, and even made special provisions in his will for their future welfare. It is very important that we should bear this in mind about Boswell. Those who are gifted with powers of expression are often in one sense primarily egoists—more so than other men because they are apt to become more completely absorbed—and Boswell, as we have shown, was not without his portion of egoism; but there may be a place in the lives of such men for unselfish feelings, and if we may think that Boswell had his due share of them we may judge less harshly in him the egoism which we cannot admire. ..... Boswell, as we have seen, had already at the age of twenty-seven made a bid for renown. He was anxious to shine in more lights than one. It was not mere social success or literary fame that he wanted: he had an ardent desire to be successful in his profession. The sphere of employment which had been chosen for him by his father with his own sanction was the Scotch Bar, to which he was formally 'called' in 1766.
This is the letter of a man who finds himself engrossed as well as busy. The truth is that Boswell was extremely anxious to make a mark in his profession. Here, as always, he must win approval; he must become a person to be considered. To this end he succeeded in mixing himself up with the Douglas Cause, a case concerned with a Scotch title which was commanding much attention in the summer of 1767. He seems to have acted as a voluntary counsel to Mr. Douglas the plaintiff, and was most diligent, even perhaps to excess, in his interest. In connection with this trial, two small publications appeared from Boswell's hand. The first of them, 'The Essence of the Douglas Cause,' is a prÉcis of the whole affair, well arranged and clearly expressed; it was written with a view to aiding Boswell's own side in the case, The other publication, 'Dorando: A Spanish Tale' Boswell's behaviour during the Douglas Cause is said to have been decidedly extravagant. His father was heard to say that 'James had taken a tout on a new horn,' There are other indications than the Douglas Cause to show that Boswell was anxious to be successful in his legal career. It is not to be thought that he always displayed the energy which he showed at this time. But he clearly took the trouble, on several occasions recorded in the 'Life,' to prepare the best arguments he could to support his case; and if we must suppose that he was as anxious as he represents himself to be that justice should be done, it is still quite evident that he hoped to gain some advantage to himself from the assistance which he solicited and obtained from Johnson, and was glad that the right should triumph, in part no doubt because it was We shall have to consider when we come to the last years of Boswell's life the various reasons for his failure at the Bar. But one reason may be mentioned here because it is so essential a part of his character that we should do wrong not to have it in mind as we go over the spectacle of his whole life. Boswell, it must be remembered, was called to the Scotch Bar; but the society of the Scotch, and particularly of the Scotch lawyers, was never congenial to him. As early as March 1767 he writes to Temple: 'It must be confessed that our Court of Session is not so favourable to eloquence as the English Courts.' By 1775 he was apparently quite tired of his work; 'On my arrival here [Edinburgh] I had the pleasure to find my wife and two little daughters as well as I could wish; but indeed, my worthy priest, it required some It is probable that Boswell's opinions about the Scotch lawyers were not entirely concealed from them. And they knew, no doubt, that he had friends among the Edinburgh players, and may have resented the fact. 'The Scottish Themis,' says Scott, speaking of his own early experience, 'is peculiarly jealous of any flirtation with the Muses on the part of those who have ranged themselves under her banners.' We may suppose that Boswell's flirtations, with the Muses at all events, injured his position in legal circles.
Boswell himself was quite unlike most Scotchmen, and he relates in the 'Life' the remarks upon this subject made by Johnson at various times:
Professor Raleigh has emphasised this point in his delightful manner:
And Boswell himself took no trouble to conceal, but rather published this truth. He saw very clearly certain qualities in the Scotch character which he disliked. It must be remembered, however, that Boswell professed to be in one sense, perhaps the only right
However Boswell may have had 'that just sense of the merit of an ancient nation,' it is clear, as we have said, that he disliked very much his legal work in Scotland. But it must not be thought that he rapidly became grave and soured by constant irritation. That ..... Before we come to discuss the domesticity of Boswell we must consider for a time those affairs of the heart in which he had such a plentiful experience. About these he was as frank as he was about all the subjects which he discusses in his letters to Temple. We have detailed accounts (detailed enough, apparently, to offend, unfortunately for our purpose, the delicate ear of the first editor of the letters) which describe in several cases the precise nature of Boswell's love or passion or whatever be the appropriate expression. These accounts were intentionally complete. The eye of Boswell is fixed upon the thermometer of his affections to observe and indicate its rise and fall. Nothing could illustrate the man so well as the attitude which he here so nakedly revealed, typical entirely of Boswell because it is so completely self-centred. He lived for his own pleasure and says as much: 'That pleasure is not the aim but the end of our being, seems to be philosophically demonstrable. Therefore all the labour and all the serious business of life should first be considered as means to It was at the early age of eighteen when Boswell was still at the University that the son of Venus came to him upon the first of many visits. The lady, a Miss W——t, is described as a most desirable companion; and Cupid in one sense was kind to Boswell—for though his hope of an ideal future in the company of the beloved, the heiress to a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, was not destined to be realised, he was able, if the lady were disinclined to adorn his life, to 'bear it Æquo animo, and retire into the calm regions of philosophy.' The subject of matrimony seems often to have occupied the thoughts of Boswell. At times the appeal of unmarried life was strong. 'The bachelor has a carelessness of disposition which pleases everybody, and everybody thinks him a sort of common good—a feather which flies about and lights now here, now there.' But the ideal of a winged good which was to float about thus amiably gave way at times to a more sedate view of living. 'If you think of the comforts of a home, where you are a sort of sovereign, the kind endearments of an amiable woman, who has no wish but to make you happy, the amusement of seeing your children grow up from infancy to manhood, and the pleasing pride of being the father of brave and The course of his amour was not destined to run very smoothly. The ardour of Boswell for the deserted or deserting lady was intermittent and expensive; it was difficult to be rid of her because the tendernesses of a farewell upset the unstable balance of Boswell's susceptibility; 'I was sometimes resolved to let her go, and sometimes my heart was like to burst within me. I took her dear hand; her eyes were full of passion, I took her in my arms.' The dramatic moment is too much for the best-laid plans, and Boswell was grateful, as he well might be, to find himself free after two months. 'I am totally emancipated from my charmer, as much as from the gardener's daughter who now puts on my fire and performs menial offices Miss Blair was a Scotch heiress whose estate was not far from Auchinleck. Boswell's father was in favour of the match, which would have been in every way desirable, particularly so if it be considered appropriate that the young lady was in love with Boswell. The An accident, however, occurs and trivial circumstance is swollen to importance by the fever of impatience. The fervour of a suitor's letter demands immediate reply; but the letter remains for some days in the post. Letter follows letter, and the perturbation increases when jealousy summons the image of a yellow nabob. The actor doubts if he has chosen the proper rÔle, and fears the effect of his 'Spanish stateliness.' But the ardent lover is able to exclaim, 'I am entertained with this dilemma like another chapter in my adventures,' and consolation comes in a letter from the Signora 'written with all the warmth of Italian affection.' Finally the matter is explained and there is the pleasure of restoring harmony. Lucky But a volatility amazing even in Boswell produces on the following day a letter which is full of the charms of Miss Blair. The more violent the quarrel the more pleasing the peace-making. A meeting is arranged at Edinburgh; a declaration is made and the now enthusiastic suitor reports, 'I ventured to seize her hand. She is really the finest woman I ever saw.' The 'princess' however is still reserved, and determined efforts have to be made at the theatre.
But even after this touching scene there is cause for disquiet. 'Still,' he says, 'I thought her distant, and still I felt uneasy.' The encouragement however was sufficient to give confidence to the attack, and there follows a tÊte-À-tÊte in which 'pleasure from the intimacy of often squeezing and kissing her fine hand, while she looked at me with those beautiful black eyes,' was somewhat darkened by a disconcerting surprise. 'I then asked her to tell me if she had any particular liking for me. What think you, Temple, was her answer? "No; I really have no particular liking for you; I like many people as well as you—I like Jeany Maxwell better than you."' Consolation must now be sought where love is denied. Boswell: 'If you should happen to love another, will you tell me immediately and help me to make myself easy?' Princess: 'Yes, I will.' But the lady's sympathy shows a want of imagination which is highly unsatisfying. Boswell: 'I must, if possible, endeavour to forget you. What would you have me do?' Princess: 'I really don't know what you should do.' It would appear that honour had no escape from such a defeat but in renewing the encounter. The history of the last period of this wooing, of the nadir of the wooer's fortunes and his cheerfulness in spite of repulses, is told to Temple six weeks later. A new Although I be an honest laird, In person rather strong and brawny, For me the heiress never cared, For she would have the knight, Sir Sawney. And when, with ardent vows, I swore, Loud as Sir Jonathan Trelawney, The heiress showed me to the door, And said, she'd have the knight, Sir Sawney. She told me with a scornful look, I was as ugly as a tawney; For she a better fish could hook, The rich and gallant knight, Sir Sawney. We might suppose that Boswell in spite of his cheerfulness would have been at heart rather dejected by these events; but he writes to Temple, 'My mind is now twice as enlarged as it has been for some months. You cannot say how fine a woman I may marry; perhaps a Howard or some other of the noblest in the kingdom.' The realities were hardly so elevated as these dreams, for in the following spring (1768), it is Zelide again, and not she alone. 'Zelide may have had her faults but is she always to have them? May not time have altered her for the better as it has altered me? But you will tell me that I am not so greatly altered, as I have still many unruly passions. To confess to you at once Temple, I have, since my last coming to town been as wild as ever.' But flowers were to be fresh at last in the month of August. 'I am exceedingly lucky in having escaped the insensible Miss Bosville and the furious Zelide, for I have now seen the finest creature that ever was formed, la belle Irlandaise. Figure to yourself, Temple, a young lady just sixteen, formed like a Grecian nymph, with the sweetest countenance full of sensibility....' Everything was favourable. 'Here every flower is united.' The diplomat who
Whether this 'perfect felicity' was attained and how long it lasted we do not know. Maria no doubt had her day like the others; the sequel to the vow in Boswell in fact was destined to be married to his cousin, Miss Montgomerie. The Montgomeries were an aristocratic family related to Lord Eglinton, and Boswell was proud of the connection: he speaks in a published pamphlet of 'having the honour and happiness to be married to his Lordship's relation, a true Montgomerie.' We know very little about Mrs. Boswell. Johnson's curt judgment in a letter to Mrs. Thrale is probably right in placing her with the great bulk of That Mrs. Boswell had in abundance the matronly virtues is sufficiently clear. She had besides considerable intellectual gifts. Boswell calls her, 'A lady of admirable good sense and quickness of understanding'; he kept a common-place book, 'Uxoriana,' to preserve her witty sayings, and after her death regretted her 'admirable conversation.' From her own expressed opinion of her husband's friendship with Dr. Johnson we are obliged to think well of her intelligence: it was a female opinion, as Boswell remarks, with something of resentment for the intrusion of this uncomfortable guest: 'His irregular hours and uncouth habits, such as turning the candles with their heads downwards, when they did not burn bright enough, and letting the wax drop upon the carpet, could not but be disagreeable to a lady.' And no doubt she failed to appreciate the devotion of Boswell to this ungainly and unpleasing animal. But her observation, in the manner of the times, is admirably pointed: 'I have seen many a bear led by a man, but I never before saw a man led by a bear.' The marriage took place in the autumn of 1769; Boswell was then twenty-nine years of age. The situation is summed up in his own remarks in the London Magazine for April 1781:
That Boswell was always fond of his wife is clear enough. 'Eleven years have elapsed and I have never yet wanted to take advantage of my stipulated privilege.' He never speaks of her without affection, and was deeply distressed by her death in 1789. But for how long he continued to love her fervently it is difficult to tell; not, one would suppose, for a great length of time, or he could hardly have written in the London Magazine: 'Whatever respect I may have for the institution of marriage, and however much I am convinced that it upon the whole produces rational happiness, I cannot but be of the opinion that the passion of love has been improperly feigned as continuing long after the conjugal knot has been tied.' Nor, if Boswell had continued to love his wife passionately, would he have found it disagreeable to return to Edinburgh, after visits to London. But Boswell no doubt wanted to be a faithful A biography of Boswell, though it might profess to be complete, could say little about his domestic life. If he has told us very little about it, there is, however, no reason that we should seek to know more. It was a very essential part of Boswell that he should have a wife and family: a wife, because she adds a certain flavour of respectability and is a definite asset to the social position of a man, still more perhaps because she increases responsibility and so intensifies the sensation of importance; a family, because to the man of estate there must be born an heir. But the mere fact of his being married was, in a sense, of far less consequence to him than to most men. There were two aspects of his life which were dissociated in a peculiar degree from each other—the life in Scotland, where he laboured at the Law and was eventually to be Laird of Auchinleck, and where his home was the basis of operations; and the life in London, which he visited as often as he was able, to live the gay life he loved, and to talk to his literary friends, especially to Dr. Johnson. The pleasure
It must be our business then to follow for a little the life of Boswell among his London friends, to see the relations in which he stood to them and the progress of his intimacy with Dr. Johnson. In the 'Life' there are recorded the consecutive visits of Boswell to England with relation always to Dr. Johnson in particular, but referring also to other celebrities whom he met, and to his own pleasures and amusements. The group of men who were in the first place the friends and admirers of Dr. Johnson, and with whom Boswell naturally associated so far as he was able, were for the most part distinguished men in the best literary society, and members of that club which was started by Johnson and Reynolds in 1762 or 1763. Burke, Beauclerk, Langton, Goldsmith, The pleasure which it gave Boswell to belong to this club of distinguished men is revealed in his own account of his election. 'The gentlemen went away to their club, and I was left at Beauclerk's till the fate of my election should be announced to me. I sat in a state of anxiety which even the charming conversation of Lady Di Beauclerk could not entirely dissipate. In a short time I received the agreeable intelligence that I was chosen. I hastened to the place of meeting, and was introduced to such a society as can seldom be found.' From a conversation reported in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' it would appear that Boswell was not elected without some difficulty. 'He [Johnson] told me, "Sir, you got into our club by doing what a man can do."'
'Several of the members wished to keep you out. Burke told me he doubted if you were fit for Boswell, of course, did not get on equally well with all of Johnson's friends. Goldsmith especially he seems to have disliked, and at a later date Mrs. Thrale, Miss Burney and Baretti; we may suppose that the feeling was mutual, especially after the appearance of the 'Life of Johnson,' in which Boswell made little attempt to conceal his feelings. With Hawkins, who was chosen to write the official biography of Johnson, he was eventually to quarrel. But he had strong supporters in the club. 'Now you are in,' Johnson told him, 'none of them are sorry. Burke says you have so much good humour naturally, it is scarce a virtue.' Beauclerk too appreciated him. 'Beauclerk was very earnest for you.' His greatest friend of this coterie besides Dr. Johnson was Sir Joshua Reynolds. Sir Joshua seems always to have understood and insisted upon the value of Boswell. He was prepared to take up the cudgels. 'He thaws reserve wherever he comes and sets the ball of conversation rolling.' There were some, no doubt, who had a high opinion of Boswell's abilities; it was admitted by everyone But it was far more for his social than for his literary qualities that Boswell was valued. In the circle of Johnson's admirers he was in a sense the most important figure; he had a greater admiration than any other and was rewarded by Johnson with a greater degree of affection. He came to understand Johnson. Hannah More relates that she was on one occasion made umpire in a trial of skill between Garrick and Boswell, which could most nearly imitate Dr. Johnson's manner. The man who could do this was clearly of importance to those who were interested, even though in a less degree than himself, in Dr. Johnson. We may suppose that the circle of Johnson's literary friends welcomed Boswell as much for his peculiar homage to the Doctor as for his own social talents. ..... We must now more nearly examine that friendship, which is as much the concern of our own age as it was of Boswell's. We have considered already what it was that caused these two men to be friends; but the meanest picture of Boswell must include some account of his behaviour towards Johnson; we must review the progress of their friendship and remark the more characteristic attitudes of the biographer. THE COURSE OF FRIENDSHIPIn the pages of the 'Life of Johnson' is recorded in detail, and almost without reserve, the story of the relations between these two friends. It is a story full of humour, telling of all the little peculiarities of a great man, of all the whims and foibles which we are accustomed to observe in old age and which we both like and laugh at; but it is the story also of a deep and anxious affection. If the course of friendship ran smoothly on the whole for Johnson and Boswell, as might be expected when one of the two was so well balanced and so practically wise as the older man, yet, as must always be the case with people who are not either quite perfect or quite colourless, there were rough places here and there; and these, if responsible for no great misery, were, however, the cause of some unhappiness to both. Boswell, at all events, realised very keenly the great gulf between them; between his own sensitive, uncertain nature and Johnson's rude strength. He, probably more than most men, wanted sympathy, wanted to be understood. With what relief he speaks from his heart to Temple: 'I have not had such a relief as this for I don't know how long. I have broke the trammels of business, and am roving unconfined with my Temple.' It is unfortunate for Boswell that he expressed himself so extravagantly. We sympathise with those who are self-contained about sentiment and particularly about their own sorrows, but we have few kind feelings for Much as we must admire the honest wrath of Johnson, and the desire which he had to cure the affectation of Boswell, we cannot but regret sometimes that he was not more discriminating. It was much, no doubt, to be assured of affection, but affection alone could not take the place of an understanding sympathy; and if this had come from one whom he so much respected, it would have been invaluable to Boswell. As it was, he realised that Johnson must partially disapprove of him, and it was because he knew, and felt Whatever may have been their cause—it may have been no more than the mere need for friendship coupled with the peculiar unreserve of Boswell's character—the result of these demands was sometimes to irritate Johnson.
On one occasion Johnson was really angry. Boswell conceived the idea of making an experiment to test his affection. It was apparently his custom to write to Johnson upon his return to his family. He wanted to see what the Doctor would do if he neglected the usual civility. Johnson, of course, was eventually the first to write; and Boswell, thus gratified, answered him by a letter which frankly explained his motives:
We may forgive Johnson for being annoyed by this letter. Those who make very large demands upon their friends for a display of affection are, as a rule, rather tiresome companions; it may possibly be good to be sensitive, but it is bad to be easily offended, which is often the case with such people. But if Boswell, like many who take a decided lead in friendship, required many proofs to make him believe that it was more than a one-sided affair, he of all men was the most difficult to offend. We cannot do better than read his own accounts of his quarrels with Johnson. There is that famous one, in the first place, of the dinner at Sir Joshua's.
We may doubt whether Boswell gives the true reason The oddest thing of all about Boswell, when we reflect upon the scenes of his humiliation, is his pride. It is not the least unlikely that, as he suggests, if circumstances had not ordained otherwise he would have waited, and waited for a long time, for Johnson to make advances. It was not merely the pride of the worm in the proverb which may be roused at the last. The worm would not consciously go out of his way to incur insulting anger as Boswell did when he arranged the dinner with Wilkes and on many other occasions. Boswell's was a pride which was constantly giving him pain and was capable, when goaded to obstinacy, of going to considerable lengths. At Sir Joshua Reynolds' dinner he must have suffered acutely. Croker tells the story of Boswell's discomfiture as it was told to him at fourth-hand by the Marquess of Wellesley. 'The wits of Queen Anne's reign were talked of, when Boswell exclaimed, "How delightful it must have been to have lived in the society of Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, and Bolingbroke! We have no such society in our days." Sir Joshua answered, "I think, Mr. Boswell, you might be satisfied with your great friend's conversation." "Nay, Sir, Mr. Boswell is right," said Johnson, "every man wishes for preferment, and if Boswell had lived in those days, he would have obtained promotion." "How so, Sir?" asked Sir Joshua. "Why, Sir," said Johnson, "he would have had a high place in the Dunciad."' It was a hard blow. How deep was the wound we cannot tell, because we do not know how it was said or how received. It is curious at first sight that Boswell should have been more sulky about this than about many a rough retort recorded in the 'Life.' It is even more remarkable that he should have concealed this story of his humiliation while he told others with perfect frankness. To do so was entirely contrary to his principle and practice. The idea that 'the several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school' should read the story, recall the circumstances and laugh, not good-naturedly but with contempt and malice, must have overcome for once the biographer's 'sacred love of truth.' From It is further to Boswell's credit that, if he winced for a moment under the sledge-hammer and pouted at the executioner, his natural good-humour and generosity made reconciliation easy.
Johnson certainly seems to have made himself most agreeable on this occasion, and it would have been churlish of Boswell to have resisted these advances; but nothing could be more truly generous than the way in which he reminded Johnson of his affection and respect. Boswell now proceeds to appease his pride by using the occasion to make a bon mot. 'I said to-day to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you tossed me sometimes—"I don't care how often or how high he tosses me, when only friends are present, for then I fall upon soft ground: but I do not like falling on stones, which is the case when enemies are present." I think this is a pretty good image, Sir.' Johnson assents, with unusual courtesy, 'Sir it is one of the happiest I have ever heard.' And Boswell is now completely satisfied. The account proceeds by giving Johnson a testimonial for good-nature and assuring its readers that the best of relations were at once re-established. 'The truth is, there was no venom in the wounds he inflicted at any time, unless they were irritated by some malignant infusion from other hands. We were instantly as cordial again as ever, and joined The story of this quarrel, if there were no other evidence, would show that Boswell endured not a few rebuffs. The fact indeed has never been challenged. Johnson's method of talking for victory often took the form of mere rudeness, and Boswell was frequently the subject of his rough wit. For Boswell it was a question whether the fun and the interest of making Johnson angry were worth the sacrifice of dignity involved. In retrospect it always was so, and, at the moment too, very often. He tells us how, on one occasion, he had quoted Shakespeare in the course of discussion, and Johnson, who was angry, had made the characteristic reply, 'Nay, if you are to bring in gabble I'll talk no more'; it is evident that this was regarded by him as a successful issue to the argument. Johnson had become angrier and angrier, and Boswell, far from trying to appease him, was glad to bring him to a state of entire unreasonableness. He was conscious of this when he commented with evident pleasure, 'My readers will decide upon this dispute.' There is something of the same spirit in the tale which Boswell tells of the quarrel on the moor during the Tour in the Hebrides. Boswell towards the end of a day had the not unnatural intention of going on ahead to make preparations at the inn.
Boswell indeed seems to have been particularly thoughtful and even shows some delicacy in not interrupting Johnson's meditations to tell him his plan. The sequel must have surprised him very much. 'He called me back with a tremendous shout, and was really in a passion with me for leaving him. I told him my intentions, but he was not satisfied, and said, "Do you know I should as soon have thought of picking a pocket as doing so?"' This did not annoy Boswell in the least, though it took place in the presence of their servants; he was accustomed by this time to the Doctor's moods, and could only be amused. He replied with a composure which he must have known would irritate Johnson exceedingly; 'I am diverted with you, Sir.' The force of the desired explosion may have been underestimated. 'Johnson: "Sir, I could never be diverted with incivility...." His extraordinary warmth confounded me so much, that I justified myself but lamely to him. Matters in fact were
The mixture of amusement and anxiety in Boswell's conduct and the affectionate and good-humoured reconciliation are all extremely typical of the relations between these two friends. Johnson indeed had far The correspondence of Boswell and Johnson is on the whole of an irregular nature; there is more than one interval, longer than we might expect, between two men who were such active friends as they, in an age when letter-writing was cultivated for its own sake. Arguing from this fact and considering that he was not present at Johnson's death-bed, Boswell has been accused of neglecting his friend at the end of his life. But from the state of mind which he described much earlier in the London Magazine, we can otherwise account for these lapses:
We may suppose that whenever Boswell for a short time failed in his careful attention it was through no lack of affection, but rather through a kind of indolence and want of purpose in the manner of it, which is far from being uncommon. The greatest event in this long friendship, and the time which has left us the fullest record, is the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in 1773. In Boswell's journal we see more nearly than elsewhere the relations between the two friends and the nature of their companionship. In the foreground is the extreme amiability of Boswell—it was by this that he was fitted to perform that most difficult office of friendship, to travel with Dr. Johnson. We may read his own account of himself at this time:
'The best good man, with the worst natur'd muse.' He cannot deny himself the vanity of finishing with the encomium of Dr. Johnson, whose friendly partiality to the companion of his 'Tour' represents him as one 'whose acuteness would help my enquiry, and whose gaiety of conversation, and civility of manners, are sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel, in countries less hospitable than we have passed.' Dr. Johnson in a letter to Mrs. Thrale wrote of him in terms of the highest esteem: 'Boswell will praise my resolution and perseverance, and I shall in return celebrate his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness.... It is very convenient to travel with him, for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect.' No one certainly could have been more attentive than Boswell was: he had a sense of responsibility in being in charge of the great writer, which made him anxious not only that Johnson should be welcomed in a fitting manner, but that he himself should appear as a worthy companion. His deep sense of respect, his desire for approval and dread of reproof are constantly
The interview, however, was a very pleasant one. Boswell found 'the Rambler' in his most agreeable mood and was glad to escape the reproof he had anticipated. 'About one he came into my room and accosted me, "What, drunk yet?"' His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. 'Sir,' said I, 'they kept me up.' He answered, 'No, you kept them up, you drunken dog:' This he said with a good-humoured English pleasantry. Boswell, it need hardly be said, was very proud of introducing Johnson to the men of Scotland: it raised him, as he no doubt understood, in their esteem, and he took trouble that Johnson should appear to them in the most favourable light. He had also a further gratification. He was more than a mere showman. He came to have proprietary rights in Dr. Johnson. Boswell's joy was the joy of possession:
We must not forget that Boswell, before everything else, was the biographer, looking ever with inquisitive eye upon the great man's movements, marking with
The malicious experiment of Boswell had the desired conclusion. 'I,' he says, 'sat quietly by, and enjoyed my success.' Dr. Johnson was irritated sometimes by Boswell's curiosity. Dr. Campbell even records that Johnson on one occasion was driven away by Boswell's continual questions.
It was presumably in some degree because he realised that Johnson was fond of him that Boswell was able to endure his rudeness. It must be remembered, however, that it was deliberately in most cases brought upon himself, and there was then no real cause to take offence. You cannot complain if Boswell in the rÔle of biographer will claim a more detailed attention later in this book. It will suffice to say here that the attitude which he presented in the scene at Lochbuy, and on all those occasions when he led Johnson to talk or arranged some situation for the sake of observing his behaviour, is that which is most typical of Boswell, that by which he was famous, or, as some might have said, notorious among his contemporaries. The relations between these two friends which we see so pleasantly revealed in Boswell's journal of the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in 1773, containing as they did all that is best between the old and the young, remained unimpaired to the death of Johnson in 1784: Boswell never neglected to pay at least one visit in the year to England, and preserved to the end his affection, his careful and kind attention, his pride and respect, and above all his humour and curiosity. It would be idle to suggest, though it may be difficult to understand or explain the fact, that his absence from Johnson's Boswell himself was feeling ill and melancholy during a considerable part of the year, and was much upset by Johnson's charges of affectation: it is easily conceivable that he shrank from the pain of being present at the death-bed of his friend, and believed too that his own distress could only irritate the other.
Johnson in one of his last letters said: 'I consider your fidelity and tenderness as a great part of the comforts which are yet left me'; and Boswell, The loss was indeed a severe one for Boswell. He made a friend of Johnson at the age of twenty-two and was forty-four at the date of Johnson's death. For more than twenty years he had been accustomed implicitly to trust the judgment of the older man. Its mere duration in time is some testimony to the value of the friendship, the more so when we remember that Boswell when he died himself was but fifty-five years old. The friend who was the hero of Boswell's youth, and his constant adviser, saw within the space of a few years the beginning of his professional life at the Scotch Bar, the publication of his first serious book, his marriage to an admirable lady, and his election to the Literary Club; he died but two years after Boswell had become the Laird of Auchinleck, at a time when he was showing an increased activity, and before the political and legal hopes that he indulged had brought about by their failure the disappointment of his later life. From the few facts which have been related here something may be gleaned, if not a complete conception of the part which Johnson played in Boswell's life. Boswell has revealed himself as a friend and in What Johnson accomplished for Boswell was primarily in the realm of ideals. The aspirations of Boswell were concentrated by his admiration. But what was the final result? When Johnson died, the ship that carried that heavy load of Boswell's hopes was sailing steadily towards a definite harbour, though not the harbour he intended to reach: what had Johnson to do with this? Was his the hand at the helm?—the breath in the sails? Biography is by its nature historical and suited to an historical method. The history of an institution is written in respect of its functions. The Christian Church, for instance, played a certain part in the life of society at the end of the fourth century, and another part when Clement proclaimed a Crusade to all Western Europe. The historian of the Church may well be expected to hold in view the later development during the whole course of his inquiry before that climax; he must analyse the primitive organism, having regard to its future growth, and explain how it was that those organs grew. The biographer has similar duties. We commonly consider the lives of men with reference to a few conspicuous events or remarkable achievements; and we want to know what were the essential qualities of the man and how they grew to those results. In Boswell's case the central theme is single, for he accomplished one thing of overwhelmingly greater importance than anything else in his life. But the growth which came to this glorious end was by no means a simple and serene development. Boswell, in the first place, had a number of what may be called conventional prejudices; he had the common prejudices of the landed gentleman in the eighteenth century. He was brought up to believe that he would one day become the Laird of Auchinleck. He was proud of his family name and ancient lineage; he believed altogether the conventional idea, that a man was not only in a higher position and a greater person, but, in some indefinable way, better from the possession of land. Soil and mansion were not merely the insignia of the governing class or the boast of blood, but, further, the supreme expression of an ideal—the commonest practical ideal of the British people, 'to be as our fathers.' 'Holding an estate,' says Boswell, in the first of the political letters which he addressed to his compatriots, In the second political letter he shows that he strongly disapproved of innovation and of change in general; disapproved because he disliked and mistrusted them as by convention a man of property ought to do. Reform, however necessary, is never respectable. Boswell liked an order and formality which should go on for ever exactly as he knew it. It was for this reason and not from any Æsthetic pleasure that he delighted in the ceremonial of the dinners in the Inner Temple and in the services which he was wont to attend in St. Paul's Cathedral each year, if he were able, upon Easter Day. The same views found expression in a series of essays which Boswell wrote for the London Magazine. It is in fact in these essays rather than in his biographical writings that we should look for Boswell's opinions on general subjects. Comprehensive though the 'Life of Johnson' is, it necessarily refrains from giving the author's view on many occasions, and when Boswell speaks for himself he does so incidentally, and 'The Hypochondriack'—for such is the title under which Boswell wrote—appeared in twenty-seven numbers of the London Magazine from October, 1777, to December, 1779. The articles are not very long—three pages of close double-columns is the average length; but altogether they must contain enough printed matter to fill one volume of a moderate size in our day. The title explains the attitude of the writer in the whole series; Boswell wrote as a hypochondriac to others who suffered as he did from periodical depression, to divert them, as he said, by good-humour. 'I may, without ever offending them by excess of gaiety, insensibly communicate to them that good-humour which, if it does not make life rise to felicity, at least preserves it from wretchedness.' It is remarkable that Boswell formed the plan of writing these papers at an earlier stage of his existence, during the years which he spent abroad from 1763-5. The tenth of the series was actually written then and was intended, so he tells us, to be published, in the London Magazine as Number X of 'The Hypochondriack.' The fact that it fulfilled its destiny, and that, though written in a rather more frivolous style, it is in no way out of place, is a testimony, if any further were needed besides the magnum opus, to the The qualities required of a biographer, which Boswell had in so supreme a measure, are not those which necessarily make a good essayist. But Boswell was by no means contemptible as a writer of essays. A great thinker he never professed to be, and never could have become; he had, however, what for his purpose was even more valuable than profound thought or comprehensive originality—the art of self-expression. We are obliged to read anything that Boswell wrote because, by some enchanter's magic, he is there talking to us. This is not the place to probe the mystery of Orpheus with his lute; perhaps, in any case, it is better that the mystery should remain for ever dark; for the charm of Orpheus might be perceptibly less if we knew its mechanism. And it may be no more than an accomplishment which, when exercised with particular grace, gives, in the common way, the capricious illusion of facility. Whatever it be in the art of letters, Boswell had it. He inevitably produced his effect; and it is himself. We are made to feel good-humoured and agreeable; and we wish to leave it at that and trouble our heads no further. A less easy style will draw our attention to the technique of words. With Boswell, it is clear midday on the dial, and we have no desire to bother with the wheels inside. 'The Hypochondriack,' however, is scarcely so gay
In this account there is no ill-placed levity and no extravagance such as we might fear to find. It is a simple and effective account of an unpleasant experience. The advice which he gives to hypochondriacs from time to time is similarly grave and sympathetic, and concerned with defeating the dangers of their state of mind; his view is that the disease is nearly always curable; he unwillingly admits that there are cases beyond hope, and condemns pessimistic fatalism:
It would be a mistake to suppose when we read such grave advice that Boswell had a serious view of himself as the spiritual adviser of hypochondriacs. His object, as he tells us, was to divert them; and in that frame of mind no doubt he began to write. He became grave and even earnest because he had a very strong vein of seriousness. In the ordinary way of life he was light-hearted enough, and easily dispensed with his thoughts when they began to be uncomfortable: but when he had set himself to write from a text he
Occasionally Boswell, on account of this same seriousness, has an outburst of Johnsonian anger. He tells of a French writer that he published a book, 'RÉflexions sur ceux qui sont morts en plaisantant,' that he succeeded in collecting a good number of instances both ancient and modern: 'But I,' says Boswell 'hold all such extraordinary appearances to be unnatural, affected, and thoughtless.' However, when all is said about the gravity of the Hypochondriack, he is essentially the easy, good-humoured companion he set out to be. He is often dignified, never indecorous; rarely is he even light-hearted, for while he supports the cares of this world with smiling equanimity he leaves the impression that The lightness of touch which was necessary for Boswell's purpose was obtained partly by anecdote and image. A wide acquaintance with books evidently supplied Boswell with a store of anecdotes; and he both selected them well and used them relevantly. One instance, where Boswell, in an essay about Excess, is speaking of the dangers of wealth, will suffice to illustrate his method:
Boswell's images, sometimes employed in imitation of Dr. Johnson's manner, if they are apt to be slightly extravagant, are generally pointed and help the sense. 'A Dogmatist,' he says, 'is a man that has got a pair of shoes that fit him exactly well, and therefore he thinks them so very good that he flies in a passion against those who cannot wear them.' An image is often used far more gracefully to bring the argument to a head as in the following admirable passage:
These few quotations may suffice to show that Boswell's essays are worthy of some attention. They can be read with pleasure because Boswell was both a capable writer and an agreeable man. And, moreover, Boswell was a good man. It is a somewhat ridiculous exclamation, because the fact is so striking and so indisputable. One might dispute the proposition that to write an unrivalled biography a man must be good: But 'The Hypochondriack' is not to be read for the sake of the author's opinions, nor even for the arguments by which he supports them. For Boswell writes from a conventional point of view. His conclusions are not his very own. He has never been tossed in the great void and fought long doubtful battles for a sure place to stand on. His children And here we return to the main battle. Boswell was conventional. But this is by no means a sufficient explanation. Clearly, in some respects, it is not even true. What then is the range of Boswell's conventionality and what are its limits? Beliefs are the result, as a rule, either of tradition, or of emotional experience, or of mere desire. In a few rare spirits they may be determined in more intellectual fashion; but Reason is seldom mistress, and very often she is servant and nurse. By reason, we seek to justify our prejudices and convictions. With varying degrees of intellectual dishonesty we make use of reason to reject what we dislike and nourish what we prefer. Boswell's case was somewhat uncommon. He was clearly not very critical. Having once adopted an attitude he marched through life without looking back. We have seen something of the outlook he adopted conventionally. He deceived himself, however, far less than most men of those opinions. And in the effort to believe what he wished to believe, Boswell used reason in a curiously deliberate fashion. He accepted the conventional beliefs and standards in an unconventional manner—not chaotically and aimlessly, but perceiving what the conventional aim essentially was, and approving it as a mode of living. Boswell's philosophy of life, as far as he had a In the 'Hypochondriack' essays we see how entirely Boswell's philosophy of life is a philosophy of comfort. With regard, for instance, to Love—a subject which, since three papers of 'The Hypochondriack' are devoted to it, must have been considered important—though too logical to be entirely conventional, his doctrine is frankly based upon his view of happiness:
It is in his religious views that we see best this
However 'romantic' Boswell may have been in other matters, there is no shadow of romance in his conception of a Deity. His admiration for what seems to be merely a superior human being admitted of no spiritual disquiet. Rather the 'steady, calm, and placid' temper so produced was to serve as an antidote to hypochondria.
Further instructions as to how these comforts are to be enjoyed are given in the 'Life' where his final view is expressed:
The argument is clear: we must choose the path where 'uneasiness' is avoided and 'comforts and enjoyments' are in store for us. The part to be played by the intellect is not doubtful. The power of reasoning may be valuable up to a certain point; beyond that point it is unsafe for it to pass:
Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise
'We must not think too deeply'—because it is not pleasant. 'I most willingly admit,' he says elsewhere, 'that of all kinds of misery, the misery of thought is the severest.' He wished to escape from thought, and found his religion a very pleasant substitute. It enabled him to believe all that he found most pleasant in beliefs, and to reject what he found disquieting. The fear of death, he discovered, could best be alleviated by believing in the divine revelation; accordingly he proceeded to adopt this belief. But the pleasure which Boswell obtained in this way was not merely the pleasure of a mind lulled to tranquillity, it was the pleasure also of possessing a point of view. He wanted to be entirely respectable. And respectability was to be achieved by adopting wholesale the respectable beliefs. Boswell perhaps could never have been otherwise than conventional in his ethical and religious thought; but he did at one time think, and he deliberately ceased to think; with the consequence that all those views which he might or might not have arrived at by thought and experience, instead of being deeply founded within him, were only an ill-balanced superstructure. ..... INFLUENCE OF JOHNSONThe effect of Johnson upon this development was a very remarkable one. Johnson himself was pre-eminently a conformist, and it was partly, no doubt, from his example that Boswell derived his desire to be respectable—to be, as he expressed it, 'an uniform pretty man.' Boswell's own words show us that he was influenced in this way. A meeting had been arranged between Johnson and one of Boswell's friends, George Dempster, who held the sceptical views of Hume and Rousseau; a discussion took place in which Johnson, whether by force of argument or power of lungs, was victorious. 'I had infinite satisfaction,' says Boswell, 'in hearing solid truth confuting vain subtilty. I thank God that I have got acquainted with Mr. Johnson. He has done me infinite service. He has assisted me to obtain peace of mind, he has assisted me to become a rational Christian.' How much are we to assume from this? How much of Boswell's respectability came directly from Johnson? There could be nothing more unreasonable than to dogmatise about the extent of a personal influence. How subtle and intricate it is in the thousand chances of a mind's development, of acquiescence and rebellion, of mere time and place! how difficult to see the beginning and the end, to know even approximately the value of any one force in a number of causes! The That which determines individuality in men more than any other factor is the freedom of choice. But there is more than one way of choosing. There are some who choose to march upon the high road where tall fences on either side prevent the possibility of wandering astray; and there are others who select the by-paths deliberately. All who choose are in search of treasure. Those who have rejected the high roads hardly know what they so urgently desire; but when they come upon a rare flower in the wilderness which pleases them particularly they cull it; they are then refreshed and go forward with more certain step, and there hangs about them something of the fragrance they inhaled, so that other men when they meet them are reminded of that flower which they too have seen and smelt. The rest press forward more directly; when they have chosen the way there is no deviation; they will pause for nothing unless it be of precious metal. And when their quest is rewarded they surround themselves with a cloud of gold-dust, as it seems to them, and cannot be seen except through this strange mist. Boswell, it would seem, was among these last. He chose freely, but did not wander far afield. He was one of those in pursuit of ideal treasure; and when he found in Dr. Johnson all that he desired, and the ideal We expect, indeed, to see in Boswell beyond his own real nature the marks of a stronger personality. But we may admit the Johnsonian flavour without impugning the originality of Boswell or degrading him to the level of a mere imitator. All the conventional prejudices, the strong conformity which was so pronounced in Johnson, existed in Boswell independently. The 'old Tory sentiments' inasmuch as they exceeded the sentiments of Johnson (which they occasionally did, e.g. on the subject of slavery), were definitely a part of the true Boswell. It is remarkable that in the 'Letters to Temple' the opinions of Johnson are very rarely mentioned; Boswell on one occasion was 'confirmed in his Toryism'; and Johnson is quoted two or three times: but his name appears far less often than we should expect. It is clear, indeed, when we read the 'Life of Johnson,' that Boswell, however he might be a worshipper, was far from being a slave: his passion for truth would not allow him to pass lightly by an opinion he disapproved, and his conviction that Johnson was wrong, or at least that his own opinions remained unaltered, is frankly if respectfully stated more than once. He knew that Johnson's opinions might be formed
Boswell's attitude in this passage is very far from being intellectually dependent on Johnson or on anyone else. And it is not an unusual attitude. We sometimes see another side—Boswell, apparently in fetters, a prisoner in the citadel of respectability. But it cannot be asserted too often that Boswell was essentially an independent individual, one who was capable of pursuing his own true vision, inflexible and careless of the consequences. There is no need to infer from this that the influence of Johnson was negligible, or even small. We cannot suppose that the guide, philosopher and If influence is to be defined it may be said perhaps that it is a quality which makes us see what we should not have seen without it. We cannot doubt that Boswell learnt many things by his intercourse with Dr. Johnson. The influence of Johnson was in the first place, as we remarked above, an influence for truth, for honesty. It helped Boswell in his early life to see the self which he came in the end to understand so well. He must long have remembered the letter which he received from Johnson at Utrecht. Boswell, in his desire to make an impression as the young genius, then regarded himself as a peculiar mortal who had no need to regulate his conduct by the ordinary standards. Johnson begins by describing this state of mind:
The result which he particularly deplored was Boswell's idleness:
He then alludes to the wrong conclusions which might be drawn by one in Boswell's mental condition from the difficulties which attend a return to a normal course of life:
And finally he gives some very solemn advice:
Boswell was too honest not to realise the truth of what Johnson said, and we cannot but think of this letter when we read a number of years later, in the London Magazine of 1778, an attack written by Boswell upon the association by Aristotle of melancholy with genius; for this essay seems to aim at undermining the same kind of affectation as that which Johnson had seen in him. Similarly the effect of Johnson in making Boswell more respectable was produced less by example than by dislike of affectation. Johnson was pre-eminently a conformist; and Boswell desired the same happy state for himself. But Johnson was honest in his conformity, and he cared less for the conformity than for the honesty. And so he was able, when he saw Boswell affecting sentiments which he did not wholly feel, to reprove him. It was not that the sentiments in themselves were not good sentiments, for they often were, but that in Boswell they were unreal.
Boswell was probably annoyed at this retort; it is very annoying to be told the truth about oneself. He now tries to make Johnson admit that he has been vexed himself 'by all the turbulence of this reign.'
The argument is too strong:
The result of Johnson's honesty acting upon Boswell's conventional affectations was not to make him less but rather more conventional. It gave him a surer foundation. An affectation does not as a rule become less affected but rather the reverse. But Boswell's affectations tended rather to become the substantial and real expression of a mind as he came to understand that they were affectations. He saw that the manners and opinions which he affected because they pleased him had a value in life and a value for him. The lessons which he learnt from Johnson in this way were, for the most part, moral; they were concerned with the piety and goodness which were But it is not so much in any minute particular that Johnson was reflected by his biographer, but rather in a more general way, in a whole attitude towards life, in the one significant fact that Boswell himself as we see him, not only in the biographical writings but in his own letters too, is essentially a moralist. The one difficulty which his conscience found in writing the 'Life' was that he might, by showing the failings of so great a man, give support to those who were inclined to the same faults so that they should conceive themselves to be justified by that example. And so he points out with zealous care that, where the 'practice' of Johnson does not agree with his 'principle,' it is not because the principle is not good but that even so great a man was not quite perfect; humanum est errare. Undoubtedly the influence of Johnson was a moral influence; this in itself may be considered as one aspect of its complete respectability. Johnson wanted Boswell to be a sober, honest, contented citizen, a hard-working, successful lawyer, a good son, a good husband, a good friend and a religious man. 'I have always loved and valued you,' he wrote in 1769, 'and shall love you and value you still more, as you become more regular and useful.' And again, in 1771:
There was no place for any intellectual unquiet—and herein it was essentially respectable—in Johnson's scheme of life as he presented it to others. If a subject were unpleasant to think of, it were better not to heed it. He wished himself to walk through life in a calm, majestic, and dignified way, with firm knowledge of good and a resolute purpose to follow it. He never, if we may judge from Boswell, was in any serious doubt as to the right course, and he seems to Lord Auchinleck died in 1782. His relations with Boswell are of some interest in this place, because they exhibit Boswell in the rÔle of son and incidentally raise an important question. The two never agreed very well. Was this the fault of the son? Was he deliberately unkind, or negligent, or disagreeable? There is no reason to suppose that Boswell was culpable in any such way: indiscretion on the one hand and intolerance on the other are sufficient to account for all the friction. Lord Auchinleck had evidently a very rigid view of the career fitting for his eldest son. His ideal of progeniture seems to have assumed with a not uncommon complacency that the ego was worthy of a second edition. James Boswell must be after the pattern of his father—a Scotch lawyer, a hard-headed, practical man of affairs, a wise man of business successful in his profession. James, however, was not made like that: and if he had practical ability he hated the Scotch law and lawyers far too much ever to use it with success. He had a taste for extravagant behaviour and liked to exhibit his high spirits. Johnson might It is not surprising, then, that Boswell found the company of his father extremely irksome:
The stern father had undoubtedly some good reasons for disapproving of the irresponsible James. Besides the habitual lack of restraint in Boswell's behaviour, money was a continual source of irritation. The heir to Auchinleck, it is clear, considered that he had a sort of natural right to his father's money. He found an allowance of £300 a year insufficient. He wrote to Temple in a complaining tone about his financial difficulties and his father:
He admits, however, that 'his paying £1000 of my debt some years ago was a large bounty.' Lord Auchinleck, no doubt with justice, considered Boswell to be extravagant; and he did not approve of his marriage. 'I understand,' writes Boswell, 'he fancies that if I had married another woman, I might not only have had a better portion with her, but might have been kept from what he thinks idle and extravagant conduct.' The indiscretion of Boswell in his correspondence and conversation with his father must have continually aggravated the pronounced prejudices and preferences of the ill-tempered old lawyer. It was a wanton imprudence to express his extreme aversion to his father's second marriage; we can hardly doubt that he was equally imprudent with regard to the Scotch law and Scotch legal circles. Boswell intended that his father should appreciate him for what he was rather than tolerate him for what he was not. In 1767 he writes to Temple:
Boswell did not understand that the temperaments of his father and himself were in some degree incompatible, and he succeeded in emphasising their points of disagreement rather than cultivating what they had in common. He was very slow to realise how much his father disapproved of his literary friends in London, and of Dr. Johnson in particular: to Temple he exclaims, with horrified surprise, 'he harps on my going over Scotland with a brute (think how shockingly erroneous) and wandering (or some such phrase) to London.' Johnson was actually taken to visit Auchinleck—a most hazardous experiment! Boswell must certainly be blamed, if blame can be distributed in this sort, for indiscretion, but not for unkindness. From no passage in the 'Letters to Temple' can it be inferred that he disliked his father, or wished to displease him; on several occasions he speaks of him with affection. Moreover the obligation to be deliberately kind to one who cannot occupy the position of a friend is based upon a supposed affection on his part. Boswell clearly was not cruel in any positive or malevolent sense; he can only be condemned as unkind if it be proved that he was inconsiderate to a man who displayed a substantial affection towards him. But Lord Auchinlech cannot be said to have done this—if we may accept as true the dictum ..... In 1782 Boswell, on his father's death, became Laird of Auchinleck. The new position was a matter of importance to him. Not only were the duties it involved such duties as he liked to perform, but it was a considerable advance in the right direction. He was the man of property. A part of his dream was come true; and he could now invest himself with a fresh halo of respect and respectability derived from his new station. Local and public affairs were more intimately connected in the eighteenth century than in our own day; and, when the men of estate had a monopoly of governing, it was not unnatural for one who inherited land to cast his eyes beyond the fences of his patrimony. At the age of forty-two Boswell was by no means too old to look forward. The event of inheriting quickened his aspirations, and the prospect of becoming 'the great man' seemed nearer. The ambitions of Boswell were not destined to be realised in any high degree. His hopes were of a double nature; they were both legal and political. Of his early life at the Bar It was hardly to be expected that a man who disliked and despised so much the whole Scotch atmosphere of his work should persevere with it. Boswell was so discontented with his lot that he began to hope for a change which should bring him into a more congenial situation. In 1775 he entered at the Inner Temple with the intention of being called eventually to the English Bar. There was much to recommend this plan; for it would enable him to spend far more time in his beloved London. Boswell no doubt considered this a very important reason. In London he was happier and better than elsewhere. 'I own, Sir, the spirits which I have in London make me do everything with more readiness and vigour. I can talk twice as much in London as anywhere else'; and he considered, no doubt with equal justice, that it had some effects of a different nature: 'In reality it is highly improving to me, considering the company which I enjoy'; and he goes on to say, 'I think it is also for my interest, as in time I may get something.' Ambition was one motive which prompted Boswell to seek a different sphere; he seems to have thought the abilities which were cramped in Scotland and were not appreciated by the Scotch would grow in London
There were, however, a number of reasons which prevented Boswell from making his home in London till long after this conversation. The possibility of his father's death, which would probably make him the Laird of Auchinleck, was always present to him, and it would be inconvenient as well as expensive to have a separate establishment in London. It was by no means certain, moreover, as Boswell seems to have realised, that there would be much financial gain by the change, and he could not afford to fail at the English Bar; his father as well as Johnson opposed the step, a consideration which would probably in itself have prevented it, from interested motives on Boswell's part if from no others. Boswell, in fact, remained at the Scotch Bar until 1786, when he determined finally, in spite of his position as a Scotch laird, which he had occupied for four years, to try his fortune at Westminster Hall. He had been disappointed of promotion The English lawyers, however, seem to have been no more congenial than the Scotchmen, for he speaks of the 'rough scene of the roaring and bantering society of lawyers,' which he is compelled to be with on the Northern Circuit.
Boswell himself pours out to Temple in plaintive We might judge from the manner in which he was treated by his fellow-lawyers that Boswell was not wholly successful at the English Bar. No one can have realised this more keenly than himself. 'I am sadly discouraged,' he writes, 'by having no practice, nor probable prospect of it.... Yet the delusion of Westminster Hall, of brilliant reputation and splendid fortune as a barrister, still weighs upon my imagination. I must be seen in the courts, and must hope for some happy openings in causes of importance. The Chancellor, as you observe, has not done as I expected; but why did I expect it?' Later in the same year, 1789, he exclaims: 'O Temple! Temple! is this realising any of the towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our conversations and letters?' It is pathetic to see him clinging still to the old hopes and ideals, when his real title to fame lay near at hand in his Johnsonian stores, so much thought of, and yet so little valued beside the great world of practical affairs. There were no doubt some special reasons, connected with his attitude towards the law itself, which may account in a large degree for Boswell's failure Boswell, moreover, had never the reputation which is suitable for a legal man. The sober citizen does not choose either the adventurer or the littÉrateur to plead his cause before a jury. His connections with actors, who were disapproved as a class by the respectable community, told against Boswell in legal circles. And worst of all was the tour in the Hebrides with the avowed enemy of Scotland. Boswell, besides, acquired a reputation for eccentricity which must have been fatal to the chances of a barrister. One habit, that of attending executions, deserves a closer examination; by this behaviour Boswell made himself conspicuous in a wholly unprofessional attitude, which must have been extremely damaging to his position as a lawyer. 'I must confess,' he writes, 'that I myself am never absent from a public execution.... When I first attended them I was shocked to the greatest degree. I was in a manner convulsed with pity and terror, and for several days,
In accordance with this practice Boswell accompanied a celebrated criminal, Hackman, in the prison coach to the gibbet; and he made the acquaintance of the murderess Mrs. Rudd. The latter apparently was an interesting woman. Johnson entirely approved Boswell's conduct, and said he would have done the same himself if he had not been afraid that his presence would be reported in the newspapers. It is interesting to note that Boswell had scruples, and wrote to Temple: 'Perhaps the adventure with Mrs. Rudd is very foolish notwithstanding the approbation of Dr. Johnson.' On one occasion Boswell persuaded Sir Joshua Reynolds to go with him, and evidently won him over to his view about the question of propriety: 'I am obliged to you,' wrote Sir Joshua, 'for carrying me yesterday to see the execution at Newgate of the five Sir Walter Scott gives a kinder motive on Boswell's part than mere curiosity:
The satisfaction which Boswell had from these strange interviews was no doubt in part the commendable satisfaction of being kind and good; and his piety as well as his jesting may have been a comfort to many of these criminals in their last hours. It was also a pleasure to Boswell to read his name in the newspaper on the day following an execution. But probably this conduct did not earn the praises of the Scotch lawyers nor inspire the confidence of the litigating public. ..... The failure which attended Boswell's legal career included also his political schemes. It is clear that Boswell had an idea of some kind of Parliamentary career. His ambition was to be a Minister:
Boswell, if he was ambitious in 1775 of some high office in the State, can certainly have had little chance, as he evidently realised, of being immediately satisfied. His financial difficulties alone would have prevented this. But when in 1782 he became the Laird of Auchinleck the increase of his importance seemed to warrant some more definite plan. 'I wish much to be in Parliament, Sir,' he said to Johnson; and though the latter discouraged him he applied himself with energy to his political schemes. Boswell had two plans by which he hoped to become a member of Parliament. He hoped in the first place that the influence of Lord Lonsdale
Early in 1788 Boswell's second plan was to represent his county. Even in Ayrshire he was not altogether independent of Lord Lonsdale, but he relied chiefly upon his own position as head of an old county family. With this project in view, he engaged himself in various activities. The most remarkable of these were his 'Letters to the People of Scotland,' the first dated 1783 and the second 1785. In these two pamphlets Boswell displayed abundantly to his countrymen his ardent patriotism and zealous Tory principles. In 1784 he
The word seems to do very well. Boswell writes later:
But this would seem to be the final achievement of Boswell's political career, for he was not successful in the General Election, and we hear no more in the 'Letters' of political schemes. Beyond any special reasons which there may be for the failure of Boswell in his legal career, there is a We can hardly be surprised from what we have seen already of Boswell's methods of approaching his patrons that he had no great success in these schemes of advancement. We have quoted already a letter to Chatham, which was designed to impress that Minister with the fact that he was a rising young man, and to solicit his favour. There is another letter of a later date
Certainly if one wishes to obtain a post it is better to avoid the 'crowd of interested expectants.' The 'old baron' too is an excellent card to play to one who is not of the aristocratic circles; few men are free from the taint of snobbishness, and patronage may be courted by cultivating disinterested friendship.
The comparison between the places that come of courting a patron and this sublime 'felicity' that comes of friendship must still be maintained—'and we know that riches and honour are desirable only as a means of felicity, and that they often fail of the end.' It is necessary now to give an account of his political opinions, so that Mr. Burke may be assured that Mr. Boswell is his supporter:
It will be noticed that the assertion of independence adds to this declaration a considerable degree of importance. After so careful a preparation the real point of the letter may be disclosed:
The letter to Burke is only less absurd than the letter to Chatham, which was quoted above. What most surprises us is not the vanity of the young man who confided to Chatham his hopes and prospects, nor his impudence in asking a Minister to favour him with a letter and in bothering Burke with his political opinions, but the entire ignorance displayed by a man of intelligence about the kind of impression that letters such as these would produce upon their recipients. Boswell indeed as we have said—and it is a sufficient reason to account for his failure—was a fool. It is this ignorance of the minds of others about oneself, a certain simplicity of character, an unquestioning, childlike self-confidence, that makes fools of men. No fool would wish to be thought foolish, and if a fool were to understand what was thought about him he would soon alter his behaviour. His foolishness depends upon the fact that in this respect he has no imagination. The ignorance of Boswell about the effect of his behaviour is the more remarkable because he was in many ways intelligent, sagacious, and extremely observant. It was not a quality which vanished with maturity, though it was slightly modified in later years: he was nearly fifty when he wrote to Temple an account of his attempts to enlist
And it was an ignorance which included even his own father:
But if all fools are alike in so far as they have this common foundation upon which the flimsy fabric of folly is erected, yet they differ widely in the manner of their foolishness. To say that a man is a fool is to say but little of all that is meant by the expression in his individual case. Boswell was a fool in a number of ways which we shall now have to consider. The extract of Boswell's letter to his father which we have quoted above in his letter to Temple is typical of one phase of all his foolishness. The impulse which made him write in this place about 'cultivating his little farm and ornamenting his nuptial villa' is one which he frequently had. It is difficult to find a name which exactly fits it. It is the melodramatic instinct applied to real life. The words which he uses in this case contain a sentiment beyond the mere facts they represent; and it is a false sentiment—false not because he did not feel it, but because there was no occasion for it; sentiment is wasted. In Boswell there was a sentimental side to the affectation that we have already spoken of as having been partially cured by Johnson. It is not meant, by this expression, that Boswell consciously assumed sentiment which he did not feel: we cannot always tell whether he was conscious or not; and it does not matter. Affectation implies only the presence of what is unreal; it is concerned as much with the feeling of what is false as with falsely pretending to feel. EXTRAVAGANT WORDSPerhaps the most remarkable of Boswell's extravagant utterances are those to Temple on the subject of their friendship. He idealises this to suit his conception of the most perfect of human relationships, and frequently alludes to it. 'May indulgent Heaven grant a continuance of our friendship! As our minds improve in knowledge, may the sacred flame still increase, until at last we reach the glorious world above, when we shall never be separated, but enjoy an everlasting society of bliss!' He was able to enjoy the 'luxury of philosophy and friendship,' and 'invaluable hours of elegant friendship and classical sociality,' and 'calmly smile' in consequence 'at the attacks of envy or of malevolence.' Temple, 'whose kind and amiable counsel never failed to soothe my dejected mind,' was told to 'reflect, my friend, that you have sure comfort, you have true friends—you have Nichols and Boswell, whom you may look upon as parts of yourself. Consider this as an exalted comfort which few enjoy, although they have many of the shining gifts of fortune.' He seems at one moment to have suspected that he might grow cold in his affection:
The friendship, indeed, was of the greatest value to Boswell; as we see, behind his absurd manner of expressing it, it must have been a comfort to him in many disappointments:
His friendship with Mrs. Stuart is treated in the same manner:
The romantic sphere into which Boswell elevated these friendships contrasts very strangely with his acute analysis to Johnson of his true sentiments: 'The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.' One would suspect that the feeling of friendship with him was, as he might have expressed it himself, like a balloon, which rises higher and higher as it is more blown out with gas. In the same fashion he believed that his life was, 'one of the most romantic' he knew of; The affectation or extravagance of Boswell appears also from time to time in his pious and moral remarks.
Boswell was very impressionable, by his own account, to good influences. He rose from reading Boswell, however, though he was continually posing, posed not for others but for himself. He had an insatiable greed of sensation. He derived prodigious pleasure from the view of himself in a situation. 'I cannot resist,' he says, 'the serious pleasure of writing to Mr. Johnson from the tomb of Melancthon. My paper rests upon the tomb of that great and good man.' While he wrote the letter he admired the scene he had arranged. He admired himself playing every kind of rÔle; he could be the grave author, or the romantic lover, the scholar of 'solid learning' or the elegant 'You can almost see him,' says Lionel Johnson, 'reckoning up, as it were, on his plump fingers, his eminent acquaintances, the cities and courts he has visited, his writings and flirtations and experiences in general: they are his treasures and his triumphs. The acquisition of Johnson was but the greatest of them all, his crowning achievement; all his life was devoted to social coups d'État. To hear service in an Anglican cathedral, to attend an exceptionally choice murderer to the gallows; to contrive a meeting between Johnson and Wilkes;... to pray among the ruins of Iona, and to run away for fear of ghosts; to turn Roman Catholic, and immediately to run away Boswell was not unaware of this extravagance in his temperament. He alludes to his 'warm imagination.' In 'Boswelliana,' pleased at having found 'a good image,' he records:
By castles in the air, he means not only glorious plans for the future, but the sensational and emotional in common incidents. A moment during the 'Tour to the Hebrides' reveals the whole of what he meant:
A knight-errant for a couple of Scotch maids! A preposterous fancy! But none the less it is Boswell. It would be too large a task to deal here with all the recorded affectation or extravagance of Boswell. But we must not omit to mention one particular phase of it. Consciously or unconsciously, Boswell in some degree imitated Dr. Johnson—precisely in what degree it is difficult to determine. IMITATION OF JOHNSONThe influence which Johnson had upon his faithful follower has been discussed already. This must be carefully distinguished from the imitation in question now; for an influence is something acquired from the manner and mind of another, assimilated and reproduced, not as original but as genuine; an imitation is, as it were, a garment put on, an adornment of the outward person, reflecting no true sentiment within. Though Johnson had a real moral influence upon Boswell, some of his remarks, and especially some of the pious exclamations, such as those we have quoted, were of the latter kind. We find passages in the 'Life' when Boswell makes truly Johnsonian remarks; as on the occasion when, in a discussion about the freedom of the will, Dr. Mayo alluded to the distinction between moral and physical necessity, and Boswell replied: 'Alas! Sir, they come both to the same thing. You may be bound as hard by chains when covered by leather, as when the iron appears'; or when he said in answer to Dr. Johnson's remark that he had downed Dr. Robertson with the King of Prussia, 'Yes, Sir, you threw a bottle at his head.' When actually in his presence, it is clear from Fanny Burney's account that Boswell imitated Dr. Johnson:
It is a curious and striking picture, and we may gather that there was always something odd and laughable, and yet rather lamentable, about Boswell's appearance. The effect of imitation he seems sometimes half-conscious of producing, from the care with which he accentuates in the 'Life' and the 'Tour' any point of difference between Dr. Johnson and himself. But it must be remembered that Miss Burney's account is an account of particular circumstances—the company was a large one, and not an inner circle of more intimate friends of Boswell and Johnson. We have no reason to suppose that Boswell's behaviour, particularly his behaviour apart from Dr. Johnson, was greatly affected by this strange homage to his friend. It is clear in any case that affectation, however
However absurd the behaviour of Boswell in the rÔle of a man of letters may seem to us when we understand the feelings which prompted it, it is doubtful whether it would have been sufficient alone to give him the reputation of a fool. Extravagance of this kind is not very commonly condemned if it is not seen to be insincere, and though it is easy enough for us who are in possession of all the records of his life to see the imposture, it must have been more difficult for those who knew Boswell to have a real interest in literature, and to be already a man of letters, to understand that he was posing as the literary man. His acquaintance would more readily have called him a fool on account of his vanity. We have all at bottom in some degree the love of self, and vanity is the expression we apply to it when it causes us in some way to lose our sense of proportion, to see things, as it were, in a false perspective. Self-love becomes vanity when we love ourselves undeservedly, or when it makes necessary to us the approbation of others. Usually when it has one effect it has also the other. But Boswell was vain, not, like many people, of It was vanity of this kind which, more than anything else, made a fool of Boswell. The insatiable desire to be conspicuous which made him as a young man publish what he must have known to be worthless, appear at the Shakespeare Jubilee as Corsican Boswell, and insert notices of his movements in the papers,
The second letter alludes to the former one as though it had almost created a revolution, and manages in the same sentence to remind his readers that he had the approval of Pitt and was himself descended from an old Scotch family:
In the same pamphlet Boswell refers to his wife's aristocratic connections, and intrudes an assertion of his domestic felicity which could have no bearing on
This declaration satisfied in some strange manner a personal vanity, and was also no doubt intended to enlist the support of his Lordship. But by far the most remarkable story of Boswell's absurdities is one told by John Taylor, editor of the Sun, about his behaviour at a public dinner:
The value of this tale as evidence of Boswell's behaviour and character depends in some degree upon the extent of his potations. Though he may have had the audacity to do such things when in a normal condition, it must have been easier to do them when tipsy. It may be judged, from the continuation of Dr. Taylor's story, that a part of Boswell's confidence in the presence of Mr. Pitt was due to the festivity of the occasion:
THE GROCERS' DINNERFitzgerald, after quoting this account of the mayoralty dinner, continues:
He goes on to explain that Boswell gained a good deal of notoriety from the escapade, which was alluded to in a popular satirical poem of the time. It is easy indeed to understand the motives of Boswell. His childish and unrestrained love of merriment, his insatiable desire to be the wag and the buffoon, enabled him to give vent in the most mirthful fashion to his passion for self-advertisement, to explain how he had been honoured by the attention of kings and how he intended to have an introduction to the great Minister; and with all this he retained a certain Boswell indeed was very fond of writing humorous verse. It is remarkable, when we recollect what a large sense of humour he had, that many of his verses and of his jokes should be so dull and colourless. But the faculty for appreciating what is amusing is very different from the capacity for originating it. It is A specimen of Boswell's humorous verse is printed in the 'Life.' He had dined one evening at Lord Montrose's and afterwards went to Miss Monckton's, where 'a great number of persons of the first rank' were assembled, in a state of improper elevation. 'Next day,' says Boswell, 'I endeavoured to give what had happened the most ingenious turn I could, by the following verses: Not that with th' excellent Montrose I had the happiness to dine; Not that I late from table rose, From Graham's wit, from generous wine. It was not these alone which led On sacred manners to encroach; And made me feel what most I dread, Johnson's just frown, and self-reproach. But when I entered, not abash'd, From your bright eyes were shot such rays, At once intoxication flash'd, And all my frame was in a blaze: But not a brilliant blaze I own, Of the dull smoke I'm yet asham'd; I was a dreary ruin grown, And not enlighten'd though enflam'd. Victim at once to wine and love, I hope, Maria, you'll forgive; While I invoke the powers above, That henceforth I may wiser live. Certainly this is amusing in some degree, and amusing too in an original way; but much of it is mere rhyming without any sort of wit. Boswell could be as banal as anyone. An ode ('Horatian Ode,' he calls it) to Charles Dilly, which is chiefly concerned with one Dr. Lettsom, frequently the host of both Boswell and Dilly, exhibits the author of humorous verse at his worst; it will be enough to quote one stanza: And guests has he in ev'ry degree Of decent estimation. His liberal mind holds all mankind, As an extended nation. Boswell's mots are of a common eighteenth-century type. The turn of phrase admired by both Johnson and Boswell and most of their contemporaries That is Boswell at his best. Here is another specimen of Boswell's wit: 'A modern man of taste found fault with the avenues at Auchinleck, and said he wished to see straggling trees. 'I wish,' said Boswell, 'I could see straggling fools in this world.' That is Boswell at his worst. Why a man who had so much natural humour as Boswell had should have failed so completely to discriminate when his own wit was in question must remain as much a problem to us as is the failure of many a poet to criticise his own writings—the explanation may be perhaps that it requires some special effort of the mind which can but rarely be made and which is impossible after the moment of composition. Boswell certainly seems to have had a high opinion of his efforts to be witty; his verses to The enjoyment which Boswell had in public at Stratford and at the mayoralty dinner and in private, no doubt, on many occasions of which unfortunately we have no account, is perhaps best illustrated and best understood from a single sentence of his own in one of the 'Letters to Temple':
For the eagerness which Boswell had to reveal to others anything about himself which he was proud of, and a sort of inevitable obtrusiveness in him, Johnson with his usual shrewdness found an excellent parallel which is faithfully recounted in the 'Life':
Endowed with these qualities of unsuspecting simplicity and open-mouthed vanity, Boswell naturally became, as we have seen, an object of mirth to his fellow-lawyers. When they took away his wig he did indeed half suspect a trick; but how confident and innocent and entirely unsuspicious he is when he boldly pleads for the writ, 'Quare adhaesit pavimento.' His own story of the storm during the sail to Mull, told in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' illustrates perhaps better than any other the childish confidence of his conduct. Boswell, though filled with undisguised terror, still ardently wished to play the man and be the hero, and he thought, no doubt, as he stood holding the rope in expectation of the captain's command, that the post assigned to him was one of vital importance.
The vanity and simplicity of Boswell no doubt obtruded themselves very frequently in his behaviour; and they caused a certain expansiveness and recklessness of conversation which would be interpreted at once as thoughtless and foolish. We have an admirable glimpse into the kind of atmosphere produced by his talk in a story which he tells of a snub he received from Colman:
'His social propensities,' says Sir J. Prior, 'were well known ... he opens his mind so freely that we discover much of what is passing there, even when the disclosure is not meant.' It seems clear that Boswell was sometimes very tactless in leading Johnson to talk; he did not understand that not every company nor every occasion is suitable for the discussion of the most serious matters. He had, too, an unfortunate habit of saying things which were extremely injudicious. He did not even understand altogether what was likely to annoy Dr. Johnson—as on the occasion when he referred to him in company by the name 'Gargantua,' which Johnson had spoken of as having been applied to himself, or when he made what must have been an obvious reference to Johnson's curious clothes: 'Would not you, sir, be the better for velvet embroidery?' These remarks were made, it is evident, without any malevolent intention. It would seem that even when he meant to be rude he did not realise all the harm he was doing: Hume was with some justice annoyed when Boswell quoted the phrase of Temple, 'their infidel pensioner, Hume;' Nor was it merely from his disregard of what was appropriate that his conversation might be thought foolish, but rather because a man who is very ready to talk of his most intimate thoughts and feelings is usually supposed to be a fool. Boswell certainly had far more candour than most men, and he had also a far greater curiosity and interest in mankind, which made him ready to talk like a child of things about which many men prefer to be silent. But it would seem, too, that though far from incapable of feeling deep emotion he was unaffected where most of us would be touched. 'He was a boy longer than others,' and this perhaps is the explanation. Nothing in Boswell's life became him so well as his second important publication, 'The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.' The event took place in 1785, not many months after Johnson's death, and less than twelve years after the eventful journey when Johnson was displayed to his biographer's countrymen. The 'Tour' has already been mentioned here as an episode in Boswell's remarkable friendship. It was an episode, besides, in Boswell's life; it decided his destiny. In the year 1785 Boswell was in the midst of his political schemes and ambitions. It was exactly in this period of his life that it was most important for him to win respect. Yet the 'Journal' revealed the whole severity of Johnson's criticisms upon Scotland and the Scotch; Boswell's position among his countrymen was certain to suffer, and did suffer very much by its publication. His candour triumphed by the event. His real self was expressed without compromise, at the expense of the respectable self which he cherished and cultivated. It matters very little ..... Johnson and Boswell were typical travellers of the eighteenth century. They went in no romantic spirit to see the beauties of Nature in remote corners of the earth. 'He always said,' reports Boswell of the Doctor, 'that he was not come to Scotland to see fine places, of which there were enough in England, but wild objects, mountains, waterfalls, peculiar manners—in short, things which he had not seen before. I have a notion that he at no time has had much taste for rural beauties. I have myself very little.' This is a clear statement. They looked at 'wild objects' because they were unusual, and eschewed almost entirely scenery of a tamer spirit. They were interested in 'manners.' The Journal bears out this statement. Observations about the people of the country are part But both Johnson and Boswell, especially the latter, had, though they may have been scarcely conscious of the fact, a far more important interest in human nature. The Tour was admirably arranged for its gratification. It consisted for the most part in visits to the gentlemen of the country: the travellers occasionally put up at an inn; but for the most part they took advantage of Highland hospitality. Their conversation therefore would naturally be concerned very much with the qualities of their various hosts. Now Boswell kept an elaborate and strictly diurnal diary of which the most important item was professedly the record of Dr. Johnson's talk. The briefest reflection on the Doctor's manner and the nature of his remarks must therefore reveal at once the character of Boswell's Journal. Assuredly it is an amazing fact that this Journal was published within twelve years of the Tour itself! As we should expect, it is full of observations, many of them condemnatory, about men and women who were still living. 'Nowadays,' says Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, 'we have been regularly trained to personality by what are called the "Society papers," in which the names of private persons as well as their doings are recorded; still it would cause a commotion if the conversation of some leading personage were reported, in which persons still living were described in such fashion as this: "A—— is a poor creature; he has no bottom." "B—— is a thorough donkey, talks a good deal of what he thinks to be sense," &c.' One instance will serve to illustrate the tone of Boswell's Journal; it shows perhaps the ultimate point of indiscretion which he reached, but is a fair indication of his manner. One of the gentlemen who entertained the two travellers was Sir Alexander Macdonald: he had not, it appears, a reputation for generosity.
Boswell proceeds to relate a story to the effect that the Highlander gave to an Irish harper a
One can hardly imagine anything more offensive—unless it were the story which follows it:
If the 'Tour to the Hebrides' is uniquely indiscreet, it is only the more typical of Boswell. He loved to be in the public eye and he was now notorious beyond measure. The wags laughed, the injured Scotsmen were angry, and the more respectable parts of the community were profoundly shocked. A sheaf of cartoons did justice to the humour of the situation. Lord Macdonald was represented with uplifted stick, But Boswell did not mean to be notorious in this fashion. He may have expected some ridicule, but not ill-feeling; he was too good-humoured himself. Possibly he satisfied his malice on more than one occasion; but as a rule he had no intention of giving pain. The admirable Dr. Beattie calls him 'a very good-natured man,' and says he was convinced that Bozzy meant no harm. Sir William Forbes said that he seemed sorry for 'some parts,' and Boswell published his own apology and defence in one of the notes of a later edition:
When Boswell says that he is unwilling to give pain we may believe him unreservedly; there may have been particular cases when he lowered himself to the satisfaction of a grudge, but as a general statement it is true. That Boswell was good-natured is incontestable: it is admitted on all hands. 'Good-nature,' wrote Mr. Courtenay, 'was highly predominant in his character. He appeared to entertain sentiments of benevolence to all mankind, and it does not appear to me that he ever did, or could, injure any human being intentionally.' Mr. Malone wrote a letter for the Gentleman's Magazine vindicating Boswell's character after his death. 'He had not only an inexhaustible fund of good-humour and good-nature, but was extremely warm in his attachments, and as ready to exert himself for his friends as any man.' His untiring kindness to Johnson might perhaps be refused as evidence that he was 'ready to exert himself for his friends.' Towards Temple and his wife also, from whom he had nothing to gain, 'he always played,' as Mr. Seccombe remarks, 'a very friendly part'; 'he made Johnson known to them, for instance; he took Paoli down to Mamhead, he had Temple up to town and took him and his daughter to Westminster Hall to see the trial of Boswell wrote and published the 'Tour' with a greedy enjoyment and uncontained expansiveness entirely typical of him, and in amazing ignorance of some of the strongest human feelings—of the proprietorship that men feel with respect to their own lives which surrounds them with a sacred halo of privacy, and of their inordinate desire to appear more virtuous and more successful than they are. He babbled of himself as he babbled of others, not unconscious of the folly that he committed and revealed, but not suspecting that he would be called a fool for admitting his folly. Truth, as these pages have already remarked, was of supreme importance to Boswell, and was not to be suppressed. He could hardly understand that plain fact could hurt anyone. A pamphleteer who wished to make Boswell ridiculous has suggested his attitude in a picturesque manner: Lord Macdonald is supposed to be threatening personal violence; Walcot writes: Treat with contempt the menace of this Lord. 'Tis Hist'ry's province, Bozzy, to record. THE 'TOUR' COMPARED WITH 'LIFE'There was fundamentally in Boswell's nature a desire to record observations—a desire which overrode his conventional aims and ambitions and, while decreasing the possibility of his being a successful man, made it certain that he would be a great one. All that Boswell meant by truth will be examined later in connection with his biographical method. 'The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides' must be criticised as a book along with the 'Life of Johnson' and not apart from it. It is, in a sense, but a portion of the larger work. The same genius, the same art, has made two incomparable books. The later is more discreet. 'I have been more reserved,' says Boswell. But it is not less vividly life-like: 'I have managed so as to occasion no diminution of the pleasure my book should afford.' The 'Tour,' however—and this is the one important difference—is concerned with Johnson in an extraordinary phase of his life, and one which is not treated in the larger work. Johnson is on a holiday. The journey is called a 'jaunt.' And the atmosphere of the 'jaunt' is reflected on every page of the Journal. The freedom, the expectancy and the high spirits of a travelling holiday to those who very rarely enjoy one, the increased opportunities to Boswell for observation and his unflagging interest and pleasure in his great experiment—all these account, and are sufficient to account, for the different effect we feel in reading the 'Tour to the Hebrides': and ..... During the eight years of Boswell's life between the ages of forty-two and fifty, several important events happened beside the publication of the 'Tour to the Hebrides.' It is unfortunate that for the greater part of this period we have no letters from Boswell to Temple. If there was any correspondence between them, none has been preserved between the dates November 3rd, 1780, and January 5th, 1787. And so we hear no private utterances about the death of Boswell's father, by which he became Laird of Auchinleck, or about the death of Johnson. It is not difficult to imagine the feelings of Boswell about the first event. There can have been no great sorrow as there had been no great affection; and there must have been no little pleasure in becoming the head of an ancient family and a man of property. It is a sad thing if the records of this period have indeed been lost, for they ought to have been peculiarly rich in extravagant and pompous sayings. Of Johnson's value to Boswell we have already spoken. It would be impossible to suppose that Boswell did not realise his loss. He must have felt when he visited London, as he continued to do in Of Boswell's sorrows in later life, of his failure to realise those 'towering hopes,' and consequent disappointment, something has been said already in these pages. It was not apparently until the autumn of 1789 that Boswell began to see that he was not destined to succeed in the manner he wished—in politics and in the law. The letters at this time were more frequent than usual, and we are able to see how, earlier in the year, he was quite hopeful about the future, but later became despondent. A further reason depressed Boswell's spirits at this time: in the summer of 1789 he lost his wife. Boswell was not a good husband, because he never became in the ordinary sense domesticated; his home
He was remorseful too after the death of his wife that he had not been present to comfort her at the end. And there was good reason. She, as he remarked, would not have treated him so. But Boswell must not be blamed too severely for this serious omission. His wife was suffering with a disease from which, though it was certain she would not recover, there was no immediate prospect of release. Boswell Boswell was not unlike many people inasmuch as he found out rather late in life the true value of his wife, and was more sorry than could have been expected when he no longer had her help and companionship; he found perhaps that he had rated too highly by comparison the greater intellectual stimulus of his literary circle. His sorrow in any case, at her death, whatever the proportion of remorse to the sense of loss, is pleasant to see. There was so much affectation in his character, that whenever he shows that he had simple, genuine feelings—and he had them more often than might be supposed—we must have some regard for them, however commonplace they may be. Boswell was evidently quite miserable at his loss; he was unrestrained in grief as he was in enjoyment, and the tale of his woe was poured out to Temple in the same fervid manner as the love affairs of earlier years:
It must not be thought that Boswell faced the world in the sad and sometimes complaining vein in which he wrote to Temple. There was no whining self-pity, and no pride of the grievance, as might perhaps have been expected, in his public attitude. 'It is astonishing what force I have put upon myself since her death, how I have entertained company, &c., &c.' The weakness of Boswell was shown in a different way, by an increase of those vices which he had been encouraged to resist by Johnson, and also, we may suppose, by his wife. Johnson had said, long before the bereavement: 'In losing her you would lose your sheet-anchor, and be tost, without stability, by the waves of life.' This prediction was fulfilled. Boswell had always been a self-indulgent man. Before his marriage he was, as may be seen from the letters, sexually self-indulgent. Whether he was so in later years, or in what degree, it is difficult to determine; But the particular form of his self-indulgence was drunkenness. Besides frequent references to his habit of drinking, there are, altogether, some half-dozen recorded instances of Boswell being drunk or intoxicated, and as they are referred to only because they had some curious results they suggest that this was far from being unusual. In the letters, Boswell records on several occasions that he has been drinking too much lately, or that he was becoming a drunkard. His mode of resisting what he quite well saw to be an evil habit was to take a series of vows. It is a method which seems to have had a curious appeal for Boswell's nature. There was something to his mind rather romantic about a vow: something heroic in taking that great resolve, made so quickly to endure for so long, something of the saintly penance; and there was something of the martyr about one who had bound himself in this way. In Boswell's drunkenness, however, there was nothing romantic; it was rather sordid; and he was neither saint, nor hero, nor martyr, for the vows, even if they could have made him all Boswell's drinking habits had ill effects. Johnson, when reminded of the headache which his companion was wont to feel after sitting up with him, exclaimed: 'Nay, Sir, it was not the wine that made your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.' But though the nature of Johnson's sense and of Boswell's head may fortify the explanation, it was not the common case; excess of alcohol was injurious to Boswell's health. It has been pointed out with justice that Boswell's melancholy was to some extent the result of this excess. How much of it was affectation we cannot easily tell. When Boswell first made his appearance to the world as the young littÉrateur, he may have hoped to increase the appearance of genius by assuming hereditary hypochondria. But it must be remarked that he seems, as far as we can judge, to have given very little impression of ever being morose; it is on the contrary his gaiety and good spirits that are always emphasised. And we may at least suppose when, as has been mentioned above, he entirely denies, in a number of the 'Hypochondriack,' that genius and melancholy have any particular connection, that he
Malone too denies altogether 'that he caught from Johnson a portion of his constitutional melancholy.' 'This was not the fact,' writes Malone. 'He had a considerable share of melancholy in his own temperament; and though the general tenour of his life was gay and active, he frequently experienced an unaccountable depression of spirits.'
It is a pitiable picture this, of a man's decay; grief and self-indulgence reacted upon each other, each of them adding something to the causes of disappointment. There is one redeeming feature, the most important feature of all, in the last years of Boswell's life. The biographer had gradually during the life of Johnson relaxed his efforts in collecting material for the magnum opus; we can see in the 'Life' how he grew less industrious in recording conversations; for though even in the later part many are preserved at great length, he neglected to write up his journal more often than in the early years of the friendship. This was due no doubt in part to his drinking habits. Conviviality of that kind has a curious effect upon the memory. But Boswell had still very firmly the purpose of writing the 'Life,' after Johnson had died, though he was not the person chosen to do so by the literary executors. The 'Life of Johnson' was published about six years later than the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in the spring of 1791. The latter, it is clear from its nature, required far less labour from the author than his magnum opus: the whole scope of the book is infinitely smaller, There was, in fact, in him the need to satisfy somehow those better qualities. His intense belief in the merit of his work and the almost endless trouble he took to verify the accuracy of the smallest fact and to discover the minutest information about Johnson—to satisfy, in a word, his 'sacred love of truth'—are the expression of this need within him. Sometimes, indeed, he is despondent about his book: 'Many a time have I thought of giving it up.' 'I am in such bad spirits that I have every fear concerning it.'
And yet he has the firmest conviction that the book will be a masterpiece; it will be an unparalleled history of a man; and for that reason of supreme importance to the world:
It is a curious mixture, this, of weariness and optimism; it shows that there was something in Boswell which drove him on, in spite of a good many difficulties, though he himself (as we see in the last sentence) understood little of its nature. 'The "Life of Johnson,"' he says in another place, 'still keeps me up; I must bring that forth.' At times his enthusiasm breaks out and he expresses his real conviction of the supreme merit of his work:
Boswell understood the scale and interest of his book:
'I think,' he says, in the same letter to Temple, 'it will be without exception the most entertaining book you ever read.' To Mr. Dempster he Boswell's belief in his own work was based not so much upon his literary powers as upon his conception of biography:
To Bishop Percy he writes in February 1788:
The conviction that Boswell had that his was the best possible conception of biography seems never to have been in doubt, though he might be sometimes depressed or indifferent, and exactly the same
The 'Life' then is, as Boswell intended, a complete picture of Johnson; complete, inasmuch as it gives a picture of Johnson in every phase of his living, as the writer, the talker, the correspondent, and most of all simply as a man in his dealings with other men, and in all these gives a living picture: complete especially in this, that it gives not merely what there is to praise in Johnson, but every little detail as it occurred, the shade as well as the light. But Boswell had something further in his mind as he wrote the 'Life.' He was, as we have said before, essentially the moralist. He seems to have had a purpose as he wrote, not only of not doing moral harm, but of doing moral good. When he talks of the faults of Dr. Johnson he does so with a kind of apology and explanation, with quotations from the great moralist himself, to show that to mention the vices of a famous man may as well do good as harm:
After saying that 'it must not be concealed, that like many other good and pious men, among whom we may place the Apostle Paul upon his own authority, Johnson was not free from propensities which were ever "warring against the law of his mind," and that in his combat with them, he was sometimes overcome,' he gives a moral lecture to his readers:
In the 'Advertisement to the Second Edition,' Boswell seems to go further:
This history of the deeds and words and thoughts of his hero is compared by Boswell to the Odyssey. He seems almost to think that the merit of Homer's epic lies in the good behaviour of Ulysses, just as he conceives that the value of his own work is in the excellence of Johnson:— ——Quid virtus et quid sapientia possit, Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulyssen. It is not perhaps remarkable in itself that Boswell should have had this attitude towards his work; it is the attitude in some degree of most biographers, the attitude especially of the age in which he lived, and the attitude of Johnson himself. Boswell's principles as a biographer are indeed the same as Johnson's. We cannot suppose, when he has revealed so clearly his supreme faculty for biography, that there was anything of this which was not entirely his own. But he took the trouble to find out on several occasions the opinions of his great friend, to ask him about particular doubts which troubled him from time to time, and obtain his approval. He had a profound respect for Johnson's manner of estimating character. Mr. Pennant, 'a
It was also due in some degree to the influence of Johnson that Boswell himself was so much a moralist: it was something of the same influence, it was in part the honest ruggedness which exalted that morality, by denuding it of excessive and affected sentiment, that enabled Boswell to be a moralist without being (in the Johnsonian phraseology) a canting moralist. Boswell, indeed, became a moralist because he wanted to be respectable; but he was not entirely respectable because he succeeded in being a moralist. A man who is a moralist to the extent that Boswell and Johnson were moralists may be too respectable to be an honest biographer. It does not become the stainless respectability of the moralist to bring to light the blemishes of a man in a book; in It is remarkable for other reasons besides this—that he was a moralist—that Boswell produced an impartial biography. He was by no means free from personal animosities. Sir John Hawkins had written the official life at the request of Johnson's literary executors, and Boswell, naturally, was jealous of him on this account. A matter for greater irritation was that Boswell himself had been almost entirely ignored,
The same lady was alluded to afterwards in a note of peculiar malice:
It was not only for his personal grievances that Boswell was anxious to contradict Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Piozzi, but also because he had a different conception of Johnson, a far more loving appreciation and veneration, which was a reason in itself that he should write the life of his friend; to vindicate his character and express his admiration would be some tribute to their long friendship. Boswell, indeed, always retained something of the 'mysterious veneration' of his early years. Johnson to him was always the hero; he was the 'literary Colossus,' the 'Rambler,' the 'awful and majestick Philosopher.' The thought
Boswell, as a matter of fact, as we may see from the 'Life,' preserved his 'reverence,' and his view of Johnson as the solemn and wise writer and moralist has tinged the biography. He records a jovial mood of Johnson's as a most extraordinary moment in a man of his dignified character:
He goes on to tell how Dr. Johnson 'could not stop It is remarkable, as we have observed, in view of his personal animosities, and of his determination to prove Dr. Johnson to be both a greater and a better man than would appear from previous accounts, and to be an extremely dignified man as fitted his own conception of him, that Boswell should have presented a complete picture of Johnson—that he should have mentioned all the incidents from which he might appear both a less important and a less pleasant man—all the circumstances that might detract from his dignity. The explanation which seems so simple and involves, when we come to understand all that it means, not only the exact shades of what the author said, but many things that he refrained from saying, is that Boswell in this particular sphere, the sphere of the biographer, was entirely truthful. And truth meant far more than that he did not distort the facts and did not suppress them; it involved in him the capacity for creating, the essential quality of his genius. Boswell had in fact the scientific spirit and applied it to the
With this statement we may heartily agree; but all that it really says is that Boswell had opportunities, and acquired a faculty, for recording. He had, besides, a quite remarkable faculty of acute observation.
That is all! And what more or what less could anyone want? In the 'Tour to the Hebrides' it is recorded that
What a difference it makes to our knowledge of Johnson that we know these details! Boswell compels us to see Johnson. Plenty of men would have noticed what he noticed, but few would have presented it so vividly. Boswell's superiority depends upon his powers as an observer; he saw things clear and strong, and so they are clear and strong for his readers. And Boswell excelled not only in painting the mere exterior; he often alludes to the spirit that it expresses
We are pleased to find that Boswell has preserved for us the motive of Johnson, 'lest the servants having It is not, however, only because he observed so accurately what was obviously relevant, as the appearance of Johnson, or that he saw exactly what his motives were, that Boswell was a good observer; the range of his observation is equally remarkable. He observed everything; no detail was too insignificant for his attention. It was of vital importance for him to record (in the 'Tour to the Hebrides') 'I slept in the same room with Dr. Johnson. Each had a neat bed, with Tartan curtains, in an upper chamber,' and it is well that he did so; it is highly agreeable to imagine Johnson and Boswell in this situation. It is also interesting to know that Boswell, on the following morning, found upon the table in their room a slip of paper, on which Dr. Johnson had written these words: 'Quantum cedat virtutibus aurum'; and that when Johnson turned his cup at Aberbrothick, where they drank tea, he muttered 'Claudite jam rivos pueri.' And what an invaluable devotion it was that has preserved for us so small a fact as this—that the book which Johnson presented to a Highland lass was 'Cocker's Arithmetic'! These details are ours not by the fortune of a
Miss Burney had no admiration for Boswell, and the effect of this description is merely grotesque. It is probable that Boswell was not so wholly unconscious of self in this performance as Miss Burney seems to have thought. His behaviour appears to have been absurd, in a degree unnecessary alike to his curious character and his extraordinary task. It is possible that Boswell, aware that his minute attention to Dr. Johnson was a rather laughable affair, tried by a sort But however that may be, Miss Burney's account is no doubt faithful enough as regards the original motive of the biographer's behaviour; his eyes goggled with a genuine eagerness. That exclusive attention was the attention of one who had a difficult task to perform and was extremely anxious to perform it. Boswell's infinite capacity for concentration in observing and recording, and for patience in collecting and preserving the smallest facts, is indeed an essential part of his genius; for genius, whenever it achieves anything, implies devotion, implies the relentless pursuit of its object, however small the actual result of the moment may seem when compared to the trouble which has been expended upon it. And this capacity for concentration enabled Boswell not merely to observe and record what he saw and heard, but to seek continually for any information, however it was to be obtained, which might be of value to him. It is easy to see from many passages in the early portion of the 'Life'—the portion, that is, which deals with Johnson before Boswell made his acquaintance, and which naturally required the greatest labour, in
It appears that, though he had at last succeeded in obtaining a copy from Johnson, he was willing to take the further trouble of getting Mr. Langton's copy, which was more likely to be absolutely accurate. Still more remarkable is the manner in which he discovered the facts about Johnson's pension:
The mere number of names consulted is sufficiently imposing. Boswell in fact was collecting evidence for a case. He must examine all the witnesses: also he must examine them in such a way that the truth might be discovered.
The profusion of information about this particular point may seem to us unnecessary—it is of course controversial, and the controversy has lost much of its interest. But it shows in any case not only the great number of questions Boswell was willing to ask in order to find out exactly what had taken place and the scale upon which his investigations were Boswell has himself said something of the labour it cost him to compile the 'Life':
Something of all that Boswell meant by this can be seen more nearly in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's essay upon Boswell's Proof-sheets:
The success of these inquiries was far from certain. Dr. Parr's name does not appear.
The proof-sheets which Dr. Birkbeck Hill was so fortunate as to see were not the first sheets, but only 'revises': in the earlier stages there must have been many more minute facts for Boswell to find out. But they are undoubtedly documents of great interest, and the point which stands out most clearly from the essay we have quoted is the extraordinary minuteness of Boswell's care and attention. ..... The devotion of Boswell to his biographical work is illustrated not so much by the prodigious toil it cost him—for many men have this power of sustained labour when they have found the right object for it—as by the reckless disregard of conventions and people to which it led him. The admirable account in the 'Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft'
Miss Burney also gives an amusing account of how she was pressed to give her recollections of Johnson. Boswell met her at the gate of St. George's chapel, and since the lady relates 'Mr. Turbulent brought him to me,' it would seem that the anxious biographer sought the mediation of a friend so as to have a better reception. Miss Burney, however, found the occasion unsuitable; she was on the way to the 'Queen's Lodge'; a Queen's lady has to reflect the aloofness of royalty, and a conversation with Mr. Boswell would not add to her dignity. Her assistance is sought in most eloquent terms:
Miss Burney apparently had no wish that her 'choice little notes' should appear in the 'Life.' Boswell did his best in vain. 'I evaded this by declaring I had not any stores at hand. He proposed a But Boswell was not easily to be dismissed; he must glean what he may from Miss Burney; she must, at least, give judgment on the style of the work.
It is a delightful scene—the enthusiastic Boswell oblivious of Royalty as he declaims the sonorous words of the Doctor, and Miss Burney anxious only to effect an escape. The whole account shows how importunate Boswell could become in the cause of his art and for his 'sacred love of truth.' There is an even more remarkable feature of Boswell's work—the scientific manner in which he deliberately made experiments. Here again we shall see his uncompromising attitude. Dr. Johnson has been considered, and very properly considered, a great talker. Not the least of our reasons for reading the 'Life' is that we are interested to know what Johnson had to say; and we find there the expressed thoughts of Johnson upon a great number of subjects. That Boswell should have preserved so much—that, though the same topics may more than once be discussed, yet every conversation gives a distinct and separate impression, and each one is valuable—tells us not only that Boswell himself must have had a high order of intelligence to apprehend and preserve the point of Johnson's discourse upon so many occasions, but, what is important for our purpose at the moment, tells us (when we remember how little time altogether he spent with Johnson and that the time most fruitful in records, during the famous tour in the Hebrides, is not included in the 'Life') that he himself must have It is remarkable that Boswell should have had so much to record. The explanation is that he made Johnson talk; he did it not by accident but quite deliberately; this is a substantial part of his whole biographical method. 'I also,' he says in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' 'may be allowed to claim some merit in leading the conversation. I do not mean leading as in an orchestra, by playing the first fiddle; but leading as one does in examining a witness—starting topics and making him pursue them.' And he did not find this part of his task particularly easy:
On most occasions, however, Boswell's mind was sufficiently fertile, and it enabled him to say some But Boswell's spirit of investigation did not lead him merely to ask questions like these; it was frequently both serious and subtle—indeed there are so many instances in the 'Life' of his leading Johnson to talk that it is difficult to choose one for illustration. Perhaps the most characteristic kind of method employed is where Boswell, evidently having thought of his subject beforehand, brings in at a convenient moment a quotation, which furnishes an excuse for starting a discussion; as when he relates:
He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, Let him not know't, and he's not robbed at all. JOHNSON ANGRYThen follows a discussion about divorce, in which Boswell takes a prominent part. A few pages later we find Boswell re-starting a topic upon which Johnson, on a former occasion, has no doubt exhibited some warmth of feeling, and, having thought out his own line of argument, is able to lead him on to one of those moments of thunder which he loves to see.
In the course of the argument Johnson exclaims ('very angry'):
The scenes which illustrate perhaps better than any others Boswell's minute interest in his friend and experimenting attitude have already been quoted. In the account of the breakfast at Lochbuy (when Johnson was offered the cold sheep's head) we see how great was his passion for experiment and what a depth of No less a person than Walter Scott, who knew much at first hand from the contemporaries of Johnson and Boswell, and could remember distinctly the tour in Scotland and the discussion it provoked, held this view of the biographer:
Boswell himself explains the visit to Lord Monboddo: 'I knew Lord Monboddo and Dr. Johnson did not love each other; yet ... I was curious to see them together.' It could hardly be supposed that Boswell adopted this attitude without encountering some opposition from Dr. Johnson. The latter evidently wished that a good life of him should be written, and was pleased with Boswell's journal and glad to tell him from time to time about his early life; but there were limits to his endurance. 'I will not be put to the question. Don't you consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with what and why; what is this? what is that? why is a cow's tail long? why is a fox's tail bushy?' 'Sir,' he said on one occasion, 'you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of both.' Boswell indeed was continually taking risks; he compares himself to 'the man who has put his head into the lion's mouth a great many times:' his ordinary method of conversing with Johnson was to push his inquiries to the furthest possible point. His courage in this respect must have been notorious. 'I won a small bet,' he relates on one occasion, 'from Lady Diana Beauclerk, by asking him as to one of his particularities, which her Ladyship said I durst not do. It seems he had been frequently observed at the Club Occasionally Boswell remarks that Johnson was not in a good humour for talking. He must have wondered at such times how long it would take before his irritation would break forth, and he would make some typical utterance. 'But I wonder, Sir,' &c., was a sort of Boswellian formula to be met sooner or later with: 'Sir, you may wonder,' or some similar retort. But what irritated Johnson perhaps more than the endless questions was to be made a 'butt' as he termed it. 'On Monday, September 22, when at breakfast, I unguardedly said to Dr. Johnson, "I wish I saw you and Mrs. Macaulay together!" He grew very angry, and, after a pause, while a cloud gathered on his brow, he burst out: "No, Sir, you would not see us quarrel to make you sport."' Boswell eventually owns that he had wished to see a contest between Mrs. Macaulay and Johnson. It is not to be supposed that Boswell's provocations How much humiliation Boswell was able to support may be seen from Miss Burney's account of a party at Streatham. Boswell, finding that there was no place at the side of Dr. Johnson, had taken up a seat immediately behind and between Dr. Johnson and Miss Burney. It was not very polite, and the discovery of his position by Dr. Johnson was disastrous:
Anything more ignominious could hardly be imagined, and that Boswell was sensitive to a rebuke from the Doctor we cannot doubt. And yet, within a few minutes, he was to run the risk of a second. For some reason or other he wished to leave the room while the ceremony still demanded his presence at the table. The Doctor, calling after him authoritatively, said: 'What are you thinking of, Sir? Why do you get up before the cloth is removed? Come back to your place, Sir!' 'Again,' Miss Burney continues, 'and with equal obsequiousness, Mr. Boswell did as he was bid.' Boswell's behaviour, indeed, on this particular occasion was not heroic. His position near Dr. Johnson cannot have been essential to his purpose of taking notes; he was unwilling to abandon it out of a childish feeling of dignity; he considered it his natural right to sit near the doctor, and was obstinate about it. And it was no experiment of his to leave the room unceremoniously with the purpose of hearing what Dr. Johnson might have to say. But it was heroic of Boswell to put himself continually, and often intentionally, in the way of such rebuffs; for this he undoubtedly did. It was heroic because he had a noble purpose. Boswell was a man of science, and his science was concerned with nothing less than the mind Miss Burney, though she neither understood nor appreciated Boswell, and even disliked him, has no doubt given a truthful picture. It is clear that Boswell suffered from the rebuffs which he received from Johnson. If he endured them on the whole willingly, yet he endured them not without feeling some pain. He could not carry it off; Boswell had no natural dignity; he had a 'jovial bluntness' and a comical air about him, but these could not help him on such occasions, and he was obliged as it were to lose prestige, to appear in fact mean-spirited and servile. Miss Burney tells us also that Johnson generally treated him as a schoolboy. The difference in their His behaviour, however, was not merely undignified and grotesque, it was rude. His whole attitude towards Johnson was a rude one. Curiosity indulged as he indulged it cannot be polite. Johnson told him more than once that he had no manners. Langton said: 'Boswell's conversation consists entirely in asking questions, and is extremely offensive.' Boswell, in fact, as the biographer, was rude not only to Johnson but to the whole company; concerned entirely with his own purpose, he ignored the social obligation. It seems to have been his common habit to sit down, note-book in hand, to record the conversation. Mr. Barclay said that he had seen Boswell lay down his knife and fork, and take out his tablets, in order to register a good anecdote. Mrs. Thrale refers to his 'reporting' as a usual and obnoxious practice.
The habit which annoyed Mrs. Thrale was necessary to Boswell's conception of his task; it involved what he spoke of as his 'authenticity.' To understand what he meant by this, an attitude perhaps not only towards himself, but to the public also, since he wished very much that those who read his book should feel that it was true in every detail, we must examine more nearly Boswell's method of carrying out his biographical plan. It is remarkable that Boswell should have begun his system of recording when quite a young man. A man of forty is more easily forgiven some eccentricity than one of two-and-twenty. Yet we find Boswell, during his travels on the Continent, tablets in hand on his first visit to Paoli, who gives an amusing account of him:
Boswell's method of recording conversations was not completed in these memoranda taken down at the moment. He had, besides these, his journal. It has been remarked already that he began to keep this regularly as early as 1758 during his tour on the Northern Circuit in the company of his father and Lord Hailes, and he tells us something of it at the time of his journey to Greenwich with Johnson in 1763:
In the 'Tour to Corsica,' also, he tells us:
We have then two processes mentioned by which Boswell recorded conversation: the notes taken down Boswell's object was to get his records written up as soon as possible after the events or conversations which he was describing:
It was upon the fact that he trusted, not to his memory, but to 'exact transcript of conversations,' that Boswell based his claim to authenticity.
But it is clear enough that the notes which Boswell made at the time must have been very unlike the final form in which he wrote the dialogue. In the course of conversations in which he himself took part, it would have been impossible without shorthand to make so full a record. The kind of notes which Boswell took may be gathered from the following passage:
It would seem then that what was written down during a conversation was far from including every word which was spoken; it was rather an aid, though a very substantial aid, to memory. We may conjecture that the most important expressions were recorded, and the course of the argument indicated, so as to be intelligible to Boswell, but not even to him, perhaps, after a long To give a full and permanent form to these rough drafts must therefore have been a work of considerable labour; and it is this no doubt that the journal accomplished. We may see in the 'Life' the traces of two kinds of record. For we have sometimes the actual words of the speakers, but at others only the purport of their remarks. What we should naturally suppose—if this theory of the respective functions of the notes and the journal is correct—that the former came from the journal and the latter from the notes taken down at the moment, or sometimes perhaps shortly afterwards—is confirmed by the fact that, when we have only the less complete account, Boswell very often regrets the neglect of his journal, and talks of presenting such scraps as he has; and on one occasion says:
He was obliged in consequence of his neglect to write the text directly from notes; with their aid he filled in what he could remember; but he dispensed with the intermediate assistance of the journal, and the account is therefore far less full. The rough notes of the moment and the elaborate journal made by writing them out at large 'soon after the time'—these, then, form the basis of Boswell's method for preserving Johnson's talk. It is not to be supposed that Boswell strictly adhered to this method on every occasion. He was too much an experimentalist for that; and sometimes it must have been very difficult to take notes. We cannot imagine that when Boswell was alone with Johnson he pulled out 'tablets' in the course of an argument. More probably he seized an opportunity, as soon afterwards as possible, when Johnson was not talking, to put down the more striking phrases and record the point of the discussion. But there must have been some occasions when opportunities did not occur. Johnson, no doubt, became accustomed to his companion's habits and was often willing to help him by telling him details about his early life or dictating the text of a letter for Boswell to write down there and then. But sometimes he was in the mood to resent memoranda; and sometimes the talk was too continuous for Boswell's task to be an easy one. At such times Boswell may have written the journal as well as he could without the notes, and as soon afterwards as possible. At Ashbourne, for instance, in 1777, he may have done this: he was alone with Johnson more than usual, and several discussions made Johnson very angry; he may well have waited to record anything until he wrote the journal, for he
Here again he may well have had in mind a process of writing the journal with no notes to help him. All the original documents from which Boswell compiled the 'Life' are concealed from this generation. There are, however—or at least there were—in existence two of Boswell's note-books. Mr. Fitzgerald relates that in Mr. Pocock's 'Johnsonian Catalogue' there was
This manuscript, if it were to be seen, might reveal more definitely what Boswell's method was. The description of it can do nothing but emphasise the use of the 'tablets'; but its value as evidence depends upon its accuracy with regard to the sequence of the notes: if they were really 'jotted down from day to day,' then they are the 'tablets' without a doubt. The other note-book is 'Boswelliana'; and it is of a different kind.
Emphatically this collection was not 'tablets.' It was probably intended for a particular purpose. Boswell may have had several collections of a similar kind. But it is clear that the purpose of 'Boswelliana' has no connection with the 'Life of Johnson.' The journal itself was kept in quarto and octavo volumes,
One might easily expect that the same words would equally well apply to the 'Life.' But this is not the case. It is reasonable to suppose that the Johnsonian stories in 'Boswelliana' are not less polished than One or two instances of these variations will illustrate Boswell's treatment of his materials; the stories are given below in double columns for purpose of comparison.
A comparison of the two versions of No. 1 reveals at once the brevity of the final form. It is evident, as Mr. Fitzgerald remarks, that the text itself could not have represented the talk as it came from Johnson's lips. 'The whole is too deliberate, too close, too well winnowed, as it were.' Conversation is more discursive. Boswell's method as we see it here is in the first place to compress—to give not the whole of Johnson's words, but only the essence of them. In the result the story in its last state preserves the most important expressions and is more pointed for being shorter. The second story in the table has not been cut down in the same fashion. It illustrates very well another process. It is the process, one may say, of Johnsonising. Not only has the argument, as in the former case, been made clearer and more concise, but the words themselves have been considerably altered. The result indicates the reason of these changes. The version in the 'Life' is stronger and more convincing; it has more of the energy of human tongues. The assertion 'he is lying' has more force than the corresponding question: the 'why, Sir,' introduced before the climax gives the proper snort of war before the culminating triumph of the dilemma. Boswell made these changes that he might retain the spirit of Johnson's talk and the atmosphere of the moment as the listeners felt it. He succeeded whenever he added force and directness; one may easily be convinced of this by A most remarkable instance of the two processes—of compressing and Johnsonising—is furnished by two stories in 'Boswelliana' which become one story in the 'Life.'
The compression and alteration are of the same character as in the two previous stories. The argument is closer and the point clearer; and the effect of the whole is stronger. One verbal change is very striking. One might expect that the image with which Johnson summarises his views would be wholly inviolate. Yet here we see Dover and Calais substituted for Whitechapel and Westminster: probably the reason is that Boswell regrets the phrase he has omitted, 'He is like a man attempting to stride across the English Channel,' and tries to combine the two images. It must not be forgotten that the stories in 'Boswelliana' were probably not used by Boswell in writing the 'Life.' If they were to be written down in full once only, then why not in the proper Johnsonian stores? Or why should this peculiar collection of 'Boswelliana' take precedence? Some of the stories, indeed, must have been in the journal; the record in 'Boswelliana,' for instance, of Johnson's retort about Scotland—the first remark he made to Boswell—cannot be the only record of the famous meeting in Tom Davies' back parlour; clearly Boswell must have It is contended, therefore, that Boswell altered his written Johnsoniana in a way which could account for the differences we have observed between the versions of stories in 'Boswelliana' and those in the 'Life.' This proposition, however, casts no reflection upon his reputation for accuracy. He preserved the 'substance and language'; and if he changed some words he preserved the colouring and made the whole a better representation of Johnson. Boswell himself gives some suggestion of his method when he presents a series of Johnsoniana for which he was indebted to Mr. Langton:
By 'unquestionable authenticity' it was meant, no doubt, that the purport of what Johnson said had been correctly reported. In 'Boswelliana' a story told by Mr. Langton is written out with suggestions for its improvement. It may be quoted as a final example of the manner in which Boswell was partly answerable for the expressions:
The method we have been examining has revealed, in a sense, a second aspect of Boswell as the biographer, the natural complement of that scientific spirit which inspired the acute observation, the delicate experiments, the methodical accuracy; for he brought to the work of recording not merely the faculty for stating truthfully what he had seen, but the power of expressing his feelings; and it was particularly this feeling—an interest at the same time full-blooded, comprehensive and minute—that insisted upon expression. The emotion which compels a man to bind himself to an ideal, and, having determined that something must be done under certain conditions, compels the doing of it without capitulation, is one which enters into many kinds of work and is to be found no doubt very often among scientists; but it is in a peculiar degree the possession of the artist. To him indeed it seems to be essential; for his value depends certainly not more on the quality of what he has to express than on the completeness with which he expresses But how was it that he came so to express himself? And what is it that he succeeded in expressing? Of the impulse to expression and what it meant in Boswell's case something has been said already in these pages. We cannot understand the engine if we forget the power that drives it, and we must emphasise once again the force that Boswell obeyed. His passion for truth was not comprehensive: and it was for the truth of the realist, not the truth of the idealist. It did not include the whole of life; it did not attempt to view the entire scene in correct perspective; and The reasons that made it certain from the beginning that Johnson would become the vehicle for They were in fact to Boswell the most striking and salient qualities of his great hero, and it was necessary therefore that they should be well and completely related. But in the story as we read it, we do not merely observe that the rude victories and uneven justice of Johnson were supremely significant in the eyes of the author. To Boswell the whole personality of Johnson was a source of the keenest pleasure. He took an insatiable delight in it. He loved to imitate the curious gestures and manner of the Doctor. He became, to use his own word, 'Johnsonised'; and no doubt he reached that state which he desired his readers to attain, and both 'talked and thought' Johnson. He was 'strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian Æther'; and when he had drunk his fill and it had all soaked in, it was And the enjoyment, one may say, depending as it did very largely upon a certain dramatic quality of that curious figure, was concerned necessarily very much with the oddities and weaknesses of the man, and particularly with that greatest weakness of all, the abuse of strength. When it is said that Boswell is an artist, it is not meant that the whole of the 'Life of Johnson' was treated artistically. It exhibits, no doubt, a certain elegance of proportion; it is a good composition, well arranged, well spaced; and in as far as it has those qualities we may consider that it belongs to art. But it is not chiefly because, having recorded what happened in a perfectly straightforward manner, he then fitted together the fragments to make as it were a complete model of a man—it is not for the design—that we call Boswell an artist. It is because he did not very often, as we have seen, relate the facts quite simply, but related them in such a manner that the whole atmosphere of the scene, all that is most human and most humorous, strikes upon us. It is in what A characteristic passage relates an attempt to make fun of Johnson by inquiring if he took dancing lessons:
In these few words Boswell has recalled the spirit of the scene. We have a vision of Johnson sitting terrible in the midst, and his hearers feeling and behaving like schoolboys in the presence of some bearish pedagogue. Some one proposes an audacious jest, and all await with eagerness the crucial moment. You may sit upon the edge of a volcano, or you may fire the train which shall explode a planet, but no expectancy is so keen as this.
The explosion unerringly follows, but the rumble dies away in rippling laughter:
Johnson in these scenes of comedy is always the dictator; the elements of the ridiculous are constantly present when someone who behaves with a pompous manner is rarely willing to be laughed at, and Boswell's sense of what was incongruous was near the surface and ready to make merry. The company on one occasion were greatly tickled by a word applied in Johnson's most majestic manner to a rather laughable female character, and the incident furnishes Boswell with material for one of his best descriptions of this kind. Johnson had remarked 'The woman had a bottom of good sense.'
This, like the other scene, is extremely dramatic. Neither would have been so had not the writer himself realised the full humour of the situation. Perhaps the most remarkable quality of the descriptions is the amount left out. JOHNSON'S DICTATORSHIPIn the two passages we have quoted, Boswell has revealed the humour of a situation; those supreme moments of Johnson's dictatorship were to him a never-failing treasure-house of priceless mirth; and he has given us a key which enables us to hear with him the magic thunder, to see each bright flash of the lightning, and with him to laugh the rich mellow laughter because it is so absurd, and yet so inevitable, and so good, that men should have been fashioned so. Boswell delights in showing us the mind of Johnson, how he was prompted like the rest of us by all the little motives of men. He enjoys Johnson's humanity. Sometimes he is more solemn. One great subject is Johnson's tenderness—as in an account of an argument with Sir Joshua about drinking:
The best instance perhaps of Johnson's compunction after rudeness is on the occasion of Dr. Percy's defence of Dr. Mounsey:
Later, in the course of conversation, Johnson denied any merit to Swift for writing 'The Conduct of the Allies'; then
The compunction, however, on this occasion seems to have had a short duration, for Boswell goes on to say:
THE JOHNSONIAN FLAVOURBoswell seems to have had the power of picking out all that was characteristic and important, of ruthlessly discarding unnecessary details and presenting only the salient points, of seeing a scene as a whole, with its more vivid colours flashing out as it were from a dull background, so that the whole impression is complete and clear. The smallest conversations, as we saw, were dealt with in this way. And as he 'Johnsonised' the talk which he had himself taken down, and 'Johnsonised' the stories given to him by Mr. Langton, he 'Johnsonised' in the same way these larger scenes. While retaining most of the words used by Johnson himself, Boswell seems to have added here and there a characteristic expression to make the whole more pointed, and to have compressed it all till it preserved nothing but the true Johnsonian flavour. ..... In all this, the artistic part of his work, Boswell was expressing his own conception of Johnson. But it has been doubted by some whether this is a true view of him, or whether the whole is not overdrawn. Dr. Birkbeck Hill says that Johnson was drawn by Boswell as 'too awful.' It is indeed, as has been said before, the awfulness of Johnson which Boswell had in mind when he wrote It must be remarked, at the outset, that several individuals may have quite different impressions of one man. Not only do the observers emphasise different qualities, so that the same person might be described by one as kind and affectionate, and by another as sentimental and stupid, without either account being untrue, except in so far as it is incomplete, but a man's behaviour often varies with the company. The truth of Boswell, since he expressed quite truthfully his own impressions, would be in nowise confounded if it were discovered that the majority did not share his view of Johnson; still less if he had seen what they saw, while they had not seen what he revealed. But the fact is that Boswell's conception of Johnson as being 'awful' was the common one. The idea that he was not so is probably derived from Miss Burney's 'Diary.' It will be remembered, however, that Johnson's behaviour to Miss Burney was quite unlike his behaviour to the great majority of people: she was chosen to be the special object of his gallantry. It was extremely pleasant for her; she was naturally pleased to be continually the recipient of the most charming compliments; and her 'Diary' tells us all about it. Boswell was well aware that to her I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam; so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself. Miss Burney indeed can hardly be excused for not giving her assistance to Boswell, since she afterwards talks of vindicating Johnson to his King and Queen, It must also be remembered that Boswell, though he loves to relate the roughness of Johnson and his imperiousness, is always at pains to show that he was a really kind and considerate man, and even seems to make allowance for the possibility that he has made the harshness too prominent, and takes care to explain that it was not so common as might be supposed:
Boswell is prepared to admit, as he is obliged to do, the dogmatist and the fighter in Johnson, but not that he was in the ordinary way disagreeable.
It will be seen from his lengthy defence of Johnson against what he considered a common accusation and an unjust one, and it may be seen also from other It is not to be supposed that the conception of Johnson's 'awfulness' depended entirely upon his capacity for giving rude blows to his antagonists in conversation. There is a certain gravity of demeanour, amounting almost to pompousness, which Boswell loves to depict. It may seem that the Doctor is not sufficiently good-humoured. No doubt it was Boswell's particular delight to represent the majesty of the great man of letters, and the many occasions on which Johnson is jovial and pleasant are, for him perhaps, the exceptions to a rule. But how many there are! The 'Tour to the Hebrides' especially (and in considering Boswell's presentation of Johnson we must consider always the 'Tour' with the 'Life') is full of instances of this kind of behaviour. It was indeed a serious departure from Boswell's ideal that the Rambler should take upon his knee a Highland lady, but it would be difficult to count the number of times that Johnson is reported quite naturally to have laughed and to have been good-humoured. He is even reported to have perverted a line of Shakespeare, with the spontaneous merrymaking of a schoolboy, to Boswell perhaps does not give the picture of affability and even gaiety which Miss Burney gives; but her account too is qualified. 'Dr. Johnson,' she says, 'has more fun and comical humour, and love of nonsense about him, than almost anybody I ever saw: I mean when with those he likes; for otherwise he can be as severe and as bitter as report relates him.' The criticism which could perhaps be made with most justice of the Johnson whom we know from Boswell is that he is not playful enough. Miss Burney's Johnson may seem a jollier man. She alludes to his 'love of nonsense' and 'a turn for burlesque humour.' Boswell, in the preface to the second edition of "With Reynolds' pencil, vivid, bold, and true, So fervent Boswell gives him to our view: In every trait we see his mind expand; The master rises by the pupil's hand. We love the writer, praise his happy vein, Grac'd with the naÏvetÉ of the sage Montaigne. Hence not alone are brighter parts display'd, But e'en the specks of character pourtray'd: We see the Rambler with fastidious smile...." Four years of life remained to Boswell after the publication of the great biography. His death came at the due moment; he was not cut off in the midst of a great undertaking or in the course of an important development. It is inconceivable that, had he lived, he would have produced another biography which should be comparable to the 'Life of Johnson.' An autobiography he might indeed have written, but there is no sign that he was engaged upon such a work in the closing years, or that the idea had taken definite shape in his mind; his nature was rather that of the casual autobiographer, such as we find him in the 'Life' from time to time, and particularly in the 'Letters to Temple'; and it is doubtful whether his autobiography, if ever it had been written, would have added much to letters and diaries which were no doubt in existence, though not preserved for our eyes. Several questions naturally present themselves when we consider the end of a man's life. Has he been successful? What is his position in the world? Do men respect him? Do they love him? Boswell, we had occasion to remark before, had not been, in the ordinary sense, successful. He had always been ambitious; he had wanted to be 'the great man'; he had coveted the world's honours; he would have liked to be busy with the affairs of a nation, or, at the least, to have been reputed a leading barrister. But the glory which fell to the lot of those who governed this country was withheld from Boswell; in the legal and political spheres he failed. The one post which he obtained, as Recorder of Carlisle—and it was one of no importance—he resigned in 1790, because he could no longer brook the overbearing behaviour of an insolent patron. Certainly Boswell was far from attaining such fame as he desired; but at the same time he had a very remarkable success. What then was Boswell's reputation among his contemporaries? The literary world had welcomed the 'Tour to the Hebrides'; men of discrimination had seen that it was a very remarkable book. And yet Boswell's talents won little respect from this performance. It was amazingly indiscreet; and censure was more readily bestowed upon the author's indiscretion than praise upon his art. It was easy to account for the interest of the book, as Gray and Walpole had accounted for the charm of the 'Tour in Corsica,' by the peculiarities of the writer; and though to many so shallow an explanation must have been unsatisfactory, it detracted from Boswell's reputation as a man of letters. Moreover, the caricaturists were always busy with Boswell's oddities: the 'Tour to the Hebrides' provided ample store for the exercise of their wit, and the persistency of their ridicule no doubt hindered the recognition of Boswell's talents. When the 'Life of Johnson' was published, the subject of Boswell and Johnson had been somewhat played out. A number of 'Lives' of Johnson had already appeared; besides Hawkins, Mrs. Thrale, and Murphy, several less known pens had made use of so promising a subject. The public interest in Johnson had begun to wane. The sale of Boswell's 'Life' was actually rather less rapid than was expected. This was, on the whole, an advantage. The work obtained a less hasty and more serious consideration. Some who would have bought the book five years before, when the subject was fresh, Boswell's reputation as a serious writer certainly gained enormously from the 'Life of Johnson.' It gained, in fact, disproportionately. The plan and scope of the 'Life' are larger than that of the 'Tour'; but the earlier book exhibits in their maturity, and equally well, all the qualities for which we most value Boswell. It was the later work, however, that brought honour to Boswell. The publication of the magnum opus in April 1791 led to a distinction which he can hardly have expected. 'In July 1791,' we read in Taylor's 'Life of Reynolds,' 'Boswell to his great delight was appointed Secretary for Foreign Correspondence to the Academy in lieu of Baretti. The newspapers abounded in squibs at his appointment, for Bozzy's weaknesses were favourite game with the small wits.' The announcement, with its double import of respect It was easy not to respect Boswell; it was difficult not to love him. He was a 'truly social' man. 'His conversation talents were always pleasing and often fascinating.' The testimony as to his radiating good humour is unanimous. Dr. Rogers in describing his personal appearance says 'his well-set features beamed with perpetual good humour,' and certainly the portraits bear him out. 'It was impossible,' remarked a contemporary, 'to look upon his face without being moved by the comicality which always reigned upon it.' Malone, replying to a detractor of Boswell, wrote:
It would be tedious to discuss Boswell's character with reference to his popularity, explaining the various qualities which were or were not attractive in him. A good-natured and affectionate disposition, supported by high spirits, gives the key to many hearts; and Boswell's lack of dignity, and even his weaknesses, may have endeared him still more, when it was considered that there was nothing low or mean about him. Popular he certainly was; he had many acquaintances and also a number of very good friends. Boswell, though he was volatile enough in some of his relations with the opposite sex, was very constant in his real
Courtenay, Dempster and Sir William Forbes were all old friends, and friends to the last. Forbes was Boswell's literary executor in company with Malone and Temple. Malone's acquaintance with Boswell was He was 'extremely warm in his attachments,' Malone tells us. He also pays a striking tribute to his devotion to Dr. Johnson and his intellectual abilities:
Mr. Malone ends his letter by paying a final tribute to the affection of Boswell's friends:
..... Life is commonly somewhat of a battle. Blows are given and received. Flags are lost and won. Positions are captured and surrendered. Limbs are crushed and amputated. There are many ugly wounds; some bleed and fester; some are healed. It is natural to look back on life, as the general surveys the battlefield and the hospitals, to count the score. At the Boswell was not an old man when he died; and apart from the prostration caused by ill-health—for he was frequently ill towards the close of his life—his robust vigour seems hardly to have diminished. In July 1790, a year after Mrs. Boswell's death, he seems already to entertain some matrimonial scheme. In his whole outlook upon life Boswell, in fact, changed very little. He had failed in the main battle;
He still was building castles in the air of the old type; still, sometimes, he took an opportunity to be 'conspicuous' and made conscious efforts to 'be the great man.' Almost simultaneously with the 'Life,' he published a political poem, 'No Abolition of Slavery, or The Universal Empire of Love.' It was of a semi-frivolous nature, the argument being drawn from a premise that slavery is the most agreeable of 'goods,' when it is enforced by the chains of loving devotion. The name of Miss Bagnal is introduced, and it is difficult to tell whether the whole may not be an elaborate attempt to bring off a marriage with that
A rumour of war with Russia also rouses the public spirit of Boswell to seek distinction, and he hesitates
At the end of his life Boswell had not deserted his ambition, and, as far as we can tell, he had not forgotten his disappointment. There are few 'Letters to Temple' during these last few years, and it is difficult to form an exact idea of Boswell's state of mind. For the year 1792 we have only one note of a few lines: it begins, 'Still I cannot write a long letter.' These words suggest, though they do not prove, that Boswell had been in low spirits; for such a condition was frequently a reason for neglecting to write. For the following year there are three letters. In the first, Boswell refers to the pain it gives him to visit Auchinleck; in the second, he discusses with remorse his habit of indulgence in wine; in the third, he says 'My spirits are somewhat better, but by no means right yet.' It is probable that Boswell wrote more regularly in 1794, but only one letter to Temple exists. This, the last The old standards had not changed. The same weights and measures, which were adopted early in life, still at the end of it were used to determine the deeds of men and fix their value. And yet a change had come. In the 'Letters to Temple' a certain difference of tone may be distinguished after Boswell lost his wife. It was partly that he began fully to realise the failure of his ambitious plans; and it was still more a different attitude which that realisation involved. When a man discovers that he cannot get what he wants, he is apt to pay more attention to what he already has. Though literature did not supply for Boswell the wine of life, it had always attracted him very strongly. He had a taste for books and a very keen desire for The scale of Boswell's literary efforts towards the end of his life is the measure of his satisfaction in the performance, and this satisfaction, though it did not
Pursues the triumph, and partakes the gale. Boswell is equally triumphant about the 'Life':
It was not merely literary fame that so much delighted Boswell: it was literary fame of the best sort. The most respected of Johnson's friends and the best critics had praised his book. Boswell could now feel secure in his own conviction that his 'Life' was beyond comparison as a portrait of a man and as a portrait of Johnson:
Boswell goes on to explain that the 'Hero,' like Ulysses, 'in the whole course of the History, is exhibited by the authour for the best advantage of his readers.' So certain is he of the merits of his book that he tells his readers, in so many words, that, if they do not like it, their own bad temper is to blame.
Boswell's satisfaction with his literary labours was certainly well-founded. It is fair to remind those who may condemn this attitude that he allowed an unduly large share of the book's merits to Dr. Johnson. It is not remarkable for an author to feel as self-satisfied as Boswell. Many authors tell their readers, though not so frankly, that they ought to be interested in a book, and few give so good reasons as Boswell gave. The point has been laboured here in order to illustrate the final stage in his paradoxical development; to show in what degree Boswell, while realising failure in all his magnificent dreams, was satisfied with the fame he had of another sort. Assuredly he was pleased with what he had; the degree may be judged from this final extract from the Advertisement to the Second Edition:
Boswell, after all, had changed very little since the publication of the 'Tour in Corsica' in his desire for literary fame, but he must have had a very different view of what it meant. In early life this literary ambition was but one aspect of the prevailing idea, to be 'the great man'; and he intended to win respect through literature as a wise and honoured 'citizen of the world.' He cannot have retained this delusion after publishing the 'Tour to the Hebrides.' It was in the very month when the 'Life' appeared that he spoke of 'the disappointment of my hopes of success in life.' There was no thought that the 'Life' would redeem these hopes. It was to win praise and bring esteem: but not in the same sphere with these 'hopes of success.' Boswell's literary fame ..... Such changes as may be observed in Boswell towards the end of his life arose, it must be repeated, from the failure of his political and legal ambitions. When he ceased to pursue the adventures suggested by his wild imagination, he paid more attention to the natural interests of his position. He was a landlord and a father; and his children had now no mother. Boswell not only accepted his responsibilities, but performed something more than his duty. When Boswell had left Auchinleck and came to live in London, his opportunities for interesting himself in the welfare of his tenants and dependants were naturally curtailed. With the strict view of a landlord's obligations which is commonly held in this age, we may be inclined to condemn Boswell simply on the ground that he did not live upon his estate. But, though Ayrshire is a far cry from London, the Laird of Auchinleck did not forget his position. He was willing to travel to Scotland 'to transact business with my tenants.' On one occasion, in 1793, he undertook the journey in order to see that the parish was provided
'Seldom,' exclaims Dr. Rogers, 'has Scottish landlord evinced greater consideration for his tenantry and domestics.' As a father, Boswell was no less kind. He had had six children altogether, three sons and three daughters;
That Boswell could stint himself in this way for his children shows a larger degree of self-sacrifice than might be expected from one of his extravagant tastes. It shows also a development in his character. The old passion for being conspicuous could now be put aside for the sake of his children. Boswell, in fact, became less extravagant and affected towards the end of life. He was less often carried away by his 'warm imagination.' He lived less in his 'castles in the air,' and nearer the solid earth. ..... The next cause of this development is not far to seek. It lies in the result of the main struggle in Boswell's life. Truth had won the day. The irrepressible quality of Boswell's genius had triumphed in spite of his Nothing in Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is more remarkable, as nothing is more charming, than the author's candour when his own person is concerned. He does not obtrude himself upon the reader's notice; he relates the events quite naturally as they occurred. And though Boswell was not a little vain, he was able to relate what was not to his credit. Most of the stories of Boswell's folly we know from himself. He has recorded the sledge-hammer blows of Johnson provoked by his own absurdity; he has told us of occasions when he lacked in manners, even when, more than once, he was drunk in a lady's drawing-room; he has described at length, in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' the story of a carouse at Corrichatachin, and has not failed to mention how very ill he felt next morning, and how much he dreaded Johnson's rebuke; it is in his own account that we read of the ridiculous figure he cut in a storm at sea; it is from his own correspondence with Johnson that we learn of all the weaknesses that earned the Doctor's reproof. Boswell was perfectly conscious of his folly when he allowed us to see the absurdity of his behaviour. He was sometimes conscious, at the moment, of provoking ridicule. Occasionally, as he takes care to explain, he deliberately planned his own discomfiture:
CONCIOUSNESS OF ABSURDITYThis was a common attitude. It has been discussed before in these pages with reference to Boswell's biographical method. Boswell even mentions once that he spoke 'with an assumed air of ignorance, to incite him to talk, for which it was often necessary to employ some address.' He realised well enough that he made the best possible foil to Johnson. And if he was able to understand his position in these undignified moments, still more must he have been conscious of it when he allowed his records to be printed many years afterwards in the 'Life.' He tells us as much himself in the Dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds:
Boswell's statement speaks for itself. He realised as well as anyone his own vanity and affectation. It had been necessary when writing Johnson's 'Life' to apply the searching light of truth indiscriminately. Boswell had not flinched from applying it to himself: on the contrary it amused him to do so. He enjoyed his own absurdities as he enjoyed those of Johnson himself and of every other figure portrayed with good-humoured ridicule in the course of his great book. Boswell, we may be sure, laughed wherever his readers may laugh: indeed his readers laugh at all only because he himself laughed so whole-heartedly. Assuredly the laughter which comes when the searching light is turned inwards is not without a lasting effect. The desire for dignity in some measure And so, in the end, the truth of Boswell, his innate and unquenchable candour, not only won a victory, but spoiled the enemy. We may observe, if we care to, that the natural development has taken place. Much of the old affectation has disappeared. Boswell, to the last, is still tempted to give rein to that 'warm imagination'; but now as a rule the impulse is checked with a smile by a moment of self-consciousness. The development is clearly to be seen in the 'Letters to Temple,' and one instance will suffice to illustrate his attitude. Boswell, when telling of his intention of visiting Auchinleck, for the purpose related before in these pages of choosing a minister for the parish, cannot refrain from exclaiming in the old manner, 'Only think, Temple, how serious a duty I am about to discharge!'
Boswell was not systematic in his self-examination; but he came to know himself with a truer judgment than most men have where self is concerned. His principles had been ill carried out; his ideals had not been comprehensive. He had neglected the personal discipline which we look to see in men of power and in men who have accomplished important matters; he had neglected to train his mind to deal with all the problems of life. His grasp upon the whole scheme of things was feeble, as his control of himself was limited. And yet this knowledge of self with the good-humoured laugh—and it was not unaccompanied by fervent regret for his weakness, and anxious piety—this knowledge, which is the key to all right knowing, was a fitting achievement for one whose predominant interest was Human Nature, and whose prevailing passion was Truth. I believe there is still at Auchinleck the manuscript of a diary and some letters, but I have not been permitted to see them. Undoubtedly Boswell must have left far more than these. A " B " C " D " E " F " G " H " I " J " K " L " M " N " O " P " R " S " T " U " V " W " Y " Z A
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