* * * * *
We will not multiply instances of this scandalous inaccuracy. It is
clear that a writer who, even when warned by the text on which he is
commenting, falls into such mistakes as these, is entitled to no
confidence whatever. Mr. Croker has committed an error of five years
with respect to the publication of Goldsmith's novel, an error of twelve
years with respect to the publication of part of Gibbon's History, an
error of twenty-one years with respect to an event in Johnson's life so
important as the taking of the doctoral degree. Two of these three
errors he has committed, while ostentatiously displaying his own
accuracy, and correcting what he represents as the loose assertions of
others. How can his readers take on trust his statements concerning the
births, marriages, divorces, and deaths of a crowd of people, whose
names are scarcely known to this generation? It is not likely that a
person who is ignorant of what almost everybody knows can know that of
which almost everybody is ignorant. We did not open this book with any
wish to find blemishes in it. We have made no curious researches. The
work itself, and a very common knowledge of literary and political
history, have enabled us to detect the mistakes which we have pointed
out, and many other mistakes of the same kind. We must say, and we say
it with regret, that we do not consider the authority of Mr. Croker,
unsupported by other evidence, as sufficient to justify any writer who
may follow him in relating a single anecdote or in assigning a date to a
single event.
Mr. Croker shows almost as much ignorance and heedlessness in his
criticisms as in his statements concerning facts. Dr. Johnson said, very
reasonably as it appears to us, that some of the satires of Juvenal are
too gross for imitation. Mr. Croker, who, by the way, is angry with
Johnson for defending Prior's tales against the charge of indecency,
resents this aspersion on Juvenal, and indeed refuses to believe that
the doctor can have said anything so absurd. "He probably said--some
_passages_ of them--for there are none of Juvenal's satires to which the
same objection may be made as to one of Horace's, that it is
_altogether_ gross and licentious."[1] Surely Mr. Croker can never have
read the second and ninth satires of Juvenal.
[1] I. 167.
Indeed the decisions of this editor on points of classical learning,
though pronounced in a very authoritative tone, are generally such that,
if a schoolboy under our care were to utter them, our soul assuredly
should not spare for his crying. It is no disgrace to a gentleman who
has been engaged during near thirty years in political life that he has
forgotten his Greek and Latin. But he becomes justly ridiculous if, when
no longer able to construe a plain sentence, he affects to sit in
judgment on the most delicate questions of style and metre. From one
blunder, a blunder which no good scholar would have made, Mr. Croker was
saved, as he informs us, by Sir Robert Peel, who quoted a passage
exactly in point from Horace. We heartily wish that Sir Robert, whose
classical attainments are well known, had been more frequently
consulted. Unhappily he was not always at his friend's elbow; and we
have therefore a rich abundance of the strangest errors. Boswell has
preserved a poor epigram by Johnson, inscribed "Ad Lauram parituram."
Mr. Croker censures the poet for applying the word puella to a lady in
Laura's situation, and for talking of the beauty of Lucina. "Lucina," he
says, "was never famed for her beauty."[1] If Sir Robert Peel had seen
this note, he probably would have again refuted Mr. Croker's criticisms
by an Appeal to Horace. In the secular ode, Lucina is used as one of the
names of Diana, and the beauty of Diana is extolled by all the most
orthodox doctors of the ancient mythology, from Homer in his Odyssey, to
Claudian in his Rape of Proserpine. In another ode, Horace describes
Diana as the goddess who assists the "laborantes utero puellas." But we
are ashamed to detain our readers with this fourth-form learning.
* * * * *
A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the
editor boasts of having added to those of Boswell and Malone consists of
the flattest and poorest reflections, reflections such as the least
intelligent reader is quite competent to make for himself, and such as
no intelligent reader would think it worth while to utter aloud. They
remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting
annotations which are penciled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on
the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries;
"How beautiful!" "Cursed Prosy!" "I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at
all." "I think Pelham is a sad dandy." Mr. Croker is perpetually
stopping us in our progress through the most delightful narrative in the
language, to observe that really Dr. Johnson was very rude, that he
talked more for victory than for truth, that his taste for port wine
with capillaire in it was very odd, that Boswell was impertinent, that
it was foolish in Mrs. Thrale to marry the music-master; and so forth.
We cannot speak more favourably of the manner in which the notes are
written than of the matter of which they consist. We find in every page
words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest
rules of grammar. We have the vulgarism of "mutual friend," for "common
friend." We have "fallacy" used as synonymous with "falsehood." We have
many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that which follows:
"Lord Erskine was fond of this anecdote; he told it to the editor the
first time that he had the honour of being in his company." Lastly, we
have a plentiful supply of sentences resembling those which we subjoin.
"Markland, _who_, with Jortin and Thirlby, Johnson calls three
contemporaries of great eminence."[2] "Warburton himself did not feel,
as Mr. Boswell was disposed to think he did, kindly or gratefully _of_
Johnson."[3] "It was _him_ that Horace Walpole called a man who never
made a bad figure but as an author."[4] One or two of these solecisms
should perhaps be attributed to the printer, who has certainly done his
best to fill both the text and the notes with all sorts of blunders. In
truth, he and the editor have between them made the book so bad, that we
do not well see how it could have been worse.
[2] IV. 377.
[3] IV. 415.
[4] II. 461.
When we turn from the commentary of Mr. Croker to the work of our old
friend Boswell, we find it not only worse printed than in any other
edition with which we are acquainted, but mangled in the most wanton
manner. Much that Boswell inserted in his narrative is, without the
shadow of a reason, degraded to the appendix. The editor has also taken
upon himself to alter or omit passages which he considers as indecorous.
This prudery is quite unintelligible to us. There is nothing immoral in
Boswell's book, nothing which tends to inflame the passions. He
sometimes uses plain words. But if this be a taint which requires
expurgation, it would be desirable to begin by expurgating the morning
and evening lessons. The delicate office which Mr. Croker has undertaken
he has performed in the most capricious manner. One strong, old-fashioned,
English word, familiar to all who read their Bibles, is
changed for a softer synonyme in some passages, and suffered to stand
unaltered in others. In one place a faint allusion made by Johnson to an
indelicate subject, an allusion so faint that, till Mr. Croker's note
pointed it out to us, we had never noticed it, and of which we are quite
sure that the meaning would never be discovered by any of those for
whose sake books are expurgated, is altogether omitted. In another
place, a coarse and stupid jest of Dr. Taylor on the subject, expressed
in the broadest language, almost the only passage, as far as we
remember, in all Boswell's book, which we should have been inclined to
leave out, is suffered to remain.
We complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions.
We have half of Mrs. Thrale's book, scraps of Mr. Tyers, scraps of Mr.
Murphy, scraps of Mr. Cradock, long prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and
connecting observations by Mr. Croker himself, inserted into the midst
of Boswell's text.
* * * * *
The _Life of Johnson_ is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is
not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more
decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the
first of orators than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no
second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not
worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human
intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men
that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest
men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to
give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who
knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described
him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not
having been alive when the _Dunciad_ was written. Beauclerk used his
name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of
the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater
part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some
eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was
always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown
unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself,
at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled
Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription
of
Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at
Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and
impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with
family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born
gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common
butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know everybody who was
talked about, that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we
have been told, for an introduction to _Tom Paine_, so vain of the most
childish distinctions, that when he had been to court he drove to the
office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and
summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword;
such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Everything
which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which
would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and
clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he
said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled
with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on
waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayerbook and took a hair of
the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away
maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his
babies because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how he was
frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as
they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one
evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent
he was to the Duchess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put
down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his
impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom
laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to
all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious
rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his
vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he
displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that
he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a
parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill;
but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.
That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world
is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted
themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has
indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works.
Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an
inspired idiot, and by another as a being
Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll.
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders
would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But
these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses.
Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a
great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the
qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he
lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery,
the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have
produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a
Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues,
an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal
hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without
delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was
hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to
derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important
department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as
Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers,
Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single
remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which
is not either common-place or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary
gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates,
may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would
be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations
made by himself in the course of conversation.
Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the
intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his
own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling.
Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally
considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He
had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These
qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of
themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a
dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.
Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are most utterly
worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of the
character of the writer. Bad in themselves, they are good dramatically,
like the nonsense of Justice Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius,
or the misplaced consonants of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is
the most candid.
* * * * *
Johnson came among [the distinguished writers of his age] the solitary
specimen of a past age, the last survivor of the genuine race of Grub
Street hacks; the last of that generation of authors whose abject misery
and whose dissolute manners had furnished inexhaustible matter to the
satirical genius of Pope. From nature he had received an uncouth figure,
a diseased constitution, and an irritable temper. The manner in which
the earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to his
demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities appalling
to the civilised beings who were the companions of his old age. The
perverse irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his
fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of
sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity,
his active benevolence, contrasted with the constant rudeness and the
occasional ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion
of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a
complete original. An original he was, undoubtedly, in some respects.
But if we possessed full information concerning those who shared his
early hardships, we should probably find that what we call his
singularities of manner were, for the most part, failings which he had
in common with the class to which he belonged. He ate at Streatham Park
as he had been used to eat behind the screen at St. John's Gate, when he
was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He ate as it was natural that a
man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed the
morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The
habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with
fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He could fast;
but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with
the veins swelling on his forehead, and the perspiration running down
his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it, he drank
it greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated
symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such deadly
malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The roughness and violence
which he showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper,
not naturally gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities,
by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of
creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools, by
the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all
food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that
deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through all these things the
ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to
eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power,
he should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his heart was
undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be
harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only
sympathy, but munificent relief. But for the suffering which a harsh
word inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of
suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his
shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets. He turned his house
into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could
find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude
weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him
ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the
pangs of wounded affection. He had seen and felt so much of sharp
misery, that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to
think that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as
himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a
head-ache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road, or
the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his phrase, "foppish
lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so
full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because the Good-natured Man
had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not
good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless
they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little.
People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep, he said,
for such events; but all that could be expected of a plain man was not
to laugh. He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock
dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such grief he
considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A
washer-woman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have
sobbed herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental
grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others
in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could not understand how a
sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. "My dear
doctor," said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call
him Holofernes?" "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, "who is the
worse for being talked of uncharitably?" Politeness has been well
defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not
because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller
to him than to people who had never known what it was to live for
fourpence halfpenny a day.
The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union of great
powers with low prejudices. If we judged of him by the best parts of his
mind, we should place him almost as high as he was placed by the
idolatry of Boswell; if by the worst parts of his mind, we should place
him even below Boswell himself. Where he was not under the influence of
some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which prevented him
from boldly and fairly investigating a subject, he was a wary and acute
reasoner, a little too much inclined to scepticism, and a little too
fond of paradox. No man was less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies
in argument, or by exaggerated statements of facts. But, if while he was
beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish
prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well managed nursery,
came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind dwindled
away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness.
Those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were now
as much astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the
fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature had
overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might seemed equal to a
contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his small
prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon.
* * * * *
The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our
readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost
superfluous to point them out. It is well-known that he made less use
than any other eminent writer of those strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon
or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our
language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long
after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and
Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised must be
considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the king's English.
His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets,
till it became as stiff as the best of an exquisite, his antithetical
forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no
opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little
things, his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful
and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the
expression of our great old writers, all these peculiarities have been
imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public
has become sick of the subject.
Goldsmith said to him, very wittily, and very justly, "If you were to
write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little
fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for
personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a
disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or
a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style.
His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him
under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the
poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her
reception at the country-house of her relations, in such terms as these:
"I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find,
instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always
promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused
wildness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every
face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla
informs us, that she "had not passed the earlier part of life without
the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph; but had danced the
round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the gratulations of
applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the
sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the
obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of
love." Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with
a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with honest Sir Hugh Evans,
"I like not when a 'oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under
her muffler."[5]
[5] It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very close
resemblance to a passage in the _Rambler_ (No. 20). The resemblance
may possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism.
We had something more to say. But our article is already too long; and
we must close it. We would fain part in good humour from the hero, from
the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed
his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced
us to read Boswell's book again. As we close it, the club-room is before
us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons
for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the
canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin
form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of
Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in
his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar
to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the
gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the
scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and paired to the
quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see
the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why,
sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, Sir!" and the "You don't
see your way through the question, sir!"
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be
regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion. To
receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius
have in general received from posterity! To be more intimately known to
posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of
fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most
durable. The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to
be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner
and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought,
would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English
language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.