Boswell's position in English literature cannot be disputed, nor can
he ever be displaced from it. He has written our greatest biography.
That is all. Theorize about it as much as you like, account for it how
you may, the fact remains. 'Alone I did it.' There has been plenty of
theorizing. Lord Macaulay took the subject in hand and tossed it up
and down for half a dozen pages with a gusto that drove home to many
minds the conviction, the strange conviction, that our greatest
biography was written by one of the very smallest men that ever lived,
'a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect'--by a dunce, a parasite,
and a coxcomb; by one 'who, if he had not been a great fool, would
never have been a great writer.' So far Macaulay, _anno Domini_ 1831,
in the vigorous pages of the _Edinburgh Review_. A year later appears
in _Fraser's Magazine_ another theory by another hand, not then
famous, Mr. Thomas Carlyle. I own to an inordinate affection for Mr.
Carlyle as 'literary critic' As philosopher and sage, he has served
our turn. We have had the fortune, good or bad, to outlive him; and
our sad experience is that death makes a mighty difference to all but
the very greatest. The sight of the author of _Sartor Resartus_ in a
Chelsea omnibus, the sound of Dr. Newman's voice preaching to a small
congregation in Birmingham, kept alive in our minds the vision of
their greatness--it seemed then as if that greatness could know no
limit; but no sooner had they gone away, than somehow or another
one became conscious of some deficiency in their intellectual
positions--the tide of human thought rushed visibly by them, and it
became plain that to no other generation would either of these men be
what they had been to their own. But Mr. Carlyle as literary critic
has a tenacious grasp, and Boswell was a subject made for his hand.
'Your Scottish laird, says an English naturalist of those days, may be
defined as the hungriest and vainest of all bipeds yet known.' Carlyle
knew the type well enough. His general description of Boswell is
savage:
'Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the
general eye, visible, palpable to the dullest. His good qualities,
again, belonged not to the time he lived in; were far from common
then; indeed, in such a degree were almost unexampled; not
recognisable, therefore, by everyone; nay, apt even, so strange
had they grown, to be confounded with the very vices they lay
contiguous to and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and
good liver, gluttonously fond of whatever would yield him a little
solacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable
enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler, had much of the
sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced, too,
with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much
when the tailor by a court suit had made a new man of him; that he
appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a riband imprinted
"Corsica Boswell" round his hat, and, in short, if you will, lived
no day of his life without saying and doing more than one
pretentious ineptitude, all this unhappily is evident as the sun at
noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. In
that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker
fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure
and scent it from afar, in those big cheeks, hanging like
half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more, in that
coarsely-protruded shelf mouth, that fat dew-lapped chin; in all
this who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility
enough? The underpart of Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish
character.'
This is character-painting with a vengeance. Portrait of a Scotch
laird by the son of a Scotch peasant. Carlyle's Boswell is to me the
very man. If so, Carlyle's paradox seems as great as Macaulay's, for
though Carlyle does not call Boswell a great fool in plain set terms,
he goes very near it. But he keeps open a door through which he
effects his escape. Carlyle sees in Bozzy 'the old reverent feeling of
discipleship, in a word, hero-worship.'
'How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love and the recognition
and vision which love can lend, epitomizes nightly the words of
Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and so, little by little,
unconsciously works together for us a whole "Johnsoniad"--a more
free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for many
centuries has been drawn by man of man.'
This I think is a little overdrawn. That Boswell loved Johnson, God
forbid I should deny. But that he was inspired only by love to write
his life, I gravely question. Boswell was, as Carlyle has said, a
greedy man--and especially was he greedy of fame--and he saw in his
revered friend a splendid subject for artistic biographic treatment.
Here is where both Macaulay and Carlyle are, as I suggest, wrong.
Boswell was a fool, but only in the sense in which hundreds of great
artists have been fools; on his own lines, and across his own bit of
country, he was no fool. He did not accidentally stumble across
success, but he deliberately aimed at what he hit. Read his preface
and you will discover his method. He was as much an artist as either
of his two famous critics. Where Carlyle goes astray is in attributing
to discipleship what was mainly due to a dramatic sense. However,
theories are no great matter.
Our means of knowledge of James Boswell are derived mainly from
himself; he is his own incriminator. In addition to the life there is
the Corsican tour, the Hebrides tour, the letters to Erskine and to
Temple, and a few insignificant occasional publications in the shape
of letters to the people of Scotland, etc. With these before him it is
impossible for any biographer to approach Bozzy in a devotional
attitude; he was all Carlyle calls him. Our sympathies are with his
father, who despised him, and with his son, who was ashamed of him. It
is indeed strange to think of him staggering, like the drunkard he
was, between these two respectable and even stately figures--the
Senator of the Court of Justice and the courtly scholar and antiquary.
And yet it is to the drunkard humanity is debtor. Respectability is
not everything.
Boswell had many literary projects and ambitions, and never intended
to be known merely as the biographer of Johnson. He proposed to write
a life of Lord Kames and to compose memoirs of Hume. It seems he did
write a life of Sir Robert Sibbald. He had other plans in his head,
but dissipation and a steadily increasing drunkenness destroyed them
all. As inveterate book-hunter, I confess to a great fancy to lay
hands on his _Dorando: A Spanish Tale_, a shilling book published in
Edinburgh during the progress of the once famous Douglas case, and
ordered to be suppressed as contempt of court after it had been
through three editions. It is said, probably hastily, that no copy is
known to exist--a dreary fate which, according to Lord Macaulay, might
have attended upon the _Life of Johnson_ had the copyright of that
work become the property of Boswell's son, who hated to hear it
mentioned. It is not, however, very easy to get rid of any book once
it is published, and I do not despair of reading _Dorando_ before I
die.