His Destiny.
It has been Boswell's fate to be universally read and almost as
universally despised. What he suffered at the hands of Croker and
Macaulay is typical of his fortune. In character, in politics, in
attainments, in capacity, the two were poles apart; but they were agreed
in this: that Boswell must be castigated and contemned, and that they
were the men to do it. Croker's achievement, consider it how you will,
remains the most preposterous in literary history. He could see nothing
in the _Life_ but a highly entertaining compilation greatly in need of
annotation and correction. Accordingly he took up Boswell's text and
interlarded it with scraps of his own and other people's; he pegged into
it a sophisticated version of the _Tour_; and he overwhelmed his amazing
compound with notes and commentaries in which he took occasion to snub,
scold, 'improve,' and insult his author at every turn. What came of it
one knows. Macaulay, in the combined interests of Whiggism and good
literature, made Boswell's quarrel his own, and the expiation was as
bitter as the offence was wanton and scandalous.
His Critic.
But Macaulay, if he did Jeddart justice on Croker, took care not to
forget that Johnson was a Tory hero, and that Boswell was Johnson's
biographer. He was too fond of good reading not to esteem the _Life_ for
one of the best of books. But he was also a master of the art of
brilliant and picturesque misrepresentation; and he did not neglect to
prove that the _Life_ is only admirable because Boswell was contemptible.
It was, he argued, only by virtue of being at once daft and drunken,
selfish and silly, an eavesdropper and a talebearer, a kind of inspired
Faddle, a combination of butt and lackey and snob, that Boswell contrived
to achieve his wretched immortality. And in the same way Boswell's hero
was after all but a sort of Grub Street Cyclops, respectable enough by
his intelligence--(but even so ridiculous in comparison to gifted
Whigs)--yet more or less despicable in his manners, his English, and his
politics. Now, Macaulay was the genius of special pleading. Admirable
man of letters as he was, he was politician first and man of letters
afterwards: his judgments are no more final than his antitheses are dull,
and his method for all its brilliance is the reverse of sound. When you
begin to inquire how much he really knew about Boswell, and how far you
may accept his own estimate of his own pretentions, he becomes amusing in
spite of himself: much as, according to him, Boswell was an artist. In
his review of Croker he is keen enough about dates and facts and
solecisms; on questions of this sort he bestows his fiercest energies;
for such lapses he visits his Tory opposite with his most savage and
splendid insolence, his heartiest contempt, his most scathing rhetoric.
But on the great question of all--the corruption of Boswell's text--he is
not nearly so implacable, and concerning the foisting on the _Life_ of
the whole bulk of the _Tour_ he is not more than lukewarm. 'We greatly
doubt,' he says, 'whether _even_ the _Tour to the Hebrides_ should have
been inserted in the midst of the _Life_. There is one marked
distinction between the two works. Most of the _Tour_ was seen by
Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of
the _Life_.' This is to say that Croker's action is reprehensible not
because it is an offence against art but because Johnson on private and
personal grounds might not have been disposed to accept the _Life_ as
representative and just, and might have refused to sanction its
appearance on an equal footing with the _Tour_, which on private and
personal grounds he _had_ accepted. In the face of such an argument who
can help suspecting Macaulay's artistic faculty? 'The _Life of
Johnson_,' he says, 'is assuredly a great, a very great, book. Homer is
not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more
decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the
first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers . . . Eclipse
is first, and the rest nowhere.' That is hearty and exact enough. But,
as I have hinted, Macaulay, furious with Croker's carelessness, is almost
tolerant of Croker's impudence. For Croker as a scholar and an historian
he is merely pitiless; to Croker ruining the _Life_ by the insertion of
the _Tour_--a feat which would scarce be surpassed by the interpolation
of the Falstaff scenes of the _Merry Wives_ in one or other of the parts
of _Henry IV._--he is lenient enough, and lenient on grounds which are
not artistic but purely moral. Did he recognise to the full the fact of
Boswell's pre-eminence as an artist? Was he really conscious that the
_Life_ is an admirable work of art as well as the most readable and
companionable of books? As, not content with committing himself thus
far, he goes on to prove that Boswell was great because he was little,
that he wrote a great book because he was an ass, and that if he had not
been an ass his book would probably have been at least a small one,
incredulity on these points becomes respectable.
Himself.
Boswell knew better. A true Scotsman and a true artist, he could play
the fool on occasion, and he could profit by his folly. In his
dedication to the first and greatest President the Royal Academy has had
he anticipates a good many of Macaulay's objections to his character and
deportment, and proves conclusively that if he chose to seem ridiculous
he did so not unwittingly but with a complete apprehension of the effect
he designed and the means he adopted. In the _Tour_, says he, from his
'eagerness to display the wonderful fertility and readiness of Johnson's
wit,' he 'freely showed to the world its dexterity, even when I was
myself the object of it.' He was under the impression that he would be
'liberally understood,' as 'knowing very well what I was about.' But, he
adds, 'it seems I judged too well of the world'; and he points his moral
with a story of 'the great Dr. Clarke,' who, 'unbending himself with a
few friends in the most playful and frolicsome manner,' saw Beau Nash in
the distance, and was instantly sobered. 'My boys,' quoth he, 'let us be
grave--here comes a fool.' Macaulay was not exactly Beau Nash, nor was
Boswell 'the great Dr. Clarke'; but, as Macaulay, working on Wolcot's
lines, was presently to show, Boswell did right to describe the world as
'a great fool,' and to regret in respect of his own silliness that in the
_Tour_ he had been 'arrogant enough to suppose that the tenour of the
rest of the book would sufficiently guard against such a strange
imputation.' In the same way he showed himself fully alive to the
enduring merits of his achievement. 'I will venture to say,' he writes,
'that he (Johnson) will be seen in this work more completely than any man
who has ever lived.' He had his own idea of biography; he had
demonstrated its value triumphantly in the _Tour_ which, though
organically complete, is plainly not a record of travel but a
biographical essay. In the _Tour_, that is, he had approved himself an
original master of selection, composition, and design; of the art of
working a large number of essential details into a uniform and living
whole; and of that most difficult and telling of accomplishments, the
reproduction of talk. In the _Life_ he repeated the proof on a larger
scale and with a finer mastery of construction and effect; and in what
his best editor describes as 'the task of correcting, amending, and
adding to his darling work' he spent his few remaining years. That he
drifted into greatness, produced his two masterpieces unconsciously, and
developed a genius for biography as one develops a disease, is 'a
ridiculous conception,' as Mr. Napier rightly says. In proof of it we
have Boswell's own words, and we have the books themselves. Such
testimony is not to be overborne by any number of paradoxes, however
ingenious, nor by any superflux of rhetoric, however plausible and
persuasive. That Boswell was a gossip, a busybody, and something of a
sot, and that many did and still do call him fool, is certain; but that
is no reason why he should not have been an artist, and none why he
should be credited with the fame of having devoted the best part of his
life to the production of a couple of masterpieces--as M. Jourdain talked
prose--without knowing what he was doing. Turner chose to go
a-masquerading as 'Puggy Booth'; but as yet nobody has put forward the
assertion that Turner was unconscious of the romance and splendour of his
_Ulysses and Polyphemus_, or that he painted his _Rain_, _Speed_, _and
Steam_ in absolute ignorance of the impression it would produce and the
idea it should convey. Goldsmith reminded Miss Reynolds of 'a low
mechanic, particularly . . . a journey-man tailor'; but that he was
unconsciously the most elegant and natural writer of his age is a
position which has not yet been advanced. And surely it is high time
that Boswell should take that place in art which is his by right of
conquest, and that Macaulay's paradox--which is only the opinion
brilliantly put of an ignorant and unthinking world--('Il avait mieux que
personne l'esprit de tout le monde')--should go the way of all its kind.