THE GENIUS OF BOSWELL
The word genius seems a strange one to apply to Boswell. Macaulay has
had his hour of authority with most of us, and, unluckily for him and
for us, the worst passages in his _Essays_ are often better remembered
{38} than the greatest chapters in his _History_. It has proved his
ill-fortune as well as his glory to have written so vividly that the
mind's eye will still see what he wrote clear before it, though twenty
years may lie between it and the actual sight of the printed page. At
his worst he is like an advertisement hoarding, crude, violent, vulgar,
but impossible to escape. The essay on Croker's Boswell is one of
those unfortunate moments. It is, unhappily, far better known than its
author's article on Johnson written for the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_,
and its violence still takes the memory by assault. No one forgets the
disgusting description of Johnson, or the insults heaped upon Boswell.
Least of all can anybody forget the famous paradox about the contrast
between Boswell and his book. As a biographer, according to Macaulay,
Boswell has easily surpassed all rivals. "Homer is not more decidedly
the first of Epic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of
dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators than
Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. Eclipse is
first, and the rest nowhere." And yet this same Boswell is "a man of
the meanest and feeblest intellect"; and, strangest of all, only
achieves his amazing success by force of his worthlessness and folly.
"If he had not {39} been a great fool he would never have been a great
writer."
Macaulay was the most self-confident of men. But, though he set his
opinion with assurance against that of any other critic, there was one
verdict he respected, the verdict of time. He would not have been
astonished to hear that in the eighty years since his essay was written
the fame of Boswell's book has continually increased. But few things
that have happened since then would have surprised him more than to be
told that, in a volume published only fifty years after his death and
in part officially addressed to his own University of Cambridge, a
Professor of English Literature, one of the two or three universally
acknowledged masters of criticism, would be found quietly letting fall,
as a thing about which there need be no discussion, a sentence
beginning with the words: "A wiser man than Macaulay, James Boswell."
It may be well, before speaking further of Johnson, to say something
about the man to whom we owe most of our knowledge of him, the most
important member of his circle, this same James Boswell. Like all good
biographers, he has put himself into his book; and we know him as well
as we know Johnson, as we know no other two men, perhaps, in the
history of the world. It cannot be denied {40} that, when we put his
great book down, it is not very easy to follow Sir Walter Raleigh in
talking of him as a wise man, or even as a wiser man than Macaulay. If
Boswell and Macaulay were put into competition in a prize for wisdom,
no ordinary examiners would give it to Boswell. By the only tests they
could apply, Macaulay must far outstrip him. The wisdom which enabled
Macaulay to render splendid services to the State and to literature,
and gave him wealth, happiness, popularity and a peerage, is as easily
tested, and, it must be confessed, as real, as the unwisdom which ended
in Boswell dying the dishonoured death of a drunkard, and leaving a
name of which his descendants felt the shame at least as much as the
glory.
But there are other tests, and though their superior value may be
doubted, they ought not to be altogether ignored. Macaulay, who knew
everything and achieved so much, spent his whole life in visible and
external activities--talking, reading, writing, governing; and was
admired, and, indeed, admirable in them all. But of the wisdom which
realizes how essentially inferior all measurable doing, however
triumphant, is to being, which is immeasurable, the wisdom which is
occupied with the ultimate issues of life and death, he had apparently
as little as any man who ever lived. He seems {41} always to have been
one of those active, hurrying, useful persons who--
"Fancy that they put forth all their life
And never know how with the soul it fares."
Whatever can be said against Boswell that cannot be said. Of this
inner wisdom, this quietness of thought, this "folie des grandeurs" of
the soul, he had a thousand times as much as Macaulay. He could not
cling to it to the end, he could not victoriously live by it and make
it himself; but he had seen the vision which Macaulay never saw, and he
never altogether forgot it. Every man is partly a lost soul. So far
as Boswell was that, he knew it in all the bitter certainty of tears.
So far as Macaulay was, he was as unconscious of it as the beasts that
perish. And the kingdom of wisdom, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is more
easily entered by those who know that they are outside it, than by
those who do not know that there is such a place and are quite content
where they are.
But these are high matters into which there is no need to go further.
It is necessary, however, to say a little more about Boswell's
character and abilities. He and Johnson are now linked together for
all eternity; and everybody who takes an interest in Johnson is
interested in Boswell too. It ought to be {42} much more than
interest, and in all true Johnsonians it is. Without Boswell, we
should have respected Johnson, honoured him as a man and a writer,
liked him as "a true-born Englishman," but we could not have known him
enough to love him. By the help of Boswell, we can walk and talk with
him, dine with him, be with him at his prayers as well as at his
pleasures, laugh with him, learn of him and disagree with him; above
all, love him as we only can love a human being, and never a mere wise
man or great writer. No Englishman doubts that Boswell has given us
one of the great books of the world. But before we realize its
greatness, we realize its pleasantness, its companionableness. The
_Life of Johnson_ and the _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_ may be
taken for practical purposes as one book; and it has some claim to be
the most companionable book in the world. There is no book like it for
a solitary meal. A novel, if it is good for anything, is too
engrossing for a dinner companion. It is impossible to put it down.
It interrupts the business of dining and results in cold food and
indigestion. A book of short poems--the Odes of Horace, the Fables of
La Fontaine, the Sonnets of Shakespeare or Wordsworth--is much more to
the purpose. One may read an Ode or a Sonnet quickly and then turn
{43} again to one's dinner, carrying the fine verse in one's mind and
tasting it at leisure as one holds good wine in the mouth before
letting it pass away into forgetfulness. But poetry is not for every
man, nor for every mood of any man: and the moment of dinner is not
with most men the moment when they appear most poetic either to others
or to themselves.
But is there any time which is not the time for Boswell? He does not
ask for a mood which may not be forthcoming: he does not demand an
attention which it is inconvenient to give. We can take him up and lay
him down as and when we will. And he has everything in his store. If
we are seriously inclined and wish to have something to think about
when we turn from the book to the dinner, he is full of the most
serious questions, discussed sometimes wisely, almost always by wise
men, the problems of morals and politics, of religion and society and
literature, such questions as those of liberty and necessity in
philosophy, liberty and government in politics, the English Church and
the Roman, private education and public, life in the country and life
in the town. Or if we wish, not for problems of any kind, but just for
a picture of life as it was lived a hundred and fifty years ago, there
is nothing like Boswell's pages for variety, intimacy, veracity and,
{44} what is the great point in these matters, lavishness of detail.
His book is sown with apparently, but only apparently, insignificant
trifles. What and how Johnson ate, his manner in talking and walking,
the colour and shape of his clothes, the size of his stick, all these
and a thousand similar details we know from Boswell, and because
Boswell had the genius to perceive that they accumulate upon us a
sensation of life and bodily presence, as of a man standing before our
eyes.
So, again, with the many little stories he tells which no one else
would have told. Who but he would have treasured up every word of that
curious meeting in April 1778, between Johnson and his unimportant old
friend Edwards, the man who said that he had tried to be a philosopher,
but "cheerfulness was always breaking in"? Yet it is not only one of
the most Boswellian but one of the very best things in the whole book.
It exactly illustrates what was newest in his method. In an age of
generality and abstraction he saw the advantage of the concrete and
particular, and put into practice the lesson his master could only
preach, "Nothing is too little for so little a creature as man." So
the total-abstaining Johnson and the bibulous Reynolds and Boswell will
each come before us exactly as they were: and we are amused as we
picture {45} the confusion of Reynolds's distinguished parties where
the servants had never been taught to wait, and make a note of the
progress of social manners as we sympathize with Johnson at Edinburgh
throwing the fingered lump of sugar out of the window. Some people,
again, like Mr. Gladstone, are fond of observing and discoursing upon
the changes of taste in the matter of wine: and such people will find
in Boswell almost as much to interest their curiosity as Johnson's own
fellowship of tea-drinkers. The drinker of champagne will have to
accept the mere modernity of his beverage, which finds no place in
Johnson's famous hierarchy: "Claret for boys, port for men, brandy for
heroes." Or, once more, if our meal ends in tobacco, we may please
ourselves by contemplating the alternate, but never contemporaneous,
glories of snuff and tobacco, and note the sage's curious, but strictly
truthful, account of the advantages and disadvantages of smoking.
"Smoking has gone out. To be sure it is a shocking thing, blowing
smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses,
and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing
which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total
vacuity has gone out." Or if we demand a keener relish for our meal
than these {46} quiet joys of observation, there is of course the whole
store of Johnson's sallies of wit, the things we all quote and forget
and like to have recalled to us.
For all these reasons Boswell's book, stuffed full of matter, and such
matter as you can take up and lay down at pleasure, is the ideal
companion for the man who dines or sups alone. Provided, of course,
that he has some tincture of intellectual tastes. Those whose
curiosity is only awakened by a prospect of the "sporting tips" will
not care for Boswell. For, though the book moves throughout in the big
world, and not in an academic groove, it still always moves
intellectually. It asks a certain acquaintance with literature and
history and the life of the human mind. The talk may, indeed, be
almost said to deal with all subjects; but it tends mainly to be of the
kind which will come uppermost when able men of a serious and bookish
turn congregate together. It requires leisure, and that sense of the
value of talk which has grown rarer in the hurry of a generation in
which the idlest people affect to be busy, and those who do nothing at
all are in a bustle from morning till night. Johnson was never in a
hurry, especially in the later days, when he had done his work and was
enjoying his fame. Mrs. Thrale says that conversation was all he {47}
required to make him happy. He hated people who broke it up to go to
bed or to keep an appointment. Much as he delighted in John Wesley's
company, he complained that he was never at leisure, which, said
Johnson, "is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and
have out his talk as I do." The world has perhaps grown a more
industrious place since those days, though nobody yet has managed to
put so much into twenty-four hours as Wesley did. Anyhow the
conditions that made for such talk as fills Boswell's pages are no
doubt less common to-day: and perhaps it only lingers now in some rare
Common Room at Oxford or Cambridge, where the evil spirit of classes
and examinations has been strictly exorcised, or in an exceptionally
well-chosen party at an exceptional country house, or in the old dining
societies of London, such as Johnson's own, "The Club," of famous
memory. Its modern rarity may, however, only make it the more precious
in a book, and it is certainly not the least important element in the
popularity of Boswell's work.
That work has always been praised from the day of its appearance. Lord
Thurlow, then Chancellor, wrote to Boswell of the _Tour to the
Hebrides_, which is essentially, though not formally, its first
instalment, that {48} he had read every word of it, because he could
not help it: and added the flattering question, "Could you give a rule
how to write a book that a man _must_ read?" Scott, a little later,
spoke of it as "without exception the best parlour window book that
ever was written." Six editions were issued within twenty years of its
appearance, a strong proof of popularity in the case of a voluminous
and expensive book. And the praise and popularity have gone on growing
ever since. But the strange thing is that the man who wrote it has
commonly been treated with insult, and even with contempt. The fact is
at first sight so inexplicable that it is worth a little looking into.
A man who has done us all such a service as Boswell, who has by the
admission even of Macaulay utterly out-distanced all competition in
such an important kind of literature as biography, would naturally have
been loaded with the gratitude and admiration of posterity. Yet all
fools and some wise men have thought themselves entitled to throw a
scornful stone at Boswell.
The truth is that Boswell was a man of very obvious weaknesses, the
weaknesses to which every fool feels himself superior, and of some
grave vices of a sort to which wise men feel little temptation. And,
unfortunately, he conquered neither. Rather they conquered {49} him,
and made his last years a degradation, and his memory one which his
friends were glad to forget. After the death of Johnson in 1784,
followed in 1789 by that of Mrs. Boswell, whom Johnson once justly and
generously described as the prop and stay of her husband's life, he had
no one left to lean on. And he was not a man strong enough to stand
alone. But it is time to insist that, when all this has been
confessed, we are very far from having told the whole truth about
Boswell. The fact is that justice will never be fully done to his
memory till Macaulay and some others have been called up from their
graves to do penance for their arrogant unfairness. Carlyle did
something, but not enough; and he stands almost alone. Yet after all,
considering what we owe Boswell, if there be any blindness in our view
of him, it surely ought to be blindness to his faults. We have heard
enough and to spare of his vanity, his self-importance, his entire lack
of dignity, his weakness for wine and worse things than wine. But we
have heard very little, far too little, of the kindness and genuineness
of the man's whole nature, the warmth of his friendships and the
enthusiastic loyalty of his hero-worship, of the reverence for religion
and the earnest desire after being a better man, which, though often
defeated {50} by temptation, were profound and absolutely sincere.
The notion that a man who does not practise what he preaches is
necessarily insincere, always called forth an angry protest from
Johnson. "Sir," he broke out at Inverary to Mr. M'Aulay, the
historian's grandfather, "are you so grossly ignorant of human nature,
as not to know that a man may be very sincere in good principles
without having good practice?" No doubt this was a doctrine which
Boswell heard gladly: and Johnson may himself have been influenced in
his zeal for it by his consciousness that, as he said when enforcing it
on another occasion, he had himself preached better than he had
practised. "I have, all my life long, been lying till noon: yet I tell
all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does
not rise early will ever do any good." But, however that may be, he is
plainly right in the broad issue. Practice is the only absolute proof
of sincerity: but defect in practice is no proof of insincerity.
Certainly, no Christian can doubt that the struggling, even though
falling, sinner is in at least as hopeful a condition as the complacent
person whose principles and practice are fairly conformable to each
other because both live only the dormant life of respectability and
{51} convention. However, no one in his senses will try to make a hero
or a saint out of Boswell. He was, as has been already said, vain, a
babbler, a wine-bibber, a man of frequently irregular and ill-governed
life. But to judge a man fairly as a whole, you must set his
achievements against his failures, and include his aspirations as well
as the weakness which prevented their being realized. He may also
reasonably ask to be tried by the standard of his contemporaries. If
this larger and juster method of judgment be adopted, the unfairness
with which Boswell has been treated becomes immediately obvious. After
all vanity is more a folly than a crime, and pays its own immediate
penalty as no other crime or folly does. The other faults of Boswell,
especially drinking, were only too common in a century at the beginning
of which Johnson remembered "all the decent people at Lichfield getting
drunk every night," and at the end of which the most honoured and
feared of English Prime Ministers could appear intoxicated in the House
of Commons itself. Drunkenness has not deprived Pitt of the gratitude
of England, and we may well be determined that, if we can help it, it
shall not deprive Boswell. It is not his vices but his virtues that
are notable and unusual. What was extraordinary in his or any other
day was {52} the generous enthusiasm which made a young Scotch laird
deliberately determine that he would do something more with his life
than shoot wildfowl or play cards, made him throw himself first with a
curious mixture of vanity and genuine devotion to a noble cause into
the Corsican struggle for liberty, and then, vain of his birth and
fortune as he was, place himself at the feet, not of a duke or a
minister, but of a man of low origin, rough exterior, and rougher
manners, in whom he simply saw the best and wisest man he had known.
That is not the action of either a bad man or a fool; and assuredly
Boswell--in the essence of him--was neither the one nor the other.
The truth is that he had the strength and the weaknesses of a man of
mobile and lively imagination. He would fancy his wife and children
drowned or dead for no better reason than that he was not by them; he
would dream of being a judge when he had scarcely got a brief, and
imagine himself a minister when he had no prospect of getting into
Parliament. Other people experience these day-dreaming vanities, but
they do not talk or write about them. Boswell did; and we all laugh at
him, especially the fools among us: the wiser part add some of the love
that belongs to the common kinship of humanity wherever it puts off the
mask, the love of which we feel {53} something even for that gross old
"bourgeois" Samuel Pepys, just because he laid out his whole secret
self in black and white upon the paper. Moreover, Boswell's
absurdities had their finer side. The dreamer of improbable disasters
and impossible good fortunes is also the dreamer of high and perhaps
unattainable ideals. Shall we count it nothing to his honour that,
instead of sitting down contentedly among the boon companions of
Ayrshire, he aspired to read the best books in the world, to know the
wisest men, and in turn to do something himself that should not be
forgotten? And note that those aspirations were in large part
realized. His intellectual tastes always remained among the keenest of
his pleasures: he numbered among his friends the most famous writer of
his day, the greatest poet, the greatest painter, the profoundest and
most eloquent of all English statesmen; and before he died his apparent
failure in personal achievements was transformed into the success that
means immortality by the production of a book which after the lapse of
a century has many more readers than the works of his great friends
whose superiority to himself he would never have dreamed of challenging.
And what did these great men think of him? Did the people who knew him
think him altogether a fool? If the magistrates {54} of his native
county had thought him merely that they would hardly have chosen him
their chairman. Nor would the Royal Academy who filled their honorary
offices with such men as Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gibbon, have given
them Boswell as a colleague if they had thought him altogether a fool.
Reynolds, again, who was his friend through life, and left him 200
pounds in his will to be expended on a picture to be kept for his sake,
was not a man who took fools for his friends. Burke, who at first
doubted his fitness for election at "The Club," became a great admirer
of his wonderful good humour, and received him on his own account and
without Johnson as a guest at Beaconsfield, where neither fools nor
knaves were commonly welcomed. The whole story of the tour to the
Hebrides shows the regard felt for him, as himself and not only as the
son of his father or the companion of Johnson, by many of the most
distinguished and cultivated men in Scotland. Johnson, the most
veracious of men, says of him in Scotland: "There is no house where he
is not received with kindness and respect"; and on another occasion he
declared that Boswell "never left a house without leaving a wish for
his return."
But the most complete refutation of the worthlessness of Boswell is of
course the {55} friendship and love he won from Johnson himself.
Assuredly, the standard of Johnson, in whose presence nobody dared to
swear or talk loosely, was not a low one either morally or
intellectually; yet we find him saying that he held Boswell "in his
heart of hearts"; perhaps, indeed, he loved Boswell better than any of
his friends. "My dear Boswell, I love you very much"; "My dear
Boswell, your kindness is one of the pleasures of my life"; "Come to
me, my dear Bozzy, and let us be as happy as we can." This is the way
Johnson constantly wrote and spoke to him. And this was not merely
because Boswell was "the best travelling companion in the world," or
even because he was, what Johnson also called him, "a man who finds
himself welcome wherever he goes and makes new friends faster than he
can want them," but also for graver reasons. Johnson said once that
most friendships were the result of caprice or chance, "mere
confederacies in vice or leagues in folly," but he did not choose that
his own should be of that sort. Beauclerk is the only one of his
friends who was not a man of high character. His feeling for Boswell
was not a love of vice or folly. He saw Boswell at his best, no doubt:
but that best must have had very real and positive good qualities in it
to win from Johnson such a remark as he {56} makes in one of his
letters: "Never, my dear sir, do you take it into your head to think
that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both
of my love and my esteem; I love you as a kind man, I value you as a
worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary
piety. I hold you, as Hamlet has it, 'in my heart of hearts.'" And
there is a still more remarkable tribute in the letter to John Wesley
giving Boswell an introduction to him "because I think it very much to
be wished that worthy and religious men should be acquainted with each
other." Nothing can be more certain than that Johnson would not have
written so often in such language as this of a man who was what
Macaulay thought Boswell was. Well may the foolish editor of Boswell's
letters to Temple, who takes Macaulay's view, talk of the difficulty of
explaining how it came about that Boswell formed one of a society which
included such men as Johnson and Burke. The truth is that on his
theory and Macaulay's it is not explicable at all.
Less explicable still, on that view, is the admitted excellence of
Boswell's book. Carlyle dismissed with just contempt the absurd
paradox that the greatness of the book was due to the imbecility of the
author. That is a theory which it would be waste of time {57} to
discuss. But it may be worth while to point out that other and more
rational explanations of Boswell's success are also insufficient. His
book is acknowledged to have originated a new type of biography. It
was felt at once, and has been increasingly felt ever since, that
Boswell is so direct and personal that beside him all other biographers
seem impersonal and vague, that he is so intimate that he makes all
others appear cold and distant, so lifelike that they seem shadowy, so
true that they seem false. Now this has commonly been attributed to
his habit of noting down on the spot and at the moment anything that
struck him in Johnson's talk or doings; and to his perfect willingness
to exhibit his own discomfitures so long as they served to honour or
illustrate his hero. In this way people have talked of his one merit
being faithfulness, and of his work as a succession of photographs.
Now it is true enough that his veracity is a very great merit, and that
no one was ever so literally veracious as he. But no number of facts,
and no quintessence of accuracy in using them, will ever make a great
book. Literature is an art, and nothing great in art has ever been
done with facts alone. The greatness comes from the quality of mind
that is set to work upon the facts. Consequently {58} the secret of
the success of the _Life of Johnson_ is to be found in the exact
opposite of the assertion of Macaulay. For the truth is that the
acknowledged excellence of the book is in exact proportion to the
unacknowledged literary gifts of its author.
The law for all works of art and literature is the same. The fact is
nothing unless the artist can give it life. Life comes from human
personality. _Ars est homo additus naturae_. Art, that is, is nature
seen through a temperament, the facts seen by a particular mind. The
landscape into which the painter has put nothing of his own personality
is fitter for a surveyor's office than for a picture gallery. The
portrait which gives nothing but the sitter's face is as dull as a
photograph. Two portraits of the same man, two sketches of the same
valley, not only are, but ought to be, quite different from each other.
Nature, the facts of the particular face or scene, remain the same for
both: but the two different artists, each bringing their own
personality, produce different results, when the face or scene has
become that composite mixture of man and nature, fact and mind, which
is art. And this is as true of all books which are meant to be
literature as of painting or sculpture. The story of Electra is,
broadly speaking, the same for Aeschylus, Sophocles, {59} and
Euripides: but each contributes to it himself, and the result differs.
Virgil's tale of Troy is not Homer's: Chaucer gives us one Troilus and
Cressida, and Shakespeare another: the fable of the Fox and the Goat
takes prose from Phaedrus and poetry from La Fontaine. So Pope's Homer
is not Homer, the thing in itself, the unrelated, absolute Homer, but
_Pope additus Homero_; and it is not Euripides pure and simple which is
the true account of certain beautiful modern versions of Euripides, but
_Euripidi additus Murray_.
It may be objected that these are all instances from poetry, where the
truth aimed at is rather general than particular. And this distinction
is a real one. The truth of the _Aeneid_ is its truth to human life as
a whole, not its accuracy in reporting the words used on particular
occasions by Dido and Turnus, neither of whom may have ever existed.
History and biography are, undoubtedly, on a different footing in this
respect, just as the artist who calls his picture "Arundel Castle" or
"Windermere" is not in the same position of freedom as the painter of
an "Evening on the Downs." But the law of _homo additus naturae_ still
remains true in this case as in the other, though its application is
modified. It is true that a {60} man who pretends to give a
representation of Arundel is not justified in adding to it a tower 800
feet high just because he happens himself to have a fancy for towers.
But what he has to add, if his work is to be art at all, is the
emotional mood, the exaltation, depression, excitement, or whatever it
may be, which Arundel stirred in him, and by means of which he and the
scene before him were melted into that unity of intensified life which
is born of the marriage of nature and man and is what we call art. The
next day another man takes his place, and the result, though still
Arundel Castle, is an entirely different picture. So in the case of
books. The same Socrates is seen in one way when we get that part of
him which could unite with the personality of Xenophon, and in quite
another when the union is with Plato. The English Civil War marries
one side of itself to Clarendon, and another to Milton; and both have
that relative truth which is all art wishes for, and which is indeed a
greater thing, as having human life in it, than any absolute truth in
itself which, if it were discoverable, would be pure science, as useful
perhaps, but as dead, as the First Proposition of Euclid. The
greatness of literature depends on the degree in which the dead matter
of fact belonging to the {61} subject has been quickened into life by
the emotional, intellectual and imaginative power of the writer. And
this is true of historical and biographical work as well as of poetry.
That is the point to be remembered about Boswell, and to be set against
his detractors. His book is admittedly one of the most living books in
existence. That life can have come from no one but the author. It is
the irrefutable proof of his genius. Life and power do not issue, here
any more than elsewhere, out of folly and nonentity. The _Life of
Johnson_ is the result of the most intimate and fertile union between
biographer and his subject which has ever occurred, and it gives us in
consequence more of the essence of both than any other biography.
Boswell brought to it his own bustling activity and curiosity from
which it draws its vividness and variety: he brought to it also his
warm-hearted, half-morbid emotionalism from which it derives its many
moving pages: he brought to it his reverence for Johnson, which enabled
him to exhibit, as no other man could, that kingship and priesthood
which was a real part, though not the whole, of Johnson's relation to
his circle. We see Johnson in his pages as the guide, philosopher and
friend of all who came in his way, the intellectual and spiritual
father of Boswell, the master of his {62} studies, the director of his
conscience. Nobody else in that company saw as much of the true and
great Johnson as Boswell's loving devotion enabled him to see; and when
he came to write the life he put himself into it, with the result that
the portrait of Johnson as posterity sees it, will never lose the halo
of glory with which the Boswellian hero-worship crowned it for all time.
This was the all-important _homo additus naturae_ part of Boswell's
work: the setting his subject in the light of his own imaginative and
emotional insight. But there was more than that. Boswell had not only
the temperament of the artist: he had an artist's craftsmanship. The
_Life_ makes four large octavo volumes, each of some 500 pages, in the
great Oxford Edition by Birkbeck Hill: and the _Tour to the Hebrides_
makes a fifth. That is a big book: yet so perfect an artist is
Boswell, that scarcely once for a single page in all the five volumes
is the chief light turned in any direction except that of Johnson.
Anybody who has even read, much more anybody who has written, a book of
any length knows how difficult and rare an achievement it is to
maintain perfect unity of subject, never to lose the sense of
proportion, never to let side issues and secondary personages obstruct
or conceal the main business in hand. {63} There is nothing of the
kind in Boswell. Under his hand no episode is ever allowed to be more
than an episode, no minor character ever occupies the centre of the
stage. Whoever and whatever is mentioned is mentioned only in relation
to Johnson. Many great men, greater some of them than his hero are
brought into his picture, but it is never upon them that the chief
light is thrown. All the other figures, whoever they are, are here but
attendants upon Johnson's greatness, foils to his wit, witnesses to his
virtues, his friends or his foes, the subjects or victims of his talk,
anything that you will in connection with him, but apart from
him--nothing. All that they say or do or suffer, is told us only to
set Johnson in a clearer light. The unity of the picture is never
broken. And that is the same thing as saying that Boswell is not
merely what every one has seen, a unique collector of material: he is
also what so few have seen, an artist of the very highest rank.
This is seen, too, in another important point. The danger of the
hero-worshipping biographer is only too familiar to us. His book is
usually a monotonous and insipid record of virtue or wisdom. The hero
is always right, and always victorious, with the result that the book
is at once tedious and incredible. But Boswell knew better than {64}
that. He was too much of an artist not to know that he wanted shadows
to give value to his lights, and too much a lover of the fullness and
variety of life not to want to get all of it that he possibly could
into his picture. Like all great writers, there was scarcely anything
he was afraid of handling, because there was scarcely anything of which
he was not conscious that he could bend it to his will and force it to
take its place, and no more than its place, in his scheme.
Consequently, he has the courage to show us his hero, now wrong-headed
and perverse, now rude almost to brutality, now so weak that the same
resolution is repeated year after year only to be again broken and
again renewed, now so gross and almost repulsive in his appearance and
habits that it requires all his greatness to explain the welcome which
well-bred men and refined women everywhere gave him. Nothing better
shows the greatness of Boswell. He was not afraid to paint the wart on
his Cromwell's nose, because he knew that he could so give the
nobleness of the whole face, that the wart would merely add to the
truthfulness of the portrait without detracting from its nobleness.
The vast quantity of material which he brought into his book and the
complete mastery which he maintained over it, is shown by the fact {65}
that few or no biographies record so many ridiculous or discreditable
circumstances about their hero, and yet none leaves a more convincing
impression of his greatness.
The notion, then, that the man who wrote the _Life of Johnson_ was a
fool, is an absurdity. If the arguments in its favour prove anybody a
fool it is not Boswell. Nor is it even true that Boswell, like some
great artists, escaped apparently by some divine gift from his natural
folly just during the time necessary for the production of his great
work, but at all other times relapsed at once into imbecility. We know
how scrupulously accurate he was in what he wrote, not only from his
candour in relating his own defeats, but from the many cases in which
he confesses that he was not quite sure of the exact facts, such as, to
give one instance, whether Johnson, on a certain occasion, spoke of "a
page" or "ten lines" of Pope as not containing so much sense as one
line of Cowley. Therefore we may take the picture he gives of himself
in his book as a fair one. And what is it? Does it bear out the
notorious assertion that "there is not in all his books a single remark
of his own on literature, politics, religion or society which is not
either commonplace or absurd"? One would sometimes imagine Macaulay
had never read the book of which he speaks with such {66} confident
decision. Certainly, except as a biographer, Boswell was not a man of
any very remarkable abilities. But, in answer to such an insult as
Macaulay's, Boswell's defenders may safely appeal to the book itself,
and to everybody who has read it with any care. Will any one deny that
not once or twice, but again and again, the plain sense of some subject
which had been distorted or confused by the perverse ingenuity of
Johnson "talking for victory" comes quietly, after the smoke has
cleared away, from the despised imbecility of Boswell? Who gives the
judgment which every one would now give about the contest with the
American colonies? Not Johnson but Boswell; not the author of
_Taxation No Tyranny_, but the man who wrote so early as 1775 to his
friend Temple: "I am growing more and more an American. I see the
unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their
Assemblies; I think our Ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate
war." Who was right and who was wrong on the question of the Middlesex
Election? Nobody now doubts that Boswell was right, and Johnson was
wrong. Which has proved wiser, as we look back, Johnson who ridiculed
Gray's poetry, or Boswell who sat up all night reading it? The fact is
that Boswell was undoubtedly a {67} sensible and cultivated as well as
a very agreeable man, and as such was warmly welcomed at the houses of
the most intelligent men of his day.
The old estimate, then, of James Boswell must be definitely abandoned.
The man who knew him best, his friend Temple, the friend of Gray, said
of him that he was "the most thinking man he had ever known." We may
not feel able to regard that as anything more than the judgment of
friendship: but it is not fools who win such judgments even from their
friends. We may wonder at the word "genius" being applied to him; and
if genius be taken in the stricter modern sense of transcendent powers
of mind, the sense in which it is applied to Milton or Michael Angelo,
there is of course no doubt that it would be absurd to apply it to
Boswell. But if the word be used in the old looser sense, or if it be
given the definite meaning of a man who originates an important new
departure in a serious sphere of human action, who creates something of
a new order in art or literature or politics or war, then Boswell's
claim to genius cannot be questioned. Just as another member of
"Johnson's Club" was in those years writing history as it had never
been written before, so, and to a far more remarkable degree, Boswell
was writing {68} biography as it had never been written before.
Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ was in fact a far less original
performance, far less of a new departure, than Boswell's _Life of
Johnson_. Boswell's book is in truth what he himself called it, "more
of a life than any work that has ever yet appeared." After it the art
of biography could never be merely what it had been before. And in
that sense, the sense of a man whose work is an advance upon that of
his predecessors, not merely in degree, but in kind, Boswell was
undoubtedly and even more than Gibbon, entitled to the praise of genius.
Let us all, then, unashamedly and ungrudgingly give the rein to our
admiration and love of Boswell. There is a hundred years between us
and his follies, and every one of the hundred is full of his claim upon
our gratitude. Let us now be ready to pay the debt in full. Let us be
sure that there is something more than mere interest or entertainment
in a book which so wise a man as Jowett confessed to having read fifty
times, of which another lifelong thinker about life, a man very
different from Jowett, Robert Louis Stevenson, could write: "I am
taking a little Boswell daily by way of a Bible; I mean to read him now
until the day I die." And not only in the book but in the author too.
Let us be {69} sure with Carlyle that if "Boswell wrote a good book" it
was not because he was a fool, but on the contrary "because he had a
heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it
forth: because of his free insight, of his lively talent, above all of
his love and childlike open-mindedness." In the particular business he
had to carry through, these qualities were an equipment amounting to a
modest kind of genius. They enabled him to produce a book which has
given as much pleasure perhaps to intelligent men as any book that ever
was written. Let us be careful whenever we think of Boswell to
remember this side, the positive, creative, permanent side of him: and
not so careful as our grandfathers generally were, to remember the
other side which ceased to have any further importance on that night in
May 1795 when he ended the fifty-five years of a life in which he had
found time for more follies than most men, for more vices perhaps,
certainly for more wisdom, but also for what most men never so much as
conceive, the preparation and production of a masterpiece.
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