As I passed along Great Queen Street the other evening, I saw that
Boswell's house, so long threatened, is at last falling a victim to the
housebreaker. The fact is one of the by-products of the war. While the Huns
are abroad in Belgium the Vandals are busy at home. You may see them at
work on every hand. The few precious remains we have of the past are
vanishing like snows before the south wind.
In the Strand there is a great heap of rubbish where, when the war began,
stood two fine old houses of Charles II.'s London. Their disappearance
would, in normal times, have set all the Press in revolt. But they have
gone without a murmur, so preoccupied are we with more urgent matters. And
so with the Elizabethan houses in Cloth Fair. They have been demolished
without a word of protest. And what devastation is afoot in Lincoln's Inn
among those fine reposeful dwellings, hardly one of which is without some
historic or literary interest!
In the midst of all this vandalism it was too much perhaps to hope that
Boswell's house would escape. Bozzy was not an Englishman; his residence in
London was casual, and, what is more to the point, he has only a reflected
greatness. Macaulay's judgment of him is now felt to be too harsh, but even
his warmest advocate must admit that his picture of himself is not
engaging. He was gross in his habits, full of little malevolences (observe
the spitefulness of his references to Goldsmith), and his worship of
Johnson was abject to the point of nausea.
He made himself a sort of doormat for his hero, and treasured the dirt that
came from the great man's heavy boots. No insult levelled at him was too
outrageous to be recorded with pride. "You were drunk last night, you dog,"
says Johnson to him one morning during the tour in the Hebrides, and down
goes the remark as if he has received the most gracious of good mornings.
"Have you no better manners?" says Johnson on another occasion. "There is
_your want_." And Boswell goes home and writes down the snub together with
his apologies. And so when he has been expressing his emotions on hearing
music. "Sir," said Johnson, "I should never hear it if it made me such a
fool."
Once indeed he rebelled. It was when they were dining with a company at Sir
Joshua Reynolds's. Johnson attacked him, he says, with such rudeness that
he kept away from him for a week. His story of the reconciliation is one of
the most delightful things in that astonishing book:
"After dinner, when Mr. Langton was called out of the room and we were by
ourselves, he drew his chair near to mine and said, in a tone of
conciliatory courtesy, 'Well, how have you done?' Boswell: 'Sir, you have
made me very uneasy by your behaviour to me when we were last at Sir Joshua
Reynolds's. You know, my dear sir, no man has a greater respect or
affection for you, or would sooner go to the end of the world to serve you.
Now, to treat me so--' He insisted that I had interrupted him, which I
assured him was not the case; and proceeded, 'But why treat me so before
people who neither love you nor me?' Johnson: 'Well I am sorry for it. I'll
make it up to you in twenty different ways, as you please.' Boswell: '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 upon
stones, which is the case when enemies are present. I think this is a
pretty good image, sir.' Johnson: 'Sir, it is one of the happiest I ever
have heard.'"
Is there anything more delicious outside Falstaff and Bardolph, or Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza? Indeed, Bardolph's immortal "Would I were with
him wheresoe'er he be, whether in heaven or in hell," is in the very spirit
of Boswell's devotion to his hero.
It was his failings as much as his talents that enabled him to work the
miracle. His lack of self-respect and humour, his childish egotism, his
love of gossip, his naive bathos, and his vulgarities contributed as much
to the making of his immortal book as his industry, his wonderful verbal
memory, and his doglike fidelity. I have said that his greatness is only
reflected. But that is hardly just. It might even be more true to say that
Johnson owes his immortality to Boswell. What of him would remain to-day
but for the man who took his scourgings so humbly and repaid them by
licking the boot that kicked him? Who now reads _London_, or _The Vanity of
Human Wishes_, or _The Rambler_? I once read _Rasselas_, and found it
pompous and dull. And I have read _The Lives of the Poets_, and though they
are not pompous and dull, they are often singularly poor criticism, and the
essay on Milton is, in some respects, as mean a piece of work as ever came
out of Grub Street.
But _The Life_! What in all the world of books is there like it? I have
been reading it off and on for more than thirty years, and still find it
inexhaustible. It ripens with the years. It is so intimate that it seems to
be a record of my own experiences. I have dined so often with Johnson at
the Mitre and Sir Joshua's and Langton's and the rest that I know him far
better than the shadows I meet in daily life. I seem to have been present
when he was talking to the King, and when Goldsmith sulked because he had
not shared the honour; when he met Wilkes, and when he insulted Sir Joshua
and for once got silenced; when he "downed" Robertson, and when, for want
of a lodging, he and Savage walked all night round St. James's Square, full
of high spirits and patriotism, inveighing against the Minister and
resolving that "they would _stand by their country_."
And at the end of it all I feel very much like Mr. Birrell, who, when asked
what he would do when the Government went out of office, replied, "I shall
retire to the country, and really read Boswell." Not "finish Boswell," you
observe. No one could ever finish Boswell. No one would ever want to finish
Boswell. Like a sensible man he will just go on reading him and reading
him, and reading him until the light fails and there is no more reading to
be done.
What an achievement for this uncouth Scotch lawyer to have accomplished! He
knew he had done a great thing; but even he did not know how great a thing.
Had he known he might have answered as proudly as Dryden answered when some
one said to him that his _Ode to St. Cecilia_ was the finest that had ever
been written. "Or ever will be," said the poet. Dryden's ode has been
eclipsed more than once since it was written; but Boswell's book has never
been approached. It is not only the best thing of its sort in literature:
there is nothing with which one can compare it.
Boswell's house is falling to dust. No matter! His memorial will last as
long as the English speech is spoken and as long as men love the immortal
things of which it is the vehicle.