There is an even more remarkable feature of Boswell's work--the
scientific manner in which he deliberately made experiments. Here
again we shall see his uncompromising attitude.
Dr. Johnson has been considered, and very properly considered, a great
talker. Not the least of our reasons for reading the 'Life' is that we
are interested to know what Johnson had to say; and we find there the
expressed thoughts of Johnson upon a great number of subjects. That
Boswell should have preserved so much--that, though the same topics
may more than once be discussed, yet every conversation gives a
distinct and separate impression, and each one is valuable--tells
us not only that Boswell himself must have had a high order of
intelligence to apprehend and preserve the point of Johnson's
discourse upon so many occasions, but, what is important for our
purpose at the moment, tells us (when we remember how little time
altogether he spent with Johnson and that the time most fruitful in
records, during the famous tour in the Hebrides, is not included in
the 'Life') that he himself must have had some part in finding out
the Doctor's opinion. For Johnson was not exactly what is called an
expansive person; it was an effort to him to talk seriously, and it
was usually necessary to engage him gradually in conversation before
he talked his best. Boswell has told us, 'he very often sat quite
silent for a long time.' He said of himself: 'Tom Tyers described me
the best. He once said to me, "Sir, you are like a ghost. You never
speak until you are spoken to."'
It is remarkable that Boswell should have had so much to record. The
explanation is that he made Johnson talk; he did it not by accident
but quite deliberately; this is a substantial part of his whole
biographical method. 'I also,' he says in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,'
'may be allowed to claim some merit in leading the conversation. I do
not mean leading as in an orchestra, by playing the first fiddle; but
leading as one does in examining a witness--starting topics and
making him pursue them.' And he did not find this part of his task
particularly easy:
He appears to me like a great mill, into which a subject is
thrown to be ground. It requires, indeed, fertile minds
to furnish subjects for this mill--I regret when I see it
unemployed; but sometimes I feel myself quite barren, and have
nothing to throw in.
On most occasions, however, Boswell's mind was sufficiently fertile,
and it enabled him to say some very odd things; his ingenuity was
exercised in asking Johnson the most absurd questions, and he did
this very often in the hope of some good retort. 'If, Sir,' he once
demanded irrelevantly, 'you were shut up in a castle and a new-born
child with you, what would you do?' Johnson is said to have related
that one question was, 'Pray, Sir, can you tell why an apple is round
and a pear pointed?'[1] On one occasion Boswell, apparently without
reference to anything which had previously been said, asked 'if he had
ever been accustomed to wear a night-cap.' And such questions were apt
to produce an amusing discussion.
But Boswell's spirit of investigation did not lead him merely to
ask questions like these; it was frequently both serious and
subtle--indeed there are so many instances in the 'Life' of his
leading Johnson to talk that it is difficult to choose one for
illustration. Perhaps the most characteristic kind of method employed
is where Boswell, evidently having thought of his subject beforehand,
brings in at a convenient moment a quotation, which furnishes an
excuse for starting a discussion; as when he relates:
Talking of divorces, I asked if Othello's doctrine were not
plausible--
He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen,
Let him not know't, and he's not robbed at all.[2]
Then follows a discussion about divorce, in which Boswell takes a
prominent part.
A few pages later we find Boswell re-starting a topic upon which
Johnson, on a former occasion, has no doubt exhibited some warmth of
feeling, and, having thought out his own line of argument, is able to
lead him on to one of those moments of thunder which he loves to see.
After Mrs. Thrale was gone to bed, Johnson and I sat up late.
We resumed Sir Joshua Reynolds' argument on the preceding
Sunday, that a man would be virtuous though he had no other
motive than to preserve his character.[3]
In the course of the argument Johnson exclaims ('very angry'):
Nay, sir, what stuff is this! You had no more this opinion
after Robertson said it than before. I know nothing more
offensive than repeating what one knows to be foolish things,
by way of continuing a dispute, to see what a man will
answer--to make him your butt! (angrier still).
The scenes which illustrate perhaps better than any others Boswell's
minute interest in his friend and experimenting attitude have already
been quoted. In the account of the breakfast at Lochbuy (when Johnson
was offered the cold sheep's head) we see how great was his passion
for experiment and what a depth of enjoyment he had from it: 'I sat
quietly by and enjoyed my success'--that is the point of view. The
manner in which he arranged the meeting with Wilkes shows the trouble
he could take to form his plans for creating a situation and his
ingenuity in carrying them out. This is not the only occasion when
he made arrangements for his observation of Johnson; the whole of the
tour in the Hebrides was in a sense a great series of experiments,
and we feel as we read it that the circumstances of Johnson's riding
bespurred upon a Highland pony, of his sitting majestically in the
stern of the little boat, of his dinner with the Duke of Argyle, of
his visit to Auchinleck, are consciously arranged, in some way, for
effect by Boswell.
No less a person than Walter Scott, who knew much at first hand
from the contemporaries of Johnson and Boswell, and could remember
distinctly the tour in Scotland and the discussion it provoked, held
this view of the biographer:
[4]After all, Bozzy, though submitting to Johnson in
everything, had his means of indemnification. Like the
jackanapes mounted on the bear's back he contrived now and
then to play the more powerful animal a trick by getting him
into situations like the meeting with Wilkes merely to see
how he would look. The voyage to the Hebrides exhibited some
tricks of that kind, the weather being so stormy at that late
season that everyone thought they must have been drowned.
Undoubtedly Bozzy wanted to see how the Doctor would look in a
storm.
Boswell himself explains the visit to Lord Monboddo: 'I knew Lord
Monboddo and Dr. Johnson did not love each other; yet ... I was
curious to see them together.' It could hardly be supposed that
Boswell adopted this attitude without encountering some opposition
from Dr. Johnson. The latter evidently wished that a good life of him
should be written, and was pleased with Boswell's journal and glad to
tell him from time to time about his early life; but there were limits
to his endurance. 'I will not be put to the _question_. Don't you
consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will
not be baited with _what_ and _why_; what is this? what is that? why
is a cow's tail long? why is a fox's tail bushy?' 'Sir,' he said on
one occasion, 'you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick
of both.' Boswell indeed was continually taking risks; he compares
himself to 'the man who has put his head into the lion's mouth a great
many times:' his ordinary method of conversing with Johnson was to
push his inquiries to the furthest possible point. His courage in this
respect must have been notorious. 'I won a small bet,' he relates on
one occasion, 'from Lady Diana Beauclerk, by asking him as to one of
his particularities, which her Ladyship said I durst not do. It seems
he had been frequently observed at the Club to put into his pocket
the Seville oranges, after he had squeezed the juice of them into the
drink which he had made for himself. Beauclerk and Garrick talked of
it to me, and seemed to think he had a strange unwillingness to be
discovered. We could not divine what he did with them; and this
was the bold question to be put.' Boswell on this occasion was not
successful in his inquiries; but it is to be observed that Boswell was
deputed to inquire, and that he asked the question, and won his bet.
Occasionally Boswell remarks that Johnson was not in a good humour for
talking. He must have wondered at such times how long it would take
before his irritation would break forth, and he would make some
typical utterance. 'But I wonder, Sir,' &c., was a sort of Boswellian
formula to be met sooner or later with: 'Sir, you _may_ wonder,' or
some similar retort.
But what irritated Johnson perhaps more than the endless questions was
to be made a 'butt' as he termed it. 'On Monday, September 22, when
at breakfast, I unguardedly said to Dr. Johnson, "I wish I saw you and
Mrs. Macaulay together!" He grew very angry, and, after a pause, while
a cloud gathered on his brow, he burst out: "No, Sir, you would not
see us quarrel to make you sport."' Boswell eventually owns that he
had wished to see a contest between Mrs. Macaulay and Johnson.
It is not to be supposed that Boswell's provocations were always
intentional, though there are many occasions upon which they clearly
were so. Sometimes he was 'out of countenance,' and when Johnson
'carried the company with him,' his discomfiture perhaps was greater
than he would have wished. Not infrequently he made mistakes. On one
occasion when Johnson began: 'If I kept a seraglio,' Boswell was so
much amused that he failed to keep his countenance and was overwhelmed
with 'a variety of degrading images'! Yet he was well aware of the
general tendency of his behaviour to provoke the ridicule of Johnson,
and though there may have been moments when he did not intend it to
do so, we may say that he consciously led to his own humiliation, or
consciously at least ran the risk of it.
How much humiliation Boswell was able to support may be seen from Miss
Burney's account of a party at Streatham. Boswell, finding that
there was no place at the side of Dr. Johnson, had taken up a seat
immediately behind and between Dr. Johnson and Miss Burney. It was
not very polite, and the discovery of his position by Dr. Johnson was
disastrous:
The Doctor turned angrily round upon him, and, clapping
his hand rather loudly upon his knee, said, in a tone of
displeasure, 'What do you do there, Sir? Go to the table,
Sir!'
Mr. Boswell instantly, and with an air of affright, obeyed;
and there was something so unusual in such humble submission
to so imperious a command that another smile gleamed its
way across every mouth except that of the Doctor and of Mr.
Boswell, who now, very unwillingly, took a distant seat.
Anything more ignominious could hardly be imagined, and that Boswell
was sensitive to a rebuke from the Doctor we cannot doubt. And yet,
within a few minutes, he was to run the risk of a second. For some
reason or other he wished to leave the room while the ceremony still
demanded his presence at the table. The Doctor, calling after him
authoritatively, said: 'What are you thinking of, Sir? Why do you
get up before the cloth is removed? Come back to your place, Sir!'
'Again,' Miss Burney continues, 'and with equal obsequiousness, Mr.
Boswell did as he was bid.'
Boswell's behaviour, indeed, on this particular occasion was not
heroic. His position near Dr. Johnson cannot have been essential to
his purpose of taking notes; he was unwilling to abandon it out of a
childish feeling of dignity; he considered it his natural right to sit
near the doctor, and was obstinate about it. And it was no experiment
of his to leave the room unceremoniously with the purpose of hearing
what Dr. Johnson might have to say. But it was heroic of Boswell to
put himself continually, and often intentionally, in the way of such
rebuffs; for this he undoubtedly did. It was heroic because he had
a noble purpose. Boswell was a man of science, and his science was
concerned with nothing less than the mind and soul of Man. He was none
the less scientific because he did not deal in generalities; he was
concerned with detail rather than with deduction and with one man
rather than with all men. Science may not have been the only motive
for enduring. Boswell may have supported the harsh sayings of Dr.
Johnson and suffered for the sake of his friendship, for its honour as
well as for its value; but when we consider the humiliation of those
rebukes we know at least that he suffered not a little; and inasmuch
as he courted them, and courted them deliberately, friendship offers
no explanation. Here we are compelled to accept the scientific motive.
Boswell must be allowed the credit of having suffered as a man of
science for the sake of Biography.
Miss Burney, though she neither understood nor appreciated Boswell,
and even disliked him, has no doubt given a truthful picture. It is
clear that Boswell suffered from the rebuffs which he received from
Johnson. If he endured them on the whole willingly, yet he endured
them not without feeling some pain. He could not carry it off; Boswell
had no natural dignity; he had a 'jovial bluntness' and a comical air
about him, but these could not help him on such occasions, and he was
obliged as it were to lose prestige, to appear in fact mean-spirited
and servile.
Miss Burney tells us also that Johnson generally treated him as a
schoolboy. The difference in their ages was more than thirty years;
but even so the expression is remarkable, and shows as does the whole
account how complete was the submission of Boswell.
His behaviour, however, was not merely undignified and grotesque, it
was rude. His whole attitude towards Johnson was a rude one. Curiosity
indulged as he indulged it cannot be polite. Johnson told him
more than once that he had no manners. Langton said: 'Boswell's
conversation consists entirely in asking questions, and is extremely
offensive.' Boswell, in fact, as the biographer, was rude not only
to Johnson but to the whole company; concerned entirely with his own
purpose, he ignored the social obligation. It seems to have been
his common habit to sit down, note-book in hand, to record the
conversation. Mr. Barclay said that he had seen Boswell lay down his
knife and fork, and take out his tablets, in order to register a
good anecdote. Mrs. Thrale refers to his 'reporting' as a usual and
obnoxious practice.
A trick which I have seen played on common occasions, of
sitting steadily down at the other end of the room to write
at the moment what should be said in company, either _by_ Dr.
Johnson or _to_ him, I never practised myself, nor approved of
in another. There is something so ill-bred, and so inclining
to treachery in this conduct, that were it commonly adopted,
all confidence would soon be exiled from society, and a
conversation assembly-room would become tremendous as a court
of justice.
[Footnote 1: _Autobiography, Letters, &c., of Mrs. Piozzi_,
ii, 125.]
[Footnote 2: _Life of Johnson_, iii, 347.]
[Footnote 3: _Life of Johnson_, iii, 349.]
[Footnote 4: _Croker Papers_, iii, 33.]