IN LITERATURE
'Eclipse is first, the rest nowhere.'--MACAULAY.
'How delicate, decent is English Biography,' says Carlyle, 'bless its
mealy mouth! A Damocles sword of Respectability hangs for ever over the
poor English Life-writer (as it does over poor English Life in general),
and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said there
are no English lives worth reading, except those of Players, who by the
nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day. The English
biographer has long felt that, if in writing his man's biography he
wrote down anything that could by possibility offend any man, he had
written wrong.' The biographer, as Mr Froude found out for a commentary
on all this, is placed between a Scylla and Charybdis, between what is
due to the subject, and what is expected by the public. If something is
left out of the portrait, the likeness will be imperfect; if the anxiety
or the inquisitiveness of readers to know private details is left
ungratified, the writer will be met by the current cant that the public
has a right to know. The line is not easily drawn, and few subjects for
the biographer can ever desire to be as candidly dealt with by him as
Cromwell acted with Sir Peter Lely, in the request to be painted as he
was, warts and all. Thus, too often the result will be but biography
written _in vacuo_, 'the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet
omitted--by particular desire.'
Biography, like History, has suffered from considerations of dignity and
propriety. The writers of the Hume and Robertson school of history, in
their stately minuet with the historical muse, have been careful to
exclude everything that seemed beneath the dignity of the sceptred pall;
biographers have as consciously studied the proprieties. 'The Muse of
history,' says Thackeray, 'wears the mask and speaks to measure; she too
in our age busies herself with the affairs only of kings. I wonder shall
history ever pull off her periwig and cease to be Court-ridden? I would
have History familiar rather than heroic, and think that Mr Hogarth and
Mr Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of
the present age in England, than the _Court Gazette_ and the newspapers
which we get thence.' As the historian has striven to obscure the real
nature of the Grand Monarque, by confining his action to courts and
battlefields, so the biographer, in his desire of never stepping beyond
the proper, has enveloped his hero in a circle of correct ideas, after
the manner of George the Fourth and his multiplicity of waistcoats.
Dignity and respectability have ruined alike the historian and the
biographer.
Lockhart foresaw that some readers would accuse him of trenching upon
delicacy and propriety over his sixth and seventh chapters in the _Life
of Scott_, and the circumstances were after all such as, had choice been
permitted him, he might easily have omitted, considering it his duty to
tell what he had to say truly and intelligibly. Of all men Macaulay had
nothing to fear from any rational biography that should ever be written
of him, yet has not Mr Trevelyan assured his readers that the reviewers
had told him, that he would much better have consulted his uncle's
reputation by the omission of passages in his letters and diaries? Such
criticism, as he justly says, is to seriously misconceive the province
and the duty of the biographer, and his justification is that the
reading world has long extended to the man the just approbation which it
so heartily extended to his books. The Latin critics assigned
history,--and accordingly history in miniature, biography,--to the
department of oratory. The feeling, in consequence, has long prevailed
of regarding biography as the field for the display of every other
feeling then veracity. It has been emotional, or it has been decorously
dull. To all such writers the style adopted by Boswell would appear, and
justly appear, revolutionary. The cry is raised of there being nothing
sacred, of the violation of domestic privacy, of the sanctities of life
being endangered, of indiscretions, and violations of confidences, by
the biographer. Accordingly, just as Macaulay decided that, in general,
tragedy was corrupted by eloquence, and comedy by wit, so biography and
history have suffered from the dignity of Clio. Boswell was perfectly
aware what he was doing, nor did he awake to find himself famous for a
method into which the sciolists pretend he only unconsciously blundered.
In the preface to the third edition of the _Journal_ he
writes:--'Remarks have been industriously circulated in the publick
prints by shallow or envious cavillers, who have endeavoured to persuade
the world that Dr Johnson's character has been _lessened_ by recording
such various instances of his lively wit and acute judgment, on every
topick that was presented to his mind. In the opinion of every person of
taste and knowledge that I have conversed with, it has been greatly
_heightened_; and I will venture to predict, that this specimen of his
colloquial talents will become still more valuable, when, by the lapse
of time, he shall have become an _ancient_; and no other memorial of
this great and good man shall remain but the following Journal.' This is
not the writing of one who has been without a clear idea of what he was
undertaking, and of his own qualifications for the task. 'You, my dear
sir,' he tells Sir Joshua Reynolds in the dedication, 'perceived all the
shades which mingled in the grand composition; all the peculiarities and
slight blemishes which marked the literary Colossus.' The inclusion of
the letters and of private details was an integral part of his scheme.
When he introduced the subject of biography at Dr Taylor's, no doubt
with his own book in his eye, he said that in writing a man's life the
man's peculiarities should be mentioned because they mark his character.
When he resolved on their publication, he thought it right to ask
Johnson explicitly on this point, and the reply was what in 1773 the
doctor had given to Macleod in Skye, when he had asked if Orrery had
done wrong, to expose the defects of Swift with whom he had lived in
terms of intimacy. 'Why, no, sir,' Johnson had decided, 'after the man
is dead, for then it is done historically.' A biographer that would omit
or disguise the relations of Nelson to Lady Hamilton, would be justly
suspected of disingenuousness, and Lockhart, especially in his treatment
of the political side of his subject,--for example in the notorious
_Beacon_ incident--is but too open to this charge. But disingenuousness
is a charge that never could have occurred to Boswell, whose veracity is
the prime quality that has made him immortal. When the _Journal_ was in
the press, Hannah More, studious of the name of the moralist and the
sage, 'besought him to mitigate his asperities.' 'I will not,' said
Boswell roughly, but wisely for posterity, 'cut off his claws, nor make
a tiger a cat to please anyone.'
Boswell's books are veritable books. Few books have had such a severe
test applied to them. His first was dedicated to Paoli, whose sanction
must be taken to guarantee every line of it. "In every narrative," he
writes in the dedication to Malone of the _Journal_, "whether historical
or biographical, authenticity is of the utmost consequence. Of this I
have ever been so firmly persuaded that I inscribed a former work to
that person who was the best judge of its truth. Of this work the
manuscript was daily read by Johnson, and you have perused the original
and can vouch for the strict fidelity of the present publication." His
_Life of Johnson_ was as fearlessly dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds,
one whose intimacy with Johnson could stamp, with assured knowledge of
the subject, the credit and success of the work. Among the 'some dozen,
or baker's dozen, and those chiefly of very ancient date,' of reliable
biographies whose paucity Carlyle laments, the works of Boswell may be
safely included. Their accuracy is confessed by workers in all fields.
His _Tour_ created a type; no better volume of travels has ever been
written than the _Journal_; and the critic who has dealt at the
reputation of Boswell its heaviest blow has yet to confess, that Homer
is no more the first of poets, Shakespeare the first of dramatists,
Demosthenes the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of
biographers, with no second.
How is this? Written in 1831, before Lockhart Southey and Carlyle by
their biographies of Scott, Nelson, and Frederick had appeared as
rivals, why is it no less true now? What singular gift or quality can
account for this singular aloofness from the ordinary or extraordinary
class of writers? Why does Boswell yet wear the crown of indivisible
supremacy in biography? His own words will not explain it, the
possession of Johnson's intimacy, the twenty years' view of his subject,
his faculty for recollecting, and his assiduity in recording
communications. This and more than this Lockhart possessed, the nearest
rival to the biographical throne. He was the son-in-law of his subject,
for whom he had as true an admiration as Boswell had for Johnson. But
Boswell was only in the company of his idol some 180 days, or 276 if we
include the time on the tour in Scotland, in all the twenty years of his
acquaintance. Lockhart had the journals of Sir Walter, and the
communications of nearly a hundred persons. A comparison in any sense,
literary, social, or moral, would have been felt by Lockhart as an
insult, for he clearly regards Sir Alexander Boswell as a greater man
than his father. But if, like the grandsire of Hubert at Hastings,
Lockhart has drawn a good bow, Boswell, like the Locksley of the
novelist, has notched his shaft, and comparisons have long ceased to be
instituted. Gray has attempted the explanation--a fool with a note-book.
He has invented nothing, he has only reported. But every year sees that
person at work, with his _First Impressions of Brittany_, _Three Weeks
in Greece_, and the everlasting _Tour in Tartanland_. These are the
creations of the note-book, but it has given them no permanence. The
tourist puts in everything he sees, truly enough, or thinks he sees. But
it is the art of Boswell to select 'the characteristical,' and the
typical, to group and to dramatize. Ninety-four days he spent on the
northern tour, and the result is a masterpiece. Pepys is garrulous,
often vulgar, always lower-middle-class; but Boswell writes like a
gentleman.
Macaulay has explained it by a paradox. Goldsmith was great in spite of
his weaknesses, Boswell by reason of his; if he had not been a great
fool, he would never have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a
parasite, a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had a quick observation, a retentive
memory, and accordingly--he has become immortal! Alas for the paucity of
such immortals under so common circumstances; their number should be
legion! That a fool may occasionally write interesting matter we know;
but that a man should write a literary classic, graced by arrangement,
selection, expression, is not even paradox but hyperbole run mad. The
truth is, Macaulay had no eye for such a complex character as Boswell.
Too correct himself, too prone to the cardinal virtues and consistency,
to follow one who, by instinct, seemed to anticipate Wendell Holmes'
advice--'Don't be consistent, but be simply _true_'--and too sound
politically in the field where Boswell and the doctor abased themselves
in absurd party spirit, Macaulay can no more understand sympathetically
the vagaries of Boswell than Mommsen or Drumann can follow the political
inconsistency of Cicero. He had no Boswellian 'delight in that
intellectual chemistry which can separate good qualities from evil in
the same person;' and in his essay on _Milton_ he has disclaimed
explicitly all such hero-worship of the living or the dead and denounced
Boswellism as the most certain mark of an ill-regulated intellect. Nor
had he, or Carlyle either, before him the evidence of the letters to
Temple.
Carlyle, in the theory of hero-worship, has made capital use of Boswell.
He sees the strong mind of Johnson leading 'the poor flimsy little soul'
of James Boswell; he feels 'the devout Discipleship, the gyrating
observantly round the great constellation.' He has Boswell's reiterated
declarations to support him. On one side Carlyle's vindication of the
biographer is successful; he errs in emphasizing the discovery by
Boswell of the Rambler. In such a discovery Langton and Beauclerk had
long preceded him, and the Johnson that Boswell met in Davies' parlour
was the pensioned writer who had out-lived his dark days, and was the
literary dictator of the day, and the associate of Burke and of
Reynolds. But Carlyle comes nearer the truth when he touches on the
Boswellian recipe for being graphic--the possession of an open, loving
heart, and what follows from the possession of such. Like White of
Selborne, with his sparrows and cockchafers, Boswell, too, has copied
some true sentences from the inspired book of nature.
But however this may account for his insight--the heart seeing farther
than the head--it will not account for his literary qualities. Of all
his contemporaries, Goldsmith and Burke excepted, no one is a greater
master of a pure prose style than Boswell, and for ease of narrative,
felicity of phrase, and rounded diction he is incomparable. Macaulay
believed a London apprentice could detect Scotticisms in Robertson;
Hume's style is often vicious by Gallicisms and Scots law phrases which
nothing but his expository gifts have obscured from the critics. Beattie
confesses learning English as a dead language and taking several years
over the task. But Boswell, 'scarce by North Britons now esteemed a
Scot,' writes with an ease that renders his style his own. 'The fact
is,' says Mr Cotter Morison, 'that no dramatist or novelist of the whole
century surpassed or even equalled Boswell in rounded and clear and
picturesque presentation, or in real dramatic faculty.'
Let us take one portrait from the Boswell gallery--the meeting of the
two old Pembroke men, Johnson and Oliver Edwards.
'It was in Butcher Row that this meeting happened. Mr Edwards,
who was a decent-looking elderly man in gray clothes and a wig
of many curls, accosted Johnson with familiar confidence,
knowing who he was, while Johnson returned his salutation with
a courteous formality, as to a stranger. But as soon as Edwards
had brought to his recollection their having been at Pembroke
College together nine-and-forty years ago, he seemed much
pleased, asked where he lived, and said he should be glad to
see him in Bolt Court. EDWARDS: "Ah, sir! we are old men now."
JOHNSON (who never liked to think of being old): "Don't let us
discourage one another." EDWARDS: "Why, Doctor, you look stout
and hearty. I am happy to see you so; for the newspapers told
us you were very ill." JOHNSON: "Ay, sir, they are always
telling lies of _us old fellows_."
Wishing to be present at more of so singular a conversation as
that between two fellow collegians, who had lived forty years
in London without ever having chanced to meet, I whispered to
Mr Edwards that Dr Johnson was going home, and that he had
better accompany him now. So Edwards walked along with us, I
eagerly assisting to keep up the conversation. Mr Edwards
informed Dr Johnson that he had practised long as a solicitor
in Chancery.... When we got to Dr Johnson's house and were
seated in his library, the dialogue went on admirably. EDWARDS:
"Sir, I remember you would not let us say _prodigious_ at
College. For even then, sir (turning to me), he was delicate in
language, and we all feared him." JOHNSON (to Edwards): "From
your having practised the law long, sir, I presume you must be
rich." EDWARDS: "No, sir; I had a good deal of money; but I had
a number of poor relations to whom I gave great part of it."
JOHNSON: "Sir, you have been rich in the most valuable sense of
the word." EDWARDS: "But I shall not die rich." JOHNSON: "Nay,
sure, sir, it is better to _live_ rich, than to _die_ rich."
EDWARDS: "I wish I had continued at College." Johnson: "Why do
you wish that, sir?" EDWARDS: "Because I think I should have
had a much easier life than mine has been. I should have been a
parson, and had a good living, like Bloxam and several others,
and lived comfortably." JOHNSON: "Sir, the life of a parson,
of a conscientious clergyman, is not easy. I have always
considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he
is able to maintain. I would rather have Chancery suits upon my
hands than the cure of souls." Here, taking himself up all of a
sudden, he exclaimed, "O! Mr Edwards! I'll convince you that I
recollect you. Do you remember our drinking together at an
ale-house near Pembroke Gate?" ... EDWARDS: "You are a
philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a
philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always
breaking in."--Mr Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr Courtenay, Mr
Malone, and, indeed, all the eminent men to whom I have
mentioned this, have thought it an exquisite trait of
character. The truth is, that philosophy, like religion, is too
generally supposed to be hard and severe, at least so grave as
to exclude all gaiety. EDWARDS: "I have been twice married,
Doctor. You, I suppose, have never known what it was to have a
wife." JOHNSON: "Sir, I have known what it was to have a wife,
and (in a solemn, tender, faltering tone) I have known what it
was to _lose a wife_. It had almost broke my heart."
EDWARDS: "How do you live, sir? For my part, I must have my
regular meals, and a glass of good wine. I find I require it."
JOHNSON: "I now drink no wine, sir. Early in life I drank wine:
for many years I drank none, I then for some years drank a
great deal." EDWARDS: "Some hogsheads, I warrant you." JOHNSON:
"I then had a severe illness, and left it off. I am a
straggler. I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo, without
being missed here or observed there." EDWARDS: "Don't you eat
supper, sir?" JOHNSON: "No, sir." EDWARDS: "For my part, now, I
consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in
order to get to bed." JOHNSON: "You are a lawyer, Mr Edwards.
Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have
them to converse with. They have what he wants." EDWARDS: "I am
grown old, I am sixty-five." JOHNSON: "I shall be sixty-eight
next birthday. Come, sir, drink water, and put in for a
hundred." ... Mr Edwards, when going away, again recurred to
his consciousness of senility, and looking full in Johnson's
face, said to him, "You'll find in Dr Young,
'O my coevals! remnants of yourselves.'"
Johnson did not relish this at all; but shook his head with
impatience. Edwards walked off seemingly highly pleased with
the honour of having been thus noticed by Dr Johnson. When he
was gone, I said to Johnson I thought him but a weak man.
JOHNSON: "Why, yes, sir. Here is a man who has passed through
life without experience: yet I would rather have him with me
than a more sensible man who will not talk readily. This man is
always willing to say what he has to say."'
How admirable is the art in this scene, how numerous and fine are the
strokes of character, and the easy turn of the dialogue! No fool with a
note-book, no tippling reporter, as the shallow critics say, could have
written this. To them there would have appeared in a chance meeting of
two old men nothing worthy of notice, yet how dramatically does Boswell
touch off the Philistine side of Edwards, and insert the fine shading
and the inimitable remarks about the setting up for the philosopher, and
supper being a turnpike to bed! This art of the biographer is what gives
a memorableness to slight incidents, by the object being real and really
seen; it is the 'infinitude of delineation, the intensity of conception
which informs the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance,
ennobling the Actual into Idealness.'
Openness of mind will do much, but there must be the seeing eye behind
it. For the mental development of Boswell, there is no doubt that, as
with Goldsmith, his foreign travels had done much. As Addison in the
_Freeholder_ had recommended foreign travel to the fox-hunting Tory
squires of his day as a purge for their provincial ideas, Boswell shares
with the author of the _Traveller_ and the _Deserted Village_
cosmopolitan instincts and feelings. 'I have always stood up for the
Irish,' he writes, 'in whose fine country I have been hospitably and
jovially entertained, and with whom I feel myself to be congenial. In
my _Tour in Corsica_ I do generous justice to the Irish, in opposition
to the English and Scots.' Again, 'I am, I flatter myself, completely a
citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany,
Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and
I sincerely love every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.'
This is the very antithesis to Johnson, whose frank confession was, 'for
anything that I can see, foreigners are fools.'
Yet Boswell's stock of learning was small. 'I have promised,' he writes
in 1775, 'to Dr Johnson to read when I get to Scotland; and to keep an
account of what I read. He is to buy for me a chest of books, of his
choosing, off stalls, and I am to read more, and drink less--that was
his counsel.' The death of his wife forces the confession, 'how much do
I regret that I have not applied myself more to learning,' and he
acknowledges to their common friend Langton that, if Johnson had said
that Boswell and himself did not talk from books, this was because he
had not read books enough to talk from them. In his manuscripts there
are many misspellings. He assigns to Terence a Horatian line and, in a
letter to Garrick, quotes as Horatian the standard _mens sana in corpore
sano_ of Juvenal. More strange is his quoting in a note an illustration
of the phrase 'Vexing thoughts,' without his being apparently aware that
the words are by Rous of Pembroke, the Provost of Eton, whose portrait
in the college hall he must often have seen, the writer of the Scottish
Metrical Version of the Psalms. Yet his intellectual interests were
keen. Late in life he has 'done a little at Greek; Lord Monboddo's
_Ancient Metaphysics_ which I am reading carefully helps me to recover
the language.' He has his little scraps of irritating Latinity which he
loves to parade, and when he dined at Eton, at the fellows' table, he
'made a considerable figure, having certainly the art of making the most
of what I know. I had my classical quotations very ready.' Besides, the
easy allusiveness of Boswell to books and to matters beyond the scope of
general readers, his interest in all things going forward in the
Johnsonian circle, his shewing himself in some metaphysical
points--predestination, for example--fully a match for Johnson, and his
own words in the _Journal_--'he had thought more than anybody supposed,
and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge'--all
conspire to shew that, if he had no more learning than what he could not
help, James Boswell was altogether, as Dominie Sampson said of
Mannering, 'a man of considerable erudition despite of his imperfect
opportunities.'
Nor were his entire interests Johnsonian. Scattered through his writings
we find allusions to other books, in a more or less forward stage of
completeness, and of which some must have been destroyed by his
faithless executors. We hear of a _Life of Lord Kames_; an _Essay on the
Profession of an Advocate_; _Memoirs_ of Hume when dying, 'which I may
some time or other communicate to the world;' a quarto with plates on
_The Beggar's Opera_; a _History of James IV._, 'the patron of my
family;' a _Collection of Feudal Tenures and Charters_, 'a valuable
collection made by my father, with some additions and illustrations of
my own;' an _Account of my Travels_, 'for which I had a variety of
materials collected;' a _Life of Sir Robert Sibbald_, 'in the original
manuscript in his own writing;' a _History of the Rebellion of 1745_; an
edition of _Walton's Lives_; a _Life of Thomas Ruddiman_, the Latin
grammarian; a _History of Sweden_, where three of his ancestors had
settled, who took service under Gustavus Adolphus; an edition of
_Johnson's Poems_, 'a complete edition, in which I shall with the utmost
care ascertain their authenticity, and illustrate them with notes and
various readings;' a work on _Addison's Poems_, in which 'I shall
probably maintain the merit of Addison's poetry, which has been very
unjustly depreciated.' His _Journal_, which is unfortunately lost, he
designed as the material for his own _Autobiography_. A goodly list, and
a varied one, involving interest, knowledge, and research, fit to form
the equipment of a professed scholar.
Boswell foresaw the danger, and he justified his method of reporting
conversations. 'It may be objected by some persons, as it has been by
one of my friends, that he who has the power of thus exhibiting an exact
transcript of conversations is not a desirable member of society. I
repeat the answer which I made to that friend:--'Few, very few, need be
afraid that their sayings will be recorded. Can it be imagined that I
would take the trouble to gather what grows on every hedge, because I
have collected such fruits as the _Nonpareil_ and the _Bon Chretien_? On
the other hand, how useful is such a faculty, if well exercised! To it
we owe all those interesting apophthegms and _memorabilia_ of the
ancients, which Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, have
transmitted to us. To it we owe all those instructive and entertaining
collections which the French have made under the title of _Ana_, affixed
to some celebrated name. To it we owe the Table-Talk of Selden, the
_Conversation_ between Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, Spence's
_Anecdotes_ of Pope, and other valuable remains in our own language. How
delighted should we have been, if thus introduced into the company of
Shakespeare and of Dryden, of whom we know scarcely anything but their
admirable writings! What pleasure would it have given us, to have known
their petty habits, their characteristick manners, their modes of
composition, and their genuine opinion of preceding writers and of their
contemporaries!'
The world in consideration of what it has gained, and the recollection
of what we should have acquired had such a reporter been found for the
talk of other great men, has long since forgiven Boswell, and forgotten
also his baiting the doctor with questions on all points, his rebuffs
and his puttings down--'there is your _want_, sir; I will not be put to
the question;' his watching 'every dawning of communication from that
illuminated mind;' his eyes goggling with eagerness, the mouth dropt
open to catch every syllable, his ear almost on the shoulder of the
doctor, and the final burst of 'what do you do there, sir,--go to the
table, sir,--come back to your place, sir.'
And these conversations which he reported in his short-hand, yet 'so as
to keep the substance and language of discourse?' How far did he
Johnsonize the form or matter? The remark by Burke to Mackintosh, that
Johnson was greater in Boswell's books than in his own, the absence of
the terse and artistic touch to the sayings of the Rambler in the pages
of Hawkins, Thrale, Murphy and others, suggest inevitably that they have
been touched up by their reporter. The _Boswelliana_ supplies here some
slight confirmation of this, for there have been preserved in that
collection stories that reappear in the _Life_, and the final form in
which they appear in the later book is always that of a pointed and
improved nature. It would, therefore, seem that Boswell, whose
imitations of Johnson Mrs Thrale declared in some respects superior to
Garrick's, in his long devotion to the style and manner of his friend,
'inflated with the Johnsonian ether,' did consciously or otherwise add
much to the originals, and so has denied himself a share of what would
otherwise be justly, if known, set down to his credit.
'I own,' he writes in 1789 to Temple, 'I am desirous that my life should
tell.' He counted doubtless on the _Autobiography_ for this purpose. 'It
is a maxim with me,' said the great Bentley, 'that no man was ever
written out of reputation but by himself.' At first sight it would
appear that Boswell had inflicted upon his own fame an indelible blot.
From whom but himself should we ever have learned those failings, of
which Macaulay has deftly made so much in his unsympathetic writing down
of the man, after the manner of the Johnsonian attack on Milton and
Gray? In whom but himself should we detect the excrescences in his
works--the permutations and combinations in shaving, the wish for a
pulley in bed to raise him, his puzzle over the disproportionate wages
of footmen and maidservants, his boastings, his family pride, his
hastily writing in the sage's presence Johnson's parody of Hervey in the
_Meditations on a Pudding_, his superstitions, and his weaknesses? It is
this that has cost him so dear with the critics, and the superior
people, 'empty wearisome cuckoos, and doleful monotonous owls,
innumerable jays also and twittering sparrows of the housetops.' He
compares his own ideas to his handwriting, irregular and sprawling; his
nature to Corinthian brass, made up of an infinite variety of
ingredients, and his head to a tavern which might have been full of
lords drinking Burgundy, but has been invaded by low punch-drinkers whom
the landlord cannot expel. Blots and inequalities there are in the great
book. Cooper off the prairie, Galt out of Ayrshire, are not more untrue
to themselves than is Boswell at such moments. But 'within the focus of
the Lichfield lamps' he regains his strength like a Samson.
Boswell, with all his experience, never attained the mellow Sadduceeism
of the diner-out. As a reward, he never lost the literary conscience,
the capacity for labour, the assiduity and veracity that have set his
work upon a pedestal of its own. The dedication to Reynolds, a masterly
piece of writing, will shew the trouble that he took over his method,
'obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly.' And
he knew the value of his work, which the man with the note-book never
does. In his moments of self-complacency he could compare his
_Johnsoniad_ with the _Odyssey_; and he will not repress his
'satisfaction in the consciousness of having largely provided for the
instruction and entertainment of mankind.' Literary models before him he
had none. Scott suggests the life of the philosopher Demophon in Lucian,
but Boswell was not likely to have known it. He modestly himself says he
has enlarged on the plan of Mason's _Life of Gray_; but his merits are
his own. For the history of the period it is, as Cardinal Duperron said
of Rabelais, _le livre_--_the_ book--'in worth as a book,' decides
Carlyle, 'beyond any other production of the eighteenth century.'
Time has dealt gently with both Johnson and Boswell. 'The chief glory of
every people,' said the former in the preface to his _Dictionary_
'arises from its authors: whether I shall add anything to the reputation
of English literature must be left to time.' In the constituency of the
present no dead writer addresses such an audience as Johnson does. Of
Johnson Boswell might have said, as Cervantes did of his great creation
Don Quixote, he and his subject were born for each other. There is no
greater figure, no more familiar face in our literature than 'the old
man eloquent'; and as the inseparable companion 'held in my heart of
hearts, whose fidelity and tenderness I consider as a great part of the
comforts which are yet left to me,' rises the figure of his biographer,
the Bozzy no more of countless follies and fatuities, but Boswell, the
prince of biographers, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, now become,
like his hero himself, an ancient. And they are still in the heyday of
their great fame. Along the stream of time the little bark, as he hoped,
sails attendant, pursues the triumph and partakes the gale.
With James Boswell it has happened, as Mark Pattison says of Milton, to
have passed beyond the critics into a region of his own. That 'mighty
civil gentlewoman,' the mistress of the _Green Man_ at Ashbourne, M.
Killingley, who waited on him with the note of introduction to his
extensive acquaintance--'a singular favour conferr'd on one who has it
not in her power to make any other return but her most grateful thanks,
&c.,'--is but a symbol of the feelings of the readers who ever wish well
to the name and the fame of James Boswell.
THE END.