We have been reading--for the first time, we blush to admit--the
_Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_, in the magnificent ten-volume
edition of Boswell published by Gabriel Wells. It is the ideal book
for reading on the train, and causes us to reassert that Jamie
was one of the world’s greatest reporters. If we were running a
newspaper we would give a copy of this book to every man on the news
staff. Professor Tinker in his introduction calls it “perhaps the
sprightliest book of travels in the language.” Indeed, this is Boswell
_in excelsis_, and it warms us to note the magnificent zest and gusto
and triumphant happiness that peep between all his paragraphs. Happy,
happy man, he had his adored Doctor to himself; he had him, at last,
actually in Scotland; they were on holiday together! “Master of the
Hebridean Revels,” Tinker charmingly calls him. What an immortal touch
is this, of the somewhat baffled Mrs. Boswell, who must have thought
the expedition a perverse absurdity. This is on the day Johnson and
Boswell left Edinburgh--
She did not seem quite easy when we left her; but away we went!
Perfect, perfect--even down to the exclamation point.
We have not got very far in the Tour--only some fifty pages--but we
are drowned deep in the engulfing humour and fecund humanity of the
book. What an appetite for life, what a glorious naïf curiosity! What a
columnist Boswell would have made! He quotes Johnson to this effect--
I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to
write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of
preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those
arts by which a big book is made.
Boswell, with superb dramatic instinct, unconsciously adopted the most
triumphant subtlety of manœuvre. He put himself in the posture of a
boob in order to draw out the characteristic good things of the great
men he admired. He fished passionately for human oddity, and used any
bait at all that was to hand--even himself. To see the two together
on Boswell’s artfully contrived stage--Scotland, which he knew would
elicit the Doctor’s most genuine humours, prejudices, shrewd manly
observations--and in the bright light of a junketing adventure--ah,
here is a bellyful of art. What a pair: the subtle simpleton, the
simple-minded sage!
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