Complete Works of Samuel Johnson, page 618
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 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 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 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 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.
CHAPTER III. THE LIVES OF BOSWELL AND JOHNSON
These two men, then, are for ever inseparable. They go down the centuries together, Johnson owing most of his immortality to the genius of Boswell, Boswell owing to Johnson that inspiring opportunity without which genius cannot discover that it is genius. There were other men in Johnson’s circle, whom he knew longer and respected more; but for us, Boswell’s position in relation to Johnson is unique. Beside him the others, even Burke and Reynolds, are, in this connection, shadows. They had their independent fields of greatness in which Johnson had no share: Boswell’s greatness is all Johnsonian. We cannot think of him apart from Johnson: and he has so managed that we can scarcely think of Johnson apart from him. No one who occupies himself with the one can ignore the other: in interest and popularity they stand or fall together. It may be well, therefore, before going further, to give the bare facts of both their lives; dismissing Boswell first, as the less important, and then devoting the rest of the chapter to Johnson.
James Boswell was born in 1740. He came of an ancient family, a fact he never forgot, as, indeed, few people do who have the same advantage. His father was a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Auchinleck. The first of the family to hold the estate of Auchinleck, which is in Ayrshire, was Thomas Boswell, who received a grant of it from James IV in whose army he went to Flodden and shared the defeat and death of his patron. The estate had therefore belonged to the Boswells over two hundred years when the future biographer of Johnson was born. His father and he were never congenial spirits. The judge was a Whig with a practical view of life and had no sympathy with his son’s romantic propensities either in religion, politics or literature. A plain Lowland Scot, he did not see why his son should take up with Toryism, Anglicanism, or literary hero-worship. When James, after first attaching himself to Paoli, the leader of the Corsican struggle for independence, returned home and took up the discipleship to Johnson which was to be the central fact in the rest of his life, his father frankly despaired of him, and broke out, according to Walter Scott: “There’s nae hope for Jamie, mon. Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, mon? He’s done wi’ Paoli — he’s off wi’ the landlouping scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon? A dominie, mon — an auld dominie: he keeped a schule, and cau’d it an acaadamy.” Well might Boswell say that they were “so totally different that a good understanding is scarcely possible.” Beside disliking Paoli and Johnson, Lord Auchinleck cared nothing for some of Boswell’s strict feudal notions, had the bad taste to give his son a step-mother, and to be as unlike him as possible in the matter of good spirits. Scarcely anything could interfere with the judge’s cheerfulness, while Boswell was always falling into depressions about nothing in particular and perhaps indulging in the “foolish notion,” rebuked by Johnson, that “melancholy is a proof of acuteness.” But in spite of their differences the father and son managed to avoid anything like a definite breach. Boswell was sincerely anxious to please his father, and was constantly urged in that direction by his great mentor: and after all the judge went some way to meet his singular son, for he paid his debts and entertained both Paoli and Johnson at Auchinleck. The latter visit was naturally a source of some anxiety to Boswell and it did not go off without a storm when the old Whig and the old Tory unluckily got on to the topic of Charles I and Cromwell: but all ended well, and Boswell characteristically ends his story of it, written after both were dead, with the pious hope that the antagonists had by then met in a higher state of existence “where there is no room for Whiggism.”
Full of activities as Boswell’s life was, the definite facts and dates in it are not very numerous. He was sent to Glasgow University, and wished to be a soldier, but was bred by his father to the law. No doubt he gave some early signs of intellectual promise, for which it was not thought the army provided a fit sphere, for the Duke of Argyle is reported to have said to his father when he was only twenty: “My lord, I like your son: this boy must not be shot at for three-and-sixpence a day.” He paid his first visit to London in 1760; and, having heard a good deal about Johnson from one Mr. Gentleman, and from Derrick, a very minor poet, he at once sought an introduction, but had to leave London without succeeding in his object. He was equally unsuccessful when he was in London the next year, during which he published some anonymous poems which would not have helped him to secure the desired introduction. The great event occurred at last in 1763. The day was the 16th of May and the scene the house of Davies, the bookseller. “At last,” says Boswell, “on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies’s back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us, — he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, ‘Look, my Lord, it comes.’”
So, with characteristic accuracy and characteristic imagination, begins his well-known account of his first meeting with his hero, and the storms to which he was exposed in its course. But all ended satisfactorily, for when the great man was gone, Davies reassured the nervous Boswell by saying: “Don’t be uneasy, I can see he likes you very well.” A few days afterwards Boswell called on Johnson at his Chambers in the Temple, and the great friendship which was the pleasure and business of his life was definitely begun. Yet it is worth remembering, if only as an additional proof of Boswell’s biographical genius, that, according to the calculation of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, when all the weeks and months during which Johnson and Boswell were living within reach of each other are added together, they amount to little more than two years. And of course this includes all the days on which they were both in London, on many, or rather most, of which they did not meet.
A few months after the first meeting, Boswell went by his father’s wish to Utrecht to study law. But before that the friendship was got on to a firm footing, and Boswell had had the pride and pleasure of hearing Johnson say, “There are few people whom I take so much to, as you.” A still stronger proof of Johnson’s feeling was that he insisted on going with Boswell to Harwich to see him out of England. This was the occasion on which he scarified the good Protestants who were with them in the coach by defending the Inquisition, and invited one of the ladies who said she never allowed her children to be idle to take his own education in hand; “‘for I have been an idle fellow all my life.’ ‘I am sure, sir,’ said she, ‘you have not been idle.’ ‘Nay, madam, it is very true, and that gentleman there,’ pointing to me, ‘has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow where he continued to be idle. He then came to London where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht where he will be as idle as ever.’ I asked him privately how he could expose me so. ‘Pooh, Pooh!’ said he, ‘they know nothing about you and will think of it no more.’” When he was not engaged in these alarums and excursions or in reproving Boswell for giving the coachman a shilling instead of the customary sixpence, he was occupied in reading Pomponius Mela De Situ Orbis. How complete the picture is and how vivid! It once more gives Boswell’s method in miniature.
He seems to have stayed at Utrecht about a year, afterwards travelling in Germany, where he visited Wittenberg, and sat down to write to Johnson in the church where the Reformation was first preached, with his paper resting on the tomb of Melanchthon. It is noticeable that, though he had only known Johnson a year, he already hoped to be his biographer. “At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend, I vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy: and, if you die before me, I shall endeavour to do honour to your memory.” He was also at this time in Italy and Switzerland, where he visited Voltaire and gratified him by quoting a remark of Johnson’s that Frederick the Great’s writings were the sort of stuff one might expect from “a footboy who had been Voltaire’s amanuensis.” Nor did this collector of celebrities omit to visit Rousseau, the rival lion of the day, between whom and Voltaire the orthodox Johnson thought it was “difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity.” But as far as Boswell’s records go, he never said such violent things of Voltaire as of Rousseau, whom he called “a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society and transported to work in the plantations.” Boswell, however, was an admirer of the Vicaire Savoyard, and said what he could in defence of his host, in return for the hospitality he had enjoyed at Neuchatel, with the usual result, of course, that Johnson only became more outrageous.
In 1765 Boswell made the acquaintance of another distinguished man with whom his name will always be connected. Corsica had at that time been long, and on the whole victoriously, engaged in a struggle to free itself from the hated rule of Genoa. The leader of the Corsicans was a man of high birth, character and abilities, Pascal Paoli, who had acted since 1753 at once as their General and as the head of the civil administration. Both the generous and the curious element in Boswell made him anxious not to return from Italy without seeing something of so interesting a people and so great a hero. Armed with introductions from Rousseau and others and with such protection as a British Captain’s letter could give him against Barbary Corsairs, he sailed from Leghorn to Corsica in September 1765. His account of the island and of his tour there, published in 1768, is still very good reading. He soon made his way to the palace where Paoli was residing, with whom he at first felt himself in a presence more awe-inspiring than that of princes, but ventured after a while upon a compliment to the Corsicans. “Sir, I am upon my travels, and have lately visited Rome. I am come from seeing the ruins of one brave and free people: I now see the rise of another.” The good sense of Paoli declined any parallel between Rome and his own little people, but he soon received Boswell into his intimacy and spent some hours alone with him almost every day. One fine answer of his, uniting the scholar and the patriot, is worth quoting. Boswell asked him how he, who confessed to his love of society and particularly of the society of learned and cultivated men, could be content to pass his life in an island where no such advantages were to be had; to which Paoli replied at once —
“Vincit amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido.”
Well might Boswell wish to have a statue of him taken at that moment. Even Virgilian quotation has seldom been put to nobler use. Like all the great men of the eighteenth century, Paoli was an enthusiast for the ancients. “A young man who would form his mind to glory,” he told Boswell, “must not read modern memoirs; ma Plutarcho, ma Tito Livio.” His own mind was formed not only to glory, but also to what so often fails to go with glory, to justice and moderation. Nothing is more remarkable in the conversations with him recorded by Boswell than his good sense and fairness of mind in speaking of the Genoese. Even in the excitement of Corsica, Boswell did not forget Johnson. He says that he quoted specimens of Johnson’s wisdom to Paoli, who “translated them to the Corsican heroes with Italian energy”; and, as he had written to his master “from the tomb of Melanchthon sacred to learning and piety,” so he also wrote to him “from the palace of Pascal Paoli sacred to wisdom and liberty.” Boswell was received with great honour in Corsica, no doubt partly because he was very naturally supposed to have some mission from the British Government. He left the island in December and arrived in London in February 1766, when his intimacy with Johnson was at once resumed, in spite of the visits to Rousseau and Voltaire which drew some inevitable sarcasms from the great man. He soon, however, returned to Scotland, where he was admitted an Advocate in the summer of 1766.
