The more we read, in short, the more sensible we become of the unique merits of our old friend. He is far too familiar to justify any elaborate analysis of character, but a word or two may help to explain how his superiority to his rivals arose from his strange idiosyncrasy. The letters to Temple, first published in 1857, show the man even more distinctly than the life of Johnson; and I have sometimes wondered that so curious a book has not been more generally read. As a self-revelation it is almost equal to a fragment of Pepys. Pepys was secretive enough to keep his diary to himself, whereas Boswell seems to have been equally willing to confide all his weaknesses to a friend. That quality, whatever it may be, seems to have been omitted from his composition which makes most people feel the absolute necessity of a veil of privacy. They have feelings of which they are not ashamed, but which it would be agony to expose to the gaze of their neighbours. Boswell seems to have enjoyed laying bare everything that he felt; he would apparently have wished his confessor, if he had had one, to publish his avowals in the papers. ‘Not a bent sixpence cares he,’ as he says of himself in a boyish song, ‘whether with him or at him you laugh.’ To good-natured people there was something attractive in the confidingness which is implied in all his absurdities. Whether he introduces himself to the hero Paoli, the moralist Johnson, or to Mitchell, then the English Ambassador at the Court of Frederick, he immediately proceeds to give him full information as to the state of his soul. No other human being could have proposed that the great Chatham should ‘honour him with a letter now and then,’ in order to keep him ‘ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame.’ He was at the time only known to Chatham as the author of the book upon Corsica, but thought it perfectly natural that the magnificent statesman should become his confidential adviser. Many distinguished people besides Johnson seem to have been flattered by his almost pathetic trust in their benevolence. His simplicity and good-nature were so unmistakable that, as Burke put it, they scarcely seemed to be virtuous. People overlooked the impudence in consideration of the genuine goodwill. David Hume and Wilkes seem to have felt the charm as much as Johnson and Burke. A man who takes you into his confidence so frankly is at least paying you a compliment. It was only such fine gentlemen as Walpole and Gibbon, who stood upon their dignity and would not take liberties even upon invitation, lest liberties should be taken with them, whom Boswell found intolerable. Gibbon in particular was an ‘ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,’ who ‘poisoned’ the club for him. Still worse, indeed, were the people who saw in Boswell’s simplicity a chance of making him a butt for rough practical jokes. The sycophants who surrounded his patron, Lord Lowther, and the Bar of the Northern Circuit seem to have embittered the poor man’s last years by using him in that capacity. His disposition, in fact, was not conducive to success in practical life. Boswell was far too easy-going and too apt to snatch at any indulgences which came in his way to play an effective part in a game of rough-and-tumble. The characteristic result was that Boswell became a kind of interested looker-on, like a delicate boy at a rough public school, who admires the games, though he cannot take part in them, and worships the heroes. To his own fancy he was a kind of Hamlet. He explains to Paoli, as he had already explained to Mitchell, that he had ‘intensely applied himself to metaphysical research,’ and got ‘beyond his depth.’ He had thus become for ever incapable of taking a part in active life. He was proud, as we know, of his hypochondria; and though he frankly confesses to less refined causes of most of his fits, he always cherishes the belief that they imply a philosophical temperament. He delights in supposing himself to be puzzling over the problems of fate and freewill. But he has not the courage to be a thorough sceptic or pessimist. At bottom, he feels the world to be infinitely too enjoyable to admit of a gloomy solution; and so his real solace is in day-dreaming. He is always in imagination overcoming his difficulties and rising to fame and fortune. In a very characteristic letter (in 1789), he explains all his troubles: Pitt had been ‘ill-advised enough’ not to patronise a ‘man of my popular and pleasant talents.’ His wife was dying; his property embarrassed; and he was induced to adopt Johnson’s melancholy view of the vanity of human wishes. And yet he is still full of ‘projects to attain wealth and eminence’; and observes that he is always ‘looking back and looking forward,’ and wondering ‘how he will feel in situations which he anticipates in fancy.’ In Corsica he sang Hearts of Oak to the natives, and fancied himself ‘a recruiting sea-officer, with his chorus of Corsicans aboard the British fleet.’ He rode Paoli’s own horse, decked with ‘crimson velvet’ and ‘broad gold lace,’ and fancied himself for a moment to be the idol of an enthusiastic population. He is always playing at being something delightful. He makes a vow ‘under a solemn yew-tree,’ in the garden of his friend Temple, and becomes straightway a model of all the virtues. True, he did not keep it ‘religiously,’ but that was because ‘a little wine hurried him on too much,’ He promises Paoli, however, that he will take no wine for a year, and, having kept his promise for three weeks at the time of writing, feels that he is virtually a reformed character. The queerest result of this strange muddle between the ideal and the practical appears in his letters to Temple upon his love affairs. He writes an admirable panegyric upon marriage to his friend, and remarks that he ‘looks with horror on adultery.’ This, however, is part of a passage in which he explains that he has an amiable mistress who, unfortunately, has also a husband. His clerical friend hereupon seems to have blamed him for ‘keeping another man’s wife.’ Boswell is startled at the phrase. That was literally his scheme, as he admits, but ‘imagination represented it just as being fond of a pretty, lively black little lady, who, to oblige me, stayed in Edinburgh, and I very genteelly paid her expenses.’ A year later Temple gives him a ‘moral lecture’ for some scrape into which he has fallen, and gets for answer that Boswell’s ‘warm imagination looks forward with great complacency on the sobriety, the healthfulness, and the worth of his future life.’ His imagination retained this inestimable power up to the last, and it must be admitted, would be an admirable consoler to a feeble conscience. It told him one truth, however, in 1790: namely, that he was writing what would be, ‘without exception, the most entertaining book’ that his correspondent had ever read. Too characteristically he had realised his aspirations just when success became valueless. But, as a rule, he is in the odd position of one who lives in a dream world, and yet one whose dreams are always a version of realities.
Boswell is thus always playing at being something else, a melancholy philosopher or a virtuous judge or patriot; when he heard music, as he told Johnson, he felt himself ‘plunging into the thick of the battle’; and after too convivial an evening, he retired in imagination to the deserts and adopted Rousseau’s ideal ‘savage state.’ Still, as nobody appreciated more heartily the actual and solid pleasures of life, he could never detach himself from the world, though he did become disqualified for success. He could always restore his complacency by virtuous resolutions, and the friendship of good-natured people, and roamed through Vanity Fair lingering at every booth and distracted between the charms of every variety of enjoyment. He was precisely in the humour, therefore, to become a disciple of Johnson. For Johnson was the professor of a science which at that period was most flourishing. He was devoted, as he and his friends would have said, to the study of human nature. He was a ‘moralist,’ not meaning, as we might now mean, that he held any particular theories about ‘hedonism’ or ‘self-realisation,’ but that he was always observing concrete human beings, their eccentricities and miseries and varieties of character, with the eagerness of a scientific student. His favourite quotation, according to Mrs. Piozzi, was Pope’s saying about the ‘proper study of mankind.’ The phrase, however, was taking a meaning rather different from that which it had borne in the days of Pope. The typical man of Pope’s circle was to be found in Courts and at Ministers’ levées. He was the person to be lectured upon manners by Chesterfield and initiated into Machiavellian worldly wisdom. Johnson, as
the famous letter to Chesterfield shows, expressed among other things the intrusion of a new social element; the rise of Grub Street to consideration, if not respect. He and his companions had known the world upon which Pope and his friends looked down with scorn, the world of sponging-houses and bailiffs and translators kept in Curll’s garrets. The study of ‘human nature,’ as Johnson, and Fielding, and Hogarth, and their contemporaries understood it, had to take into account the life of London slums, and to consider a good many bald facts, coarse and repulsive enough, which their predecessors had regarded as beneath the notice of a gentleman. Dimly, too, they became aware of the passions which were leading, though they knew it not, to a great social upheaval, and beginning to be sentimental and denounce luxury and believe in the state of nature or the rights of man. Johnson was rich in such experience, and his best sayings are summaries of the reflections which it suggested. His reading and his criticism had all the same purpose. He loved biography and such history as deals with individual character. He could not bear to talk about the ‘Punic War,’ as he told Mrs. Piozzi — formal accounts of campaigns and conquests; but he loved the history which showed ‘how our ancestors lived.’ He was even modern in his approval of early attempts to give accounts of ‘common manners’ rather than political events. He always estimates books, from Shakespeare to Richardson, by the ‘knowledge of the human heart’ which he considers them to contain. He loves London as a botanist might love a fertile country, on account of the abundance of the material for his favourite study. He sent Boswell and Windham to ‘explore Wapping’ on account of the variety of ‘modes of life’ to be found there. Boswell is generally ridiculed for his willingness to visit even such people as the famous Mrs. Rudd, who was probably guilty of forgery and something very like murder. Johnson would have visited her too, he said, if they had not already got into the habit of putting things into the papers; and both would have justified themselves on the pretext that they were studying ‘human nature.’ When people go to Wapping now it is generally to carry out Mr. Charles Booth’s admirable method of investigating great social problems. They deal with criminals by statistical tables, not by seeking the society of eminent murderers, or looking on at executions. We talk about sociology, not the study of human nature, and investigate the manners and customs of primitive savages instead of generalising our private personal experience. The speciality of Johnson’s period is precisely this desire to consider the concrete human being, from Wapping to St. James’s, as the subject-matter of a separate and intensely interesting science.
This, not to go further, characterises Boswell’s view of Johnson. Boswell, already inclined to study life after a quaint and desultory fashion enough, to put himself in contact with all manner of famous people and to play their parts in imagination, imagined, not without excuse, that he had found in Johnson an embodiment of all the wisdom to be extracted from manifold experience of life, guided by profound penetration into character. Johnson’s conversation is delightful because it is full of the pithy aphorisms which concentrate the results of the experience. Johnson is the half-inspired prophet who can tell him what fruit to grow in his garden, what profession he should adopt, and how he should behave to his wife or his father. If there were such a thing as a scientific knowledge of the human heart, and if Johnson had possessed it, there would be much sense in this; and so far as strong common sense could be a substitute for science, Boswell was perhaps not so far wrong in his choice of an oracle. It helps to explain — not Boswell’s skill, for that is as inexplicable as all genius — but the special distinction between Boswell and his rivals. Boswell, that is, had not only sat at the feet of the prophet, but had really imbibed his method. The others, from Hawkins up to Mrs. Piozzi, simply take the point of view of the ordinary biographer. They assume that their readers have studied The Rambler or Rasselas or the Dictionary, and want to know something about the author. They collect as many good sayings and characteristic anecdotes as they can, and argue as to the justice of the various charges of rudeness and so forth. Some of them, who, from no fault of Dr. Hill’s, fill rather more pages than we could wish, think that a great man ought to be mainly the hero of a religious tract, and treat us simply to minute and painful descriptions of the poor man’s last days. In any case, the real Johnson is for them the author, and their function is simply to satisfy the curiosity of his readers. Boswell being, in however quaint a fashion, a man of real genius, saw instinctively something more. Johnson was, in the first place, his oracle — the man who has extracted the truth implicitly written in the book of human life. But then, besides this, Johnson might also be considered as himself a page in the book. To understand his significance we must take not merely his utterances, but their whole setting, the ‘environment’ as well as the individual. Boswell has to study the Johnson circle as he was sent to study Wapping. Charing Cross is profoundly interesting because through it flows a full tide of humanities. The biography is not merely an account of Johnson, but what we should call a study of human life. Johnson himself is, of course, in the foreground — he was, so to speak, a great nugget, a gigantic mass of ‘human nature.’ He had that article, like Carlyle, in so much abundance as to shock and alienate a good many people who shrink from the rough ore, however full it may be of precious metal. To study him, therefore, was to study a type of surpassing interest, and nobody was really freer than Boswell from what Macaulay, erroneously, I should say, called the lues Boswelliana, the unqualified admiration even of a hero’s failings. He would not, as he told Hannah More, make his lion a cat to please anybody, and perceived that the shadows were necessary to do justice to the lights. But the point in which he is even more unique is the perception that Johnson, though always in the foreground, is still to be only in the foreground of a group of living and moving human beings. The dramatic skill displayed in such descriptions as the famous scene with Wilkes enables him to do what is not even approached by his rivals. It makes us incidentally share Boswell’s own feeling. He comes up from Edinburgh with such a ‘gust’ for London society as excited even Johnson’s wonder. It is not a mere search for pleasure or amusement, but a kind of scientific zeal, that animates him. He has a genuine desire to see life at its fullest, all human passions stimulated to the utmost by the conflict of multitudes, and shown in the greatest variety by the mixture of men of all ranks and conditions, to see the keenest intellects of the day roused to activity by constant intercourse, and to have before his eyes every variety of incident, from a change of Ministry to a procession of criminals to Tyburn tree. The insatiable curiosity is only stimulated by the circumstance that he is jostled aside by men of stronger fibre and obliged to look on or to play his part by ‘a warm imagination’ instead of actual participation. This, I take it, is why Boswell’s rivals seem to give us merely a collection of detached anecdotes, while in Boswell all the persons seem to come suddenly to life and give us a real insight into the whole social sphere instead of being mere lay figures. Mme. d’Arblay perhaps deserves the exception made in her favour, in so far as she has the real novelist’s instinct, and gives us lively accounts of incidents, instead of isolated facts. But Mme. d’Arblay scarcely sees more than one aspect of Johnson — the famous old moralist who likes to make a pet of a charming young woman, and relaxes into more than usual playfulness in course of administering delightful doses of pardonable flattery. Of the others, even of Mrs. Piozzi, we can hardly say more than that they become amusing by the light of Boswell. He has revealed the actors to us with such skill that even the dry and pompous narratives enable us to supply what was wanting, as in the dullest of reports we can sometimes hear the accents of a familiar friend.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 651