CHAPTER X
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 MAKING JOHNSON TALK 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]
JOHNSON ANGRYThen 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. AMAZING QUESTIONS 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 DEGRADING IMAGES 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 SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 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.
[1:] Autobiography, Letters, &c., of Mrs. Piozzi, ii, 125.
[2:] Life of Johnson, iii, 347.
[3:] Life of Johnson, iii, 349.
[4:] Croker Papers, iii, 33.