My visit had not been a success, I cannot recommend a Boswell pilgrimage. I wished that I was in London, and bethought me of Johnson’s remark that “the noblest prospect in Scotland is the high-road that leads to England.” On that high-road my party made no objection to setting out.
I once heard an eminent college professor speak disparagingly of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” saying that it was a mere literary slop-pail into which Boswell dropped scraps of all kinds—gossip, anecdotes and scandal, literary and biographical refuse generally. I stood aghast for a moment; then my commercial instinct awakened. I endeavored to secure this nugget of criticism in writing, with permission to publish it over the author’s name. In vain I offered a rate per word that would have aroused the envy of a Kipling. My friend pleaded “writer’s cramp,” or made some other excuse, and it finally appeared that, after all, this was only one of the cases where I had neglected, in Boswell’s phrase, to distinguish between talk for the sake of victory and talk with the desire to inform and illustrate. Against this opinion there is a perfect chorus of praise rendered by a full choir.[11]
The great scholar Jowett confessed that he had read the book fifty times. Carlyle said, “Boswell has given more pleasure than any other man of this time, and perhaps, two or three excepted, has done the world greater service.” Lowell refers to the “Life” as a perfect granary of discussion and conversation. Leslie Stephen says that his fondness for reading began and would end with Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “I am taking a little of Boswell daily by way of a Bible. I mean to read him now until the day I die.” It is one of the few classics which is not merely talked about and taken as read, but is constantly being read; and I love to think that perhaps not a day goes by when some one, somewhere, does not open the book for the first time and become a confirmed Boswellian.
“What a wonderful thing your English literature is!” a learned Hungarian once said to me. “You have the greatest drama, the greatest poetry, and the greatest fiction in the world, and you are the only nation that has any biography.” The great English epic is Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.”