The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

This was the invariable charge against the book. It was a mass of small talk collected by a man with a retentive memory, ‘not to do honour to his [Johnson’s] memory, by judiciously selecting the best and most striking of his sentences, but with a design to show his own assiduity in exhibiting the Doctor in the most glaring colours of inconsistency.’[442]

There was a secondary charge against the book. It was conceived as a libel on living people.[443] Various persons—the Duchess of Hamilton, Sir Alexander MacDonald, and many of those who had entertained the travellers in the Hebrides—discovered in the book remarks about themselves that were anything but palatable. A reference to Mrs. Thrale created the greatest excitement. Johnson’s remark that she could not get through Mrs. Montagu’s Essay on Shakespeare was there for all the world to read. She protested in her Anecdotes; but Boswell reminded her, in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine, that she had read his Journal in manuscript, without complaining of this, and that he was but quoting Johnson’s own words regarding her. So ended one controversy. It was not the only one.

But perhaps the chief excitement rose from the advertisement at the end of the volume, in which Boswell announced that he had but begun his memoirs of Johnson. He proposed presently to ‘erect a literary monument worthy of so great an author,’ and stated that he had been collecting biographical material for more than twenty years. The promise, for those who had known Johnson, was not gratifying. If Boswell had upset the literary world with an account of three months in Johnson’s life, what would he do in recounting seventy-five years of it? Everybody who had known Johnson held his breath for fear. Many urged the new biographer to be cautious. Fanny Burney refused to assist him in his work of showing the pleasanter side of Johnson’s character, and wrote in her Diary,[444] ‘I feel sorry to be named or remembered by that biographical, anecdotical memorandummer till his book of poor Dr. Johnson’s life is finished and published.’ Sir William Forbes, who was distressed because Boswell had quoted his approval of the Journal, took the liberty of ‘strongly enjoining him’ to be more careful about personalities in the later work.[445] He had perhaps never heard Boswell’s famous reply to Hannah More, who had urged him to ‘mitigate some of Johnson’s asperities’ when he published the Journal. ‘He said roughly,’ she writes, ‘“He would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.”’[446] This remark has been hackneyed in every work on Boswell, but it can never be quoted too often, for it is Boswell’s reply to the world. There is nothing more to be said.

I have dwelt on the reception of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides because it is the most effective way of showing the novelty and the magnitude of his achievement. If the author had been any other than James Boswell, critics would long ere this have expatiated on the splendid courage of his undertaking; but he enjoyed and esteemed his own work too highly to elicit such praise. Whatever were Boswell’s superficial faults, whatever the resentments that he caused, it is impossible to withhold our admiration from the simple confidence in the letter of the truth that characterized his Scotch soul. His would be the simplicity of childhood if it were not the simplicity of genius. The Lord Bishop of Chester complained[447] that Boswell recorded facts simply because they were facts. Such was indeed the case.

When, in 1791, the Life appeared, many of the old charges were repeated and some of the old satires revived; but it is not important to consider them in detail, for the note of admiration, which had been heard now and again in the beginning, when the Journal was published, soon became dominant. The other lives and memoirs of Johnson, with which Boswell’s former work had often been compared, now served only for purposes of contrast; they were useful in illustrating the greatness of the new work.

What are the characteristics which tended to give the Life its place in the history of biography? They are of the simplest kind. Boswell had, as this entire chapter has been designed to show, a passion for completeness. It is hardly necessary to labour this point. Boswell himself writes near the opening of his book: ‘I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has yet lived.’ In this sentence Boswell wrote his own panegyric, as in his reply to Miss More he had pronounced his own defence. Like everything that he did, the panegyric is not without the ludicrous touch, for he adds: ‘Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved.’ He might, indeed; for why should anything be lost, while there is a note-book—and a Boswell? Boswell, I repeat, aspired to the completeness of life itself.

Nor is it greatly necessary to dwell on Boswell’s fidelity to fact. It has been often dwelt upon, and, through the labours of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, is now generally admitted; though by one who liked neither Boswell nor Hill the matter has recently been once more called in question.[448] It would seem that a work which in its own day was both praised and denounced for its scrupulous accuracy might have been accepted without question. It is scarcely reasonable to demand a more lifelike biographer than Boswell. His own times readily granted that he had given the true Johnson; that was both the praise and the blame. Pepys, who knew Johnson and had no illusions about him, wrote to Hannah More:

The Journal is a most faithful picture of him, so faithful that I think anybody who has got a clear idea of his person and manner may know as much of him from that book as by having been acquainted with him (in the usual way) for three years.[449]

This was written before the Life appeared. Respecting the later work we have the testimony of Burke to its value as a monument to Johnson’s conversation.[450] Even more than this may be said. We have the nearest possible thing to Johnson’s own approval. He had himself read the Journal in manuscript, and pronounced it a ‘very exact picture of a portion of his life.’ It is difficult to demand more than this. In the same work Boswell writes: