He read this day a good deal of my Journal, written in a small book with which he had supplied me, and was pleased, for he said, ‘I wish thy books were twice as big.’ He helped me fill up blanks which I had left in first writing it, when I was not quite sure of what he had said, and he corrected any mistakes that I had made.[451]

In his accurate reproduction of life, Boswell surpasses all the realists and attains to something of the inexhaustibility of nature itself. Delightful as is his book for mere reading, it can never be fully appreciated till it has been used as a work of reference; for such it was intended to be. The work exhibits, according to the title-page, ‘a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain for near half a century.’ Boswell aspired to be not only stenographer but historian. And to the life that he loved he was both.

We reach at last the core of Boswell’s being, his pagan joy in life, that greediness of social pleasure which explains all his faults and suggests all his greatness. He loved social life as other men have loved a noble woman or a noble cause. He solemnly dedicated his life to it and his genius to the recording of it. Only when his work is viewed in the large does one see its grandeur. Like Ulysses, he might have said, when his great work was done, ‘Much have I seen and known, cities of men and manners ... myself not least but honoured of them all.’

I incline to think that this social avidity is the ruling passion not only of Boswell but of all the life that we have been studying, of the salons, the conversationists, the diarists, and the letter-writers. That life at its best blends two kinds of pleasure that seem ordinarily incompatible, those of society and solitude, of association and reflection. In the ‘exchange of mind’ which is its ideal, its disciples find a joy that excels the more passive pleasures of reading, by bringing them directly into the creation of its characteristic product, conversation, and to this it adds the pleasure of seeing the immediate effect of one’s words. Conversation such as this may be said to represent the active, social, and more human side of the intellectual life, while meditation stands for its contemplative and eremitical side. The two are often mutually exclusive. Philosopher and poet belong to the latter class, because the meditative temper naturally shuns social distractions; but diarists, letter-writers, and biographers owe their very existence to this social instinct, and write to exalt it. They cannot bear that the delights which they have experienced should pass away without leaving a memorial. They are determined not only to pluck the passing hour, but to do what they can to preserve the blossom even as it droops in their hand. A withered flower is better than none at all; at worst, it is a pathetic reminder of what has been. The memorialist is one whose face is ever towards the past and the glories that have been, the noctes cæncæque deum. It is in honour of them that his work is done. His office is to record life, not to transfigure it. He cannot aspire to be among those who have seen visions and pointed others towards them; the joy of poetic creation and the passion of adventurous thought are not for him; but it is his to know men and the cheerful ways of men, and to unite us with the heroic minds of old, not in the lonely glory of their visions, but in their more familiar hours and their more human joys.

INDEX

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Hume, Boswell, Burke, and Johnson are quoted in turn. The first reference is to Edinburgh, the rest to London.

[2] Boswell’s Life, Hill’s edition, 2. 75.