We are not joking. You can have more fun, and get better paid for it, as a sporting reporter than in any other newspaper job. And there is in it a bigger opportunity for men of real originality.
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A GREAT REPORTER
We have been reading—for the first time, we blush to admit—the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, in the magnificent ten-volume edition of Boswell published by Gabriel Wells. It is the ideal book for reading on the train, and causes us to reassert that Jamie was one of the world’s greatest reporters. If we were running a newspaper we would give a copy of this book to every man on the news staff. Professor Tinker in his introduction calls it “perhaps the sprightliest book of travels in the language.” Indeed, this is Boswell in excelsis, and it warms us to note the magnificent zest and gusto and triumphant happiness that peep between all his paragraphs. Happy, happy man, he had his adored Doctor to himself; he had him, at last, actually in Scotland; they were on holiday together! “Master of the Hebridean Revels,” Tinker charmingly calls him. What an immortal touch is this, of the somewhat baffled Mrs. Boswell, who must have thought the expedition a perverse absurdity. This is on the day Johnson and Boswell left Edinburgh—
She did not seem quite easy when we left her; but away we went!
Perfect, perfect—even down to the exclamation point.
We have not got very far in the Tour—only some fifty pages—but we are drowned deep in the engulfing humour and fecund humanity of the book. What an appetite for life, what a glorious naïf curiosity! What a columnist Boswell would have made! He quotes Johnson to this effect—
I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.
Boswell, with superb dramatic instinct, unconsciously adopted the most triumphant subtlety of manœuvre. He put himself in the posture of a boob in order to draw out the characteristic good things of the great men he admired. He fished passionately for human oddity, and used any bait at all that was to hand—even himself. To see the two together on Boswell’s artfully contrived stage—Scotland, which he knew would elicit the Doctor’s most genuine humours, prejudices, shrewd manly observations—and in the bright light of a junketing adventure—ah, here is a bellyful of art. What a pair: the subtle simpleton, the simple-minded sage!
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