A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

And the funniest part of the whole comedy is to be found in the fact that the pair lived happy ever after!

The extraordinary influence which Boswell has had upon almost every student of the life of the latter half of the eighteenth century is shown in a marked way by the general acceptance of his view—which it is scarcely necessary to say was Johnson's view—of the second marriage of Mrs. Thrale. We are treating Boswell much more fairly than he treated Mrs. Thrale when we acknowledge at once that his opinion was shared by a considerable number of the lady's friends, including Dr. Burney and his family. They were all shocked when they heard that the widow of the Southwark brewer had married the Italian musician, Signor Gabrielli Piozzi. Even in the present day, when one might reasonably expect that, the miserable pettiness of Boswell's character having been made apparent, his judgment on most points would be received with a smile, he is taken very seriously by a good many people. It has long ago been made plain that Boswell was quite unscrupulous in his treatment of every one that crossed his path or made an attempt to interfere with the aim of his life, which was to become the biographer of Johnson. The instances of his petty malevolence which have come to light within recent years are innumerable. They show that the opinion which his contemporaries formed of him was absolutely correct. We know that he was regarded as a cur who was ever at Johnson's heels, and took the insults of the great man with a fawning complacency that was pathetically canine. He was daily called a cur. “Oh, no,” said Goldsmith, “he is not a cur, only a burr; Tom Davies flung him at Johnson one day as a joke, and he stuck to him ever since”—a cur, and an ape and a spy and a Branghton—the last by Dr. Johnson himself in the presence of a large company, that included the creator of the contemptible Mr. Branghton. (The incident was not, however, recorded by Mr. Boswell himself.) But as the extraordinary interest in his Life of Johnson began to be acknowledged, the force of contemporary opinion gradually dwindled away, until Boswell's verdicts and Boswell's inferences found general acceptance; and even now Goldsmith is regarded as an Irish omadhaum, because Boswell did his best to make him out to be one, and Mrs. Thrale is thought to have forfeited her claims to respect because she married Signor Piozzi.

People forget the origin of Boswell's malevolence in both cases. He detested Goldsmith because Goldsmith was a great writer, who was capable of writing a great biography of Johnson, with whom he had been on the most intimate terms long before Tom Davies flung his burr at Johnson; he hated Baretti and recorded—at the sacrifice of Johnson's reputation for humanity—Johnson's cynical belittling of him, because he feared that Baretti would write the biography; he was spiteful in regard to Mrs. Thrale because she actually did write something biographical about Johnson.

The impudence of such a man as Boswell writing about “honest Dr. Goldsmith” is only surpassed by his allusions to the second marriage of Mrs. Thrale. He was a fellow-guest with Johnson at the Thrales' house in 1775, and he records something of a conversation which he says occurred on the subject of a woman's marrying some one greatly beneath her socially. “When I recapitulate the debate,” he says, “and recollect what has since happened, I cannot but be struck in a manner that delicacy forbids me to express! While I contended that she ought to be treated with inflexible steadiness of displeasure, Mrs. Thrale was all for mildness and forgiveness and, according to the vulgar phrase, making the best of a bad bargain.” This was published after the second marriage. What would be thought of a modern biographer who should borrow a little of Boswell's “delicacy,” and refer to a similar incident in the same style?

In his own inimitable small way Boswell was for ever sneering at Mrs. Thrale. Sometimes he did it with that scrupulous delicacy of which an example has just been given; but he called her a liar more than once with considerable indelicacy, and his readers will without much trouble come to the conclusion that his indelicacy was preferable to his delicacy—it certainly came more natural to him. He was small and mean in all his ways, and never smaller or meaner than in his references to Mrs. Thrale's second marriage.

But, it must be repeated, he did not stand alone in regarding her union with Piozzi as a mésalliance. Dr. Burney was shocked at the thought that any respectable woman would so far forget herself as to marry a musician, and his daughter Fanny wept remorseful tears when she reflected that she had once been the friend of a lady who did not shrink from marrying a foreigner and a Roman Catholic—more of the irony of Fate, for Fanny Burney was herself guilty of the same indiscretion later on: she made a happy marriage with a Roman Catholic foreigner, who lived on her pension and her earnings. Dr. Johnson was brutal when the conviction was forced upon him that he would no longer have an opportunity of insulting a lady who had treated him with incredible kindness, or the guests whom he met at her table. Upon one of the last occasions of his dining at Mrs. Thrale's house at Streatham, a gentleman present—an inoffensive Quaker—ventured to make a remark respecting the accuracy with which the red-hot cannon-balls were fired at the Siege of Gibraltar. Johnson listened for some time, and then with a cold sneer said, “I would advise you, sir, never to relate this story again. You really can scarce imagine how very poor a figure you make in the telling of it.” Later on he took credit to himself for not quarrelling with his victim when the latter chose to talk to his brother rather than to the man who had insulted him. Yes, it can quite easily be understood that Johnson should look on the marriage as a sad mésalliance, and possibly it is fair to assume from the letter which he wrote to the lady that he felt hurt when he heard that it was to take place.

Mrs. Thrale wrote to tell him that she meant to marry Piozzi, and received the following reply:

“Madam,—If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once more talk together. If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame and your country, may your folly do no further mischief!”

Possibly the lady may have gathered from the hint or two conveyed to her, with Boswellian delicacy, in this letter, that Johnson was displeased with her. At any rate, she replied, declining to continue the correspondence.

In her letter she summed up the situation exactly as a reasonable person, acquainted with all the facts, and knowing something of the first husband, would do.