Thursday, September 2. I had slept ill. Dr. Johnson's anger had affected me much. I considered that, without any bad intention, I might suddenly forfeit his friendship; and was impatient to see him this morning. I told him how uneasy he had made me by what he had said, and reminded him of his own remark at Aberdeen upon old friendships being hastily broken off. He owned he had spoken in a passion ...; and he added, 'Let's think no more on't.' Boswell: 'Well then, Sir, I shall be easy. Remember I am to have fair warning in case of any quarrel. You are never to spring a mine upon me. It was absurd in me to believe you.' Johnson: 'You deserved about as much as to believe me from night to morning.'
The mixture of amusement and anxiety in Boswell's conduct and the affectionate and good-humoured reconciliation are all extremely typical of the relations between these two friends. Johnson indeed had far too much sense of Boswell's good qualities and value ever to fall out with him seriously, and it would have been hard to do so. There was never one real misunderstanding between them up to the end. Their intercourse, consisting of the visits of Boswell to London and a number of letters on both sides, had but one break, from November 1769 to April 1771. Boswell had just been married, and omitted in 1770 to pay his usual visit to London; he tells us that there was no coldness on either side, no reason for not writing beyond the common one of procrastination.
The correspondence of Boswell and Johnson is on the whole of an irregular nature; there is more than one interval, longer than we might expect, between two men who were such active friends as they, in an age when letter-writing was cultivated for its own sake. Arguing from this fact and considering that he was not present at Johnson's death-bed, Boswell has been accused of neglecting his friend at the end of his life. But from the state of mind which he described much earlier in the London Magazine, we can otherwise account for these lapses:
To pay a visit or write a letter to a friend does not surely require much activity. Yet such small exertions have appeared so laborious to a Hypochondriack, that he has delayed from hour to hour, so that friendship has grown cold for want of having its heat continued, for which repeated renewals, however slight, are necessary; or, perhaps, till death has carried his friend MEETINGS AND LETTERS beyond the reach of any token of his kindness, and the regrets which pained him in the course of his neglect are accumulated and press upon his mind with a weight of sorrow.[5]
We may suppose that whenever Boswell for a short time failed in his careful attention it was through no lack of affection, but rather through a kind of indolence and want of purpose in the manner of it, which is far from being uncommon.
The greatest event in this long friendship, and the time which has left us the fullest record, is the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in 1773. In Boswell's journal we see more nearly than elsewhere the relations between the two friends and the nature of their companionship. In the foreground is the extreme amiability of Boswell—it was by this that he was fitted to perform that most difficult office of friendship, to travel with Dr. Johnson. We may read his own account of himself at this time:
Think then, of a gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his predominant passion. He was then in his thirty-third year, and had been about four years happily married. His inclination was to be a soldier; but his father, a respectable judge, had pressed him into the profession of the law. He had travelled a good deal, and seen many varieties of human life. He had thought more than anybody supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. He had all Dr. Johnson's principles, with some degree of relaxation. He had rather too little, than too much prudence; and, his imagination being lively, he often said things of which the effect was very different from the intention. He resembled sometimes
'The best good man, with the worst natur'd muse.'
He cannot deny himself the vanity of finishing with the encomium of Dr. Johnson, whose friendly partiality to the companion of his 'Tour' represents him as one 'whose acuteness would help my enquiry, and whose gaiety of conversation, and civility of manners, are sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel, in countries less hospitable than we have passed.' Dr. Johnson in a letter to Mrs. Thrale wrote of him in terms of the highest esteem: 'Boswell will praise my resolution and perseverance, and I shall in return celebrate his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness.... It is very convenient to travel with him, for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect.'[6]
No one certainly could have been more attentive than Boswell was: he had a sense of responsibility in being in charge of the great writer, which made him anxious not only that Johnson should be welcomed in a fitting manner, but that he himself should appear as a worthy companion. His deep sense of respect, his desire for approval and dread of reproof are constantly TRAVELLING COMPANIONS obvious. This attitude is well illustrated by the account of his carouse in Corrichatachin: