We expect, indeed, to see in Boswell beyond his own real nature the marks of a stronger personality. But we may admit the Johnsonian flavour without impugning the originality of Boswell or degrading him to the level of a mere imitator. All the conventional prejudices, the strong conformity which was so pronounced in Johnson, existed in Boswell independently. The 'old Tory sentiments' inasmuch as they exceeded the sentiments of Johnson (which they occasionally did, e.g. on the subject of slavery), were definitely a part of the true Boswell. It is remarkable that in the 'Letters to Temple' the opinions of Johnson are very rarely mentioned; Boswell on one occasion was 'confirmed in his Toryism'; and Johnson is quoted two or three times: but his name appears far less often than we should expect. It is clear, indeed, when we read the 'Life of Johnson,' that Boswell, however he might be a worshipper, was far from being a slave: his passion for truth would not allow him to pass lightly by an opinion he disapproved, and his conviction that Johnson was wrong, or at least that his own opinions remained unaltered, is frankly if respectfully stated more than once.
He knew that Johnson's opinions might be formed only to refute an adversary: 'But it is not improbable that if one had taken the other side he might have reasoned differently.' Not infrequently Boswell ventures to criticise his philosopher's argument. On one occasion, when predestination had been discussed, he even goes so far as to excuse Johnson's prejudices:
He avoided the question which has excruciated philosophers and divines beyond any other. I did not press it further, when I perceived that he was displeased, and shrunk from any abridgment of an attribute usually ascribed to the divinity, however irreconcilable in its full extent with the grand system of moral government. His supposed orthodoxy here cramped the vigorous powers of his understanding. He was confined by a chain, which early imagination and long habit made him think massy and strong, but which, had he ventured to try, he could at once have snapped asunder.
Boswell's attitude in this passage is very far from being intellectually dependent on Johnson or on anyone else. And it is not an unusual attitude. We sometimes see another side—Boswell, apparently in fetters, a prisoner in the citadel of respectability. But it cannot be asserted too often that Boswell was essentially an independent individual, one who was capable of pursuing his own true vision, inflexible and careless of the consequences.
There is no need to infer from this that the influence of Johnson was negligible, or even small. We cannot suppose that the guide, philosopher and friend of Boswell, for whom he had a 'mysterious veneration,' whose 'just frown' he so greatly dreaded, whom upon so many occasions he eagerly consulted, can have been of small account. Boswell himself was far from thinking so; he knew the value of Johnson to him when, reflecting that death must soon rob him of his friend, he wrote to Temple, in Johnsonian words: 'it will be like a limb amputated.'
If influence is to be defined it may be said perhaps that it is a quality which makes us see what we should not have seen without it. We cannot doubt that Boswell learnt many things by his intercourse with Dr. Johnson. The influence of Johnson was in the first place, as we remarked above, an influence for truth, for honesty. It helped Boswell in his early life to see the self which he came in the end to understand so well. He must long have remembered the letter which he received from Johnson at Utrecht.
Boswell, in his desire to make an impression as the young genius, then regarded himself as a peculiar mortal who had no need to regulate his conduct by the ordinary standards. Johnson begins by describing this state of mind:
There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.... You know a gentleman who, when first he set his foot in the gay world, as he prepared himself to whirl in the vortex of pleasure, imagined a total indifference and universal negligence to be the most agreeable concomitants of youth, and the strongest indication of an airy temper and a quick apprehension.
The result which he particularly deplored was Boswell's idleness:
Vacant to every object, and sensible of every impulse, he thought that all appearance of diligence would deduct something from the reputation of genius; and hoped that he should appear to attain, amidst all the ease of carelessness, and all the tumults of diversion, that knowledge and those accomplishments which mortals of the common fabrick obtain only by mute abstraction and solitary drudgery.