The romantic sphere into which Boswell elevated these friendships contrasts very strangely with his acute analysis to Johnson of his true sentiments: 'The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.' One would suspect that the feeling of friendship with him was, as he might have expressed it himself, like a balloon, which rises higher and higher as it is more blown out with gas.
In the same fashion he believed that his life was, 'one of the most romantic' he knew of;[22] that Temple's 'soft admonitions would at any time calm ROMANCE the tempests of his soul,'[23] and that he could 'retire into the calm regions of philosophy' and contemplate the 'heroism' which he was able to see in his conduct towards his father.[24] Philosophy, indeed, had a great attraction for him. It was in the bower of philosophy that many of his best hours were filled with that noble admiration which his disinterested soul was able to enjoy for the character of Lord Chatham. In early years he was Temple's philosophic friend, and Paoli is told that 'with a mind naturally inclined to melancholy and a deep desire of inquiry, I have intensely applied myself to metaphysical researches.'
The affectation or extravagance of Boswell appears also from time to time in his pious and moral remarks.
Being in a frame of mind which I hope, for the felicity of human nature, many experience—in fine weather—at the country house of a friend—consoled and elevated by pious exercises—I expressed myself with an unrestrained fervour to my 'Guide, Philosopher and Friend': 'My dear Sir, I could fain be a good man; and I am very good now. I fear God and honour the king, I wish to do no ill, and to be benevolent to all mankind.'[25]
Boswell was very impressionable, by his own account, to good influences. He rose from reading a dialogue of Hume's 'happier and more disposed to follow virtue.'[26] Relating how Mr. Edward Dilly repeated on his death-bed a passage from Young's 'Night Thoughts'—'Death, a subterraneous road to bliss,' or some such words—Boswell remarks: 'I am edified here.'[27] The greatest triumph, one would suppose, of this nature was when, as he says, speaking of his 'moral fences,' 'Reason, that steady builder and overseer, has set them firm.'[28] Boswell was excellent too at giving moral advice: 'It is certainly true philosophy to submit to the will of Heaven, and to fulfil the amiable duties of morality.'[29] 'Read Epictetus,'[30] he writes to Temple; on another occasion, 'Read Johnson. Let a manly and firm philosophy brace your mind.'
Boswell, however, though he was continually posing, posed not for others but for himself. He had an insatiable greed of sensation. He derived prodigious pleasure from the view of himself in a situation. 'I cannot resist,' he says, 'the serious pleasure of writing to Mr. Johnson from the tomb of Melancthon. My paper rests upon the tomb of that great and good man.' While he wrote the letter he admired the scene he had arranged. He admired himself playing every kind of rôle; he could be the grave author, or the romantic lover, the scholar of 'solid learning' or the elegant ENJOYMENT OF LIFE man of the world, the sage counsellor or the jolly good fellow, the enthusiast for liberty who talked heroics with Paoli and politics with Chatham, explorer and diplomat, the feudal lord or the humble paterfamilias of a rustic domesticity; he could be literary, theological, pious, philosophical, legal, or political, as occasion suited, with profound enjoyment of the part he was acting. He delighted in the solemnity of a vow, and even had a taste for the solitude of a hermit: 'Sometimes,' he exclaims, 'I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desert.' His gust for London was the same gust for sensation; and his pursuit of distinguished men was partly for the sake of an added zest and excitement from their company.
'You can almost see him,' says Lionel Johnson, 'reckoning up, as it were, on his plump fingers, his eminent acquaintances, the cities and courts he has visited, his writings and flirtations and experiences in general: they are his treasures and his triumphs. The acquisition of Johnson was but the greatest of them all, his crowning achievement; all his life was devoted to social coups d'état. To hear service in an Anglican cathedral, to attend an exceptionally choice murderer to the gallows; to contrive a meeting between Johnson and Wilkes;... to pray among the ruins of Iona, and to run away for fear of ghosts; to turn Roman Catholic, and immediately to run away with an actress: each and all of these performances were to him sensational, enlivening, vivid.'
Boswell was not unaware of this extravagance in his temperament. He alludes to his 'warm imagination.' In 'Boswelliana,' pleased at having found 'a good image,' he records:
There have been many people who built castles in the air; but, I believe, I am the first who ever attempted to live in them.
By castles in the air, he means not only glorious plans for the future, but the sensational and emotional in common incidents. A moment during the 'Tour to the Hebrides' reveals the whole of what he meant: