It might be supposed that any friend of Boswell would play the part of the strong man. He might not have the capacity of Dr. Johnson for sweeping away cobwebs and for discouraging complaint, but one would expect to find him upon the same platform. Temple, however, did not take this attitude. On the contrary it was Boswell who encouraged Temple. Not once but many times we find in the letters that Temple has told the tale of his evil fortune in tones of despondency, and Boswell tries to present the circumstances in a more favourable light. Boswell perhaps did not do this very well. Neither the cheerfulness of optimism nor the consolation of philosophy is sufficient for the occasion; and it may be doubted whether the philosophy advocated by Boswell was anything more than an affectation of indifference. But it does him credit that he should have made the attempt to console, and at the same time displays the weakness of Temple's character. Certainly this was not the kind of man to exert a strong influence. Boswell seems to have regarded him in the light of a father confessor with whom a certain ceremony is to be performed, and is reproved and forgiven by a natural sequence, which adds nothing but pleasure to the agreeable duty of confession. Temple expostulates in the rôle of parson when the conduct of his friend is particularly damnable; it is possible there shall be a 'blaze hereafter,' and one must at least be on the safe side. So Boswell no doubt understood it. The mild reproofs of his clerical friend never for a moment deterred him either from doing or from telling of his deed. He came to expect and even to like them. 'Admonish me, but forgive me,' he says after a particularly detailed account of his amours; and at a later date, in an expression which seems to epitomise the relations of the pastor and his erring sheep, 'Your soft admonitions,' he writes, 'would at any time calm the tempests of my soul.'
It is clear that Boswell had no moral respect for Temple; it was not in search of guidance that he told stories of his profligacy, but simply because he liked to tell them. Boswell, as his friend remarked, mounted the hobby-horse of his own temperament; this was his perennial and unfailing interest, and the irrepressible delight which he had in his own feelings and performances found an outlet in the 'Letters to Temple' and in many amusing passages in the 'Life of Johnson.'
Boswell no doubt was capable of self-revelation without encouragement, and it is difficult for this reason to tell how much sympathy he had from his friend. Temple wanted to hear from Boswell; he asked him to write, and praised his letters. But his mild disapproval was probably genuine. When he LETTERS TO TEMPLE accuses Boswell of neglecting a friend or of unkindness to his father, he must have thought himself a more considerate man. He was not like Boswell, a tippler, and seems to have been really distressed by the other's intemperate habits. In a manuscript diary, reports Mr. Seccombe, he describes Boswell, no doubt in a moment of irritation, as 'irregular in conduct and manners, selfish, indelicate, no sensibility or feeling for others.' And yet Temple himself was not above a gross fault; he talks of a 'dear infidel,' and Boswell exclaims that he is exceeded by his friend. Boswell no doubt made the most of any lapse on Temple's part from the path of rectitude; he would like to feel that he had the support of a respectable companion. His conscience was by no means complacent, and it would become more tranquil if one whom he respected were in the same boat with himself. It is conceivable that Temple encouraged Boswell's confidence with the object of controlling him as much as he could; his advice certainly was always that he should get well married instead of carrying on a number of flirtations. But it is difficult to believe, if we read the letters carefully, that Temple ever appeared to be shocked by Boswell's confessions; and to the latter no doubt that was an encouragement.
In brief, we may describe Temple as a refined and well-intentioned creature, but hardly wise and not courageous. His marriage was so much a failure that he sought at one time a colonial chaplaincy with the object of living apart from his wife. He was discontented with his lot and inclined rather to complain acrimoniously than to make the best of it. He had apparently no staunch qualities to influence a friend; and this friend needed a firm monitor.
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The date of the first of Boswell's letters to Temple is July 1758. In 1763 he met Johnson. In the five years between these dates we see Boswell in a number of characteristic lights. The period from eighteen to twenty-three is commonly held to mark a special change and development in a man's character. In Boswell's, however, we do not see this very strongly. As he grew up he did fewer, no doubt, of the wild things of youth. But he seems hardly to have become older in the ordinary way, until towards the close of his life. He was always to the world the gay, good-humoured, sociable being, with a strong vein of fatuous buffoonery, that we see in these early years. A great difficulty in rightly understanding Boswell's life lies in this fact. It seems impossible at times to realise that this was a serious man; he appears to find the world and himself such a preposterous joke. And yet if he saw to the full the humour of living, he felt too very keenly that it was an important matter, that there were real standards. No one has valued more the opinion of others about himself, and no one EIGHTEEN TO TWENTY-THREE has experienced more miserably the bitterness of disappointed ambition. It must be our duty, then, to mark, with all the follies and frivolities which express the youth he retained so long, a more serious nature within, which showed itself also from time to time to the outer world.
The course of Boswell's life during this period of five years may be briefly followed in chronological order. In 1758 he was at Edinburgh University, and it is from there that his first letter to Temple is dated. The summer vacation was spent on the Northern Circuit with his father and Sir David Dalrymple, afterwards also a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Hailes. In November 1759, he entered Adam Smith's class for Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University. In 1760 he paid his first visit to London, and in the spring of 1761 returned to Edinburgh, where he resided until the close of 1762; he then went for the second time to London. It was upon this second visit that he met Dr. Johnson.
It is characteristic of these years that he did not quite know what he was or what he wanted. He was posing now in one guise and now in another, wondering the while what his serious purpose might be. At Edinburgh University he seems to have wished to appear an intellectual cynic. He writes to Temple:
Don't be surprised if your grave, sedate, philosophic friend, who used to carry it so high, and talk with such composed indifference of the beauteous sex, and whom you used to admonish not to turn an old man too soon—don't be thunderstruck if this same fellow should all at once subito furore obreptus commence Don Quixote for his adorable Dulcinea.
The inference is clear; the subito furore obreptus type of conduct is a great change from a sedate indifference.