Boswell was not unlike many people inasmuch as he found out rather late in life the true value of his wife, and was more sorry than could have been expected when he no longer had her help and companionship; he found perhaps that he had rated too highly by comparison the greater intellectual stimulus of his literary circle. His sorrow in any case, at her death, whatever the proportion of remorse to the sense of loss, is pleasant to see. There was so much affectation in his character, that whenever he shows that he had simple, genuine feelings—and he had them more often than might be supposed—we must have some regard for them, however commonplace they may be.
Boswell was evidently quite miserable at his loss; he was unrestrained in grief as he was in enjoyment, and the tale of his woe was poured out to Temple in the same fervid manner as the love affairs of earlier years:
I am amazed when I look back. Though I often and often dreaded this loss, I had no conception how distressing it would be. May God have mercy on me! I am quite restless and feeble and desponding.... I have an avidity for death; I eagerly wish to be laid by my dear wife; years of life seem insupportable.
I cannot express to you, Temple [he writes in a later letter], 'what I suffer from the loss of my valuable wife and the mother of my children. While she lived, I had no occasion to think concerning my family; every particular was thought of by her, better than I could. I am the most helpless of human beings; I am in a state very much that of one in despair.'
It must not be thought that Boswell faced the world in the sad and sometimes complaining vein in which he wrote to Temple. There was no whining self-pity, and no pride of the grievance, as might perhaps have been expected, in his public attitude. 'It is astonishing what force I have put upon myself since her death, how I have entertained company, &c., &c.'[5] He no doubt tried to be cheerful in company, and probably he succeeded.
The weakness of Boswell was shown in a different way, by an increase of those vices which he had been encouraged to resist by Johnson, and also, we may suppose, by his wife. Johnson had said, long before the bereavement: 'In losing her you would lose your sheet-anchor, and be tost, without stability, by the waves of life.' This prediction was fulfilled.
Boswell had always been a self-indulgent man. Before his marriage he was, as may be seen from the letters, sexually self-indulgent. Whether he was so in later years, or in what degree, it is difficult to determine; INTOXICATION he may have been alluding to this when he talks of 'little fondnesses,' and of being 'dissipated';[6] and the fact that he says on one occasion that he had no 'confessions' to make rather suggests the possibility that this may not always have been the case, though he never actually confesses.
But the particular form of his self-indulgence was drunkenness. Besides frequent references to his habit of drinking, there are, altogether, some half-dozen recorded instances of Boswell being drunk or intoxicated, and as they are referred to only because they had some curious results they suggest that this was far from being unusual. In the letters, Boswell records on several occasions that he has been drinking too much lately, or that he was becoming a drunkard.
His mode of resisting what he quite well saw to be an evil habit was to take a series of vows. It is a method which seems to have had a curious appeal for Boswell's nature. There was something to his mind rather romantic about a vow: something heroic in taking that great resolve, made so quickly to endure for so long, something of the saintly penance; and there was something of the martyr about one who had bound himself in this way. In Boswell's drunkenness, however, there was nothing romantic; it was rather sordid; and he was neither saint, nor hero, nor martyr, for the vows, even if they could have made him all these, were too frequently broken. There was no doubt some serious effort on Boswell's part; but the impulse of the moment was always too strong for him, and the efforts which lasted too short a time were apparently followed by grave relapses.
Boswell's drinking habits had ill effects. Johnson, when reminded of the headache which his companion was wont to feel after sitting up with him, exclaimed: 'Nay, Sir, it was not the wine that made your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.' But though the nature of Johnson's sense and of Boswell's head may fortify the explanation, it was not the common case; excess of alcohol was injurious to Boswell's health.
It has been pointed out with justice that Boswell's melancholy was to some extent the result of this excess. How much of it was affectation we cannot easily tell. When Boswell first made his appearance to the world as the young littérateur, he may have hoped to increase the appearance of genius by assuming hereditary hypochondria. But it must be remarked that he seems, as far as we can judge, to have given very little impression of ever being morose; it is on the contrary his gaiety and good spirits that are always emphasised. And we may at least suppose when, as has been mentioned above, he entirely denies, in a number of the 'Hypochondriack,' that genius and melancholy have any particular connection, that he MELANCHOLY had by that time outgrown any affectation there may originally have been. That one of Boswell's great vivacity should sometimes be dejected, is really very natural, and when we add to this his self-indulgent habits, it is not hard to account for occasional attacks of low spirits. Sir Walter Scott remarks: