In the 'Advertisement to the Second Edition,' Boswell seems to go further:
His strong, clear, and animated enforcement of religion, morality, loyalty, and subordination, while it delights and improves the wise and the good, will, I trust, prove an effectual antidote to that detestable sophistry which has been lately imported from France, MORAL APTITUDE under the false name of Philosophy, and with a malignant industry has been employed against the peace, good order, and happiness of society, in our free and prosperous country; but thanks be to God, without producing the pernicious effects which were hoped for by its propagators.
This history of the deeds and words and thoughts of his hero is compared by Boswell to the Odyssey. He seems almost to think that the merit of Homer's epic lies in the good behaviour of Ulysses, just as he conceives that the value of his own work is in the excellence of Johnson:—
——Quid virtus et quid sapientia possit,
Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulyssen.
It is not perhaps remarkable in itself that Boswell should have had this attitude towards his work; it is the attitude in some degree of most biographers, the attitude especially of the age in which he lived, and the attitude of Johnson himself. Boswell's principles as a biographer are indeed the same as Johnson's. We cannot suppose, when he has revealed so clearly his supreme faculty for biography, that there was anything of this which was not entirely his own. But he took the trouble to find out on several occasions the opinions of his great friend, to ask him about particular doubts which troubled him from time to time, and obtain his approval. He had a profound respect for Johnson's manner of estimating character. Mr. Pennant, 'a traveller in Scotland,' is censured in the 'Life' for a book of travel which is compared to Johnson's 'Journey to the Western Islands' and then quoted on the subject of Johnson; the quotation speaks of 'the numerous weaknesses and prejudices which his friends have kindly taken care to draw from their dread abode.' Boswell's note is:
This is the common cant against faithful biography. Does the worthy gentleman mean that I, who was taught discrimination of character by Johnson, should have omitted his frailties, and in short, have bedaubed him, as the worthy gentleman has bedaubed Scotland?
It was also due in some degree to the influence of Johnson that Boswell himself was so much a moralist: it was something of the same influence, it was in part the honest ruggedness which exalted that morality, by denuding it of excessive and affected sentiment, that enabled Boswell to be a moralist without being (in the Johnsonian phraseology) a canting moralist. Boswell, indeed, became a moralist because he wanted to be respectable; but he was not entirely respectable because he succeeded in being a moralist. A man who is a moralist to the extent that Boswell and Johnson were moralists may be too respectable to be an honest biographer. It does not become the stainless respectability of the moralist to bring to light the blemishes of a man in a book; in HONEST BIOGRAPHY conversation that may be done; there is no harm in a few people knowing; but it would be dangerous and improper to reveal them in print to the public gaze; and so it was not respectable in Boswell to say anything about the sexual temptations of Johnson, and Miss Burney and Hannah More would no doubt be shocked. But the love of truth which Johnson nourished was fundamental in Boswell, and it was irrepressible; we know Johnson, chiefly for this reason, better than any other man whose life has been recorded.
It is remarkable for other reasons besides this—that he was a moralist—that Boswell produced an impartial biography. He was by no means free from personal animosities. Sir John Hawkins had written the official life at the request of Johnson's literary executors, and Boswell, naturally, was jealous of him on this account. A matter for greater irritation was that Boswell himself had been almost entirely ignored,[9] the one slighting mention of his name being worse than no mention of his connection with Johnson. And Mrs. Thrale also, who had published her 'Anecdotes,' had alluded to Boswell only in one contemptuous passage. Boswell therefore had the deliberate intention of showing up the faults of these two rivals; a long paragraph is introduced as early as possible, explaining fully why the 'Life' by Sir John Hawkins is a bad book, and ending thus: