[4]After all, Bozzy, though submitting to Johnson in everything, had his means of indemnification. Like the jackanapes mounted on the bear's back he contrived now and then to play the more powerful animal a trick by getting him into situations like the meeting with Wilkes merely to see how he would look. The voyage to the Hebrides exhibited some tricks of that kind, the weather being so stormy at that late season that everyone thought they must have been drowned. AMAZING QUESTIONS Undoubtedly Bozzy wanted to see how the Doctor would look in a storm.
Boswell himself explains the visit to Lord Monboddo: 'I knew Lord Monboddo and Dr. Johnson did not love each other; yet ... I was curious to see them together.' It could hardly be supposed that Boswell adopted this attitude without encountering some opposition from Dr. Johnson. The latter evidently wished that a good life of him should be written, and was pleased with Boswell's journal and glad to tell him from time to time about his early life; but there were limits to his endurance. 'I will not be put to the question. Don't you consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with what and why; what is this? what is that? why is a cow's tail long? why is a fox's tail bushy?' 'Sir,' he said on one occasion, 'you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of both.' Boswell indeed was continually taking risks; he compares himself to 'the man who has put his head into the lion's mouth a great many times:' his ordinary method of conversing with Johnson was to push his inquiries to the furthest possible point. His courage in this respect must have been notorious. 'I won a small bet,' he relates on one occasion, 'from Lady Diana Beauclerk, by asking him as to one of his particularities, which her Ladyship said I durst not do. It seems he had been frequently observed at the Club to put into his pocket the Seville oranges, after he had squeezed the juice of them into the drink which he had made for himself. Beauclerk and Garrick talked of it to me, and seemed to think he had a strange unwillingness to be discovered. We could not divine what he did with them; and this was the bold question to be put.' Boswell on this occasion was not successful in his inquiries; but it is to be observed that Boswell was deputed to inquire, and that he asked the question, and won his bet.
Occasionally Boswell remarks that Johnson was not in a good humour for talking. He must have wondered at such times how long it would take before his irritation would break forth, and he would make some typical utterance. 'But I wonder, Sir,' &c., was a sort of Boswellian formula to be met sooner or later with: 'Sir, you may wonder,' or some similar retort.
But what irritated Johnson perhaps more than the endless questions was to be made a 'butt' as he termed it. 'On Monday, September 22, when at breakfast, I unguardedly said to Dr. Johnson, "I wish I saw you and Mrs. Macaulay together!" He grew very angry, and, after a pause, while a cloud gathered on his brow, he burst out: "No, Sir, you would not see us quarrel to make you sport."' Boswell eventually owns that he had wished to see a contest between Mrs. Macaulay and Johnson.
It is not to be supposed that Boswell's provocations DEGRADING IMAGES were always intentional, though there are many occasions upon which they clearly were so. Sometimes he was 'out of countenance,' and when Johnson 'carried the company with him,' his discomfiture perhaps was greater than he would have wished. Not infrequently he made mistakes. On one occasion when Johnson began: 'If I kept a seraglio,' Boswell was so much amused that he failed to keep his countenance and was overwhelmed with 'a variety of degrading images'! Yet he was well aware of the general tendency of his behaviour to provoke the ridicule of Johnson, and though there may have been moments when he did not intend it to do so, we may say that he consciously led to his own humiliation, or consciously at least ran the risk of it.
How much humiliation Boswell was able to support may be seen from Miss Burney's account of a party at Streatham. Boswell, finding that there was no place at the side of Dr. Johnson, had taken up a seat immediately behind and between Dr. Johnson and Miss Burney. It was not very polite, and the discovery of his position by Dr. Johnson was disastrous:
The Doctor turned angrily round upon him, and, clapping his hand rather loudly upon his knee, said, in a tone of displeasure, 'What do you do there, Sir? Go to the table, Sir!'
Mr. Boswell instantly, and with an air of affright, obeyed; and there was something so unusual in such humble submission to so imperious a command that another smile gleamed its way across every mouth except that of the Doctor and of Mr. Boswell, who now, very unwillingly, took a distant seat.
Anything more ignominious could hardly be imagined, and that Boswell was sensitive to a rebuke from the Doctor we cannot doubt. And yet, within a few minutes, he was to run the risk of a second. For some reason or other he wished to leave the room while the ceremony still demanded his presence at the table. The Doctor, calling after him authoritatively, said: 'What are you thinking of, Sir? Why do you get up before the cloth is removed? Come back to your place, Sir!' 'Again,' Miss Burney continues, 'and with equal obsequiousness, Mr. Boswell did as he was bid.'
Boswell's behaviour, indeed, on this particular occasion was not heroic. His position near Dr. Johnson cannot have been essential to his purpose of taking notes; he was unwilling to abandon it out of a childish feeling of dignity; he considered it his natural right to sit near the doctor, and was obstinate about it. And it was no experiment of his to leave the room unceremoniously with the purpose of hearing what Dr. Johnson might have to say. But it was heroic of Boswell to put himself continually, and often intentionally, in the way of such rebuffs; for this he undoubtedly did. It was heroic because he had a noble purpose. Boswell was a man of science, and his science was concerned with nothing less than the mind SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT and soul of Man. He was none the less scientific because he did not deal in generalities; he was concerned with detail rather than with deduction and with one man rather than with all men. Science may not have been the only motive for enduring. Boswell may have supported the harsh sayings of Dr. Johnson and suffered for the sake of his friendship, for its honour as well as for its value; but when we consider the humiliation of those rebukes we know at least that he suffered not a little; and inasmuch as he courted them, and courted them deliberately, friendship offers no explanation. Here we are compelled to accept the scientific motive. Boswell must be allowed the credit of having suffered as a man of science for the sake of Biography.
Miss Burney, though she neither understood nor appreciated Boswell, and even disliked him, has no doubt given a truthful picture. It is clear that Boswell suffered from the rebuffs which he received from Johnson. If he endured them on the whole willingly, yet he endured them not without feeling some pain. He could not carry it off; Boswell had no natural dignity; he had a 'jovial bluntness' and a comical air about him, but these could not help him on such occasions, and he was obliged as it were to lose prestige, to appear in fact mean-spirited and servile.