Boswell the Biographer

by George Mallory

Sense, taste, religion, and good nature joined,

There gladly will she raise her feeble voice

Nor fear to tell that Boswell is her choice.

On his return to Edinburgh Boswell became more DAVID ROSS AND THE STAGE than ever concerned with the ill-favoured art of the drama. 'The popular prejudice against theatricals,' says Dr. Rogers, 'was a sufficient cause for our author falling into the opposite extreme; he threw his whole energies into a movement which led, six years afterwards, to a theatre being licensed in the capital.'

He became associated in this movement with a Mr. David Ross, the most important save Garrick of his actor friends. Ross, too, was acquainted with misfortune, yet not without earning some kind of celebrity. When he made his first appearance at Drury Lane, 'he was approved by a polite and distinguishing audience, who seemed to congratulate themselves on seeing an actor whom they imagined capable of restoring to the stage the long-lost character of the real fine gentleman'; and his first success was followed by a considerable measure of popularity at Covent Garden. He must have been a good actor, for Garrick is said to have been jealous of his reputation. It was the 'fine gentleman' we may suppose that Boswell particularly admired. 'Poor Ross!' he exclaims at the time of his death; 'he was an unfortunate man in some respects; but he was a true bon-vivant, a most social man, and never was without good eating and drinking and hearty companions.' These qualities were no doubt to Boswell the highest recommendation. And he seems besides to have found the society of actors in general especially congenial. In his own character there was much of the actor: he was so often conscious of a part to be played! And he had a way of occupying the stage when conversing in company. He may have found, too, that actors appreciated best his lively social qualities.

Ross, though irregular habits, as we are told, may have interfered with his advancement, was evidently a man of some talents and some enthusiasm, and eventually he succeeded in starting a theatre in Edinburgh. He had some respect, it would appear, for Boswell's talents; for on the occasion of his first performance in the capital of Scotland, he requested Boswell to write a prologue which the actor himself was to recite. Boswell can hardly have seen much of Ross in later years, but the friendship between them was preserved, and Boswell was chief mourner at the actor's funeral in 1790.

One other friend of Boswell's in these early years must be mentioned here. Actors may have had particular qualities which made them attractive to him, but Boswell in any case had always a sympathy with misfortune which was mere good-nature; he had at the same time an interest in the shady walks of life, in human nature exhibited under stress of adverse circumstances, and in an added poignancy to the performance of intellect when spurred by poverty. These feelings may account for his friendship with DERRICK THE POET Mr. Derrick the poet. Derrick, like Love and Gentleman and Ross, was somewhat of a failure. He had been apprenticed to a linendraper, and deserted the concerns of trade to seek his fortune as an actor; when Boswell met him as a man of thirty-six he aspired to be a poet. His verses must have been remarkably poor; Boswell refers to some of them as 'infamously bad.' Dr. Johnson, who knew him slightly, 'reproved his muse and condemned his levity.' But he was a writer, and that meant a great deal to Boswell; the mark of his profession was a sign of grace. The Doctor was probably right when he said: 'It is to his being a writer that he owes anything he has. Sir, had not Derrick been a writer, he would have been sweeping the crosses in the streets, and asking halfpence from everybody that passed.' Derrick no doubt was a gay companion, and Boswell evidently liked him, though not excessively. He was of some importance, too, in the youth of Boswell, for he was his first tutor in the ways of London, and these were not entirely good ways.

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It was as a poet that Boswell was to make his début in literary performance. Besides his contributions to the collections edited by Erskine, he published in 1761 two longer poems, 'An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady' and 'An Ode to Tragedy.' The latter was apparently a serious attempt at poetry; but it serves only to demonstrate that poetry was quite beyond Boswell's grasp. His productions were typical of the eighteenth century. He had no imagination teeming with beautiful images, such as came to a later generation; the graces and conceits of the Elizabethans, and the appeal of Nature, were alike unknown to him; and he never acquired the technical skill which was the merit of the best poets of the age. The 'Ode' is neither better nor worse than might be expected from a wholly misdirected literary talent; it could have been written by almost anyone who had read a certain quantity of English verse.