The rest of his life is soon told. Paoli was now again in Corsica. When Mirabeau had recalled the exiles, the general had been made by Louis XVI. military commandant of the island. Johnson, also, was gone, and the two strongest checks upon the excesses of Boswell were removed. Piteous it is to find him writing to Malone: 'that most friendly fellow Courtenay, begging the pardon of an M.P. for so free an epithet,' had taken him in hand, and had taken his word that for some months his daily allowance of wine should not exceed four good glasses at dinner, and a pint after it. The qualifying adjective 'good' is dangerous, and before the time for the bill was half expired, Bozzy has closured it and the amendment. The state of his affairs, the loss of his wife bore heavily on him, together with 'the disadvantage to my children in having so wretched a father—nay, the want of absolute certainty of being happy after death, the sure prospect of which is frightful.' Then a fitful gleam of the old Adam breaks out. He has heard of a Miss Bagnal, 'about seven and twenty, lively and gay, a Ranelagh girl, but of excellent principles insomuch that she reads prayers to the servants in her father's family every Sunday evening.' Another matrimonial scheme was the daughter of the late Dean of Exeter, 'a most agreeable woman d'un certain âge,' as he engagingly adds, 'and with a fortune of £10,000.' The preparation of a second edition of the Life for July 1793 raised his spirits, but after a while he had run into excess, been knocked down and robbed. This he vows shall be a crisis in his life, and Temple's apprehension of his friend being carried off in a state of intoxication he finds awful to contemplate. Early in 1795 the end is announced by Temple's son writing to his father—'a few nights ago Mr Boswell returned from the Literary Club, quite weak and languid;' and the last letter to Temple from his correspondent of thirty-seven years is dated 8th April: 'I would fain write to you in my own hand, but really cannot.' His son James finishes the letter, to tell that the patient 'feels himself a good deal stronger to-day.' He was attended by Dr Warren, who had been with Johnson as he died. Some slight hopes of a recovery had been held out; and, with the ruling passion strong in death to interview a celebrity, he rallied in a letter to Warren Hastings. With the spirit on him of the days when he had told Chatham that his disinterested soul had enjoyed the contemplation of the great minister in the bower of philosophy, he tells him, 'the moment I am able to go abroad, I will fly to Mr Hastings and expand my soul in the purest satisfaction.' On May 19th 1795, at two in the morning, after an illness of five weeks, he died. He was in his fifty-fifth year.
A life which cannot challenge the world's attention—like that of John Sterling—which perhaps does not even modestly solicit it, yet one which no less certainly will be found to reward the critic of literary history and pathology. A complex, weak, unsteady life enough, and no one did more than Boswell himself to bring into glaring prominence the faults that lie on the surface, by that frank, open, and ostentatious peculiarity which he avowed, and which he compared to the characteristics of the old seigneur, Michael de Montaigne. Never was there a franker critic of James Boswell, Esq., than himself; 'the most unscottified of mortals,' as Johnson called him, has little or none of the reserve and reticence that are generally supposed to be marks of the national character. A rare and curious Epistle in Verse, by the Rev. Samuel Martin of Monimail, 1795, touches on the main points of his life, and the author, who was apparently a friend of Boswell, had learned 'with affectionate concern and respect that at the end prayer was his stay.' He criticises, in rather halting and prosaic lines,
'The prison scenes, his prying into death,
How felons and how saints resign their breath;
How varying and conflicting passions roll,
How scaffold exhibitions shew the soul.'
He laments his 'injurious hilarity,' his degrading himself as 'the little bark, attendant on the huge all-bearing ark,' his political and ecclesiastical aberrations from the surer and better standpoints of his family and country. The feeling of this friend of Boswell would represent, we cannot doubt, the verdict at the time of his own circle.
The 'prison scenes' are an integral part in Boswell's psychology. Never did George Selwyn attend them with greater regularity, or Wyndham run after prize fights more assiduously. In the Public Advertizer, April 25, 1768, we find him writing: 'I myself am never absent from a publick execution. When I first attended them, I was shocked to the greatest degree ... convulsed with pity and terror. I feel an irresistible impulse to be present at every execution, as there I behold the various effects of the near approach of death.' The parallels of Charles V., Philip II., Philip IV., Charles II. of Spain, will not escape the reader, and strangely, or rather naturally enough, Boswell is found disagreeing with the censure pronounced by Johnson on the celebration of his own obsequies in his lifetime by Charles V. In the St James' Gazette of April 20, 1779, he is found actually riding in the cart to Tyburn with Hackman, the murderer of Miss Ray, and writing to the papers over the feeling of 'unusual Depression of Spirits, joined with that Pause, which so solemn a warning of the dreadful effects that the Passion of Love may produce must give all of us who have lively Sensations and warm Tempers.' But he suddenly deviates into business when he adds that 'it is very philosophically explained and illustrated in the Hypochondriack, a periodical Paper, peculiarly adapted to the people of England, and which comes out monthly in the London Magazine, etc.' In his Corsican tour we had seen him interviewing the executioner in the island, and some days before his final parting with Johnson he had witnessed the execution of fifteen men before Newgate and been clouded in his mind by doubts as to whether human life was or was not mere machinery and a chain of planned fatality. These cravings are clearly the marks of a mind morbidly affected and diseased, the result of the Dutch marriage as Ramsay believed. All through his life Boswell is conscious of his 'distempered imagination,' and the letters to Temple are scattered with irrelevances and repetitions, fatuities and inconsistencies that can be explained only on the score of mental disease. Were any doubts possible on this point, the expressions of his opinions on religion would dispel them. His 'Popish imagination,' quickened as it may have been by the escapade with the actress, was but the natural outcome of an ill-balanced mind. His feelings about consecrated places, loca solennia such as Iona, and Wittenberg, Rasay and Carlisle, we have seen. He delighted, says Malone, in what he called the mysterious, leading Johnson on ghosts, and kindred subjects. He was a believer in second sight: 'it pleases my superstition,' he tells Temple, 'which you know is not small, and being not of the gloomy but the grand species is an enjoyment.' When his uncle John died, we learn he was 'a good scholar and affectionate relative, but had no conduct. And, do you know, he was not confined to one woman; he had a strange kind of religion, but I flatter myself he will be ere long, if he is not already, in heaven!' He comforts himself constantly over life being a mere state of purification, and looks forward to a condition of events in which 'a man can soap his own beard and enjoy whatever is to be had in this transitory state of things.' He is for ever questioning Johnson upon purgatory, 'having much curiosity to know his notions on that point.' One of the last authentic glimpses of Boswell is his being found in the company of Wilberforce, going west, with a nightcap in his pocket, on some visit to a friend such as Miss Hawkins says he was but too fond of doing,—'away to the west as the sun went down'—doubtful of future punishment, but resolute in maintaining the depravity of man. It would almost appear as if Bozzy had read himself into Butler's doctrine that our present life is a state of probation for a future one, but had forgotten the qualification 'that our future interest is now depending on ourselves.'
The very influence of Johnson himself may have affected the weaker mind of Boswell injuriously. Both suffered from hypochondria, though that of the latter was far distant from the affliction of Johnson whom Dr Adams found 'in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room.' Temple maintained that the effect of Johnson's company had been of a depressing nature to his friend, and Sir Wm. Forbes believed that some slight tincture of superstition had been contracted from his companionship with the sage. The 'cloudy darkness,' as he himself calls it, of his mind, the weakness and the confusion of moral principles manifest enough in the Temple correspondence, are better revealed in the conversation with Johnson at Squire Dilly's, 'where there is always abundance of excellent fare and hearty welcome.' 'Being in a frame of mind which, I hope for the felicity of human nature, many experience,—in fine weather,—at the country-house of a friend,—consoled and elevated by pious exercises, I expressed myself with an unrestrained fervour to my "guide, philosopher, and friend;" My dear Sir, I would fain be a good man; and I am very good now. I fear God, and honour the King; I wish to do no ill, and to be benevolent to all mankind.' He looked at me with a benignant indulgence; but took occasion to give me wise and salutary caution. 'Do not, sir, accustom yourself to trust to impressions.' Boswell had surely forgotten all this when he cries bitterly to Temple that he was inclined to agree with him in thinking 'my great oracle did allow too much credit to good principles, without good practice.' Perhaps he remembered Johnson's appreciation of Campbell, the good pious man that never passed a church without pulling off his hat, all which shewed 'he has good principles.' Boswell had, unfortunately, been 'caught young' by the sceptical talk of Dempster, Hume, and Wilkes, and his extended Continental ramble had impaired the earlier views under which he had been reared.
But James Boswell deserves at the hands of his readers and of critics better treatment than has been measured out to him in the contemptuous estimate of Macaulay, and, still worse, in the shrill attack of the smaller brood 'whose sails were never to the tempest given,' but who have, by the easy repetition of a few phrases and an imperfect acquaintance with the writings and character of the man they decry, come to the complacent depreciation which, as Niebuhr said, is ever so dear to the soul of mediocrity. If James Boswell was not like Goldsmith, a great man, as Johnson finely pronounced, whose frailties should not be remembered, nor was, perhaps, in any final sense a great writer, yet for twenty years he had been the tried friend of the man who at the Mitre had called out to him, 'Give me your hand, I have taken a liking to you.' A plant that, like Goldsmith also, 'flowered late,' he has created in literature and biography a revolution, and produced a work whose surpassing merits and value are known the more that it is studied.
CHAPTER VIII
IN LITERATURE
'Eclipse is first, the rest nowhere.'—Macaulay.