James Boswell

by W. Keith Leask

'How delicate, decent is English Biography,' says Carlyle, 'bless its mealy mouth! A Damocles sword of Respectability hangs for ever over the poor English Life-writer (as it does over poor English Life in general), and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said there are no English lives worth reading, except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day. The English biographer has long felt that, if in writing his man's biography he wrote down anything that could by possibility offend any man, he had written wrong.' The biographer, as Mr Froude found out for a commentary on all this, is placed between a Scylla and Charybdis, between what is due to the subject, and what is expected by the public. If something is left out of the portrait, the likeness will be imperfect; if the anxiety or the inquisitiveness of readers to know private details is left ungratified, the writer will be met by the current cant that the public has a right to know. The line is not easily drawn, and few subjects for the biographer can ever desire to be as candidly dealt with by him as Cromwell acted with Sir Peter Lely, in the request to be painted as he was, warts and all. Thus, too often the result will be but biography written in vacuo, 'the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted—by particular desire.'

Biography, like History, has suffered from considerations of dignity and propriety. The writers of the Hume and Robertson school of history, in their stately minuet with the historical muse, have been careful to exclude everything that seemed beneath the dignity of the sceptred pall; biographers have as consciously studied the proprieties. 'The Muse of history,' says Thackeray, 'wears the mask and speaks to measure; she too in our age busies herself with the affairs only of kings. I wonder shall history ever pull off her periwig and cease to be Court-ridden? I would have History familiar rather than heroic, and think that Mr Hogarth and Mr Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of the present age in England, than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which we get thence.' As the historian has striven to obscure the real nature of the Grand Monarque, by confining his action to courts and battlefields, so the biographer, in his desire of never stepping beyond the proper, has enveloped his hero in a circle of correct ideas, after the manner of George the Fourth and his multiplicity of waistcoats. Dignity and respectability have ruined alike the historian and the biographer.

Lockhart foresaw that some readers would accuse him of trenching upon delicacy and propriety over his sixth and seventh chapters in the Life of Scott, and the circumstances were after all such as, had choice been permitted him, he might easily have omitted, considering it his duty to tell what he had to say truly and intelligibly. Of all men Macaulay had nothing to fear from any rational biography that should ever be written of him, yet has not Mr Trevelyan assured his readers that the reviewers had told him, that he would much better have consulted his uncle's reputation by the omission of passages in his letters and diaries? Such criticism, as he justly says, is to seriously misconceive the province and the duty of the biographer, and his justification is that the reading world has long extended to the man the just approbation which it so heartily extended to his books. The Latin critics assigned history,—and accordingly history in miniature, biography,—to the department of oratory. The feeling, in consequence, has long prevailed of regarding biography as the field for the display of every other feeling then veracity. It has been emotional, or it has been decorously dull. To all such writers the style adopted by Boswell would appear, and justly appear, revolutionary. The cry is raised of there being nothing sacred, of the violation of domestic privacy, of the sanctities of life being endangered, of indiscretions, and violations of confidences, by the biographer. Accordingly, just as Macaulay decided that, in general, tragedy was corrupted by eloquence, and comedy by wit, so biography and history have suffered from the dignity of Clio. Boswell was perfectly aware what he was doing, nor did he awake to find himself famous for a method into which the sciolists pretend he only unconsciously blundered. In the preface to the third edition of the Journal he writes:—'Remarks have been industriously circulated in the publick prints by shallow or envious cavillers, who have endeavoured to persuade the world that Dr Johnson's character has been lessened by recording such various instances of his lively wit and acute judgment, on every topick that was presented to his mind. In the opinion of every person of taste and knowledge that I have conversed with, it has been greatly heightened; and I will venture to predict, that this specimen of his colloquial talents will become still more valuable, when, by the lapse of time, he shall have become an ancient; and no other memorial of this great and good man shall remain but the following Journal.' This is not the writing of one who has been without a clear idea of what he was undertaking, and of his own qualifications for the task. 'You, my dear sir,' he tells Sir Joshua Reynolds in the dedication, 'perceived all the shades which mingled in the grand composition; all the peculiarities and slight blemishes which marked the literary Colossus.' The inclusion of the letters and of private details was an integral part of his scheme. When he introduced the subject of biography at Dr Taylor's, no doubt with his own book in his eye, he said that in writing a man's life the man's peculiarities should be mentioned because they mark his character. When he resolved on their publication, he thought it right to ask Johnson explicitly on this point, and the reply was what in 1773 the doctor had given to Macleod in Skye, when he had asked if Orrery had done wrong, to expose the defects of Swift with whom he had lived in terms of intimacy. 'Why, no, sir,' Johnson had decided, 'after the man is dead, for then it is done historically.' A biographer that would omit or disguise the relations of Nelson to Lady Hamilton, would be justly suspected of disingenuousness, and Lockhart, especially in his treatment of the political side of his subject,—for example in the notorious Beacon incident—is but too open to this charge. But disingenuousness is a charge that never could have occurred to Boswell, whose veracity is the prime quality that has made him immortal. When the Journal was in the press, Hannah More, studious of the name of the moralist and the sage, 'besought him to mitigate his asperities.' 'I will not,' said Boswell roughly, but wisely for posterity, 'cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anyone.'

Boswell's books are veritable books. Few books have had such a severe test applied to them. His first was dedicated to Paoli, whose sanction must be taken to guarantee every line of it. "In every narrative," he writes in the dedication to Malone of the Journal, "whether historical or biographical, authenticity is of the utmost consequence. Of this I have ever been so firmly persuaded that I inscribed a former work to that person who was the best judge of its truth. Of this work the manuscript was daily read by Johnson, and you have perused the original and can vouch for the strict fidelity of the present publication." His Life of Johnson was as fearlessly dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, one whose intimacy with Johnson could stamp, with assured knowledge of the subject, the credit and success of the work. Among the 'some dozen, or baker's dozen, and those chiefly of very ancient date,' of reliable biographies whose paucity Carlyle laments, the works of Boswell may be safely included. Their accuracy is confessed by workers in all fields. His Tour created a type; no better volume of travels has ever been written than the Journal; and the critic who has dealt at the reputation of Boswell its heaviest blow has yet to confess, that Homer is no more the first of poets, Shakespeare the first of dramatists, Demosthenes the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers, with no second.

How is this? Written in 1831, before Lockhart Southey and Carlyle by their biographies of Scott, Nelson, and Frederick had appeared as rivals, why is it no less true now? What singular gift or quality can account for this singular aloofness from the ordinary or extraordinary class of writers? Why does Boswell yet wear the crown of indivisible supremacy in biography? His own words will not explain it, the possession of Johnson's intimacy, the twenty years' view of his subject, his faculty for recollecting, and his assiduity in recording communications. This and more than this Lockhart possessed, the nearest rival to the biographical throne. He was the son-in-law of his subject, for whom he had as true an admiration as Boswell had for Johnson. But Boswell was only in the company of his idol some 180 days, or 276 if we include the time on the tour in Scotland, in all the twenty years of his acquaintance. Lockhart had the journals of Sir Walter, and the communications of nearly a hundred persons. A comparison in any sense, literary, social, or moral, would have been felt by Lockhart as an insult, for he clearly regards Sir Alexander Boswell as a greater man than his father. But if, like the grandsire of Hubert at Hastings, Lockhart has drawn a good bow, Boswell, like the Locksley of the novelist, has notched his shaft, and comparisons have long ceased to be instituted. Gray has attempted the explanation—a fool with a note-book. He has invented nothing, he has only reported. But every year sees that person at work, with his First Impressions of Brittany, Three Weeks in Greece, and the everlasting Tour in Tartanland. These are the creations of the note-book, but it has given them no permanence. The tourist puts in everything he sees, truly enough, or thinks he sees. But it is the art of Boswell to select 'the characteristical,' and the typical, to group and to dramatize. Ninety-four days he spent on the northern tour, and the result is a masterpiece. Pepys is garrulous, often vulgar, always lower-middle-class; but Boswell writes like a gentleman.

Macaulay has explained it by a paradox. Goldsmith was great in spite of his weaknesses, Boswell by reason of his; if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a parasite, a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had a quick observation, a retentive memory, and accordingly—he has become immortal! Alas for the paucity of such immortals under so common circumstances; their number should be legion! That a fool may occasionally write interesting matter we know; but that a man should write a literary classic, graced by arrangement, selection, expression, is not even paradox but hyperbole run mad. The truth is, Macaulay had no eye for such a complex character as Boswell. Too correct himself, too prone to the cardinal virtues and consistency, to follow one who, by instinct, seemed to anticipate Wendell Holmes' advice—'Don't be consistent, but be simply true'—and too sound politically in the field where Boswell and the doctor abased themselves in absurd party spirit, Macaulay can no more understand sympathetically the vagaries of Boswell than Mommsen or Drumann can follow the political inconsistency of Cicero. He had no Boswellian 'delight in that intellectual chemistry which can separate good qualities from evil in the same person;' and in his essay on Milton he has disclaimed explicitly all such hero-worship of the living or the dead and denounced Boswellism as the most certain mark of an ill-regulated intellect. Nor had he, or Carlyle either, before him the evidence of the letters to Temple.

Carlyle, in the theory of hero-worship, has made capital use of Boswell. He sees the strong mind of Johnson leading 'the poor flimsy little soul' of James Boswell; he feels 'the devout Discipleship, the gyrating observantly round the great constellation.' He has Boswell's reiterated declarations to support him. On one side Carlyle's vindication of the biographer is successful; he errs in emphasizing the discovery by Boswell of the Rambler. In such a discovery Langton and Beauclerk had long preceded him, and the Johnson that Boswell met in Davies' parlour was the pensioned writer who had out-lived his dark days, and was the literary dictator of the day, and the associate of Burke and of Reynolds. But Carlyle comes nearer the truth when he touches on the Boswellian recipe for being graphic—the possession of an open, loving heart, and what follows from the possession of such. Like White of Selborne, with his sparrows and cockchafers, Boswell, too, has copied some true sentences from the inspired book of nature.

But however this may account for his insight—the heart seeing farther than the head—it will not account for his literary qualities. Of all his contemporaries, Goldsmith and Burke excepted, no one is a greater master of a pure prose style than Boswell, and for ease of narrative, felicity of phrase, and rounded diction he is incomparable. Macaulay believed a London apprentice could detect Scotticisms in Robertson; Hume's style is often vicious by Gallicisms and Scots law phrases which nothing but his expository gifts have obscured from the critics. Beattie confesses learning English as a dead language and taking several years over the task. But Boswell, 'scarce by North Britons now esteemed a Scot,' writes with an ease that renders his style his own. 'The fact is,' says Mr Cotter Morison, 'that no dramatist or novelist of the whole century surpassed or even equalled Boswell in rounded and clear and picturesque presentation, or in real dramatic faculty.'

Let us take one portrait from the Boswell gallery—the meeting of the two old Pembroke men, Johnson and Oliver Edwards.

'It was in Butcher Row that this meeting happened. Mr Edwards, who was a decent-looking elderly man in gray clothes and a wig of many curls, accosted Johnson with familiar confidence, knowing who he was, while Johnson returned his salutation with a courteous formality, as to a stranger. But as soon as Edwards had brought to his recollection their having been at Pembroke College together nine-and-forty years ago, he seemed much pleased, asked where he lived, and said he should be glad to see him in Bolt Court. Edwards: "Ah, sir! we are old men now." Johnson (who never liked to think of being old): "Don't let us discourage one another." Edwards: "Why, Doctor, you look stout and hearty. I am happy to see you so; for the newspapers told us you were very ill." Johnson: "Ay, sir, they are always telling lies of us old fellows."