James Boswell

by W. Keith Leask

Wishing to be present at more of so singular a conversation as that between two fellow collegians, who had lived forty years in London without ever having chanced to meet, I whispered to Mr Edwards that Dr Johnson was going home, and that he had better accompany him now. So Edwards walked along with us, I eagerly assisting to keep up the conversation. Mr Edwards informed Dr Johnson that he had practised long as a solicitor in Chancery.... When we got to Dr Johnson's house and were seated in his library, the dialogue went on admirably. Edwards: "Sir, I remember you would not let us say prodigious at College. For even then, sir (turning to me), he was delicate in language, and we all feared him." Johnson (to Edwards): "From your having practised the law long, sir, I presume you must be rich." Edwards: "No, sir; I had a good deal of money; but I had a number of poor relations to whom I gave great part of it." Johnson: "Sir, you have been rich in the most valuable sense of the word." Edwards: "But I shall not die rich." Johnson: "Nay, sure, sir, it is better to live rich, than to die rich." Edwards: "I wish I had continued at College." Johnson: "Why do you wish that, sir?" Edwards: "Because I think I should have had a much easier life than mine has been. I should have been a parson, and had a good living, like Bloxam and several others, and lived comfortably." Johnson: "Sir, the life of a parson, of a conscientious clergyman, is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have Chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls." Here, taking himself up all of a sudden, he exclaimed, "O! Mr Edwards! I'll convince you that I recollect you. Do you remember our drinking together at an ale-house near Pembroke Gate?" ... Edwards: "You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in."—Mr Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr Courtenay, Mr Malone, and, indeed, all the eminent men to whom I have mentioned this, have thought it an exquisite trait of character. The truth is, that philosophy, like religion, is too generally supposed to be hard and severe, at least so grave as to exclude all gaiety. Edwards: "I have been twice married, Doctor. You, I suppose, have never known what it was to have a wife." Johnson: "Sir, I have known what it was to have a wife, and (in a solemn, tender, faltering tone) I have known what it was to lose a wife. It had almost broke my heart."

Edwards: "How do you live, sir? For my part, I must have my regular meals, and a glass of good wine. I find I require it." Johnson: "I now drink no wine, sir. Early in life I drank wine: for many years I drank none, I then for some years drank a great deal." Edwards: "Some hogsheads, I warrant you." Johnson: "I then had a severe illness, and left it off. I am a straggler. I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo, without being missed here or observed there." Edwards: "Don't you eat supper, sir?" Johnson: "No, sir." Edwards: "For my part, now, I consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in order to get to bed." Johnson: "You are a lawyer, Mr Edwards. Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with. They have what he wants." Edwards: "I am grown old, I am sixty-five." Johnson: "I shall be sixty-eight next birthday. Come, sir, drink water, and put in for a hundred." ... Mr Edwards, when going away, again recurred to his consciousness of senility, and looking full in Johnson's face, said to him, "You'll find in Dr Young,

'O my coevals! remnants of yourselves.'"

Johnson did not relish this at all; but shook his head with impatience. Edwards walked off seemingly highly pleased with the honour of having been thus noticed by Dr Johnson. When he was gone, I said to Johnson I thought him but a weak man. Johnson: "Why, yes, sir. Here is a man who has passed through life without experience: yet I would rather have him with me than a more sensible man who will not talk readily. This man is always willing to say what he has to say."'

How admirable is the art in this scene, how numerous and fine are the strokes of character, and the easy turn of the dialogue! No fool with a note-book, no tippling reporter, as the shallow critics say, could have written this. To them there would have appeared in a chance meeting of two old men nothing worthy of notice, yet how dramatically does Boswell touch off the Philistine side of Edwards, and insert the fine shading and the inimitable remarks about the setting up for the philosopher, and supper being a turnpike to bed! This art of the biographer is what gives a memorableness to slight incidents, by the object being real and really seen; it is the 'infinitude of delineation, the intensity of conception which informs the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance, ennobling the Actual into Idealness.'

Openness of mind will do much, but there must be the seeing eye behind it. For the mental development of Boswell, there is no doubt that, as with Goldsmith, his foreign travels had done much. As Addison in the Freeholder had recommended foreign travel to the fox-hunting Tory squires of his day as a purge for their provincial ideas, Boswell shares with the author of the Traveller and the Deserted Village cosmopolitan instincts and feelings. 'I have always stood up for the Irish,' he writes, 'in whose fine country I have been hospitably and jovially entertained, and with whom I feel myself to be congenial. In my Tour in Corsica I do generous justice to the Irish, in opposition to the English and Scots.' Again, 'I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.' This is the very antithesis to Johnson, whose frank confession was, 'for anything that I can see, foreigners are fools.'

Yet Boswell's stock of learning was small. 'I have promised,' he writes in 1775, 'to Dr Johnson to read when I get to Scotland; and to keep an account of what I read. He is to buy for me a chest of books, of his choosing, off stalls, and I am to read more, and drink less—that was his counsel.' The death of his wife forces the confession, 'how much do I regret that I have not applied myself more to learning,' and he acknowledges to their common friend Langton that, if Johnson had said that Boswell and himself did not talk from books, this was because he had not read books enough to talk from them. In his manuscripts there are many misspellings. He assigns to Terence a Horatian line and, in a letter to Garrick, quotes as Horatian the standard mens sana in corpore sano of Juvenal. More strange is his quoting in a note an illustration of the phrase 'Vexing thoughts,' without his being apparently aware that the words are by Rous of Pembroke, the Provost of Eton, whose portrait in the college hall he must often have seen, the writer of the Scottish Metrical Version of the Psalms. Yet his intellectual interests were keen. Late in life he has 'done a little at Greek; Lord Monboddo's Ancient Metaphysics which I am reading carefully helps me to recover the language.' He has his little scraps of irritating Latinity which he loves to parade, and when he dined at Eton, at the fellows' table, he 'made a considerable figure, having certainly the art of making the most of what I know. I had my classical quotations very ready.' Besides, the easy allusiveness of Boswell to books and to matters beyond the scope of general readers, his interest in all things going forward in the Johnsonian circle, his shewing himself in some metaphysical points—predestination, for example—fully a match for Johnson, and his own words in the Journal—'he had thought more than anybody supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge'—all conspire to shew that, if he had no more learning than what he could not help, James Boswell was altogether, as Dominie Sampson said of Mannering, 'a man of considerable erudition despite of his imperfect opportunities.'

Nor were his entire interests Johnsonian. Scattered through his writings we find allusions to other books, in a more or less forward stage of completeness, and of which some must have been destroyed by his faithless executors. We hear of a Life of Lord Kames; an Essay on the Profession of an Advocate; Memoirs of Hume when dying, 'which I may some time or other communicate to the world;' a quarto with plates on The Beggar's Opera; a History of James IV., 'the patron of my family;' a Collection of Feudal Tenures and Charters, 'a valuable collection made by my father, with some additions and illustrations of my own;' an Account of my Travels, 'for which I had a variety of materials collected;' a Life of Sir Robert Sibbald, 'in the original manuscript in his own writing;' a History of the Rebellion of 1745; an edition of Walton's Lives; a Life of Thomas Ruddiman, the Latin grammarian; a History of Sweden, where three of his ancestors had settled, who took service under Gustavus Adolphus; an edition of Johnson's Poems, 'a complete edition, in which I shall with the utmost care ascertain their authenticity, and illustrate them with notes and various readings;' a work on Addison's Poems, in which 'I shall probably maintain the merit of Addison's poetry, which has been very unjustly depreciated.' His Journal, which is unfortunately lost, he designed as the material for his own Autobiography. A goodly list, and a varied one, involving interest, knowledge, and research, fit to form the equipment of a professed scholar.

Boswell foresaw the danger, and he justified his method of reporting conversations. 'It may be objected by some persons, as it has been by one of my friends, that he who has the power of thus exhibiting an exact transcript of conversations is not a desirable member of society. I repeat the answer which I made to that friend:—'Few, very few, need be afraid that their sayings will be recorded. Can it be imagined that I would take the trouble to gather what grows on every hedge, because I have collected such fruits as the Nonpareil and the Bon Chretien? On the other hand, how useful is such a faculty, if well exercised! To it we owe all those interesting apophthegms and memorabilia of the ancients, which Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, have transmitted to us. To it we owe all those instructive and entertaining collections which the French have made under the title of Ana, affixed to some celebrated name. To it we owe the Table-Talk of Selden, the Conversation between Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, Spence's Anecdotes of Pope, and other valuable remains in our own language. How delighted should we have been, if thus introduced into the company of Shakespeare and of Dryden, of whom we know scarcely anything but their admirable writings! What pleasure would it have given us, to have known their petty habits, their characteristick manners, their modes of composition, and their genuine opinion of preceding writers and of their contemporaries!'

The world in consideration of what it has gained, and the recollection of what we should have acquired had such a reporter been found for the talk of other great men, has long since forgiven Boswell, and forgotten also his baiting the doctor with questions on all points, his rebuffs and his puttings down—'there is your want, sir; I will not be put to the question;' his watching 'every dawning of communication from that illuminated mind;' his eyes goggling with eagerness, the mouth dropt open to catch every syllable, his ear almost on the shoulder of the doctor, and the final burst of 'what do you do there, sir,—go to the table, sir,—come back to your place, sir.'