CHAPTER VIII
IN LITERATURE
"Eclipse is first, the rest nowhere."--MACAULAY.
"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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sured his readers that the reviewers had told him, that he would much better have consulted his uncle"s reputation by the omission of pa.s.sages 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 a.s.signed 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 sanct.i.ties 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 ma.n.u.script 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 a.s.sured 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.siduity 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 inst.i.tuted. 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-cla.s.s; 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 c.o.xcomb, 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 circ.u.mstances; their number should be legion! That a fool may occasionally write interesting matter we know; but that a man should write a literary cla.s.sic, 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 p.r.o.ne to the cardinal virtues and consistency, to follow one who, by instinct, seemed to antic.i.p.ate 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 a.s.sociate 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 c.o.c.kchafers, 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 surpa.s.sed 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_."
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 a.s.sisting 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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, enn.o.bling 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 ant.i.thesis 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 ma.n.u.scripts there are many misspellings. He a.s.signs 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 cla.s.sical 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 t.i.tle 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."
And these conversations which he reported in his short-hand, yet "so as to keep the substance and language of discourse?" How far did he Johnsonize the form or matter? The remark by Burke to Mackintosh, that Johnson was greater in Boswell"s books than in his own, the absence of the terse and artistic touch to the sayings of the Rambler in the pages of Hawkins, Thrale, Murphy and others, suggest inevitably that they have been touched up by their reporter. The _Boswelliana_ supplies here some slight confirmation of this, for there have been preserved in that collection stories that reappear in the _Life_, and the final form in which they appear in the later book is always that of a pointed and improved nature. It would, therefore, seem that Boswell, whose imitations of Johnson Mrs Thrale declared in some respects superior to Garrick"s, in his long devotion to the style and manner of his friend, "inflated with the Johnsonian ether," did consciously or otherwise add much to the originals, and so has denied himself a share of what would otherwise be justly, if known, set down to his credit.
"I own," he writes in 1789 to Temple, "I am desirous that my life should tell." He counted doubtless on the _Autobiography_ for this purpose. "It is a maxim with me," said the great Bentley, "that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself." At first sight it would appear that Boswell had inflicted upon his own fame an indelible blot.
From whom but himself should we ever have learned those failings, of which Macaulay has deftly made so much in his unsympathetic writing down of the man, after the manner of the Johnsonian attack on Milton and Gray? In whom but himself should we detect the excrescences in his works--the permutations and combinations in shaving, the wish for a pulley in bed to raise him, his puzzle over the disproportionate wages of footmen and maidservants, his boastings, his family pride, his hastily writing in the sage"s presence Johnson"s parody of Hervey in the _Meditations on a Pudding_, his superst.i.tions, and his weaknesses? It is this that has cost him so dear with the critics, and the superior people, "empty wearisome cuckoos, and doleful monotonous owls, innumerable jays also and twittering sparrows of the housetops." He compares his own ideas to his handwriting, irregular and sprawling; his nature to Corinthian bra.s.s, made up of an infinite variety of ingredients, and his head to a tavern which might have been full of lords drinking Burgundy, but has been invaded by low punch-drinkers whom the landlord cannot expel. Blots and inequalities there are in the great book. Cooper off the prairie, Galt out of Ayrshire, are not more untrue to themselves than is Boswell at such moments. But "within the focus of the Lichfield lamps" he regains his strength like a Samson.
Boswell, with all his experience, never attained the mellow Sadduceeism of the diner-out. As a reward, he never lost the literary conscience, the capacity for labour, the a.s.siduity and veracity that have set his work upon a pedestal of its own. The dedication to Reynolds, a masterly piece of writing, will shew the trouble that he took over his method, "obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly." And he knew the value of his work, which the man with the note-book never does. In his moments of self-complacency he could compare his _Johnsoniad_ with the _Odyssey_; and he will not repress his "satisfaction in the consciousness of having largely provided for the instruction and entertainment of mankind." Literary models before him he had none. Scott suggests the life of the philosopher Demophon in Lucian, but Boswell was not likely to have known it. He modestly himself says he has enlarged on the plan of Mason"s _Life of Gray_; but his merits are his own. For the history of the period it is, as Cardinal Duperron said of Rabelais, _le livre_--_the_ book--"in worth as a book," decides Carlyle, "beyond any other production of the eighteenth century."
Time has dealt gently with both Johnson and Boswell. "The chief glory of every people," said the former in the preface to his _Dictionary_ "arises from its authors: whether I shall add anything to the reputation of English literature must be left to time." In the const.i.tuency of the present no dead writer addresses such an audience as Johnson does. Of Johnson Boswell might have said, as Cervantes did of his great creation Don Quixote, he and his subject were born for each other. There is no greater figure, no more familiar face in our literature than "the old man eloquent"; and as the inseparable companion "held in my heart of hearts, whose fidelity and tenderness I consider as a great part of the comforts which are yet left to me," rises the figure of his biographer, the Bozzy no more of countless follies and fatuities, but Boswell, the prince of biographers, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, now become, like his hero himself, an ancient. And they are still in the heyday of their great fame. Along the stream of time the little bark, as he hoped, sails attendant, pursues the triumph and partakes the gale.
With James Boswell it has happened, as Mark Pattison says of Milton, to have pa.s.sed beyond the critics into a region of his own. That "mighty civil gentlewoman," the mistress of the _Green Man_ at Ashbourne, M.
Killingley, who waited on him with the note of introduction to his extensive acquaintance--"a singular favour conferr"d on one who has it not in her power to make any other return but her most grateful thanks, &c.,"--is but a symbol of the feelings of the readers who ever wish well to the name and the fame of James Boswell.
THE END.
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
_The following Volumes are now ready:_--
THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson.
ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton.
HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask.
JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes.
ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun.
THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie.
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless.
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson.
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie.
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask.