Critical Woodcuts/Boswell on His Own Hook
"I wonder how you and I admitted this to the publick eye, for Windham &c. were struck with its indelicacy, and it might hurt the book much. It is, however, mighty good stuff."—Boswell to Malone, 10 Feb., 1791.
WHEN Boswell's mind was not preoccupied and splendidly buzzing with drink, women, friends, celebrities, business, literature and glory, it was occupied with religion. He was no Calvinist, the good Boswell; and he did God the justice to believe him no Calvinist either. From Pope and the tolerant deists of his day he acquired a leaning toward universalism. Of one thing at least he was sure: That the use of religion is to comfort men with whom everything in this world has not gone strictly according to hope and expectation.
How he himself would have governed the universe, with what benignity of temper he would have dealt with sheep and goats alike, one may deliciously infer from his comment on the death of his "poor uncle, Dr. Boswell," who seems to have been, like his poor nephew, what is called nowadays a "yea-sayer to life." Writing to his lifelong confidant, the Rev. William Temple, James Boswell says of his deceased relative, with sympathetic indulgence and a sidelong glance at the complex case he himself was preparng for the last assizes: "He was a very good scholar, knew a great many things, had an elegant taste and was very affectionate. But he had no conduct. His money was all gone; 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." [My italics.]
Poor Boswell! He hoped all his life for a blessed resurrection, and now he has got one—a resurrection of that quick, curious, eager, affectionate spirit, so scintillant and vivacious, so subject to somber hypochondriac vapors. He has got, also, a resurrection "of the body," according to the aspiration of his creed, with his tied wig, his pointed nose, the fat collops of his double chin, his stomach ruined by alcohol and refusing food, long fevers and shameful diseases clinging to him from nights spent, after intoxication from drinking the health of his intended wife, with girls of doubtful virtue. But all of these ignominies of the unruly flesh, quite unbecoming the friend of Paoli and the disciple of the moral Johnson, as he would be the first to acknowledge, were veiled from a censorious world during his lifetime by "a suit of imperial blue lined with rose-colored silk and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons."
Here he is again, the naughty, irrepressible fellow with no conduct, whom the sternest moralist of his day loved like a son; who brought to another stern moralist, Carlyle, more pleasure than any other of the fifteen million souls whose decorum he outraged; and who was declared by Lord Macaulay to be as indubitably the first of biographers as Homer is the first of poets.
Professor Tinker's book,[1] which every library and every Johnsonian and Boswellian will wish to possess, gives us the most accurate, comprehensive, intimate and scandalous account now available of one of the most captivating figures in the entire range of English literature. There are a hundred hitherto unpublished letters, including a series addressed to the steward of Boswell's estate at Auchinleck. More important than these considerations is the restoration of the original text of the letters to Temple, which are the piece de resistance.
Since 1857, when the series was first published, with the disreputable editing and the grave expurgations characteristic of that decorous Victorian time, apparently no one had studied what Boswell actually wrote till Professor Tinker explored the manuscript treasures in the possession of Mr. J. P. Morgan. After due hesitation, he decided to reproduce with practically immaculate integrity the correspondence in which Boswell shows himself to Temple naked and only intermittently ashamed.
His editorial work may serve as a model to all editors of letters; and all scholars, of course, know that Professor Tinker is much more than a master of editorial technique. In the flourishing Yale school for the study of eighteenth century literature, Professor Tinker has for some years appeared to be, as Boswell said of Malone, "Johnsonianissimus," with his studies of "Johnson and Fanny Burney," "The Salon and English Letters," "Young Boswell" and "Nature's Simple Plan." But his long frequentation of the wits and the blue stockings who bowed to the Great Bear appears at present as but preliminary to the "insidious circumvallation" of James Boswell, who now emphatically challenges reconsideration, not as a satellite, but as the fiery center of his own turbulent system.
The impression that Boswell derives all his interest from his relation to Johnson is an error which this edition of his letters will help to explode. This erroneous impression is due, first, to the great biography and then to two famous essays on the biography by Macaulay and by Carlyle. Macaulay, as every one remembers, spitted Boswell on a glittering antithesis: "Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all." Macaulay went on to prove that Boswell's achievement was due precisely to the fact that he was an officious, inquisitive, insensible, toad-eating fool, and that he possessed "absolutely none" of "the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers." Carlyle, himself a biographer of a new style, disrelished Macaulay's recipe for supremacy in the biographical art. He declared this estimate of Boswell egregiously wrong, assured the world that every great work is the fruit of virtues and not of vices, and, in accordance with his own favorite doctrine, he explained Boswell as a man eminently endowed with the supreme virtue of hero-worship. Thus Macaulay and Carlyle both place Boswell in the list of Johnson's dependents.
Carlyle's theory is not, like Macaulay's, positively silly, but it is quite inadequate. It doesn't really touch: Boswell's center. Hero-worship certainly was not the mainspring in Boswell. No one can scrutinize intimately his inner workings and fail to recognize that he burns with a flaming desire to be a great man in his own right. He also would rather like, if he could Boswell on His Own Hook manage it without impediment to larger ambitions, to be a good man in his own right. Se perfectionner—to shape and polish his own character: that is an object which already interests him in his teens. With that in mind, he applies for guidance to Hume, to Johnson, to Paoli, to Rousseau, to Voltaire, and he feebly returns from time to time to the consideration of self-perfection amid the growing dissipations of his later years.
But the master passion in Boswell from the outset is for full self-realization and self-expression. He is the supreme biographer because he is a great artist and has a most extraordinary faculty for taking in and giving forth again all the elements in a situation which constitute its life. With much loud ado, Macaulay and Carlyle bring their critical sledge-hammers down on both sides of the nail. Professor Tinker strikes it accurately on the head with this simple declaration in his "Young Boswell": "The distinctive feature in Boswell is the capacity for realizing and using the richness of life to which he was admitted."
Boswell, beyond any man in his time, realized the richness to which he was admitted in Johnson; but in this case he had brisk competition. Fanny Burney, for example, describes an Irish gentleman, a Mr. Musgrave, a member of the Irish Parliament, as glancing up at Johnson's portrait and exclaiming: "What a fine old lion he is! Oh! I love him—I honor him—I reverence him! I would black his shoes for him. I wish I could give him my night's sleep." That is hero-worship, and Fanny, who thinks it is a little foolish, remarks that Musgrave "is a caricature of Mr. Boswell, who is a caricature, I must add, of all other of Dr. Johnson's admirers."
Boswell excelled all the other admirers not because he was a greater hero-worshiper but because he had a far more comprehensive appreciation of the points of interest in the hero. As a biographer Johnson himself was a dry-as-dust professor compared with Boswell. Johnson hadn't, for instance, the dimmest notion why it was worth while to preserve a record of his hoarding of orange peel. Boswell had. From the time he published his "Account of Corsica" to the close of his literary career he was master of a recipe for writing such a book as no one could help reading.
He realized the richness of life that there was in a Corsican patriot before Lundon had heard of him. He realized the richness of life in John Wilkes when England had exiled him. If Johnson had not happened to be the best extant subject for a biographer and the recognized center of literary society, Boswell would not have focused his magnum opus upon him, and he would not have wasted his time touring Scotland and the Hebrides with him. He valued his time and he was absolutely sure of the quality of his talent while all the world was laughing at him. In order to prove his possession of a glorious lifeenhancing faculty, independent of his subject, it was no more necessary for him to paint Johnson than for Velasquez to paint Philip IV. If Johnson had never lived, Boswell, I think, would still have produced masterpieces.
In the "Letters," the Johnson Biography drops into its place as only a considerable incident in a many-sided, adventurous and ambitious career, full and running over with experience, most of which was zestfully welcomed.
There is the stuff of an excellent novel in Boswell's relation to Scotland, the Auchinleck estate, and his father, and that "implacable" woman, his father's second wife. As Carlyle recognized well enough, the young James was no insolent toad-eating upstart from nowhere. He has the blood of Bruce in his veins, and social position and culture behind him. His father, an eminent member of the Scottish bar and Lord of Auchinleck, can ride ten miles from his front door on his own land. He wants an heir to his profession and his property and to his position in the country, and he gives his boy an Edinburgh education, and tries to make a sound religious Tory and a good Scotsman of him. Sentimentally, the project appeals to James; he always remained sentimentally enthusiastic for his religion, his king, and his family, and he enjoyed drinking port wine and coffee on the 30th of January in honor of the blessed martyr Charles I.
But young James has a pair of the most candid realistic eyes that were ever set in a man's head. At the age of seventeen, precocious, well-read, wide-eyed, he turns his eyes toward London, recognizing that Scotland is going to be more and more irredeemably provincial. With his instinct for the main current, he cannot bear the thought of accepting a Scotch laird's universe, and remaining in the backwater. Edinburgh he knows only too well. He is irked by the study and practise of law as he sees it in the provinces. He loathes the gloom and the dull placidity of country life. His temperamental melancholy craves the stimulation of gay scenes and people. To escape from his manifest destiny and to torment his father, he talks about entering the priesthood and the army. These are but youthful writhings against the study of law. As a disciple of the rational Hume, he has no place in the priesthood. Physically timorous, he has no use for the army, except as the convivialities of the officers' mess entice.
What the young Boswell is really yearning for is the new poetry, the new plays, the new histories, the new skeptical philosophy, hot from the capital; and, as soon as possible, he must be down there in London among the producers of the new age, which his prescient nostrils have scented afar off. His father, almost heartbroken, sees this restlessness, but has outlived his sympathy with it. He talks to James as if he were a silly, stubborn boy—even after James is a man grown and married, he always is made to feel like a "timid boy" in the presence of his father, except when deep drafts of strong beer have stupefied his sensibilities to the paternal snibbing. He reveres his father and would, if given a chance, love him. But his father sheds a black frost on his affection, and seeks to destroy the form which the spirit of his son's young life spontaneously takes. As an incidental consequence, perhaps, of this repressive discipline, when James at the age of twenty-two makes his arrangements to go abroad, ostensibly to study law in Utrecht, he is obliged to set aside £10 of his traveling allowance for the upkeep of the illegitimate child which he leaves behind him.
By heredity and by poetical sentiment and by association with Johnson, Boswell is a Tory, but by a deeper impulse in him he takes to radicalism and revolution like a duck to water. He has in Holland an interesting affair with a young lady of excellent birth, whose skepticism in religious and moral matters shocks him, superficially; but to whom does he run for consultation on the case but to the author of "The Nouvelle Héloise"! He carries messages from Rousseau to Paoli, the Corsican patriot. He makes a sensation at the age of twenty-seven by his "Account of Corsica," containing the spirited journal of his association with Paoli, which first interpreted him to the English world. He would like to effect a meeting between Rousseau and Voltaire. Failing at that, he assists at the junction of Rousseau and Hume; and he pilots Rousseau's mistress across the Channel. He has an affair with a lady in Sienna, which pleases him for years. He courts in italy the insolent democrat John Wilkes; and later, as a masterpiece of mediation, he maneuvers Dr. Johnson himself into a meeting with Wilkes at a dinner party with the bookseller Dilly. He sides with the Americans against Dr. Johnson. He pretends to side with Burke against the French; but Burke's continually raging against the French bores him to extinction, and he is grateful and happy when the great man refrains from the subject for an entire evening.
The fact is that Boswell, in the prime of life, hasn't a political conviction in his body for which he would shed his blood, nor a moral principle which he isn't ready to sacrifice at a moment's notice for an enlargement of his experience—unless, indeed, we recognize as a conviction his impresario's passion for bringing great artists together; and as a principle, his desire "to be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy."
Every vital impulse in him is an expansive impulse; and it is his misfortune, when he is in "good society," to live in an "epoch of concentration." His presence in the sturdy classical circle of Burke, Johnson and Reynolds is, in a sense, an accident. He paints the temple of Georgian classicism because it is quite the finest thing in England. He goes through the political and religious and social motions of conforming with the age, and works quite a bit of ardor into his conformity. He calls himself a Tory, a Christian and a gentleman, and he keeps up appearances as well as he can when he isn't drunk. But his gentility, his Christianity and his Toryism are garments which he has got at the tailor's, like his suit of imperial blue with the rose-colored lining. At heart, one is tempted to say, the man is a rationalist, a free-thinking deist, a "child of nature," and far better qualified for discipleship to Rousseau than to Johnson.
If one were bent on proving Boswell a hollow sham and a contemptible hypocrite one could find abundant evidence in his outpourings to Temple.
After innumerable previous affairs of the heart and of the flesh he does marry a cousin and beget three daughters and two sons, to perpetuate his ancient race. He thinks an ancient race is a good thing and ought to be preserved—if it can be done without interfering with more interesting occupations. But he doesn't even consider settling down after his marriage to be a country gentleman. He leaves his "valuable" wife—his constantly recurring epithet for her—to manage his estate and the children in the country. He is glad to pay her an occasional visit, but he is also glad that she doesn't care to live in town. For his part, he candidly recognizes that he is "too many, as the phrase is, for one woman, and a certain transient connection I am persuaded does not interfere with that attachment which a man has for a wife and which I have as much as any man that ever lived, though some of my qualifications are not valued by her, as they have been by other women—aye, and well educated women, too." Besides, there is a handsome chambermaid who cheers him on the way to and from his wife. And on one of his trips to Auchinleck he has the gout, or some trouble with his toe; and he easily finds in the post-chaise an "agreeable young widow" who is happy to hold his foot in her lap.
These little amours are the byplay of idle moments. They don't weigh on his mind or fill it. He aspires for distinction at the English bar. He is trying to attract the attention of Lord Chatham. He would like to be English commissioner in Corsica. He is giving dinner parties and dining out daily with the most exciting groups of the most stimulating people, and sitting from 8:30 to 3 in the morning at the Turk's Head Tavern, gathering material for "the most entertaining book you ever read"—and it is only now and then in a spare moment that his mind wanders to his debts and to his "valuable spouse" who, far away in Auchinleck, is dying of consumption, as he rather fears from the physician's report of her "severe cough, sweatings and swelled legs."
Up to the time of his wife's death, Boswell felt, like another great man, that "he had come to the ring, and now he must hop." He was hopping in the London ring when his "valuable wife," who had repeatedly warned him that she was about to do it, died, uncheered by his presence. He had tarried, with apparent callousness, till it was just too late, and then had posted to Auchinleck to find her beyond the reach of his belated consolation. Feebly, at first, he recognized what had happened. Her countenance was so little disfigured that he almost felt it must all be a deception. "But alas, to see my excellent wife, and the mother of my children, and that most sensible lively woman, lying cold and pale and insensible was very shocking to me." Contrary to the custom of Scottish gentlemen, he resolved to attend the funeral, and got through it very decently. Then he privately read the funeral service over the coffin in the presence of his sons, and was temporarily relieved by that.
But in the next days and weeks gradually there breaks over him such an overwhelming sense of what he has lost that he is "avid of death," and wonders why people are so eager to bring offspring into the world to meet with so much misery and so little real happiness. In his depressed fantastic moods his wife, he now remembers, had been wont to be his comforter and to suggest "rational thoughts" to him. The complex and annoying business of the estate she had in great part taken off his mind. The five sons and daughters—he is terribly attached to them, now that he thinks of them; and he has got to think of them now very hard. Their schooling, for example, must receive attention at once, and what problems for his poor head! The girls are too precocious and too independent to be sent to any ordinary governess; he himself has no "authority" over them and can influence them only by "affection." One of the boys he will send to Eton; the other he takes into his own bachelor apartment in London and provides a private tutor for him; but this arrangement worries him because the poor little fellow has no one to associate with but the old housekeeper and the footman. He rests badly at night, thinking of his sickly mind, his bereavement, the disappointment of his "hopes of success in life," the embarrassment of his affairs, "the disadvantage to my children in having so wretched a father," the uncertainty of being happy after death, the certainty of death.
One can't read the later pages of this correspondence without recognizing that Boswell responds to the elementary moral appeals of life in a way to justify his declaration that, in spite of the romantic aspects of his career, he is "a very sensible, good sort of man." Yet to dull the edge of his misery and his anxiety, he drinks in these last years harder than ever—scarcely gets through a day without sinking into a drunken sleep. In these circumstances, in this half desperate mood between the death of his wife, in 1789, and 1791, in "a dissipated stupor and afraid to think," this Divine Madman, as he called himself, wrote out, polished and published the "Life of Johnson." It was all that held him up. It was enough.
- ↑ Letters of James Boswell, New York, 1924, two vols.