CHAPTER XV
Boswell and the Art of Intimate Biography

It is the privilege of few men in any age to raise an art to such perfection that it becomes in effect a new thing. The development of intimate biography is still largely the work of one man. After a hundred years of memorabilia, personal reminiscences, and interviews, Boswell is still as indubitably the greatest of biographers as when he referred to his book as the ‘first in the world,’ or when, fifty years later, Macaulay applied to him the language of the race-course, and pronounced, ‘Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.’ Later biographers do not eclipse him, nor do earlier ones explain him. A comparison of his work with what went before serves only to reveal his utter uniqueness. If an earlier biographer suggests a point of comparison in his realistic record of conversation, the slightness of his work gives no conception of the whole life he is writing; if another seems like Boswell in refusing to write a mere eulogy, he seems chill and judicial where Boswell is warm with pulsing life. Other lives give us admirable things: table-talk, a portrait, a eulogy, a handful of anecdotes, a list of dates from ‘pedigree to funeral,’ or a volume of letters; but Boswell gives us all these and more. He aspires to be as complete as life itself. Boswell knew and delighted in other biographies; but was hardly influenced by them. He knew Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, among the ancients, and Jonson’s Timber, Selden’s Table-Talk, and Spence’s Anecdotes, among modern ana; but is like none of these. He surpasses them all in intimacy, variety, and what, for want of a better name, may be called his sustained quality. To read Boswell after these men is like passing to a Flemish painting from a study in black and white.

In so far as he can be said to have learned his art from any man, his master was Johnson himself. The first sentence in the Life proclaims Johnson’s superiority to all men in writing the lives of others. Biography was often discussed by the two men together, and Boswell was also well acquainted with Johnson’s published remarks on the subject. Johnson enunciated, with fair consistency, the theory of intimate biography, but he never fully realized it in any work of his. Thus he was wont to assert that autobiography was superior to biography, for the simple reason that a man might more readily reveal the facts concerning himself. If a man’s life is to be written by another than himself, it should be by one who has ‘eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.’ The material of biography, he asserts, at various times, to be ‘trifles,’ the ‘delicate features of the mind,’ the ‘minute peculiarities of conduct,’ ‘domestic privacies,’ and ‘the minute details of daily life.’ He approved of much anecdote in biography, used such incidents with a free hand in his own work, and encouraged Boswell to record them. He did not, however, anywhere fully embody his theories. It was, in truth, impossible for him to do so in the Lives of the Poets, for, with the exception of Savage, he had been on terms of real intimacy with none of these men. Had he written the life of Goldsmith, as he once thought of doing, he might, if his indolence had not prevented him, have produced such a book as would illustrate his own theories. Yet, in spite of this lack of intimacy in the Lives of the Poets, he was attacked for making them too familiar. Potter, Mrs. Montagu’s protégé, denounced his introduction of trifles into serious biography, considering it beneath the dignity of that art to mention that Pope wore three pairs of stockings to increase the size of his legs, and that he loved to feast on potted lampreys which he heated in a silver saucepan. ‘We know,’ writes the critic, ‘that the greatest men are subject to the infirmities of human nature equally with the meanest; why then are these infirmities recorded?’

This sentence may be taken to summarize the general conception of biography before Boswell. The death of a man seems to have been regarded as an opportunity for rationalizing his views and perfecting his character. The duty of a biographer was to forget all vices and to idealize all virtues, with the laudable purpose of setting before the public a notable pattern of conduct. ‘He that writes the life of another,’ wrote Johnson in the Idler, ‘endeavours to hide the man that he may produce a hero.’ Even Johnson never felt quite sure how far it was proper to describe a man’s vices in writing his biography. Boswell notes the inconsistency of his views. When the subject of the poet Parnell’s drinking arose, Johnson remarked, ‘More ill may be done by the example, than good by telling the whole truth’; but at another time he said, ‘If a man is to write A Panegyric, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.... It would produce an instructive caution to avoid drinking, when it was seen that even the learning and genius of Parnell could be debased by it.’[435] In practice it is clear that Johnson preferred to err on the side of frankness. Potter was shocked because he revealed the avidity of Addison by repeating the now-hackneyed story of how Steele was forced to pay a debt of £100. If biography is regarded as the handmaid of morality, and eulogy is preferred to actuality, such details are of course worse than useless. Beattie dwells on ‘the due distinction between what deserves to be known and what ought to be forgotten.’[436] Miss Burney considered that the publication of letters verbatim was the ‘greatest injury’ to a man’s memory. Horace Walpole, who deplored the whole policy of expurgation, nevertheless gives Mason, the biographer of Gray, the conventional advice. He avows that the publication of the life of Gray is an opportunity to establish that poet’s character ‘unimpeached.’ He was shocked at the section of the biography which Mason had submitted to his criticism, because it was honest and frank. ‘What can provoke you to be so imprudent?... You know my idea was that your work should consecrate his name.’[437] Once such a theory of consecration is adopted, the author of a life is driven relentlessly towards panegyric; for, not daring to trust the public to interpret facts, he must suppress everything that is not admirable, lest the mention of even the slightest fault be taken to point to the existence of thousands that are passed over in silence. When once you have taken to varnishing, you must varnish thoroughly, for any cracks or bare spots which reveal the material beneath ruin your whole effect.

To a public with these lofty notions of propriety Boswell, genially sacrificing what little was left to him of his reputation, addressed, in 1785, his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson ... ‘containing ... A series of his Conversation, Literary Anecdotes and Opinions of Men and Books.’ It was a jumble of gossip such as readers had hitherto seen only in the twopenny pamphlets of the scandal-mongers of Grub Street; but was set forth with an abundance of detail which captured the most frivolous and an air of authenticity which convinced the most sceptical. It depicted a great man who had been in his grave but a few months. It was written with veneration, but wholly without awe, as though a valet had collaborated with the Recording Angel. It flouted all restraints, and passed the most distant limits of decency. Nothing like it had ever been heard of. Even in our own day, to a world whose nerves have been jaded by a thousand exposés, such a book would come as a surprise, but to the world of 1786 it was a revelation of new possibilities in literature, as alarming as they were entertaining. With all the frankness of Pepys the author combines the conscious skill of one who has mastered the art of anecdote and the joy of a conceited man who realizes that he is about to attain fame by one of the by-paths of literature. It was difficult, in 1785, to say whether Johnson’s theory of familiar biography had been realized or travestied in this book. It was obvious that he had been hoist with his own petard. The world was informed with the most scrupulous accuracy of how he said his prayers and how he was persuaded to wear a woollen night-cap. His idlest word was recorded as though in a dictograph. ‘I have often thought that if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns,—or cotton; I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances. I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean, ...’ and so forth. At times the book is hardly quotable. Once when about to get into a dirty bed, during their travels in the Hebrides, Boswell remarks: ‘We had much hesitation, whether to undress, or lye down with our clothes on. I said at last, “I’ll plunge in! There will be less harbour for vermin about me when I’m stripped”—Dr. Johnson said, he was like one hesitating to go into the cold bath. At last he resolved too.’ The first sensation of the reader of such amazing stuff as this is that Boswell was engaged in a deliberate attempt to degrade a great man. He was accused by a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine[438] of having ‘exposed and cut up’ his hero ‘in the most shameful and cruel manner.’ That Boswell had a kind of mischievous delight in what he was doing, no one need take the trouble to tell us; but that he was a sort of skilful blackmailer is now unthinkable. He felt that he was doing the world a service in showing that a great man was human; and time has proved that he was right. ‘There is something noble,’ Johnson had remarked to him, ‘in publishing truth, though it condemns one’s self.’ Boswell paid this price. He made Johnson permanently familiar by making himself almost permanently notorious. Witness the following extract:

Such writing as this at once divided the reading public into hostile camps. There were many who considered the book delightful; others considered it a new kind of libel. It became the subject of a long controversy in the Gentleman’s Magazine. In the December following its appearance, Boswell was accused of ‘betraying private conversations even of the most trivial kind.’ In May, the tastes of a ‘gossiping age’ were denounced as well. By December 1786, the sale of the book having gone triumphantly forward, Boswell was reminded that his popularity was due solely to the general interest in Johnson; the sale of his work was compared to the consumption of potatoes in a time of famine; and the public was instructed that such works require for their composition nothing but an ear and a memory.

In the spring of the same year, soon after the appearance of Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes, Walpole wrote to Mann:

Other caricatures represented the ghost of Johnson haunting Boswell while he pieced together his Journal from various rags of reminiscence, and the bust of Johnson frowning down upon Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi as they wrote. Rowlandson and Collings later made the Tour the subject of a series of sixteen caricatures.

In 1786, moreover, a pamphlet appeared entitled, A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson to his Friends, in which Boswell was satirized together with Strahan, Courtenay, and Mrs. Piozzi. The verses were elaborately annotated with quotations from the Journal, and Boswell was addressed by the manes of Johnson in these words:

This was the invariable charge against the book. It was a mass of small talk collected by a man with a retentive memory, ‘not to do honour to his [Johnson’s] memory, by judiciously selecting the best and most striking of his sentences, but with a design to show his own assiduity in exhibiting the Doctor in the most glaring colours of inconsistency.’[442]

There was a secondary charge against the book. It was conceived as a libel on living people.[443] Various persons—the Duchess of Hamilton, Sir Alexander MacDonald, and many of those who had entertained the travellers in the Hebrides—discovered in the book remarks about themselves that were anything but palatable. A reference to Mrs. Thrale created the greatest excitement. Johnson’s remark that she could not get through Mrs. Montagu’s Essay on Shakespeare was there for all the world to read. She protested in her Anecdotes; but Boswell reminded her, in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine, that she had read his Journal in manuscript, without complaining of this, and that he was but quoting Johnson’s own words regarding her. So ended one controversy. It was not the only one.

But perhaps the chief excitement rose from the advertisement at the end of the volume, in which Boswell announced that he had but begun his memoirs of Johnson. He proposed presently to ‘erect a literary monument worthy of so great an author,’ and stated that he had been collecting biographical material for more than twenty years. The promise, for those who had known Johnson, was not gratifying. If Boswell had upset the literary world with an account of three months in Johnson’s life, what would he do in recounting seventy-five years of it? Everybody who had known Johnson held his breath for fear. Many urged the new biographer to be cautious. Fanny Burney refused to assist him in his work of showing the pleasanter side of Johnson’s character, and wrote in her Diary,[444] ‘I feel sorry to be named or remembered by that biographical, anecdotical memorandummer till his book of poor Dr. Johnson’s life is finished and published.’ Sir William Forbes, who was distressed because Boswell had quoted his approval of the Journal, took the liberty of ‘strongly enjoining him’ to be more careful about personalities in the later work.[445] He had perhaps never heard Boswell’s famous reply to Hannah More, who had urged him to ‘mitigate some of Johnson’s asperities’ when he published the Journal. ‘He said roughly,’ she writes, ‘“He would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.”’[446] This remark has been hackneyed in every work on Boswell, but it can never be quoted too often, for it is Boswell’s reply to the world. There is nothing more to be said.

I have dwelt on the reception of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides because it is the most effective way of showing the novelty and the magnitude of his achievement. If the author had been any other than James Boswell, critics would long ere this have expatiated on the splendid courage of his undertaking; but he enjoyed and esteemed his own work too highly to elicit such praise. Whatever were Boswell’s superficial faults, whatever the resentments that he caused, it is impossible to withhold our admiration from the simple confidence in the letter of the truth that characterized his Scotch soul. His would be the simplicity of childhood if it were not the simplicity of genius. The Lord Bishop of Chester complained[447] that Boswell recorded facts simply because they were facts. Such was indeed the case.

When, in 1791, the Life appeared, many of the old charges were repeated and some of the old satires revived; but it is not important to consider them in detail, for the note of admiration, which had been heard now and again in the beginning, when the Journal was published, soon became dominant. The other lives and memoirs of Johnson, with which Boswell’s former work had often been compared, now served only for purposes of contrast; they were useful in illustrating the greatness of the new work.

What are the characteristics which tended to give the Life its place in the history of biography? They are of the simplest kind. Boswell had, as this entire chapter has been designed to show, a passion for completeness. It is hardly necessary to labour this point. Boswell himself writes near the opening of his book: ‘I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has yet lived.’ In this sentence Boswell wrote his own panegyric, as in his reply to Miss More he had pronounced his own defence. Like everything that he did, the panegyric is not without the ludicrous touch, for he adds: ‘Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved.’ He might, indeed; for why should anything be lost, while there is a note-book—and a Boswell? Boswell, I repeat, aspired to the completeness of life itself.

Nor is it greatly necessary to dwell on Boswell’s fidelity to fact. It has been often dwelt upon, and, through the labours of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, is now generally admitted; though by one who liked neither Boswell nor Hill the matter has recently been once more called in question.[448] It would seem that a work which in its own day was both praised and denounced for its scrupulous accuracy might have been accepted without question. It is scarcely reasonable to demand a more lifelike biographer than Boswell. His own times readily granted that he had given the true Johnson; that was both the praise and the blame. Pepys, who knew Johnson and had no illusions about him, wrote to Hannah More:

This was written before the Life appeared. Respecting the later work we have the testimony of Burke to its value as a monument to Johnson’s conversation.[450] Even more than this may be said. We have the nearest possible thing to Johnson’s own approval. He had himself read the Journal in manuscript, and pronounced it a ‘very exact picture of a portion of his life.’ It is difficult to demand more than this. In the same work Boswell writes:

In his accurate reproduction of life, Boswell surpasses all the realists and attains to something of the inexhaustibility of nature itself. Delightful as is his book for mere reading, it can never be fully appreciated till it has been used as a work of reference; for such it was intended to be. The work exhibits, according to the title-page, ‘a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain for near half a century.’ Boswell aspired to be not only stenographer but historian. And to the life that he loved he was both.

We reach at last the core of Boswell’s being, his pagan joy in life, that greediness of social pleasure which explains all his faults and suggests all his greatness. He loved social life as other men have loved a noble woman or a noble cause. He solemnly dedicated his life to it and his genius to the recording of it. Only when his work is viewed in the large does one see its grandeur. Like Ulysses, he might have said, when his great work was done, ‘Much have I seen and known, cities of men and manners ... myself not least but honoured of them all.’

I incline to think that this social avidity is the ruling passion not only of Boswell but of all the life that we have been studying, of the salons, the conversationists, the diarists, and the letter-writers. That life at its best blends two kinds of pleasure that seem ordinarily incompatible, those of society and solitude, of association and reflection. In the ‘exchange of mind’ which is its ideal, its disciples find a joy that excels the more passive pleasures of reading, by bringing them directly into the creation of its characteristic product, conversation, and to this it adds the pleasure of seeing the immediate effect of one’s words. Conversation such as this may be said to represent the active, social, and more human side of the intellectual life, while meditation stands for its contemplative and eremitical side. The two are often mutually exclusive. Philosopher and poet belong to the latter class, because the meditative temper naturally shuns social distractions; but diarists, letter-writers, and biographers owe their very existence to this social instinct, and write to exalt it. They cannot bear that the delights which they have experienced should pass away without leaving a memorial. They are determined not only to pluck the passing hour, but to do what they can to preserve the blossom even as it droops in their hand. A withered flower is better than none at all; at worst, it is a pathetic reminder of what has been. The memorialist is one whose face is ever towards the past and the glories that have been, the noctes cæncæque deum. It is in honour of them that his work is done. His office is to record life, not to transfigure it. He cannot aspire to be among those who have seen visions and pointed others towards them; the joy of poetic creation and the passion of adventurous thought are not for him; but it is his to know men and the cheerful ways of men, and to unite us with the heroic minds of old, not in the lonely glory of their visions, but in their more familiar hours and their more human joys.