Boswell's Life of Johnson
acceptable everywhere, have mingled throughout with his own handiwork,
and cause it to radiate a kind of genial warmth. This geniality it may
be which has attracted so many readers to the book. They find themselves
in good company, in a comfortable, pleasant place, agreeably stimulated
with wit and fun, and cheered with friendliness. They are loth to leave
it, and would ever enter it again. This rare charm the book owes in
large measure to its creator.
The alliance of author with subject in Boswell's Johnson is one of the
happiest and most sympathetic the world has known. So close is it that
one cannot easily discern what great qualities the work owes to each.
While it surely derives more of its excellence than is commonly remarked
from the art of Boswell, its greatness after all is ultimately that of
its subject. The noble qualities of Johnson have been well discerned by
Carlyle, and his obvious peculiarities and prejudices somewhat magnified
and distorted in Macaulay's brilliant refractions. One quality only
shall I dwell upon, though that may be the sum of all the rest. Johnson
had a supreme capacity for human relationship. In him this capacity
amounted to genius.
In all respects he was of great stature. His contemporaries called him a
colossus, the literary Goliath, the Giant, the great Cham of literature,
a tremendous companion. His frame was majestic; he strode when he
walked, and his physical strength and courage were heroic. His mode of
speaking was 'very impressive,' his utterance 'deliberate and strong.'
His conversation was compared to 'an antique statue, where every vein
and muscle is distinct and bold.' From boyhood throughout his life his
companions naturally deferred to him, and he dominated them without
effort. But what overcame the harshness of this autocracy, and made it
reasonable, was the largeness of a nature that loved men and was ever
hungry for knowledge of them. 'Sir,' said he, 'I look upon every day
lost in which I do not make a new acquaintance.' And again: 'Why, Sir, I
am a man of the world. I live in the world, and I take, in some degree,
the color of the world as it moves along.' Thus he was a part of all
that he met, a central figure in his time, with whose opinion one must
reckon in considering any important matter of his day.
His love of London is but a part of his hunger for men. 'The happiness
of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it.'
'Why, Sir, you find no man at all intellectual who is willing to leave
London: No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for
there is in London all that life can afford.' As he loved London, so he
loved a tavern for its sociability. 'Sir, there is nothing which has yet
been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a
good tavern.' 'A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity.'
Personal words are often upon his lips, such as 'love' and 'hate,' and
vast is the number, range, and variety of people who at one time or
another had been in some degree personally related with him, from Bet
Flint and his black servant Francis, to the adored Duchess of Devonshire
and the King himself. To no one who passed a word with him was he
personally indifferent. Even fools received his personal attention.
Said one: 'But I don't understand you, Sir.' 'Sir, I have found you an
argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.' 'Sir, you
are irascible,' said Boswell; 'you have no patience with folly or
absurdity.'
But it is in Johnson's capacity for friendship that his greatness is
specially revealed. 'Keep your friendships in good repair.' As the old
friends disappeared, new ones came to him. For Johnson seems never to
have sought out friends. He was not a common 'mixer.' He stooped to no
devices for the sake of popularity. He pours only scorn upon the lack of
mind and conviction which is necessary to him who is everybody's friend.
His friendships included all classes and all ages. He was a great
favorite with children, and knew how to meet them, from little
four-months-old Veronica Boswell to his godchild Jane Langton. 'Sir,'
said he, 'I love the acquaintance of young people, . . . young men have
more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every
respect.' At sixty-eight he said: 'I value myself upon this, that there
is nothing of the old man in my conversation.' Upon women of all classes
and ages he exerts without trying a charm the consciousness of which
would have turned any head less constant than his own, and with their
fulsome adoration he was pleased none the less for perceiving its real
value.
But the most important of his friendships developed between him and such
men of genius as Boswell, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, and Edmund Burke. Johnson's genius left no fit testimony of
itself from his own hand. With all the greatness of his mind he had no
talent in sufficient measure by which fully to express himself. He had
no ear for music and no eye for painting, and the finest qualities in
the creations of Goldsmith were lost upon him. But his genius found
its talents in others, and through the talents of his personal friends
expressed itself as it were by proxy. They rubbed their minds upon
his, and he set in motion for them ideas which they might use. But the
intelligence of genius is profounder and more personal than mere ideas.
It has within it something energetic, expansive, propulsive from mind to
mind, perennial, yet steady and controlled; and it was with such force
that Johnson's almost superhuman personality inspired the art of his
friends. Of this they were in some degree aware. Reynolds confessed that
Johnson formed his mind, and 'brushed from it a great deal of rubbish.'
Gibbon called Johnson 'Reynolds' oracle.' In one of his Discourses Sir
Joshua, mindful no doubt of his own experience, recommends that young
artists seek the companionship of such a man merely as a tonic to their
art. Boswell often testifies to the stimulating effect of Johnson's
presence. Once he speaks of 'an animating blaze of eloquence, which
roused every intellectual power in me to the highest pitch'; and again
of the 'full glow' of Johnson's conversation, in which he felt himself
'elevated as if brought into another state of being.' He says that all
members of Johnson's 'school' 'are distinguished for a love of truth and
accuracy which they would not have possessed in the same degree if they
had not been acquainted with Johnson.' He quotes Johnson at length and
repeatedly as the author of his own large conception of biography. He
was Goldsmith's 'great master,' Garrick feared his criticism, and
one cannot but recognize the power of Johnson's personality in the
increasing intelligence and consistency of Garrick's interpretations,
in the growing vigor and firmness of Goldsmith's stroke, in the charm,
finality, and exuberant life of Sir Joshua's portraits; and above all in
the skill, truth, brilliance, and lifelike spontaneity of Boswell's art.
It is in such works as these that we shall find the real Johnson, and
through them that he will exert the force of his personality upon us.
Biography is the literature of realized personality, of life as it
has been lived, of actual achievements or shortcomings, of success or
failure; it is not imaginary and embellished, not what might be or might
have been, not reduced to prescribed or artificial forms, but it is the
unvarnished story of that which was delightful, disappointing, possible,
or impossible, in a life spent in this world.
In this sense it is peculiarly the literature of truth and authenticity.
Elements of imagination and speculation must enter into all other forms
of literature, and as purely creative forms they may rank superior to
biography; but in each case it will be found that their authenticity,
their right to our attention and credence, ultimately rests upon the
biographical element which is basic in them, that is, upon what they
have derived by observation and experience from a human life seriously
lived. Biography contains this element in its purity. For this reason it
is more authentic than other kinds of literature, and more relevant. The
thing that most concerns me, the individual, whether I will or no, is
the management of myself in this world. The fundamental and essential
conditions of life are the same in any age, however the adventitious
circumstances may change. The beginning and the end are the same, the
average length the same, the problems and the prize the same. How, then,
have others managed, both those who failed and those who succeeded,
or those, in far greatest number, who did both? Let me know their
ambitions, their odds, their handicaps, obstacles, weaknesses, and
struggles, how they finally fared, and what they had to say about it.
Let me know a great variety of such instances that I may mark their
disagreements, but more especially their agreement about it. How did
they play the game? How did they fight the fight that I am to fight, and
how in any case did they lose or win? To these questions biography gives
the direct answer. Such is its importance over other literature. For
such reasons, doubtless, Johnson 'loved' it most. For such reasons
the book which has been most cherished and revered for well-nigh two
thousand years is a biography.
Biography, then, is the chief text-book in the art of living, and
preeminent in its kind is the Life of Johnson. Here is the instance of a
man who was born into a life stripped of all ornament and artificiality.
His equipment in mind and stature was Olympian, but the odds against
him were proportionate to his powers. Without fear or complaint, without
boast or noise, he fairly joined issue with the world and overcame it.
He scorned circumstance, and laid bare the unvarying realities of the
contest. He was ever the sworn enemy of speciousness, of nonsense, of
idle and insincere speculation, of the mind that does not take seriously
the duty of making itself up, of neglect in the gravest consideration of
life. He insisted upon the rights and dignity of the individual man,
and at the same time upon the vital necessity to him of reverence
and submission, and no man ever more beautifully illustrated their
interdependence, and their exquisite combination in a noble nature.
Boswell's Johnson is consistently and primarily the life of one man.
Incidentally it is more, for through it one is carried from his own
present limitations into a spacious and genial world. The reader there
meets a vast number of people, men, women, children, nay even animals,
from George the Third down to the cat Hodge. By the author's magic each
is alive, and the reader mingles with them as with his acquaintances.
It is a varied world, and includes the smoky and swarming courts and
highways of London, its stately drawing-rooms, its cheerful inns,
its shops and markets, and beyond is the highroad which we travel in
lumbering coach or speeding postchaise to venerable Oxford with its
polite and leisurely dons, or to the staunch little cathedral city of
Lichfield, welcoming back its famous son to dinner and tea, or to the
seat of a country squire, or ducal castle, or village tavern, or the
grim but hospitable feudal life of the Hebrides. And wherever we go
with Johnson there is the lively traffic in ideas, lending vitality and
significance to everything about him.
A part of education and culture is the extension of one's narrow range
of living to include wider possibilities or actualities, such as may be
gathered from other fields of thought, other times, other men; in short,
to use a Johnsonian phrase, it is 'multiplicity of consciousness.' There
is no book more effective through long familiarity to such extension and