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Title: Dr. Johnson and His Circle


Author: John Bailey



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Language: English

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DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE

by

JOHN BAILEY

Author of "Poets and Poetry," "The Claims of French Poetry," etc.







Thornton Butterworth Limited
15 Bedford Street, London, W.C.2

First Published  . . . . February 1913
Second Impression  . . . September 1919
Third Impression . . . . August 1927
Fourth Impression  . . . January 1931

All Rights Reserved




{v}

CONTENTS


CHAP.                                                    PAGE

   I  JOHNSON AS A NATIONAL INSTITUTION  . . . . . . . .    7
  II  THE GENIUS OF BOSWELL  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   37
 III  THE LIVES OF BOSWELL AND JOHNSON . . . . . . . . .   70
  IV  JOHNSON'S CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTICS  . . . . .  109
   V  JOHNSON'S WORKS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  171
  VI  THE FRIENDS OF JOHNSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  230
      BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  253
      INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  265




{7}

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE


CHAPTER I

JOHNSON AS A NATIONAL INSTITUTION

The name of Samuel Johnson is, of course, not the greatest in English
prose, but even to-day, when he has been dead more than a century and a
quarter, it is still the most familiar.  We live in an age of
newspapers.  Where all can read, the newspaper press, taken as a whole,
will be a fairly accurate reflection of what is in the mind of a
people.  Nothing will be mentioned frequently in newspapers which is
not of some interest to a large number of readers; and whatever is
frequently mentioned there cannot fail to become widely known.  Tried
by this test, Johnson's name must be admitted to be very widely known
and of almost universal interest.  No man of letters--perhaps scarcely
even Shakespeare himself--is so often quoted in the columns of the
daily press.  His is a name that may {8} be safely introduced into any
written or spoken discussion, without fear of the stare of
unrecognizing ignorance; and the only danger to which those who quote
him expose themselves is that of the yawn of over-familiarity.  Even in
his own lifetime his reputation extended far beyond the limited circle
of literature or scholarship.  Actresses delighted in his conversation;
soldiers were proud to entertain him in their barracks; innkeepers
boasted of his having slept in their inns.  His celebrity was such that
he himself once said there was hardly a day in which the newspapers did
not mention his name; and a year after his death Boswell could venture
to write publicly of him that his "character, religious, moral,
political and literary, nay his figure and manner, are, I believe, more
generally known than those of almost any man."  But what was, in his
own day, partly a respect paid to the maker of the famous _Dictionary_
and partly a curiosity about "the great Oddity," as the Edensor
innkeeper called him, has in the course of the nineteenth century
become a great deal more.

He is still for us the great scholar and the strongly marked
individuality, but he has gradually attained a kind of apotheosis, a
kind of semi-legendary position, almost rivalling that of the great
John Bull himself, as the {9} embodiment of the essential features of
the English character.  We never think of the typical Englishman being
like Shakespeare or Milton.  In the first place, we know very little
about Shakespeare, and not very much about Milton; and so we are thrown
back on their works, and our mental picture of them takes on a dim and
shadowy grandeur, very unlike what we see when we look within into our
familiar and commonplace selves.  Nor do Englishmen often plume
themselves on their aesthetic or imaginative gifts.  The achievements
of Wren, or Purcell, or Keats may arouse in them admiration and pride,
but never a sense of kinship.  When they recognize themselves in the
national literature, it is not Hamlet, or Lear, or Clarissa, or
Ravenswood that holds up the mirror; but Falstaff, or The Bastard, or
Tom Jones, or Jeanie Deans, or perhaps Gabriel Oak: plain people, all
of them, whatever their differences, with a certain quiet and downright
quality which Englishmen are apt to think the peculiar birthright of
the people of this island.  It is that quality which was the central
thing in the mind of Johnson, and it is to his possession of it, and to
our unique knowledge of it through Boswell, that more than anything
else he owes this position of the typical Englishman among our men of
letters.  We can all imagine that {10} under other conditions, and with
an added store of brains and character, we might each have been Doctor
Johnson.  Before we could fancy ourselves Shelley or Keats the self
that we know would have to be not developed but destroyed.  But in
Johnson we see our own magnified and glorified selves.

It has sometimes been asserted to be the function of the man of letters
to say what others can feel or think but only he can express.  Whatever
may be thought of such a definition of literature, it is certain that
Johnson discharged this particular function with almost unique success.
And he continues to do so still, especially in certain fields.
Whenever we feel strongly the point of view of common sense we almost
expect to be able to find some trenchant phrase of Johnson's with which
to express it.  If it cannot be found it is often invented.  A few
years ago, a lover of Johnson walking along a London street passed by
the side of a cabmen's shelter.  Two cabmen were getting their dinner
ready, and the Johnsonian was amused and pleased to hear one say to the
other: "After all, as Doctor Johnson says, a man may travel all over
the world without seeing anything better than his dinner."  The saying
was new to him and probably apocryphal, though the sentiment is one
which can well be imagined {11} as coming from the great man's mouth.
But whether apocryphal or authentic, the remark well illustrates both
the extent and the particular nature of Johnson's fame.  You would not
find a cabman ascribing to Milton or Pope a shrewd saying that he had
heard and liked.  Is there any man but Johnson in all our literary
history whom he would be likely to call in on such an occasion?  That
is the measure of Johnson's universality of appeal.  And the secret of
it lies, to use his own phrase, not used of himself of course, in the
"bottom of sense," which is the primary quality in all he wrote and
said, and is not altogether absent from his ingrained prejudices, or
even from the perversities of opinion which his love of argument and
opposition so constantly led him to adopt.  Whether right or wrong
there is always something broadly and fundamentally human about him
which appeals to all and especially to the plain man.  Every one feels
at home at once with a man who replies to doubts about the freedom of
the will with the plain man's answer: "Sir, we _know_ our will's free,
and there's an end on't," and if he adds to it an argument which the
plain man would not have thought of, it is still one which the plain
man and everyone else can understand.  "You are surer that you can lift
up your finger or not as you please, than you are of any {12}
conclusion from a deduction of reasoning."  Moreover we all think we
are more honest than our neighbours and are at once drawn to the man
who was less of a humbug than any man who ever lived.  "Clear your mind
of cant" is perhaps the central text of Johnson, on which he enlarged a
hundred times.  "When a butcher tells you his heart bleeds for his
country, he has in fact no uneasy feeling."  No one who has ever
attended an election meeting fails to welcome that saying, or the
answer to Boswell's fears that if he were in Parliament he would be
unhappy if things went wrong, "That's cant, sir. . . .  Public affairs
vex no man."  "Have they not vexed yourself a little, sir?  Have you
not been vexed at all by the turbulence of this reign and by that
absurd vote of the House of Commons, 'That the influence of the Crown
has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished'?"  "Sir, I
have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat.  I would
have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not
_vexed_."

Here we all know where we are.  This is what we wish we could have said
ourselves, and can fancy ourselves saying under more favourable
circumstances; and we like the man who says it for us.  Certainly no
man, not even Swift, ever put the plain man's view with {13} such
exactness, felicity, and force as Johnson does a thousand times in the
pages of Boswell.  And not only in the pages of Boswell.  One of the
objects of this introductory chapter is to try to give a preliminary
answer to the very natural question which confronts every one who
thinks about Johnson, how it has come about that a man whose works are
so little read to-day should still be so great a name in English life.
How is it that in this HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY he is the second author
to have a volume to himself, only Shakespeare preceding him?  The
primary answer is, of course, that we know him, as we know no other man
whose face we never saw, whose voice we never heard.  Boswell boasted
that he had "Johnsonized the land," and that he had shown Johnson in
his book as no man had ever been shown in a book before; and the boast
is after a hundred years seen to be a literal statement of fact.  But
after all Boswell did not make Johnson's reputation.  On the contrary,
it was Johnson's name that sold Boswell's book.  No man owes so much to
his biographer as Johnson to Boswell, but that must not make us forget
that Johnson was the most famous man of letters in England before he
ever saw Boswell.  Boswell's earnest desire to make his acquaintance
and to sit humbly at his feet was only an extreme {14} instance of an
attitude of respect and admiration, often even of reverence, commonly
felt towards him among the more intelligent and serious portion of the
community.  He had not then attained to the position of something like
Dictatorship which he filled in the world of English letters at the
time he wrote the _Lives of the Poets_, but, except the _Shakespeare_
and the _Lives_, all the work that gave him that position was already
done.  In this case, as in others, fame increased in old age without
any corresponding increase in achievement, and it was the easy years at
Streatham, not the laborious years at Gough Square, that saw him
honoured and courted by bishops and judges, peers and commoners, by the
greatest of English statesmen and the greatest of English painters.
But his kingship was in him from the first.  He had been _anax andron_
even among his schoolfellows.  His bigness, in more ways than one, made
them call him "the great boy," and the father of one of them was astute
enough even then to perceive that he would be more than that: "you call
him the great boy, but take my word for it, he will one day prove a
great man."  The boys looked upon him so much as a superior being to
themselves that three of them, of whom one was his friend Hector, whom
he often saw in later life, "used to come in the morning as his humble
{15} attendants and carry him to school.  One in the middle stooped
while he sat upon his back, and one on each side supported him, and
thus he was borne triumphant."  Such a tribute by boys to intellectual
superiority was less rare in those days than it has become since: but
it would not be easy to find a parallel to it at any time.  What began
at school continued through life.  Even when he was poorest and most
obscure, there was something about him that secured respect.  It is too
little to say that no one ever imagined he could with impunity behave
disrespectfully to Johnson.  No one ever dared to do so.  As he flung
the well-meant boots from his door at Oxford, so throughout life he
knew how to make all men afraid to insult, slight, or patronize him.

But these, after all, were qualities that would only affect the few who
came into personal contact with him.  What was it that affected the
larger world and gave him the fame and authority of his later years?
Broadly speaking of course it was what he had written, the work he had
done, his poems, his _Rambler_ and _Idler_, his _Rasselas_, his
_Shakespeare_, above all that colossal and triumphant piece of
single-handed labour, the _Dictionary of the English Language_.  But
there was more than that.  Another man might have written {16} books
quite as valuable, and attained to nothing like Johnson's position.  A
thousand people to-day read what Gray was writing in those years for
one who reads what Johnson wrote, and they are quite right.  Yet Gray
in his lifetime had little fame and no authority except among his
friends.  Pope, again, had of course immense celebrity, more no doubt
than Johnson ever had among men of letters; but he never became, as
Johnson did, something almost like a national institution.  What was it
that gave Johnson what great poets never attained?  It could not yet be
his reputation as a great talker, which was only beginning to spread.
We think of him as the greatest talker the world has ever seen: but
that is chiefly due to Boswell, of course, and we are speaking at
present of the years before the memorable meeting in the back parlour
of Mr. Davies's shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden.  Besides, good
talk, except in Boswell's pages, is like good acting, a vain thing to
those who only know it by hearsay.  We are therefore thrown back on
Johnson's public work for an explanation of the position he held.  What
was it in his work, with so little of Pope's amazing wit and
brilliancy, with so little of Gray's fine imaginative quality and
distinction, prose too, in the main, and not poetry, with none of the
prestige of poetry, {17} that gave him what neither Pope nor Gray ever
received, what it is scarcely too much to call, the homage of a nation?

The answer is that, especially in England, it is not brilliance or
distinction of mind that win the respect of a nation.  George III had
many faults, but all through his reign he was an admirable
representative of the general feelings of his people.  And he never did
a more representative act than when he gave Johnson a pension, or when
he received him in the library of Buckingham House.  No doubt many,
though not all, of Johnson's political and ecclesiastical prejudices
were very congenial to the king, but plenty of people shared George
Ill's views without gaining from him an ounce of respect.  What he and
the nation dimly felt about Johnson was a quality belonging less to the
author than to the man.  The English, as we were saying just now, think
of themselves as a plain people, more honest and direct in word and
deed than the rest of the world.  George III never affected to be
anything but a plain man, was very honest according to his lights, and
never for an instant failed to have the courage of his convictions.
Such a king and such a people would inevitably be attracted to a man of
Johnson's fearless sincerity and invincible common sense.  The ideal of
the nation is {18} still the same.  Johnson once praised the third Duke
of Devonshire for his "dogged veracity."  We have lately seen one of
that duke's descendants and successors, a man of no obvious or shining
talents, attain to a position of almost unique authority among his
fellow countrymen mainly by his signal possession of this hereditary
gift of veracity, honesty and good sense.  So it was with Johnson
himself.  Behind all his learning lay something which no learned
language could conceal.  "On s'attend à voir un auteur et on trouve un
homme."  Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical,
namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's
interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities,
indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life.  Nobody could
feel that about Johnson.

He never pretended to be superior to the pains or pleasures of the body
and never concealed his interest in the physical basis of life.  He
might with truth have spoken, as Pope did, of "that long disease, my
life," for he declares in one of his letters that after he was past
twenty his health was such that he seldom enjoyed a single day of ease;
and he was so scrupulously truthful when he had a pen in his hand that
that must be taken as at the least a literal record of the truth as it
appeared {19} to him at that moment.  But though he never enjoyed
health he never submitted to the tyranny of disease.  The manliness
that rings through all he wrote made itself felt also in his life, and
we are not surprised to hear from Mrs. Thrale, in whose house he lived
so long, that he "required less attendance sick or well than ever I saw
any human creature."  He could conquer disease and pain, but he never
affected stoic "braveries," about not finding them very actual and
disagreeable realities.  In the same way, he never pretended not to
enjoy the universal pleasures, such as food and sleep.  Boswell records
him as saying: "Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or
pretending not to mind, what they eat.  For my part, I mind my belly
very studiously and very carefully, for I look upon it that he who does
not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else."  This is not
particularly refined language, and Johnson's manners at the
dinner-table, where, until he had satisfied his appetite, he was
"totally absorbed in the business of the moment," were not always of a
nature to please refined people.  But our present point is that they
were only an exaggeration of that sense of bodily realities which is
one of the things that has always helped to secure for him the plain
man's confidence.  Throughout his life he kept his {20} feet firmly
based on the solid ground of fact.  Human life, as it is actually and
visibly lived, was the subject of his study and conversation from first
to last.  He always put fine-spun theories to mercilessly positive
tests such as the ordinary man understands and trusts at once, though
ordinary men have not the quickness or clearness of mind to apply them.
When people preached a theory to him he was apt to confute them simply
by applying it to practice.  He supposed them to act upon it, and its
absurdity was demonstrated.  One of his friends was Mrs. Macaulay, who
was a republican and affected doctrines of the equality of all men.
When Johnson was at her house one day he put on, as he says, "a very
grave countenance," and said to her: "Madam, I am now become a convert
to your way of thinking.  I am convinced that all mankind are upon an
equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam, that I
am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved
fellow-citizen, your footman: I desire that he may be allowed to sit
down and dine with us."  No wonder that, as he adds, "she has never
liked me since."  To the political thinker, perhaps, such an argument
rather proves the insincerity of Mrs. Macaulay than what he claimed for
it, "the absurdity of the levelling doctrine."  But it exhibits, {21}
with a force that no theoretical reasoning could match, the difficulty
which doctrines of equality will always have to meet in the resistance
of human nature as it is and as it is likely to remain for a long time
to come.  And it illustrates the habit of Johnson's mind which has
always made the unlearned hear him so gladly, the habit of forcing
theory to the test of fact.  For quick as he was, perhaps quicker than
any recorded man, at the tierce and quart of theoretical argument, he
commonly used the bludgeon stroke of practice to give his opponent the
final blow.  We are vaguely distrustful of our reasoning powers, but
every man thinks he can understand facts and figures.  The quickness of
Johnson in applying arithmetical tests to careless statements must have
been another of the elements in the fear, respect and confidence he
inspired.  A gentleman once told him that in France, as soon as a man
of fashion marries, he takes an opera girl into keeping, and he
declared this to be the general custom.  "Pray, sir," said Johnson,
"how many opera girls may there be?"  He answered, "About four score."
"Well then, sir," replied Johnson, "you see there can be no more than
fourscore men of fashion who can do this."

There is no art of persuasion, as all orators know, so overwhelming in
effect as this appeal, {22} or even appearance of appeal, to a court in
which every man feels as much at home as the speaker himself.  And
though Johnson's use of it is, of course, seen at its most telling in
his conversation, it was in him from the first, is a conspicuous
feature of all he wrote, and was undoubtedly a powerful factor in
winning for him the reputation of manliness and honesty he enjoyed.
Take, for instance, a few paragraphs from his analysis of the rhetoric
of authors on the subject of poverty.  It is No. 202 of _The Rambler_.
There is no better evidence of his perfect freedom from that slavery to
words which is the besetting sin of authors.

"There are few words of which the reader believes himself better to
know the import than of _poverty_; yet whoever studies either the poets
or philosophers will find such an account of the condition expressed by
that term as his experience or observation will not easily discover to
be true.  Instead of the meanness, distress, complaint, anxiety and
dependence, which have hitherto been combined in his ideas of poverty,
he will read of content, innocence and cheerfulness, of health and
safety, tranquillity and freedom; of pleasures not known but to men
unencumbered with possessions; and of sleep that sheds his balsamick
anodynes only on the {23} cottage.  Such are the blessings to be
obtained by the resignation of riches, that kings might descend from
their thrones and generals retire from a triumph, only to slumber
undisturbed in the elysium of poverty."

      *      *      *      *      *      *

"But it will be found upon a nearer view that they who extol the
happiness of poverty do not mean the same state with those who deplore
its miseries.  Poets have their imaginations filled with ideas of
magnificence; and being accustomed to contemplate the downfall of
empires, or to contrive forms of lamentation for monarchs in distress,
rank all the classes of mankind in a state of poverty who make no
approaches to the dignity of crowns.  To be poor, in the epick
language, is only not to command the wealth of nations, nor to have
fleets and armies in pay.

"Vanity has perhaps contributed to this impropriety of style.  He that
wishes to become a philosopher at a cheap rate easily gratifies his
ambition by submitting to poverty when he does not feel it, and by
boasting his contempt of riches when he has already more than he
enjoys.  He who would show the extent of his views and grandeur of his
conceptions, or discover his acquaintance with splendour and
magnificence, may talk, like Cowley, of an humble station and quiet
{24} obscurity, of the paucity of nature's wants, and the
inconveniences of superfluity, and at last, like him, limit his desires
to five hundred pounds a year; a fortune indeed, not exuberant, when we
compare it with the expenses of pride and luxury, but to which it
little becomes a philosopher to affix the name of poverty, since no man
can with any propriety be termed poor who does not see the greater part
of mankind richer than himself."

What good sense, what resolute grip on the realities of life, what a
love of truth and seriousness, shines through the long sentences!  The
form and language of the essay may perhaps be too suggestive of the
professional author; but how much the opposite, how very human and
real, is the stuff and substance of what he says!  Professor Raleigh
once proposed as a test of great literature, that it should be found
applicable and useful in circumstances very different from those that
were in the author's mind when he wrote.  By that test these words of
Johnson are certainly great literature.  The degrees of wealth and
poverty have varied infinitely in the history of the world.  They were
very different under the Roman Empire from what they became in the
Middle Age; by Johnson's day they had become quite unlike what they had
been in {25} the days of Dante and Chaucer; and they have again changed
almost or quite as much in the hundred and thirty years that have
passed since he died.  Yet was there ever a time, will there ever be,
when the self-deception of the human heart or the loose thinking of the
human mind, will not allow men who never knew poverty to boast of their
cheerful endurance of it?  Have we not to-day reached a time when men
with an assured income of ten, twenty, or even thirty pounds a week,
affect to consider themselves too poor to be able to afford to marry?
And where will such people better find the needed recall to fact, than
in Johnson's trenchant and unanswerable appeal to the obvious truth as
all can see it, if they will, for themselves, in the visible conditions
of the world about them: "No man can, with any propriety, be termed
poor who does not see the greater part of mankind richer than himself?"

This hold on the realities of life is the most essential element in
Johnson's greatness.  Ordinary people felt it from the first, however
unconsciously, and looked to Johnson as something more than an author.
Pope might do himself honour by acclaiming the verses of the unknown
poet: Warburton might hasten to pay his tribute to the unknown critic:
but they could not give Johnson, what neither {26} of them could have
gained for himself, the confidence, soon to be felt by the whole
reading part of the population of England, that here was a man uniquely
rich in the wisdom of every day, learned but no victim of learning,
sincerely religious but with a religion that never tried to ignore the
facts of human life, a scholar, a philosopher and a Christian, but also
pre-eminently a man.

A grave man, no doubt, apt to deal in grave subjects, especially when
he had his pen in his hand.  But that helped rather than hindered his
influence.  He would not have liked to think that he owed part of his
own authority to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Puritans, but no
doubt he did.  Still the Puritan movement only deepened a vein of
seriousness which had been in the English from Saxon days.  One may see
it everywhere.  The Puritans would not have been the power they were if
they had not found congenial soil in the English character.  The
Reformation itself, a Protestant may be excused for thinking, owes its
ultimate triumph in England partly to the fact that Englishmen saw in
it a movement towards a more serious and ethical religion than the
Catholicism either of the Middle Age or of the Jesuits.  The same thing
may be seen in the narrower fields of literature.  The Renaissance {27}
on the whole takes a much more ethical note in England than, for
instance, in France.  A little later indeed, in the France of Pascal
and Bossuet, books of devotion and theology were very widely read, as
may be seen in the letters of Madame de Sévigné; but they can never
have had anything like the circulation which they had in England, both
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Every one who looks at an
English country-house library is struck by the abundant provision of
sermons, mainly collected, like everything else indeed, in the
eighteenth century.  And every reader of Boswell's _Johnson_ has been
impressed by the frequent recurrence of devotional and religious books
in the literary talk of the day, and, what is perhaps more remarkable,
by the fact that wherever Boswell and Johnson go they constantly find
volumes of sermons lying about, not only in the private houses, but
also in the inns where they stay.  There never was a period when
"conduct," as Matthew Arnold used to call it, was so admitted to be the
three-fourths of life he claimed for it, as it was between the
Restoration and the French Revolution.  It was conduct, not faith,
ethics not religion, the "whole duty of man" in this life, not his
supernatural destiny in another, that mainly occupied the minds of
serious people {28} in that unecclesiastical age.  And Johnson,
definite Christian, definite Churchman as he was, full even of
ecclesiastical prejudices, was just the man to appeal to a generation
with such interests as these.

No questions occupied him so much as moral questions.  He was all his
life considering how he ought to live, and trying to live better.
People who are in earnest about these things have always found not only
his published prayers or his moral essays, but his life as told by
Boswell full of fortifying and stimulating ethical food.  All alike
exhibit a mind that recognized the problem of the conduct of life as
the one thing of supreme interest to a rational man, and recognized it
as above all things a moral problem.  His treatment of it is usually
based on reason, not on mere authority or orthodoxy, or even on
Christianity at all.  _Rasselas_, for instance, his most popular
ethical work, which was translated into most of the European languages,
does not contain a single allusion to Christianity.  Its atmosphere is
neither Mahomedan nor Christian, but that of pure reason.  And when
elsewhere he does discuss definitely Christian problems it is usually
in the light of free and unfettered reason.  Reason by itself has
probably never made any one a Christian, and certainly Johnson's {29}
Christianity was not an affair of the reason alone, but he was seldom
afraid to test it by the touchstone of reason.  That was not merely a
thing done in accordance with the fashion of his age; it was the
inevitable activity of an acute and powerful mind.  But the fact that
he had in him this absorbing ethical interest, and that throughout his
life he was applying to it a rare intellectual energy, and what was
rarer still in those fields, a close and unfailing grip on life and
reality, gave him that peculiar position to which he came in his last
years; one of an authority which was probably not equalled by that of
any professed philosopher or divine.

Still, his seriousness could not by itself have given him this
position.  The English people like their public men to be serious, but
they do not like them to be nothing else.  The philosopher and the
saint, the merely intellectual man or the merely spiritual man, have
never been popular characters or become leaders of men, here any more
than elsewhere.  The essential element in the confidence Johnson
inspired was not his seriousness: it was his sovereign sanity, the
unfailing common sense, to which allusion has already been made.  He
was pre-eminently a bookish man, but he was conspicuously free from the
unreality that is so often felt {30} in the characters of such men.  He
knew from the first how to strike a note which showed that he was well
aware of the difference between literature and life and their relative
importance.

  "Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
  And pause awhile from Letters, to be wise."


So he said, as a young man, in his finest poem, and so he acted all
through the years.  Scholar as he was, and very conscious of the
dignity of scholarship, he never forgot that scholarship faded into
insignificance in presence of the greater issues of life.  In his most
scholarly moment, in the Preface to the _Dictionary_, he will throw out
such remark as "this recommendation of steadiness and uniformity (in
spelling) does not proceed from an opinion that particular combinations
of letters have much influence on human happiness."  Such a sentence
could not but give plain people a feeling of unusual confidence in the
writer.  How different they would at once feel it to be, how different,
indeed, we still feel it, from the too frequent pedantry of critics,
insisting with solemn importance or querulous ill-temper upon trifling
points of grammar or style.  We know that this man has a scale of
things in his mind {31} he will not vilify his opponent's character for
the sake of a difference about a Greek construction, or make a lifelong
quarrel over the question of the maiden name and birthplace of
Shelley's great-grandmother.  From first to last he was emphatically a
human being, with a feeling for human life as a whole, and in all its
parts.  He said once: "A mere antiquarian is a rugged being," and he
was never himself a mere grammarian or a mere scholar, but a man with
an eager interest in all the business and pleasure of life.  His high
sense of the dignity of literature looked to its large and human side,
not to any parade of curious information.  Everywhere in his writings
plain people are conciliated by his frank attitude as to his own
calling, by his perfect freedom from any pontifical airs of the mystery
of authorship.  "I could have written longer notes," he says in the
great Preface to his _Shakespeare_, "for the art of writing notes is
not of difficult attainment."  "It is impossible for an expositor not
to write too little for some, and too much for others."  "I have indeed
disappointed no opinion more than my own; yet I have endeavoured to
perform my task with no slight solicitude.  Not a single passage in the
whole work has appeared to me corrupt which I have not attempted to
restore; or {32} obscure which I have not endeavoured to illustrate.
In many I have failed, like others, and from many, after all my
efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse.  I have not
passed over with affected superiority what is equally difficult to the
reader and to myself, but where I could not instruct him have owned my
ignorance.  I might easily have accumulated a mass of seeming learning
upon easy scenes; but it ought not to be imputed to negligence that,
where nothing was necessary, nothing has been done, or that, where
others have said enough, I have said no more."

A man who writes like this is sure of his public at once.  He is
instantly seen to be too proud, as well as too sincere, too great a
man, in fact, altogether, to stoop to the dishonest little artifices by
which vanity tries to steal applause.  In his writings as in his talk,
he was not afraid to be seen for what he actually was; and just as,
when asked how he came to explain the word Pastern as meaning the knee
of a horse, he replied at once, "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance," so
in his books he made no attempt to be thought wiser or more learned
than he was.  And this modesty which he showed for himself he showed
for his author too.  The common notion that he depreciated {33}
Shakespeare is, indeed, an entire mistake.  There were certainly things
in Shakespeare which were out of his reach, but that does not alter the
fact that Shakespeare has never been better praised than in Johnson's
Preface.  But he will not say what he does not mean about Shakespeare
any more than about himself.  There is in him nothing at all of the
subtle trickery of the common critic who thinks to magnify his own
importance by extravagant and insincere laudation of his author.  He is
not afraid to speak of the poet with the same simplicity as he speaks
of the editor.  "Yet it must be at last confessed that, as we owe
everything to him, he owes something to us; that, if much of his praise
is paid by perception and judgment, much is likewise given by custom
and veneration."  He even adds that Shakespeare has "perhaps not one
play which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary
writer, would be heard to the conclusion."  Whether that is true or not
of Johnson's day or of our own--and let us not be too hastily sure of
its untruth--at least the man who wrote it in the preface to an edition
of Shakespeare lacked neither honesty nor courage.  And he had then, as
he has still, the reward which the most popular of the virtues will
always bring.

{34}

With courage and honesty usually go simplicity and directness.  That is
not the first praise that Johnson would win from people familiar with
caricatures of his style.  But it is a complete mistake to suppose that
he always wore that heavy armour of magniloquence.  He could be as free
from pedantry of phrase as he always was from pedantry of thought.  He
is not only a supreme master of common sense; he is a supreme master of
the language of common sense.  He has the gift of saying things which
no one can misunderstand and no one can forget.  His common sense is
what its name implies, no private possession thrust upon the minds of
others, but their own thoughts expressed for them.  That was one of the
secrets of the unique confidence he inspired.  The jury gave him their
verdict because he always put the issue on a basis they could
understand.  His answer to the specious arguments of the learned is
always an appeal to what it needs no learning to know.  The critics of
Pope's _Homer_ are met by the unanswerable retort: "To a thousand
cavils one answer is sufficient.  The purpose of a writer is to be
read."  To Pope himself affecting scorn of the great, the same
merciless measure of common knowledge is dealt.  "His scorn of the
great is too often repeated to be real: no man thinks {35} much of that
which he despises."  And so once more to Pope's victims.  If they would
have kept quiet, he says, the _Dunciad_ would have been little read:
"For whom did it concern to know that one or another scribbler was a
dunce?"  But this is what the dunces are the last people to realize:
indeed, "every man is of importance to himself, and therefore, in his
own opinion, to others"; so the victim is the first to "publish
injuries or misfortunes which had never been known unless related by
himself, and at which those that hear them will only laugh; for no man
sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity."

Every one who is much read in Johnson will recall for himself other and
perhaps better instances than these of his rare faculty of gathering
together into a sentence some piece of the common stock of wisdom or
observation, and applying it simply, directly and unanswerably to the
immediate business in hand.  Is there anything which clears and
relieves an argument so well?  "The true state of every nation is the
state of common life"; "If one was to think constantly of death the
business of life would stand still"; "To be happy at home is the
ultimate result of all ambition."  How firm on one's feet, on the solid
ground of truth, one feels when one reads such sentences!  The writer
of them {36} is at once recognized as no maker of phrases, no victim of
cloudy speculations, self-deceived and the deceiver of others, but a
man who kept himself always close to the realities of things.  And when
to this, which had been always there, was added the special charm of
the _Lives of the Poets_, the old man speaking, often in the first
person, without reserve or mystery, out of the fullness of his
knowledge of books and men and the general life which is greater than
either, then the feeling entertained for him grew into something not
very unlike affection.  The man who could not be concealed even by the
grave abstractions of the earlier works, was now seen and heard as a
friend speaking face to face with those who understood him.  The
wisdom, and learning and piety, the shrewdness and vigour and wit, the
invincible common sense, took visible shape in the face of Samuel
Johnson, were heard in his audible voice, became known and honoured and
loved as a kind of national glory, the embodiment of the mind and
character of the English people.  And then, of course, came Boswell.
And what might have died away as a memory or a legend was made secure
from mortality by a work of genius.  At the moment Boswell had only to
complete an impression already made.  But, strong as it was at the
time, without Boswell it could {37} not have lasted.  Those who had sat
with Johnson at the Mitre or "The Club" could not long survive, and
could not leave their eyes and ears behind them.  Literary fashions
changed; popular taste began to ask evermore for amusement and less for
instruction or edification; and the works of Johnson were no longer
read, except by students of English literature.  But for Boswell the
great man's name might soon have been unknown to any but bookish men.
It is due to Boswell that journalists quote him, and cabmen tell
stories about him.  Johnson had himself almost every quality that makes
for survival except genius; and that, by the happiest of fates for
himself and for us, he found in his biographer.




CHAPTER II

THE GENIUS OF BOSWELL

The word genius seems a strange one to apply to Boswell.  Macaulay has
had his hour of authority with most of us, and, unluckily for him and
for us, the worst passages in his _Essays_ are often better remembered
{38} than the greatest chapters in his _History_.  It has proved his
ill-fortune as well as his glory to have written so vividly that the
mind's eye will still see what he wrote clear before it, though twenty
years may lie between it and the actual sight of the printed page.  At
his worst he is like an advertisement hoarding, crude, violent, vulgar,
but impossible to escape.  The essay on Croker's Boswell is one of
those unfortunate moments.  It is, unhappily, far better known than its
author's article on Johnson written for the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_,
and its violence still takes the memory by assault.  No one forgets the
disgusting description of Johnson, or the insults heaped upon Boswell.
Least of all can anybody forget the famous paradox about the contrast
between Boswell and his book.  As a biographer, according to Macaulay,
Boswell has easily surpassed all rivals.  "Homer is not more decidedly
the first of Epic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of
dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators than
Boswell is the first of biographers.  He has no second.  Eclipse is
first, and the rest nowhere."  And yet this same Boswell is "a man of
the meanest and feeblest intellect"; and, strangest of all, only
achieves his amazing success by force of his worthlessness and folly.
"If he had not {39} been a great fool he would never have been a great
writer."

Macaulay was the most self-confident of men.  But, though he set his
opinion with assurance against that of any other critic, there was one
verdict he respected, the verdict of time.  He would not have been
astonished to hear that in the eighty years since his essay was written
the fame of Boswell's book has continually increased.  But few things
that have happened since then would have surprised him more than to be
told that, in a volume published only fifty years after his death and
in part officially addressed to his own University of Cambridge, a
Professor of English Literature, one of the two or three universally
acknowledged masters of criticism, would be found quietly letting fall,
as a thing about which there need be no discussion, a sentence
beginning with the words: "A wiser man than Macaulay, James Boswell."

It may be well, before speaking further of Johnson, to say something
about the man to whom we owe most of our knowledge of him, the most
important member of his circle, this same James Boswell.  Like all good
biographers, he has put himself into his book; and we know him as well
as we know Johnson, as we know no other two men, perhaps, in the
history of the world.  It cannot be denied {40} that, when we put his
great book down, it is not very easy to follow Sir Walter Raleigh in
talking of him as a wise man, or even as a wiser man than Macaulay.  If
Boswell and Macaulay were put into competition in a prize for wisdom,
no ordinary examiners would give it to Boswell.  By the only tests they
could apply, Macaulay must far outstrip him.  The wisdom which enabled
Macaulay to render splendid services to the State and to literature,
and gave him wealth, happiness, popularity and a peerage, is as easily
tested, and, it must be confessed, as real, as the unwisdom which ended
in Boswell dying the dishonoured death of a drunkard, and leaving a
name of which his descendants felt the shame at least as much as the
glory.

But there are other tests, and though their superior value may be
doubted, they ought not to be altogether ignored.  Macaulay, who knew
everything and achieved so much, spent his whole life in visible and
external activities--talking, reading, writing, governing; and was
admired, and, indeed, admirable in them all.  But of the wisdom which
realizes how essentially inferior all measurable doing, however
triumphant, is to being, which is immeasurable, the wisdom which is
occupied with the ultimate issues of life and death, he had apparently
as little as any man who ever lived.  He seems {41} always to have been
one of those active, hurrying, useful persons who--

  "Fancy that they put forth all their life
    And never know how with the soul it fares."

Whatever can be said against Boswell that cannot be said.  Of this
inner wisdom, this quietness of thought, this "folie des grandeurs" of
the soul, he had a thousand times as much as Macaulay.  He could not
cling to it to the end, he could not victoriously live by it and make
it himself; but he had seen the vision which Macaulay never saw, and he
never altogether forgot it.  Every man is partly a lost soul.  So far
as Boswell was that, he knew it in all the bitter certainty of tears.
So far as Macaulay was, he was as unconscious of it as the beasts that
perish.  And the kingdom of wisdom, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is more
easily entered by those who know that they are outside it, than by
those who do not know that there is such a place and are quite content
where they are.

But these are high matters into which there is no need to go further.
It is necessary, however, to say a little more about Boswell's
character and abilities.  He and Johnson are now linked together for
all eternity; and everybody who takes an interest in Johnson is
interested in Boswell too.  It ought to be {42} much more than
interest, and in all true Johnsonians it is.  Without Boswell, we
should have respected Johnson, honoured him as a man and a writer,
liked him as "a true-born Englishman," but we could not have known him
enough to love him.  By the help of Boswell, we can walk and talk with
him, dine with him, be with him at his prayers as well as at his
pleasures, laugh with him, learn of him and disagree with him; above
all, love him as we only can love a human being, and never a mere wise
man or great writer.  No Englishman doubts that Boswell has given us
one of the great books of the world.  But before we realize its
greatness, we realize its pleasantness, its companionableness.  The
_Life of Johnson_ and the _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_ may be
taken for practical purposes as one book; and it has some claim to be
the most companionable book in the world.  There is no book like it for
a solitary meal.  A novel, if it is good for anything, is too
engrossing for a dinner companion.  It is impossible to put it down.
It interrupts the business of dining and results in cold food and
indigestion.  A book of short poems--the Odes of Horace, the Fables of
La Fontaine, the Sonnets of Shakespeare or Wordsworth--is much more to
the purpose.  One may read an Ode or a Sonnet quickly and then turn
{43} again to one's dinner, carrying the fine verse in one's mind and
tasting it at leisure as one holds good wine in the mouth before
letting it pass away into forgetfulness.  But poetry is not for every
man, nor for every mood of any man: and the moment of dinner is not
with most men the moment when they appear most poetic either to others
or to themselves.

But is there any time which is not the time for Boswell?  He does not
ask for a mood which may not be forthcoming: he does not demand an
attention which it is inconvenient to give.  We can take him up and lay
him down as and when we will.  And he has everything in his store.  If
we are seriously inclined and wish to have something to think about
when we turn from the book to the dinner, he is full of the most
serious questions, discussed sometimes wisely, almost always by wise
men, the problems of morals and politics, of religion and society and
literature, such questions as those of liberty and necessity in
philosophy, liberty and government in politics, the English Church and
the Roman, private education and public, life in the country and life
in the town.  Or if we wish, not for problems of any kind, but just for
a picture of life as it was lived a hundred and fifty years ago, there
is nothing like Boswell's pages for variety, intimacy, veracity and,
{44} what is the great point in these matters, lavishness of detail.
His book is sown with apparently, but only apparently, insignificant
trifles.  What and how Johnson ate, his manner in talking and walking,
the colour and shape of his clothes, the size of his stick, all these
and a thousand similar details we know from Boswell, and because
Boswell had the genius to perceive that they accumulate upon us a
sensation of life and bodily presence, as of a man standing before our
eyes.

So, again, with the many little stories he tells which no one else
would have told.  Who but he would have treasured up every word of that
curious meeting in April 1778, between Johnson and his unimportant old
friend Edwards, the man who said that he had tried to be a philosopher,
but "cheerfulness was always breaking in"?  Yet it is not only one of
the most Boswellian but one of the very best things in the whole book.
It exactly illustrates what was newest in his method.  In an age of
generality and abstraction he saw the advantage of the concrete and
particular, and put into practice the lesson his master could only
preach, "Nothing is too little for so little a creature as man."  So
the total-abstaining Johnson and the bibulous Reynolds and Boswell will
each come before us exactly as they were: and we are amused as we
picture {45} the confusion of Reynolds's distinguished parties where
the servants had never been taught to wait, and make a note of the
progress of social manners as we sympathize with Johnson at Edinburgh
throwing the fingered lump of sugar out of the window.  Some people,
again, like Mr. Gladstone, are fond of observing and discoursing upon
the changes of taste in the matter of wine: and such people will find
in Boswell almost as much to interest their curiosity as Johnson's own
fellowship of tea-drinkers.  The drinker of champagne will have to
accept the mere modernity of his beverage, which finds no place in
Johnson's famous hierarchy: "Claret for boys, port for men, brandy for
heroes."  Or, once more, if our meal ends in tobacco, we may please
ourselves by contemplating the alternate, but never contemporaneous,
glories of snuff and tobacco, and note the sage's curious, but strictly
truthful, account of the advantages and disadvantages of smoking.
"Smoking has gone out.  To be sure it is a shocking thing, blowing
smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses,
and having the same thing done to us.  Yet I cannot account why a thing
which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total
vacuity has gone out."  Or if we demand a keener relish for our meal
than these {46} quiet joys of observation, there is of course the whole
store of Johnson's sallies of wit, the things we all quote and forget
and like to have recalled to us.

For all these reasons Boswell's book, stuffed full of matter, and such
matter as you can take up and lay down at pleasure, is the ideal
companion for the man who dines or sups alone.  Provided, of course,
that he has some tincture of intellectual tastes.  Those whose
curiosity is only awakened by a prospect of the "sporting tips" will
not care for Boswell.  For, though the book moves throughout in the big
world, and not in an academic groove, it still always moves
intellectually.  It asks a certain acquaintance with literature and
history and the life of the human mind.  The talk may, indeed, be
almost said to deal with all subjects; but it tends mainly to be of the
kind which will come uppermost when able men of a serious and bookish
turn congregate together.  It requires leisure, and that sense of the
value of talk which has grown rarer in the hurry of a generation in
which the idlest people affect to be busy, and those who do nothing at
all are in a bustle from morning till night.  Johnson was never in a
hurry, especially in the later days, when he had done his work and was
enjoying his fame.  Mrs. Thrale says that conversation was all he {47}
required to make him happy.  He hated people who broke it up to go to
bed or to keep an appointment.  Much as he delighted in John Wesley's
company, he complained that he was never at leisure, which, said
Johnson, "is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and
have out his talk as I do."  The world has perhaps grown a more
industrious place since those days, though nobody yet has managed to
put so much into twenty-four hours as Wesley did.  Anyhow the
conditions that made for such talk as fills Boswell's pages are no
doubt less common to-day: and perhaps it only lingers now in some rare
Common Room at Oxford or Cambridge, where the evil spirit of classes
and examinations has been strictly exorcised, or in an exceptionally
well-chosen party at an exceptional country house, or in the old dining
societies of London, such as Johnson's own, "The Club," of famous
memory.  Its modern rarity may, however, only make it the more precious
in a book, and it is certainly not the least important element in the
popularity of Boswell's work.

That work has always been praised from the day of its appearance.  Lord
Thurlow, then Chancellor, wrote to Boswell of the _Tour to the
Hebrides_, which is essentially, though not formally, its first
instalment, that {48} he had read every word of it, because he could
not help it: and added the flattering question, "Could you give a rule
how to write a book that a man _must_ read?"  Scott, a little later,
spoke of it as "without exception the best parlour window book that
ever was written."  Six editions were issued within twenty years of its
appearance, a strong proof of popularity in the case of a voluminous
and expensive book.  And the praise and popularity have gone on growing
ever since.  But the strange thing is that the man who wrote it has
commonly been treated with insult, and even with contempt.  The fact is
at first sight so inexplicable that it is worth a little looking into.
A man who has done us all such a service as Boswell, who has by the
admission even of Macaulay utterly out-distanced all competition in
such an important kind of literature as biography, would naturally have
been loaded with the gratitude and admiration of posterity.  Yet all
fools and some wise men have thought themselves entitled to throw a
scornful stone at Boswell.

The truth is that Boswell was a man of very obvious weaknesses, the
weaknesses to which every fool feels himself superior, and of some
grave vices of a sort to which wise men feel little temptation.  And,
unfortunately, he conquered neither.  Rather they conquered {49} him,
and made his last years a degradation, and his memory one which his
friends were glad to forget.  After the death of Johnson in 1784,
followed in 1789 by that of Mrs. Boswell, whom Johnson once justly and
generously described as the prop and stay of her husband's life, he had
no one left to lean on.  And he was not a man strong enough to stand
alone.  But it is time to insist that, when all this has been
confessed, we are very far from having told the whole truth about
Boswell.  The fact is that justice will never be fully done to his
memory till Macaulay and some others have been called up from their
graves to do penance for their arrogant unfairness.  Carlyle did
something, but not enough; and he stands almost alone.  Yet after all,
considering what we owe Boswell, if there be any blindness in our view
of him, it surely ought to be blindness to his faults.  We have heard
enough and to spare of his vanity, his self-importance, his entire lack
of dignity, his weakness for wine and worse things than wine.  But we
have heard very little, far too little, of the kindness and genuineness
of the man's whole nature, the warmth of his friendships and the
enthusiastic loyalty of his hero-worship, of the reverence for religion
and the earnest desire after being a better man, which, though often
defeated {50} by temptation, were profound and absolutely sincere.

The notion that a man who does not practise what he preaches is
necessarily insincere, always called forth an angry protest from
Johnson.  "Sir," he broke out at Inverary to Mr. M'Aulay, the
historian's grandfather, "are you so grossly ignorant of human nature,
as not to know that a man may be very sincere in good principles
without having good practice?"  No doubt this was a doctrine which
Boswell heard gladly: and Johnson may himself have been influenced in
his zeal for it by his consciousness that, as he said when enforcing it
on another occasion, he had himself preached better than he had
practised.  "I have, all my life long, been lying till noon: yet I tell
all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does
not rise early will ever do any good."  But, however that may be, he is
plainly right in the broad issue.  Practice is the only absolute proof
of sincerity: but defect in practice is no proof of insincerity.
Certainly, no Christian can doubt that the struggling, even though
falling, sinner is in at least as hopeful a condition as the complacent
person whose principles and practice are fairly conformable to each
other because both live only the dormant life of respectability and
{51} convention.  However, no one in his senses will try to make a hero
or a saint out of Boswell.  He was, as has been already said, vain, a
babbler, a wine-bibber, a man of frequently irregular and ill-governed
life.  But to judge a man fairly as a whole, you must set his
achievements against his failures, and include his aspirations as well
as the weakness which prevented their being realized.  He may also
reasonably ask to be tried by the standard of his contemporaries.  If
this larger and juster method of judgment be adopted, the unfairness
with which Boswell has been treated becomes immediately obvious.  After
all vanity is more a folly than a crime, and pays its own immediate
penalty as no other crime or folly does.  The other faults of Boswell,
especially drinking, were only too common in a century at the beginning
of which Johnson remembered "all the decent people at Lichfield getting
drunk every night," and at the end of which the most honoured and
feared of English Prime Ministers could appear intoxicated in the House
of Commons itself.  Drunkenness has not deprived Pitt of the gratitude
of England, and we may well be determined that, if we can help it, it
shall not deprive Boswell.  It is not his vices but his virtues that
are notable and unusual.  What was extraordinary in his or any other
day was {52} the generous enthusiasm which made a young Scotch laird
deliberately determine that he would do something more with his life
than shoot wildfowl or play cards, made him throw himself first with a
curious mixture of vanity and genuine devotion to a noble cause into
the Corsican struggle for liberty, and then, vain of his birth and
fortune as he was, place himself at the feet, not of a duke or a
minister, but of a man of low origin, rough exterior, and rougher
manners, in whom he simply saw the best and wisest man he had known.
That is not the action of either a bad man or a fool; and assuredly
Boswell--in the essence of him--was neither the one nor the other.

The truth is that he had the strength and the weaknesses of a man of
mobile and lively imagination.  He would fancy his wife and children
drowned or dead for no better reason than that he was not by them; he
would dream of being a judge when he had scarcely got a brief, and
imagine himself a minister when he had no prospect of getting into
Parliament.  Other people experience these day-dreaming vanities, but
they do not talk or write about them.  Boswell did; and we all laugh at
him, especially the fools among us: the wiser part add some of the love
that belongs to the common kinship of humanity wherever it puts off the
mask, the love of which we feel {53} something even for that gross old
"bourgeois" Samuel Pepys, just because he laid out his whole secret
self in black and white upon the paper.  Moreover, Boswell's
absurdities had their finer side.  The dreamer of improbable disasters
and impossible good fortunes is also the dreamer of high and perhaps
unattainable ideals.  Shall we count it nothing to his honour that,
instead of sitting down contentedly among the boon companions of
Ayrshire, he aspired to read the best books in the world, to know the
wisest men, and in turn to do something himself that should not be
forgotten?  And note that those aspirations were in large part
realized.  His intellectual tastes always remained among the keenest of
his pleasures: he numbered among his friends the most famous writer of
his day, the greatest poet, the greatest painter, the profoundest and
most eloquent of all English statesmen; and before he died his apparent
failure in personal achievements was transformed into the success that
means immortality by the production of a book which after the lapse of
a century has many more readers than the works of his great friends
whose superiority to himself he would never have dreamed of challenging.

And what did these great men think of him?  Did the people who knew him
think him altogether a fool?  If the magistrates {54} of his native
county had thought him merely that they would hardly have chosen him
their chairman.  Nor would the Royal Academy who filled their honorary
offices with such men as Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gibbon, have given
them Boswell as a colleague if they had thought him altogether a fool.
Reynolds, again, who was his friend through life, and left him 200
pounds in his will to be expended on a picture to be kept for his sake,
was not a man who took fools for his friends.  Burke, who at first
doubted his fitness for election at "The Club," became a great admirer
of his wonderful good humour, and received him on his own account and
without Johnson as a guest at Beaconsfield, where neither fools nor
knaves were commonly welcomed.  The whole story of the tour to the
Hebrides shows the regard felt for him, as himself and not only as the
son of his father or the companion of Johnson, by many of the most
distinguished and cultivated men in Scotland.  Johnson, the most
veracious of men, says of him in Scotland: "There is no house where he
is not received with kindness and respect"; and on another occasion he
declared that Boswell "never left a house without leaving a wish for
his return."

But the most complete refutation of the worthlessness of Boswell is of
course the {55} friendship and love he won from Johnson himself.
Assuredly, the standard of Johnson, in whose presence nobody dared to
swear or talk loosely, was not a low one either morally or
intellectually; yet we find him saying that he held Boswell "in his
heart of hearts"; perhaps, indeed, he loved Boswell better than any of
his friends.  "My dear Boswell, I love you very much"; "My dear
Boswell, your kindness is one of the pleasures of my life"; "Come to
me, my dear Bozzy, and let us be as happy as we can."  This is the way
Johnson constantly wrote and spoke to him.  And this was not merely
because Boswell was "the best travelling companion in the world," or
even because he was, what Johnson also called him, "a man who finds
himself welcome wherever he goes and makes new friends faster than he
can want them," but also for graver reasons.  Johnson said once that
most friendships were the result of caprice or chance, "mere
confederacies in vice or leagues in folly," but he did not choose that
his own should be of that sort.  Beauclerk is the only one of his
friends who was not a man of high character.  His feeling for Boswell
was not a love of vice or folly.  He saw Boswell at his best, no doubt:
but that best must have had very real and positive good qualities in it
to win from Johnson such a remark as he {56} makes in one of his
letters: "Never, my dear sir, do you take it into your head to think
that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both
of my love and my esteem; I love you as a kind man, I value you as a
worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary
piety.  I hold you, as Hamlet has it, 'in my heart of hearts.'"  And
there is a still more remarkable tribute in the letter to John Wesley
giving Boswell an introduction to him "because I think it very much to
be wished that worthy and religious men should be acquainted with each
other."  Nothing can be more certain than that Johnson would not have
written so often in such language as this of a man who was what
Macaulay thought Boswell was.  Well may the foolish editor of Boswell's
letters to Temple, who takes Macaulay's view, talk of the difficulty of
explaining how it came about that Boswell formed one of a society which
included such men as Johnson and Burke.  The truth is that on his
theory and Macaulay's it is not explicable at all.

Less explicable still, on that view, is the admitted excellence of
Boswell's book.  Carlyle dismissed with just contempt the absurd
paradox that the greatness of the book was due to the imbecility of the
author.  That is a theory which it would be waste of time {57} to
discuss.  But it may be worth while to point out that other and more
rational explanations of Boswell's success are also insufficient.  His
book is acknowledged to have originated a new type of biography.  It
was felt at once, and has been increasingly felt ever since, that
Boswell is so direct and personal that beside him all other biographers
seem impersonal and vague, that he is so intimate that he makes all
others appear cold and distant, so lifelike that they seem shadowy, so
true that they seem false.  Now this has commonly been attributed to
his habit of noting down on the spot and at the moment anything that
struck him in Johnson's talk or doings; and to his perfect willingness
to exhibit his own discomfitures so long as they served to honour or
illustrate his hero.  In this way people have talked of his one merit
being faithfulness, and of his work as a succession of photographs.
Now it is true enough that his veracity is a very great merit, and that
no one was ever so literally veracious as he.  But no number of facts,
and no quintessence of accuracy in using them, will ever make a great
book.  Literature is an art, and nothing great in art has ever been
done with facts alone.  The greatness comes from the quality of mind
that is set to work upon the facts.  Consequently {58} the secret of
the success of the _Life of Johnson_ is to be found in the exact
opposite of the assertion of Macaulay.  For the truth is that the
acknowledged excellence of the book is in exact proportion to the
unacknowledged literary gifts of its author.

The law for all works of art and literature is the same.  The fact is
nothing unless the artist can give it life.  Life comes from human
personality.  _Ars est homo additus naturae_.  Art, that is, is nature
seen through a temperament, the facts seen by a particular mind.  The
landscape into which the painter has put nothing of his own personality
is fitter for a surveyor's office than for a picture gallery.  The
portrait which gives nothing but the sitter's face is as dull as a
photograph.  Two portraits of the same man, two sketches of the same
valley, not only are, but ought to be, quite different from each other.
Nature, the facts of the particular face or scene, remain the same for
both: but the two different artists, each bringing their own
personality, produce different results, when the face or scene has
become that composite mixture of man and nature, fact and mind, which
is art.  And this is as true of all books which are meant to be
literature as of painting or sculpture.  The story of Electra is,
broadly speaking, the same for Aeschylus, Sophocles, {59} and
Euripides: but each contributes to it himself, and the result differs.
Virgil's tale of Troy is not Homer's: Chaucer gives us one Troilus and
Cressida, and Shakespeare another: the fable of the Fox and the Goat
takes prose from Phaedrus and poetry from La Fontaine.  So Pope's Homer
is not Homer, the thing in itself, the unrelated, absolute Homer, but
_Pope additus Homero_; and it is not Euripides pure and simple which is
the true account of certain beautiful modern versions of Euripides, but
_Euripidi additus Murray_.

It may be objected that these are all instances from poetry, where the
truth aimed at is rather general than particular.  And this distinction
is a real one.  The truth of the _Aeneid_ is its truth to human life as
a whole, not its accuracy in reporting the words used on particular
occasions by Dido and Turnus, neither of whom may have ever existed.
History and biography are, undoubtedly, on a different footing in this
respect, just as the artist who calls his picture "Arundel Castle" or
"Windermere" is not in the same position of freedom as the painter of
an "Evening on the Downs."  But the law of _homo additus naturae_ still
remains true in this case as in the other, though its application is
modified.  It is true that a {60} man who pretends to give a
representation of Arundel is not justified in adding to it a tower 800
feet high just because he happens himself to have a fancy for towers.
But what he has to add, if his work is to be art at all, is the
emotional mood, the exaltation, depression, excitement, or whatever it
may be, which Arundel stirred in him, and by means of which he and the
scene before him were melted into that unity of intensified life which
is born of the marriage of nature and man and is what we call art.  The
next day another man takes his place, and the result, though still
Arundel Castle, is an entirely different picture.  So in the case of
books.  The same Socrates is seen in one way when we get that part of
him which could unite with the personality of Xenophon, and in quite
another when the union is with Plato.  The English Civil War marries
one side of itself to Clarendon, and another to Milton; and both have
that relative truth which is all art wishes for, and which is indeed a
greater thing, as having human life in it, than any absolute truth in
itself which, if it were discoverable, would be pure science, as useful
perhaps, but as dead, as the First Proposition of Euclid.  The
greatness of literature depends on the degree in which the dead matter
of fact belonging to the {61} subject has been quickened into life by
the emotional, intellectual and imaginative power of the writer.  And
this is true of historical and biographical work as well as of poetry.

That is the point to be remembered about Boswell, and to be set against
his detractors.  His book is admittedly one of the most living books in
existence.  That life can have come from no one but the author.  It is
the irrefutable proof of his genius.  Life and power do not issue, here
any more than elsewhere, out of folly and nonentity.  The _Life of
Johnson_ is the result of the most intimate and fertile union between
biographer and his subject which has ever occurred, and it gives us in
consequence more of the essence of both than any other biography.
Boswell brought to it his own bustling activity and curiosity from
which it draws its vividness and variety: he brought to it also his
warm-hearted, half-morbid emotionalism from which it derives its many
moving pages: he brought to it his reverence for Johnson, which enabled
him to exhibit, as no other man could, that kingship and priesthood
which was a real part, though not the whole, of Johnson's relation to
his circle.  We see Johnson in his pages as the guide, philosopher and
friend of all who came in his way, the intellectual and spiritual
father of Boswell, the master of his {62} studies, the director of his
conscience.  Nobody else in that company saw as much of the true and
great Johnson as Boswell's loving devotion enabled him to see; and when
he came to write the life he put himself into it, with the result that
the portrait of Johnson as posterity sees it, will never lose the halo
of glory with which the Boswellian hero-worship crowned it for all time.

This was the all-important _homo additus naturae_ part of Boswell's
work: the setting his subject in the light of his own imaginative and
emotional insight.  But there was more than that.  Boswell had not only
the temperament of the artist: he had an artist's craftsmanship.  The
_Life_ makes four large octavo volumes, each of some 500 pages, in the
great Oxford Edition by Birkbeck Hill: and the _Tour to the Hebrides_
makes a fifth.  That is a big book: yet so perfect an artist is
Boswell, that scarcely once for a single page in all the five volumes
is the chief light turned in any direction except that of Johnson.
Anybody who has even read, much more anybody who has written, a book of
any length knows how difficult and rare an achievement it is to
maintain perfect unity of subject, never to lose the sense of
proportion, never to let side issues and secondary personages obstruct
or conceal the main business in hand.  {63} There is nothing of the
kind in Boswell.  Under his hand no episode is ever allowed to be more
than an episode, no minor character ever occupies the centre of the
stage.  Whoever and whatever is mentioned is mentioned only in relation
to Johnson.  Many great men, greater some of them than his hero are
brought into his picture, but it is never upon them that the chief
light is thrown.  All the other figures, whoever they are, are here but
attendants upon Johnson's greatness, foils to his wit, witnesses to his
virtues, his friends or his foes, the subjects or victims of his talk,
anything that you will in connection with him, but apart from
him--nothing.  All that they say or do or suffer, is told us only to
set Johnson in a clearer light.  The unity of the picture is never
broken.  And that is the same thing as saying that Boswell is not
merely what every one has seen, a unique collector of material: he is
also what so few have seen, an artist of the very highest rank.

This is seen, too, in another important point.  The danger of the
hero-worshipping biographer is only too familiar to us.  His book is
usually a monotonous and insipid record of virtue or wisdom.  The hero
is always right, and always victorious, with the result that the book
is at once tedious and incredible.  But Boswell knew better than {64}
that.  He was too much of an artist not to know that he wanted shadows
to give value to his lights, and too much a lover of the fullness and
variety of life not to want to get all of it that he possibly could
into his picture.  Like all great writers, there was scarcely anything
he was afraid of handling, because there was scarcely anything of which
he was not conscious that he could bend it to his will and force it to
take its place, and no more than its place, in his scheme.
Consequently, he has the courage to show us his hero, now wrong-headed
and perverse, now rude almost to brutality, now so weak that the same
resolution is repeated year after year only to be again broken and
again renewed, now so gross and almost repulsive in his appearance and
habits that it requires all his greatness to explain the welcome which
well-bred men and refined women everywhere gave him.  Nothing better
shows the greatness of Boswell.  He was not afraid to paint the wart on
his Cromwell's nose, because he knew that he could so give the
nobleness of the whole face, that the wart would merely add to the
truthfulness of the portrait without detracting from its nobleness.
The vast quantity of material which he brought into his book and the
complete mastery which he maintained over it, is shown by the fact {65}
that few or no biographies record so many ridiculous or discreditable
circumstances about their hero, and yet none leaves a more convincing
impression of his greatness.

The notion, then, that the man who wrote the _Life of Johnson_ was a
fool, is an absurdity.  If the arguments in its favour prove anybody a
fool it is not Boswell.  Nor is it even true that Boswell, like some
great artists, escaped apparently by some divine gift from his natural
folly just during the time necessary for the production of his great
work, but at all other times relapsed at once into imbecility.  We know
how scrupulously accurate he was in what he wrote, not only from his
candour in relating his own defeats, but from the many cases in which
he confesses that he was not quite sure of the exact facts, such as, to
give one instance, whether Johnson, on a certain occasion, spoke of "a
page" or "ten lines" of Pope as not containing so much sense as one
line of Cowley.  Therefore we may take the picture he gives of himself
in his book as a fair one.  And what is it?  Does it bear out the
notorious assertion that "there is not in all his books a single remark
of his own on literature, politics, religion or society which is not
either commonplace or absurd"?  One would sometimes imagine Macaulay
had never read the book of which he speaks with such {66} confident
decision.  Certainly, except as a biographer, Boswell was not a man of
any very remarkable abilities.  But, in answer to such an insult as
Macaulay's, Boswell's defenders may safely appeal to the book itself,
and to everybody who has read it with any care.  Will any one deny that
not once or twice, but again and again, the plain sense of some subject
which had been distorted or confused by the perverse ingenuity of
Johnson "talking for victory" comes quietly, after the smoke has
cleared away, from the despised imbecility of Boswell?  Who gives the
judgment which every one would now give about the contest with the
American colonies?  Not Johnson but Boswell; not the author of
_Taxation No Tyranny_, but the man who wrote so early as 1775 to his
friend Temple: "I am growing more and more an American.  I see the
unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their
Assemblies; I think our Ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate
war."  Who was right and who was wrong on the question of the Middlesex
Election?  Nobody now doubts that Boswell was right, and Johnson was
wrong.  Which has proved wiser, as we look back, Johnson who ridiculed
Gray's poetry, or Boswell who sat up all night reading it?  The fact is
that Boswell was undoubtedly a {67} sensible and cultivated as well as
a very agreeable man, and as such was warmly welcomed at the houses of
the most intelligent men of his day.

The old estimate, then, of James Boswell must be definitely abandoned.
The man who knew him best, his friend Temple, the friend of Gray, said
of him that he was "the most thinking man he had ever known."  We may
not feel able to regard that as anything more than the judgment of
friendship: but it is not fools who win such judgments even from their
friends.  We may wonder at the word "genius" being applied to him; and
if genius be taken in the stricter modern sense of transcendent powers
of mind, the sense in which it is applied to Milton or Michael Angelo,
there is of course no doubt that it would be absurd to apply it to
Boswell.  But if the word be used in the old looser sense, or if it be
given the definite meaning of a man who originates an important new
departure in a serious sphere of human action, who creates something of
a new order in art or literature or politics or war, then Boswell's
claim to genius cannot be questioned.  Just as another member of
"Johnson's Club" was in those years writing history as it had never
been written before, so, and to a far more remarkable degree, Boswell
was writing {68} biography as it had never been written before.
Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ was in fact a far less original
performance, far less of a new departure, than Boswell's _Life of
Johnson_.  Boswell's book is in truth what he himself called it, "more
of a life than any work that has ever yet appeared."  After it the art
of biography could never be merely what it had been before.  And in
that sense, the sense of a man whose work is an advance upon that of
his predecessors, not merely in degree, but in kind, Boswell was
undoubtedly and even more than Gibbon, entitled to the praise of genius.

Let us all, then, unashamedly and ungrudgingly give the rein to our
admiration and love of Boswell.  There is a hundred years between us
and his follies, and every one of the hundred is full of his claim upon
our gratitude.  Let us now be ready to pay the debt in full.  Let us be
sure that there is something more than mere interest or entertainment
in a book which so wise a man as Jowett confessed to having read fifty
times, of which another lifelong thinker about life, a man very
different from Jowett, Robert Louis Stevenson, could write: "I am
taking a little Boswell daily by way of a Bible; I mean to read him now
until the day I die."  And not only in the book but in the author too.
Let us be {69} sure with Carlyle that if "Boswell wrote a good book" it
was not because he was a fool, but on the contrary "because he had a
heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it
forth: because of his free insight, of his lively talent, above all of
his love and childlike open-mindedness."  In the particular business he
had to carry through, these qualities were an equipment amounting to a
modest kind of genius.  They enabled him to produce a book which has
given as much pleasure perhaps to intelligent men as any book that ever
was written.  Let us be careful whenever we think of Boswell to
remember this side, the positive, creative, permanent side of him: and
not so careful as our grandfathers generally were, to remember the
other side which ceased to have any further importance on that night in
May 1795 when he ended the fifty-five years of a life in which he had
found time for more follies than most men, for more vices perhaps,
certainly for more wisdom, but also for what most men never so much as
conceive, the preparation and production of a masterpiece.




{70}

CHAPTER III

THE LIVES OF BOSWELL AND JOHNSON

These two men, then, are for ever inseparable.  They go down the
centuries together, Johnson owing most of his immortality to the genius
of Boswell, Boswell owing to Johnson that inspiring opportunity without
which genius cannot discover that it is genius.  There were other men
in Johnson's circle, whom he knew longer and respected more; but for
us, Boswell's position in relation to Johnson is unique.  Beside him
the others, even Burke and Reynolds, are, in this connection, shadows.
They had their independent fields of greatness in which Johnson had no
share: Boswell's greatness is all Johnsonian.  We cannot think of him
apart from Johnson: and he has so managed that we can scarcely think of
Johnson apart from him.  No one who occupies himself with the one can
ignore the other: in interest and popularity they stand or fall
together.  It may be well, therefore, before going further, to give the
bare facts of both their lives; dismissing Boswell first, as the less
important, and then devoting the rest of the chapter to Johnson.

{71}

James Boswell was born in 1740.  He came of an ancient family, a fact
he never forgot, as, indeed, few people do who have the same advantage.
His father was a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Auchinleck.  The
first of the family to hold the estate of Auchinleck, which is in
Ayrshire, was Thomas Boswell, who received a grant of it from James IV
in whose army he went to Flodden and shared the defeat and death of his
patron.  The estate had therefore belonged to the Boswells over two
hundred years when the future biographer of Johnson was born.  His
father and he were never congenial spirits.  The judge was a Whig with
a practical view of life and had no sympathy with his son's romantic
propensities either in religion, politics or literature.  A plain
Lowland Scot, he did not see why his son should take up with Toryism,
Anglicanism, or literary hero-worship.  When James, after first
attaching himself to Paoli, the leader of the Corsican struggle for
independence, returned home and took up the discipleship to Johnson
which was to be the central fact in the rest of his life, his father
frankly despaired of him, and broke out, according to Walter Scott:
"There's nae hope for Jamie, mon.  Jamie is gaen clean gyte.  What do
you think, mon?  He's done wi' Paoli--he's off wi' the {72} landlouping
scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned
himself to now, mon?  A _dominie_, mon--an auld dominie: he keeped a
schule, and cau'd it an acaadamy."  Well might Boswell say that they
were "so totally different that a good understanding is scarcely
possible."  Beside disliking Paoli and Johnson, Lord Auchinleck cared
nothing for some of Boswell's strict feudal notions, had the bad taste
to give his son a step-mother, and to be as unlike him as possible in
the matter of good spirits.  Scarcely anything could interfere with the
judge's cheerfulness, while Boswell was always falling into depressions
about nothing in particular and perhaps indulging in the "foolish
notion," rebuked by Johnson, that "melancholy is a proof of acuteness."
But in spite of their differences the father and son managed to avoid
anything like a definite breach.  Boswell was sincerely anxious to
please his father, and was constantly urged in that direction by his
great mentor: and after all the judge went some way to meet his
singular son, for he paid his debts and entertained both Paoli and
Johnson at Auchinleck.  The latter visit was naturally a source of some
anxiety to Boswell and it did not go off without a storm when the old
Whig and the old Tory unluckily got on to the topic of Charles I and
Cromwell: but all {73} ended well, and Boswell characteristically ends
his story of it, written after both were dead, with the pious hope that
the antagonists had by then met in a higher state of existence "where
there is no room for Whiggism."

Full of activities as Boswell's life was, the definite facts and dates
in it are not very numerous.  He was sent to Glasgow University, and
wished to be a soldier, but was bred by his father to the law.  No
doubt he gave some early signs of intellectual promise, for which it
was not thought the army provided a fit sphere, for the Duke of Argyle
is reported to have said to his father when he was only twenty: "My
lord, I like your son: this boy must not be shot at for
three-and-sixpence a day."  He paid his first visit to London in 1760;
and, having heard a good deal about Johnson from one Mr. Gentleman, and
from Derrick, a very minor poet, he at once sought an introduction, but
had to leave London without succeeding in his object.  He was equally
unsuccessful when he was in London the next year, during which he
published some anonymous poems which would not have helped him to
secure the desired introduction.  The great event occurred at last in
1763.  The day was the 16th of May and the scene the house of Davies,
the bookseller.  "At last," says Boswell, "on {74} Monday the 16th of
May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having
drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the
shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the
room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,--he announced his
aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part
of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's
ghost, 'Look, my Lord, it comes.'"

So, with characteristic accuracy and characteristic imagination, begins
his well-known account of his first meeting with his hero, and the
storms to which he was exposed in its course.  But all ended
satisfactorily, for when the great man was gone, Davies reassured the
nervous Boswell by saying: "Don't be uneasy, I can see he likes you
very well."  A few days afterwards Boswell called on Johnson at his
Chambers in the Temple, and the great friendship which was the pleasure
and business of his life was definitely begun.  Yet it is worth
remembering, if only as an additional proof of Boswell's biographical
genius, that, according to the calculation of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, when
all the weeks and months during which Johnson and Boswell were living
within reach of each {75} other are added together, they amount to
little more than two years.  And of course this includes all the days
on which they were both in London, on many, or rather most, of which
they did not meet.

A few months after the first meeting, Boswell went by his father's wish
to Utrecht to study law.  But before that the friendship was got on to
a firm footing, and Boswell had had the pride and pleasure of hearing
Johnson say, "There are few people whom I take so much to, as you."  A
still stronger proof of Johnson's feeling was that he insisted on going
with Boswell to Harwich to see him out of England.  This was the
occasion on which he scarified the good Protestants who were with them
in the coach by defending the Inquisition, and invited one of the
ladies who said she never allowed her children to be idle to take his
own education in hand; "'for I have been an idle fellow all my life.'
'I am sure, sir,' said she, 'you have not been idle.'  'Nay, madam, it
is very true, and that gentleman there,' pointing to me, 'has been
idle.  He was idle at Edinburgh.  His father sent him to Glasgow where
he continued to be idle.  He then came to London where he has been very
idle; and now he is going to Utrecht where he will be as idle as ever.'
I asked him privately how he could expose me {76} so.  'Pooh, Pooh!'
said he, 'they know nothing about you and will think of it no more.'"
When he was not engaged in these alarums and excursions or in reproving
Boswell for giving the coachman a shilling instead of the customary
sixpence, he was occupied in reading Pomponius Mela _De Situ Orbis_.
How complete the picture is and how vivid!  It once more gives
Boswell's method in miniature.

He seems to have stayed at Utrecht about a year, afterwards travelling
in Germany, where he visited Wittenberg, and sat down to write to
Johnson in the church where the Reformation was first preached, with
his paper resting on the tomb of Melanchthon.  It is noticeable that,
though he had only known Johnson a year, he already hoped to be his
biographer.  "At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend, I
vow to thee an eternal attachment.  It shall be my study to do what I
can to render your life happy: and, if you die before me, I shall
endeavour to do honour to your memory."  He was also at this time in
Italy and Switzerland, where he visited Voltaire and gratified him by
quoting a remark of Johnson's that Frederick the Great's writings were
the sort of stuff one might expect from "a footboy who had been
Voltaire's amanuensis."  Nor did this {77} collector of celebrities
omit to visit Rousseau, the rival lion of the day, between whom and
Voltaire the orthodox Johnson thought it was "difficult to settle the
proportion of iniquity."  But as far as Boswell's records go, he never
said such violent things of Voltaire as of Rousseau, whom he called "a
rascal who ought to be hunted out of society and transported to work in
the plantations."  Boswell, however, was an admirer of the _Vicaire
Savoyard_, and said what he could in defence of his host, in return for
the hospitality he had enjoyed at Neuchatel, with the usual result, of
course, that Johnson only became more outrageous.

In 1765 Boswell made the acquaintance of another distinguished man with
whom his name will always be connected.  Corsica had at that time been
long, and on the whole victoriously, engaged in a struggle to free
itself from the hated rule of Genoa.  The leader of the Corsicans was a
man of high birth, character and abilities, Pascal Paoli, who had acted
since 1753 at once as their General and as the head of the civil
administration.  Both the generous and the curious element in Boswell
made him anxious not to return from Italy without seeing something of
so interesting a people and so great a hero.  Armed with introductions
from Rousseau {78} and others and with such protection as a British
Captain's letter could give him against Barbary Corsairs, he sailed
from Leghorn to Corsica in September 1765.  His account of the island
and of his tour there, published in 1768, is still very good reading.
He soon made his way to the palace where Paoli was residing, with whom
he at first felt himself in a presence more awe-inspiring than that of
princes, but ventured after a while upon a compliment to the Corsicans.
"Sir, I am upon my travels, and have lately visited Rome.  I am come
from seeing the ruins of one brave and free people: I now see the rise
of another."  The good sense of Paoli declined any parallel between
Rome and his own little people, but he soon received Boswell into his
intimacy and spent some hours alone with him almost every day.  One
fine answer of his, uniting the scholar and the patriot, is worth
quoting.  Boswell asked him how he, who confessed to his love of
society and particularly of the society of learned and cultivated men,
could be content to pass his life in an island where no such advantages
were to be had; to which Paoli replied at once--

  "Vincit amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido."

{79}

Well might Boswell wish to have a statue of him taken at that moment.
Even Virgilian quotation has seldom been put to nobler use.  Like all
the great men of the eighteenth century, Paoli was an enthusiast for
the ancients.  "A young man who would form his mind to glory," he told
Boswell, "must not read modern memoirs; _ma Plutarcho, ma Tito Livio_."
His own mind was formed not only to glory, but also to what so often
fails to go with glory, to justice and moderation.  Nothing is more
remarkable in the conversations with him recorded by Boswell than his
good sense and fairness of mind in speaking of the Genoese.  Even in
the excitement of Corsica, Boswell did not forget Johnson.  He says
that he quoted specimens of Johnson's wisdom to Paoli, who "translated
them to the Corsican heroes with Italian energy"; and, as he had
written to his master "from the tomb of Melanchthon sacred to learning
and piety," so he also wrote to him "from the palace of Pascal Paoli
sacred to wisdom and liberty."  Boswell was received with great honour
in Corsica, no doubt partly because he was very naturally supposed to
have some mission from the British Government.  He left the island in
December and arrived in London in February 1766, when his intimacy with
Johnson was at once resumed, in spite {80} of the visits to Rousseau
and Voltaire which drew some inevitable sarcasms from the great man.
He soon, however, returned to Scotland, where he was admitted an
Advocate in the summer of 1766.

Johnson thought he was too busy about Corsica, and wrote to him: "Empty
your head of Corsica, which I think has filled it rather too long."
But this was in March 1768, when Boswell's _Account of Corsica_ had
already been published.  It sold very well, a second and a third
edition appearing within the year.  Gray and other good judges spoke
warmly of it and it seems that a French translation as well as two
Dutch ones were made.  It caused so much stir and aroused so much
sympathy in England that Lord Holland was quite afraid we were going to
be "so foolish as to go to war because Mr. Boswell has been in
Corsica."  After this it was less likely than ever that Boswell would
forget that island.  Motives of vanity combined with his genuine
enthusiasm to keep him full of it, and he replied to Johnson's
monition: "Empty my head of Corsica! empty it of honour, empty it of
humanity, empty it of friendship, empty it of piety!  No! while I live,
Corsica and the cause of the brave islanders shall ever employ much of
my attention and interest me in the sincerest {81} manner."  It seems
from his letters to Temple that he found these outbursts a great deal
easier than living in a manner worthy of a friend of Paoli.  But he did
more than talk.  He wrote to Chatham to try to interest him in Corsica,
and received a reply three pages long applauding his generous warmth;
he brought out a volume of _British Essays in Favour of the Brave
Corsicans_, sent Paoli Johnson's Works and, what was more substantial,
forwarded a quantity of ordnance, to buy which he had managed to raise
a subscription of 700 pounds.  His desire to be a well-known man now
began to receive some gratification and he frankly confesses his
pleasure at having such men as Johnson, Hume and Franklin dining with
him at his chambers.  Nor will any reasonable man blame him.  His
snobbishness, if it is to be so called, was always primarily a
snobbishness of mind and character, not of wealth or rank.

Nothing else of importance occurred to him in these years.  He was much
occupied with the great law-suit about the succession to the Douglas
property, on which he wrote two pamphlets and was so sure of the
justice of his view that he once dared to tell Johnson he knew nothing
about that subject.  He was with Johnson at Oxford in 1768 and they
were already talking of going to the Hebrides {82} together.  The next
year, 1769, saw the conquest of Corsica by the French to whom the
Genoese had ceded their claims.  The result was that Paoli came to
London, where he lived till 1789, and Boswell was constantly with him.
In this year he did at least one very foolish thing, and at least one
very wise one.  He made himself ridiculous by going to the Shakespeare
Jubilee at Stratford and appearing in Corsican costume with "_Viva la
Libertà_" embroidered on his cap.  He also took the most sensible step
of his whole life in marrying his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, on
November 25.  She never liked Johnson, and her husband had the candour
to report an excellent sally of hers at his and his sage's expense: "I
have seen many a bear led by a man; but I never before saw a man led by
a bear."  But though, as Boswell says, she could not be expected to
like his "irregular hours and uncouth habits," she never failed in
courtesy to him: and he on his part was unwearied in sending friendly
messages to his "dear enemy" as he called her, and was well aware of
her importance to her husband.  The event unhappily proved his
prescience; for after her death in 1789, Boswell's downward course was
visibly accelerated.

After Boswell's marriage there was no {83} communication between him
and Johnson for a year and a half, and they did not meet again till
March 1772, when Boswell came to London, and stayed some time.  The
next year he came again, and, by Johnson's active support, was elected
a member of "The Club," a small society of friends founded by Reynolds
and Johnson in 1764.  At first it met weekly for supper, but after a
few years the members began the custom of dining together on fixed
dates which has continued to the present day.  Among the members when
Boswell was elected were Johnson and Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and
Garrick.  Gibbon and Charles Fox came in the next year, and Adam Smith
in 1775.  In 1780 the number of members was enlarged to forty which is
still the limit.  "The Club" has always maintained its distinction, and
a recent article in the _Edinburgh Review_ records that fifteen Prime
Ministers have been members of it, as well as men like Scott, Tennyson,
Hallam, Macaulay and Grote.  The first advantage over and above pride
and pleasure derived by Boswell from his election was the acquaintance
of Burke, which he had long desired and retained through life.  Burke
said of him that he had so much good humour naturally that it was
scarcely a virtue in him.

In the autumn of that year, 1773, Johnson {84} and Boswell made their
famous tour to the Hebrides.  They, in fact, went over much more than
the Hebrides, seeing the four Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews,
Aberdeen and Glasgow, besides many less famous places.  Johnson says
they were everywhere "received like princes in their progress," and
though no doubt hospitality was freer in those days when travellers
were few and inns poor, yet the whole story is a remarkable proof of
Johnson's fame and Boswell's popularity.  The University Professors
vied with each other in paying civilities to Johnson, the town of
Aberdeen gave him its freedom, and among their hosts were magnates like
the Duke of Argyll, Lord Errol and Lord Loudoun, who "jumped for joy"
at their coming, and great men of law or learning like Lord Monboddo
and Lord Elibank.

By this time all the important events in Boswell's life were over
except the publication of his two great books, the _Tour to the
Hebrides_ and the _Life of Johnson_.  During all the ten years which
Johnson still had to live, except 1780 and 1782, the two friends
managed to spend some time together, and when they did not, the
friendship was maintained by correspondence.  Boswell's father died in
1782, and Boswell came into possession of the estate, {85} worth 1,600
pounds a year.  Johnson and Boswell took more than one "jaunt" in the
country together, visiting Oxford, Lichfield and other places.  They
were at Oxford together in June 1784; but Johnson was then evidently
failing.  On their return to London, Boswell busied himself with the
help of Reynolds in trying to get Johnson's pension increased, so that
he might be able to spend the winter abroad.  Johnson was very pleased
on hearing of the attempt, saying, when Boswell told him, "'This is
taking prodigious pains about a man.'  'O, sir,' said Boswell, 'your
friends would do everything for you.'  He paused, grew more and more
agitated, till tears started into his eyes, and he exclaimed with
fervent emotion, 'God bless you all.'  I was so affected that I also
shed tears.  After a short silence he renewed and extended his grateful
benediction, 'God bless you all, for Jesus Christ's sake.'"  Those were
the last words Boswell heard under Johnson's roof.  The next day they
both dined with Reynolds, and on July 2 Boswell left London, to see
Johnson no more.  Johnson died on the 13th of December 1784.

Fitful and unsuccessful legal and political ambitions occupied a large
part of Boswell's later years.  He made some approaches to standing as
a candidate for Ayrshire in 1784, {86} and again in 1788, was called to
the English Bar in 1786, attached himself to Lord Lonsdale, and hoped
to enter Parliament for one of his boroughs, but seems to have got
nothing out of his connection with that insolent old bully but a
certain amount of humiliation and the Recordership of Carlisle.  That
unimportant office was the only substantial reward he received from all
his long suit and service in the antechambers of law and politics.
Whatever he achieved he owed to literature and the friends his love of
literature had brought him.  It was not the laird or the lawyer, but
the friend and biographer of Johnson whom the Royal Academy appointed
in 1791 to the complimentary office of their Secretary for Foreign
Correspondence.  And those last years, while they brought him
disappointment in everything else, saw him take definite rank as a
successful author.  The _Tour to the Hebrides_ was published in 1785,
and sold out in a few weeks.  The third edition was issued within a
year of the appearance of the first.  It was followed by the
publication of Johnson's famous Letter to Lord Chesterfield and of an
account of his Conversation with George III, and finally in 1791 by the
_Life_ itself.  A second edition of this was called for in 1793.
Boswell only lived two years more.  He died on May 19, 1795.  He left
two sons, Alexander, {87} who became Sir Alexander, was the principal
mover in the matter of the Burns Monument on the banks of Doon, and was
killed in a duel in 1822; and James, who supplied notes for the third
edition of his father's great book, and edited the third _Variorum
Shakespeare_, known as Boswell's _Malone_, in 1821.

Such were the main outlines of the life of the biographer.  We may now
turn to those of the life which he owes his fame to recording.  They
are in most ways very unlike his own.  Samuel Johnson was very far from
being heir to a large estate and an ancient name.  He was the son of a
bookseller at Lichfield, and was born there on the 18th of September
1709, in a house which is now preserved in public hands in memory of
the event of that day.  His father's family was so obscure that he once
said, "I can hardly tell who was my grandfather."  His mother was Sarah
Ford, who came of a good yeoman stock in Warwickshire.  She was both a
good and an intelligent woman.  Samuel was the elder and only
ultimately surviving issue of the marriage.  A picturesque incident in
his childhood is that his mother took him to London to be "touched" by
Queen Anne for the scrofula, or "king's evil," as it was called, from
which he suffered.  He must have been one of the last persons to go
through this curious {88} ceremony, which the Georges never performed,
though the service for it remained in the Book of Common Prayer for
some years after the accession of George I.  The boy made an impression
upon people from the first.  He liked to recall in later life that the
dame who first taught him to read brought him a present of gingerbread
when he was starting for Oxford, and told him he was the best scholar
she had ever had.  Afterwards he went to Lichfield School, and at the
age of fifteen to Stourbridge.  At both he was evidently held in
respect by boys and masters alike.  Probably the curious combination in
him of the invalid and the prize-fighter which was conspicuous all
through his life, already arrested attention in his boyhood.  He played
none of the ordinary games, but yet, as we have already seen, was
acknowledged as a leader by the boys, and his abilities were the pride
of the school.  He already exhibited the amazing memory which enabled
him in later life to dictate to Boswell his famous letter to
Chesterfield rather than search for a copy, and to confute a person who
praised a bad translation from Martial by a contemptuous "Why, sir, the
original is thus," followed by a recitation not only of the Latin
original which it is not likely he had looked at for years, but also of
the translation which he had only read {89} once.  So on another
occasion when Baretti, who had read a little Ariosto with him some
years before, proposed to give him some more lessons, but feared he
might have forgotten their previous readings, "Who forgets, sir?" said
Johnson, and immediately repeated three or four stanzas of the
_Orlando_.  To the lover of literature there is no possession more
precious than a good verbal memory, and this Johnson enjoyed to a very
unusual degree all through his life.  But it is worth noting that he
was entirely free from the defect which commonly results from an
exceptional memory.  He always thought and spoke for himself, and was
never prevented from using his own mind and his own words by the fact
that his memory supplied him abundantly with those of others.  His
scholarly friend Langton annoyed him by depending upon books too much
in his conversation, and one of his compliments to Boswell was, "You
and I do not talk from books."

After he left Stourbridge he spent two years at home in desultory
reading, "not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient
writers, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and
Hesiod," the result of which was that when he went up to Oxford, the
Master of his College said he was "the best qualified for the
University that {90} he had ever known come there."  His College was
Pembroke, of which he became a Commoner (not a Servitor, as Carlyle
said) in 1728.  The Oxford of that day was not a place of much
discipline and the official order of study was very laxly maintained.
It seems not to have meant much to Johnson, and he is described as
having spent a good deal of his time "lounging at the College gates
with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining
with wit and keeping from their studies."  Most good talkers find the
first real sphere for their talent when they get to the University, and
the best of all was not likely to be an exception, nor to resist that
strongest of the intellectual temptations.  But he did some solid
reading, especially Greek, though he seemed to himself to be very idle,
perhaps because his standard was so high that he used to say in later
life, "I never knew a man who studied hard."  So when he confesses the
imperfections of his Greek scholarship, and other people exaggerate his
confession, it is well to remember the reply made by Jacob Bryant when
Gifford in an argument quoted Johnson's admission that "he was not a
good Greek scholar," "Sir, it is not easy for us to say what such a man
as Johnson would call a good Greek scholar."  A man whose remedy for
{91} sleeplessness was to turn Greek epigrams into Latin was at any
rate not ignorant of Greek.

Johnson was prevented by his poverty from getting the full advantages
either out of the life or the studies of Oxford.  His want of shoes
prevented his attending lectures, his pride forbad him to receive doles
of help, the friend, said to be a Mr. Corbet of Shropshire, on whose
promises of support he had relied in going to Oxford, failed him, his
father's business went from little to less; with the inevitable result
that he had to leave Oxford without a degree.  This was in December
1729.  But he had made an impression there, had a strong affection for
his College, and liked going to stay there in the days of his glory.
His usual host was one Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke, who had once
been his tutor but told Boswell that the relation was only nominal; "he
was above my mark."  When he left Oxford he returned to his Lichfield
home, where his father died two months later, leaving so little behind
him that all that Johnson received of his estate was twenty pounds.  He
seems to have remained at Lichfield, where the poverty of his family
did not prevent his mixing with the most cultivated society of a town
rich in cultivated people, till 1732, when he became an usher in a
school at Market Bosworth.  He hated this monotonous drudgery {92} and
left it after a few months, going to live with a Mr. Warren, a
Birmingham bookseller of good repute, whom he helped by his knowledge
of literature.  While in Birmingham he did a translation of a Jesuit
book about Abyssinia, for which Warren paid him five guineas.  In 1734
he returned to Lichfield, tried without success to obtain subscribers
for an edition of the poems of Politian, and offered to write in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_.  It is difficult to see how he supported
himself at this period: perhaps he was helped by his mother or by his
brother who carried on the bookselling business till his death a little
later.  Anyhow it was just at this time that he took a step for which
poverty generally finds the courage more quickly than wealth.  He
married Elizabeth Porter at St. Werburgh's Church, Derby, in July 1735.
Mrs. Porter was a widow twice his age and not of an attractive
appearance; but there is no doubt that Johnson's love for her was
sincere and lasting.  To the end of his life he remembered her
frequently in his prayers "if it were lawful," and kept the anniversary
of her death with prayers and tears.  Eighteen years after she died he
could write in his private note-books that his grief for her was not
abated and that he had less pleasure in any good that happened to him,
because she could not share {93} it: and in 1782 when she had been dead
thirty years, and he was drawing near his own end, he prays for her and
after doing so, noted "perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her.
Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me.  God help me."

This was the inner truth of the relation between Johnson and his
elderly wife, but it was natural and indeed inevitable that the world,
the little world of their acquaintances, should have been chiefly alive
to the humorous external aspect of the marriage, and one does not
wonder that Beauclerk, whose married life was a scandal following on a
divorce, should have enjoyed relating that Johnson had said to him,
"Sir, it was a love marriage on both sides!"  Johnson's own account of
the actual wedding is singular enough.  "Sir, she had read the old
romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman
of spirit should use her lover like a dog.  So, sir, at first she told
me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I
rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged
behind.  I was not to be made the slave of caprice; and I resolved to
begin as I meant to end.  I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was
fairly out of her sight.  The road lay between two hedges, so I was
sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should {94} soon
come up with me.  When she did, I observed her to be in tears."

Mrs. Johnson was the widow of a Birmingham draper, and brought her
husband several hundred pounds, part of which was at once spent in
hiring and furnishing a large house at Edial near Lichfield where
Johnson proposed to take pupils.  But no pupils came except David
Garrick and his brother, the sons of an old Lichfield friend, and the
"academy" was abandoned after a year and a half.  The lack of pupils,
however, was perhaps a blessing in disguise, for it enabled Johnson to
write most of his tragedy _Irene_, with which he went to London in
March 1737.  His pupil, David Garrick, went with him to study law, and
when Garrick was a rich, famous and rather vain man, Johnson, who liked
to curb the "insolence of wealth" once referred to 1737 as the year
"when I came to London with twopence half-penny in my pocket; and thou,
Davy, with three-halfpence in thine."  Nothing came of this first visit
to the capital.  He lived as best he could, dining for eightpence, and
seeing a few friends, one of whom was Henry Hervey, son of the Earl of
Bristol, of whose kindness he always retained an affectionate memory,
so that he once said to Boswell, "If you call a dog Hervey, I shall
love him."  In the summer he returned to Lichfield, and finished his
{95} tragedy, after which he brought his wife back with him to London
which was his home for the rest of his life.  Efforts to get _Irene_
performed were unsuccessful, but he soon began to write regularly for
the _Gentleman's Magazine_, of which he held so high an opinion that he
looked "with reverence" on the house where it was printed.  To this he
contributed essays and was soon employed to write the _Parliamentary
Debates_ which, in the days before reporters, were made up with
fictitious names from such scanty notes as could be got of the actual
speeches.  There is a story of his being, many years later, in a
company who were praising a famous oration of Chatham, and were
naturally a good deal startled by his quietly saying, "That speech I
wrote in a garret in Exeter Street."  He continued to do this work till
1743 when he became aware that the speeches were taken as authentic and
refused to be "accessory to the propagation of falsehood."  But, while
engaged in it, he had had no scruples about taking care "that the Whig
dogs should not have the best of it."

A much more important matter than this hack-work was the publication of
his _London_, a poem in imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.  This
appeared in May 1738.  He got ten guineas for it, which he was in no
position to despise; but he also got something {96} much more
important, an established name in the world of letters.  Every one
talked of him, and Pope, who published his "1738" in the same year, was
not only generous enough to inquire about him, and to say when told
that the author of _London_ was some obscure man, "He will soon be
_déterré_," but also to try to get him an Irish degree of M.A.  This
was in view of some attempts Johnson made to escape from dependence on
journalism for his daily bread: but they were all unsuccessful, and
till he received his pension his only source of income was what his
various writings produced.  In such circumstances he naturally wrote
many things of quite ephemeral interest which call for no mention now.
Perhaps the only prose work of permanent value he produced in these
years was the life of his mysterious friend, Richard Savage.  This
curious volume appeared in 1744.  The subject of it died in 1743.  He
and Johnson had been companions both in extreme poverty and in the
intellectual pleasures which in such men poverty is unable to
annihilate.  Mrs. Johnson seems to have been out of London at this
time, and the two struggling men of letters often passed nights
together, walking and talking in the streets and squares without the
price of a night's lodging between them.  Johnson's account of {97} his
friend did not fill his pocket, but must have contributed something to
his fame as it was very favourably criticized.  It was the occasion of
Reynolds first becoming acquainted with his name.  He was so interested
by the book that, having taken it up while standing with his arm
leaning upon a chimney-piece, he read the whole without sitting down
and found his arm quite benumbed when he got to the end.

"Slow rises worth by poverty depressed."  Johnson had now been seven
years in London, but had not yet found the way to do anything worthy of
his powers.  If he had died then, only the curious and the learned
would have known his name to-day.  A single satire in verse would
never, by itself, have had the force to push its way through the
ever-increasing crowd of applicants that besiege the attention of
posterity.  But the next year, 1745, is the literary turning-point of
his life.  Before it was over he had begun to deal with two subjects
with which much of his remaining life was occupied, and on which much
of his fame depends.  He had published a pamphlet upon Shakespeare's
_Macbeth_ which won the praise of Warburton, for which Johnson always
felt and showed his gratitude ("He praised me at a time when praise was
of value to me"); and, if Boswell is right, he had begun to occupy {98}
himself with the idea of making an English Dictionary.  Thus, poor and
obscure as he was in those years, sick with deferred hope as he must
have been, he had in fact laid the foundation-stones of the authority
and fame he was soon to enjoy as the Editor of Shakespeare and above
all as "Dictionary Johnson."  Now at last he began to do work worthier
of his powers.  The "_Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language_"
was published in 1747 and in the same year he wrote the admirable
_Prologue_ for the opening of Drury Lane Theatre, of which his pupil,
David Garrick, more fortunate than the master with whom he had come to
London, was now become manager.

Two years later Garrick produced the long-delayed tragedy of _Irene_.
It is not a great drama, as Johnson well knew, at least in his later
years.  There is a story of his being told that a certain Mr. Pot
called it "the finest tragedy of modern times," to which his only reply
was, "If Pot says so, Pot lies."  But this hardly has the genuine ring
about it.  Even Garrick's talent and friendship could not make _Irene_
a success, but the performance brought Johnson a little welcome profit
and enabled him to sell the book to Dodsley for a hundred pounds.  In
the same year, 1749, a more lasting evidence of his poetic powers was
given {99} by the appearance of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, another
Juvenalian imitation, but freer and bolder than the first.  From 1750
to 1752 he was writing _The Rambler_, a sort of newspaper essay which
appeared every Tuesday and Friday.  He wrote it almost entirely
himself, and almost always at the last moment, when the printer was
calling for it.  No one will now wonder that it never had a large
circulation as a periodical, for it usually exhibits him at his
gravest, and many of the essays are scarcely distinguishable from
sermons.  But that age had grave tastes and few temptations to
intellectual frivolity.  We have seen that the idlest sort of reading
Johnson could think of for a boy was "voyages and travels"; novels he
does not mention, indeed there were then very few of them; plays he
rather strangely ignores: newspapers, as we now know them and suffer by
them, he of course could not so much as conceive.  _The Rambler_ had no
sixpenny magazines of triviality, no sensational halfpenny papers, to
compete with it, and it pursued an even course of modest success for
its two years of life.  The greatest pleasure it brought Johnson was
the praise of his wife, who said to him, "I thought very well of you
before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to
this."  That was just the discovery a good {100} many people beside his
wife were making about Johnson in those years: with the result that
when _The Rambler_ appeared as a book, it sold well and had gone
through twelve editions by the time Boswell wrote its author's life.

Three years after the cessation of _The Rambler_ and, unhappily, also
three years after the death of his wife, with whom it would have been
his chief happiness to share his success, the great Dictionary
appeared.  It may safely be said that no single Englishman has ever
accomplished a literary task of such vast extent.  The mere labour, one
might say the mere dull drudgery, of collecting and arranging the
materials of such a work is enormous.  Nor could any literary labour
bring with it greater temptations.  Johnson's success is not more due
to his learning and powers of mind than to the good sense which never
failed him and the strong will which he could generally exert when he
chose.  He pleased himself at first, as he tells us in his Preface,
"with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of
literature"; but that, of course, was where the danger lay.  A man of
an equally strong love of literature and a weaker will would have
allowed himself to be swept away by the indulgence of curiosity, and
the luxury of desultory reading; but Johnson soon saw {101} that these
visions of intellectual pleasure were "the dreams of a poet doomed at
last to wake a lexicographer"; and that, if he was to do the thing he
had undertaken to do, he must set stern limits, not only to the
pleasures of study, but also to the delusive quest of unattainable
perfection, which is the constant parent of futility.  He realized, as
so many men of letters have failed to realize, that "to deliberate
whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have
protracted the undertaking without end and perhaps without much
improvement"; and instead of attempting the impossible and achieving
nothing, he was wise enough and modest enough, by attempting only the
attainable, to place himself in a position to achieve all that he
attempted.

The praise he deserved was somewhat slow in coming, as is commonly the
case with the greatest literary achievements.  But though, as he sadly
says in the last words of his great Preface, most of those whom he
wished to please had sunk into the grave, and he had therefore little
to hope or fear from praise or censure, yet he was always and before
all things a human being, and only a creature above or below humanity
could have been insensible to the pleasure of the new fame, the new
authority and the new friends which his {102} Dictionary gradually
brought him.  Before many years had passed the "harmless drudge," as he
himself had defined a lexicographer, had become the acknowledged
law-giver and dictator of English letters; he had gathered round him a
society of the finest minds of that generation, he had received a
public pension which secured his independence, he had begun the long
friendship which gave him a second home for more than fifteen years.
These things did not all come at once--he did not know the Thrales till
1764 or 1765--but the true turning-point in his career is the
publication of his Dictionary.  He was still poor for some years after
that, and still much occupied in the production of hack-work: but he
was never again obscure and was soon to be famous.  Within a year after
the appearance of the Dictionary he had issued his _Proposals for an
Edition of Shakespeare_, the second in time and perhaps in importance
of his three great works.  His new position secured him a good number
of subscribers and he intended to publish it the next year, 1757; but
the interruptions of indolence, business and pleasure, as he himself
says of Pope, usually disappoint the sanguine expectations of authors,
and the book did not in fact appear till 1765.

Neither Shakespeare nor idleness had {103} occupied the whole of the
intervening years.  From 1758 to 1760 he produced a weekly paper called
_The Idler_, of the same character as _The Rambler_.  In 1759 he wrote
his once famous story _Rasselas_ to pay the expenses of his mother's
funeral.  It was written in the evenings of a single week.  Good judges
thought that, if he had known how to make a bargain, he ought to have
received as much as four hundred pounds for this book, which was
translated into most of the European languages; but he did not in fact
receive more than a hundred pounds for the first and twenty-five for
the second edition.  By this time he could visit Oxford, from which
University he had received the degree of M.A. when his Dictionary was
on the eve of publication: and another sign of the position he was
beginning to occupy is that we find Smollet writing of him in 1759 as
the "great Cham of literature."  More substantial evidences followed in
1762 when George III was advised by Bute to grant him a pension of 300
pounds a year, an income which must have seemed boundless affluence to
a man who had never known a time when five pounds was not an important
sum to him.

Next year came the event which was even more important to his fame than
the receipt of the pension was to his comfort.  In 1763 {104} he met
Boswell for the first time.  Fortune now began to smile upon him in
good earnest and evidences of his established position and prosperity
follow each other in rapid succession.  "The Club" (its proper and
still existing name, though Boswell occasionally calls it The Literary
Club) was founded in 1764 and provided him for the rest of his life
with an ideal theatre for the display of his amazing powers of talk,
though it appears that he was not in his later years a very regular
attendant.  The next year, 1765, was probably the year in which he
first met Thrale, the great brewer, and his clever and ambitious wife.
No event contributed so much to the happiness of his after years.
Thrale was a man of character and understanding, and was not without
scholarly tastes.  He at once saw the value of such a friend as
Johnson, lived in the closest intimacy with him for the rest of his
days, and named him executor in his will, which gave Johnson an
opportunity such as he always liked, of mixing in business, and
incidentally also, of saying the best thing that ever was said at the
sale of a brewery.  He appeared at the auction, according to the story
told by Lord Lucan, "bustling about with an inkhorn and pen in his
button-hole, like an excise-man; and, on being asked what he really
considered to be the value of the {105} property, answered,