W. Keith Leask

“ Never was there a club of which each member was better qualified to take care of his own fame with posterity. None of Johnson's associates would have hesitated in declaring an extended date of renown for the Rambler; and perhaps he himself would have staked the reputation{86} assured, as Cowper said, by the tears of bards and heroes in order to immortalize the dead, on his Rasselas or the Dictionary. Yet he and most members of that club, apart from the record of Boswell, would be but names to the literary antiquary, and be by the mass of readers entirely forgotten. ”

“ There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. ”

“ Temple, too, was against this, and 'Temple thou reasonest well,' he cries, and thinks his abnegation will be a solace to his worthy father on his circuit. Freed now from Miss Blair and the Dutch divinity, he is devoted to la belle Irlandaise, 'just sixteen, with the sweetest countenance and a Dublin education.' Never till now had he been so truly in love; every flower is united, and she is a rose without a thorn. Her name 'Mary Anne' he has carved upon a tree, and cutting off a lock of her hair she had promised Bozzy not to marry a lord before March, or forget him. ”

“ At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases for ever upon the earth.
'The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet another morrow—the morrow of God's rest—that divine Sabbath in which there is no more creative labour, and which, "blessed and sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. ”

“ Biography, like History, has suffered from considerations of dignity and propriety. The writers of the Hume and Robertson school of history, in their stately minuet with the historical muse, have been careful to exclude everything that seemed beneath the dignity of the sceptred pall; biographers have as consciously studied the proprieties. 'The Muse of history,' says Thackeray, 'wears the mask and speaks to measure; she too in our age busies herself with the affairs only of kings. ”

“ It now no longer threatens like a second flood to cover the earth, and it is possible for mental and historical science to reappear like the earth out of the waters, and a clear line to be drawn between the limits of mind and matter. Happily, accordingly, it is no longer possible for a Voltaire to meet the theologian with a belief that the shells found on high hills were dropped by pilgrims and palmers from the Holy Land, any more than it would be possible to assert, with Dugald Stewart, that the words in Sanskrit akin to Greek were dropped by the troops of Alexander the Great. ”

“ The minister had bowed to the storm and resigned, while the writer of the libel had been arrested under a general warrant and discharged on the 30th of the month under appeal, either to be hanged, thought Adam Smith, or to get Bute impeached in six months. Alexander Cruden, of Concordance fame, was rambling over London in his lucid interval like an inverted Old Mortality, busy with a sponge obliterating every hated '45' scrawled over the walls and every conceivable spot in the city against his country. Yet at such an hour it was that the famous meeting of Johnson and his biographer took place. ”

“ Yet Carlyle at his worst has his value. He has the merit of showing that the problem is in its very nature an everlasting one, and that the plummet line of the mere profit-and-loss moralist will never sound the depths of man and his destiny. Such thinkers are, however, rare; but in natural science they are the salt. Such are Oken, Cuvier, Darwin; their position is independent of the truth of their theories, and they have the gift of a fused and informing imagination, by which their theories are landmarks. ”

“ 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 and, elevated by the remembrance of you, persist in noble piety. May God, the father of all beings, ever bless you! and may you continue to love your most affectionate friend, and devoted servant,—James Boswell.'
So early had Boswell made his resolve to be the biographer of Johnson. ”

“ The men of the opposition had 'nothing to draw with, and the well was deep'; and many names then blown far and wide by windy rumour, such as Dr. Cook, Robertson of Ellon, Dr. Bryce, and Principal Pirie of Aberdeen, survive like flies in amber only because it was their misfortune to be associated with great men. He might have said with Landor that he did not strive with these men, for certainly of them all 'none was worth his strife'; yet, though individually contemptible, they formed a solid phalanx of Moderatism and of dead resistance to argument and conviction. ”

“ The London citizen who, says Lockhart, 'makes Loch Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben Nevis,' can with difficulty imagine a journey in the Hebrides with rainy weather, in open boats, or upon horseback over wild moorland and morasses, a journey that even to Voltaire sounded like a tour to the North Pole. ”

“ The Jacobite Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident in the history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 1843 will show the peculiar spirit of the people in a fairer flowering. How curiously illusory are the generalisations of philosophers! Calculation, shrewdness, pawkiness—these are the traditional marks of the stage-Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's perfervidum ingenium is surely much truer, and mere calculation is just what is not the national mark. ”

“ Edwards: "Ah, sir! we are old men now." Johnson (who never liked to think of being old) : "Don't let us discourage one another." Edwards: "Why, Doctor, you look stout and hearty. I am happy to see you so; for the newspapers told us you were very ill." Johnson: "Ay, sir, they are always telling lies of us old fellows."
Wishing to be present at more of so singular a conversation as that between two fellow collegians, who had lived forty years in London without ever having chanced to meet, I whispered to Mr Edwards that Dr Johnson was going home, and that he had better accompany him now. ”

“ It is this informing power that keeps alive the geologist. Hume owes his position in metaphysics to this power, and to his great gifts as a stylist. Few men of science have had graces of style. In Darwin it is lacking, and he has himself set on record that literature and art had ceased for him to exert any influence, and that a mere novel had become the highest form of intellectual amusement. Hutton needed a Playfair to make him intelligible, as Dugald Stewart was needed for the exposition of Reid. But it is this power that will keep Miller alive. ”

“ I would have History familiar rather than heroic, and think that Mr Hogarth and Mr Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of the present age in England, than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which we get thence.' As the historian has striven to obscure the real nature of the Grand Monarque, by confining his action to courts and battlefields, so the biographer, in his desire of never stepping beyond the proper, has enveloped his hero in a circle of correct ideas, after the manner of George the Fourth and his multiplicity of waistcoats. ”

“ Holy Alliances in recent times have not found this doctrine strange to them, and a high elevation of the prerogative and the mitre was the very breath of existence to a church whose being depended on the stability of the throne. Passive obedience was a convenient cry for those who never dreamed that the breath of the king could unmake them as a breath had made. Never till James VII. began to oppress the clergy did they begin to see what was logically involved in their abject protestations of loyalty, and in their professions of turning the right cheek to the royal smiter. ”

“ Edwards: "But I shall not die rich." Johnson: "Nay, sure, sir, it is better to live rich, than to die rich." Edwards: "I wish I had continued at College." Johnson: "Why do you wish that, sir?" Edwards: "Because I think I should have had a much easier life than mine has been. I should have been a parson, and had a good living, like Bloxam and several others, and lived comfortably."{152} Johnson: "Sir, the life of a parson, of a conscientious clergyman, is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. ”

“ To a nation believing that the divine decree of election has singled out the individual, the claims of a church with the greatest of histories and the most unbroken of descents are of slight value. To the individual believing it is God's own immutable decree that has made his calling and election sure, the whole retinue of priests and priestly paraphernalia appears but an idle pageant. ”

“ This man is always willing to say what he has to say."'
How admirable is the art in this scene, how numerous and fine are the strokes of character, and the easy turn of the dialogue! No fool with a note-book, no tippling reporter, as the shallow critics say, could have written this. To them there would have appeared in a chance meeting of two old men nothing worthy of notice, yet how dramatically does Boswell touch off the Philistine side of Edwards, and insert the fine shading and the inimitable remarks about the setting up for the philosopher, and supper being a turnpike to bed! ”

“ And what is true in science is also no less true in his purely literary performances. The reader of his articles, political or social, cannot fail to be struck with the pertinence of his quotations and illustrations. What he knew was instantly at the call of a powerful memory and a vigorous imagination. As an editor, he had not to go to memory for his metaphors, and to his imagination for his facts. ”

“ But if, like the grandsire of Hubert at Hastings, Lockhart has drawn a good bow, Boswell, like the Locksley of the novelist, has notched his shaft, and comparisons have long ceased to be instituted. Gray has attempted the explanation—a fool with a note-book. He has invented nothing, he has only reported. But every year sees that person at work, with his First Impressions of Brittany, Three Weeks in Greece, and the everlasting Tour in Tartanland. ”

“ Professor Blackie has pointed out that the true secret of the vitality of the old Paganism and its logical internal consistency simply lay in the fact of the great humanity of the deities it created. This, also, as Miller himself no less clearly shows, is at the bottom of the enduring element in the lower reaches of Catholicism. 'There is,' says our Scottish Neander, Rabbi John Duncan, 'an old cross stone of granite by the roadside as you wind up the hill at Old Buda, in Hungary, upon which a worn and defaced image of our Saviour is cut, which I used often to pass. ”

“ If a man, he adds, is praised for seeking knowledge, though mountains and seas are in his way, he may be pardoned in the pursuit of the same object under difficulties as great though of a different kind. And the defence will not be refused him for the use he has made of the means. Wisdom and literature alike are justified of their children, and the masters in either are not so numerous that we can afford to quarrel with them, or wrangle over their respective merits. 'Sensation,' said Johnson, 'is sensation,' and the pretty general feeling now is that in his department Boswell is a master. ”

“ That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or grey, smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold—an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation ”

“ That a fool may occasionally write interesting matter we know; but that a man should write a literary classic, graced by arrangement, selection, expression, is not even paradox but hyperbole run mad. The truth is, Macaulay had no eye for such a complex character as Boswell. ”

“ The times, as Richter said, were indeed 'a criticising critical time, hovering between the wish and the ability to believe, a chaos of conflicting times: but even a chaotic world must have its centre, and revolve round that centre: there is no pure entire confusion, but all such presupposes its opposite, before it can begin.' In Scotland and in England the great ecclesiastical currents of the Disruption and the Oxford Movement had left the nation for a time weary of theology, and the school of natural science was in possession of the field. ”

“ Every man, says Johnson, has at one time or other of his life an ambition to set up for a wag, but that a man who had completed the Life of Johnson should in after years complacently refer to this character of himself and 'traits in it which time has not yet altered, that egotism and self-applause which he is still displaying, yet it would seem with a conscious smile,' is scarcely credible were it not out-distanced by graver weaknesses. ”

“ So entirely has the national unity been preserved in Scotland that Professor Blackie has said, with no less truth than pith, that while Presbyterianism is the national and the rational dress of the land, Episcopacy is but the dress coat by which the nakedness is hid of the renegade from the nation, and the apostate from its church. ”

“ This art of the biographer is what gives a memorableness to slight incidents, by the object being real and really seen; it is the 'infinitude of delineation, the intensity of conception which informs the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance, ennobling the Actual into Idealness.'
Openness of mind will do much, but there must be the seeing eye behind it. For the mental development of Boswell, there is no doubt that, as with Goldsmith, his foreign travels had done much. ”

“ When we consider the great amount of solid literary performance, and of minute observation, recorded in his Cruise of the Betsey and his Rambles of a Geologist, extending over the West Coast and the Orkneys—when we know that much of his work consisted of papers in The Witness, republished, like The Old Red Sandstone, in book form with the necessary additions, we shall wonder at the fertility and the quickness of the mind that could, in the midst of distracting journalistic demands on his time and attention, produce such a mass of varied and finished work in science and literature. ”

“ Never, we may rest assured, did he tell the sage of this hidden passage in his life; yet how often do we find him putting leading questions to his friend and Mentor on all points of Catholic doctrine and casuistry, purgatory, and the invocation of the saints, confession, and the mass! There can be no doubt that this wrench left a deep impress on the confused religious views of Boswell, and this is the clue which explains the opening conversation with Johnson at the beginning of their intimacy. ”

“ There is life in that great sea—invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. ”

“ A life which cannot challenge the world's attention—like that of John Sterling—which perhaps does not even modestly solicit it, yet one which no less certainly will be found to reward the critic of literary history and pathology. ”

“ Facts like these and the presence of such men should go far to dispel much of the cheap sentiment introduced into the current of Scottish life by writers such as Smiles and others, who profess to be ever finding some 'peasant' or 'uneducated genius' in the subjects of their all too unctuous biographies. Such a class has really no existence in Scotland, and between such men as Miller, Burns, or even the unfortunate and sorely buffeted Bethunes, there is a great gulf fixed when they are sought to be brought into relation with men like John Clare and Robert Bloomfield. ”

“ Temple is adjured to dwell upon his odd, inconstant, impetuous nature, how he is accustomed to women of intrigue, and he is to ask of the fair one if she does not think there is insanity in the Boswell family. She is to hear of his travels, his acquaintance with foreign princes, Voltaire and Rousseau, his desire to have a house of his own; and then he diverges into{78} practicality when he desires his friend to 'study the mother,' and take notes of all that passed, as it might have the effect of fixing the fate of the lover. ”