John Cann Bailey

“ He thought of London as the place in all the world where the pulse of human life beat strongest. There a man could store his mind better than anywhere else: there he could not only live but grow: there more than anywhere else he might escape the self-complacency which leads to intellectual and moral torpor, because there he would be certain to meet not only with his equals but with his superiors. ”

“ The explanation is no doubt partly that Miss Burney was a woman and saw him chiefly with women, Boswell a man who saw him chiefly with men. Even without her genius she would not be the first young woman whose admiring affection has seemed to an old man to give him back his youth. And she had not only her own sudden and surprising celebrity but all that happy ease of the Streatham life, and the cleverness and good humour of Mrs. Thrale, to help her. No wonder Johnson was at his brightest in such circumstances. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But has there ever, then or at any other time, been a man who could find such language for his disapproval as Johnson? "Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality: a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death." It is at once as devastating as a volcano and as neat as a formal garden. So, in a smaller way, is his criticism of a smaller man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ CHAPTER V JOHNSON'S WORKS In his lifetime Johnson was chiefly thought of as a great writer. To-day we think of him chiefly as a great man. That is the measure of Boswell's genius: no other biographer of a great writer has unconsciously and unintentionally thrown his hero's own works into the shade. Scott will always have a hundred times as many readers as Lockhart, and Macaulay as Trevelyan. But in this, as in some other ways, Boswell's involuntary greatness has upset the balance of truth. ”

“ The pleasures and the business that lie on life's surface, the acquaintances and half friends that are encountered there, are enough for it: and the crowded empty days glide by as easily and as imperceptibly as a boatful of dreaming idlers drifting on unawares till the pace suddenly quickens for a moment, and almost before the speed wakens them they are struggling hopelessly in the whirlpool at the bottom of the fall. But, for Johnson, society had no sleeping potion strong enough to overcome his ever-wakeful sense of the issues of life. ”

“ But real as the social element in Johnson {136} was, and important as the remembrance of it is for a corrective of the too solemn portrait of him for which Boswell gives some excuse, it never got the mastery of him. In the ordinary way the life of the pre-eminently social man or woman gradually disappears in a dancing sunshine of sociability. The butterfly finds crossing and recrossing other butterflies in the airy, flowery spaces of the world such a pleasant business that it asks no more: above all, it does not care to ask the meaning of a thing so easy and agreeable as day to day existence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of Boswell it is enough to repeat that, while he could not compare with these men in life or action or general powers of mind, and therefore enjoyed no contemporary fame, he left a book behind him at his death which every succeeding generation has increasingly recognized as possessing that uniqueness of achievement which is another phrase for genius. Four such men alone would make a society such as few men have lived in. But Johnson's society is as remarkable for the variety and quantity, as for the quality, of its distinction. ”

“ Every impartial reader of Boswell will admit that the rudeness of his retorts where it exists is entirely swallowed up and forgotten in their aptness, ingenuity and wit. He was rude sometimes, no doubt; as, for instance, to the unfortunate young man who went to him for advice as to whether he should marry, and got for an answer, "Sir, I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding." But, human nature being what it is, sympathy for the victim is in such cases commonly extinguished in delighted admiration of the punishment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In England before Johnson's Dictionary, nothing had been done to claim for English an equal place with Italian or French in the future of the literature and civilization of the world. What companies of learned men had taken generations to do for foreign countries had now been done for England in a few years by the industry, and abilities of a single scholar. Englishmen who took a pride in their language might now do so with understanding: foreigners who wished to learn English could now learn in the method and spirit of a scholar, no longer merely as travellers or tradesmen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first breath of the facts, as known to every one who has visited a theatre, is brought to demolish the airy castles of pedantry: and it is shown that unity is required not for the sake of deceiving {213} the spectators, which is impossible, but for the sake of bringing order into chaos, art into nature, and the immensity of life within limits that can be compassed by the powers of the human mind. The unity of action, which assists the mind, is therefore vital: the unities of time and place, which are apparently meant to deceive it, are empty impostures. ”

“ Johnson could break out in conversation as well as in his books into a noble eloquence all his own; such a phrase as "poisoning the sources of eternal truth," rises spontaneously to his lips when his indignation is aroused. His free language disdained to be confined within any park palings of pedantry. Some of his most characteristic utterances owe their flavour to combining the language of the schools with the language of the tavern: as when he said of that strange inmate of his house, Miss Carmichael, "Poll is a stupid slut. ”

“ 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, on the other hand, is one of the three great qualities in which Johnson's talk is supreme. Without often aiming at being instructive it is not only nearly always interesting but with an amazing variety of interest. The theologian, the moral philosopher, the casuist, the scholar, the politician, the economist, the lawyer, the clergyman, the schoolmaster, the author, above all the amateur of life, all find in it abundance of food for their own particular tastes. Each of them—notably for instance, the political economist—may sometimes find Johnson mistaken; not one will ever find him dull. ”

“ No one ever was so free as Johnson from that pest of literature which a fine French critic, one of the subtlest of his countrymen, called "l'ingénieux sans bon {212} sens"; and he never showed himself so free of it as in his Shakespeare. The master of life who "whether life or nature be his subject, shows plainly that he has seen with his own eyes," inspired the great critic with more even than his usual measure of sanity: and perhaps the very best things in the Preface and the notes are the frequent summonings of ingenious sophistries to the bar of a merciless common sense. ”

“ Men like Dryden and Gibbon and Lecky are the men to get through immense literary labours: to a great talker like Johnson what can the praises of reviewers or of posterity be in comparison with the flashing eyes, and attentive ears, the expectant silence and spontaneous applause, of the friends in whom he has an immediate mirror of his success? ”

“ Alike to the new Liberalism ever more and more drenched in sentiment, to the new Conservatism ever more and more looking for a base in history, to Romanticism in literature with its stir, colour and emotion, to science with its new studies and new methods, the works of Johnson almost inevitably appeared as the dry bones of a dead age. ”

“ 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. ”