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The editor's want of perspicacity is indeed very amusing. He is perpetually
telling us that he cannot understand something in the text which is as plain as
language can make it. "Mattaire," said Dr. Johnson, "wrote Latin verses from
time to time, and published a set in his old age, which he called Senilia, in
which he shows so little learning or taste in writing, as to make Carteret a
dactyl."1 Hereupon we have this note: "The editor
does not understand this objection, nor the following observation." The
following observation, which Mr. Croker cannot understand, is simply this: "In
matters of genealogy," says Johnson, "it is necessary to give the bare names as
they are. But in poetry and in prose of any elegance in the writing, they
require to have inflection given to them." If Mr. Croker had told Johnson that
this was unintelligible, the doctor would probably have replied, as he replied
on another occasion, "I have found you a reason, sir; I am not bound to find you
an understanding." Everybody who knows anything of Latinity knows that, in
genealogical tables, Joannes Baro de Carteret, or Vice-comes de Carteret, may be
tolerated, but that in compositions which pretend to elegance, Carteretus, or
some other form which admits of inflection, ought to be used.
All our readers have doubtless seen the two distichs of Sir William Jones,
respecting the division of the time of a lawyer. One of the distichs is
translated from some old Latin lines; the other is original. The former runs
thus:
"Six hours to sleep, to law's grave study six, Four spend in prayer, the rest on
nature fix."
Rather," says Sir William Jones,
"Six hours to law, to soothing slumbers seven, Ten to the world allot, and all
to heaven."
The second couplet puzzles Mr. Croker strangely. "Sir William," says he, "has
shortened his day to twenty-three hours, and the general advice of "all to
heaven," destroys the peculiar appropriation of a certain period to religious
exercises."2 Now we did not think that it was in
human dullness to miss the meaning of the lines so completely. Sir William
distributes twenty-three hours among various employments. One hour is thus left
for devotion. The reader expects that the verse will end with "and one to
heaven." The whole point of the lines consist in the unexpected substitution of
"all" for "one." The conceit is wretched enough, but it is perfectly
intelligible, and never, we will venture to say, perplexed man, woman, or child
before.
Poor Tom Davies, after failing in business, tried to live by his pen. Johnson
called him "an author generated by the corruption of a bookseller." This is a
very obvious, and even a commonplace allusion to the famous dogma of the old
physiologists. Dryden made a similar allusion to that dogma before Johnson was
born. Mr. Croker, however, is unable to understand what the doctor meant. "The
expression," he says, "seems not quite clear." And he proceeds to talk about the
generation of insects, about bursting into gaudier life, and Heaven knows what.3
There is a still stranger instance of the editor's talent for finding out
difficulty in what is perfectly plain. "No man," said Johnson, "can now be made
a bishop for his learning and piety." "From this too just observation," says
Boswell, "there are some eminent exceptions." Mr. Croker is puzzled by Boswell's
very natural and simple language. "That a general observation should be
pronounced too just, by the very person who admits that it is not universally
just, is not a little odd."4
A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the editor
boasts of having added to those of Boswell and Malone consists of the flattest
and poorest reflections, reflections such as the least intelligent reader is
quite competent to make for himself, and such as no intelligent reader would
think it worth while to utter aloud. They remind us of nothing so much as of
those profound and interesting annotations which are penciled by sempstresses
and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from
circulating libraries; " How beautiful!" "Cursed prosy!" "I don't like Sir
Reginald Malcolm at all." "I think Pelham is a sad dandy." Mr. Croker is
perpetually stopping us in our progress through the most delightful narrative in
the language, to observe that really Dr. Johnson was very rude, that he talked
more for victory than for truth, that his taste for port wine with capillary in
it was very odd, that Boswell was impertinent, that it was foolish in Mrs.
Thrale to marry the music-master; and so forth.
We cannot speak more favorably of the manner in which the notes are written than
of the matter of which they consist. We find in every page words used in wrong
senses, and constructions which violate the plainest rules of grammar. We have
the vulgarism of "mutual friend," for "common friend." We have "fallacy" used as
synonymous with "falsehood." We have many such inextricable labyrinths of
pronouns as that which follows: "Lord Erskine was fond of this anecdote; he told
it to the editor the first time that he had the honor of being in his company."
Lastly, we have a plentiful supply of sentences resembling those which we
subjoin. "Markland, who, with Jortin and Thirlby, Johnson calls three
contemporaries of great eminence."5 "Warburton
himself did not feel, as Mr. Boswell was disposed to think he did, kindly or
gratefully of Johnson."6 "It was him that Horace
Walpole called a man who never made a bad figure but as an author."7
One or two of these solecisms should perhaps be attributed to the printer, who
has certainly done his best to fill both the text and the notes with all sorts
of blunders. In truth, he and the editor have between them made the book so bad,
that we do not well see how it could have been worse.
When we turn from the commentary of Mr. Croker to the work of our old friend
Boswell, we find it not only worse printed than in any other edition with which
we are acquainted, but mangled in the most wanton manner. Much that Boswell
inserted in his narrative is, without the shadow of a reason, degraded to the
appendix. The editor has also taken upon himself to alter or omit passages which
he considers as indecorous. This prudery is quite unintelligible to us. There is
nothing immoral in Boswell's book, nothing which tends to inflame the passions.
He sometimes uses plain words. But if this be a taint which requires
expurgation, it would be desirable to begin by expurgating the morning and
evening lessons. The delicate office which Mr. Croker has undertaken he has
performed in the most capricious manner. One strong, old-fashioned, English
word, familiar to all who read their Bibles, is changed for a sober synonym in
some passages, and suffered to stand unaltered in others. In one place a faint
allusion made by Johnson to an indelicate subject, an allusion so faint that,
till Mr. Croker's note pointed it out to us, we had never noticed it, and of
which we are quite sure that the meaning would never be discovered by any of
those for whose sake books are expurgated, is altogether omitted. In another
place, a coarse and stupid jest of Dr. Taylor on the same subject, expressed in
the broadest language, almost the only passage, as far as we remember, in all
Boswell's book, which we should have been inclined to leave out, is suffered to
remain.
We complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions. We have
half of Mrs. Thrale's book, scraps of Mr. Tyers, scraps of Mr. Murphy, scraps of
Mr. Cradock, long prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and connecting observations by
Mr. Croker himself, inserted into the midst of Boswell's text. To this practice
we most decidedly object. An editor might as well publish Thucydides with
extracts from Diodorus interspersed, or incorporate the Lives of Suetonius with
the History and Annals of Tacitus. Mr. Croker tells us, indeed, that he has done
only what Boswell wished to do, and was prevented from doing by the law of
copyright. We doubt this greatly. Boswell has studiously abstained from availing
himself of the information given by his rivals, on many occasions on which he
might have cited them without subjecting himself to the charge of piracy. Mr.
Croker has himself, on one occasion, remarked very justly that Boswell was
unwilling to owe any obligation to Hawkins. But, be this as it may, if Boswell
had quoted from Sir John and from Mrs. Thrale, he would have been guided by his
own taste and judgment in selecting his quotations. On what Boswell quoted he
would have commented with perfect freedom; and the borrowed passages, so
selected, and accompanied by such comments, would have become original. They
would have dovetailed into the work. No hitch, no crease, would have been
discernible. The whole would appear one and indivisible.
"Ut per laeve severos Effundat junctura ungues."
This is not the case with Mr. Croker's insertions. They are not chosen as
Boswell would have chosen them. They are not introduced as Boswell would have
introduced them. They differ from the quotations scattered through the original
Life of Johnson, as a withered bough stuck in the ground differs from a tree
skillfully transplanted with all its life about it.
Not only do these anecdotes disfigure Boswell's book; they are themselves
disfigured by being inserted in his book. The charm of Mrs. Thrale's little
volume is utterly destroyed. The feminine quickness of observation, the feminine
softness of heart, the colloquial incorrectness and vivacity of style, the
little amusing airs of a half-learned lady, the delightful garrulity, the "dear
Doctor Johnson," the "it was so comical," all disappear in Mr. Croker's
quotations. The lady ceases to speak in the first person; and her anecdotes, in
the process of transfusion, become as flat as Champagne in decanters, or
Herodotus in Beloe's version. Sir John Hawkins, it is true, loses nothing; and
for the best of reasons. Sir John Hawkins has nothing to lose.
The course which Mr. Croker ought to have taken is quite clear. He should have
reprinted Boswell's narrative precisely as Boswell wrote it; and in the notes or
the appendix he should have placed any anecdote which he might have thought it
advisable to quote from other writers. This would have been a much more
convenient course for the reader, who has now constantly to keep his eye on the
margin in order to see whether he is perusing Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Murphy,
Hawkins, Tyers, Cradock, or Mr. Croker. We greatly doubt whether even the Tour
to the Hebrides ought to have been inserted in the midst of the Life. There is
one marked distinction between the two works. Most of the Tour was seen by
Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of the Life.
We love, we own, to read the great productions of the human mind as they were
written. We have this feeling even about scientific treatises; though we know
that the sciences are always in a state of progression, and that the alterations
made by a modern editor in an old book on any branch of natural or political
philosophy are likely to be improvements. Some errors have been detected by
writers of this generation in the speculations of Adam Smith. A short cut has
been made to much knowledge at which Sir Isaac Newton arrived through arduous
and circuitous paths. Yet we still look with peculiar veneration on the Wealth
of Nations and on the Principia, and should regret to see either of those great
works garbled even by the ablest hands. But in works which owe much of their
interest to the character and situation of the writers, the case is infinitely
stronger. What man of taste and feeling can endure rifacimenti, harmonies,
abridgments, expurgated editions? Who ever reads a stage-copy of a play when he
can procure the original? Who ever cut open Mrs. Siddons's Milton? Who ever got
through ten pages of Mr. Gilpin's translation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim into
modern English? Who would lose, in the confusion of a Diatessaron, the peculiar
charm which belongs to the narrative of the disciple whom Jesus loved? The
feeling of a reader who has become intimate with any great original work is that
which Adam expressed towards his bride:
"Should God create another Eve, and I Another rib afford, yet loss of thee Would
never from my heart."
No substitute, however exquisitely formed, will fill the void left by the
original. The second beauty may be equal or superior to the first; but still it
is not she.
The reasons which Mr. Croker has given for incorporating passages from Sir John
Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale with the narrative of Boswell, would vindicate the
adulteration of half the classical works in the language. If Pepys's Diary and
Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs had been published a hundred years ago, no human being
can doubt that Mr. Hume would have made great use of those books in his History
of England. But would it, on that account, be judicious in a writer of our own
times to publish an edition of Hume's History of England, in which large
extracts from Pepys and Mrs. Hutchinson should be incorporated with the original
text? Surely not. Hume's history, be its faults what they may, is now one great
entire work, the production of one vigorous mind, working on such materials as
were within its reach. Additions made by another hand may supply a particular
deficiency, but would grievously injure the general effect. With Boswell's book
the case is stronger. There is scarcely, in the whole compass of literature, a
book which bears interpolation so ill. We know no production of the human mind
which has so much of what may be called the race, so much of the peculiar flavor
of the soil from which it sprang. The work could never have been written if the
writer had not been precisely what he was. His character is displayed in every
page, and this display of character gives a delightful interest to many passages
which have no other interest.
The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more
decidedly the first of heroic 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. He has distanced all his
competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is
first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so
strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have
written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he
has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or
to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest
intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of
immortality by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk
used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock
of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of
its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and
begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous
nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but
literally. He exhibited himself, at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd
which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the
inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that
at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and
impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride,
and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to
be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London, so
curious to know everybody who was talked about, that, Tory and High Churchman as
he was, he maneuvered, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine, so
vain of the most childish distinctions, that when he had been to Court, he drove
to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and
summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword; such was
this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Everything which another man
would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another
man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and
diseased mind. What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how
at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how
at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayer-book and
took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and
came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his
babies because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how was frightened out
of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a
child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment
annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyll and with
what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered
to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of
his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed
to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious
rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all
his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool
self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of
himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of
mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as
himself.
That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is
strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves
foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior
powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was very justly described
by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being
"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in
amiss among the stories of Heracles. But these men attained literary eminence in
spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If
he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without
all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he
lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the
toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so
excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced
that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never
scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of
confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know
when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to
derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of
literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri,
and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had
absolutely none. 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. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on
the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these
passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They
have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable
observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those
observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of
a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters
he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those
things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly
wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory.
These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue would scarcely of
themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a
parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.
Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are most utterly
worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of the character of
the writer. Bad in themselves, they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of
justice Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced consonants
of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is the most candid. Other men who have
pretended to lay open their own hearts, Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron,
have evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be then most
distrusted when they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely any man who
would not rather accuse himself of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous
passions than proclaim all his little vanities and wild fancies. It would be
easier to find a person who would avow actions like those of Caesar Borgia, or
Danton, than one who would publish a daydream like those of Alnaschar and
Malvolio. Those weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most secret
places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of love,
were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell paraded before all the world. He was
perfectly frank, because the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his
spirits prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous. His book
resembles nothing so much as the conversation of the inmates of the Palace of
Truth.
His fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt, be lasting; but it is fame of
a peculiar kind, and indeed marvellously resembles infamy. We remember no other
case in which the world has made so great a distinction between a book and its
author. In general, the book and the author are considered as one. To admire the
book is to admire the author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the
only exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be interesting,
instructive, eminently original: yet it has brought him nothing but contempt.
All the world reads it, all the world delights in it: yet we do not remember
ever to have read or ever to have heard any expression of respect and admiration
for the man to whom we owe so much instruction and amusement. While edition
after edition of his book was coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was
ashamed of it, and hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural and
reasonable. Sir Alexander saw that in proportion to the celebrity of the work,
was the degradation of the author. The very editors of this unfortunate
gentleman's books have forgotten their allegiance, and, like those Puritan
casuists who took arms by the authority of the king against his person, have
attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings. Mr. Croker, for example,
has published two thousand five hundred notes on the life of Johnson, and yet
scarcely ever mentions the biographer, whose performance he has taken such pains
to illustrate, without some expression of contempt.
An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the malignity of the most
malignant satirist could scarcely cut deeper than his thoughtless loquacity.
Having himself no sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it for granted
that all others were equally callous. He was not ashamed to exhibit himself to
the whole world as a common spy, a common tattler, a humble companion without
the excuse of poverty, and to tell a hundred stories of his own pertness and
folly, and of the insults which his pertness and folly brought upon him. It was
natural that he should show little discretion in cases in which the feelings or
the honor of others might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such
stories respecting persons whom he professed to love and revere. He would
infallibly have made his hero as contemptible as he has made himself, had not
his hero really possessed some moral and intellectual qualities of a very high
order. The best proof that Johnson was really an extraordinary man is that his
character, instead of being degraded, has, on the whole, been decidedly raised
by a work in which all his vices and weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly
than they ever were exposed by Churchill or by Kenrick.
Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a
competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history.
Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his
St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which
too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for
fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his
trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring
up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his
contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute,
and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits
of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams,
the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the objects by
which we have been surrounded from childhood.
But we have no minute information respecting those years of Johnson's life
during which his character and his manners became immutably fixed. We know him,
not as he was known to the men of his own generation, but as he was known to men
whose father he might have been. That celebrated club of which he was the most
distinguished member contained few persons who could remember a time when his
fame was not fully established and his habits completely formed. He had made
himself a name in literature while Reynolds and the Wartons were still boys. He
was about twenty years older than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton, about
thirty years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton, and about forty years
older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and Windham. Boswell and Mrs.
Thrale, the two writers from whom we derive most of our knowledge respecting
him, never saw him till long after he was fifty years old, till most of his
great works had become classical, and till the pension bestowed on him by the
Crown had placed him above poverty. Of those eminent men who were his most
intimate associates towards the close of his life, the only one, as far as we
remember, who knew him during the first ten or twelve years of his residence in
the capital, was David Garrick; and it does not appear that, during those years,
David Garrick saw much of his fellow-townsman.
Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when the condition of a man of
letters was most miserable and degraded. It was a dark night between two sunny
days. The age of patronage had passed away. The age of general curiosity and
intelligence had not arrived. The number of readers is at present so great that
a popular author may subsist in comfort and opulence on the profits of his
works. In the reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First,
even such men as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have been able to live like
gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the deficiency of the natural
demand for literature was, at the close of the seventeenth and at the beginning
of the eighteenth century, more than made up by artificial encouragement, by a
vast system of bounties and premiums. There was, perhaps, never a time at which
the rewards of literary merit were so splendid, at which men who could write
well found such easy admittance into the most distinguished society, and to the
highest honors of the State. The chiefs of both the great parties into which the
kingdom was divided, patronized literature with emulous munificence. Congreve,
when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for his first comedy
with places which made him independent for life. Smith, though his Hippolytus
and Phaedra failed, would have been consoled with three hundred a year but for
his own folly. Rowe was not only Poet Laureate, but also land-surveyor of the
customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to the Prince of Wales, and
secretary of the Presentations to the Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to
the Commissions of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative Court
in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of the Board of Trade. Newton
was Master of the Mint. Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of high
dignity and importance. Gay, who commenced life as apprentice to a silk mercer,
became a secretary of legation at five-and-twenty. It was to a poem on the death
of Charles the Second, and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his
introduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his Auditorship of
the Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable prejudice of the queen, would
have been a bishop. Oxford, with his white staff in his hand, passed through the
crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that ingenious writer deserted the
Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of stamps and a member of Parliament. Arthur
Mainwaring was a commissioner of the customs, and auditor of the imprest.
Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison was Secretary of
State.
1 iv. 335.
2 v. 233.
3 Vol. iv. 323.
4 2 iii. 228.
5 iv. 377.
6 iv. 415.
7 ii. 461.
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