At the same time, ask yourself: Whether
such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein; whether
this was the true essence and moving principle of the pheno-
menon, or not rather its outward vesture, and the accidental
environment (and defacement) in which it came to light?
such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein; whether
this was the true essence and moving principle of the pheno-
menon, or not rather its outward vesture, and the accidental
environment (and defacement) in which it came to light?
Thomas Carlyle
C.
2
E. P. DUTTON & CO. INC.
286-302 FOURTH AVENUE
NEW YORK
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? ENGLISH & OTHER
CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 1
[1832]
Esop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much
aughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise! Yet
vhich of us, in his way, has not sometimes been guilty of the
ike? Nay, so foolish are men, they often, standing at ease
ind as spectators on the highway, will volunteer to exclaim
if the Fly (not being tempted to it, as he was) exactly to the
ame purport: What a dust thou dost raise! Smallest of
nortals, when mounted aloft by circumstances, come to
eem great; smallest of phenomena connected with them are
reated as important, and must be sedulously scanned, and
:ommented upon with loud emphasis.
That Mr. Croker should undertake to edit Boswell's Life
,f Johnson, was a praiseworthy but no miraculous procedure:
leither could the accomplishment of such undertaking be,
n an epoch like ours, anywise regarded as an event in
Jniversal History; the right or the wrong accomplishment
hereof was, in very truth, one of the most insignificant of
hings. However, it sat in a great environment, on the axle
>f a high, fast-rolling, parliamentary chariot; and all the
rorld has exclaimed over it, and the author of it: What a
lust thou dost raise! List to the Reviews, and " Organs of
'ublic Opinion," from the National Omnibus upwards:
riticisms, vituperative and laudatory, stream from their
housand throats of brass and of leather; here chanting
1 Fraser's Magazine, No. 28. --" The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D. ;
ncluding a Tour to the Hebrides. " By James Boswell, Esq. --A new
Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes, by John Wilson Croker,
-L. D. , F. R. S. 5 vols. London, 1831.
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? 2 Carlyle's Essays
Io-pmans; there grating harsh thunder or vehement shrew
mouse squeaklets; till the general ear is filled, and nigl
deafened. Boswell's Book had a noiseless birth, compared
with this Edition of Boswell's Book. On the other hand
consider with what degree of tumult Paradise Lost and tbj
Iliad were ushered in!
To swell such clamour, or prolong it beyond the time, seems
nowise our vocation here. At most, perhaps, we are bound
to inform simple readers, with all possible brevity, whal
manner of performance and Edition this is; especially,
whether, in our poor judgment, it is worth laying out thra
pounds sterling upon, yea or not. The whole business
belongs distinctly to the lower ranks of the trivial class.
Let us admit, then, with great readiness, that as Johnsoi
once said, and the Editor repeats, " all works which describi
manners require notes in sixty or seventy years, or less; ]
that, accordingly, a new Edition of Boswell was desirable,
and that Mr. Croker has given one. For this task he hai)
various qualifications: his own voluntary resolution to
it; his high place in society, unlocking all manner of archive!
to him; not less, perhaps, a certain anecdotico-biographii
turn of mind, natural or acquired; we mean, a love for tfy
minuter events of History, and talent for investigating these
Let us admit too, that he has been very diligent; seems q
have made inquiries perseveringly far and near; as well al
drawn freely from his own ample stores; and so tells us, ti
appearance quite accurately, much that he has not foun^
lying on the highways, but has had to seek and dig for
Numerous persons, chiefly of quality, rise to view in thes|
Notes; when and also where they came into this world,
received office or promotion, died and were buried (onlj
what they did, except digest, remaining often too mysterious
--is faithfully enough set down. Whereby all that thei
various and doubtless widely-scattered Tombstones couli
have taught us, is here presented, at once, in a bound Bool
Thus is an indubitable conquest, though a small one, gaino
over our great enemy, the all-destroyer Time; and as suol
shall have welcome.
Nay, let us say that the spirit of Diligence, exhibited
in this department, seems to attend the Editor honestl]
throughout: he keeps everywhere a watchful outlook on hi|
Text; reconciling the distant with the present, or at leas|
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? Boswcll's Life of Johnson 3
ndicating and regretting their irreconcilability; elucidating,
imoothing down; in all ways exercising, according to ability,
1 strict editorial superintendence. Any little Latin or even
Jreek phrase is rendered into English, in general with perfect
iccuracy; citations are verified, or else corrected. On all
lands, moreover, there is a certain spirit of Decency main-
ained and insisted on: if not good morals, yet good manners,
ire rigidly inculcated; if not Religion, and a devout Christian
leart, yet Orthodoxy, and a cleanly Shovel-hatted look,--
riiich, as compared with flat Nothing, is something very
onsiderable. Grant too, as no contemptible triumph of this
itter spirit, that though the Editor is known as a decided
'olitician and Party-man, he has carefully subdued all
emptations to transgress in that way: except by quite
^voluntary indications, and rather as it were the pervading
emper of the whole, you could not discover on which side
f the Political Warfare he is enlisted and fights. This, as
'e said, is a great triumph of the Decency-principle: for
his, and for these other graces and performances, let the
Iditor have all praise.
Herewith, however, must the praise unfortunately
;rminate. Diligence, Fidelity, Decency, are good and
idispensable: yet, without Faculty, without Light, they
ill not do the work. Along with that Tombstone-informa-
<m, perhaps even without much of it, we could have liked
> gain some answer, in one way or other, to this wide question:
/hat and how was English Life in Johnson's time; wherein
as ours grown to differ therefrom? In other words: What
lings have we to forget, what to fancy and remember, before
e, from such distance, can put ourselves in Johnson's place;
id so, in the full sense of the term, understand him, his
lyings and his doings? This was indeed specially the
roblem which a Commentator and Editor had to solve:
complete solution of it should have lain in him, his whole
ind should have been filled and prepared with perfect
sight into it; then, whether in the way of express Disserta-
on, of incidental Exposition and Indication, opportunities
iough would have occurred of bringing out the same:
hat was dark in the figure of the Past had thereby been
lightened; Boswell had, not in show and word only, but
1 very fact, been made new again, readable to us who are
ivided from him, even as he was to those close at hand. Of
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? 4 Carlyle's Essays
all which very little has been attempted here; accomplished
we should say, next to nothing, or altogether nothing.
Excuse, no doubt, is in readiness for such omission
and, indeed, for innumerable other failings;--as where, fo
example, the Editor will punctually explain what is ahead
sun-clear; and then anon, not without frankness, declai
frequently enough that " the Editor does not understand,
that " the Editor cannot guess,"--while, for most part, th
Reader cannot help both guessing and seeing. Thus,:
Johnson say, in one sentence, that "English names shoul
not be used in Latin verses;" and then, in the next sentenci
speak blamingly of " Carteret being used as a dactyl," wi
the generality of mortals detect any puzzle there? C
again, where poor Boswell writes: "I always remember
remark made to me by a Turkish lady, educated in Franc<
'Ma foi, monsieur, notre bonheur depend de la facon que nob
sang circule;'" -- though the Turkish lady here speal
English-French, where is the call for a Note like this: "M
Boswell no doubt fancied these words had some meaninj
or he would hardly have quoted them: but what that meai
ing is, the Editor cannot guess "? The Editor is clearly n
witch at a riddle. --For these and all kindred deficiencies tl
excuse, as we said, is at hand; but the fact of their existent
is not the less certain and regrettable.
Indeed it, from a very early stage of the business, becomi
afflictively apparent, how much the Editor, so well furnishe
with all external appliances and means, is from withi
unfurnished with means for forming to himself any ju
notion of Johnson, or of Johnson's Life; and therefore
speaking on that subject with much hope of edifying. Tc
lightly is it from the first taken for granted that Hungt
the great basis of our life, is also its apex and ultimate perfe
tion; that as "Neediness and Greediness and Vainglory
are the chief qualities of most men, so no man, not even
Johnson, acts or can think of acting on any other principl
Whatsoever, therefore, cannot be referred to the two form
categories (Need and Greed), is without scruple ranged und
the latter. It is here properly that our Editor becom
burdensome; and, to the weaker sort, even a nuisanc
"What good is it," will such cry, " when we had still son
faint shadow of belief that man was better than a selfii
Digesting-machine, what good is it to poke in, at every tur
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 5
nd explain how this and that which we thought noble in
Id Samuel, was vulgar, base; that for him too there was no
sality but in the Stomach; and except Pudding, and the
ner species of pudding which is named Praise, life had no
abulum? Why, for instance, when we know that Johnson
wed his good Wife, and says expressly that their marriage
? as' a love-match on both sides,'--should two closed lips
pen to tell us only this: 'Is it not possible that the obvious
dvantage of having a woman of experience to superintend
a establishment of this kind (the Edial School) may have
mtributed to a match so disproportionate in point of age?
-Ed. '? Or again when, in the Text, the honest cynic
leaks freely of his former poverty, and it is known that he
ace lived on fourpence-halfpenny a-day,--need a Com-
tentator advance, and comment thus: 'When we find
r. Johnson tell unpleasant truths to, or of, other men, let
; recollect that he does not appear to have spared himself,
1 occasions in which he might be forgiven for doing so'?
Tiy in short," continues the exasperated Reader, "should
otes of this species stand affronting me, when there might
lve been no Note at all? "--Gentle Reader, we answer,
e not wroth. What other could an honest Commentator
), than give thee the best he had? Such was the picture
id theorem he had fashioned for himself of the world and
: man's doings therein: take it, and draw wise inferences
om it. If there did exist a Leader of Public Opinion, and
lampion of Orthodoxy in the Church of Jesus of Nazareth,
ho reckoned that man's glory consisted in not being poor;
id that a Sage, and Prophet of his time, must needs blush
icause the world had paid him at that easy rate of four-
mce-halfpenny per diem--was not the fact of such existence
orth knowing, worth considering?
Of a much milder hue, yet to us practically of an all-defac-
g, and for the present enterprise quite ruinous character,--
another grand fundamental failing; the last we shall feel
irselves obliged to take the pain of specifying here. It is,
lat our Editor has fatally, and almost surprisingly, mis-
ken the limits of an Editor's function; and so, instead of
orking on the margin with his Pen, to elucidate as best
ight be, strikes boldly into the body of the page with his
:issors, and there clips at discretion! Four Books Mr. C.
id by him, wherefrom to gather light for the fifth, which
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? 6 Carlyle's Essays
was Boswell's. What does he do but now, in the placides
manner,--slit the whole five into slips, and sew these togethe
into a sextum quid, exactly at his own convenience; givin
Boswell the credit of the whole! By what art-magic, 01
readers ask, has he united them? By the simplest of al
by Brackets. Never before was the full virtue of the Bracki
made manifest. You begin a sentence under Boswell
guidance, thinking to be carried happily through it by tl
same: but no; in the middle, perhaps after your semicolo:
and some consequent" for,"--starts up one of these Bracke
ligatures, and stitches you in from half a page to twenty i
thirty pages of a Hawkins, Tyers, Murphy, Piozzi; so th
often one must make the old sad reflection, Where we are, i
know; whither we are going, no man knoweth! It is tru
said also, There is much between the cup and the lip; b
here the case is still sadder: for not till after considerate
can you ascertain, now when the cup is at the lip, what liqu
it is you are imbibing; whether Boswell's French wi
which you began with, or some Piozzi's ginger-beer,
Hawkins's entire, or perhaps some other great Brewe
penny-swipes or even alegar, which has been surreptitious
substituted instead thereof. A situation almost origini
not to be tried a second time! But, in fine, what ideas 1
Croker entertains of a literary whole and the thing call
Book, and how the very Printer's Devils did not rise
mutiny against such a conglomeration as this, and refuse
print it,--may remain a problem.
And now happily our say is said. All faults, the Morali
tell us, are properly shortcomings; crimes themselves i
nothing other than a not doing enough; a fighting, but w
defective vigour. How much more a mere insufficien
and this after good efforts, in handicraft practice! ]
Croker says: "The worst that can happen is that all
present Editor has contributed may, if the reader so pleas
be rejected as surplusage. " It is our pleasant duty to fc
with hearty welcome what he has given; and render thai
even for what he meant to give. Next and finally, it is ,
painful duty to declare, aloud if that be necessary, that
gift, as weighed against the hard money which the Bo
sellers demand for giving it you, is (in our judgment) v
greatly the lighter. No portion, accordingly, of our sn
floating capital has been embarked in the business, or sl
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson
7
sver be; indeed, were we in the market for such a thing, there
is simply no Edition of Boswell to which this last would seem
ferable. And now enough, and more than enough!
We have next a word to say of James Boswell. Boswell
las already been much commented upon; but rather in the
way of censure and vituperation than of true recognition.
He was a man that brought himself much before the world;
:onfessed that he eagerly coveted fame, or if that were not
Dossible, notoriety; of which latter as he gained far more
han seemed his due, the public were incited, not only by
heir natural love of scandal, but by a special ground of envy,
o say whatever ill of him could be said. Out of the fifteen
nillions that then lived, and had bed and board, in the
British Islands, this man has provided us a greater pleasure
han any other individual, at whose cost we now enjoy
mrselves; perhaps has done us a greater service than can be
pecially attributed to more than two or three: yet, ungrate-
ul that we are,, no written or spoken eulogy of James Boswell
nywhere exists; his recompense in solid pudding (so far
s copyright went) was not excessive; and as for the empty
raise, it has altogether been denied him. Men are unwiser
han children; they do not know the hand that feeds them.
Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open
o the general eye; visible, palpable to the dullest. His
pod qualities, again, belonged not to the Time he lived in;
rere far from common then; indeed, in such a degree, were
lmost unexampled; not recognisable therefore by every
ne; nay, apt even (so strange had they grown) to be con-
yunded with the very vices they lay contiguous to, and had
prung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and gross liver;
hittonously fond of whatever would yield him a little solace-
lent, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable
nough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much
f the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously
Diced too with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that
e gloried much when the Tailor, by a court-suit, had made
new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakspeare
tibilee with a riband, imprinted "Corsica Boswell,"
>>und his hat; and in short, if you will, lived no day of his
fe without doing and saying more than one pretentious
? eptitude: all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon.
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? 8 Carlyle's Essays
The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much
In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weake
fellow-creatures, partly to snuff-up the smell of comin|
pleasure, and scent it from afar; in those bag-cheeks, hang
ing like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more; i
that coarsely-protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dewlappe
chin; in all this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, boil
terous imbecility enough; much that could not have bee
ornamental in the temper of a great man's overfed grei
man (what the Scotch name flunky), though it had bee
more natural there? The under part of Boswell's face is of
low, almost brutish character.
Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great and genuii
good lay in him was nowise so self-evident. That Bosw<
was a hunter after spiritual Notabilities, that he loved sue
and longed, and even crept and crawled to be near then
that he first (in old Touchwood Auchinleck's phraseolog
"took on with Paoli;" and then being off with " the Con
can landlouper," took on with a schoolmaster, "ane th
keeped a schule, and ca'd it an academy:" that he' did i
this, and could not help doing it, we account a very singul
merit. The man, once for all, had an "open sense,":
open loving heart, which so few have: where Excelled
existed, he was compelled to acknowledge it; was drai
towards it, and (let the old sulphur-brand of a Laird s
what he liked) could not but walk with it,--if not as superi
if not as equal, then as inferior and lackey, better so than r
at all. If we reflect now that his love of Excellence had r
only such an evil nature to triumph over; but also what
education and social position withstood it and weighed
down, its innate strength, victorious over all these thin
may astonish us. Consider what an inward impulse th
must have been, how many mountains of impediment hur
aside, before the Scottish Laird could, as humble serva
embrace the knees (the bosom was not permitted him) of
English Dominie! Your Scottish Laird, says an Engi
naturalist of these days, may be defined as the hungr
and vainest of all bipeds yet known. Boswell too wa
Tory; of quite peculiarly feudal, genealogical, pragmat
temper; had been nurtured in an atmosphere of Herak
at the feet of a very Gamaliel in that kind; within t
walls, adorned only with pedigrees, amid serving-men
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 9
threadbare livery; all things teaching him, from birth up-
wards, to remember that a Laird was a Laird. Perhaps
there was a special vanity in his very blood: old Auchinleck
had, if not the gay, tail-spreading, peacock vanity of his
son, no little of the slow-stalking, contentious, hissing vanity
of the gander; a still more fatal species. Scottish Advocates
will yet tell you how the ancient man, having chanced to be
the first sheriff appointed (after the abolition of " hereditary
jurisdictions ") by royal authority, was wont, in dull-snuffing
pompous tone, to preface many a deliverance from the bench
iwith these words: "I, the first King's Sheriff in Scotland. "
And now behold the worthy Bozzy, so prepossessed and
held back by nature and by art, fly nevertheless like iron to
its magnet, whither his better genius called! You may
surround the iron and the magnet with what enclosures and
encumbrances you please,--with wood, with rubbish, with
brass: it matters not, the two feel each other, they struggle
restlessly towards each other, they will be together. The
iron may be a Scottish squirelet, full of gulosity and "gig-
manity;"1 the magnet an English plebeian, and moving
rag-and-dust mountain, coarse, proud, irascible, imperious:
nevertheless, behold how they embrace, and inseparably
cleave to one another! It is one of the strangest phenomena
of the past century, that at a time when the old reverent feeling
of Discipleship (such as brought men from far countries, with
rich gifts, and prostrate soul, to the feet of the Prophets)
had passed utterly away from men's practical experience,
and was no longer surmised to exist (as it does), perennial,
indestructible, in man's inmost heart, -- James Boswell
should have been the individual, of all others, predestined to
recall it, in such singular guise, to the wondering, and, for a
long while, laughing and unrecognising world. It has been
commonly said, The man's vulgar vanity was all that at-
tached him to Johnson; he delighted to be seen near him,
to be thought connected with him. Now let it be at once
rranted that no consideration springing out of vulgar vanity
(ould well be absent from the mind of James Boswell, in this
his intercourse with Johnson, or in any considerable trans-
I
1" Q. What do you mean by ' respectable ' ? --A. He always kept
t gig. " (ThurttU's Trial. )--" Thus," it has been said, " does society
uturally divide itself into four classes: Noblemen, Gentlemen, Gig-
nen and Men. "
II 704 B
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? io Carlyle's Essays
action of his life.
At the same time, ask yourself: Whether
such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein; whether
this was the true essence and moving principle of the pheno-
menon, or not rather its outward vesture, and the accidental
environment (and defacement) in which it came to light?
The man was, by nature and habit, vain; a sycophant-
coxcomb, be it granted: but had there been nothing more
than vanity in him, was Samuel Johnson the man of men tc
whom he must attach himself? At the date when Johnsor
was a poor rusty-coated " scholar," dwelling in Temple-lane
and indeed throughout their whole intercourse afterwards
were there not chancellors and prime ministers enough
graceful gentlemen, the glass of fashion; honour - giving
noblemen; dinner-giving rich men; renowned fire-eaters
swordsmen, gownsmen; Quacks and Realities of all hues,--
any one of whom bulked much larger in the world's eye thar
Johnson ever did? To any one of whom, by half that sub
missiveness and assiduity, our Bozzy might have recom
mended himself; and sat there, the envy of surroundin;
lickspittles; pocketing now solid emolument, swallowinj
now well-cooked viands and wines of rich vintage; in eacl
case, also, shone-on by some glittering reflex of Renown o
Notoriety, so as to be the observed of innumerable observers
To no one of whom, however, though otherwise a mos
diligent solicitor and purveyor, did he so attach himself
such vulgar courtierships were his paid drudgery, or leisur
amusement; the worship of Johnson was his grand, ideal
voluntary business. Does not the frothy - hearted, ye
enthusiastic man, doffing his Advocate's-wig, regularly tak
post, and hurry up to London, for the sake of his Sage chiefly
as to a Feast of Tabernacles, the Sabbath of his whole year
The plate-licker and wine-bibber dives into Bolt Court, t
sip muddy coffee with a cynical old man, and a sour-tempere
blind old woman (feeling the cups, whether they are full, wit
her finger); and patiently endures contradictions withou
end; too happy so he may but be allowed to listen and liv<
Nay, it does not appear that vulgar vanity could ever hav
been much flattered by Boswell's relation to Johnson. M:
Croker says, Johnson was, to the last, little regarded by th
great world; from which, for a vulgar vanity, all honour, a
from its fountain, descends. Bozzy, even among Johnsorv
friends and special admirers, seems rather to have bee
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 11
laughed at than envied: his officious, whisking, consequential
ways, the daily reproofs and rebuffs he underwent, could gain
from the world no golden but only leaden opinions. His
devout Discipleship seemed nothing more than a mean
Spanielship, in the general eye. His mighty "constellation,"
or sun, round whom he, as satellite, observantly gyrated, was,
for the mass of men, but a huge ill-snuffed tallow-light, and
he a weak night-moth, circling foolishly, dangerously about
it, not knowing what he wanted. If he enjoyed Highland
dinners and toasts, as henchman to a new sort of chieftain,
Henry Erskine, in the domestic " Outer-House," could hand
him a shilling "for the sight of his Bear. " Doubtless the
man was laughed at, and often heard himself laughed at for
his Johnsonism. To be envied is the grand and sole aim of
vulgar vanity; to be filled with good things is that of sensu-
ality: for Johnson perhaps no man living envied poor Bozzy;
and of good things (except himself paid for them) there was
no vestige in that acquaintanceship. Had nothing other
or better than vanity and sensuality been there, Johnson
and Boswell had never come together, or had soon and
finally separated again.
In fact, the so copious terrestrial dross that welters chaotic-
ally, as the outer sphere of this man's character, does but
render for us more remarkable, more touching, the celestial
spark of goodness, of light, and Reverence for Wisdom, which
dwelt in the interior, and could struggle through such encum-
brances, and in some degree illuminate and beautify them.
There is much lying yet undeveloped in the love of Boswell
for Johnson. A cheering proof, in a time which else utterly
wanted and still wants such, that living Wisdom is quite
infinitely precious to man, is the symbol of the Godlike to
him, which even weak eyes may discern; that Loyalty,
Discipleship, all that was ever meant by Hero-worship, lives
perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in these
dead days, only for occasions to unfold it, and inspire all
men with it, and again make the world alive! James Boswell
we can regard as a practical witness, or real martyr, to this
high everlasting truth. A wonderful martyr, if you will;
and in a time which made such martyrdom doubly wonderful:
yet the time and its martyr perhaps suited each other. For
i decrepit, death-sick Era, when Cant had first decisively
her poison-breathing lips to proclaim that God-
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? 12 Carlyle's Essays
worship and Mammon-worship were one and the same, tha
Life was a Lie, and the Earth Beelzebub's, which the Supreme
Quack should inherit; and so all things were fallen into tb
yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome corruption: fo
such an Era, perhaps no better Prophet than a parti-colourei
Zany-Prophet, concealing, from himself and others, hi
prophetic significance in such unexpected vestures,--wa
deserved, or would have been in place. A precious medicin
lay hidden in floods of coarsest, most composite treacle
the world swallowed the treacle, for it suited the world'
palate; and now, after half a century, may the medicin
also begin to show itself! James Boswell belonged, in hi
corruptible part, to the lowest classes of mankind; a foolish
inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit
but in his corruptible there dwelt an incorruptible, all th
more impressive and indubitable for the strange lodging i
had taken.
Consider too, with what force, diligence and vivacity h
has rendered back all this which, in Johnson's neighbourhood
his " open sense " had so eagerly and freely taken in. Tha
loose-flowing, careless-looking Work of his is as a picture b;
one of Nature's own Artists; the best possible resemblance o
a Reality; like the very image thereof in a clear mirroi
Which indeed it was: let but the mirror be clear, this is th
great point; the picture must and will be genuine. Hoi
the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love, and the recog
nition and vision which love can lend, epitomises nightly th
words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and sc
by little and little, unconsciously works together for us
whole Johnsoniad; a more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit
speaking likeness than for many centuries had been draw
by man of man! Scarcely since the days of Homer has th
feat been equalled; indeed, in many senses, this also is
kind of Heroic Poem. The fit Odyssey of our unheroic ag
was to be written, not sung; of a Thinker, not of a Fighter
and (for want of a Homer) by the first open soul that migb
offer,--looked such even through the organs of a Boswel
We do the man's intellectual endowment great wrong,
we measure it by its mere logical outcome; though here toe
there is not wanting a light ingenuity, a figurativeness an,
fanciful sport, with glimpses of insight far deeper than tb
common. But BoswelPs grand intellectual talent was, a
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 13
such ever is, an unconscious one, of far higher reach and
significance than Logic; and showed itself in the whole, not
in parts. Here again we have that old saying verified,
"Tie heart sees farther than the head. "
Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an ill-assorted,
glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest. What, indeed,
is man's life generally but a kind of beast-godhood; the god
in us triumphing more and more over the beast; striving
more and more to subdue it under his feet? Did not the
Ancients, in their wise, perennially-significant way, figure
Nature itself, their sacred All, or Pan, as a portentous
commingling of these two discords; as musical, humane,
oracular in its upper part, yet ending below in the cloven
hairy feet of a goat? The union of melodious, celestial
Freewill and Reason with foul Irrationality and Lust; in
which, nevertheless, dwelt a mysterious unspeakable Fear
and half-mad panic Awe; as for mortals there well might!
And is not man a microcosm, or epitomised mirror of that
same Universe; or rather, is not that Universe even Him-
self, the reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, "the
waste fantasy of his own dream "? No wonder that man,
that each man, and James Boswell like the others, should
resemble it! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual
defect of amalgamation and subordination: the highest lay
side by side with the lowest; not morally combined with it
and spiritually transfiguring it, but tumbling in half-mechani-
cal juxtaposition with it, and from time to time, as the mad
tfternation chanced, irradiating it, or eclipsed by it.
The world, as we said, has been but unjust to him; dis-
:erning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass;
without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret;
md thus figuring him nowise as a god Pan, but simply of
the bestial species, like the cattle on a thousand hills. Nay,
sometimes a strange enough hypothesis has been started of
lim; as if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities
:hat he did his good work; as if it were the very fact of his
being among the worst men in this world that had enabled
bin to write one of the best books therein! Falser hypothesis,
we may venture to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by
its nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enabled
us to do anything is by its very nature good. Alas, that there
should be teachers in Israel, or even learners, to whom this
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? 14 Carlyle's Essays
world-ancient fact is still problematical or even deniable!
Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an
eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth:
because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his
Love and childlike Open-mindedness. His sneaking syco-
phancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was
bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his Book
which still disturb us in its clearness; wholly hindrances
not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was nol
Sycophancy, which is the lowest, but Reverence, which is th<
highest of human feelings. None but a reverent man (whid
so unspeakably few are) could have found his way fron
Boswell's environment to Johnson's: if such worship foi
real God-made superiors showed itself also as worship foi
apparent Tailor-made superiors, even as hollow interestec
mouth-worship for such,--the case, in this composite humai
nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the pity
But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last articli
of Faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge wortl
the name: That neither James Boswell's good Book, nor arc
other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is or cai
be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always
and solely in spite thereof.
As for the Book itself, questionless the universal favoui
entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book -wt
have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteentl
century: all Johnson's own Writings, laborious and in then
kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it
already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this genera
tion; and for some future generation may be valuabi
chiefly as Prolegomena and expository Scholia to thi
Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which of us remembers, as one o!
the sunny spots of his existence, the day when he openet
these airy volumes, fascinating him by a true natural magic
It was as if the curtains of the past were drawn aside, ant
we looked mysteriously into a kindred country, where dwell
our Fathers; inexpressibly dear to us, but which had seemd
forever hidden from our eyes. For the dead Night hat
engulfed it; all was gone, vanished as if it had not been
Nevertheless, wondrously given back to us, there once mon
it lay; all bright, lucid, blooming; a little island of Creatior
amid the circumambient Void. There it still lies; like a
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 1$
thing stationary, imperishable, over which changeful Time
were now accumulating itself in vain, and could not, any
longer, harm it, or hide it.
If we examine by what charm it is that men are still held
to this Life of Johnson, now when so much else has been for-
gotten, the main part of the answer will perhaps be found in
that speculation " on the import of Reality," communicated
to the world, last month, in this Magazine. The Johnsoniad
of Boswell turns on objects that in very deed existed; it is
all true. So far other in melodiousness of tone, it vies with the
Odyssey, or surpasses it, in this one point: to us these read
pages, as those chanted hexameters were to the first Greek
hearers, are, in the fullest deepest sense, wholly credible.
All the wit and wisdom lying embalmed in Boswell's Book,
plenteous as these are, could not have saved it. Far more
scientific instruction (mere excitement and enlightenment of
the thinking power) can be found in twenty other works of that
time, which make but a quite secondary impression on us.
The other works of that time, however, fall under one of two
classes: Either they are professedly Didactic; and, in that
way, mere Abstractions, Philosophic Diagrams, incapable of
interesting us much otherwise than as Euclid's Elements may
do: Or else, with all their vivacity, and pictorial richness
of colour, they are Fictions and not Realities. Deep truly,
as Herr Sauerteig urges, is the force of this consideration:
the thing here stated is a fact; those figures, that local
habitation, are not shadow but substance. In virtue of such
advantages, see how a very Boswell may become Poetical!
Critics insist much on the Poet that he should communicate
an " Infinitude" to his delineation; that by intensity of
conception, by that gift of "transcendental Thought,"
which is fitly named genius, and inspiration, he should inform
the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance; or as they
sometimes say, ennoble the Actual into Idealness. They
are right in their precept; they mean rightly. But in cases
like this of the Johnsoniad, such is the dark grandeur of that
"Time element," wherein man's soul here below lives im-
prisoned,--the Poet's task is, as it were, done to his hand:
Time itself, which is the outer veil of Eternity, invests, of its
own accord, with an authentic, felt " infinitude " whatsoever
it has once embraced in its mysterious folds. Consider all
that lies in that one word Past I What a pathetic, sacred,
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? 16 Carlyle's Essays
in every sense poetic, meaning is implied in it; a meaning
growing ever the clearer, the farther we recede in Time--
the more of that same Past we have to look through! --On
which ground indeed must Sauerteig have built, and not
without plausibility, in that strange thesis of his: "That
History, after all, is the true Poetry; that Reality, if rightly
interpreted, is grander than Fiction; nay that even in the
right interpretation of Reality and History does genuine
Thus for Boswell's Life of Johnson has Time done, is Time
still doing, what no ornament of Art or Artifice could have
done for it. Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were,
and are not. Their Life and whole personal Environment has
melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street:
but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving,
cocked-hatted, pot-bellied Landlord; its rosy-faced assiduous
Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well-
filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand-
boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone! Gone! The
becking Waiter who, with wreathed smiles, was wont tc
spread for Samuel and Bozzy their supper of the gods, has
long since pocketed his last sixpence; and vanished, six-
pences and all, like a ghost at cock-crowing. The Bottles
they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all
rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with
have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and
mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all has vanished;
in every deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's
air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls
remain there: of London, of England, of the World, nothing
but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were the)
of adamant), only slower. The mysterious River of Exist-
ence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes
wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the forma
Billow with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it? --Where! --
Now this Book of Boswell's, this is precisely a revocation o!
the edict of Destiny; so that Time shall not utterly, not s<<
soon by several centuries, have dominion over us. A little
row of Naphtha-lamps, with its line of Naphtha-light, bum!
clear and holy through the dead Night of the Past: they whe
are gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed,
though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that little
Poetry consists
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 17
miraculously lamplit Pathway; shedding its feebler and
feebler twilight into the boundless dark Oblivion,--for all
that our Johnson touched has become illuminated for us: on
which miraculous little Pathway we can still travel, and see
wonders.
It is not speaking with exaggeration, but with strict
measured sobriety, to say that this Book of Boswell's will give
us more real insight into the History of England during those
days than twenty other Books, falsely entitled " Histories,"
which take to themselves that special aim. What good is it
to me though innumerable Smolletts and Belshams keep
dinning in my ears that a man named George the Third was
born and bred up, and a man named George the Second died;
that Walpole, and the Pelhams, and Chatham, and Rocking-
ham, and Shelburne, and North, with their Coalition or then-
Separation Ministries, all ousted one another; and vehemently
scrambled for " the thing they called the Rudder of Govern-
ment, but which was in reality the Spigot of Taxation "?
That debates were held, and infinite jarring and jargoning
took place; and road-bills and enclosure-bills, and game-
bills and India-bills, and Laws which no man can number,
which happily few men needed to trouble their heads with
beyond the passing moment, were enacted, and printed by
the King's Stationer? That he who sat in Chancery, and
rayed-out speculation from the Woolsack, was now a man
that squinted, now a man that did not squint? To the
hungry and thirsty mind all this avails next to nothing.
These men and these things, we indeed know, did swim, by
strength or by specific levity, as apples or as horse-dung, on
the top of the current: but is it by painfully noting the
courses, eddyings and bobbings hither and thither of such
drift-articles, that you will unfold to me the nature of the
current itself; of that mighty-rolling, loud-roaring Life-
current, bottomless as the foundations of the Universe,
mysterious as its Author? The thing I want to see is not
Redbook Lists, and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary
Registers, but the Life of Man in England: what men did,
thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit,
of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its
inward principle; how and what it was; whence it proceeded,
whither it was tending.
Mournful, in truth, is it to behold what the business called
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? 18 Carlyle's Essays
"History," in these so enlightened and illuminated timt
still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till yoi
eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that gre
question: How men lived and had their being; were it bi
economically, as, what wages they got, and what they boug]
with these? Unhappily you cannot. History will throw i
light on any such matter. At the point where living memoi
fails, it is all darkness; Mr. Senior and Mr. Sadler must st
debate this simplest of all elements in the condition of tl
Past: Whether men were better off, in their mere larders an
pantries, or were worse off than now! History, as it stani
all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructs
than the wooden volumes of a Backgammon-board. ~Ho
my Prime Minister was appointed is of less moment to n
than How my House Servant was hired. In these days, te
ordinary Histories of Kings and Courtiers were well exchange
against the tenth part of one good History of Booksellers.
For example, I would fain know the History of Scotlanc
who can tell it me? "Robertson," say innumerable voice
"Robertson against the world. " I open Robertson; an
find there, through long ages too confused for narrative, an
fit only to be presented in the way of epitome and distille
essence, a cunning answer and hypothesis, not to thisquestior
By whom, and by what means, when and how, was this fa
broad Scotland, with its Arts and Manufactures, Temple:
Schools, Institutions, Poetry, Spirit, National Characte
created, and made arable, verdant, peculiar, great, here as
can see some fair section of it lying, kind and strong (lik
some Bacchus-tamed Lion), from the Castle-hill of Edinburgh
--but to this other question: How did the King keep hin
self alive in those old days; and restrain so many Butchei
Barons and ravenous Henchmen from utterly extirpating on
another, so that killing went on in some sort of moderation
In the one little Letter of ^Eneas Sylvius, from old Scotlanc
there is more of History than in all this. --At length, howeve
we come to a luminous age, interesting enough; to the age c
the Reformation. All Scotland is awakened to a second hight
life: the Spirit of the Highest stirs in every bosom, agitate
every bosom; Scotland is convulsed, fermenting, struggling t
body itself forth anew. To the herdsman, among his cattle i
remote woods; to the craftsman, in his rude, heath-thatche
workshop, among his rude guild-brethren; to the great and t
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 19
he little, a new light has arisen: in town and hamlet groups
ire gathered, with eloquent looks, and governed or ungovern-
tble tongues; the great and the little go forth together to do
attle for the Lord against the mighty. We ask, with breath-
ess eagerness: How was it; how went it on? Letusunder-
tand it, let us see it, and know it! --In reply, is handed us a
eally graceful and most dainty little Scandalous Chronicle
as for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons: Mary Stuart,
1 Beauty, but over lightheaded; and Henry Darnley, a
3ooby who had fine legs. How these first courted, billed and
ooed, according to nature; then pouted, fretted, grew utterly
nraged, and blew one another up with gunpowder: this, and
tot the History of Scotland, is what we good-naturedly read,
fay, by other hands, something like a horse-load of other
3ooks have been written to prove that it was the Beauty who
Jew up the Booby, and that it was not she. Who or what
t was, the thing once for all being so effectually done, concerns
is little. To know Scotland, at that great epoch, were a
uable increase of knowledge: to know poor Darnley, and
him with burning candle, from centre to skin, were no
ncrease of knowledge at all. --Thus is History written.
Hence, indeed, comes it that History, which should be
'the essence of innumerable Biographies," will tell us, ques-
ion it as we like, less than one genuine Biography may do,
)leasantly and of its own accord! The time is approaching
vhen History will be attempted on quite other principles;
vhen the Court, the Senate and the Battlefield, receding more
ind more into the background, the Temple, the Workshop
Lnd Social Hearth will advance more and more into the fore-
;round; and History will not content itself with shaping
ome answer to that question: How were men taxed and kept
wet then? but will seek to answer this other infinitely wider
ind higher question: How and what were men then? Not
iut Government only, or the "House wherein our life was
ed," but the Life itself we led there, will be inquired into.
)f which latter it may be found that Government, in any
nodern sense of the word, is after all but a secondary con-
dition: in the mere sense of Taxation and Keeping quiet, a
small, almost a pitiful one. --Meanwhile let us welcome such
Boswells, each in his degree, as bring us any genuine contribu-
tion, were it never so inadequate, so inconsiderable.
An exception was early taken against this Life of Johnson,
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? 20 Carlyle's Essays
and all similar enterprises, which we here recommend; ant
has been transmitted from critic to critic, and repeated in
their several dialects, uninterruptedly, ever since: That sud
jottings-down of careless conversation are an infringement o:
social privacy; a crime against our highest Freedom, thi
Freedom of man's intercourse with man. To this accusa
tion, which we have read and heard oftener than enough
might it not be well for once to offer the flattest contradictior
and plea of Not at all guilty? Not that conversation is notec
down, but that conversation should not deserve noting down
is the evil. Doubtless, if conversation be falsely recorded
then is it simply a Lie; and worthy of being swept, with al
despatch, to the Father of Lies. But if, on the other hand
conversation can be authentically recorded, and any one i;
ready for the task, let him by all means proceed with it; lei
conversation be kept in remembrance to the latest datf
possible. Nay, should the consciousness that a man may b<
among us " taking notes " tend, in any measure, to restrict
those floods of idle insincere speech, with which the though
of mankind is wellnigh drowned,--were it other than th<
most indubitable benefit?
E. P. DUTTON & CO. INC.
286-302 FOURTH AVENUE
NEW YORK
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? ENGLISH & OTHER
CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 1
[1832]
Esop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much
aughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise! Yet
vhich of us, in his way, has not sometimes been guilty of the
ike? Nay, so foolish are men, they often, standing at ease
ind as spectators on the highway, will volunteer to exclaim
if the Fly (not being tempted to it, as he was) exactly to the
ame purport: What a dust thou dost raise! Smallest of
nortals, when mounted aloft by circumstances, come to
eem great; smallest of phenomena connected with them are
reated as important, and must be sedulously scanned, and
:ommented upon with loud emphasis.
That Mr. Croker should undertake to edit Boswell's Life
,f Johnson, was a praiseworthy but no miraculous procedure:
leither could the accomplishment of such undertaking be,
n an epoch like ours, anywise regarded as an event in
Jniversal History; the right or the wrong accomplishment
hereof was, in very truth, one of the most insignificant of
hings. However, it sat in a great environment, on the axle
>f a high, fast-rolling, parliamentary chariot; and all the
rorld has exclaimed over it, and the author of it: What a
lust thou dost raise! List to the Reviews, and " Organs of
'ublic Opinion," from the National Omnibus upwards:
riticisms, vituperative and laudatory, stream from their
housand throats of brass and of leather; here chanting
1 Fraser's Magazine, No. 28. --" The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D. ;
ncluding a Tour to the Hebrides. " By James Boswell, Esq. --A new
Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes, by John Wilson Croker,
-L. D. , F. R. S. 5 vols. London, 1831.
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? 2 Carlyle's Essays
Io-pmans; there grating harsh thunder or vehement shrew
mouse squeaklets; till the general ear is filled, and nigl
deafened. Boswell's Book had a noiseless birth, compared
with this Edition of Boswell's Book. On the other hand
consider with what degree of tumult Paradise Lost and tbj
Iliad were ushered in!
To swell such clamour, or prolong it beyond the time, seems
nowise our vocation here. At most, perhaps, we are bound
to inform simple readers, with all possible brevity, whal
manner of performance and Edition this is; especially,
whether, in our poor judgment, it is worth laying out thra
pounds sterling upon, yea or not. The whole business
belongs distinctly to the lower ranks of the trivial class.
Let us admit, then, with great readiness, that as Johnsoi
once said, and the Editor repeats, " all works which describi
manners require notes in sixty or seventy years, or less; ]
that, accordingly, a new Edition of Boswell was desirable,
and that Mr. Croker has given one. For this task he hai)
various qualifications: his own voluntary resolution to
it; his high place in society, unlocking all manner of archive!
to him; not less, perhaps, a certain anecdotico-biographii
turn of mind, natural or acquired; we mean, a love for tfy
minuter events of History, and talent for investigating these
Let us admit too, that he has been very diligent; seems q
have made inquiries perseveringly far and near; as well al
drawn freely from his own ample stores; and so tells us, ti
appearance quite accurately, much that he has not foun^
lying on the highways, but has had to seek and dig for
Numerous persons, chiefly of quality, rise to view in thes|
Notes; when and also where they came into this world,
received office or promotion, died and were buried (onlj
what they did, except digest, remaining often too mysterious
--is faithfully enough set down. Whereby all that thei
various and doubtless widely-scattered Tombstones couli
have taught us, is here presented, at once, in a bound Bool
Thus is an indubitable conquest, though a small one, gaino
over our great enemy, the all-destroyer Time; and as suol
shall have welcome.
Nay, let us say that the spirit of Diligence, exhibited
in this department, seems to attend the Editor honestl]
throughout: he keeps everywhere a watchful outlook on hi|
Text; reconciling the distant with the present, or at leas|
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? Boswcll's Life of Johnson 3
ndicating and regretting their irreconcilability; elucidating,
imoothing down; in all ways exercising, according to ability,
1 strict editorial superintendence. Any little Latin or even
Jreek phrase is rendered into English, in general with perfect
iccuracy; citations are verified, or else corrected. On all
lands, moreover, there is a certain spirit of Decency main-
ained and insisted on: if not good morals, yet good manners,
ire rigidly inculcated; if not Religion, and a devout Christian
leart, yet Orthodoxy, and a cleanly Shovel-hatted look,--
riiich, as compared with flat Nothing, is something very
onsiderable. Grant too, as no contemptible triumph of this
itter spirit, that though the Editor is known as a decided
'olitician and Party-man, he has carefully subdued all
emptations to transgress in that way: except by quite
^voluntary indications, and rather as it were the pervading
emper of the whole, you could not discover on which side
f the Political Warfare he is enlisted and fights. This, as
'e said, is a great triumph of the Decency-principle: for
his, and for these other graces and performances, let the
Iditor have all praise.
Herewith, however, must the praise unfortunately
;rminate. Diligence, Fidelity, Decency, are good and
idispensable: yet, without Faculty, without Light, they
ill not do the work. Along with that Tombstone-informa-
<m, perhaps even without much of it, we could have liked
> gain some answer, in one way or other, to this wide question:
/hat and how was English Life in Johnson's time; wherein
as ours grown to differ therefrom? In other words: What
lings have we to forget, what to fancy and remember, before
e, from such distance, can put ourselves in Johnson's place;
id so, in the full sense of the term, understand him, his
lyings and his doings? This was indeed specially the
roblem which a Commentator and Editor had to solve:
complete solution of it should have lain in him, his whole
ind should have been filled and prepared with perfect
sight into it; then, whether in the way of express Disserta-
on, of incidental Exposition and Indication, opportunities
iough would have occurred of bringing out the same:
hat was dark in the figure of the Past had thereby been
lightened; Boswell had, not in show and word only, but
1 very fact, been made new again, readable to us who are
ivided from him, even as he was to those close at hand. Of
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? 4 Carlyle's Essays
all which very little has been attempted here; accomplished
we should say, next to nothing, or altogether nothing.
Excuse, no doubt, is in readiness for such omission
and, indeed, for innumerable other failings;--as where, fo
example, the Editor will punctually explain what is ahead
sun-clear; and then anon, not without frankness, declai
frequently enough that " the Editor does not understand,
that " the Editor cannot guess,"--while, for most part, th
Reader cannot help both guessing and seeing. Thus,:
Johnson say, in one sentence, that "English names shoul
not be used in Latin verses;" and then, in the next sentenci
speak blamingly of " Carteret being used as a dactyl," wi
the generality of mortals detect any puzzle there? C
again, where poor Boswell writes: "I always remember
remark made to me by a Turkish lady, educated in Franc<
'Ma foi, monsieur, notre bonheur depend de la facon que nob
sang circule;'" -- though the Turkish lady here speal
English-French, where is the call for a Note like this: "M
Boswell no doubt fancied these words had some meaninj
or he would hardly have quoted them: but what that meai
ing is, the Editor cannot guess "? The Editor is clearly n
witch at a riddle. --For these and all kindred deficiencies tl
excuse, as we said, is at hand; but the fact of their existent
is not the less certain and regrettable.
Indeed it, from a very early stage of the business, becomi
afflictively apparent, how much the Editor, so well furnishe
with all external appliances and means, is from withi
unfurnished with means for forming to himself any ju
notion of Johnson, or of Johnson's Life; and therefore
speaking on that subject with much hope of edifying. Tc
lightly is it from the first taken for granted that Hungt
the great basis of our life, is also its apex and ultimate perfe
tion; that as "Neediness and Greediness and Vainglory
are the chief qualities of most men, so no man, not even
Johnson, acts or can think of acting on any other principl
Whatsoever, therefore, cannot be referred to the two form
categories (Need and Greed), is without scruple ranged und
the latter. It is here properly that our Editor becom
burdensome; and, to the weaker sort, even a nuisanc
"What good is it," will such cry, " when we had still son
faint shadow of belief that man was better than a selfii
Digesting-machine, what good is it to poke in, at every tur
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 5
nd explain how this and that which we thought noble in
Id Samuel, was vulgar, base; that for him too there was no
sality but in the Stomach; and except Pudding, and the
ner species of pudding which is named Praise, life had no
abulum? Why, for instance, when we know that Johnson
wed his good Wife, and says expressly that their marriage
? as' a love-match on both sides,'--should two closed lips
pen to tell us only this: 'Is it not possible that the obvious
dvantage of having a woman of experience to superintend
a establishment of this kind (the Edial School) may have
mtributed to a match so disproportionate in point of age?
-Ed. '? Or again when, in the Text, the honest cynic
leaks freely of his former poverty, and it is known that he
ace lived on fourpence-halfpenny a-day,--need a Com-
tentator advance, and comment thus: 'When we find
r. Johnson tell unpleasant truths to, or of, other men, let
; recollect that he does not appear to have spared himself,
1 occasions in which he might be forgiven for doing so'?
Tiy in short," continues the exasperated Reader, "should
otes of this species stand affronting me, when there might
lve been no Note at all? "--Gentle Reader, we answer,
e not wroth. What other could an honest Commentator
), than give thee the best he had? Such was the picture
id theorem he had fashioned for himself of the world and
: man's doings therein: take it, and draw wise inferences
om it. If there did exist a Leader of Public Opinion, and
lampion of Orthodoxy in the Church of Jesus of Nazareth,
ho reckoned that man's glory consisted in not being poor;
id that a Sage, and Prophet of his time, must needs blush
icause the world had paid him at that easy rate of four-
mce-halfpenny per diem--was not the fact of such existence
orth knowing, worth considering?
Of a much milder hue, yet to us practically of an all-defac-
g, and for the present enterprise quite ruinous character,--
another grand fundamental failing; the last we shall feel
irselves obliged to take the pain of specifying here. It is,
lat our Editor has fatally, and almost surprisingly, mis-
ken the limits of an Editor's function; and so, instead of
orking on the margin with his Pen, to elucidate as best
ight be, strikes boldly into the body of the page with his
:issors, and there clips at discretion! Four Books Mr. C.
id by him, wherefrom to gather light for the fifth, which
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? 6 Carlyle's Essays
was Boswell's. What does he do but now, in the placides
manner,--slit the whole five into slips, and sew these togethe
into a sextum quid, exactly at his own convenience; givin
Boswell the credit of the whole! By what art-magic, 01
readers ask, has he united them? By the simplest of al
by Brackets. Never before was the full virtue of the Bracki
made manifest. You begin a sentence under Boswell
guidance, thinking to be carried happily through it by tl
same: but no; in the middle, perhaps after your semicolo:
and some consequent" for,"--starts up one of these Bracke
ligatures, and stitches you in from half a page to twenty i
thirty pages of a Hawkins, Tyers, Murphy, Piozzi; so th
often one must make the old sad reflection, Where we are, i
know; whither we are going, no man knoweth! It is tru
said also, There is much between the cup and the lip; b
here the case is still sadder: for not till after considerate
can you ascertain, now when the cup is at the lip, what liqu
it is you are imbibing; whether Boswell's French wi
which you began with, or some Piozzi's ginger-beer,
Hawkins's entire, or perhaps some other great Brewe
penny-swipes or even alegar, which has been surreptitious
substituted instead thereof. A situation almost origini
not to be tried a second time! But, in fine, what ideas 1
Croker entertains of a literary whole and the thing call
Book, and how the very Printer's Devils did not rise
mutiny against such a conglomeration as this, and refuse
print it,--may remain a problem.
And now happily our say is said. All faults, the Morali
tell us, are properly shortcomings; crimes themselves i
nothing other than a not doing enough; a fighting, but w
defective vigour. How much more a mere insufficien
and this after good efforts, in handicraft practice! ]
Croker says: "The worst that can happen is that all
present Editor has contributed may, if the reader so pleas
be rejected as surplusage. " It is our pleasant duty to fc
with hearty welcome what he has given; and render thai
even for what he meant to give. Next and finally, it is ,
painful duty to declare, aloud if that be necessary, that
gift, as weighed against the hard money which the Bo
sellers demand for giving it you, is (in our judgment) v
greatly the lighter. No portion, accordingly, of our sn
floating capital has been embarked in the business, or sl
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson
7
sver be; indeed, were we in the market for such a thing, there
is simply no Edition of Boswell to which this last would seem
ferable. And now enough, and more than enough!
We have next a word to say of James Boswell. Boswell
las already been much commented upon; but rather in the
way of censure and vituperation than of true recognition.
He was a man that brought himself much before the world;
:onfessed that he eagerly coveted fame, or if that were not
Dossible, notoriety; of which latter as he gained far more
han seemed his due, the public were incited, not only by
heir natural love of scandal, but by a special ground of envy,
o say whatever ill of him could be said. Out of the fifteen
nillions that then lived, and had bed and board, in the
British Islands, this man has provided us a greater pleasure
han any other individual, at whose cost we now enjoy
mrselves; perhaps has done us a greater service than can be
pecially attributed to more than two or three: yet, ungrate-
ul that we are,, no written or spoken eulogy of James Boswell
nywhere exists; his recompense in solid pudding (so far
s copyright went) was not excessive; and as for the empty
raise, it has altogether been denied him. Men are unwiser
han children; they do not know the hand that feeds them.
Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open
o the general eye; visible, palpable to the dullest. His
pod qualities, again, belonged not to the Time he lived in;
rere far from common then; indeed, in such a degree, were
lmost unexampled; not recognisable therefore by every
ne; nay, apt even (so strange had they grown) to be con-
yunded with the very vices they lay contiguous to, and had
prung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and gross liver;
hittonously fond of whatever would yield him a little solace-
lent, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable
nough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much
f the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously
Diced too with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that
e gloried much when the Tailor, by a court-suit, had made
new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakspeare
tibilee with a riband, imprinted "Corsica Boswell,"
>>und his hat; and in short, if you will, lived no day of his
fe without doing and saying more than one pretentious
? eptitude: all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon.
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? 8 Carlyle's Essays
The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much
In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weake
fellow-creatures, partly to snuff-up the smell of comin|
pleasure, and scent it from afar; in those bag-cheeks, hang
ing like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more; i
that coarsely-protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dewlappe
chin; in all this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, boil
terous imbecility enough; much that could not have bee
ornamental in the temper of a great man's overfed grei
man (what the Scotch name flunky), though it had bee
more natural there? The under part of Boswell's face is of
low, almost brutish character.
Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great and genuii
good lay in him was nowise so self-evident. That Bosw<
was a hunter after spiritual Notabilities, that he loved sue
and longed, and even crept and crawled to be near then
that he first (in old Touchwood Auchinleck's phraseolog
"took on with Paoli;" and then being off with " the Con
can landlouper," took on with a schoolmaster, "ane th
keeped a schule, and ca'd it an academy:" that he' did i
this, and could not help doing it, we account a very singul
merit. The man, once for all, had an "open sense,":
open loving heart, which so few have: where Excelled
existed, he was compelled to acknowledge it; was drai
towards it, and (let the old sulphur-brand of a Laird s
what he liked) could not but walk with it,--if not as superi
if not as equal, then as inferior and lackey, better so than r
at all. If we reflect now that his love of Excellence had r
only such an evil nature to triumph over; but also what
education and social position withstood it and weighed
down, its innate strength, victorious over all these thin
may astonish us. Consider what an inward impulse th
must have been, how many mountains of impediment hur
aside, before the Scottish Laird could, as humble serva
embrace the knees (the bosom was not permitted him) of
English Dominie! Your Scottish Laird, says an Engi
naturalist of these days, may be defined as the hungr
and vainest of all bipeds yet known. Boswell too wa
Tory; of quite peculiarly feudal, genealogical, pragmat
temper; had been nurtured in an atmosphere of Herak
at the feet of a very Gamaliel in that kind; within t
walls, adorned only with pedigrees, amid serving-men
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 9
threadbare livery; all things teaching him, from birth up-
wards, to remember that a Laird was a Laird. Perhaps
there was a special vanity in his very blood: old Auchinleck
had, if not the gay, tail-spreading, peacock vanity of his
son, no little of the slow-stalking, contentious, hissing vanity
of the gander; a still more fatal species. Scottish Advocates
will yet tell you how the ancient man, having chanced to be
the first sheriff appointed (after the abolition of " hereditary
jurisdictions ") by royal authority, was wont, in dull-snuffing
pompous tone, to preface many a deliverance from the bench
iwith these words: "I, the first King's Sheriff in Scotland. "
And now behold the worthy Bozzy, so prepossessed and
held back by nature and by art, fly nevertheless like iron to
its magnet, whither his better genius called! You may
surround the iron and the magnet with what enclosures and
encumbrances you please,--with wood, with rubbish, with
brass: it matters not, the two feel each other, they struggle
restlessly towards each other, they will be together. The
iron may be a Scottish squirelet, full of gulosity and "gig-
manity;"1 the magnet an English plebeian, and moving
rag-and-dust mountain, coarse, proud, irascible, imperious:
nevertheless, behold how they embrace, and inseparably
cleave to one another! It is one of the strangest phenomena
of the past century, that at a time when the old reverent feeling
of Discipleship (such as brought men from far countries, with
rich gifts, and prostrate soul, to the feet of the Prophets)
had passed utterly away from men's practical experience,
and was no longer surmised to exist (as it does), perennial,
indestructible, in man's inmost heart, -- James Boswell
should have been the individual, of all others, predestined to
recall it, in such singular guise, to the wondering, and, for a
long while, laughing and unrecognising world. It has been
commonly said, The man's vulgar vanity was all that at-
tached him to Johnson; he delighted to be seen near him,
to be thought connected with him. Now let it be at once
rranted that no consideration springing out of vulgar vanity
(ould well be absent from the mind of James Boswell, in this
his intercourse with Johnson, or in any considerable trans-
I
1" Q. What do you mean by ' respectable ' ? --A. He always kept
t gig. " (ThurttU's Trial. )--" Thus," it has been said, " does society
uturally divide itself into four classes: Noblemen, Gentlemen, Gig-
nen and Men. "
II 704 B
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? io Carlyle's Essays
action of his life.
At the same time, ask yourself: Whether
such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein; whether
this was the true essence and moving principle of the pheno-
menon, or not rather its outward vesture, and the accidental
environment (and defacement) in which it came to light?
The man was, by nature and habit, vain; a sycophant-
coxcomb, be it granted: but had there been nothing more
than vanity in him, was Samuel Johnson the man of men tc
whom he must attach himself? At the date when Johnsor
was a poor rusty-coated " scholar," dwelling in Temple-lane
and indeed throughout their whole intercourse afterwards
were there not chancellors and prime ministers enough
graceful gentlemen, the glass of fashion; honour - giving
noblemen; dinner-giving rich men; renowned fire-eaters
swordsmen, gownsmen; Quacks and Realities of all hues,--
any one of whom bulked much larger in the world's eye thar
Johnson ever did? To any one of whom, by half that sub
missiveness and assiduity, our Bozzy might have recom
mended himself; and sat there, the envy of surroundin;
lickspittles; pocketing now solid emolument, swallowinj
now well-cooked viands and wines of rich vintage; in eacl
case, also, shone-on by some glittering reflex of Renown o
Notoriety, so as to be the observed of innumerable observers
To no one of whom, however, though otherwise a mos
diligent solicitor and purveyor, did he so attach himself
such vulgar courtierships were his paid drudgery, or leisur
amusement; the worship of Johnson was his grand, ideal
voluntary business. Does not the frothy - hearted, ye
enthusiastic man, doffing his Advocate's-wig, regularly tak
post, and hurry up to London, for the sake of his Sage chiefly
as to a Feast of Tabernacles, the Sabbath of his whole year
The plate-licker and wine-bibber dives into Bolt Court, t
sip muddy coffee with a cynical old man, and a sour-tempere
blind old woman (feeling the cups, whether they are full, wit
her finger); and patiently endures contradictions withou
end; too happy so he may but be allowed to listen and liv<
Nay, it does not appear that vulgar vanity could ever hav
been much flattered by Boswell's relation to Johnson. M:
Croker says, Johnson was, to the last, little regarded by th
great world; from which, for a vulgar vanity, all honour, a
from its fountain, descends. Bozzy, even among Johnsorv
friends and special admirers, seems rather to have bee
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 11
laughed at than envied: his officious, whisking, consequential
ways, the daily reproofs and rebuffs he underwent, could gain
from the world no golden but only leaden opinions. His
devout Discipleship seemed nothing more than a mean
Spanielship, in the general eye. His mighty "constellation,"
or sun, round whom he, as satellite, observantly gyrated, was,
for the mass of men, but a huge ill-snuffed tallow-light, and
he a weak night-moth, circling foolishly, dangerously about
it, not knowing what he wanted. If he enjoyed Highland
dinners and toasts, as henchman to a new sort of chieftain,
Henry Erskine, in the domestic " Outer-House," could hand
him a shilling "for the sight of his Bear. " Doubtless the
man was laughed at, and often heard himself laughed at for
his Johnsonism. To be envied is the grand and sole aim of
vulgar vanity; to be filled with good things is that of sensu-
ality: for Johnson perhaps no man living envied poor Bozzy;
and of good things (except himself paid for them) there was
no vestige in that acquaintanceship. Had nothing other
or better than vanity and sensuality been there, Johnson
and Boswell had never come together, or had soon and
finally separated again.
In fact, the so copious terrestrial dross that welters chaotic-
ally, as the outer sphere of this man's character, does but
render for us more remarkable, more touching, the celestial
spark of goodness, of light, and Reverence for Wisdom, which
dwelt in the interior, and could struggle through such encum-
brances, and in some degree illuminate and beautify them.
There is much lying yet undeveloped in the love of Boswell
for Johnson. A cheering proof, in a time which else utterly
wanted and still wants such, that living Wisdom is quite
infinitely precious to man, is the symbol of the Godlike to
him, which even weak eyes may discern; that Loyalty,
Discipleship, all that was ever meant by Hero-worship, lives
perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in these
dead days, only for occasions to unfold it, and inspire all
men with it, and again make the world alive! James Boswell
we can regard as a practical witness, or real martyr, to this
high everlasting truth. A wonderful martyr, if you will;
and in a time which made such martyrdom doubly wonderful:
yet the time and its martyr perhaps suited each other. For
i decrepit, death-sick Era, when Cant had first decisively
her poison-breathing lips to proclaim that God-
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? 12 Carlyle's Essays
worship and Mammon-worship were one and the same, tha
Life was a Lie, and the Earth Beelzebub's, which the Supreme
Quack should inherit; and so all things were fallen into tb
yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome corruption: fo
such an Era, perhaps no better Prophet than a parti-colourei
Zany-Prophet, concealing, from himself and others, hi
prophetic significance in such unexpected vestures,--wa
deserved, or would have been in place. A precious medicin
lay hidden in floods of coarsest, most composite treacle
the world swallowed the treacle, for it suited the world'
palate; and now, after half a century, may the medicin
also begin to show itself! James Boswell belonged, in hi
corruptible part, to the lowest classes of mankind; a foolish
inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit
but in his corruptible there dwelt an incorruptible, all th
more impressive and indubitable for the strange lodging i
had taken.
Consider too, with what force, diligence and vivacity h
has rendered back all this which, in Johnson's neighbourhood
his " open sense " had so eagerly and freely taken in. Tha
loose-flowing, careless-looking Work of his is as a picture b;
one of Nature's own Artists; the best possible resemblance o
a Reality; like the very image thereof in a clear mirroi
Which indeed it was: let but the mirror be clear, this is th
great point; the picture must and will be genuine. Hoi
the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love, and the recog
nition and vision which love can lend, epitomises nightly th
words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and sc
by little and little, unconsciously works together for us
whole Johnsoniad; a more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit
speaking likeness than for many centuries had been draw
by man of man! Scarcely since the days of Homer has th
feat been equalled; indeed, in many senses, this also is
kind of Heroic Poem. The fit Odyssey of our unheroic ag
was to be written, not sung; of a Thinker, not of a Fighter
and (for want of a Homer) by the first open soul that migb
offer,--looked such even through the organs of a Boswel
We do the man's intellectual endowment great wrong,
we measure it by its mere logical outcome; though here toe
there is not wanting a light ingenuity, a figurativeness an,
fanciful sport, with glimpses of insight far deeper than tb
common. But BoswelPs grand intellectual talent was, a
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 13
such ever is, an unconscious one, of far higher reach and
significance than Logic; and showed itself in the whole, not
in parts. Here again we have that old saying verified,
"Tie heart sees farther than the head. "
Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an ill-assorted,
glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest. What, indeed,
is man's life generally but a kind of beast-godhood; the god
in us triumphing more and more over the beast; striving
more and more to subdue it under his feet? Did not the
Ancients, in their wise, perennially-significant way, figure
Nature itself, their sacred All, or Pan, as a portentous
commingling of these two discords; as musical, humane,
oracular in its upper part, yet ending below in the cloven
hairy feet of a goat? The union of melodious, celestial
Freewill and Reason with foul Irrationality and Lust; in
which, nevertheless, dwelt a mysterious unspeakable Fear
and half-mad panic Awe; as for mortals there well might!
And is not man a microcosm, or epitomised mirror of that
same Universe; or rather, is not that Universe even Him-
self, the reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, "the
waste fantasy of his own dream "? No wonder that man,
that each man, and James Boswell like the others, should
resemble it! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual
defect of amalgamation and subordination: the highest lay
side by side with the lowest; not morally combined with it
and spiritually transfiguring it, but tumbling in half-mechani-
cal juxtaposition with it, and from time to time, as the mad
tfternation chanced, irradiating it, or eclipsed by it.
The world, as we said, has been but unjust to him; dis-
:erning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass;
without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret;
md thus figuring him nowise as a god Pan, but simply of
the bestial species, like the cattle on a thousand hills. Nay,
sometimes a strange enough hypothesis has been started of
lim; as if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities
:hat he did his good work; as if it were the very fact of his
being among the worst men in this world that had enabled
bin to write one of the best books therein! Falser hypothesis,
we may venture to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by
its nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enabled
us to do anything is by its very nature good. Alas, that there
should be teachers in Israel, or even learners, to whom this
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? 14 Carlyle's Essays
world-ancient fact is still problematical or even deniable!
Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an
eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth:
because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his
Love and childlike Open-mindedness. His sneaking syco-
phancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was
bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his Book
which still disturb us in its clearness; wholly hindrances
not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was nol
Sycophancy, which is the lowest, but Reverence, which is th<
highest of human feelings. None but a reverent man (whid
so unspeakably few are) could have found his way fron
Boswell's environment to Johnson's: if such worship foi
real God-made superiors showed itself also as worship foi
apparent Tailor-made superiors, even as hollow interestec
mouth-worship for such,--the case, in this composite humai
nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the pity
But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last articli
of Faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge wortl
the name: That neither James Boswell's good Book, nor arc
other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is or cai
be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always
and solely in spite thereof.
As for the Book itself, questionless the universal favoui
entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book -wt
have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteentl
century: all Johnson's own Writings, laborious and in then
kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it
already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this genera
tion; and for some future generation may be valuabi
chiefly as Prolegomena and expository Scholia to thi
Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which of us remembers, as one o!
the sunny spots of his existence, the day when he openet
these airy volumes, fascinating him by a true natural magic
It was as if the curtains of the past were drawn aside, ant
we looked mysteriously into a kindred country, where dwell
our Fathers; inexpressibly dear to us, but which had seemd
forever hidden from our eyes. For the dead Night hat
engulfed it; all was gone, vanished as if it had not been
Nevertheless, wondrously given back to us, there once mon
it lay; all bright, lucid, blooming; a little island of Creatior
amid the circumambient Void. There it still lies; like a
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 1$
thing stationary, imperishable, over which changeful Time
were now accumulating itself in vain, and could not, any
longer, harm it, or hide it.
If we examine by what charm it is that men are still held
to this Life of Johnson, now when so much else has been for-
gotten, the main part of the answer will perhaps be found in
that speculation " on the import of Reality," communicated
to the world, last month, in this Magazine. The Johnsoniad
of Boswell turns on objects that in very deed existed; it is
all true. So far other in melodiousness of tone, it vies with the
Odyssey, or surpasses it, in this one point: to us these read
pages, as those chanted hexameters were to the first Greek
hearers, are, in the fullest deepest sense, wholly credible.
All the wit and wisdom lying embalmed in Boswell's Book,
plenteous as these are, could not have saved it. Far more
scientific instruction (mere excitement and enlightenment of
the thinking power) can be found in twenty other works of that
time, which make but a quite secondary impression on us.
The other works of that time, however, fall under one of two
classes: Either they are professedly Didactic; and, in that
way, mere Abstractions, Philosophic Diagrams, incapable of
interesting us much otherwise than as Euclid's Elements may
do: Or else, with all their vivacity, and pictorial richness
of colour, they are Fictions and not Realities. Deep truly,
as Herr Sauerteig urges, is the force of this consideration:
the thing here stated is a fact; those figures, that local
habitation, are not shadow but substance. In virtue of such
advantages, see how a very Boswell may become Poetical!
Critics insist much on the Poet that he should communicate
an " Infinitude" to his delineation; that by intensity of
conception, by that gift of "transcendental Thought,"
which is fitly named genius, and inspiration, he should inform
the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance; or as they
sometimes say, ennoble the Actual into Idealness. They
are right in their precept; they mean rightly. But in cases
like this of the Johnsoniad, such is the dark grandeur of that
"Time element," wherein man's soul here below lives im-
prisoned,--the Poet's task is, as it were, done to his hand:
Time itself, which is the outer veil of Eternity, invests, of its
own accord, with an authentic, felt " infinitude " whatsoever
it has once embraced in its mysterious folds. Consider all
that lies in that one word Past I What a pathetic, sacred,
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? 16 Carlyle's Essays
in every sense poetic, meaning is implied in it; a meaning
growing ever the clearer, the farther we recede in Time--
the more of that same Past we have to look through! --On
which ground indeed must Sauerteig have built, and not
without plausibility, in that strange thesis of his: "That
History, after all, is the true Poetry; that Reality, if rightly
interpreted, is grander than Fiction; nay that even in the
right interpretation of Reality and History does genuine
Thus for Boswell's Life of Johnson has Time done, is Time
still doing, what no ornament of Art or Artifice could have
done for it. Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were,
and are not. Their Life and whole personal Environment has
melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street:
but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving,
cocked-hatted, pot-bellied Landlord; its rosy-faced assiduous
Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well-
filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand-
boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone! Gone! The
becking Waiter who, with wreathed smiles, was wont tc
spread for Samuel and Bozzy their supper of the gods, has
long since pocketed his last sixpence; and vanished, six-
pences and all, like a ghost at cock-crowing. The Bottles
they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all
rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with
have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and
mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all has vanished;
in every deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's
air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls
remain there: of London, of England, of the World, nothing
but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were the)
of adamant), only slower. The mysterious River of Exist-
ence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes
wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the forma
Billow with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it? --Where! --
Now this Book of Boswell's, this is precisely a revocation o!
the edict of Destiny; so that Time shall not utterly, not s<<
soon by several centuries, have dominion over us. A little
row of Naphtha-lamps, with its line of Naphtha-light, bum!
clear and holy through the dead Night of the Past: they whe
are gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed,
though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that little
Poetry consists
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 17
miraculously lamplit Pathway; shedding its feebler and
feebler twilight into the boundless dark Oblivion,--for all
that our Johnson touched has become illuminated for us: on
which miraculous little Pathway we can still travel, and see
wonders.
It is not speaking with exaggeration, but with strict
measured sobriety, to say that this Book of Boswell's will give
us more real insight into the History of England during those
days than twenty other Books, falsely entitled " Histories,"
which take to themselves that special aim. What good is it
to me though innumerable Smolletts and Belshams keep
dinning in my ears that a man named George the Third was
born and bred up, and a man named George the Second died;
that Walpole, and the Pelhams, and Chatham, and Rocking-
ham, and Shelburne, and North, with their Coalition or then-
Separation Ministries, all ousted one another; and vehemently
scrambled for " the thing they called the Rudder of Govern-
ment, but which was in reality the Spigot of Taxation "?
That debates were held, and infinite jarring and jargoning
took place; and road-bills and enclosure-bills, and game-
bills and India-bills, and Laws which no man can number,
which happily few men needed to trouble their heads with
beyond the passing moment, were enacted, and printed by
the King's Stationer? That he who sat in Chancery, and
rayed-out speculation from the Woolsack, was now a man
that squinted, now a man that did not squint? To the
hungry and thirsty mind all this avails next to nothing.
These men and these things, we indeed know, did swim, by
strength or by specific levity, as apples or as horse-dung, on
the top of the current: but is it by painfully noting the
courses, eddyings and bobbings hither and thither of such
drift-articles, that you will unfold to me the nature of the
current itself; of that mighty-rolling, loud-roaring Life-
current, bottomless as the foundations of the Universe,
mysterious as its Author? The thing I want to see is not
Redbook Lists, and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary
Registers, but the Life of Man in England: what men did,
thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit,
of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its
inward principle; how and what it was; whence it proceeded,
whither it was tending.
Mournful, in truth, is it to behold what the business called
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? 18 Carlyle's Essays
"History," in these so enlightened and illuminated timt
still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till yoi
eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that gre
question: How men lived and had their being; were it bi
economically, as, what wages they got, and what they boug]
with these? Unhappily you cannot. History will throw i
light on any such matter. At the point where living memoi
fails, it is all darkness; Mr. Senior and Mr. Sadler must st
debate this simplest of all elements in the condition of tl
Past: Whether men were better off, in their mere larders an
pantries, or were worse off than now! History, as it stani
all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructs
than the wooden volumes of a Backgammon-board. ~Ho
my Prime Minister was appointed is of less moment to n
than How my House Servant was hired. In these days, te
ordinary Histories of Kings and Courtiers were well exchange
against the tenth part of one good History of Booksellers.
For example, I would fain know the History of Scotlanc
who can tell it me? "Robertson," say innumerable voice
"Robertson against the world. " I open Robertson; an
find there, through long ages too confused for narrative, an
fit only to be presented in the way of epitome and distille
essence, a cunning answer and hypothesis, not to thisquestior
By whom, and by what means, when and how, was this fa
broad Scotland, with its Arts and Manufactures, Temple:
Schools, Institutions, Poetry, Spirit, National Characte
created, and made arable, verdant, peculiar, great, here as
can see some fair section of it lying, kind and strong (lik
some Bacchus-tamed Lion), from the Castle-hill of Edinburgh
--but to this other question: How did the King keep hin
self alive in those old days; and restrain so many Butchei
Barons and ravenous Henchmen from utterly extirpating on
another, so that killing went on in some sort of moderation
In the one little Letter of ^Eneas Sylvius, from old Scotlanc
there is more of History than in all this. --At length, howeve
we come to a luminous age, interesting enough; to the age c
the Reformation. All Scotland is awakened to a second hight
life: the Spirit of the Highest stirs in every bosom, agitate
every bosom; Scotland is convulsed, fermenting, struggling t
body itself forth anew. To the herdsman, among his cattle i
remote woods; to the craftsman, in his rude, heath-thatche
workshop, among his rude guild-brethren; to the great and t
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 19
he little, a new light has arisen: in town and hamlet groups
ire gathered, with eloquent looks, and governed or ungovern-
tble tongues; the great and the little go forth together to do
attle for the Lord against the mighty. We ask, with breath-
ess eagerness: How was it; how went it on? Letusunder-
tand it, let us see it, and know it! --In reply, is handed us a
eally graceful and most dainty little Scandalous Chronicle
as for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons: Mary Stuart,
1 Beauty, but over lightheaded; and Henry Darnley, a
3ooby who had fine legs. How these first courted, billed and
ooed, according to nature; then pouted, fretted, grew utterly
nraged, and blew one another up with gunpowder: this, and
tot the History of Scotland, is what we good-naturedly read,
fay, by other hands, something like a horse-load of other
3ooks have been written to prove that it was the Beauty who
Jew up the Booby, and that it was not she. Who or what
t was, the thing once for all being so effectually done, concerns
is little. To know Scotland, at that great epoch, were a
uable increase of knowledge: to know poor Darnley, and
him with burning candle, from centre to skin, were no
ncrease of knowledge at all. --Thus is History written.
Hence, indeed, comes it that History, which should be
'the essence of innumerable Biographies," will tell us, ques-
ion it as we like, less than one genuine Biography may do,
)leasantly and of its own accord! The time is approaching
vhen History will be attempted on quite other principles;
vhen the Court, the Senate and the Battlefield, receding more
ind more into the background, the Temple, the Workshop
Lnd Social Hearth will advance more and more into the fore-
;round; and History will not content itself with shaping
ome answer to that question: How were men taxed and kept
wet then? but will seek to answer this other infinitely wider
ind higher question: How and what were men then? Not
iut Government only, or the "House wherein our life was
ed," but the Life itself we led there, will be inquired into.
)f which latter it may be found that Government, in any
nodern sense of the word, is after all but a secondary con-
dition: in the mere sense of Taxation and Keeping quiet, a
small, almost a pitiful one. --Meanwhile let us welcome such
Boswells, each in his degree, as bring us any genuine contribu-
tion, were it never so inadequate, so inconsiderable.
An exception was early taken against this Life of Johnson,
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? 20 Carlyle's Essays
and all similar enterprises, which we here recommend; ant
has been transmitted from critic to critic, and repeated in
their several dialects, uninterruptedly, ever since: That sud
jottings-down of careless conversation are an infringement o:
social privacy; a crime against our highest Freedom, thi
Freedom of man's intercourse with man. To this accusa
tion, which we have read and heard oftener than enough
might it not be well for once to offer the flattest contradictior
and plea of Not at all guilty? Not that conversation is notec
down, but that conversation should not deserve noting down
is the evil. Doubtless, if conversation be falsely recorded
then is it simply a Lie; and worthy of being swept, with al
despatch, to the Father of Lies. But if, on the other hand
conversation can be authentically recorded, and any one i;
ready for the task, let him by all means proceed with it; lei
conversation be kept in remembrance to the latest datf
possible. Nay, should the consciousness that a man may b<
among us " taking notes " tend, in any measure, to restrict
those floods of idle insincere speech, with which the though
of mankind is wellnigh drowned,--were it other than th<
most indubitable benefit?
