ΤΗ SAMUEL JOHNSON SEPTEMBER, 1831 NOTE ON THE ESSAY HE review of Croker's Boswell is one of the best known and most characteristic of Macaulay's Essays. Nowhere else are the resources of his extraordinary memory, his wide range of allusion, his keen eye for the outward circumstances of a period or of an individual, his effective but fatiguing impetuosity of attack upon persons whom he disliked, and his weakness now for rhetorical commonplace, and now for rhetorical paradox, more strikingly displayed. In plan the essay is a threefold criticism of Croker, of Boswell and of Johnson himself. Macaulay found it easy to think ill of a Tory; but his detestation of Croker must have had some other ground beside difference of political opinion. It was shared indeed by Disraeli and by Thackeray who in politics were more adverse to Macaulay than to Croker. No hint as to its origin can be derived from Croker's Correspondence and Diaries which were published not many years since. An unwritten character of every well-known man circulates among his contemporaries and usually vanishes when they die. Partly derived from special knowledge, partly from loose or spiteful gossip, it takes a new colour from the sympathies or antipathies of each mind through which it passes. Believing Croker to be a very bad man Macaulay was glad to prove him a very bad editor. To what extent his scornful exhibition of Croker's ignorance and want of literary tact was justified we may judge by the words of the distinguished scholar who in our own time has made the age of Boswell and Johnson his own peculiar patrimony. "I should be wanting in justice were I not to acknowledge that I owe much to the labours of Mr. Croker. No one can know better than I do his great failings as an editor. His remarks and criticisms far too often deserve the contempt that Macaulay so liberally poured on them. Without being deeply versed in books he was shallow in himself. Johnson's strong character was never known to him. Its breadth and depth and length and height were far beyond his measure. With his writings even he shows few signs of being familiar. Boswell's genius, a genius which even to Lord Macaulay was foolishness, was altogether hidden from his dull eye. No one, surely, but a 'blockhead,' a 'barren rascal,' could with scissors and pastepot have mangled the biography which of all others is the delight and the boast of the English-speaking world. He is careless in small matters and his blunders are numerous. These I have only noticed in the more important cases, remembering what Johnson somewhere points out that the triumphs of one critic over another only fatigue and disgust the reader. Yet he has added considerably to our knowledge of Johnson. He knew men who had intimately known both the hero and his biographer, and he gathered much that but for his care would have been lost for ever. He was diligent and successful in his search after Johnson's letters, of so many of which Boswell with all his persevering and pushing diligence had not been able to get a sight. The editor of Mr. Croker's Correspondence and Diaries goes, however, much too far when, in writing of Macaulay's criticism, he says: "The attack defeated itself by its very violence and therefore it did the book no harm whatever. Between forty and fifty thousand copies have been sold, although Macaulay boasted with great glee that he had smashed it.' The book that Macaulay attacked was withdrawn. That monstrous medley reached no second edition. In its new form all the worst excrescences had been cleared away, and though what was left was not Boswell, still less was it unchastened Croker. His repentance, however, was not thorough. He never restored the text to its old state; wanton transpositions of passages still remain and numerous insertions break the narrative" (Dr. Birkbeck Hill, Preface to Boswell's Life of Johnson, pp. xxii, xxiii). Having set down Croker for a pretentious dunce, Macaulay next represents Boswell as an officious toady. Here again truth and falsehood are evidently mingled. All that Macaulay says respecting Boswell's vices, although expressed with a severity which we may deprecate when we think each of his own failings, may pass as true in substance. Boswell had neither a masculine intellect nor a high spirit nor a fine sense of the becoming. But when Macaulay tells us that if Boswell had not been a great fool he would never have been a great writer, we are shocked with an absurdity more poignant than any which we can find in Boswell's own writings. Macaulay ventured on assertions of this kind because he wrote with the light heart of a clever youth who prepares an essay to amuse, excite and astonish a circle of friends in debate after dinner. If we are to take him seriously we find him best refuted in Carlyle's famous review of the same edition of Johnson's Life. A mere fool would not have recognised or loved Johnson's wit and worth or have endured for the sake of his society his unpleasant tricks of manner, his overbearing habits in discussion or his occasional lapses into the grossest incivility. A mere fool would not have selected with faultless tact the little incidents and the occasional sayings which Boswell has wrought with such unconscious art into "the most delightful narrative in the language" and one of the most consummate pictures of human nature to be found in any literature. A mere fool might indeed have written some of the passages in the Life which Macaulay ridicules; but if the Life itself could have been written by a fool, why is there not such another? There is no scarcity of biographers, and there has always been a great plenty of fools. Macaulay's estimate of Johnson is much fairer, although even here we are too often reminded that nature had not made Macaulay a deep critic. With regard to all things human truth is an affair of degree, and in the case of literature the correct degrees are exquisitely fine. Much that Macaulay says about the union in Johnson of great powers with low or rather dogged prejudices may be fully admitted. Johnson as a critic was narrow and most unequal. Often he was led by strong sense to a right conclusion; but as often his most imperfect sense of beauty led him to a conclusion that was either conventional or absurd. Johnson's style is often wearisome and never rises to the highest standard of perfection. But Macaulay, whilst ridiculing Johnson's early manner as displayed in the Rambler, fails in justice to Johnson's later manner as displayed in the Lives of the Poets. There Johnson is often stiff, ungraceful and abrupt; but he is very often terse and vivid and forcible. The style has not ceased to be artificial, but it has become individual, and in becoming individual it has become interesting. So likewise in drawing deductions from Johnson's spoken remarks Macaulay might have remembered that most good talkers are apt to follow the impulse of the moment and to express the thought which fills their minds without adding those provisoes or qualifications which we reasonably expect from the scholar who writes a treatise. The wish to please, the wish to provoke, the wish to sparkle, the inspiration of the wine, the company or the weather may incite a man to say somewhat more than he means or something irreconcilable with what he has said formerly. With pious care Dr. Hill has shown that Johnson was neither so ignorant of country life nor so averse to travel nor so contemptuous of history as Macaulay would seem to have proved him out of his own conversation. But Macaulay is entitled to more indulgence than he would have afforded to Johnson. Though the essay on Croker's Boswell may not be a profound work of criticism, hundreds of thousands have read and will read it with pleasure, and not a few have owed to it a real impulse towards literature. James Boswell, born in 1740, was the son of Alexander Boswell, a Lord of Session, better known by his title of Lord Auchinleck. He became a student in the University of Edinburgh and intended to follow his father's profession, but lacked the temperament of the successful lawyer, preferring social enjoyment and excursions into literature to the drudgery of practice. At an early age he made acquaintance with the most distinguished literary men in Edinburgh, including Lord Hailes who first taught him to revere Dr. Johnson. It was on the 16th of May, 1763, and in Mr. Davies' book shop, Russell Street, Covent Garden, that Boswell was first introduced to the Doctor. He next went to study law at Utrecht and thence travelled to Berlin, Geneva and Italy, and crossed over to Corsica where he became intimate with Paoli, the brave and accomplished leader of the Corsicans in their resistance to the French conquerors. His enthusiasm for the Corsican cause did honour to his warm heart, but it was sometimes expressed in ways which made it ridiculous. At length he returned home, was called to the Scotch bar, obtained some practice and wrote his Account of Corsica. In 1769 he married his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie. In 1772 he resumed his frequent intercourse with Johnson to which we owe most of the material of the Life. By his father's death in 1782 he gained a good estate. He afterwards joined the English bar, but kept his idle, sociable and self-indulgent habits. He was now engaged on the Life which appeared in 1791. His health had suffered from anxiety and the habit of drinking and he died on 26th September, 1795.1 1 As Croker's edition of the Life in its original form is rarely accessible, the references in the notes to this essay (other than the Author's) are all to Dr. Hill's edition, but the year to which the quotation belongs is added for the convenience of readers who possess the work in any other form. 1 SAMUEL JOHNSON The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, by James Boswell, Esq. A new Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes. BY JOHN WILSON CROKER, LL.D., F.R.S. Five volumes, 8vo. London: 1831. HIS work has greatly disappointed us. Whatever faults we may have been prepared to find in it, we fully expected that it would be a valuable addition to English literature; that it would contain many curious facts, and many judicious remarks; that the style of the notes would be neat, clear, and precise; and that the typographical execution would be, as in new editions of classical works it ought to be, almost faultless. We are sorry to be obliged to say that the merits of Mr. Croker's performance are on a par with those of a certain leg of mutton on which Dr. Johnson dined, while travelling from London to Oxford, and which he, with characteristic energy, pronounced to be " as bad as bad could be, ill fed, ill killed, ill kept, and ill dressed." 1 This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed. Nothing in the work has astonished us so much as the ignorance or carelessness of Mr. Croker with respect to facts and dates. Many of his blunders are such as we should be surprised to hear any well educated gentleman commit, even in conversation. The notes absolutely swarm with misstatements, into which the editor never would have fallen, if he had taken the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions, or if he had even been well acquainted with the book on which he undertook to comment. We will give a few instances. Mr. Croker tells us in a note that Derrick, who was master of the ceremonies at Bath, died very poor in 1760. We read on; and, a few pages later, we find Dr. Johnson and Boswell talking 1 Boswell does not specify the joint. The incident occurred in 1784 (Life of Johnson, vol. iv., p. 284). 2 Samuel Derrick, 1724-1769, a native of Ireland, who forsook trade for the stage and then took to literature. He was an acquaintance of Johnson and Boswell. He became master of the ceremonies at Bath in 1761. 3 AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE.-I. 394. |