BOSWELL'S LETTERS

PROFESSOR TINKER deserves the praise and thanks of all readers of Boswell for publishing this large collection of letters. The book contains nearly four hundred letters ; about one hundred had not been printed before, and a large number of the most intimate (those written to the Rev. William Temple) were strangely mutilated and interpolated in Richard Bentley's edition. The revelation of Boswell in these letters may not be wholly pleasant, but Professor Tinker was right to give the collection intact ; for we have now an indispensable complement to the Boswell of the Life. The Boswell of the Letters is something very different from the "green goose" (as Gray unkindly called him) of the Paoli dialogues and from the fluttering, admiring, on-his-best-behaviour Boswell of the Life and Tour. We have now a figure drawn in darker but truer shades, a self-revelation compared by Professor Tinker, not unjustly, with the Rousseau of the Confessions.

The importance of Boswell as a figure in our literary history will now hardly be questioned. If (as Mr. Lytton Strachey has hinted) the gloges of Fontenelle are the models for subsequent French biography and created a tradition of neatness, irony, urbanity, orderliness, compactness ; Boswell is the creator of

the more diffuse, more intimate, more exacting English

biography. As always, the French cadre can be filled by com- petent intelligence ; the English demands genius. Boswell was a biographer of genius ; he has given his formidable friend far

wider fame than Joluison's own works would have secured him in our times. With a few exceptions, Johnson's works have kept his memory far less alive than his talk—and that talk lives in the pages of Boswell only.

There is no doubt of Boswell's biographical genius then ; but what of his character? He has been called a fool and a syco- phant, a lackey to Parnassus. His letters show that he has been misinterpreted to some extent. Boswell was an unhappy man. He was excessively vain; he was a drunkard ; he was coarsely and abominably unchaste. But he knew his faults and struggled earnestly against them, though with lamentable relapses. The secret of his devotion to Johnson was that the intimacy not only gratified Boswell's vanity and love for dis- tinguished company, but gave him a strong moral support he lacked. Johnson made him ashamed of his grosser faults, yet

while condemning them did not treat Boswell with the con- temptuous incomprehension of the old Laird of Auchinleck. What with vices ill-suppressed, money troubles, family cares

melancholy religious doubts, a father's hardness, the uncon- geniality of his profession, poor Boswell's life was anything but

happy. Yet he must have possessed charm in cOnipany and

certainly had the gift of adaptability. He is a Rousseauite when he writes to Rousseau, a Johnsonian when he writes to Johnson; only when he is confessing himself to Temple does he assert himself, and then the openness of his confession calls for indul gence. The letter. to Isabella de Zuylen is an odd mixture of conceit, impudence and sprightliness ; it is certainly the most attractive letter Boswell ever wrote. And it contains sound sense :— " Believe me, God does not intend that we should have much pleasure in this world. But he has been kind enough to place us .ao that we attain to a pleasing serenity, what one of.our poets calls, The soul's calm sunshine and the heartfelt joy.' To be thus is, truly, to follow nature. They who seek for exquisite joy were always deceived. If they obtain it, it is but for a moment.'

That "pleasing serenity" was a state poor Boswell seldom or never attained. He was not intellectually and morally self-supporting ; solitude was unbearable to him ; take him from London or Edinburgh, deprive him of the pleasures and stimulus of good company, and he pined, grew lethargic, fell into drunkenness and worse to escape his boredom. He was a Scotch Sir Andrew Aguecheek ; and unconsciously quotes in paraphrase that worthy's expressions when writing to Wilkes :— " I have the most incoristaht rnind in the world. At times I can hardly help believing myself a man of considerable parts: but, at other times, I insensibly fall into a state little better than that of a blockhead."

his vanity, if preposterous, was naif. After relating. to Temple a series of ridiculous and base adventures and mis- adventures in love, Boswell adds, once more in Sir Andrew's vein : "What a fellow am I ! " He was, in fact, rather happy to pose as a gay debauehee to his respectable clerical friend ; but then in the next letter we find him truly repentant :— " Every instance of our doing those things we ought not to have done, and leaving undone those things we ought to have done, is attended with more or less of what is truly remorse. I am an unhappy man."

And thus Boswell passed his life, erring and boasting of his errors, then deeply repenting, forming good resolutions for the future, and erring once more. He was scarcely a good husband, and his wife's death brought him more remorse than is pleasant to contemplate ; but he was a kind and generous father and spent almost two-thirds of his net income on the care and education of his children. But through all his errors and misfortunes and ill-directed ambitions he held to the great literary task he had set himself. That gigantic Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., was the real work of his existence; it occupied his thoughts ceaselessly, and these letters show how ungrudgingly he laboured at it. Posterity has not scorned that devoted labour ; for wherever English literature is studied Boswell's Life of Johnson is read and honoured. His vices may be deplored, his vanities and foibles—such as the appearance at the Shakespeare Festival in Corsican dress with the words "Corsican Boswell" in his hat—may appear ridiculous ; but that one solid achievement cannot be disabled or destroyed. Moreover, we can plead for Boswell that his plan of a trip tie

the Hebrides and the subsequent publications of Johnson and himself prepared an English audience for the delights of the Waverley Novels.

One of the best and most final things said about Boswell is preserved on the blank sheet of a letter in the Bodleian and is thought to have been written by his kinsman, David Erskine :— " Boswell had genius, but wanted ballast to counteract his whim. He preferred being a Show man to keeping a Shop of his own."

But he was a "Show man" of genius, and some of that

genius may be found in these letters as well as in the immortal Life.