Life of Johnson, I

Though as I start this blog I am 600 pages through Boswell's Life of Johnson, and the great man is already 66, there are still about 700 pages to go, so no harm done. Also I have just been reading the years around the trip to Scotland, which are very boring, the interesting parts all having been written into Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, so this post will not even be about the Life.

Before starting the book, I read Macaulay's review of Croker's edition. It is not much of an encouragement to read the book, but it is pretty funny. Macaulay starts off softly, with the first sentence: "This work has greatly disappointed us." From there he goes into a little warm-up routine. "This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed." A little farther on: "The tomes 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." He accuses Croker of gross ignorance and negligence akin to medical malpractice, compares Croker to schoolgirls to his disadvantage and repeatedly fantasizes about lashing him as a schoolmaster would a pig-headed little boy.

Having now warmed up, Macaulay goes for a touch directly on Croker's class: "A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the editor boasts of having added... remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annotations which are pencilled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries; 'How beautiful!' 'Cursed prosy!' 'I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at all.' 'I think Pelham is a sad dandy.'"

Croker does sound like an idiot, and only a very small number of his comments survive in the 1953 OUP edition I have, and all of his ill-advised omissions and additions to the text have been reverted. Still, it is hard to believe any man could be as much of a jackass as Macaulay portrays him. Macaulay wholly justifies himself, however, when he complains that in Croker's comments, "We have 'fallacy' used as synonymous with 'falsehood.'" It warms my thistle-ish heart to hear someone who commits that gross solecism so savagely abused.

Macaulay animadverts against Boswell and Johnson as well. After saying that Boswell is the foremost biographer of all time, he strangely continues by calling Boswell the worst of men:

"We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect... Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame... Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London... Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof he never could have produced so excellent a book."

Having read about halfway through, I think I can defend Boswell. Perhaps he becomes especially stupid later, but so far he seems like a guileless man of moderately good intelligence and much better education. His views on literature, where they differ from Johnson's, largely amount to agreeing with the dominant opinion of his time regarding each author, but he occasionally makes a good point. He does seem to have driven Johnson and others crazy at times, but he was pretty clearly a kind and good-natured man and only a little given to sycophancy. I was going to say that Macaulay might have been misled by the lack of celebrities and celebrity hangers-on in his day, but surely there are no worse sycophants than courtiers. The explanation for Macaulay's intense hatred of Boswell and considerable abuse of Johnson, is hinted at in these lines and explained in the Life. Macaulay says, "Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples."

And that is it. Macaulay was a fervent Whig, so a republican, an abolitionist, a hater of the old aristocracy, and in short the bitter enemy of Boswell (who was, after all, a Scottish nobleman) and of Johnson's politics, if not of Johnson himself. Both Boswell and Johnson often say things that would be intolerable if said now, and sometimes that were poorly reasoned, but it would be very foolish to judge what kind of men they were, by looking at what kind of men in the 19th or 21st century hold some opinions similar to theirs. A man who believes in the unmoving Earth in 1500 is not (without further evidence) the same sort of man as one who holds the same belief today.