Boswell the Biographer. George Mallory
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passages in the 'Life of Johnson.'
Boswell no doubt was capable of self-revelation without encouragement, and it is difficult for this reason to tell how much sympathy he had from his friend. Temple wanted to hear from Boswell; he asked him to write, and praised his letters. But his mild disapproval was probably genuine. When he LETTERS TO TEMPLE accuses Boswell of neglecting a friend or of unkindness to his father, he must have thought himself a more considerate man. He was not like Boswell, a tippler, and seems to have been really distressed by the other's intemperate habits. In a manuscript diary, reports Mr. Seccombe, he describes Boswell, no doubt in a moment of irritation, as 'irregular in conduct and manners, selfish, indelicate, no sensibility or feeling for others.' And yet Temple himself was not above a gross fault; he talks of a 'dear infidel,' and Boswell exclaims that he is exceeded by his friend. Boswell no doubt made the most of any lapse on Temple's part from the path of rectitude; he would like to feel that he had the support of a respectable companion. His conscience was by no means complacent, and it would become more tranquil if one whom he respected were in the same boat with himself. It is conceivable that Temple encouraged Boswell's confidence with the object of controlling him as much as he could; his advice certainly was always that he should get well married instead of carrying on a number of flirtations. But it is difficult to believe, if we read the letters carefully, that Temple ever appeared to be shocked by Boswell's confessions; and to the latter no doubt that was an encouragement.
In brief, we may describe Temple as a refined and well-intentioned creature, but hardly wise and not courageous. His marriage was so much a failure that he sought at one time a colonial chaplaincy with the object of living apart from his wife. He was discontented with his lot and inclined rather to complain acrimoniously than to make the best of it. He had apparently no staunch qualities to influence a friend; and this friend needed a firm monitor.
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The date of the first of Boswell's letters to Temple is July 1758. In 1763 he met Johnson. In the five years between these dates we see Boswell in a number of characteristic lights. The period from eighteen to twenty-three is commonly held to mark a special change and development in a man's character. In Boswell's, however, we do not see this very strongly. As he grew up he did fewer, no doubt, of the wild things of youth. But he seems hardly to have become older in the ordinary way, until towards the close of his life. He was always to the world the gay, good-humoured, sociable being, with a strong vein of fatuous buffoonery, that we see in these early years. A great difficulty in rightly understanding Boswell's life lies in this fact. It seems impossible at times to realise that this was a serious man; he appears to find the world and himself such a preposterous joke. And yet if he saw to the full the humour of living, he felt too very keenly that it was an important matter, that there were real standards. No one has valued more the opinion of others about himself, and no one EIGHTEEN TO TWENTY-THREE has experienced more miserably the bitterness of disappointed ambition. It must be our duty, then, to mark, with all the follies and frivolities which express the youth he retained so long, a more serious nature within, which showed itself also from time to time to the outer world.
The course of Boswell's life during this period of five years may be briefly followed in chronological order. In 1758 he was at Edinburgh University, and it is from there that his first letter to Temple is dated. The summer vacation was spent on the Northern Circuit with his father and Sir David Dalrymple, afterwards also a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Hailes. In November 1759, he entered Adam Smith's class for Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University. In 1760 he paid his first visit to London, and in the spring of 1761 returned to Edinburgh, where he resided until the close of 1762; he then went for the second time to London. It was upon this second visit that he met Dr. Johnson.
It is characteristic of these years that he did not quite know what he was or what he wanted. He was posing now in one guise and now in another, wondering the while what his serious purpose might be. At Edinburgh University he seems to have wished to appear an intellectual cynic. He writes to Temple:
Don't be surprised if your grave, sedate, philosophic friend, who used to carry it so high, and talk with such composed indifference of the beauteous sex, and whom you used to admonish not to turn an old man too soon—don't be thunderstruck if this same fellow should all at once subito furore obreptus commence Don Quixote for his adorable Dulcinea.
The inference is clear; the subito furore obreptus type of conduct is a great change from a sedate indifference.
He often adopted the rôle of the wise counsellor. His letters to Temple are full of excellent advice. It is always hard to be quite certain that Boswell is serious, but it is probable that he was sincere enough in this. He was ready always with sympathy and kind actions for his friend, and we may conjecture that besides wishing to appear wise beyond his years he thought that Temple could best be served by the commonplace advice of the old to the young.
But it is pre-eminently as the promising young littérateur that we see Boswell in these years. He became acquainted with many interesting people, who were attracted, no doubt, by a clever young man, fond of literature and appearing less ignorant than most young men. Lord Hailes, Lord Kames, and Dr. Robertson were numbered among his friends. Even Hume took notice of him: 'We talk a great deal of genius, fine learning, improving in our style, &c., but I am afraid solid learning is much wore out. Mr. Hume, I think, is a very proper person for a young man to cultivate an acquaintance with.' Boswell was not eighteen when he wrote these words. They OTHER EARLY FRIENDSHIPS suggest an amusing picture of a clever and conceited young genius. He was admitted in 1761 to the Select Society, a distinguished group of men who represented the best learning of Edinburgh—a high compliment this, both to his brains and to his social qualities.
Among Boswell's friends of the aristocracy of letters were several younger men. Charles Dilly, the publisher, who was afterwards host at the famous dinner when Dr. Johnson met Jack Wilkes, was a native of Edinburgh; and George Dempster, who became M.P. for the burghs of Fife and Forfar in 1762, was, like Boswell, a member of the Select Society; it was he who afterwards appeared as the disciple of Hume and Rousseau, and of whom Johnson said, 'I have not met with any man for a long time who has given me such general displeasure.'
A greater friend than either of these, and one who had far more influence in forming the literary tastes of Boswell, was the Honourable Andrew Erskine. This lively young gentleman was both soldier and writer. His interest in literature was not of a very creative order: he edited, however, in 1760 and 1761, two volumes of a 'Collection of Original Poems by the Rev. Mr. Blacklock and other Scotch Gentlemen,' to which both he and Boswell contributed; in 1764, he published a farce in two acts, and in 1773 he issued a poem of twenty-two quarto pages intended 'to expose the false taste for florid description which prevails in modern poetry.' He appears to have had considerable discrimination; he was an early admirer of the poet Burns, and Burns, in a letter to a friend, praises some of Erskine's songs; an eminent publisher describes him as having 'an excellent taste in the fine arts.' Such a man may well have had influence with Boswell, and the two became associated in several small literary ventures.
The early tastes and tendencies of Boswell in literary matters are connected with several influences of a different nature. There was always a strong instinct of rebellion in Boswell, and with him it found expression in sympathy for those whom the world rejected. Some of his friends among those who sought favour of the Muses were therefore less successful and less respectable than the distinguished members of the Select Society, the learned and the grave.
Several of these friends were connected in various ways with the stage. Acting was not supported as an art in Edinburgh, nor countenanced as a profession, at the time when Boswell was an undergraduate at the University. But he came in contact with a Mr. Love who, it would seem, was the first to encourage his sympathy with the drama. Mr. Love had been connected at one time with Drury Lane Theatre; fortune cannot have favoured him greatly, since he left London for Edinburgh; and there after fruitless attempts to practise private theatricals he became a teacher of elocution. It was in this last capacity that Boswell met him.
The lessons of Mr. Love were apparently of some MR. LOVE use to Boswell; for Dr. Johnson said in commendation of his English accent, 'Sir, your pronunciation is not offensive'; and Miss Burney