Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Friendship of Johnson and Boswell: Some Biographical Considerations

1977; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.1977.0011

1938-6133

Irma S. Lustig,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

The Friendship of Johnson and Boswell: Some Biographical Considerations IRMA S. LU ST IG Though the friendship of Boswell and Johnson is important in the lives of both men, a just and comprehensive view of it is essential to the biography of Boswell. The relationship universally employed to illustrate Johnson’s moral and psychological strength is still, on the other hand, one of the sticks used to beat Boswell. Now critics renew the Macaulayan paradox by invoking not just the Life of Johnson but also the very journals which should refine our understanding of its author. They praise the Life—at least most of them do—but caricature Boswell by exaggerating his deference and his dependence. Thus they separate the talent from the person. I am not an apologist for Boswell’s character. On the contrary, I wish to speak frankly about actions which trouble most of us still. But I hope that by making his friendship with Johnson the subject of close examination I will contribute proportion and perspective both to it and to the figure we make of Boswell. I do not presume to advise Professors Brady and Pottle, the authors of the definitive biography; they do not need my help. But as students and teachers of literature, we are necessarily also con­ tinuing if informal biographers. 199 200 / IRMA S. LUSTIG The cornerstone of my argument is modern orthodoxy: the teachings of Chauncey Tinker, Geoffrey Scott, Bertrand Bronson, and Frederick Pottle. I wish also to acknowledge the pre-Isham perceptiveness of George Mallory. It is generally agreed that an austere and demanding father had accustomed Boswell to author­ ity, but provoked resistance to his own guidance by disapproval and a caustic tongue. Boswell’s rebellion against Lord Auchinleck was troubled, on the other hand, by respect for his father’s virtues and accomplishments. A feudal landowner of stern self-discipline, a good classicist, and most significantly, a Lord of Session and of Justiciary (appointment in the highest courts of Scotland), Lord Auchinleck was a man highly esteemed in the community. It is understandable, therefore, that the paternal figures to whom Boswell turned for sympathetic guidance were also distinguished men of strong character. Among his famous friends and confidants of Lord Auchinleck’s generation—Rousseau, Voltaire, General Paoli, Lord Karnes, for example—Samuel Johnson was the fathersurrogate supreme. I believe that Boswell’s reverence for Johnson as moral and intellectual hero never failed. It is a fixed element of the friendship, and the motive and theme of the Life. Boswell came to see Johnson’s imperfections, and to express resentment when Johnson tyrannized—directly, in the journal, and obliquely or even pointedly to Johnson himself. Others complained more bitterly than Boswell about Johnson’s severity toward “weaker minds than his own.”1 Knowing his own frailties, Boswell was generally tolerant of those he found in others. He was aware, moreover, that he incited Johnson’s wrath by persisting because of his own needs at disquieting topics like death and futurity. Finally, Johnson’s superiority of mind and of character overrode all minor criticism. Evidence of Boswell’s reverence, and of its basis, is both public and private, and abounds from the first to the last years of their association. One of Boswell’s particular talents is the ability to evoke the feeling of past experience. When he described his introduction to Johnson in Tom Davies’ back parlor a quarter­ The Friendship ofBoswell and Johnson I 201 century after the event, he transmitted his awe and panic to the reader of the Life by comparing Johnson’s approaching figure with the ghost of Hamlet’s father (“Look, my Lord, it comes”). That vivid metaphor is not found in Boswell’s journals, but the reaction is. On 19 March 1778, fifteen years later, he read in proof a portion of Johnson’s life of Cowley, and recorded the observation that “I really worshipped him, not idolatrously, but with pro­ found reverence, in the ancient Jewish sense of the word.”2 On 2 May 1780 he wrote to the Earl of Pembroke, “I own I feel stately now from my consciousness of having been so warm against the American War notwithstanding...