Boswells Life of Johnson | Page 2

no time in perfecting his notes both
mental and stenographic, and sat up many a night followed by a day of
headache, to write them in final form, that none of the freshness and
glow might fade. The sheer labor of this process, not to mention the
difficulty, can be measured only by one who attempts a similar feat. Let
him try to report the best conversation of a lively evening, following its
course, preserving its point, differentiating sharply the traits of the
participants, keeping the style, idiom, and exact words of each. Let him
reject all parts of it, however diverting, of which the charm and force
will evaporate with the occasion, and retain only that which will be as
amusing, significant, and lively as ever at the end of one hundred, or,
for all that we can see, one thousand years. He will then, in some
measure, realize the difficulty of Boswell's performance. When his
work appeared Boswell himself said: 'The stretch of mind and prompt
assiduity by which so many conversations are preserved, I myself, at
some distance of time, contemplate with wonder.'
He was indefatigable in hunting up and consulting all who had known
parts or aspects of Johnson's life which to him were inaccessible. He
mentions all told more than fifty names of men and women whom he
consulted for information, to which number many others should be
added of those who gave him nothing that he could use. 'I have
sometimes been obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date
correctly.' He agonized over his work with the true devotion of an artist:
'You cannot imagine,' he says, 'what labor, what perplexity, what
vexation I have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of
materials, in supplying omissions, in searching for papers buried in
different masses, and all this besides the exertion of composing and
polishing.' He despairs of making his picture vivid or full enough, and
of ever realizing his preconception of his masterpiece.
Boswell's devotion to his work appears in even more extraordinary
ways. Throughout he repeatedly offers himself as a victim to illustrate
his great friend's wit, ill-humor, wisdom, affection, or goodness. He

never spares himself, except now and then to assume a somewhat
diaphanous anonymity. Without regard for his own dignity, he exhibits
himself as humiliated, or drunken, or hypochondriac, or inquisitive, or
resorting to petty subterfuge--anything for the accomplishment of his
one main purpose. 'Nay, Sir,' said Johnson, 'it was not the wine that
made your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.' 'What, Sir,' asks
the hapless Boswell, 'will sense make the head ache?' 'Yes, Sir, when it
is not used to it.'
Boswell is also the artist in his regard for truth. In him it was a passion.
Again and again he insists upon his authenticity. He developed an
infallible gust and unerring relish of what was genuinely Johnsonian in
speech, writing, or action; and his own account leads to the inference
that he discarded, as worthless, masses of diverting material which
would have tempted a less scrupulous writer beyond resistance. 'I
observed to him,' said Boswell, 'that there were very few of his friends
so accurate as that I could venture to put down in writing what they told
me as his sayings.' The faithfulness of his portrait, even to the minutest
details, is his unremitting care, and he subjects all contributed material
to the sternest criticism.
Industry and love of truth alone will not make the artist. With only
these Boswell might have been merely a tireless transcriber. But he had
besides a keen sense of artistic values. This appears partly in the unity
of his vast work. Though it was years in the making, though the details
that demanded his attention were countless, yet they all centre
consistently in one figure, and are so focused upon it, that one can
hardly open the book at random to a line which has not its direct
bearing upon the one subject of the work. Nor is the unity of the book
that of an undeviating narrative in chronological order of one man's life;
it grows rather out of a single dominating personality exhibited in all
the vicissitudes of a manifold career. Boswell often speaks of his work
as a painting, a portrait, and of single incidents as pictures or scenes in
a drama. His eye is keen for contrasts, for picturesque moments, for
dramatic action. While it is always the same Johnson whom he makes
the central figure, he studies to shift the background, the interlocutors,
the light and shade, in search of new revelations and effects. He

presents a succession of many scenes, exquisitely wrought, of Johnson
amid widely various settings of Eighteenth-Century England. And
subject and setting are so closely