The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [16]
Not steady faith and a confidence in salvation, but a troubled meditation on the likelihood of being ‘Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly’ – this is the keynote of Johnson’s religion.122 It is therefore revealing that Johnson’s first expression of liking for Boswell follows immediately upon Boswell’s confession of religious doubts:
I acknowledged, that though educated very strictly in the principles of religion, I had for some time been misled into a certain degree of infidelity; but that I was come now to a better way of thinking, and was fully satisfied of the truth of the Christian revelation, though I was not clear as to every point considered to be orthodox. Being at all times a curious examiner of the human mind, and pleased with an undisguised display of what had passed in it, he called to me with warmth, ‘Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.’123
What Johnson warms to in Boswell is the shadow of his own religious misgivings and imperfections. This strenuous conforming of his mind and conduct to an ideal of belief explains why Johnson was so irritated by even dispassionate speculation on subjects such as the doctrine of the Trinity or predestination and theodicy, and perhaps also why he would occasionally speak affectionately about Roman Catholicism. On some subjects, freedom of inquiry entailed unwelcome psychological risks.124 The relentless disciplining of the mind to an external standard both allowed Johnson to control his psychological turbulence and at the same time brought him up hard against something outside himself which both checked and confirmed him. This perhaps also explains Johnson’s lifelong affinity for the law. He was always prone to giving energetic expression to cases which were not, in the fullest sense, his own.125
The pages of the Life of Samuel Johnson contain vivid impressions of two extraordinary characters, of their friendship, of the material world through which they moved, and of the imaginative world they created together. However, the Life of Johnson is in itself, as an artefact and as a literary project, just as fascinating as what it describes and preserves. In respect both of how it was put together and of the general ideas about biography by which it is informed, the book is as extraordinary as its subject.
The Life of Johnson is, self-evidently, a very large book. It is however also, and much less self-evidently, a work of furious compression. The volume of the Boswell papers discovered by Colonel Ralph H. Isham in Malahide Castle126 indicates how large and difficult to control was the mass of material which Boswell had over years accumulated in connection with the project of writing Johnson’s life. Exactly when Boswell began collecting this material is not quite clear.127 In March 1785 he wrote to Herbert Croft soliciting information about Johnson, and at the same time informing him that ‘for upwards of twenty Years, I with his knowledge Collected materials for writing his life, which will be a large work, and require a Considerable time to make it ready for publication.’128 ‘Upwards of twenty years’ from 1785 would place the decision to compose the Life very close to the first meeting of Boswell and Johnson in 1763, and it is very difficult to find evidence to corroborate this, unless a letter to Wilkes from Venice in 1765, expressing the hope that ‘could my feeble mind preserve but a faint impression of Johnson, it would be a glory to myself and a benefit to mankind’, might be thought to do so.129 Nevertheless, at the very beginning of the Life Boswell asserts that ‘I had the scheme of writing his [Johnson’s] life constantly in view,’ and he furthermore claims that Johnson