The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [22]
Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited. But although he at different times, in a desultory manner, committed to writing many particulars of the progress of his mind and fortunes, he never had persevering diligence enough to form them into a regular composition. Of these memorials a few have been preserved; but the greater part was consigned by him to the flames, a few days before his death.156
The ‘opinion’ of Johnson’s to which Boswell refers is to be found in Idler 84 (1759), in which Johnson elevates autobiography (although he does not call it that) above biography, on grounds of its probably superior veracity.157 The preference is advanced explicitly in terms of comparison between the two forms of life-writing:
Those relations are… commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story. He that recounts the life of another, commonly dwells most upon conspicuous events, lessens the familiarity of his tale to increase its dignity, shews his favourite at a distance decorated and magnified like the ancient actors in their tragick dress, and endeavours to hide the man that he may produce a hero.158
Boswell’s practice in the Life can be read as an implicit reproof of this Johnsonian suspicion of biography, since he welcomes the quotidian into his narrative and displays his subject in the most intimate circumstances. For Boswell, the route to appreciating Johnson’s heroism lies directly through his common humanity: it is not to be found by detouring round it. For this reason, it is difficult to accept at face value the praise Boswell bestows on the hypothetical autobiography which Johnson did not get round to writing: ‘had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.’ Difficult because the crafted discontinuities and asperities of Boswell’s narrative aim at vivacity of impact more than they do at clarity and elegance; and, most importantly, difficult because Boswell’s object is not to embalm, but spectrally to revive.159 So there is a trace of triumphant ressentiment when Boswell notes the abortion of this hypothetical Johnsonian autobiography. His own work, albeit produced on a different plan, at least exists.
What was that plan? Boswell confessed that he had been influenced by William Mason’s Memoirs of Thomas Gray, which had been published in 1775.160 It was a model which, at least as Boswell understood it, prescribed the intermittent self-effacement of the biographer:
Wherever narrative is necessary to explain, connect, and supply, I furnish it to the best of my abilities; but in the chronological series of Johnson’s life, which I trace as distinctly as I can, year by year, I produce, wherever it is in my power, his own minutes, letters or conversation, being convinced that this mode is more lively, and will make my readers better acquainted with him, than even most of those were who actually knew him, but could know him only partially…
Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to ‘live o’er each scene’ with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life.161
It is the unmediated (although framed, arranged, and set) incorporation of particularity which is the cornerstone of Boswell’s practice in the Life. ‘Minute particulars are frequently characteristick’: this is Boswell’s creed.162