The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [8]
To sickness and sullenness might be added calculation, and Boswell’s willingness to work upon Johnson by employing what seem close to the arts of coquetry. All this was part of the greater artfulness which produced the Life, but it was a risky strategy. In a character as labile as that of Boswell, it was (as we have seen) hard always to keep the feigned clearly separated from the felt, and the felt could easily have led to rupture, as it nearly did in 1778, in consequence of a dinner party at which Boswell had not been able to control Johnson’s environment:
there were several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school; so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humour; and upon some imaginary offence from me, he attacked me with such rudeness, that I was vexed and angry, because it gave those persons an opportunity of enlarging upon his supposed ferocity, and ill treatment of his best friends. I was so much hurt, and had my pride so much roused, that I kept away from him for a week; and, perhaps, might have kept away much longer, nay, gone to Scotland without seeing him again, had not we fortunately met and been reconciled. To such unhappy chances are human friendships liable.50
And also human books, for this tiff might have not only ended Boswell’s friendship with Johnson, but also aborted the Life of Johnson. So the reader of the Life might shudder at this passage, which reveals the slenderness of the thread by which the ‘work which they are now perusing’ (to return to that Boswellian phrase) once hung.51
If, for Boswell, resistance could be an instrument for literary production, for Johnson it was a trait much more deeply etched into his character, and which even assumed an ethical significance. Many of the most vivid phrases and images of the Life reflect the centrality of the practice and principle of opposition in Johnson’s personality. Johnson’s appetite for opposition could take the form of a simple combativeness directed towards others, as when Boswell summed up an evening’s conversation in the words ‘Yes, Sir; you tossed and gored several persons.’52 This is the Johnson who loved above all else to prevail:
This [an explanation of how medicated baths might bestow curative benefits] appeared to me very satisfactory. Johnson did not answer it; but talking for victory, and determined to be master of the field, he had recourse to the device which Goldsmith imputed to him in the witty words of one of Cibber’s comedies: ‘There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.’53
This is the Johnson who was animated by the ‘spirit of contradiction’ and a ‘love of argumentative contest’, who might at any moment be overtaken by the ‘humour of opposition’.54 Sometimes the motive for this was ostentation, as Johnson confessed to Boswell: ‘When I was a boy, I used always to choose the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious things, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.’55 It was a failing he did not entirely outgrow, as Boswell noted in 1776: ‘The truth, however, is, that he loved to display his ingenuity in argument; and therefore would sometimes in conversation maintain opinions which he was sensible were wrong, but in supporting which, his reasoning and wit would be most conspicuous.’56 Boswell thought this characteristic so central to Johnson’s personality that he allowed it to stand at the climactic point of the summary assessment which closes the book:
In him were united a most logical head with a most fertile imagination,