The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [909]
152. ‘… there is here an accumulation of intelligence from various points, by which his character is more fully understood and illustrated’ (ibid., p. 21).
153. Ibid., p. 818.
154. For an example of how densely juxtaposed these different forms of writing can be in the Life, see ibid., p. 268. The best account of Boswell’s artistry of incorporation, particularly in respect of the inclusion of letters, which has provoked some scholarly and critical controversy, is to be found in Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 113–36.
155. ‘Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved. As it is, I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 21).
156. Ibid., p. 19.
157. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest occurrence of the word ‘autobiography’ in the Monthly Review for 1797.
158. Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. Jackson Bate et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 262. Rambler 60 (1750), Johnson’s other important statement about the principles and practice of biography, concludes with compatible thoughts about the temptation to falsehood in lives written by someone other than the subject. Contrast, however, another of Johnson’s opinions about who might best write a man’s life, delivered in conversation with Thomas Warton in 1776: ‘It [biography] is rarely well executed. They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 502).
159. The subject of ghosts is an important and recurrent one in the Life: cf. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 712–13 (the ghost of Ford), 683-4 and 736 (a ghost at Newcastle), 216 and 667 (the Cock-Lane Ghost). Boswell attributed Johnson’s preparedness to entertain the possibility of ghosts to his ‘opposition to the groveling belief of materialism’ which ‘led him to a love of such mysterious dispositions’ (ibid., p. 340). But biography itself makes a revenant of its subject.
160. The Poems of Mr. Gray, with Memoirs Prefixed, ed. William Mason (1775). For the misleadingness of this Boswellian identification of his model, see Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 115–16. Nevertheless, Boswell praised Mason to his friend Temple in February 1788: ‘Mason’s Life of Gray is excellent, because it is interspersed with Letters which shew us the Man’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 208).
161. Life of Johnson, below, p. 21. The quotation is taken from Alexander Pope’s ‘Prologue’ to Addison’s Cato (1713). The notion of writing Johnson’s life ‘in scenes’ seems first to have occurred to Boswell in 1780, and to have been touched on again in a letter to Thomas Percy of 1788: see Redford, Designing the Life, p. 84. The theatrical template for the Life shows the preferences of the biographer triumphing over those of the subject. Johnson’s distaste for the theatre is evident in his remark to Daniel Astle that ‘it would afford him more entertainment to sit up to the chin in water for an hour than be obliged to listen to the whining, daggle-tail Cibber, during the tedious representation of a fulsome tragedy’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 143). Boswell’s contrasting enthusiasm for the theatre is clear from his journal, and also from the three essays ‘On the Profession of a Player’ which he contributed to the London Magazine in 1770 (On the Profession of a Player: Three Essays by James Boswell, Reprinted from ‘The London Magazine’ for August, September, October, 1770 (London: Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1929)).
162. Life of Johnson, below, p. 23.
163. ‘Si j’etais ecrivain, et mort, comme j’aimerais que ma vie se reduisit, par les soins d’un biographe amical et desinvolte, à quelques details, à quelques