Boswell the Biographer. George Mallory
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Название: Boswell the Biographer

Автор: George Mallory

Издательство: Bookwire

Жанр: Языкознание

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isbn: 4064066136772

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СКАЧАТЬ probable that Boswell was in earnest both about the young lady and about his religion. But since, in order to be entirely respectable, it is often necessary to give a hypocritical consistency to our fickle inclinations, we are not thought to be serious if we do not affect to be constant. We can assume, in the case of most people, from a sort of faith they hold in the durability of sentiment, and a desire which they have to prove by a time test the depth of their emotion, that the feelings which do not appear to endure are trivial and shallow. In Boswell's case we cannot make this assumption; though he affected much, he yet had real and vivid feelings; but since they could never be wholly dissociated from the pleasure which they gave him, they were both various and contradictory; he could be grave and sedate at one moment and gay and boyish the next, yet really feeling something both of the gravity and the gaiety of living; he could be almost in the same breath either the romantic lover or the indifferent cynic, and yet feel something both of the romance of love and of the aloofness which has tasted often enough the joys and sorrows of life; he forgot more quickly than most men, but did not care very often—while it was part of his inconsistency that he did sometimes care—to conceal the fundamental elasticity of his nature.

      This volatility of Boswell, exhibited especially in his sexual inconstancy, was in itself but a phase of an innate and irrepressible candour which, in spite of a lifelong desire and struggle for respectability, showed itself very often to his friend Temple in the 'Letters,' and not infrequently also to the general public.

      In all that he wrote we find passages of amazing frankness about matters which most men would prefer to conceal. He was absurdly vain, he was childishly sanguine, he was often both foolish and ridiculous, and he tells us all about it as a matter that should interest us as well as him. 'Why,' he says, '"out of the abundance of the heart" should I not speak?' The light of truth led him into strange paths. He was a formalist and yet he was sometimes known to fail in formalism through an aversion to insincerity; when his enemy Baretti came, by chance, into the room where he was being entertained by a friend, Boswell refused to greet him; he could even be flagrantly rude in company.

      To be entirely respectable and conventional, to be the man of the world, the gentleman of society, that is what Boswell wanted most in life; and that he never could become, because there was in his nature a further consciousness, which was not to be subdued, INNATE CANDOUR and which determined, by reason of the curious inconsistency so produced, his whole capacity for interesting mankind, for fame, for greatness.

      And so beside the sentimentality, the self-deception, the respectability, which he so often exhibited, we see the germ of self-knowledge, of honesty, of truth, which developed and was ultimately expressed, almost by chance as it seems, in a supreme biography: for it is the candour of Boswell far more than any other single factor, the natural instinct to record what he observed both of himself and of others, the honesty in observing and the truthfulness which he had as an artist in recording, that distinguishes his literary work. Herein lay the essence of his genius. The story of Boswell's life is the story of a struggle between influences and ambitions which led him towards the commonplace, and the rare qualities grafted deeply within him, which bore him steadily in an opposite direction. The triumph of the latter involved no doubt the unhappiness of Boswell, but it also involved the production of a great work of art; and this achievement has won for its author a unique place among distinguished men; he is famous beyond any fame that he dreamed of attaining and failed to attain.

      

      CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      'The accident,' says Professor Raleigh,1 'which gave Boswell to Johnson and Johnson to Boswell is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good fortune in literary history.' The event of their meeting took place on May 16th, 1763, and if in one sense it was clearly, as the word is commonly used, an accident, it was equally the result of a strong wish and intention, if not of deliberate design, on Boswell's part. He had long known of Johnson, and as early as 1760 had hoped for an introduction from 'Mr. Derrick, the poet,' 'an honour,' he says, 'of which I was very ambitious.' This honour bestowed eventually upon a vain and extravagant youth (a circumstance which must be highly esteemed among the good gifts of the Lady Fortune to humanity) was to be attained through a humble agent. Among those of Boswell's friends who were not of the higher strata in society was one Tom Davies. He was at this time a bookseller, but as he had been formerly an actor and then dramatic critic, there was something uncommon and adventurous MEETING WITH JOHNSON about his career. He had in fact in some degree the equivalent of what has been known at a later date as Bohemianism. It seems particularly appropriate that Boswell should have forgotten the pride of birth to meet so, in humble circumstances, the object of his devotion. The scene which took place in Tom Davies' back-parlour has the essence of true comedy. Two of the actors are light-heartedly unconscious that the moment has the least importance; the third is painfully and anxiously aware that it is important to him, and naturally unaware that it can have a value to anyone else. And it has, too, that dramatic quality of great events taking place by accident, as it seems, among incongruous circumstances. It is a scene which must kindle always, for one who feels a serious value in humour, an emotion beyond mere pleasure.

      The comedy opens by Tom Davies announcing the eventful news in farcical manner.

      At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him, through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us—he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, 'Look, my Lord, it comes. … '