Young Boswell

‘WHOSE tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, man?’ cried the afflicted laird of Auchinleck, convinced that Jamie, when he attached himself to ‘an auld dominie that keepit a schule and ca’d it an academy,’ was ‘gane clean gyte.’ He never dreamed that he had begotten a genius. And for a hundred and thirty years, the world, possessed of the greatest biography ever written, has, as a whole, either agreed with the ‘auld laird’ or, at best, condescended to patronize Boswell for writing it. ‘An inspired idiot,’ ‘any fool may write a valuable book by chance,’ ‘a touch of genius,’ ‘an ill-assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest, ’volatile’ (even more volatile than Miss Mowcher), ‘naïve’— the list can be indefinitely prolonged. Strange fate, that the world should throw all its emphasis upon the weaknesses of one whom Johnson loved for twenty years; for whose election to ’The Club’ Sir Joshua was as eager as Johnson; while Beauclerk and the friends who had that day dined with him went oft in a body to vote. The truth is, that, like Dick Steele and Samuel Pepys, Boswell was too frank, and spoke and did where most have only thought and withheld their hands.

Thrice welcome, then, Professor Tinker’s Young Boswell of the admirably chosen title,— for Boswell was perennially young, — precursor, we hope, of a biography. At any rate, we have at last a portrait, just and sane, and we wait with delightful thrills of expectation ‘the forthcoming edition of Boswell’s correspondence.’ There is wealth of new material; Professor Tinker has had access to the precious collection of Mr. Adam, from which come letters and illustrations; he has reëxamined the Temple manuscript, now in Mr. Morgan’s collection, ‘unstudied since 1857’; he has taken counsel with other Boswellians; and he has brought into happy and illuminating juxtaposition comment and narrative heretofore divorced. Would that he could have found the manuscripts of that ’cabinet’ so ruthlessly destroyed.

As a result of Professor Tinker’s work we have Boswell, a man, not a mountebank—nothing extenuated and naught set down in malice. Of a distinguished American man of letters, Barrett Wendell once said that ‘he owed his success to the skill with which he played second fiddle,’ a very useful instrument, but one upon which few are deliberately willing steadily to perform. Boswell was, and he would have been happy always just to play second; but underneath his consent lay, half-hidden, the solace, if ever he needed it, of a bigger purpose — composition; which finally ripened into that resolution to write ‘more of a life than any work that has ever yet appeared.’ And with what firmness he stuck to his resolution, and with what consummate skill he played, Professor Tinker has made clear. He managed his father; resolved to know Rousseau and Voltaire (these new French letters are immensely valuable), he sat, docile disciple, at the feet of each in turn, meditating bringing the two together. If only he had succeeded, what a companion-piece had there been for the Wilkes-Johnson dinner at Mr. Dilly’s. With every man he knew the note to strike. For only a moment did Paoli let his eyes glance aside; but when they returned they caught the incorrigible, scribbling — a breach of etiquette, that getting caught; soon, however, repaired; and if Fanny Burney had n’t locked her diary and her lips with the ‘prunes, prisms, persimmons,’ of a later high priestess of good form, but, instead, had yielded to the blandishments of that ‘biographical, anecdotical memorandummer’ of ‘the comic-serious face and manner’ and let him rescue her from the platitudes of George and his family, that little lady (and all the generations of us, her lovers) would have found herself, her life, and her style ‘greatly enlivened.’ All this, and the unity of his purpose, and his perseverance, Professor Tinker shows.

Incidentally, too, we have the tale of his more or less passionate affairs of the heart— never so passionate as to defy analysis — and his calculating ventures into the matrimonial market: Miss W——t, Zélide, the ‘ Italian Signora,’' Princess’ Kate, ‘the Moffat woman,’ la belle Irlandaise, and Margaret of the ‘nutritive’ conversation — all are here.

Finally, Professor Tinker has given us a valuable study of Boswell’s method of work and of the magnum opus itself, and the story of his passion for London, and his justice and generosity as a landlord. From it all emerges the true Boswell, the man in his habit as he lived, and, beyond this, the figure of the genius, the great artist, far greater than he ever dreamed himself to be, with the reward of him who is willing to give himself heart and soul to the attainment of his object — an immortal work of art.

B. S. HURLBUT.