BOSWELL AS BIOGRAPHER

Boswell’s position in English literature cannot be disputed, nor can he ever be displaced from it.  He has written our greatest biography.  That is all.  Theorize about it as much as you like, account for it how you may, the fact remains.  ‘Alone I did it.’  There has been plenty of theorizing.  Lord Macaulay took the subject in hand and tossed it up and down for half a dozen pages with a gusto that drove home to many minds the conviction, the strange conviction, that our greatest biography was written by one of the very smallest men that ever lived, ’a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect’—­by a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb; by one ’who, if he had not been a great fool, would never have been a great writer.’  So far Macaulay, anno Domini 1831, in the vigorous pages of the Edinburgh Review.  A year later appears in Fraser’s Magazine another theory by another hand, not then famous, Mr. Thomas Carlyle.  I own to an inordinate affection for Mr. Carlyle as ‘literary critic’ As philosopher and sage, he has served our turn.  We have had the fortune, good or bad, to outlive him; and our sad experience is that death makes a mighty difference to all but the very greatest.  The sight of the author of Sartor Resartus in a Chelsea omnibus, the sound of Dr. Newman’s voice preaching to a small congregation in Birmingham, kept alive in our minds the vision of their greatness—­it seemed then as if that greatness could know no limit; but no sooner had they gone away, than somehow or another one became conscious of some deficiency in their intellectual positions—­the tide of human thought rushed visibly by them, and it became plain that to no other generation would either of these men be what they had been to their own.  But Mr. Carlyle as literary critic has a tenacious grasp, and Boswell was a subject made for his hand.  ’Your Scottish laird, says an English naturalist of those days, may be defined as the hungriest and vainest of all bipeds yet known.’  Carlyle knew the type well enough.  His general description of Boswell is savage: 

’Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the general eye, visible, palpable to the dullest.  His good qualities, again, belonged not to the time he lived in; were far from common then; indeed, in such a degree were almost unexampled; not recognisable, therefore, by everyone; nay, apt even, so strange had they grown, to be confounded with the very vices they lay contiguous to and had sprung out of.  That he was a wine-bibber and good liver, gluttonously fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable enough.  That he was vain, heedless, a babbler, had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced, too, with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much when the tailor by a court suit had made a new man of him;