Biography, then, is the chief text-book in the art of living, and preeminent in its kind is the Life of Johnson.  Here is the instance of a man who was born into a life stripped of all ornament and artificiality.  His equipment in mind and stature was Olympian, but the odds against him were proportionate to his powers.  Without fear or complaint, without boast or noise, he fairly joined issue with the world and overcame it.  He scorned circumstance, and laid bare the unvarying realities of the contest.  He was ever the sworn enemy of speciousness, of nonsense, of idle and insincere speculation, of the mind that does not take seriously the duty of making itself up, of neglect in the gravest consideration of life.  He insisted upon the rights and dignity of the individual man, and at the same time upon the vital necessity to him of reverence and submission, and no man ever more beautifully illustrated their interdependence, and their exquisite combination in a noble nature.

Boswell’s Johnson is consistently and primarily the life of one man.  Incidentally it is more, for through it one is carried from his own present limitations into a spacious and genial world.  The reader there meets a vast number of people, men, women, children, nay even animals, from George the Third down to the cat Hodge.  By the author’s magic each is alive, and the reader mingles with them as with his acquaintances.  It is a varied world, and includes the smoky and swarming courts and highways of London, its stately drawing-rooms, its cheerful inns, its shops and markets, and beyond is the highroad which we travel in lumbering coach or speeding postchaise to venerable Oxford with its polite and leisurely dons, or to the staunch little cathedral city of Lichfield, welcoming back its famous son to dinner and tea, or to the seat of a country squire, or ducal castle, or village tavern, or the grim but hospitable feudal life of the Hebrides.  And wherever we go with Johnson there is the lively traffic in ideas, lending vitality and significance to everything about him.

A part of education and culture is the extension of one’s narrow range of living to include wider possibilities or actualities, such as may be gathered from other fields of thought, other times, other men; in short, to use a Johnsonian phrase, it is ‘multiplicity of consciousness.’  There is no book more effective through long familiarity to such extension and such multiplication than Boswell’s Life of Johnson.  It adds a new world to one’s own, it increases one’s acquaintance among people who think, it gives intimate companionship with a great and friendly man.

The Life of Johnson is not a book on first acquaintance to be read through from the first page to the end.  ’No, Sir, do you read books through?’ asked Johnson.  His way is probably the best one of undertaking this book.  Open at random, read here and there, forward and back, wholly according to inclination; follow the practice of Johnson and all good readers, of ‘tearing the heart’ out of it.  In this way you most readily come within the reach of its charm and power.  Then, not content with a part, seek the unabridged whole, and grow into the infinite possibilities of it.