We today have an advantage denied to Macaulay. We may read the great Yale edition of Boswell's journals and private papers. They show a man who was often wayward and ridiculous, who was selfish and self-indulgent, but who was also possessed of a keen intelligence and a remarkable capacity for self-examination. The journals fascinate because Boswell found himself to be as extraordinary and interesting as he found the world about him. He was certainly an eccentric, but his eccentricity lay chiefly in his inexhaustible appetite for life and for all possible varieties of experience. He suffered from melancholia and hypochondria, but he was also high-spirited and social. His zest for life was what Johnson loved in him.
Boswell's public life was a failure. He had some success at the Scottish Bar, to which he had been called reluctantly, and was notable for the care and compassion he showed for poor and criminal clients. But he failed in his ambition to get into Parliament and suffered humiliation at the hands of the Earl of Lonsdale whom he had selected as his patron. He was an unfaithful husband, who yet retained the love of his wife; her death left him wretched. He sank into depression and drunkenness, from which he was rescued only by his dedication to the great work to which he had committed himself. At odds with his own father, he was loved by his children and a host of friends, partly, I suspect, because his company was always enlivening. Certainly Johnson cherished him for this reason.
All the failures of his career were wiped out by the achievement of The Life of Johnson. It is a book which is not only written with masterly art, apparent in the manipulation of mood and argument, but also one which is a remarkable study in virtue.
Boswell's regard for Johnson was entirely to his credit. Many people were frightened by Johnson; others, like Horace Walpole, regarded him with disgust. The slovenly uncouth shambling figure, with his relish for goring his opponents in argument, was an unlikely hero for Boswell — young, intensely self-conscious and snobbish when they first met — to attach himself to. He did so because he recognised Johnson's essential virtue, to which many were blind. Johnson appealed to the best in Boswell and Boswell was a better man for it.
