INTRODUCTION

Yet such seems to have been the case. In the sixteenth century, for instance, most educated men saw the history of the race as the rise and fall of kingdoms, the gradual development and then the sudden ruin of one great civilization after another; and the object of the most far-sighted was, not to share in the general progress of the race, for to their thinking there was no such progress, but to gain what little stability they could for themselves and their descendants from an uncertain and unstable world. Such a man if he were conscientious would try to make a true man of himself, establish a character for his family, and add what he could to the welfare of his country or community. But he never argued on the assumption that there is a universal good time coming.

In the eighteenth century, in the days of Johnson and Boswell, we see something of a transition from these views I have just described to something more like our modern fashion of thinking. Already there were a good many men, of a sort of liberality of view, who were beginning first to wish, then to hope, then to entertain the idea, which sometimes ripened into a conviction, that with a little more knowledge, a few changes in government and social customs, a reasonable increase in general prosperity, the world might become a very perfect world. James Boswell liked to "live pleasant," and this was a pleasant doctrine to pick up or to drop, according to convenience. Buoyant, rather easily captivated by novelties and popular vogues, full of notions that flattered him rather than of convictions, he floated along on a general current of optimism.

Dr. Johnson was of a different temper. He had to judge what the mass of men were likely to do by the sort of things they had done. He did not think society unimprovable, but neither did he think it perfectible. Civilization, men's habits of living in the mass, he thought pretty well rooted in human nature. "No, sir," he once said, "let fanciful men do as they will, depend upon it, it is difficult to disturb the system of life." With his fellow-men he was companionable; he aimed to understand them with the same sincerity with which he aimed to understand himself; he was accustomed to make liberal allowance for them, but it was not his practice to idealize them or

to imagine that they belonged to a race capable of perfection. Johnson had what Walter Bagehot and William Hazlitt, before him, have called an experiencing nature. He took things to heart. He scrutinized and sifted, he weighed and considered; he went through the processes of observation and reflection. So he was schooled into a point of view, as consistent as experience and a solid, though tumultuous, character could make it, toward the inconsistencies of human nature, its prejudices, its pretexts, its way of making its reasons fit its wishes. Many times he seems to be contradicting himself when he is simply reminding some abstract reasoner of the contradictions that honest observers will always find in life.

No doubt Boswell took to life as a duck to water. But not much of it soaked in. He shook off one experience to plunge more easily into the next. He sought out famous men, one after another, asked their advice to draw them out, and put it all down in his notebooks as an interesting record of the way their minds worked. For this reason he was gay with the wicked John Wilkes, melancholy and "romantic" with the sentimental Rousseau, pious and serious with the doggedly honest Dr. Johnson. He loved crowded taverns, rushing streets, and theaters, lighted by torches at night. He took to the fashionable habit of praising the innocent Indian and his simple life in the forest. He thought himself respectable and substantial in defending such great vested interests as the slave trade. He grew eloquent over the charms of universal liberty. Qualification, too often, seemed to him to be contradiction; chasing one enthusiasm, and then another, to be the same thing as leading a consistent life.

Modern publishers have a habit of covering a book with a jacket of paper, on which they print such glowing praise of the book within that it sometimes turns modest readers against it. Boswell was a little like such a jacket. In this fashion, he grows superlative over Dr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. But Johnson, himself, was not superlative. Whatever his thought when he first undertook his task, as he toiled over it, he realized that "everything in life is set either above or below our faculties," that a free people are, fortunately, too big

to endure a final authority, even though he be only a dictionary maker, that words must perpetually change their meanings with the circumstances which they describe, so that dictionaries are as imperfect as watches; if the worst is better than none, the best cannot be expected to go quite true; that "definition," indeed, "is not the province of man." A lexicographer he whimsically defines in his own dictionary as a "harmless drudge." And yet with it all, he had learned to like such "muddling work." So, pretty skeptical as to the exact worth of what he accomplishes, he plays his part as best he can and, as he calls it, drives on the "system of life."

How Boswell preferred to drive is pretty well symbolized by a little incident in his career. He was coaching with two companions, as exuberant as himself, from the Hague to Rotterdam. One of them, says Mr. Tinker in his delightful volume on "Young Boswell," seized the reins from a Dutch blockhead who held them and showed him how a party of young Britons expected to travel. Boswell said he drove so hard "that the very moles came above ground to look at him." And Boswell liked it.

Johnson used sometimes to refer to himself as an old struggler. He fought not only against hard circumstances and his own physical infirmities but against his own doubts and passions. There is no finer passage in Boswell than the last pages of this volume, where he describes these contending passions, unless it be where he compares the struggle against them to that of a gladiator with the mad beasts of the arena. Out of this tumult grew Dr. Johnson's philosophy of life. It was very like the old philosophy of Sir Roger de Coverley, "Much may be said on both sides," but reasserted with the most zealous intensity. It included a great desire for the right, and a recognition that the exact right was difficult to find, a passionate dislike of slipping into extremes and a contempt for wabbling and evasion. It was often suspense of judgment without peace of mind. It was compromise with others without disloyalty to oneself. It was keeping an even keel in a tempestuous sea. This was the sort of unstable equilibrium that Johnson constantly maintained through more than half a century. Only by trying to live and relive it with him can we fully understand it.

There are, no doubt, inconsistencies in Dr. Johnson. Passions will sometimes break out, friendship or compassion will color his views on occasion, and indolence will have its day. Men grow, too; they sometimes mellow and ripen into a fuller recognition of their own philosophy and its practical demands upon them. At thirty-nine, a man, eager for stimulating social conversation, may lose all patience with anyone who will "shuffle cards and rattle dice from noon to midnight without tracing any new idea in his mind." At sixty, he may realize that a great many people have not much capacity for new ideas; he may grow tolerant of the little knots grouped in partnerships and drawn together in rivalries over something, not very important, but which, at least, they can understand. He may find that card playing after all "generates kindness and consolidates society." A man may hold that giving employment is better than giving charity and yet when passing a shilling to a beggar and asked why, may respond with sturdy frankness, “to enable him to beg on." A man may wax indignant over an attempt to influence Parliament through petitions signed by all sorts of people under all sorts of pressure, and yet when a criminal's life is at stake, be moved into thinking that a petition in his behalf of twenty thousand signatures should have some weight. He may even be excused for the lack of all patience when he exclaims to a gentleman who, he thought, made little allowance for the temptations of life, "Sir, you are so grossly ignorant of human nature as not to know that a man may be very sincere in good principles without having good practice."

But most of Johnson's apparent inconsistencies, or what Boswell guesses to be such, prove on a little investigation to be among his most thorough and consistent views of men and society. One day, for example, in the Harwich stage coach, Johnson fell in with, and then fell out with, a fat, elderly gentlewoman, who, being an uncompromising Protestant, bitterly attacked the inquisition. Johnson defended it. And Boswell's only comment is that the Doctor could talk on any side of any subject. Of course he could; and equally, of course, it was his very sincerity which prompted him to see that every side should have its due. Here was a question the old lady had raised,

without being aware of it, between the right to freedom and the right of protection against the freedoms of others. Johnson often pondered on it. "The danger of unbounded liberty," he was later to write in his life of Milton, "and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government, which human understanding seems hitherto unable to solve. If nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth; if every dreamer of innovations may propagate his projects, there can be no settlement; if every murmurer at government may diffuse discontent, there can be no peace; and if every skeptic in theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion."

This same problem he has recognized more pithily, more wittily in the words: "Sir, I have got no further than this: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth and every other man has a right to knock him down for it." Of course, a man who can sympathize with both sides of a controversy to this degree can hardly have convictions so one-sided that he can pound a face or use a thumb-screw in their defense. The most he can claim for himself is to say, as Johnson, indeed, has said: "Sir, I considered myself as entrusted with a certain portion of truth. I have given my opinion sincerely; let them show me where they think me wrong." And this in almost every case is where Johnson personally stands.

Again, on the duel, Boswell thinks he detects Dr. Johnson in an inconsistency. But here, too, he misses the true ground of Dr. Johnson's opinion. It is the business of society, Johnson thinks, either by law or custom, to prescribe the tests by which men may settle their quarrels and yet remain civilized. Its tests are none of them perfect, none of them ideal. It has tried, not very successfully, to draw up mutual understandings for the decent prosecution of war; it has established a long line of rather complicated precedents for determining when a man may use fatal weapons in the defense of his life. It has invented a method, by no means infallible, of trial by jury. In Johnson's day, through public opinion it offered to men of a certain station in society still another method, more imperfect even