Life of Samuel Johnson - Critical Response

Critical Response

Edmund Burke told King George III that the work entertained him more than any other. Robert Anderson, in his Works of the British Poets (1795), wrote: "With some venial exceptions on the score of egotism and indiscriminate admiration, his work exhibits the most copious, interesting, and finished picture of the life and opinions of an eminent man, that was ever executed; and is justly esteemed one of the most instructive and entertaining books in the English language."

Macaulay's critique in the Edinburgh Review was highly influential and established a way of thinking of Boswell and his Life of Johnson which was to prevail for many years. He was damning of Croker's editing: "This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed", and held a mixed opinion of Boswell: "Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London...; such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be". Macaulay also claimed "Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them". Macaulay also criticised (as did Lockhart) what he saw as a lack of discretion in the way the Life reveals Johnson's and others' personal lives, foibles, habits and private conversation; but recognised that it was this that made the Life of Johnson a great biography.

Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensitivity to all reproof, he could never have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.

Macaulay noted that Boswell could only give a detailed account of Johnson in his later years: "We know him, not as he was known to men of his own generation, but as he was known to men whose father he might have been" and that long after Johnson's own works had been forgotten, he would be remembered though Boswell's Life.

...that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why sir!" and "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion. To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe..."

Thomas Carlyle reviewed Croker's edition in Fraser's Magazine in 1832. He shared Macaulay's unfavourable verdict on Croker's efforts: "there is simply no edition of Boswell to which this last would seem preferable", but argued that to judge Boswell as Macaulay had was to overlook the most important point; that Boswell had had the great good sense to admire and attach himself to Dr Johnson; an attachment which had little to offer materially. "James Boswell belonged, in his corruptible part, to the lowest classes of mankind; a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit: but in his corruptible there dwelt an incorruptible, all the more impressive and indubitable for the strange lodging it had taken..."

Consider too, with what force, diligence and vivacity he has rendered back all this which in Johnson's neighbourhood, his "open sense" had so eagerly and freely taken in. That loose-flowing, careless-looking Work of his is as a picture by one of Nature's own Artists; the best possible resemblance of a Reality; like the very image thereof in a clear mirror. Which indeed it was: let but the mirror be clear, this the great point; the picture must and will be genuine. How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love, and the recognition and vision which love can lend, epitomises nightly the words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and so, by little and little, unconsciously works together for us a whole Johnsoniad; a more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for many centuries had been drawn by man of man!

Macaulay's view that the book was great because of the baseness of Boswell was brushed aside by Carlyle ("Falser hypothesis, we may venture to say, never rose in human soul"):

Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Open-mindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness; wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was not Sycophancy, which is the lowest, but Reverence, which is the highest of human feelings.

"As for the Book itself," wrote Carlyle, "questionless the universal favour entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century: all Johnson's own Writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it...""

More recent critics have been mostly positive. Frederick Pottle suggests that "the crowning achievement of an artist who for more than twenty five years had been deliberately disciplining himself for such a task." W. K. Wimsatt argues, "the correct response to Boswell is to value the man through the artist, the artist in the man". Leopold Damrosch claims that the work is of a type that "do not lend themselves very easily to the usual categories by which the critic explains and justifies his admiration". Walter Jackson Bate emphasized the uniqueness of the work when he says "nothing comparable to it had existed. Nor has anything comparable been written since, because that special union of talents, opportunities, and subject matter has never been duplicated."

However, many critics disagree with the positive assessment of the work as a biography; Leopold Damrosch explains the potential problems with Boswell's Life: "he usual claim that it is the world's greatest biography seems to me seriously misleading. In the first place, it has real defects of organization and structure; in the second place (and more importantly) it leaves much to be desired as the comprehensive interpretation of a life." Brady Frank describes the mixed feelings that critics have in regards to The Life of Samuel Johnson when he says, "Though Boswell is the world's greatest, critics have consistently patronized Boswell the man." Although Donald Greene thought that Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides is a "splendid performance", he felt that the Life was inadequate and Johnson's later years deserved a more accurate biography.