His Critic
But Macaulay, if he did Jeddart justice on Croker, took care not to forget that Johnson was a Tory hero, and that Boswell was Johnson’s biographer. He was too fond of good reading not to esteem the Life for one of the best of books. But he was also a master of the art of brilliant and picturesque misrepresentation; and he did not neglect to prove that the Life is only admirable because Boswell was contemptible. It was, he argued, only by virtue of being at once daft and drunken, selfish and silly, an eavesdropper and a talebearer, a kind of inspired Faddle, a combination of butt and lackey and snob, that Boswell contrived to achieve his wretched immortality. And in the same way Boswell’s hero was after all but a sort of Grub Street Cyclops, respectable enough by his intelligence—(but even so ridiculous in comparison to gifted Whigs)—yet more or less despicable in his manners, his English, and his politics. Now, Macaulay was the genius of special pleading. Admirable man of letters as he was, he was politician first and man of letters afterwards: his judgments are no more final than his antitheses are dull, and his method for all its brilliance is the reverse of sound. When you begin to inquire how much he really knew about Boswell, and how far you may accept his own estimate of his own pretentions, he becomes amusing in spite of himself: much as, according to him, Boswell was an artist. In his review of Croker he is keen enough about dates and facts and solecisms; on questions of this sort he bestows his fiercest energies; for such lapses he visits his Tory opposite with his most savage and splendid insolence, his heartiest contempt, his most scathing rhetoric. But on the great question of all—the corruption of Boswell’s text—he is not nearly so implacable, and concerning the foisting on the Life of the whole bulk of the Tour he is not more than lukewarm. ‘We greatly doubt,’ he says, ‘whether even the Tour to the Hebrides should have been inserted in the midst of the Life. There is one marked distinction between the two works. Most of the Tour was seen by Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of the Life.’ This is to say that Croker’s action is reprehensible not because it is an offence against art but because Johnson on private and personal grounds might not have been disposed to accept the Life as representative and just, and might have refused to sanction its appearance on an equal footing with the Tour, which on private and personal grounds he had accepted. In the face of such an argument who can help suspecting Macaulay’s artistic faculty? ‘The Life of Johnson,’ he says, ‘is assuredly a great, a very great, book. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers... Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.’ That is hearty and exact enough. But, as I have hinted, Macaulay, furious with Croker’s carelessness, is almost tolerant of Croker’s impudence. For Croker as a scholar and an historian he is merely pitiless; to Croker ruining the Life by the insertion of the Tour—a feat which would scarce be surpassed by the interpolation of the Falstaff scenes of the Merry Wives in one or other of the parts of Henry IV.—he is lenient enough, and lenient on grounds which are not artistic but purely moral. Did he recognise to the full the fact of Boswell’s pre-eminence as an artist? Was he really conscious that the Life is an admirable work of art as well as the most readable and companionable of books? As, not content with committing himself thus far, he goes on to prove that Boswell was great because he was little, that he wrote a great book because he was an ass, and that if he had not been an ass his book would probably have been at least a small one, incredulity on these points becomes respectable.