CHAPTER VIII

THE SOCIAL GENIUS OF BOSWELL

I SUPPOSE that the simplest manifestation of social genius is a desire of getting people together and exposing them to one another. Our interest in drama and novel consists largely in seeing people whom we know brought into contact with strange or hostile persons, so that they may exhibit or develop new sides of themselves. It is hard to interest a reader in the unbroken serenities of family life. It is hard for social genius to content itself with the domestic circle. A man endowed with such a genius is perpetually hankering after "new faces, other minds"; he finds in clubs and crowded drawing-rooms a varied and coloured life which puts to shame the modest pleasures of solitude and meditation.

All intellectual improvement arises, perhaps, from submitting ourselves to men and to ways of life that are originally alien to us; if, in time, they get the better of our conservatism, our life is clearly the better for the enrichment they have given it; but if, on the other hand, we are in the end obliged to repudiate them, we retire with the renewed strength that arises from opposition,

and our second state is better than our first. If you happen, for example, to dislike Frenchmen, it would, according to this philosophy, be well for you to go and live among Frenchmen until you discover whether you are right. If you find yourself becoming a snob or a Pharisee, it might be well for you to go among criminals and mendicants, until you realise the fascination of the irregular life. An hour's experience in such matters is worth more than a year of meditations.

Of this philosophy of exposure James Boswell was ever an ardent disciple. He loved friction -the excitement which arises from the sudden contact of rivals, the collision of opponents, illassorted companies: Jove among peasants, Samuel Johnson in the Hebrides. He let his imagination play with the thought of bringing Rousseau and Voltaire together. In his youth he went into the company of actors and of Roman Catholics, because actors and Roman Catholics were not approved of by the stern society in which he had been reared; in his maturer years he courted the acquaintance of the notorious Mrs. Margaret Caroline Rudd, who had barely escaped from the fangs of the law when the Perreau brothers were hanged for forgery; and he rode to the place of execution with the Reverend Mr. Hackman, the murderer.

Over these incidents the biographers and critics of Boswell have made merry, or wagged their heads with indignation. There is, however, something to be said for knowing human nature, even in its most unpopular, or even criminal, manifestations; one may hazard the opinion that the critics themselves would be the wiser for some knowledge of the unconventional life. What if Boswell did write an amatory song to Mrs. Rudd? It was because he felt her charm; and I do not doubt that she had more of it than all the bluestockings and dowagers in Scotland. Johnson himself envied Boswell his acquaintance with Mrs. Rudd.

There were, Boswell discovered, easy ways of introducing into conversation this necessary friction. One can always take the other side, whether he belongs on it or not. One can always affect ignorance or prejudice. This was, from the beginning, one of his favourite methods of drawing a man out. "I ventured," he writes of Paoli, "to reason like a libertine, that I might be confirmed in virtuous principles by so illustrious a preceptour. I made light of moral feelings. I argued that conscience was vague and uncertain; that there was hardly any vice but what men might be found who have been guilty of it without remorse." This from the man who wrote reams of the most excellent counsel to Zélide! Yet, in the midst of his

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Boswell's Inscription in a copy of Anthony Horneck's The Fire of the Altar, or Certain Directions how to raise the Soul into Certain Flames, before, at, and after the Receiving the Blessed Sacrament'

sermon to Zélide, he had cried out, "Defend yourself. Tell me that I am the severe Cato."

The record of Johnson's conversation teems with illustrations of Boswell's skill in starting or directing the flow of talk. When Johnson expatiated on the advantages to Scotland of the union with England, Boswell himself was delighted with the "copious exaggeration" of the talk, but he feared the effect of it on the Scotch listeners. "I therefore," says he, "diverted the subject." He talked with Mr. Gerard on the "difference of genius," for the express purpose of engaging him and Johnson in a discussion of the subject. On another occasion he wrote: "A strange thought struck me, to try if he knew anything of . . . the trade of a butcher. I enticed him into the subject."

Again, he was eternally asking questions. How else, pray, is one to discover the extent of another's conversation? Recall that fascinating vision which he summoned up, of Johnson shut into a tower with a new-born baby. "Sir, what would you do? Would you take the trouble of rearing it? Would you teach it anything?" And (doubtless as growing out of this very subject), “Is natural affection born with us? Is marriage natural to man?" Here is an interlocutor by no means profound, but eager and curious, full of novel expedients for waking his subject into activity,