'He Set Himself to Do a Most Difficult Thing'

James Boswell reports on some of the events of Oct. 2, 1773, when he and Johnson were touring Scotland:  

“We were very social and merry in his room this forenoon. In the evening the company danced as usual. We performed, with much activity, a dance which, I suppose, the emigration from Sky has occasioned. They call it ‘America’. Each of the couples, after the common involutions and evolutions, successively whirls round in a circle, till all are in motion; and the dance seems intended to shew how emigration catches, till a whole neighbourhood is set afloat.”

Scots were for leaving for the American colonies, especially after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Most settled in South Carolina and Virginia, and many, understandably, sided with the colonists against the British during in the American Revolution. Boswell’s understanding of the dance as allegory of Scottish emigration reminds us of his intelligence, sympathy and heritage, and helps refute the Macaulay/Carlyle school of anti-Boswell calumny. He continues in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D (1785):

“Mrs M’Kinnon told me, that last year when a ship sailed from Portree for America, the people on shore were almost distracted when they saw their relations go off; they lay down on the ground, tumbled, and tore the grass with their teeth. This year there was not a tear shed. The people on shore seemed to think that they would soon follow. This indifference is a mortal sign for the country.”

   

In a prefatory note to Alec Wilder and His Friends (1974), the jazz writer Whitney Balliett says: “There is no New Journalism; Boswell invented modern literary reporting, and we have all been improvising on him ever since.” In a form that resembles a travelogue, Boswell has the brains and confidence to write insightfully about geopolitics. I was reading again in George Saintsbury’s The Peace of the Augustans (1916), which comes with one of my favorite subtitles: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Refreshment. Saintsbury stirringly champions Boswell:

“[He] has been a temptation to that lowest of literary vermin, the cheap paradoxer; but let him not tempt us. The inspired-zany theory, and the devout-hero-worshipper-with-a-few-personal-flaws theory, and all the rest shall rest, in the other sense, as far as this book is concerned. One thing is clear, that Boswell was a great artist, for he set himself to do a most difficult thing, and he did it consummately.”

That Boswell was a drunk and a whoremonger is inarguable. It was Joseph Epstein who noted that readers scandalized by Philip Larkin’s political-correctness deficit were “people who, along with being impressed with their own virtue, cannot stand too much complication in human nature (“Mr. Larkin Gets a Life,” Life Sentences: Literary Essays, 1997).”