In the late summer and autumn of 1773, Johnson and Boswell visited Scotland, the latter’s birthplace and the butt of many jokes by the former. The journey lasted eighty-three days and both men published books recounting their adventures. Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland came out in 1775. Boswell published The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson a decade later, one year after Johnson’s death. Much of Boswell’s text follows a formula he would later use in his Life of Johnson. Like a theatrical director he places Johnson in a scene with secondary players and waits to see what will happen. He knows his friend to be a powerful personality with strong opinions.
On September
7, the pair visit the Isle of Skye, and Boswell portrays a scholarly, less
bellicose Johnson, a man always first attracted to the books in a
room:
“Dr Johnson
was much pleased with his entertainment here. There were many good books in the
house: Hector Boethius [Scottish philosopher and historian] in Latin; [William]
Cave’s Lives of the Fathers; [Sir
Richard] Baker’s Chronicle [of the Kings of England]; Jeremy Collier’s Church History [of Great Britain]; Dr Johnson’s small Dictionary; Craufurd’s [The
Lives and Characters, of the Officers of the Crown], and several more . . .”
Contrast
this with Boswell’s September 27 entry, in which he describes a very
different Johnson during their second visit to Corriechatachan, a farmstead also on the
Isle of Skye:
“This evening, one of our married ladies, a lively pretty little woman, good-humouredly sat down upon Dr Johnson’s knee, and, being encouraged by some of the company, put her hands round his neck, and kissed him. ‘Do it again,’ said he, ‘and let us see who will tire first.'’ He kept her on his knee some time, while he and she drank tea. He was now like a BUCK indeed. All the company were much entertained to find him so easy and pleasant. To me it was highly comick, to see the grave philosopher—the Rambler—toying with a Highland beauty! But what could he do? He must have been surly, and weak too, had he not behaved as he did. He would have been laughed at, and not more respected, though less loved.”
Boswell’s final observation is memorably shrewd.
1 comment:
A favorite anecdote from Boswell's Journal (p 238 in my edition), when Johnson was grumbling about the rough terrain:
Hay, their guide, with a very Highland accent, "See such pretty goats!"
Little did he conceive what Dr Johnson was. Here now was a common ignorant Highland clown imagining that he could divert, as one does a child, DR SAMUEL JOHNSON! The ludicrousness, absurdity, and extraordinary contrast between what the fellow fancied, and the reality, was truly comick.
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