“April 17 [in 1778], being Good Friday, I waited on Johnson, as usual.”
As was the custom in school
when I was growing up, I learned history as a rollcall of great men and
memorized dates. “Abraham Lincoln” and “December 7, 1941” plugged leaks in my obligatory knowledge and that was the end of it. History was static, fixed like a
photograph. To know it was an act of memorization, not moral imagination. Only
later, as “History” and personal history blurred, and as Gibbon’s lessons
slowly sank in, did I become intimate with the past. The minutiae of individual
lives seemed not only more interesting but more charged with personal significance.
“They” became “us.” Reading history is not unlike reading a great novel, say Daniel
Deronda or Nostromo, fiction containing history and the lives of men
and women not entirely unlike us. Cynthia Ozick recently referred to “the long
and intertwined corridors of the past, and a conviction that a mind shorn of
history is vacuous.”
Above, Boswell begins recounting yet another meeting with Dr. Johnson, 247 years ago. It’s a holy day:
“I observed at breakfast
that although it was a part of his abstemious discipline on this most solemn
fast, to take no milk in his tea, yet when Mrs. Desmoulins inadvertently poured
it in, he did not reject it. I talked of the strange indecision of mind, and
imbecility in the common occurrences of life, which we may observe in some
people. JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, I am in the habit of getting others to do things
for me.’ BOSWELL. ‘What, Sir! have you that weakness?’ JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir. But
I always think afterwards I should have done better for myself.’”
A history of religious
practice and a good man’s tolerance and moral scruples is casually present in that
passage. An exchange on travel writing follows. Boswell tells Johnson that
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) contains much he possessed
even before leaving London:
“JOHNSON. ‘Why yes, Sir,
the topicks were; and books of travels will be good in proportion to what a man
has previously in his mind; his knowing what to observe; his power of
contrasting one mode of life with another. As the Spanish proverb says, ‘He,
who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the
Indies with him.’ So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him,
if he would bring home knowledge.’ BOSWELL. ‘The proverb, I suppose, Sir,
means, he must carry a large stock with him to trade with.’ JOHNSON. ‘Yes, Sir.’”
That says volumes about the worthlessness of most “travel writing,” as opposed to the work of Charles Doughty, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Zbigniew Herbert and V.S. Naipaul. Among other qualities, their travel writing attends closely to history.
After attending Good Friday services at St. Clement’s, Boswell
recounts the chance reunion of Johnson with an old acquaintance, Oliver Edwards,
from his Pembroke Colleges days. It’s a marvelous passage and I’ve written about it before. Johnson recalls drinking ale with Edwards and sharing lines of
poetry. In reply, Edwards utters his “deathless remark”:
“You are a philosopher,
Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know
how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”
Apart from Boswell’s
literary gifts, think of the raw historical knowledge gleaned from a close
reading and rereading of his Life of Johnson.
[Speaking of history, my youngest son, David Kurp, a senior at Rice University, has just had a paper, “Limits,Liberty, and Localism: The Shared Vision of Burke and Tocqueville,” published in the Spring 2025 issue of Rice Historical Review.]
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