SOURCE: "Boswell's Control of Aesthetic Distance," University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, January, 1969, pp. 174-91.

[In the following essay, Alkon discusses devices Boswell uses in the Life of Johnson in order to control the aesthetic distance between author and subject and author and reader.]

I

Proper control of aesthetic distance was so highly regarded by Johnson that he was sometimes inclined to undervalue biography. Thus in the Idler, No. 84, he argues that autobiography is more useful because "he that recounts the life of another, commonly dwells most upon conspicuous events, lessens the familiarity of his tale to increase its dignity, shews his favourite at a distance decorated and magnified like the ancient actors in their tragick dress, and endeavours to hide the man that he may produce a hero."¹ Hence the failure of most biographers. They keep their heroes too far away from us while, paradoxically, making them seem larger than life-size. Johnson's ideal for life-writing is clear: the less distance between reader and subject the better. Equally clear is Boswell's conscious adherence to that ideal.

Indeed Boswell's fame as an instigator of modern biography rests largely on histhorough rejection of the "doctrine of dignified distance."² Using a variety of devices which are well recognized by critics, Boswell succeeded in bringing his readers close, often uncomfortably close, to Johnson. Early in the Life of Johnson and only four paragraphs after referring to the argument in the Idler, No. 84, Boswell explains his decision to let as little as possible, especially of the narrator, stand between readers and Johnson: "Instead of melting down my materials into one mass, and constantly speaking in my own person, by which I might have appeared to have more merit in the execution of the work, I … produce, wherever it is in my power, his own minutes, letters, or conversation, being convinced that this mode is more lively."³ Neither Boswell nor his critics, however, have pointed out the crucial devices employed throughout the Life to increase and, in general, vary aesthetic distance in order to solve some of the literary problems confronting the biographer.

A major problem is hinted at by Boswell's equation of liveliness with "minutes, letters, or conversation." The reader's interest must somehow be sustained through a very long work. One method of doing so, Boswell implies, is to minimize distance by allowing his audience to remain in close touch with Johnson's own statements rather than with those statements seen at one remove through the filtering and perhaps distracting or tedious consciousness of an omnipresent narrator. Yet if Boswell faithfully kept to his promise of not constantly speaking in his own person, he was nevertheless uneasily aware of the fact that he did choose to remain what critics would now characterize as a highly intrusive, dramatized, self-conscious narrator-agent in his account of Johnson's life.⁴ Shortly before the conclusion, in somewhat ironic counterpoint to his initial statement of method, Boswell apologetically calls attention to his role as narrator: "I now relieve the readers of this Work from any farther personal notice of its authour, who if he should be thought to have obtruded himself too much upon their attention, requests them to consider the peculiar plan of his biographical undertaking." (IV, 380)

Accepting this invitation to consider his "peculiar plan" does in fact lead to a better understanding of Boswell's artistic problems and his manipulation of aesthetic distance to cope with them. The peculiarity of his Life obviously does not consist in the mere presence of a narrator speaking in the first person to recount incidents and analyze character; nor is the chronological organization any novelty. What is distinctive, rather, is Boswell's announced effort to bring us close to Johnson by "interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought: by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to 'live o'er each scene' with him." (1, 30) And the Life's singularity is not only in taking readers strikingly close to Johnson's private self; perhaps an even more radical departure from traditional biography is Boswell's determination to present in so far as possible each scene—no matter how seemingly trivial—of Johnson's life. In principle, nothing was to be excluded. Everything recoverable was to be put on record. The work's peculiarity lies as much in its sheer quantity of close views as in their quality. This peculiarity too Boswell saw clearly and frequently explained apologetically. After describing how Johnson removed "branches of trees and other rubbish" from Taylor's waterfall, for example, Boswell adds: "This may be laughed at as too trifling to record; but it is a small characteristick trait in the Flemish picture which I give of my friend, and in which, therefore, The scenes I mark must the not most minute rather 191) focus particulars." on Johnson (III, only than⁵ on the potentially distracting narrator, but they must at their most trifling suggest what is characteristic of the subject.

Otherwise the Life, even when most closely attending to Johnson, will seem digressive. In the need to avoid this danger resides another major problem: that of creating and maintaining a coherent though necessarily complicated picture of Johnson to which all "minute particulars" will appear related. Without such coherency the biographical forest petrifies into dead wood. Corollary to this problem are the problems of maintaining faith in the reliability of the narrator and in the accuracy as well as the completeness of his "Flemish picture." Readers must be induced to trust the skill of a painter whose canvas is at once so large and so foreign to English practice. Moreover, as in all friendly biographies but especially in one whose peculiar plan entails unprecedentedly extensive close-up views, warts and all, there is the problem of maintaining the reader's love and respect for the subject. Finally, as the minute particulars pile up, through hundreds of pages, there is the problem of preventing readers kept this closely in Johnson's company from becoming so used to him that they forget what a remarkably rara avis Boswell is keeping in his biographical cage. Wayne Booth has correctly observed that "a prolonged intimate view of a character works against our capacity for judgment."⁶ Any judgement, he might have added, whether of merit or merely of singularity. There is thus considerable danger that our very familiarity with Johnson, induced by such close acquaintance with "what he privately wrote and said, and thought," may induce us to lose track of his astonishing uniqueness. Yet for the Life to succeed readers must at the conclusion still be able to feel the force of Hamilton's moving farewell to his friend: "He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up.—Johnson is dead.—Let us go to the next best:—there is nobody;—no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson." (IV, 420-21)

II

Not all of Boswell's artistic problems in writing the Life were dealt with entirely or even partly through control of aesthetic distance, to be sure. Most notably, his success in maintaining a coherent image of Johnson's character as a unifying principle of the Life was achieved by other means and therefore lies outside the scope of my discussion.⁷ Nor are the remaining problems I have listed resolved equally through the device of varying aesthetic distance. Boswell resorts most conspicuously to this technique, for example, in his effort to sustain interest in one man throughout a book which, though it cannot hope to compare in variety, rivals in bulk such works as Hume's History of Great Britain. If we tire of Alfred there is always William. If the feudal period bores us there is always the Elizabethan age. But what if the reader wearies of Johnson half-way through?

Since Boswell's professed and peculiar goal is to make readers "live o'er each scene" with Johnson, the Life is committed to the methods of drama. And to describe a performance as "dramatic" was then as it still is a way of saying that it is interesting. Going beyond the metaphor, however, critics are now in agreement on how, in general, the Life succeeds in aspiring to the condition of drama. There are stage directions: "Johnson (smiling), Sir.…" There is dialogue. There are even some conspicuous episodes such as the Wilkes dinner which are given the beginning-middle-and-end structure of a well constructed play.⁸ In many of the more dramatic episodes, moreover, Boswell as narrator-dramatist is appropriately out of sight behind the scenes: having set the stage, he minimizes the distance between audience and events by cutting down references to himself ("I kept myself snug and silent") so that attention isfocussed on the other actors surrounding his hero.⁹ And because the essence of drama is talk, it is tempting to add to our growing list of critical commonplaces about Boswell's dramatic technique the fact that his commitment to dramatic method dictated a simple principle of decorum by which relevancy could be separated from tedious digression: commenting on his decision to exclude some "pleasant conversation" that Johnson had one day enjoyed hearing but in which he had not taken part, Boswell asserts that Johnson's "conversation alone, or what led to it, or was interwoven with it, is the business of this work." (II, 241-42)

But this plausible-sounding assertion will hardly do as an accurate or sufficient account of Boswell's method even at its most dramatic. In fact, the Life's ability to sustain interest is due largely to Boswell's willingness to violate every aspect of the principle of decorum he so sweepingly enunciates here. He often includes material that is not part of Johnson's conversation or his life, that did not occasion Johnson's remarks, and that was in no direct sense "interwoven" with them. But this is not to say that such material is unrelated to Boswell's subject. Rather, it is to suggest that the relationship is far different from that which Boswell claims in his explicit statement of what may properly find a place in his book. That remark more accurately describes the effect than the methods of his artistry: where the Life is successfully dramatic we are often only made to feel that Boswell has given us exclusively Johnson's talk, its causes, and what "was"—at the time the scene took place—"interwoven" with it. Sometimes we are indeed given these things. Often, however, the feeling is dramatic illusion. We have been induced to willing suspension of distinctions between past and present, as well as to suspension of our awareness of the difference between action on-stage and action off-stage.

Consider, for example, the following paragraph, complete in itself, and taken from a part of the record for 1776 where Boswell says that "to avoid a tedious minuteness" he will "group together what I have preserved of his conversation during this period … without specifying each scene where it passed" since "where the place or the persons do not contribute to the zest of the conversation, it is unnecessary to encumber my page with mentioning them." (III, 52) The dramatic method has been modified to the extent of dropping stage directions and the list of dramatis personae involved, but only in order—Boswell claims—to render the conversation, still his professed subject, as vigorously as possible:

"There is much talk of the misery which we cause to the brute creation; but they are recompensed by existence. If they were not useful to man, and therefore protected by him, they would not be nearly so numerous." This argument is to be found in the able and benignant Hutchinson's 'Moral Philosophy.' But the question is, whether the animals who endure such sufferings of various kinds, for the service and entertainment of man, would accept of existence upon the terms on which they have it. Madam Sévigné, who, though she had many enjoyments, felt with delicate sensibility the prevalence of misery, complains of the task of existence having been imposed upon her without her consent. (III, 53)

What Johnson actually said occupies only the first two sentences, less than half of the passage. His opinion is followed by the seemingly degressive and gratuitous information that Johnson's opinion was also held by the Scot, Hutcheson. Conspicuously omitted is any claim that Johnson was influenced by Moral Philosophy. Indeed so far as Boswell knew, or at least so far as he reports in the Life, Johnson had not even read Hutcheson's book. Instead of urging anyrelationship other than coincidence of opinion between the two moralists, Boswell chooses to praise Hutcheson's ability and benevolence. Boswell as narrator then moves to the front of the stage where he proceeds in the next sentence to soliloquize on what the question is: whether animals would choose to be—that is the question. Finally, the passage moves far away from Johnson, his time, and his island to what was written on the continent in the preceding century by a French lady. One may properly ask whether Boswell has in constructing his paragraph contributed "to the zest of the conversation" or whether he has drifted away from conversation altogether and, like an unscrupulous performer, simply upstaged the great star. Is Boswell's dramatic method sometimes that of the ham actor?

Not in this case, certainly, for despite our initial doubts, it is clear that everything Boswell has done here conspires to produce the illusion—effect is a better term—of a lively, interesting, four-way dialogue between Johnson, Hutcheson, Boswell, and Madame de Sévigné. That the dialogue not only never took place, but that it never could have since two of the "speakers" were dead in 1776, only reminds us that Boswell's imagination was not turned off by his determination to remain faithful to the truth, to invent nothing. There are other effects, too: finding him in agreement with the praise-worthy author of Moral Philosophy should raise or maintain our esteem for Johnson. Boswell, by his willingness to praise the moral and intellectual qualities of Hutcheson even while going on to indicate a deficiency in his (and Johnson's) statement of the question, has minimized the moral distance between the narrator, Hutcheson and Johnson: all are worthy men who can respect one another without falling into dull identity of viewpoint on an issue. By the same token, moral distance between Hutcheson, Johnson, and the reader is minimized. Identifying with the biographer in the absence of any reason here for feeling unlike him, the reader will adopt the narrator's moral kinship with men who are explicitly singled out for praise or implicitly praised by association. Madame de Sévigné, too, is made to seem morally close to all concerned: Boswell carefully characterizes her as a person who "felt with delicate sensibility the prevalence of misery." Along one axis, therefore, aesthetic distance has been sharply reduced.

Along another axis, however, distance is simultaneously increased. As the passage moves from Johnson's sentences to the viewpoints of Hutcheson, Boswell and Madame de Sévigné, the reader is taken further away intellectually from Johnson. His statement of the question is said to be inadequate, the topic is broadened from the misery of animals to the misery of people, and the lady is allowed to have the last word. There is no crushing retort from Johnson—"Madame (frowning)"—to bring readers back under the sway of his position and settle the matter. Nor does Boswell settle it. We are left only with the implication created by his restatement of the question, i.e., that Madame de Sévigné is more nearly right than Johnson.

But it is we who must finally decide. Boswell has in effect collapsed the distinction between actor and audience, between action on-stage and action off-stage. His drama—here as elsewhere throughout the Life primarily a play of ideas—becomes supremely interesting because he has put into it the most interesting of all possible characters: ourselves. It is a strikingly "modern" piece of dramaturgy. But as Professor Pottle has actuely pointed out, the current popularity of Boswell's joumals is no accident due simply to their spicy night-scenes: "Boswell writes like one of us. His style raises few feelings of strangeness in the minds of readers whose taste has been fixed by Maugham, Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, Salinger."¹⁰ We are at home with Boswell's style formany reasons, but partly because he can so adroitly manipulate different aspects of aesthetic distance, as in the passage under discussion, to implicate us in his drama by keeping us morally (or emotionally) close to his cast of characters while nevertheless compelling us to stand back intellectually and pass judgement on the argument. Such manipulation does not occur in every scene of the Life any more than eloquent soliloquies occur in every act of Shakespeare's plays, but the occurrence is sufficiently frequent to warrant notice as a striking felicity of style. Of course one could read the Ten Commandments and then disagree with them. Any reader is always free to dispute any point. But some works do not encourage dissent as Boswell does in passages similar to the one I am discussing. His very deftness in sustaining interest by involving readers in the Johnsonian dialectic accounts for the dearth of critical comment on this aspect of his style. His art elegantly conceals itself, for it is only rarely that he makes his invitation as crudely explicit as for example he does when after describing one heated argument he says: "My readers will decide upon this dispute." (III, 350)

Even that comparatively crude invitation, however, serves to make the reader move away intellectually from Johnson, who otherwise would have had the last word in that argument when he silenced Boswell by growling "Nay, if you are to bring in gabble, I'll talk no more. I will not, upon my honour." (III, 350) In many scenes Boswell relies on another device for implicating readers and simulating conversation at that point in the naration where it is made clear that everyone has been reduced to silence by Johnson, all real conversation thereby ceasing. Consider, for example, the evening in 1775 at Cambridge's villa when Johnson, after giving his views on the harmlessness of The Beggar's Opera, brought the discussion to an adrupt halt by "collecting himself, as it were, to give a heavy stroke," and saying "There is in it such a labefactation of all principles, as may be injurious to morality." (11, 367) Johnson's remark is followed by two paragraphs, the second giving information on the stage history of The Beggar's Opera and the first providing the following information:

While he pronounced this response, we sat in a comical sort of restraint, smothering a laugh, which we were afraid might burst out. In his Life of Gay, he has been still more decisive as to the inefficiency of 'The Beggar's Opera' in corrupting society. But I have ever thought somewhat differently; for, indeed, not only are the gaiety and heroism of a highwayman very captivating to a youthful imagination, but the arguments for adventurous depredation are so plausible, the allusions so lively, and the contrasts with the ordinary and more painful modes of acquiring property are so artfully displayed, that it requires a cool and strong judgement to resist so imposing an aggregate: yet, I own, I should be very sorry to have 'The Beggar's Opera' suppressed; for there is in it so much of real London life, so much brilliant wit, and such a variety of airs, which, from early association of ideas, engage, soothe, and enliven the mind, that no performance which the theatre exhibits, delights me more. (II, 367)

Here only the first two sentences are obviously relevant inasmuch as they finish describing the scene and then relate Johnson's conversation to his writing. Moreover, the first sentence increases our emotional distance from Johnson by showing that even the other actors in the scene found his remark funny. As the butt of ridicule, even silent ridicule, he is moved away from us.¹¹ This comic distancing also reminds us of Johnson's uniqueness, for who but he could ever silence intelligent men by referring to labefactation?

The rest of the paragraph moves us away from Johnson intellectually as Boswell now occupies the stage alone, again soliloquizing: "I have ever thought somewhat differently.…" Though the effect is of discussion continued through more pros and cons (since Boswell proceeds to tell us what he has always thought on both sides of the issue), in fact the description of the scene has ended. We are not even given what Boswell thought at the time but was perhaps too intimidated to speak aloud; instead we merely have his life-long ambivalent response to The Beggar's Opera. The question is, or is intended to be, complicated by Boswell's ruminations, and the reader is thereby presented with a dialectic whereas in fact during the scene described—that evening's conversation at Cambridge's villa—there was only a comical ipse dixit.

Boswell has deftly added to the comic interlude an intellectual pleasure. After laughing, the reader must think about whose argument is most convincing. Very often more serious moments are also protracted in the same manner to make readers disengage themselves from Johnson's dicta and assess them. Having reported a conversation during which Johnson gave his views on marital infidelity, for example, Boswell adds a paragraph of disagreement beginning "Here it may be questioned, whether Johnson was entirely in the right." (III, 406) It is we who are left to settle the question. Again, after reporting Johnson's dismissal of Elfrida with the concession that it contains "now and then some good imitations of Milton's bad manner," Boswell registers dissent in a paragraph beginning "I often wondered at his low estimation of the writings of Gray and Mason." (II, 335) Having reported Johnson's refusal to concede that the "question concerning the legality of general warrants" was important, Boswell attributes the refusal to Johnson's characteristic "laxity of talking" and then adds that "surely, while the power of granting general warrants was supposed to be legal … we did not possess that security of freedom, congenial to our happy constitution, and which, by the intrepid exertions of Mr. Wilkes, has been happily established." (II, 73) By casting his opposition to Johnson in the form of praise for Wilkes, Boswell wrenches us intellectual miles if not light-years away from Johnson. We are of course always free to return. But simply by adding a sentence, Boswell has insured that agreement with Johnson on this issue will not be easy or thoughtless. Any siding with Johnson here that is not mere bias will only occur after the reader has mentally thrashed through the complicated question of Wilkes and liberty.

The list of similar examples could easily be lengthened. More significant than their mere presence as devices for engaging readers as "participants" in the Johnsonian intellectual drama, however, is the high degree of success Boswell has achieved. It has always been difficult for critics to remain indifferent to his Johnson. It is Boswell's skill as much as Johnson's personality that has created so many partisans and so many detractors. Even those who in Macaulay's vein disparage Boswell are in their way testifying to his effectiveness in forcing commitment, because it has usually been impossible merely to register dislike of the biographer without also inclining to preference for his subject. Even in a recent, sympathetic, and utterly unMacaulaian account of "the self-portrait of James Boswell which emerges from the conversations, letters, and editorial comments of the Life of Johnson," Irma S. Lustig was moved to deplore Boswell's "arrogant posthumous refutations of Johnson's views" on slavery.¹² The corollary of her reaction is increased respect for the victim of Boswell's arrogance. And whatever in this fashion sustains or creates admiration for Johnson works towards an important goal of the Life. Boswell has created a rhetorical dilemma from which it is hard if not impossible to escape: agree with him and your opinion of Johnson, always finally admired by Boswell, goes up; disagree with or dislike him, and Johnson, by contrast, looks good.

Without so many Boswellian intrusions after the fact, the dilemma could not be posed in such acute form. Nor could it always function so effectively without Boswell's adroit blurring of the distinctions between past and present and between thought and word. In the above examples it has mostly been clear that Boswell is dissenting from Johnson at a safe distance in time: narrator and reader move away from the reported scene to its recollection in tranquillity. "Here it may be questioned whether Johnson was entirely in the right." Here in the book and now that he is gone. But not then and there. Often, however, the line between past and present is not so sharply drawn. After quoting Johnson's opinion of Rousseau, for example, Boswell has the last word by adding: "This violence seemed very strange to me, who had read many of Rousseau's animated writings with great pleasure, and even edification; had been much pleased with his society, and was just come from the Continent, where he was very generally admired. Nor can I yet allow that he deserves the very severe censure which Johnson pronounced upon him." (11, 12) In this case Boswell carefully distinguishes between his present opinion as he writes the biography and what he thought when he heard Johnson censure Rousseau. Yet the effect of so closely juxtaposing two consistently dissenting Boswellian opinions is to collapse the temporal distance between then and now. What seemed strange at the time still does. Nothing has shaken Boswell's admiration of Rousseau, which therefore gains at least some weight in our mental scales as it is balanced against Johnson's view. By the same juxtaposition, written word (what Boswell cannot yet allow as he writes the biography) coalesces with thought (what Boswell thought then about the strangeness of Johnson's violence). Similarly, Boswell's reported thought has for readers almost the same effect as disagreement spoken aloud. We see two sides of a "dialogue" whereas a witness of the scene itself (or a tape recording) would have noted only Johnson's remark and Boswell's silence.

Elsewhere Boswell more thoroughly collapses the distance between past and present. After quoting verbatim, for example, Johnson's remarks on Churchill's poetry—remarks incited, Boswell vaguely reports, by his having "ventured to hint that [Johnson] was not quite a fair judge"—the biographer adds: "In this depreciation of Churchill's poetry I could not agree with him. It is very true that the greatest part of it is upon the topicks of the day.… But Churchill had extraordinary vigour.… Let me add, that there are in his works many passages which.…" (1, 419-20) The paragraph from which these extracts are taken moves smoothly from past ("I could not agree") to present tense ("it is very true.… Let me add") via a listing of the attributes of Churchill's poetry. Most often any such list will be in the present tense, whether or not it is part of a reported thought or statement that occurred in the past. With such a passage serving as bridge, readers are less aware of the switch in tense. Moreover there is some ambiguity about Boswell's statement that he "could not agree" with Johnson. Does this mean that Boswell was silent? Or does it mean that he spoke aloud arguments like—but not verbally identical with—those that he gives in the paragraph?

These questions are significant precisely because they do not occur to most readers of the Life. So deftly has Boswell collapsed the distance between past and present in this and similar passages that we are normally aware only of the effect he thereby creates: dialogue is imitated with elegant artifice. Here, as in other ways elsewhere, Boswell's art achieves its success not by transcription of life but rather by skillful mimesis.

III

Most often temporal distance is minimized without conspicuously lessening intellectual distance between readers and Johnson. Especially is this the case in the many extreme instances where Boswell simply takes his readers completely back into the past by omitting any explicit reference to the act or moment of writing, giving instead merely what Johnson said together with what Boswell was moved to think in response. A few examples will suffice: "Here he seemed to me to be strangely deficient in taste; for surely statuary is a noble art of imitation…" (II, 439); "My illustrious friend, I thought, did not sufficiently admire Shenstone.…" (II, 452); "I, however, could not help thinking that a man's humour is often uncontroulable by his will" (III, 335); "Seeing him heated, I would not argue any farther; but I was confident that I was in the right. I would, in due time, be a Nestor, an elder of the people; and there should be some difference between the conversation of twenty-eight and sixty-eight." (III, 337) In noting these and similar passages where Boswell's dissent maintains significant intellectual distance between readers and Johnson, however, it must be remembered that such distance is always a comparatively short remove from Johnson and from the narrator's reiterated position of affinity to his 'illustrious friend." It is somewhat surprising to discover how often Boswell actually disagrees with Johnson, because what the narrator causes to stand out most prominently in our memories of the Life are the places where he describes his response to Johnson in such phrases as "I thought I could defend him at the point of my sword. My reverence and affection for him were in full glow." (III, 198)

Historically, most readers have been left with an overwhelming impression of Boswell standing close to Johnson in rapt attention and enthusiastic accord. Boswell's kinship with the master has so far exceeded that of all but the most sympathetic readers as to become proverbial: only recently has Webster's New International Dictionary stopped defining Boswellian as "Relating to, or characteristic of Dr. Johnson's biographer, James Boswell, whose hero worship made a faithful but often uncritical record of details."¹³ But this impression, like the reader's memory of almost unceasing dialogue, is partly dramatic illusion. Boswell has in fact chosen to remain in the middle distance between objective spectator and hero-worshipper. He portrays himself as sufficiently close to the average reader so that the narrator functions as Everyman reacting to the unique Johnson while nevertheless remaining close enough to the Sage in outlook and disposition so that readers will accept the biographer as a fit guide.

Upon the success of Boswell's difficult balancing act depends much of the effectiveness of "the peculiar plan of his biographical undertaking." Imagine for a moment a Life of Johnson written in the grand manner of, say, Winston Churchill, Gibbon, or even of Johnson himself. Imagine that all the Johnsonian dialogue is retained together with the distinctive piling up of "each scene" of which there is some record. But suppose that for Boswell's personality as it is revealed to us in his book the personality of Gibbon, or Churchill, or some twin of Johnson were substituted. There is no reason why such a Life could not be successful. But it would be a radically different kind of success. We as readers would be kept at a greater distance from the subject by the imposing personality of the narrator. There would always be the distancing realization, as there is for example in reading Johnson's lives of the greater poets, that we are watching from a respectful distance one extraordinary mind respond to another. Thespectacle may be fascinating, but we cannot become part of it in the way Boswell makes us participants in the drama of Johnson's life, living "o'er each scene with him."

To maintain the narrator equidistant from readers and Johnson, Boswell plays many roles throughout the Life. Extremes are intended to cancel each other out. Sometimes he is simply, like his presumed readers, the literate Everyman intelligently in touch with the current state of belles lettres. Thus, early in the Life, commenting on the publication of London, he remarks: "To us who have long known the manly force, bold spirit, and masterly versification of this poem, it is a matter of curiosity to observe the diffidence with which its author brought it forward into publick notice." (1, 123-24) Here by his choice of plural pronoun Boswell joins the group of readers long familiar with one of the century's most famous poems. Distance between narrator and audience is collapsed to the point of complete identification. He becomes one of us. Much later in the Life Boswell quotes a passage of self-analysis written in his journal after an evening with Johnson, asserting in defense of the quotation: "This reflection, which I thus freely communicate, will be valued by the thinking part of my readers, who may have themselves experienced a similar state of mind." (III, 225) Together with its attempt to disarm through bullying and flattery any charge of irrelevancy, this sentence endeavors to move narrator and reader close together intellectually by suggesting a probable kinship of mental experience. Boswell thus reassures his intelligent readers that he is like them.

He usually does so less explicitly by disclosing the narrator's character in ways that invite readers to infer their likeness to him. After quoting, for example, Johnson's statement that the most famous men worry most about losing their reputation, Boswell adds: "I silently asked myself, 'Is it possible that the great SAMUEL JOHNSON really entertains any such apprehension, and is not confident that his exalted fame is established upon a foundation never to be shaken?'" (1, 451) Here the narrator portrays himself as an ordinary, unfamous man startled to catch a close glimpse of the uncertainties of greatness. Readers not suffering delusions of grandeur will by this sentence and similar ones be moved closer to the narrator and thereby encouraged to continue their identification with him, seeing Johnson through eyes that might—so Boswell makes us feel—belong to any man.

To ensure, however, that such identification by readers with the narrator does not become so close that confidence in him as fit guide is rattled by any feeling that he is just an ordinary man, no different from the run-of-the-mill reader of biographies, Boswell frequently invites attention to his own distinctiveness. At no point in the Life are we allowed to forget that the narrator, unlike his readers, was after all one of the charmed circle admitted to friendship with "the great SAMUEL JOHNSON." Nor does Boswell omit to remind us, albeit with disarming wit, of how the members of Johnson's circle differ from the rest of us: "Dr. Goldsmith, being a privileged man, went with him this night, strutting away, and calling to me with an air of superiority, like that of an esoterick over an exoterick disciple of a sage of antiquity, 'I go to Miss Williams.' I confess, I then envied him this mighty privilege, of which he seemed so proud; but it was not long before I obtained the same mark of distinction." (I, 421)

Not that all members of Johnson's circle are to be equally respected. Boswell's reiterated sniping at Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale is only part of a sustained effort intended to display the narrator as remarkable both for his illustriousfriendships and for his unusually selfless devotion to the exacting task of accurately portraying Johnson. After briefly marvelling at his own talents, Boswell says in the Advertisement to the first edition that he "will only observe, as a specimen of my trouble, that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly; which, when I had accomplished, I well knew would obtain me no praise, though a failure would have been to my discredit." (1, 7) Elsewhere in the Life Boswell's pains-taking humility is brought to our attention. No seeker after praise, the narrator is only "desirous that my work should be, as much as is consistent with the strictest truth, an antidote to the false and injurious notions of his character, which have been given by others." (III, 391) Though "others" have been slanderous, Boswell is simply the vir bonus motivated in all matters by "my earnest love of truth." (III, 147) But his humility does not of course exclude selfless literary courage in a worthy cause: "To please the true, candid, warm admirers of Johnson, and in any degree increase the splendour of his reputation, I bid defiance to the shafts of ridicule, or even of malignity." (III, 190) Brave Boswell! It is not everyone—certainly not every reader, however well disposed to Johnson—who would feel equally willing to expose himself for the cause. As in these and other similar statements Boswell displays his moral and intellectual fitness for his biographical task he is also precluding the possibility of excessive identification by readers with the narrator. Though similar, they are not to be thought identical. He has written the book. They have not. At the outset Boswell calls attention to this elementary though crucial distinction by asserting: "The labour and anxious attention with which I have collected and arranged the materials of which these volumes are composed, will hardly be conceived by those who read them with careless facility." (1, 5-6) Readers speeding through the Life are thus reminded of their distance from its author. So far are they from him intellectually that his immense labors will be almost beyond their ken.

Another way of avoiding over-familiarity with readers is to put on the mask of Johnsonian sage, however illfitting. Boswell moves away from us—in the direction of Johnson—by assuming that we need advice and then supplying it. "The excellent Mr. Nelson's 'Festivals and Fasts' … is a most valuable help to devotion; and in addition to it I would recommend two sermons on the same subject, by Mr. Pott, Archdeacon of St. Alban's, equally distinguished for piety and elegance." (II, 458) Here readers are reduced to students taking their reading list from the pious, learned narrator. After mastering Pott's sermons, the open-minded reader may wish advice on whether to support abolitionists: "I have read, conversed, and thought much upon the subject, and would recommend to all who are capable of conviction, an excellent Tract by my learned and ingenious friend John Ranby, Esq. entitled 'Doubts on the Abolition of the Slave Trade'." (III, 205) Does the reader perhaps have children? "No book whatever can be recommended to young persons, with better hopes of seasoning their minds with vital religion, than YOUNG'S 'NIGHT THOUGHTS'." (IV, 61) Of the importance of treating an errant daughter sternly Boswell leaves the possibly wavering reader in no doubt: "After frequently considering this subject, I am more and more confirmed in what I then meant to express, and which was sanctioned by the authority and illustrated by the wisdom of Johnson; and I think it of the utmost consequence to the happiness of Society, to which subordination is absolutely necessary. It is weak, and contemptible, and unworthy, in a parent to relax in such a case." (II, 329) Boswell goes on, but this much sufficiently illustrates one of his more vehement moves in the direction of the firm-minded Johnsonian sage, agreeing with the master in something like the master's magisterial tone.

Boswell also affects the Johnsonian tone by sententiously generalizing on the human condition: "To such unhappy chances are human friendships liable.… " (III, 337) Or, for another example, after stating his disagreement with the philosophy of Rasselas and then affirming that life is sometimes more, and sometimes less happy, Boswell launches another flight of sober religious advice by saying: "This I have learnt from a pretty hard course of experience, and would, from sincere benevolence, impress upon all who honour this book with a perusal, that until a steady conviction is obtained that the present life is an imperfect state, and only a passage to a better…" (I, 343-44) Nothing better illustrates the mask Boswell is trying to wear in such passages than his soliloquy on "how different a place London is to different people." Placing himself momentarily in their shoes, the narrator concisely describes how the city will seem to "a politician … a grazier … a mercantile man … a dramatick enthusiast … a man of pleasure" and, finally, to such men as the narrator himself: "But the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible." (I, 422) Throughout the Life Boswell tries to portray himself as intellectual man, just as throughout the London Journal he tries equally hard to cast himself in a very different role: "The description is faint; but I surely may be styled a Man of Pleasure … I patrolled up and down Fleet Street, thinking on London, the seat of Parliament and the seat of pleasure, and seeming to myself as one of the wits in King Charles the Second's time."¹⁴

Equally illustrative of the role Boswell adopts in his London Journal—and of the fact that he does conspicuously put on different masks to match different rhetorical situations in different books—is the moment when he reports that he "drank about and sung Youth's the Season and thought myself captain Macheath."¹⁵. In the Life our narrator does not Captain try to persuade readers that he is a Restoration rake or a character in search of a comic opera. Instead there are the solemn warnings and sober generalizations together with a very different and much more respectable order of literary allusions. Thus after describing how he has educated his sons, Boswell adds his expectation that "they will, like Horace, be grateful to their father for giving them so valuable an education." (III, 12) We readers may well feel put back in our (distant) place by such glimpses of the generalizing Scottish sage as intellectual man in London or at home raising so wisely his Horatian family.

Or we may smile. And in that case Boswell's control of aesthetic distance has wavered. Instead of moving away from readers in the direction of Johnson, the narrator has moved away in the opposite direction, far alike from Johnson and from the readers to whom the narrator has become an object of ridicule. Consider, for example—everyone will have his own favorite—Boswell at grips with the problem of getting up in the morning: "I have thought of a pulley to raise me gradually; but that would give me pain, as it would counteract my internal inclination." (III, 168) Here the would-be intellectual man looks suspiciously like Falstaff. Too often throughout the Life Boswell comes onstage wearing the wrong mask.

Control of aesthetic distance has not wavered every time we smile at the narrator, however. After one memorable Johnsonian retort, for example, Boswell interrupts his narrative by observing: "I never heard the word blockhead applied to a woman before, though I do not see why it should not, when there is evident occasion for it." (II, 456) Here readers may well laugh at Boswell's naively solemn consideration of the great lexicographer's word usage. But the narrator has conspicuously placed tongue in cheek to heighten our appreciation of a comic incident. While pausing to smile at the narrator readers must also stand apart from what Johnson has just said and reflect on how extraordinary the remark really was. It is only when our laughter at Boswell deflects attention from Johnson that control of aesthetic distance has been lost. All readers would not agree on precisely where and how often these mistakes occur. Nor is it necessary to achieve such accord. The acceptance for so long of Macaulay's response to Boswell is sufficient evidence of the Life's most conspicuous flaw: Boswell's characterization of the narrator does not always keep readers at a respectful distance which is nevertheless sufficiently close to him for that identification which induces maximum involvement in the Life's play of ideas. Where the Life fails it is because we are allowed to come too close to the narrator or, what is in effect perhaps the same thing, because he is pushed too far away from us in the wrong direction.

But to pinpoint the Life's weak spot as a wavering in control of aesthetic distance between readers and narrator is not to say that the weakness is fatal. Boswell's overwhelming achievement in creating the most famous biography in the English language is in large though not exclusive measure due to his skill in varying different aspects of aesthetic distance.¹⁶ The places where his control falters are comparatively few and, because he does succeed in establishing the rhetorical dilemma which I have described above, even those places do not significantly undercut the Life's over-all effect. The brief examples discussed here typify the ways in which by varying aesthetic distance along several axes Boswell succeeds in sustaining interest, maintaining faith in the narrator, creating sympathy for Johnson, and, perhaps most important of all, preventing the reader's sensibilities from being anesthetized by such thorough immersion in the "Johnsonian aether" as Boswell's peculiar plan entails. By compelling us so often to stand back and weigh Johnson's distinctive remarks, by thus reminding us of how debatable his views so often are, Boswell keeps alive our sense of wonder. We are never allowed to forget that Samuel Johnson was "a man whose talents, acquirements, and virtues were so extraordinary, that the more his character is considered the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence."

Notes

¹ Samuel Johnson, The Idler and the Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, L. F. Powell (New Haven 1963), 262. Italics added.

² Joseph W. Reed, Jr., English Biography in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven 1966), 38-41.

³ James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford 1934-64), 1, 29. References to this work (short title: Life) will be cited hereafter by volume and page within parentheses in the text.

⁴ See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago 1961), esp, 149-69.

⁵ See also Life, 1, III; 11, III; III, 190; IV, 206 and Bertrand H. Bronson, Johnson Agonistes (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1965), 93. A further measure of Boswell's sensitivity to the issue of "minute particulars" is provided in Harlan W. Hamilton, "Boswell's Suppression of a Paragraph in Rambler 60," MLN, LXXVI (March 1961), 218-20.

⁶ Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 322.

⁷ See Ralph W. Rader's forthcoming article "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: the Example of Boswell's Johnson," scheduled to appear in The Art of Biography in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Philip B. Daghlian (Bloomington 1968).

⁸ Sven Eric Molin, "Boswell's Account of the Johnson-Wilkes Meeting," SEL, III (Summer 1963), 307-22; Bronson, Johnson A'gonistes, 77; Frederick A. Pottle, "Boswell Revalued," Literary Views, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago 1964), 79-91.

⁹ Molin, "Boswell's Account of the Johnson-Wilkes Meeting," 320-21.

¹⁰ Pottle, "Boswell Revalued," 91.

¹¹Held up to ridicule is the stock phrase, its dead metaphor sufficiently suggesting the shift away from us of any comic object.

¹² Irma S. Lustig, "Boswell on Politics in The Life of Johnson," PMLA, LXXX (September 1965), 393.

¹³Even Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Springfield 1961) defines Boswell as "One who out of admiration or hero worship records in detail … the life … of a famous or otherwise significant contemporary … One who stays in almost constant attendence upon another out of great admiration or hero worship, often in a voluntarily servile position."

¹⁴ James Boswell, Boswell's London Journal, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York 1950), 140.

¹⁵Ibid., 264.

¹⁶I have called Boswell's work the most famous rather than simply the greatest biography in our language in order more thoroughly to beg the questions raised by Donald J. Greene, "Reflections on a Literary Anniversary," Queen's Quarterly, LXX (1963), 198-208. While Greene's invitation to ask ourselves whether the Life is a biography at all deserves a careful response, it has not seemed necessary to provide one here. The question of the book's adequacy as a record of Johnson's life is distinct from—though of course not unrelated to—the question of how Boswell disposed his material in ways that enabled the Life to achieve its enduring and undeniable success.