Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/14

Boswell was the opposite of all these things. He made himself at home in all societies, and charmed others into a like ease and confidence. Under the spell of his effervescent good-humour the melancholy Highlanders were willing to tell stories of the supernatural. ‘Mr. Boswell’s frankness and gayety,’ says Johnson, ‘made everybody communicative.’ It was no small part of Boswell’s secret that he talked with engaging freedom, and often, as it seemed, with childish vanity, of himself. He had the art of interesting others without incurring their respect. He had no ulterior motives. He desired no power, only information, so that his companions recognized his harmlessness, and despised him, and talked to him without a shadow of restraint. He felt a sincere and unbounded admiration for greatness or originality of intellect. ‘I have the happiness,’ he wrote to Lord Chatham, ‘of being capable to contemplate with supreme delight those distinguished spirits by which God is sometimes pleased to honour humanity.’ But indeed he did not confine his interest to the great. He was an amateur of human life; his zest in its smallest incidents and his endless curiosity were infectious and irresistible. No scientific investigator has ever been prompted by a livelier zeal for knowledge; and his veracity was scrupulous and absolute. ‘A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist,’ said Johnson, ‘who does not love Scotland better than truth.’ Boswell was very far indeed from being a sturdy moralist, but he loved truth better than Scotland, better even than himself. Most of the stories told against him, and almost all the witticisms reported at his expense, were first narrated by himself. He had simplicity, candour, fervour, a warmly affectionate nature, a quick intelligence, and a passion for telling