fe_ for
one of the best of books. But he was also a master of the art of
brilliant and picturesque misrepresentation; and he did not neglect to
prove that the _Life_ is only admirable because Boswell was contemptible.
It was, he argued, only by virtue of being at once daft and drunken,
selfish and silly, an eavesdropper and a talebearer, a kind of inspired
Faddle, a combination of butt and lackey and snob, that Boswell contrived
to achieve his wretched immortality. And in the same way Boswell's hero
was after all but a sort of Grub Street Cyclops, respectable enough by
his intelligence--(but even so ridiculous in comparison to gifted
Whigs)--yet more or less despicable in his manners, his English, and his
politics. Now, Macaulay was the genius of special pleading. Admirable
man of letters as he was, he was politician first and man of letters
afterwards: his judgments are no more final than his antitheses are dull,
and his method for all its brilliance is the reverse of sound. When you
begin to inquire how much he really knew about Boswell, and how far you
may accept his own estimate of his own pretentions, he becomes amusing in
spite of himself: much as, according to him, Boswell was an artist. In
his review of Croker he is keen enough about dates and facts and
solecisms; on questions of this sort he bestows his fiercest energies;
for such lapses he visits his Tory opposite with his most savage and
splendid insolence, his heartiest contempt, his most scathing rhetoric.
But on the great question of all--the corruption of Boswell's text--he is
not nearly so implacable, and concerning the foisting on the _Life_ of
the whole bulk of the _Tour_ he is not more than lukewarm. 'We greatly
doubt,' he says, 'whether _even_ the _Tour to the Hebrides_ should have
been inserted in the midst of the _Life_. There is one marked
distinction between the two works. Most of the _Tour_ was seen by
Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of
the _Life_.' This is to say that Croker's action is reprehensible not
because it is an offence against art but because Johnson on private and
personal grounds might not have been disposed to accept the _Life_ as
representative and just, and might have refused to sanction its
appearance on an equal footing with the _Tour_, which on private and
personal grounds he _had_ accepted. In the face of such an argument who
can help suspecting Macaulay's artistic faculty? 'The