critic like Macaulay could
waste time in carefully considering whether Boswell was more fool or
more knave, and triumphantly announce that he produced a good book by
accident. Probably Boswell did not realise how matchless a biographer
he was, though he was not disposed to belittle his own performances.
But his unbridled interest in the smallest details, his power of
hero-worship, his amazing style, his perception, his astonishing memory
and the training he gave it, his superb dramatic faculty, which enabled
him to arrange his other characters around the main figure, and to
subordinate them all to his central emphasis--all these qualities are
undeniable. Moreover he was himself the most perfect foil and contrast
to Johnson that could be imagined, while he possessed in a unique
degree the power of both stimulating and provoking his hero to
animation and to wrath. Boswell may not have known what an artist he
was, but he is probably one of the best literary artists who has ever
lived.

But the supreme quality of his great book is this--that his interest in
every trait of his hero, large and small, is so strong that he had none
of that stiff propriety or chilly reserve which mars almost all English
biographies. He did not care a straw whether this characteristic or
that would redound to Johnson's credit. He saw that Johnson was a
large-minded, large-hearted man, with an astonishing power of
conversational expression, and an extremely picturesque figure as well.
He perceived that he was big enough to be described in full, and that
the shadows of his temperament only brought out the finer features into
prominence.

Since the days of Johnson there are but two Englishmen whose lives we
know in anything like the same detail--Ruskin and Carlyle. We know the
life of Ruskin mainly from his own power of impassioned autobiography,
and because he had the same sort of power of exhibiting both his charm
and his weakness as Boswell had in dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was
not at all a typical Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his
character, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme
trenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is
beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque. He
had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and an exuberant fancy;
but though his spell over those who understand him is an almost magical
one, his point of view is bound to be misunder