Her reply deserves a place in the history of woman:
I received your letter with joy and read it with gratitude. … All those expressions of friendship and all those promises of eternal regard and of constantly tender recollection which you have collected [from her past words to him] are acknowledged and renewed by my heart at this moment. … You went on repeating … that I was in love with you. … You would have me admit this, you were determined to hear me say it and say it again. I find this a very strange whim in a man who does not love me and thinks it incumbent upon him (from motives of delicacy) to tell me so in the most express and vigorous terms.... I was shocked and saddened to find, in a friend whom I had conceived of as a young and sensible man, the puerile vanity of a fatuous fool.
My dear Boswell, I will not answer for it that never at any moment may my talk, my tone, or my look have kindled with you. If it happened, forget it. … But never lose the memory of so many talks when the pair of us were equally lighthearted: I well content in the flattery of your attachment, and you as happy to count me your friend as if there were something rare about a woman with many talents. Keep the memory, I say, and be sure that my tenderness, my esteem, I would even say my respect, are yours always.108
This letter chastened Boswell transiently; he kept his peace for a year. Then (January 16, 1766) he wrote from Paris to Zélide’s father, asking for her hand. “Would it not be a pity if so fortunate an alliance were unrealized?”109 The father answered that Zélide was considering another offer. A year later Boswell sent her a direct proposal. She replied, “I read your belated endearments with pleasure, with a smile. Well, so you once loved me!”110—and she refused his offer.
While this epistolary game was going on, Boswell had sampled many countries and women. In Berlin he saw Frederick on the paradeground, but no nearer. He took to his bed a pregnant chocolate vendor; she seemed a safe port. In Leipzig he met Gellert and Gottsched; at Dresden he visited “the grand gallery of pictures, which I was told is the noblest in Europe.”111 He passed down through Frankfurt, Mainz, Karlsruhe, and Strasbourg into Switzerland. We have already accompanied him on his visits to Rousseau and Voltaire. In those exalted days the aura of genius and the fever of fame subdued the lust of youth.
On January 1, 1765, he left Geneva to cross the Alps. He spent nine exhilarating months in Italy, saw every major city, and sampled feminine wares at every stop. In Rome he sought out Winckelmann, kissed the Pope’s slippered foot, prayed in St. Peter’s, and caught his favorite disease again. He ascended Vesuvius with John Wilkes. In Venice he shared the same courtesan with Lord Mountstuart (son of the Earl of Bute), and renewed his infection. In a month at Siena he courted Porzia Sansedoni, the mistress of his friend Mountstuart; he urged her not to let any sentiment of fidelity interfere with generosity, for “my Lord is so formed that he is incapable of fidelity himself, and does not expect it of you.”112
His better side showed in his next exploit. From Livorno he took ship to Corsica (October 11, 1765). Paoli had liberated the island from Genoa in 1757, and was now in the eighth year of his rule of the new state. Boswell reached him at Sollacarò, and presented a letter of introduction from Rousseau. He was at first suspected as a spy, but “I took the liberty to show him a memorial I had drawn up on the advantages to Great Britain from an alliance with Corsica”; thereafter he dined regularly with the General.113 He took many notes that served him later in writing his Account of Corsica (1768). He left the island on November 20, and traveled along the Riviera to Marseilles. There “a tall and decent pimp” secured for him “an honest, safe, and disinterested girl.”114
From Aix-en-Provence he began to send to The London Chronicle news paragraphs to be released in successive issues from January 7, 1766, informing the British public that James Boswell was approaching England with firsthand data on Corsica. Arriving in Paris (January 12), he received word from his father that his mother had died. He undertook to escort Rousseau’s Thérèse Levasseur to London; if we may believe him she gave herself to him en route. He dallied in London for three weeks, saw Johnson on several occasions, and finally presented himself to his father in Edinburgh (March 7, 1766). His three years and four months of independence and travel had done something to mature him. It had not weakened his lust nor tempered his vanity, but it had broadened his knowledge and perspective, and had given him a new poise and self-confidence. He was now “Corsican Boswell,” a man who had dined with Paoli, and who was writing a book that might stir England to go to the Liberator’s aid and make the island a British stronghold in a strategic sea.
3. Boswell at Home
On July 29, 1766, he was admitted to the Scottish bar, and for the next twenty years his life was centered in Edinburgh, with many forays into London and one to Dublin. Helped perhaps by his father’s position as a judge, but also by his readiness in debate, he “came into great employment,” and “made sixty-five guineas” in his first winter before the courts.115 An exuberant generosity mingled with his self-esteem; he defended the lowliest criminals, spent his florid eloquence on obviously guilty persons, lost most of his cases, and dissolved his fees in drink. After those sunny months in Italy he felt to his bones the cold of Scotland, for which there seemed no cure but alcohol.
He continued his sexual wandering. He took a Mrs. Dodds as his mistress, but to supplement her services he “lay all night with … a common girl,” and presently “discovered that some infection had reached me.”116 Three months later, in a vertigo of intoxication, he tells us that he “went to a bawdy house, and passed a whole night in the arms of a whore. She was a fine, strong, spirited girl, a whore worthy of Boswell, if Boswell must have a whore.”117 Another infection. Obviously marriage was the only device that could save him from physical and moral degeneration. He courted Catherine Blair; she rejected him. He fell in love with Mary Ann Boyd, an Irish lass with a Grecian form and a rich father. He followed her to Dublin (March, 1769), lost his passion on the way, got drunk, went to an Irish prostitute, contracted venereal disease again.118
In February, 1768, he sent to the press An Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to That Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli. Its plea for British aid to Paoli caught the imagination of England, and prepared public opinion to approve the action of the British government in sending secret arms and supplies to the Corsicans. The book sold ten thousand copies in England; it was translated into four languages, and gave Boswell more fame on the Continent than Johnson enjoyed. On September 7, 1769, the author appeared at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford in the garb of a Corsican chief, with “Corsican Boswell” inscribed on his hat; but, as this was for a masquerade ball, it did not quite deserve the ridicule it received.
His cousin Margaret Montgomerie had accompanied him to Ireland, and had borne humbly with his Irish courtship and revelry. She was two years older than he, and her £ 1,000 made her no equal match (as Boswell Senior urged) for the heir of Auchinleck, but when he contemplated her patient devotion to him it dawned upon him that she was a good woman and would make a good wife; moreover, his reputation for lechery and drinking had narrowed his choice. The judge himself was contemplating marriage, which would put a stepmother between father and son, and might eat into the estate. Boswell begged his father not to marry; the father persisted; they quarreled; Boswell thought of going to America. On July 20, 1769, he wrote to “Peggy” Montgomerie asking would she marry him and consent to go with him to America and live on his £ 100 a year and the interest on her £ 1,000. He warned her that he was subject to periods of melancholy. Her reply (July 22) deserves remembrance:
I have thought fully, as you desired, and … I accept your terms. … J. B. with £ 100 a year is every bit as valuable to me as if possessed of the estate of Auchinleck. … Free of ambition, I prefer real happiness to the splendid appearance of it. … Be assured, my dear Jamie, you have a friend that would sacrifice everything for you, who never had a wish for wealth till now, to bestow it on the man of her heart.119
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On November 19 the father married; on November 25 the son. The younger couple set up a separate household, and in 1771 they rented a flat from David Hume. James strove for sobriety, worked hard as an advocate, and rejoiced in the children his wife bore him. Apparently she discouraged his marital approaches during the later months of her repeated pregnancies. On October 27, 1772, he went to a prostitute after having “too much wine.”120 He excused himself by arguing that concubinage was permitted by Scripture. He resumed his drinking, and added gambling. His journal noted, October 5, 1774: “Drank to intoxication.” November 3: “Many of us drank from dinner till ten at night.” November 4: “Much intoxicated; … fell with a good deal of violence.” November 8: “Drunk again.” November 9: “I was very ill, and could not get up till about two.” December 24: “I was very drunk, … stayed above an hour with two whores at their lodging in a narrow dirty stair in the Bow. I found my way home about twelve. I had fallen.”121 His wife forgave him, and cared for him in his illnesses.
His drinking had many causes: his many failures at the bar, his difficulties with his father, his shame of his infidelities, his awareness that he had not realized the dreams of his vanity, and his distaste for life in Scotland. Almost yearly he ran off to London, partly to plead cases there, partly to savor the conversation of Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, and Burke. In 1773 he was admitted to “the Club.” In the fall of that year he proudly walked the streets of Edinburgh with Dr. Johnson at his side, as a prelude to their tour of the Hebrides.
At first, on these London trips, he remained faithful to his wife, and wrote to her fondly; but by 1775 he had resumed his patronage of promiscuity. He was especially busy toward the end of March, 1776. “When I got into the street the whoring rage came upon me. I thought I would devote a night to it.” His devotion continued for several nights. “I thought of my valuable spouse with the highest regard and warmest affection, but had a confused notion that my corporeal connection with whores did not interfere with my love for her.”122 Another venereal infection sobered him transiently.
These exploits, and his subservience to Johnson, earned him scornful comments from men like Horace Walpole, and (posthumously) a lethal lashing by Macaulay,123 but they did not leave him friendless. “My character as a man of parts and extensive acquaintance makes people fond of my attention.”124 Most Londoners agreed with Boswell that no woman had a right to a whole man. If men like Johnson and Reynolds liked him, and many London homes were open to him, he must have had many amiable traits. These men of discernment knew that he passed from woman to woman, and from idea to idea, like a hasty traveler, scratching many surfaces but never reaching to the heart of the matter, never feeling the bruised soul behind the sacrificial flesh. And he knew it, too. “I have really a little mind with all my pride,” he said; “my brilliant qualities are like embroidery upon gauze.”125 “There is an imperfection, a superficialness, in all my notions. I understand nothing clearly, nothing to the bottom. I pick up fragments, but never have in my memory a mass of any size.”126
It was those fragments, and that memory, that redeemed him. He made amends for his defects by worshiping in others the excellence that he could not achieve for himself; by attending upon them humbly, by remembering their words and deeds, and, at last, with no minor artistry, placing them in an order and a light that made an unrivaled picture of a man and an age. And may we never be disrobed, in body and mind, in secret lust and indefatigable vanity, as thoroughly as this man, half lackey and half genius, revealed himself for posterity.
CHAPTER XXXII
The Literary Scene
I756-89
I. THE PRESS
IN the background were newspapers, magazines, publishers, circulating libraries, theaters, all multiplying recklessly, bringing to an ever wider public the conflicts of parties and talents. Several journals were now born: The Literary Magazine and The Critical Review in 1756, The Public Ledger in 1760. Johnson’s Rambler began in 1750; The Gentleman’s Magazine, which fed Johnson in his struggling years, had begun in 1731, and was to survive till 1922. The London newspapers doubled their number and total circulation in this period. The Monitor began in 1755, The North Briton in 1761, The Morning Chronicle in 1769, The Morning Herald in 1780, The Daily Universal Register in 1785, becoming The Times in 1788. The Public Advertiser struck gold in the letters of Junius; its circulation rose from 47,500 to 84,000. Most of the other dailies subsisted on narrow clienteles; so the circulation of The Times in 1795 was only 4,800. They were more modest in size than in speech—usually four pages, one of which was given to advertisements. Johnson in 1759 thought that newspaper advertising had reached its limit.
Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promise, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic. … The vendor of the beautifying fluid sells a lotion that repels pimples, washes away freckles, smooths the skin, and plumps the flesh. … The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions?1
Printers, booksellers, and publishers were still largely confused in one profession. Robert Dodsley had published Pope and Chesterfield, and now printed Walpole and Goldsmith. Thomas Davies had a popular bookshop, where he allowed leisurely browsing, and Johnson and others came there to sample the books and ogle the pretty wife. William Strahan won fame by publishing Johnson’s Dictionary, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire— the latter two in the annus mirabilis 1776. Oxford established the Clarendon Press in 1781. Booksellers paid well for good books, but could get hacks to prepare articles and compilations for a pittance. Says a bookseller in Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1766): “I can get one of these gentlemen, … on whose education more money has been spent than … would maintain a decent family to the end of the world—I can get one of them to labor like a hackney horse from morning to night at less wage than I could hire … a porter or shoeboy for three hours.”2 Authors multiplied to saturation of the market, fought desperately for their starveling share, and satirized one another with poisoned ink. Women added to the competition: Mrs. Anna Barbauld, Sarah Fielding, Mrs. Amelia Opie, Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, Fanny Burney, Hannah More. A country parson entered the game and walked away with the prize.
II. LAURENCE STERNE
He was not made for a parson; he was the son of a soldier, and was dragged from post to post for ten years; then and afterward he picked up enough military lore to make Uncle Toby talk like an old general about sieges and forts. His mother he later described as “the daughter of … a poor sutter [peddler] who followed the camp in Flanders.”3 However, his great-grandfather had been archbishop of York, and the Sterne family managed to get Laurence to Cambridge on a scholarship. He took his degree there in 1737, but a lung hemorrhage in 1736 foretold a lifelong struggle with tuberculosis. Ordained an Anglican priest (1738), he was given a modest vicarage at Sutton-in-the-Forest, near York. In 1741 he married Elizabeth Lumley, and took her to live with him in his tattered rectory. She entrusted to him her forty pounds a year; he invested some of it in land, and it grew.
Otherwise they were miserable. Both were consumptives, and both were made of nerves. Mrs. Sterne soon concluded that “the largest house in England could not contain them both, on account of their turmoils and disputes.”4 Her cousin, “bluestocking” Elizabeth Montagu, described her as a fretful porcupine, “with whom one could avoid a quarrel only by keeping at a distance.”5 Two children came; one died, the other, Lydia, became conspicuously attached to her mother. Unhappiness increased when Sterne’s mother and sister, who had been living in poverty in Ireland, came to York and appealed to him to settle eight pounds a year upon them ou
t of his wife’s income. The idea aroused no enthusiasm. Sterne gave his mother some money and begged her to go back to Ireland. She remained in York. When she was arrested for vagrancy Sterne refused to bail her out.
After eighteen years of arduous marriage the vicar felt that any really Christian soul would allow him a little adultery. He fell in love with Catherine Fourmantelle, and swore, “I love you to distraction, and will love you to eternity.”6 His wife accused him of infidelity; he denied it; she came so close to insanity that he put her and Lydia in care of “a lunatic doctor,” and continued the liaison.
Amid the tumult he wrote one of the most famous books in English literature. His friends, having read some of the manuscript, begged him to eliminate “gross allusions which could be matter of just offense, especially when coming from a clergyman.” Sorrowfully he deleted some 150 pages. The remainder he sent to the press anonymously; it was published in January, 1760, as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. Enough scandal and whimsical humor remained in the two volumes to make them the literary event of the London year. Far off in Ferney the furor echoed: “A very unaccountable book,” Voltaire reported, “and an original one; they run mad about it in England.”7 Hume called it “the best book that has been writ by any Englishman these thirty years, bad as it is.”8 At York, where Sterne’s authorship was an open secret and many local figures were recognized in the leading characters, two hundred copies were sold in two days.
It is hard to describe the book, for it has no form or subject, no head or tail. The title is a trick, for the “Gent.” who tells the story, and whose “life and opinions” were to be presented, does not get born until page 209 of Volume IV (of the original nine-volume edition). The substance of the tale is what happened, or was said, while he was being conceived, and while he was growing leisurely in the womb. The first page is the best: