Boswell

Citizen of the World, Man of Letters

Irma S. Lustig

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813187457
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

These eleven original essays by well-known eighteenth-century scholars, five of them editors of James Boswell's journal or letters, commemorate the bicentenary of Boswell's death on May 19, 1795. The volume illuminates both the life and the work of one of the most important literary figures of the age and contributes significantly to the scholarship on this rich period.

In the introduction, Irma S. Lustig sets the tone for the volume. She reveals that the essays examining Boswell as "Citizen of the World" are deliberately paired with those that analyze his artistic skills, to emphasize that "Boswell's sophistication as a writer is inseparable from his cosmopolitanism." The essays in Part I focus on the relationship of the Enlightenment, at home and abroad, to Boswell's personal development. Marlies K. Danziger restores to significant life the continental philosophers and theologians Boswell consulted in his search for religious certainty. Peter Perreten examines Boswell's enraptured study of Italian antiquity and his responses to the European landscape. Richard B. Sher and Perreten document the personal and aesthetic influence of Henry Home, Lord Kames, Scottish jurist and leading Enlightenment figure, on Boswell. Michael Fry discusses Boswell's relationship with Henry Dundas, political manager for Scotland, and Thomas Crawford examines Boswell's long-standing interest in the volatile political issues of the period, including the French Revolution, through his correspondence with William Johnson Temple. In evaluation Boswell's performance as Laird of Auchinleck, John Strawhorn documents his efforts to improve the estate by use of new agricultural methods.

The essays in Part II study aspects of Boswell's artistry in Life of Johnson, the magnum opus that set a standard for biography. Carey McIntosh examines Boswell's use of rhetoric, and William P. Yarrow offers a close scrutiny of metaphor. Isobel Grundy invokes Virginia Woolf in demonstrating Boswell's acceptance of uncertainty as a biographer. John B. Radner reveals Boswell's self-assertive strategies in his visit with Johnson at Ashbourne in September 1777, and, finally, Lustig examines as a "subplot" of the biography Johnson's patient efforts to win the friendship of Margaret Montgomerie Boswell. An appendix by Hitoshi Suwabe serves scholars by providing the most exact account to date of Boswell's meetings with Johnson.

PART I

Boswell and the Enlightenment

Boswell’s Travels through the German, Swiss, and French Enlightenment

MARLIES K. DANZIGER

Boswell and the continental Enlightenment? To link the two may, at first glance, seem far-fetched. Yet the journal Boswell wrote while traveling through Germany, Switzerland, and a little corner of France from June to December 1764 gives vivid accounts of several German and Swiss representatives of the Enlightenment, respected in their own day even if unfamiliar to British and American readers today. More importantly, Boswell provides a detailed record of his own intellectual development, revealing the impact of the Enlightenment on an eager, ambitious young man. And most significantly, his interviews with Rousseau and Voltaire, those key figures of the Enlightenment whom he portrays so vividly in some of the best-known passages of his early journals, represent a culminating point in his experiences.

Boswell was fortunate. Among the many acquaintances he made in Germany and Switzerland were several clerics, scientists, university professors, editors, writers, and even a ruling margrave, all of whom showed a remarkable willingness to discuss philosophical issues or literary questions with him. These men, who represented a variety of interests and points of view, may all be regarded as Enlightenment figures in that they believed in reason, religious tolerance, and self-development. But most of them were less radical or skeptical than the French philosophes. Several were, in fact, part of the conservative Enlightenment characteristic of northern Europe.¹ Boswell, with his relatively conventional religious beliefs and deep-seated monarchism, tested his own views against theirs, using his conversations with them to clarify his own thinking.

Indeed, Boswell was at a stage in his life when he was receptive to new experiences. His intellectual curiosity had been aroused by no less a person than Samuel Johnson, himself certainly a representative of the conservative Enlightenment in England, during their meetings in London in 1763. Now, at the age of twenty-four, his year-long homesickness in Holland behind him, Boswell was embarking on travels through which he hoped to develop his knowledge, tastes, and character. The German courts were a sensible choice for such self-cultivation; they were francophile and even francophone—culturally rich and linguistically manageable without the expense and social snobbery of the court in Paris or Versailles. Most of the Swiss cities were also French-speaking, but their main attraction for Boswell was that they lay on his path to Rousseau in Môtiers and Voltaire at Ferney.

As he moved from one interesting acquaintance to another, Boswell became part of the cosmopolitan network that is a hallmark of the Enlightenment. And he contributed to this network, as we shall see, by bringing greetings, transmitting messages, starting correspondences, and finally writing about his experiences in his journal, which he hoped to convert into a travel book. That he was so readily received by a number of prominent people attests to his persuasiveness, perhaps even to a certain youthful charm. Besides, he was a Scot—something of a novelty—and, better still, he could claim to be a baron, at least by the standards of the German courts, and could therefore lay claim to some attention in those rank-conscious societies.

At the beginning of his tour, Boswell made a brief foray into the intellectual world of Berlin. He attended a meeting of the Académie royale des sciences et belles lettres, an august body founded in 1700 with Leibniz as its president and now under the personal control of Frederick II (who insisted on its French name).² Boswell heard two papers, one in Latin on astronomy and another in French on ambergris, but was “not greatly edified” (13 Sept. 1764, GT I 92–93). At least the Academy’s Perpetual Secretary should have been interesting, for Jean-Henri-Samuel Formey (1711–97) was a prolific editor, lecturer, and translator, as well as the intellectual leader of the large Huguenot community in Berlin. But when Boswell dined in his company, Formey spoke so much about his books and lectures that Boswell was struck only by his vanity, not by his accomplishments (1 Aug. 1764, GT I 46–47).

His meeting with one of the Academy’s scientists was more satisfying. The chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf (1709–82), best known for discovering the sugar in the sugar beet, was apparently working on crystallization, for he was able to make a “composition” that looked like precious stones and presented Boswell with a sapphire-like substance. Boswell promised to send him minerals from Scotland in return. It was a fine gesture of international good will, though whether Boswell ever sent anything is not recorded. At the same time, he was gathering interesting anecdotes. In an unusual glimpse that belies Marggraf’s reputation as a quiet, restrained man,³ Boswell saw him greeting a burst of thunder and lightning with the cry, “I love to see my God in flames” (14 Sept. 1764, GT I 94). But Boswell was merely sightseeing, and in general was more interested in personalities than in scientific achievements.

Religion was a different matter; on that subject he was really in search of personal enlightenment. Boswell had already experienced one religion, strict Presbyterianism, in his childhood; had explored several others, including Methodism, Catholicism, and deism; and had recently decided to become an Anglican. For a long time he had been troubled by the relation between religion and life; that is, between his yearning for piety and his yielding to temptations, especially to sexual transgressions. And he had given some thought to such religious concepts as revelation, foreknowledge, free will, and the immortality of the soul. His frame of mind is vividly illustrated in several precepts in the “Inviolable Plan,” which he composed in Holland on 15 October 1763 and was determined to read “frequently” to regulate his behavior. The admonition “Elevate your soul by prayer and by contemplation without mystical enthusiasm” suggests his genuine spiritual aspirations but also his distrust, by this time, of the highly emotional approach of the Methodists. And the exhortation “Be steady to the Church of England, whose noble worship has always raised your mind to exalted devotion and meditation on the joys of heaven,” attests not only to his newfound Anglicanism but also, by its focus on “the joys of heaven,” to his attempts to counteract the Presbyterian teachings of hell, punishment, and eternal damnation (Boswell in Holland 388).⁴ Yet his Anglicanism was not quite secure. On 24 June 1764, for instance, he was finding “Catholic pomp” an aid to devotion and was only tentative about his beliefs: “I see a probability for the truth of Christianity” (GT I 10–11). And so, wavering between doubts and the earnest wish to believe, he made a point of seeking out the representatives of several religious denominations.

The remarkable Lutheran clergyman Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem (1709–89), whom Boswell visited repeatedly in Brunswick, seemed just the man to reassure him. Known locally as the abbé or Abt (abbot) Jerusalem because he headed a seminary, he combined great personal piety with the ability to reason persuasively about religion; indeed, his particular forte was the soothing of religious doubts. Formerly tutor to the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick and his brothers as well as chaplain to the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick, he had managed to calm the restlessness of the Prince and the momentary doubts of the Duchess by giving them, as he explained to Boswell, “a neat summary of the proofs of Christianity” (15 Aug. 1764, GT I 63–64). He even promised Boswell a copy, though he never sent it.⁵

Jerusalem was very much a man of the Northern Enlightenment. He was known for his religious tolerance; he was well versed in the classics, the Bible, and contemporary thought; and he accepted the basic tenets of Christianity, “the genuine Christian religion itself,” while refusing to become involved with the sectarian squabbles of the time. Moreover, as an educator as well as a clergyman—he was founder and director of a renowned school, the collegium Carolinum, as well as the head of a seminary—he certainly regarded religion as essential for a moral, happy life. Above all, true to the Protestant tradition, the abbé valued personal religious experience. On their first meeting he told Boswell with disarming frankness how his own faith had been confirmed. Twice, when he was on the verge of death, he had tried to find peace by reading Plato’s Phaedo, but in vain. It was reading the New Testament that had given him strength. “Thus . . . I had a trial of my religion” (28 June 1764, GT I 14). That the New Testament was so important in confirming Jerusalem’s faith was no accident; much of his teaching was based on a close reading of the Bible. Boswell was touched by the anecdote, which he recorded in some detail in his journal. But he could not apply it to himself.

Nor were the abbé’s religious theories easy for Boswell to grasp, particularly those on revelation, which they also discussed during their first meeting. Jerusalem was drawing on several sources, notably the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy with its emphasis on the harmonious interaction of reason and revelation, and English latitudinarianism with its emphasis on rational and practical Christianity, an approach to religion he had come to know during a stay in England.⁶ His popularizing treatise, Betrachtungen über die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der Religion (Reflections on the Foremost Truths of Religion), published a few years after Boswell’s visit, gives a good idea of his thinking. In the first volume (1768), Jerusalem interpreted revelation as God’s gift to mankind in general; he even paraphrased the passage in the first Epistle of Pope’s Essay on Man that scorns man’s pride in thinking he is singled out by God. Yet the abbé also recognized each individual’s wish to be known to God, and he acknowledged a special revelation for individual human beings, at least to the extent of letting them feel that their happiness or suffering serves a purpose in the universe.⁷ In the second volume of the Betrachtungen (1772, 1774) Jerusalem took the Old and New Testaments as quasi-historical documents and described three stages of revelation: from God the Creator in Genesis, from Moses, and from Christ. Such ideas were surely of interest to Boswell, who had been encouraged to think about revelation by Johnson and had continued to do so during his stay in Holland.⁸ But Boswell made no attempt to record the abbé’s arguments and simply declared: “My faith was confused. Objections rose thick against revelation. Yet I hoped at last to attain stability” (28 June 1764, GT I 14–15).

Jerusalem’s explanation that divine foreknowledge was compatible with free will was not reassuring to Boswell, either. After discussing this point in another of their conversations, Boswell noted patronizingly that “the good abbé” could not bear to question divine power. Unwilling to accept Jerusalem’s characteristic balancing of opposites, Boswell strongly favored one side: “I boldly opposed prescience, and clearly defended my liberty” (11 Aug. 1764, GT I 56). It is noteworthy that in this emphasis on free will, Boswell was rejecting not only the abbé’s moderate position but also the much sterner Calvinist teachings on predestination and original sin. However, in a letter to Jerusalem written from Strasbourg some weeks later, on 16 November, Boswell was no longer so sure. Jocularly calling their argument about free will and necessity a mere “sport of the mind” because it was bound to be inconclusive, he admitted to second thoughts: “I used to be a strenuous asserter of the Liberty of man. No Roman ever had a warmer ambition to vindicate external freedom than I had to vindicate internal” (L654). Suddenly, reflecting on how certain memories can come to the fore without one’s volition, he was aware of experiences that seemed to contradict free will. And so Boswell was continuing the exchange of ideas begun with Jerusalem in Brunswick, showing that their conversations still germinated in his mind.

Although he could not accept the abbé’s religious views, Boswell was touched by the fact that Jerusalem’s apparently cloudless piety was actually hard won. This seemingly calm, rational man had suffered from periodic depressions—the “hypochondria” that afflicted so many of his contemporaries, including Boswell—but had borne them with patience, thanks, he said, to God’s help. With hindsight, we know that Jerusalem’s son was not so fortunate; the model for Goethe’s Werther, he committed suicide a few years later. Boswell, relieved to hear that Jerusalem had successfully vanquished “the demon,” described his own extreme depression in Utrecht and felt like a hero for not having succumbed. In addition, Boswell was impressed by the abbé’s library, one of several created by European scholars in the Enlightenment,⁹ and was determined to have a “large and good one” at Auchinleck one day (11 Aug. 1764, GT I 56–57).

While in Berlin, Boswell encountered a more skeptical approach to religion in a secular representative of the Enlightenment, the mathematician Jean Salvemini de Castillon (1708–91). A cosmopolitan figure, Italian by birth, Castillon had earned a law degree from Pisa but had then taught mathematics and astronomy in Lausanne and more recently in Utrecht. He had just been appointed to the Prussian Academy and it was he, in fact, who took Boswell to the Academy meeting. Castillon was an active scholar. He had edited Newton’s minor mathematical treatises and the Leibniz-Euler correspondence; he had also written an answer to Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (in 1756, two years after its publication) and had translated Pope’s Essay on Man into Italian (1760) and Locke’s Elements of Natural Philosophy into French (1761). Frederick II was sufficiently impressed by him that he named Castillon royal astronomer a year after Boswell’s visit and eventually made him head of the Academy’s mathematics section.¹⁰

Boswell had studied with Castillon in Utrecht without enthusiasm, but now that both were newcomers in Berlin, they sought each other’s company. On one occasion, Castillon acknowledged with remarkable frankness that he considered God a being to be revered but that he disapproved of emotional worship, which he called “the fancy of fanatics.” He also declared that only the Gospels were “truly Christian scriptures,” that the Epistles might be useful “sometimes,” but that “the Christian religion had not added much to morality.” Sounding rather like the French philosophes with their distrust of fanaticism and doubts about the ameliorating power of the Church, Castillon left Boswell wondering: “What would he be at?” (14 Sept. 1764, GT I 94–95). Questioning the link between Christianity and morality, in particular, was bound to be disturbing to Boswell, who needed Christian beliefs and indeed the sense of belonging to a church (he was an avid church-goer) even though he changed from one religious denomination to another.

Interestingly enough, Castillon’s ideas as recorded by Boswell sound more skeptical than those expressed in his Réponse to Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, published in Amsterdam while he was teaching in Utrecht. In this work, in which he debunked Rousseau’s idealization of the state of nature, Castillon was hardly ever critical of religion or the clergy, and he expressed such unsubversive ideas as that God the Creator has endowed man with a soul, with reason, and—following Francis Hutcheson—with a moral sense (99–107, 117). Perhaps Castillon was being deliberately cautious in the Réponse. That would explain Boswell’s commiserating with him for having had to hide his philosophical thoughts while in Utrecht (29 August 1764, GT I 77). Apparently the Dutch were even less ready than Boswell for some of Castillon’s ideas.

Boswell expressed his commiseration after he recorded their talk about that other favorite subject of his, free will. At first Castillon maintained that he could “conceive the most perfect prescience without restraining liberty”—the position which Jerusalem had taken but which Boswell now rejected as “absurd.” Thereupon Castillon, giving the subject a more philosophical cast, explained that since God has offered man part of His own nature, He has granted man some of this will. And he offered as example the choice between two eggs. Boswell does not clarify this puzzling allusion, which perhaps refers to man’s ability ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Cue Titles and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I. Boswell and the Enlightenment
• Part II. The Life of Johnson
• Index