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Utrecht; Frederick the Great, whom he courts obsessively
in Berlin but fails to meet; Rousseau, whom he
interrogates in Switzerland for a solid week; Voltaire,
victim of a similar siege; John Wilkes, the exiled English
anti-monarchist; Pasquale Paoli, the great rebel
leader of Corsica, whose bid for an enlightened liberation
from France was in 1766 as promising as the
American colonies’ was from England. Armed with
letters of reference, Boswell had come for more than
Grand Tourism:
“But tell me sincerely, are you a Christian?” I
looked at [Rousseau] with a searching eye. His
countenance was no less animated. Each stood
steady and watched the other’s looks. He struck
his breast, and replied, “Yes. I pride myself on
being one.” ... BOSWELL: “But tell me, do you
suffer from melancholy? ROUSSEAU: “I was
born placid. I have no natural disposition to
melancholy. My misfortunes have infected me
with it.” BOSWELL: “I, for my part, suffer from
it severely. And how can I be happy, I who have
done so much evil?” ROUSSEAU: “Begin your
life anew. God is good, for he is just. Do good.
You will cancel all the debt of evil ...” BOSWELL:
“Will you, Sir, assume direction of me?”
The answer to that wonderful Boswellian flourish:
no.
Then Voltaire: “I suffer much. But I suffer with
Patience & Resignation; not as a Christian – But as a
man.” “I was moved,” wrote the Scot that night. “I was
sorry.” Then General Paoli: “Let us leave these disputes
to the idle. I always hold firm one great object. I
never feel a moment of despondency.”
Zaretsky does an admirable job of arranging these
giants – most of them delighted, some repulsed by
their animated caller – not only into the era’s intellectual
chain of being but into the pricklier chain of Boswell’s
selfhood. This is the heart of the book. Zaretsky
is right to call Boswell a “bricoleur of the self,” an assemblage
of the many people and ideas he absorbs.
One gets the sense he is writing himself into existence
– scribo ergo sum. “I had lately a thought that appeared
new to me,” he would write years later in desperation,
“that by burning all my journals and all my written
traces of my former life, I should be like a new being.”
Zaretsky is right to call Boswell a
‘bricoleur of the self,’ an assemblage of
the many people and ideas he absorbs.
This attitude toward oneself – thrillingly similar to
our modern attitudes, in an age where one’s public
identity is more malleable than ever – is not exactly
unique even in the second half of the 18th century.
It was an attitude at least 200 years in the making.
Modern scholarship in the “history of mentalities” –
dubbed by the French Annales school – has asked the
fundamental, nearly incalculable question of how historical
peoples became who they were, how they understood
themselves and acquired identities.
Stephen Greenblatt marks the Protestant
schism of the early 16th century as the decisive moment,
the great “unmooring” of personal identity
from state and religious forces. Luther’s German
Bible and William Tyndale’s English Bible liberated
the most important moral knowledge in the world,
formerly locked up and out of reach by the learned
priesthood, into the layman’s hands. One’s inner conscience,
a private mechanism to be fed and cultivated,
replaced the public Church confessional as the
measure of one’s moral life. Sumptuary laws were
abolished; handbooks like Machiavelli’s The Prince
and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier proposed new
models of social conduct in court life. The merchant
class was born, and it grew from Spenser to Pepys to
the 18th century. This era has been well documented,
and we know it to be a breeding ground of social
climbing and imitation. But we arrive at Boswell: to
read his chronicle of every mood swing, every passing
influence consumed and digested into an identity,
one becomes so enmeshed in the young Boswell, so
convinced by his search for the right artifice, that for
a moment he seems the sole inheritor of Greenblatt’s
entire tradition of self-fashioning.
“Set out for Harwich like Father, grave and comfortable.”
“I hoped by degrees to attain to some degree of
propriety. Mr. Addison’s character in sentiment, mixed
with a little of the gaiety of Sir Richard Steele and the
manners of Mr. [West] Digges were the ideas I aimed
to realize.” “Let me moderate & cultivate my Originality.
God would not have formed such a diversity
of men if he had intended that they should all come
up to a certain standard ... Let me then be Boswell and
render him as fine a fellow as possible.” “Remember
Johnson’s precepts on experience of mankind. Consider
there is truth.”
Pause here and consider this entry, written two years
earlier, in Johnson’s slender diary:
Enlighten me with true knowledge, animate
me with reasonable hope, comfort me with a
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