Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/179

Rh other men, they are merely true. Why, in the pageant of life, should we insist on casting Truth for a comic part?

Boswell, no doubt, is responsible for keeping Johnson a little at a distance. We are still under the spell of his hero-worship; and heroes are people whom we look at, but do not confide in. Yet if Boswell’s advice had weighed with us, we should all be reading The Rambler to-day. We have taken delight in Boswell’s pictures, and have paid too little attention to his text.

Johnson has a large following of enthusiastic admirers who would indignantly repudiate any slur cast upon their devotion. Yet some of them perhaps are worshippers rather than lovers, and lovers rather than friends. At any rate, they do not read his works.

No man—not even Boswell—can claim sole possession of Johnson. He dominated his biographers in life, and, if they were to perish, he would still live. He was always the centre of his circle: where he was, there was society. The mists and miasma of the earlier nineteenth century have partly hidden him from us. The mists will clear away, and he will come by his own.

In the meantime those who love his works enjoy no vulgar pleasure. For some years after his death, his writings were held in huge esteem, and shaped the prose of England. That time has passed. New models have captured the public ear; and at this day Johnson’s noble prose is perhaps studied chiefly by his parodists. Most men who attain to literary immortality depend on their works; the works are still admired, when the man is dead. Johnson has experienced another fate; the man still has disciples, though his works are