to the imbecility of the
author. That is a theory which it would be waste of time {57} to
discuss. But it may be worth while to point out that other and more
rational explanations of Boswell's success are also insufficient. His
book is acknowledged to have originated a new type of biography. It
was felt at once, and has been increasingly felt ever since, that
Boswell is so direct and personal that beside him all other biographers
seem impersonal and vague, that he is so intimate that he makes all
others appear cold and distant, so lifelike that they seem shadowy, so
true that they seem false. Now this has commonly been attributed to
his habit of noting down on the spot and at the moment anything that
struck him in Johnson's talk or doings; and to his perfect willingness
to exhibit his own discomfitures so long as they served to honour or
illustrate his hero. In this way people have talked of his one merit
being faithfulness, and of his work as a succession of photographs.
Now it is true enough that his veracity is a very great merit, and that
no one was ever so literally veracious as he. But no number of facts,
and no quintessence of accuracy in using them, will ever make a great
book. Literature is an art, and nothing great in art has ever been
done with facts alone. The greatness comes from the quality of mind
that is set to work upon the facts. Consequently {58} the secret of
the success of the _Life of Johnson_ is to be found in the exact
opposite of the assertion of Macaulay. For the truth is that the
acknowledged excellence of the book is in exact proportion to the
unacknowledged literary gifts of its author.

The law for all works of art and literature is the same. The fact is
nothing unless the artist can give it life. Life comes from human
personality. _Ars est homo additus naturae_. Art, that is, is nature
seen through a temperament, the facts seen by a particular mind. The
landscape into which the painter has put nothing of his own personality
is fitter for a surveyor's office than for a picture gallery. The
portrait which gives nothing but the sitter's face is as dull as a
photograph. Two portraits of the same man, two sketches of the same
valley, not only are, but ought to be, quite different from each other.
Nature, the facts of the particular face or scene, remain the same for
both: but the two different artists, each bringing their own
personality, produce different results, when the fa