oth have
that relative truth which is all art wishes for, and which is indeed a
greater thing, as having human life in it, than any absolute truth in
itself which, if it were discoverable, would be pure science, as useful
perhaps, but as dead, as the First Proposition of Euclid. The
greatness of literature depends on the degree in which the dead matter
of fact belonging to the {61} subject has been quickened into life by
the emotional, intellectual and imaginative power of the writer. And
this is true of historical and biographical work as well as of poetry.

That is the point to be remembered about Boswell, and to be set against
his detractors. His book is admittedly one of the most living books in
existence. That life can have come from no one but the author. It is
the irrefutable proof of his genius. Life and power do not issue, here
any more than elsewhere, out of folly and nonentity. The _Life of
Johnson_ is the result of the most intimate and fertile union between
biographer and his subject which has ever occurred, and it gives us in
consequence more of the essence of both than any other biography.
Boswell brought to it his own bustling activity and curiosity from
which it draws its vividness and variety: he brought to it also his
warm-hearted, half-morbid emotionalism from which it derives its many
moving pages: he brought to it his reverence for Johnson, which enabled
him to exhibit, as no other man could, that kingship and priesthood
which was a real part, though not the whole, of Johnson's relation to
his circle. We see Johnson in his pages as the guide, philosopher and
friend of all who came in his way, the intellectual and spiritual
father of Boswell, the master of his {62} studies, the director of his
conscience. Nobody else in that company saw as much of the true and
great Johnson as Boswell's loving devotion enabled him to see; and when
he came to write the life he put himself into it, with the result that
the portrait of Johnson as posterity sees it, will never lose the halo
of glory with which the Boswellian hero-worship crowned it for all time.

This was the all-important _homo additus naturae_ part of Boswell's
work: the setting his subject in the light of his own imaginative and
emotional insight. But there was more than that. Boswell had not only
the temperament of the artist: he had an artist's craftsmanship. The
_Life_ makes four large octavo volumes, each of some 500 pages, in the
gr