eat Oxford Edition by Birkbeck Hill: and the _Tour to the Hebrides_
makes a fifth. That is a big book: yet so perfect an artist is
Boswell, that scarcely once for a single page in all the five volumes
is the chief light turned in any direction except that of Johnson.
Anybody who has even read, much more anybody who has written, a book of
any length knows how difficult and rare an achievement it is to
maintain perfect unity of subject, never to lose the sense of
proportion, never to let side issues and secondary personages obstruct
or conceal the main business in hand. {63} There is nothing of the
kind in Boswell. Under his hand no episode is ever allowed to be more
than an episode, no minor character ever occupies the centre of the
stage. Whoever and whatever is mentioned is mentioned only in relation
to Johnson. Many great men, greater some of them than his hero are
brought into his picture, but it is never upon them that the chief
light is thrown. All the other figures, whoever they are, are here but
attendants upon Johnson's greatness, foils to his wit, witnesses to his
virtues, his friends or his foes, the subjects or victims of his talk,
anything that you will in connection with him, but apart from
him--nothing. All that they say or do or suffer, is told us only to
set Johnson in a clearer light. The unity of the picture is never
broken. And that is the same thing as saying that Boswell is not
merely what every one has seen, a unique collector of material: he is
also what so few have seen, an artist of the very highest rank.

This is seen, too, in another important point. The danger of the
hero-worshipping biographer is only too familiar to us. His book is
usually a monotonous and insipid record of virtue or wisdom. The hero
is always right, and always victorious, with the result that the book
is at once tedious and incredible. But Boswell knew better than {64}
that. He was too much of an artist not to know that he wanted shadows
to give value to his lights, and too much a lover of the fullness and
variety of life not to want to get all of it that he possibly could
into his picture. Like all great writers, there was scarcely anything
he was afraid of handling, because there was scarcely anything of which
he was not conscious that he could bend it to his will and force it to
take its place, and no more than its place, in his scheme.
Consequently, he has the courage to show us his hero, now wrong-headed