himself in it. In the Fleet Street of
letters, smiling at him and jeering by him, who does not always see
James Boswell, completely lost to the street, gaping at the soul of
Samuel Johnson as if it were the show window of the world, as if to be
allowed to look at a soul like this were almost to have a soul one's
self?

Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is a classic because James Boswell had the
classic power in him of unconsciousness. To book-labourers, college
employees, analysis-hands of whatever kind, his book is a standing
notice that the prerogative of being immortal is granted by men, even to
a fool, if he has the grace not to know it. For that matter, even if the
fool knows he is a fool, if he cares more about his subject than he
cares about not letting any one else know it, he is never forgotten. The
world cannot afford to leave such a fool out. Is it not a world in which
there is not a man living of us who does not cherish in his heart a
little secret like this of his own? We are bound to admit that the main
difference between James Boswell and the rest, consists in the fact that
James Boswell found something in the world so much more worth living
for, than not letting the common secret out, that he lived for it, and
like all the other great naives he will never get over living for it.

Even allowing that Boswell's consistent and unfailing motive in
cultivating Samuel Johnson was vanity, this very vanity of Boswell's has
more genius in it than Johnson's vocabulary, and the important and
inspiring fact remains, that James Boswell, a flagrantly commonplace man
in every single respect, by the law of letting himself go, has taken his
stand forever in English literature, as the one commonplace man in it
who has produced a work of genius. The main quality of a man of genius,
his power of sacrificing everything to his main purpose, belonged to
him. He was not only willing to seem the kind of fool he was, but he did
not hesitate to seem several kinds that he was not, to fulfil his main
purpose. That Samuel Johnson might be given the ponderous and gigantic
and looming look that a Samuel Johnson ought to have, Boswell painted
himself into his picture with more relentlessness than any other author
that can be called to mind, except three or four similarly commonplace
and similarly inspired and self-forgetful persons in the New Testament.
There has never been any other biography in England with the single
exception of Pepys, i