Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

was a privilege that he reserved for himself in light of the close friendship between them. So he said [to Boswell]: “Sir, I have known Garrick since childhood, and I will not allow any slight to be made against him.” And Boswell had to ask to be forgiven. Then Johnson left, without knowing that something very important had happened, something that would determine his fame more than his dictionary, more than
Rasselas
, more than the tragedy
Irene
, more than his translation of Juvenal, more than all his journals. Boswell complained a little about how harshly Johnson had treated him, but the bookseller reassured him that Johnson had a brusque manner, and that he believed Boswell could attempt a second meeting with Johnson. Naturally, there were no telephones then, and visits were announced. But Boswell let three or four days pass before he presented himself at Johnson’s house, and Johnson gave him a warm welcome.
    There is something very strange about Boswell, something that has been interpreted in two different ways. I’m going to look at the two extreme views: the one of the English essayist and historianMacaulay, who wrote around the middle of the nineteenth century, and that of Bernard Shaw, written, I believe, around 1915, or something like that. 5 Then there is a whole range of judgments between those two. Macaulay says that the preeminence ofHomer as an epic poet, of Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, of Demosthenes as an orator, and of Cervantes as a novelist is no less indisputable than the preeminence of Boswell as a biographer. And then he says that all those eminent names owed their preeminence to their talent and brilliance, and that the odd thing about Boswell is that he owes
his
preeminence as a biographer to his foolishness, his inconsistency, his vanity, and his imbecility. He then recounts a series of instances in which Boswell appears as a ridiculous character. He says that if these things that happened to Boswell had happened to anybody else, that person would have wanted the earth to swallow him up. Boswell, however, dedicated himself to publicizing them. 6 For example, there’s the scorn shown to him by an English duchess, and the fact that members of the club he managed to join thought there could not be a person less intelligent than Boswell. But Macaulay forgets that we owe the narration of almost all those facts to Boswell himself. Moreover, I believe a priori that a person with the lights out upstairs can write a good poem. I have known poets “whose name I do not wish to recall,” who were extremely vulgar, and even trivial, apart from their poetry, but they were well enough informed to know that a poet should exhibit delicate sentiments, should express noble melancholy, should limit himself to certain vocabulary. 7 And so these people were, outside their work . . . some were broken men, but to tell the truth, when they wrote, they did so with decorum because they had learned the trade. Now, I think this is possible in the case of a short composition—a fool can utter a brilliant sentence—but it seems quite rare for a fool to be able to write an admirable biography of seven or eight hundred pages in spite of being a fool or, according to Macaulay,
because
he was a fool.
    Now, let us take a look at the opposite opinion, that of Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw, in one of his long and incisive prologues, says that he is the heir to an apostolic succession of dramatists, that this succession comes from the Greek tragedians—from Aeschylus, Sophocles, through Euripides—and then passes throughShakespeare, through Marlowe. He says that he is not, in fact, better than Shakespeare, that if he had lived in Shakespeare’s century he would not have written works better than
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
; but now he can, for he cannot stand Shakespeare, because he has read authors who are better than him. Before, he mentioned other dramatists, names that are somewhat surprising for such a list. He says we have the four Evangelists, those four great dramatists who created the character Christ. Before, we hadPlato, who created the character Socrates. Then we have Boswell, who created the character Johnson. “And now, we have me, who has created so many characters it is not worth listing them, the list would be almost infinite as well as being well known.” “Finally,” he says, “I am heir to the apostolic succession that begins with Aeschylus and ends in me and that undoubtedly will continue.” So