BOOKS OF THE DAY
A Literary Quartet
Four Portraits : Studies of the Eighteenth Century. By Peter Quennell. (Collins. 12s. 6d.)
THIS is a very agreeable exercise in the lighter form of popular biography, neither overloaded with industry nor puffed-up with an inordinate display of knowledge. I: will serve the ordinary inteLigent reader as a most excellent introduction to Boswell, Gibbon, Sterne and Wilkes, whose " portraits " are here presented in a fashion that is, upon the whole, adequately dimensional and elegantly precise. If Mr. Quennell is unable to produce any novelties or discoveries, anything with which a student of the eighteenth century is unfamiliar, he is none the less lucid and entertaining, and he is often extremely felicitous in deduction.
Of these portraits the longest and the most important is that of Boswell. This is by far the best account of Boswell that has ever been written. Even if one does not agree entirely with Mr. Quennell's interpretation, it is at any rate legitimately deducible from the docu- ments and is unquestionably accurate in its general form. But I doubt whether Mr. Quennell has made the portrait as complete as it might have been. We learn little in these pages of Boswell's cool indecency in the treatment of his friends (observable even in the case of Johrkson), of his impetuous malice, of the blank and ravening egoism—the cause of his precarious elation and ultimately his destroyer. I think we should also take into account the effects of syphilitic degeneration and of alcoholism, which were clearly respon- sible for much of Boswell's behaviour as well as for the habits of his mind. There is no mention of the sad and attentive.companion of his last years : Veronica Boswell, his daughter, who died only a few months after her father and who almost certainly died as a conse., quence of her devotion. Boswell's relations with Johnson are placed in a rational perspective, though perhaps Mr. Quennell gives Boswell the credit for a higher degree of tenderness and of sincerity than he actually possessed. I doubt, also, whether Johnson had very much " amazing sensitiveness ": I should be inclined to suppose that he was perceptive rather than sensitive. No man who was amazingly sensitive could have delighted, as Johnson certainly did, in the humiliation of inoffensive people and in the sallies and assaults of cruel rudeness. Indeed, one has only to lools;at the face of Johnson to see at once that it is not the face of a sensitive man.
With Mr. Quennell's estimate of the Tour to the Hebrides I cannot express agreement, and I think there must be many who do not consider that it " ranks far below the Life of Johnson" from a literary point of view. The Tour, of course, is not even remotely comparable to the Life, either in magnitude or variety, but it may be doubted whether it falls below the Life as a literary performance. At any rate, the Tour has none of the " woeful longueurs " of which Horace Walpole so justly complained when he expressed his opinion of the Life. If Mr. Quennell is capable of honest heresy, he will doubtless allow that at least one quarter of the Life could be excised, including the footnotes, without any disadvantage to the reader.
Mr. Quennell's accounts of Gibbon, Sterne and Wilkes are equally graphic and entertaining, though perhaps he does not show, in these, the same satisfying grasp of character which he has displayed in his masterly study of Boswell. He is, of course, wrong in saying that his four subjects were " alike in their devotion to the pleasures of the world," for Gibbon was never devoted to the pleasures of the world: he was devoted with a singular, happy intensity of passion to literature. Mr. Quennell is fully justified in referring to the affair with Suzanne as a " brief, innocent, inconclusive episode." There is little complexity in. Gibbon, but there is a deal of complexity in the case of Sterne. Here, I think, Mr. Quennell shows uncommon perspicacity in suggesting a study of the physiological elements of genius—a line of investigation which offers the reward of many discoveries and of many surprises. • I should like to ask Mr. Quennell, however, whether he is not prepared to draw a distinction between " sentimentality " and " sentimentalism." The former (like " re- ligiosity ") `implies a spurious element, and I do not think we have reason to suspect anything of the sort in the tenderly lachrymose constitution of Sterne. The portrait of Wilkes is altogether so lively and admirable that I cannot help expressing the wish that Mr. Quennell will some day undertake a full-size biography of this extraordinary person. It is high time that such a biography was written, and I cannot imagine a more delightful task.
C. E. VULLIAMY.
Previous page
