20 OCTOBER 1967, Page 21

Misfit laird

ART

PAUL GRINKE

The National Portrait Gallery's Boswell exhi- bition, loaned, appropriately enough, from Edinburgh, is a model of the new style of presentation. Portraits which alone always give the sinking feeling of an identity parade have been cunningly supplemented by sculpture, books and manuscripts, prints and blown-up photographs to round out the picture of an age.; Europe seen through Boswell's eyes. Dominating the show in catalogue and poster is Lawrence's brilliant premier coup sketch of Boswell himself, a baggy-eyed, bewigged Sidney Greenstreet, pointing a stubby finger like a directional microphone at the giants of the century and with, no doubt, another finger up his sleeve for intimate tavern work.

Boswell has come into his own only in this century with the discovery of a great cache of manuscripts at Malahide Castle and the publication of his private journals. To his own age he seemed the archetypal toady, the 'anec- detical memorandummer' of Fanny Burney. Would Reynolds admit him into the Club, would Rousseau and Voltaire condescend to entertain the callow eager youth, would John- son, his pole star, allow him to mop up the crumbs from his conversational table? These were vital questions for a man whose predeter- mined role in life was that of a humble, not very successful, Scottish banister.

Cap in hand, and a curious Scottish cap at that, he approached Frederick the Great and Pascal Paoli, supremely, blithely confident of his own powers of persuasion. In most cases his evidently unassailable charm won through; a failure cast its own temporary shadow of de- snondency. The catalogue suggests that John- son is almost a provincial beside Voltaire and Rousseau (in, their respective portraits VOltaire is seen as a mummified geriatric with the grim

inquisitorial humour of an Ena Sharpies and Rousseau, sensitively aloof, as 'a genteel black man in the dress of an Armenian'). Beside Johnson, Boswell should pale into total insig- nificance, but he stays doggedly in the picture, an omnipresent recording angel. Edinburgh, then living up to its name as the Athens of the north with Monboddo and Kames in the ascen- dancy, could not contain him. London and the Continent offered the peaks of idolatry. His own 'Career, his private life, everything was sacrificed for the transient moment of glory in the presence of a great intellect. Moth-like, BosWell headed for the already guttering candles of the Enlightenment.

Boswell's own life peeps fitfully through the perimeter of great names. His greatest motiva- tion was the inexorable and highly successful pursuit of women. Scottish heiresses, Dutch bluestockings, the plump wives of Italian func- tionaries and old Betty on London Bridge, all were grist to his mill and all peer wistfully at us out of their frames. His energy in this as in every activity he pursued was phenomenal —only his wife and legal practice received short measure.

The exhibition is conceived as a picaresque Grand Tour in miniature, with London, Edin- burgh, Potsdam and Rome glimpsed as it were through the post-chaise window, the procession of quickly forgotten faces, sights and public ceremonies and then the sudden confrontation with something exceptional. Reynolds's por- traits of Johnson, a great morose bear, and of Baretti worrying irritably at a book held inches in front of his nose, the Pine portrait of Mrs Piozzi, the 'belle dame sans merci' of the 1770s, or the final irresistible wax tableau of all the cast rollicking in the tavern. The element of discovery enhances our pleasure and provides a faithful mirror of Boswell's own intricate roller-coaster path through life. Apposite and highly entertaining quotations from Boswell's papers put each character firmly in his place in the Boswell canon and save constant reference to the catalogue. A show devoted to Johnson could never have induced the same thrill of eavesdropping, the feeling that round the next corner our hero is going to shake himself out of the legal rut and set off on fresh conquests. The personality which infuses the journals gives life to the exhibition and pervades it. Boswell emerges as a three-dimensional figure, irritating, fallible and perverse, but touched with his own genius. Posterity may one day reverse the traditiOnal roles and reveal Johnson, always the prima donna, as Boswell's pander. Mean- while, like Laurel and Hardy, they linger on in our affections.

Any lingering notions of mediaeval Hungary as a land of splendidly barbaric Magyars with rings through their noses are dispelled by the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition of Hungarian art treasures. The V and A must be congratulated on securing the loan of such a rich collection, and as usual they have pro- vided the perfect setting with the minimum of fuss.