If Hogg could have spent more of
his life with Shelley, and had been allowed to complete his book,
we might, I believe, have had a monument of the same kind.
But in the case of Boswell and Johnson, it is Boswell's magnificent
scorn of reticence which has done the trick, like the spurt of
acid, of which Browning speaks in one of his best similes. The
final stroke of genius which has established the Life of Johnson so
securely in the hearts of English readers, lies in the fact that
Boswell has given us something to compassionate. As a rule the
biographer cannot bear to evoke the smallest pity for his hero. The
absence of female relatives in the case of Johnson was probably a
part of his good fortune. No biographer likes, and seldom dares, to
torture the sensibilities of a great man's widow and daughters. And
the strength as well as the weakness of the feminine point of view
is that women have a power not so much of not observing, as of
actually obliterating the weaknesses of those whom they love. It is
sentiment which ruins biographies, the sentiment that cannot bear
the truth.
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