More Adventures of Boswell
NETBOY, ANTHONY
More Adventures of Boswell Boswell on the Grand Tour. Ed. by Frederick A. Pottle. McGraw-Hill. 357 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Anthony Netboy The discovery of James Boswell's journals and...
...In the process, he pursues a lifelong hobby by adding Rousseau and Voltaire to his collection of famous friends...
...The new volume picks up the thread of Boswell's peregrinations where the last, Boswell in Holland, left off...
...The highlights of the present volume are undoubtedly Boswell's interviews with the two monarchs of French literature...
...Gaining admittance on the pretext of looking for guidance from the author of Emile and The New Heloise, Boswell quickly pleased Rousseau and was permitted to dine at his kitchen table...
...Here is a sample of their conversation: Boswell: "Would you have no public worship...
...Boswell left Rousseau in a state of tremendous excitement, proud that he had made a friend of the harassed, persecuted and anti-social philosopher...
...Boswell is nearly always interesting and always readable...
...Thirdly, they enlarge the reputation of a much-maligned English writer...
...After a number of interviews, Boswell drew incisive sketches of the agnostic philosopher whose acid pen made monarchs shiver and whose sneers at the corrupt French aristocracy helped light the torch of the Revolution...
...Boswell on the Grand Tour is not a book to be read at a sitting, but rather to be dipped into at leisure...
...The importance of these books is several-fold...
...Secondly, they unfold a fascinating panorama of European social history in the second half of the eighteenth century??unforgettable pictures of aristocratic life in Britain, Holland, Germany and Italy (the latter to be the subject of the next volume...
...Voltaire was a pagan who did not believe in Christianity, and his unorthodox ideas on religion shocked young Boswell...
...There is one sun...
...If there is a fault to be found, it is that the footnotes contain too much material about unimportant persons (though they often reveal such startling facts as that one of the Electors of Saxony had over 350 illegitimate children...
...Boswell gained admittance to every German court, and was feted as an equal (which, as the heir to a minor Scotch barony, he was...
...Boswell spent two months in the realm of Frederick the Great, and, though he failed to wangle an interview with that famous monarch, he had ample opportunity to observe him at close hand...
...In later years, he was able to do Rousseau a good turn when events forced the latter into temporary exile...
...To the two volumes published earlier there has now been added a third, of equally superior vintage, and more are to come...
...Frederick A. Pottle of Yale, has done a conscientious job of assorting the manuscripts and stitching together diaries, letters and memoranda into a running narrative...
...Let us meet four times a year in a grand temple with music, and thank God for all his gifts...
...Let us have one religion...
...Yet, he could not help idolizing him, and so anxious was the exhibitionistic Boswell to gain Frederick's attention that, on one occasion, he had an impulse to throw himself at his feet during a military parade...
...The young traveler (he is only 24), surfeited with the dour Hollanders and trying to escape the tentacles of the enigmatic Zelide, ventures on the grand tour of the courts of Germany and an excursion to Switzerland...
...With the cynical, toothless Voltaire, then living in semi-regal splendor at Fermey, Boswell had equal luck...
...His supreme gift is reportage...
...Voltaire: "Yes, with all my heart...
...By dint of a prodigious memory, he brilliantly recreates the scenes in which he participated...
...His introductions are masterful and his footnotes compounded of tremendous knowledge of the eighteenth century...
...An intensely lively man, he had the pertinacity of the modern journalist, poking his head into all kinds of places and bearding all sorts of prominent people...
...The non-academic reader could easily dispense with so much editorial interference...
...The editor of the journals, Prof...
...He shrewdly sized up Frederick as a man of iron will, contemptuous of the lives of his subjects, vain and haughty??in short, Prussian to the core...
...The interviews, carried on over a period of several days, reveal the temperamental Rousseau in a more personal and human light than he had been known to us before...
...Rousseau was living in semi-retirement in a Swiss Alpine village when young Boswell descended upon him...
...Reviewed by Anthony Netboy The discovery of James Boswell's journals and miscellaneous papers unquestionably constituted the literary find of the century...
...Like The Life of Johnson, it is crowded with people??footboys, lackeys, Hausfrauen, courtiers, courtesans, aristocrats and kings??all seen through the wondering eyes of a foreign youth...
...He scored his greatest triumph with Prince Karl of Baden-Durlach, in whose eyes he found such favor that he brazenly asked the Prince to award him his Order of Fidelity...
...There is one God...
...Flaunting his best finery, a sea-green coat and silver-buckled shoes, the dashing young man easily gained admittance to Voltaire's court and was even permitted to lodge there...
...The result is not mere journalism, but enduring literature...
...First of all, they bring to light an outstanding English diarist whose output easily compares with that of Samuel Pepys...
...Then mankind will be brethren...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 4
