Books: Incongruous Crusoe

BOSWELL’S JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES WITH SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. (520 pp.)—Edited by Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett—McGraw-Hill ($10).

Boswell’s matchless life of Dr. Johnson made rather small potatoes of their engaging tour together through the Hebrides. But the tour was unforgettable in many ways—and this eighth volume of Yale University’s edition of Boswell’s papers lets the reader count the ways. It pictures Johnson—the most ungainly of oldsters, the most nearsighted of onlookers, the most sedentary of talkers, the most fanatical of Londoners—perched atop tiny horses, half-drowned in pitching vessels, sleeping in chilly barns and clambering over rocks in remote Scottish islands. And by the side of this most incongruous of Crusoes trudges the most inspired of Man Fridays.

Published in 1785, Boswell’s Tour proved a sort of tryout for the Life that appeared six years later. But the published Tour varied considerably from the actual journal that Boswell kept, most of which turned up a generation ago in a croquet box at an Irish castle. First brought out in 1936. the journal is now reprinted with much supplementary mate rial drawn from documents that have since come to light. Densely annotated, the present volume is as formidable as Johnson, but much of it, freed of foot notes, is also as chatty as only Boswell could be.

Endless Gibes. The Tour has a double value to the very degree that Boswell had a double aim in writing it. His first concern was his hero, and only his second the Hebrides. The two objectives sometimes gloriously combine, but they can just as gloriously clash. Scotland was always for Johnson a pet target that he waggishly exploited as a pet aversion; it produced endless gibes on tour as well as at home.

When Johnson was shown a Scottish forest, he remarked that he would have called it a heath. As for Scottish scenery: “The noblest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to London.” But he could poke fun at himself as well; asked if he would not start if he saw a ghost, he answered, “I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost.” But if the tour aroused Johnson’s antic side, it aroused his antiquarian side even more. On the islands — Raasay and Skye and Mull — there were still feudal forms of life, clans and chieftains, Macdonalds and MacLeods and Macleans. There were ruins and grottoes, homely customs, and high ritualized hospitality. Johnson per ambulated, gazed and pontificated. He could also be playful as well as sententious. When a young bride sat on his knee and hugged and kissed him, the 64-year-old lexicographer said: “Do it again and let us see who will tire first.” Rowers & Reapers. As against his un surpassed ear for talk, Boswell’s eye for travel was merely superior. He had a feeling for the picturesque: the boatmen singing as they crossed to Raasay and, “as we came to shore, the music of rowers was succeeded by that of reapers.” He recorded traditions: whenever the head of the MacLeods or the Macdonalds died, his sword was given to the head of the other clan. But what haunted the islands like a ghost was nothing ancient; it was the hiding out there, 28 years before, of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender. Many who had risked their lives for him had tales to tell, such as Malcolm MacLeod’s: “I went to London to be hanged and came [back] down in a chaise with Miss Flora Macdonald.” That young girl, immortalized for helping the Prince escape, became the travelers’ hostess—”a little woman” of 51, married to a Macdonald kinsman and about to emigrate to North Carolina. She gave Dr. Johnson the same bed that the Prince had slept in. It inspired in him, he announced afterwards, no “ambitious thoughts.”