The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (107 page)

During these years in France, Franklin sought to meet writers he admired, but more than once he suffered their distrust of the American cause. One day in 1781 Franklin found himself staying at the same French inn with Edward Gibbon, whom we have met as the famous historian of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. He sent a friendly message to Gibbon expressing admiration for his work and asking for the pleasure of his
company. Gibbon, an unrepentant Tory, answered that, much as he admired Franklin as a man and philosopher, being a loyal subject of his king he could not have conversation with a rebel. Franklin, unfazed, is reputed to have replied to Gibbon that he still had great respect for Gibbon the historian. And, he added, he would be glad to provide all the materials in his own possession when Gibbon came to write his history of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

Franklin’s miscellaneous
Autobiography
had an appropriately disorderly publishing history. None of the work was ever published in Franklin’s lifetime or by him. Its first known publication was an unauthorized version in French in 1791, the year after Franklin’s death, which was then translated back into English by an unidentified London journalist. And it was only through retranslations from the French that the work was known in English until 1818, when Franklin’s grandson printed an authorized version from a manuscript that Franklin himself had revised in 1789. Franklin’s original manuscript was finally found in France in 1868, the fourth part was now included, and the whole work at last appeared in Franklin’s own words.

America offered a new stage for European man. And what Franklin euphemistically called the “Art of Virtue,” his “arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” was really a prescription for success in this modern world. His thirteen virtues were all self-regarding: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility. None of them pertained to God or Salvation. His was an eminently practical scheme, for which he gave detailed instructions. He prepared a ruled notebook, then devoted one week to each of his virtues, making a black mark in the appropriate box every time he committed a fault. “To avoid the Trouble of renewing now & then my little Book, which by scraping out the Marks on the Paper of old Faults to make room for new Ones in a new Course, became full of Holes: I transferr’d my Tables & Precepts to the Ivory leaves of a memorandum Book, on which the Lines were drawn with red Ink that made a durable stain, and on those Lines I marked my Faults with a black Lead Pencil, which Marks I could easily wipe out with a wet Sponge.” The number thirteen, in which he saw no ill omen, made it possible for him to go through one whole course of perfection in thirteen weeks, and four courses in a year.

Franklin seemed always to be asking himself and his reader, “How am I doing?” In his inward battle between Appearance and Reality, Appearance always wins and remains a challenge to Reality. Self-improvement was his “Way to Wealth,” his sure path to success. Humility, “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” was the afterthought thirteenth of his virtues. “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the
Reality
of this Virtue; but I had a good deal
with regard to the
Appearance
of it. I made it a rule to forbear all direct Contradiction to the Sentiments of others, and all positive Assertions of my own.… and I adopted instead of them, I
conceive
, I
apprehend
, or I
imagine
a thing to be so, or so it appears at present.” His
Autobiography
became a prototype for generations of popular success sagas—from Samuel Smiles to Horatio Alger, Edward Bok, Elbert Hubbard, Andrew Carnegie, and Dale Carnegie. Franklin pioneered with elementary rules for “Personal Relations” in an era before mass media had made possible a vocation of “Public Relations.”

Foreshadowing the new age to come, Franklin emphasizes appearances—the image—not in confession but as a boast. His
Autobiography
explained his technique for success as a rising young printer in Philadelphia, and no twentieth-century public relations consultant could have done better.

Poets and romantics would not admire Franklin’s cosmetics for the successful self. John Keats called Franklin “a philosophical Quaker full of mean and thrifty maxims.”

“He that falls in love with himself,” warned Franklin’s Poor Richard, “will have no rivals.” But the modern explorer of the self would have rivals everywhere. The temptation of the modern self-made man (which John Bright noted of Disraeli) was to worship his creator. And each such sounder of the self naturally distrusted others. “Benjamin’s barbed wire fence,” was D. H. Lawrence’s name for Franklin’s “list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a grey mare in a paddock.” In Franklin, Lawrence in 1923 saw only “this dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern to America.… Either we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin or we move in the gesture of creation, from our deepest self, usually unconscious. We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. It is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. The best we can do is to try to hold ourselves in unison with the deeps which are inside us.” So Lawrence foresaw the rewards and frustrations of the self pursuing the self.

W
E
might suppose that it would be easier to write the life of an individual than of a city or a nation. But in the West the art of history long preceded the art of biography. The word “biography” does not enter the English language to describe “the history of the lives of individual men, as a branch of literature” until 1683, when John Dryden used it to describe the writings of Plutarch (
A.D
. c.46–c.120). But what Plutarch wrote was not biography in the modern sense. He called his work
Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
. The lives of these soldiers, statesmen, lawmakers, and orators were “parallel” because Theseus and Romulus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Alexander and Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero, played similar roles in the public life of their time. Plutarch offered twenty-three pairs (with an essay comparing each of nineteen pairs) and four single lives, making fifty in all. Though peppered with telling anecdotes to amuse the reader, the dominant purpose of his
Lives
was ethical. He hoped by these examples to encourage virtue and discourage vice in public life. A Greek from Boeotia, he could not conceal his preference for the Spartan over the Roman virtues, but he aimed by the similarities of roles and qualities to encourage mutual respect of Greeks and Romans and provide models for imitation.

Plutarch’s lively style and his shrewd selection of anecdotes made his work popular in following centuries. Sir Thomas North’s elegant and idiomatic Renaissance translation (1579) from Jacques Amyot’s French was the principal source for Shakespeare’s Roman plays,
Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra
, and
Coriolanus
. Whole passages of Shakespeare were mere revisions of North. But Plutarch’s
Lives
had a rhetorical rigidity. They generally followed the prescription for an encomium—a celebration of a man, originally a Greek choral hymn sung in honor of the victor at the national games or at the end of the
komos
, a banquet in praise of the host. The plan called for the man’s origins, nature, character, actions, virtues, achievements, and then for a comparison with others. Plutarch included no
women, who presumably could provide no useful public models. Vasari too wrote only
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
.

These classical “lives” became prototypes for later writing about individuals. A rival for Plutarch was Suetonius (flourished
A.D
. 112–121), whose
Lives of the Caesars
overflowed with anecdotes of lust, violence, and idiosyncrasy. But sycophancy or malice prevented these from being biographies in the modern sense, the full-bodied story of a life from beginning to end. Instead they were homilies, biographical Sunday school lessons. With few exceptions, English “biography” remained in this sanctimonious mold. A popular English clerical writer of the mid-nineteenth century defined biography as “the chronicle of goodness—the history of the lovely, the beautiful—the assurance of the certainty of something better than we are.” “How delicate, how decent is English biography,” exclaimed Carlyle, “bless its mealy mouth!”

The transformation of “lives” from a branch of morals or of the history of the arts into a literary art was accomplished by a most unlikely author on a most unpromising subject. “Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators,” Macaulay wrote in 1831, “than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.” Macaulay meant
first
both in time and in eminence. In the years since there has been only occasional ill-tempered dissent.

Boswell’s subject, Samuel Johnson, would hardly have qualified for one of Plutarch’s noble Greeks or Romans. He was not a public figure, a statesman, a soldier, a lawmaker, or an orator. Though honored by the king as a pioneer lexicographer, he struggled to support himself by writing dedications and prefaces to other people’s books. In the public eye of London he was a crotchety man of letters and surely not a model of courage or character. In later years his
Dictionary
would be superseded, his edition of Shakespeare and his
Lives of the Poets
would seldom be read. He would live on in literary history as the man about whom the great biography had been written.

The author James Boswell was no more likely as the author. First of all, as a Scotsman he was one of the “race” for whom Dr. Johnson had outspoken contempt. A man of irregular habits and sexual excesses, frustrated in his chosen profession, he had little to commend him to a man who considered himself a moral arbiter and, above all, respected rank and “subordination.” When Boswell undertook his life of Johnson his small literary reputation depended on an obscure work about Corsica. To this work Dr. Johnson reacted characteristically. “I wish there were some cure, like the lover’s leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession. Mind your own affairs, and leave the Corsicans to theirs.”

During the whole seventy-five years of Johnson’s life, Boswell had a direct experience of his subject for parts of only twenty-one. “Nobody can write the life of a man,” Johnson said, “but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” After Boswell’s marriage to his Scots cousin in 1769 he spent almost all the rest of his life in Scotland as a practicing lawyer. Apart from his tour of Scotland and the Hebrides with Johnson (August to November 1773) Boswell was in Johnson’s presence altogether for parts of some three hundred days. This left him with only a fragmentary secondhand knowledge of two-thirds of Johnson’s life and a patchy if minute knowledge of the third of Johnson’s life when he knew him.

With only this limited firsthand contact with his subject, Boswell needed the steady industry of the scholar to collect his facts. For this, too, his passion for strong drink and weak women would seem to have left him ill qualified. In his book he would make up for his lack of personal knowledge by copiously reprinting Johnson’s letters. But even to collect these, along with notes of Johnson’s life and utterances, was a laborious, exacting, and miscellaneous task. “Were I to detail the books which I have consulted, and the inquiries which I have found it necessary to make by various channels, I should probably be thought ridiculously ostentatious,” Boswell boasted in his advertisement to the first edition. “Let me only observe, as a specimen of my trouble, that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly.”

If ever there was an unnecessary book when Boswell set about his work, it was surely another life of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Although Johnson was buried in Westminster Abbey, at his death in December 1784 he was no national hero. Still, within the next two years three lives of Dr. Johnson appeared. The first, by the scholarly William Shaw (1749–1831), a member of Johnson’s literary circle, a noted Gaelic lexicographer, and unmasker of James Macpherson’s
Ossian
, appeared in 1785. Then Johnson’s intimate friend and comfort, Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (1741–1821), who on remarriage had become Mrs. Piozzi, published her warm and personal
Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson
in 1786. These she followed in 1788 by publishing her letters to and from Johnson. Most notable was the
Life of Samuel Johnson
, by Sir John Hawkins, also a member of the Literary Club, who had known Johnson well enough to be asked to draft his will. Hawkins’s
Life
, appearing in March 1787, had a second edition in June. Was the market for lives of this dyspeptic icon of English letters inexhaustible? It seemed so.

Boswell’s friend, and a fellow member of the Literary Club, Edmond (or Edmund) Malone (1741–1812), the Irish scholar who pioneered in dating the plays and purifying the texts of Shakespeare, prodded Boswell to do a more ample life. Without the selfless Malone’s confidence and persuasion the
Life
might never have been written.