A Grand Tour

James Boswell (1740–1795), diarist and biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Painting by George Willison, 1765. The owl above Boswell’s head is either a symbol of wisdom, or suggests his delight in nighttime activities.

(Scottish National Gallery)

On December 3, 1764, a young man hunched over the table in his lodging in the Alpine village of Môtiers, Switzerland. Glancing frequently at leaves of paper fanned across the table on which he had already sketched his life, he was busily revising the self-portrait. He dwelt on the sorrows of his childhood, raised by a pious mother who, while inspiring him with devotion, had “unfortunately taught [him] Calvinism.” More than a decade later, despite six enlightening years spent at the University of Edinburgh, the dire visions spawned by his dour upbringing still hounded him. “My gloomy ideas of religion returned, and sometimes I believed nothing at all.” Bringing his letter to a close, he exclaimed: “O charitable philosopher, I beg you to help me. My mind is weak but my soul is strong. Kindle that soul, and the sacred fire shall never be extinguished.”

Getting up from the table, the letter writer caught a glimpse of his visage in the room’s small mirror. It was a round, pale face crowned by a thick tuft of dark hair, setting off full, red lips. He was as pleased by what he saw as by what he had written: “I shall ever preserve it as a proof that my soul can be sublime.”With that, he signed the letter “James Boswell” and asked the maid to deliver it to the local philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the European “grand tour” was all the rage: Legions of young Scots and Brits burnished their university education by visiting the continent’s great museums and ancient ruins during the day, then furnished untold sums to the local economies by visiting taverns and brothels at night.

Boswell had staked out a different itinerary, however. This is not to say he didn’t drink or whore—he did to an epic degree. But, crucially, Boswell sought out not the great ruins, but instead the age’s most celebrated thinkers. He had already launched this peculiar quest in Great Britain, having befriended towering figures such as Adam Smith and Lord Kames, David Hume and Adam Ferguson, David Garrick and, most famously, Samuel Johnson.

Boswell’s irrepressible ego played no small part in this relentless pursuit. “I am sure I have genius,” he observed, “but was at a loss for something to say, and, when I set myself seriously to think of writing, that I wanted a subject.” The subject, it soon turned out, was Boswell himself: a subject he would draw and detail over the course of decades in his private journals. To be sure, the larger his collection of thinkers, the greater Boswell’s sense of selfworth. But something deeper was also at play. Boswell was not merely a celebrity seeker, but also a truth seeker.

The two great sources of truth then, reason and religion, were increasingly at loggerheads. Boswell had been raised in the dour Church of Scotland, where the worst of Scottish weather and Scottish Calvinism met to form a perfect storm of fear and trembling. The fear over the eternity of punishment never fully left him. “How it made me shudder,” he told Rousseau. “I imagined that the saints passed the whole of eternity in the state of mind of people recently saved from a conflagration, who congratulate themselves on being in safety while they listen to the mournful shrieks of the damned.”

Yet, these desolate howls were countered by the urbane voices of the philosophes declaring the good news of modernity: the rightness of reason and the pleasures of progress. These men and women did not deny that reason was variously expressed according to place and time, or that progress was a slow and uneven process. But they also believed that beneath the welter of linguistic and geographical differences, a single and unchanging set of values abided, one...