Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

On God's Making both Hell and Scotland

On God’s Making both Hell and Scotland Let me continue the thought in the previous chapter on Dr. Johnson, by talking about the first essay in Chesterton’s G.K.C. as M.C., his essay “Boswell.”Actually, this essay is not so much on Boswell as on Boswell’s book on Samuel Johnson. I say this because I have read Boswell’s journeys to the Continent and his London Journal, where we see a younger Boswell, a less edifying Boswell, yet still the Boswell who eventually encounters Johnson . Chesterton is quite aware that Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is the record not of one great man but “it is the record of two very great men,” one of whom is Boswell himself. There is ever something refreshing about Boswell. In Chesterton ’s essay, he remarks that Boswell “towers above the whole eighteenth century, as the one man who had discovered that it was not necessary to praise a man in order to admire him.” Even more fundamentally, Boswell was the first to discover that “in biography the suppression of a man’s faults did not merely wreck truth, but wrecked his virtues.” What an extraordinary remark that is! The truth about it is that we have vices and without this truth about our vices, we cannot describe our virtues, our wholeness. The occasion of Chesterton’s essay on Boswell is the issuing in  of an abridged edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Chesterton takes pains to explain why it is quite all right to abridge a great book. Most of the books we possess including the Bible and the Greek classics are but abridgments of the original whole.“If there is really no justification for dipping into a book, as is the habit of some of us,” Chesterton remarks in a most selfrevealing passage in defense of reading only selections from 66 Boswell, “it seems really doubtful whether there is any justification for dipping into existence, as all of us do.Whenever and wherever we are born, we are coming into the middle of something .”1 That Chesterton would have liked Boswell in many ways can be ascertained from Chesterton’s notion that real conversations about the highest things never really end, which is why we find earnest young men staying up most of the night arguing about God, sex, religion, the things that are most worth arguing about. Take this passage from Boswell’s London Journal, for St. Patrick’s Day, .Though the Scotsman Boswell does not note this Irish feast, he does note it is a Thursday. Boswell had made it a habit to dine in many different places in London—St. Clement’s Chop House, the Chop House near New Church in the Strand, Dolly’s Beef-steak House, Chapman’s Eating-house on Oxford Road, Slaughter’s Coffee House, Harris’s Eating-house in Covent Garden , the great Piazza Coffee-house, Clifton’s. What does he do this March th? He breakfasts with “young Pitfour.” Pitfour is good for “a very copious meal.” This put Boswell in high humor because of Pitfour’s “oddity.” Boswell next dines at the Lord Advocate’s, where there is a formal, mixed company.“I was but dull,” Boswell confesses. Alexander Weddeburn was there, a man who later became Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor. He was “overbearing and flippant.” From Glasgow, there was a lady by the name of Mrs. Miller. Her terrible accent “excruciated” him. Indeed,“I resolved never again to dine where a Scotchwoman from the west was allowed to feed with us.”2 Boswell then goes to George Dempster’s, a Member of Parliament living in St. James Street.There he meets his friend Andrew Erskine and has tea with the Dempsters. Boswell found the society most agreeable.What I want to emphasize about Boswell and why Chesterton liked him is what follows:“Time galloped along. We stayed and had a little supper, and then getting into a deep On God’s Making both Hell and Scotland 67 speculative conversation about the immortality of the soul, human nature, the pursuits of men, and happiness, we did not part till near three.”3 So Chesterton is prepared to admit that almost anything in Boswell is worth reading,even if we cannot read all of him.“I am prepared to maintain,” Chesterton wrote in defense of his position,“that if one...