In all that he wrote we find passages of amazing frankness about matters which most men would prefer to conceal. He was absurdly vain, he was childishly sanguine, he was often both foolish and ridiculous, and he tells us all about it as a matter that should interest us as well as him. 'Why,' he says, '"out of the abundance of the heart" should I not speak?' The light of truth led him into strange paths. He was a formalist and yet he was sometimes known to fail in formalism through an aversion to insincerity; when his enemy Baretti came, by chance, into the room where he was being entertained by a friend, Boswell refused to greet him; he could even be flagrantly rude in company.
To be entirely respectable and conventional, to be the man of the world, the gentleman of society, that is what Boswell wanted most in life; and that he never could become, because there was in his nature a further consciousness, which was not to be subdued, and which determined, by reason of the curious inconsistency so produced, his whole capacity for interesting mankind, for fame, for greatness.
And so beside the sentimentality, the self-deception, the respectability, which he so often exhibited, we see the germ of self-knowledge, of honesty, of truth, which developed and was ultimately expressed, almost by chance as it seems, in a supreme biography: for it is the candour of Boswell far more than any other single factor, the natural instinct to record what he observed both of himself and of others, the honesty in observing and the truthfulness which he had as an artist in recording, that distinguishes his literary work. Herein lay the essence of his genius. The story of Boswell's life is the story of a struggle between influences and ambitions which led him towards the commonplace, and the rare qualities grafted deeply within him, which bore him steadily in an opposite direction. The triumph of the latter involved no doubt the unhappiness of Boswell, but it also involved the production of a great work of art; and this achievement has won for its author a unique place among distinguished men; he is famous beyond any fame that he dreamed of attaining and failed to attain.
[Footnote 2: I have not seen a copy; _v._ Fitzgerald, _Life of Boswell_ i. 37-38, and _Life of Garrick_.]