And he will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect. To be as he was, is indeed subject of panegyrick enough to any man in this state of being; but in every picture there should be shade as well as light, and when I delineate him without reserve, I do what he himself recommended, both by his precept and his example.[8]
The 'Life' then is, as Boswell intended, a complete picture of Johnson; complete, inasmuch as it gives a picture of Johnson in every phase of his living, as the writer, the talker, the correspondent, and most of all simply as a man in his dealings with other men, and in all these gives a living picture: complete especially in this, that it gives not merely what there is to praise in Johnson, but every little detail as it occurred, the shade as well as the light.
But Boswell had something further in his mind as he wrote the 'Life.' He was, as we have said before, essentially the moralist. He seems to have had a purpose as he wrote, not only of not doing moral harm, but of doing moral good. When he talks of the faults of Dr. Johnson he does so with a kind of apology and explanation, with quotations from the great moralist himself, to show that to mention the vices of a famous man may as well do good as harm:
When I objected [evidently for the sake of argument] to the danger of telling that Parnell drank to excess, he said, that 'it would produce an instructive caution to avoid drinking, when it was seen that even the learning and genius of Parnell could be debased by it.' And in the Hebrides he maintained, as appears from my journal, that a man's intimate friend should mention his faults, if he writes his life.
After saying that 'it must not be concealed, that like many other good and pious men, among whom we may place the Apostle Paul upon his own authority, Johnson was not free from propensities which were ever "warring against the law of his mind," and that in his combat with them, he was sometimes overcome,' he gives a moral lecture to his readers:
But let no man encourage or soothe himself in 'presumptuous sin,' from knowing that Johnson was sometimes hurried into indulgences which he thought criminal. I have exhibited this circumstance as a shade in so great a character, both from my sacred love of truth, and to shew that he was not so weakly scrupulous as he has been represented by those who imagine that the sins, of which a deep sense was on his mind, were merely such little venial trifles as pouring milk into his tea on Good Friday.