And yet he has the firmest conviction that the book will be a masterpiece; it will be an unparalleled history of a man; and for that reason of supreme importance to the world:
However, though I shall be uneasily sensible of its many deficiencies, it will certainly be to the world a very valuable and peculiar volume of biography, full of literary and characteristical anecdotes _told with authenticity and in a lively manner_. Would that it were in the booksellers' shops! Methinks if I had this _magnum opus_ launched, the public has no further claim upon me; for I have promised no more, and I may die in peace, or retire into dull obscurity, _reddarque tenebris_.
It is a curious mixture, this, of weariness and optimism; it shows that there was something in Boswell which drove him on, in spite of a good many difficulties, though he himself (as we see in the last sentence) understood little of its nature. 'The "Life of Johnson,"' he says in another place, 'still keeps me up; I must bring that forth.'[2]
At times his enthusiasm breaks out and he expresses his real conviction of the supreme merit of his work:
The next [day] I am in Malone's study revising my 'Life of Johnson,' of which I have the highest expectations both as to fame and profit. I surely have the art of writing agreeably. The Lord Chancellor told me he had read every word of my Hebridean Journal; he could not help it; adding, 'Could you give a rule how to write a book that a man _must read_? I believe Longinus could not.'[3]
Boswell understood the scale and interest of his book:
In truth it is a view of much of the literature, and many of the literary men, of Great Britain for more than half a century.[4]
'I think,' he says, in the same letter to Temple, 'it will be without exception the most entertaining book you ever read.' To Mr. Dempster he said: 'I really think it will be the most entertaining collection that has appeared in this age.'[5]
Boswell's belief in his own work was based not so much upon his literary powers as upon his conception of biography:
Mason's 'Life of Gray' is excellent, because it is interspersed with letters which show us the _man_. His 'Life of Whitehead' is not a life at all, because there is neither a letter nor a saying from first to last. I am absolutely certain that my mode of biography, which gives not only a _history_ of Johnson's _visible_ progress through the world, and of his publications, but a _view_ of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared.[6]