Note 10: — Chapter II

The nature of the desire for fame which he had is revealed to us by Boswell in this curious passage. It does not compromise his character as an artist.10 He wished to obtain the public esteem, to have the reputation of an ingenious and worthy man; and literature was considered as a means to this end. But we cannot argue that he must therefore have pandered to the public taste: he wrote, as he proclaimed at a later date in a contribution to a periodical, 'from the primary motive of pleasing himself.' This ambition is not in its nature an attitude towards art but towards the world. In all his writings, even in the frivolous publications of his youth, Boswell has expressed his own person in a peculiar degree. We must not suppose, when we see an eagerness for literary fame, which, from the frankness of his expression, may appear extravagant, that he lacked a literary conscience, for he had an excellent one; nor indeed that it mattered at all to him whether opinion in general should care about his book, except in so far as it approved of him, of the real Boswell, which it could not but find there.