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Johnson's "Rasselas": Implicit ContextsAuthor(s): Earl R. WassermanReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 1-25Published by: University of Illinois Press
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JOHNSON'S RASSELAS: IMPLICIT CONTEXTS
Earl R. Wasserman], The Johns Hopkins University
Moralists, like other writers, instead ofcasting
their eyes abroad in
theliving world, and
endeavouringto form maxims of
practiceand
new hints oftheory,
content theircuriosity
with thatsecondary
knowledge which books afford, and think themselves entitledto rev
erenceby
a newarrangement
of an ancientsystem,
or new illustra
tion of establishedprinciples.
The sameprecepts
of the first in
structors of the world are transmitted fromage
toage
with little
variation, and echoed from one author to another, notperhaps
with
out some loss of theiroriginal
force atevery repercussion.
In this mannerJohnson began
his Rambler 129 (1751), and the inti
mated bias alerts us toexpect that he will not rest content with
popularmaxims. Characteristically, his strategy
is tolay
down a moral common
place?in this case, thefolly of attempts beyond
ourpower ?in
order to subject to the test of human reality what his culture has longbeen drilled to
acceptas obvious truth and has accepted
all the more
submissively because, as he says, it iseasy
and flattering.But is
thekey
structural device of the essay as itproceeds
toqualify
and
undermine the maxim:
But if the same attention had beenapplied
to the search ofarguments
againstthe
follyof
presupposing impossibilities,and
anticipatingfrustra
tion, I know not whether many would not have been roused to usefulness,
who, havingbeen
taughtto confound
prudencewith
timidity,never
ventured to excel, lest
they
should
unfortunately
fail.
Logical,even self-evident
thoughthe maxim is in the abstract, and there
fore true in the ideal sense, it is notwholly
true when appliedto human
nature; for, as Imlac knows, Inconsistencies cannot both beright,
but
imputed to man, they may both be true.
The stance isrecognizably Johnsonian:
he is conscious ofbelonging
to an age that has inherited and been molded byan extensive system of
cultural formulas thatpresumably simplify
and organize, and the sub
versive task he set for himself is to test them against reality,to
questionthe old fictions
by castinghis
eyesabroad in the
livingworld.
Shortlybeforewriting
RasselasJohnson cautioned young Bennet
Langton: I
know not any thingmore
pleasantor more instructive than to compare
1
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2 Wasserman
experience with expectation,or to
register from time to time the differ
ence between Idea and Reality.It is
bythis kind of observation that we
grow dailyless liable to be disappointed. 1
It oughtto be the first en
deavour of awriter, accordingto
Johnson'scritical axiom, to distinguish
nature from custom, or that which is established because it isright,
from
that which isright only because it is established (Rambler 156). Under
this test, for example,the traditional rules of dramatic unity and decorum
fail to stand up: there isalways
anappeal open from criticism to
nature. Theintermingling
oftragedy
andcomedy, despite the estab
lished prohibition, is valid because it exhibits the real state of sublunary
nature, whichpartakes
ofgood
and evil, joy and sorrow ; and the
requirement of the unity of place,however rational, is
psychologicallyfalse.2
As moralist, Johnson espouses the convention of poetic justice: virtue
oughtto be rewarded and vice
punished,and literature which fulfills
thatprinciple
has the value of encouraging morality. But in the perspective of reality, instead of the ideal which moral didacticism necessarily
urges, such literature is mere fiction: Dennis, faithful to convention,
had condemned Addison's Cato for neglectof poetic justice, but Johnson
asks, if poetry is an imitation of reality, how are its laws broken by
exhibitingthe world in its true form? The stage may sometimes
gratifyour wishes; but if it be truly the 'mirror of life,' it
oughtto show us
sometimes what we are toexpect. 3 Similarly,
on theoreticalgrounds
Dryden petulantlyand
indecentlydenies the heroism of [Milton's]
Adam, because he was overcome; but there is no reasonwhy
the hero
should not be unfortunate, except established practice,since success
and virtue do not go necessarily together. 4In sum, Johnson
is both an
idealist and a realist: on the one side, especiallyfor moral and didactic
purposes,
he
clings
to the ideal conventions of order; on the other, he
crushes the ossifiedmyths with reality. Imlac, waxing enthusiastic, de
fines the ideal poet; Rasselas recognizes that in those terms no human
beingcan ever be a
poet.
1
It is thediscriminating
observation ofW. K. Wimsatt that althoughthe
professed standard of the Augustansis a literature of embracing order
and lofty ideals, such as an Annus Mirabilis, anEssay
on Criticism, and
1Letter to Bennet
Langton, 27 June 1758.2
Preface to Shakespeare.3
Life of Addison; see also Rambler 156.4
Life of Milton.
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Johnsons Rasselas: ImplicitContexts 3
anEssay
on Man, at its best their work is the comic art of heightened
unreality,a Peri Bathous and a Dunciad. Each of these modes, how
ever, was meant as a version ofreality.
One assumes that truereality
is ideal and expects the actual to conform; the other recognizes that
actualityviolates or deviates from the norms and laughingly inflates the
deviations. But theeighteenth century also produced
a literature that,
like Johnsons performanceon the moral commonplace, questions,
trans
forms, and undermines the established norms themselves. And that fact
suggests thepossibility
of aspectrum of
eighteenth-centurysubversive
and transformative strategies.
At one extreme stands the satiric literature Wimsatt has described, a
literature that assumes the inherited values and forms should be the
norms but thatdamages
them in order to reveal, interpret, and evaluate
the chaos ofactuality.
This relation between model and databegins
to
shade off into anambiguity
in works like Swift's Descriptionof a
CityShower and
Gay's Shepherd's Week, where the reader hovers be
tween a sense that thesqualor and triviality
of the real world arebeing
played offagainst the ideal worlds of
georgic andpastoral,
and a sense
that those genres themselves arebeing put into question by reality.
At
this point the spectrum divides into two branches, one toward a trans
formation of traditional forms, the other toward the calculated shatter
ingof them. What
beginsinworks like The Rape of the Lock and The
Dunciad gets completedin Tom Jones, for here the classical epic
is no
longera referential moral and aesthetic standard; it has been
thoroughly
appropriated, domesticated, and converted into a newgenre. However
much Tom may intimate, say, Aeneastraveling
hisallegorical journey
of education, we do not measure him against that model. Out of the
domestication of theepic has
emergeda new and autonomous form, the
comic prose epic. Yet it is stillepic,
even if of a new kind; that is, it
assumes that the traditional structure ismorally purposeful
and that life
can be structured.
The other branch of the spectrum, however, isdisruptive
of the
accepted forms, and at its faredge
is of course TristramShandy, the
classic of antiform, of theliterary impossibility
of literature.Reality
refuses to be confinedby literary
conventions :Tristram lives morerap
idly than he can record hisorganizing autobiography
or than his father
cancompose the
Tristrapaedia which is toshape the development of
his mind.Language itself comes to mean whatever the characters' and
readers' inner drives andprivate preoccupations
want them tomean. All
those other intellectual and social forms that man has developed for
the purpose ofbringing coherence to life also
collapse. Walter'shypoth
eses are frustrated by recalcitrant reality; thefamily
and household, to
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4 Wasserman
which the narrative, contraryto the novelistic tradition, is
tightlycon
fined and which oughtto be the
archetypeof togetherness, prove
so
unstructured that all are at cross purposes; and thelegal system, de
signedto harmonize human relations, is found to prove, when carried to
itslogical extreme, that parents
are not of kin to their child. All factors of
livedreality
turn out to be either toostarkly simple
or toointricately
muddled ever to conform to the straitjacketof theoretical and conven
tional order, justas
Johnsonfinds that human nature is too
complexto
be profited bythe logical
truism that it isfolly
to attempt what isbeyond
our power.
Yet, like recent antiliterature, TristramShandy
is not, at its center,
merelyan act of autodestruction.
By assumingthe conventional order
ings and thenexploding
them it uncovers the radical, infracultural,
infralinguistic bonds that do unite men. Atsporadic
moments amidst the
failure of hypotheses, language, militaristic rituals, and Tristram's his
toricism, it is aglance,
theposture of a
body,a touch on the shoulder,
thedropping
of a hat, and Trim's instinctive charityto his parents (and
not the fifth Commandment) that communicate and join. The novel is
an act ofliterary
mediation that destroys all mediations, clearingthem
away to reveal in glimpses that the only real connections are unmedi
ated. The path from Popeto Sterne then leads to such works as McPher
son's Ossianic poems, which eschew formentirely
for continuity of mood
and cango
on aslong
as their mood is sustained. Sincethey
can never
complete themselves, theyare as
open-endedas Sterne's novel and cor
respondingly reflect areality
that cannot be enclosed in form.
It isprobable,
as we arecoming
to understand, that all literature is
referential to literature and, invarying degrees, proceeds
from previous
literaryforms. In the
eighteenth century, such usagecan be sorted out
into three broad
categories:
the use of
accepted
structures to define
reality by comparison and contrast, as inAbsalom and Achitophel and
The Dunciad; the transformation of those structures into new forms, as
in Tom Jones; and the resultingdeformation of the structures in collision
with reality,as in Tristram Shandy. My purpose is to
suggestthat con
sciously reading Johnson'sRasselas as a member of this third category
and therefore as an act of constructive formaldamage
cansharpen
sensi
tivityto a central artistic feature that
dependedon the way inwhich the
minds of itscontemporary
readers wereformally
conditioned.
H
The line of criticism that interprets Rasselas asquietly
comic in its
disillusionment will tend to agree that it is subversive of its own thematic
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Johnsons Rasselas: Implicit Contexts 5
proposals step by step. Almost every chapterconcludes by ironically
up-endingits
apparently serioussubject
asreality
collides with theory.The Stoic violates his own
precepts when he learns of hisdaughter's
death. The hermit is comeupon at the very moment when he has re
solved to return to the world, and we leave himdigging up a consid
erable treasure which he had hid among the rocks and sobetraying
the
irresolution of even hisoriginal
resolution to be a hermit. Rasselas, on
regretting hismerely dreaming about escaping the
Happy Valley, then
spends timeregretting
his regret. When the old man denies thatlong
life produces happiness, the young ladies disbelieve him because, they
conjecture, he is older than he appears and old men, being querulousand
malignant,are
untrustworthyon the subject. Pekuah refuses to
enter thePyramids for fear of ghosts and as a
consequence is abducted
bya live Arab.
Originallytoo
frightenedto enter the
Pyramidseven
though Nekayah offers togo before you, and Imlac shall follow you,
she is cured of her silliness by herexperience with the terrors of real
life and agrees now toaccompany them to the Catacombs
fearlessly: I
will not be left. ... Iwill go down between you and theprince. Every
enquiiywe are drawn into is
exploded and becomes absurd, until
Rasselas' whole enterprise ofsearching
for the one right kind of life
becomes the inclusiveabsurdity.
Thegloomy
visionJohnson gives
us of
human life is infused with ahealthy kind of Democritian humor, the
Sterneancomedy
ofobserving
men with simplistic closed-system minds
encounteringa
realitywhich is
open, contingent, incomplete,and recal
citrant. At the end of theapologue
we are left with the revelation that
life requires hope and desire in order tokeep going, but that we are mad
ifweexpect
ourhopes
to be fulfilled in this world, justas in the Rambler
essay Johnson urgedthat we
attempt what isbeyond
ourpower while
knowing
it is unattainable. Lest man be a
Phaeton,he should be a
Sisyphus, eagerly rolling
the stone uphill andwisely knowing
he must fail?
not because thegods
arepunishing him, but because that is the limit of
possible happiness here.
This much isfairly evident on the surface of
Johnson's fable. But,
except for such obvious ironies as themocking
ofpastoral assumptions
and the frustration of the romanceexpectations of the Oriental tale,5
what is not soapparent is the formal absurdity
of Rasselas; and to
retrieve that we mustbring
to it formal expectations that are nolonger
ours but that would haveoperated
incontemporary minds as its
implicit
5See, e.g., Martha P. Conant, The Oriental Tale in
England (New York, 1908);
Geoffrey Tillotson, Rasselas and the Persian Tales, inEssays
in Criticism and Re
search(Cambridge, 1942), pp. 111-16; Gwin
J. Kolb, The Structure of Rasselas,''PMLA, 66 (1951), 698-717.
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6 Wasserman
context. The essence of Johnson'sironic thematic technique,
we have
noted, is that every positionturns out
eventuallyto be the opposite of
what it seems orpretends
to be.Every apparently
terminal point proves
ironicallyto be a new
beginning because human vicissitude does not
permit stasis:having squandered time
dreaming,Rasselas squanders
timeregretting
the lost time, and then spendstime
regrettinghis
having
regretted; Pekuah refuses to enter the Pyramids for fear that the ghostswill shut us in for ever, only
to be abductedby
theliving Arab, by
whom she fears she is now to be imprisonedfor ever ; as
Nekayah's
grief over loss of Pekuah dims, she grieves that she no longer grieves;the man who wants
nothingis in want of something
to want; and the
Conclusion is one in whichnothing
is concluded. The ironic techniqueis identical with the theme of the
apologue;it underlies Imlac's return
to the worlddespite
hishaving
withdrawn from it to theHappy Valley
and the hermit'soscillating
between world and retreat; and it is the
reasonwhy
no absolute choice of life ispossible.
Are there, then, also
embracingformal
designs implicit in Rasselas that similarlyinvert
themselves and theirexpected functions, formal expectations generated
in the readeronly
to beultimately
subverted?
Johnson originallyintended to call his book The Choice of Life,
and that phrase, usuallyblazoned in italics, recurs
throughouthis text
as a kind of ironic refrain. To the culture ofJohnson
sday
the prototypeof the theme that
happinessin its fullest sense
depends upona choice
betweenopposing alternatives was Prodicus' Choice of Hercules, which
represents that heroelecting
Virtue's arduous road of life instead of
Pleasure's easy pathand which was collated with the traditional moral
interpretation of thePythagorean Y, the bivium vitae.G Prodicus' alle
6 Prodicus' theme of the choice between two roads of lifegained
additional stature
not only from the Pythagorean Y but also from the appearance of the theme in otherclassical works, and the editors of the classics were wont to make cross-reference to
them. Forexample,
the editors of Persius annotate his moralexplanation
of the
PythagoreanY (III.52-57 and V.33-35) with allusions to Prodicus as well as to
accounts of choice between the two roads of life in Hesiod (Works and Days,
287-91), Servius on Aeneid VI. 136, AnthologiaLatina 632, traditionally
attributed
toVirgil ( Littera Pythagorae
discrimine secta bicorni ), Philostratus (De vita
Apollonii, Vl.x-xi), Silius Italicus (XV. 18-128), and Cicero (De officiis, I.xxxii.118).
A Christian allegorizingof the
PythagoreanY appears in Lactantius, Vl.iii. A
skeptical interpretation of the choice of life, strikingly
like Johnson'streatment of the
theme even in some of its details, is Ausonius'Idyll XV, Ex Graeco. Pythagoricon.
De ambiguitate eligendaevitae ( Quod
vitae sectabor iter ).
The account in this essay of Prodicus and of Cebes isby
no means exhaustive, and
is intended only to give a sense of their prevalence in Johnson's day. For further accounts of their enormous
popularityand influence, especially
in the Renaissance, see
Erwin Panofsky, Hercules amScheidewege (Leipzig/Berlin, 1930); T. W. Bald
win, William Shakespere'sSmall Latine ?- Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944); Theodor
E. Mommsen, Petrarch and the Storyof the Choice of Hercules, Journal of the
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Johnsons Rasselas :Implicit Contexts 7
gorical parable, excerpted from Xenophons Memorabilia and known
to almost every schoolboyin the original
Greek or in Latin translation as
part of his early curriculum, waspraised by
Addison as the first of
this sort that made any considerablefigure
in theWorld ; andby John
Baillie asuniversally allow'd noble and sublime. 7 As such, it had the
status of one of the major archetypes of its genre. John Hughes,for
example, afteroutlining
the requirements of allegory,offered it as the
perfect model: I shallonly add one Instance of a
very ancient Allegory,which has all the
Propertiesin it I have mention'd: I mean that in
Xenophon, of the Choice of Hercules when he is courted by Virtue andPleasure. . . .This Fable is full of Spirit and
Elegance;the Characters
arefinely drawn, and consistent; and the Moral is clear. 8 It was sub
jected to elaborate pictorial analysis by Shaftesbury, who defined it as
Hercules' deliberation on the Choice he was to make on the different
ways of Life ; and ErwinPanofsky
has demonstrated howremarkably
widelyitwas
depicted byartists and used as a formal pictorial design
for avariety
of themes of choice.9Joseph Spence, among others, trans
lated it,10 and Tatler 97 is aprose version made for the benefit of the
youth of Great Britain. The report thatWilliam Duncombe's translation
sold out almost at once is irrefutable proof of the age's high threshold
of boredom for the sake of moral instruction and evidence of its readiness
tosimplify morality
into a decision between opposing alternatives.11
Shenstone and Robert Lowth wereamong those who cast it into verse;12
and in 1750 Handel, perhapsmotivated
by J. S. Bach's cantata Hercules
Warburgand Courtauld Institutes, 16 (1953), 178-92; Jean H.
Hagstrum, The
Sister Arts(Chicago, 1958); Marc-Ren?
Jung, Hercule dans la litt?rature fran?aisedu XVIe si?cle (Geneva, 1966).
7
Spectator 283; An Essay on the Sublime ( 1747), p. 15. As a moral and linguisticschool text, the Greek and Latin versions of Prodicus
appeared repeatedlyin the
eighteenth century in company withEpictetus' Enchiridion and the Tabula of Cebes.
The text annotatedby Joseph Simpson, for
example, reached a fourth edition in
1758. It was read also, of course, in the editions of the Memorabilia.8
Essayon
Allegorical Poetry,inWorks of Spenser, ed. John Hughes (1715).
0Panofsky,
Hercules.10
Joseph Spence,in Moralities: or
Essays, Letters, Fables, and Translations
(1753)> by SirHarry Beaumont.
11John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the
Eighteenth Century (1812-15), vin,266.
12William Shenstone, The
Judgment of Hercules ( 1741 ). Robert Lowth's version,The Choice of Hercules, appeared anonymously
inSpence's Polymetis (1747) and
againin
Dodsley's Collection of Poems ( 1748). In addition, there were Peter Layng,TheJudgment of Hercules, Imitated . . .
from Prodicus (Eton, 1748); [ThomasCooke of Braintree], The Tryal of Hercules, an Ode on
Glory, Virtue, and Pleasure
(1752); William Dunkin, The Judgment of Hercules(together with a Latin
poetic version), in his Selected Poetical Works (Dublin, 1769).
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8 Wasserman
auf demScheidewege (1733), scored his interlude The Choice of
Hercules, based on Lowth'spoetic
version.13
The consequence of theprevalence
and educational role of Prodicus
was awidespread
moral bias toward conceivingof human happiness
as
attainable if one makes theright
choice between clearlydefined alterna
tives, especially between virtus and voluptas. Joseph Spence's testimony
will serve, for in the pages of his Polymetis ( 1747) precedinghis printing
of Lowth's Choice he wrote anessay
on the subject.Because there can
be no virtue without choice and because Prodicus' allegoryis one of
the noblest lessons in all antiquity, the theme was ubiquitous amongthe ancients, Spence writes, and he ranges through
classical literature
to find it: in Prodicus, Cebes, and the moral meaning of the Pythagorean
Y, in Philostratus, Silius Italicus, and Horace, inOvid's choice between
elegyand tragedy, Ulysses'
choice between Circe and Penelope, Paris'
amongthe
goddesses,Persius' between avaritia and luxuria, and Lu
cian's between Eloquenceand Sculpture. Indeed, one
might givein
stances of some strokes resemblingthis method of instruction, from
sacred writers: as in the choice of Solomon recorded in the Old Testa
ment; and that of agreater than Solomon, in the New. 14 Because the
thematic design of Prodicus' Choice had come to be accepted by the
eighteenth centuryas
universallyvalid it could tacitly
lend its structure
to newcompositions
even on choices other than that betweenpleasure
and virtue, as inReynolds' portrait
of Garrick between the comic and
tragicMuses. John Lawson explicitly
announced that his poemon
Plato's choice between Philosophyand the Muse was based on Prodi
cus,15 but so too are Thomson's Castle of Indolence and the second book
of Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination.In the section devoted to
Human Life and Manners inDodsley's Preceptor: Containing
a Gen
13According
to Winton Dean (Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques [Lon
don, 1959], p. 580), there were also musical settings of Prodicus byMaurice Greene
andJohn Stanley. Handel's interlude was
performedfour times between 1750 and
1757, and the libretto waspublished
in 1751 and 1753.14 Further evidence of the centrality of the choice theme and the tendency
to
subsume avariety of examples
under that topic isprovided by
Guardian 111, which
quotes Solomon's dream of choosingan
understanding heart inpreference
tolong
life, riches, or revenge (1 Kings 3:5-15), and which then describes a French alle
gorical poemon this theme, the hint for the poem being
taken from the fable of
the three goddesses appearingto Paris, or rather from the vision of Hercules, re
corded by Xenophon, where Pleasure and Virtue arerepresented
as real persons mak
ingtheir court to the hero with all their several charms and allurements.
15John Lawson, The Judgment of Plato,
in LecturesConcerning Oratory
(Dublin, 1758).16 An essay by John
Gilbert Cooperon the choice between Good, or
Beauty, and
Evil, inexplicit
imitation of Prodicus, appearsin Dodsley's
Museum (1746), 11,
48-49.
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Johnson's Rasselas :Implicit
Contexts 9
eral Course of Education . . .for
. ..Advancing
the Instruction of Youth
(1748) Lowth's Choice of Hercules directly followsJohnson's
moral al
legory, The Vision of Theodore ; and, to select an obvious example,the
allegoryof
Johnson's Rambler 65 (1750), an oriental tale like
Rasselas, is patternedon the moral
interpretationof the Pythagorean Y,
the alternative roads of life, ease and virtue.
With the Prodician choice actingas a
strong force inshaping
the
moralorganization of the
eighteenth-century mind, it seemshighly
likelythat itwas this framework that the reader would have brought
to
Johnson's apologue, structured as it is around a succession of alterna
tives, almost all of whichbelong
to thecategories of engagement and
retreat. And Johnson's pointedly italicized and repeated phrase, a
choice of life, must have functioned to evoke Prodicus' pattern, espe
cially when the reader found that the first alternatives Rasselas en
counters in his search forhappiness
areyoung
men of spiritand
gaietyand the Stoic
philosopher, correspondingto voluptas and virtus. The
traditionaldesign inherent in the reader's mind, although outside John
son'sapologue, is nevertheless a further dimension of its text. But of
course formalanticipation of ideal dichotomous choice, to which the
reader had been trained to give automatic assent, serves there only to
berepeatedly shocked and frustrated, just
as in his Rambler essay
Johnson set up the truism that it isfolly
to attempt what isbeyond man's
power, onlyto undermine its absolute validity with the facts of human
nature. Prodician choice is idealtheory, but Human
experience,which
Johnson called the great test of truth, is, he added, constantlycon
tradicting theory. 17
To alarge
sector of theeighteenth century and to
Johnsonin particu
lar, everythingis
bipolar,not
multiple: reality ismade up ofopposites.
Even
Johnson's prose notoriously
falls into this
patternand
expressesan almost instinctive habit of antitheticalthinking: the
awfullyvast or
elegantly little ; thesprightliness of infancy [or] the
despondencyof
decrepitude ; pleased withprognostics of
good [and] terrified with
tokens of evil. Thecontrolling
connectives of Rasselas are or and
and (which can beregularly
read as or ). Everything requirescon
sideration of itsopposite, and
consequentlyin their search for the proper
choice of lifeJohnson's characters investigate alternately high
life
and low, activityand retirement, hedonism and stoicism, marriage
and
celibacy, society andsolitary study. The implicit formal anticipation
is
thata
moral election will be made in the manner of Prodicus' Choice,but it never is. Choice, we are
quicklymade to see, is sometimes
impos
17Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill and Powell, I, 454.
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?o Wasserman
sible and always indifferent. Obviously Johnsonis not
denyingProdicus'
theme that arduous virtue is to bepreferred
to soft pleasure;he is
directinghis text
againsta conventional ideal fiction in order to upset
the customary simplistic expectation that choice is clear and absolute,
since no oneway of life can fulfill
hopesof
earthly happiness.Some
choice between alternatives, Johnsonis
revealing,must be made, but
life is toocomplex, incomplete, and frustrating
ever topermit
total hap
piness and anindisputably right choice, or even a fixed state. The pattern
of dichotomous choices provesa formal
designthat destroys itself, like
Tristram Shandy's self-defeating effort to organize his life into an auto
biography.Even Johnson
srepeated
alliteration ofopposites
tends to
make them parallel and suggests their indifference: the gratificationsof
society, and the secrecy of solitude ; expectationand experience ;
the
ignoranceof
infancy,or
imbecility of age ;favours or afflictions ;
Some husbands areimperious,
and some wivesperverse ; Marriage
has many pains, butcelibacy
has nopleasures.
In addition to the choice between alternatives, there were built into
the structure of theeighteenth-century
mind two other ideal ways of
managingits
bipolar world, andJohnson carefully invokes both, only
to
sweep them away also. Unlike the Prodician choice, these do not serve
Johnsonas
implicit narrative patternsto be subverted, but are refuted
explicitlyat the climax of Rasselas' search, as
thoughto seal off the sub
ject by preventing the reader from proposing any alternative way of
resolvingthe dilemma of
unsatisfactory opposites. One of these possibleresolutions is concordia discors, that harmonious union of contraries
whose well accorded strife, accordingto
Pope, Gives all the strengthand color to our life. Those who
marry late, Nekayah observes, are
bestpleased
with their children, and those who marry early,with their
partners,
and Rasselas
proposes
the ideal union of these two affec
tions, a time neither tooearly for the father, nor too late for the hus
band. But this of course is obvious blindness to the necessary vicissitude
of time, and Nekayah explodesthe
possibilityof the
harmonyof
opposites: No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is
delightinghis scent with the flowers of
spring:no man can, at the same time, fill
his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile. Nature, she
adds, sets hergifts
on the right hand and on the left. Those conditions
which flatterhope
and attract desire, are so constituted, that, as we
approach one, we recede from another . . .we cannot seize both. Flatter
not
yourself
with contrarieties of
pleasure.
The classical via media, that
secret rare, asPope
defined it, between th' extremes to move, is
the other ideal cosmicprinciple that Johnson crushes under the pressure
of actuality: There aregoods
soopposed, says Nekayah,
that we can
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Johnsons Rasselas :Implicit Contexts 11
not seize both, but, bytoo much
prudence, may pass between them at
toogreat
a distance to reach either. 18Correspondingly,
when Rasselas'
Astronomer, in his madness, tries to turn aside the axis of the earth so
that there will be an eternalspring
instead of the alternations of the
extreme seasons, he finds that what oneregion gains,
another loses.
Onlya madman would suppose that the world can be made
perfectlybalanced and that its oscillations can ever be halted in a mean.
Even the diachronic version of concordia discors isdestroyed by
Johnsonin the process of
invokingclosed designs long
assumed toshape
life into purposeful order and then letting them undo themselves toreveal that life has no
significant order and forms no neatplot. According
to the moral tradition, ideallya man like Pope's Trumbull or Marvell's
Fairfax should engage in activepublic affairs and then
bringhis life
to a close inmeditative retreat. As adisciple
of thephilosophy
of a life
accordingto nature
says in Rasselas, a man shouldsatisfy
the claims
of thepublic and then
sequester himself to review his life, andpurify
his heart. In this mannerJohnson's hermit, who had followed a
militarycareer, has now retired to
solitary religiousmeditation and therefore
should havecompleted life's
design.But just
as the hermit had found
the active world full of snares, discord, and misery, so he has learned
that the life of asolitary
man will becertainly miserable, but not
certainly devout, and he is on thepoint
ofreturning
to the world. As for
the future, one of theapparently
wiser students speculates, the hermit
will, in a few years, go back to his retreat. And then? And then return
once more from his retreat into the world. Theprobability, of course,
hadalready
been foreshadowedby Imlac, who withdrew from the world
into theHappy Valley, willingly re-entered it, and will return to
Abyssinia.In the dichotomous but
everfluctuating world there is no clear Pro
dician choice between alternatives, nomarriage
of contraries, and no
mean between extremes, butonly
an endless, directionless oscillation
betweenopposites, neither of which is either sufficient or stable. All is
process; nothingis static form, despite
the idealdesigns that moralists
hadlong taught. Meanwhile, in the
background of Johnson's story
18Cf. Rambler 179: Providence has fixed the limits of human enjoyment by
im
moveable boundaries, and has set differentgratifications
at such a distance from each
other, that no art orpower
canbring
them together. This great law it is the businessof every rational
beingto understand, that life may not pass away in the attempt to
make contradictionsconsistent,
tocombine opposite qualities, and to unite thingswhich the nature of their
beingmust
always keep asunder. Of twoobjects tempting
at a distance oncontrary sides it is
impossibleto
approachone but by receding from
the other; by long deliberation anddilatory projects, they may be both lost, but can
never be bothgained.
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12 Wasserman
torrential rain, which in these countries isperiodical,
alternates with
dry seasons; and the inundation that causes the lake to rise and inter
rupts speculationson escape from the Happy Valley
at the beginning
of the adventure ismatched at the endby
the inundation of the Nile that
delaysreturn to
Abyssinia.Like the hermit's oscillations between the
world and his retreat, like the want of him that wantsnothing, and
like Nikayah's griefthat she no
longer grieves,the
beginningand the end
of the adventure are as mirrorimages, denying
that the narrative is
one of progress and assertingthe persistent
recurrence of life'spendu
lumlike fluctuations. A number of passages in the book suggest thatthe
movement of waters functions as ametaphor
of life: the stream of
life ; the stream of time ; the stream that rolled before my feet up
braided my inactivity ;The world, which you figure
toyourself
smooth
and quietas the lake in the valley, you will find a sea
foamingwith
tempest, andboiling
with whirlpools; you will be sometimes over
whelmed bythe waves of violence, and sometimes dashed against
the
rocks of treachery ; Do not suffer life tostagnate;
itwill grow muddy
for want of motion; commit yourself againto the current of the world.
It is in this context that the Nile, which Nekayahinvokes to tell whether
there is any happiness along its course, is a repeated point of narrativereference and in the
backgroundof the events
periodicallyshrinks and
then, from somemysterious
cause that had notablybaffled man's under
standing, overflows withfructifying
floods.
Justas the tactic of the individual chapters
is todestroy
with a final
abrupt irony eachproposed
choice of life, so the recurrent tactic
throughoutthe book is to subvert the comforting
formal designsof
alternatives the reader had been educated toanticipate, and so to
reorder the structure of histhought.
in
But what of the inclusive strategy of Rasselas, the designof the plot
within which the theme of choice isincorporated?
In order torecognize
that as another formal subversion it isnecessary
to reconstruct the
embracing anticipation that would have been developedin the reader
byhis
customary experience withorganized
narrative. As ajourney
of
educationexpected
to instruct theprotagonist
in therequirements
for
ahappy life, Rasselas is akin to the classical epics
asthey
wereallegori
cally interpreted and, even moresignificantly,
to the Tablet of Cebes.
Whereas Prodicus' Choice represents a static scene, the Tablet is an
elaborate picture that its interpreter explicatesas an
allegorical journey
to the successivestages
at which one learns the various virtuesleading
toWisdom and Happiness, whence one can returnfully
armed to sustain
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Johnsons Rasselas :Implicit
Contexts 13
himself in the mixed world of virtue and vice. It can be defined in pre
ciselythe terms in which Smollett defined the novel as a
genre in the
Dedication of Ferdinand Count Fathom: alarge diffused picture,
com
prehendingthe characters of life, disposed
in different groupes, and
exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of a uniformplan,
and
generaloccurrence [i.e., concurrence], to which every individual
figureis subservient. To this Smollett added the need of a
principal per
sonage who is conductedthrough the vicissitudes of fortune, to that
goal ofhappiness, which ever
oughtto be the repose of
extraordinary
desert.
Like Prodicus' Choice, Cebes' Tablet was, alongwith Latin para
phrase, the usualelementary school text in Greek. It was, for
example,the text with which Boswell had been
taught and to which he returned
when, at the age oftwenty-four, he decided to recover his Greek;19
and SirJohn Hawkins reported that in the projected curriculum of
1736 forJohnson's Lichfield school the
introductoryGreek texts were to
be Cebes, Aelian, Lucian, and Xenophon (which contains Prodicus ) .20
Theeighteenth-century history
of Cebes' Tabletparallels
that of Prodi
cus' Choice. It was translatedby Jeremy Collier, Samuel Boyse, Joseph
Spence, and Lawrence Jackson, among others.21 Like Prodicus' Choice,itwas
subjectedto careful pictorial analysis,
wasoccasionally elaborated
into verse, and very frequentlyserved
explicitlyor
tacitlyas a model
forallegories (often
dream-allegories ) on other moralsubjects,
such as
thoseby Addison, David
Fordyce, James Fordyce, and Shenstone.22
Moreover, Prodicus and Cebes notonly served as
companion texts for
19 Boswell in Holland, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1952), p. 28. For the
role of Cebes in Boswell's formal education, see Pottle's Boswell'sUniversity Edu
cation, in Johnson, Boswell, and their Circle (Oxford, 1965), pp. 239, 252.20 The Life of Samuel Johnson, abridged by
Bertram H. Davis (London, 1961),
pp. 20-21. The same list appears in Johnson's letter of 1735 to Samuel Ford (Letters
of Samuel Johnson, ed.Chapman [Oxford, 1952], 1, 7).
21Jeremy Collier, The
Mythological Picture of Cebes the Theban. Beinga serv
iceable Emblem for theacquiring of Prudence, and the Direction of Human Life,
in TheEmperor Marcus Antoninus His Conversation with Himself ( 1701); Samuel
Boysein Translations and Poems (1734); Joseph Spence, The Picture of Human
Life, inDodsley's Museum (1747), in, no. 33 (this was
reprintedin
Dodsley's
Preceptor [1748] and then collected by Spence, under thepseudonym
SirHarry
Beaumont, together with his prose version of Prodicus, in his Moralities [1753]);Lawrence Jackson, Occasional Letters on Several
Subjects ( 1745), Letter 42.22 On the
Composition of the Picture described in theDialogue
of Cebes, in
[James Moor], Essays Read to aLiterary Society (Glasgow, 1759); Cebes' Table,
in Verse.By
aLady,
in a translation ofEpictetus' Manual ( 1707); Thomas Scott,
The Table of Cebes (1754), reprinted in Dodsley's Collection of Poems (1758);The Picture of Human Life, a Poem, by
a Gentleman of Oxford (1759); Addisonin Tatler 161; David Fordyce, Dialogues concerning Education ( 1745), Dialogue 16;
James Fordyce, TheTemple of Virtue (1757); Shenstone in
Essayson Men and
Manners. See also John Lawson'sallegory
in his LecturesConcerning Oratory
(Dublin, 1758), Lecture 4.
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14 Wasserman
the rudiments of Greek and often appeared togetherin the same volume;
theywere considered
togetherthe prime works of ancient
allegoryand
usuallywent hand-in-hand in critical commentary,
as inDavidFordyce's
statement that The Fable of Prodicus, and Picture of Cebes, are Ex
amples... in which the several Passions, Virtues and Vices, are
repre
sented under MaterialShapes, and Human Life is formed, as it were,
into a beautifulLandscape 23
orJohn Gilbert
Cooper'sadvice that the
Genius of the present Age,whether Poet, Painter, or
Statuary, instead
offollowing
the wild Lure of his ownImagination,
or the Whim of
modern Originals, should modestly content himself to make Prodicus'
Judgment of Hercules inXenophon's Memorabilia; the perfect Beauty
of Lucan; or the mythological Picture of Human Life writtenby Cebes,
theSubject
of his Imitation. 24 Incommenting
on the Ancients, John
Ogilviewas to
speak of Prodicus and Cebes as Their twoallegorical
Philosophers and topraise their compositions
as two of the most beau
tifulpieces of
antiquity. 25 Or onemight point
to the commentaryon
Pope's attack on the schools:
Words are Man'sprovince,
Words we teach alone.
When Reasondoubtful, like the
Samianletter,
Points him twoways, the narrower is the better.
Plac'd at the door ofLearning, youth
toguide,
We never suffer it to stand too wide.
(Dunciad, IV. 150-54)
ThePope-Warburton annotation invokes Prodicus' theme by explain
ing Samian Letter as a reference to The letter Y, used by Pythagorasas an emblem of the different roads of Virtue and Vice ; and it
explainsPlac'd at the door, as an allusion to the Table of Cebes, where the
Genius of human Nature pointsout the road to be pursued by
those
entering into life. Johnson himself wrote of the Fables of Cebes andProdicus as of the
highest Authority,in the ancient Pagan World. 26
The consequence of this recurrentyoking
was atendency
to fuse the
forms of the twoallegories and to conceive of an
archetypal journeyof
education toward Wisdom and Happiness througha succession of moral
choices?that is, the journey pattern which Rasselas hopesto follow but
whichJohnson implicitly mocks.27 When Spence, for example, entered
23David Fordyce, Dialogues, p. 375.24
John Gilbert Cooper, LettersConcerning
Taste (1755), p. 54.25
John Ogilvie,An
Essayon the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients, in Poems on
Several Occasions(1762), pp. lxi-?xii;
Observations on . . .
Composition (1774), 11,182. See also Shaftesbury, Char act eristicks (1723), 11, 253-54.26 Preface to
Dodsley's Preceptor.27 In
referring glancinglyto the two roads of life, Prodicus' Choice
impliesa
journey, but is itself static; in Cebes' Tablet thejourney of life is narrated in full, but
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Johnsons Rasselas :Implicit Contexts 15
upon the theme of moral choice, althoughhe assimilated Prodicus into
the pattern, itwas Cebes that he analyzedas his major example:
The many difficulties that attend the following the dictates of the goddess Virtus . . .were
strongly expressedin that very just
antient emblem,
of aperson climbing up the side of a vast, steep, rocky mountain; often
readyto fall, and
meetingwith
many thingsto
opposehim or divert him
from his way; but, when he has oncegained the summit, finding himself
at oncegot
into a delicious tract ofcountry,
with apurer
air and a serener
sky,and with every object
about himpleasing
andcharming
to his senses.
This is what Pythagoras partly shadowed out... bya
single letterin
theGreek
alphabetof his time; and what Cebes has laid out, so much at
large,in his most excellent
pictureof human life. . . .The
generality,
[Pythagoras] said, took the broad easy road, to the left hand; and the
virtuous, the narrowsteep
line to theright.28
Thejourney
toHappiness by way of a series of moral choices en route,
usually under theguidance
of a Genius or anelderly instructor, had
established itself as the fundamental narrative form for thelarge
num
ber ofeighteenth-century allegories;29
and itclearly determined the
structure ofJohnson
s own Vision of Theodore, the Hermit of Teneriffe.
In a dream Theodore envisions an ascent of the Mountain of Existence
to the Temple ofHappiness: Appetite attempts
to draw the traveler
from the rough,narrow
pathof Education; the
pathsof Reason and
Religion diverge;some who abandon Reason enter the Maze of Indo
lence; and Reason andReligion
are bothopposed by
Passion. Johnsonwrote that
allegoryfor the section of Dodsley's Preceptor
on Human
Life and Manners, where, probablyunder
Johnson'seditorial direc
moral elections are madealong
the way although the factor of choice is not made
central as it is in Prodicus. The fusion of the two forms therefore was easily effected,since the two works
implyeach other. It is
possiblethat some of the traditional pic
torial representations of Prodicus (see Panofsky) which show Virtuepointing
to a
path upa
steep hill crownedby
atemple
are influenced by Cebes. As in the alle
gory of thePythagorean Y, Prodicus
speaksof a smooth, easy path
and one that is
long and difficult, and the passage from Hesiod (Works and Days, 286-92 ) preced
ing Prodicus'allegory
inXenophon (but not included in the school texts of Prodicus )
furtherdistinguishes Virtue's road as
longand steep. That Virtue's path
is steep is
recurrent in classical literature(e.g., Xenophon's Cyropaedia, II.ii.24), but the steep
hilltopped by
thetemple of Happiness ( in his treatise on Prodicus, Shaf
tesburycalls
it the Fortress, Temple,01 Palace of Virtue ) is
explicit onlyin Cebes. Shaf
tesburyadds that there is
nothingof this kind
express'd byour Historian, that is, Prodicus.
28Spence, Polymetis (1747), P- 14?
20
For example, to mention but a few, the dream visions in the Tatler and Spectator (such as Tatler 81, 120, and 123); the anonymous Vision in
Dodsley'sMu
seum, 11, 165-73; theallegory already
mentioned in DavidFordyce's Dialogues,
which isexplicitly generated by Cebes; and James Fordyce's Temple of Virtue,
which is based on David's allegory.
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i6 Wasserman
tion,30 it isjoined by
means of transitional passages with both Spence'stranslation of Cebes and Lowth's
poeticversion of Prodicus. It is this
fusion of thedesigns of Cebes and Prodicus that is the context that
Rasselas mocks, ironically clothingthat subversion with the trappings of
the oriental moral romance andedging
it toward a moreparticularized
realismby specifying
realplaces
andsubstituting representative humans
forpurely allegorical personifications.
But Homer'sepics and
especially Virgil's Aeneid were also still read
asallegorical journeys of the prince (such as Prince Rasselas) during
which, by choosing Virtue and rejecting Vice, he achieves Wisdom.31The
Odysseywas
interpretedas the
allegoricaleducative journey of the
return home, like Joseph Andrews; and the Aeneid notonly
was alle
gorized but, as Andrew Michael Ramsay, for example, described it, is
the return of the hero to the country from which his own Ancestors
originally descended and the establishment there of an Empiremore
great and glorious than the one abandoned inTroy.32 The original
composition that mostfully transformed the classical epic into an alle
gorical journey of education and approximatedit to the pattern of Cebes
and Prodicus was F?nelon's T?lemache, which enjoyedan
astonishing
eighteenth-century popularity. An analogue to Xenophon's Cyropaedia
(which is also a form of Bildungsroman) and asequel
to the Odyssey,it
places Telemachus under thetutelage
of Minerva in the form of Mentor
and sends him on a tour of allegorical adventures, usually involvinga
moral choice. Thegoal
is the attainment of Wisdom and trueprinceli
ness so that Telemachus mayreturn to Ithaca
preparedto be the wise
ruler. The common pattern of all these narratives is an outward journeyof education so that there may be a return at a
higherand more secure
level of wisdom andhappiness;
and that circular?or, rather, spiral?
design
is theeighteenth century's major
formal
experience
in
organizednarrative. But that spiral designis also, of course, the basic form of the
Christian narrativecentering
on the Fortunate Fall, especiallyas un
folded inMilton's Paradise Lost. Man falls and, happily,enters the world
of trials in order that, through experience and the test of his virtues, he
30 See Allen T. Hazen, Samuel Johnsons Prefaces and Dedications (New Haven,
1937), p. 172.31
See, e.g., Spectator 183, a discussion of allegoricalfables in which Addison not
only links Homer with Prodicus' Choice and mentions the fables inXenophon but
also states that Some of the Ancient Criticks will have it that the Iliad and Odissey
of Homer are Fables ... in which the Actors are Passions, Virtues, Vices, and other
imaginary Persons of like Nature. The tide was turning against the allegorizing ofthe epics, but the spirit of such interpretations
as that of Le Bossu's Trait? du po?me
?pique had byno means vanished.
32 Andrew Michael Ramsay, Discourse upon Epick Poetry,in F?nelon, The
Adventures of Telemachus, trans. Ozell, 3rd ed. (1720), p. xxvi.
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Johnsons Rasselas :Implicit
Contexts 17
mayearn the
redemption,not to return to Eden, but, better, to ascend to
Heaven and dwell with his Father. In Addison's words, our first parentswere raised to a
greater Happinessthan that which
they had for
feited/'83 The Fall into experience correspondsto the allegorical journeys
of moral education inHomer, Virgil, Cebes, and F?nelon; and the spiralcourse ends at a
higherand more secure level than that first abandoned.
This Classical-Christiandesign
is so fundamental to the eighteenth
century mind that it tends to assimilate to itself the organization of prose
fiction. Robinson Crusoe's refusal to accept his father's advice to submit
to the comfortable, protective middle way of life into which he wasborn is
explicitly labeled his originalsin. Finally
exiled to a deserted
island, heengages
in a succession of educative moral, religious,and
social experiences until he has constructed an orderedsociety
on the
model of the one he had abandoned and can now return home.Granting
the considerableepisodic
randomness of that novel and itsprotraction
beyond the return to civilization, the essential narrativespiral
of educa
tion is at its center. Richardson's Pamela opens with its heroine in a kind
of servant's Eden, a domestic on alarge
estate andspecially
favored and
protected byher beneficent mistress. Like Adam, she enjoys the good
life by sufferance and favor, not by virtue of having earned it. But on the
death of her mistress, she is set upon by the evils of Mr. B and carried off
to his Lincolnshire estate, where she isbesieged by every vice and
oppression. By persistingin her virtue she
ultimatelyearns the
rightto
return to the Bedfordshire estate where shebegan,
not now in the con
tingent andprecarious
state of servant, but as mistress of the house. It is
hers in her ownright
as Mr. B's wife. The evil that drove her from her
Edenic servanthoodhappily
madepossible
the exercise of that virtue
that earned her what shepreviously
hadonly
beenpermitted.
The novel
as
genre
has secularized the Christian Fortunate Fall: the reward of
virtue is notredemption and Heaven, but
securityhere on earth, and
theproletarian-bourgeois culture-hero has replaced the Christian hero
and the prince of the epic journeys of education.
A decade before Rasselas the comic prose epicwas
fully fashioned
in Tom Jones, and the secularized spiral journeyof education achieved
itsperfect shape, evolving
out of the classical epic and moralallegories
and, implicitly,out of the Christian journey from Fall, through Exile, to
Redemption.An Adam, an
Everyman,a mere Tom
Jones,so unlocated
andprimal
as to be afoundling, enjoys through
the sheer beneficence of
anAllworthy all the delights of an estate named Paradise Hall. To be
sure, Allworthyis not God, despite
hisnearly absolute authority and
33Spectator 369. Also Spectator 297; Adam, at the end of Paradise Lost, envisions
himself restored to ahappier Paradise than that from which he fell.
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i8 Wasserman
power within his own domain, and is flawed by weaknesses and errors.
Nor is Paradise Hall an Eden, although, given the comic vision and
postlapsarian man, it is as Edenic as the world can offer. Tom'sexpul
sion isengineered by Allworthy's nephew Blifil (whose name
loosely
suggests theeighteenth-century pronunciation of Devil ), and, that we
mightnot overlook the
design, Fielding expelsTom from Paradise Hall
with the comment that The world, as Miltonphrases it, lay
all before
him; andJones,
no more than Adam, had anyman to whom he might
resort for comfort or assistance. The hero's educationaljourney
of
moral choices carries him into the real world, unfailingly devoted to hisone love, Sophia, whose name demands that we be aware of that Wis
dom which wasalways
thegoal
of the allegorical journeys and the alle
gorized epics. The end is his possession of Sophia and thediscovery of
his trueparentage;34
andalthough
he is then to return toWestern's
estate, he willultimately
inheritneighboring
Paradise Hall, which he
first knewonly
asadopted foundling. Devilish Blifil is disinherited, ban
ished to the north, andconsigned
to Methodism as the worst hell-on
earth thatFielding
can conceive of.
Of courseFielding
is notmocking
Milton's story of the Fortunate Fall
nor, in the manner of Pope, erecting it as a norm against which to
measure human failures; he has translated it into secular terms, divested
the pattern of itsreligious meaning,
andreapplied
it to aninterpretation
ofstrictly
human life. The end of the spiral plot is not the attainment of
Heaven, but the security of the best there can be on earth.35 Out of the
fusion of the Cebes-like allegoryof education, the
allegorical interpretations of the classical epics and their imitations, and the Christian
designof the Fortunate Fall, there has evolved the essential form of the spirally
plotted, closed-ended novel of success; and itwill continue to appear in
works as diverse as The Vicar ofWakefield,Jane
Austen's novels, Cole
ridge'sThis Lime Tree Bower
My Prison, Wordsworth's Prelude, and
a host of novels byScott?a movement from precarious and ignorant
comfort, into the real world ofexperience,
and back to the place of
originin
security, wisdom, and happiness. Coleridgehad in mind a
larger subject than prose fiction, but his definition of poem is an exalted
expression of the form that has been outlined here: The common end
34 Cf. Aeneas' restoration of empire to theplace whence his ancestors had come,
and the discovery of F?nelon's Telemachus of his father upon thecompletion
of his
circular journeyof education. The
discovery of parentsor restoration to them
simultaneouslywith the
completionof the
journeyof education
is,as
Pamela, JosephAndrews, and Tom Jones testify, another element of the
archetypalnarrative.
35However, for the element of
unpredictability and chance in Tom Jones that
runs counter to the closed design of itsplot,
seeJohn Preston, The Created Self
(London, 1970), PP- 94~H3
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Johnsons Rasselas: Implicit Contexts 19
of all narrative, nay, of all, Poems is to convert a series into aWhole: to
make those events, which in real orimagined History
move on in a
strait Line, assume to ourUnderstandings
a circular motion?the snake
with it's Tail in it'sMouth. 36
This has been along way around to
Johnson's Rasselas, but my pur
pose has been topropose that these are the
presidingnarrative
patternsits
eighteenth-century reader would havebrought
to theapologue
as
formal expectations and asimplicit
norms on which thecorrespondences
and deviations act togenerate
asignificance beyond the limits of the
explicit text. The bearing of the archetypal design on Rasselas is fairlyevident. The story begins
with the Prince in theHappy Valley
in the
kingdom of Amhara, that Amharatraditionally identified, as Milton
identified it, with theAbyssinian Paradise, that Amara ( later Abora )
whereColeridge
was to locate Kubla Khan'sparadise. Like Adam and
like Tom Jones, Rasselas beginsin the Eden of the
Happy Valley, where
All the diversities of the world werebrought together; the
blessings of
nature were collected, and its evils extracted and excluded. Unlike
Adam, who wasexpelled, Rasselas, being postlapsarian and thus in need
ofsomething
to desire, finds anearthly Paradise a tedious imprison
ment and escapes. The escape is made with worldly-wise Imlac, a
parody of Cebes' aged Genius of Life or animperfect Mentor to
Rasselas' Telemachus. When the company then enters the world of
Cairo, Rasselasproclaims, I have here the world before me; I will
review it at leisure; surely happinessis somewhere to be found. The
words echo those with which Milton sent Adam and Eve from Paradise;with which
Fieldingsent Tom
Jonesout of Paradise Hall into the world;
with which Wordsworth willbegin the circular movement of his Pre
lude: The earth is all before me. . . . / I look about; and should the
chosenguide / Be
nothingbetter than a
wanderingcloud, / I cannot
miss my way. For Milton had also ended with a chosen: The Worldwas all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest ; and Rasselas
isviewing the world before him with the intention of
choosingthat
life inwhichhappiness
is to be found. And just as, directly after Field
ing's Miltonic allusion, Tom is misled at Herculean crossroads into
taking thepath leading
him into activeengagement with the world
instead of his intendedpath, which would have led him to evade it,37 so,
36Coleridge, Letter to
Joseph Cottle, 7 March 1815.37 The event
immediately following Fielding's allusion to Milton's words (Bk. 7,Ch. 2
)is a
kind of parodie version of the Hercules-at-the-crossroads topos. Tom intends to seek his fortune at sea, or rather, indeed, to
fly away from his fortune onshore (Bk. 7, Ch. 10), but at the fork in the road, instead of
taking the pathto
Bristol, hemistakenly takes the other, decides as a
consequence to fall in with thesoldiers as a volunteer against the insurrection, and so
begins hisjourney toward
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20 Wasserman
immediatelyafter his Miltonic utterance, Rasselas, resolved now to
begin his experiments upon life, encounters first theyoung
men of
spirit andgaiety
and then the Stoic philosopher.But the
pointis that Rasselas finds there is no clear choice, and
Johnson iscalling up the Herculean choice, the Cebean-epic journey,
and the Miltonic pattern of the Fortunate Fallonly
to frustrate them.
He has invoked the Christiandesign not, as
Fielding did, in order to
secularize it and translate it into adesign for the
happy earthly life, but,
on the contrary, to reveal that it cannot be secularized and toexplode the
design and assumptions of a Tom Jones. Earthly life forms no closed
plot, and Johnson's lastchapter
is The Conclusion, in whichNothing
is Concluded. Rasselas' journey, then, is one of educationonly
in the
sense that he learns that the conventional formulas forhappiness
are
delusions. Instead ofgaining
theprogressive princely
education of the
allegorizedAeneas or the education of Cebes' traveler in how to act and
what to avoid, Rasselas ends wiseronly
inknowing
that his questwas
futile. The ultimateabsurdity
of life is that one mustproject the
hopeof
earthly happinessin order to
keep going and avoid stagnation, but
one must have the educative experienceto know that such
hopesare in
vain and can never be fulfilled here.
Nevertheless, in accordance with the normative narrativeorganiza
tion, Rasselasprojects
a closed circle, and at the end the characters are
to return toAbyssinia,
whencethey
had come, justas Tom returns to
Somerset, Pamela to the Bedfordshire estate, and Wordsworth to Gras
mere. The return in Rasselas, however, has troubled some critics be
cause, with uncustomary obscurity, Johnsonseems to say that one who
leaves theHappy Valley
can return, and yet, in another way ofreading
his words, they do not say that. The last sentence of the book tells us
only, They
deliberated awhile what was to be done, and resolved . . .
to return toAbyssinia. Does the company, then, return to the Happy
Valleyin
Abyssiniaor
merelyto
Abyssinia?It is not like
Johnsonto be
soimprecise. Now the normative
plotis a closed circle because it is
teleological. It sets out to fulfill something, andby closing
the circle it
consummates itself and gainsits end, so that there is
nothing more,
nothingleft over.
Eschatologically,it drives to the four last secular
London. His decision for engagement in the human world instead of flight from it is
analogousto Hercules' choice of difficult Virtue instead of soft Pleasure.
A similar crossroadepisode
occurs later(Bk. 12,
Ch.3-5)
whenTom, despairingof pursuing Sophia and abandoning
thepath of love, chooses, for the sake of glory
and honor, the road leadingto the army, which again
turns outby chance to be
the road Sophia has followed. This violation of the crossroad topos by the element
of chance suggests the thematic area of Tom Jones that it shares with Rasselas.
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Johnsons Rasselas:Implicit
Contexts 21
things, Wisdom, Wealth, Status, and Parents. There isnothing
more
toaccomplish
when Tom will return to Somerset, whenUlysses
returns
to Ithaca andPenelope,
when Aeneas overcomes Turnus, gains Lavinia,
and settles in ancestral Rome; and Pamela's story continuesbeyond
her
marriage onlybecause Status has not
yet been fully gained.The circular
journey thereforeimplies
that life is a closed system: innocent inse
curity, education, and an earned return topossession.
And that isexactly
what Johnsonis
denying. Earthly life, he issaying,
is notteleological,
contains no ultimate solutions, has nopoint that can be labeled Happi
ness, or, as Johnson defined it, the state in which the desires are satisfied. 38 His hermit will
repeatedlyalternate between active life and
retreat; Imlac, who hasalready
retreated from the world, returns to it,
and then withdraws toAbyssinia; he and the Astronomer, at the end, are
willingto be driven
alongthe stream of life. The Nile overflows and
ebbsperiodically.
What seems like an end isonly
a newbeginning.
For
Johnson, life, like our minds and bodies, is in continual flux; somethingis
hourly lost, andsomething acquired.
It is linear, not circular, or at
least a continuous oscillationalong
a line that has nopurposeful
end
in this world, andcorrespondingly Johnson's last chapter
is The Con
clusion, inwhich Nothing is Concluded. That title resonates ironicallynot
only against itself but also against what had become the conven
tional title of lastchapters
in prose fiction. Variants of In which this
HistoryisConcluded appear, for example, in Le Sage's Gil Bias, Char
lotte Lennox's Female Quixote (of which Johnsonwrote the Dedication
andprobably
onechapter),
Eliza Hay wood's History of Jemmyand
Jenny Jessamy,and all of
Fielding's major novels, the last chapter of
Joseph Andrewsbeing
entitled In which this True Historyis
Broughtto a
Happy Conclusion. In that context Rasselas concludes only by
stopping,
and no conclusion is reached as to the
proper
choice of life
because in this lifeNothing
is [ever] Concluded.
The information that the company returns toAbyssinia, flung
outonly
in the very last sentence, isJohnson's
ironic bow to the closed circular
plot, emptyingit of
meaning; and ifwe cannot decide whether the com
pany returns toAbyssinia
or theHappy Valley,
we are not meant to
because the question itself is irrelevant.Johnson
can make his gesture of
accepting the ritual of the circular return and capitalizeon the
ironyof
it because he hasalready
made it evident that theclosing
of the circle is
38
Johnson illustrated his Dictionary definition with a quotation from Hooker:Happiness
is that estatewhereby
we attain, so far aspossibly may be attained, the
full possession of that which simplyfor itself is to be desired, and containeth in it
after an eminent sort the contentation of our desires, the highest degreeof all our
perfection.
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22 Wasserman
fraudulent and that life is asopen-ended
as the title of his lastchapter.
In Rasselas fiction is critical of its own fantasies.
IV
But it would be a distortion ofJohnson's apologue
to read itonly
as
thenegation
ofanticipated forms, for, putting
aside itsglaring
difference
from TristramShandy
inmanner and method, the two works are alike in
bothexploding
conventional illusions anduncovering
the essential.39
Johnson deforms only those designs which imply that life is uncomplicated and
systematically self-completing;but the concomitant purpose
of these violations is to let appear another inheriteddesign
that is of
unquestionable sanction. The overt theme of Rasselas is secular, and its
subjectis the
possibilityof earthly happiness; yet the penultimate chap
ter ends withNekayah's decision that the choice of life is a
pseudo
problem that fades before the choice of eternity. This is the additional
sense of the finalchapter's paradoxical, multisignificant
title. The previous
chapter ends with Imlac's observation that the tomb would be a
gloomy object of contemplation to him who did not know that he should
never die, that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now
thinks shall think on for ever. In that sense, death concludes life but
not the existence of soul and mind. With all his profound religious
concern, Johnson's public writingsare on human conduct, and
religiousobservations arise
onlyas
ancillaryto that
subject.The choice of eter
nity accordinglyis the climax of only
thepenultimate chapter of Rasse
las, and the finalchapter
returns to theproblem
of human existence be
causeimmortality, while the most
important,is only the implicit theme of
the book and arisesonly by complex indirection in the process of sub
verting
the optimisticdesigns
of mortal life.
Similarly,
in
assigning
the
characters toAbyssinia, Johnson
has chosen that exoticcountry
that was
notablyChristian and has intimated their
Christianity by havingthe
39 In this essay I have beenelaborating
what seem to me the rich andcomplex
activities in Rasselas that support and extend the excellent insights of Emrys Jones
( The Artistic Form of Rasselas, RES, 18 [1967], 393-94): It can be said of
Sterne and Johnson that they both have a subversive attitude to certain kinds of
theoryand certain kinds of form. Both are hostile to certain kinds of
philosophic
system, toready-made formulas of all kinds; both in their different ways are enemies
of the rigid, the prescriptive, thethoughtlessly
mechanical or theoretical: mere
custom, mere cant. ... In TristramShandy
much of thecomedy
arises of course
from a collision between theory and practice.. . . the books [Sterne and
Johnson]both wrote
testifyto a similar
impatiencewith closed
systems,whether in
philosophyor in literature. In literarymatters both question
thevalidity of the concept of form
in terms of beginning, middle, and end. . . .Like Sterne to some extent, Johnson?or one side of him?felt that theory could never catch up with practice; closed sys
tems ofthought
would eventuallybe burst from within.
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Johnsons Rasselas :Implicit
Contexts 23
abducted Pekuah restored at the monastery of St.Antony; yet nowhere
doesJohnson specify
theirreligion.
But the subjectof
postmortalitydoes not arise
onlyin the penultimate chapter;
it is the undercurrent
of the last third of the book, unifies thatportion,
makes it functional to
the entire fable, andimplicitly
makes the ultimate point.In the first two-thirds of Rasselas the intimations of
postmortalityare
nearly negligibleand never more
explicit than, toward the end of
that section, the statement that All that virtue can afford isquietness of
conscience and asteady prospect of a
happierstate. But the last third,
as nearly every reader has recognized, is strikingly different inmannerand substance. Instead of mere observers of different modes of life,
Rasselas and company becomeactively engaged
in experience, and
variousepisodes like the visit to the
Pyramids would seem to have little
to do with the choice of life. Overtly the characters are still examining
alternatives, and the Astronomerthey
encounterrepresents the life of
solitary learningas
opposedto social engagement, while the monks of
St.Antony represent meditative retirement; but the neat pattern of
alternation between extreme modes of life that marked the narrative
after the escape from theHappy Valley has been blurred and distorted,
and the sequence of events becomes apparently haphazard. Haphazardof course it should be, for, instead of the
systematically plannedbut
unsuccessful search for theright life, the characters are now
directly
experiencinghow
unplanned andcontingent real life is. Yet, underlying
this chance sequence of events there is a thematic unity thatdepends
uponan assumed context.
Why,one
might ask, does the Astronomer'sstory occupy
sodispro
portionatelymuch of the third part
as tomisshape
the structure? Now
accordingto a
long classical and Christian tradition, astronomers are
the type of the
prideful
searcher into forbidden
knowledge,40
and in his
Life of Milton Johnson singledout for
special praise Raphael's reproofof Adam's
curiosity after theplanetary motions :
together with Adam's
reply,it
may beconfidently opposed
to any rule of life which any
poet has delivered. Transcendentknowledge belongs
to God, not man,
whoseproper
concern is human conduct.Consequently,
the Astronomer
in Rasselasinsanely
thinks he has God's powers and canregulate
the
heavens and the seasons; and heregains sanity only by returning
to
human society. In the context of the choice of life he represents the dire
consequence ofsolitary study
asopposed
to human intercourse, but as
40 See Howard Schultz, Milton and ForbiddenKnowledge (New York, 1955).
Johnson's view of astronomyas the extreme form of
curiosityis detailed, but without
reference to Rasselas, inJohn Hardy's Johnson and
Raphael's Counsel to Adam,in Johnson, Boswell and their Circle (Oxford, 1965), pp. 122-36.
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24 Wasserman
a traditional type he hasreligious significance.
The conventional opposite of
star-knowledgeis
self-knowledge?a 1740 commentator on Mil
ton, for example, annotatedRaphael's reproof with Noli altum sapere.
Tv?Ol o-eavTov (Don't seek to know what is aboveyou.
Knowthyself)41?
andself-knowledge
was understood as the first step toward aknowledge
of one'sreligious
duties and God.42 Correspondingly,in a Rambler
essay ( 180 ) onRaphael's injunction against star-knowledge Johnson
rejected thewandering
after the meteors ofphilosophy
for the permanent lustre of moral and
religious truth ; and in his essays explicitly
on self-knowledge (Rambler 24, 28 ) he satirized the astronomer Gelidusto elaborate on the moral and
religious value of knowing oneself. It is
significanttherefore that it is Rasselas' Astronomer, now restored to
sanity and human affairs, who recommends the visit to the Catacombs
and comments on theinfinity
of God's powers.The story of the Astronomer, however, is interrupted inmid-career
byan encounter with an old man that seems
curiously digressiveand irrele
vant to the surface narrative but that servesfunctionally nevertheless in
the context of the traditional attack onstar-knowledge. Since the As
tronomerepisodes signify
man's need to engage in human affairs, they
would seem to imply that life is therefore a good in itself and that the
more of it the better. Thereligious significance
of the Astronomer con
sequently becomes fullyevident only when the old man serves as
evidence thatlong
life is an intolerable burden. It is foolish to wish for
long life, Johnsonwrote elsewhere; and, since the future lies beyond
thegrave, Piety
is theonly proper and adequate
relief of decayingman (Rambler 69 ).With respect
to the explicittheme of Rasselas, the
Astronomer and the old man, taken together, show that the choice of
neithersolitary study
nor social engagementterminates in
worldly hap
piness;
in the
implicit religiousdrift,
they signify
that the proper studyof mankind isman, not the unknowable things of God, but, conversely,that the affairs of man are not an end in themselves and lead only
to the
choice of eternity.In brief, Johnson
has balanced Astronomer and old
man for the same reason that in the third book of Gulliver Swift satirized
notonly the crazed, antisocial astronomers of Laputa but also the
Struldbrugs,who live forever a vacuous existence. Man's immediate
concern is human life, but hisdestiny
iseternity.
Johnson, then, has subverted the inherited forms that assume the sim
41 Francis Peck, New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton,
p. 185.42 For example, The knowledge of ourselves maketh us tofly
unto God: For the
first point of wisdom, bythe common consent of all learned men, is the knowledge of
ourselves. Now, if we do not know what we are of ourselves, verilywe can never
know God aright (Thomas Becon, Early Works [Cambridge, 1843], p. 42).
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Johnsons Rasselas: ImplicitContexts 25
plicityand
finalityof
earthlyexistence in order to
implythe
validityof
another inheriteddesign.
His structural strategyis to
destroywith
ironyone set of formal assumptions about earthly happiness
while allow
ingto arise in the reader's awareness, in the midst of that destructive act,
a formalassumption designed
to lead to postmortal happiness.43 But
the distinction is essential: what Johnson undermines are those inherited
designsinvented
byman that assume life can have its own ordered
purpose; what he preserves is the design dictated by God that directs
man to hisonly
ultimate happiness. Bymeans of the Astronomer and the
old man, Johnson has, in effect, rescued the original Christian patternof the Fortunate Fall from the novelistic secularized version, which he
hasformally repudiated. Man does not leave Paradise Hall or the Happy
Valleyto repossess it
securely through the acquisition of Wisdom; he
acquires Heaven throughthe wisdom that the choice of
eternity,not
the choice of life, is essential. Recognitionof the
religious implicationsof Astronomer and old man makes functional the otherwise
apparentlydisconnected and random
surrounding episodes of the last third of the
book. Whatever their surface functions, the visit to the Monastery of
St.Antony
and the discussion of monastic devotions, the tour of the
Catacombs and the discourse on the immortality of the soul all serve to
distract us from the question of the happylife and direct our attention to
whatJohnson
calls the state of futureperfection,
to which we all
aspire.
43 In a similar way Lactantius (Vl.iii) rejectedthe
allegoryof the
PythagoreanY as the two roads of life and
reinterpretedit as the roads to Heaven and Hell.
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