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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







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.







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







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







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.







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







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).







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.







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.







?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








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.







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







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.







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








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.







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.








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.







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







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







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.







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.







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.








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.







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).







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.

rasselas contexts

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