SOURCE: "The Artistic Form of Rasselas," in The Review of English Studies, n.s., Vol. XVIII, No. 72, November, 1967, pp. 387-401.

[In the following essay, Jones argues that a three-part structure, rather than the usual division of Rasselas into two unequal parts, reflects more accurately Johnson's original intent for this work.]

Johnson's powers as a poet are more readily appreciated than they were fifty years ago. But the artistry of Rasselas is still too little recognized. The traditional reading of the book speaks of it as a species of sober discourse, and finds its unity—if it has one—in its mood or temper, that of a philosophical pessimism. To approach Rasselas in terms of its apparent sentiments may be misleading; for where a work has the degree of organization that, I suggest, may be found in Rasselas, the bearing of its statements cannot be clear until their context is ascertained. The tone of Rasselas will be misunderstood, in fact, if its artistic form is neglected.

I

'That most melancholy of fables' is how Walter Raleigh described Rasselas. That is all he had to say about it in his book on Johnson,' and in using such a phrase he was no doubt assenting to the traditional way of reading it. The gloom of Rasselas has long been a critical commonplace. Boswell's short account of it in the Life,² although conventional and perfunctory, serves to indicate how the book was usually read until close to our time. He first recounts the circumstances in which Rasselas was written: 'The late Mr. Strahan the printer told me, that Johnson wrote it, that with the profits he might defray the expense of his mother's funeral, and pay some little debts which she had left. He told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he composed it in the evenings of one week.… 'Boswell remarks: 'This Tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery, and all the force and beauty of which the English language is capable, leads us through the most important scenes of human life, and shews us that this stage of our being is full of "vanity and vexation of spirit".' And he goes on to quote the observation of a 'very accomplished lady' that Rasselas was 'a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon the interesting truth, which in his Vanity of Human Wishes he had so successfully enforced in verse'. Boswell's three main points: that Rasselas was associated with the funeral of Johnson's mother; that it was a philosophical discourse, a prose counterpart of The Vanity of Human Wishes; and that its aim was to enforce the moral of Ecclesiastes, that in this life 'all is vanity and vexation of spirit': these three points have all become critical commonplaces. Professor Nichol Smith, for example, observes of Rasselas that 'the gloom is heavy', and for him 'The book ends in resignation to the futility of searching for happiness, and in resolution to pursue life as it is found'.³ Nearer our own time, in his biography of Johnson, Professor Krutch finds the term 'pessimism' appropriate to Rasselas, although he adds: 'It was, indeed, the pessimism which is more properly called the tragic sense of life.'⁴ 'Gloom', 'melancholy', 'vanity and vexation of spirit', 'resignation', 'pessimism', 'the tragic sense of life': it is in such terms as these that Rasselas has traditionally been interpreted. And Imlac's undeniably gloomy remark has been the sentence most readily quoted to justify such a reading: 'Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.'⁵

The term 'tragic', used by Professor Krutch, may serve to introduce, by way of contrast, a fairly recent and very different way of reading Rasselas. I am referring to a fresh and stimulating article by Mr. Alvin Whitley which he provocatively named 'The Comedy of Rasselas'.⁶ He claims that what he calls 'the ponderous school' of critics has been mistaken in its views, and that the right way to read Rasselas is to see it as a 'critical comedy'. He insists on the 'dramatic' structure of the book;⁷ he argues thatits moral is implicit, not explicit; that we cannot, or should not, tear maxims out of their context and interpret them as unqualified assertions of the author; for even Imlac is not Johnson, even if Imlac is closer to him than Pekuah. Finally, in The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (London, 1965), Mr. Paul Fussell describes an eighteenth-century literary form, or set of motifs, which he calls 'the salutary moral comedy of disappointment' (p. 270), and as an example of this kind—this comic kind—he confidently cites Rasselas.

Here are two ways of reading the same book. The first sees Rasselas as a work of heavy gloom; it tends to stress the moral, a detachable moral, or (to use Nichol Smith's term) the 'lesson'. The second, which sees the book as belonging to a species of comic narrative, neglects the moral—or at least does not look for a detachable one—but instead attends to its sardonic or rueful wit. It insists on Johnson's deliberate control of his material, his freedom to choose, his artistry. In particular it calls attention to certain structural features of Rasselas. The first school, by contrast, is not interested in the book's structure. Indeed, Boswell and Nichol Smith, for example (others could be found saying much the same thing), do not merely fail to give attention to the book's structure, they positively suggest that there would not be very much structure if they looked for it. Boswell sees it as a philosophical discourse in prose on the same subject as The Vanity of Human Wishes, while Nichol Smith remarks: 'There is little or no story, no crisis, no conclusion: there is little more than a succession of discussions and disquisitions on the limitations of life.' And he goes on to call it 'an expanded essay'.⁸ The second school of critics, who argue for an essentially comic Rasselas, do not deny its moralistic intentions, but they see them as working through a set of literary contrivances; and so for them a careful attention to the structure of Rasselas is necessary. Far from being a philosophical discourse or an 'expanded essay', which might well be carelessly assembled, Rasselas is properly to be viewed as an arrangement of effects, a patterned sequence, in short a work of art.

Of course some critics, among them the most perceptive, can be said to belong to neither school. Among these are Dr. F. R. Leavis⁹ and Miss Mary Lascelles,¹⁰ who have both noted in Rasselas certain affinities with Jane Austen. And in general the critical situation is more complicated and more untidy than this simplified account would suggest. For not all those who have examined the structure of Rasselas believe it to be a comic work. In his article 'The Structure of Rasselas"' Professor Gwin Kolb rejects a comic interpretation. His summing-up firmly allies him to the school of gloom:

What, briefly, Johnson seems to be urging upon us is this:human limitations make happiness in this world ephemeral, accidental, the product of hope rather than reality, and almost as nothing compared to the miseries of life; consequently, searches for permanent enjoyment, although inevitable to man as man, are bound to end in failure. The wise man, therefore, will accept submissively the essential grimness of life, seek no more lasting felicity than is given by a quiet conscience, and live with an eye upon etemity, in which he may perhaps find, through the mercy of God, the complete happiness unattainable on earth.

So for Professor Kolb, as for Professor Raleigh, Rasselas could be described, in summary phrase, as 'that most melancholy of fables'.

It is not my purpose to try to adjudicate between the two approaches. It is, after all, not altogether unknown for works of art of exceptional vitality to be interpreted in similarly diverse ways. Some of Shakespeare's plays have provoked this kind of disagreement, and in Johnson's own century, among Mozart's operas for example, Don Giovanni and Cosí fan Tutte have been tugged, now in the direction of comedy, now of tragedy, by critics of opposed views. One might, in an attempt to reconcile them, quote Horace Walpole's dictum: 'This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.' However, there is this to be said for those critics who interpret Rasselas as a fundamentally comic work, that they seem to be those most willing to credit Johnson with the powers and the intentions of an artist; and it is as a work of art, a deliberately shaped sequence, that Rasselas deserves to be considered, and has perhaps been insufficiently so considered in the past.

In the first place, the book needs to be released from the bonds laid on it by an otherwise justifiable interest in Johnson's biography. Mr. Whitley says of Rasselas (perhaps rather extravagantly): 'It would be hard to name another literary work which has been so completely transformed … by bringing extraneous knowledge to bear upon it"². The foremost item of extraneous knowledge is undoubtedly that concerning the death of Johnson's mother.¹³ So far as we can determine them, the circumstances in which Johnson sat down to write Rasselas were certainly melancholy; but in traditional accounts of the book too easy or too direct a transition has been made from these circumstances to the state of Johnson's mind while he actually composed. It has been too hastily assumed that because these circumstances were gloomy, therefore Rasselas must be gloomy. But the circumstances in which a work of art was composed are seldom if ever a safe guide to the meaning of the work itself. We could hardly have guessed from listening to Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte that it was composed in circumstances of increasingly desperate financial hardship. Mozart and Johnson make an odd pair. Yet in onerespect they are comparable: in the facility and extraordinary competence with which each practised in his chosen medium. The facility and fecundity of Mozart are famous, while Rasselas was composed in the evenings of a week. I doubt if one could have inferred from Rasselas itself that Johnson had very recently suffered a severe bereavement. The subject of bereavement does indeed occur in it, but it is treated with a fine comic irony. Johnson the writer is unmistakably in control of his material; there is no suggestion that he is struggling to subdue a painful pressure of emotion. The incident in question is Nekayah's grief after the abduction of her handmaid Pekuah. Nekayah, we are told,

sat from morning to evening recollecting all that had been done or said by her Pekuah, treasured up with care every trifle on which Pekuah had set an accidental value, and which might recall to mind any little incident or careless conversation. The sentiments of her whom she now expected to see no more, were treasured in her memory as rules of life, and she deliberated to no other end than to conjecture, on any occasion, what would have been the opinion and counsel of Pekuah. (p. 118)

She determines to go into a permanent retreat from the world, until dissuaded by Imlac and Rasselas; and the following chapter (xxxvi) has for its title 'Pekuah is still remembered. The Progress of Sorrow.' And the progress of sorrow is shown to be in fact its abatement:

She rejoiced without her own consent at the suspension of her sorrows, and sometimes caught herself with indignation in the act of turning away her mind from the remembrance of her, whom yet she resolved never to forget.

As Imlac had said, 'sorrow is never long without a dawn of ease' (p. 120). The writing in this episode is masterly in its mature equilibrium. Nekayah engages our sympathies, but Johnson sees to it that we can also afford to smile.

It is possible then that Rasselas has been seen too restrictively within the context of Johnson's private life. It is also possible that it has been seen too restrictively, and prejudicially, within the context of Johnson's other writings. Johnson the writer was seen by his own contemporaries primarily as a moralist, one who habitually spoke as if in the first person, and also as one distinguished from other men by a habitual sincerity of utterance. The literary form most congenial to him was felt to be the essay, the form that most closely approximated to his conversation. So Boswell, in the passage already quoted, thinks of Rasselas as a 'philosophical discourse'; later, Nichol Smith speaks of it as an 'expanded essay' (and he later quotes it for what he calls Johnson's 'perfect sincerity'). In keeping with these assumptionsRasselas is commonly said to be not very much more than a series of Rambler-type papers. The association of Rasselas with the Rambler and the other periodical essays is perhaps another restrictive bond that needs to be loosened. Of course there are good reasons for comparing some of the episodes in Rasselas to certain of the periodical essays: reasons of style, presentation, and length as well as substance. A clear example is Rambler 6, whose subject is 'Happiness not Local', which is, of course, the thought underlying Johnson's ironical invention of the Happy Valley. But interesting and indeed inescapable as are such affinities between the periodical essays and Rasselas, it is perhaps now more desirable to insist on the differences. In her essay on Rasselas Miss Lascelles has urged some of the greater opportunities awaiting Johnson in the long fable as opposed to the short essay. 'Johnson', she remarks, 'liked, and needed, more room to turn in than a single periodical number allowed him.' And moreover: 'whereas the essays forming a series in a periodical must be all of a length, these episodes [in Rasselas] vary both in bulk and density.' And she goes on to point out the greater complexity in attitude allowed Johnson by the long narrative form:

Rasselas expresses such a tension of contrarieties as no other medium could sustain. It urges, with equal cogency, the necessity, and the danger, of hope. For moderation in both, a Rambler paper could offer a sufficient plea. But for a stronger and subtler tension; for the presentation of contrary states of mind alike valid; for the annihilation of distinction between successive and simultaneous phases of experience—only this will serve.¹⁴

This is admirably put; but one may argue for an even greater degree of liberation from the directly instructive, hortatory mode of the periodical essay, a liberation into the freer, more open-minded, more inconclusive mode of imaginative fiction. Rasselas is not, in short, a few periodical essays stitched together and given a flimsy fictional envelope—for this would suggest that the relation between its episodes were merely additive, as if the whole were merely the sum of its parts, as it would be in a series of Rambler papers. The whole of Rasselas is really more than this: the parts merge together, they work accumulatively, to form a whole larger and more interesting than the parts themselves.

II

If we want a wider setting, outside the context of Johnson's own life and writings, we have only to consider the time when he started writing Rasselas. This seems to have been January 1759.¹⁵ In exactly the same month another writer was starting on his novel: one who at first glance has very little to do with Johnson. This was Laurence Steme, who was just embarking on Tristram Shandy.¹⁶ Sterne's novel would also seem to have little in common with Rasselas. The differences need hardly be dwelt on, they are sufficiently striking. But is it true that they have nothing whatever in common? Rasselas is often described as a philosophical romance; and Miss Lascelles has adopted a term used by Gibbon: 'philosophical fiction'. (Critics of Rasselas have tended to stress the philosophy at the expense of the fiction.) But Tristram Shandy might also—without unduly stretching the term—be described as philosophical fiction. It is not exactly a straight novel in the course of narrating incidents in the lives of Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, and the rest, it raises large questions about time and the self, as well as some especially radical questions about literary form. This point has been well put in a recent essay on Sterne by Mr. Christopher Ricks. He notices that one of the questions that initially perplexed Steme was, Where to begin? And he remarks: 'The innovation and the value of Tristram Shandy … are that it reminds us of what novelists are tempted to let us forget. That there is no such thing as a beginning, middle, and end."⁷ Now Rasselas has also been thought formless: 'There is little or no story, no crisis, no conclusion', says Nichol Smith—he might almost be talking about Tristram Shandy. And its inconclusiveness is something that Johnson pointedly draws our attention to: the last chapter is 'A Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded'. His intention here has been variously interpreted, and I shall return to it later. But apart from their apparent formlessness, what else have the two books in common? It can be said of Sterne and Johnson that they both have a subversive attitude to certain kinds of theory and certain kinds of form. Both are hostile to certain kinds of philosophical system, to ready-made formulas of all kinds; both in their different ways are enemies of the rigid, the prescriptive, the thoughtlessly mechanical or theoretical: mere custom, mere cant. Johnson's remark in his Preface to Shakespeare, 'there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature' might, suitably adapted, have been made by Sterne. And Johnson's attack on Soame Jenyns's callow cosmic optimism shows another aspect of what is the same general policy. In Tristram Shandy much of the comedy arises of course from a collision between theory and practice: Mr. Shandy, we are told, is 'the most philosophical man who ever lived'; he is the slave of theory, he plans his life minutely, he tries to apply his learning to daily domestic experience and is always thwarted by Nature, by the irrepressibly unexpected, by what happens to happen. Rasselas is a youthful example of the same philosophical or theoretical tendency. He wants to make the right 'choice of life'. (And Johnson usually prints the phrase 'choice of life' in italics, as if to bring out its ludicrously theoretical nature. As is well known, he originally planned to call his story The Choice of Life.) Rasselas wants to make the 'choice of life' that will bring him perfect happiness; he wants to choose his life in the same way as one chooses a pair of shoes: something that will fit properly and give perfect satisfaction. He is like Mr. Walter Shandy in that hedesires something unattainable: a perfectly regulated life. This is brought out by, for example, the finely comic debate on marriage (chs. xxviii-xxix). Rasselas hopes to choose the perfect wife, he wants to be certain in his choice of a marriage partner. He is fully aware of the dangers of choosing hastily but, he says: 'Surely all these evils may be avoided by that deliberation and delay which prudence prescribes to irrevocable choice.' Nekayah remonstrates with him on the insurmountable difficulties, but still he persists: 'Whenever I shall seek a wife, it shall be my first question, whether she be willing to be led by reason.' Nekayah's next reply has a convincing resonance:

'Thus it is', said Nekayah, 'that philosophers are deceived. There are a thousand familiar disputes which reason never can decide; questions that elude investigation, and make logic ridiculous; cases where something must be done, and where little can be said. Consider the state of mankind, and inquire how few can be supposed to act upon any occasions, whether small or great, with all the reasons of action present to their minds. Wretched would be the pair above all names of wretchedness, who should be doomed to adjust by reason, every morning, all the minute detail of a domestic day. (p. 106)

Everything Nekayah says here could be applied, with little modification, to Mr. Walter Shandy who does the same: 'adjust by reason … all the minute detail of a domestic day'.

One should not, of course, exaggerate the similarities between Johnson and Sterne. It is true that Johnson had very different allegiances from Steme both as a moralist and as a critic. But the books they both wrote testify to a similar impatience with closed systems, whether in philosophy or in literature. In literary matters both question the validity of the concept of form in terms of beginning, middle, and end. Johnson's defence of tragi-comedy (in his Preface to Shakespeare) is perhaps relevant here: he favoured a form more inclusive than either tragedy or comedy. And similarly, his fondness for biography seems also to indicate a preference for the all-inclusive, for something approaching the amorphous all-inclusiveness of life itself. He preferred truth to fiction, for the imaginative mode was perhaps felt to be constraining to the mind compared with the liberating wide spaces of actuality. Like Sterne to some extent, Johnson—or one side of him—felt that theory could never catch up with practice; closed systems of thought would eventually be burst from within; the prescriptive critic will inevitably lag behind the innovating artist.

Part of the tension of Johnson's thought comes from two opposed impulses in him. He was at once a dogmatist and a sceptic. He loved to generalize, but he also saw the futility of generalization. Areading of Johnson will make one aware not only of the uniformity of life but of its endless diversity, all that part of it which resists generalization. His Rambler 184 gives strong statement to this aspect of his thinking. In the course of this essay he turns to the reader: 'Let him that peruses this paper review the series of his life, and inquire how he was placed in his present condition. He will find that, of the good and ill which he has experienced, a great part came unexpected, without any visible gradations of approach; that every event has been influenced by causes acting without his intervention; and that, whenever he pretended to the prerogative of foresight, he was mortified with conviction of the shortness of his views.' He goes on: 'No course of life is so prescribed and limited, but that many actions must result from arbitrary election … it is necessary to act, but impossible to know the consequences of action, or to discuss all the reasons which offer themselves on every part to inquisitiveness and solicitude.' He concludes: 'Since life itself is uncertain, nothing which has life for its basis can boast much stability.'

Such remarks as these show where Johnson's thought comes closest to Sterne's in an intense awareness of arbitrariness, ignorance, uncertainty, flux. 'Our minds, like our bodies', says Imlac, 'are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired.' (p. 121.) And in Rasselas our attention is repeatedly drawn to the passage of time,¹⁸ it flows ceaselessly, like the Nile. If we give due weight to this side of Johnson's mind—his concern with that part of life which eludes prescription and planning, his concern with the unforeseeable and unrepeatable movement of things—then we will hardly expect to find in Rasselas a simple definitive moral of the kind which Professor Kolb and others offer us. For although there are scores of generalizations about life in Rasselas, it seems unwise to assume that we have in any one of them Johnson's considered philosophy—and this applies even to Imlac's often quoted (surely too often quoted) 'Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed'.

It has often been said that the four travellers in Rasselas all speak with Johnson's voice. It needs to be said just as often that none of them speaks with his voice: they are all partial, including Imlac. Indeed, when Johnson himself speaks with his own voice in a very obvious sense, as in the essays or in conversation, even in his most generalized and dogmatic utterances, he must know that he is being partial since nothing worth saying can possibly embrace the whole truth. Hence, Imlac's observation: 'Inconsistencies cannot both be right, but, imputed to man, they may both be true' (p. 56). At one point in the debate on marriage Rasselas accuses his sister of inconsistency. Her reply has an emphasis and a depth of reflectiveness that should be taken into account if we are to do justice to Johnson's full meaning in Rasselas:

'I did not expect', answered the princess, 'to hear that imputed to falsehood which is the consequence only of frailty. To the mind, as to the eye, it is difficult to compare with exactness objects vast in their extent, and various in their parts. Where we see or conceive the whole at once, we readily note the discriminations, and decide the preference; but of two systems, of which neither can be surveyed by any human being in its full compass of magnitude and multiplicity of complication, where is the wonder, that, judging of the whole by parts, I am alternately affected by one and the other, as either presses on my memory or fancy? We differ from ourselves, just as we differ from each other, when we see only part of the question, as in the multifarious relations of politics and morality; but when we perceive the whole at once, as in numerical computations, all agree in one judgment, and none ever varies his opinion.' (p. 103)

Two phrases here seem particularly striking: 'in its full compass of magnitude and multiplicity of complication', and 'the multifarious relations of politics and morality'. Both phrases indicate Johnson's considered awareness of an almost bewildering heterogeneity in the varied scenes of human life; just as Nekayah's speech as a whole argues for an undogmatic position with regard to questions of politics and morality because no one can know enough.

This sense of life's multifariousness is of prime importance in Rasselas for it not only gives the book its subject; in large part it determines the structure. The book is organized in such a way as to show life in its 'multiplicity of complication' and 'multifarious relations' resisting and defeating the narrow theories which men (in this case the young travellers) mistakenly desire to impose on it. The structure of Rasselas must now be considered.

III

In their analyses of Rasselas Professor Kolb and Mr. Whitley divide it into two parts: (1) in the Happy Valley; (2) in the World. In Mr. Whitley's scheme the division between the two parts occurs after chapter xiv. But this division into two unequal parts does not, I think, bring out the real shape—indeed the shapeliness—of the book. If we disregard for the moment the final chapter, Rasselas can be said to fall into three movements; each of these movements has an equal number of chapters, namely sixteen."⁹ The first sixteen chapters set the scene in the Happy Valley and state the main subject: Rasselas's wish to make the 'choice of life'. The sixteenth chapter shows the four travellers arrived in Cairo and ends with the prince's emphatic declaration: 'I have here the world before me,20 I will review it at leisure: surely happiness is somewhere to be found.' And the next chapter opens: 'Rasselas rose next day, and resolved to begin his experiments upon life.' Wehave here a clear indication that the narrative is entering on a new phase. This second, or middle, phase also occupies sixteen chapters. In it the travellers survey mankind: they investigate different walks of life (hedonists, stoics, hermits, shepherds, etc.); they discuss public and private life; and the movement ends with the visit to the Pyramids which itself culminates in Imlac's sombre apostrophe:

Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly! (p. 114)

This sonorous utterance brings the second movement of Rasselas to a close. At the beginning of the next chapter (ch. xxxiii) the narrative takes a new turn: the chapter itself is entitled 'The Princess Meets with an Unexpected Misfortune'. The misfortune is, of course, the abduction of Pekuah. As a result of this sudden emergency the quest for the 'choice of life' is tacitly abandoned, and this last phase or movement of the book (the sixteen chapters from xxxiii to xlviii) is occupied with, on the face of it, a haphazard series of happenings: Nekayah's grief, Pekuah's return and her account of her adventures, the meeting with the mad astronomer, and his recovery to sanity, the brief meeting with the old man, and finally the visit to the Catacombs.

If Rasselas is considered with this tripartite arrangement in mind, it will be seen to be far from formless: on the contrary it can be said to have a regular and significant design. The first movement shows us Rasselas, driven by a restless impulse he hardly understands, determining to make the 'choice of life'. He witnesses the artist's abortive attempt to fly, meets Imlac and hears his life story, and, finally, accompanied by Imlac, Nekayah, and Pekuah, escapes to the outside world. The second movement is given to the 'experiments upon life' which Rasselas carries out; and he discovers that no actual case will fit his theory—no one can be said to possess perfect happiness. The third movement, from Pekuah's abduction to the visit to the Catacombs, shows the travellers living fully in the world, no longer at leisure to contemplate the spectacle of life, but buffeted by circumstances, and themselves becoming actively involved with other men. Seen in this way, the whole narrative exhibits the breakdown of untested theory in the face of actual experience. Rasselas loses his insularity, his state of innocent isolation from ordinary living; he becomes fruitfully involved in life—but it is a life which refuses to be planned and which can no longer be called a series of 'experiments'.

That this scheme was deliberately planned by Johnson may be borneout by the following suggestion. The first two movements in this three-movement structure stand in marked opposition to each other. There is a good deal of local complication in each, but this does not obscure the general design of the two movements. Their relationship is like that of the two parts of an antithesis: the Happy Valley and Lower Egypt, innocence and experience, hope and disappointment, idealistic theory and frustrating particularity. This antithetical relation between the two parts—that between a largely misplaced hope and an apparently definitive disappointment ('expectation and disgust¹²¹)—may be seen as a structural parallel to that favourite figure of eighteenth-century rhetoric, the antithetical epigram. This figure, amusing in its succinctness and apparently conclusive in its wisdom, occurs perhaps more frequently in Rasselas than in any other of Johnson's writings. The way we take these epigrams may help to determine how we interpret the antithetical structure of the narrative in these first two movements of Rasselas. These epigrams (e.g. 'Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures') are often, perhaps usually, taken 'straight', as if they were Johnson's weighty conclusions on life. They should surely be more guardedly interpreted, enjoyed as wit rather than prized as nuggets of explicit wisdom. For Johnson often uses them in such a way that one is made to see, even while enjoying them, how comically insufficient to the true purposes of life such rhetorical devices really are. If they seem, often, to lead us into a baffling cul-de-sac, this is their precise intention; they lead us there because we follow too innocently the false premiss upon which they are based and which they are designed to undermine. This can be illustrated from one of the most amusing of the episodes: the debate on marriage.

Rasselas has taken as his theme the unhappiness that arises from early marriages:

From those early marriages proceeds likewise the rivalry of parents and children. The son is eager to enjoy the world before the father is willing to forsake it, and there is hardly room at once for two generations. The daughter begins to bloom before the mother can be content to fade, and neither can forbear to wish for the absence of the other. (p. 105)

A little later in this conversation Nekayah concludes: 'I believe it will be found, that those who marry late are best pleased with their children, and those who marry early, with their partners.' 'The union of these two affections' (answers Rasselas soberly) 'would produce all that could be wished. Perhaps there is a time when marriage might unite them, a time neither too early for the father, nor too late for the husband.'²² This neat antithesis comes as the climax of a systematic categorization; it proclaims the mastery of reason and theory over the obstreperousness of existence. Rasselas's sentiments may seem grave and admirable, but they have one flaw: the abstract 'time' he speaks of does not exist—or does not exist in dissociation from the particular 'husband' or 'father', or rather the particular man, who must 'make the happiness he does not find'. The premisses on which the young travellers argue are exquisitely innocent, and false; and the very form of the limiting, stylishly neat antithesis declares its own insufficiency. In short, Johnson can use the antithetical epigram much as Swift uses his ironical formulas (although with far more sympathy towards his characters than Swift ever shows), as a way of arousing the reader to detached reflection and self-criticism.

It is necessary to bear this in mind when we return to the structural antithesis formed by the first two movements of Rasselas. Our first impulse should not be, I think, to take as a simple statement this large antithesis of hope and disappointment and argue whether or not it suggests pessimism in Johnson. We should rather see in it the underlying structural device: the posited closed system of false hope and false disappointment which is to be broken down. This process of breaking down is to be shown in the important third movement of the book (chs. xxxiii-xlviii).

The third movement, announced by the title of chapter xxxiii ('The Princess Meets with an Unexpected Misfortune'), opens with a marked change of tempo and incorporates a new kind of material. Imlac's calm and gravely detached oration on the Pyramids (his theme, 'that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life') is rapidly succeeded—indeed almost interrupted—by a scene of tumultuous activity.

What had happened they did not try to conjecture, but immediately inquired. 'You had scarcely entered into the Pyramid,' said one of the attendants, 'when a troop of Arabs rushed upon us …'(p. 114)

There follows the first of the two extended episodes which give the third movement its character and meaning. In this first episode, Pekuah's abduction, the travellers become for the first time the passive ones, feeling the full weight of the unplannable and unlooked-for in human life. They had expected the world—other people—to lie passive before their inspection; instead, their philosophical reflections are cut short, and they emerge from the Pyramid to find themselves the victims of others. The member of the party who is lost and must be ransomed back seems to be the least important; yet it is she, Pekuah, who provides a link, albeit a tenuous one, with the next episode: she plays a prominent part in leading the astronomer back to sanity. Indeed, Rasselas himself plays a comparatively subordinate role in this third movement. The curing of the astronomer constitutes the second extended episode of this last movement; and it is given a peculiar emphasis. (The episode fills five chapters; one may suspect that, as well as stressing its importance, Johnson perhaps had an eye to the number of chapters he was required by his scheme to supply. Chapter xli, for example, is exceptionally brief and its two paragraphs seem to gain little by being detached from what follows.) In the context of Rasselas as a whole, the astronomer, virtuous and learned as he is, illustrates in an extreme and disturbing form the tendency of the young travellers to impose theories upon life.²³ He has moved beyond the understandable desire to regulate one's own life into the further reaches of delusion: he is burdened with the god-like task of regulating the weather. The travellers are moved by his case, and actively help him in a simple and humane way; they win him back to sanity by offering him their friendship and admitting him to their society. So for the second time in this third movement of the book the actual number of the party of travellers has changed: they were first reduced to three by the loss of Pekuah, and now, after her return, have gained a fifth member, the astronomer. Both incidents show the travellers engaged in some real give and take with life, some natural reciprocity. By means of these two extended episodes the baffling cul-de-sac formed by the first two movements yields to a more promising way forward.

The last chapter stands outside the tripartite scheme, and Johnson's purpose in it has often been debated. Its witty title, 'A Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded', contains a multiple word-play that suggests the theme of the whole work. It is an ending in which the 'choice of life' is not decided, a decision that nothing can end here, a decision that nothing can be simply decided, and an ending that acknowledges the seeming endlessness of things. Moreover, the chapter makes a further point that concerns the artistic structure of the book. From a conventional point of view the book, with its trailing coda, has now become structurally defective. But at a second glance one sees originality and aesthetic purpose in this new asymmetrical design in which the neat tripartite form is given a brief extension that at once fractures and fulfils it. The book therefore contrives to be both a closed and an open system; the demands of literary form and the demands of life are both met.

Johnson's intentions here in the last chapter, and indeed in the book as a whole, may be elucidated by a Shakespearian analogy. Shakespeare's comedy Love's Labour's Lost also ends with an ending which is no conclusion. The philosophical young men do not win their ladies, but are made to do penance for a year and a day, at the end of which period they may try again. Their unnatural vows, their artificial behaviour, and their clever wit are rebuked by the supremely natural, indeed banally unavoidable fact of death—the death of the princess's father, the King of France. And so the play's ending is also a 'Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded':

Berowne: Our wooing doth not end like an old play:
Jack hath not Jill. These ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
King: Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,
And then 'twill end.
Berowne: That's too long for a play.
(v. ii. 862-4)

Rasselas, like Shakespeare's comedy, is about 'labour lost': 'Of these wishes that they had formed they well knew that none could be obtained' (p. 158). Both Shakespeare's comedy and Johnson's tale are concerned with wisdom and folly; their leading characters are 'wise' or clever fools. And both have a similar structural feature, the inconclusive conclusion. Shakespeare's characters take their leave with a curiously effective realism: 'You that way: we this way', and Johnson's simple resolve, for all their plans, to return to the place where they began. This last feature—the inconclusive conclusion—may in both cases be interpreted as Nature making a critique on Art. Nature exposes the insufficiency of Art by calling in question the very form of the work of art itself—by suggesting that an ending is not possible because there are no endings in nature. The flow of life cannot be checked; life refuses to be contained within a neat literary form. In Rasselas Johnson has created a form in which this perception can be artistically conveyed in his own terms and for his own age. To have done so is evidence of an artistic power with which he has been too little credited.

Notes

¹ Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson (Oxford, 1910), p. 33.

² Ed. G. B. Hill, revised L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), i. 341-2.

³ Nicole Smith,] Cambridge History of English Literature, x (1913), 179.

⁴ J. W. Krutch, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1944), p. 163.

⁵ Ch. xi, p. 67. Quotations are taken from Rasselas, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1887).

⁶ [Alvin Whitley,] E.L.H., xxiii (1956), 48-70.

⁷ Cf. the remarks on Johnson's 'dramatic' procedure in Rasselas in W. J. Bate's The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York, 1955), pp. 90-91.

⁸ Loc. cit., p. 179 [Nicole Smith].

⁹ 'Johnson and Augustanism' in The Common Pursuit (London, 1952), p. 115.

¹⁰ [Mary Lascelles,] 'Rasselas Reconsidered' in Essays and Studies (1951), p. 51.

¹¹P.M.L.A., lxvi (1951), 698-717.

¹² Loc. cit., p. 49 [Alvin Whitley].

¹³ In "'The Fourth Son of the Mighty Emperor": The Ethiopian Background of Johnson's Rasselas', P.M.L.A., lxxviii (1963), 516-28, D. M. Lockhart establishes that Johnson's Ethiopian research for Rasselas was probably completed at least seven years before he wrote Rasselas. It may thus be conjectured that Johnson had conceived the idea of the book long before the occasion of its writing and publication.

¹⁴ Loc. cit., pp. 44-45 [Mary Lascelles].

¹⁵ See Rasselas, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1927), p. xv.

¹⁶ See W. L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (New Haven, 1929), p. 189.

¹⁷The Listener, 11 Feb. 1965; reprinted in The Novelist as Innovator (London, 1965).

¹⁸ Cf. Geoffrey Tillotson, 'Time in Rasselas', in Augustan Studies (London, 1961).

¹⁹ This scheme would perhaps have been obscured on the book's first publication by its division into two volumes, the first volume ending with chapter xxv.

²⁰ The echo of the ending of Paradise Lost is unmistakable: 'The World was all before them, where to choose'.

²¹ Ch. xlix, p. 157.

²² p. 107.

²³ In the astronomer himself Johnson uses the traditional opposition between astronomy, or star-knowledge, and self-knowledge; astronomy was traditionally cited as an example of knowledge remote from use, as opposed to the supremely useful study of ethics. Cf. John Hardy, 'Johnson and Raphael's Counsel to Adam' in Johnson, Boswell, and their Circle: Essays presented to L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1965), pp. 122-36.