SOURCE: "Rasselas and the Traditions of 'Menippean Satire'," in Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, edited by Isobel Grundy, Vision Press and Barnes & Noble, 1984, pp. 158-85.

[In the following essay, Woodruff considers Rasselas within the context of classical satiric traditions, suggesting that such a view makes clearer Johnson's efforts to create a Christian philosophy founded on realism.]

As Carey McIntosh has pointed out, Rasselas is 'the most problematic' of Johnson's narrative works.' Disagreement exists about its genre and about the effect of its style, moral, structure, plot and characterization. My aim is to suggest a context of discussion that I hope will contribute to the clarification of at least some of these controversies.

Most of the extensive and valuable discussion of the literary backgrounds of Rasselas has been in a biblical or relatively modem context. Occasionally Cicero and the Stoics are cited, but, as far as I am aware, the book has rarely been associated with ancient literary traditions. Earl R. Wasserman, however, has connected Rasselas with two Greek allegories, well known in the eighteenth century if not today: Prodicus's Choice of Hercules and the Tablet of Cebes.² Wasserman uses his suggestion to work out implications of a fundamental insight about Rasselas and its period: 'the eighteenth century … produced a literature that … questions, transforms, and undermines the established norms themselves' (3). Though Johnson must certainly have known the allegories of Prodicus and Cebes and even have been influenced by them at certain points in his work as a whole, it is hard not to share some of Irvin Ehrenpreis's scepticism about the degree to which we should see their influence operating in Rasselas.³ Yet the validity of the insight about the book's essentially subversive nature remains.

Ehrenpreis, in the concluding part of his essay, makes a series of statements that formulate precisely and elegantly many of the essential characteristics of Rasselas and develop the argument about the critical and ironic nature of Johnson's book. A selection of them should provide a sound starting point for further discussion.

Rather than call the work a novel, I agree with those who classify it as a philosophical romance like More's Utopia and Voltaire's Candide. The action seems intended to illustrate a set of doctrines. What holds the reader is the author's playful substitution of ironically framed argument for exciting incident.… He invites us to identify ourselves with Imiac or Rasselas but then detaches himself from the person in order to smile sympathetically at him and us.… [Johnson] gives us amock-romance. The story of Rasselas moves through ironic contrasts between the fantasies of traditional romance and the realities of earthly experience. (111) … Consistency and depth of characterization do not [lend themselves to the author's purpose of creating 'an impression that [he] has confronted all the possibilities of sublunary existence'.] (112) … If Johnson provides us with the superficial features of the oriental romance, he frustrates the expectations aroused by them.… The method is deliberate and works as comic irony. (113) … In the style of the speeches (as also in much of the narrative) Johnson recalls the distinctive manner of the oriental tale, but he does so in a delicate parody.… Even when the style is straightforward, and wisdom is offered such as the author might recommend as his peculiar teaching, it may be set in an ironic frame. (116)

These statements formulate sharply some real but difficult qualities of Rasselas which are certainly, as Ehrenpreis suggests, well suited to Johnson's habits as a writer, but which I propose in the following essay to associate with a somewhat wider and more enduring literary tradition than he or other writers on Rasselas mention.

1

A discussion has been developing in recent years, mainly outside the field of eighteenth-century studies, about a literary kind variously referred to as the anatomy, the menippea, and Menippean satire. While the genre is referred to by earlier writers, the mention is usually brief. The detailed conception of this literary kind recently developed, however, allows a new historical and critical understanding of the form of many 'problematic' works, from the eighteenth century as well as from other times. Rasselas, I think, is one of them, along with such a likely companion as Candide and such less likely associates as Gulliver's Travels and Tristram Shandy.⁴ Indeed, the eighteenth-century philosophic tale may be seen as a sub-class of the genre.

To some the identification may only need to be asserted to be evident. To others one of the main focuses of objection to such a description is the word 'satire' itself. While several writers have called Rasselas satiric, the description has also been vigorously denied.⁵ Part of the problem in using the term may lie in the conception of the Menippean genre, but part lies in the way the basic characteristics of satire per se are viewed. Many 'Menippean' works such as Gulliver's Travels A Tale of a Tub, Erasmus's Praise of Folly, and some of Lucian's dialogues like the Icaromenippus or the Vitarum auctio are by common consent and usage 'satiric'.⁶ Others, such as Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, are not. It is this difficulty that has led Northrop Frye to suggest that theterm 'anatomy' be substituted for the cumbersome and misleading 'Menippean satire', and Mikhail Bakhtin generally shortens the term to 'menippea'. The substitution, however, has been rejected by other writers such as Eugene Kirk and F. Anne Payne, who insist on the genre's basically satiric nature.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most attempts to understand the essential quality of satire involved placing it in an antithesis of praise and invective. Dryden uses this approach in his 'Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire' in a sentence that Johnson slightly misquotes in his Dictionary under the first meaning of 'invective' as a noun: 'If we take satire in the general signification of the word, as it is used in all modem languages, for an invective, 'tis certain that it is almost as old as verse.⁷ The problem, however, as Dryden recognizes, is that satire in becoming an art form becomes much more complex than its primitive original or its common modern meaning would allow. He echoes Dacier in observing

that the word satire is of a more general signification in Latin than in French or English. For amongst the Romans it was not only used for those discourses which decried vice, or exposed folly, but for others also, where virtue was recommended. (11, 116)

Like most writers in the period he sees true satire as achieving general moral significance rather than remaining mere personal abuse. Johnson sums up this view in the definition of 'satire' in his Dictionary:

A poem in which wickedness or folly is censured. Proper satire is distinguished, by the generality of the reflections, from a lampoon which is aimed against a particular person; but they are too frequently confounded.⁸

This extended conception of satire implied certain things about the satirist's character, as many writers in the eighteenth century were certainly aware.⁹ An indulgence in invective can easily lead to the image of the satirist as a mean-spirited and vindictive creature who cares little for truth and real virtue in his attempts to mount an attack on his victims. Yet some satirists would rather think of themselves as noble moralists willing to suffer if necessary for the good of mankind. Pope as seen by his enemies and by himself is a good example of both images. Such a perceived conflict or tension could in turn have implications for the character satire was allowed to develop. The more scrupulous the satirist about truth and general morality the less likely he might be to indulge in violence and personal invective. But the farther the writer moves towards moral nobility and away from mere invective the less like satire his work will appear to many readers, though he may still think of himself as working withinsatiric traditions. In the end it comes to a matter both of the real character of the writer and of the rhetorical character he wishes to project in his works. It has been observed, most notably by W. Jackson Bate in his influential discussion of 'Johnson and Satire Manqué', that Johnson seems to have felt acutely both the impulse of the satirist and the need to mute that impulse because of compassion and, one might add, a concern for truth.'" Several of the illustrative quotations he gives for 'satire' and its derivatives in the Dictionary, particularly for the word 'satirist' itself, reiterate a need to mute the violence of satire and to stress positive moral concerns. They bring out the tension we have noted between the character of satire and that of the good satirist. Two examples must serve, though at least eight out of the sixteen quotations used to illustrate these words have a similar thrust.

Wycherly, in his writings, is the sharpest satyrist of his time; but, in his nature, he has all the softness of the tenderest dispositions: in his writings he is severe, bold, undertaking; in his nature gentle, modest, inoffensive.

Granville.

Yet soft his nature, though severe his lay;
His anger moral, and his wisdom gay:
Blest satyrist! who touch'd the mean so true,
As show'd vice had his hate and pity too.
Pope.

Taken together, the quotations Johnson selects bring out the responsibilities of the satirist and the dangers inherent in using a powerful weapon irresponsibly, the sort of points that Addison before him had reiterated many times. They caution by implication against the temptation satire too readily offers of indulging ill nature, and they suggest the controls we should expect to find operating when Johnson himself worked in a satiric mode or genre.

The complex nature of satire, involving tensions between the personal and the general, invective and exposure, raillery and morality, makes it difficult to simplify its definition in terms of a single characteristic such as attack or ridicule. A satiric writer experiencing the compunctions just suggested would be likely, I think, to de-emphasize the more personal, more violent aspects—the mere decrying of vice—and to emphasize the exposure of folly and the recommending of virtue. When this aspect of satire is stressed it begins to sound more and more like one of Johnson's usual modes. This stripping bare from the encrustations of pretence- and wish-fantasy is perhaps satire's most universal though not its sole aim. The fictions of satire force the fresh look that leads to such exposure. Satire intends not only to rob the shameless of honour but, in a famous phrase, to clear the mind of cant, of what we take for granted and mindlessly repeat. Satire is the mode of 'reality', of the actual, of things as they are. At base it is the opposite of romance, which is the mode of wishes and their fulfilment and of the ideal rather than the actual. Sometimes to show or suggest this difference satire stresses the anti-romantic.

Irony becomes another way of establishing the actual through implied contrast, for it is a trope that is constantly bringing out a sense of difference. In the most general sense irony depends on a perception of discrepancy within moral structures. In itself it does not necessarily imply moral judgement, only difference. Though such judgement is frequent in satire and the ironic discrepancy is between an actual and an ideal (as in Juvenal), there may be ironies where right (and wrong) rests on both sides and our primary awareness is of the discrepancy between different perspectives. This latter kind of irony is, in fact, frequent in Johnson's writing. Other kinds of irony, like 'dramatic irony' or even much 'tragic' or 'comic irony', depend on discrepancies in knowledge or in point of view—between different characters, between audience and characters, or even between knowledge of a part and of the whole. Irony, then, can be employed as a ready means to the satiric end of exposure. Similarly, ridicule in satire is perhaps more means than end. In a good deal of satire at least, the underlying intention, as we have noted, is to expose a truth or reality concealed or ignored by the assumptions or fictions or wilful misrepresentations of everyday living and converse. The ridicule is one of the techniques used to effect the exposure of falsity and discovery of truth.¹¹

When satire is viewed thus Rasselas appears much more convincingly to belong within the mode. The point has already been made succinctly by Arieh Sachs:

The method of Rasselas is the method of satire, in the sense that it involves an ironical exposé of human delusions which is intended to make us confront unpleasant realities. By means of its irony, it makes us see the absurdity of many 'luscious falsehoods' and feeds us the salutary 'bittemess of truth'.¹²

The conception of the 'Menippean satire' allows a good deal more to be said about Rasselas seen in this way and also allows us to incorporate into our view many of the characteristics of the book noted by Ehrenpreis and others.

2

Not only does it make sense to see Rasselas as Menippean satire in a modem critical context, but there is a good possibility that Johnson himself might have looked on it as connected with that kind of work. Thus there is some point in looking both at how the genre was viewed in Johnson's time and how it has been described by recent critics. The principal source of theoretical and historical knowledge about Menippean satire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was Isaac Casaubon's De Satyrica Graecorum Poesi et Romanorum Satira originally published in 1605.¹³ Later writers who touch on the genre, such as Dacier, Dryden (in his 'Discourse … 'prefixed to the translation of Juvenal and Persius, 16934), and Joseph Trapp add very little. Dryden's few pages are a good summary from an important writer who saw his own 'Mac-Flecknoe' and 'Absalom and Achitophel' as being of this kind."⁵ He follows Casaubon in preferring the term 'Varronian satire', though he notes that the Roman satirist Varro himself, whose works survive only in fragments, called it Menippean after the Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara, who later appears as a character in the dialogues of Lucian. One essential characteristic of Menippean satire for these writers rests in the root meaning of satire in satura, a mixture, a point first established by Casaubon. Dryden notes: 'This sort of satire was not only composed of several sorts of verse, like those of Ennius, but was also mixed with prose; and Greek was sprinkled amongst the Latin' (113). Varro, 'one of those writers whom they called spoudogeloioi, studious of laughter' (114), had commented on the mixture of mirth and philosophy in his own writings. Dryden observes Menippus's reputation for cynical impudence, obscenity, and parody, but notes that 'Varro, in imitating him, avoids his impudence and filthiness, and only expresses his witty pleasantry.… As [Varro's] subjects were various, so most of them were tales or stories of his own invention' (115). The writers and works that for Dryden define the continuation of this tradition are the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, many of Lucian's dialogues, particularly his Vera Historia, the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the Apocolocyntosis of Seneca, the Symposium of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, Erasmus's Praise of Folly, John Barclay's Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon, a German work (probably, according to W. P. Ker, the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum), Spenser's Mother Hubbard's Tale, and his own works mentioned above. In these remarks, many of the characteristics listed in recent accounts of the genre are already present, thought its satiric ethos is assumed rather than explicitly articulated. Central to Dryden's and the seventeenth-century view is a notion of medley that breaks through ordinary literary decorums, brings together mirth and philosophic seriousness, and is usually embodied in dialogue or at least quasi-narrative forms, often fragmentary and digressive.

Modem criticism spells out much more fully the notion of medley central to older views, and often seeks the raison d'etre behindthe mixtures. Considerable scholarship has touched on the subject of Menippean satire in classical literature. A rather full summary in relation to Lucian is given by J. Bompaire in his Lucien Ecrivain, and Eugene P. Kirk has recently published Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism, a useful account of texts and scholarship that follows the genre to 1660.¹⁶ Kirk emphasizes the genre's Protean character, how writers looking to the same models can be led by their own concerns to emphasize very different characteristics so that both Boethius and Erasmus can be seen as imitators of Lucian. Such diversity makes definition difficult. Kirk arrives at a statement of 'family resemblances' that appears to grow from a sense of the genre similar to Dryden's, and emphasizes diversity of language, variety of structure, and a concentration in theme on subjects dealing with problems of right learning or right belief.

Even more suggestive of aspects of Johnson's work are the analyses of this genre by Northrop Frye, Mikhail Bakhtin and F. Anne Payne. Frye outlined his view in Anatomy of Criticism.'⁷ He distinguishes the kind of characterization typically found in these works from more 'novel-centred' conceptions.

The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behaviour.… [Its characterization] is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent.… A constant theme in the tradition is the ridicule of the philosophus gloriosus.… The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry which the philosophus gloriosus at once symbolizes and defines. (309)

The characterization in Rasselas, frequently described as wooden yet in context somehow right, is suggested by such an account. The book also contains a whole procession of philosophi gloriosi from the would-be flyer to the astronomer. Many other characteristics of Menippean satire noted by Frye could readily be illustrated from Rasselas: its loose-jointed narrative is often confused with romance but differs significantly from it; 'at its most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern' (310)¹⁸; 'the form is not invariably satiric in attitude, but shades off into more purely fanciful or moral discussions' (310); the dialogue and the cena or symposium often appear; piling up of erudition and jargon are common and authors of this sort of work have frequently been encyclopaedic compilers. Frye adds to writers and works already mentioned not only Rabelais and Swift but Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the work which Johnson said 'was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise'.¹⁹

Before Frye wrote, the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin had analysed the menippea in his book Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, which originally appeared in the late 1920s but was not widely known in the West until recent years.²⁰ For Bakhtin the concept of the menippea is deeply connected with his notion of the carnivalization of literature. He sees the 'carnival spirit' holding together and making coherent the disparate characteristics of the genre. Bakhtin posits a large class of ancient serio-comical literature including 'Menippean satire' and 'Socratic dialogue' with several other forms, and notes the difficulties of establishing distinct and stable boundaries within its realm. He suggests three basic characteristics for all the serio-comic genres. (1) 'Their starting point for understanding, evaluating, and formulating reality is the present' (88). 1 understand this to mean that they make a sense of things-as-they-are reality their basis rather than introducing a vision of epic or tragic distance. (2) These genres are consciously based on experience and on free imagination rather than on legend. They are often explicitly critical of previous formulations of experience such as are found in myth. (3) They exhibit deliberate multifariousness and discordance. Stylistically self-conscious, they reject the stylistic unity of the established genres. Bakhtin proceeds next to the Socratic dialogue, pointing out how it is set up to undermine the claims of those who profess to possess the truth, which 'does not reside in the head of an individual person; it is born of the dialogical intercourse between people in the collective search for the truth' (90). Thus juxtaposed points of view are characteristic of the seriocomic genres.

Bakhtin's listing of specific traits of the menippea is also relevant to Rasselas. The weight and nature of the comic element can vary widely from the burlesque of Varro and Lucian to the contemplative irony and 'reduced laughter' of Boethius.²¹ Recent writers, beginning with Clarence Tracy and Alvin Whitley, have found a comic element in Rasselas, though the precise way to read it remains a problem.²² The genre also shows great freedom of invention and fantasy. However, it creates

extraordinary situations in which to provoke and test a philosophical idea—the word or the truth, embodied in the image of the wise man, the seeker after this truth. We emphasize that the fantastic serves here not in the positive embodiment of the truth, but in the search after the truth, its provocation and, most importantly, its testing. (94)

Rather than developing complex argument like the Socratic dialogue, the Menippean dialogue tests ultimate philosophical positions, and makes us aware of the human dimensions of ideas.These are the characteristics of Rasselas.

Bakhtin's statement is a precise formulation of the way in which Rasselas differs from the simple, Aesop'sfable type of apologue or from allegory as conventionally conceived; many passages such as the encounter with the stoic in Chapter 18 or with the philosopher of nature in Chapter 22 show the testing of ultimate positions in their human terms. The positions tested are characteristically of an 'ethico-practical inclination' rather than more clearly 'academic' ones. Characteristic too is the juxtaposition of stripped-bare positions (for example, the happiness of solitude set against the happiness of various kinds of society, or the sensual indulgence of young men set against the stoic denial of an old man). There are only hints in Rasselas of the tri-level construction (heaven, earth, hell) often found, but they may be important, as is the characteristic of observation from an unusual point of view—here wealthy outsiders from the happy valley look at the ordinary world. Significantly, Johnson brings his characters to the level of the real world for most of their work of observation. The whole element of the fantastic is muted in Rasselas compared with many works in the genre. However, 'the representation of man's unusual, abnormal moral and psychic states—insanity of all sorts … unrestrained daydreaming … etc.' (96) appears in the astronomer or the daydreaming of Rasselas and later of all the young people. Of other elements identified by Bakhtin, Rasselas includes sharp contrasts and oxymoronic combinations (the happy valley as paradise and prison, for example), elements of a social Utopia usually involving a journey to another land (the happy valley again, and perhaps the Arab's harem, but with some interesting—though not unprecedented—reversals), inserted genres intensifying the variety of styles and tones, parody, etc. (the elements of anti-romance and of the oriental tale, as well as summaries of several philosophical positions, dissertations, dialogues, etc. and various life stories which are in a way mock-aretology, another ancient aspect of the genre), and finally a topical quality (not prominent in Johnson though he does address some current philosophical issues). The element most obviously omitted from Rasselas is the scandalous, the 'underworld naturalism' that has given so many Menippean works the reputation of dirty books. The omission is typical of Johnson. But Boethius omits it too and in so doing, as Casaubon pointed out, emulates Varro who effectively established the genre.²³

F. Anne Payne offers the most extensive and probing analysis of Menippean satire I have yet encountered.²⁴ Her discussions of Lucian and Boethius are extremely suggestive in relation to Johnson's work, though eighteenth-century literature is not her concern. She maintains that the genre should continue to be viewed in the context of satire, but that it is satire of a special kind whose ultimate aim is to set the mind free. While ordinary satire isfrequently seen as setting up some ideal standard and criticising deviations, she sees at this genre's centre a questioning of the very possibility of ideal standards.²⁵ Consequently interest centres on freedom of will and the dominance of choice in human action as well as in thought. The conventions found in the satires are 'merely aids to the dramatization of this fundamental assumption' (6). Johnson's exploration of the 'choice of life' obviously has this kind of focus, and the end, if seen only as a demonstration that the travellers should abandon their search for the answer to an impossible question and get on 'with living an ordinary life in an everyday world' (202), sounds very much like one of Lucian's terminal positions. Johnson, however, superimposes the Christian perspective of eternity on the position typically taken by the pagan writer, thus transforming its meaning.

Several of the characteristics Payne adds to Bakhtin's list have an obvious applicability to Rasselas: a central dialogue between a 'know-it-all' and a 'neophyte'; one character involved in an endless quest, 'helped' by the comments of the other, but with any norm which tries to provide an end satirized; freedom to think, frequently imaged as freedom of action, seen as a gift and a burden; characters who 'exhibit a courteous intention to continue conversing no matter what happens and no matter what must be given up'; and the radiation of 'an unquenchable hope and titanic energy for whatever the problem is' (10). Payne stresses that the genre is to be recognized not by the occurrence of particular characteristics—many occur at least singly in other kinds of work—but by the totality and by the domination of themes like freedom of will, choice, and the questioning of the possibility of ideal standards.

To consider Rasselas's affinities to this genre leads to certain emphases, especially on the anti-establishment dimension which it shares with most of Johnson's writings. The genre works towards questioning things. It lets nothing rest easy. Ultimately a grasp on reality is aimed at—just the opposite of the world of wishes that dominates in romance. In Rasselas the stress is always on the presence of alternatives and the uncertainty of final answers. All truths except the final and ultimately unknowable divine truth are partial, but the undercurrent of hope and elation which many readers sense in this book as in other Menippean works (despite the temptation rationally to label the book pessimistic) comes from the vision of the world without forced answers, the emphasis on discovery and on the continuing effort to know rather than the subsidence into easy decision or agnosticism. The Menippean satirist is 'too restless for settled schools'.²⁶ Johnsonians will surely echo with 'Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri …'.²⁷ In Rasselas Johnson has created frequent difficulties for readers by undercutting in some way speakers of obvious wisdom, as he does with Imlac at the end of Chapter 10. This does not mean that we are to reject the speaker. It is part of the creation of a dialogical way of thinking. We are neither to accept or reject on the basis of authority but to weigh thoughtfully in context. Above all Johnson does not want his readers to relax into merely following authority in earthly matters. Only in the other dimension which Robert G. Walker has argued lies behind most of Rasselas, that dimension of spiritual immortality suggested by the mind's unsatisfiable yearning and which in its fullness always keeps behind the surface of the work, is there a prospect of certainty.²⁸ In this respect Johnson has modified some of the genre's tendency as described by Payne. While he questions the possibility of ideal earthly and temporal standards he holds out the possibility of eternity where the hope for enduring happiness may be fulfilled. The constant irony remains, however, of the separation between this dimension and the temporal, living and changing world where inevitably unsatisfied human beings find themselves.

3

Having established the relationship of Rasselas to Menippean satire, we are left with two further lines of questioning: what was Johnson's likely knowledge of and attitude to works of this kind, and what are the significant affinities between Rasselas and major earlier works from the genre?

Johnson's acquaintance throughout his life with works from this tradition can be demonstrated. Often he can be shown not merely to have known them but to have liked and admired them. During his first interview as a new undergraduate at Pembroke College, Oxford, he quoted Macrobius, and, though this could have been the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Charles G. Osgood has suggested that it may have been the Saturnalia, a compendium of learning in the Menippean tradition.²⁹ Other Menippean works appear in the list of his undergraduate library left behind at Oxford in 1729: More's Utopia, the Colloquies of Erasmus, and the Satyricon of John Barclay, the early-seventeenth-century Franco-Scottish neo-Latin writer, whose allegorical romance Argenis was also in Johnson's collection. The works of Seneca are included in the list too.³⁰

Works of this kind are part of the schemes of education Johnson drew up during the 1730s.³¹ Among Greek authors for pre-University study (along with the allegory of Cebes, mentioned by Wasserman) is 'Lucian by Leeds', a collection of the dialogues prepared for school use originally published in the mid-1670s.³² Its motto from Horace's De Arte Poetica (11. 343-44), 'Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci/Lectorem delectando pariterque movendo [sic]', a significant hint of Johnson's and the eighteenth century's dominant attitude towards this kind of work, is close in sentiment to the passage from Phaedrus that Johnson used as a motto for the collected Idlers. Leedes's collection contained several of thedialogues of the gods along with some of the other shorter dialogues and the Judicium Dearum, Somnium sive Gallus, and Vitarum Auctio. The sale catalogue of Johnson's library (far from a complete listing, of course, of the books he owned) includes works by several Menippean authors: the Emperor Julian, Boethius, Lucian (three editions), Macrobius, Erasmus, More, Cervantes (two editions), Swift, Burton, Seneca and Lipsius.³³

Other connections with writers whose works have at least sometimes been looked on as Menippean appear throughout Johnson's life. We have evidence of his admiring Chaucer, Burton, Cervantes and Boileau.³⁴ Lucian was not only included in his scheme of education (a usual thing at the time) but was once noticed as his reading during a stagecoach journey, and in 1776 he alluded to the Juppiter Tragoedus in a way suggesting he had been struck by how Lucian shows a sense of character and emotion operating in 'intellectual' argument.³⁵ His interest in Boethius was also enduring. On several occasions he was involved with the Consolation of Philosophy in the context of translation, and he drew from it in the Rambler and Adventurer.³⁶ Not all these writers and works are equally relevant to Rasselas. In many of them, however, are found a tone or stance that seems to be echoed or deliberately built on by Johnson. The sense many of them try to establish of the value, even the necessity, of giving up attractive but ultimately impossible delusions and resting content with freshly apprehended ordinary reality is in harmony with one dominant strain in Johnson's own thought, as is the rather consistent strain of anti-romance that runs through them. The odd mixtures and complex ironies characteristic of much of this work suggest another important side of his writing.

The connection of Johnson's work with the traditions of Menippean satire is not simple. It is often a good example of what is now fashionably referred to as intertextuality, a condition where works 'have meaning in relation to other texts which they take up, cite, parody, refute, or generally transform'.³⁷ Sometimes the affinities between Rasselas and earlier works connected with this tradition go so far that they suggest an association specific as well as general; here I can only present a few of these. Some works already mentioned offer one striking point of resemblance—Barclay's Euphormio presents the story of a young man who comes from a Utopia to the ordinary world and in the course of his adventures exhaustively surveys it—as well as some general stylistic resemblance in the use of balance and parallel. Similarities of vision occur fairly often in other works, and similarities of design can be found. However, some of the writings of Lucian of Samosata and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy are of particular interest.

4

Evidence of Johnson's knowledge of Lucian has already been mentioned. Like Johnson Lucian is fundamentally devoted to getting at the basic realities which lie under the structure of human illusions, though as a pagan he rests, unlike Johnson, in the here and now. Lucian sometimes uses allegories rather like those Johnson included in his periodical essays, reminding us that Prodicus and Cebes are not the only classical models for allegory.³⁸ An element of anti-romance also runs throughout Lucian, most apparent perhaps in the Vera historia but more directly reminiscent of Johnson in De morte Peregrini or Alexander, whose mock-aretology deflates, by realistic presentation, the forms and illusion of exemplary biography. Beyond general similarities of vision and treatment particular works by Lucian more closely resemble Rasselas. For example, the Vitarum auctio presents the weakness in practice of all philosophies through an auction of their founders or practitioners, and the Somnium sive Gallus contains a kind of Pythagorean 'choice of life' in the cock's accounts of the various transmigrations he has lived through from high to low, male to female, human to animal.³⁹ The stimulus to the survey is Micyllus's desire to find out the relative happiness of the different lives (21), and on the whole animals come out best. As the cock says, 'there is no existence that did not seem to me more care-free than that of man, since the others are conformed to natural desires and needs alone' (27; II, 227). The perception is like the one that Rasselas arrives at in Chapter 2.

Anyone who reads through the works of Lucian will find, I think, more interesting points of contact with Johnson's work. Obviously it is Lucian the moralist, 'Lucian, severe, but in a gay disguise⁴⁰ as seen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than Lucian the entertainer of modem scholarship, that engages Johnson. Johnson's Lucian is not the Lucian of Fielding or even of Swift. In some respects it is as if Johnson sees him through Boethius's eyes. But the Greek writer provides many examples of ways to embody brilliantly an ironic, questioning world view that in important respects is consonant with Johnson's own, and poses issues that Johnson engages in his turn. Two of Lucian's dialogues in particular show interesting affinities with Rasselas.

The first is the Navigium seu vota. In this dialogue a trip to see a ship that had landed at Piraeus after a peculiarly trouble-ridden voyage suggests the perception that human wishes are as uncertain and as subject to misfortune and fatality as the voyage. Each of three companions tells of his wishes during their walk back to Athens, and in tum the Lucian figure helps show the vanity of these wishes for wealth, for power, and for more than man's mortal and imperfect bodily state allows. The themes, of course, are favourites with Johnson. The final wish, particularly, suggests Rasselas and is what the would-be flier in Chapter 6 tries to put into practice. One of the Navigium's wishes, in fact, involves themagically granted ability to fly. 'I alone would know the source of the Nile and how much of the earth is uninhabited and if people live head-downwards in the southern half of the world', says Lucian's Timolaus (44; VI, 483). 'How easily shall we then trace the Nile through all his passage; pass over to distant regions, and examine the face of nature from one extremity of the earth to the other!' says Johnson's philosopher.⁴¹ A desire to fly is a recurrent symbol in Lucian of aspiration to more than the human state permits,42 and this could easily have been a source for Johnson's similar use of the image, along with all the more modem contexts so illuminatingly set out by Gwin Kolb and Louis Landa.⁴³ Johnson certainly modifies the motif in introducing it into 'realistic' action, but the essential point is the same.

Lucian's long dialogue Hermotimus also suggests Rasselas in certain ways. Its subject is the failings of all specialized philosophies as guides to happiness, with particular reference to Hermotimus's Stoic master but with the moral extended to other philosophies as well. Like Rasselas, it contains in passing the deflation of a Stoic who acts passionately in response to the ordinary contingencies of life (though on a different scale of magnitude from the calamity Johnson introduces). But it is focused throughout on an obsessive pursuit of happiness and the single philosophical way of life that will be most likely to lead to it. One of the problems considered is how, with limited experience, to make an intelligent choice of such a philosophy. Choice can only be valid if the full range of choices is known. Lycinus imagines the problem posed this way:

Tell me this, Lycinus: suppose an Ethiopian, a man who had never seen other men like us, because he had never been abroad at all, should state and assert in some assembly of the Ethiopians that nowhere in the world were there any men white or yellow or of any other colour than black, would he be believed by them? Or would one of the older Ethiopians say to him: "Come now, you are very bold. How do you know this? You have never left us to go anywhere else, and indeed you have never seen what things are like among other peoples?" …

'Let us make a comparison, Lycinus, and posit a man who knows only the Stoic tenets, like this friend of yours, Hermotimus; he has never gone abroad to Plato's country or stayed with Epicurus or in short with anyone else. Now, if he said that there was nothing in these many lands as beautiful or as true as the tenets and assertions of Stoicism, would you not with good reason think him bold in giving his opinion at all, and that when he knows only one, and has never put one foot outside Ethiopa?' (31-2; VI, 317-19)

One can imagine that such a passage may have jogged Johnson's imagination towards the construction of his own tale. 'What if wewere to examine the experience of an Ethiopian who does examine all the choices of life open?', Johnson may have asked himself At least the passage strongly suggests the situation in Chapter 3 of Rasselas where the old man's reminder that he has not seen the miseries of the world gives the prince a motive for wanting to escape the happy valley.⁴⁴

Other details in Hermotimus also resemble elements of Johnson's book. One passage (71), for example, elaborates on the seductiveness of daydreaming and the difficulty of coming back to reality afterwards—a mental state noted in both Chapters 4 and 43 of Rasselas. Throughout Lucian's dialogue one observes a constant concern more with the human factor than with the philosophical doctrine. There is, moreover, a basic perception, as Lycinus says, 'that virtue lies in action, in acting justly and wisely and bravely' (79; VI, 405). His final advice is 'you will do better in the future to make up your mind to join in the common life. Share in the city life of everyday, and give up your hopes of the strange and puffed-up' (84; VI, 413). There are also ironic dimensions to the work's ending, though Hermotimus's final response recalls Gulliver more clearly than Rasselas. In throwing off what he now calls his madness he proposes to change his appearance as much as his mind. Unlike Imlac and the astronomer who are content 'to be driven along the stream of life' he thanks Lycinus for coming and pulling him out 'when I was being carried away by a rough, turbid torrent, giving myself to it and going with the stream' (86; VI, 415). These elements, some though not all specific to Hermotimus, suggest a special relationship between it and Rasselas that is more than the merely generic and may even be genetic.

Johnson reinterprets and goes beyond positions found in Lucian, but in many respects he seems in Rasselas to be carrying on a dialogue with him. They work over the same themes and subjects with similar aims and techniques. In his analysis of Lucian's satires Ronald Paulson makes statements that could up to a point apply to Johnson.⁴⁵

Aristophanes focused on the solution; Lucian focuses on the quest and on the witnesses and their testimony. He is interested in the separate encounters, knowing that there is no solution but only the people who offer false solutions. (32)

Paulson analyses Lucian's basic techniques as a writer of anti-romance and shows how he works to expose the evil of illusion and reduce things to the plane of reality which if not ideal is at least real. Lucian's 'purpose', he concludes, 'is the very general one of discomfiting his reader, shaking up his cherished values, disrupting his orthodoxy' (41). Johnson is also concerned with disrupting the orthodoxies of a too easy optimism. But always in Johnson behind this view of man's earthly life is a Christian senseof the immortality of the soul and of the new perspective that the prospect of eternity can give to the inconclusiveness and ordinariness of terrestrial and temporal life.

5

Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Menippean though not obviously comic or satiric, engages, like the works by Lucian just discussed, some of the same central themes as Rasselas; it leads to a specifically Christian conclusion; and to a greater extent than Lucian, I think, its style frequently suggests Johnson's strikingly balanced, ironic dignity. In many respects it is very different from Rasselas. It is not a tale but a dialogue between the imprisoned Boethius and the allegorical figure of the Lady Philosophy, its passages of prose alternate with passages of verse, and much of the time it is concerned less with practical moral problems than with rather technical questions of philosophy and theology. The search for happiness becomes an exploration of the problem of the summum bonum. Yet there are underlying similarities that suggest Johnson may have been transferring some of Boethius's problems and themes to another context. The two works complement each other; Boethius treats at length the philosophical and theological issues that Johnson mutes and Johnson brings into the foreground the practical moral dimensions unexplored in Boethius. Most of the ground they share is covered in the first three books of the Consolation, particularly the second, the book of fortune (which examines and rejects worldly conditions, such as wealth, power and fame, as possible sources of enduring happiness), and the third, the book of the summum bonum (which examines the nature of happiness). It is, by the way, from these two books especially that Johnson drew mottoes and quotations for the Rambler and Adventurer, and it was mainly the metres from these two books that Johnson and Mrs. Thrale translated week by week.'

The underlying thematic structure of the Consolation is in broad outline like that used by Johnson. It begins with one who is disillusioned with what had been taken to be happiness (I, i). Boethius is concerned that righting wrongs and doing good in a position of power (one of Rasselas's favourite aspirations) has not brought him earthly happiness (I, iv). In this first book a strong image of man's condition as imprisonment is developed, just as Johnson develops the image of the happy valley as an imprisonment, mental as well as physical, from which Rasselas seeks to escape. Also developed in this first book is a sense of human alienation. Man finds himself surrounded by the order in God's natural world expressed in ordered and balanced images and statements. Only man's acts do not seem to participate in this order (I, v). Rasselas too finds himself in the happy valley in a natural world (expressed in its completeness in a highly ordered set of images), from which he apprehends his difference (9; 14-16; 23-4).

Boethius proceeds in the second book to consider the constant vicissitudes of fortune. The deepest poetic sense of this part lies perhaps in a realization of the inevitable transience and change of things in this world and of man's yearning in such a context for permanence, a quality of vision shared with Rasselas. After the refutation of false ideas of how happiness may be obtained, the third book proceeds to an exploration of what constitutes true happiness and the supreme good, concluding that God is happiness itself. These books are close to the middle section of Rasselas. The final conclusion is also the same, that man is led by the immortality of his soul, the yearning of the mind to find again its proper place which it cannot quite locate in the order of nature, to realize that true and lasting happiness is only to be found with God in the realm of eternity." Although Johnson's presentation of a 'choice of life' gives his work a different emphasis, its wisdom is consonant with that of Boethius.

Boethius's fourth and fifth books go on among other things to explore the rôle of evil in the scheme proposed and to affirm the freedom of the human will, the final freedom of the mind that transcends the imprisonment of the body. Only in the most general terms are these parts echoed by Johnson. More akin to the tone of Rasselas is the ironic view of human weaknesses and insufficiencies in the face of the cosmic scheme perceptible in the verses that conclude the books of the Consolation, the account of Orpheus in III, xii, for instance, where the power of human love leads to disaster on the upward way and the sense of ironic discrepancy is perhaps at its strongest and most poignant,⁴⁷ or the distinctly ambiguous accounts of ancient heroes in IV, vii.

Boethius's Menippean dialogue takes up some of the commonplaces which Lucian treated ironically—the vain pursuit of happiness, the vanity of wishes, the power of fortune—with a heightened sense of the discrepancy between the position of the human sufferer and the transcendent capabilities personified in Philosophy which though still human are able to lead man to the divine. He goes beyond Lucian's here-and-now reality to focus on the status of the human mind and the affirmation of its freedom. While Johnson shares this central interest in the mind, he recognizes more clearly the delusions to which reason can be subject. He also affirms the value of a grasp on here-and-now reality, but with the important qualification that while freed from delusion it must be put in the perspective of the transcendent.

This perspective is in Boethius especially the gift of Philosophy. It does not take away melancholy or imperfection, but allows it to be seen in a larger context and thus transformed in significance. A similar gift of perspective occurs at the end of Rasselas. The wishing mortals continue with their wishing though now they know they will not get what they want. It is only those without suchperspective who fall prey to disillusion or even madness. The difference is that between Swift and the Gulliver at the end of the fourth voyage⁴⁸; with considerable variations of tone, the ends of many Menippean satires present something similar. This gift of perspective is an important reason why, I think, Rasselas does not seem ultimately to most readers a sad or nihilistic book. As Philosophy says, 'Talia sunt quippe quae restant, ut degustata quidem mordeant, interius autem recepta dulcescant.⁴⁹

6

The affiliation of Rasselas with the tradition of Menippean satire and with specific works from that tradition suggests an important dimension of the environment within which Johnson's imagination was operating when he wrote the book. Much recent scholarship on Rasselas deals, in fact, with aspects of its 'Menippean' character, even though the term is not used.⁵⁰ The 'Lucianic' strain in Johnson is not confined to Rasselas. This quality of vision has for long been recognized as part of the essential Johnson even if this name has not been applied to it, and it is strong in the periodical essays. I have argued elsewhere that the Idler, written at the same time as Rasselas, can profitably be associated with works of this kind.⁵¹ In Rasselas Johnson takes up themes basic to Lucian and Boethius and seems even to engage specific works and passages by them, but he transforms the ancient commonplaces into something Johnsonian and of the eighteenth century. There is no single 'source' for Rasselas (like the undiscovered source of the Nile), but a confluence of many streams. He goes beyond Lucian in a specifically Christian way and gives to Boethius a more directly practical, here-and-now thrust. He casts his work as a 'tale' in compliance, no doubt, with the taste of his time and the model of the contemporary conte philosophique (though narrative of one kind or another had always been common enough in the genre), and he brings in not only Abyssinian and Biblical background but suggestions of a popular genre, the oriental tale, and elements of other forms and genres. He gives every indication of writing with awareness not only of a vast philosophic and theological background which he distills to its essentials but also of how things were done in this kind of work and of the sort of emphases it usually gave.

At the core of Rasselas is an exploration of the psychology and environment of choice, which is equally important with the idea of the search for happiness as the controlling principle of the book (though the two can scarcely be separated). Johnson produced a work which generates all sorts of meaningful patterning in terms not only of ideas per se but of structures of thought, imagery and human situation. It is a technique and a structure calculated to raise questions, stimulate thought, and undermine orthodox illusions rather than to provide answers. Truths always exist inhuman contexts. A reader needs consequently to cultivate an awareness not only of obvious pattern but, as Ehrenpreis suggests, a sensitivity to variations in tone and style and to complex and subtle ironies which, while they do not undercut the main thrust of the work, may qualify it. This constant possibility of irony and allusion means that a reader must further cultivate an awareness of the impact of differences as well as similarities within the larger controlling patterns which he perceives in the book. In this context the final direction of the book is not to the disillusioning proof of a thesis but to a satiric sense that we should discover reality by whatever means and learn to rest with the impossibilities and imperfections of the world in the context of a larger knowledge that inoculates us against disillusion and in Christian terms sanctifies and transforms the ordinary.

Notes

¹The Choice of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 163.

² 'Johnson's Rasselas: Implicit Contexts', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXXIV (1975), 125. Page references to this and other works cited will after the first citation be included in parentheses in the text.

³ Irvin Ehrenpreis, 'Rasselas and Some Meanings of "Structure" in Literary Criticism', Novel, XIV (1981), 101-17. See pp. 112-13.

⁴ Johnson himself in 1778 observed to Boswell the similarity in plan and conduct between Candide and Rasselas. See [James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., edited by George Birkbeck Hill, revised by L.F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934)], Vol. 1, p. 342. For a comparison see James L. Clifford, 'Some Remarks on Candide and Rasselas' in Bicentenary Essays on Rasselas, ed. Magdi Wahba, Supplement to Cairo Studies in English, 1959, pp. 7-14, and McIntosh, pp. 209-12.

⁵ E.g. see Alvin Whitley, 'The Comedy of Rasselas', E.L.H., XXIII (1956), 48-70 (who blunts his argument by making little distinction between satire and comedy); Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 98-9; Clifford, p. 10; George F. Butterick, 'The Comedy of Johnson's Rasselas', Studies in the Humanities, 11 (1971), 25-31. Vs. Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), especially pp. 49-60; Patrick O'Flaherty, 'Dr. Johnson as Equivocator: The Meaning of Rasselas', Modern Language Quarterly, XXXI (1970), 195-208.

⁶ In the absence of agreed-on English names I follow the convention of referring to Lucian's works by the Latin names common since theRenaissance. A table of equivalent names appears in Christopher Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe (London: Duckworth, 1979), pp. 239-41.

⁷ John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: Everyman, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 97.

⁸ In this and other citations I refer to the fourth edition of Johnson's Dictionary (London, 1773), two volumes folio. For an extended discussion of meanings of and attitudes to satire in this period see P. K. Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).

⁹ See Elkin, Chapters 6 and 7.

¹⁰ Originally in Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W. H. Bond (New York: Grolier Club, 1970), pp. 145-60. The argument is repeated in Bate's Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 489-97. Cf. Johnson's 'Life of Akenside', para. 7 (Lives of the English Poets, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905)], Vol. 3, p. 413).

¹¹ It will be noted that in this discussion I have in mind the treatments of satire by Edward W. Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist's Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), especially pp. 11-13, and Sheldon Sacks, especially pp. 7 and 26. The latter uses his definition of satire to differentiate it from the apologue, of which he uses Rasselas as an example. While I respect the theoretical rigour and literary perception of these writers I cannot completely accept their arguments on this point.

¹² Sachs, pp. 98-9.

¹³De Satyrica Graecorum Poesi et Romanorum Satira (1605; rept. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1973, intro. Peter E. Medine). Parts of Casaubon's discussion are translated in Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland, 1980), pp. 231-33.

¹⁴ This book was in Johnson's undergraduate library. See Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings: Part V. The Doctor's Life 1728-1735 (1928; repr. New York: Octagon, 1968), p. 225.

¹⁵ Dryden, Vol. 2, pp. 113-15.

¹⁶ J. Bompaire, Lucien Ecrivain (Paris: Boccard, 1958), pp. 550-62; Kirk, n. 13, above, especially his description of the genre, p. xi.

¹⁷ N. Fyre, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 308-12.

¹⁸ Cf. the tendency of most recent discussions of structure in Rasselas. See, for example, Gwin J. Kolb, 'The Structure of Rasselas', P.M.L.A., LXVI (1951), 698-717; Emrys Jones, 'The Artistic Form of Rasselas', Review of English Studies, n.s. XVIII (1967), 387-401; and Eric Rothstein, Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 23-61. Rothstein lists other studies on p. 37.

¹⁹ Boswell, Life, Vol. 2, p. 121.

²⁰ M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973). See Ch. 4, especially pp. 87-113.

²¹ See ibid., p. 296 n. 91.

²² Tracy, 'Democritus, Arise! A Study of Johnson's Humour', Yale Review, XXXIX (1950), 294-310; Whitley, 'The Comedy of Rasselas'; Butterick, 'The Comedy of Johnson's Rasselas'.

²³ Casaubon, De … Satira, p. 270. A translation is in Kirk, p. 233.

²⁴Chaucer and Menippean Satire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). See especially Chapters 1-3.

²⁵ Cf. Ronald Paulson's contrast of Juvenal and Lucian, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 32.

²⁶ In this paragraph I paraphrase Payne, p. 11.

²⁷ Motto of the Rambler from Horace, Epistles, I, i, 14.

²⁸Eighteenth-Century Arguments for Immortality and Johnson's 'Rasselas', English Literary Studies Monograph Series No. 9 (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1977).

²⁹ Charles G. Osgood, 'Johnson and Macrobius'. Modern Language Notes, LXIX (1954), 246. Osgood associates the text he proposes from Macrobius with Rasselas.

³⁰ See Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, Part V, Appendix K, pp. 213-29.

³¹ Boswell, Life, Vol. 1, pp. 99-100.

³²Nonnuli e Luciani Dialogis selecti, Et Scholiis illustrati ab Edwardo Leedes … In usum eorum, Qui dum Graecari student, non metuunt interim ridere (London, 1678). There were later editions.

³³ Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson's Library: An Annotated Guide, andJ. D. Fleeman (ed.), The Sale Catalogue of Samuel Johnson's Library: A Facsimile Edition, English Literary Studies Monograph Series Nos. 1 and 2 (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1975).

³⁴ For Chaucer, Life, Vol. 4, p. 381. For Cervantes and Boileau, William Shaw and Hester Lynch Piozzi, Memoirs and Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 152-53. See also Johnson's 'Life of Butler', paras. 22, 23, 25 (Lives, Vol. 1, pp. 209-10). Cf. Stuart Tave's account of eighteenth-century readings of Don Quixote as primarily satiric, The Amiable Humorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 151-63.

³⁵ Anecdote from Croker's Boswell in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (1897; rept. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), Vol. 2, p. 405; Life, Vol. 3, p. 10.

³⁶ He suggested a translation to Elizabeth Carter, 1738 (Life, Vol. 1, p. 102) and undertook one with Mrs. Thrale in the mid-1760s (Samuel Johnson, Poems, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 169-77). See also Idler 69 (11 August 1759) on previous English translations. See Ramblers 6, 7, 96, 143, 178, Adventurer 10.

³⁷ Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 38.

³⁸ See e.g. De mercede conductis, 42; Somnium sive vita, 5-16; Prometheus es in verbis, 6. The extended metaphor of scaling the heights in Hermotimus 5 is also reminiscent of one of Johnson's allegorical images. Parenthetical references in the text will be to the marginal chapter numbers in the Loeb edition (as above in this note) followed by volume and page for quotations. Lucian, ed. with English transl. by A. M. Harmon, K. Kilburn, and M. D. Macleod (London: Heinemann, 1913-67), 8 vols.

³⁹ Cf. also Menippus and perhaps Charon, Icaromenippus, and Piscator.

⁴⁰ Walter Harte, An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad (1730), Augustan Reprint Society, Publication Number 132 (Los Angeles, 1968), p. 18.

⁴¹The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissinia, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 30.

⁴² Cf. not only Navigium and Icaromenippus but Somnium sive Gallus, 23, and Hermotimus, 71.

⁴³ Gwin J. Kolb, 'Johnson's "Dissertation on Flying" and JohnWilkins' Mathematical Magick', Modern Philology, XLVII (1949), 24-31; Louis Landa, 'Johnson's Feathered Man: "A Dissertation on the Art of Flying" Considered' in Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W. H. Bond (New York: Grolier Club, 1970), pp. 161-78.

⁴⁴ In the original the elder addresses the one of limited experience as thrasutate, a noun formation related to the adjective thrasus meaning in a good sense 'bold, spirited, resolute' and in a bad sense 'rash, venturous, presumptuous', and it is tempting to speculate that some residual memory of the word may have influenced Johnson's choice of an Abyssinian name for his prince, whose character its meaning certainly touches. Johnson had formed many names in the Rambler on Greek roots. One may add that 'Nekuia' is the title of a dialogue by the real Menippus thought to lie behind Lucian's Menippus and apparently involving a descent to the underworld and an exploration of the vanity of human wishes. Does Pekuah suggest peko meaning to comb or to card wool, perhaps the occupations of a lady's companion? Or does Imlac, another real Abyssinian name, suggest elake, 'he spoke loud, shouted forth' or 'he sang', activities not inappropriate to a rhetorician and poet? It may be added that the subtitle of Hermotimus is 'peri hairese n, translated in the Loeb as 'concerning the Sects [of philosophy]'. It could also be translated 'concerning choices'. Rasselas, of course, in Johnson's letter to William Strahan of 20 January 1759, was titled 'The Choice of Life'. The title of Vitarum auctio (Philosophies for Sale) is 'Bi n prasis, 'the sale of lives', or, as the Loeb editor points out, 'of various types of the philosophic life' as they are embodied in their practitioners—a meaning close to Johnson's usage here. Cf. also J. P. Hardy's note on the 'choice of life' topos in ancient literature in his edition of Rasselas (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 141-42.

⁴⁵The Fictions of Satire, pp. 31-42.

⁴⁶ The pattern may be a frequent Menippean one in so far as there is a final movement to the divine.

⁴⁷ Johnson not only translated these verses with Mrs. Thrale but alluded to them in Ramblers 143 and 178. The lines he quotes in the latter are not far in tone (and even form), especially in the Latin, from the opening paragraph of Rasselas, and the paragraph following in Rambler 178 suggests the context of the search for happiness and its relation to the life of faith. Cf. especially 11. 52-4.

⁴⁸ Cf. Swift's letter to Pope, 26 November 1725: 'I tell you after all that I do not hate Mankind, it is vous autres who hate them because you would have them reasonable Animals, and are Angry for being disappointed' (Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1963), Vol. 3, p. 118).

⁴⁹ 'Those remedies that are left now are like those that sting on the tongue, but sweeten once taken within' (III, i: The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 228-29).

⁵⁰ Among critical discussions, for example, Carey McIntosh anticipates several Menippean qualities in his description of the form of Rasselas. See The Choice of Life, e.g. pp. 201, 206, and other parts of his discussion. Among others see also Ehrenpreis,'Rasselas and Some Meanings of "Structure" in Literary Criticism'; Whitley, 'The Comedy of Rasselas'; Sheridan Baker, Rasselas: Psychological Irony and Romance', in Essays in English Neoclassicism in Memory of Charles B. Woods: Philological Quarterly, XLV (1966), 249-61. The need for studies of large and complex backgrounds is typical of Menippean works. There are many of the backgrounds of Rasselas.

⁵¹ James F. Woodruff, 'Johnson's Idler and the Anatomy of Idleness', English Studies in Canada, VI (1980), 21-38, especially 36-7.