[In the following excerpt, Raleigh considers whether Rasselas belongs to the novel genre.]

The contributions of Johnson and Goldsmith to prose fiction are examples of pure eighteenth-century work. It was in the year 1759, some months before the publication of the earliest instalment of Tristram Shandy, that the great Cham descended into the arena of the novelists with his moral apologue called The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. His immediate object in writing it was, as the printer told Boswell, "that with the profits he might defray the expense of his mother's funeral and pay some little debts that she had left." There could be no doubt that a novel by the great lexicographer would be eagerly bought by the public, and, in seeking for a framework for his story, it is possible that Johnson was directed to Abyssinia by the memory of his labours, twenty-five years earlier, on the translation of Father Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia. However this may be, the theme of the story was all his own. The natural gloom of his temperament, deepened by the sadness of the occasion, finds fuller and stronger expression in Rasselas than in the poem that treats the same subject, The Vanity of Human Wishes.

It has been doubted whether Rasselas may justly be considered as a novel at all. The conversations held between the characters, it has been pointed out, are to be criticized, not in relation to circumstance and verisimilitude, but after the manner of an essay, in relation to truth. And certainly the strong moral and didactic purpose cannot be gainsaid. But the youth of the modem novel was a season of experiment, no rules of form had been determined, and a moral directly inculcated had never been disallowed. Far later in the century a noted literary critic, out of compliment to Richardson, refused to his works the title of novels, preferring to class them as excursions in "imaginative ethics." The sermon has played its part, as well as the drama, the epic, and the narrative poem, in shaping the form of the novel.

Sermon or novel, Rasselas was written at a time when Johnson had first attained his full command of literary expression. In the essays of The Rambler, begun some nine years earlier, his inversions, abstractions, monotonous sentences, and long words seem almost to exhibit, if the thought be not heresy, an imperfectly educated person struggling to acquire a polite diction. They certainly make his style as unsuitable for narrative as for the light ridicule of social foibles. The Rambler is not easy to read; or rather, to speak as the case demands, the otiose prolongation of the periods and the superabundance of polysyllabic vocables render the task of the intrepid adventurer who shall endeavour to peruse the earlier performances of this writer an undertaking of no inconsiderable magnitude. On the other hand, the later highly finished and effective style of the Lives of the Poets has an epigrammatic quality, a studied balance of phrase and a dogmatic ring, like the stroke of a hammer, that would infallibly interrupt the flow of imaginative narrative. In Rasselas the merits of both manners are combined to produce that ease of narration and those memorable and weighty turns of phrase which give it its principal distinction.

The main theme is never forgotten. The prince, educated in the happy valley, and taken with his sister into the world, is acquainted with human aims and human enjoyments, only that their futility and insufficiency may be demonstrated, and the verdict again and again recorded with merciless severity. The "choice of life" is indeed difficult. The pastoral life is marred by ignorance, discontent, and stupid malevolence. Prosperity means disquiet and danger. Is happiness to be found in solitude? "The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout." Is marriage to be preferred? "I know not whether marriage be more than one of the innumerable modes of human misery." Will varied pleasures serve to wile away the time? "Pleasures never can be so multiplied and continued as not to leave much of life unemployed." May the true solution be found in the pursuit of virtue? "All that virtue can afford is quietness of conscience, a steady prospect of a happier state; this may enable us to endure calamity with patience; but remember that patience must suppose pain."

All the sterner traits of Johnson's character, his uncompromising rectitude, his steadiness of outlook on unrelieved gloom, his hatred of sentimental and unthinking optimism, have left their mark on Rasselas. What was perhaps less to be expected, the structure of the plot is masterly, the events are arranged in a skilful climax, culminating in the story of the mad astronomer, whose delusions supply the picture with a shade darker than death itself. "Few can attain this man's knowledge," says Imlac, "and few practise his virtues, but all may suffer his calamities. Of the uncertainties of our present state the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertaincontinuance of reason." And a note of personal sadness is struck towards the close in the declaration of the virtuous sage, who confesses that praise has become to him an empty sound. "I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband." The words recall a similar phrase in the famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, but the defiant strain that they there introduce is exchanged for a subdued and deepened melancholy. Taken as a whole, Rasselas is one of the most powerful of moral fables to be found in any literature, and the lighter and wittier passages, such as those on the functions of a poet and on the definition of a life "according to nature," relieve its inspissated tenebrosity with something like an air of comedy.…