SOURCE: "The Hunger of Imagination," in The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, Oxford University Press, 1955, pp. 63-91.

[In the following essay, Bate, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century, explores Johnson's view of the mind as a aspect of the human organism that should be constantly stimulated and diverted with intellectual pursuits and conscious reflection.]

In Rasselas, the little group, which has been traveling about in search of a fuller understanding of human nature and destiny, is taken by the philosopher, Imlac, to see the pyramids. Neither Rasselas nor his sister is excited by the prospect of the visit. They state, rather pretentiously, that their 'business is with man'—with human manners and customs—not with 'piles of stones' or 'fragments of temples.' Imlac replies that in order to know anything we must also know the products and traces it leaves behind: to understand men, we must see what they did 'that we maylearn what reason has dictated or passion incited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge rightly of the present, we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative …' The travelers enter the Great Pyramid, and descend to the tomb. As they sit to rest awhile before returning, Imlac, in an altogether Johnsonian way, starts to speculate why the pyramid was ever built in the first place, and why a king, 'whose power is unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants,' should be compelled to 'amuse the tediousness of declining life, by seeing thousands labouring without end.' Secrecy for a tomb or treasure could have easily been secured by less costly and more effective means:

It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life … Those who have already all that they can enjoy, must enlarge their desires. He that has built for use, till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity … I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments.¹

The 'hunger of imagination,' or what he elsewhere calls the 'hunger of mind,' puts in a strong metaphor a perception almost constantly present in Johnson's writing: that 'few of the hours of life are filled up with objects adequate to the mind of man,' since the mind of man can conceive so much more than the present can ever supply. We are therefore 'forced to have recourse, every moment, to the past and future for supplemental satisfactions.'² The recognition appears in the phrasing of almost every page, sometimes with comic impatience and more usually with charity: riches fail to 'fill up the vacuities of life'; 'fill the day with petty business'; the recourses of people at summer resorts to 'rid themselves of the day'; 'filling the vacuities of his mind with the news of the day'; literary quarreling gratifies the malignity of readers or 'relieves the vacancies of life' for them. 'The vacuity of life,' said Mrs. Thrale, 'had at some early period of his life struck so forcibly' on Johnson's mind that it appeared in every context, even in casual talk; and she cites some instances. For example, a rake noted for gaming and sensuality was mentioned: 'Why, life must be filled up (says Johnson), and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.' Another is mentioned as a hoarder: 'Why, a fellow must do something; and what so easy to a narrow mind as hoarding halfpence till they turn into sixpences.'³

'The truth is,' said Imlac, 'that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.' Our emotions, he goes on, take some form of love, hate, fear, or hope. In all of these, we find ourselves glancing back to what occurred five minutes, five days, or five years ago. Or we flit ahead into the future in the same way. In fact, as Johnsonsays elsewhere, we can hardly think at all except in terms of the past and future. For 'the present is in perpetual motion, leaves us as soon as it arrives,' and is hardly felt for what it is until we note 'the effects which it leaves behind. The greatest part of our ideas arises, therefore, from the view before or behinid us'; and we are happy or miserable as we are affected by what we believe has happened or is to come.⁴ The context of Imlac's remark that 'recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments' is the defense of the study of history that he makes before the group visits the pyramids. To employ the mind by studying the different forms that men's motives and desires have taken is itself a way of satisfying the restless appetite of 'looking before and after'; and it is a method that is valuable and self-enlightening. The ironic corollary is that the Great Pyramid itself, which the group then visits, is still another result of the constant need to find 'supplemental satisfaction,' but a result that takes a very different form. When fed with objective knowledge the 'hunger of imagination' may be turned to profit and lead to growth. But if this awareness is lacking, as is generally the case, the imagination will seek to fill itself in some other way, or will uneasily begin to prey upon itself. In doing so, it can only too often transform man's state into one 'in which many of his faculties can serve only for his torment.'

2

If we take into consideration the sheer amount of time spent in 'recollection and anticipation,' the appetite for novelty as a means of 'disburdening the day' or inciting new interest is perhaps man's most constant and pervasive desire. The term 'novelty,' as Johnson uses it, suggests the whole seductive vista of everything we desire, do not actually need, and do not have at the moment. It includes the desire for possessions, of course, whether we want more of the same or something different. Considering the lack of vivid enjoyment we feel once we possess them, novelty also provides much of the attraction we feel in our hunger for reputation or fame, for learning, for possessing the love of others, our desire for seeing a task completed, or even—once it is finished—to have it brought back in order to keep ourselves occupied. With that leap of the imagination which is 'always breaking away from the present,' the novelty desired may even be the wish that we ourselves should be able to feel differently, just as emotional or passionate people envy the calm and serene, or as those who feel they cannot love envy those they think able to love. Even Rasselas, in the Happy Valley, where all desires are gratified, envies an existence where active and unsatisfied desires would stimulate him to some sort of activity. Infants, as we know, cry more frequently from mere boredom than from pain. When they toss away their toys in spite or weariness, they cry to have them back—not because the toys are really prized, but because to have them again will be differentfrom the present moment when they are lacking. Nor do we live down the desire for novelty and difference as we grow older, though it may take subtler forms and use a more elaborate vocabulary. The sheer capacity to desire is so much greater than any possible satisfactions that can be wrung from attaining what we want that satiety, as we all know abstractly, provides no joy or durable contentment. Nor does satiety, as a general state at least, last very long. 'We desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit.'⁵

Even when we cling to familiar memories of the past in an imaginary hope for security, we are often indirectly responding to the tug of novelty. The nostalgia for lost childhood in Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality ('Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?'), the garden and the lost pool of sunlight in Eliot's Burnt Norton, bring back the haunting memory of circumstances in our past that were once graphic and fresh. They look back to a time when, as Johnson said, the 'diversity of nature pours ideas in,' when neither search nor labor is necessary to gratify the imagination, and 'we have nothing more to do than to open our eyes.' The contrast with Wordsworth's Immortality Ode is singularly pointed: what is now going on about Wordsworth ('The young lambs bound … The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep') lacks the visionary splendor it once had. Johnson, a half century before, states that 'we all remember a time when nature … gave delight which can now be found no longer, when the noise of a torrent, the rustle of a wood … or the play of lambs, had power to fill the attention, and suspend all perception of the course of time.⁶

Few classical moralists are closer to Freud than Johnson, or have so uncanny a sense of what repression can mean. Yet in the nostalgic pull backward to one's childhood, whether with Wordsworth's sense of vision or simply Proust's absorption in early impressions, the attraction, from Johnson's point of view, is not simply to security in the ordinary sense. What we really want is a security that includes more than mere safety; we want to recapture a keener, fresher fullness of impression than we now feel. However tamed or circumscribed they may now be beneath the proscenium arch of memory and familiarity, the luster of what was once an eager newness still floods these recollected scenes. The situation is comparable to the occasional envy of the single by the married, who sometimes describe 'the happiness of their earlier years,' and, at least secretly, 'blame the rashness of their own choice.' But they forget that the days they wish to call back 'are the days not only of celibacy but of youth, the days of novelty and … of hope.' Sheer novelty, in fact, explains much of the vivid impact that sexual love makes on us in youth; and the memory of this creates the nostalgia in later years for those infatuations that could once fill the attention,' and stirs the vicarious interests of those'who employ themselves in promoting matrimony, and … without any discoverable impulse of malice or benevolence, without any reason, but that they want objects of attention and topics of conversation, are incessantly busy in procuring wives and husbands.'⁷ Yet, in this remembered vividness, we forget that there were fears as well as hopes, and that not everything that 'fills the attention' through freshness or novelty does so in an agreeable way. The pleasures that we recall may actually have been outweighed by disadvantages we now forget. We should remember how rarely we look back with painful longing on any past circumstances that closely parallel our present state. But when once the past has become irretrieveable, and the portcullis closed, the liabilities and disadvantages of former conditions more easily lapse from memory; and recollected novelties and attractions blend without hindrance into a simpler and denser unit of pleasure than had ever really existed.

3

Nothing is so typical of the dynamic character of Johnson's thinking as the way in which he follows the human craving for 'novelty' and immediately recognizes it despite its agile, Proteus-like ability to take any form. He is always getting directly to the activity of 'looking before and after.' The procedure contrasts with the optical illusions of naive naturalism, which lead us to interpret or at least label instincts or desires in terms merely of the particular objects on which they happen to fix. It is, in fact, this clear-eyed ability to brush aside the clutter of labels, and to seize on the actual process of desiring itself, that enables Johnson's moral thought to avoid the egocentric determinism of Thomas Hobbes and of moralists or psychologists who have repeated or refined on Hobbes for the past three centuries. Johnson does not, like Shaftesbury, Rousseau, or other romantics, simply deny Hobbes's arguments that man is basically selfish. Instead, he takes them for granted. Where Johnson differs from Hobbes is in supplementing these arguments with other considerations which Hobbes overlooks or disregards. He does this especially by recurring always to the nature of desire itself, as an activity inherent in a living creature 'whose motions are gradual.' Those only, said Coleridge, 'can acquire the philosophic imagination … who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar.… They know and feel that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them.'⁸ Exactly this sense of process is immanent throughout all of Johnson's writing on human nature. By reaching down to the active function of desire itself, Johnson's thought touches a greater generality than that of Hobbes. Indeed, from this stand-point, the naturalism of Hobbes and his modern descendants is just another side of the coin to the romantic temptation to glorify theparticular objects of desire. In either case, what we have is a confusion of a process with a static concept: a confusion of the instinct—of the desiring mechanism, so to speak—with particular images or objects on which desire happens to fasten. Both of them mirror—one in a poetic, the other in an analytic way—the common tendency of the imagination to simplify its own wants and then to mistake the objects to which it happens to turn for actual ends—as ends that are somehow able, because of nature or one's own personal character, to serve as permanent sources of satisfaction once we get them. Precisely this mistake—a variety of Whitehead's 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness'—is, as Johnson conceives it, the source of most of the chronic dissatisfaction we feel when, once our basic physical needs are met, 'we begin to form wants in consequence of our wishes.'

The insight is that of Ecclesiastes: 'All the rivers flow into the sea; yet the sea is not full … the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.' Of course, general wishes have to localize themselves into definite wants. Human existence could hardly continue otherwise. Also the objects of what we desire may vary in value. Some may satisfy a greater range of human needs, and some may offer a more enduring satisfaction. The protest, in Johnson's case, is only against the quick answer, against the flat, two-dimensional interpretation, whether in philosophy, in the criticism of literature, or in daily ambitions. Increasingly, as we look back on the great series of reflections on human nature that begin with the Rambler and continue through Rasselas, one of their prevailing themes appears to be the paradox of the human imagination itself. It is the paradox that the human imagination is potentially boundless in what it desires, and yet will fix itself hypnotically on a single aim or object. For what Swift called the 'converting imagination,' or the 'mechanical operation of the spirit,' has a frightening way of over-simplifying or restricting its field of interest for the moment. Hence its slapdash tendency, as Swift says, 'to reduce all Things into Types,' to pluck out of context, interpret according to one aim, engross itself in only one object or aspect, and conveniently remove other elements or else twist them around to this immediate concern. But the paradox appears less extreme when we recall that the tendency to over-simplify—at least as far as our hopes for happiness are concerned—is only one more byproduct of the fact that the 'capacity of the imagination' is so 'much larger than actual enjoyment.' Finding the present moment inadequate, the imagination bounds ahead to something else that contrasts with it. Naturally, the future, not yet being experienced, is 'pliant and ductile,' and will be imperceptibly molded by our wishes. The past, too, once it is safely removed, becomes 'ductile' in our memories. For the 'hope of happiness… is so strongly impressed, that the longest experience is not able to efface it. Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel … the misery; yet, when the same state is againat a distance, imagination paints it as desirable.⁹

4

'The general remedy,' said Johnson, 'of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place,' or of condition generally: 'they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it …'¹⁰ To the extent that it snatches at whatever seems to contrast with the present, hope, like nostalgia for the past, also simplifies outlines and blots out the probable context. Hence, in our 'anticipation of change' to other conditions and different possessions, too often 'the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.' The hard-driven merchant, chained down by a lifetime of routine, will naturally have periods when he looks forward to retirement from 'the fatigues of business, and the confinement of a shop'; it may even become an obsession; and then we find, when the looked-for retirement is attained, that he relieves the 'vacuity' of life in his country retreat by watching carriages from his window, and eagerly hoping he will be interrupted. Johnson himself, in his own reactions, certainly provides examples. The difference is that he cannot refrain from thinking about them. So, after writing the long series of the Rambler, the occasion of the next to the last issue suggests its own subject, in which he notes—and he was still at work on the Dictionary—that 'When once our labour has begun, the comfort that enables us to endure it is the prospect of its end.' Pleasing intervals may occur, as he goes on to say, during which we day-dream about the work in its completed form. But these intervals are short-lived. The mind is pitched to getting the thing done, and to being able to look back on the finished work as a whole. Yet like Gibbon, who had so long looked forward to the 'freedom' he would possess when he completed the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, we find the experience of this freedom does not fill the imagination with the vivid pleasure we expected; and the liberty quickly proves empty, until some further desire charges this vacant freedom with uneasiness and stimulates us to start something new. One thinks of Johnson, himself, while he was writing, impatiently running his finger down the margin to see how many verses were completed and how many were yet to be written, and at the same time seeing exactly what he was doing.

'Every man recounts the inconveniences of his own station, and thinks those of any other less, because he has not felt them. Thus the married praise the ease and freedom of a single state, and the single fly to marriage from the weariness of solitude.… Whoever feels great pain, naturally hopes for ease from change of posture …'¹¹ Indeed, Johnson seems to become most light-hearted and amusing in the Rambler and Idler sketches when he is discussing either marriage, the pursuit of wealth, or the hopes we place inretirement to country retreats. The expectations we feel, in all three cases, also serve for Johnson as recurring symbols of the way in which the imagination, in common and daily life, is always simplifying the endless desires of the heart into specific wants, and then finding them insufficient. To interpret the sprightly essays on marriage, or the debates about it in Rasselas, as an expression or rationalization of Johnson's own disillusionment about "Tetty' only suggests the limitations and projections of the interpreter. It is on a par with interpreting the great Preface to Shakespeare, with its massive plea for sanity of outlook, as a compensatory recoiling from Johnson's own distress of mind in the 1760's. Moreover, Johnson's point of view is generally that 'Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has few pleasures'; that much of the pain simply results from that tendency by which 'every animal revenges his pain upon those who happen to be near'; and that 'we see the same discontent at every other part of life which we cannot change.' Again, it is plain that marriage is far from being really miserable, if for no other reason than that we find 'such numbers, whom the death of their partners has set free from it, entering it again.' In fact, he himself, after the death of 'Tetty,' was apparently thinking of marrying again, even though, on hearing of another's remarriage, he referred to it as 'the triumph of hope over experience.'

Indeed, whatever is subjective in Johnson's own experience he generally uses in an opposite way from rationalization. That is not to say that he automatically swings away from it through simple compensation. Instead, the immediately personal in Johnson remains openly and honestly present, serving as a bond, as a basis for charitable sympathy with the illusion he is dispelling. And if we at times find him cutting through the illusion with phrasing that seems too vigorous, we also find him equally able to turn against the next level—against psychological compensation in practically every temptation to it that he experienced (and his range of susceptibility was large)—and then qualifying the compensation itself with equal vigor. We know how strongly Johnson clung to religious orthodoxy, for example (and there may be an element of compensation here, in reaction from his own disturbing doubts), and that he had misgivings about the work of the brilliant Samuel Clarke. But when the Reverend Hector Maclean said that 'Clarke was very wicked for going so much into the Arian system,' 'I will not say he was wicked,' answered Johnson; 'he might be mistaken.' And when Maclean blandly asserted that 'worthy men since, in England, have confuted him to all intents and purposes,' Johnson burst out, 'I know not who has confuted him to all intents and purposes.'¹²

5

When we recall Johnson's poverty during the years before he wrote the Rambler, his enlightened treatment there of the hungerfor wealth or possessions provides an especially graphic example of the balance and purity of his thinking—of his ability to resist not merely the temptation to rationalize the bitterness of poverty but also the temptation to compensate for it by a sour-grapes attitude toward wealth. True enough, he later admitted that 'When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor.' Yet the spectrum of his thinking in the Rambler ranges from 'that false estimation of the value of wealth, which poverty, long continued, always produces,' to the balancing reminder of how few desires 'can be formed which riches do not assist to gratify.'¹³ Even the 'art of pleasing,' of being sympathetically receptive to others, is made very difficult by poverty; for 'by what means can the man please whose attention is engrossed by his distresses?' Moreover, defensive pride, even if it does not turn into truculence or freeze into awkward reserve, may still incite too aggressive and eager a desire to excel and 'attract notice.' Here indeed Johnson was speaking from his own experience. He admitted to Mrs. Thrale that he was thinking of himself when he wrote the story of the poor scholar in Idler, No. 75, who tried to fight his way by his learning and wit, and who found that wherever 'he had remarkably excelled, he was seldom invited a second time.'

These essays persuade because nothing that can attract the human imagination or bias judgment is ever lightly or easily dismissed. In fact, any such quick dismissals of the desire for wealth are themselves anticipated and exposed as simply another variety of over-simplification. Once a man attains wealth, and finds himself in a state of 'imagination operating on luxury,' where other desires begin to spawn 'in numberless directions,' he who wishes 'to become a philosopher at a cheap rate' can only too easily gratify himself by speaking lightly of poverty 'when he does not feel it, and by boasting his contempt of riches when he has already more than he enjoys.' Years later, when the wealthy Mrs. Thrale 'dwelt with peculiar pleasure' on David Garrick's line, 'I'd smile with the simple, and feed with the poor,' he at once interrupted: 'Nay, my dear Lady, this will never do. Poor David! Smile with the simple! What folly is that! And who would feed with the poor that can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.'¹⁴ But if Johnson undercuts cant in this he is not satirizing it. Instead there is charity in seeing it as being itself one more instance of man's 'dream of happiness in novelty'—of happiness from different circumstances. Again, almost everyone values 'esteem and influence,' and 'whoever has found the art of securing them without the help of money, ought, in reality, to be accounted rich, since he has all that riches can purchase to a wise man.' Even the monk, though he is living an ascetic life, is not entitled to brush aside too quickly the powerful desire of the human heart for possessions, which convinces us that, 'Whatever is the remote or ultimate design, the immediate care is to be rich,' with no 'disagreement but about the use.' For if the monk resides in a monastery, he ought to remember that 'he converses only with men whose condition is the same with his own.' He should recall that 'the munificence of the founder' saves him from that destitution which is an 'impediment to virtue' simply because it does not allow 'the mind to admit any other care.' Temptations to 'envy and competition' are kept down: he is not exposed to the same range of 'pains and insults' as others; and if 'he wanders abroad, the sanctity of his character amply compensates all other distinctions.' Nor, lastly, are we to forget that many who neglect opportunities to amass wealth do so not because 'they value riches less, but that they dread labour or danger more than others.' Practically none would refuse 'to be rich, when to be rich was in his power.'¹⁵ Hence the confidence inspired by Johnson as he illuminates the 'fallacies of imagination' that attach themselves to the image of wealth or possessions. We simplify reality when we dispose of the powerful appeal of wealth after we ourselves have attained it and found it inadequate. We do so when we cannot attain wealth, and therefore, by compensation, dismiss it as unimportant. We do so, thirdly, when the imagination narrows itself by confusing one means—the possession of wealth—with the end, and creates an image of possessions without which happiness is deemed impossible. Especially in the light of the other realizations, we can accept this final perception as something more than an abstract moral cliche.

Thus Johnson describes the hope of an entire family, waiting for the death of three wealthy, elderly aunts; and governing every action in this expectation. When snubbed or out-shone by their neighbors, the family has always the solace of the future before them. They dream of putting their neighbors in their place, and chalk up 'every act of civility and rudeness.' As the years pass, the nerves of the father of the family become more edgy, and he occasionally barks out that no creature has 'so many lives as a cat and an old maid.' Finally, when one of the aunts recovers from a severe illness, the father begins to pine away and dies. The family continues in the 'shackles of expectation,' meeting together

only to contrive how our approaching fortune should be enjoyed; for in this our conversation always ended, on whatever subject it began. We had none of the collateral interests which diversify the life of others with joys and hopes, but had turned our whole attention on one event, which we could neither hasten nor retard.

Finally, the two eldest aunts die, but leave their fortunes to their younger sister. She, in turn, plunges the remaining family into dismay by contemplating marriage now in her old age. In time this panic subsides. The nephew consoles himself with the undeniable truth that 'all are mortal,' without making the obvious application back to himself; for he is fast moving into middle age. When the remaining aunt dies at ninety-three, he now finds himself 'accustomed to give the future full power over my mind, and to start away from the scene before me to some expected enjoyment.¹⁶

Yet the almost savage irony of this brief satiric sketch is at once crossed by the large sadness through which Johnson's range of perception is always passing. For the 'shackles of expectation' have, as the aging nephew finds, now chained and reduced his own mind to 'an inveterate disease of wishing … unable to think on anything but wants.' Elsewhere, with more pity, Johnson can stress that 'Of riches, as of everything else, the hope is more than the enjoyment … no sooner do we sit down to enjoy our acquisitions, than we find them insufficient to fill up the vacuities of life.'¹⁷ Hence the blind attempt, when we do have money, to 'fill our houses with useless ornaments, only to shew that we can buy them,' and to show not only others but principally ourselves;—or else we congratulate ourselves upon now dismissing the belief that money is a good, and turn instead to other ends. Turning to other ends is desirable, even though the self-congratulation and lapse of sympathy are to be avoided.

Our motives, as Johnson continually reminds us, can rarely be completely pure. But they are not for that reason to be left unused. The value is to be judged by the final degree of purity. This is one of the ways in which Johnson goes beyond Swift, who so frequently darkens his interpretation by recurring to original motives. If 'poverty long continued' leads to a 'false estimation' of the importance of wealth, then one of the advantages of wealth is certainly that it can help free us, though it does not do so automatically, from stumbling into this false estimate. If Johnson's treatment of the hope of riches is viewed as a self-protective method of reminding himself and of keeping his own mind clear, the fact remains that we can tell ourselves what is true and desirable while we are also telling others, particularly if we are emphasizing not one but two or more different aspects of a matter. Indeed, we may question whether what we are telling others will have the desired persuasiveness unless we are also telling ourselves. With what we know too well, as with what we already possess too abundantly, the difficulty of attaining it and the pressures that once underlay our desire for it may be forgotten. In his moral writing as in his criticism of literature, Johnson never writes in the closet or the study as one who has lived through an experience and forgotten the details but as one who is again reliving it.

6

Macaulay is largely responsible for the strange notion that, because Johnson praised the variety of London life as compared with that of a village or a hermitage, he therefore disliked traveling; that, in fact, he dismissed travel 'with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance.' Macaulay seems to have forgotten Johnson's financial condition; his constant reading of books of travel; his pathetic hope that he could make a trip to Iceland; the arduous trip over the Scottish mountain-paths that he made with Bos well; the visits that he restlessly made to Lichfield, Oxford, and Ashboume; his snatching at the opportunity to go to France with the Thrales; his final resurgence of hope while dying—which he dared not speak out, for he was dependent on another's bounty—that he might at last go to Italy.

If he had money, he once wrote to Mrs. Thrale, the very first use to which he would put it would be to travel extensively through the Orient. 'He loved indeed the very act of travelling,' said Mrs. Thrale, and was 'an admirable companion on the road, as he piqued himself upon feeling no inconvenience, and on despising no accommodations.' There are also the various remarks about the height of felicity consisting of riding rapidly in a postchaise. In fact, any inconvenience seemed so trifling compared with the enormous advantages and interest of travel that he regarded the complaints of others about 'the rain, the sun, or the dust,' about 'long confinement in a carriage' or meagerness of comfort at inns, as 'proofs of an empty head, and a tongue desirous to talk without materials of conversation. "A mill that goes without grist (said he) is as good a companion as such creatures." 'And when a visitor at the Thrales' who had traveled through Bohemia seemed uninterested in taking part in any sort of conversation, 'Surely,' said Johnson afterward, 'the man who has seen Prague might tell us something new and something strange, and not sit silent for want of matter to put his lips in motion.'¹⁸

Hence the shallowness of viewing his discussions of the restless desire for travel or for rural retreat as a rationalization of his own physical near-sightedness, his deafness, or his insensibility to those 'natural' objects to which the nineteenth century automatically assumed that the eighteenth century was oblivious, as though the neo-classic ideal of bliss were to sit at the court of George II or in the midst of Fleet Street. Instead, the impulsive hopes of travel, or of flying to rural retreats, are only one more instance, in daily life, of both the insatiability and self-defeating simplicity of the human heart. Rambler, No. 6, comes as close to satire as Johnson generally permitted himself. Its theme is the much advertised assertion of the poet, Abraham Cowley, that, since fame had brought him everything but rest, he now intended to sail overseas to a plantation, and 'foresake this world forever, with all the vanities and vexations of it, and to bury myself there in some obscure retreat.' He could easily have buried himself, says Johnson, within his own country: "There is prideenough in the human heart to prevent much desire of acquaintance with a man, by whom we are sure to be neglected … Even those to whom he has formerly been known, will very patiently support his absence when they have tried a little to live without him.' But Cowley, when he was interrupted or fatigued in his present state, 'conceived it impossible to be far enough from [what he thought] the cause of his uneasiness,' and picturing by contrast an idyllic state of leisure and retreat, he

determined to enjoy them for the future without interuption … He forgot, in the vehemence of desire, that solitude and quiet owe their pleasures to those miseries, which he was so studious to obviate … that day and night, labour and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other… we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit.

If he had proceeded in his project … it may be doubted, whether his distance from the vanities of life, would have enabled him to keep away the vexations. It is common for a man, who feels pain, to fancy that he could bear it better in any other part. Cowley, having known the troubles and perplexities of a particular condition, readily persuaded himself that nothing worse was to be found, and that every alteration would bring some improvement; he never suspected that the cause of his unhappiness was within …

'He that travels in theory,' as Johnson says elsewhere, 'has no incovenience: he has shade and sunshine at his disposal.' In its recoil from one's present state, the imagination selects only those advantages which seem most attractive, and then unites them into an impossible expectation that is 'indulged till the day of departure arrives.' A few miles then teach the traveler the 'fallacies of imagination': the road is dusty, and the horses slow; he 'longs for the time of dinner, that he may eat and rest,' and finds the inn crowded; while the people he has looked forward to visiting turn out to be cool, occupied with their affairs, or burdened with private sorrow. If 'Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought'—where it is imagined and then deliberately searched for—it is because we seldom

find either men or places such as we expect them. He that has pictured a prospect upon his fancy, will receive little pleasure from his eyes; he that has anticipated the conversation of a wit, will wonder to what prejudice he owes his reputation. Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction.'¹⁹

The recurring theme of the 'vanity of human wishes,' then, from the poem through the great prose of the following decade, isnot merely that we give ourselves unnecessary pain by desiring what is unattainable, and thus become inevitably frustrated. Least of all is it some vague, pessimistic assertion that all wishes are vain. The theme is rather that, in the very activity or process of wishing, there are inherent liabilities that are able to undercut the wish itself—the liabilities that the 'capacity of the imagination' is always so 'much larger than actual enjoyment,' and that nevertheless it tends to simplify, to fix on a specific object, if only by contrast, and to dwell 'attentively upon it, till it has wholly engrossed the imagination, and permits us not to conceive any happiness but its attainment, or any misery but its loss.²⁰ But 'since life is uncertain, nothing which has life as its basis can boast much stability.'

Even if the external objects we want proved to be stable, yet we ourselves, in our ability to enjoy them, would not be. The sense of process, and the awareness of what lies beyond the horizon of the moment, is indigenous and continual in Johnson, habitually modifying fears as well as hopes; even casual conversational remarks reveal it. Not long after meeting Johnson, Boswell planned a dinner for several guests; a quarrel with his landlord left him without a house; and he was worried about the impression this would give. Johnson's immediate response is typical: 'Consider … how insignificant this will appear a twelvemonth hence.' Or again, in Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides, when Johnson was sixty-four, some young women were discussing among themselves how ugly he was. One of them took a bet to go over, sit on Johnson's knees, and kiss him. Even in this little incident, Johnson's amused awareness of the situation and his unsleeping, almost Shakespearean realization of the transitoriness of things come at once into focus, in a healthful and comic sanity of statement, entirely characteristic of him when once uttered, and yet completely unpredictable: 'Do it again,' he said, 'and let us see who will tire first. ²¹

7

If Johnson comes closest to comedy when he is dealing with the disappointments of what we expect in ordinary experience—expectations of happiness from riches, marriage or single life, travel or country retreats—it is because, for most of us, these disappointments have been tamed by familiarity. We are all so used to them that we feel we have such expectations—or could have them—fairly well under control. As such, they remain comparatively innocent. Of course, the frustrations that result, like any other disappointment, can arouse in us a hidden tendency to revenge ourselves on those with whom we spend our lives or whom we imagine to possess what we lack. Generally, however, we learn to take them for granted, and try to proceed to other matters, if not in our actual lives at least in what we think is reputable to discuss.

But Johnson's vigorous grip on the principal weakness of human nature has subtlety as well as range. He reaches vertically, so to speak, as well as horizontally. With shrewd perception, he discloses the motives, hopes, and frustrations that reach to the philosopher's desk, seeing them not as special reactions, cut off from more familiar desires and fears, but as refinements of them. The underlying sense of community contrasts refreshingly with the usual belief of the sophisticated that they have escaped or lived through the temptations of the unsophisticated. For while they verbally dispose of the hunger for riches, and of the more obvious desires for change of scene and condition—or even, as academic moralists, pin such desires down and describe them—we know very well that exactly these compulsions and others like them are at work within themselves.

The needless demands and the delight in machinery for its own sake that clutter up the pursuit of learning and trivialize it are seen as the product of the same simplicity and 'fallacy of the imagination,' the same confusing of the means with the end, that leads the miser to concentrate on his coins.²² Usually Johnson cites the way in which scholars dig intently and single-mindedly in what he calls the 'secondary' fields of learning, glorify what they are doing as an end in itself, make a vested interest of it, and self-defensively fight others who seek greater generality. Now, the writer of the English Dictionary can hardly be charged with dismissing detailed scholarship lightly. In fact, those who do dismiss it, as Johnson implies, are rarely invigorated by any impelling concern for human values. Johnson's protest is not against labor that requires only 'sluggish resolution' but against a flatness of mind that confuses this with the end. Even more, the protest is against the habit—by which everyone seeks to 'conceal his own unimportance from himself'—of identifying ourselves too exclusively with what we are doing. For we bog down, in our habitual feeling and judgments, into a self-protective and therefore intolerant defense, which is really more of a defense of ourselves than of what we are doing. Since man's powers are limited, 'he must use means for the attainment of his ends.'²³ But the immediate end, when attained, is—and should be—found to be 'only one of the means to some remoter end. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.'²⁴ Unless we feel what we are doing is important, we should neglect it—and neglect it, in all probability, not for something better but for something worse. The weakness is that, in learning as in other human activities, we institutionalize, and then seal and arm this fortress instead of keeping it open by trying constantly to generalize, to extend our vision, and to see what 'can be put to use' for daily human needs. Too often the aim is merely to keep or 'advance reputation' within a specialized groove. At the very least there is the temptation to use knowledge rather to 'diversify conversation than to regulate life.' Johnson couldsay this while maintaining that curiosity is, 'in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last; and perhaps always predominates in proportion to the strength of the contemplative faculties.'²⁵ One of the Ramblers (No. 61) describes a rustic who, after returning from London to his native village, took care to crowd his talk with 'names of streets, squares, and buildings' with which he knew his hearers to be 'unacquainted,' and 'when any of his phrases were unintelligible, he could not suppress the joy of confessed superiority.' In the eighteenth century, polite conversation was more frequently sprinkled with historical allusions to antiquity than the more compartmentalized talk of today. The Punic Wars became a stock symbol to Johnson of talk that 'carried one away from common life' without really extending 'ideas':

He never (as he expressed it) desired to hear of the Punic war while he lived: such conversation was lost time (he said) … I asked him once [Mrs. Thrale goes on] concerning the conversation powers of a gentleman [Charles James Fox] … 'He talked to me at club one day… concerning Cataline's conspiracy—so I withdrew my attention and thought about Tom Thumb.'²⁶

The use of knowledge for the sake of learned allusions—knowledge to impress others, 'advance reputation,' or make the day less 'vacuous' for oneself—is so obvious an example of devoting the mind to 'employments that engross, but do not improve it' that few people fail to recognize it. Less innocent, perhaps, is the openly analytic thinking about human values—in life, literature, or anything else—continued solely for its own sake apart from the end that gives it relevance and dignity. This has its own obvious and comic side, of course. While the moralist is analyzing the emptiness of ambition, we can only too often find him swelling 'with the applause he has gained by proving that applause is of no value'²⁷ (we may contrast Johnson's honest reminder that 'the applause of a single human being is of great consequence'). But the real danger is that it subtly encourages ourselves and others to believe that analysis for its own sake is the proper aim and indication of intelligence. The potential hypocrisy is greater if only because such analysis seems intellectually more respectable. It satisfies the imagination more quickly that something is being done which is immediately relevant to human values. Johnson's own greatest pleasure, as Mrs. Thrale said, was in 'metaphysical reasoning.' The delight in an incisive analytic thinking that could 'fill the mind,' even when pursued for its own sake, had a powerful attraction for him, as his literary criticism especially shows. But there is always the swing back to remember that, in technical analysis or incisive ingenuity when pursued apart from the broad concern of actual human development, there is just as much pedantry, just as much a sidetracking of effort intomeans, as in collecting and redistributing brute knowledge. It is the light verbalizing—however sharply analytic—about human ends and conduct that Imlac has in mind when he cautions Rasselas that the philosophers lecturing on ethics 'discourse like angels, but they live like men.' And when Rasselas himself visits a learned society, he finds that, however the members differ in other ways, 'every one was pleased to hear the genius or knowledge of another depreciated.'²⁸

8

Even when our motives are as pure as human nature is able to attain, an inevitable simplification follows the process of idealizing—the process of plucking out from experience an ideal, a pattern, or a form. For we then find that details do not precisely fit it. 'He that has abilities to conceive perfection, will not easily be content without it'; and since perfection cannot be reached, he may neglect the chance of doing anything in the hope of impossible excellence.²⁹ Not that we are for this reason to throw over ideals, or become embittered like Swift. Rather, it follows that we should nuance and inform our ideals with practical judgment, and watch lest we narrow charity and even our own experience by prematurely recoiling from what fails to fit exactly into our ideals. Yet almost any ideal, however objectively based, is bound to be somewhat smoothed out and simplified by the human imagination. It will be at best an abbreviation of reality. Hence, as Johnson notes, the disappointment or irritability of so many scholars, critics, or philosophers, when they are faced with all the concrete problems and exceptions which they have previously hoped to settle or iron out by clean-shaped theory. Hence also their love of system and definition, and the tendency of some of them to eulogize the past; for all the accomplishments of a lengthy past are blended together in their imagination with such density as to make the smaller unit of the present seem, by contrast, hopelessly sterile. The habit of idealizing, although no development is possible without it, can still create states of expectation and anxiety that are a mixed blessing; and the problem becomes acute when it turns on ourselves, creating a self-expectation that intimidates our inventive originality. This, as Johnson recognizes, is a real problem in literature as it becomes more self-conscious. Also, in what we talk or write about, we become afraid to deal with what is most important, as he says, because we feel we can add so little to it, and show ourselves to advantage. We start worrying about frills, occupy ourselves with minor qualifications or embellishments, and, either as a pose or a form of despair, become the victims of our ideal of 'elegance refined into impatience.' But Johnson also touches on other examples, from the stagefright of lecturing to self-consciousness in social gatherings. Bishop Sanderson, anxiously preparing his lectures, 'hesitated so much, and rejected so often,' that when thetime came to deliver them he had to present not what was best but what he had at hand. Again, the lecturer who imagines an audience of admirers

panting with expectation, and hushed with attention, easily terrifies himself with the dread of disappointing them, and strains … [to] show his reputation was not gained by chance. He considers that what he shall say or do will never be forgotten; that renown or infamy is suspended on every syllable; and that nothing ought to fall from him which will not bear the test of time. Under such solicitude, who can wonder that the mind is overwhelmed … ? Those who are oppressed by their own reputation, will, perhaps, not be comforted by hearing that their cares are unnecessary.… While we see multitudes passing before us … we should remember, that we are likewise lost in the same throng; that the eye which happens to glance on us is turned in a moment on him that follows … ³⁰

'Nothing is more hopeless,' said Johnson, 'than a scheme of merriment.' He seems to have found irresistibly amusing the way in which we form a precarious image of ourselves—or the image we imagine others to have of ourselves—and the paralysis we then feel because of our dread of disappointing it. There is the story of the wit who is invited by a friend to dinner and told how many people will be present who have heard of his reputation.³¹ Instead of quickening his eagerness, the mere thought of the high expectation with which the company awaits him fills him with anxiety. Lying sleepless all night, he plans out to himself 'the conversation of the coming day,' recollects 'all my topics of raillery,' makes up 'answers to imaginary repartees,' and then shows up at dinner the next day, completely exhausted and 'sunk under the weight of expectation.' Forgetting that mirth cannot operate in a vacuum but needs 'objects,' and that most people are gay or serious by infection, the company is hushed with expectation. Dinner gives only a temporary relief. There is no real context within which his wit can get a start, especially any context like that he had imagined the night before. A few desperate efforts produce 'neither applause nor opposition.' The contagious atmosphere of expectation became so general that, if others uttered remarks 'with timidity and hesitation, there was none ready to make any reply. All our faculties were frozen, and every minute took away our capacity of pleasing, and disposition to be pleased.' The effect of self-consciousness, as Johnson returns to this fascinating subject, is seen to apply to all aspects of social and intellectual life arranged by 'preconcerted invitation.' To know that a thing is expected can often stimulate us, particularly in carrying out physical or mechanical actions, where an obvious or clear-cut course of action is indicated. But it can also chill invention, unless we already possess a confidence firmly grounded in experience and habit. The imagination, instead of flowing out tomeet new and unexpected objects, recoils into taut or frozen self-defense. And this pause of spirits is then all the more difficult to overcome except through awkward and self-conscious jerks of effort. Johnson mentions how fortunate we are to have set conventions for beginning and ending letters. There would be an appalling loss of time if we had to decide, in every case, the most appropriate method of beginning and closing every letter. He contrasts with this the unfortunate situation of the writer, paralyzed before the blank page, searching for a beginning that will at once ensnare attention, or suggest, with impressive impact, the sum total of all he feels he can later unfold. Again, Johnson pictures a group of wits, invited together for an evening, 'with admirers prepared to laugh and applaud.' But they 'gaze awhile on each other, ashamed to be silent, and afraid to speak.' They become discontented both with themselves and each other, and later 'retire to vent their indignation in safer places, where they are heard with attention; their importance is restored,' and they 'recover their good humour.'³²

9

On matters about which we really care, we are not usually convinced until we have seen for ourselves. The relevance of Johnson is not simply that he touches directly on so much that we care about. It is especially to be found in the way his thought proceeds, which is like that of experience itself. For his thinking goes first through everything that will not work, minimizing nothing, sharing ih the attraction felt by the human heart, and even expressing that appeal memorably. And only gradually, as one thing after another gives way, do we find left a citadel of unshaken results that have withstood the test. Too often the abstract systems of the philosopher, as Sir Philip Sidney said, teach only those who are 'already taught,' appearing thin, irrelevant, or even visionary to others; while the dramatist can concretely show what happens to human beings under certain conditions, leading us to identify ourselves with them and to take in their experience as our own.

Johnson's own procedure, in other words, is ultimately dramatic, evoking personal sympathies and tapping the reader's own experience. The real actors are not, it is true, individual characters. Even in Rasselas the particular characters are only incidental. Instead, the motives and persuasions within this drama are always being gathered up into the great generalizations that rise from its pages. Like characters in dialogue, they give dramatic expression and even dignity to widely different motives and hopes; or, like brief asides or longer soliloquies, they serve as pauses in which human actions break out into reflection or self-knowledge. That the final outline of the action does not emerge easily or mechanically, that it is not cut to order, is a tribute to its genuineness. Like the close of Rasselas—a 'Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded'—the results cannot be put into a rigid, air-tight formula, if only because every new experience will always be somewhat different. The drama, in short, is that of life itself, which is rarely neat in the answers it provides, and in which honest doubts and perplexities still persist. But when conviction does follow, it is the massive conviction that our own experience gives.

Notes

¹Rasselas, chs. 30-32.

²Rambler, No. 41.

³ Piozzi, Anecdotes, I, 251.

⁴Rambler, No. 41.

⁵ No. 6.

⁶Idler, No. 44.

⁷Rambler, Nos. 45, 115.

⁸Biographia Literaria (ed. Shawcross, 1907), I, 167.

⁹Rasselas, ch. 22.

¹⁰Rambler, No. 6.

¹¹ No. 45.

¹² [Boswell, James,] Tour to the Hebrides, [New York, 1936] pp. 256-7.

¹³Rambler, Nos. 170, 131.

¹⁴ No. 202; Boswell, Life [of Johnson (Oxford, 1934-50)], II, 79.

¹⁵Rambler, Nos. 202, 58, 48, 131.

¹⁶ No. 73.

¹⁷Idler, No. 73.

¹⁸Anecdotes, J.M, I, 263, 329-30; Boswell, Life, III, 459.

¹⁹Idler, No. 58.

²⁰Rambler, No. 17.

²¹Tour to the Hebrides, p. 226.

²² Cf. Rambler, Nos. 82-3, 103, 177.

²³ No. 2.

²⁴ Loc. cit.

²⁵ No. 150.

²⁶Anecdotes, JWM, I, 202.

²⁷Rambler, No. 54.

²⁸Rasselas, ch. 22.

²⁹Rambler, No. 134.

³⁰ Nos. 19, 159.

³¹ No. 101.

³²Idler, No. 58.