Like almost everything else from Samuel Johnson, RASSELAS concerns the complete un-attainablility of human happiness - the Vanity of Human Wishes - in particular through what he considered to be the vainest of all human quests for it: commune with nature. His entire life was spent saying very little else.
Johnson was almost blind. He crawled home from school in Lichfield on all fours, for fear of bumping into things. When his teacher tried to help, he assaulted her. He was still throwing tantrums - picking fights - much later in life, whenever his eyesight was mentioned. There are several recorded instances of it. Where philosophical observations on nature are concerned, this is the crippled viewpoint you're expected to share. He would not have people noticing nature, still less talking about it - 'A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.' He wanted everyone to be as visually challenged as he was. He'd 'grow warm' if you had the chance to mention it to his face. He'd 'roar', he'd 'thunder'. he'd 'puff himself up with passion seeking for a vent.' (Boswell's words.) He would not be "Blinking Sam", he said. He refused to be what he was.
The result was a lifetime's contempt for 'angelick nature' and for the the pastoral tradition in western literature which declared any undue affection for it. (The pastoral movement lasted for almost two thousand years.) In RASSELAS, Imlac (i.e Johnson) goes into Arabia where he sees 'a nation at once pastoral and warlike.' They 'carried on, through all ages, an hereditary war with all mankind, though they neither covet nor envy their possessions.' You may or may not have noticed, independent of anything from Samuel Johnson, that renunciation of worldly goods does not imply warlike intentions against all mankind. It might be argued that the exact urban antithesis espoused by Johnson often does.
In Cairo, wherever Rasselas went, 'he met gaiety and kindness, and heard the song of joy.' For Cairo is, of course, a city, and that's what you get in cities. (I believe it's now called Muzak.) In the gay assemblies of city life, 'there appeared such spriteliness of air, and volatility of fancy, as might have suited beings of an higher order.' Trouble is, when the party was over, these beings of an higher order had to return home to cope with their own company - 'the tyranny of reflection.' Johnson always had problems with his own company, not entirely without reason, though he was always ready to psycho-analyse those who didn't. He believed in ghosts, 'shadowy beings', second sight. He believed in Hell. Solitude is terrifying to the nervous wreck so he lambasted solitude. His alternative was 'angelick friendship,' a fiercely competitive model of the urban male's tavern-talk which was his idea of 'external diversion.' (Indoors, of course.) He craved the 'extasies of protestation and quarrels', 'talking for victory', conquest. He wanted to charge threepence for not turning up.
'Pastoral simplicity,' by way of contrast - in RASSELAS as in every other commemorated little corner of Johnson's life - was strictly for 'savages,' a favourite word of his, and of Boswell. 'Low life.' The Princess of Abyssinia pronounces the peasants of Happy Valley 'envious savages.' Like all of Johnson's fictional females - female Samuel Johnsons (of which there are many in his essays) - 'she should not soon be desirous of seeing any more specimens of rustick happiness.' These imaginary women all return eagerly to the city life they left, to the song of joy and the ecstasies of male protestations - quarrelling for them, if not over them. Real females, infuriatingly, eagerly returned to the country each summer.
The savages eventually direct the little group of Rasselasian travellers to a hermit's cell - 'hermit hoar in solemn cell.' More solitude and rustic simplicity!
There was a hermit on Cannock Chase in the 18th-century - very close to Lichfield - but Samuel Johnson never met him. He never met a hermit in his life, except as an imaginary extension of his own fears and inadequacies. But the hermit in Happy Valley carries all the assured authenticity of Doctor Johnson's vast experience and wisdom. This hermit had spent 15 years in solitude but, as a product of his author's contempt for it, he did not recommend it. The novelty soon wore away and he turned to the study of natural history - 'plants and minerals.' That inquiry also grew 'tasteless and irksome,' as you'd expect, so the hermit decides to go back to Cairo, 'on which, as he approached it, he gazed with rapture,' as you'd expect. You might have some difficulty finding evidence of a bona fide naturalist, even a modern twitcher, who ever discovers his inquiries to be tasteless and irksome. But Johnson's hermit 'found no opportunities for relaxation or diversion.' He failed to 'secure himself from vice by retiring from the exercise of virtue,' clearly an exclusive prerogative of the city, of the virtuous life to which he returns with rapture. In the city, he can be suitably directed by 'the counsel and conversation of the good.' He should never have left it in the first place - he should have stayed in town to be talked at by the Good Doctor Johnsons of this world. The life of the solitary man, says Johnson, 'will be certainly miserable but not certainly devout,' one of the grand ruling principles of human existence. Ask yourself about the certainty of misery for the man who chooses solitude. Ask yourself why it should be devout.
The Prince of Abyssinia went often to an assembly of learned men in Cairo. It was there that he met the philosopher, clearly meant to be Rousseau, who had the kind of ponderous English put into his mouth by Johnson which ostensibly caricatures Rousseau but in fact very effectively parodies Johnson. 'The prince soon learned that this was one of the sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer.' (For Rousseau, of course, enjoyed nature, implicitly solitude!) The worst of Rousseau's prose is no more prolix than Johnson's, the best is a good deal less turgid.
Johnson reviled solitude as a rejection of pleasure - the pleasure of crowds. He remained a hypochondriac to the last! When the princess loses her favourite servant, she declares her intention to retire from the world. Imlac (Johnson) advises against it - 'commit yourself again to the current of the world,' he says. 'Learn to diffuse yourself in general conversation.' The world, of course, is urban. Rasselas also resolves to retire from the world - un-diffused - so Imlac tells him about the mad astronomer, afflicted with a terrible disease: 'the dangerous prevalence of the imagination.' This turns out to be a sort of 18th-century version of Walter Mittyism, attendant upon 'silent speculation.' It speaks eloquently of Johnson's own mental state if of nothing else. 'He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not.' Delusive illusions of illusory delusions in others - it blighted his whole life. It became more wilful with age, roughly the kind of insult by 'amour propre' which offended Jean Jacques Rousseau. Samuel Johnson's very obvious infirmities were used as grounds for accusing the healthy. The 'false opinions' he complained about, the 'despotick fantasies' were in his own head. He was not much good at logic.
'Perfect human felicity is completely unattainable,' as if we didn't know! Johnson could never come to terms with it. But the people who have achieved at least some acceptable compromise where human felicity is concerned - much better men than Samuel Johnson - have done it, very often, through some form or other of commune with nature. The much vaunted modern "relevance" of RASSELAS is for modern devotees of anti-nature, zeitgeist for the maverick millions. The humour, such as it is ('Come my lad and drink some beer') is just another sad, contemptuous justification for his own paranoia.
In the UK a BBC radio programme called Open Book has just nominated RASSELAS as one of its ten Neglected Classics. Advocate: Howard Jacobson. Howard Jacobson hates nature, Anglo-Saxon nature. He prefers streets. So do his fictional females - female Howard Jacobsons. His career as iterary advocate was launched on it: COMING FROM BEHIND. What the \_\_\_\_ did country walks have to do with Sefton Goldberg? You've seen a jay? So \_\_\_\_\_\_ what? That sort of thing. It's not hard to see why RASSELAS appeals.
RASSELAS was ostensibly written in one week, to pay for the funeral of Johnson's mother. In fact, it was begun before he heard of the death of his mother, from whom he'd been estranged for the last twenty years of her life. The book should have been neglected as she was, many years ago. Unfortunately, it never has been.
[This review was written by BWE and passed on to me to post here. Amazon.co.uk refused to have it on their site!]
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