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Content THE DEVELOPMENT OF SAMUEf. JOHNSON’S
THEORY OF NEUROSIS, 1709-1759
by
Gloria Sybil Gross
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1977
UMI Number: DP23054
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U N IV E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
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U N IV E R S IT Y P A R K
LO S A N G E L E S , C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7 Ph.D.
t
'77
( X8~7%
This dissertation, written by
Jjr.£&4/.A......................... .
under the direction of Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
n„u- 'Jiyu. Uiuem
DISSERTATION ITTEE
Chairman
To my father and mother.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. JOHNSON AND THE BACKGROUND OF EIGHTEENTH-
CENTURY PSYCHIATRY.................... 1.
II. THE YOUTHFUL MATRIX, 1709-1737 . ....... 21
III. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, 1739-1742 43
IV. THE INQUIRER INTO HUMAN NATURE, 1742-1744 . . 66
V. THE PHYSICIAN OF THE SOUL, 1745-1749 .... 101
VI. THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE: THE
PERIODICAL ESSAYS ...................... 126
VII. TOWARD A THEORY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA: RASSELAS . 166
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................. 241
i i i
Thy mind which Voluntary doubts molest
Asks but its own permission to be blest.
Lines contributed by Johnson to
a tragedy by John Hawkesworth
i v
CHAPTER I
JOHNSON AND THE BACKGROUND OF
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PSYCHIATRY
"If you betray yourself, who can support you?"^
wrote Samuel Johnson in 1764 to his intimate friend, John
Taylor, whom he comforted through an agonizing succession
of matrimonial troubles. The advice for self-integrity to
withstand delusion was given by philosophers, moralists and
theologians long before the eighteenth century. Of' medieval
authors, the great Church Father, St. Augustine, was among
the first to describe subjective emotional experience, and
in doing so demonstrated that introspection is an important
source of knowing the truth. St. Augustine’s Confessions
is a profound work of self-analysis, a significant climax
in the history of psychology when, according to one commen
tator, an "expositor can say that the foundation of the
soul is continuous self-consciousness, and thought is
2
simply life reflected into itself." The premise that the
individual human mind images its own ideas and feelings
elucidates Augustine's purpose in the Confessions to recall
his earliest impressions and bare his soul without reserva
tion. Augustine's self-interrogation demands uncompromis
ing truthfulness and he unfalteringly attacks the blindness
1
and deception of those who would slight the underlying
thresholds of consciousness he uncovers.
With the revival of Augustinian Christianity in
western Europe at the time of the Reformation, the moral
and psychiatric implications of Augustine's writings were
increasingly .scrutinized by literary men of penetrating
insight. In Spain, Miguel de Cervantes created Don
Quij ote, the archetypal victim of fictional allurements
whose madness portrays disastrous perceptive failure. In
psychological terms, the crucial theme of the Quijote is
escape from the unbearable present to fantasies of the
glorious past. Reading his books of knight-errantry, Don
Quijote lost his true identity as Alonso Quijano, country
gentleman. He succumbed to magicians who convinced him of
the reality of their bizarre enchantments. Ironically, he
compensates for this defeat of his very being by joining
them to recover his sanity.
Through a grueling process of neurasthenic exhaus
tion, Don Quijote is finally brought around to renounce his
wishful fantasies and falsifications, yet at the expense of
a world so seductively rich, so fantastically embroidered,
that his dementia becomes a formidable opponent to the
reader’s sanity. The crazed knight challenges his reader's
discriminatory powers so that even renunciation of illusion
by the story's arch-illusionist can hardly dissipate his
magical dictatorship. The characters who gather at Alonso
2
Quijano*s death-bed yearn for the return of Don Quijote and
insanity and the reader cannot but mourn the passing of so
extraordinary an influence. Cervantes allows his narrator,
Cide Hamete, the final lament, "Para m£ sola nacio don
Quijote, y yo para el; el supo obrar y yo escribir; solos
los dos somos para en uno ..." (For me alone Don
Quijote was born, and I for him. He knew how to act, and I
knew how to write. We two alone are as one . . .) Follow
ing the death of Don Quijote, the author’s imperious claim
of identification with his creation seems to inspire
awesome respect, yet what immediately follows is a series
of crass and fatuous remarks about impostor scribes,
unworthy posterity and a magic spell presumably placed upon
the reader:
jTate, tate, folloncicosl
De ninguno sea tocada;
Porque esta empresa, buen rey,
Para mi estaba g;uardada. 4 -
(Beware, beware, all petty knaves!
I may be touched by none;
This enterprise, my worthy king,
Is kept for me alone.)
The obtuse inappropriateness of these lines which
follow Don Quijote’s death as well as their somewhat
malignant, incantatory purport, serve as final reminder of
the supreme misrepresentation depicted in the novel.
Quijote’s madness gives a faithful picture of the psychotic
mind--the annihilation of the self by giving free rein to
hallucinations that fulfill deep-seated emotional needs.
3
In terms of Freudian psychiatry, Don Quijote illustrates
the futility of attempting to combat invisible enemies, and
shows that mental disturbances can be conquered only
through revelation of their hidden origin in the self.
Such spiritual integrity demands, in the genuine Augustin-
ian sense, unwavering truthfulness and shuns the insidious
distortions, however fantastically alluring, of a mad
universe.
Though the moral of Don Quijote seems clear enough
to a modern audience with respect to its psychiatric
inferences, there were nevertheless sharp changes through
time in the way the story was read, from the celebration of
illusion at the expense of reality that nineteenth-century
Romantics envisioned, to the later nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century ’ ’ bitter" and "pessimistic" interpreta
tions. In eighteenth-century England, however, the
interpretation of the "satire on imagination and fancy, and
essay in applause of reason and fact,"^ seems most compa
rable to the present Freudian one. Burgeoning interest in
the Quij ote during the eighteenth century included manifold
references by readers such as Locke, Hume, Defoe, Fielding,
Sterne, Smollett, Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope and Samuel
f i
Johnson. Indeed the figure of Don Quijote becomes a kind
of prototype in eighteenth-century English literature for a
bizarre succession of characters whose great folly leads
them to insanity.
4
The Grub Street Hack narrator of Jonathan Swift's
A Tale of a Tub is a good example. In the section
entitled, "A Digression Concerning the Original, the Use,
and Improvement of Madness in A Commonwealth," the Hack in
A Tale of a Tub defines happiness as "the perpetual posses
sion of being well deceived."'7 He unconsciously distorts
moral, cultural, and spiritual values to entice others into
the same lunacy. He presents, in the Tale proper, an
account of a tailor-delty in a system which sees all things
as the tailor's creation--clothes. He exuberantly endorses
this emphasis upon surfaces and appearances, describing
proper human attributes as mere dressing:
Is not religion a cloak, honesty a pair of shoes worn
out in the dirt; self love a surtout; vanity a shirt;
and conscience a pair of breeches, which, though a
cover for lewdness as well as nastiness, is easily
slipt down for the service of both?
According to the Hack, what appear to be worthy
human qualities are just show or pretense. Finally, the
soul itself, the sanctum of truth, is reduced to mere
semblance: ". . . it is manifest that the outward dress
must needs he the soul." This statement suggests the
grotesquerie latent within the Hack's mind: his perversion
of basic human understanding, his fraudulent obscurity of
truth reveals him as an individual with a moral void, as
insubstantial as the mad schemes and ambitions he dreams
up. Totally abandoning the real world, he detaches himself
from essential humanity. This horror is nowhere better
_______________ 5
illustrated than in the case of the flayed woman and
anatomized beau. Here the Hack is clinching his argument
that surface is preferable to depth, concealment more
attractive than revelation:
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly
believe how much it altered her person for the worse.
Yesterday I ordered the carcass of a beau to be
stripped in my presence, when we were all amazed to
find so many faults under one suit of clothes. Then
I laid open his brain, his heart, and his spleen;
but I plainly perceived at every operation, that the
farther we proceeded, we found the defects increase
upon us in number and bulk.
As the Hack sits back coolly to observe human agony
and gruesome death, his audience must acknowledge, if they
have not done so before, his morbid mentality. He no
longer possesses the conscience Erich Fromm, for one,
describes as ’ ’ the guardian of our integrity which recalls
us to ourselves when we are in danger of losing our-
g
selves," Genuine insight or self-knowledge must be
regarded as the product of both intellectual and emotional
9
experience, The lack of either means wretched impotence.
Clearly there is a literary tradition of such
decrepitude from Cervantes’ ' "Cabellero de la Triste Figura"
(Knight of the Sad Countenance) and Shakespeare ’s Macbeth
to Swift’s Hack, Pope’s Dunces, Johnson’s astronomer in
Rasselas and other "case histories" in the Rambler and
Idler, up through Melville’s Captain Ahab and Faulkner’s
Colonel Sutpen and beyond. Suffering the horror of
impoverishment of human personality, these characters
6
grapple their way through cryptic, labyrinthine cages,
tortured by hallucinatory demons of their own making, never
knowing the wondering and marveling, the consciousness of
life and of their own existence.
First slave to Words, then vassal to a Name,
Then dupe to Party; child and man the same;
Bounded by Nature, narrow’d still by Art,
A trifling head, and a contracted heart.
The climax of Pope’s Dunciad (IV, 501-4) signifies the
reciprocity of enervated intellect and emotional vacuity
that stunts worthy human development. In the war they
waged against the dunces, both Pope and Swift fumed over
inner coercions that inhibit ego enlargement: consequently,
they created magnificent depravities like the Hack and the
early Gulliver or Book II of the Dunciad where, says Emrys
Jones, ’ ’ Pope’s glimpses into the limbo of the mind communi
cate a sense of non-conscious life, sometimes infantile,
sometimes -maniac.”^ ■ The indignation and ’ ’ gloom" generated
in the reader by Pope’s and Swift's caricatures, Louis
Bredyold observes, becomes salutory, revealing the evil in
the world: "They probed for its origin in the recesses of
human nature; they cut into the flesh. „ . . Their work
remains for all agea a painful discipline in self-
11
examination and humiliation."
The acerbity of Pope and Swift’s work recalls the
traditional role of satirist as stern castigator of vice,
vindicating the strength of moral imperative. In exhibit
ing Juvenal’s saeva indlgnatlo, their methods are
7
deliberately severe and their invective shades off not to
comedy or tragedy but to a kind of hysterical derision
that unmasks the mad conduct of idiots and fools. Through
their characters’ demented schemes, ideals and ambitions,
Swift and Pope portray the frightening spectacle of
neurotic retardation, of malignity that devastates self-
respect and paralyzes productive human incentive. Their
relentless probing of the inner logic of psychoneurosis
scourges the world’s deformities and asserts the primacy of
mental health. In this respect, their work resembles
aspects of Renaissance satire with its penchant for strong
cathartic therapy. The satirist wields the whip, scalpel,
strappado, emetic, burning acid, becoming a "'doctour of
physi.k” whose mission is to minister to the pathological
symptoms of a diseased society. His cruel method of treat
ment, notes Mary Claire Randolph, reflects his metaphoric
pose as barber-surgeon whose ''pen is often a searing,
cauterizing scalpel which probes deep and cuts away dead or
12
gangrenous flesh, leaving a clean wound to heal.”
It is noteworthy that methods of psychiatric treat
ment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries likewise
attempted the satirist’s vehement ’ ’ demonic” exorcism,
theoretically driving away evil "humors,” "animal spirits,”
and other combinations of primitive psychological and
physiological speculations. To Hermann Boerhaave, one of
the most celebrated eighteenth-century physicians,
8
psychotherapy consisted of bloodletting and purgatives or
dousing the patient in ice-cold water to produce near
shock. Among Boerhaave's contributions to the medical
profession was one of its first shock instruments, a
gyrating chair that rendered the patient unconscious. The
chair was also used by Charles Darwin's grandfather,
Erasmus Darwin, a physician who believed rotation would
correct disharmony of the nervous tissues of the body. In
Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush, the founder of American
psychiatry, was also a firm advocate of spinning movement
to relieve what he considered congested blood in the
brain.13
For the most part, histories of psychiatry record
that physicians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
were fascinated by the grotesque features of mental
disturbance. Their fascination was reflected in the
incredible inhumanity with which mentally sick citizens
were treated in European society. Innumerable contemporary
descriptions testify to the miserable lot of the insane.
In Germany, Johann Christian Reil, one of the most advanced
psychiatrists of his era, recounts their cruel isolation
and restraint:
We incarcerate these miserable creatures as if they
were criminals in abandoned jails, near to the lairs
of owls in barren canyons beyond the city gates, or
in damp dungeons of prisons, where never a pitying
look of a humanitarian penetrates; and we let them,
in chains, rot in their own excrement. Their fetters
have eaten off the flesh of their bones, and their
9
emaciated pale faces look expectantly toward the
grave which will end their misery and cover up
our shame fulne s s. 14-
In the last chapters of Madness and Civilization,
Michel Foucault traces a more humane tradition in the
treatment of mental illness which was developed toward the
latter half of the eighteenth century, by doctors such as
Philippe Pinel in France, Johann Reil in Germany and the
Tukes family in England.^ Particularly in London, public
outrage at the treatment accorded lunatics in Bethlehem
Hospital led to the establishment of St. Luke's Hospital in
1750 with Dr. William Battie, Christopher Smart's
physician, as superintendent. More humanitarian operations
and reforms were introduced and the hospital significantly
shut its doors to the public, unlike Bedlam, a favorite
London tourist attraction where for a penny one could not
only see the inmates, but tease them to his heart's
content. Other hospitals in Manchester in 1763 and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1764 were founded upon similar
humanitarian principles. A parliamentary committee's
scandalous disclosures about private madhouses in the
mid-sixties testified to the growing public indignation
16
concerning the victimized insane.
Another important reason for the more compassionate
attitude toward mental illness in the eighteenth century
may be the new Lockean psychology. Xn 1700, Locke added a
chapter to his Essay Concerning' Human Understanding,
10
resulting, he says, from his speculations on insanity.^
Locke’s theory of mental imbalance is revolutionary in its
radical assertion that madness and ordinary folly are
essentially the same, differing only in degree. Locke
insists that there is no absolute dichotomy between sanity
and insanity: ’ ’ All opposition to reason ... is really
madness.” Yet
there is scarce a man so free from it, but that if
he should always, on all occasions, argue or do as
in some cases he constantly does, would not be
thought fitter for Bedlam than civil conversation.
1 do not here mean when he is under the power of
an unruly passion, but in the steady calm of his
life.18
In recognizing that there is a narrow line between the
normal and abnormal, that the differences between them are
ones of degree instead of kind, Locke clearly anticipates a
fundamental Freudian maxim: that psychic disorders are
related to normality rather than sharply and qualitatively
distinct from it, Indeed, what Freud called psychoneurotic
conflicts and symptoms are present in every so-called
normal individual. All minds experience similar pleasures
and pains, hopes and fears, and similar dreams that are the
"temporary insanity of everyday life” when reason slumbers
and fantasy runs wild. The fear of the mentally ill has
been likened by psychiatrists to fear of oneself, of those
primitive emotional drives that everyone harbors in his
19
unconscious mind. Considering such fear, the break
through of humanitarian reforms in treating the insane
11
during the late eighteenth century is the more commendable.
The humane tradition in psychiatric care, as well
as Locke's rudimentary identification of every man's
susceptibility to mental disorder, greatly diminished the
deep-felt dread of the insane and the brutal maltreatment
accorded them since the Dark Ages. Horribly sadistic
methods began to be replaced by gentleness and kindness and
therapy based on careful clinical observation and research.
Psychiatrists clearly had reached the point of discarding
the theory of the exogenous demon that caused internal
disharmony. Reflecting the work of scientists like Locke
and, in France, Philippe Pinel, they began to study what
was called "the history of human understanding," insight
fully ascribing mental disturbance to emotional experi^ . . .
20
ence.
During the same period, the analogy between cruel
methods of psychiatric treatment and the satirist's
metaphoric pose as barber-surgeon or violent demonic
exorcist noticeably changes. Influenced by the humane
tradition, as well as by the prevailing spirit of rational
inquiry, both scientists and literary men seemed to wish to
encourage madness instead of exterminating it. The example
of Don Quijote especially induced writers to create cracked
protagonists whose mania strangely displayed elements of
benevolence and philanthropic good works. Stuart Tave, in
The Amiable Humorist, traces the several manifestations of
12
this attractively capricious and sentimentally good-hearted
crackpot, culminating in the most successful of many
so-called quixotic characters, Laurence Sterne's Walter and
21
Toby Shandy. Yet it is essential to realize that
Sterne's and others' idealization of benign lunacy, a
fascinating if little explored aspect of eighteenth-century
precursors of the Romantics, is merely the other side of
the coin from such earlier successors of Don Quijote as
Swift's Tale of a Tub, that fumed at what was considered an
22
outrageous object of ridicule and folly. Not too many
writers managed some kind of reconciliation of the two
extremes of soothing, tender-hearted optimism and the
astringent, penetrating glare of the satirist.
One of these was Samuel Johnson, who with indomi
table courage and powerful intellect comprehended
ambivalences in literature, politics, morality and
psychology. In his important essay, "Johnson Agonistes,"
Bertrand Bronson remarks, "Philosophy was too narrow a room
for his humanity: he could not look upon a metaphysical
system, no matter how pretty the structure, as a desirable
exchange for the rich irrelevancies and contradictions by
23
which men live." In his writings dealing with psychol
ogy, Johnson probes the inner logic of psychoneurosis by
baring hideous deformity as Swift and Pope do. Yet
Johnson's added application of a kind of therapeutic balm
diminishes the vehemence of attack without lessening its
13
import. A pioneer in psychiatry, Johnson treats neurotic
characteristics with an empathy that anticipates the modern
therapist-patient relationship. His reassuring and suppor
tive comments seem to convey the intimacy and insight of
successful therapeutic encounters. Johnson's opinion of
Don Quijote, in view of his staunch yet compassionate
attitude toward mental disturbance, is noteworthy. His
shrewd comprehension of the hero's insanity perhaps
accounts for the fact that "after Homer's Iliad, Mr.
Johnson confessed that the work of Cervantes was the
o /
greatest in the world."
In Rambler 2, Johnson writes on one of his favorite
topics, the dangerous prevalence of the imagination. He
examines the beguilements of hope and desire, warns against
wanton imaginations and leads up to the climax of the
article, the example of Don Quij ote. Johnson has been
strategically embellishing the advantages of the possession
of a lively mind, that provokes excitement and pleasure and
spurs one to success, so that here the introduction of Don
Quijote seems almost a pleasingly melancholy lament:
When the knight of La Mancha gravely recounts to his
companion the adventures by which he is to signalize
himself in such a manner that he shall be summoned
to the support of empires, solicited to accept the
heiress of the crown which he has preserved, have
honours and riches to scatter about him, and an
island to bestow on his worthy squire, very few
readers, amidst their mirth or pity, can deny that
they have admitted visions of the same kind: though
they have not, perhaps, expected events equally
strange, or by means equally inadequate. When we
pity him, we reflect on our own disappointments; and
14
when we laugh, our hearts inform us that he is not
more ridiculous than ourselves, except that he tells
what we have only thought.25
So far the passage reads like a consolatory salve for
smiling or weeping sentimentalists, whose empathy also
recalls Locke's recognition of the thin line between sanity
and insanity. Johnson's tone initially soothes by assuring
that everyone is vulnerable to indulgence in fantasy, and
this greater or lesser degree of madness seems sympatheti
cally presented until the very next paragraph when Johnson
makes it clear that his main point is altogether different:
The understanding of a man naturally sanguine may,
indeed, be easily vitiated by the luxurious indulgence
of hope, however necessary to the production of every
thing great or excellent, as some plants are destroyed
by too open exposure to that sun which gives life and
beauty to the vegetable world.
Certainly Johnson here condemns Quijote's madness
as pathological, as a malignancy that threatens the proper
development and functioning of the psychic apparatus or
what Johnson calls the "understanding of a man." His use
of the word vitiated implies contamination and morbidity:
the second QED definition of vitiate, "to render corrupt
in morals; to deprave in respect of principles or conduct;
to lower the moral standard of (persons)," is in fact
26
illustrated by a quotation from another Rambler article.
Moreover, Johnson's sun metaphor is particularly well
chosen, indicating his sensitivity to Cervantes' sun that
blazed down over the stark, ghostly landscape of La Mancha,
reflecting and distorting the apparitions of Quijote's
15
poor sick brain. Johnson acknowledges the dazzling brilli
ance of this mental landscape which "gives life and
beauty," but exhorts against "too open exposure to that
sun" which also consumes consciousness and self-knowledge.
Johnson's analysis of Don Quijote is a small
sampling from what could be considered his theory of
neurosis, formulated in works such as the periodical
essays, the biographies and especially Rasselas. Justly
mediating between extremes of benevolent and malevolent
attitudes toward madness, Johnson documents neurotic
characteristics in the mid-eighteenth century with the
astonishing insight that does not appear again until the
advent of professional psychiatric literature published
27
well into the nineteenth century. Though not medically
trained, Johnson was deeply interested in medical science,
particularly in its inchoate branch of psychiatry; as Mrs.
Thrale noted, "He had studied medicine diligently in all
its branches but had given particular attention to the
diseases of the imagination, which he watched in himself
with a solicitude destructive of his own peace, and
2 8
intolerable to those he trusted."
The crucial insight in Johnson's theory of neurosis
was his familiar "dangerous prevalence of the imagination"
or the peril of unloosing psychoneurotic conditions when
abandoning oneself to indulgence in wishful fantasy. "If
you betray yourself, who can support you?" Johnson's
16
incisive counsel to John Taylor summarizes a good part of
what is sane and truthful about human life. It is a <
counsel that students of psychiatry from St. Augustine,
through Cervantes, to Erich Fromm have heeded and attempted
to inculcate through the ages. The following chapters will
attempt to describe something of Johnson's special contri
bution to the history of psychiatry. While this study does
not go beyond Rasselas (1759), Johnson pursued his psycho
analytic studies for the rest of his life. They are,
perhaps, the quintessence of his devout humanitarianism.
17
N otes
1. R. W. Chapman, ed., The Letters of Samuel Johnson,
3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), No. 165.
2. R. S. Peters, ed., Brett's History of Psychology
(New York: The Macmillan CoT] 1953), p. 215.
3. Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don
Qui-jote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1605-15; Mexico: Editorial
Porrua, 1971), p. 629 (II, lxiv).
4. Ibid.
5. Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and
Function (1953; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pT 18.
6. Angel Flores and M. J. Benardete, Cervantes Across
the Centuries (New York: The Dryden Press, 1947), p " ! 279.
7. Louis Landa, ed., Gulliver's Travels and Other
Writings (Boston: Riverside^ I960), pp. 326-36.
8. Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950;
rpt. New York: Bantam"] 1972) , p. 85.
9. See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of :
Man, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1941), especially I,i,
"Mah as a Problem to Himself," for an attempted integration
of this complicated dualism which he calls Reason vs.
Nature.
10. Emrys Jones, Pope and Dulness (London: Oxford
University Press, 1968) , p. I T T ] -
11. "The Gloom of the Tory Satirists" in James
Clifford, Eighteenth Century English Liter a ture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 15.
12. "The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric
Theory" in Ronald Paulson, Satire: Modern Essays in
Criticism (Englewood Cliffs'] N.J. : Prentice-Hall, T971) ,
p ~ ] 149. See also Michael DePorte, Nightmares and Hobby
horses (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974) , Ch. 2 ~ ,
"Swift: Madness and Satire."
13. Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnich, The History
of Psychiatry (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p~ 109.
18
14. E. Kraepelin, "Hundert Jahre der Psychiatrie,"
Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Neurologie, 38 (1918), 162,
quoted in Alexander, pp. 115-16.
15. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 221-89.
16. Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 1974), p. 133.
17. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975), p. 395 (II, iii, iv).
18. Ibid.
19. Alexander, p. 115.
20. See, for example, DePorte's discussion of "Locke
and the New Psychology," pp. 19-25, and W. Riese, "Philippe
Pinel, His Views on Human Nature and Disease, His Medical
Thought," Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 114
(1951) , 3137
21. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960),
pp. 140-63.
22. For more detailed information on earlier inter
pretations, see Edward M. Wilson, "Cervantes and English
Literature of the Seventeenth Century," Bulletin
Hispanique, 50 (1948), 27-52, and "Edmund Gayton on Don
Quijote, Comparative Literature, 2 (1950), 64-72.
23. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946),
p. 8.
24. Ed. S. C. Roberts, Anecdotes' of the Late Samuel
Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925) ,
p. 180.
25. Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson
(New Haven! Yale University Press, 1958- J ~ , III, IT.
26. Johnson also uses vitiate in the chapter he
contributed to Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote,
speaking of "senseless fictions; which at once vitiate the
mind, and pervert the understanding ..." (1752; rpt.
London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 374.
27. Kathleen M. Grange must be credited as one of the
first to note Johnson's anticipation of modern psychiatric
theory in two articles, "Samuel Johnson's Account of
Certain Psychoanalytic Concepts," Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease, 135 (1962); rpt. in Donald J. Greene, ed.,
Samuel Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 149-57, and "Dr.
Samuel Johnson's Account of a Schizophrenic Illness in
Rasselas," Medical History, 6 (1962), 162-68.
28. Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill,
2 vols (1897; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), I, 199.
20
CHAPTER II
THE YOUTHFUL MATRIX, 1709-1737
Beginning the sixtieth year of his life, Johnson
entered in his diary:
How the last year has past I am unwilling to terrify
myself with thinking. . . . This day it came into my
mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this
I purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may
not too much disturb me.l
2
While he never proceeded with this intriguing project, the
history of Johnson's melancholy is revealed through
irrepressible thoughts and feelings expressed so candidly
as to make the snobbish Boswell exclaim, "Indeed, his open-
ness with people at first interview was remarkable."
Johnson's forthrightness facilitates an analysis of his
distress, which stemmed from a multitude of causes includ
ing heredity, illness, and emotional conflicts. Certainly
the penetration of Johnson's observations on life indicates
that in large part they were the product of his own painful
experience.
Glimpses of Johnson's early childhood convey a
sense of gloomy frustration and discord, of emotional
deprivation imposed, like most people's, by well-meaning
but foolishly incompetent family relationships. In the
fragment which survives of his Proustian autobiography
written in middle life, Johnson re-creates the burden of an
21
ever-living, ever-present past which shapes and determines
his response to further experience:
My father and mother had not much happiness from each
other. They seldom conversed; for my father could
not bear to talk of his affairs; and my mother, being
unacquainted with books, cared not to talk of any
thing else. Had my mother been more literate, they
had been better companions. She might have sometimes
introduced her unwelcome topick with more success, if
she could have diversified her conversation. Of
business she had no distinct conception; and there
fore her discourse was composed only of complaint,
fear, and suspicion. 4 -
Dropped into the middle of this loveless, impover
ished household, young Johnson apparently grew up with a
feeling of worthlessness so deeply internalized that he
once confessed to Henry Thrale, "He had never sought to
please till past thirty years old considering the matter as
hopeless.""* Here Johnson might have been referring to
physical as well as psychological handicaps since early
illness also took its toll upon the developing child.
"A poor, diseased infant, almost blind," he writes, "I
remember my aunt Nath. Ford told me . . . that she would
not have picked such a poor creature up in the street."
Blind in one eye and extremely shortsighted in the other,
he was also early marked with scars of scrofula and small
pox. Dr. Swinfen, who lived with the Johnsons when Sam was
born, remarked that "he never knew any child reared with so
much difficulty."^
Recent critics trained in modern psychiatry have
hypothesized that Johnson's mother was the person most
22
directly responsible for the dark and painful struggles of
his later life. In particular, George Irwin's account in
g
Samuel Johnson: A Personality in Conflict carefully docu
ments Johnson's unhappy childhood and his ensuing paroxyms
of melancholia, tracing their origin to Sarah Johnson's
aggravating anxiety and self-centeredness that deprived her
family of the comfort they so craved. Irwin describes
Johnson's fits of unaccountable, overwhelming terror and
subsequent physical exhaustion in terms of the unremem
bered, all-consuming panic of babyhood which epitomizes
rejection, perhaps the most frightening and debilitating of
all feelings. The results of Johnson's lifelong struggle
against suffering and despair, of his unremitting surveil
lance of his psyche, are preserved in his works. "Every
man," says Imlac, "may, by examining his own mind, guess
Q
what passes in the minds of others." Clearly the
strangely moving, passionate quality of Johnson's writings
is distilled from his own personal grief. The wisdom and
compassion that he brings to diagnosing neurotic disorders
springs from his lifelong struggle to overcome them.
The earliest of Johnson's works preserved consist
of some occasional poetry and school exercises in Latin and
translation from the Latin. Of the verses in English, "On
a Daffodil, the first flower the author had seen that
year," was written when Johnson was fifteen or sixteen."^
The poem is a lyric in the seventeenth-century tradition of
23
Marvell, Herrick, and Carew, surveying man's ephemeral
joys. The poet cherishes the daffodil that symbolizes
glories of budding youth, yet is painstakingly aware of the
threatening inclemencies of nature which he appeases
primarily through "throngs of beauteous virgins" and the
"divine Cleora." He maintains this erotic fantasy for some
lines until he notices passing time, the blossom shrivels
and dies, and he observes:
With grief this emblem of mankind X see,
Like one awaken'd from a pleasing dream,
Cleora's self, fair flower, shall fade like thee,
Alike must fall the poet and his theme.
Unlike, for instance, Marvell’s "The Garden," where the
poet maintains a casual tone through the delicate equipose
of fantasy and reality, Johnson does not playfully balance
these extremes nor does he succumb to one or the other.
Even as a boy of fifteen, Johnson meditates human life as
"a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be
11
enjoyed." While romantic visions such as Cleora may
ecstatically gratify wishful fantasies, Johnson early
identifies this vision as a "pleasing dream," not to be
cultivated for its accessibility in real life. He views
this non-fulfillment "with grief" much like that of
Herrick's lines in the Hesperides, "To Daffodils," but
altering the traditional lyrical lament, Johnson moralizes
his song in order to point out a common human frailty.
Another of Johnson's early poems which has survived
--Hector thought it written the year after "On a
24
Daffodil"--is "An Ode on Friendship. J. D. Fleeman
thinks the theme reflects Johnson's reaction to leaving
13
Lichfield Grammar School and Edmund Hector, possibly the
friend who inspired the poem. In the tradition of the
classical topos, de amicitia, Johnson treats what is noble,
blessed, and virtuous in human relationships. On the other
hand, what is termed love images man's bestiality:
While Love, unknown among the blest,
Parent of Rage and hot Desires,
The human and the savage Breast
Inflames alike with equal Fires.
"Guiltless joys" become the reward of friendship to which
men aspire to be guided through life's "darksome way" where
"the tortures of mistrust/ On selfish bosoms only prey."
Here Johnson seems to explain the vicissitudes of fiery
appetite and gloomy contrition much as Shakespeare
describes them in Sonnet 129, "Th' expense of spirit in a
waste of shame."
But Johnson further diagnoses the guilty aftermath
of love as stemming from "mistrust" and "selfish bosoms."
This egocentricity, exemplified by the foolish monarch who
"hugs a flatterer for a friend," implies neurotic pride and
the never-ending concern for one's own status that inhibits
relationships with anything outside the self. Sensitive to
the need for affection and happiness through others,
Johnson early looks to Platonic friendship as relief from
the melancholy fluctuations of this world. Of course in
later life, Johnson will clutch at the companionship
25
which enables him to escape from morbid introspection or
that hell which Burton says is only to be found at the
heart of a melancholy man. "If anything trouble them, they
cannot sleep, but fret themselves still, till another
object mitigate or time wear it out. They have grievous
passions, and immoderate perturbations of the mind, fear,
sorrow, etc., yet not so continuate but that they are
sometimes merry, apt to profuse laughter.""*"^ Relieved by
interludes of good fellowship, Johnson always cherished
those close acquaintances who cheered and uplifted him.
Boswell describes his second meeting with Johnson when he
called upon him uninvited at his chambers in the Temple.
"'Sir, (said I,) I am afraid that I intrude upon you. It
is benevolent to allow me to sit and hear you.' He seemed
pleased with this compliment, which I sincerely paid him,
and answered, 'Sir, I am obliged to any man who visits
me. '
Diversion with friends provided for Johnson a
"security" from what he later describes in a letter to
Boswell as "those troublesome and wearisome discontents,
which are always obtruding themselves upon a mind vacant,
16
unemployed, and undetermined." Giving himself to people,
Johnson valued friends very dearly throughout his life on
every level, from eccentric rabble-rousers like the
phenomenal Richard Savage and other Grub Street drinking
companions, to coterie members including the most famous
26
figures of the time, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, to the queer
specimens of his household: the widow Desmoulins, blind
Miss Williams, old Dr. Levet who practiced medicine without
a license among London slum dwellers, the prostitute Poll
Carmichael, the young black ladies' man Frank Barber,
17
brought from slavery in Jamaica, to intimates such as
Edmund Hector, John Taylor, Boswell, and Mrs. Thrale.
A clergyman acquaintance who wrote down some reminiscences
of Johnson called him "the most accessible and communica
tive man alive.At the age of sixteen in the juvenile
piece, "An Ode on Friendship," Johnson clearly recognizes
what becomes for most people a lifelong quest to fill their
vacuous, inhibiting solitude with a wealth of interpersonal
relationships.
Presumably as an exercise suggested by his school
master at Stourbridge where he attended from October, 1725
to May, 1726 and later returned as a pupil-teacher in the
Summer, 1726 under the Reverend John Wentworth, Johnson
wrote Festina Lente. The composition warns against rash
ness: to "make haste slowly" is to
Observe your steps, be careful to command
Your passions; guide the reins with steady hand,
Nor down steep cliffs precipitously move
Urg'd headlong on by hatred or by love:
Although its typically classical doctrine calls for control
of the passions through reason, it is interesting that
Johnson is not in the least tempted to make a case for
_____________________________________________________27
Stoic suppression of emotion altogether. The model of
"cautious Fabius" accomplishes the preservation of Rome at
first through delay and intellectual strategy; but when the
time for action came, he "drove the swarthy troops to their
own barren sands," implying fierce pursuit and exultant
victory. In Rasselas, Johnson satirizes the Stoic philos
opher who preaches neutrality to pain and pleasure but is
later overcome by the news of his daughter's death.
Johnson's refutation of Stoicism involves a quality of
active patience in which "we may lawfully struggle; for the
calamities of life, like the necessities of nature, are
19
calls to labor, and exercises of diligence." It is
healthier to feel the throes of pleasure and pain than to
languish in cowardly withdrawal like Rasselas' Stoic
philosopher. Festina Lente anticipates Johnson's formula
tion of strenuous patience rather than Stoicism, of control
like Fabius' that is not indifferent to his country's
danger, but shrewdly resists the fruitless anguish of
impatience, bides his time, and eventually leads his troops
to glorious triumph.
Another type of triumphant struggle is depicted in
the most unusual of Johnson's early verses, "Upon the Feast
of St. Simon and St. Jude," written for October 28, 1726.
The poet celebrates with "extatick fury" the martyrdom of
both saints whose "gen'rous zeal" and "ardent love of
virtue" is described in his song. Although Johnson, as a
28
sign of independence, intermittently sloughed off religion
after the age of fourteen until he happened to pick up
William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life at
Oxford, his capacity for religious feeling seems fore
shadowed here. He tells Boswell that he expected "to find
it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps
20
to laugh at it." But it proved an "overmatch" for him
and he later called it "the finest piece of hortatory
theology in any language." Although the romantic fervor of
"St. Simon and St. Jude" seems strictly curbed in Johnson's
later writings, his emotionality is not diminished.
Johnson's occasional poems addressed to young
ladies are like Pope's enchanting epistles to Martha
Blount; they lovingly cherish a woman's exquisite charms
while at the same time they make the reader aware of the
writer's frustrated deprivation in his relationship to
women. Highly susceptible to feminine beauty, both men
were favorites with ladies who overcame what were probably
first impressions of physical inelegance to sense qualities
of grace and deep tenderness beneath. While the extent of
Pope's deformity is probably accurately recorded in
accounts like Johnson's in the Lives of the Poets, a
caricature of Johnson's own appearance has unfortunately
become traditional. Macaulay's review of Croker's Boswell
in 1831 helped establish the image:
29
Even the peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for
civilised society, his gesticulations, his rollings,
his puffings, his mutterings, the strange way in
which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness
with which he devoured his dinner, his fits of melan
choly, his fits of anger, his frequent rudeness, his
occasional ferocity, increased the interest which his
new associates took in him.2 1
The bizarre portrait was perpetuated in Macaulay's
essay of 1856, reprinted countless times in school
editions. Edgar Allan Poe's famous "Letter to B "
typically reiterates the concept of the obese ridiculous
old pedant who was moreover incapable of esthetic apprecia
tion: "Think of poetry, dear B , think of poetry, and
then think of--Dr. Samuel Johnson! Think of all that is
airy and fairy-like, and then of all that is hideous and
unwieldy; think of his huge bulk the Elephant! and then--
and then think of the Tempest--the Midsummer Night's Dream
22
--Prospero--Oberon--and Titanis!" It would be difficult
for anyone to appear as grotesque as all that and certainly
Johnson was not: he had a strong, burly figure, not a
corpulent one and could perform feats of physical strength
that amazed his friends. Johnson's portraits, particularly
the one of 1770 by Sir Joshua Reynolds, show a certain
delicacy of feature, a sympathetic warmth that must have
elicited many ladies' affection. And presumably the
Johnson who wrote in his Preface to Shakespeare, "Delusion
. . . has no certain limitation; if the spectator can be
once persuaded, . . . he is in a state of elevation above
the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights
30
of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of
23
terrestrial nature," appreciated Shakespeare's exoticism
as well as Poe and other Romantics.
Like Pope, Johnson regards a woman's beauty as a
salutary inspiration, an incentive for good sense and
generosity. "To a Young Lady on her Birthday" solicits
feeling from Belinda, hoping that she may be touched by her
lovers' admiring gaze: "May powerful nature join with
graceful art,/ To point each glance, and force it to the
heart." Warning against coquetry, Johnson hopes that
Belinda's wholesome charms will "improve mankind" by expos
ing ridiculous forms of vanity among her suitors and other
coquettes. In the "Epilogue to the Distrest Mother" that
Johnson wrote for some young ladies who proposed to act the
2 4
play at Lichfield, he enumerates the pathological
symptoms of vanity much like Pope's "Cave of Spleen" in
The Rape of the Lock. The "dismal realms" are inhabited by
cruel virgins upon whom the same ills are inflicted which
they once caused in others: "Vexation, Fury, Jealousy,
Despair,/ Vex every eye, and every bosom tear." Avenging
furies sentence these beauties to wither, forever plagued
by these "foul deformities" that pride engenders. Johnson
appeals to fair ladies to avoid this dire fate through
feeling: "With pity soften every awful grace,/ And beauty
smile suspicious in each face." While a woman's good looks
may make men adore her, this worship only provokes scornful
31
pride and its ugly counterparts unless tempered by sympa
thetic benevolence, the true object of pleasure and
devotion.
M0n a Lady’s Presenting a Sprig of Myrtle to a
Gentleman" likewise portrays the unsettling emotions
aroused by a woman’s loveliness, entreating her to "cure
the throbbings of an anxious heart" thrilled by her casual
proffering of a gift to her lover. In his poetry about
women Johnson realizes the tantalizing emotions, the
desperate fluctuations of people in love. He advocates
Stella’s "gentle touches" as opposed to more furious
provocations ("To Miss Hickman Playing on the Spinet")
since a woman’s sympathetic feeling--"musick" that "soothes
the raging pain"--wields enormous power. Even raging
Alexander the Great, had he heard the music, would have
"Reigned his thirst of empire to her charms,/ And found a
thousand worlds in Stella’s arms."
In longer and more ambitious works written by
Johnson in his twenties, his deep concern with aberrations
of the human mind is readily apparent. His preface to his
first published volume, a translation from the French of
Father Jeronymo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, printed in
1735, expresses views of human nature often to be found in
his later writings:
The Portugese traveller contrary to the general vein
of his countrymen, has amused his reader with no
romantick absurdities or incredible fictions: what
ever he relates, whether true or not, is at least
32
probable; and he who tells nothing exceeding the
bounds of probability, has a right to demand that
they should believe him who can not contradict him.
. . . The reader will discover what will always be
discovered by a diligent and impartial inquirer,
that wherever human nature is to be found, there
is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of
passion and reason; and that the Creator doth not
appear partial in his distributions, but has
balanced in most countries their particular incon
veniences by particular favours.25
The distrust of romantic fictions that purport to be true
and the conviction that people cannot basically differ in
their emotional make-up from one part of the world to
another are crucial Johnsonian tenets clearly formulated
as early as this first publication.
In 1736 and 1737, Johnson was at work on a blank
verse historical tragedy to be called Irene, the story of
the Sultan Mahomet's love for a beautiful Christian captive
taken at the siege of Constantinople. In the end, Irene
succumbs to the temptation of worldly power by apostasizing
to Mohammedanism in order to become the Turkish Sultan's
queen. Suspense is created by the conflict in Irene's mind
just before she yields to the Sultan's embraces. Curiously,
love does not enter into her motives, as Bertrand Bronson
explains by pointing out Johnson's deviation from his
sources: Johnson underlines the religious message by
26
detaching the love interest. Bronson moreover suggests
that Johnson's exposition of the Christian point of view in
Irene is based not upon the love of God or joys of religion
but almost entirely upon an appeal to fear. This is made
emphatic in the first draft of the play: 0 3
Man ... by vice or passion driv'n
Is but the executioner of Heav'n
When erring Fury throws the random dart
Heav’n turns its point upon the guilty Heart
Behold Irene--oe'rthrown
By crimes abhord, and treasons not her own
Eternal justice thus her doom decreed
And in the traytress bad th’ Apostle bleed.
Johnson tones down the passage in its final form, making
"Weak man with erring Rage" instead of "Fury" throw the
dart, and Heaven "guide" this instrument of justice: he
revises what seemed to suggest Nemesis to Christian divine
retribution. Nevertheless Bronson uses this passage to
explain what he considers the "private content" of Irene,
that Johnson's own faith gave him little peace and that it
27
was grounded in fear.
In his classic study of Johnson's melancholia,
W.B.C. Watkins similarly discusses Johnson's religion in
terms of what he describes as a pathological dread of the
unknown, potentially annihilating the spiritual world:
"There was an element of the terrible in Johnson’s
Christianity, oppressed as he was by the fear of God and a
28
profound sense of his own frailty." To dwell on
Johnson's preoccupation with fear in religion and his
repeated exhortations about vice and temptation conveys in
part the impassioned vigilance of his convictions yet
neglect another large dimension of his religious position:
his abiding faith and enthusiasm about the pleasures of
this world. The one-dimensional view that overemphasizes
Johnson's suffering and unhappiness is also found in
34
some interpretations of The Vanity of Human Wishes that
label the poem gloomy and pessimistic because Johnson
exposes the unsatisfactory pursuit of material, egotistical
values. Talk about Johnson's "Stoicism" also concentrates
upon his "depressing" denial of worldly ambition and
Johnson's "tragic view of life" considers his contemplation
of man's continually miserable state.
Such narrow conceptions disregard Johnson's posi
tive appreciation of a properly conducted life. Though
difficulty and fear constitute a large element of experi
ence, men also are affected by faith and promises of
pleasure. In the Preface to the Preceptor Q.748)* an
introduction to a general course of education, Johnson
writes about the good life that religion teaches by
engaging both affirmative and negative values: "To
counteract the power of temptations, hope must be excited
by the prospect of rewards, and fear by the expectations of
29
punishment." Hope, according to Johnson, is as powerful
a component of religious devotion as fear. In his Sermon
III, especially concerned with fear of God, he considers
the vigilance necessary for salvation:
He is happy that carries about with him in the world
the temper of the cloister; and preserves the fear
of doing evil, while he suffers himself to be impelled
by the zeal of doing good . . . who can partake the
pleasures of sense with temperance, and enjoy the
distinctions of honor with moderation; who can pass
undefiled through a polluted world; and, among all
the vicissitudes of good and evil, have his heart
fixed only where true joys are to be found.30
______________________________________________________35
In the whirl of human affairs, Johnson clearly
recognizes the attractions of pleasurable pursuits as well
as avoidance of sin: moreover, he conceives of pleasure as
man's prime directive and fear merely the means to this
end. The happiness of the cloister which he describes
effects true delight by gratifying one's spiritual integ
rity but, says Johnson, "This only can be done, by fearing
always, by preserving in the mind a constant apprehension
31
. . ." That Johnson does not cultivate fear for its own
sake but as a method to inspire self-respect and secure
happiness in one's progress toward a good life is exempli
fied in Irene by the heroine's undirected fear and its
catastrophic consequences.
In Act II, Scene I, before Irene chooses between
glory and religion, she comes to the virtuous Aspasia to
fortify her against the panic she feels when contemplating
her renunciation of Christianity. She tells Aspasia that
she needs her encouragement since.
Death rises to my view, with all his terrors;
Then visions horrid as a murd'rer's dreams
Chill my resolves, and blast my blooming virtue:
Stern Torture shakes his bloody scourge before me,
And Anguish gnashes on the fatal wheel.
Irene's afflictions are terrifying enough, inspiring what
would seem to be the proper fear necessary to oppose
temptation and preserve the sense of the danger of sin.
Yet Aspasia's reply curiously seems to devalue the efficacy
or potentially beneficial influence of Irene's terror: she
36
in fact demeans it to a sense of "timidity" or "frailty":
Since fear predominates in every thought
And sways thy breast with absolute dominion,
Think on th1 insulting scorn, the conscious pangs,
The future miseries that wait th' apostate;
So shall timidity assist thy reason,
And wisdom into virtue turn thy frailty.
While Aspasia realizes that her friend's weakness is less
desirable than her own courage, still she urges her to use
this means to resist incitements to evil.
In much the same way, Johnson's exhortation in
Sermon III is for the man who "dreads the contamination of
evil, and endeavors to pass through his appointed time,
with such cautions, as may keep him unspotted from the
32
world." In neither case--Irene's or the good man's--is
dread pursued for its own sake but rather as a route to
more pleasurable aspirations: happiness, salvation,
infinite spiritual perfection. In Irene, dread by itself
is in fact deprecated through the tragic heroine's cowardly
flaw. She even pleads the woman's prerogative of faint
hearted indecision, "Will not that Pow'r that formed the
heart of woman,/ And wove the feeble texture of her nerves/
Forgive those fears that shake the tender frame?" To this
Aspasia replies with a call for sturdy self-reliance:
The weakness we lament, our selves create,
Instructed from our infant years to court
With counterfeited fears the aid of man;
We learn to shudder at the rustling breeze,
Start at the light, and tremble in the dark;
Till Affectation rip'ning to belief,
And Folly, frighted at her own chimeras,
Habitual cowardice usurps the soul.
37
Aspasia’s pre-women’s-liberation speech must have
stirred the heartstrings of militant feminists, some of
33
whom lived as early as the eighteenth century, and saw
themselves debased through culturally assigned debilitating
roles. Johnson's admiration for intellectually vigorous
women is well-known through his associations with ladies
like Molly Aston, Elizabeth Carter, Fanny Burney and, of
course, Hester Thrale. Aspasia’s speech probably embodies
Johnson's conception of the ideal feminine mind, whether or
not one believes, as Bronson does, that Aspasia is a
34
lover's portrait of Johnson's wife, Elizabeth Porter.
For the most part, Aspasia's words proclaim what every
intellectually honest individual should seek in the way of
courageous self-confidence. Johnson properly analyzes
cowardice as defensive positions out of which conflicts
grow, alienating one increasingly from oneself. He defines
these defensive or protective structures as "counterfeited
fears" and "Affectation": they have been put into gear to
preserve a cherished self-image--in this case, the ideal of
the helpless maiden who is taught to "court" the "aid of
man" from her earliest years. With "Affectation, rip'ning
to belief,/ And Folly, frighted at her own chimeras,"
Johnson says, "Habitual cowardice usurps the soul." The
woman becomes her idealized image but must pay the price of
living in dread, probably of having her real self discov
ered, as Johnson intimates by chimeras, suggesting
38
imaginary creations of the mind. The dread or "habitual
cowardice" that "usurps the soul” is detachment from the
self which impedes personal growth. Irene even recognizes
that Aspasia's soul is "enlarg'd" by the "knowledge" she
herself lacks: by the spiritual integrity that knows and
governs itself, promoting worthy human development.
Irene was not to be produced until 1749, more than
twelve years after Johnson began writing it, and only then
through the special favor of his former pupil, David
Garrick, by this time England's most famous actor and
manager of Drury Lane. Though the play was not successful
on the stage--Johnson himself seems to have been embar- ;
34
rassed about its merit in later years — the psychological
issues are ones that Johnson will deal with time and time
again. The writing of Irene as well marks a turning point
in Johnson's life when he left Lichfield for London, 28-
years -old, a newly-married man, and somewhat belatedly out
to set the world on fire.
The examples from the short pieces written by
Johnson as a young man, and particularly from the longer
work, Irene, convey his concern, even at this early stage,
with problems of mental health. As he expanded his
horizons when he moved to London in 1737, this concern
naturally took a wider range. A most acute observer of
human nature, Johnson was to enrich his experience with the
turbulence of life in the big city.
39
Notes
1. Works, I, 119.
2. Johnson did write his own case history in Latin,
now lost, which he gave to Dr. Swinfen in Lichfield, who
was impressed, says Boswell, with the "extraordinary
acuteness, research, and eloquence of this paper, that in
his zeal for his godson he showed it to several people" to
Johnson's great mortification. Life, I, 64.
3. Life, IV, 284.
4. Works, I, 7.
5. Johnsonian Miscellanies, I, 318.
6 . Works, I, 5.
7. Works, 1, 6 .
8 . (Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press,
1971), Chapter I.
9. Ed. Warren L. Fleischauer, Samuel Johnson's
Rasselas (New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1962),
p. 72.
10. James Clifford, Young Samuel Johnson (1955; rpt.
London: Mercury Books, 1962), p. 73.
11. Rasselas, p. 55.
12. Clifford, p. 75.
13. Samuel Johnson: The Complete English Poems, ed.
J. D. Fleeman (London: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 182.
14. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A.
Shilleto, 3 vols. (London, 1893), Pt. I, Sec. 3, Mem. 1,
Sub s. 2.
R.
15. Life of Johnson, I, 396-97.
16. Letters, No. 185.
17. According to Herman W. Liebert's fine psychological
analysis, Johnson's character was "riven by the lodgment of
a powerful mind in a lame body." For this reason, he
believes, Johnson craved his humble social circle: "In the
40
frailties of Levett, the blindness of Mrs. Williams, the
miseries of the sick and sorrowful for whom he was a sure
retreat, there was anodyne for the pain of his own unceas
ing struggle, and with them he could be one in the fellow
ship of the afflicted.” Liebert further explains Johnson's
search for a "deeper strength” not to be found in the high
intellectual society he also frequented: "This [deeper
strength] he could only gain, Antaeus-like, in the world
from which he sprang; the placid life he demanded and found
with little people is a pathetic attempt to seek peaceful
and normal social existence with his fellows in the only
place in which his sadly divided spirit permitted him to
find it.” "Reflections on Samuel Johnson," Journal of
English and Germanic Philology, 47 (January, 1948), rpt. in
Donald Greene, ed., Samuel Johnson: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, ! T . J . : Prentice-Hall,
1965), pp. 17-18.
18. Boswell, Life of Johnson, II, 119.
19. Works, III, 177.
20. Life, I, 6 8 .
21. Thomas B. Macaulay, "Boswell's Life of Johnson”
[review of Croker ' s ed. , 1831] , Edinburgh Review" 54
(September, 1831), rpt. Macaulay~rs~L~ife of Johnson, ed.
Buehler and Croswell (New York: Longmans" Green, 1903),
p. 32.
22. Southern Literary Messenger (July, 1836), rpt. in
Bradley, Beatty, Long ed., The American Tradition in
Literature, 3rd ed. (New York- ! Norton, 1956) , p ~ . 8 ” 80.
23. Works, VII, 77 (Preface to Shakespeare).
24. Clifford, p. 98.
25. A Voyage to Abyssinia (London, 1735), p. vii.
26. Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays (Berkeley:
University of California Press!! 1965) , _p . 135 .
27. Bronson, p. 132.
28. W.B,C, Watkins, Perilous Balance (Princeton:
Princeton University Press"! T9397” ! p. 57. Later studies of
Johnson's religion, by Maurice Quinlan (Samuel Johnson:
A Layman's Religion (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1964) and Chester Chapin (The Religious Thought of
Samuel Johnson (Ann Arbor: UniversTty of Michigan Press,
1968).tend to discount the "fear” and "gloom.”
41
29. The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Murphy,
12 vols. (London: Luke Hansard & Sons, 1810), II, 307.
30. Johnson, Works (Oxford, 1825), IX, 314
(Sermon III).
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 312.
33. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a distinguished
feminist herself, describes what happened one day when the
House of Lords decided to exclude the ’ ’ fair sex” from the
auditor’s gallery: "A tribe of dames resolved to shew on
this occasion, that neither men nor laws could resist them.
. . . These Amazons now shewed themselves qualified for the
duty even of foot-soldiers; they stood there till five in
the afternoon, without either sustenance or evacuation,
every now and then playing vollies of thumps, kicks, and
raps against the door, with so much violence that the
speakers in the House were scarce heard.” The Complete
Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband
XOxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) , II~7 135-36 (to the
Countess of Pomfret, March, 1739).
34. Boswell reports that upon hearing Irene read aloud
at a house he was visiting, "he left the room; and, some
body having asked him the reason of this, he replied, ’Sir,
I thought it had been better.Life, IV, 5.
42
CHAPTER III
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, 1739-1742
Johnson's early and middle life was hardly a
sheltered one. He became fully aware of the psychological
effects of poverty and deprivation, economic and emotional,
in the long, arduous climb from poverty and neglect to
security and fame. But although he had not been protected
from grief and disappointment in the Midlands, he certainly
never could have foreseen the squalor and brutality of the
large capital city to which he first came at the age of 28.
Joseph Wood Krutch describes the misanthropy Johnson must
have felt all around him when he first arrived in London in
1737:
No one seems to have considered the possibility of
making the city itself clean or orderly or safe.
People aimed at no more than measures of individual
self-protection and must have lived there almost as
an explorer lives in a jungle, surrounded by savages
and intent only on taking every possible precaution
against intimate contact with the barbarity and
infection which reigned almost undisputed.!
In London, Johnson took work as a literary drudge
for Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine, having just been
rebuffed in his efforts to get Irene produced. Joining
Cave's team of industrious journalists, he came into contact
with a motley group of men and women, many of whom shared
the indignation of finding themselves condemned to the
43
dreary reek of Grub Street, bitterly resenting past
failure. The bizarre Richard Savage who was, or claimed to
be, the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield by
her lover Earl Rivers was pre-eminently one who must have
inflamed Johnson's naturally rebellious temperament. It is
not difficult to see why a young man's defiance took the
form of a plunge into violent partisan politics. According
to Arthur Murphy, "Johnson has been often heard to relate,
that he and Savage walked round Grosvenor Square till four
in the morning; in the course of their conversation reform
ing the world, dethroning princes, establishing new forms
of government, and giving laws to the several states of
Europe, till, fatigued at length with their legislative
office, they began to feel the want of refreshment; but
2
could not muster up more than fourpence half-penny."
Johnson later told Sir Joshua Reynolds that "one night in
particular, when Savage and he walked round St. James's
Square for want of a lpdging, they were not at all
depressed by their situation; but in high spirits and
brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several
hours, inveighed against the minister, and 'resolved they
3
would stand by their country. "'
Johnson's attack on Walpole's government, among
other "evils" he felt to be connected with London's
degeneracy, is understandable in psychological terms since
the diabolism he describes around him must have been in
44
part a projection of his own frustration and impatience.
Donald J. Greene accounts for Johnson's early political
writings as largely the consequence of a young man's
irritation with the world:
. . . one must imagine the young Johnson newly arrived
in London, sore at the neglect of the world, repelled
by the ugliness of city life, and homesick for the
gentler scenes of the Midlands. Through the instrumen
tality of Savage, or Hervey, or Guthrie, or the
Craftsman, there is revealed to Johnson the appalling
wickedness of Walpole's regime, which is responsible
for the sad state of a world in which "slow rises
worth." The young man's eyes are opened. He eagerly
seizes on Walpolian inequities and uses them as pegs
on which to hang his own griefs: bribery and castrati
and masquerades become projections and symbols of the
Johnsonian dissatisfaction with the world . . . 4 -
As the title of this chapter suggests, Johnson becomes for
a time a "rebel without a cause," imposing his unhappiness
upon the world while estranging himself from it and any
firm sense of community conscience or moral commitment.
With Swift and Pope as obvious models, Johnson's
early political writings were diatribes denouncing the
deplorable state of his country: the alleged increase in
poverty, crime, graft, censorship, the general low state of
morality. Summoning all valiant Englishmen to reform, he
bewailed the old national vigor and simple honesty that
were fast disappearing, supposedly due to Walpole's corrupt
mismanagement. Opposition to Walpole during the twenty
years he was First Lord of the Treasury included all those
out of power who wanted in: Pulteney, Carteret, Chester
field, the elder Pitt who represented various splinter
45
groups of Whigs, old Tories, Jacobites, the Prince of
Wales’s circle, peevish city merchants who were precipitat
ing war with Spain. The Daily Gazetteer, a propaganda
sheet for Walpole's government, derisively characterized
the Opposition as "compounded of heterogeneous parties
bound together by the wisp of malice: of Jacobites, who
make a joke of the Revolution: of old Tories, who make a
joke of liberty: of new Tories who make a joke of the old
ones: of discontented Whigs, who make a joke of the true
ones: and of discarded courtiers, who make a joke of all
5
things ever since they became jokes themselves." Embit
tered by this kind of smug mockery that laughed in the face
of some serious movements to reform, Johnson was drawn to
the Opposition with the enthusiasm of an angry young man.
While he might have been labeled a "radical" or
"liberal," Johnson's socio-political attitudes when he
first came to London represent those of the enlightened
intellectual of the time. Following fundamental Lockean
assumptions, he believed in the "law of nature," that even
before government existed men were free, independent, and
equal in the enjoyment of unalienable rights, chief among
them being life, liberty, and property. The function of
government was to preserve this natural freedom as much as
possible by contracting a "trust" between individuals to be
exercised solely for the good of the community. Men in
society thus surrender certain rights in return for
46
protection of the rest and their subjection is based upon a
stable, conservative constitution grounded in historical
6
precedent. Johnson's affiliation with hard core rabble-
rousers like Richard Savage must have aroused his feelings
about certain aspects of these principles, particularly
notions of almost Rousseauistic, starry-eyed liberty,
derived from the initial concept of the "law of nature":
Savage and others wanted release from what was thought to
be an oppressively moribund government under Walpole.
More and more infuriated by his neglect as a Grub
Street hack, Johnson retaliated with violent productions;
the poem London, Marrnor Norfolciense, the Vindication of
the Licensers of the Stage. Moreover, he undertook another
anti-Walpolian tract in the Gent1enian's Magazine for June,
1738 entitled "Appendix to Capt. Lemuel Gulliver’s Account
of the Famous Empire of Lilliput" to introduce the famous
series of "Debates in the Senate of Lilliput" that the
magazine ran from 1738 to 1746, for which Johnson was first
helper, reviser, then sole writer.^ Lilliputian affairs
afforded Johnson the opportunity in the first tract for a
scathing denunciation of the Walpole regime and in the
"Debates," for a more sober schooling in the art of
political analysis. As a parliamentary "reporter," he
acquired firsthand knowledge of important controversial
issues of the day by recording and elaborating speeches on
both sides about, for example, the removal of Walpole, the
__________________________________________________________________________4Z
state of the armed forces, foreign relations, trade and
commerce, and the regulation of drinking and alcoholism.
In this occupation, Johnson must have realized after a time
how little effect firebrand rhetoric will have in alleviat
ing real distress, and that speculative moral dissertations
about real problems do not give answers but merely raise
more questions. Indeed, at the start of this early period
in London, Johnson was a kind of frustrated utopian with
high ideals and an acute sense of right and wrong that
bristled easily under the turpitude he discovered around
him.
He was as well a frustrated playwright, having,
like other ambitious young writers, arrived in the big
city, manuscript in hand, and having failed to get his play
produced. Seeing with how little wisdom the world is
governed, Johnson added his own moral disquisitions to the
"Debates." It is possible to consider many sections of the
"Debates" as creative literature, communicating Johnson's
opinions about the major political and ethical problems of
the age. Beginning as a young enthusiast staunchly adher
ing to the Opposition line, he must have seen how such an
inflexible position denies the actual process of political
decision, that partisan oratory only obfuscates issues, or
at most, like his own London, the State of Affairs in
Lilliput, Marmor, and the Vihdication, arouses righteous
indignation about alleged injustice, but does not lead to
48
solutions. Johnson's mellowing from the hot-headed
rhetorician of these early pieces to a more conservative
position, suspicious of ultra-libertarian points of view,
tending to encourage anarchy, is illustrated by his report
of the debate in the House of Commons over Walpole's
dismissal.
Composing page after page of invective against
Walpole which he put in the mouths of the Opposition,
Johnson at first seems to be exercising his talent for
incendiary abuse which he had developed in Marmor and the
Vindication. The speeches he reports for the opposition
seem to bear the same insurrectionary tone of the leaders
g
of the American or French Revolution:
It cannot surely be denied that such conduct
[Walpole's] may justly produce a censure more severe
than that which is intended by this motion, and that
he who has doomed thousands to the grave, who has
cooperated with foreign powers against his country,
who has protected its enemies and dishonoured its
arms, should be deprived not only of his honours but
of his life; that he should be at least stripped of
those riches which he has amassed during a long
series of prosperous wickedness, and not barely be
hindered from making new acquisitions, and increasing
his wealth by multiplying his c r i m e s . ?
Yet after more of the same furious recrimination, Johnson
reports Walpole giving a speech in his own defense, that
begins with a passage characterized by superb psychological
insight into Johnson's own plight and that of his hot
headed "comrades-in-arms."' Using metaphors that suggest
fantasy worlds and hallucination, Johnson describes what
49
seems to be mental imbalance on the part of Walpole's
opponents:
If their dream has really produced in them the terrors
which they express ... Compassion would direct us to
awaken them from so painful a delusion, to force their
eyes open and stimulate them to a clear view of their
own condition and that of the public ... to show
them that . . . every question is debated with the
utmost freedom, as before that fatal period in which
they were seized with this political delirium that has
so long harassed them . . .10
The paranoia which Johnson here implies was clearly
familiar to him through firsthand experience: he suffered
from similar "terrors" and "painful" dreams along with
Savage and others who wallowed in self-pity, cultivating
delusion of wicked persecution and fabricating pleasing
schemes of utopian emancipation. Having abandoned them
selves to "political delirium" or imaginary worlds bearing
little relation to the real one, they needed to be
awakened, as Johnson puts it, to "a clear view of their own
condition and that of the public," Johnson's occupation as
parliamentary reporter taught him to study political reali
ties, to analyze both sides of an issue and then concede
that in many cases there is "the conclusion, in which
nothing is concluded." The turning point in Johnson's
political attitudes, from fiery partisan devotee to
mellowed conservative who doubted easy solutions and
examined many points of view, seems to have occurred during
Johnson's first years in London. In this training ground
for pragmatic wisdom, Johnson's apprenticeship as
50
parliamentary reporter helped him to grow up, to abandon
the impulsive, sometimes outrageous ardors of youth for a
more mature perspective on the real world.
While it is true that Johnson changed some of his
early political opinions, it is worthwhile to look back at
his early heated writings. These help to dispose of
Boswell's popular stereotype of Johnson as an old man, a
pompous "Tory reactionist" bigot, and reveal him as a
contentious young troublemaker, a "rebel without a
cause,antagonized by what he considered establishment
tyranny. In London, published in May, 1738, Johnson blasts
forth with an attack on the Walpole administration, on
insidious foreign infiltrators, and on popular vices of the
day. The "imitation" of the satires of Juvenal or Horace
was a well established tradition in the post-Restoration
era, going back to Oldham and Dryden and continued with
great effectiveness by Pope. The form was not so much a
translation or faithful line-by-line rendering of the
original as a set of variations on a theme by Horace or
Juvenal, an adjustment of thought and expression from the
Latin verse to modern scenes and instances.
London begins with the scene of "injured Thales"
standing on the banks of the Thames waiting for the boat
that will take him "from vice and London far" to the
12
peaceful shores of Wales. With vigorous invective packed
into measured couplets and through agitating, emphatic
51
language, Thales enumerates the vicious degradation of city
life:
Here malice, rapine, accident conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead.
Johnson's descriptions seethe with the saeva indignatio of
satire's most distinguished practitioners, Swift and Pope.
London particularly resembles Pope's One Thousand Seven
Hundred and Thirty Eight, published the same month.
According to Hawkins, George Lyttelton carried Johnson's
anonymously published poem "in rapture to Mr. Pope, who,
having read it, commended it highly, and was very importu
nate with Dodsley [the publisher] to know the author's
13
name." After sending out inquiries, all Pope was able to
discover was that the author was someone named Johnson and
that he was an obscure man to which Pope replied, "He will
soon be deterre. But while Pope's praise was generous
and there is a noticeable similarity here between Pope's
work and Johnson's, still London must be classified, as
most critics agree, "a young man's poem,"^~* not to be
equated with Pope's and later Johnson's own more considered
and mature productions. In London, Johnson's descriptions,
while vivid enough, sometimes seem to be there for their
own belligerent sakes, not unified into the rhetorical
16
construction that makes for best satire.
52
Johnson’s Thales is just not definite enough to
develop the rhetorical ethos that is needed in fine satire
and his perception of evil everywhere heavily outweighs the
possibility of good, so that he seems merely to be express
ing feeble escapism. Pope’s spokesman, on the other hand,
reveals himself as a dramatic character deeply engaged in
feelings that have built up throughout the poem, intensely
exhibiting the "strong Antipathy of Good to Bad";
When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
Th' Affront is mine, my Friend, and should be yours.
Mine, as a Friend to ev’ry worthy mind; y i
And mine as Man, who feel for all mankind.
Pope's speaker assumes the heroic stature of public
defender, of the community conscience, expressing a recog
nizable moral code. He strongly enforces the ethical
values held dear by that community of good people who wish
to exclude evil from the public weal.
Pope's own note to 1738 explains that he wrote the
poem as a "protest" against the corruption of the times,
and while he realizes its ineffectualness against shameless
depravity, still "he had reason to be satisfied with the
approbation of good men, and the testimony of his own
18
conscience." Pope’s poem breathes assurance that his
attacks are justly motivated, that he is secure in the
knowledge of right and therefore eminently qualified to
promulgate its cause. Johnson's, however, seems to lack
this assurance. Not that he neglects to give moral
53
precepts, but next to Pope’s "strong Antipathy of Good to
Bad," Johnson's language is pale by comparison. He is
seemingly overwhelmed by diabolical denizens who exploit
and persecute poor, frail Britons, pursuing them until they
flee into exile.
Unlike Pope's more settled and confident spokesman
who will "feel for all mankind" with a positive commitment
to uphold truth and virtue, Johnson's seems to thrive on
negative feelings of pain and humiliation. We are told of
the "public crimes" of statesmen and courtiers, of wealthy
Orgilio's "social guilt," of villainous foreign parasites
and beguilers, of gruesome atrocities committed by street
criminals. The closest Johnson comes to supporting
virtue's cause is to conjure up visions of a bygone golden
age, and these are dull when compared to his vigorous,
sweeping account of corruption at the heart of British
life. The message of Johnson's London in many ways
reflects that "political delirium" which he later came to
repudiate when creating Walpole's speech of self-
justification in the "Debates."
The "pursuing horrors" of city life in London are
then to some extent fabrications of a disillusioned,
unsettled young man whose high ideals were shattered by
contact with harsh reality and who retaliated with scornful
diatribes against the status quo. While the older, more
experienced Pope could present believable examples of both
54
wickedness and virtue in his work, not minimizing the power
of wickedness, yet strengthening confidence in what is
right, Johnson, as a scourging young protestor, could
merely feel hurt and disappointment. His poem dwells on
these and avoids strong affirmative values. The combina
tion of pent-up anger and insecurity had so lowered his
self-esteem that he could not see the good for the evil and
consequently he neglected for a time the cultivation of a
sturdy, realistic moral and mental philosophy. Like many
later hippies or bohemians, he was hotly rebellious against
prevailing authority because of rage that accumulated with
little outlet and was complicated by a weakened ego or lack
of self-respect. Unable to exploit their environment
efficiently for opportunities for gratification--work,
love, play--these downtrodden "outsiders" vent their
hostility against the systems they think have entrapped and
frustrated them.
Magnifying the. crimes of the government and
denouncing the pollution of city life probably eased
Johnson's humiliating sense of failure, but he paid the
price of a benumbing, short-sighted surveillance of folly
and disgrace. As a "rebel without a cause," he seemed-to
be beating his head against a stone wall without any hope
or direction for escape. Moreover, he was prevented from
knowing life's infinite variety, which he later came to
savor deliciously. As an older man, Johnson insists to
55
Boswell: "Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual,
who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is
tired of London, he is tired of life: for there is in
19
London all that life can afford."
In spite of its limitations, London nevertheless
conveys a powerful impression of the sinister, threatening
atmosphere that Johnson found in the city. In one passage
he brilliantly describes the way cunning, treacherous
foreigners beguile overly-credulous poor Englishmen:
For arts like these preferred, admired, caressed
They first invade your table, then your breast;
Explore your secrets with insidious art,
Watch the weak hour, and ransack all the heart;
Then soon your ill-placed confidence repay,
Commence your lords, and govern or betray.
By "invasion," Johnson seems to mean a kind of assault or
rape, with all the associations of physical and spiritual
violation. While the innocent, trusting Englishman has
amiably received him, the foreigner has been seeking out
vulnerable defenses, vigilant for the signal to attack. He
will "ransack all the heart" by using that "ill-placed
confidence" once so generously offered, capturing his
helpless victim and compelling absolute submission.
The final sections of London builds momentum,
intensifying the sense of imminent disaster, and finally
arriving at the most terrifying portrayal of malignity
where:
Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair,
The midnight murd'rer bursts the faithless bar;
Invades the sacred hour of silent rest,
And leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast,
_____________________________________________________5ji
While referring to the current crime wave, Johnson creates
a nightmare of absolute invasion, of total helplessness
where malevolence and ruin violate blessed refuge, "the
sacred hour of silent rest." As the poem reaches its
climax with a murderer stabbing a man to death as he
sleeps, Johnson implies that the spirit of evil can over
power even a good man’s most intimate and consecrated
thoughts, penetrating to his vital, virtuous heart and
bursting it. At this point the poem abruptly ends by
invoking "Alfred’s golden reign," "Fair Justice," and
Thales’s pledge to "virtue's cause.” One suspects that it
is probably poor Johnson’s virtuous heart that has been
pierced, is bleeding, and sorely in need of repair.
Johnson continued his virulent blasts at the
Walpole administration in the spring of 1739, with the
publication of Marmor Norfolciense; or, Ah Essay on an
Ancient Prophetical Inscription in Monkish Rhyme Lately
Discovered near Lynn; by Probus Britanicus. Adopting the
well-known device of discovering a medieval inscription on
a long-buried block of marble, Johnson assumes the voice of
an obtuse, blundering commentator who proceeds to decipher
and translate the "cryptic" prophesy into eighteenth-
century doggerel along with his own foolish annotations.
The meaning of "To Posterity," however, is clear enough to
the reader as another inflammatory attack on contemporary
affairs, and the commentator's stupidity only aggravates
the issues. c-7
The persona whom Johnson creates in Marmor
Norfolciense is very similar to the one in his other polit
ical pamphlet published in May, 1739, A Compleat Vindica
tion of the Licensees of the Stage from the Malicious and
Scandalous Aspersions of Mr. Brooke, Author of Gustavus
Vasa, with a Proposal for Making the Office of Licenser
more Extensive and Effectual; by an Impartial Hand. Both
characters, the commentator of Marmor and the "vindicator1 '
of the government censors who refuse to allow Brooke's
"patriotic" play to be produced, exhibit that Swiftian
grotesquerie, the perversion of moral, cultural, and
spiritual values, that attempts to entice the reader into
their lunacy. Their fraudulent obscuration of truth
reveals them as moral voids, as insubstantial as the mad
schemes and ambitions they concoct, separating them from
the rest of human kind. For example, at the end of Marmor
Norfolciense, the commentator realizes that his explication
of the prophesy may not be complete and indisputable, so
that he suggests the institution of a "Society of Commen
tators" composed of thirty of the most distinguished
geniuses; around, half from the legal profession and half
from the military. He goes on to enumerate exorbitant
plans and descriptions, finally choosing for the site of
the "Society," Greenwich Hospital, an eighteenth-century
convalescent home for veterans of the war. He modestly
proposes:
58
If the establishment of this society be thought a
matter of too much importance to be deferred till the
new buildings are finished, it will be necessary to
make room for their reception, by the expulsion of
such of the seamen as have no pretensions to the
settlement there, but fractured limbs, loss of eyes,
or decayed constitutions, who have lately been
admitted in such numbers, that it is now scarce
possible to accommodate a nobleman's groom, footman,
or postilion, in a manner suitable to the dignity of
his profession, and the original design of the
foundation. 2 0
The malignity of this character who will casually
turn out suffering victims whose misfortune it was to fall
in defense of their country closely approximates the
abysmal horror latent within the mind of Swift's Hack in
A Tale of a Tub: they will sacrifice basic human feeling
and understanding for the propagation of their insane self-
aggrandizement. Likewise Johnson's Vindicator protests the
grievances of those who disagree with his demented prin
ciple of absolute authority:
Unhappy would it be for men in power, were they always
obliged to publish the motives of their conduct. What
is power, but the liberty of acting without being
accountable? The advocates for the licensing act have
alleged, that the lord Chamberlain has always had
authority to prohibit the representation of a play for
just reasons. Why then did we call in all our force
to procure an act of parliament? Was it to enable him
to do what he has always done? to confirm an authority
which no man attempted to impair, or pretend to dis
pute? No, certainly: our intention was to invest him
with new privileges, and to empower him to do that
without reason, which with reason he could do before.2 1
With the Vindicator, Johnson portrays the kind of mental
paralysis that sneers at humanity, fostering confusion and
eventual insensibility to the most essential human
processes. Like Swift's, Johnson's imaginary spokesmen
59
scorn such worthy human accomplishments as respect for
reason or sympathy and care for others, instead devoting
themselves to the promotion of vicious self-regarding
ideals and ambitions.
Marmor Norfolciense and the Compleaf Vindication
probably represent Johnson’s most rebellious, profusely
contemptuous writing. In Swiftian vein, he savagely
denigrates his opponents by prodigiously exaggerating their
faults. Disdainful of anything that does not measure up to
his austere, uncompromising judicial code, he abandons
himself to the portrayal of hard-core malevolence. Johnson
indeed seems to be remembering this hostile period of his
youth when he later comes to write his curiously derogatory
Life of Swift. Here he seems to be criticizing Swift for
that same vindictive arrogance, that spiteful petulance
that lashes out in retaliation for wounded vanity that he
himself once so blindly promoted:
He seems to have wasted his life in discontent, by the
rage of neglected pride and the languishment of
unsatisfied desire. He is querulous and fastidious,
arrogant and malignant; he scarcely speaks of himself
but with indignant lamentations, of of others but with
insolent superiority when he is gay, and with angry
contempt when he is gloomy. From the letters that pass
between him and Pope it might be inferred that they,
with Arbuthnot and Gay, had engrossed all the under
standing and virtue of mankind, that their merits
filled the world; or that there was no hope of more.
They shew the age involved in darkness, and shade the
picture with sullen emulation.2 2
In other places in the Life, Johnson describes
Swift's personality as "childish," displaying "fits of
60
pique." Evidently Johnson came to attach a pathogenic
sense to Swift *s--and of course his own--antagonistic,
moody estrangement. Johnson as "rebel without a cause" in
this respect very closely approximates his modern-day
counterparts: the James Dean "loner" personality of the
nineteen-fifties or the "drop-out" hippie mentality of the
sixties and seventies.
Johnson’s brooding jeremiads diminished as he
started writing the "Debates" and channeling his energy in
other directions by journalism and writing biography. The
chief of Johnson’s early biographies, the Life of S ava g e,
perhaps represents his crucial renunciation of a childishly
insufficient set of values, but its striking ambivalences
also show the painful effort he underwent in order to
abandon such an easy defense against the world. Realizing
that self-pity only nurtures more self-pity and wears away
more valuable, progressive opportunities for satisfaction
in life, Johnson broke out of his not unpleasing melancholy
indulgences to acquire a more substantial moral and mental
system. Instead of cherishing and imitating agents of
folly, he began to view them objectively, though sympathet
ically, trying to understand their aberrations and attempt
ing to apply the proper therapy.
Johnson’s treatment of the astronomer in Rasselas
will illustrate his compassion for another’s trouble and
the healing procedures which he develops. Even when
61
dealing with dangerous threats to the social order, as in
some case histories in the Rambler and Idler, Johnson
presents these unbalanced specimens not as grim menaces, in
the Swiftian manner, but as suffering victims of neurosis
who elicit pity instead of fear: the insidious malice
designed to entice others into their own lunacy, found in
Swift's Hack or the speakers in Johnson's Marmor and
Vindication, is missing in the sad dunderheads of Johnson's
later portraits. The deranged behavior of Suspirius, the
"screech-owl" or prophet of evil in Rambler 59; of Squire
Bluster, the oppressor in Rambler 142; or of Dick Minim,
the critic in Idlers 6 Q, 61 is sorrowful and ridiculous,
rather than threatening. As Johnson matured, he was able
to transfer his pity for himself to pity for others,
mitigating an insecure ‘ self-center ednes: s and fostering a
reliable sense of self-esteem. Instead of shooting first
and asking questions later, Johnson began to probe and
analyze political and ethical problems with a sure, steady
hand and a mind replete with positive convictions.
In the Life of Lyttelton, Johnson describes the
character of a young man as having "something of that
indistinct and headstrong ardour for liberty which a man of
genius always catches when he enters the world, and always
23
suffers, to cool as he passes forward." By "liberty"
Johnson implies that unruly, defiant passion--the romantic
inclination to be a "rebel without a cause"--that he needed
62
to repudiate in order to grow up or "pass forward" in the
world. In "cooling" his hot-headed rebelliousness which
prevents advancement and merely causes mental development
to stagnate, Johnson "passes forward" to a realistic
appraisal of his environment and of opportunities to
exploit it to the full.
63
Notes
1. Samuel Johnson (New York: Holt, 1944), p. 37.
2. Johnsonian Miscellanies, I, 371.
3. Quoted in Clifford, p. 203.
4. Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson
(1960; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y. : Kennikat Press), p. 91.
5. Daily Gazetteer, July 7, 1739.
6 . John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government. See
especially Chapter 11^ "Of the State of Nature,'* and
Chapter VIII, "Of the Beginning of Political Societies."
7. The standard reference is Benjamin B. Hoover,
Johnson1s Parliamentary Reporting (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1953).
8 . Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, p. 126.
9. Gentleman's Magazine, March, 1742, p. 133.
10. Gent1eman1s Magazine, April, 1743, pp. 180-81.
11. The phrase, "Rebel Without a Cause," is the title
of one of the chapters in Robert Lindner, The Fifty-Minute
Hour (New York: Rinehart, 1955).
12. Although Hawkins thought that Thales represented
Richard Savage, both Boswell and the Rev. John Hussey,
another friend of Johnson's, denied this. See Works, VI,
p. 47 for Hussey's annotation.
13. The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bertram Davis
(New York: Macmillan', TW STJ~ p3 35.
14* Life, I, 128-29.
15. Clifford, Young Samuel Johnson, p. 187.
16. See especially Mary Claire Randolph, "The Struc
tural Design of Formal Verse Satire," and Maynard Mack,
"The Muse of Satire" in Ronald Paulson, ed. , Satire: Modern
Essays in Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
197TT:
64
17. Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey
Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 293 (11. 199-
200, 203-204).
18. Williams, p. 294.
19. Boswell, Life of Johnson, III, 178.
20. The Works of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols. (Troy, N.Y.:
Pafraets BooFTJo. , 1903), XIII, 3 0 1 ' . "
21. Works (Pafraets ed.), XII, 287.
22. Lives of the Poets, III, 61-62.
23. Lives of the Poets, III, 446.
CHAPTER IV
THE INQUIRER INTO HUMAN NATURE, 1742-1744
Whether to see life as it is will give us much
consolation, I know not; but the consolation which
is drawn from truth, if any there be, is solid and
durable; that which may be derived from error must
be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive.
--Letters, No. 116
Taking his mind off the political delirium he had
described in earlier writings, Johnson wrote a number of
scattered pieces for the Gentleman's Magazine which
appeared in the 1740s and early 1750s. These consisted
largely of biography, which Johnson treated as the psychol
ogy of historical figures and events. While his research
methods were not particularly innovative,^ Johnson’s
remarks are full of acute observations that show the
gradual maturing of his mental processes, and insights into
a psychological theory derived from the study of the lives
of great men.
During this period, Johnson seemed especially
concerned about the problem of historical evidence: to
recognize the truth by scrutinizing thinking and feeling
and detecting true motivations from the myriad of false
rationalizations people impose upon themselves and others.
As in the psychoanalytic process, Johnson attempts in his
66
biographies to find out which of a person's ideas and
beliefs have an emotional matrix and which are only
convenient excuses not rooted in his character structure
and therefore insubstantial pretexts for behavior.
Probably Johnson's earliest lives do not so remarkably
illustrate this technique as do the Life of Savage, various
later character sketches in the Rambler, and certain of the
Lives of the Poets, notably the lives of Milton, Dryden,
and Pope. Yet these first biographies do show the initial
stages of Johnson's irresistible urge to analyze human
nature.
In a review in the Gentleman's Magazine of
February, 1742, of the Account of the Conduct of the
Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, Johnson directly confronts
the difficulty of dealing with the narrator of historical
memoirs. He explains that such a recorder, undoubtedly
possessed with the "ambition of being distinguished from
the herd of mankind," may be tempted to distort the facts
in his favor. "Every man that is solicitous about the
esteem of others, is, in a great degree, desirous of his
own, and makes, by consequence, his first apology to him
self; and when he has once deceived his own heart, which
is, for the greatest part, too easy a task, he propagates
the deceit in the world, without reluctance or conscious-
2
ness of falsehood." Here Johnson explains that critical
self-evaluation and the resulting ability to distinguish
67
between genuine and false experience are essential elements
in knowing the truth, that self-deceit, a dangerously
comfortable means of avoiding reality, detaches one's
feelings--"his own heart"--from his stated beliefs and
convictions about what has happened to him.
The search for truth must take place therefore,
says Johnson, in the mind of the student of history. Like
the competent psychoanalyst, "distrust is a necessary
qualification" for attending to the narrative at hand.
"Distrust quickens his discernment of different degrees of
probability, animates his search after evidence, and,
perhaps, heightens his pleasure at the discovery of truth;
for truth, though not always obvious, is generally discov
erable; nor is it any where more likely to be found than in
private memoirs . . ." Realizing that subjective convic
tion is by no means a sufficient criterion of fact, both
the historian and psychoanalyst must delve to the center of
a subject's thinking and feeling and behavior to explore
their connection. Speaking of historical characters,
Johnson writes, "The inquirer into human nature may obtain
an intimate acquaintance with [them] . . . and discover the
4
relationship between their minds and their actions." As
in the theory of psychoanalysis, Johnson gives the concept
of truth a new dimension by showing that its search is for
phenomena not outside man but in man himself: his
"relationship" between "minds" and "actions" refers to that
search which often finds the two closely integrated. / - «
In order to begin his truth-seeking inquiry into
human nature effectively, Johnson had to come to terms with
the enthusiastic falsifications which he earlier subscribed
to during his rebellious period. It is possible to see a
maturation in critical and interpretive ability going
through Johnson’s early lives, bringing him from propa
gandist hack journalists to the realm of creative litera
ture where he pierces some of the most subtle intricacies
in the human soul. Since several of Johnson’s early lives
are largely derivative, it is valuable to view some
Johnsonian additions and deletions to see how he changes
his emphasis from fiery partisan to objective situational
analyst. The lives of Sarpi, Blake, and Drake probably
represent his more doctrinaire, pedestrian journalism with
some interesting psychological interpolations in the latter
two. The Life of Boerhaave and some other lives of doctors
begin to reflect his stand on important mental processes,
but the Life of Savage in 1744 remains his most accom
plished psychological writing to that date.
The Life of Sarpi, published November, 1738, was
part of Johnson’s involvement with a translation of the
Council of Trent under the auspices of Cave. The project
was later abandoned, but the surviving Life shows how
Johnson engaged his readers by appealing to the sense of
community spirit in his English audience. He somewhat
slants his account of Sarpi’s activities in order to bias
69
his readers against what was considered the abuse of papal
authority. Radically condensing his material from Le
Courayer's French biography, he focuses upon Sarpi's open
rebellion against the Pope, ignoring some important
subsidiary causes that led to the break.^ The Pope's
maxims, which Johnson lists almost verbatim, omitting the
£
ones difficult to controvert, he calls "shocking, weak,
pernicious, and absurd; which did not require the abilities
or learning of Father Paul, to demonstrate their falsehood,
and destructive tendency." Gradually drawing his reader
into the controversy, he arouses his indignation with the
account of five hired assassins who attacked the good
Father Sarpi and "gave him no less than fifteen stabs,
three of which wounded him in such a manner that he was
left for dead."^
More of what could be called chauvinistic indigna
tion is evoked by Johnson in the lives of Blake and Drake,
which he wrote to inspire criticism of the ministry's
feeble conduct of the War of Jenkins' Ear. At the begin
ning of the Life of Blake, he extols Britain's former
naval greatness: "At a time when a nation is engaged in a
war with an enemy, whose insults, ravages, and barbarities,
have long called for vengeance, an account of such English
commanders as have merited the acknowledgements of
posterity, by extending the powers and raising the honour
of their country, seems to be no improper entertainment for
70
9
our readers." It might be suspected that Johnson's
militancy represents more of that angry enthusiasm he
vented against authority figures, especially in the case of
the Pope, and the lives of Blake and Drake are merely more
feeble escapism to a golden age where people were surer and
braver than in present times, when they waver for lack of
proper leadership. Certainly Walpole's reluctant war of
Jenkins' Ear with Spain was forced upon him by the Opposi
tion. Yet Johnson's accounts of the historical characters
whom he chooses become more multi-faceted than propagandist
pieces like Marmor and the Vindication.
While using popular issues like religious contro
versy and the war effort as psychological ploys to attract
attention, Johnson strikes out in other directions as he
begins to analyze rather than dogmatize about the events of
the past, attempting to discover true precepts for living.
The lives of Blake and Drake, both published in the
Gentleman's Magazine in 1740, were lively, suspenseful
narratives of the two admirals' exploits, describing
important voyages to faraway lands, and extracted primarily
from one or two biographical sources.^ But Johnson's
accounts also contain psychological insights that show his
thoughtful weighing of the evidence in order to discover
how individuals and groups of people order their lives.
In the Life of Blake, Johnson seems to present a
cyclical view of human nature which will consistently
71
appear in later writings, a tendency to look at men's
actions in terms of changes or vicissitudes that succes
sively complement each other. Commenting upon the general
revolution in affairs of state in Blake's time--the Civil
War and its aftermath--Johnson says, "Anger and distress
produce unanimity and bravery, virtues which are seldom
unattended with success; but success is the parent of
pride, and pride of jealousy and faction; faction makes way
for calamity, and happy is that nation whose calamities
renew their unanimity. Such is the rotation of interests,
that equally tend to hinder the total destruction of a
people, and to obstruct an exorbitant increase in power.
Later, in Rambler articles, Johnson refines his
cyclical theory of human nature by putting it on an
individual rather than a collective basis, referring it to
the individual's demand for new gratifications: "Our sense
of delight is in a great measure comparative, and arises at
once from the sensations which we feel, and those which we
remember: Thus ease after torment is pleasure for a time,
and we are very agreeably recreated, when the body, chilled
with the weather, is gradually recovering its natural
tepidity; but the joy ceases when we have forgot the cold,
we must fall below ease again, if we desire to rise above
12
it, and purchase new felicity by voluntary pain."
Deploring the stagnation which comes from idleness or the
attempt to preserve life in a state of neutrality or
72
indifference, Johnson understands the indispensability of
fluctuations in everyday life, howsoever painful. One of
the most horrendous states of being, according to Johnson,
is the rust of the soul or the putrefaction of life, which
must be avoided by regulating the mind to accept shifting
circumstances. These variations, he believes, "endear each
other; such are the changes that keep the mind in action;
we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire
13
something else, and begin a new persuit."
In the Life of Drake, we find not only Johnson's
cyclical theory of human nature, but also another important
principle formulated as early as the preface to Father
Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia--that people do not basically
differ in their emotional make-up from one form of society
to another:
Happiness and misery are equally diffused through all
states of human life. In civilized countries, where
regular policies have secured the necessaries of life,
ambition, avarice, and luxury, find the mind at leisure
for their reception, and soon engage it in new pur
suits; pursuits that are to be carried on by incessant
labour, and whether vain or successful, produce anxiety
and contention. Among savage nations, imaginary wants
find indeed no place; but their strength is exhausted
by necessary toils, and their passions agitated not by
contests about superiority, affluence, or precedence,
but by perpetual care for the present day, and by fear
of perishing for want of food. 14-
Believing that a healthy life in any society
involves the constant anticipation of change, Johnson also
tackles in the Life of Drake the popular notion of the
"happy savage," criticizing fallacious reasoners about
73
primitive virtues, such as Bolingbroke and Pope in the
Essay on Man. Much like Milton in Areopagtitica, who could
not "praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised
and unbreathed," Johnson condemns those who "confound
innocence with the mere incapacity of guilt. He that never
saw, or heard, or thought of strong liquors, cannot be
15
proposed as a pattern of sobriety." Again Johnson
insists upon the challenge of life's vexation and irregu
larities, of sallying out in the dust and heat, as Milton
puts it, to release oneself in the living process.
"The Life of Dr. Herman Boerhaave, late Professor
of Physic in the University of Leyden in Holland" appeared
in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1739 but was later revised
and enlarged for inclusion in Robert James's Medicinal
Pictionary in 1744, along with a dozen or so other
biographical entries by Johnson on ancient Greek, Roman,
16
and Arabian physicians. In these lesser articles, the
most striking passages emphasize Johnson's advocacy of
empiricism, the belief that receptivity to sensory experi
ence is the foundation of knowledge and happiness.^
Johnson agrees that the cause of much intellectual as well
as emotional suffering is the cloud of speculation men feel
compelled to impose upon their lives, which inevitably
confuses and misleads them. Especially when dealing with
the works of ancient writers who sought knowledge through
Aristotelian and scholastic logic, unaided by experience,
74
Johnson felt obliged to challenge such books, which he says
1 O
"have always been found fallacious and uncertain Guides."
He repeatedly praises and blames his subjects according to
their openness to empirical methods.
Johnson describes the propensity of the Greek
physician, Actuarius, to systems and theories, then
disapprovingly remarks, "As the authority of Actuarius is
not sufficiently established, to mislead any of our readers,
it is not necessary to separate with great accuracy his
errors from his just notions. I shall only observe, that
theory may make physic easy, but its success must arise
19
from experience." In the life of Archagathus, a cele
brated Roman physician, he commends Marcus Cato, another
medical man, for his adherence to that "natural physic, or
simple empiricism, which we may well suppose to have been
practised by the infant world, when men made their first
20
appearance on it." But Johnson censures other aspects of
Cato's practice for superstitious peculiarities that he
mocks: "if they will not inform the Judgment, [these
speculations] will, at least, excite the laughter of every
thinking person . . .he has given us an inimitable formula
of words to be pronounced for the cure of a dislocation or
fracture . . .
Writing about the pioneering French botanist,
Tournefort, Johnson on the other hand applauds his ardent
desire for empirical knowledge. Johnson narrates
75
Tournefort’s clandestine and often dangerous trips to
obscure places to satisfy his curiosity, much as Thoreau
describes his wild excursions through New England, combing
the countryside for new sights and compiling this observ
able data for his survey of natural history. Telling the
story of the botanist’s once being taken for a robber and
almost stoned to death, Johnson rather dismisses the
perilous episode as all in the line of duty, since "What
hardships will not a mind, actuated with an ardent and
insatiable desire of knowledge, undergo for satisfac-
22
faction?" Johnson’s defense of Tournefort’s extreme zeal
amusingly calls to mind his own hobby of making ether,
which presented some potential danger to the Thrales’ home.
In his Life of Boerhaave, Johnson most concisely
presents his arguments in favor of experimental knowledge,
vigorously approving the Dutch physician’s empirical
methods and his condemnation "with just severity, upon
those arrogant philosophers, who are too easily disgusted
with the slow methods of obtaining true notions by frequent
experiments, and who, possessed with too high an opinion of
their own abilities, rather choose to consult their own
imaginations, than enquire into nature, and are better
pleased with the charming amusement of forming hypotheses,
23
than the toilsome drudgery of making observations." The
yalue of affirming the empirical method and its sometimes
even more significant corollary of negating rationalism--
76
belief in the powers of the human mind unaided by experi-
ence--cannot be over-stressed in attempting to determine
Johnson's psychological theories. Certainly the most
decrepit human specimens in Johnson's writings suffer from
what might be called the abstraction of self, erecting
elaborate metaphysical schemes and ambitions which destruc
tively isolate them from the rest of humankind. Johnson
usually and very simply refers to this phenomenon as Pride,
"an immoderate degree of self-esteem, or an over-value set
upon a man by himself, and, like most other vices, [it] is
24
founded originally upon intellectual falsehood.
Johnson had clearly formulated his ideas on
empiricism as early as his Life of Boerhaave and indeed
this principle seems uppermost in his mind as he continu
ally defends his hero against scientists whose "airy
dreams" bewilder mankind "in error and obscurity," and who
"like the Pythagoreans of old, wrapt up their secrets in
symbols and enigmatical expressions . . . because they
25
wrote not from benevolence but vanity." He treats
Boerhaave's religious convictions in a similar way, regard
ing his patience not as that of the Stoic school (a philos
ophy Johnson always views in his later works as a
deplorable condition of spiritual pride), but founded on
true religion, "not [on] vanity, not on vain reasonings,
O
but on confidence in God." Likewise Johnson discusses
Boerhaave's conception of God, whom he worshipped "as he is
77
in himself, without attempting to inquire into his nature.
. . . There he stopped, lest, by indulging his own ideas,
he should form a Deity from his own imagination, and sin by
27
falling down before him.” Like Horace in the epigraph
for the ' Rambler,
Nullius addictus jurare in verbo magistri,
Quo me cunque rapit tempestas deferor hospes.
^--Horace, Epistles , I.i. 14-15
Sworn to no master's arbitrary sway,
I range where-e'er occasion points the way.
Elphinston
Johnson looks to the liberating aspects of a principle
which frees man from the mind-forged idolatry that enslaves
him to his own illusions. It is only through empirical
procedures that man reaches outside himself to find himself
and the rich sources of his relatedness to the universe.
It has been pointed out that Johnson's portrait of
Boerhaave is a kind of ideal conception of how he saw
28
himself at that particular time in life. In his early
thirties, just beginning to slough off the effects of a
miserably impoverished background, economic and emotional,
Johnson must have looked toward a kind of imago or an
idealized likeness of a person he constructed to admire and
attempt to emulate. The tendency toward identification
with an ideal is a perfectly normal one, not to be confused
With the excessive preoccupation Johnson condemns in other
places. Boerhaave fulfilled Johnson's needs admirably
through their corresponding social circumstances and
___________78
remarkably similar physical appearances. Both men came
from poor families who could not afford to give them lavish
educations, but they broke through such obstacles, driven
by an "insatiable curiosity after knowledge."
Considering Johnson's awkward, self-conscious
bearing which emphasized a deficiency in classic good
looks, his description of Boerhaave's demeanor probably
soothed disagreeable feelings about himself, letting him
realize that a large, unpolished man need not be grotesque
but could command respect. In writing about Boerhaave's
appearance, it is almost as though Johnson is imaging how
he desired to look and act:
He was of a robust and athletic constitution of body,
so hardened by early severities, and wholesome fatigue
that he was insensible of any sharpness of air, or
inclemency of weather. He was tall, and remarkable
for extraordinary strength. There was in his air and
motion something rough and artless, but so majestic
and great at the same time, that no man ever looked
upon him without veneration, and a kind of tacit
submission to the superiority of his genius. The
vigour and activity of his mind sparkled visibly in
his eyes ... He was always cheerful, and desirous
of promoting mirth by a facetious and humorous conver
sation . . .29
As Clifford notes, the parallel breaks down when Johnson
30
makes his hero too saintly, yet all of the qualities he
names Johnson must have considered worthy of emulation.
Perhaps the most affecting of Johnson's imitations
of Boerhaave occurs in the passage on the physician's early
affliction with excruciating pains, which Johnson says
"exposed him to such sharp and tormenting application, that
79
31
the disease and remedies were equally insufferable.”
Johnson of course suffered wretchedly as a child with pain
that manifested itself physically and emotionally. As he
goes on to describe Boerhaave1s reaction to his sickness,
it is possible to discern Johnson’s own reasons for decid
ing to explore the sources of human grief: "Then it was
that his own pain taught him to commpassionate others, and
his experience of the inefficacy of the methods then in use
incited him to attempt the discovery of others more
32
certain." Like Boerhaave, Johnson "began upon himself"
to practice methods of alleviating the lifelong agony he so
movingly endured. It is for this reason sometimes diffi
cult to separate biographical elements in Johnson from his
theories of mental disorder, since his practice was indeed
limited to himself, his writings and a small group of
intimate friends. The problem of objective analysis
becomes even more provoking when approaching the Life of
Savage, perhaps the man whose actions exemplified all those
neurotic symptoms he was constantly warning against, yet
one whose memory he seemed to have cherished above many
others.
Unlike his previous lives, where Johnson ordinarily
used only a single printed source, for the Life of Savage
he had several sources including various early biographies,
anecdotes from Savage's friends, papers left behind by
Savage., an account of his trial for murder, and, most
80
important, his own intimate acquaintance with the man.33
Although Johnson undertook the project for Cave, who was
desirous of the commercial advantage in getting his account
of the sensational life out first, Johnson seems to have
taken his time. Savage's sudden death in a Bristol jail
took place on August 1, 1743, but the work was not finished
until December 14 when Johnson received his pay for the
Q /
book from Cave. The delay could be attributed to his
being engaged in other projects, notably editing the
volumes of the Harleian catalogue for Osborne and a number
of journalistic assignments for the Gentleman's Magazine.
But it is also very likely that Johnson, grieving over the
tragic loss of a dear friend, allowed himself some time for
brooding and reflection before he could bring himself to
write.
It is well known that Johnson was capable of dash
ing off prodigious amounts of copy at one time: years
later he told Boswell that he wrote "forty-eight of the
printed octavo pages of the life of Savage at a sitting
[there were only 180 pages all together], but then I sat up
35
all night." Very likely Johnson wrote most of Savage's
life during a few torrential frenzies of inspiration, a
method which accounts both for the passionate brilliance
and what has been called the factual unreliability of the
work. In poor health, indigent and depressed during the
36
autumn of 1743, Johnson must have drawn upon his own
81
unhappy condition in creating the complex personality of
his subject. Indeed, John Wain believes the Life of Savage
a vehicle for Johnson’s strong empathic attachment to his
friend or a projection of Johnson’s personality on to
Savage, attributing to him certain facets of his own
feelings, responses, and accomplishments:
Savage was an imaginative man, a poet, a wonderful
talker, and a man who, lacking an elaborate formal
education and lacking opportunities for leisured
study, had made himself creditably well read and
well informed. Johnson was all these things.
Savage was poor, insecure, sometimes even destitute.
So was Johnson. Savage was, or claimed to be,
cruelly wronged by an unnatural mother. Johnson
had his own deeply hidden and unconfessed doubts
about his mother’s love. The special plangency of
the Life of Savage arises from Johnson's profound
i denazification with, its subject. 37
Because of his exceptional affection for his
friend, Johnson was bound to have problems writing the Life
pf Savage in his chosen role of objective inquirer after
historical truth. Moreover, he must have been somewhat
baffled in deciphering that truth by means of what he had
of the Savage story itself. The Johnson who wrote so
assuredly in his review of the Conduct of the Duchess of
Mar1borpugh about how historical narrators deceive them
selves, thus emphasizing the importance of discovering the
relationship between men's minds and actions, how has to
deal with a character in which mind and action are so
sharply dissociated that no one, to this day, has been able
to solve the puzzle of Savage's bizarre tale. Indeed
Boswell's pronouncement that the world must "vibrate in i
82
a state of uncertainty as to what was the truth'1 ^ remains
39
unchallenged by even the latest scholarly investigation.
The fragmentation of Savage's personality of course
helped to intensify the mystery, making it all the more
difficult to get a clear-eyed perspective on the truth. As
his biographer, Johnson had to deal with both sharply
divergent aspects of Savage's identity: in terms of his
actions, that neurotic temperament which produced symptoms
so disturbingly resembling Johnson's own, aroused feelings
of repugnance and disgust; in terms of his mind, pity for a
poor orphan’s sorrowful plight evoked extravagantly senti
mental indulgence. Johnson approaches the problem by
incorporating elements from both aspects in his Life of
Savage, thus emphasizing the dichotomy in Savage's person
ality: between his thought and his conduct, his attractive
rationalizations for his behavior and that aberrant behavior
itself.
These contradictions are what make Johnson's Life
of Savage seem to vacillate so from condemnation to
commiseration. Moreover, Johnson himself, in the white
heat of composition, seems strangely compelled to amplify
the factual information available to him, particularly that
dealing with Savage's mother. At times his casual investi
gation of his evidence makes critics point to the factual
unreliability of the work; and admittedly he is mistaken
about certain subsidiary details and particularly about the
83
chronology in the middle section.^0 The fact that Johnson
unquestionably accepted Savage’s testimony that Mrs. Brett
was his mother also bothers critics like Krutch, who
believes the story downright trumpery and Johnson's
/ " 1
credulity "almost fatuous." No one, however, seems
willing to credit Johnson with adhering to Savage's story,
whether true or fictitious, simply because Savage believed
it so. Such an explanation does not discount the value of
reliable documentation but makes allowances for Johnson's
psychological interpretation of Savage's character,
materializing the phantom that so haunted Savage his whole
life for all to see. As historical inquirer, Johnson helps
to innovate the concept of psychological biography, which
does not merely compile a list of external events but
weighs and extrapolates from this material to discover
internal causes. As psychiatrist, Johnson in addition uses
that attribute he so commended in Boerhaave, the ability
"to compassionate others" while still painstakingly probing
for the source of the disease.
Probably Johnson's most exceptional psychological
insight in the Life of Savage is a diagnosis constantly
found in psychoneurosis: the need for punishment.
People who require this type of suffering impose it
upon themselves according to a deeply rooted emotional
syllogism--that pain can relieve the guilt caused by
repressed wishes. Franz Alexander explains the process as
_________ 8A
a "peculiar equation [by which] conscience accepts suffer
ing as a currency by which its claims can be satisfied.
After suffering, the ego's defense against alien tendencies
is diminished. In terms of the structural theory this can
be explained allegorically by saying that the ego bribes
the superego through suffering to lessen its dependence
upon the latter. Through suffering the superego's claims
are satisfied and its vigilance against repressed tenden
cies is relaxed. This explains why persons who have been
subjected to intense suffering feel that their turn has
come to do what they want and that they can therefore
A * 2
disregard convention."
This underlying psychic mechanism is implicit in
Johnson's brilliant psychological characterization of
Richard Savage. Probing the psychodynamic principles
behind that fragmentation of Savage's personality--between
what he thought and what he did, between the piteous,
woebegone waif and the criminal street derelict--Johnson
discredits Savage's lifelong rationalizations in order to
understand the devastating pathology that ultimately
destroyed him. Johnson even attempts to penetrate to the
origin of Savage's disease by manifesting that relentless,
wicked mother figure who so persecuted and enslaved him.
To appreciate Johnson's psychoanalytic procedures in the
Life of Savage, it is necessary to look closely first at
his creation of that dire "mother," then at his analysis of
85
Savage's submission to and perpetuation of the appalling
phantom, and finally at his compassion for the agony he
therapeutically attempts to alleviate in others.
It is apparent that Johnson could have had no real
information about the personal feelings of Savage's
^ 3
supposed mother, Mrs. Brett, so that his invention of
her demonic ferocity immediately calls attention to itself.
That Johnson was acutely aware of the dangerous "intoxica
tions of dominion" that parental authority may induce, is
illustrated in Rambler 148, where he deplores the inhumanity
of the parent who "may wanton in cruelty without controul"
and "may please himself with exciting terror as the
inflictor of pain; he may delight his solitude with contem
plating the extent of his power and the force of his
commands, in imagining the desire that flutter on the
tongue which is forbidden to utter them, or the discontent
which preys on the heart in which fear confines it; he may
amuse himself with new contrivances of detection, multipli
cations of prohibition, and varieties of punishment.
"44
Evidently Johnson was personally familiar with the
psychodynamics of the parent-child relationship, realizing
the lifelong suffering that could result from the internal-
45
ization of brutal, overpowering parental attitudes.
Living shackled to an impregnable sense of wrongdoing, the
person filled with guilt feelings must either inflict
86
punishment on himself or induce others to punish him. It
is important to understand that the portrait of parental
tyranny that Johnson presents in Rambler 148 and the Life
of Savage may or may not be true to life, but is a
convenient model for the exposition of unconscious mental
phenomenon. That is, in the case of the Life of Savage,
whether or not Savage's mother was really the mistress of
iniquity is irrelevant; the fact is Savage believed her so
and that fact accounts for the peculiar deviation of his
mental life.
Certainly Johnson spares no pains or drama in
making Savage's mother as foul and fiendish as possible.
According to Johnson, she is a brazen adulteress who shame
lessly flaunted her crimes in order to divorce her husband
and illegitimize her child; then barbarously abandoning
that child whom "she would look upon . . . with a kind of
resentment and abhorrence; and instead of supporting,
assisting, and defending him, delight to see him struggling
with misery; that she would take every opportunity of
aggravating his misfortunes, and obstructing his resources,
and with an implacable and restless cruelty continue her
persecution from the first hour of his life to the last."^
Further on Johnson launches into another vociferous tirade,
analogizing from the atrocities of parents who murder their
children to Savage's mother who "forbears to destroy him
only to inflict sharper miseries upon him; who prolongs his
87
life only to make it miserable; and who exposes him without
care and without pity, to the malice of oppression, the
caprices of chance, and the temptations of poverty; who
rejoices to see him overwhelmed with calamities; and when
his own industry, or the charity of others, has enabled him
to rise for a short time above his miseries, plunges him
again into his former distress."^7 And once again, when
she allegedly conspires in various ways to do Savage in,
Johnson asks why "she could employ all the arts of malice
and all the snares of calumny, to take away the life of her
own son," and reflects, "This mother is still alive, and
may perhaps even yet, though her malice was so often
defeated, enjoy the pleasure of reflecting, that the life
which she often endeavoured to destroy, was at least
shortened by her maternal offices; that though she could
not transport her son to the plantations, bury him in the
shop of a mechanick, or hasten the hand of the publick
executioner, she has yet had the satisfaction of imbitter-
ing all his hours, and forcing him into exigencies that
48
hurried on his death."
Considering the fantastic monstrosity of Johnson’s
portrait of Savage's mother seen in these excerpts from the
Life, it is possible to come to the startling realization
that Johnson was not describing a person at all but a
psychic phenomenon. Indeed the literary background of
biography in Johnson’s time gave him liberty to invent his
88
own account of bizarre mental experience, much as did
writers of early eighteenth-century biographies of
criminals and the histoire scandaleuse, such as Defoe and
49
Mrs. Manley. Johnson’s own later comments on writers of
familiar histories declare that only the strongest examples
of vice and virtue should be exhibited, for they "take
possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce
effects almost without the intervention of the will,""*^
almost as a kind of archetypal lesson that puts people in
touch with primary psychic patterns. And on the subject of
biography, he made a statement (not wholly consistent with
other statements of his), that one may do more harm than
good by telling the whole truth about someone.^ Perhaps
he is advocating here a psychological consistency which
unambiguously conveys fundamental impressions to the
* ^ 52
mind.
In the Life of Savage, one critic goes so far as to
5 3
consider Johnson's picture of Mrs. Brett "prose fiction,"
and perhaps it is even more accurate to conceive of her
allegorically as a psychodynamic entity or symbolic embodi
ment of that brutally repressive component of the person
ality that demands suffering to satisfy its claims.
Certainly Savage was aware of such a presence below the
threshold of his consciousness and Johnson's bringing this
bugaboo figure to life strikes right to the heart of
Savage's disturbance. Johnson diagnoses Savage's neurosis
89
by demonstrating time and time again his pathological
enslavement to and maintenance of a hideous and incorri
gible masochism or eroticism of suffering as a goal and
immediate source of pleasure.
In various sections of the Life of Savage, Johnson
demonstrates just how Savage practiced masochism by foster
ing an image of baleful oppression throughout his life,
oppression that emanated of course from that unspeakable
phantom, his mother. In case after case, Johnson shows
Savage insulting his benefactors, provoking disgrace and
rejection while unconsciously revelling in this humilia
tion. The salient factor of Savage's malady seemed to be
the idea that all providers must be changed into refusers,
thus Johnson's observation that "he scarcely ever found a
stranger, whom he did not leave a friend; but it must
likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long,
without obliging him to become a stranger."^ In a central
section of the Life, Johnson becomes quite specific about
the emotional configuration of Savage' s symptoms : the
self-punitive measures; the consequent relaxation of that
oppressive vigilance, a release which produces temporary
euphoria; the reactivation of the ever watchful tyrant.
After an exhaustive list of Savage's rationaliza
tions about his lack of success as a writer, Johnson
summarizes the central problem--"the blame was laid rather
55
on any other person than the author." He goes on to
90
explain: "By arts like these, arts which every man
practices in some degree, and to which too much of the
little tranquility of life is to be ascribed, Savage was
5 6
always able to live at peace with himself." Correctly
perceiving that what is called normal and what is called
pathological are differences of degree rather than kind,
Johnson warns against the "danger of this pleasing
intoxication," of creating imaginary wrongs and enjoying
them to boot, "nor indeed can any one," says Johnson,
after having observed the Life of Savage, need to be
cautioned against it. By imputing none of his
miseries to himself, he continued to act upon the same
principles, and follow the same path, was never made
wiser by his sufferings, nor preserved by one misfor
tune from falling into another. He proceeded through
out his life to tread the same steps on the same
circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at
least forgetting it, to amuse himself with phantoms of
happiness, which were dancing before him; and willingly
turned his eyes from the light of reason, when it would
have discovered illusion, and shewn him, what he never
wished to see, his real state.57
In this vicious circle, the phases are both the
causes and effects of each other. Since Savage had no
insight into "his real state" or awareness of his own
mental attitudes and behavior, he was compelled to walk the
treadmill. Johnson hits the mark even better with his next
remark: "After having lulled his imagination with those
ideal opiates, of having tried the same experiment upon his
conscience; and having accustomed himself to impute all
deviations from the right to foreign causes, it is certain
that he was upon every occasion too easily reconciled to
91
himself, and that he appeared very little to regret those
58
practices which had impaired his reputation." Johnson
recognizes that Savage clearly atoned for those crimes
committed during his manic period through compulsive,
expiating rituals that, in turn, regenerated his imaginary
wrongs. "The same experiment upon his conscience" refers
to those self-created defeats that he needed to invoke
("imput[ing] all deviations ... to foreign causes") to
appease an abnormally oppressive superego. "Too easily
reconciled to himself," as Johnson says, Savage restores
internal equilibrium by paying--or rather overpaying--for
his guilt. He can now defy his superego again and make the
undeserved punishment an excuse for further licentiousness.
Again and again Johnson reviews the same syndrome:
distress--well-being--distress. If given money, Savage
would immediately squandor it, if given lodging, he would
do everything he could to effect "the entire subversion of
all economy, a kind of establishment which, wherever he
went, he always appeared ambitious to overthrow. . . .
Wherever Savage entered he immediately expected that order
and business should fly before him, that all should thence
forward be left to hazard, and that no dull principle of
domestic management should be opposed to his inclination,
59
or intrude upon his gaiety." Inviting the rejection he
so craved, Savage wallows in it, doing all in his power to
perpetuate it. A typical example is his former benefactor,
92
Lord Tyrconnel, whom Johnson says he wrote to in a style of
"reproach, menace, and contempt, and appeared determined,
if he ever regained his allowance, to hold it only by the
• uj- -e +. m6Q
right of conquest.
While Johnson may have his tongue in his cheek with
this last comment, as the Life of Savage wears on, his
heartfelt sympathy for his friend takes over as he begins
to show Savage wearying, running his vicious circle with
too frenzied a pace, and concocting more and more desperate
schemes of future felicity. Johnson portrays Savage's
alarming degeneration in Bristol, as his image begins to
change from the gay, topsy-turvy lord of misrule, the
"incommodious inmate" of London society, to the frightening
one of a kind of madman aware of being pushed to the brink:
His custom was to lie in bed the greatest part of the
day, and to go out in the dark . . . return again
before morning to his lodging, which was in the garret
of an obscure inn. „ . .In this distress he received a
remittance of fifty pounds from London, with which he
provided himself a decent coat, and determined to go to
London, but unhappily spent his money at a favourite
tavern. Thus was he again confined to Bristol, where
he was every day hunted by bailiffs. In this exigence
he once more found a friend, who sheltered him in his
house, though at the usual inconveniences with which
his company was attended; for he could neither be
persuaded to go to bed in the night, nor to rise in the
day.61
Perhaps the most poignant moment in Johnson's
depiction of Savage's mental deterioration is a letter he
prints written by Savage to a friend just after his
confinement for debts in January, 1743: "'The whole day,'
says he, 'has been employed in various people's filling
93
my head with their foolish chimerical systems, which has
obliged me coolly (as far as nature will admit) to digest,
and accommodate myself to, every different person’s way of
thinking; hurried from one wild system to another, 'till it
has quite made a chaos of my imagination, and nothing done
--promised--disappointed--order'd to send every hour, from
6 2
one part of the town to the other.'--" Raving at the
maltreatment accorded him, Savage is almost delirious in
this, his final orgiastic punishment. Here is the disinte
gration of Savage's mind that Johnson must have particu
larly noted for its echoing the chronic symptoms he
continually warned against in the Life. The "foolish
chimerical systems" and the "chaos of my imagination" were
the source, the sustenance and the bitter end of Savage's
psychopathological career.
Near the end of the Life, Johnson once again
summarizes the vicious habits that ran Savage to death:
"An irregular and dissipated manner of life had made him
the slave of every passion that happened to be excited by
the presence of its object, and that slavery to his
passions reciprocally produced a life irregular and dissi
pated. He was not master of his own motions, nor could
6 3
promise any thing for the next day." The last comment on
Savage's lack of self-control recalls Johnson's earlier
remarks on his lack of self-knowledge and the "dangers" of
his "pleasing intoxication" which obscured for him and
94
others "what he never wished to see, his real state."
Clearly, as Freud saw it, enemies cannot be licked who are
not seen. The horror show of Johnson's account of Savage
takes place behind the scenes, but Johnson does his best to
expose the outlines of those devastating unconscious
emotional ogres.
Johnson's therapeutic recommendations in the Life
of Savage are best expressed by compassion, the word that
appears most conspicuously throughout the work. Building
up a delusion of continual persecution, Savage evidently
needed sympathetic supportive measures to relieve his
complex tensions. With extraordinary precision, Johnson
documents in one section Savage's enactment of what is
analytically known as the "magic gesture," an unconscious
technique that masochists employ to dramatize their
suffering complaints. It is almost as if to say, "I show
you how I wanted to be treated--kindly," and in the deeper,
6Zl
repressed layer, "Look, bad mother, how cruel you were!"
Johnson explains how Savage forgave a woman of the town
whose perjured testimony almost brought him to the gallows;
he "reproved her gently for her perjury, and changing the
only guinea that he had, divided it equally between her and
65
himself." This action elicits the .following tribute from
Johnson, which is also an appeal for corrective emotional
procedures on the part of every man: "Compassion was
indeed the distinguishing quality of Savage; he never
95
appeared inclined to take advantage of weakness, to attack
the defenseless, or to press upon the falling; whoever was
distressed was certain at least of his good wishes; and
when he could give no assistance, to extricate them from
misfortunes, he endeavoured to sooth them by sympathy and
tenderness .
Counteracting the harmful effects of unhealthy
emotional patterns, Johnson recommends compassion, not
self-pity as a restorative. With the Life of Savage,
Johnson seems finally roused from his own sulking indul
gences in melancholy, and he moves toward a more knowledge
able, even expert assessment of human nature. By creating
a fairy tale of the wicked persecution of a frail, defense
less waif, Johnson shows the childish insufficiency of this
regressive fantasy for dealing with problems of real life.
The Life of Savage represents Johnson’s most sophisticated
inquiry into human nature so far, brilliantly documenting
what becomes his crucial insight into a theory of neurosis:
the familiar ’ ’ dangerous prevalence of the imagination."
96
Notes
1. Clifford, pp. 239-41.
2. Gentleman's Magazine, 12 (February, 1742), 127.
3. Ibid., p. 128.
4. Ibid.
5. E. L. McAdam, Jr., "Johnson's Lives of Sarpi,
Blake, and Drake," PMLA, 58 (June, 1943), 467.
6. Ibid.
7. Early Biographical Writings of Dr. Johnson,
ed. J. D. Fleeman (Westmead, Farnburgh, Hampshire, England:
Gregg Int. Pubs., 1973), p. 22.
8. Ibid., p. 23.
9 . Ibid., p. 69.
10. McAdam, p. 474.
11. Early Biographical Writings, p. 77.
12. Works, IV, 56 (Rambler 80).
13. Works, III, 34-35 (Rambler 6).
14. Early Biographical Writings, p. 58.
15. Ibid., p. 63.
16. See Allen T. Hazen, "Samuel Johnson and Dr. Robert
James," Bulletin of the Institute of the History of
Medicine^ 4 (June, 1936), 455-65, for more precise
attribution.
17. Here Johnson would probably be in accord with
Bishop Berkeley, who wrote in one of his early notebooks,
"Sensual Pleasure is the Summum Bonum. This the Great
Principle of Morality" [Philosophical Commentaries, No.
769, in Berkeley, Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E ~ ] Jessup
(Edinburgh: Nelson" 1948), I].
18. Early Biographical Writings, p. 100.
19. Ibid.
9 7
20. Early Biographical Writings, p. 126.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., p. 152.
23. Ibid., p. 30.
24.
Talboys,
The Works of Samuel Johnson, 9 vols. (Oxford:
Wheeler, Pickering, 1825), VI, 344. (Sermon 6.)
25. Early Biographical Writings, p. 31.
26. Ibid., p. 32.
27. Ibid., p. 34,
28. Clifford, p. 244.
29. Early Biographical Writings, p. 33.
30. Clifford, p. 245.
31. Early Biographical Writings, p. 25.
32. Ibid.
33. See Clarence Tracy, ed., Samuel Johnson's Life of
Savage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Introduction.
34. Clifford, pp. 263-64.
35. Boswell, Life of Johnson, I, 166.
36. See Letters, No. 15.
J/. John Wain, bamuel Johnson: A biography (New York:
Viking Press), p. 109.
38. Life of Johnson, I, 174.
39. See Clarence Tracy, The Artificial Bastard:
A Biography of Richard Savage ^Cambridge: Harvard Univer
sity Press, 1953), Preface, p. vii: "As to the great
question of the genuineness of Savage’s claim to be the
illegitimate son of the fourth Earl Rivers by the Countess
of Macclesfield, I have not been able to settle it
finally. . . ."
40. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, p. 264.
41. Krutch, SamueI Johnson, pp. 78-81.
98
42. Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton,
1948), p. 119. According to A Psychiatric Glossary, 3rd
ed. [ed. American Psychiatric Association (New York:
Springer, 1969)], the ego "serves to mediate between the
demands of primitive instinctual drives (the id), of
internalized parental and social prohibitions-(the super
ego) , and of reality. The compromises between these forces
achieved by the ego tend to resolve intrapsychic conflict
and serve an adaptive and executive function."
43. Benjamin Boyce, "Johnson's Life of Savage and its
Literary Background," Studies in Philology, 53 (October,
1956), 596.
44. Works, V, 23-24.
45. Irwin, Ch. I.
46. Life of Savage, p. 6.
47. Ibid., p. 20.
48. Ibid., p. 39.
49. Boyce, p. 593.
50. Works, III, 22 (Rambler 4).
51. Life of Johnson, III, 155.
52. See Rambler 164: "It is particularly the duty of
those who consign illustrious names to posterity, to take
care lest their readers be misled by ambiguous examples"
[Works, V, 109].
53. Boyce, p. 595. Cyril Connolly likewise includes
Johnson's Life of Savage as the first of his Great English
Short Novels" 1953.
54. Life of Savage, p. 60.
55. Ibid., p. 73.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., p. 74.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., pp. 98-99.
60. Ibid., p. 100.
99
61- Life of Savage, p. 120.
62. Ibid., p. 123.
63. Ibid., p. 137.
64. Edmund Bergler, "Samuel Johnson's 'Life of the
Poet Richard Savage'--A Paradigm for a Type," American
Imago, '4 (December, 1947), 60.
65. Life of Savage, p. 40.
66. Ibid., p. 41.
100
CHAPTER V
THE PHYSICIAN OF THE SOUL, 1745-1749
Speaking of the "misery of life," Johnson explains,
"It is one of those intellectual medicines, of which the
nauseous essence often obstructs the benefit . . . Many
things which are not pleasant may be salutary; and among
them is the just estimate of human life . . . it is our
duty, in the pilgrimage of life, to proceed with our eyes
open, and to see our state; not as hope or fancy may
delineate it, but as it has been in reality appointed by
divine providence."^ According to Johnson, suffering is
within man's power to overcome by rational measures. While
these measures are often the product of his religious
views, the core of Johnson's beliefs is related to what
have become principles of modern psychotherapy or the
2
psychoanalytic cure of the soul.
Of paramount significance in Johnson's theology and
psychology is the striving to recognize the truth. As
Erich Fromm expresses it, "To help man discern truth from
falsehood in himself is the basic aim of psychoanalysis, a
therapeutic method which is an empirical application of the
statement, 'The truth shall make you free.' Both in human
istic religious thinking and in psychoanalysis man's
101
ability to search for the truth is held to be inseparably
3
linked to the attainment of freedom and independence."
Johnson became a "physician of the soul" when he wrote the
Vanity of Human Wishes and his sermons, expounding what he
considered the criteria for spiritual well-being, and he
continues the practice throughout his writing career.
That Johnson’s notions of spiritual health were
arrived at by scrupulously empirical methods can be demon
strated by numerous excerpts from his writings. Johnson
always exalts knowledge acquired by contact with reality,
through sensory experience with the world outside oneself,
and condemns the dangers of self-centered illusion. He
insists that the only acceptable information comes from
sensible natural phenomena or historically or scientifi
cally demonstrable fact.
Speaking about scoffers at religion, Johnson warns
against the ineffectuality of man’s speculative actions:
Let it be remembered, that the nature of things is not
alterable by our conduct. We cannot make truth; it is
our business only to find it. No proposition can
become more or less certain or important, by being
considered or neglected. It is to no purpose to wish,
or to suppose, that to be false which is in itself
true, and therefore to acquiesce in our wishes and
suppositions, when the matter is of eternal conse
quence, to believe obstinately without grounds of
belief, and to determine without examination, is the
last degree of folly and absurdity.4
The difference between making the truth and finding it is
that found between those who facilely conjure up pleasing
theories, and true researchers like Tournefort, whom
102
Johnson admired, and Thoreau, whom he would have, who
arduously sally forth in the dust and the heat to receive
life’s rich sources of wonder and knowledge. Johnson
clearly enunciates this doctrine in two pieces he wrote for
Dodsley's Preceptor in 1748, containing succinct declara
tions of his empiricist creed.
For the first volume of The Preceptor, a collection
of popularized information for purposes of self-education,
Johnson wrote a long preface, part of which deals with the
need for religion rather than mere "morality." Religion is
superior because it necessitates emotional involvement.
Speaking first of the "coercive power" of religion, Johnson
says it may curb "the ardour of desire, or the vehemence of
rage, amidst the pleasure and tumults of the world":
religion acts to balance the harmful effects of such over-
indulgence by allowing more receptivity to sensory experi
ence, Johnson explains. "To counteract the power of
temptations, hope must be excited by the prospect of
rewards, and fear by the expectation of punishment." Hope
and fear thus become the potent forces that motivate people
to a better life, whereas "the laws of mere morality"
which only "please the reasoner in the shade, when the
passions stagnate without impulse, and the appetites are
secluded from their objects . . ."^ are ineffective and
abstract.
In the second volume of The Preceptor, Johnson
103
published "The Vision of Theodore, the Hermit of
Teneriffe," a composition dashed off in one night, which in
later years he called the best thing he ever wrote. An
allegory of human life, the tale beautifully demonstrates
Johnson's empirical premises for religious belief as well
as shedding some fascinating lights on the phantoms that
allure and ensnare people in their quest for a good life.
Here Reason becomes "of all subordinate beings the noblest
and the greatest," who helps conduct men up the Mountain of
Existence to the Temple of Happiness. Yet the insistence
upon Reason's fallibility is a crucial lesson of the
allegory. Many dangers lurk along the road to true con
tentment. Among the pitfalls are Appetites and Passions
and the greatest menace, Habits. When accosted by these
beings who first entice with offers of seeming assistance
but soon betray the traveller into deviations from the true
path, the traveller who calls solely upon Reason can expect
little if any benefit. It is Religion alone who can
prevail over the host of destructive specters that stalk
their credulous prey and rely on strong emotional coercions
that eventually drive the victim to their gloomy domain.
With her emissary, Conscience, Religion signifies
the most powerful emotional coercion of all, mighty enough
to overcome her formidable opponents and profitably
minister to the suppliant. When rescuing a repentant
follower from the tyranny of Habit, Johnson says, "Religion
104
never submitted to treaty, but held out her hand with
certainty of conquest; and if the captive to whom she gave
it did not quit his hold, always led him away in triumph,
and placed him in the direct path to the Temple of Happi
ness."^ As in the Preface to The Preceptor, Johnson proves
Religion and the most potent of sentient inspirations if
man would only hold on; whereas Reason Cor what he previ
ously called "the laws of mere morality") is weak and
undependable,
Johnson's method in "The Vision of Theodore" is not
to set up an elaborate, harmonious moral or theological
system based upon metaphysical speculation. Rather it is
to study mental processes whose operations are based
ultimately on data provided by the senses. He illuminates
these images of physical actions connected with the mental
processes:
Habit always threw new chains upon her fugitive; nor
did any escape her but those who, by an effort sudden
and violent, burst their shackles at once, and left her
at a distance; and even of these, many, rushing too
precipitately forward, and hindered by their terrours
from stopping where they were safe, were fatigued with
their own vehemence, and resigned themselves again to
that power from whom an escape must be so dearly
bought, and whose tyranny was little felt, except when
it wag resisted.8
The latter part of the description touches on a common
finding in psychoneurosis: the inadequate substitution of
symptoms--Johnson’s Habits--for realistic gratification;
because symptoms represent regression to earlier forms of
gratification, conflicts arise from attempting to impose
105
these old, unrealistic and impractical patterns upon the
9
present real world.
Johnson’s description of the formation of Habit,
who "had the address of appearing only to attend but was
continually doubling her chains upon her companions,
resembles those regressive behaviors that initially sprung
up to meet early emotional needs, but whose persistent and
unchanging employment becomes an impediment to future
progress. Such mechanisms represent for Johnson deviations
from the path to true comfort. Rather than encouraging
forward movement, they retard it; "Every link grew tighter
as it had been longer worn; and when by continual additions
they became so heavy as to be felt, they were frequently
11
too strong to be broken.” The tenacity of the bonds
indicates the rigid and fearful isolation of the neurotic
personality who barricades himself behind irrational
defenses like Habits; and that "escape [which] must be so
dearly bought" accentuates the contest between those
familiar excruciations and the inscrutable unknown, that
poises one at the gaping abyss alone.
Johnson here is probing secret psychic recesses in
an attempt to liberate and put to wholesome use the
energies he finds there. Undoubtedly Johnson, like the
competent psychoanalyst, does not delude himself into
believing he can produce flawless human beings. Yet this
is an end to strive toward, lending direction to life like
106
the true path to the Temple of Happiness--a path where
various forces either assist or inhibit according to their
salutary or noxious effects. In The Vanity of Human
Wishes, Johnson puts his reader through an exhaustive
exercise in distinguishing between the two, trying to get
him to discern the genuine values in which the elements of
mental health rest.
The Vanity of Human Wishes is patterned on
Juvenal’s tenth Satire. But Johnson refuses to accept
Juvenal's bitter jest that pits frail man against a sense
less , incomprehensible Destiny with only the recommendation
of Stoic self-sufficiency. Instead, Johnson promotes the
ideal of striving for intelligibility, of directing life
toward a goal of absolute comprehension: such knowledge is
clearly the sine qua non of Johnson's conception of Heaven.
In a sermon on the text in Ecclesiastes so especially
linked to the theme of The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson
writes:
When the present state of man is considered, when an
estimate is made of his hopes, his pleasures, and his
possessions; when his hopes appear to be deceitful, his
labours ineffectual, his pleasures unsatisfactory, and
his possessions fugitive, it is natural to wish for an
abiding city, for a state more constant and permanent,
of which the objects may be more proportioned to our
wishes, and the enjoyments to our capacities; and from
this wish it is reasonable to infer, that such a state
is designed for us by that infinite wisdom, which, as
it does nothing in vain, has not created minds, with
comprehensions never to be filled.1 2
Johnson’s Heaven is one of total knowledge as well as
absolute gratification, which clearly in this life--
107
theologically as well as psychologically--is not attain
able. Johnson's is a view of man’s improvable virtue and
happiness that delivers him from hazardous delusion to a
realistic assessment of his present state. Moreover,
Johnson does not run the risk of replacing one deceptive
belief with another, as do the Stoics by encouraging
schemes of omnipotent and omniscient self-reliance or try
ing to convince man of his divine infallibility. Johnson’s
friend, Elizabeth Carter, in an introduction to the works
of Epictetus, published in 1758, well enunciates Johnson's
position: "The Stoic philosophy insults human nature, and
discourages all our attempts, by enjoining and promising a
perfection in this life of which we feel ourselves
incapable. The Christian religion shows compassion to our
weakness, by prescribing to us only the practicable task of
aiming continually at further improvements by the promise
13
of a divine aid equal to every trial." The Vanity of
Human Wishes takes the same position.
The pleasure gardens at Hampstead, a popular resort
in Johnson's time, James L. Clifford suggests, were an
14
inspiration for The Vanity of Human Wishes as Johnson
spent the autumn of 1748 there meditating the old theme of
Ecclesiastes; "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." In the
maze of the human pursuit of pleasure, Johnson notes very
much as he did in the "Vision of Theodore" the multifarious
snare s that lie in wait for the wav * ring, self-centered man
108
who arrogantly and without direction sets out to make his
way in the world.
As treach’rous phantoms in the mist delude,
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good;
How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice, 2.5
Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice.
The phantoms that seduce man, exhausting his energies to no
avail, are the product of his senseless, presumptuous
attitude. In recounting the spectacle of universal
disappointment, Johnson’s notion of reason clearly is a
reference to man’s proper striving for rational insight.
A common basis for Johnson's religious and psychological
views, the application of such reason would eliminate that
unknowable, indefinable unreason that Johnson names Fate
and carefully delineates in the first stanza; "the clouded
maze of Fate," "Fate wings with ev’ry wish fh' afflictive
dart," and "With fatal heat impetuous courage glows,/ With
fatal sweetness elocution flows,"
In the series of sketches of human lives that
compose the central part of The Vanity of Human Wishes, the
implied link between them is clearly that Fate or Fortune
to which mobs of ignorant suppliants appeal: "Delusive
Fortune hears th’ incessant call,/ They mount, they shine,
evaporate, and fall" (75-76) . Here perhaps Johnson had in
mind Pope’s famous lines from Windsor-Forest, where
describing the ravages of the hunt, Pope tells how men
shoot lovely but thoughtless animals from the sky, "Qft as
the mounting Larks their Notes prepare,/ They fall, and
_________________________________________________________________________ IM.
leave their little Lives in Air."^ The similarity between
Johnson's suppliants and Pope’s larks is their fragile,
uncomprehending existence that provokes a sudden tragic
end,
Here perhaps also is what critics see as the
17
"tragic sense1 ' of the poem, and certainly in its middle
section, replete with calamity, Johnson uses the old de
caslbus exemplum, the story of the fall of illustrious men.
Such a spectacle of ruin implies a blind, irrational
encounter with inexorable forces, ending in death for the
principal characters. Johnson rejects this grim, hopeless
tenet at the conclusion of the poem. He is not willing to
accept what becomes for Stoics the sole positive recommen
dation for meeting the unknown, a self-centered idealism,
or a conquest through one’s own default. Indeed, Stoic
self-sufficiency carried to its ideal limit amounts to
impassive withdrawal from life’s struggles, with the
dubious prize of the consciousness of one’s own importance,
or what some medical authorities would label autistic
thinking. With his keen insight into neurotic behavior,
18
Johnson seeks to avoid such a malady at all costs.
Johnson’s salutary recommendations for dealing with
life’s sorrow first of all abjure the benumbing Stoic
resolution. He asks:
Where then shall Hope and Fear their objects find?
Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant mind?
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
110
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise,
No cries attempt the mercies of the skies? (343-48)
Johnson delineates Stoicism here as that mental stupor he
so vehemently rejects in all of his writings. In Rambler
32, his most formal refutation of the doctrine, Johnson
explains the "art of bearing calamities" not as unnatural
exemption from sensibility but as greater immersion in
responsibility for intellectual and emotional decisions:
"The calamities of life, like the necessities of nature,
are calls to labour, and exercises of diligence. When we
feel any pressure of distress, we are not to conclude that
we can only obey the will of heaven by languishing under
it, any more than when we perceive the pain of thirst we
19
are to imagine that water is prohibited."
Johnson believes that it is within man's power,
though admittedly limited power, to change the pathogenic
factors in his life to allow him to get more happiness.
While it is necessary to "leave to heav'n the measure and
the choice" for such gratification, emphasizing the
unfeasibility of complete fulfillment in this world just as
psychoanalytic theory does not purport to reach absolute
goals, Johnson does offer positive counsel to the suppli
cating patient:
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resign'd;
For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience sov'reign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith, that panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind Nature's signal of retreat. (359-64)
111
Johnson encourages the exuberant quest for ideals that open
men up to knowledge and experience of themselves and the
business going on around them: perhaps the key word here
is that love which Johnson first names, which men must
strive for, breaking the bounds of their self-seeking
wishes.
Speaking of self-seeking wishes and vain endeavors,
Johnson asks in the sermon on vanity, "What pleasure is
granted to man . . . that does not demand the help of
others, and the help of greater numbers, as the pleasure is
20
sublimated and enlarged?" Anticipating the modern
psychoanalytic concept of sublimation, Johnson calls for
diversion of potentially harmful wishes into personally and
socially acceptable channels or developing one's accessi
bility to other people to become an efficiently functioning
human being. It is only with these prescriptions, says
Johnson, that "celestial wisdom calms the mind,/ And makes
the happiness she does not find” (367-68). The Vanity of
Human Wishes contains a crucial statement of Johnson's
psychological theories that looks forward to the sermons,
his various periodical essays, and especially Rasselas. U
The wisdom Johnson here names is the discovery of implicit
meaning in life, of rational insight into the seemingly
haphazard motivations and feelings that comprise person
ality structure.
Johnson's sermons are clearly founded upon that
112
"celestial wisdom" sought by religious and psychoanalytic
counselors as physicians of the soul: their common objec
tives are spiritual liberation or freeing the suffering
invalid from his complex, acutely personal, and often
almost inaccessible afflictions. Likewise ministering to
complicated disorders, in his sermons, Johnson carefully
scrutinizes underlying layers of personality in order to
reconstruct the origin of disease, working toward clarifi
cation and correction. The sermons are as much psychiatry
as they are theology, in that they rely on the healing
potential of the quest for supreme knowledge.
Johnson’s sermons defy attempts to place them in
chronological order, although various recent studies have
21
considered the problem. Written over a period of several
decades, only twenty-eight of some forty sermons still
survive: two were published in Johnson’s lifetime, twenty-
five appeared posthumously, and one will appear in print
for the first time in the Yale Edition of The Work's of
Samuel Johnson. The main body of the sermons consists of
those written for his intimate, lifelong friend, John
Taylor, who delivered them with Johnson sometimes present,
as Hawkins recalls, in the church of St. Margaret,
22
Westminster. On the whole, Johnson's sermons deal with
subjects that apply to basic human problems: he defines
sermpn in his Dictionary, "a discourse of instruction . . .
for the edification of the people,” For Johnson, the most
113
important cause of mental dysfunction seemed to be man's
inhibiting self-centered stratagems, stifling the liberat
ing, enlarging understanding that comes with experience of
one's true state and that of others, and this is an issue
no less apparent in Johnson's sermons than in his other
writings.
In the sermons, Johnson repeatedly expresses what
he and other preeminent analysts of human psychology
consider a fundamental premise: "The general employment of
mankind is to increase pleasure, or remove the pressure of
pain."^ Locke had earlier presented this theory: "Good
and evil, as hath been shown, are nothing but pleasure or
pain, or that which occasions or procures pleasure or pain
to us. Moral good and evil, then, is only the conformity
or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law,
whereby good or evil is drawn on us, from the will and
power of the law-maker; which good and evil, pleasure or
pain, attending our observance or breath of the law by the
decree of the law-maker, is that we call reward and
punishment.
Johnson assigns Locke's "law-making authority" to
the Judeo-Christian Deity. For Johnson, God assumes the
role of the psychiatrist who exposes a man's experience and
takes responsibility for its control and guidance. God is
that wisdom, says Johnson, "that searches the secrets of
the heart, that knows what temptations each man has
114
resisted; how far the means of grace have been afforded
him, and how he has improved or neglected them; that sees
the force of every passion, knows the power of every
prejudice, attends to every conflict of the mind, and marks
all the struggles of imperfect virtue ... He only, that
knows every circumstance of life, and every motion of the
mind, can tell how far the crimes, or the virtues, of each
25
man are to be punished or rewarded."
In nearly every one of his sermons, Johnson
continues to describe the "vanity of human wishes," through
which people consume themselves in successive delusions,
wasted by passion and empty ambition, shunning or chasing
the insubstantial shadows that haunt them:
That every man is disappointed in his search after
happiness is apparent from the clamorous complaints
which are always to be heard; from the restless discon
tent, which is hourly to be observed, and from the
incessant pursuit of new objects, which employs almost
every moment of every man's life. For a desire of
change is a sufficient proof that we are dissatisfied
with our present state; and evidently shews that we
feel some pain which we desire to avoid, or miss some
enjoyment which we wish to posses s.26
More elaborately than he could in the poem, Johnson details
the anguish of such neurotic behavior, which he often
refers to simply as self-love.
Those who selfishly desire personal distinction,
Johnson indicates, are inhibited, since "every sentiment of
the mind has been contracted into the narrow compass of
27
self-love." Moreover, men who are given to "unreasonable
self-love" wander in "insensible deviations . . . from
115
28
the ways of virtue." Teachers are especially prone to
this dangerous temptation, says Johnson, when confidence is
gained "only by measuring ourselves by ourselves dwelling
on our own excellence, and flattering ourselves with secret
29
panegyrics." It is this self-exaltation that stifles
worthy new development, for such a man cannot distinguish
"between the pleasure that naturally arises from the
enlargement of the mind, and increase of knowledge, and
that which proceeds from a contempt of others, and the
30
insolent triumphs of intellectual superiority." Johnson
describes the seclusion, the estrangement from the world,
that impoverishes creative potential, and induces mental
deterioration: "In solitude perplexity swells into dis
traction, and grief settles into melancholy; even the
satisfactions and pleasures, that may by chance be found,
are but imperfectly enjoyed, when they are enjoyed without
31
participation." The initial stages of such a condition
are moreover barely perceptible; they involve "the most
hidden motions of our hearts . . . and all those lurking
inclinations, which operate very frequently without being
32
attended to, even by ourselves . . ."
Here Johnson seems to be postulating the phenomenon
of the unconscious, or psychic content that is barred from
access to consciousness by some force within the mind
itself:
116
It is frequently observed in common life, that some
favourite notion or inclination, long indulged, takes
such entire possession of a man's mind, and so
engrosses his faculties, as to mingle thought perhaps
he is not himself conscious of, with almost all his
conceptions, and influence his whole behavior. It will
often operate on occasions with which it could scarcely
be imagined to have any connection, and will discover
itself, however it may lie concealed, either in
trifling incidents, or important occurrences, when it
is least expected or foreseen. It gives a particular
direction to every sentiment and action, and carries a
man forward, as by a kind of resistless impulse, or
insuperable destiny.33
Such a compulsion seems at first to resemble Pope's formu
lation of the "ruling passion";
Hence diff'rent Passions more or less inflame,
As strong or weak, the organs of the frame;
And hence one master Passion in the breast,
Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the r e s t.34
With his unremitting empiricism, however, Johnson
unequivocally and consistently repudiates this popular
a priori notion, in the notes to his translation of
Crousaz's commentary on Pope's Essay on Man to the Life of
Pope written over forty years later, In the Commentary on
Mr. Pope's Principles of Morality, or Essay on Man (1739),
Johnson dismisses the ruling passion because it is a
product of "reason" instead of "fact and experience." He
goes on to suggest that while the phenomenon may be a real
one, its source is not predestined but it perhaps derives
from primary impressions received in early childhood:
Men, indeed, appear very frequently to be influenced a
long time by a predominant inclination . . . but
perhaps if they review their early years, and trace
their ideas backwards, they will find that those strong
desires were the effects either of example or
117
instruction, the circumstances in which they were
placed, the objects which they first received impres
sions from, the first books they read, or the first
company they conversed with,35
Much laLer in the Life of Pope, Johnson elaborates upon the
derivation of the ruling passion, which he first describes,
following Pope, as an "original direction of desire to some
particular object, an innate affection which gives all
actions a determinate and invariable tendency, and operates
upon the whole system of life either openly or more
secretly by the intervention of some accidental or subordi-
3 6
nate propension." This description approximates
Johnson’s account of the unconscious in the sermons
mentioned earlier. But Johnson differs from Pope by
considering the harmful effects of this mental apparatus
while Pope merely abstracts the beneficial ones. More
important, Johnson denies that the passions or what he
delineates' as the dictates of the unconscious are "innate
and irresistible," Instead of being uncontrollably
directed by "an ascendant planet or predominating humour,"
Johnson firmly maintains the experientialist view that men
can probe the origin of their actions by evoking their
primary experiences: "the first book which they read, some
early conversation which they heard, or some accident which
37
excited ardour and emulation." It follows that, by
knowing, men can learn to guide and perhaps modify the
compulsions that constrain them against their better wills.
118
In the sermons, Johnson describes these unconscious
coercions and names them Habits, as he did in the ’ ’ Vision
of Theodore.” ’ ’ Habits,” he writes,"grow stronger by long
continuance, and passions more violent by indulgence.
Vice, by repeated acts becomes almost natural, and plea
sures by frequent enjoyment, captivate the mind almost
beyond resistance. . , , We must banish every false argu
ment, every known delusion from our minds, before our
passions can operate in its favour; and forsake what we
know must be forsaken, before we have endeared it to our-
38
selves by long possession." Again Johnson is speaking of
the inadequate subs titution of imaginary gratifications --
habits, false argument, delusion--for real ones. People
contrive, usually in early life, to gratify their wishes
through these self-created, later extensively developed
emotional mechanisms. But these soon become the symptoms--
or Johnson's Habits— of psychoneurotic behavior, since one
must pay the piper, so to speak, for attempting to impose
regressive, unrealistic enactments upon the present real
39
world.
The immature, debilitating dependency upon Habits
must be forsaken, Johnson explains. But they are given up
with tremendous apprehension. He realizes how people can
dread abandoning safe, familiar patterns, albeit harmful
ones, to make a leap into the dire unknown: "The mode of
life, to which we have been accustomed, and which has
___________ 119
entwined itself with all our thoughts and actions, is not
quitted but with much difficulty. The want of those
vanities, which have hitherto filled the day, is not
easily supplied. Accustomed pleasures rush upon the
imagination; the passions clamour for their usual gratifi
cations, and sin though resolutely shaken off, will
struggle to regain its former hold."^
Yet the pathogenic impulses of Habits must be
eliminated, Johnson insists. "As this unbounded dominion
of ideas, long entertained by the fancy, and naturalized to
the mind is very strong argument against suffering our-;
selves to dwell too long upon pleasing dreams, or delight
ful falsehoods, or admitting any inordinate passion to
insinuate itself, and grow domestic; so it is a reason, of
equal force, to engage us in a frequent, and intense
meditation on those important and eternal rules, which are
to regulate our conduct, and rectify our minds; that the
power of habit may be added to that of truth.Naturally
Johnson appeals to what he always considered a foremost
restorative for languishing souls: the "serious and
rational enquiry, where real happiness is to be found; by
what means man . . . may set himself free from the shackles
of anxiety with which he is incumbered; may throw off the
load of terror which oppresses him, and liberate himself
from those horrors which the approach of death perpetually
/ o
excites." It is this search for knowledge that redeems
120
man from his retarding, peculiarly isolated schemes and
entanglements, urging him forward in life through inner
expansion and free accessibility to other human beings.
As "physician of the soul," Johnson believes in the
alleviation of suffering by finding out its cause, by
probing the disorders of the psyche, tracing symptoms to
their often unconscious sources, and prescribing corrective
emotional procedures. Time and time again in the sermons,
Johnson delves to the origin of mental disturbance to
reveal a crucial principle of modern psychotherapy: that
is, contact with reality and especially contact with other
people is the emotional center from which spiritual health
radiates. In the Life of Savage, Johnson prescribed
compassion as therapy, and here he enlarges his method to
include more than the "tender regard to the unhappiness of
another." Writing on charity, Johnson considers the term
"having compassion" as "mutually feeling for each other,
receiving the same impressions from the same things . . ,
'be all of one mind, each feeling by sympathy, the affec-
/ Q
tions of another.'" Mpre than sympathy, it seems Johnson
is describing empathy here, the insightful and instructive
entering into the feelings, emotions, and behavior of
another person.
Such sensitivity, Johnson says, "is the great
source of social happiness. To gain affection, and to
preserve concord, it is necessary not only to 'mourn with
121
those that mourn,’ but to 'rejoice with them that
rejoice.’"^ Johnson shows that by acknowledging his place
as a link in the common chain of humanity, a man’s actions
are sanctioned by their contributions to general human
fellowship. He ideally advises a man "to place his inter
est at such, a distance from him, as to act, with constant
and uniform diligence, in hopes only of happiness flowing
back upon him in its circulation through a whole community,
to seek his own good only by seeking the good of all
45
others . , ." Here he names this behavior "sublimation
of self-love" or the ability to redirect one's desires from
self-admiring fantasies, which readily lead to neurosis, to
concern that opens out to others and results in their
affection and tender regard.
As Imlac counsels the mad astronomer in Rasselas,
"You are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have
neither such virtue nor vice, as that you should be singled
out for supernatural favours or afflictions," Johnson
calls for a humble self-respect on the part of every man,
encouraging the freedom which comes from voluntary
spiritual control. Such obedience, says Johnson, "is the
effect not of compulsion, but of reverence, not of
agitated neurotic defensiveness, but true mental and
emotional integrity. In the sermons, Johnson demonstrates
his ability to provide shrewd analyses of neurotic struc
tures , analyses which will be found in many of his other
writings. -,00
N otes
1. The Works of Samuel Johnson, 9 vols. (Oxford:
Talboys, Wheeler, and Pickering^ HT25), IX, 423 (Sermon
15).
2. The title of this chapter, "The Physician of the
Soul," is derived from an ancient inscription that was well
known to Johnson. The inscription appeared on the gates of
the Ptolomean library: Psyches iatreion, "the Physic of
the Soul."
3. Psychoanalysis and Religion .(1950; rpt. New York:
Bantam, T772) , p " !
4. Works (Oxford, 1825), p. 477 (Sermon 20).
5. The Works of Samuel Johnson, 12 vols., ed.
Alexander Chalmers (London: Luke Hansard & Sons, 1810),
II, 307.
6 . Life of Johnson, I, 537.
7. Works (London, 1810), II, 446.
8 . Ibid., p. 465.
9. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, A General Intro
duction to Psychoanalysis (1924; rpt. New York: Simon &
Shuster, 1972), Lecture 23, "The Paths of Symptom-
Formation," pp. 367-85.
10. Works (London, 1810), II, 460.
11. Ibid.
12. Works (Oxford, 1825), IX, 403 (Sermon 12).
13. The Moral Discourses of Epictetus, 2 vols., trans.
Elizabeth Carter (1758; rpt. London: J. M. Dent & Co.,
1899), p. xxi.
14. Young Samuel Johnson (1955; rpt. London: Mercury
Books, 1962), p. 305.
15. Works, VI, 92, 11, 9-12, Hereafter cited in the
text by line number.
^6 * Prose and Poetry of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey
Williams(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 69, 11. 133-
34.
123
17. For the most recent exponent of this thesis, see
Leopold Damroach, Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), Chapter 6 .
18. I.e. the Stoic philosopher who suffers a nervous
breakdown in Chapter 18 of Rasselas and the mad astronomer
in Chapters 40-end.
19. Works, III, 177.
2 0 . Works (Oxford, 1825), p. 401 (Sermon 12).
21. The best studies are Jean Hagstrum, "The Sermons
of Samuel Johnson," Modern Philology, 40 (1943), 255-66;
James Gray, Johnson's Sermons (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1972) ; Maurice Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).
2 2 . The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bertram Davis
(New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 392.
23. Works (Oxford, 1825), p. 462 (Sermon 18).
24. Human Understanding, II, xx, 2.
25. Works (Oxford, 1825), pp. 438-39 (Sermon 16).
26. Ibid., pp. 414-15 (Sermon 14).
27. Ibid., p. 350 (Sermon 7).
28. Ibid., pp. 321-22 (Sermon 4).
29. Ibid., p. 362 (Sermon 8 ).
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 289 (Sermon 1).
32. Ibid., pp. 354-55 (Sermon 7).
33. Ibid., p. 434 (Sermon 16).
34. Prose and Poetry of Alexander Pope, p. 134 (An
Essay on Man: Epistle II, 11. 129-32).
35. (London, 1739), p. 109.
36. Lives of the Poets, III, 173-74.
37. Ibid., p. 174.
124
38. Works (Oxford, 1825), p. 309 (Sermon 2).
39. See Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanaly
sis , pp. 367-85.
40. Works (Oxford, 1825), p. 428.
41. Ibid., pp. 434-35.
42. Ibid., p. 419 (Sermon 14).
43. Ibid., pp. 388-89 (Sermon 11). Johnson is quoting
the Bible, I Peter iii.8 : "Finally, be ye all of one mind,
having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be
pitiful, be courteous."
44. Ibid., p. 389 (Sermon 11).
45. Ibid., p. 497 (Sermon 23).
46. Ed. Warren Fleischauer (New York: Barron's Educa
tional Series, 1962), p. 177 (Chapter 46).
47. Works (Oxford, 1825), p. 515 (Sermon 24).
125
CHAPTER V I
THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE:
THE PERIODICAL ESSAYS
The business from which we withdraw our cognizance,
is not above our abilities, but below our notice.
--Rambler 162
Tracing the development of Johnson's theory of
neurosis leads inevitably to one of his greatest achieve
ments as diagnostician of the human condition: his
periodical essays. As author of the Rambler and Idler and
regular contributor to the Adventurer, Johnson had the
opportunity to express in the most concise form to that
date his evolving hypotheses concerning mental states and
processes. Taken as a whole, his formulations in these
works can be said to comprise a body of psychoanalytic
literature in some ways resembling the more complete
studies conducted by Freud and other professionals in the
latter part of the nineteenth century and later. Writing
in the mid-eighteenth century as a layman, Johnson compiled
a theory of neurosis that goes far to clear up the terra
incognita of everyday human conduct, of morbid symptoms in
minds whose operations were little understood.
The prototype for English periodical essays of the
eighteenth century was of course Addison's and Steele's
126
Spectator, which established the structure and tone for the
genre. In his Life Of Addison, Johnson describes it:
Before the Tatler and Spectator, if the writers for the
theatre are excepted, England had no masters of common
life. No writers had undertaken to reform either the
sayageness of neglect or the impertinence of civility;
to shew when to speak, or to be silent; how to refuse,
or how to comply, ... A judge of propriety, was yet
wanting, who should survey the track of daily conversa
tion and free it from thorns and prickles, which teaze
the passer, though they do not wound him. For this
purpose nothing is so proper as the frequent publica
tion of short papers, which we read not as study but
amusement. If the subject be slight, the treatise
likewise is short. The busy may find time, and the
idle may find patience.1
According to Johnson, the genre began as a semi-serious,
almost frivolous guide for decorum in everyday affairs,
attempting nto teach the minuter decencies and inferior
duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to
correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than
criminal, and remove those grievances which, if they
produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation
2
. . Toward the end of this account Johnson seems to be
approaching more serious topics of discourse, closer to
those in his own essays.
The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature
lists the sum total of periodical publication by the
eighteenth century, including essay sheets, newspapers,
journals, monthly miscellanies, weekly diatribes, and daily
3
medleys, amounting to some 2,500 titles by 1800,
Certainly not all attained the excellence of the Spectator,
127
which Johnson so admired, and in a general sense it seemed
the genre started to deteriorate when many attempted indis
criminately to combine instruction, entertainment, and
commercial advantage, with a marked emphasis on the latter
two. Johnson began the Rambler in March, 1750, in the
midst, as Boswell puts it, of "his constitutional indo
lence, his depression of spirits. . . . [In] his labour in
carrying on his Dictionary, he answered the stated calls of
the press, twice a week from the stores of his mind . . .
that by reading and meditation and a very close inspection
of life, he had accumulated a great fund of miscellaneous
knowledge, which, by a peculiar promptitude of mind, was
ever ready at his call, and which he had constantly accus
tomed himself to clothe in the most pat and energetic
expression.
In 1753, a year after the Rambler ceased publica
tion, Johnson contributed to the Adventurer, a joint effort
among {himself, Hawkesworth, Joseph Warton, and Bonnell
Thorton. Later, between 1758 and 1760, Johnson started the
Idler, published once a week in the Universal Chronicle.
More than just the arbiter e1egantiarum that he designated
the Spectator and its succession of lesser, light-weight
imitations, Johnson often writes moralizing discourses of a
somber, comprehensive nature. While there are indeed
differences among his three major sets of essays, notably
in length, tone, and style,^ the doctrines Johnson sets
128
forth in them concerning fundamental laws of the mind are
methodical and consistent. These may be abstracted from
his periodical essays as Johnson’s principal theories of
therapy for mental and emotional disorder, rather in the
way that Freud, realizing the confusion in his day about
the often trifling and promiscuous collections of papers
on the subject, proceeded to outline for the layman his
classic General Introduction to Psychoanalysis and The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
Of the fundamental hypotheses of psychoanalysis,
the two principal ones are so established and confirmed
that most people nowadays are inclined to view them as
established structures of the mind. These are the mutually
related principles of psychic determinism and the uncon
scious . The proposition that nothing happens by chance or
in a random way reflects the laws of the physical universe,
since mental phenomena are no more capable of a lack of
causal connection with what preceded them than are physical
ones. Events in mental life may seem to be random and
unrelated but only apparently so. One may feel that
certain processes are foreign to his being and unconnected
with the rest of his mental life, but this is because he is
unaware of their cause. It is precisely this notion of the
unconscious that accounts for the apparent discontinuities
in mental life.
Charles Brenner, in a standard text for beginning
129
students of psychoanalysis, explains: "When a thought, a
feeling, an accidental forgetting, a dream, or a patholog
ical symptom seems to be unrelated to what went on before
in the mind, it is because its causal connection is with
some unconscious mental process rather than with a
conscious one. If the unconscious cause or causes can be
discovered, then all apparent discontinuities disappear
6
and the causal chain or sequence becomes clear." The
clarification Brenner describes is therapeutic insight, or
the effect of a person's understanding of the nature and
origin of his actions. By exposing this often conflicting
and repressed material within the personality, the individ
ual can look at himself more objectively and learn to
modify restricting, unsuccessful patterns to more liberat
ing ones. Clearly these fundamental hypotheses were not
unknown to Johnson; they are implied in his earlier works,
chiefly in the Life of Savage, the "Vision of Theodore,"
the Vanity of Human Wishes, and the sermons. Embarking
upon the enterprise of periodical journalism in the 1750s,
Johnson had the opportunity to develop his theories of
mental functioning to their fullest, ministering to a
public that could always benefit from them.
The premise that complex and decisive mental opera
tions have causes, but that these causes are often
undetected by an individual is basic to Johnson's concep
tion of the mind's evolution from childhood on:
130
Whoever shall review his life will generally find, that
the whole tenor of his conduct has been determined by
some accident of no apparent moment, or by a combina
tion of inconsiderable circumstances, acting when his
imagination was unoccupied, and his judgment unsettled;
and that his principles and actions have taken their
colour from some secret infusion, mingled without
design in the current of his ideas. The desires that
predominate in our hearts, are instilled by impercep
tible communications at the time when we look upon the
various scenes of the world, and the different employ
ments of men, with the neutrality of inexperience; and
we come forth from the nursery or the school, invari
ably destined to the pursuit of great acquisitions, or
petty accomplishments.7
This account of predetermined behavior developed in
response to the incidental events of early childhood is
often important in Johnson’s theory of neurosis. Those
"secret infusions" and "desires" so impressed upon pliable
young minds frequently become the source of human grief.
It is a "disease of the soul," says Johnson, when "[we] may
corrupt our hearts in the most recluse solitude, with more
pernicious and tyrannical appetites and wishes . . . for we
are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their
full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wicked
ness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the
artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinc
tions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to
absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to dark-
ness." Here Johnson describes the secret nourishment of
harmful drives, fostered by "recluse solitude" and inevi
tably leading to bewilderment or what he calls "absurdity"
and "darkness." Such clandestine operations suggest the
131
unconscious, a repository for repressed data or Johnson's
"pernicious and tyrannical appetites and wishes." With the
"artifices of self-deceit" these forces do receive expres
sion but unhappily as psychoneurotic symptoms or distor
tions of proper functional behavior, many of which Johnson
details in the course of his periodical essays.
The nightmare of mental affliction for Johnson as
well as for modern psychotherapists is that indeterminate
mystery, that floundering in a cryptic universe where all
behavior remains obscure and problematic. Johnson explains
this mischannelling of unconscious drives into bewildering
neurotic symptoms as "unnatural desires [that] insinuate
themselves unobserved into the mind, and we do not perceive
that they are gaining upon us, till the pain which they
9
give us awakens us to notice." He elaborates upon this
perplexing source of human agony: "An ardent wish, what
ever be its object, will always be able to interrupt
tranquility. What we believe ourselves to want torments us
not in the proportion of its real value, but according to
the estimation by which we have rated it in our own minds.
. . . To clarify his theory, he analogizes from
physical to mental infirmity:
In some diseases, the patient has been observed to long
for food which scarce any extremity of hunger would in
health have compelled him to swallow; but while his
organs were thus depraved the craving was irresistible,
nor could any rest be obtained till it was appeased by
compliance. Of the same nature are the irregular
appetites of the mind; though they are often excited by
132
trifles, they are equally disquieting with real wants:
the Roman, who wept at the death of his lamprey, felt
the same degree of sorrow that extorts tears on other
occasions. 1 1
Johnson clearly understands the absolute dominion of uncon
scious processes in neurotic yearning, that objects are
estimated solely according to a peculiar rigid code of
psychic relativity, not their objective value in the real
world.
In another example of the tyranny of the uncon
scious, Johnson explains that the man given to sudden
bursts of rage is "mean enough to be driven from his post
by every petty incident, that he is the mere slave of
casuality, and that his reason and virtue are in the power
12
of the wind." Such hysterical symptoms for Johnson mean
the failure of proper evaluative insight, but they also
encouragingly signify soluble enigmas. "Remember," he
says, "that the pleasures of fancy, and the emotions of
desire are more dangerous as they are more hidden, since
they escape the awe of observation, and operate equally in
every situation, without the concurrence of external
13
opportunities." By uncovering such unconscious phenomena,
repressed tendencies begin to come into the open, easing
the tension created in repressing them and facilitating
conscious judgment of them. "Without the concurrence of
external opportunities" is perhaps the most difficult
condition to combat in neurotic behavior, and Johnson
133
realizes the poignant burden of this intensely personal,
solitary struggle: "Nothing is to be estimated by its
effect upon common eyes and common ears. A thousand
miseries make silent and invisible inroads on mankind, and
the heart feels innumerable throbs which never break into
complaint, Keenly perceiving the unconscious as causal
agent of such, "materials of human life," "a few pleasures"
as well as "a few pains,” Johnson further elaborates upon
its operation: "perhaps, likewise, our pleasures are for
the most part equally secret, and most are borne up by some
private satisfaction, some internal consciousness, some
latent hope, some peculiar prospect, which they never
communicate, but reserve for solitary hours, and clandes
tine meditation;"'^
Frequently, these emotions are designedly incommu
nicable : "As very few can search deep into their own minds
without meeting what they wish to hide from themselves,
scarce any man persists in cultivating such disagreeable
acquaintance, but draws the veil again between his eyes and
his heart, leaves his passions and appetites as he found
them, and advises others to look into themselves." Even
the individual whom Johnson approximately describes as
therapist is scarcely able to bare these unconscious
movements:
It is not often that any man can have so much knowledge
of another, as is necessary to make instruction useful.
We are sometimes not ourselves conscious of the original
__________ 134
motives of our actions, and when we know them, our
first care is to hide them from the sight of others,
and often from those most diligently, whose superiority
either of power or understanding may entitle them to
inspect our lives; it is therefore very probable that
he who endeavours the cure of our intellectual mala
dies, mistakes their cause; and that his prescriptions
avail nothing, because he knows not which of the
passions or desires is vitiated.17
Johnson often refers to the corruption of mental
life or the lack of connection of instincts with their
appropriate outlets as vitiation. In his contribution to
Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Johnson, in
the role of the kindly "good divine, who had the cure of
Arabella's mind greatly at heart," is called in for consul
tation to minister to the young lady's hysteria, probably
in the way that Freud encountered his first patients in the
late nineteenth century. Arabella, formerly "languishing
under the pressure of pain and dejection of mind," is now
more clear-headed but still driven by the "corrupt
passions" and "wild imaginations" that caused her so much
terror and perplexity. Imploring the good doctor, "I
conjure you discover me to myself," she is gradually shown
the folly of her aberrant patterns, as he explains,
"[those] senseless fictions, which at once vitiate the
18
mind, and pervert the understanding. ..." Here Johnson
is speaking of the misdirection or mischanneling of
energies that could be put to good use. With hysterical
symptoms, however, these energies are exhausted in enacting
unconscious conflicts, as Johnson says, the mind is
135
vitiated by extravagant passions that overthrow normal,
regulated processes:
It is the fault of the best fictions that they teach
young minds to expect strange adventures and sudden
vicissitudes, and therefore encourage them often to
trust to Chance. A long life may be passed without a
single occurrence that can cause much surprise, or
produce any unexpected consequence of great importance;
the order of the world is so established, that all
human affairs proceed in a regular method, and very
little opportunity is left for sallies or hazards, for
assault or rescue; but the brave and the coward, the
sprightly and the dull, suffer themselves to be
carried alike down the stream of custom.19
Much as in the ending of Rasselas, Johnson calls
for corrective self-evaluation: Arabella and the escapees
from the "happy valley" are discovered to themselves
through accommodation to natural, orderly functionings and
an effort to maintain these through relationships with
others. Trusting to "chance" or encouraging those
"sallies," "hazards," "assaults," and "rescues" implies the
vast catalogue of neurotic styles Johnson so conscien
tiously details in his periodical essays. He sensitively
probes important psychopathological traits, discovering
inner factors that dispose people to develop their bizarre
symptoms. Certainly Locke had earlier discovered empirical
causes for psychic phenomena. But Johnson goes farther,
attempting to make the unconscious conscious with shrewd
analyses that become almost clinical studies or case
histories in the manner of Breuer, Freud, and other innova
tors of psychoanalytic technique.
In his valuable study summarizing various schools
^ ^
of psychoanalytic thinking, J.A.C. Brown writes about
neurotic human beings: "Their ivory towers conceal the
inner stinking cave by the entrance of which they ruth
lessly trade physical needs or personal relationships for
private gain, returning to the innermost recesses to enjoy
them without interference--and this, after all, is not
surprising since they ceased to develop emotionally at the
age of five and any trait presented in later life is mere
20
camouflage to conceal what goes on within." This
passage, with certain qualifications, may be said to repre
sent Johnson's opinion of much human behavior, particularly
those instincts or drives defined psychoanalytically as
psychic constituents which produce a state of excitation or
tension, impelling an individual to activity. Basic
Freudian doctrine sees the aim of life as seeking to be
relieved of this tension and people as its rather mechan-
21
istic victims, chafing under the preordained burden.
Man's basic biological problem thus becomes a struggle with
his instincts or what Freud names, in Civilization and Its
Discontents, instinctual privation: suffering comes from
relinquishing instinctual satisfaction complicated by
unstable attempts at such drive gratification. Primarily
man is restless in society, a mass of isolated, hostile
beings who insensibly, but mercilessly inflict punishment
22
upon one another in trying to attain their goals.
137
That Johnson subscribed to this view of man's
essential though perhaps latent barbarity is illustrated in
many examples from his writings, particularly in his later
political pamphlets where he seems constantly intent on
unmasking for his more squeamish adversaries the naked fact
of political power. Almost in a Darwinian sense of the
survival of the fittest, Johnson portrays man in a kind of
primitive unmajesty--he never again suffers himself to be
deluded by those starry-eyed Rousseauistic notions of
liberty he flirted with in earlier years as "rebel without
a cause." Instead, he sees man's only hope for survival in
the compromise truce which civilization imposes in the
interest of mutual self-protection. "The end of all civil
regulations is to secure private happiness from private
malignity; to keep individuals from the power of one
23
another," and Johnson staunchly maintains this position
throughout his life.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of Johnson's
depiction of man's ruthless primitivism is the original
Idler 22, suppressed when the essays were collected in book
form, undoubtedly because Johnson or his printer felt it
was too shocking for the general public. Here a philo
sophic mother vulture is instructing her children how to
get man's flesh for their diet. "'Man,' said the mother,
'is the only beast who kills that which he does not devour,
and this quality makes him so much a benefactor to our
138
species. . . . Man will, sometimes , . . remain for a long
time quiet in his den. The old vultures will tell you when
you are to watch his motions. When you see men in great
numbers moving close together, like a flight of storks, you
may conclude that they are hunting, and that you will soon
2 A '
revel in human blood.'" The reason for this internecine
slaughter the mother vulture attributes to "some unaccount
able power" by which men are "driven one against another,
25
till they lose their motion, that vultures may be fed."
Like the mother vulture, Johnson finds the evidence
of man's aggressive drives in the data of historical expe
rience. Speaking, approximately, of the concept of
instinctual privation, he suggests, "He surely is an useful
monitor, who inculcates to these thoughtless strangers,
that the 'majority are wicked'; who informs them, that the
train which, wealth and beauty draw after them, is lured
only by the scent of prey; and that, perhaps, among all
those who croud about them with professions and flatteries,
there is not one who does not hope for some opportunity to
devour or betray them, to glut himself by their destruc-
26
tion, or to sha.re their spoils with a stronger savage."
Like Brown, and certainly in the tradition of Hobbes,
Darwin, and Freud, Johnson often sees men as "thoughtless
strangers" who stalk and plunder each other for booty.
These actions are manifestations of psychic energy run
rampant, the consequence of instinctual privation or
139
pent-up forces that burst the bonds of social control. In
27
this respect neurosis is a form of social maladaptation
where confusion springs from the failure to band together
satisfactorily with the whole in cooperative, creative
ventures. Johnson refers to this failure as a lapse in
verifiable judgment of oneself and others: "There is no
crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is
apparent that men can be social beings no longer than they
-elieve each other. When speech is employed only as the
vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from
others, inhabit his own cave, and seek prey only for
28
himself." Such disintegration of the common bond of
humanity signifies for Johnson the most baleful form of
neurosis, one that he especially treats in his periodical
essays, probing the psychopathology of various self
deceived and deceiving, self-alienated and alienating human
misfits.
Johnson was fascinated by the phenomenon of mental
growth, and, like Freud and his fellow innovators in
psychoanalytic technique, Johnson often analogizes from
physical to mental maturation:
The writers of medicine and physiology have traced with
great appearance of accuracy, the effects of time upon
the human body, by marking the various periods of the
constitution, and the several stages by which animal
life makes its progress from infancy to decrepitude.
. . . It had been a task worthy of the moral philos
ophers to have considered with equal care the climac
terics of the mind; to have pointed out the time at
which every passion begins and ceases to predominate,
and noted the regular variations of desire, and the
succession of one appetite to another.29
With this project in mind, Johnson begins his own
exposition of the development of mental autonomy: "[Our]
minds are committed in a great measure first to the direc
tion of others, and afterwards of ourselves. It would be
difficult to protract the weakness of infancy beyond the
usual time, but the mind may be very easily hindered from
its share of improvement, and the bulk and strength of
mankind must, without the assistance of education and
instruction, be informed only with the understanding of a
30
child." Here Johnson is touching upon the debilitating
effects on individuals who remain at the mercy of early
childhood experiences, ceasing to develop beyond the
conflicts and disturbances induced by these, unable to take
over control of their own minds because of infantile
dependencies on obscure inner constrictions.
The anguish that these people suffer Johnson
consistently attributes to the passions, by which he means
psychic energy that impels one to activity until gratifica
tion is achieved, roughly what in modern usage is referred
to as libido. In early life, Johnson believes there exists
general "similitude" among people with regard to these
instinctual feelings: "We all enter the world in equal
ignorance, gaze round about us on the same objects, and
have our first pains and pleasures, our first hopes and
fears, our first aversions and desires from the same
31
causes." Later, however, as men are led to "wider
141
prospects," "accidental impulses determine us to different
paths." These impulses he further explains as more
complicated passions by which "[we] are solicited by our
senses and appetites to more powerful delights, as the
taste of him who has satisfied his hunger must be excited
by artificial stimulations. The simplicity of natural
amusement is now past, and art and contrivance must improve
our pleasures; but in time art, like nature, is exhausted,
and the senses can no longer supply the cravings of the
32
intellect." What Johnson seems to be describing is the
waylaying of primary gratification--a potential source of
neurotic behavior as the personality of the developing
adult becomes separated from his instinctual life. From
simple, direct communication between these, the individual
begins to create complex, confusing patterns--"artificial
stimulations"--for relieving himself of the mounting
tensions: "to give," as Johnson puts it, "those faculties
which, can not lie wholly quiescent some particular
direction.
These paths become the deviant, treacherous cycles
of neurosis: "New desires and artificial passions are by
degrees produced; and, from having wishes only in conse
quence of our wants, we begin to feel wants in consequence
of our wishes; we persuade ourselves to set a value upon
things which are of no use, but because we have agreed to
/
value them. . . These are the imaginary structures
142
that mislead people in search, of gratification, leading
them astray from proper channels of emotional release.
With these deviations from more simple, direct accessi
bility to rewards, the concept of pleasure becomes, says
Johnson, ’ 'diffused to a wider extent, and protracted
35
through new gradations." Johnson recognizes that the
condition is far from a happy one. Instead it is precari
ous, since "to contend with the predominance of successive
passions" is "to be endangered first by one affection, and
36
then by another." The individual is placed at the mercy
of those "artificial passions" or ill-directed libidinal
impulses as he frantically claws his way about life,
mismanaging his decaying allotment of motivational power.
The various ways in which people shift about in
order to find accessible forms of libidinal discharge is a
subject that fascinated Johnson in all its ramifications.
The "vicissitudes of life" is a phrase that appears time
and time again in the course of his periodical writings.
Analyzing the poet Abraham Cowley's neurotic world-
weariness, he firmly rejects Cowley's proposal of retiring
from the world to distant America, since this "chimerical
provision" would deny the natural "vicissitudes of the
world"; "such are the changes that keep the mind in
action; we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated;
37
we desire something else, and begin a new persuit."
Johnson admits this process of libidinal transfer as a
143
normal function of psychic life. However, Cowley's problem
was dysfunctional, since he apparently discontinued his
pleasurable pursuits and consequently "he never suspected
that the cause of his unhappiness was within, that his own
passions were not sufficiently regulated, and that he was
harassed by his own impatience, which could never be
without something to awaken it, would accompany him over
3 8
the sea, and find its way to his American elysium."
Cowley’s trouble, Johnson explains, arose from the inade
quate discharge of mental contents, from unsuccessful
attempts to release that tension or those unregulated
passiohs and consequent "impatience" that unhappily drove
him.
Another intriguing example for Johnson of the
misuse of psychic energy brings up a central principle in
neurotic structures, often a basic observation in psycho
analytic literature, the problem of anxiety. Johnson
describes this dismaying symptom, the harbinger of neurosis,
as "a temper which keeps the man always in alarms, disposes
him to judge of every thing in a manner that least favours
his own quiet, fills him with perpetual stratagems of
counteraction, wears him out in schemes to obviate evils
which never threatened him, and at length, perhaps,
contributes to the production of those mischiefs of which
it had raised such dreadful apprehensions."^ Basic
Freudian doctrine defines neurosis as the replacement of
144
suitable behavior with inadequate compromise substitutes.
The axis of neurotic structure is anxiety which is found
initially in conjunction with a traumatic experience or an
early situation in which fundamental drives were dramati
cally frustrated. As anxiety maintains itself in order to
repress subliminal recollections of this dire original
event, keeping the conflictive material from becoming
conscious, the phenomenon meanwhile provokes substitute
formations or neurotic symptoms to deal with the influx of
similar present drives that could potentially trigger the
same response.^ Johnson’s description of this reaction
portrays the sense of vague, impending catastrophe, as well
as the exhausting psychic expenditure, the "stratagems,"
"schemes," and "dreadful apprehensions" that the maintenance
of anxiety entails, There is no way to win in such a
condition, since it promotes the damming up of normal
expressive outlets. Overwhelmed by a flood of stimuli, the
mind’s automatic response is anxiety, or as Freud put it,
"Libido that cannot be discharged is continuously being
converted into an apparently ’objective* anxiety, and so an
insignificant external danger is taken as a representative
of wha.t the libido desires.
Observing the effects of what might be called
inhibition, Johnson remarks upon a similar phenomenon:
Thus life is languished away in the gloom of anxiety,
and consumed in collecting resolution which the next
morning dissipates; in forming purposes which we
145
scarcely hope to keep, and reconciling ourselves to our
own cowardice by excuses, which, while we admit them,
we know to be absurd. Our firmness is by the continual
contemplation of misery hourly impaired; every submis
sion to our fear enlarges its dominion; we not only
waste that time in which the evil we dread might have
been suffered and surmounted, but even where procras
tination produces no absolute encrease of our difficul
ties, make them less superable to ourselves by habitual
terrors.42
Johnson seems to agree with Freud*s conception of dangers
signalling libidinal desires: as the man approaches his
coveted goal through the plans Johnson lists, it appears he
is more prone to conjure up visions of calamity. He
further explains that "remorse and vexation” seize upon the
anxiety-ridden man, "and forbid him to enjoy what he is so
/ Q
desirous to appropriate,*' suggesting the integral
relationship between powerful psychic impulses and halluci
natory evil.
With a metaphor strongly evocative of libidinal
drives, Johnson implies the enervating effects upon the
personality when psychic forces are insufficiently
expressed: "The case of Tantalus, in the region of poetic
punishment, was somewhat to be pitied, because the fruits
that hung about him retired from his hand; but what tender
ness can be claimed by those who though perhaps they suffer
the pains of Tantalus will never lift their hands for their
own relief?"^ Fearful of the strength of his own wishes,
such a man will not even commendably persist, like Tantalus,
in pursuing emotional release by reaching for what he
wants. Instead, he withdraws in a cowardly manner.
146
Johnson calls this inhibition the nvis inertiae, the mere
repugnance to motion” and later a torpid condition, suggest
ing the unhealthy confinement of normal stimuli or
instincts. Acutely enough, Johnson recommends immediate,
head-on confrontation of one’s worst presentiments: "When
evils cannot he avoided, it is wise to contract the
interval of expectation; to meet the mischiefs which will
overtake us if we fly; and suffer only their real malignity
without the conflicts of doubts and anguish of anticipa-
45
tion." The key phrase here is real malignity as opposed
to those spectral images so painfully summoned from a
distorted imagination. Making the visionary real or the
unconscious conscious was a prime object of Johnson’s
psychopathological studies«
Such is the emptiness of human enjoyment, that we
are always impatient of the present. Attainment is
followed by neglect, and possession by disgust . . .
Few moments are more pleasing than those in which the
mind is concerting measures for a new undertaking.
From the first hint that wakens the fancy, till the
hour of actual execution, all is improvement and
progress, triumph and felicity. Every hour brings
additions to the original scheme, suggests some new
expedient to secure success, or discovers consequential
advantages not hitherto forseen. While preparations
are made, and materials accumulated, day glides after
day through elysian projects, and the heart dances to
the song of hope. Such is the pleasure of projecting,
that many content themselves with a succession of
Visionary schemes, and wear out their allotted time in
the calm amusement of contriving what they never
attempt or hope to execute.4-6
The latter part of the passage approaches one of Johnson's
favorite diagnoses of neurotic styles, the "dangerous
prevalence of the imagination."
147
To the man "who involves himself in his own
thoughts," Johnson warns, "so frequent is the necessity of
resting below that perfection which we imagined within our
reach, that seldom any man obtains more from his endeavours
than a painful conviction of his defects, and a continual
resuscitation of desires which he feels himself unable to
/ * 7
gratify." Striving to live according to the pleasure
principle, man must inevitably clash with inhibiting
forces, and of these, the imaginary prohibitions that
people impose upon themselves had an exceptional appeal for
Johnson. He gives special attention to those repressions
which provoke delusory patterns or the wanton impulses of
neurotic behavior, "Every desire, however innocent, grows
dangerous, as by long indulgence it becomes ascendant in
the mind. When we have been much accustomed to consider
any thing as capable of giving happiness, it is not easy to
restrain our a,rdour, or to forbear some precipitation in
our advances, and irregularity in our pursuits.
In a famous reply to a letter of Boswell's, which,
he says, "gave me an account so hopeless of the state of
your mind," Johnson elaborates upon this statement, tracing
the course of fundamental instincts gone awry:
There lurks, perhaps in every human heart a desire of
distinction, which inclines every man first to hope,
and then to believe, that Nature has given him some
thing peculiar to himself. This vanity makes one mind
nurse aversions, and another actuate desires, till they
rise by art much above their original state of power;
and as affectation, in time, improves to habit, they
148
at last tyrannise over him who at first encouraged them
only for show. Every desire is a viper in the bosom,
who, while he was chill, was harmless; but when warmth
gave him strength, exerted it in poison.4-9
Here is contained a crucial tenet of Johnson's theory of
neurosis: the double-bind paradox of drives so preposses
sing yet at the same time impractical and unrealizable that
man is coerced into fleeing to the irrational world of
neurotic formations. Seeking to evade that dilemma brought
on by the strength of his innermost wishes and the impossi
bility of obtaining them in real life, such a man veers off
acceptable channels of relief to the solitary, addictive
life of neurotic daydreaming. Both Johnson and Freud
carefully study man's survival in these terms--that men
long to be relieved of libidinal tension, yet man in
society purchases civilization at the price of giving up
this important instinctual gratification.
"The mind of man is never satisfied with the objects
immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the
present moment. , , . [Such is] the folly of him who lives
only in idea, refuses immediate ease for distant pleasures,
and, instead of enjoying the blessings of life, lets life
glide away in preparations to enjoy them.Johnson's
descriptions of escape from the reality against which the
neurotic feels helpless constitute some of his most "clini
cally" detailed observations of mental disturbance. The
"frigid and narcotick infection" that seizes such a person,
149
or ’ ’ the art of regaling his mind with those airy gratifica
tions, " Johnson proves to be "fatal" to mental health.
Other vices or follies are restrained by fear, reformed
by admonition, or rejected by the conviction which the
comparison, of our conduct with that of others, may in
time produce. But this invisible riot of the mind,
this secret prodigality of being, is secure from
detection, and fearless of reproach. The dreamer
retires to his apartments, shuts out the cares and
interruptions of mankind, and abandons himself to his
own fancy; new worlds rise up before him, one image is
followed by another, and a long succession of delights
dances round him.51
The clandestine, solitary indulgence in these scenarios is
what so concerns Johnson. Apart from the general mass of
society, such a man can gratify his wishes to his heart's
content, with impunity and abandon--only however until
reality or the intrusion of others disturbs his fantasy,
recalling him to the world he found so unattractive and
unmanageable in the first place.
He is at last called back to life by nature, or by
custom, and enters peevish into society, because he
cannot model it to his own will. He returns from
his idle excursions with the asperity, tho' not with
the knowledge, of a student, and hastens again to
the same felicity with the eagerness of a man bent
upon the advancement of some favourite science. The
infatuation strengthens by degrees, and, like the
^ ‘ ' ’ ’ ! owers, without any
The keen metaphor at the end of the passage is particularly
well-selected, illustrating Johnson's knowledge of the
infirmity which initially drove the man to such measures:
as people take opium to relieve debilitating pain, but
should cautiously resist the dangers of an overdose that
may deaden feeling altogether, so Johnson hints at an
external symptom o± malignity.^
150
original distress in his subject, who is driven to seek
comfort through narcotic maneuvers yet throws caution to
the wind by becoming dependent on their tranquilizing
effect. As with most forms of addiction, the more one
indulges, the more vulnerable and impotent he becomes
without his support system. Thus a vicious circle is
formed, typical of many neurotic careers.
Johnson explored the enervating tyranny of neurosis
with particular diligence, devoting special attention to
those daily, recurrent, seemingly harmless temptations that
everyone experiences seeking to escape from the brutal
realities of life to a wonderland where one’s wish is
delightfully one's command. Yielding to the enticements of
pleasure, however, one is seduced and abandoned to the
nightmare of helpless, unsatisfied longing when reality
inevitably breaks in upon his cherished mythologies. "In
the universal conspiracy of mankind against themselves,"
explains Johnson,
every age and every condition indulges some darling
fallacy; every man amuses himself with projects which
he knows to be improbable, and which therefore he
resolves to persue without daring to examine them.
, . . Such is the general dream in which we all slumber
out our time; every man thinks the day is coming, in
which he shall be gratified with all his wishes, in
which he shall leave all those competitors behind, who
are now rejoicing like himself in the expectation of
victory; the day is always coming to the servile in
which they shall be powerful, to the obscure in which
they shall he eminent, and to the deformed in which
they shall be beautiful.53
151
The cultivation of such self-deceit is not only
useless but demeaning, since "when we delight to brood in
secret over future happiness, and silently to employ our
meditations upon schemes of which we are conscious that the
bare mention would expose us to derision and contempt; we
should then remember, that we are cheating ourselves by
voluntary delusions; and giving up to the unreal mockeries
of fancy, those hours in which solid advantages might be
54
attained by sober thought and rational assiduity." But
the most sinister consequence of hallucinatory escapism,
Johnson always maintains, is its self-induced bondage:
"These, like all other cordials, though they may invigorate
in a small quantity, intoxicate in a greater; these plea
sures , . , become dangerous and destructive, when once
they gain the ascendant in the heart. ... To lull our
55
faculties in a lethargy is poor and despicable.” Johnson
proves how people imprison themselves in their own castles
in the sky, incapable of resisting their increasing isola
tion and lapse of communication with other men.
Johnson's periodical essays are filled with "case
histories" of characters who suffer the tyranny of neurotic
symptoms in their blind struggles to maintain those
intricate, ensnaring webs they have so fantastically woven.
Cupidus, for example, grew up in a family where "visionary
opulence" was the sole object of endeavor. The family met
together for years determining schemes of pleasure that
152
depended upon the inheritance of a large fortune from
certain wealthy, old relatives who threatened never to die.
When finally they did, in protracted succession, compounded
by the family's anxieties and trepidations, only Cupidus is
left to execute in truth what they could only all imagine.
He complains, however, that he is rendered incapable of
enjoying the riches and instead, "I have returned again to
my old habit of wishing. Being accustomed to give the
future full power over my mind, and to start away from the
scene before me to some expected enjoyment, I deliver up
myself to the tyranny of every desire which fancy suggests,
and long for a thousand things which I am unable to
procure." He ends by imploring Mr. Rambler for a remedy
for a mind "corrupted with an inveterate disease of wish
ing, and unable to think on any thing but wants, which
5 6
reason tells me will never be supplied."
Cupidus' problem of course was the narrow confine
into which he was forced to direct his energies, not having
developed alternate channels of expression. Johnson hints
at these limitations in Cupidus' earlier explanation:
"I had not enlarged my conceptions either by books or
conversation . . . The poignancy of his misfortune is
clearly found in his estrangement from other people, a
typical case in all neuroses. Many of the characters in
Johnson's "case histories" suffer similar perplexities.
Dick Linger, a typical Johnsonian invalid, languishing in
153
idleness, complains:
Thus burdensome to myself and others, I form many
schemes of employment which may make my life useless
or agreeable, and exempt me from the ignominy of
living by sufferance. This new course I have long
designed but have not yet begun. The present moment
is never proper for the change, but there is always
a time when all obstacles will be removed, and I
shall surprise all that know me with a new distribu
tion of my time. Twenty years have past since I
have resolved a complete amendment, and twenty years
have been lost in d e l a y s .58
The case of Linger illustrates the great amount of
emotional energy expended to maintain a neurotic structure
or the status quo, making it nearly impossible for the
individual to break out. "Those only will sympathize with
my complaint," he attests, "whose imagination is active and
resolution weak, whose desires are ardent, and whose choice
is delicate; who can not satisfy themselves with standing
still, and yet cannot find a motive to direct their
59
course." Linger is clearly enmeshed in a subservience to
his "imagination," powerless to redirect the psychic forces
that incapacitate him. Detached from his innermost feel
ings, he is moreover detached from other people, incapable
of the emotional experience that could remedy his lethargy:
like Cupidus, he has never learned to diversify his
pursuits through gainful employment.
Perhaps the most pitiable example of such mental
paralysis is Johnson’s Victoria, a young lady taught only
to exult in her beauty, so that when she contracts small
pox, her only means of gratification is cruelly snatched
154
from her life. She painfully recounts her plight to Mr.
Rambler: "[A young woman in my condition] is at once
deprived of all that gave her eminence or power; of all
that elated her pride, or animated her activity; all that
filled her days with pleasure and her nights with hope; all
that gave gladness to the present hour, or brightened her
6 0
prospects of futurity." Johnson's description of
Victoria's former glory is curiously reminiscent of the
ecstasies of those who revel in neurotic daydreams. In
fact, Victoria's mental life before her illness was full of
bizarre rituals and fantastic schemes and ambitions that
bore little relation to the ways of the real world:
Johnson is perhaps ironically hinting that Victoria was in
actuality "diseased" before the onset of small-pox. When
the cruel reality does strike, and her insubstantial
pageants forever fade, she laments her "helpless destitu
tion" and "dismal inanity" like other emotional invalids:
"Every object of pleasing contemplation is at once snatched
away, and the soul finds every receptacle of ideas empty,
or filled only with the memory of joys that can return no
more. All is gloomy privation, or impotent desire; the
faculties of anticipation slumber in despondency, or the
6 X
powers of pleasure mutiny for employment." As in all
aggravated indulgence in fantasy, when the loved object
must be forsaken Victoria is bereft of her sole means of
mental survival. She abandons herself to despairing
155
melancholy, "motionless indifference,1 ' and similar signs of
emotional stupor.
neurotic maladjustment, so does its attendant, sorrow.
Johnson begins his examination of sorrow by describing more
normal, well-adjusted patterns of emotional discharge. "Of
the passions with which the mind of man is agitated, it may
be observed that they naturally hasten towards their own
extinction by inciting and quickening the attainment of
their objects. Thus fear urges our flight, and desire
animates our progress. , . , Their immediate tendency is to
some means of happiness really existing, and generally
6 2
within the prospect." Sorrow, however, does not have
this self-regulatory effect, since it deadens sensibility
and causes a complete alienation from present and future
6 3
possibilities of satisfaction. Johnson describes the
fixating symptoms:
It requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the
universe should be repealed; that the dead should
return, or the past should be recalled. . . . Sorrow
is properly that state of the mind in which our desires
are fixed upon the past, without looking forward to the
future, an incessant wish that something were otherwise
than it has been, a tormenting and harassing want of
some enjoyment or possession which we have lost, and
which no endeavors can possibly regain. , . . Such
people have suffered all sensibility of pleasure to be
destroyed by a single blow, have given up for ever the
hopes of substituting any other object in the room of
that which they lament, resigned their lives to gloom
11 ndency, and worn themselves out in unavailing
As idleness intrigues Johnson as a symptom of
156
Into this category fall many of Johnson's neuras
thenic characters, obsessed by traumatic severance from
objects in which they have come to invest their sole
commitment to life. "It too often happens that sorrow,
thus lawfully entering, gains such a firm possession of the
mind, that it is not afterwards to be ejected; the mournful
ideas, first violently impressed, and afterwards willingly
received, so much engross the attention, as to predominate
in every thought, to darken gayety, and perplex ratiocina
tion. An habitual sadness seizes upon the soul, and the
faculties are chained to a single object, which can never
6 5
be contemplated but with hopeless uneasiness." Here are
obstructed libidinal wishes gone awry: in senseless,
unsatisfied longing, one consumes one's time mourning past
and therefore inalterable structures, clinging automati
cally to behavior which was once satisfying in the past but
now no longer serves. Freud recognized this arrest in
f \ ft
development and called it fixation. Johnson's explana
tion approximates the description of strong libidinal
attachment to things from which one is unable to extricate
his affections. "Sorrow," Johnson perceives, "is a kind of
rust of the soul. , , . It is the putrefaction of stagnant
life," and he condemns this prodigal mismanagement of
life's rich natural resources.
"The whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts
of it,"^ As his various biographers have shown, Johnson
157
was ever occupied in finding means of avoiding what one
recent critic deems a prominent idea in his philosophy of
68
human experience, "the vacuity of life." In his
periodical essays, Johnson focuses special attention upon
the urgent need to escape this essential ennui. His
condemnation of man's alienation bqth from himself and
others seems very modern. In particular, it is pride that
leads one astray from the route to mental health. In his
case history of Misellus, he portrays a young man who
victimizes himself through a form of ego-mania run rampant.
With a finely comprehensive account of paranoid delusion
and its intricately developed systems of imaginary persecu
tion and grandiose abilities, Johnson has Misellus (ironi
cally, in Latin meaning poor, little) grieving at the end
of his fantastic tirade: "Thus I live, in consequence of
having given too great proofs of a predominant genius, in
the solitude of a hermit, with the anxiety of a miser, and
the caution of an outlaw; afraid to shew my face, lest it
should be copied; afraid to speak, lest I should injure my
character, and to write lest my correspondents should
publish m y letters; always uneasy lest my servants should
steal my papers fo r the sake of money, or my friends for
that of the publick. Thus it is to soar above the rest of
69
mankind . , ." The poor little man indeed dismally
suffers, from an estrangement from himself and others,
incapable of any real assessment of his state.
158
Pride likewise defeats Gelidus (in Latin, frozen or
numb), a scientist, perhaps anticipating the mad astronomer
in Rasselas, who locks himself in the highest room of his
house, to pursue abstruse research. "He has totally
divested himself of all human sensations,” writes Johnson,
and he reflects that this great philosopher lives, "insen
sible to every spectacle of distress, and unmoved by the
loudest call of social nature, for want of considering that
men are designed for the succour and comfort of each other
. . , that he may be justly driven out from the commerce of
mankind, who has so far abstracted himself from the
species, as to partake neither of the joys nor griefs of
others. . . According to Johnson, man must learn to
divest himself of the imaginary accoutrements he constructs,
much like the tailor-deity in Swift's A Tale of A Tub, to
achieve that one-upmanship he so fanatically craves. Again
and again Johnson details man's multifarious disguises--
scientist, author, politician, theologian, famous beauty.
But all fall under the same heading of vain, misguided
impulses that deplete one's already low storehouse of
energy. "By such arts of voluntary delusion does every man
endeavour to conceal his own unimportance from himself. It
is long before we are convinced of the small proportion
which every individual bears to the collective body of
71
mankind. , . ." . Calling attention to the weakness and
imperfection of individual man, Johnson inferentially
159
stresses the common bond of humanity, perhaps his most
prevalent therapeutic recommendation and one still not
superseded By modern modes of treatment.
72
"Mankind are universally corrupt," Johnson
reflects, and his reference is specifically to individuals
segregated from the whole of humanity. Johnson's remedy is
simply that men get together: what Freud termed sublima
tion, Eric Fromm, productive forms of relatedness, and
H, S, Sullivan, interpersonal relationships, to name a few
modern versions of Johnson's basic formula. According to
Johnson and his modern colleagues, people's dangerous
libidinal tensions can be relieved by interacting with one
another, for better or for worse, "The business of life is
carried on by a general co-operation; in which the part of
any single man can be no more distinguished, than the
effect of a particular drop when the meadows are floated by
a summer shower: yet every drop increases the inundation,
and every hand adds to the happiness or misery of man-
73
kind." The metaphor is typically well chosen, for
rainfall can signify healthful nourishment and promising
harvest, or overpowering destruction and uncontrollable
rampage. Of course Johnson hopes for the best, for produc
tive and creative enterprises that yield man the pleasure
he is so fundamentally propelled toward, "To receive and
to communicate assistance, constitutes the happiness of
human life: man may indeed preserve his existence in
160
solitude, but can enjoy it only in society.
The common business of everyday life held a
peculiar fascination for Johnson, because of the success or
failure of communal undertaking, and in many ways this is
central to his theory of neurosis. By probing in his
periodical essays the seemingly humdrum occurrence of
everyday life, Johnson succeeds in producing a thoroughly
comprehensive analysis of psychodynamic structures. It
seems that by 1759, Johnson gathered enough information and
formulated his theories so positively that he is ready to
compose Rasselas, possibly the most sophisticated exposi
tion of mental life that he ever came to put together.
161
Notes
1. Lives of the Poets, II, 93.
2. Ibid., p, 92.
3. See also editor’s introduction to Studies in the
Early English Periodical, ed. R. P, Bond (Chapel Hill:
University o£ North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 3-48.
4. Boswell, Life of Johnson, I, 203.
5. Works, II, xx-xxii (Introduction),
6. Charles Brenner, An Elementary Textbook of Psycho
analysis (New York: Doubleday & Go., 1955), p. 4.
7. Works, IV, 383-84 (Rambler 141).
8. Works, III, 43 (Rambler 8),
9. Works, II, 462-63 (Adventurer 119).
o
1 —1
Ibid,
1 —1
Works, II, 465 (Adventurer 117).
12. Works, III, 59 (Rambler 11),
13 . Works, III, 46 (Rambler 8).
14. Works, III, 359 (Rambler 68),
15. Ibid.
16. Works, II, 84 Cldier 27).
17. Works, IV, 95 (Rambler 87).
18. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752)
(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 374,
19. Ibid,, p. 379.
20.
1961),
Freud and the Post-Freudians (London: Cassell,
pp. 13-14.
21. Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and
Development (New York: Hermitage House, 1950), p. 28.
162
22. Freud, "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1930),
Standard Edition, XXI, 64-145.
23. Works, II, 70 (Idler 22).
24. Works, II, 319 (Idler 22) (original).
25. Ibid., p. 320.
26. Works, V, 161 (Rambler 175).
27. Brown, Freud and the Post-Freudians, Ch. 6 ,
PP
. 108-28.
28. Works, II, 62 (Idler 20).
29. Works, V, 37-38 (Rambler 151).
30. Ibid., p. 38.
31. Ibid., p. 39.
32. Ibid.
33. Works, Ill, 264 (Rambler 49).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Works, V, 42 (Rambler 151).
37. Works, Ill, 34-35 (Rambler 7).
38. Ibid., p. 35 .
39. Works, Ill, 160 (Rambler 29).
to
40. Brenner, pp. 76 ff. Freud, A General Introduction
Psychoanalysis, Lecture 25, "Anxiety."
41. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,
PP
. 415-16.
42. Works, IV, 346-47 (Rambler 134).
43. Ibid. , p. 348.
44. Ibid., p. 347.
45. Ibid.
46. Works, V, 310 (Rambler 207).
163
47. Works, V, 311 (Rambler 207).
48. Ibid., p. 312.
49. Letter 163.
50. Works, III, 10 (Rambler 2).
51. Ibid.
52. Works, IV, 106 (Rambler 89).
53. Works, II, 390-91 (Adventurer 69).
54. Ibid., p. 393.
55 . Ibid., p. 394.
56. Works, IV, 22 (Rambler 73).
57. Ibid., p. 19.
58. Works, II, 6 8 (Idler 21).
59. Ibid., p. 6 6 .
60. Works, IV, 342 (Rambler 133).
61. Ibid.
62. Works, III, 253 (Rambler 47).
63. Freud, p. 287.
64. Works, III, 254 (Rambler 47).
65. Ibid., p. 255.
6 6 . Freud, Lecture 22, "Aspects of Development and
Regression," pp. 348-66.
67. Life, II, 93.
6 8 . Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1967).
69. Works, III, 91 (Rambler 16).
70. Works, III, 133 (Rambler 24).
71, Works, V, 15 (Rambler 146).
16'4
72.
73.
74.
Works, IX, 489 (Adventurer 137).
Ibid.
Works, II, 389 (Adventurer 67).
165
CHAPTER V I I
TOWARD A THEORY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA: RASSELAS
As for me, though now freed from my task, I
am become my own master, the harsh lot of
slothful idleness awaits me, and black and
gloomy leisure, more burdensome than any
labour, and the tedium of sluggish living.
Worries beget worries, and a pestering
company of troubles harass me, and the bad
dreams of an empty mind. ... In trembling
I rush through everything, I wander round
everything to see if anywhere a path to a
better life opens up.1
The lines he composed in Latin after the revision
and correction of his great Dictionary in December, 1772,
offer a particularly insightful introduction to Johnson's
Rasselas, published more than thirteen years earlier. In
the poem, "Know Thyself,” Johnson describes the phantasma
goric figures that haunt vacuous minds whose projections
are both the causes and effects of their dismal impoverish
ment. A vicious circle is inscribed as "worries beget
worries" through the idleness that aggravates and perpetu
ates itself.
The theme of the mind's destitution, "where empty
appearances and fleeting shadows and thin shapes of things
2
flit through the void," runs deep in Johnson's theory of
neurosis, notably in his periodical essays and the
diagnoses of neurotic daydreaming discussed in Chapter VI.
166
Coining from these comprehensive analyses of the psychic
apparatus in the early and middle 1750s, it is not surpris
ing that by 1759, Johnson was ready to apply his theories
to a fictional representation of the schema of the mind and
to study how people learn to manage the instinctual forces
that energize and impel them to activity. "The Choice of
Life," Johnson's original title for Rasselas, signifies the
same fluctuating uncertainty he attributes to most people's
quest for pleasurable gratification and rewards that are
personally and socially redeemable. The tale as well marks
his extraordinary progress toward a theory of schizophrenia,
a topic over which modern psychotherapists are still
puzzling.
The circumstances surrounding the composition of
Johnson's Rasselas and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan
are worthy of comparison, considering the striking similari
ties between both men’s mental states at the time. It is
well known that Coleridge, an habitual victim of idleness,
dissoluteness, and loneliness wrote his dream-poem in an
abandoned farmhouse under the influence of opium, appar
ently taken to relieve not only his painful physical
ailments but the agonies of guilt and despair he was
3
subjected to. Though we should not force the resemblance
too far, Johnson, who was also prone to fits of melancholy
dejection, wrote his exotic tale similarly distraught by
grief and remorse at the death of his mother.
___________________167
Certainly Johnson long anticipated the death of his
mother, who died at the age of ninety in January, 1759, as
he confided to Lucy Porter ten years earlier, describing it
as "one of the few calamities on which I think with
terror."^ Along with this, there is the fact that Johnson
did not see his mother for twenty-two years after 1737,
when he permanently moved to London. It is possible to
imagine the complicated psychological factors that must
have contributed to his disorientation when she died.“ * It
is very painful to read the entries in Johnson's Diary in
the months following his mother's death as he continually,
almost droningly, names the members of his family, all dead
now, and all people with whom his relationships were
obviously conflicting. On Easter Day, 1759, his despon
dency over the past and its old entrapping feelings of
worthlessness and bewilderment emerge to haunt him till he
appears to revert almost to the helplessness of a child:
Almighty and most merciful Father, look down with pity
upon my sins. I am a sinner, good Lord, but let not
my sins burden me for ever. Give me the grace to break
the chain of evil custom. Enable me to shake off
idleness and sloth; to will and to do what thou hast
commanded . . . Forgive me, 0 Lord, whatever I have
done amiss, and whatever duty I have neglected. Let me
not sink into useless dejection . . . And 0 Lord, so
far as it may be lawful, I commend unto thy fatherly
goodness my father, brother, wife and mother, beseech
ing thee to make them happy for Jesus Christs sake.
Amen.6
While Johnson's prayer may exhibit qualities of orthodox
Christian humility and the appropriate mortification when
man beseeches God, still the passage elicits other less
168
accountable aspects of childish weakness and perplexity.
"Make them happy" is a particularly immature expression,
written apparently during Johnson’s excruciating recollec
tions of spectres from an unhappy past.
The figures and events of the past fill those
twilight realms of consciousness that so engage Johnson in
his writings on neurosis. In exploring his own personal
ordeals, he describes, in "Know Thyself," the nightmares
people suffer who are plagued by unresolved old fears and
conflicts. And where else but in an imaginary world like
the Abyssinia of Rasselas could this subliminal chaos
approach resolution by reenacting one's private struggles
through the imagery of dreams.^ Indeed, Freud and other
psychoanalysts frequently suggest the close relationship
between the interpretation of literature and that of
dreams. Significantly, explains Freud, the artist "is not
the only one who has a life of phantasy; the intermediate
world of phantasy is sanctioned by general human consent,
and every hungry soul looks to it for comfort and consola-
tiqn.'V It is perhaps for this therapeutic content that
Hilaire Belloc recommended, "Every man ought to read
Rasselas, and every wise man will read it half a dozen
times in his life. Indeed, a man would do well to read it
once a year at least, for never was wisdom better put, or
g
more enduringly."
169
The famous legend of the Old Man of the Mountain
described in Purchas His Pilgrimes was a source for both
Coleridge’s and Johnson's representation of the threshold
of consciousness: both depict its inhabitation by alle
gorical denizens that image the workings of the mind. Much
as in what Freud called the manifest dream or the conscious
experience during sleep, Coleridge and Johnson create
imaginary conceptions and sensations as symbols of primary
psychic processes. While Coleridge’s journeys through what
he called the "vestibule of consciousness" have been
exhaustively treated by himself and others, Johnson’s
similar travels have been somewhat glossed over, probably
through a diffidence in attributing romantic flair to the
reputedly stolid old literary dogmatist. Quite to the
contrary, Johnson’s attraction to the exotic and the
imaginary is frequently demonstrated in his literary criti
cism,, notably in the famous beginning of Rambler 60: "All
joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is
produced by an act of the imagination, that realises the
event however fictitious, or approximates it however remote,
by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose
fortune we contemplate; so that we feel, while the decep
tion lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same
9
good or evil happening to ourselves," Here Johnson's
promotion of an "act of the imagination" points to his
Lockean belief in the power of the mind to create its own
170
pictures. In the Preface to Shakespeare, he writes,
"Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are
mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities
to mind. When the imagination is recreated by a painted
landscape, the trees are not supposed capable to give us
shade, or the fountains coolness; but we consider how we
should be pleased with such fountains playing beside us,
and such woods waving over us."^ In the same way that
Reynolds and Burke extol the inward, personalized, and
concrete expression of objects as the material for literary
art, rather than their abstract, indefinite portrayal,
Johnson is interested primarily in the rousing and invigo
rating powers of the imagination> in those actualized
mental configurations that lie at the threshold of
consciousness, to be probed, as in dream interpretation,
for their revelatory content.
According to Donald M. Lockhart’s convincing
account of the composition of Rasselas, Johnson not only
wrote the tale "in the evenings of one week,"^ but
prepared for it at least seven years before by studying
Ethiopian backgrounds. Lockhart believes that Johnson read
a number of sources characterized by the incantatory,
dream-like style found in Rasselas and generally in the
"oriental tale” so popular in the eighteenth century. In
Rasselas, more so than in other more pedestrian examples of
the genre, Johnson employs this magic-endowing stylistic
171
device to conjure up fantastical images that in many ways
reflect the schema of the mind. Indeed, it is likely that
Johnson, like Freud, another thorough-going empiricist, was
tantalized by the possibility of describing psychological
theories in physiological terms. And while even today it
seems difficult to accomplish this feat except in good
science fiction, it is very possible that Johnson wrote
Rasselas as such a fantasy, exploiting illusion and
enchantment so as to create, as Coleridge did in Kubla
Khan, a surrealistic diagram of mental life.
Of the various phantasmagoric images that haunt
minds whose depths are dark and largely unexplored, perhaps
the most ominous is that force roughly comparable to the
superego. Chapter One of Rasselas, ’ ’ Description of a
Palace in a Valley," seems to approximate the coercion of
this habitually repressive, largely unconscious influence.
Here Johnson explains the confinement of young Prince
Rasselas of the ancient royal family of Abyssinia in a
private palace cut off from the rest of the world, save for
his immediate family and various familial servants or
permanent resident guests:
The place which the wisdom or policy of antiquity had
destined for the residence of the Abyssinian princes
was a spacious valley in the kingdom of Amhara,
surrounded on every side by mountains, of which the
summits overhang the middle part. The only passage by
which it could be entered was a cavern that passed
under a rock, of which it has long been disputed
whether it was the work of nature or of human industry.
The outlet of the cavern was concealed by a thick wood,
172
and the mouth which opened into the valley was closed
with gates of iron, forged by the artificers of ancient
days, so massy that no man could without the help of
engines open or shut them.1 2
Johnson's picture of the mountains and caves was of
13
course transcribed from various travel sources, yet his
account, with such close attention to detail, invokes the
constraining, prohibitive qualities of a superego mecha^
nism. His description anticipates as well an especially
"romantic" literary tradition. As Marjorie Nicolson shows
in Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory, romantic poets used
nature as symbols of secret places in man's soul or a kind
of Neoplatonic mysticism.^ Similarly, Johnson explicates
the mind's mysteries and bizarre experiences with a rather
Blakean aplomb. Indeed Blake's "Ancient of Days," the
terrible, repressive father figure in many of his poems and
engravings, may be said to resemble the Johnsonian proto
type, the frightening imprisonment by dreadful forefathers
in massive stone structures, "closed with gates of iron,
forged by the artificers of ancient days." With these
images of captivity, surrounded by threatening mountains
and water that "fell with, dreadful noise from precipice to
precipice, till it was heard no more, Johnson conjures
up nightmarish visions or archetypal patterns of a superego
principle. An awful and avenging phenomenon, acquired in
some long-forgotten past, the superego, in psychoneurosis,
may tyrannize over and immobilize other functions of the
mind just as Rasselas' ancestors, to his detriment,
173
have incarcerated him.
Johnson suggests the sinister results of helpless
mystification, where knowledge is shrouded in esoteric
ritual in passages which might be from The Castle of
Otronto or some macabre Jacobean tragedy. These passages
perhaps stand for the labyrinths of the mind and the
evolution of thought process:
This house, which was so large as to be fully known to
none but some ancient officers who successively
inherited the secrets of the place, was built as if
suspicion herself had dictated the plan. To every room
there was an open and secret passage; every square had
a communication with the rest, either from the upper
stories by private galleries or by subterranean passage
from the lower apartments. Many of the columns had
unsuspected cavities, in which a long race of monarchs
had deposited their treasures. They then closed up the
opening with marble, which was never to be removed but
in the utmost exigencies of the kingdom, and recorded
their accumulations in a book, which was itself con
cealed in a tower, not entered but by the emperor
attended by the prince who stood next in succession.1”
The idea of archaic ruins, another favorite "romantic"
convention, invokes feelings of patriarchal custom
inherited through generations, of a kind of collective
unconscious where the riches buried deep in the structure
may symbolize some arcane mythology connected with enig
matic primogenitors. The cryptic writings in the book,
together with the elaborate ritual required to examine
them, suggest the various taboos and magical powers
associated with the secrets of a civilization. Johnson
seems to be depicting what anthropologists study in
primitive forms of religion. But whereas ancestor worship,
174
totemism, fetishism, ritualism, and various other cults are
ancient idolatries, Johnson recognizes the dangerous
potency of modern idolatry, as Freud did in interpreting
17
neurosis as a private form of religion. In the first few
chapters of Rasselas, Johnson focuses primarily upon
ancestor worship, or what psychiatrists term neurotic
fixation on parental authority. In Rasselas' struggles to
extricate himself from the tyranny of the equivocal "Happy
Valley," he describes a mind crippingly fixed in a fear
some, irrational, undiminishingly intense frame of refer
ence .
Johnson's terming Rasselas' predicament "blissful
captivity" is ironic considering his careful efforts to
portray the "Happy Valley" not as the Garden of Eden but a
phantasmagoric chamber of horrors, rather in the Sartre
tradition of Huis Clos. Rasselas' position at the opening
of the story indeed exhibits symptoms of schizophrenic
illness, anticipating the full-blown portrayal of the mad
astronomer later on. In the course of Rasselas' travels,
which are mental as well as geographical, we constantly
encounter greater or lesser degrees of delusion, culminat
ing in the dramatic schizophrenic case history at the
end.1 8
To define schizophrenia is fraught with difficulty
even nowadays, let alone in Johnson's time. In the inter
est of brevity, we may use a formulation derived from
175
several authorities who discuss at least four interrelated
aspects of schizophrenic behavior: 1 ) thought disturbances
marked by alterations of concept formation that may lead to
misinterpretations of reality and sometimes to delusions
and hallucinations; 2) mood changes that include ambiva
lence, constriction, inappropriateness of response, and
loss of empathy with others; 3) social inadequacy and
inflexibility; 4) conspicuously abnormal behavior that may
19
be withdrawn, regressive, bizarre. During Rasselas'
journey, he encounters manifold instances of such symptoms,
in his own early evasions of reality and in the confused
behavior of various individuals whom he encounters in his
progress toward healthful maturity and the assumption of a
career and responsibilities in life. He leaves these
deviant influences behind to find companions whose values
match his own newly acquired salutary insights, with Imlac,
of course, patiently directing him as more or less of a
psychiatrist or spiritual guide. Perhaps resuming his role
as the kindly doctor who is called in to minister to a
young lady's hysteria in Charlotte Lennox's The Female
Quixote (1752), Johnson may have created Imlac as a further
elaboration upon this character, the Johnsonian psychothera
pist in action. If we consider Rasselas as a treatise on
madness and the ensuing quest for mental stability, then it
seems beside the point to search for tragic and satiric
elements in the story or its personalities, as recent
176
20
criticism appears disposed to. Rather, "The Choice of
Life," Johnson’s original title, seems the key to inter
pretative cruxes, and makes the focus of the story his
endeavors to derive a practicable theory of neurosis.
Johnson clinically traces the onset of Rasselas'
illness as an inmate of the Happy Valley, when the young
man, "in the twenty-sixth year of his age, began to with
draw himself from . . . pastimes and assemblies, and to
21
delight in solitary walks and silent meditation." Here
neurotic trends toward detachment set in as Rasselas, weary
of his stagnant way of life and apparently unfulfilled by
his relationships with others, retreats to a solitude that
affords him "some complacence in his own perspicacity and
. . . some solace of the miseries of life from conscious-
22
ness of the delicacy with which he bewailed them."
Johnson characteristically diagnoses the allurements of
neurotic daydreams as the prince, in clandestine, solitary
self-absorption, begins to fabricate scenarios that express
his unacknowledged superiority and uniqueness. As the
illness progresses, reports Johnson, "He was now no longer
gloomy and unsocial," though keeping at a distance from
others to preserve his peculiar integrity. But his
symptoms of withdrawal persist, operating in a neurotic
framework that is compulsive, rigid, and jealously guarded
from the awareness of others. He considered himself
"master of a secret stock of happiness, which he could
_________________________________________________ 177
enjoy only by concealing it . . . His chief amusement was
to picture to himself that world which he had never seen;
to place himself in various conditions, to be entangled in
imaginary difficulties, and to be engaged in wild adven-
23
tures. . . ." Thus Rasselas languishes twenty months in
an anesthetic dream world, showing symptoms of schizo
phrenic illness as his thoughts and moods fluctuate exclu
sive of reality and as he becomes increasingly estranged
from other people. "He busied himself so intensely in
visionary bustle that he forgot his real solitude, and,
amidst hourly preparations for the various incidents of
human affairs, neglected to consider by what means he
2 A
should mingle with mankind.”
After some time, a symbolic episode acquaints
Rasselas with some notion of his folly as one day, while
conjuring a particularly disgraceful melodramatic fantasy,
along the lines of some preposterous silent movie hero
whose redundant rescues of heroines occur ad nauseam,
Rasselas rushes to the foot of the mountains to avenge some
imaginary wrong in the world outside, Johnson wryly
indulges in the details of the ludicrous chase until
suddenly, his bumbling hero realizes he can advance no
more. Smiling at his own "useless impetuosity," Rasselas
recognizes the inhibiting, dismaying structures that
surround him and the burlesque vanishes. The metaphorical
significance of the mountains as a tyrannical superego
178
principle becomes apparent as the young man reflects, "This
. . . is the fatal obstacle that hinders at once the enjoy
ment of pleasure and the exercise of virtue. How long is
it that my hopes and wishes have flown beyond this boundary
of my life, which yet I never have attempted to
25
surmount!” Rasselas has perniciously wandered in his
imagination, compensating for those prohibitions that
hindered his achievement of appropriate degrees of autonomy
as he grew older. It is not difficult to consider the
plausibility of a flight to mental illness under such
circumstances where airy gratifications are remuneration
for the absence of real ones. Lamenting the claustrophobic
web that enmeshes him and his own foolish waste of time,
Rasselas reproaches ”the crime or folly of my ancestors
and the absurd institutions of my country. ... I only
haye made no advances, but am still helpless and
0 f \
ignorant.” He is now painfully conscious of the closed
structure that kept him within its boundaries so long, a
system comparable to the schizophrenogenic family described
27
in modern clinical studies.
According to recent theorists, schizophrenogenic
families are characterized primarily by mechanisms used to
resist external influences which might challenge the closed
system, chiefly in conceptualizing the outside environment
28
as chaotic and unknowable. In a remarkably similar
appraisal, Johnson portrays Rasselas* ignorance of the
179
world beyond the Happy Valley and its reputed unmaster-
ability. Such helplessness is fostered by the same
prohibitive principle found in schizophrenogenic families
who maintain tight boundary constructs that sharply
discourage healthful exploration of the outside environ
ment, Johnson thus describes Rasselas' education: "The
sages who instructed them [children of the royal family]
told them of nothing but the miseries of public life, and
described all beyond the mountains as regions of calamity,
29
where man preyed upon man." 7 So vigilantly insulated from
the rest of the world, it is no wonder Rasselas is mysti
fied and incapable of committing himself to a proper course
of action for so long. At the end of Chapter 4, however,
after his startling insight into the true nature of his
neurosis--superego formation gone awry--Johnson affirms:
"From that time [he] bent his whole mind upon the means of
30
escaping from the valley of happiness."
To overcome a psychological disease, particularly
one as serious as that of a crippling repressive superego,
requires total dedication and perseverance. So Rasselas'
initial attempts to effect his cure or escape from the
Happy Valley--from the discovery of the malady, to his
patronage of the quack who promises to deliver him through
the ill-contrived flying machine, to his encounter with the
true physician of the soul, Imlac--is fraught with immense
difficulty. Johnson once more evokes surrealistic images
180
of a mind filled with fearsome visions that symbolize its
perplexing entanglements. As Rasselas surveys the land
scape, which is clearly psychic as well as physical,
Johnson notes, "When he looked round about him, he saw
himself confined by the bars of nature, which had never yet
been broken, and by the gate, through which none that once
had passed it were ever able to return. . . . The iron gate
he despaired to open, for it was not only secured with all
the power of art, but was always watched by successive
sentinels, and was by its position exposed to the perpetual
31
observation of all the inhabitants."
The idea of sentinel patrols or police supervision
again clearly elicits the phenomena associated in psycho
analysis with a malfunctioning superego. The severe
restraints imposed by ancestor worship, or Rasselas'
pathological attachment to an incomprehensible ancient
dominion, render him powerless, isolated, and vulnerable.
This vulnerability is a serious matter in a world where man
does prey upon man, as the Abyssinian sages correctly
32
preach, and Johnson of course well understood. After
Rasselas breaks his mind-forged manacles with Imlac's help,
the course of his psychic journey still displays his
susceptibility to other terrifying influences. But once
more he successfully manages to ward off the ever-looming,
ever-entrancing apparitions, with the assistance of his
kindly therapist. Johnson's story thus resembles a modern
181
Bildungsroman, which describes the psychological develop
ment of a young man, using a technique more imaginative and
sophisticated than the episodic, picaresque series of
adventures of Fielding's and Smollett's heroes.
Before he engages Imlac's services, Rasselas has a
brief, disenchanting encounter with a charlatan guru, the
first of a series he seems inevitably to draw as he seeks
guidance in "the choice of life." The artisan proposes to
cure Rasselas' malady with a ready and easy way to happi
ness, by exalting man's ability to overcome difficulties or
substituting one fallacious ideal with another. Encourag
ing Rasselas' confidence in the powers of human reason, he
convinces him they can fly over the fantastical mountains
much as Daedalus and Icarus escaped from the Minoan maze.
Johnson wryly portrays the "scientist's" simpering and
boasting before the prince: "I have been long of opinion
that, instead of the tardy conveyance of ships and
chariots, man might use the swifter migration of wings;
that the fields of air are open to knowledge and that only
33
ignorance and idleness need crawl upon the ground." As
one critic notes, while Voltaire would have concocted a
uniquely gruesome finale for the tamperer with the natural
order, and one not even as symbolically enchanting as
Icarus’, Johnson lets the poor devil off quickly and easily
when he drops instantly into a lake and Johnson comments
satirically, "His wings, which were of no use in the air,
182
sustained him in the water, and the prince drew him to
3 A -
land, half dead with terror and vexation." The artisan's
airy contraption turns out to be as hazardous as Rasselas'
daydreams, taking another precious year to prove equally
insubstantial.
The inundation of the legendary Nile, the most
venerable of historic streams, marks Rasselas' encounter
with Imlac and his embarkation on a new life. The symbolic
river is skillfully invoked again at the end of the tale
when Rasselas and his companions prepare to take the
ultimate voyage: they vow to return to Abyssinia, a
symbolic mission to discover the source of life, evidently
as inaccessible as it is desirable to explore. Throughout
the story, relics and monuments of the past assume special
significance, as the characters attempt to probe hiero
glyphics only partially cognizable.
As the director of Rasselas' mental development,
Imlac assumes the role of the experienced, worldly-wise
psychotherapist Johnson so relished in his periodical
essays, his contribution to the Female Quixote and in
assisting his psychologically disturbed friends, among whom
the classic case was of course Boswell. Rasselas' first
sessions with Imlac communicate factual and emotional
biographical data indispensable to the onset of the psycho
therapeutic procedure or the collaboration of psychiatrist
35
and patient. While Rasselas can only testify to his
183
present acute distress, presumably Imlac surmises the
severe handicaps under which the young man labors are
difficulties of long standing. With this diagnostic
appraisal, he begins treatment by a kind of intellectual
clarification of his patient’s problem; that is, he offers
Rasselas a comprehensive view of the ways of the world he
never saw, demystifying the taboos promoted by his unfor
tunate upbringing. He narrates his own biography, provid
ing insight into what is currently labeled family process
and child outcome theory, in particular, that schizophrenia
and other personality disorders can be best understood and
treated as the product of specific patterns of family
36
interaction, Imlac describes to Rasselas his own early
development which somewhat resembles the prince’s radically
sheltered upbringing. Apparently Imlac1s father also kept
him at home surrounded by riches with little to do but study
or play. "I was twenty years old before his tenderness
would expose me to the fatigue of travel," reports Imlac,
and at that time he was precipitously launched into the
wicked world, where fraud, plunder, and covetousness are
37
the products of human pride.
The world's neurosis, as well as his own upbring
ing, that rendered him incapable of dealing with the
puzzling vicissitudes of life, drives Imlac back into
seclusion and the closed boundaries of the equivocal Happy
Valley. Once there, however, he realizes his folly, and in
184
diagnosing the origin and nature of the prince's distress,
points to the dissipation of mind that is clearly fostered
by their surroundings: "Ignorance is mere privation, by
which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the
soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction.
. . . I am therefore inclined to conclude that, if nothing
counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow
38
more happy as our minds take a wider range." Johnson
naturally prefers enlargement of one's activity to its
restriction or inhibition: the former is associated with
healthy ego functioning in deriving the maximum degree of
satisfaction out of the limitations imposed by the environ
ment. Johnson is of course painfully and realistically
conscious of the small measure of pleasure available to
people even after mind-forged manacles and other such
proscriptive mechanisms are thrown off. He expresses his
practical assessment of the best that even successful
remedies have to offer in the famous lines, "Human life is
everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and
39
little to be enjoyed."
In the same way that a psychiatrist and patient
enter into a contractual relationship, so Imlac and
Rasselas seem to arrange therapeutic prospects and goals,
tentatively evaluating changes for the better and worse in
the course of treatment. Imlac clearly defines Rasselas’
present condition in the Happy Valley where "there can
185
never be community of love or of esteem," where members of
this perverse familial structure are "weary of themselves
and of each other, . . . envy the liberty which their folly
has forfeited, and would gladly see all mankind imprisoned
like themselves. Johnson is describing the stultifying
isolation fostered by schizophrenic families whose
maneuvers encourage limited interaction with the outside
world: such people remain spitefully suspicious and
hostile toward any influence that might disrupt their
unwholesome closed universe. Here affectionate human
relationships are at a bare minimum as the bizarre system
promotes "wretchedness" and "malignity1 . 1 even within itself,
as Imlac points out. Recognizing the desperate plight,
Rasselas implores Imlac, "Teach me the way to break my
prison. Thou shalt be the companion of my flight, the
guide of my rambles, the partner of my fortune, and my sole
director in the choice of life.
Having developed a reliable, trusting relationship
with his physician, Rasselas now asks him to help change
his unhappy style of life, to direct him toward worthy
ideals upon which the elements of psychic health rest.
Imlac properly admonishes his patient's expectant, over-
zealous attitude toward the treatment, in a speech every
therapist ought to repeat to prospective clients:
Sir . . . your escape will be difficult, and, perhaps,
you may soon repent your curiosity. The world, which
you figure to yourself smooth and quiet as the lake in
186
the valley, you will find a sea foaming with tempests
and boiling with whirlpools; you will be sometimes
overwhelmed by the waves of violence, and sometimes
dashed against the rocks of treachery. Amidst wrongs
and frauds, competitions and anxieties, you will wish
a thousand times for these seats of quiet, and will
ingly quit hope to be free from fear.4-2
"I never promised you a rose garden," Imlac warns. The
real world is not so delightful a place when compared with
the soft indulgences of a secure, narcotic retreat. Yet
reality, Johnson indefatigably maintains in all his writ
ings, is preferable to such stupefaction, and so together
Rasselas and Imlac set out to correct the young man's
misconception of the world. As the older man puts it, "If
your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to
despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and
skill."43
Rasselas' sister, Nekayah, and her friend, Pekuah,
soon join Imlac and the prince in making their escape from
the Happy Valley. As Imlac guides Rasselas and his party
beyond his family's bizarre domain, the princess, suffering
evidently from the same schizophrenic malaise as Rasselas,
remarks, "I am almost afraid ... to begin a journey of
which I cannot perceive an end, and to venture into this
immense plain, where I may be approached on every side by
men whom I never saw."44 She is expressing a reaction
common to many neurotic types upon first emerging from
their shells, an essential mistrust of fellow human
beings.43 Imlac attempts to ease this conditioned
187
diffidence by gradually and cautiously introducing his
patients into the world, in effect, re-socializing them as
they learn a new language, new manners, and how to deal
with the exigencies of everyday life. In a series of
difficult encounters, they experience trustworthiness, or
oftener, the lack of it, in others, testing relationships
outside the therapeutic one under Imlac's kindly auspices.
They learn to take up or drop companions according to a
new-found code of self-trust and integrity, becoming
increasingly able to take care of themselves. The final
46
step toward maturity involves taking care of others, in
Johnson's classic case history of the mad astronomer for
whom these ex-patients serve as auxiliary therapists,
successfully effecting the cure of a pitifully abandoned
chronic schizophrenic.
The theme informing Rasselas and his companions'
experimentation in the world is the quest for happiness,
Johnson's euphemism in all his writings for avoiding
madness through successful channels of emotional release.
Such endeavors clearly signify legitimate and thus pleasur
able outlets for dangerous libidinal impulses that could
potentially damage their possessors. As it happens, almost
everyone the company meets is damaged because of some
neurotic mismanagement or another. The travellers' quest
for the secret of mental stability is almost comparable to
a stroll in a psychiatric ward, perhaps in the way that
188
tourists sauntered through Bethlehem Hospital in the
eighteenth century, where for a penny one could not only
see the inmates but tease them to his heart’s content.
While Imlac does not really permit such cruelty, still many
have noted a mildly ironic tone, especially in the busy
middle chapters of Rasselas, where Johnson's motif seems
the Swiftian definition of happiness, "a perpetual posses-
i
s - i . o n of being well deceived." Here the ridiculous
succession of fools among knaves, and occasionally knaves
among fools, discloses to Rasselas a whole range of chronic
neuroses that divide human beings from each other, varia
tions on the theme of his own former crippling isolation.
While their symptoms are different, these characters
display the same rigid fixation to an irrational, obsessive
frame of reference as Rasselas once did, fearing lest their
dearly purchased equilibrium be shattered. The "young men
of spirit and gaiety," the Stoic philosopher, the pastoral
shepherds, the wealthy Bassa, the hermit, and the Stoic-
Rousseauistic philosopher all have in common a miserable
one dimensionality or self-centeredness: they expose their
own inner terrors and insecurities to the prince as he
begins to look deeply into the dark side of human nature.
With these insights, he learns to cope, with Imlac's help,
with the world's treachery, and by doing so, to develop
integrity and self-esteem.
The deceptions people impose upon themselves and
189
others is well explicated in the middle series of character
sketches in Rasselas. Walter Jackson Bate notes the preva
lent Johnsonian motif, "the treachery of the human heart,"
and he deserves credit in this respect for being one of the
first to appreciate Johnson's psychological insights. Bate
points out Johnson's recognition of the "treacherous abil-
48
ity of the human imagination to project or rationalize,"
to defend, in essence, a very paltry, narrowly bound, and
basically falsified ideal of selfhood. The would-be
teachers of Rasselas display this treacherous attitude
usually seeking to enroll the ingenu to their shabby and
dishonorable designs. Beneath each clever facade of self-
importance and complacency lurks an apprehensive, bewil
dered little animal fighting for survival in a world he
only vaguely understands. The sole comfort seems to lie in
luring others to his folly, thus defending his precarious
position by adding to the numbers of those occupying it.
- J - n a Rambler essay, Johnson explains the unhealthy system
49
and relates it to his diagnosis of neurotic pride. He
describes people tainted with guilt who "are unwilling to
suppose themselves meaner, and more corrupt than others,
and therefore willingly pull down from their elevations
those with whom they cannot rise to an equality. No man
was ever wicked without secret discontent. ... He either
endeavours to reform himself, or corrupt others; either to
regain the station which he has quitted, or prevail on
190
50
others to imitate his defection," Thus Rasselas’ new
acquaintances attempt to recruit him to their side, taking
advantage of his impeccable good nature. Yet all six also
reveal themselves as distressed victims of a sorrowful
malaise.
Each of Rasselas' intended seducers is easily
exposed. Upon his entrance into the world, Imlac warns him
of the "pleasing delusion" of gay assemblies where "there
was not one who did not dread the moment when solitude
51
should deliver him to the tyranny of reflection." It
soon becomes apparent that the riotous young men abandon
themselves to voluptuary pleasures since they are "dejected"
by the power and "abashed" by the wisdom which harshly
52
reproves their mindless activities. Likewise, the
shepherds, celebrated for their innocent enjoyment of the
good life, are really "rude and ignorant." "It was
evident that their hearts were cankered with discontent,"
says Johnson, so resentful are they of their superiors, to
53
whom they look with "stupid malevolence." The Bassa and
the hermit, though less offensive, are also subject to the
"tyranny of reflection," or anxiety and misgivings about
their own profitlessness- Both admit the delusory appear
ance of happiness, too preoccupied with their precarious
situations to enjoy peace and quiet. The hermit, particu
larly, in a story that capsuli.zes Imlac*s account of
suffering in the world and unrealistic mechanisms of escape
191
frpm it, and also anticipates the plight of the mad
astronomer later on, explains to the group, "My mind is
4
disturbed with a thousand perplexities of doubt and vani
ties of imagination ... 1 am sometimes ashamed to think
that I could not secure myself from vice, but by retiring
from the exercise of virtue, and begin to suspect that 1
was rather impelled by resentment, than led by devotion,
into solitude. My fancy riots in scenes of folly, and I
lament that 1 have lost so much and have gained so
r /
little." Repenting his cowardly withdrawal for the past
fifteen years, the hermit resolves to return to society.
Along the lines of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, or the
unprofitable servant in the parable of the talents, Johnson
has him digging up the usel es s treasure he has buried among
the rocks, perhaps to suggest his waste of the mind’s rich
natural resources,
Finally, the two Stoic philosophers clearly evoke
Johnson’s scorn as they erect schemes of man’s divine
infallibility. Encouraging neurotic pride by preaching a
flawless ideal of selfhood, the Stoic philosophy gives a
false account of man’s capabilities, promoting delusions of
grandeur. In believing he can attain perfection in life,
an inconceivable goal morally as well as psyehiatrically,
man worships a false god, and grows increasingly stultified
in his vain attempts: at "virtuous" detachment and imper-
55
turbability-, Johnson writes in Idler 11: "It was the
192
boast of Stoic philosophy, to make man unshaken by
calamity, and unelated by success, incorruptible by plea
sure, and invulnerable by pain: these are heights of
wisdom which none ever attained and to which few can
aspire,Blocked in this foredoomed pursuit, the human
imagination turns back upon itself in harmful defense
mechanisms., Donald Greene, in his essay, "The Sin of
Pride," remarks upon the general inhibition fostered by the
vicious system: "The whole vast range of compassion, of
empathy, of the ability to respond with genuine feeling to
the world outside oneself--to other people, to nature, to
art and literature--is narrowed to an ability to respond
only to self-regarding situations. The shallow emotional
life of the egocentric consists only in pleasure in situa
tions that bolster his ego and pain in situations that he
thinks diminish his status,"'’^ So Johnson presents his two
Stoic philosophers, both simpering blockheads whose cool
facades disguise timid, anxiety-ridden souls. The first
proponent of absolute self-sufficiency Johnson exposes when
he breaks down in abject helplessness at the death of his
only daughter who was to have supported him in old age; the
second Johnson lets remain complacently in his muddled
world. Swift’s "perpetual possession of being well-
deceived" seems especially appropriate for the latter, as
he bamboozles his audience where no one is really inter
ested in the truth to begin with. Instead, this assembly
193
of learned men trade upon each, others' neurotic emotional
shallowness: "Everyone was desirous to dictate to the
rest, and everyone was pleased to hear the genius or
C o
knowledge of another depreciated."
With the death of his mother reawakening painful
memories of his dismal childhood, Johnson wrote Rasselas
"in the evenings of one week," according to Boswell, but
his actual psychological preparation was a lifetime.
Johnson knew all too well the hooks people use to hold each
other against their better wills: fraudulent political
propaganda, sham literary scholarship, all the entrapping
stratagems of everyday life. Though he could vividly
allegorize them in the shape of Richard Savage’s phantom-
mother, the formidable shndes in the "Vision of Theodore,"
the loathsome aspects of the Happy Valley, still in essence
Johnson knew that the workings of the mind are also
expressed as patterns of interaction among real people.
Although it is true that Johnson and certainly his eminent
successors utilized intrapsychic devices in formulating a
theory of neurosis, still the phenomenology of mental
illness also manifests itself clearly in human relation
ships. And evidently the relationship uppermost in
Johnson’s mind as he came to write Rasselas in the wake of
his mother's death was that between parents and children.
In this respect, the maxriage and family chapters at the
center of Rasselas assume special significance.
194
It is well known that ever since Eugene Bleuler
first used the term schizophrenia in the early twentieth
century, there has been no condition beset with such
controversy in the whole field of medicine. Characterized
59
by distortions in one's experience and behavior, the
disease has been traditionally described, by Freud and his
followers, in terms of intrapsychic movements, or pictures
of dysfunctional mental operations. Their predecessor
Johnson, we have seen, was likewise attracted by the
possibility of thus diagramming mental life. Some very
recent investigators of the families of schizophrenics,
however, notably R. D, Laing, A. Esterson and their associ
ates, have begun to focus upon the social intelligibility
of the disease, on family relationships instead of enig
matic, endogenous forces that produce a pathological
condition. They trace their ideas to the philosophy of
Jean-Paul Sartre, who laid the basis for a new psycholog
ical method: the central principle of this "existential
psychoanalysis" is not libido or notions of psychic
determinism, But the individual's voluntary decisions.
Sartre writes, "The goal of existential psychoanalysis is
to rediscover through these empirical, concrete projects
the original mode in which each man has chosen his
f i n
being." "I am my choices," he summarizes, and surely
Johnson, a thorough-going empiricist who subtitled his most
formal psychological treatise "The Choice of Life" would
195
61
have no difficulty here accepting Sartre’s postulate.
The ’ 'Neo-Freudians," Eric Fromm, Karen Horney,
H, S, Sullivan, and Erik Erikson in particular, also empha
size a sociological rather than biological conditioning in
their methods. All are greatly concerned with what
Sullivan called the "psychology of interpersonal relation
ships." With this study of the human being in situation--
precisely the orientation of Sartre’s existentialism--these
psychologists probe the central meaning of human experience
at least as fully as those who use models of the psychic
apparatus. Indeed Freud clearly understood the value of
social psychiatry, becoming himself the first family
therapist in "The Case of Little Hans," where he treated
6 2
the child through the fa th e r, seeing the boy only once.
Tracing the development of Johnson’s theory of
neurosis, it soon becomes apparent that he shifts back and
forth in emphasis from intrinsic to extrinsic concerns,
from questions of psychic determinism or the individual's
libidinal drives to questions of total life adaptation or
interpersonal relations. It is interesting to notice that
^ - n Resselas, the two types of approach alternate in the
course of the ta,le, which begins and ends with rather
orthodox Freudian models, yet shifts at times to a more
sociological orientation, Indeed, Rasselas seems to lose
its surrealistic aura during the later episodes, as Johnson
brings his characters out into the real world, engaging
196
them in situations that illustrate his inchoate theories of
social psychiatry. This is particularly so in the middle
section, in the chapters dealing with marriage and family
therapy,
As Rassalas and Nekayah appear in the world "to
divide between them the work of observation," they proceed
much in the way that Laing and Esterson conducted their
survey of schizophrenic families reported in their Sanity,
Madness, and the Family. Gathering data by interviewing
family members, the authors accounted for the experience
and behavior of disturbed individuals by interpreting the
conflicts, and misunderstandings that beset the family
63
group. Similarly Rasselas and his sister investigate the
basic elements of family dynamics and assess the neurotic
maladjustments people make to each other. Nekayah, who
"insinuated herself into many families," notes the epidemic
proportions of the malady. She knows "not one house that
6
is not haunted by some fury that destroys their quiet."
She also comes close to describing the "ambivalence"
usually associated with, schizophrenic experience where
"everything floated in their mind unconnected with the past
or future, so that one desire easily gave way to another,
as a second stone cast into the water effaces and confounds
the circles of the first." The metaphor is particularly
apt, describing the disorientation and fluctuation common
to schizophrenic patients. Moreover, in the course of her
197
investigation, Nekayah. documents the simultaneous presence
of two separate tendencies, or dilemmas that incline to
drive people crazy. These are the paradoxes which psychol
ogists designate as disjunctive attributions and percep
tions among family members,^ and Johnson simply refers to
as discord,
In her famous discourse on private life, Nekayah
explains the growing strife between parents and children,
leading in later life to the grievous symptoms of mental
illness:
If a kingdom be, as Imlac tells us, a great family, a
family likewise is a little kingdom, torn with factions
and exposed to revolutions. , . . In a short time the
children become rivals to their parents; benefits are
allayed by reproaches, and gratitude debased by envy.
Parents and children seldom act in concert. Each child
endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the
parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation,
betray each other to their children; thus, some place
their confidence in the father, and some in the mother,
and by degrees the house is filled with artifices and
feuds.67
The princess’s narration approximates those paradoxical
bonds described by family therapists in case histories
where secret signs and signals and the formation of unholy
alliances against other family members produce exasperating
conflicts: any two mutually exclusive commands as an
injunction to come close arid an injunction to keep one’s
distance might typically be given under such circum-
stances. Johnson goes even more to the heart of the
matter in Rambler 148, where he remarks upon those "freaks
198
of injustice’1 committed by unfit parents: "Capricious
injunctions, partial decisions, unequal allotments, distri
butions of reward not by merit but by fancy, and punish
ments regulated not by the degree of offense, but by the
humour of the judge, are too frequent where no power is
69
known but that of a father." Such is the victimization
suffered early in life that inevitably begets neurotic
symptoms in the developing adult. "Thus parents and
children, for the greatest part, live on to love less and
less," Nekayah observes, "and, if those whom nature has
thus closely united are the torments of each other, where
shall we look for tenderness and consolation?"^ Johnson
deftly implies the transference of unhealthy family
patterns of interaction to the outside world as these are
perpetuated ad. infinitum by its sad inhabitants.
Pursuing their research into family dynamics,
Rasselas and Nekayah are naturally led to a discussion of
marriage, its assets and liabilities. The debate on
marriage is largely centered upon the typical misrepresen
tations and hypocrisies people impose upon one another, not
surprising considering their backgrounds of deception.
Courtship seems an especially precarious time, when two
people, "having little to divert attention or diversify
thought," marry in "voluntary blindness," thus perpetuating
the vicious, fraudulent system. Johnson elaborated in
Rambler 45: "Both parties endeavor to hinder themselves
199
from being known, and to disguise their natural temper, and
real desires, in hypocritical imitation, studied compli
ance, and continued affectation. . . . Neither sees the
other but in a mask, and the cheat is managed often on both
sides with so much art, and discovered afterwards with so
much abruptness"^ that bitterness and recrimination
result, to be visited upon the unlucky offspring, and so
life goes on.
Perhaps the most fascinating section in the
marriage debate concerns its alternative, celibacy.
Nekayah expatiates on the various neurotic symptoms associ
ated with people who live alone:
They dream away their time without friendship, without
fondness, and are driven to rid themselves of the day,
for which they have no use, by childish amusements or
vicious delights. They act as beings under the
constant sense of some known inferiority that fills
their minds with rancor and their tongues with censure.
They are peevish at home and malevolent abroad, and,
as the outlaws of human nature, make it their business
and their pleasure to disturb that society which debars
them from its privileges.72
Single people simulate by their behavior the same disrup
tive family patterns of interaction as married people, the
only difference being they have no regular company upon
which to unburden their hostility. For this reason their
strife turns upon society in general, producing the desper
ate warfare Johnson describes. They take on as well the
role of children, in puerile petulance, never having
assumed adult responsibilities, and thus they reenact the
old familiar quarrels and feuds of an unhappy past.
200
Nekayah summarizes: "To live without feeling or exciting
sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of
others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a
state more gloomy than solitude. It is not retreat, but
exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but
73
celibacy has no pleasures." The princess rather reluc
tantly concludes in favor of marriage as the lesser of two
evils, a kind of contemporary transcription of St. Paul's
compromise directive, "It is better to marry than to burn."
But her skepticism here and particularly in succeeding
conversations with Rasselas must be dispelled, and Johnson
skillfully does so in the lesson of the loss of Pejuah. At
that time she truly realizes the meaning of those deep
feelings to which now she merely pays lip service.
It is curious to observe that at Imlac's entrance
in Chapter 30 of Rasselas, the whole tenor of psychological
inquiry shifts drastically from a sociological orientation
back to the intrapsychic exploration with which Johnson
first began his research. It is equally remarkable that
Imlac, complaining that his disciples, preoccupied with the
choice of life, have "neglect[ed] to live," takes them not
to a center of activity, but to ancient monuments of a dead
civilization. Even his foremost disciple Rasselas protests
this seeming folly on the part of the normally rational
master. With some indignation he demands, "My business is
with man. I came hither not to measure fragments of
201
temples or trace choked aqueducts, but to look upon the
various scenes of the present world.Indeed, it seems
that Rasselas* criticism of Imlac's therapeutic technique
is valid, since he and Nekayah appeared to be on the right
track, testing themselves in the world and conducting
valuable studies in social psychiatry. Imlac, however,
whom Johnson significantly designates here as the poet,
refers them back to those allegorized mental configurations
Johnson so skillfully interpreted in the beginning chapters
of the tale.
To find what directs men's actions, Imlac suggests
returning to the past, since some of our most intense
emotions, "joy and grief, love and hatred," are invested
there. "The present state of things is the consequence of
the former, and it is natural to inquire what were the
sources of the good that we enjoy or the evil that we
suffer.His procedure sounds very much like the
Freudian prime directive: "In order to dissolve the
symptoms it is necessary to go back to the point at which
they originated, to review the conflict from which they
proceeded, and with the help of propelling forces which at
that time were not available to guide it towards a new
7 6
solution." Both Freud and Johnson subscribe to the
psychic deterministic factors in man's life, the wholesome
or unwholesome set of original formulations that dictate
one's life-pursuits. Imlac demonstrates the validity of
202
the system when the party emerges from the ancient Egyptian
vaults that invoke, like the Happy Valley, the hieroglyphic
inscrutability of a collective unconscious . Like Rasselas ’
ancestral home, the pyramids symbolize a primitive origin
for the human psyche, entailing the dictates of a fearsome,
tyrannical principle of coercion, Imlac reports, ''I con
sider this mighty structure, as a monument of the insuffi
ciency of human enjoyments. A king whose power is
unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and
imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of
a Pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of
pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life,
by seeing thousands laboring without end, and one stone,
77
for no purpose, laid upon another," So Johnson implies
most people spend their lives, condemned by primitive
authority to serve a fierce master,, with little if any
appreciable reward. The theme is a prevalent one in
Johnson’s theory of neurosis, explicating man’s peculiarly
blind, wretchedly isolated schemes and maneuvers--or
neurotic symptoms. Johnson’s analogy to the psyche is that
man engages in these obsessional activities as the pyramids
were once erected, under the direction of a ghostly
dictator who condemns him to pointless drudgery. ’ ’ Survey
the Pyramids, and confess thy folly!’ ’ enjoins Imlac, the
orthodox Freudian, and he appears again to be expressing
Johnson’s earlier condemnation of ancestor worship in the
203
Happy Valley, where he interprets the arcane religious
system as pathogenic.
One of Johnson's most sophisticated case histories,
perhaps surpassed only by that of the mad astronomer, is
found in the section in Rasselas dealing with the loss of
Pekuah. Here the clinical problem of depression or melan
cholia is treated with great insight as Nekayah is seen to
fall desperately ill at the separation from her dear
friend. Then slowly, with Imlac's therapeutic guidance,
she recovers her old equilibrium. Johnson describes the
onset of the disease, as she "sunk down inconsolable in
hopeless dejection. A thousand times she reproached
herself with the easy compliance by which she permitted her
78
favorite to stay behind her.” Johnson immediately notes
a predominant feature in depression: the presence of
powerful self-reproach and hostility turned toward the
self. Depressive patients, psychiatrists observe, labor
under an unbearable sense of guilt, according to the
dynamics of a fundamental ambivalence in all human
relations. At the "loss of a loved object," latent hostile
impulses are suddenly released against this otherwise
beloved person. Then an exaggerated sense of remorse for
this hostility is created in the mourner. According to
quantitative differences in these basic attitudes, one
person works through the conflict during a normal time of
79
sorrow, while another develops chronic depression. Imlac
204
properly proceeds to try to resolve the princess's ambiva
lence by attempting to convince her of the lack of evil
intent in her dealings with Pekuah. Had she wickedly
compelled her friend against her will to stay behind, Imlac
affirms, her guilt would have been overwhelming. Nekayah
agrees: "I could not have endured life till now. I should
have been tortured by the remembrance of such cruelty, or
80
must have pined away in abhorrence of myself."
The next stage in Nekayah's illness is her indul
gence in self-imposed restrictions, withdrawing from all
pleasurable pursuits to cherish the memory of her absent
friend. In "silent pensiveness and gloomy tranquility,"
Johnson says, "she sat from morning to evening, recollect
ing every trifle on which Pekuah had set an accidental
value and which might recall to mind any little incident or
careless conversation. The sentiments of her whom she now
expected to see no more were treasured in her memory as
rules of life, and she deliberated to no other end than to
conjecture, on any occasion, what would have been the
81
opinion and counsel of Pekuah." Johnson is describing
another common occurrence in depressed patients, the
identification with a lost loved object. According to this
process, one takes upon himself the attributes of the
abandoned person, feeling a lasting need to imitate or
become the image of what has been lost. In melancholia,
one treats oneself as the abandoned person, with the same
205
ambivalence of antithetical feelings--affectionate and
82
hostile--directed toward oneself. Nekayah vows to retire
from the world and "hide” herself from those unbearable
emotional vicissitudes, to "compose” her mind, she says,
but actually meditating upon imminent death. Her despair,
accompanied by the veiled suicidal threat, calls Imlac back
to practice. He offers emotional and intellectual support,
giving her the opportunity to discuss her problem and
clearing the way for insight.
Imlac"s imperative counsel to Nekayah first warns
her of the dangers implicit in rigidly formulated resolu
tions : "Do not entangle your mind ... by irrevocable
determinations,” and his advice touches upon an apparently
painful source of distress in Johnson’s personal life.
Johnson’s horror of "scruples" is well documented in his
diaries, where he resolves time and time again to overcome
and suppress these ideas which "entangle” and "perplex" his
83
mind. Likewise, he advises Boswell "not [to] accustom
yourself to enchain your volatility by vows: they will
sometimes leave a thorn in your mind, which you will,
perhaps, never be able to extract or eject,And again,
85
"A vow is a horrible thing, it is a snare for sin.” In
these instances as well as in Imlac’s caution to Nekayah,
Johnson discerns the debilitating effect of severe self-
impositions, since these usually come from old scenarios
and mythologies. With such rigidly conditioned rules and
206
models for action, neurotic individuals respond to diffi
cult or threatening situations, reasserting earlier
patterns of behavior. Such reactions seem to approximate
what H. S. Sullivan terms "parataxic distortion" or confu
sions in judgment and perception based upon carry-overs
from one's previous interpersonal experience.^ This
essential fixation upon the past was recognized by Johnson
o 7
elsewhere, particularly in his essay on sorrow, and in
Rasselas, he once more describes the "voluntary accumula
tions of misery" in Nekayah's treasury of lost figures and
events.
The focus of Imlac's therapy in the case of
Nekayah's grievous fixation is to make her aware of life's
fundamental adaptability. She must replace her arrested
perspective concerning the loss of Pekuah and the ensuing
regressions, with conscious control and flexible responses
to the inevitable changing conditions of life. "Our minds,
like our bodies," Imlac explains, "are in continual flux.
. . . Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy
for want of motion. Commit yourself again to the current
of the world. Pekuah will vanish by degrees. You will
meet in your way some other favorite, or learn to diffuse
8 8
yourself in general conversation." At this point in
particular, Pekuah seems to take on allegorical signifi
cance, denoting a desperately cherished structure from a
long-lost past--indeed, she comes from the princess's
207
childhood--that needs to be relinquished if one is to go on
living.
During the treatment of Nekayah, Johnson surpris
ingly employs a modern strategy of psychotherapy known as
"prescribing a symptom." Recognizing the elements of
inescapability and self-contradiction in all human prob
lems, especially those designated as neurotic symptoms, he
approaches the paradox in an equally paradoxical way: that
is, he uses Nekayah1s seemingly uncontrollable sorrow to
89
gain control of it. Rather than fight her feelings, she
indulges in them at a certain appointed hour of the day,
thus transforming the situation from one of helpless
prostration into one over which she has power. In this
way, she lifts her problem out of the paradox-engendering
trap--to try not to think or to think of Pekuah are equally
painful--to place it in a position of here and now: she
creates her problem at will, mastering the phobia by direct
confrontation with it. In a Rambler essay, Johnson recom
mends the same procedure: ’ ’ When evils cannot be avoided,
it is wise to contract the interval of expectation; to meet
the mischiefs which will overtake us if we fly; and suffer
only their real malignity without the conflicts of doubt
90
and anguish of anticipation."
Though it is not clear whether Nekayah achieves
insight into her difficulty, it is certain that change is
91
induced by the use of the therapeutic paradox. No longer
208
is the princess damned if she does and damned if she does
not; rather Johnson shows, that under the proper conditions,
applying the disease which is supposed to be the cure
yields successful results. Indeed, as time passes, Nekayah
is so sufficiently in control of her symptom that she can
choose to relinquish it or not. "By degrees she grew less
scrupulous, and suffered any important and pressing avoca
tion to delay the tribute of daily tears. She then yielded
to less occasion, sometimes forgot what she was indeed
afraid to remember, and at last wholly released herself
92
from the duty of periodical affliction." If this aspect
of Johnson’s account of her cure seems semi-serious in
tone, this can only be' attributed to his advanced insight
into the "games people play." As the authors of one modern
textbook on techniques of psychotherapy ironically preface
their remarks, "None of what follows is recommended for
problem solvers who are too honest to ’play games,’ that
is, who prefer to play the game of not seeing that they are
93
playing games."
The lesson Nekayah painfully learns with the loss
of Pekuah is worthy of note considering her previous
skepticism about living alone or with others in the
marriage and family chapters, and anticipating the plight
of the mad astronomer. Lamenting her misfortune, she
declares, "Since Pekuah was taken from me ... I have no
pleasure to reject or to retain. She that has no one to
209
love or trust has little to hope. £5he wants the radical
94
principle of happiness.” Johnson counters her first
reluctant transcription of Paul’s somewhat ambivalent
counsel: MIt is better to marry than to burn," with Paul's
more positive directive of faith (trust), hope, and charity
(love). Nekayah now realizes the need for companionship in
human life, a prerequisite for avoiding those devastating
pitfalls that threaten even the best of men, as Johnson
demonstrates in his grand finale— the case history of a
full-blown paranoid schizophrenic.
With Chapter 40 of Rasselas> "The History of a Man
of Learning,” Johnson begins his extraordinary study of the
mental abnormality now diagnosed as schizophrenia. Upon
the group’s return to Cairo after the romantic restoration
of Pekuah., Imlac, ever on the prowl to enlarge his practice
--as was Johnson himself--encounters an old man who for
forty years "has drawn out his soul in endless calcula
tions," studying celestial bodies. The astronomer's
occupation is an apt metaphor for "star-gazers" and other
such eyaders of reality, typical Johnsonian invalids whose
sole commitments in life are to the solitary, addictive
95
world of pathogenic fantasy. His thoughts "long fixed
upon a single point," and "the images of other things
stabling away," the astronomer is a prime find for Imlac
and well worth his psychotherapeutic regard.
When Imlac first interviews the astronomer, he
210
cannot help noticing symptoms of acute anxiety. Grateful
to find a temporary suspension from "the severity of his
rule," in a conversation with Imlac, the patient has yet to
develop trust in the therapeutic relationship. Imlac
observes:
I had quickly reason to imagine that some painful
sentiment pressed upon his mind. He often looked up
earnestly toward the sun, and let his voice fall in
the midst of his discourse. He would sometimes, when
we were alone, gaze upon me in silence, with the air
of a man who longed to speak what he was yet resolved
to suppress. He would often send for me with vehement
injunctions of haste, though when I came to him he had
nothing extraordinary to say, and, sometimes when I
was leaving him, would call me back, pause a few
moments, and then dismiss me.96
Disorientation and vacillation are common problems with
schizophrenic patients whose suspicion and betrayal of
themselves is transferred to others, rendering them J
97
incapable of trusting anyone, The astronomer has so far
diverged from normal self-regard and regard for other
people that he watches Imlac suspiciously, wary of this
threatening intruder, yet at the same time he yearns to
tell his story to a concerned, supportive helper. More
over, it is difficult for him to speak freely to Imlac
since he lives in a restricted universe where communication
is unconventional. Reticence is a typical schizophrenic
symptom, and when provoked, the patient habitually shifts
to metaphoric statement to withdraw safely into his strong-
98
hold. Clearly the astronomer is provoked by Imlac's keen
attention and so reveals, with the psychotic's
211
characteristic grim earnestness, his ’ ’ terrible secret,”
The story that follows is Johnson’s astounding portrait of
the bizarre symbolic structures found in a diseased mind.
’ ’ The first of human beings to whom this trust has
been imparted,” the astronomer believes himself in command
of the heavenly bodies. With impeccable professionalism,
Imlac hears the revelation without astonishment and begins
carefully probing to get to the heart of the matter.
Medical experts note that the psychotic loses touch with
external reality because he falsifies the data of his sense
perceptions, Franz Alexander explains, ”He is so vulner'-
able to the pressure of his own maladjusted demands that he
cannot accept a reality which opposes them and so falsifies
it. The most extreme forms of this falsification are
99
hallucinations . . .” Astutely, Imlac’s questions focus
on quietly bringing his patient’s distorted perspective
back to the real world. Hi.s inquiries seem therefore
inohtrusive and mundane, ’ ’ How long, sir,” he asks, ’ ’ has
this great office been in your hands?” and ’ ’ Might not some
Other cause . , . produce this concurrence? The Nile does
not always rise on the same day,” The astronomer reacts to
these questions with the typical obstinacy of a mental
patient indulging in his favorite fantasy and replies with
some impatience (in a marvelous bit of Johnsonian tongue-
in-cheek) : " 1 sometimes suspected myself of madness, and
should not have dared to impart this secret but to a man
212
like you, capable of distinguishing the wonderful from the
impossible and the incredible from the false.
At this point Imlac modestly but shrewdly inter
jects, ’ ’ Why, sir ... do you call that incredible which
you know, or think you know, to be true?" He is attempting
to trap him in his own strange system, setting up something
akin to a therapeutic paradox, in which whatever response a
patient makes, he cannot win, and is thus induced to change
101
his premises. The astronomer-, however, is too wily, and
protests that his scientific training likewise stresses the
importance of empirical reality. Yet all fails since, "It
is sufficient that I feel this power, that I have long
102
possessed and every day exerted it." According to
Alexander's account of psychotic withdrawal, the astron
omer's speech is roughly translatable into, "So powerful
are my needs to be as I am that I cannot return to the real
world which would rudely contradict me. Thus I make my own
reality." And indeed, as Kathleen Grange says, the world
does not understand the poor invalid, since of the people
with whom he comes into contact, only Imlac represents
enlightened medical authority, while Rasselas is puzzled,
103
and the two girls laugh unsympathetically. Responding
to the latter uncivil display, Imlac reprimands them in a
humanitarian speech that underlines Johnson's awareness, as
Locke’s before him, of the fine line between normal and
abnormal states of mind."*"^ "To mock the heaviest of human
213
afflictions is neither charitable nor wise. Few can attain
this man’s knowledge, and few practice his virtues; but all
may suffer his calamity. Of the uncertainty of our present
state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain
105
continuance of reason,” With. Imlac*s caveat, Johnson
begins the famous chapter on "The Dangerous Prevalence of
the Imagination," perhaps the crucial tenet in his theory
of mental disorder.
As in Locke's theory about the relation between
madness and ordinary folly, Johnson affirms that the usual
distinction between normal and pathological is one of
degree rather than kind: "Disorders of intellect . . .
happen much mpre often than superficial observers will
easily believe. Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exact-
X06
ness, no human mind is in its right state." This
general observation of the widespread occurrence of psychic
dysfunction and the supposition that all men suffer such
impairment is rather like the concept of original sin
(certainly not at all a daring statement since all good
eighteenth-century Anglicans, including Johnson, believed
it). Johnson explains how every man is tempted to pick the
delectable fruit from which are sown all the hardship and
misery in the world, "There is no man whose imagination
does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can
regulate his attention wholly by his will and whose ideas
Will come and go at his. command. No man will be found in
214
whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize and
force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober
probability. Most people, however, learn to regulate
these temptations to irrational behavior: "All power of
fancy over reason is a degree of insanity, but, while this
power is such as we can control and repress, it is not
visible to others, nor considered as any depravation of the
mental faculties. It is not pronounced madness but when
it becomes ungovernable and apparently influences speech or
,,108
action.
This central proposition in Johnson's theory of
neurosis, in this case history, moving toward psychosis, is
examined at length during Imlac's discourse on the imagina
tion. Medical authorities point to the chief difference
between a neurosis and a psychosis as the extent to which
disoriented mental contents break into consciousness, often
in the form of hallucination. Alexander writes, "In a
psychosis even the earliest adjustment of the ego, the
capacity to subordinate imagination to the evidence of
sense perceptions, breaks down, and the consequence is a
109
loss of orientation to the world," Johnson similarly
links the astronomer's psychotic condition to this
"dangerous prevalence of the imagination," when fantasy
irrepressibly comes to dominate one's perception of the
real world. This flight from reality gradually allures
those who cannot deal successfully with it: the less one
215
can manage, the more attracted he is to airy notions. Of
the familiar Johnsonian menagerie of idlers and loners,
clearly the mad astronomer is Johnson's tour de force. He
had studied vainly and in solitude for forty years a sub
ject of little direct connection to mankind. Imlac
describes the height of escapism which the astronomer
personifies: "He who has nothing external that can divert
him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must
conceive himself what he is not, for who is pleased with
what he is?"^^ The question is clearly directed to every
man. Imlac describes the progress of the disease:
He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls
from all imaginable conditions that which for the
present moment he should most desire, amuses his
desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon
his pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances
from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all
combinations, and riots in delights which nature and
fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.HI
The symptoms as yet seem neurotic, as the accept
tance of reality remains intact; the mind appears to
realize that the real world "cannot bestow" the delights it
longs for. Johnson's characteristic description of
112
neurotic pride, recalling "the vanity of human wishes,"
likewise lessens the magnitude of the disease. What
follows, however, is an account of further injury to the
psychic apparatus, precipitating a psychotic condition:
In time some particular train of ideas fixes the
attention; all other intellectual gratifications are
rejected; the mind, in weariness or leisure, recurs
constantly to the favorite conception, and feasts on
the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with
216
the bitterness of truth. By degrees the reign of
fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious and,
in time, despotic. Then fictions begin to operate
as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind,
and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish.113
Thus the psychotic relinquishes "by degrees" his grasp of
reality, indicating again the quantitative rather than
qualitative difference between neurotics and psychotics, as
between so-called normal people. Johnson has described
many times before this vicious assault upon the rational
faculties by harmful denizens of the imagination (e.g. in
The Life of Savage, The Vision of Theodore, numerous
periodical essays), but never as having the force with
which they attack the astronomer. So startled in fact are
the young people by the full-blown magnitude of the
psychosis that they quickly resolve to purge their own
lesser neurotic states of mind: Pekuah will no longer
fantasize herself Queen of Abyssinia, Nekayah will stop
daydreaming about pastoral life, and Rasselas will refrain
from his fantasies about a perfect government. Although,
as Johnson earlier insists, "No human mind is in its right
state," and clearly, at the end of the story, the group is
left yet engaging in wishful thinking, still the dramatic
lesson of the "dangerous prevalence of the imagination" has
been learned, and Imlac’s disciples are more wary of
uncontrolled fantasy.
The cure of the mad astronomer .is effected by a
means social psychiatrists of today would sanction. Rather
217
than relieving the patient by complicated intrapsychic
probings, Johnson attacks the problem by addressing the
wider range of human interaction. Once more Johnson
departs from the Freudian approach of Chapter 44 that
emphasized intrinsic psychic principles, for a more socio
logical orientation. At this point, he considers the sick
man's immediate need for companionship instead of attempt
ing a long-term program to induce rational insight. This
is not to say that the patient's therapy does not encourage
self-understanding, since clearly the old man soon gains
awareness of his condition. Yet according to Johnson's
psychotherapeutic procedures, change is brought about by
rearranging the patient's social system--or rather, in this
case, the lack of one.
Since the astronomer apparently escaped or was
driven from the world because of some essential lack of
validity in it, Imlac and the others attempt to revive his
self-esteem by treating him with the respect he long
merited as a gentleman and a scholar. Johnson notes the
ladies' splendid appearance and everyone's deferential
attitude toward the awkward recluse when they visit him,
and indeed such seeming minor adjustments in his daily
routine assume major significance: ' ' H e found his thoughts
grow brighter in their company; the clouds of solicitude
vanished by degrees, as he forced himself to entertain
them, and he grieved when he was left at their departure to
218
his old employment of regulating the seasons. Over a
period of several months, their visits continue and are
reciprocated as Imlac conducts group therapy for the
benefit not only of his chronic patient, but of Rasselas,
Nekayah, and Pekuah, who are now well on the road to
115
recovery. Moving "from patienthood to self-hood,"
Imlac's earlier clients have expanded their narrow horizons
to be able to include others in their universe. Psychia
trists recognize that the final step toward adaptive
capacity and independence is feeling the need to help
others. Thus former mental patients are commonly employed
1X6
as effective auxiliary therapists and paraprofessionals.
In the same way, the members of Imlac's initial group
thoroughly involve themselves in caring for the newcomer,
concerned about his welfare and allowing his dependence
upon them.
Imlac and his paramedical helpers cunningly
approach the subject of the astronomer's madness, after
more direct methods fail, by appealing to his faith and
affection for them in the therapeutic relationship.
Entrusting him with their secret that they are refugees
from the Happy Valley, they ask for his, purportedly
asking his advice about the choice of life. Here he admits
the folly of his vain, solitary endeavors, exhibiting for
the first time a , flicker of insight into the "fear,
disquiet, and scrupulosity" that accompanied his insane
219
"prerogatives." Of these powers, he says, "Whatever they
were, I have, since my thoughts have been diversified by
more intercourse with the world, begun to question the
reality." Imlac is of course delighted with his patient’s
progress, noting, "The sage’s understanding was breaking
through its mists"--the advent of intellectual insight.
Johnson has the astronomer beautifully describe the
dissipation of his disease:
If I am accidentally left alone for a few hours . . .
my inveterate persuasion rushes upon my soul, and my
thoughts are chained down by irresistible violence;
but they are soon disentangled by the prince’s
conversation, and instantaneously released at the
entrance of Pekuah. I am like a man habitually
afraid of spectres, who is set at ease by a lamp and
wonders at the dread which harassed him in the dark;
yet if his lamp be extinguished, feels again the
terrors which he knows that when it is light he shall
feel no more.H?
Once more Johnson has returned to the twilight
realm of consciousness. These ghostly coercions are
psychically dysfunctional, and here Imlac correctly
analyzes the phenomenology of what is now diagnosed as
paranoid schizophrenia:
No disease of the imagination . . . is so difficult of
cure as that which is complicated with the dread of
guilt; fancy and conscience then act interchangeably
upon us and so often shift their places that the
illusions of one are not distinguished from the dic
tates of the other. . . . When melancholic notions
take the form of duty, they lay hold on the faculties
without opposition, because we are afraid to exclude
or banish them.118
So modern experts note that paranoid hallucinations are
actually the threats of the conscience projected upon
220
119
external reality: the astronomer's "guilt” and "duty"
express such maladjusted imaginary demands. Imlac's
therapy prescribes more of the same illumination: "Open
your heart to the influence of the light which from time
to time breaks in upon you; when scruples importune you,
which you in your lucid moments know to be vain, do not
120
stand to parley, but fly to business, or to Pekuah . . . ."
Thus the patient's intellectual insight--the "influence of
the light"--prepares the way for corrective emotional
experience: the astronomer is released from his lonely,
dread obligation to productive and genuinely pleasurable
occupations that involve others.
Imlac1s final, resounding counsel to his now
recuperating patient is perhaps Johnson's best admonition
against the estrangement, the anguish, and worst of all,
the self-destructive, hideous delusion that constitute
mental illness: Remember, he says, that "you are only one
atom of the mass of humanity and have neither such virtue
nor vice as that you should be singled out for supernatural
favors or afflictions." Imlac has brought this segmented
part back to the whole, has brought this lone "betrayer" of
the real world, who suffered "chimeras" to prey upon him,
to a wholesome self-appraisal in the real world. With
moving grace, the astronomer thanks his physician for caring
for him: "I never found a man before to whom I could
impart my troubles though I had been certain of relief.
221
. . . I hope that time and variety will dissipate the gloom
that has so long surrounded me, and the latter part of my
121
days will be spent in peace.” Imlac replies, "Your
learning and virtue „ , . may justly give you hopes," and
upon this compassionate, dignified note, Johnson concludes
his finest psychotherapeutic role.
According to Erik Erikson's conception of ego-
integrity, such maturity develops "only in him who in some
way has taken care of things and people and has adapted
himself to the triumphs and disappointments adherent to
being. . . ." His definition of integrated human identity
deserves to be quoted at length,:
It is the ego's accrued assurance of its proclivity
for order and meaning. It is a post-narcissistic
love of the human ego--not of the self--as an
experience which conveys some world order and spiri
tual sense, no matter how dearly paid for. It is
the acceptance of one's one and only life cycle as
something that had to be and that, by necessity,
permitted of no substitutions: it thus means a new,
a different love of one's parents. It is a comrade
ship with the ordering ways of distant times and
different pursuits, as expressed in the simple
products and sayings of such times and p u r s u i t s . 1 2 2
Moreover, Erikson quotes Calder6n--"pero-el -honor/~Es
patrimonio del alma"--to exemplify the mature man's integ
rity as a continuum of past, present, and future, embodying
his ancestral heritage. "The patrimony of his soul" is the
"seal of his moral paternity of himself," Erikson explains:
123
"In such final consolidation, death loses its sting."
Johnson also seems to endorse this sense of historical
continuity--indeed the psychoanalytic method is founded
222
upon this premise, interpreting present behavior as the
function of past experience. Imlac earlier expressed the
notion of psychic determinism: '"The present state of
things is the consequence of the former, and it is natural
1 0 f
to inquire what were the sources, . . ." For this
reason the penultimate scene of Rasselas is set in the
catacombs, as Johnson returns to the ancient enigmatic
symbols of parental dominion or ancestor worship. Here, as
his people wander through the "labyrinth of subterraneous
passages, where the bodies were laid in rows on either
side," Johnson draws them back to their origins, probing
the intrapsychic mechanisms that liberate or enslave men’s
souls,
The conclusion of Rasselas reproduces the begin
ning, replete with phantasmagoric images that allegorize
the psychic apparatus. Descending into sepulchral caves,
Johnson recalls the same dread superego from the Happy
Valley and the pyramids, attempting to decipher psychic
hieroglyphics which he knows are indecipherable. Speaking
of arcane primordial myths, Imlac accounts for their
inscrutability: "The origin of ancient customs ... is
commonly unknown, for the practice often continues when the
cause has ceased, and concerning superstitious ceremonies
it is vain to conjecture, for what reason did not dictate,
125
reason cannot explain," Imlac refers to those
irrational inner determinants which enslave men in pointless
223
devotion to unfathomable causes. Clearly what Johnson
himself called his "'obstinate rationality" about matters of
faith^^ led him to reject such, mysticisms; perhaps he
would have concurred in this special case, with Freud’s
pronouncement that religion is group psychosis. Certainly
the obsessive rituals and occultisms observed in every
man’s behavior in Rasselas resemble pathogenic religious
practices. Ultimately Johnson refutes ancestor worship
here as an unintelligible and therefore fallacious modus
vivehdi; its observances prove the reprehensible imprison
ment of the psyche rather than its deliverance, or, as
Imlac explains, the primitive "method of eluding death,”
Nekayah significantly asks, "Could the wise Egyptians . . .
127
think so grossly of the soul?" Having discussed the
erroneous causes that produce mental disturbance, Johnson
moves on to those origins that theologically and psycho-
analytically emanate health.. In Calderbn’s words, these
origins become the "patrimpnio del alma," passed on ever
lastingly to redeemable generations.
Using his extensive knowledge accumulated from
lifelong empirical study, Johnson very simply determines on
the side of reason, to minister to a vast assembly of minds
diseased, Imlac declares, "All the conclusions of reason
enforce the immateriality of mind," and here follows
Johnson’s cruciaJ discourse on the immortality of the soul.
He explains eternity in terms of a kind of imperishability
224
of thought: as matter was rendered perpetually durable by
divine consciousness, so this quality of mind is endlessly
transmitted throughout distant time. Imlac proclaims, "As
is the effect, such is the cause; as thought is, such is
the power that thinks, a power impassive and indiscerp-
128
tible." He speaks of course of the Judeo-Christian
deity, and here Johnson’s theological and psychological
views are most prominently interwoven as they both relate
to fundamental meaning in life. To serve the proper cause
or to worship God instead of idols is to achieve the proper
effect, that is, to become a being made in the likeness of
God, capable of passing on the dignity of his individual
life within the historical continuum. Such a being does
not fear death, since he finds consolation in the absolute
survival of man’s most cherished possession--not the self,
but the highest spiritual good or a sense of worthy human
development.
With this realization, Rasselas reflects, "Let us
return . , . from this scene of mortality. How gloomy
would be these mansions of the dead to him who did not know
he should never die, that what now acts shall continue its
129
agency, and what now thinks shall think on forever."
Moreover, the insight makes him wistfully regret life’s
vain pursuits: "Those that lie here stretched before us,
the wise and the powerful of ancient times, warn us to
remember the shortness of our present state. They were,
225
perhaps, snatched away while they were busy, like us, in
the choice of life." The faint note of despair applies
directly to those who reject spiritual liberation for
narrowly encompassed worlds of selfhood, pursued by and
pursuing phantoms, and in panic lest one meagre lifetime
be too brief to accommodate their multiple routes of
escapism, Nekayah also perceives the pointless fear and
wisely proclaims her commitment to more substantial
endeavors; "To me . . , the choice of life is become less
important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of
130
eternity." In terms of both religious and psychological
values, the goal is one of spiritual integrity, of belong
ing to one's heritage, and lending meaning to human
striving by promotion of this moral inheritance above all
else,
The last cha,pter of Rasselas, "The Conclusion in
Which Nothing Is Concluded," is perhaps the nearest
Johnsonian equivalent to Book XV of Gul1iyer’s Traye1s.
131
While Johnson rarely indulged in Swiftian acerbity,
bringing more compassion to his diagnoses of human folly
than Swift's searing invectives, yet both men predicated
the unattainability of perfect virtue in this life as part
of their fundamental belief. As Gulliver had his glimpse
of absolute reason in the Houyhnhnms, inspiring his
conversion from a priggish dolt to an aspirant after ideal
wisdom, so Rasselas and company undergo a similar
226
metamorphosis. Having described the road to perfect under
standing, they abandon old frivolities in order to strive
toward that ultimate awareness. Yet Johnson always insists
on their human fallibility, although with a far gentler
touch than Swift’s. Confined to the house during the
inundation of the Nile, he reports that they "diverted”
themselves with further visionary schemes of happiness:
Pekuah is charmed with the idea of becoming a prioress,
Nekayah with founding a women’s college, and Rasselas with
administering a perfect government. At the last evidently
invincible delusion, Johnson can barely refrain from the
amused comment, "He could never fix the limits of his
dominion and was always adding to the number of his
132
subjects." Even Imlac and the astronomer engage in
fantasies of indolence, "contented to be driven along the
stream of life, without directing their course to any
particular port,"
In spite of the recurrence of inveterate daydreams
which are the direst threat to man’s mental equilibrium, as
the events of Rasselas obviously demonstrate, the tale yet
finishes upon a hopeful note, Near the end, Johnson
optimistically proclaims, "Of these wishes that they had
formed, they well knew that none could be obtained": their
education was therefore not profitless. And finally, i
having invoked the Nile, the venerable "Father of Waters,"
symbolically the source of all civilizations, Johnson
227
declares the group will return to Abyssinia. In allegori
cal terms, Johnson concludes Rasselas as he began it, ■
probing archetypal patterns related to inner determinants
of mental life. With, the fresh revelation of a perfect
order, they will strive toward this perfectibility while
knowing full well the impossibility of their task. As one
can never really return to Abyssinia, to the fount of
collective and individual consciousness, so one can never
achieve the supreme psychoanalytic or theological cure of
the soul. Yet as they gradually advance from greater to
lesser stages of inherent disorder, certainly Johnson's
people emerge in reasonable mental health. Johnson's
Rasselas contains his most sophisticated account of a
theory of neurosis.
The development of Johnson's theory of neurosis did
not end with Rasselas in 1759. He continued his investiga
tions into the human psyche in later works, written during
the last twenty-five years of his life. In the Preface to
Shakespeare and notes to that edition, in The Journey to
the Western Islands of Scotland, his later political
pamphlets, and the Lives of the Poets, Johnson consistently
demonstrates his concern with psychological problems and
the therapy he believes can alleviate them. In these
works, he enters into the thoughts and feelings of others,
228
and he uses a compassion and insight that were barely-
understood until the advent of the Freudian age. Devoted
to the premise that suffering, perplexity, and other
ramifications of human perversity are accessible through
the light of reason, Johnson makes this striving for
intelligibility--and the emotional experience thereby
expressed--his chief aim. "To strive with difficulties,"
he writes in the Adventurer, "and to conquer them, is the
highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve
to conquer; but he whose life has passed without a conquest,
and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey
himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is
content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction
133
to insensibility." Above all else, Johnson abhorred the
spiritual torpor he interpreted as diseased surrender of
the mind. "X will be conquered; I will not capitulate," he
said in the last months of his life, and the words surely
epitomize his lifelong contest against all modes of
surrender--physical, spiritual, emotional.
Doubtless Johnson’s acute sensitivity to the
"vicissitudes of life" in part emanated from his own
deplorable melancholia, Xn this respect, the development
of his theory of neurosis is clearly interwoven with his
personal development; his insights seem to mirror his own
intimate preoccupations. We have seen Johnson as an angry
young man, persecuted and hostile, conjuring up terrifying
229
pictures of evil everywhere. With his apprenticeship as
parliamentary reporter, however, he soon adopted a more
practical and realistic view of the ways of the world.
The turning point in his attitude was seen in the Life of
Savage, where he began to analyze human folly rather than
arrogantly to parade it, in order to help people find a
better way of life. Much of his poetry, his sermons, his
periodical essays, and chiefly Rasselas illustrate this
"choice of life"--the way to rewards that.;are personally
and socially redeemable.
It was not until the receipt of his pension in 1762
that one aspect of Johnson's personal anxiety was allevi
ated, the day-to-day strain of financial necessity. With
300 pounds a year, he was able to live comfortably, to
study and improve his mind, and to liberate himself to
enjoy the companionship he very much craved. Johnson's
relationships with his intimate circle of friends seem once
more to elicit his willing service as kindly, learned
spiritual counselor in the grand tradition of the good
divine in The Female Quixote, Mr. Rambler, Mr. Idler, and,
of course, Imlac. Johnson's letters that generously
counsel friends in distress seem the practical application
134
in real life of his theory of neurosis.
In later life, it is appropriately another medical
man whom Johnson admires, as he once admired the great
humanitarian Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave. "Dr."
230
Robert Levet, who practiced medicine without a license
among London slum-dwellers, was a permanent resident-guest
in Johnson's home, and assumed a special relationship with
his patron. At Levet's death in 1782, Johnson wrote an
elegy that expresses many of his thoughts about the prob
lems inherent in human affairs. Though man is an inmate
confined for life to the murky den, the unfathomable deep
of his convoluted thoughts--"hope's delusive mine" and
"misery's darkest caverns" being pervasive images of the
poem--still he may find intermittent sanctuary in the
compassionate regard of his fellow prisoners:
Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levet to the grave descend,
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend.
Yet still he fills affection's eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind,
Nor, lettered arrogance, deny
Thy praise to merit unrefined.
As in the case of many of his warmest expositions of human
emotion, Johnson strongly empathizes with the subject under
scrutiny, realizing himself the charity and rude goodness
of the lonely, old pensioner. Such insightful awareness of
the feelings of another recalls the last passage of the
Life pf Savage, a man for whom he likewise bore the tender-
est affection. As he summarizes the account of Savage's
emotional suicide, he seems to engage every man--perhaps
himself preeminently--as a latent variation on the unhappy
theme. Then he presents his supreme caveat against the
231
mutilating symptoms of mental illness. The passage, as
well, describes his motive for working out a theory of
neurosis, a task to which he in large part devoted his
writing career:
This relation will not be wholly without its use if
those who languish under any part of his sufferings
shall be enabled to fortify their patience by
reflecting that they feel only those afflictions
from which the abilities of Savage did not exempt
him; or those who, in confidence of superior capaci
ties or attainments, disregard the common maxims of
life, shall be reminded that nothing will supply
the want of prudence, and that negligence and
irregularity long continued will make knowledge
useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.
232
Notes
1. Me, pensi immunis cum jam mihi reddor, inertis
Desidiae sors dura raanet, graviorque labore
Tristis et atra quies, et tardae taedia bitae
Nascuntur curis curae, vexatque dolorum
Importuna cohors, vacuae mala somnia mentis.
Omnia percurro trepidus, curum omnia lustro
Si qua usquam pateat melioris semita vitae,
Nec quid aguam invenio . . . (Know Thyself,
11. 25-28, 32-35).
Sam Johnson: The Complete English: Poems, ed. J. D. Fleeman
XHarmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), pp. 146-49.
2. Ibid.
3. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 1927
(rev. 2nd ed.; Boston: HoughtonTHTfflin^ 1951), pp. 356 ff.
4. Letters, No. 25.
5. See Irwin, Samuel Johnson: A Personality in
Conflict, on Johnson's feelings about his mother's death,
particularly pp. 107-12.
6 . Works, I, 59.
7. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,
p. 384.
8 . Quoted on the cover of Rasselas, ed. Warren L.
Fleischauer (New York: Barron’s~Educational Series, Inc.,
1962), All citations from Johnson's Rasselas are from this
edition.
9. Works, III, 318-19 (Rambler 60).
I.0. Works, VII, 78,
II. Boswell, Life of Johnson, I, 185.
12, Rasselas ( ’ Ch. 1), pp. 13-14.
13. See Donald M. Lockhart, "’The Fourth Son of the
Mighty Emperor': The Ethiopian Background of Johnson’s
Rasselas," PMLA, 78 (December, 1963), 516-28, and Thomas
Pakenham, "Gondar and the Mountain," History Today, 7
(March, 1957), 172-81.
233
14. Marjorie Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain
Glory (New York: Norton, 1959) pT~379 .
15• Rasselas (Ch. 1), p. 15.
16. Ibid., p. 16.
17. Freud, "The Future of an Illusion'’ (1927),
Standard Edition, XXI, 5-56.
18. Kathleen Grange first noted Rasselas’ early
symptoms but she does not necessarily decide upon this
same thesis for the tale. "Dr, Samuel Johnson's Account of
a Schizophrenic Illness in Rasselas (1750)," Medical
History, 6 (April, 1962), 164,
19. The most noted modern sources who describe such
symptoms are Theodore Lidz, Alice Cornelison, Stephen
Fleck, and Dorothy Terry, "The Intrafamilial Environment of
Schizophrenic Patients," American Journal of Psychiatry,
114 (September, 1957), 241^48; Lyman Wynne and Margaret
Singer, "Thought Disorders and the Family Relations of
Schizophrenics," Archives of General Psychiatry, 9 (1967),
191-98; Gregory Bateson, "Minimal Requirements for a Theory
of Schizophrenia," Archives of General Psychiatry, 2
(1960), 477-91; Jay~Haley, "Toward a Theory of Pathological
Systems," in Gerald Zuk and Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, eds,,
Family Theory and Disturbed Families (Palo Alto: Stanford
UniversTty~Tress”, 1971) ; Ronald D. Laing and Aaron
Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family (London: Pantheon
Books, 196517
20. See, for example, Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel
Johnson (New York: Holt, 1944), p, 176, for the "tragic
dimension of the story; Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelli
gence , and V. J. Bate, "Johnson and Satire Manque, in
Eighteenth Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde,
ed. W, H. Bond (New York, 1970), pp. 151 ff. For arguments
about satiric technique, see Sheridan Baker, "Rasselas:
Psychological Irony and Romance," PQ, 45 (January, 1966),
249-61; Alvin Whitley, "The Comedy of Rasselas," ELH, 23
(1956), 48-70.
21. Rasselas (Ch. 2), p. 18. Modern authorities note
the onset of schizophrenic illness at age 13-16. However,
Johnson gives us no previous information about Rasselas'
condition in the Happy Valley. See Werner Mendel, Schizo
phrenia : The Experience and Its Treatment (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1976).
22. Rasselas (Ch. 2), p. 20.
234
23. Rasselas (Ch. 4), p. 25.
24. Ibid., pp. 25-26.
25. Ibid., p. 26.
26 . Ibid.
27.
Toward
David Kantor and William Lehr, Inside the Family:
a Theory of Family Process (San Francisco: Jossey-
Bass, 1975).
28. Ibid., Introduction.
29. Rasselas (Ch. 2), p. 17.
30. Rasselas (Ch. 4), p. 28.
31. Rasselas (Ch. 5), p. 29.
32. See Ch. 6 above.
33. Rasselas (Ch. 6 ) , p. 32.
34. Ibid., p. 35.
35. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Principles of Intensive
Psychotherapy (1950; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971), pp. 45-68.
36. To name some of the most prominent groups: Palo
Alto (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, Weakland, et al.), NIMH
(Bowen, Wynne, et al.), Yale (Lidz et al.), and the Family
Mental Health Clinic in New York (Ackerman et al.).
37. Rasselas (Ch. 9), pp. 43-44.
38. Rasselas (Ch. 11), p. 54.
39. Ibid., p. 55.
40. Rasselas (Ch. 1 2 ), p. 60.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., p. 61.
44. Rasselas (Ch. 15), p. 67.
45 .
Books,
Werner Mendel, Supportive Care (Los Angeles: Mara
1975), p. 40. 2 3 5
46. Mendel, Supportive Care, p. 42.
47. McIntosh, The Choice of Life, p. 181, first notes
the similarity in theme.
48. The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, p. 105.
49. See Ch. 4 above and Johnson's Sermon 6 on pride.
50. Works, IV, 35 (Rambler 76).
51. Rasselas (Ch. 16), p. 73.
52. Rasselas (Ch. 17), p. 74.
53. Rasselas (Ch. 19), p. 81.
54. Rasselas (Ch. 21), p. 87.
55. See Ch. 5 above.
56 . Works, II, 39 (Idler 11).
57. New Mexico Quarterly, 34 (Spring, 1964), 25.
58. Rasselas (Ch. 22), p. 89.
59.
phrenia.
See p. 176 above for a definition of schizo-
60. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existential Psychoanalysis
(1953; rpt. Chicago: Regenery, 1962), p. 115.
61. Hazel Barnes, "Humanistic Existentialism and
Contemporary Psychoanalysis," rpt. in 20th Century Views
of Sartre (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962),
p. 149.
62.
Edition,
Freud, "The Case of Little Hans" (1909), Standard
X, 5-149. Little Hans was a four-year-old boy who
developed a fear of horses. Freud interpreted the phobia,
and his interpretations were then given back to the child
through the father.
63. Laing and Esterson, Introduction.
64. Rasselas (Ch. 25), p. 99.
65. Ibid., p. 98.
6 6 . Laing and Esterson, Appendixes.
236
67. Rasselas (Gh. 26), p. 100.
6 8 . Gregory Bateson et al, , "Toward a Theory of
Schizophrenia," Behavioral Science, Is . (1956), 251-64. See
also Laing, The Politics of Experience: "No schizophrenic
has been studied whose disturbed pattern of communication
has not been shown to be a reflection of, and reaction to,
the disturbed and disturbing pattern characterizing his or
her family of origin. ... It seems to us that without
exception the experience and behavior that gets labeled
schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents
in order to live in an unlivable situation. ... He cannot
make a move, or make no move, without being beset by
contradictory and paradoxical pressures and demands, pushes
and pulls, both internally from himself, and externally
from those around him" (pp. 78-79).
69. Works, V, 25 (Rambler 148),
70. Rasselas (Ch. 26), p. 101.
i— i
Works, III, 247 (Rambler 45).
C M
r - ^
Rasselas (Ch. 26), pp. 102-103.
73, Ibid., p. 103,
74. Rasselas (Ch, 30), p. 117.
75, Ibid., pp. 117-18.
76.
p. 462.
Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,
77. Rasselas (Ch. 32), p, 124.
00
r - .
Rasselas (Ch. 34), pp. 128-29.
79.
Edition,
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), Standard
XIV, 243-58, and Alexander, pp. 224-25.
o
00
Rasselas (Ch. 34), p, 13Q.
81, Rasselas (Ch. 35), p, 131.
82. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia."
83. See Works, I, 70, 106, 26 7, 368.
v f
00
Life, II, 21,
85. Life, III, 357.
237
8 6 . Fr omm-Re i chmann, p. 234.
87. See Rambler 47 and Ch. 6 above.
8 8 . Rasselas (Ch. 35), p. 134.
89. For references on the therapeutic paradox, see
Paul Watzlawick et al., Change: Principles of Problem
Formation and Problem Resolution (New York: Norton, 19 74),
and Jay Haley, Strategies of Psychotherapy (New York:
Greene and Stratton, 1963), especially Ch. 8 .
90. Works, IV, 347 (Rambler 134).
91. Haley, p. 179. Whether or not the patient
achieves insight is a controversial topic concerning the
use of the therapeutic paradox.
92. Rasselas (Ch. 36), p. 136.
93. Change, p. 114.
94. Rasselas (Ch. 35), p. 133.
95. See Ch. 6 above.
96. Rasselas (Ch. 40), p. 155.
97. Mendel, p. 38.
98.
pp. 224-
Bateson, "Toward a
25.
Theory of Schizophrenia,"
99. Alexander, p. 252.
1 0 0 . Rasselas (Ch. 42), p. 159.
1 0 1 .
pp. 263-
Bateson, "Toward a
64.
Theory of Schizophrenia,"
1 0 2 . Rasselas (Ch. 42), p. 160.
103. Grange, p. 166.
104. See Ch. 1 above on Locke's influence on
eighteenth-century psychiatry.
105. Rasselas (Ch. 43), p. 162.
106. Rasselas (Ch. 44), p. 163.
107. Ibid.
238
108 . Rasselas (Ch. 44), p. 163.
109. Alexander, p. 19.
1 1 0 . Rasselas (Ch. 44), p. 164.
1 1 1 . Ibid.
1 1 2 . See Ch. 5 above.
113. Rasselas (Ch. 44), p. 164.
114. Rasselas (Ch. 46), p. 174.
115. Mendel, p. 40.
116. Ibid., p. 42, and Alexander, p. 258.
117. Rasselas (Ch. 46), p. 176.
118. Ibid.
119. Alexander, p. 254.
1 2 0 . Rasselas (Ch. 46), p. 177.
1 2 1 . Rasselas (Ch. 47), p. 178.
1 2 2 . Childhood and Society (1950; rev. ed. New York:
Norton, 1963), p. 268.
123. Ibid.
124. Rasselas (Ch. 30), p. 117.
125. Rasselas (Ch. 48), p. 183.
126. Life, IV,.289; see also Ch. 5 above and Mrs.
Thrale's quoting Johnson, "Religion is the highest exercise
of reason."
127. Rasselas (Ch. 48), p. 184.
128. Ibid., p. 186.
129. Ibid., p. 187.
130. Ibid.
131.
cation,
With the notable exceptions of Marmor, the Vindi-
and the original Idler 22, mentioned earlier.
239
132. Rasselas (Ch. 49), p. 189.
133. Works, II, 455 (Adventurer 111).
134. See, for example, Letters 165 (to John Taylor),
338 (to Mrs. Thrale), 446 (to Boswell), and those to young
George Strahan and Bennet Langton.
240
241
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