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Joh nson ’s M i lton
Samuel Johnson is often represented as primarily antagonistic or antipathetic to Milton. Yet his imaginative and intellectual engagement with Milton’s life and writing extended across the entire span of his own varied writing career. As essayist, poet, lexicographer, critic, and biographer – above all as reader – Johnson developed a controversial, fascinating and productive literary relationship with his powerful predecessor. To understand how Johnson creatively appropriates Milton’s texts, how he critically challenges yet also confirms Milton’s status, and how he constructs him as a biographical subject, is to deepen the modern reader’s understanding of both writers in the context of historical continuity and change. Christine Rees’s insightful study will be of interest not only to Milton and Johnson specialists, but to all scholars of early modern literary history and biography. c h r i s t i n e r e e s is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London.
Joh nson ’s M i lton C h r is t i n e R e e s
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521192798 © Christine Rees 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13
978-0-511-77616-8
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ISBN-13
978-0-521-19279-8
Hardback
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For Roger
Contents
Acknowledgements List of abbreviations
page ix xi
Introduction: Johnson and Milton
1
Pa r t I Joh ns on t h e r e a de r / w r i t e r : a ppropr i at i ng M i lt on’s t e x t s 1 Summoning Milton’s ghost: Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
7
2 ‘No Miltonian Fire’? Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
31
3 Rasselas: a rewriting of Paradise Lost?
58
4 ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty’: the 1770s tracts
82
Pa r t II Joh ns on t h e c r i t ic: a s s e s s i ng M i lt on’s ac h i e v e m e n t 5 ‘Phantoms which cannot be wounded’: the Lauder affair
97
6 Cutting a Colossus: Johnson’s criticism of Paradise Lost
108
7 Cherry-stones: Johnson on Milton’s shorter poems
150
Pa r t III Joh ns on t h e bio g r a ph e r : c ons t ruc t i ng M i lt on’s c h a r ac t e r 8 ‘An acrimonious and surly republican’: Milton as political subject vii
191
Contents
viii
‘Domestick privacies’: Milton as private subject Conclusion: ‘what other author ever soared so high?’
Notes Select bibliography Index
Acknowledgements
I owe a lifetime’s gratitude to all those teachers, students, and colleagues who have shared with me the pleasures and challenges of studying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, in particular the writings of Milton and Johnson. Among them are friends and former colleagues at King’s College London: I warmly thank Clare Brant, Elizabeth Eger, and Hugh Adlington, for their wit and insight, and especially Rivkah Zim for her constant support, encouragement, and scholarly example. I owe a special debt to David Nokes, whose untimely death is such a loss to eighteenthcentury scholarship, for his appreciative appraisal of my book proposal at a very early stage. I have benefited in many ways from contact with distinguished Johnsonians and Miltonists, including the late Paul J. Korshin, Isobel Grundy, Freya Johnston, Jack Lynch, Pat Rogers, Warren Chernaik, John Creaser, and Martin Dzelzainis. I am grateful to Bruce Redford for his generosity in sending me a copy of his authoritative article on the political tracts at a crucial stage. I am also very grateful for the help of the librarians of the British Library, Senate House Library, University of London, and the Maughan Library, King’s College London. Linda Bree and Maartje Scheltens of Cambridge University Press, and the two anonymous readers for the Press, gave me valuable guidance, and made constructive suggestions from which I profited immensely when revising the book (it should go without saying that the author is responsible for any remaining defects). Part of the material was originally published in The New Rambler and in The Age of Johnson, and I thank the respective editors, Michael Bundock and Jack Lynch, for permission to adapt it. Permission from the National Portrait Gallery to use images of Johnson and Milton, and from Faber and Faber Ltd to quote from Edwin Muir’s sonnet, ‘Milton’, is gratefully acknowledged. I greatly appreciate the less easily measured contribution from members of the Johnson Society of London, who are collectively, under the ix
x
Acknowledgements
genial chairmanship of Nicholas Cambridge, a shining example of the sociability and intellectual stimulus that Johnson himself so much valued. Finally, the dedication pays heartfelt tribute to what Johnson said marriage should be: ‘the strictest tie of perpetual friendship’.
Abbreviations
BL British Library CEP J. D. Fleeman, ed., Samuel Johnson: The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). CPW D. M. Wolfe et al., eds., The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82). CSP John Carey, ed., Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (Harlow, Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd., Longman Annotated English Poets, 2nd edn., 1997). Dictionary Anne McDermott, ed., Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language on CD-ROM. The First and Fourth Editions (Cambridge University Press in association with The University of Birmingham, 1996). Early Lives Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1932). JM George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2 vols., 1897). Johnson: Critical Heritage James T. Boulton, ed., Johnson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Critical Heritage Series, 1971). Letters Bruce Redford, ed., The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Hyde Edition, 5 vols., (vols. I–III, Princeton University Press, 1992; vols. IV–V, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). xi
xii
Abbreviations
Life George Birkbeck Hill, ed., rev. L. F. Powell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 6 vols., 1934–50). Lives Roger Lonsdale, ed., Samuel Johnson: The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 4 vols., 2006). Milton: Critical Heritage John T. Shawcross, ed., Milton: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Critical Heritage Series, 1970). Milton 1732–1801 John T. Shawcross, ed., Milton 1732– 1801: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Critical Heritage Series, 1972). PL, 1998 Alastair Fowler, ed., Milton: Paradise Lost (Harlow, Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd., Longman Annotated English Poets, 2nd edn., 1998). Poems David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam, eds., rev. J. D. Fleeman, The Poems of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn., 1974). Yale Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1958–2005): vols. I–V, VII–X, and XIV, XVI, XVIII. Pe r iodica l s
AJ ECS EiC ELH ES GM HLQ JEGP MQ MS MLQ
Age of Johnson Eighteenth-Century Studies Essays in Criticism Journal of English Literary History English Studies Gentleman’s Magazine Huntington Library Quarterly Journal of English and Germanic Philology Milton Quarterly Milton Studies Modern Language Quarterly
Abbreviations
xiii
MLR Modern Language Review MP Modern Philology N&Q Notes and Queries PQ Philological Quarterly PBSA Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America RES Review of English Studies SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 TLS Times Literary Supplement YES Yearbook of English Studies
Introduction: Johnson and Milton
‘“Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones”’ (Life IV. p. 305). Johnson’s metaphor might apply to the range of his own creative engagement with Milton’s work over his career, from the cherry-stones of scattered allusion, comment, and quotation, to the Colossi: the Dictionary, the criticism, the biography. Whatever the scale, he brings the shaping tools of intellect and imagination to a body of material that continues to resist and challenge him. It is impossible for him to ignore an English poet who not only justifies himself to posterity, and before the tribunal of the ancients, but who also claims to justify the ways of God to men. It should also be impossible for readers of either Milton or Johnson (or both) to ignore the confrontation of two of the most important claimants to cultural and literary dominance in their respective centuries. The central issue is one of authority: whether it affects religious or political ideology, the requirements of literary form and genre, the control of the English language, or, possibly most basic of all, the authority over, and responsibility to, the reader. In the grand narrative of literary history in English, Milton and Johnson represent rival paradigms of the literary career, almost exactly a century apart. It was not by accident that each of them became a focus of early modern literary biography. As well as having certain striking biographical parallels in common, and sharing the same foundation of the classical and Judaeo-Christian tradition, they both pose the question of the writer’s claim on his readership – a claim that Johnson has to address in his own reading and assimilation of Milton’s texts. As the anecdotal as well as literary evidence suggests, Johnson is not only deeply familiar with Milton’s life and work – which we might expect – but his respect for Milton grows over his lifetime, even as his reservations about certain aspects of that life and work become more entrenched. Mrs Thrale’s recollection of his Latin conversation with Abbé 1
2
Introduction
Roffette in 1775 may owe something to English patriotism (and her own enthusiasm) but it also records a level of engagement that should not be underestimated: ‘Mr. Johnson pronounced a long eulogium upon Milton with so much ardour, eloquence, and ingenuity, that the Abbé rose from his seat and embraced him’ (JM I. p. 216). While not expecting that all modern Miltonists can be induced to embrace Johnson, I hope in this study to reassess sympathetically a very considerable volume of evidence concerning Johnson’s lengthy, and complicated, relationship with his predecessor – a relationship that involves the interaction of one particularly strong-minded and influential literary genius with another equally powerful. On the whole, though far from exclusively, critics and scholars have tended to define themselves as either Miltonists or Johnsonians: it is a privilege to have a foot in both camps (‘Both them I serve, and of their train am I’). The first part of the book concentrates on Johnson as a reader of Milton, who, like most readers who are also writers, appropriates what he reads in the form of allusion and quotation. The theory of the ways in which literary allusion functions is a complex and sophisticated area of literary criticism. My contention is simply that Miltonic allusion (sometimes mediated through another powerful predecessor, Dryden) is more prevalent in Johnson’s writing than has often been recognised: increased awareness of its presence contributes to an understanding of how Johnson reads, interprets, and recreates Milton’s poetry – even, occasionally, his prose – in different contexts. This practice enhances not only his style, but also his arguments on a range of subjects, many of which both writers consider vitally important. In pursuing this aim, I am conscious of, and indebted to, a number of previous critics, who have likewise discovered that remembering Paradise Lost in particular enriches their understanding of Johnson’s poetry or Rasselas. But before considering the poetry and Rasselas, I begin with the periodical essays, which have received less attention from this perspective, and which, I argue, can in some respects modify our view of Johnson’s critical reactions to Milton. Part I ends with a chapter on the 1770s tracts, which show Johnson paradoxically applying Miltonic allusion for political ends. The Dictionary, in the first edition of 1755 and especially the fourth edition of 1773, is clearly a massive resource for Johnson’s appropriation of Milton’s texts; however, I have chosen not to allocate an independent section to it, partly because the sheer quantity of material is overwhelming for a study of this kind – it deserves separate treatment in itself, as the ground-breaking research of Allen Reddick and Anne McDermott testifies – and partly because it seemed more
Introduction
3
a ppropriate to use it primarily as an aid to interpreting Johnson’s critical responses to Milton. The criticism is the focus of the second part of the book. It begins with an investigation of the notorious Lauder affair, and what it reveals about Johnson’s attitude to Paradise Lost and its creator at this stage of his career: his role is marked by an ambivalence that characterises his criticism of the epic throughout his life. Central to Part II (and to the whole project) is the following chapter on Johnson’s literary assessment of Paradise Lost, from the Rambler essays on prosody to the extended general analysis of its beauties and defects in the ‘Life of Milton’. In the Rambler essays, he exercises the method of close reading; in the ‘Life’, he addresses fundamental critical questions regarding how, and by what criteria, to judge Milton’s ‘wonderful poem’, questions that have been integral to its reception from the late seventeenth century to the present. This chapter not only enquires into possible reasons for Johnson’s responses, both positive and negative, but also contextualises his commentary in relation to the abundant evidence from other eighteenth-century readers, editors, and commentators, and considers its effect on modern Milton criticism. The next chapter, on his criticism of the shorter poems, follows a similar strategy. Both are based on the principle that Milton is essential to Johnson’s critical thinking, putting his theory and practice to the most rigorous of tests. In turn, Johnson’s assessments have profoundly influenced the subsequent critical history of Milton’s poetry, even or especially when they have provoked violent contradiction (or incredulity). As student, teacher, and indeed examiner, I have long been familiar with the academic practice of using Johnson quotations to stimulate counter-arguments; and it is noticeable that Milton critics are still citing him, if too often in easy dismissal. But Johnson’s emphasis on the importance of the reader, his concern with language and genre, his struggle with the subject of Paradise Lost, and above all his enthrallment by the Miltonic imagination, deserve to be taken seriously by serious readers, all the more so because his is a mind which is not easily subjugated. His criticism raises questions about our current interpretative strategies, and continues to challenge our assumptions. The final part of the book, on Johnson’s biographical construction of Milton as political, private, and literary subject, goes to the heart of his attempt to understand the relation between a great writer and his work. He is a brilliant theorist as well as practitioner of literary biography: his scrutiny of the evidence available to him from earlier lives of Milton is illuminating, and again the nuances of his interpretation can be more exactly defined in the context of other Milton biographies, from the first-hand
4
Introduction
accounts, through his eighteenth-century predecessors, to the moderns. Johnson’s well-documented political divergence from his subject complicates but also intensifies his effort to comprehend both the genius and the fallible human being, and he shows himself capable of empathy towards both. At the present time, approximately four centuries after the birth of Milton and three centuries after the birth of Johnson, it seems timely to reconsider a relationship between two classic writers which still has much to say about British literary and political culture, and literary history. From one viewpoint, the relation can be described as an agon, a struggle for authority between two giants of the early modern canon. From another viewpoint, it is a collaboration, establishing the enduring value of that canon, and of their shared tradition of Christian humanism, which – whether it is accepted or rejected – continues to be essential to our historical understanding. Moreover, the subject remains relevant to past, present, and future academic research. Among the distinguished modern scholars whose work has laid the foundations of knowledge about the reception of Milton’s work in the eighteenth century, and Johnson’s view of Milton in particular, are John T. Shawcross, for his Critical Heritage volumes on Milton; Roger Lonsdale, for his edition of Lives of the Poets; Allen Reddick, for his work on Milton in the Dictionary; Bruce Redford, for his study of Milton in the Political Tracts; and Dustin Griffin and Stephen Fix for their seminal critical studies of Johnson and Milton. In conjunction with the magisterial editions of the works of both authors, they have made Johnson’s Milton possible.
Pa r t I
Johnson the reader/writer: appropriating Milton’s texts
Ch apter 1
Summoning Milton’s ghost: Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
When Johnson was writing the Rambler essays between 1750 and 1752, he had reached that stage of middle life at which Milton, a century previously, was writing in defence of regicide. The gulf between their literary careers and commitments could scarcely seem wider than at this point. Yet for each of them the flexing of their rhetorical muscles in prose marks very powerfully a shared humanism, a sense of the writer’s responsibility in the public domain. The ‘three problems’ which Milton claimed to have addressed in his earlier pamphlets on ‘domestic liberty’ – marriage, education, and ‘the existence of freedom to express oneself ’1 – are ones that also preoccupy Johnson in the work of his maturity. Both are trained to argue, believing that argument in print is fundamental to public discourse. However greatly they diverge in their political principles, they agree on the moral seriousness of what they are doing, and on the writer’s duty to communicate truth as he perceives it. Even if Milton’s prose might be rejected as a model (though not entirely, as we shall see), for Johnson, whether he likes it or not, the fact that Milton’s poetry is so deeply embedded in his own reading experience and in that of his contemporaries turns Milton himself into an inescapable author/authority figure. In addition, his work on the Dictionary during the same period saturates his verbal memory with Milton’s poetic language. The Rambler and the other periodical essays, establishing as they do Johnson’s status as moralist and critic, are a valuable starting point for assessing how he appropriates Miltonic texts. Certainly in these essays Milton emerges as a presence to be reckoned with, visible or invisible. Johnson summons up Milton’s ghost partly as a critic through direct confrontation, as in his own wonderful analogy of Aeneas in the underworld drawing his sword against ‘phantoms which cannot be wounded’ (Yale IV. p. 134); partly through biographical reference; and partly through literary allusion, the most subtle haunting of all. Criticism and biography will be 7
8
Johnson’s Milton
dealt with at a later stage. The immediate purpose of this chapter is to consider how Milton’s texts infiltrate the periodical essays. It is perhaps not surprising that Johnson like so many others uses the Miltonic currency of quotation and allusion. What is more surprising is the impact and even the frequency of these allusions. In respect of Johnson’s appropriation of texts, to quantify references is not necessarily to indicate their relative importance, but it is worth noting how the Yale editors’ statistics for allusions to early modern authors in the periodicals break down individually.2 Even if we discount the sequence of essays devoted to Milton criticism, it is interesting, indeed startling, to see how prominent Milton is (in comparison, say, with Shakespeare). He and his work appear in a greater variety of contexts than most (possibly any?) of the post-classical authors to whom Johnson alludes. Although Dryden and Pope are quoted more frequently, these citations are bulked up by Johnson’s use of their translations. Of course a number of factors might explain Milton’s presence: his general cultural dominance in the eighteenth century, the precedent of Addison’s Spectator criticism, Johnson’s own immersion in seventeenth-century texts for lexicographical purposes. But added to these must be Johnson’s personal long-standing involvement with reading Milton, and appropriating what he reads. At the very least, his use of allusion registers an intimate knowledge and recall of Milton’s writing, and its transmission through other sources. Like many early modern writers, when Johnson quotes, ‘he frequently, perhaps habitually, quotes from memory’.3 And since he lays exceptional stress on memory as the fundamental intellectual faculty, the indispensable basis of thought itself, the workings of his own memory are particularly revealing. The periodical essay is not a genre that binds the writer to the academic injunction ‘always verify your references’, and, precisely because of this freedom, Johnson’s illustrative borrowings allow glimpses of how he is assimilating Miltonic material into his own writing practice, his own mental habits. Misquotation may indicate even more clearly than absolute accuracy a text lived with, unconsciously adapted, however slightly, to the contours of a different individual literary consciousness. In order to reconstruct Johnson’s Milton as a memory-text, fragmentary as such a construction must be, it is worth looking as closely as possible at these verbal traces where Johnson appropriates his writings either to point a moral or adorn a tale. Unsurprisingly, almost all the direct quotations are from Paradise Lost, although there are a scattering of allusions to the prose and shorter poems. As for so many eighteenth-century writers, it is Milton the epic
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
9
poet who sets the standard, occupies the generic high ground: he is the competition. Indeed, in the very first number Johnson gestures in the direction of heroic precedents. He invokes epic proems almost enviously, because for the epic poet the problem of where to begin is already settled: confronted by the terror of the blank page or the listening audience, he has the support of convention. Although Johnson does not mention Milton (or any other post-classical poet) by name, he scarcely needs to, for in such a context the author of Paradise Lost – noted for his ‘spirit and intrepidity’ (Yale III. p. 5) – leaps to mind. In a much later number of The Rambler (158), Johnson will return to the subject of the epic proem, placing Milton in the exalted company of Homer and Virgil in order to contradict Addison’s close reading.4 The requirement of proems is not to be ‘plain, simple, and unadorned’ as Addison asserts, but, rather, to blaze in ‘grandeur of expression’ (Yale V. pp. 78–80). It is clear in retrospect that by linking the opening of The Rambler to epic poetry through allusion, Johnson is at the same time claiming and disclaiming a powerful literary precedent. M i lt on, w r i t i ng, a n d t ru t h The first group of allusions relate directly to Johnson’s consciousness of the writer’s – and the critic’s – responsibility to truth. If proof were needed that Milton’s epic is not far from Johnson’s mind in these early stages of his new literary project, it is provided by the fact that his first explicit quotation from Paradise Lost occurs in number 3, an essay that continues his preoccupation with the difficulties that the writer has to confront. Here he widens his remit to include the critic, a major creation in The Rambler, and one who is by no means always on the side of the angels.5 In his allegory of true Criticism, ‘the eldest daughter of Labour and of Truth’, who has departed from this earth, Johnson glances at the classic mythical paradigm of Astraea (Yale III. pp. 16, 18). But his sardonic description of the current state of criticism, embarrassingly for its practitioners, locates it in the company of Milton’s Satan and his fallen angels. Hell is other critics. At best, they practise Flattery like Belial, politicising and prostituting favourable judgements; at worst, they exercise Malevolence like Beelzebub, the motive force of hellish malignity. The original authority of true Criticism is divided and travestied. Instead of the impartial torch of Truth,
10
Johnson’s Milton The companions of Malevolence were supplied by the Furies with a torch, which had this quality peculiar to infernal lustre, that its light fell only upon faults. No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’d only to discover sights of woe.
Paradise Lost, I. lines 63–4 Yale III. p.18
Johnson is not prone to allude to hell frivolously. The phrase ‘darkness visible’ has haunted generations of readers and writers. Here Johnson applies it to the profession that unites reading and writing – literary criticism – to drive home the point that entirely destructive criticism is damning, and therefore damnable, in a more than colloquial sense. He develops his analysis of the function of criticism in The Rambler the following year, and again in these later issues the shade of Milton seems not far distant. In the midst of his irregular sequence of critical essays on Milton’s versification, he revisits in Rambler 93 the subject of the critic’s responsibility to both writer and reader, in what seems like a less dramatic reprise of Rambler 3. Whereas in his early allegory Johnson had deliberately demonised the critic’s power, in Rambler 93 he humanises it: ‘Criticks, like all the rest of mankind, are very frequently misled by interest’ (Yale IV. p. 132). If the critic is accountable to truth above all, with a responsibility to both writer and reader as a kind of honest broker between them, all too often in his modern incarnation he acts as a dishonest broker and betrays his trust. No-one is more conscious than Johnson of the fact that literary criticism is bedevilled – a verb he might take literally – by subjectivity, that the critic has many motives, and that the critic’s temptation is to exercise power without responsibility. He recognises that negative criticism provokes a backlash just because it ‘has so often given occasion to the envious and ill-natured of gratifying their malignity’ (Yale IV. p. 133). But the solution does not lie in the opposite extreme, undue deference to the writer’s authority or sensibility. To write is to enter a potentially adversarial relationship with readers and critics, and, in the case of dead authors, ‘the critic is, undoubtedly, at full liberty to exercise the strictest severity’ (Yale IV. p. 134). Interestingly, at this point he displaces the evocation of Milton’s biblical hell in Rambler 3 with Virgil’s classical underworld. The distinction between living and dead authors is the crux at which he introduces the Virgilian image, already alluded to, of ‘phantoms which cannot be wounded’ (contrast Milton’s hell, where the pain of the fallen angels is integral to their intellectual being). However, it is at the conclusion of this essay that Johnson most emphatically rewrites his earlier rhetoric in
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
11
Rambler 3, substituting ‘the light of reason’ for ‘infernal lustre’, Milton’s ‘darkness visible’: the duty of criticism is neither to depreciate, nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate. (Yale IV. p. 134)
Perhaps it is not coincidental that in the previous issue of The Rambler (92), where Johnson had also been reflecting on ‘the duty of criticism’, he seems to have remembered Areopagitica, since that is the text in which Milton expresses most eloquently the power of the printed word and the necessity ‘to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate’. He does in any case make reference to Milton’s poetics in that issue, since this is one of the essays devoted to considering versification. But a particular allusion to Areopagitica has been identified in this passage: It is, however, the task of criticism to establish principles; to improve opinion into knowledge; and to distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction, from the nameless and inexplicable elegancies which appeal wholly to the fancy, from which we feel delight, but know not how they produce it, and which may well be termed the enchantresses of the soul. (Yale IV. p. 122)
The phrase singled out is ‘to improve opinion into knowledge’ (Johnson originally used ‘exalt’); arguably the whole sentence has a Miltonic flavour, especially in the Circean metaphor ‘enchantresses of the soul’. Johnson is addressing a problem in aesthetics, much canvassed in the mid-eighteenth century, which also presents itself as a problem of epistemology. How can we know what is beautiful and true, and is it possible to progress beyond purely subjective criteria? He argues that criticism as a discipline can indeed liberate us from a pleasure that is irrational, and contingent upon what is ‘merely relative and comparative’; that it can attain to a rationally based truth, ‘under the dominion of science’ (Yale IV. pp. 121, 122). Although Milton in Areopagitica does not concern himself primarily with aesthetics, he too envisages literary activity as a quest for truth, discoverable through the processes of writing and reading: ‘to be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal, and proportionall) this is the golden rule …’ (CPW II. p. 551). He imaginatively projects the London of 1644 as a hive of intellectual activity, crammed with ‘pens and heads … sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea’s … others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement’. In short, ‘where there is much desire to learn,
12
Johnson’s Milton
there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making’ (CPW II. p. 554). It is this ‘striking idea of improving opinion into knowledge’6 that Johnson appears to borrow from Milton and endorse. As I have argued elsewhere,7 Rambler 96 (published a fortnight later) can also be profitably read against the template of Areopagitica. In this essay, the trope of personified Truth is familiar and traditional; Johnson handles it in allegorical mode, as Milton had done. Unlike Milton, however, he keeps the framework consistently classical, not Christian, avoiding the mingling of ‘trifling fictions’ with ‘the most awful and sacred truths’ which so disquiets him in Lycidas (Lives I. p. 279). Yet there is a distinct family likeness between the opening of Milton’s myth of Truth and Johnson’s, as if Johnson is rewriting Areopagitica at this point: Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on …
Areopagitica, CPW II. p. 549
When the world was yet in its infancy, Truth came among mortals from above, and Falsehood from below. Truth was the daughter of Jupiter and Wisdom; Falsehood was the progeny of Folly impregnated by the wind.
Yale IV. p. 149
Interestingly, the Yale editors compare Falsehood’s genealogy not only with a Spenserian analogue but also with the first lines of Milton’s Il Penseroso – ‘Hence vain deluding joyes, / The brood of folly without father bred’ (although it is actually Euphrosyne of L’Allegro whose mother Aurora is said to be impregnated by Zephyr – apparently a Miltonic invention).8 To take the Miltonic allusion in a different direction, away from the pagan fictions for which Johnson shows frequent distaste, it seems likely that Johnson models his Truth on Milton’s figure in Areopagitica, but that he deliberately creates a rational secular version, without the compelling mystical dimension of the Christian incarnation combined with the Osiris myth. Milton’s Truth suffers martyrdom in this world; her fate in human history is to be sacrificed like her divine master, and dismembered like Osiris by her enemies. Johnson’s Truth initially bestrides the world, a martial and irresistible force: Truth seemed conscious of superior power and juster claim [than Falsehood’s], and therefore came on towering and majestick, unassisted and alone; Reason indeed always attended her, but appeared her follower, rather than companion. Her march was slow and stately, but her motion
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
13
was perpetually progressive, and when once she had grounded her foot, neither gods nor men could force her to retire. Yale IV. p. 150
Initially Milton’s Truth appears the more vulnerable – Johnson’s Truth ‘though she was often wounded, always recovered in a short time’ (Yale IV. p. 151) – yet when it comes to the direct confrontation between Truth and Falsehood, neither writer doubts the ultimate outcome. The closest parallel occurs in their depiction not of Truth martyred but of Truth militant. It is difficult to believe that Johnson did not recall, consciously or unconsciously, Milton’s later passage in Areopagitica when devising his own allegory of (in Milton’s phrase) ‘the wars of Truth’. Certainly Milton is here writing to a specific historical moment, but the corollary is one that Johnson can perceive as universal: And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licencing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter … For who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licencings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power: give her but room, & do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught & bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time … untill she be adjur’d into her own likenes. (CPW II. pp. 561, 562–3)
Yet this shape-changing Truth is still truth, as Milton is made to concede for his own rhetorical purposes: ‘Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one [my italics].’ Indeed she does in Milton’s own rhetorical fictions. Johnson likewise imagines an armed contest between Truth and Falsehood, in which Falsehood has recourse to evasions and stratagems: It sometimes happened that the antagonists met in full opposition. … … [Falsehood] always endeavoured to skirmish at a distance, perpetually shifted her ground, and let fly her arrows in different directions; for she certainly found that her strength failed, whenever the eye of Truth darted full upon her. Truth had the awful aspect though not the thunder of her father … (Yale IV. pp. 150–1)
Having described the vicissitudes of the conflict, Johnson makes it clear that, while Truth’s ultimate victory is not in doubt – ‘Truth, however, did not grow weaker by the struggle, for her vigour was unconquerable’ (Yale IV. p. 152) – nevertheless she can be frustrated; in a parallel to his own
14
Johnson’s Milton
allegory of Criticism, he has her asking her divine father to let her abandon humanity and return to the heaven which is her home. So far, Johnson has been playing variations on Miltonic and classical motifs. But at this point the allegory takes an individual turn, apparently swerving away from Milton’s more eschatological myth-making in Areopagitica. The solution to humanity’s recalcitrance is to make Truth herself more alluring: in effect, she steals Falsehood’s clothes: The Muses wove in the loom of Pallas, a loose and changeable robe, like that in which Falsehood captivated her admirers; with this they invested Truth, and named her Fiction. She now went out again to conquer with more success; for when she demanded entrance of the Passions, they often mistook her for Falsehood, and delivered up their charge; but when she had once taken possession, she was soon disrobed by Reason, and shone out, in her original form, with native effulgence and resistless dignity. (Yale IV. p. 152)
Even this narrative development may have grown from a seed sown in Johnson’s reading of Milton’s prose. For Milton’s idea of a Protean Truth that, unlike Proteus, speaks what her auditors wish to hear, ‘tunes her voice according to the time … untill she be adjur’d into her own likenes’, suggests, mutatis mutandis, the same narrative of disguise, accommodation, and revelation as Johnson’s truth-as-fiction. Johnson may also recall Milton’s other earlier allegory of Truth and Falsehood in The Reason of Church Government (1642) which exhibits certain striking parallels with Rambler 96. For example, Johnson’s Truth invested in ‘a loose and changeable robe, like that in which Falsehood captivated her admirers’ reflects Milton’s image of Truth ‘habited and colour’d like a notorious Falshood’. (CPW I. p. 830) Yet each fiction is shaped by a different cultural ideology. If Johnson is reworking Milton’s original, he stamps it with a distinctively eighteenthcentury imprint. He secularises and rationalises his discourse, so that, in place of the intense and volatile situation that Milton is attempting to influence by his polemical prose, the reader can sense a more polite and stable social context, in which fiction – in the shape of novels, fables, or romances – has come to dominate much literary activity. Johnson is writing for consumers, not controversialists, and his approach is more obviously worldly than Milton’s. Nonetheless, the seventeenth-century polemicist and the eighteenth-century essayist unite in one fundamental conviction: that truth will prevail, and that her wars are fought with the weapons of the printed word. The conclusion that might be drawn from Johnson’s use of Miltonic allusion in the Rambler essays just discussed, which have a common denominator of attending to principles that Johnson, like Milton, takes very seriously, is that he practises what he preaches. He will not allow any
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
15
personal critical bias to interfere with his recognition that the critic’s first responsibility is to literature and to truth. That being so, Milton’s authority (rather than being challenged) reinforces Johnson’s own arguments. ‘H u m a n i n t e r e s t ’ Not all the Milton allusions in The Rambler are on this conceptual level. They surface in contexts where Johnson’s morality is of a more down-toearth variety, or where he is as much concerned with adorning a tale as with pointing a moral. Notoriously, Johnson criticised Paradise Lost in the ‘Life of Milton’ for its ‘want of human interest’ (Lives I. p. 290). But he delivered that verdict over a quarter of a century after composing the Rambler essays: a survey of his allusions to Paradise Lost in The Rambler and the later periodical essays suggests that Johnson could and did respond to what can only be described as human interest in sections of Milton’s epic. If he wrests at least a few of these verbal echoes into contexts far removed from, or even incongruous with, their original settings, that further proves how far he has creatively assimilated the material. To begin with a minor example: writing on the theme of good humour in Rambler 72, he cherrypicks a phrase – ‘balm of life’ – from Paradise Lost XI. line 546, altering it to the alliterative ‘balm of being’. Probably the alliteration results from a common trick of memory (a classic instance is the familiar misremembering of Milton’s ‘fresh woods, and pastures new’ from Lycidas, line 193, as ‘fresh fields and pastures new’). More interesting is how Johnson applies it in a supposed letter addressed to the Rambler: You have … hitherto neglected to recommend good humour to the world, though a little reflection will shew you that it is the “balm of being,” the quality to which all that adorns or elevates mankind must owe its power of pleasing. (Yale IV. pp. 12–13)
What may have originally attracted Johnson’s attention to the source, however, is a much more melancholy association with ageing. The archangel Michael explains to Adam (in a disquisition surely remembered by Johnson when he wrote The Vanity of Human Wishes), that even the most temperate and gracious old age is subject to physical incapacity and depression: … and for the air of youth Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign A melancholy damp of cold and dry To weigh thy spirits down, and last consume The balm of life.
Paradise Lost XI. lines 542–6
16
Johnson’s Milton
Unusually for him, Johnson turns a negative into a positive, to recommend the virtue of good humour as one that sweetens everything else in life. In a way, it constitutes an ironic misappropriation. The Johnson of the ‘Life’ is more inclined to associate Milton with ‘gloomy seriousness’ than with good humour (Lives I. p. 251). In the capacity for good-humoured comedy, as in other respects, Shakespeare must have appeared to Johnson as Milton’s antithesis.9 In fact, later in this essay Johnson summons up his favourite Falstaff as the exemplar ‘of the chearful companion’ (Yale IV. p. 15). Yet, against all likelihood, it is Milton who contributes a fragment to the mosaic celebrating the most agreeably human of virtues. Much more characteristic are those occasions in the periodical essays when Johnson borrows from Milton to intensify a painful emotion or association. One such instance is his beginning a sombre meditation on dependence, in particular the dependence of old age, with an allusion not in this case to Paradise Lost but to Samson Agonistes (Rambler 162). This touches a nerve because Johnson is imagining a state he dreads, and vicariously experiencing it through empathising with a dramatic character and situation: One of the complaints uttered by Milton’s Sampson, in the anguish of blindness, is, that he shall pass his life under the direction of others; that he cannot regulate his conduct by his own knowledge, but must lie at the mercy of those who undertake to guide him. (Yale V. p. 95)
Though Johnson always has an ability to feel a text on his pulses, as his childhood reaction to Hamlet and adult reaction to King Lear testify, nevertheless it is striking that Samson Agonistes, a text that he seems scarcely to value as tragedy, can also activate a powerful sense of human solidarity in suffering. To adapt his own dictum, there is indeed always an appeal open from criticism to nature. He inserts another example of ‘human interest’, this time from Paradise Lost, in a first-person narrative in which Misella traces her fall from innocence (Rambler 170 and 171). When her parents, of good breeding but with too many children to support, give up their child to adoption by a rich relative to whom she has ‘endeared [herself] by [her] innocence,’ the parents’ tears are compared to those shed by our first parents, Adam and Eve, over the loss of paradise: My parents felt the common struggles at the thought of parting, and “some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon”. (Yale V. p. 136)
The irony is proleptic, because the child falls from the world of innocence to experience, and, ultimately, prostitution. Indeed this rehearses an all too familiar eighteenth-century tale, a harlot’s progress; but Johnson’s
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
17
allusion to the famous ending of the epic reminds the reader that these ‘common struggles’ re-enact an archetypal event. Perhaps not altogether successfully: the contemporary fiction softens the force of the quotation, and runs the risk of sentimentalising it, especially since the moral of the tale is so overtly that of the lovely woman who stoops to folly. Somewhere in the wings lurks the Vicar of Wakefield, waiting for his cue to enter literary history. We need to look elsewhere in The Rambler for Johnson’s more profound engagement with the humanity of Paradise Lost. If we look at the other evidence for Johnson as a sympathetic reader of Paradise Lost at the time of writing the periodical essays, it becomes apparent that he is attracted precisely to those parts of the poem that deal directly with accessible human sentiment (or that can be adapted to human sentiment). He only quotes from books that are set before the Fall, where ‘The man and woman … are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know’ (Lives I. p. 289), if he can meaningfully connect that state with the fallen human condition; for instance, the episode of Eve’s dream. In the ‘Life of Milton’, he would later observe that Milton could hardly create a prelapsarian discourse without reference to postlapsarian psychology: To find sentiments for the state of innocence, was very difficult; and something of anticipation perhaps is now and then discovered. Adam’s discourse of dreams seems not to be the speculation of a new-created being. (Lives I. p. 291)
Much earlier, in Rambler 8, he had demonstrated the truth of this observation by adapting Adam’s lines to a psychoanalytical problem endemic in fallen humanity, the difficulty of maintaining ‘the moral discipline of the mind’ under the temptations of solitary fantasising. Johnson pushes this anxiety to an extreme, where it topples over into the malady of excessive scrupulosity (Johnson was ‘no friend to scruples’ from which he himself suffered):10 But I cannot forbear … to caution pious and tender minds, that are disturbed by the irruptions of wicked imaginations, against too great dejection, and too anxious alarms; for thoughts are only criminal, when they are first chosen, and then voluntarily continued. Evil into the mind of god or man May come and go, so unapprov’d, and leave No spot or stain behind.
Paradise Lost V. lines 117–19 Yale III. p. 45
Johnson’s memory substitutes ‘No spot or stain’ for the original text’s wording ‘No spot or blame’: again this may simply arise from the mnemonic trick of alliterative quotation. On the other hand, it may be something of
18
Johnson’s Milton
a Freudian slip, pleonastically reinforcing the metaphor of contamination, and replacing the more external judgement implied in ‘blame’. Johnson, no stranger to ‘the irruptions of wicked imaginations’, seems to speak for himself here. But if Mrs Thrale accurately reports his words to her on one occasion, then he did not always benefit from his own reassuring application of Adam’s lines: ‘“Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered into my heart was communicated in a dream”’(JM I. p. 159). When he once more confronts the consciousness of sin and guilt in Rambler 110, composed during the Easter season of 1751, he is solaced by another passage from Paradise Lost with its moving summons to human repentance in the hope of divine forgiveness: What better can we do, than to the place Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall Before him reverent, and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.
Paradise Lost X. lines 1086–92
Like a piece of music, the entire essay moves gravely towards this beautiful coda: Adam and Eve, fallen yet still in paradise, turning to God in penitence. The burden of Johnson’s meditation is the need for, and nature of, true repentance, and the hope of God’s mercy. For him this is a subject that collects and concentrates all his religious emotion, in expressing not only the transcendental hopes and fears which he believes to be universal – ‘since all rational agents are conscious of having neglected or violated the duties prescribed to them, the fear of being rejected, or punished by God, has always burdened the human mind’ – but also the pragmatic consequences of faith in human lives: That God will forgive, may, indeed, be established as the first and fundamental truth of religion; for though the knowledge of his existence is the origin of philosophy, yet, without the belief of his mercy, it would have little influence upon our mortal conduct. (Yale IV. p. 221)
Writing on how the prospect of death and damnation ought to affect the being ‘whose crimes have deprived him of the favour of God’ stimulates Johnson to an almost Miltonic rhetoric as he imagines the terror of the abyss: if he who considers himself as suspended over the abyss of eternal perdition only by the thread of life, which must soon part by its own weakness, and which the
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
19
wing of every minute may divide, can cast his eyes round him without shuddering with horror, or panting for security; what can he judge of himself but that he is not yet awaked to sufficient conviction …? (Yale IV. p. 224)
Yet Johnson refrains from the expected comparison with ‘the wasteful deep’ into which Milton’s fallen angels hurl themselves (Paradise Lost X. line 862). In fact, when he actually turns to the text of Paradise Lost, it is not Milton’s sublimity, his capacity for ‘enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful’ (Lives I. p. 286) that gives him his climax, but (again) the ‘human interest’ of the description of Adam and Eve waking to conviction of guilt – a passage that Milton himself thought so important that it is reprised as the climax of Book X.11 In this connection, it is worth observing how comparatively rare it is for Johnson to end a Rambler essay with a quotation. Out of 208 issues, he chooses to do so only seven times, and in four of these instances (numbers 11, 17, 118, and the final issue, 208) he is still, in a sense, using his own words, since he is translating from classical sources. Of the remaining three instances, two end with biblical quotations, also a rare occurrence in Johnson’s essay-writing compared to his quoting from secular sources. That leaves this Milton quotation as the sole example of Johnson’s using a nonclassical and non-scriptural closure that is not his own. Since Johnson, like Milton, crafts his endings with consummate skill to leave a powerful and lasting impact on the reader, the inference is that he does indeed accord a special status and authority to the text of Paradise Lost. To adopt these lines at the end of this profoundly felt essay is to pay serious homage to Milton’s religious inspiration. Moreover, as Stephen Fix points out when citing this essay to support his contention that Johnson makes devotional use of Paradise Lost,12 the source is unattributed. Johnson segues into the coda as if it were part of his original text, albeit in verse not prose: What better can we do, than prostrate fall Before him reverent; and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Wat’ring the ground, and with our sighs the air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeign’d, and humiliation meek?
Yale IV. pp. 225–6
Obviously he has the verses by heart; he does not need to look them up. But he also lays claim to the passage by changing it slightly, omitting the words ‘to the place/ Repairing where he judged us …’ but preserving the line-break and the sense. This may not be entirely accidental, a mere memory lapse. We retain what is important to us, and for Johnson place is not the most important thing. Possibly the reference to place drops out
20
Johnson’s Milton
because it seems redundant, focusing too much attention on the original and unique situation of Adam and Eve instead of facilitating the reader’s – and writer’s – identification with emotions and actions both intimate and universal. It would be like Johnson to feel penitence – like happiness – not local.13 Something similar happens with another allusion to the experience of the fallen Adam, which reinforces the argument that Johnson does read Paradise Lost for human interest as he understands it, quarrying the text for whatever insights he can adapt to his own reflections. In Rambler 78, he is considering how human beings have become desensitised to the fact of their mortality: Milton has judiciously represented the father of mankind, as seized with horror and astonishment at the sight of death, exhibited to him on the mount of vision. For surely, nothing can so much disturb the passions, or perplex the intellects of man, as the disruption of his union with visible nature; a separation from all that has hitherto delighted or engaged him; a change not only of the place, but the manner of his being; an entrance into a state not simply which he knows not, but which perhaps he has not faculties to know; an immediate and perceptible communication with the supreme Being, and, what is above all distressful and alarming, the final sentence, and unalterable allotment. (Yale IV. p. 47)
Johnson’s own well-known horror at the prospect of death and judgement breaks through his measured prose, and causes him to elaborate and reinterpret his source. In Paradise Lost Adam cries out in anguish: But have I now seen death? Is this the way I must return to native dust? Oh sight Of terror, foul and ugly to behold, Horrid to think, how horrible to feel!
Paradise Lost XI. lines 462–514
However, what Johnson leaves out is that Milton’s Adam is not just reacting to his first, vicarious experience of human mortality, but is witnessing the murder of one of his sons by another, the first death by human violence which ‘hath the primal eldest curse upon’t’ (Hamlet, III.iii.37). True, this creates the opportunity for the archangel Michael’s grim general summary of all the ills that flesh is heir to, including the disquisition on old age to which Johnson had alluded in his Rambler essay of three weeks before; but what prompts this angelic homily is an individual, and tragic, act. By universalising Adam’s ‘horror and astonishment at the sight of death’, Johnson detaches the emotion from its original context, as he had to a lesser extent with Adam’s penitence. He does this so that he can shock us out of our conspiracy of indifference to our mortal state – familiarity, he
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
21
argues, has dulled our consciousness. Milton’s text acts as a memento mori. He concludes this essay by advising us ‘to accustom ourselves, whenever we see a funeral, to consider how soon we may be added to the number of those whose probation is past, and whose happiness or misery shall endure for ever’ (Yale IV. p. 50). If reading the last books of Paradise Lost makes Johnson himself face up to his own mortality, it provides another reason for his finding this reading experience painful rather than pleasurable. ‘Human interest’ in Paradise Lost comes in various guises however – not all of which are strictly human. If Johnson can empathise with Adam, the interesting question is whether the same imaginative involvement occurs when Johnson encounters Milton’s Satan, the creation that more than any other has given many of Milton’s readers the addictive fix of ‘human interest’ that in Johnson’s view makes us readers in the first place.15 In The Rambler, Johnson appears to neglect the possibilities of Satanic allusion. Yet, in the periodical essays taken as a whole, there is only one quotation from Paradise Lost that is actually repeated, and that is Satan’s address to the sun, ‘O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams …’ (Paradise Lost IV. line 37). As Johnson knew, this soliloquy is supposed to be part of the earliest stratum of the poem’s composition,16 and it is one that has always been crucial to readers and critics of Paradise Lost in the interpretation of Satan’s role and rhetoric. In the ‘Life of Milton’, Johnson tends to evade the problem of Satan’s imaginative hold over the reader, rejecting John Clarke’s objections to satanic impiety simply by counter-assertion rather than demonstration. Certainly he sees the problem, but he dismisses it (Lives I. p. 284). Yet Johnson might have been more affected by satanic rhetoric than he would admit, at least in this particular instance. This suspicion is not necessarily dispelled by the apparently trivial contexts in which he uses the quotation. In both the essays from The Adventurer and The Idler, Johnson resorts to his frequent fictional techniques: Adventurer 102 consists of a merchant’s tale in epistolary form; Idler 31 incorporates a generic literary ‘character’, Mr Sober, whom Mrs Thrale claimed to be a self-portrait of Johnson (Yale II. p. 97, note 5). The shared subject of the essays (that of idleness) might sufficiently account for the recycled quotation. To any reader unfamiliar with Johnson’s psychology and habits, it appears simply as a witticism. What prompts the Milton borrowing in each case is the thought of getting up in the morning. In Adventurer 102, the once bustling and happy London trader, stranded out of his element in country tedium, nostalgically recalls his previous earlyrising routine, and laments ‘I now seldom see the rising sun, but “to tell
22
Johnson’s Milton
him,” with the fallen angel, “how I hate his beams”’ (Yale II. p. 438). In Idler 31, Johnson first classifies the species, not the individual: There are some that profess idleness in its full dignity … who boast that they do nothing, and thank their stars that they have nothing to do; who sleep every night till they can sleep no longer, and rise only that exercise may enable them to sleep again; who prolong the reign of darkness by double curtains, and never see the sun but to “tell him how they hate his beams” … (Yale II. pp. 95–6)
From the sublime to the ridiculous? To ‘prolong the reign of darkness’ with double curtains scarcely equates with the self-damnation of fallen angels, or even men who love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil (John 3:19). Yet for Johnson the struggle with idleness, focused on his lifelong difficulty with early rising, is essentially a sickness of the spirit, or accidie. Throughout his recorded prayers and resolutions, the same motif recurs, as he castigates himself for sloth and constantly renews his attempts to regularise his daily life. To associate this struggle with Satan’s blasphemy against God’s radiant creation17 is on one level comically pretentious. But possibly Johnson means it more seriously when he aligns idleness with the traditionally satanic sin of pride in Idler 31: It is not my intention to degrade pride from this pre-eminence of mischief, yet I know not whether idleness may not maintain a very doubtful and obstinate competition. (Yale II. p. 95)
Idleness – which can also take the form of futile activity – may well bring Milton’s Satan to Johnson’s memory: not just because ‘Satan finds some mischief still, / For idle hands to do’, in the words of Johnson’s earlier contemporary, Isaac Watts,18 but also because it is a form of blasphemy, a destruction of God-given time and talent. The psychoanalytically-inclined reader might suspect a subliminal emotional identification with Milton’s Satan, of the kind that Johnson appears to resist so easily in his remarks in the ‘Life of Milton’. Through appropriating Satan’s words, apparently light-heartedly, Johnson can express aggression, negativity, fear, all the anti-God impulse that consciousness suppresses. Hatred of the sun may sublimate a fundamental self-hatred; in the original context Satan’s outburst also violently rejects the creation and the Creator, a rejection driven by both pride and despair. For Johnson, Milton’s text may suggest a way to articulate inadmissible feelings, to dramatise the guilt of a depressive mentality confronted with the inexorable daily inrush of renewed consciousness. Johnson wrenches the text bizarrely from its source, yoking heterogeneous ideas by violence together in a stroke of wit. In the essays he makes the application obliquely and defensively, by turning Satan’s line into a joke. But the joke is ultimately
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
23
against himself, and one that is too good – and perhaps too bitter – to forget. According to Boswell, in the last year of his life he is still cracking it:19 It was observed to Dr. Johnson, that it seemed strange that he, who has so often delighted his company by his lively and brilliant conversation, should say he was miserable. JOHNSON. “Alas! it is all outside; I may be cracking my joke, and cursing the sun. Sun, how I hate thy beams!”
The contrast between inward and outward state, even the narrowness of the dividing line between curse and black humour, is strongly reminiscent of Milton’s Satan. Interestingly, Boswell does not know quite how to take Johnson in this mood: I knew not well what to think of this declaration; whether to hold it as a genuine picture of his mind … (Life IV. p. 304)
No such ambivalence attaches to Johnson’s final allusion to the ‘human interest’ of Paradise Lost in the Rambler essays. Judging from his silence, here and in the ‘Life of Milton’, there are areas of the poem that inhibit him from quotation or direct allusion (nowhere in the periodical writings does he quote from or allude to Milton’s God). But angelic wisdom is accessible to him, and in this instance it epitomises what Johnson finds most humanly and ethically valuable in the entire epic. Again he selects an episode that has a direct bearing on how to live in the fallen world; again it involves the education of Adam, although in narrative terms it precedes the Fall itself. In fact, later in the ‘Life of Milton’ he singles out two passages precisely for their moral relevance: Splendid passages, containing lessons of morality, or precepts of prudence, occur seldom. Such is the original formation of this poem, that as it admits no human manners till the Fall, it can give little assistance to human conduct. Its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures. Yet the praise of that fortitude, with which Abdiel maintained his singularity of virtue against the scorn of multitudes, may be accommodated to all times; and Raphael’s reproof of Adam’s curiosity after the planetary motions, with the answer returned by Adam, may be confidently opposed to any rule of life which any poet has delivered. (Lives I. p. 286)
It is this second example that Johnson appropriates in Rambler 180, to drive home the point that he makes in so many contexts: that the highest priorities in living are moral and spiritual rather than intellectual. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole academic world and lose his own soul?: Raphael, in return to Adam’s enquiries into the courses of the stars and the revolutions of heaven, counsels him to withdraw his mind from idle speculations, and
24
Johnson’s Milton
employ his faculties upon nearer and more interesting objects, the survey of his own life, the subjection of his passions, the knowledge of duties which must daily be performed, and the detection of dangers which must daily be incurred. This angelick counsel every man of letters should always have before him. He that devotes himself to retired study, naturally sinks from omission to forgetfulness of social duties; he must be therefore sometimes awakened, and recalled to the general condition of mankind. (Yale V. p. 183)
Given Johnson’s estimate of Milton the man, there is something ironic in his turning to Paradise Lost to support an argument that the writer must not isolate himself from human contact. Nevertheless, Raphael’s ‘angelick counsel’ strongly appeals to eighteenth-century moralists besides Johnson, and the reader encounters its echo elsewhere in Johnson’s own writings, notably Rasselas.20 Not all Milton critics have found Raphael’s reproof to be quite so unproblematic as Johnson seems to imply. Yet Johnson, like Milton himself, holds a balance between the advancement of knowledge in investigating the secrets of the universe and theological constraints on the desire to know and control nature.21 Johnson has no desire to clip the wings of intellect as it soars in the rarified atmosphere of pure theory: I am far from any intention to limit curiosity … It is only from the various essays of experimental industry, and the vague excursions of minds sent out upon discovery, that any advancement of knowledge can be expected …
Yale V. p. 183
His ideal is an intellectual heroism, which he contrasts with martial heroism: arguably, this essay works out Johnson’s own variation on Milton’s ‘better fortitude’ that ensures ‘a paradise within’. And the ultimate and only means of achieving this inner paradise – as at the end of The Vanity of Human Wishes – is to gaze steadfastly ‘upon the permanent lustre of moral and religious truth’ (Yale V. p. 186). ‘T h roug h t h e spe c tac l e s of b o ok s’ If Johnson as reader locks on to a ‘human interest’ in Paradise Lost that Johnson the critic largely denies or resists, there is evidence in the essays of another kind of interest that is even more unexpected – an interest in passages of natural description. Here too, the reader and the critic in Johnson seem potentially in conflict. He certainly gives the impression in the ‘Life of Milton’ that he does not consider ‘images and descriptions of the scenes or operations of Nature’ to be altogether Milton’s forte. In fact, he implies
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
25
a detrimental contrast with Shakespeare in this respect, by deliberately reversing Dryden’s verdict on Shakespeare in order to apply it to Milton. Milton, he asserts, ‘saw Nature … through the spectacles of books’ (Lives I. p. 287).22 Once more, however, this illustrates that it is necessary to be wary before backdating Johnson’s later critical commentary to his practice as reader and writer at the time of the periodical essays. For various reasons, Johnson himself sees nature – in the sense of the natural world – through the spectacles of books. After all, the point of wearing spectacles is to improve or correct deficiencies in unaided sight. Ironically, one of the finest eighteenthcentury English naturalists, Gilbert White, quotes Milton on several occasions to enhance perception of the natural world.23 In Johnson’s case, it is even more ironic that he should calmly borrow Milton’s spectacles when it suits him. This is apparent in two overlapping kinds of writing about nature in the periodical essays: first, when Johnson writes about pastoral (nature as literary construct); second, when he writes about country life (nature as human environment), especially from the viewpoint of urban inhabitants, like Johnson himself (and, for that matter, like Milton for much of his life). The periodical essays on pastoral (Rambler 36 and 37 and Adventurer 92) will be discussed more fully in the context of Johnson’s Lycidas criticism. As regards Miltonic allusion, it is interesting that in the two Rambler essays Lycidas is, so to speak, the dog that doesn’t bark in the night: Johnson makes a critical example of Spenser (Yale III. p. 203), but no overt negative comment on Milton’s elegy (though the essay seems to shriek ‘Lycidas’ at Johnson editors).24 When seeking to explain the origin and enduring appeal of pastoral poetry, he turns instead to Paradise Lost. Having conceded that ‘There is scarcely any species of poetry, that has allured more readers, or excited more writers, than the pastoral’ (Yale III. p. 195), he provides a kind of anthropological explanation of its allure that culminates in the image of worship in Milton’s Eden: since it is probable, that poetry is nearly of the same antiquity with rational nature, and since the life of the first men was certainly rural, we may reasonably conjecture, that, as their ideas would necessarily be borrowed from those objects with which they were acquainted, their composures, being filled chiefly with such thoughts on the visible creation as must occur to the first observers, were pastoral hymns like those which Milton introduces the original pair singing, in the day of innocence, to the praise of their Maker. (Yale III. pp. 195–6)
He assumes that each reader re-enacts this ancestral experience in his or her reading history: For the same reason that pastoral poetry was the first employment of the human imagination, it is generally the first literary amusement of our minds. (Yale III. p. 196)
26
Johnson’s Milton
Yet Paradise Lost is not usually the first literary amusement of our minds, even though Johnson himself obviously considered it as possible childhood entertainment (he writes to Mrs Thrale, ‘Harry will be happier now he goes to School and reads Milton’).25 The mature reader responds to Milton’s passages of pastoral lyricism as part of a highly sophisticated generic system, for Paradise Lost is a poem that contains and transforms many different genres.26 What is so striking about Johnson’s allusion to Adam and Eve singing the glories of the divine creation in Paradise is that it records Johnson’s own sensitivity to a dimension of Milton’s poetry to which, it has often been thought, he is temperamentally deaf and blind. Always when writing about Paradise Lost he gives the sublime its due; here he gives natural beauty its due as well. Admittedly, he may qualify this tribute by associating it with a childish or primitive instinct. But he does not question the reality of the pleasure itself, whether direct or mediated. If as readers we are sent back to the Miltonic hymns by Johnson’s essay, we can experience the deep primeval pleasure that he describes. His brief musical phrase, ‘birds, and brooks, and breezes’ (Yale III. p. 196), in Milton’s Eden expands into a fully scored and orchestrated pastoral harmony, a dawn chorus of singing birds and singing waters, waving leaves and beating wings (Paradise Lost V. pp. 153–208). Johnson does not imply that the pleasures of nature are superior to engagement with humanity; but traditionally this is an experience that recreates something resembling an unfallen state. Nor is it put away with childish things: we do not, as we advance into the intellectual world, throw it away among other childish amusements and pastimes, but willingly return to it in any hour of indolence and relaxation. The images of true pastoral have always the power of exciting delight, because the works of nature, from which they are drawn, have always the same order and beauty, and continue to force themselves upon our thoughts, being at once obvious to the most careless regard, and more than adequate to the strongest reason, and severest contemplation. (Yale III. p. 196)
Milton’s Adam and Eve respond to their natural environment as pastoral writers respond to it: they turn it into language.27 Johnson’s perceived failure to appreciate pastoral discourse is often (though not always) because of a debased language that falsifies nature and vandalises true pastoral idiom. His benchmark for true pastoral is the poetry of the ancient world and the ‘pastoral hymns’ of Paradise Lost. Although Milton certainly sees nature ‘through the spectacles of books’, in this context at least Johnson accepts the practice as entirely appropriate. His singling out of these hymns as archetypal pastoral poetry argues that, in contrast to Lycidas, he considers them to have a kind of imaginative authenticity that does indeed allow
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
27
the reader access to ‘the day of innocence’. Also, as hymns, they transcend purely aesthetic judgement. Johnson emphasises that the first humans are praising God through the creation: the natural world is neither an object nor an end in itself. But Adam and Eve are not the only beings in Paradise Lost who are aware of the beauty of Eden, and capable of articulating that awareness. It is impossible to ignore Satan’s presence or his consciousness when reading consecutively the narrative of Book IV into Book V, although not every Miltonist agrees with Frank Kermode’s brilliant aperçu regarding Milton’s strategy in the presentation of Eden – ‘we see all delight through the eyes of Satan’.28 Yet that consciousness can be edited out by selective quotation. I have already argued that Johnson’s borrowing of Satan’s famous curse of the sun reveals a highly personal appropriation of the satanic viewpoint. There is another essay, Adventurer 39, where Johnson sees through Satan’s eyes without actually mentioning the fact (assuming that this essay is Johnson’s, an attribution which the Yale editor confirms).29 Adventurer 39 offers a compendium of quotations and reflections on the favourite eighteenth-century topic of night and sleep, and Johnson chooses Milton as a celebrant of the former:30 Nor have the poets been always deficient in her praises: Milton has observed of the Night, that it is “the pleasant time, the cool, the silent.”
Yale II. p. 345
As a stock quotation describing the appeal of night to the senses, it is unexceptional. What makes Johnson’s choice worth remarking upon is the (suppressed) context. Milton composed many memorable nocturnes in his poetry, from Il Penseroso onwards, and he assigns them to different voices, whether the poet’s persona, or a created character like Eve in her paradisal love-song. In this instance, the voice is not ‘Milton’, as Johnson implies, but Satan. Having quoted Satan against the sun, he here quotes him on his own element, darkness. The description is embedded in a segment of text that clearly fascinates Johnson, the episode of Eve’s dream that opens Paradise Lost, Book V.31 In Eve’s narrative – and for her it has been an ‘irksome night’ – the tempter, like Comus before him, represents night as a time not for sleep but for pleasure: Why sleepst thou Eve? Now is the pleasant time, The cool, the silent, save where silence yields To the night-warbling bird, that now awake Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song; now reigns
28
Johnson’s Milton Full orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light Shadowy sets off the face of things; in vain, If none regard; heaven wakes with all his eyes, Whom to behold but thee, nature’s desire, In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.
Paradise Lost V. lines 38–47
Johnson clearly remembers exactly where the specific quotation comes from, for the suppressed context partly surfaces in the following paragraph of his essay. There he makes an explicit transition from the licit to the illicit pleasures of the night: But the greater part of her [Night’s] avowed votaries are the sons of Luxury; who appropriate to festivity the hours designed for rest; who consider the reign of pleasure as commencing, when day begins to withdraw … who begin to awake to joy, when the rest of the world sinks into insensibility; and revel in the soft effluence of flattering and artificial lights, which “more shadowy set off the face of things.”32 (Yale II. p. 346)
Among these ‘sons of Luxury’ can be counted Milton’s Comus and Satan, not to mention his sons of Belial (and indeed Johnson himself, if not a son of Luxury, is a nocturnal animal). Yet, even here, Johnson does not identify the source of the quotation. Not for the first time, Johnson if not exactly misreading, is in a sense misrepresenting his original by incorporating Milton’s language into his own associative patterns. Having presented the first Milton quotation in the essay as straight lyrical description, he then alludes to the satanic context in relation to the second quotation, but displaces Satan’s evocation of moonlight – ‘shadowy sets off the face of things’ – to apply to ‘artificial lights’ (which in Paradise Lost illuminate hell). Like many readers who are also writers, Johnson uses a memorytext selectively to conform to his own creative needs. As with Satan’s cursing of the sun, so with his praise of the moon: Johnson freely adapts the satanic rhetoric for its expressiveness, if necessary against the grain of the original. In this type of allusion, Johnson exploits the essential literariness of Milton’s natural description. But he is also interested in the practical impact of nature on human beings: how people react to mundane realities such as weather and the change of seasons. Here too Milton becomes both target, and, oddly, exemplar. Far from applauding sensitivity to weather and seasonal change, Johnson is given to expressing scorn for those persons, writers generally and Milton in particular, who allow the seasons to affect their state of mind or their creativity.33 With one notable
Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
29
exception: in Rambler 80, he appears to take the opposite view (‘Every season has its particular power of striking the mind’) and quotes approvingly Milton’s advice in Of Education: It is observed by Milton, that he who neglects to visit the country in spring, and rejects the pleasures that are then in their first bloom and fragrance, is guilty of “sullenness against nature.” (Yale IV. p. 57)
He makes a very similar use of an equivalent passage from Paradise Lost in another Rambler essay (135) on the subject of seasonal pleasures, with specific reference to the urban dweller’s retreat into the country: Novelty is itself a source of gratification, and Milton justly observes, that to him who has been long pent up in cities no rural object can be presented, which will not delight or refresh some of his senses. (Yale IV. p. 353)
The reference is to the epic simile beginning ‘As one who long in populous city pent’, which does indeed conjure up the freshness of a summer morning in the countryside. But, as so often, both the original context and Johnson’s deployment of the allusion are obliquely at odds with the apparent sentiment. Milton’s simile describes and enacts pleasure in the natural world of the senses; but the pleasure is Satan’s, intent on the victim whom he stalks among the flowers of her paradise garden. Nor does Johnson’s argument in Rambler 135 simply endorse the jaded metropolitan’s quest for country pleasures; his point is likewise a Satanic one, summed up in a Horatian tag but equally applicable to Satan’s famous soliloquy in Book IV of Paradise Lost – ‘Place may be chang’d; but who can change his mind?’ (Yale IV. p. 349). Johnson’s scepticism about the psychological effect of seasons and locality seems much more characteristic than his occasional acknowledgement of these effects. Of the two essays in which he quotes Milton on the delights of rustication, it is Rambler 80 which appears the more anomalous – a discrepancy which has been explained as a rhetorical ploy.34 Milton’s poetry is not just a rhetorical resource for Johnson in his writing, but a means of sharpening his own powers of discrimination. The conclusion that can be drawn from this survey of Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays must surely be, first, that Milton’s ghost is a far more influential presence in Johnson’s writing life than has usually been conceded (particularly by Miltonists fixated on the much later ‘Life of Milton’); and, second, that awareness of the original contexts shows how he appropriates specific passages in original and complex ways, often with wit and elegance. To some extent, Johnson’s citations of Milton texts in his essays reinforce his critical judgements; but they also challenge our perception of these judgements. Most importantly, his allusions demonstrate
30
Johnson’s Milton
an openness and subtlety in his reading of Milton for which he has not often received credit. Paradise Lost in particular is a fundamental component of Johnson’s literary memory. It is clear that when he was writing the periodicals, often under pressure, it came naturally to him to think of Milton when addressing certain topics. If he believes, as he later says, that ‘reality was a scene too narrow for [Milton’s] mind’ (Lives I. p. 287), his own genius is for reality: in The Rambler, and in a different way in the Dictionary, he brings Paradise Lost to bear on contemporary human lives, and in the process illuminates its multiple meanings.
Ch apter 2
‘No Miltonian Fire’? Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
The eminence of Milton looms over eighteenth-century English poets far more than it does for prose writers, and they devise different strategies for thriving in, or escaping from, that shadow. In this, Johnson resembles many of his contemporaries; but his use of Miltonic allusion, especially in his mature poetry, is far from merely imitative or deferential. In particular, he challenges the reader to reconsider the original context in the light of his own appropriations. Moreover, his choices in prosody and diction set up an alternative poetic discourse for the treatment of certain subjects; he competes for territory with Milton. Comparisons and contrasts between Johnson’s poetry and Milton’s are worth making because they contribute to explaining why he reads Milton as he does. As T. S. Eliot, himself an eminent poet-critic, has asserted, ‘unless we know and appreciate Johnson’s poetry we cannot judge either the merits or the limitations of his criticism.’1 Comparisons are also worth making because of what they reveal about how Johnson the poet reacts to and against his reading of Milton’s poetry. Close observation of his practice of allusion yields valuable clues about how far he remembers or resists the poetry of his mighty predecessor. Juvenilia In the ‘Life of Milton’, Johnson expresses the view that: Milton never learned the art of doing little things with grace; he overlooked the milder excellence of suavity and softness; he was a Lion that had no skill in dandling the Kid. (Lives I. p. 278)
Johnson’s sense that Milton is unsuited to a certain kind of poetic form and subject is suggestive in regard to his own practice. Although Johnson himself might appear leonine, he does a good deal of dandling the kid in English verse throughout his life.2 At the opening of Vanity Fair Thackeray 31
32
Johnson’s Milton
slyly lampoons his penchant for composing neat and elegant verses to his female friends, by associating the great Cham with the ‘reputation and … fortune’ of Miss Pinkerton and her educational establishment for young ladies. Becky Sharp’s defenestration of the famous Dictionary simultaneously disposes of the fictitious ‘Lines addressed to a young lady on quitting Miss Pinkerton’s school, at the Mall; by the late revered Doctor Samuel Johnson’.3 The title selected for these ‘Lines’ is all too plausible: many of Johnson’s shorter poems are occasional, many extempore, brief, and epigrammatic. Only in Irene, and the two masterpieces of his maturity, London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), does he write on a scale that allows the reader to glimpse vestiges of ‘Miltonian Fire’. Yet to contrast Johnson’s juvenilia with Milton’s is to gain interesting insights into what they have in common as well as what separates them. One obvious difference from the very outset in their practice of English poetry is in technique. Whatever mode he writes in – with the single important exception of tragic drama 4 – poetic composition for Johnson equates with end-rhyme. This issue of verse-form is a major one, which will be revisited in the context of Johnson’s criticism. Nevertheless, it is worth remarking here that his choice of verse form as a practising poet goes beyond purely aesthetic implications. Such a choice can signal the poet’s sense of his place in a wider intellectual community, marking out where his allegiances lie. Richard Helgerson suggests, commenting on Milton’s self-isolation: As Waller anticipated and as Pope so consummately realized, the heroic couplet itself puts the poet in the company of other men. Perhaps that is why Milton vigorously rejected “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhiming”.5
Later, in his discussion of Milton’s blank verse, Johnson appears to agree with modern criticism that what is at stake is more than a divergence of aesthetic choices; that there is a politics of prosody. However, like Milton himself, Johnson is not confined to a single language or form in writing poetry. His juvenilia follow a familiar pattern for someone of his education and ambitions: a considerable quantity of verse translations, English and Latin, and variations on themes such as friendship, nature, and religious devotion. Predictably, it is in Johnson’s translations and Latin verse that traces of Miltonic parallels are most likely to occur. Both youthful poets are writing within the early modern educational system, which requires verse composition to further the acquiring of linguistic skills. One such exercise, apparently imposed upon Johnson at Pembroke, was a Latin translation of Pope’s Messiah (itself indebted to
Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
33
Milton).6 Not only does this have an indirect link to the Nativity Ode, but it may be one of the earliest instances where Johnson alludes to Milton in order to strengthen a point – in this instance, the dismissal of pagan fictions, which Pope’s version soft-pedals.7 Tantalisingly, two texts which could have provided direct comparison of their neo-Latin poetry are missing from the Johnson canon: a poem on the Gunpowder Plot (which ‘Johnson neglected to perform’ at Pembroke) and the substitute described by Boswell: To apologise for his neglect, he gave in a short copy of verses, entitled Somnium, containing a common thought; ‘that the Muse had come to him in his sleep, and whispered, that it did not become him to write on such subjects as politicks; he should confine himself to humbler themes:’ but the versification was truly Virgilian. (Life I. p. 60)
The versification and motif may be Virgilian,8 but the nightly visitation from a Muse also suggests Milton, although Johnson – deliberately? – gives her advice the opposite twist.9 The Miltonic association of ideas recurs in another of Johnson’s Latin exercises, Aurora Est Musis Amica (‘Aurora is friend to the Muses’), which J. D. Fleeman compares to Milton’s first Prolusion ‘“exaudiatque Aurora Musis amica, exaudiat et Phoebus …” (May Aurora, the friend of the Muses, hearken, and may Phoebus give heed …)’. He adds, ‘Johnson adopts the point made by Milton that early morning is a time of poetic inspiration.’10 As an observation, it is a commonplace familiar to generations of early modern students, but for both Milton and Johnson it would come to be invested with strongly personal meaning. The young Johnson’s poetic ambitions, however, take a different direction from Milton’s. Indeed, having uneasily attempted a poem on Christian heroics in ‘Upon the Feast of St Simon and St Jude’, he seems more comfortable with mock-heroic than heroic. Already in his juvenilia he is a child of his age, nowhere more so than in his translation of Addison’s ‘Battle of the Pigmies and the Cranes’; and precisely because he is a child of his age, he fashions his mock-heroic diction and metaphors in the idiom of the Miltonic sublime. In his analysis of Johnson’s rehabilitation of ‘dead metaphors’ in this poem, Christopher Ricks has pointed out that Johnson is going back to Milton’s own practice. Citing Paradise Lost I. lines 573–6, he observes ‘Addison’s poem has many latinised Miltonisms; that Johnson recalled the original context in Milton is suggested by his taking up the word “embodied” (78) from it.’ But it is not only this ‘revivification of dead metaphors’ that revives Milton in Johnson’s verse.11 His opening lines invoke Milton,
34
Johnson’s Milton
as well as his Muse, by pointedly alluding to ‘my advent’rous song’, a phrase with no direct parallel in Addison’s Latin. ‘Direct O Goddess, my advent’rous song’ (line 3) must bring to mind Milton’s ‘Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song’ at the outset of Paradise Lost (I. line 13). A piece of adolescent cheek perhaps: Johnson is challenging comparison with Addison’s own English mentor. Although one heroic, or mock-heroic, battle may seem much like another in its sound and fury, Johnson’s version of the battle of the pygmies and the cranes does appear to replay Milton’s war in heaven as well as its classical analogues. Hurling mountains about as weapons lends itself to both heroic and mock-heroic contexts: Themselves invaded next, and on their heads Main promontories flung, which in the air Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions armed … So hills amid the air encountered hills Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire …
Paradise Lost VI. lines 653–5 and 664–5
Such was the horrour of the dreadfull fight As when great Briareus with matchless might Hurling vast mounts against the realms above Shook headlong from his throne imperial Jove. In rat’ling storms huge Promontories flie And Bolts and rocks encounter in the Skie.
‘Battle of the Pygmies and Cranes’, lines 136–41
Characteristically, Johnson relishes the violence of the image. Like Addison’s cranes, the youthful poet is preparing his wings for flight, whetting his beak and sharpening his claws on his two illustrious predecessors. Although Johnson’s juvenilia yield a few suggestive Miltonic allusions or parallels, the reader is likely to be most struck by their differences at this stage in their lives. Both are highly conscious of the Anglo-Latin tradition they inherit, and of literary ambition, but Johnson is already the more pessimistic. ‘The Young Author’, like Lycidas, represents life’s insecurity through the symbolism of unforeseen peril in ‘the faithless deep’ (line 10), but Johnson’s poem locates authorship very firmly within a social and commercial context, ironically confronting youthful idealism with the sordid reality of struggling to get into print and receiving only bad reviews for one’s pains. It threatens his alter ego with a fate worse even than being a mute inglorious Milton: he must face the brutal truth that he is more likely to join the army of hacks – ‘These dreams were Settle’s once and Ogilby’s’
Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
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(line 24). Far from looking forward to ‘fresh woods, and pastures new’ (Lycidas, line 193), he ends in full retreat, ‘Glad to be hid, and proud to be forgot’ (line 30). Both Lycidas and ‘The Young Author’ prophesy the outcome of intense literary ambition, self-fulfilling prophecies up to a point. In the actual future, Milton’s dream of ‘fresh woods, and pastures new’ comes true in his triumphant journey to Italy. But Johnson, forsaking ‘his rural seats and peaceful home’ for the delusive ‘smiling ocean’ of glittering literary London (‘The Young Author’, lines 2–3), would in the short term experience some of the anticipated humiliations of Grub Street. His dream in 1737 is bound up with the unfinished verse tragedy he carried with him on the road to the metropolis: Irene. ir ene:
t h e t wo fac e s of E v e
Until recently, Irene has had an almost uniformly bad press (apart from ‘a man named Pot’). Even its author, on hearing it read aloud, is said to have sadly remarked ‘I thought it had been better’.12 ‘So frigid and uninteresting a tragedy’ is Joseph Warton’s dismissal; while Robert Potter calls it ‘a child of mediocrity’.13 Many modern scholars have felt that in terms of creative composition Irene represents a dead end for Johnson, although there are exceptions, critics who see Irene as an important learning curve in his development.14 But it is rarely read for its own sake, and much of the criticism of the last half-century consists either of source-hunting or of explanations for its perceived shortcomings. Unfortunately it has also proved to be a dead end in terms of performance history (although its original run might be considered ‘a definite success by contemporary standards’).15 To adapt Potter’s ‘child’ metaphor, Irene, though certainly not premature and not stillborn, survived in the theatre for nine nights largely because of the efforts of her midwife, Garrick. Yet there is more of interest in Irene than this marginal existence suggests. Even if the tragedy is not highly valued for literary and dramatic qualities, it has caught and rewarded the attention of Johnson critics investigating his political attitudes (including the politics of gender) at this stage in his career. In addition, this (relatively) neglected offspring has another advantage for anyone tracing Johnson’s creative development and its influences, because we are privileged to be able to scan it in utero, so to speak. Like Milton’s drafts for his proposed tragedy on the subject of paradise lost, Johnson’s drafts for Irene survive in manuscript, giving access to its ‘dark materials’. Irene, like many if not most texts, is conceived in the act of reading. As Johnson himself was to remark to Boswell, ‘The greatest part of a writer’s
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Johnson’s Milton
time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book’ (Life II. p. 344). Consequently, it is a highly literary product, arguably too much so (this was Garrick’s opinion).16 Reconstructing the ‘half a library’, in order to map Irene’s literary genes, provides work for scholars, headed by Bertrand H. Bronson in a pioneering essay.17 Robert DeMaria takes this further, distinguishing between more modern sources and embedded ancient ones: Macbeth, Paradise Lost, The Essay on Man, and Dryden’s Auren-Zebe may have occurred to him as he composed his play, but his draft notes glide over these to rest on deeper, classical sources.18
This is perfectly accurate as regards named sources, identified by Johnson himself, and conforms to his habitual elevation of ancient writers over modern. But ‘may have occurred to him’ seems too vague and non-committal with reference to the presumed influence of English poetry. A stronger case can and has been made, certainly for Paradise Lost. Irene has long been recognised as a drama centred on temptation and apostasy, with a political as well as a religious dimension. For that reason alone, it invites comparison with Milton’s archetypal treatment of these themes.19 But the choice of a female protagonist also involves the dramatist in the construction of powerful gender conflicts; and for this Paradise Lost again supplies an archetype. Whether or not his creation of the female roles in his one and only drama, and the discussion of sexual stereotyping in the play, owe something to his own marriage is open to debate.20 Certainly the circumstances of that marriage, unconventional as it was in some respects, might prompt him to consider more closely the nature of human sexuality and gender difference. But when it comes to human relations, Johnson always presses towards a less subjective, more universal analysis. In this context the influence of Paradise Lost appears inescapable. In the embryonic speeches of the drafts, Johnson is experimenting not only with gender concepts but with ways of poeticising them. If he starts with the essentialist view of gender, as do almost all early modern writers, he also takes pains to scrutinise what are recognised as cultural assumptions; and particularly because it features a clash of civilisations, the Christian and the Islamic, Irene offers an overt opportunity for such scrutiny. Take the speech assigned to Mahomet in the draft but later discarded from the printed text: Mah. Nature gives every being means of compassing its end, to some force to others wiles (serpents fascination of the Leveret) Your end is to please Man You
Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
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have therefore an higher instinct, as Nature ordains Man to love himself in his Resemblance, she gives you the power of copying in some degree his Virtues (this is the Original of yours) and act the mimickry of Man (Poems, p. 388)
Mahomet theorises gender difference as natural; but the marginal gloss invites us to assimilate it to myth: ‘sees with pleasure the faint resemblance of his Excellencies Like the fond Boy renown’d in Grecian Song’. Later in the draft Johnson returns to the Narcissus allusion, this time softening it to a more Edenic version of how the female resembles and yet differs from the male: As we often turn our dazled Eyes from the Sun in its meridian Glories to gaze uninjur’d on its Image in the untroubled lake so your softer Mind receiving the beams of masculine
<excellence> Returns the (fierce) Effulgence or Radiance of our Virtue softend in gentler (milder) Lustre (Splendor) what aw’d before in us allures in You. what was imperious is alluring what was awfull is charming. (or engaging) (Poems, p. 389)
What links these passages is a fundamentalist idea of woman’s secondary creation that Johnson could have found everywhere in his reading, from classical texts such as Aristotle to the Bible itself. But his metaphoric mode of expressing it is one particularly favoured by Milton in Paradise Lost. Interestingly, he seems to rework Milton’s application of the Narcissus myth in Eve’s account of her own creation in Paradise Lost Book IV. Whereas Milton’s Eve is allured by her reflection in ‘the clear/ Smooth lake … another sky’ (lines 458–9) – the equivalent of Johnson’s ‘untroubled lake’ – Johnson’s version restores the original male gaze of Narcissus, but feminises the image itself. Indeed his second draft passage (which is not attributed to a speaker) suggests a much more positive form of complementarity between the sexes, although the image of reflection links the two. Taken together, they correspond to two different emphases on male/female interdependence in Paradise Lost, and two different responses to the relationship of Adam and Eve. Mahomet’s speech grounds male superiority on a contemptuous, classically misogynistic view of woman that reduces her to the level of a merely instinctual and imitative being, higher in degree than the animal but possessed of the serpent’s subtlety and the monkey’s mimicry. The second repeats the idea of woman as man’s reflection, but radically shifts the value assigned to that reflection. Her nature is not simply a self-serving travesty of his. Instead, the female image recreates and mediates its original source in an affirmative, unthreatening order of being, softening and civilising the destructive power of the male. Just as the relation of Adam and Eve in Paradise
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Johnson’s Milton
Lost can be read in terms of both hierarchy and reciprocity,21 so Johnson’s metaphoric experiments seem to accommodate both. Indeed, the revised Narcissus myth might go further. Paradoxically, man’s turning away from the excessive brightness of the godlike masculine sun to its reflection in woman’s ‘softer Mind’ – ‘he for God in her’ as it were – displaces the direction of his gaze (and potential worship?) from deity to image. In Paradise Lost, it is just such a displacement that causes Adam to fall and to incur the divine censure, ‘Was she thy God’ …? (X. line 145). On the basis of Milton’s famous invented episode ‘critics dispute whether Eve is innocently or culpably narcissistic’.22 But however the episode is read, the narrative outcome is indisputable. She accepts Adam in place of her self-image, and she accepts him not only as the being for whose love she was created, but also as the manifestation of a higher beauty: … I yielded, and from that time see How beauty is excelled by manly grace And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.
Paradise Lost IV. lines 489–91
This does not mean that Eve herself is incapable of wisdom, or that Adam always shows himself the wiser. Indeed, Adam later will – unwisely – confess to God’s angel that she seems to him to be an ‘absolute’, original not copy, ‘As one intended first, not after made’ (Paradise Lost, VIII. line 555). The mystery of sexual difference and likeness at the heart of Milton’s poem cannot be separated from the mystery of selfhood, and the human yearning for an ‘other self’. Feminist and Lacanian critics have identified the narcissist in Adam himself, divinely ratified as Eve’s (apparently) is not.23 In the next century, Johnson sketches out similar archetypal gender patterns in his rough draft and profiles a male narcissism which also might be innocent or culpable, so ambivalently is it presented. How far he himself is ambivalent about the ‘natural’ relation of man and woman is another matter. He is setting out to write a play; and it is the dramatist’s business to try out conflicting ideas through created characters. Ideological conflict is certainly prominent in Irene.24 One manifestation of this is the number of key scenes centred on the clash between different, even antithetical, ideas of woman. Although he discarded much of the draft material, Johnson clearly retains considerable interest (and assumes that audiences will be interested) in how expectations of female behaviour are formed. Act II, scene vii, is a particularly challenging and interesting scene in this respect, setting two cultural stereotypes against each other. Before and during the eighteenth century, English audiences associate
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Islam and the Ottoman empire with an extreme form of female subordination. ‘Were I born an humble Turk’, laments Farquhar’s Mrs Sullen, ‘where women have no soul nor property, there I must sit contented. But in England, a country whose women are its glory, must women be abused?’25 Johnson’s Mahomet amply fulfils this prejudice when he tells Irene: … For your inferiour Natures Form’d to delight, and happy by delighting, Heav’n has reserv’d no future Paradise, But bids you rove the Paths of Bliss, secure Of total Death and careless of Hereafter …
II. vii. lines 15–19, Poems, p. 310
For her part, Irene claims that this is a false ideology, even by the criterion of ‘nature’: woman is created to exercise the power of both beauty and reason, like Milton’s Eve: Then let me once, in honour of our Sex, Assume the boastful Arrogance of Man. Th’attractive Softness, and th’indearing Smile, And pow’rful Glance, ’tis granted, are our own; Nor has impartial Nature’s frugal Hand Exhausted all her nobler Gifts on you; Do we not share the comprehensive Thought, Th’enlivening Wit, the penetrating Reason? Beats not the female Breast with gen’rous Passions, The Thirst of Empire, and the Love of Glory?
II. vii. lines 49–58, Poems, p. 311
At moments in this scene she sounds like a prototype Mary Wollstonecraft. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft reacts violently against the same notorious passage in Paradise Lost that Johnson evokes here, also with reference to Islamic attitudes: Thus Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.26
The difference between this and Irene’s position is that Irene wants to retain the femininity that Wollstonecraft despises, as well as laying claim to masculine prerogatives. But she leaves herself vulnerable, by pushing her case too far: the claim to share male reason is justifiable in a Christian
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Johnson’s Milton
heroine; the desire to share male ambition and aggression is not. Again like Milton’s Eve – in one interpretation at least – she is conditioned to think of power in masculinist terms (‘For inferior who is free?’). And Mahomet, like Satan, takes instant advantage of her desire, offering her imperial power and sweetening the bait by suggesting that she should exercise it constructively for human welfare. Where Johnson himself thinks that Milton’s sympathies lie is an interesting question. Much later in the ‘Life of Milton’, he, like Wollstonecraft, ranks Milton with the misogynists, memorably observing that ‘there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings’ (Lives, I. p. 276). Mahomet’s speeches in this scene demonstrate precisely what Johnson understood by ‘a Turkish contempt of females’. But this accusation levelled against Milton’s work is ironic in more ways than one. It need not matter that Johnson himself is by no means always politically correct when writing or talking about women. What matters more is that, in Irene at least, he seems to be aware of a far more nuanced and subtle treatment of Eve in Paradise Lost, to which the poet responds, if not the critic. The evidence for this response is in his assimilation of the poetry Milton uses to describe Eve, and aspects of her psychology, into Irene’s role. The phrases in which she expresses the essence of femininity echo Paradise Lost: Th’attractive Softness, and th’indearing Smile, And pow’rful Glance, ’tis granted, are our own …
II. vii. lines 51–2, Poems, p. 311
In contrast to Adam, Eve is formed ‘For softness … and sweet attractive grace’ (Paradise Lost, IV. line 298). In fact, when toying with variants in his draft notes, Johnson had echoed Milton even more closely – ‘That <Smile> resistless and enchanting blush’ (Poems, p. 385). (Although unfallen, Milton’s Eve is also given to blushing.27) But Johnson may also have remembered that the next line in Paradise Lost states precisely the axiom that Irene resists in this scene – ‘He for God only, she for God in him’. Also, her use of the phrase, ‘pow’rful Glance’ seems pregnant with meaning for both participants, given its original context. Adam, archetypal man, is described in Paradise Lost Book VIII as ‘here only weak / Against the charm of beauty’s powerful glance’ (lines 532–3). Mahomet develops the seduction trope when he apparently recants his unexamined misogyny under Irene’s influence:
Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
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I thought, forgive my Fair, the noblest Aim, The strongest Effort of a female Soul, Was but to chuse the Graces of the Day; To tune the Tongue, to teach the Eyes to roll …
II. vii. lines 61–4, Poems, p. 311
This recalls a long history of female stereotyping, which includes the archangel Michael’s exposure to Adam of ‘that fair female troupe’ in Paradise Lost, Book XI, ‘Bred only … To dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye’ (lines 618, 20).28 Johnson avoids Milton’s contemptuous internal rhyme, but repeats the description; the very familiarity of the trope makes it readily adaptable to a context where he tests conflicting ideas of essential femaleness. To this end, he contrasts not just verbal arguments but roles, Irene’s with Aspasia’s. It is a normal convention of heroic drama to have contrasting or complementary heroines, such as Addison provides in Cato; Johnson, therefore, seems to be following an established pattern. But, as commentators have noted, he does not entangle Irene herself in the conventional conflict of emotional loyalties, unlike his predecessors who adapted the same source.29 Instead, the scenes between Irene and Aspasia conceptualise two different definitions of what it is to be a woman. In Act II, scene i, Irene turns to Aspasia, pleading womanly fear as an excuse for apostasy: Will not that Pow’r that form’d the Heart of Woman, And wove the feeble Texture of her Nerves, Forgive those Fears that shake the tender Frame?
II. i. lines 23–5, Poems, p. 300
Aspasia counters this traditional premise that woman is the feebler sex because God and nature ordain it so, by asserting that female fear is learned rather than innate (a position later to be theorised in the claim that gender is a cultural construct30): The Weakness we lament, our selves create, Instructed from our infant Years to court With counterfeited Fears the Aid of Man …
II. ii. lines 26–8, Poems, p. 300
Irene responds by playing another familiar card in the gender game. Aspasia, she retorts, is more masculine than feminine, unsexed by her learning and greatness of soul – ‘all ASPASIA but her Beauty’s Man’ (line 37). As in her later scene with Mahomet, she assumes that the woman who aspires to spiritual and intellectual strength aspires to the condition of masculinity. Yet Aspasia herself does not claim independence; she attributes her moral
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education to her lover and mentor, Demetrius. In a later crucial scene, where she attempts to save Irene from herself, she redefines female heroism as essentially passive, not active, almost as though reneging on her earlier attitude: Heav’n, when its Hand pour’d Softness on our Limbs Unfit for Toil, and polish’d into Weakness, Made passive Fortitude the Praise of Woman: Our only Arms are Innocence and Meekness.
III. viii. lines 42–5, Poems, p. 323
However, rather than reneging she is in effect redefining a kind of Christian heroism accessible to both sexes. Although Johnson does not claim with Milton that this ‘passive Fortitude’ is necessarily a better fortitude, it is central to the play’s concept of female capacity. Irene, by this stage, has evidently embraced masculine ambition, as the draft indicates (‘who for a Crown &c’, Poems, p. 369). The contrast between her and Aspasia is pivotal to the dramatic and ethical structure of Irene, and can be variously interpreted. But however the contrast is defined, one thing that they have in common is not just their sex, but the fact that they are both women in a man’s world, shaped by male values, and that they are judged accordingly. The same, of course, applies to Milton’s Eve. In writing an epic on the Genesis narrative, Milton does not have the option of using paired human characters to embody different aspects of the female psyche, as a dramatist might (although the gender pairing of Eve and Sin is often commented on). Instead Eve herself has two faces, and the consequent ambiguity inherent in her role has divided opinion as strongly as Satan’s. In fact, the history and polarisation of the critical debates over Milton’s representation of Eve offer a model for the much smaller-scale debates over Johnson’s representation of Irene and Aspasia, particularly over their exercise of choice and the degree of Irene’s guilt. Irene herself is perhaps at her most sympathetic when, like a fallen and banished Eve, she lyrically recalls lost paradise on a balmy Byzantine night: See how the Moon through all th’unclouded Sky Spreads her mild Radiance, and descending Dews Revive the languid Flow’rs; thus Nature shone New from the Maker’s Hand, and fair array’d In the bright Colours of primaeval Spring; When Purity, while Fraud was yet unknown, Play’d fearless in th’unviolated Shades. This elemental Joy, this gen’ral Calm Is sure the Smile of unoffended Heav’n.
V. ii. lines 1–9, Poems, p. 346
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If Johnson is not imitating Milton in this passage, he is certainly evoking him.31 In this speech at least, Irene grieves over an imminent loss of innocence which re-enacts the primal loss. True, she is self-deceived. But, as with Milton’s Eve, readers have responded very differently to the question of how far she is condemned by her creator – or if, as a daughter of Eve, she is damned by her Creator. Damnation is a subject that Johnson always treats with extreme seriousness. When the focus shifts to parallels between Irene’s apostasy and Satan’s – rather than Eve’s – the play darkens into a different kind of tragedy. And the parallels with Satan are inescapable,32 for example in the pointed allusion: Will not th’Apostate feel the Pangs of Guilt, And wish too late for Innocence and Peace? Curst as the Tyrant of th’infernal Realms, With gloomy State and agonizing Pomp.
III. viii. lines 132–5, Poems, p. 326
It is unlikely that the comparison would have escaped Johnson’s contemporaries. In his one foray into stage drama, Johnson – obsessed all his adult life with the fear of hell – is writing what seems to be a tragedy of damnation. Yet is that the final verdict? Is Irene ultimately transformed from an Eve figure into a Satanic one? Certainly what is at stake is the fate of her immortal soul, and the contrast between outward beauty and inward guilt strikes even Mahomet at the play’s end. Believing her to have conspired against his life, he speaks of her in an image that would resonate with Christian audiences:33 True, she was fair; the Smile of Innocence Play’d on her Cheek – So shone the first Apostate –
V. xi. lines 10–11, Poems, p. 363
In Judaeo-Christian tradition, it is Satan who merits the title of ‘the first Apostate’ (Milton refers to him as ‘the apostate angel’ in Paradise Lost, I. line 125). Yet the preceding description of Irene accentuates her femininity – ‘the Smile of Innocence / Play’d on her Cheek’ – in a way much more evocative of Eve in Eden. Humanly speaking, it is Eve who is the first apostate; and for all his alleged lack of sympathy for Irene, it is questionable whether Johnson does consign her to the unthinkable destiny of eternal damnation. Physical death may be poetic justice enough. If, as has been proposed, she makes the ‘tentative return to grace’ anticipated by Aspasia – Aspasia who warned her most solemnly against the fate of Milton’s apostate angel – then she ends much closer to the repentant Eve than to Satan.34 This
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contention finds support in Johnson’s draft: ‘She turn [sic] herself wholly to Heav’n own’s her Crime – the Justice of her punishment professes her Repentance Prays’ (Poems, p. 376) – a close analogy with the behaviour of Milton’s Eve.35 If Irene represents a fallen Eve, at least in Johnson’s original conception, then where does Aspasia, who resists temptation, fit into the archetypal pattern? Critics have not hesitated to read Johnson’s own views into his representation of both women’s roles. From Bronson onwards, the standard assumption has been that Aspasia is a version of his ‘ideal woman’, or idealised wife. More recently, feminist readings have criticised or reversed this traditional valuation.36 But Johnson need not be in thrall to his own subjective judgement; he attempts something more universal. In a sense, Irene and Aspasia represent the two faces of Eve, the fallen and the unfallen. Aspasia is distinguished for her intellect, ‘bred up in all the Learning of Greece’ (Poems, p. 369),37 and, more importantly, she exercises right reason. Milton’s Eve is also, as he stresses, ‘capable … Of what was high’ (Paradise Lost VIII. lines 49–50). Like Eve, who delights in learning from her male mentor, Aspasia gives intellectual precedence to Demetrius; but he gives her in return a powerful moral status: Thou kind Assistant of my better Angel, Propitious Guide of my bewilder’d Soul, Calm of my Cares, and Guardian of my Virtue.
IV. i. lines 10–12, Poems, p. 331
This is what Eve should have been to Adam, but, in Milton’s view at any rate, it is as much Adam’s failure as hers that her guidance before the Fall is so disastrously unpropitious. (After the Fall, it is a different matter.) Unlike Eve, and her successor, Irene, Aspasia keeps the faith, and has her reward. An ingenious political allegorisation of the play casts her as a possible ‘personification of the Church of England’; more psychological interpretations see the relationship between Aspasia and Demetrius as fulfilling a kind of unity of male and female qualities, a concordia discors.38 In terms of the latter reading, again the conversation of Milton’s Adam and Eve in their prelapsarian paradise offers Johnson a precedent. Certainly Aspasia is a fallen being in a fallen world, but what gives her spiritual strength is her Christian perspective on that world as not being all that there is. In writing Irene, Johnson was motivated by a view to its commercial viability. As a stage play, it has other more obvious predecessors than Milton’s epic. Nevertheless, Irene pays literary tribute to Paradise Lost of a kind that
Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
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may go beyond Johnson’s conscious awareness: ‘the strong dead return, in poems as in our lives’.39 london
and
t h e va n i t y o f h u m a n w i s h e s
When London was first published in May 1738, it caught public attention as an ‘opposition’ poem. Opposition to Walpole’s government, ‘that ferment against the court and the ministry’, as Boswell calls it (Life, I. p. 129), had gathered considerable momentum. The ferment had literary as well as political fallout; and one of its consequences was an intensified interest in Milton, and Milton imitations.40 Yet it is Juvenal whose poetry Johnson enlists in the political cause. In London, he tests his strength in a genre, satiric imitation, that puts him into direct competition with an older generation, notably Pope and Swift, that engages him directly with the political scene, and that – done well – is eminently marketable. But it would appear that his choice of Juvenal relegates Milton very much to the margins of his project. And yet: his choice of Juvenal’s Third Satire ensures that Johnson has to reinvent one traditional literary antithesis which for eighteenth-century poets and readers is as much part of their Milton experience as it is of their classical education, namely the antithesis between town and country. In London, as later in the periodical essays, Johnson has to heed the siren call of pastoral, a call he is peculiarly fitted to resist but whose seductiveness he recognises. More often than not for an eighteenth-century writer, that siren call sounds in Miltonic diction. Johnson’s views on deliberate imitation of Milton’s style could be trenchant: when Boswell presses him to concede that Mason’s Elfrida has ‘some good passages’, he retorts that ‘“There are now and then some good imitations of Milton’s bad manner”’(Life II. p. 335). Yet in passages of natural description, the question is not so much whether to aim consciously at Milton’s manner, as whether it is possible to avoid it, however vestigial its traces. In the case of London, the pastoral alternative to the corrupt metropolis is itself an unstable construct, a wavering mirage that provokes different reactions from readers.41 This instability and indeterminacy derive partly from allusiveness. The city versus country theme enters the poem virtually at the outset, with Thales’s proposal to exchange one environment for the other: Resolv’d at length, from Vice and London far, To breathe in distant Fields a purer Air …
lines 5–6
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By compressing a more expansive original, Johnson makes a virtue of economy; he also anglicises the Roman field of reference. And I would suggest that one way he does this is through hinting at Miltonic phrase and simile. In Paradise Lost, Satan epitomises original Vice, and carries its miasma with him wherever he goes; but on two striking occasions in the poem he breaks into an environment where he can breathe a different air, an air that revives the heart, potent against anything except despair itself: … and of pure now purer air Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires Vernal delight and joy, able to drive All sadness but despair …
Paradise Lost IV. lines 153–6
This transfiguring moment is replayed in Book IX, when Satan sees Eve alone in the garden. In one of his finest extended similes (often appropriated by the Romantics),42 Milton again focuses on the freedom to breathe, in an atmosphere that is both literally and figuratively a ‘purer air’: As one who long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe Among the pleasant villages and farms Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight, The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine, Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound …
Paradise Lost IX. lines 445–51
As Fowler notes, ‘The assumptions are pastoral or georgic: cities resemble hell, the country Paradise.’43 Johnson attributes the same assumptions to his Thales. However commonplace the sentiment, the expression ‘a purer air’ evokes the remembered landscape of Milton’s Eden, and Johnson knows the value of ‘images which find a mirrour in every mind’ and ‘sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’ (Lives, IV. p. 184). There is no very direct precedent in Juvenal. Moreover, Milton’s ‘populous city’ with its ‘houses thick’ and ‘sewers’ which ‘annoy the air’ fits the archetypal city, which Juvenal’s Rome and Johnson’s London both typify. That Johnson, like other writers, was impressed by this epic simile is evident from the fact that he alludes to it at a later date in Rambler 135, another variation on the topic of country and city and the effects of environment. But is Johnson’s allusion to be taken at face value as an uncritical equation of the country with paradise, the city with hell? It seems unlikely. More probably, it is a subtle reminder that place is intrinsically neither vicious nor innocent, that Edenic associations are imposed by human perception.
Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
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In London, Johnson draws attention to this subjective construction of place by setting up different versions of pastoral. One of these is the unpolluted biblical – or political – wilderness. DeMaria notes that lines 170–5 ‘start and end with echoes of Paradise Lost’:44 Has Heaven reserv’d, in Pity to the Poor, No pathless Waste, or undiscover’d Shore? No secret Island in the boundless Main? No peaceful Desart yet unclaim’d by SPAIN? Quick let us rise, the happy Seats explore, And bear Oppression’s Insolence no more.
The deliberately vague evocation of the Miltonic sublime functions ironically – or so we might suppose – to give added edge to the political satire. In his epic, Milton repeatedly uses ‘happy seat’ or its variants to designate paradise,45 but it is, of course, a paradise lost, no longer attainable as a refuge from oppression in the fallen world. The dream of solving human problems by physical relocation is just that, a dream. The notion of finding happiness in unspoilt nature, as yet unviolated by human presence, not only runs counter to Johnson’s known preference for cultivated landscape, but also to his distrust of utopian thinking. Yet how far can he control the scope of the allusion? Thales’s final burst of enthusiasm sounds, momentarily, as much like the revolutionary fallen angel urging an attempt on ‘the happy seat’ of newly created man in defiance of the Divine Oppressor as an altruistic liberator. By combining Miltonic allusion with his classical sources (and Johnson at this point is utilising Horace’s Epode XVI as well as Juvenal)46 the poet is free to suggest both a sceptical and a sympathetic attitude to Thales’s impossible dream. Imagining a world elsewhere can take many forms, and Thales, unlike the equally sardonic but more down-to-earth Umbritius of Juvenal’s Satire III, experiments with various flights of fancy. He is consistent in occupying the moral high ground in all of them, but less consistent in the choice of life he advocates. Having started off as the austere hermit, he nevertheless permits a more hedonistic note to creep in: Some pleasing Bank where verdant Osiers play, Some peaceful Vale with Nature’s Paintings gay
lines 45–6
He then slides into the Horatian persona, and lays claim to a social conscience. Finally, he recommends the life of the gardener. In the poem’s most extended evocation of an earthly paradise, ‘Some secret Cell’ mutates into ‘some elegant Retreat’ and we are back in familiar English countryhouse territory.47 Lines 210 to 223 describe the earthly paradise in instantly
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recognisable eighteenth-century mode, associated with those horticultural practitioners who did in all seriousness set about recreating Milton’s Eden in the British landscape: Could’st thou resign the Park and Play content, For the fair Banks of Severn or of Trent; There might’st thou find some elegant Retreat, Some hireling Senator’s deserted Seat; And stretch thy Prospects o’er the smiling Land, For less than rent the Dungeons of the Strand; There prune thy Walks, support thy drooping Flow’rs, Direct thy Rivulets, and twine thy Bow’rs; And, while thy Grounds a cheap Repast afford, Despise the Dainties of a venal Lord: There ev’ry Bush with Nature’s Music rings, There ev’ry Breeze bears Health upon its Wings; On all thy Hours Security shall smile, And bless thine Evening Walk and Morning Toil.
As before, this blends specific and general allusiveness. Johnson’s pastoral idyll is scarcely ingenuous nostalgia; placed where it is in the poem, it is deeply compromised by the versions of pastoral that have preceded it. And as before, he uses the tactic of jarring registers, political satire assaulting Miltonic pastoral, like an unwelcome intruder in a paradise garden. On the one hand, this may taint the rural ideal; on the other, since the ‘hireling Senator’ is after all an absent presence, literally an absentee landlord, his ‘deserted Seat’ may be reclaimed for a more productive way of life. Although this is an Eden already tarnished by its proprietorship, the narrator may leave it open to the reader to accept the possibility of its redemption, depending on whether the lyric register can temporarily dominate the satiric. It has to be said that a number of expert readers consider that it does not.48 And this is where the effect of Miltonic allusion becomes critical. In Johnson’s Juvenal, Niall Rudd observes of lines 216 to 223 that: This elevated, and yet tender, way of writing about rural life owes something to Milton: see, e.g., his description of Eve in Paradise Lost 9 lines 427–30: … oft stooping to support Each flower of slender stalk, whose head, though gay Carnation, purple, azure, or speck’d with gold, Hung drooping unsustained.
He emphasises, however, that it is Thales who ‘wants us to see the country in these idealized terms’ and that Johnson’s own ‘general view of country
Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s poetry
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life was much more complex’.49 If Thales sees rural life through a Miltonic prism, it might be because Johnson intends an irony at his expense, the kind of irony all too apparent in the passage from the Life of Savage sometimes juxtaposed with this description from London: ‘he had planned out a Scheme of Life for the Country, of which he had no Knowledge but from Pastorals and Songs …’50 (nature through the spectacles of books again). But even for Johnson there are pastorals and pastorals. The London description differs from the ‘Scheme of Life’ sketched out in the Life of Savage precisely because it balances action and contemplation, culminating in the Edenic ‘bless thine Evening Walk and Morning Toil’ (line 223, my italics). In contrast, Savage expects to exist like a lily of the field: in his fantasy he toils not, neither does he spin. A. D. Moody deduces from revisions in the manuscript draft of London that: Clearly, Johnson was indulging the idyll to the extent of entering more particularly into its details; he was also, perhaps, effecting a more conscious allusion to the duties of Adam and Eve in Milton’s “elegant retreat”.51
‘Perhaps’ may be too cautious. Again and again in Paradise Lost Milton foregrounds the importance of Adam’s and Eve’s gardening labour, its divine ordination, its physical necessity, and the spiritual responsibility that it represents. Its particular ideological underpinning, which in British culture had evolved into the Protestant work ethic, is as familiar to Johnson as to Milton. Through the thrust of verbal energy in his verse – ‘prune’, ‘support’, ‘direct’, ‘twine’ – Johnson toughens the lyricism, and rescues it from flaccidity, from ‘easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting’ pastoral, just as the local references to the rivers of Trent and Severn rescue the description from pure fantasy.52 It may not be necessary to choose between either dismissing or upholding the authenticity of Thales’ ideal; even if his dream of the good life is, on one level, just another instance of the vanity of human wishes, on another level it has the most distinguished of precedents – not only in the classics, but in the scriptural narrative of origins. At the other extreme, the infernal city of ‘Vice and London’ also participates in a myth of origins. As the poem reverts from the peaceful country scene with its sanctified ‘Evening Walk’ to the dangerous, edgy and alcohol-fuelled nightlife of London, Johnson may be reminded again of Paradise Lost. The lineage of Milton’s fallen angels is found in the world’s cities: … and when night Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
50
Johnson’s Milton Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine. Witness the streets of Sodom …
Paradise Lost I. lines 500–3
In imitating Juvenal, Johnson censors mention of the sexual vices that flourish in a metropolis, though not the violence. But in describing the marauding tribes of drunk and aggressive young men that terrorise the London streets, he associates them not only with their classical predecessors, but also with Milton’s sons of Belial wandering the streets of Sodom: … these Heroes, mischievously gay, Lords of the Street, and Terrors of the Way; Flush’d as they are with Folly, Youth and Wine …
lines 230–2
The allusion may be fugitive; yet Johnson later repeats the Miltonic association of night, the city, and ‘the sons of Luxury’ in Adventurer 39 (Yale II. p. 346). And there is good precedent for a London application, since, in another satire that closely connects personal vice and political corruption, Dryden had memorably alluded to the same Miltonic source. In his brilliant shorthand for what he saw as the heyday of vicious misrule in the City, he notes ‘The Sons of Belial had a glorious Time’ (line 598).53 Paradise Lost imaginatively reinvigorates the already traditional analogy between the city and hell, as it does the analogy between the country and paradise, influencing the representation of both environments in poetry from the eighteenth century to the modern period (Edwin Muir can still contrast ‘the steely clamour known too well/ On Saturday nights in every street in Hell’ with ‘the fields of Paradise’ in his sonnet, ‘Milton’).54 If Johnson himself does not simplify the ideological contrast of city and country in London into quite such a straightforward antithesis, he is certainly aware of the possibility of doing so. Arguably, he is sufficiently influenced by his reading of Paradise Lost to inflect his imitation of Roman satire with nuances that derive ultimately from Milton rather than Juvenal. If this is true of London, it is a fortiori true of his later imitation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, The Vanity of Human Wishes. Where London localises its cityscape and landscape, The Vanity of Human Wishes, as its title suggests, goes global. In the famous opening lines – lines that have been both derided and defended – the poet confidently invites the reader to view the world from a virtually extraterrestrial standpoint. Of course, the viewpoint is that of an abstraction – Observation – not a person, and the view is mental not physical. Yet it creates the temporary sensation of seeing like gods (or even God Himself) which is itself a vanity. In requiring this leap of imagination and intellect, the poet is already emulating Milton, among
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other predecessors.55 Insofar as The Vanity of Human Wishes takes for its scope the entire human world and (unlike Juvenal) interprets it from a final vantage point of Christian philosophy, it bears a certain comparison with Milton’s epic undertaking. Naturally, however, most scholarly readers direct their attention to Johnson’s immediate source, Juvenal’s satire, rather than to identifying Miltonic affinities. Yet it is precisely in his deliberate departures from Juvenal that Johnson moves closer to Milton. Readers have also recognised a scale and enterprise that goes beyond classical imitation. Sanford Budick, who offers the most consistent interpretation of the poem from a Miltonic angle, not only believes that The Vanity of Human Wishes ‘is subtly pervaded by the Christian idea of man’s fall’, but develops this assertion to encompass Paradise Lost: We should not be surprised to find that when Johnson came to write his Christian version of Juvenal’s poem – a version not less but more heroic than any Stoic, tragic satire – his imagination should have turned automatically to a poem that contains the central demythological proclamation of fall and redemption in English literature. In fact, he chose a poem which was itself a Christian version of the most estimable Greek and Roman poetic form.56
This is a bold claim: how far is it verifiable? To return to the opening: although it has a number of literary analogues, its use of a privileged viewpoint from which to survey human error for educative purposes strongly recalls Michael’s revelation to Adam in the final two books of Paradise Lost: ‘the angel leads him up to a high hill, sets before him in vision what shall happen …’ (Book XI, The Argument). Johnson transposes Milton’s future tense, ‘what shall happen’, into a timeless present, which, as the poem progresses, modulates into an historically specific panorama. Vision becomes narrative, just as it does at the beginning of Paradise Lost, Book XII. Both Milton and Johnson move easily between generalising description and particular example, as they condense human history into an object lesson that holds good ‘from China to Peru’ (The Vanity of Human Wishes, line 2). As Budick observes, these place-names also delimit the range of vision in Paradise Lost: Milton tells us that Michael and Adam ascend the hill of Paradise to see the earth in “clearest Ken” and “amplest reach of prospect,” and that their view was not less extensive than the temptation to vanity offered Christ by Satan in the wilderness, a sight of vanity from China to Peru [i.e. “Cathaian Can” and “Cusco in Peru”].57
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Interestingly, Isobel Grundy substitutes Milton’s heavenly Muse for the archangel Michael, remarking that ‘Johnson begins by invoking Observation almost as Milton invokes his heavenly Muse’ – a comparison which she follows up with an important distinction: ‘Whereas Milton’s heavenly Muse could tell the causes of the Fall, since Heaven and Hell were open to her sight, Johnson’s Observation soon runs into difficulties.’58 Even so, consciousness of the Fall is implicit in Johnson’s powerful metaphors for lost, deluded, straying humanity, Milton’s ‘long wandered man’ (Paradise Lost XII. line 313). Doomed ‘To tread the dreary Paths without a Guide’ (Vanity, line 8), Adam’s and Eve’s descendants are even more benighted than their first parents, who, although exiled from Paradise, still have ‘providence their guide’ (Paradise Lost XII. line 647). And they have almost lost the other guide, right reason, which Milton equates with right choice – ‘for reason is but choosing’ (CPW II. p. 527): ‘How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice’ (Vanity, line 11). As he remarks so frequently in his writing, Johnson is here only reminding readers of what they already know. Knowing, however, is one thing, understanding is another. The Vanity of Human Wishes will relentlessly reinforce its sombre opening vision of how the world is; it also implies the question of why it is as it is. Paradise Lost poses the same question. In the last two books, which like Johnson’s poem dramatise the vanity of human wishes, the answer keeps coming back to the Fall, that first and fatal outcome of misdirected human desire. Yet if the texts have much in common, we should also be aware of the contrasts. Each poem calibrates judgement and compassion differently. Also, where Milton condenses biblical history within a fundamentally teleological frame, Johnson, following his Juvenalian model, selects from the annals of the past ‘To point a Moral, or adorn a Tale’ (Vanity, line 222). Yet, despite the differences, there seems no doubt that Johnson engaged especially strongly with the human interest of Paradise Lost XI and XII. In his old age, he is inclined to assert that in Milton’s epic ‘human manners’ only begin with the Fall. But, as The Rambler and the ‘Life of Milton’ testify, he makes one important exception, the ‘angelick counsel’ given by Raphael to Adam.59 In the treatment of youth and, later, old age in The Vanity of Human Wishes the light of angelic counsel – both Raphael’s and Michael’s – falls across the speaker’s advice. Raphael warns Adam against the academic tendency to be distracted by ‘idle speculations’; Johnson warns the scholar that wisdom lies outside academia: Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes, And pause awhile from Letters to be wise …
lines 157–8
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The scholar is perhaps the most sympathetic figure in the poem, the one with the most harmless of ambitions since he aspires, like another Adam in Eden, to the exercise of pure reason. But even if that were possible: Should Reason guide thee with her brightest Ray, And pour on misty Doubt resistless Day
lines 145–6
the doom of the fallen Adam will not be reversed for him. Like the poet of Lycidas, though Johnson does not draw this explicit parallel, the aspiring young scholar is brought up sharply against both the fact of his own mortality and the prospect of earthly failure. Even earthly fame may be recognised too late. Johnson seems to draw a parallel with Milton in the following couplet: See Nations slowly wise, and meanly just, To buried Merit raise the tardy Bust.
lines 161–2
Johnson’s editors identify an allusion to ‘the bust of Milton which was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1737 by William Benson’ (Poems, p. 123).60 However, the named historical figures paraded in The Vanity of Human Wishes harbour more destructive ambitions, wield more devastating power, and meet more catastrophic ends than the anonymous scholar.61 He is invited to contemplate the fate of Archbishop Laud, presented as a paragon of learning victimised for his ‘glitt’ring Eminence’ in the turmoil of civil conflict: Nor deem, when Learning her last Prize bestows That glitt’ring Eminence exempt from Foes; See where the Vulgar ’scape, despis’d or aw’d, Rebellion’s vengeful Talons seize on Laud.
lines 165–8
In choosing the phrase ‘the Vulgar scape’,62 did Johnson remember, even if subconsciously, that in another seventeenth-century tragedy of revenge and the fall of the great, Samson Agonistes, Milton inserts a non-scriptural detail when recounting Samson’s destruction of his political enemies – ‘The vulgar only scaped who stood without’? The general idea – that the humble may be spared when the mighty perish – is similar. But of course the political application could hardly be more at odds with Milton’s. For Milton, the grandees of church and state – Laud in the 1640s, the Restoration court in the 1660s – deserve their fate.63 For Johnson, the downfall of Laud is to
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be deplored, not relished, the unjust outcome of anti-elitist revolution. He underscores the ‘vulgar’ reaction with a bitter pun: Around his Tomb let Art and Genius weep, But hear his Death, ye Blockheads, hear and sleep.
lines 173–4
Some modern commentary on The Vanity of Human Wishes assumes that we should read it, as Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost have long been read, for a political subtext.64 If that is the case, their subtexts are diametrically opposed in their political messages. Yet, despite their opposite political persuasions, as poets they react in very similar ways to the spectacle of mankind, and they elicit emotional responses ranging from tragic pity and terror to satiric irony. Why does The Vanity of Human Wishes seem so closely attuned in its philosophical stance, if not in its politics, to Books XI and XII of Paradise Lost? One answer must surely lie in the common grounding of these texts in classical and Christian humanism. Although historiographical methods and the philosophy of history are changing profoundly in the eighteenth century, Johnson shares with Milton a belief that history can teach both an ethical and a religious understanding.65 In Paradise Lost, Michael educates Adam by exposing him to predominantly biblical history; in The Vanity of Human Wishes, the narrator educates the reader by reviewing examples from secular history. Where their visions most markedly converge is when they focus not on the particular but on the universal (which accords with Johnson’s literary theory). Just as Johnson appropriates Raphael’s angelic counsel in his admonition to youth, he appropriates Michael’s angelic counsel when making the natural transition in his subject-matter from disease to old age and death. Although this corresponds to material in Juvenal’s satire, Johnson’s treatment differs from Juvenal’s and approaches more closely to Milton’s.66 Characteristically, he seems to have been especially struck by the catalogue of ill-health: ‘It may be remarked … that, of the few alterations made by Milton in the second edition of his wonderful poem, one was, an enlargement of the enumeration of diseases’ (Yale VIII. p. 933). When Adam, traumatised by his vicarious experience of the physical and mental torments that flesh is heir to, asks the archangel if such suffering can be avoided, Michael replies that temperance may prolong life: So mayst thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop Into thy mother’s lap, or be with ease Gathered, not harshly plucked, for death mature: This is old age …
Paradise Lost XI. lines 535–8
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But if disease has many pains, old age has few pleasures, as he reminds Adam in a gloomy recital to which Johnson alludes in Rambler 78 (Yale IV. p. 47). Yet the corresponding passage from The Vanity of Human Wishes reprises the beautifully balanced modulation in Michael’s speech from mellowness to melancholy: But grant, the Virtues of a temp’rate Prime Bless with an Age exempt from Scorn or Crime; An Age that melts with unperceiv’d Decay, And glides in modest Innocence away … Such Age there is, and who shall wish its End? Yet ev’n on this her Load Misfortune flings, To press the weary Minutes flagging Wings … Year chases Year, Decay pursues Decay, Still drops some Joy from with’ring Life away …
Vanity, lines 291–4, 298–300, 305–6
Or, as Milton has it, the melancholy to which old age is subject will ‘last consume / The balm of life’ (Paradise Lost XI. lines 545–6). In Paradise Lost, the effect is to reconcile Adam to the prospect of death; in The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson too, unusually for him, presents death as release rather than something to be dreaded: New Forms arise, and diff’rent Views engage, Superfluous lags the Vet’ran on the Stage, Till pitying Nature signs the last Release, And bids afflicted Worth retire to Peace.
Vanity, lines 307–10
And, in the poem’s finale, Johnson returns to this thought of death as release, ‘kind Nature’s Signal of Retreat’ (line 364). More importantly, he shifts the dominant discourse from that of classical satire to that of implicitly Christian faith. In so doing, it can be claimed, he substitutes Milton for Juvenal. Although Juvenal acknowledges the human need for gods, he does so sardonically, advising us to tailor our supplications to what is actually within our grasp; ultimately it is humanity that makes its own god of Fortune (Satire 10, lines 346–66). Johnson, on the other hand, instead of satirising human helplessness, conveys its horror in a quasi-biblical metaphor: Must helpless Man, in Ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the Torrent of his Fate?
Vanity, lines 345–6
‘Darkling’ is a word with rich Shakespearean and Miltonic connotations. In the Dictionary, Johnson describes it as ‘a word merely poetical’,
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illustrating it from Shakespeare and Paradise Lost. Again, therefore, it is English rather than Latin tradition that Johnson invokes here. As for the flood metaphor, although it is also found in classical poetry, in this context the rhetorical question is one that might have occurred to Milton’s Adam as he witnessed the biblical Flood – the Flood which, according to Milton in Paradise Lost, uproots and despoils the earthly paradise itself, clearing a space for another kind of paradise, the paradise within.67 Several Johnson readers have recalled Paradise Lost when responding to the restrained yet intensely felt conclusion of The Vanity of Human Wishes.68 Johnson may choose to imply, rather than overtly state, the Christian nature of his faith that man is not abandoned to ‘the Torrent of his Fate’, but his language leaves little doubt that he is indebted to biblical wisdom literature for his concept of ‘celestial Wisdom’ (line 367). Wisdom also runs like a golden thread through the text of Paradise Lost, culminating in ‘the sum/ Of wisdom’ defined in Book XII (lines 575–6): personified, she is the daughter of God who plays in his presence with her sister, the heavenly Muse, Urania.69 Behind Johnson’s phrase thrusts a huge imaginative pressure of associations. Johnson has further built up an emotional pressure through the rising sequence of the final lines that is reminiscent of Michael’s reply to Adam’s acknowledgement of the spiritual wisdom he has gained: This having learned, thou hast attained the sum Of wisdom … … only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith, Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love, By name to come called charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far …
Paradise Lost XII. lines 575–6, 581–7
Johnson likewise adjures his readers to pray for gifts of the spirit that paraphrase Milton’s list and go beyond Juvenal’s (significantly he focuses on faith rather than works): 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:
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These Goods for Man the Laws of Heav’n ordain, These Goods he grants, who grants the Pow’r to gain; With these celestial Wisdom calms the Mind, And makes the Happiness she does not find.
Vanity, lines 359–368
In Paradise Lost, Milton uses variations on the phrase ‘happy/happier seat’ to designate Paradise and even Heaven itself. In this final passage of The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson merges the vision of ‘a happier Seat’, the eternal paradise visible to the eye of faith, with the paradise within, attainable even in earthly life to those who have learned with Milton’s Adam – … that to obey is best, And love with fear the only God, to walk As in his presence …
Paradise Lost XII. lines 561–3
Johnson is no less capable than Milton of responding emotionally to the Christian narrative of redemption, Christ bringing back ‘Through the world’s wilderness long wandered man / Safe to eternal paradise of rest’ (Paradise Lost XII. lines 313–14). If he recreates the world’s wilderness through satire, courtesy of Juvenal, he nevertheless concludes with a glimpse of the eternal paradise of rest, courtesy of Milton. Perhaps it is not going too far to say that in all Johnson’s English poetry it is the ending of The Vanity of Human Wishes that radiates an authentic ‘Miltonian Fire’.
Ch apter 3
Rasselas: a rewriting of Paradise Lost?
Readers of Rasselas have long regarded it as the quintessential Johnson text, the distillation of his philosophy of life. According to James L. Clifford, one great modern Johnsonian speaking about another, ‘David Nichol Smith used to say that Rasselas was the touchstone by which you could determine whether you could ever be a true Johnsonian or not.’1 While scholars have excavated sources for the Abyssinian and Egyptian setting of Johnson’s oriental tale,2 the common readers close to Johnson’s heart have generally brought their experience of his own writings to bear. If the fashion (originating in the eighteenth century) for regarding it ‘as a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical’ prose equivalent of The Vanity of Human Wishes has faded a little,3 the periodical essays continue to be mined for parallels, and the Dictionary is a constant resource for linguistic usage. The notes of modern Rasselas editors bulge with citations from Johnson’s other works. But this practice simply conforms to a familiar critical expectation of intertextuality, that the texts of a mature and established writer will converse with, or even interpenetrate, each other, that the best commentary on a text is often the writer’s own. It is an exogamous marriage with other texts that introduces more difficult questions of interpretation, since the degree of affinity, and how the relationship develops, does not start from a given kinship. The differences between Paradise Lost and Rasselas seem absurdly obvious: differences of scale, of medium, of genre, of outlook, of history. Yet, for earlier generations of general readers, and more recently for academic readers at least, Paradise Lost is part of the intellectual baggage that the experienced reader brings to Rasselas (what Earl R. Wasserman has termed an ‘implicit context’).4 Beginning as it does in the Happy Valley, which the protagonists leave for the outside world, Rasselas lends itself to interpretation as yet another fable of the fall into experience, of which the Judaeo-Christian archetype is the Garden of Eden narrative. However, again beginning with the Happy Valley, this is clearly a revisionist fable (‘Johnson can also be seen to be working ironically with Miltonic 58
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materials’, as one critic puts it).5 Although Rasselas can be read from either a religious or secular perspective,6 the sense of a special relationship with Paradise Lost obstinately insists on intruding itself, in editorial notes, in critical commentary, and in the imagination of readers who are also lovers of Milton. Apparently the author of the Rambler, of the Dictionary, of The Vanity of Human Wishes also evokes a strong Miltonic presence here, in his little ‘history’. Might it even be said that, writing in 1759 a century after Milton was composing Paradise Lost, he is responding to, and selectively rewriting, the most authoritative post-biblical version of the paradise myth in his culture? T h e H a pp y Va l l e y Johnson’s Happy Valley not only shares the ancient tradition of earthly paradises with Milton’s Garden of Eden; the two loci amoeni are also linked specifically through the connection with Abyssinian legend.7 Milton deliberately distinguishes the Abyssinian location from the site of the original biblical garden, but the very act of distinguishing presupposes a mental association: Nor where Abassin kings their issue guard, Mount Amara, though this by some supposed True Paradise under the Ethiop line By Nilus’ head enclosed with shining rock, A whole day’s journey high, but wide remote From this Assyrian garden …
Paradise Lost IV. lines 280–8
Not surprisingly, readers of Rasselas also make the association, though very few suppose the Happy Valley to be ‘true Paradise’.8 Edward Tomarken credits the Victorian editor, the Reverend William West, with being ‘one of the first to attend to the exotic element of the happy valley, which he saw in relation to the Arabian Nights, Paradise Lost, Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence,” and Johnson’s own translation of the Lobo-Legrand Voyage to Abyssinia.’9 Many have followed suit, usually with qualifications in the case of Paradise Lost. Johnson’s initial description certainly evokes a natural paradise, only achievable in a fallen world by excluding existing evils: From the mountains on every side, rivulets descended that filled all the valley with verdure and fertility, and formed a lake in the middle inhabited by fish of every species, and frequented by every fowl whom nature has taught to dip the wing in water …
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The sides of the mountains were covered with trees, the banks of the brooks were diversified with flowers; every blast shook spices from the rocks, and every month dropped fruits upon the ground. All animals that bite the grass, or brouse the shrub, whether wild or tame, wandered in this extensive circuit, secured from beasts of prey by the mountains which confined them. On one part were flocks and herds feeding in the pastures, on another all the beasts of chase frisking in the lawns; the spritely kid was bounding on the rocks, the subtle monkey frolicking in the trees, and the solemn elephant reposing in the shade. All the diversities of the world were brought together, the blessings of nature were collected, and its evils extracted and excluded. (Yale XVI. pp. 8–9)
In its physical landscape – mountainous, well-watered (including a subterranean river), rich in woodland, lawns, and pastures – and in its fertility, this is strongly reminiscent of Milton’s Paradise, the ‘happy rural seat of various view’ as described in Paradise Lost, Book IV.10 In particular, the pleasurable absorption in the activities of innocent animals recalls Milton (who in turn is following an established visual tradition):11 … About them frisking played All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase In wood or wilderness, forest or den …
Paradise Lost IV. lines 340–2
Like Milton, Johnson itemises individual species, though his list does not entirely overlap with Milton’s (logically, he cannot include lions or tigers, for instance, and he clearly has in mind the local fauna of Abyssinia).12 His elephant is ‘solemn’ rather than ‘unwieldy’, dignified, rather than the comic turn of Milton’s prelapsarian garden.13 But the dominant impression, as with Milton, is that of an animal creation enjoying itself in accordance with its own varied nature.14 Obviously Milton’s Eden predates the ‘natural’ evils which are a consequence of the Fall: the animals are all herbivorous, not divided into herbivores and carnivores. Johnson translates this into topographical instead of temporal terms, making the Happy Valley an exclusion zone – the mountains conveniently divide the ‘beasts of prey’ from the rest. Milton had already emphasised the difficulty of access into the earthly Eden, although this might seem to contradict the belief that the entire earth was created perfect, and that ‘grotesque and wild’ vegetation resulted from the curse of the Fall (Paradise Lost IV. pp. 131–7 and 172–7). Like the Happy Valley and other postlapsarian earthly paradises, his garden is guarded by natural barriers, to intensify its perfection and isolation. Whatever its natural perfection, however, so far as its human inhabitants are concerned, Johnson’s Happy Valley also incorporates features that
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have more in common with Milton’s hell than his paradise.15 Milton’s hell is after all a civilised place in its own way, with denizens who practise the arts of architecture, music, and debate. Johnson’s Happy Valley also boasts magnificent architecture, impressive in its scale and ingenuity but sinister in design – ‘built as if suspicion herself had dictated the plan’ (Yale XVI. p. 11). The immediate source may well be Charles Jacques Poncet’s account, translated as the Voyage to Aethiopia, 1709, but the description reinforces a much more ancient association between opulent and paranoiac architecture and the power of evil, an association exploited in Milton’s description of Pandemonium (Paradise Lost I. lines 710–30, 792–7). All the resources of nature and art seem to cooperate to ensure human bliss in the Happy Valley, but that bliss is an illusion: unlike the original inhabitants of Eden, the human occupants of the Happy Valley are indubitably fallen beings, who need to be constantly brainwashed into sustaining ‘their opinion of their own felicity’ (Yale XVI. p. 11). J. S. Cunningham exposes the ‘institutional ideology’ that underlies ‘this ambivalent paradise’, and concludes ‘It is as if Eden were to be redesigned and maintained in the light of the worst that Satan could bring himself to say about Milton’s Eden.’16 The serpent in this version of Eden has already been internalised. Indeed, Imlac’s description of their state in chapter XII transforms it into a version of hell within, for just as Satan and the fallen angels are motivated to seduce humanity into damnation, so these unhappy human beings wish ill to others: The invitations, by which they allure others to a state which they feel to be wretched, proceed from the natural malignity of hopeless misery. They are weary of themselves, and of each other, and expect to find relief in new companions. They envy the liberty which their folly has forfeited, and would gladly see all mankind imprisoned like themselves. (Yale XVI. p. 55)
Yet this is only a partial view of the Happy Valley. Not all those who live there have the mentality of the damned, and this flawed paradise has something to teach innocent and virtuous minds, as Adam was instructed in Eden. The obvious candidate for the Adamic role is naturally the eponymous hero, Rasselas himself. T h e rol e s of R a s s e l a s a n d I m l ac Again, the correspondence between Rasselas and Adam is not a new observation. Clearly it has its limits: Rasselas is not innocent in the archetypal sense of the Genesis narrative. Yet he is unusually insulated by circumstance from the experience of the vast majority of human
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beings, in one respect even more so than Adam, since he never marries. He does have companions in the Happy Valley, but he increasingly sets himself apart from them, and chooses to turn initially to the idyllic natural environment – a return to Eden, which is a common fantasy – to find answers to his ontological questions. Both Milton’s Adam in Paradise Lost and Dryden’s Adam in The State of Innocence are born philosophers, asking ‘who am I? why am I here?’17 In his first speech in Johnson’s narrative, Rasselas likewise defines himself in relation to what he observes: “What,” said he, “makes the difference between man and all the rest of the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporal necessities with myself … I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fulness.”
He concludes: “Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.” (Yale XVI. p. 13)
Certainly Johnson did not need to go to Paradise Lost in order to formulate this particular question: it raises a philosophical issue given fresh scrutiny by eighteenth-century rationalists. Nevertheless, Rasselas goes on to confirm a fundamental theological orthodoxy in his thinking. He does not envy the animals their happiness, ‘“for it is not the felicity of man” ’(Yale XVI. p. 14). At this point he glances at a religious explanation (‘the equity of providence’), a scripture-based belief also implied at a later stage when he reminds the would-be aviator that ‘“Every animal has his element assigned him; the birds have the air, and man and beasts the earth” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 24, note 2). What he has in common with Milton’s Adam is not only this implicit theology of creation, but also his mode of reasoning from the difference between men and animals to an articulation of his own consciousness and his own needs. True, the circumstances of this process differ: in Paradise Lost, Book VIII, Adam narrates how God puts him to the test after the naming of the animals, so that he is brought simultaneously to awareness both of their natures and of their otherness from himself with such knowledge God endued My sudden apprehension: but in these I found not what methought I wanted still …
Paradise Lost VIII. lines 353–5
His Creator manoeuvres Adam into defining what he does want (in both senses), namely a consort ‘fit to participate/ All rational delight’ (VIII. lines
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390–1). For Rasselas, knowing what he wants is less simple: indeed, in a sense, he never knows. But in a fiction predicated on human choice, Johnson has surely taken some hints from Milton’s Adam in shaping the growing self-awareness of his hero. To what extent his situation while in the Happy Valley resembles Adam’s, and whether or not his escape from it constitutes a Fortunate Fall, may be a matter of dispute. However, the education that he undergoes before entering the wider world has at least two features in common with Adam’s: the process of self-realisation, and the role of a mentor. If the wisdom of the Happy Valley, embodied in the persons of his old instructor and the man of science, fails Rasselas, he can turn to a more reliable though not infallible source of insight: the poet. For it is as a poet and scholar that Imlac is introduced into the tale, carrying all the weight and dignity of that designation – with his singing robes about him, as Milton might have said. Imlac’s privileged insights derive from his own wide experience of all sorts and conditions of humanity.18 Accordingly, his purpose is partly proleptic, to prepare Rasselas for his own journeyings and to reveal to an innocent idealist, through an inset narrative, something of how power operates in the world at large. In this respect Imlac is to Rasselas as the angel Raphael is to unfallen Adam in Paradise Lost, a messenger (the root meaning of angelos) who comes to warn and enlighten. Indeed the best-known legend concerning Raphael also involves journeying and instruction, the story of the angel who accompanied and advised the young man, Tobias.19 At times Imlac’s narrative of his travels is tinged with biblical precedents: in leaving home he reenacts the parabolic role of the prodigal son, and he is entrusted with a responsibility reminiscent of the parable of the talents. His early experience of the deep evokes a quasibiblical awe: Kolb, following Hill, annotates the phrase ‘the world of waters’ (Yale XVI. p. 35), with Milton’s ‘the rising world of waters dark and deep’ (Milton himself is borrowing from Spenser). As Imlac traverses a fallen and secular earth, he does so as a kind of undercover agent, a recording angel in disguise, as it were, which is one possible description of a poet. Imlac’s own celebrated description of the poet in the ‘dissertation upon poetry’ may be brought down from its exalted heights by Johnsonian irony, but it remains a compendium of ideas which can all be documented as seriously held at one time or another. To what extent Johnson himself endorses these ideas is questionable, and has provoked one of the liveliest theoretical debates focused on Rasselas. Suggestively, the opening sentence associates poetry with angelic discourse. Imlac says: “Wherever I went, I found that poetry was considered as the highest learning, and regarded with a veneration somewhat approaching to that which man would pay to the angelick nature.” (Yale XVI. pp. 38–9)
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This is a claim that has been treated with particular scepticism, as uncharacteristic of Johnson.20 Ironically, Johnson’s friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, at a later date exhibits suspicious signs of just such veneration towards Rasselas itself: If … we could suppose novels writ by an angel or some superior being whose comprehensive faculties could develope and lay open the inmost recesses of the human mind … such a novel would give in a few hours the experience of ages, such a novel is Rasilas … (cit. Kolb, Yale XVI. lix)
Robert Folkenflik shrewdly points out apropos of Imlac’s observation that ‘The answer to this comes from Imlac himself in chapter XVIII’21: ‘“Be not too hasty … to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 74). Yet is this quite as relevant as it seems? In this context, Johnson, through Imlac, is repeating one of his very familiar warnings, that there is a difference – often a discrepancy – between discourse and deeds, aspiration and actuality, nowhere more so than in the life of the writer. However he does not necessarily discredit the angelic discourse on the grounds of human failure to live up to its idealism. Far from it: in Rambler 14, he recognises that, even though ‘for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives’, it is ‘necessary for the idea of perfection to be proposed’ (Yale III. pp. 75, 76). Imlac, in Rasselas chapter X, is proposing the idea of perfection. And if ‘veneration somewhat approaching to that which man would pay to the angelick nature’ is a marker for poetic greatness, then it is not hard to identify which poets fulfil the idea. Preeminent in European culture, as Imlac remarks, are the ancient poets; but, as the dissertation proceeds, British readers might discern native-born genius in his depiction of the ideal poet. Looked at from one angle, Shakespeare is an obvious sitter for the features of this portrait; there are evident parallels in language and concept between the ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ and Rasselas chapter X.22 Looked at from another angle, Milton’s profile emerges: what other English poet so notoriously writes to an angelic standard, taking down the dictation of the heavenly Muse? As for ‘veneration’, eighteenth-century readers idolise both. In fact, although modern critics have made both identifications, neither exactly matches Imlac’s description in every detail. According to Johnson, Shakespeare is the poet of nature and humanity but deficient in moral teaching, Milton excels in the ‘awfully vast’ but not the ‘elegantly little’ (Yale XVI. p. 42).23 The simplest solution seems to be to take the portrait as a composite.24 Yet the underlying problem of how seriously Johnson intends it (either in part or as a whole) remains. Particularly in
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the peroration with its reference to the poet as ‘the legislator of mankind’, Imlac’s dissertation closely corresponds to what Milton himself had to say about the poet’s vocation,25 and the additional qualification of knowing ‘many languages and many sciences’ seems a very strong pointer to Milton rather than Shakespeare (Yale XVI. p. 45). This is precisely where Johnson as author interrupts the dissertation with a chapter ending, and the narrator, as it were, seizes the microphone from his character. The next chapter begins: Imlac now felt the enthusiastic fit, and was proceeding to aggrandize his own profession, when the prince cried out, “Enough! Thou hast convinced me, that no human being can ever be a poet. Proceed with thy narration.” “To be a poet,” said Imlac, “is indeed very difficult.” (Yale XVI. p. 46)
It is a wonderful comic deflation, and if the shade of Milton has been hovering solemnly in the reader’s memory, Johnson’s irony puts it to flight. But this does not necessarily mean that the intention is to deflate the ideal of the poet altogether by puncturing Imlac’s ‘enthusiastic fit’. Johnson manages to have it both ways, by virtue of the chapter division – a superb touch – and his rhetorical skill.26 Because it leaves the ‘dissertation on poetry’ as an intact, self-contained rhetorical entity (unlike the parallel chapter, ‘A dissertation on the art of flying’, which includes its own ironic reversal), it preserves ‘the idea of perfection’ as something worth having. The species ‘poet’ is a concept greater than any individual. Possibly Johnson thought that Milton in the height of his epic splendour did come as close as any modern poet could to fulfilling it.27 If, contrary to Mrs Piozzi’s conviction,28 Imlac’s views on poetry are not to be identified totally with Johnson’s own, nevertheless in the following chapters he often sounds very Johnsonian. Although Rasselas asks Imlac to proceed with his narration, in chapter XI reflection quickly displaces narrative action. The hypothetical parallel between the Rasselas/ Imlac relationship and the Adam/Raphael relationship in Paradise Lost is beginning to shift, so that the model resembles more closely the dialogue between Adam and another angelic instructor, Michael. In the middle books of Milton’s epic, Raphael recounts the past history of the universe; in the last two books, Michael reveals the future history of fallen humanity. Fred Parker notes the latter as a possible parallel when discussing the evolution of the Rasselas/ Imlac relationship ‘from being one in which Imlac simply corrects Rasselas’s naïvety, rather as Michael corrects Adam in the final books of Paradise Lost, into a more mobile, dialogic rhythm.’29 Johnson’s own contrast between the two angelic narratives in Paradise
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Lost concentrates on function: ‘one was necessary to Adam as a warning, the other as a consolation’ (Lives I. p. 175). In Rasselas, Imlac both warns and consoles, though scarcely in equal measure; but then Johnson’s view of the final books of Paradise Lost as consolatory depends very much on a religious interpretation that stresses outcome rather than historical process. Michael’s portrayal of human existence, like Imlac’s – and Johnson’s – is certainly of ‘a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed’ (Yale XVI. p. 50). In fact, another thing that Rasselas has in common with the last two books of Paradise Lost is the revolt of a number of readers against what they feel to be almost unremitting gloom, at least in the depiction of earthly experience. Boswell’s representation of Johnson’s aim in Rasselas – ‘Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal’ (Life I. p. 342) – could apply with equal force to Paradise Lost XI and XII. With one major difference: in Paradise Lost the Christian doctrine concerning ‘things eternal’ is explicit, whereas in Rasselas it is largely implicit. Imlac’s educative role is associated with a favourite Johnsonian (and Miltonic) theme, the desire for knowledge and whether knowledge brings happiness. On the whole, Imlac concludes that the answer to Rasselas’s question is in the affirmative, for ‘“Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure” ’ and ‘“Ignorance is mere privation” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 49). But knowledge does not guarantee happiness: ‘“The Europeans … are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 50). Indeed, Milton’s angel had reprimanded Adam for making pleasure a criterion at all: To whom thus Michael. Judge not what is best By pleasure, though to nature seeming meet …
Paradise Lost XI. lines 603–4
The concept of a Fortunate Fall is often interpreted as the transition from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge, rather than in its theological sense of making redemption possible (the sense that Adam glances at in Paradise Lost XII. lines 469–78). Because Rasselas is not given an explicitly Christian frame of reference, this theological meaning of felix culpa is ruled out; and in any case, as already observed, Rasselas and the Happy Valley cannot exactly replicate the situation of Adam in Eden, although they allude to it. However, the acquisition of knowledge as a good is relevant, and to continue that acquisition Rasselas has to escape from the Happy Valley to observe for himself. He regards the quest for knowledge
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and the quest for happiness as equivalent – the assumption by which Satan deceived Eve in Paradise. Regarded in this light, Rasselas does enact a kind of Fortunate Fall, although critics do not all agree on exactly at what stage of the narrative it takes place.30 Just as the biblical Flood marks the climax of Paradise Lost XI and a divide between the old world and the new, destroying the earthly paradise, so an extraordinary inundation provides not only the opportunity for Imlac’s narrative but also indirectly the opportunity for escape from the Happy Valley: a crucial turning point in the minimalist plot. Like the original expulsion from Paradise, this event appears to open up a vista of choice, though even amongst the most privileged and independent human beings, ‘“Very few,” said the poet, “live by choice” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 67). Paul Fussell detects an element of parody at this juncture: We sense that we are close to a mock-Paradise Lost when we hear the naïve hero say at the end of Chapter 16: “I have here the world before me,” which forces us to recall Milton’s The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. The joke is that in Rasselas Providence is not their guide: they err and wander, guided only by the fallible Imlac. We sense again the proximity of Paradise Lost to the proceedings in Rasselas when Nekayah, in Chapter 23, becomes suspicious of Imlac’s perpetual skepticism and imputes to him motives very like those which Eve, rationalizing her desire for the fruit, imputes to God: “Imlac favors not our search,” says Nekayah, “lest we should in time find him mistaken.”31
This is a witty and provocative passage, especially in the ironic analogy between Imlac and Milton’s God. But Imlac is a generous though not an infallible guide, and he does represent the wisdom of experience (most of the time). Arguably, even Milton’s tutelary angels are not absolutely infallible when it comes to understanding humanity. Ultimately no guide can replace the exercise of one’s own reason and observation, and, by provoking resistance, Imlac’s scepticism enables Rasselas and Nekayah to make progress in thinking for themselves. T h e pu r s u i t of h a ppi n e s s: t h e m a r r i ag e de b at e Significantly, one of the modes of experience that none of Johnson’s main characters experience at first hand is that of married life (an omission unwisely rectified in Ellis Cornelia Knight’s sequel).32 That does not prevent them from theorising about it in their pursuit of the choice of life; and this marriage
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debate also gains from being read in a Miltonic context. Indeed in certain respects it provides a commentary on the Miltonic ideal as it is formulated both in the divorce tracts and Paradise Lost. Johnson, like Milton, expresses opinions on marriage in a variety of contexts. Perhaps the most serious of these contexts is the first of his published sermons, on the text of Genesis 2:24 (Yale XIV. pp. 3–15). In their notes, the Yale editors of both Rasselas and the Sermons invite readers to compare Johnson’s views on marriage across a spectrum of different texts. What emerges from an often sceptical, occasionally contradictory collage of opinions is one recurrent and dominant concept: that which is now termed companionate marriage. This he shares with Milton, and although to some extent it is a product of their culture and religion, it is worth noting how strong their individual commitment to the analogy between friendship and marriage is, an analogy so powerful that it overrides, and tends to diminish, the sexual and reproductive purposes of the latter. This is certainly evident in Milton’s divorce tracts (of which, however, Johnson has little to say in the ‘Life of Milton’); and the ideal of companionate marriage also struggles for domination over an older ideology of sexual subordination in Paradise Lost.33 Both Milton and Johnson are deeply attracted to the possibility of realising a genuine intellectual friendship in happy marriage, an aspiration which by its very nature requires that both partners should be capable, as Milton puts it, ‘Of what [is] high’ (Paradise Lost VIII. line 50). According to Boswell, Johnson ‘maintained to me, contrary to the common notion, that a woman would not be the worse wife for being learned’ (Life II. p. 76: Boswell does not agree) and that he further observed, that a man of sense and education should meet a suitable companion in a wife. It was a miserable thing when the conversation could only be such as, whether the mutton should be boiled or roasted, and probably a dispute about that. (Life II. p. 128)
However, one can have too much of a good thing (would Milton have agreed?): “Supposing (said he) a wife to be of a studious or argumentative turn, it would be very troublesome: for instance, – if a woman should continually dwell upon the subject of the Arian heresy.” (Life IV. p. 32)
The trajectory of Johnson’s marriage sermon follows that of the marriage of Milton’s Adam and Eve, from the original institution ‘by God himself, as necessary to happiness, even in a state of innocence’ (Yale XIV. p. 13) to the fallen reality: as folly will sometimes intrude upon an unguarded hour; and temptations, by frequent attacks, will sometimes prevail; one of the chief acts of love is readily to
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forgive errours, and overlook defects … if anger be to be opposed with anger, and reproach retorted for reproach; either the contest must be continued for ever, or one must at last be obliged by violence to do what might have been at first done, not only more gracefully, but with more advantage. (Yale XIV. p. 14)
As Milton’s Adam and Eve discover; they progress from the nadir of their recriminations after the Fall: Thus they in mutual accusation spent The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning, And of their vain contést appeared no end
Paradise Lost IX. lines 1187–9
to their moving reconciliation and penitence in Book X. For all his enjoyment of argument, Johnson has a keen sense of the futility of dispute, particularly marital disputes. Indeed, he sees this as one reason for the necessity of subordination in marriage, unlike friendship. Friendships can in the last resort be terminated if irreconcilable disagreements arise; marriage cannot. Therefore ‘as marriage is indissoluble, either one must be content to submit, when conviction cannot be obtained; or life must be wasted in perpetual disputes’ (Yale XIV. p. 14). When he writes Rasselas, a book of disputes if ever there was one, he ironically shows his characters attempting to apply these principles. For instance, Rasselas enthusiastically subscribes to the belief that it is important for ‘a man of sense and education’ to make the right choice of companion: “Whenever I shall seek a wife, it shall be my first question, whether she be willing to be led by reason?”
To which Nekayah makes the withering retort: “Thus it is … that philosophers are deceived … Wretched would be the pair above all names of wretchedness, who should be doomed to adjust by reason every morning all the minute detail of a domestick day.” (Yale XVI. p. 109)
The debate between the brother and sister is more dispassionate than Milton’s arguments in his divorce tracts, but the analysis of why marriages go wrong in some respects parallels his. Rasselas, like Milton, is inclined to blame not the institution – which if it is ‘best for mankind’ ought to be ‘best for individuals’ – but human fallibility and social practices (Yale XVI. pp. 106–7). In his editorial commentary, G. Birkbeck Hill juxtaposes the passage describing ‘the common process of marriage’, which concludes: “They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty” (Yale XVI. p. 107)
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with two quotations from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: He who marries intends as little to conspire his own ruin, as he that swears allegiance … For all the wariness can be used it may yet befall a discreet man to be mistaken in his choice; and we have plenty of examples. The soberest and bestgoverned men are least practised in these affairs.34
However, divorce is never considered as an option in Rasselas: the choice is between marriage and celibacy, not marriage and divorce. As for Johnson’s silence on sexuality in Rasselas, that perhaps owes less to an enlightened attitude to women (although that may play a part)35 than to the philosophical nature of the text itself. What interests him about the subject of marriage is not sexual relations as such but the whole social, psychological, and ethical matrix in which sexuality is embedded. For Johnson, sexuality is part of life, and he rarely if ever separates it from a larger ethical context. Again Boswell – far more obsessed with sex than Johnson – reveals how Johnson’s conversational reticence on the subject affected him, and prides himself on his own reticence when mentioning it: It would not be proper to record the particulars of such a conversation in moments of unreserved frankness, when nobody was present on whom it could have any hurtful effect. That subject, when philosophically treated, may surely employ the mind in as curious discussion, and as innocently, as anatomy; provided that those who do treat it keep clear of inflammatory incentives. (Life III. p. 342)
The subject of the relations between the sexes is nothing if not ‘philosophically treated’ in Rasselas, where the main characters are astonishingly free from sexual temptation or complications. Anna Barbauld approves this avoidance of the erotic on moral, not feminist, grounds: It should not be forgotten to be noticed in praise of Rasselas, that it is, as well as all the other works of its author, perfectly pure. In describing the happy valley, he has not, as many authors would have done, painted a luxurious bower of bliss, nor once throughout the work awakened any ideas which might be at variance with the moral truths which all his writings are meant to inculcate.36
Some readers have felt that this purity comes at a price. Another woman writer, Hester Mulso, finds ‘something … strangely unnatural’ about ‘a young man and woman without any one passion’, whom she regards ‘as merely ideal beings’;37 and William Mudford levels a criticism which, probably deliberately, echoes the criticism that Johnson himself directs at the alleged lack of human interest in Paradise Lost: … it [Rasselas] excites no tumultuous sensations, nor awakens any sympathy; hence it is soon forgotten; the reader finds in it nothing which he has been
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accustomed to experience or believe; nothing which bears any resemblance to the real events of life; nor any situations which he can assimilate to his mind.38
Mary Lascelles also observes how ‘Rasselas and Nekayah are indeed open to the very objection that Johnson levelled against Milton’s Adam and Eve’, although she adds in defence: It would, however, be dishonest to use against a man a charge which, when he used it, was judged invalid; and, if we reject Johnson’s censure of the choice of ideal beings by Milton, we may, on like grounds, accept his own choice of such characters … they are fashioned for the proper purposes of ‘philosophical fiction’.39
But many readers have thought that a more valid objection to over-philosophising is voiced by Imlac within the fiction itself. When at last he interrupts the marriage debate, it is with the famous criticism ‘“It seems to me … that while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 111). T h e pu r s u i t of k now l e d g e : p y r a m i d s a n d s ta r s Logically, the reader might expect this to mark a narrative turning point. But Johnson’s strategy in Rasselas depends largely upon disappointing expectations. According to Emrys Jones’s widely accepted explanation of the tripartite structure of the text (with a single-chapter coda), the middle phase concludes with the visit to the pyramids which plunges the group into unforeseen narrative action.40 Yet that visit starts from Imlac’s recommendation of a sightseeing tour which only extends their principal occupation of passive observation. His proposal of what is in effect a form of time-travel into antiquity does not immediately appeal to Rasselas and Nekayah; the princess’s reaction has been taken as yet another allusion to Paradise Lost: ‘“The things that are now before us … require attention, and deserve it” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 111). This recalls Adam’s response to Raphael’s advice (advice that demonstrably made a deep and lasting impression on Johnson himself):41 … to know That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime wisdom …
Paradise Lost VIII. lines 192–4
However, although the sentiment is admirable, the corollary is flawed. Nekayah continues: “What have I to do with the heroes or the monuments of ancient times? with times which never can return, and heroes, whose form of life was different from all that the present condition of mankind requires or allows.” (Yale XVI. pp. 111–2)
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Johnson devotes most of the remaining chapter to Imlac’s elegant refutation of her assumption that the past is irrelevant. On the contrary, it is only by understanding the past that we can hope to understand the present, a belief consistently and powerfully upheld by Johnson. This is not to diminish the importance of Raphael’s advice, but rather to enhance it by adding the perspective that Michael vouchsafes to Adam in Paradise Lost XI and XII. As already noted, Johnson thinks that both angelic narratives are necessary to the scheme of Paradise Lost. Having by this stage assimilated Raphael’s lesson by attending to daily life, Rasselas and Nekayah are now ready to widen their intellectual horizons further by viewing one of the most potent symbols of the kingdoms of the world: the pyramids. Paradoxically, what they actually learn from the pyramids reinforces Raphael’s warning against the folly of human overreaching. As Milton’s Adam observes, … apt the mind or fancy is to rove Unchecked, and of her roving is no end;
Paradise Lost VIII. lines 188–9
Johnson’s counterpart is the famous and beautiful phrase explaining the origin of the pyramids in ‘that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life’. The next sentence might even explain the psychology of the Fall itself: ‘Those who have already all that they can enjoy, must enlarge their desires’ (Yale XVI. p. 118). Even more pertinent to Raphael’s advice is the episode of the astronomer, who in his ‘hunger of imagination’ believes that he exercises power over the cosmos itself. Yet there is a real ethical difference between pharaoh and astronomer. The former exercises an actual power irresponsibly, exploiting the lives and labour of thousands out of terminal boredom, building ‘for vanity’ in a kind of frenzied frivolity all too familiar from the behaviour of dictators in all ages. The latter attempts to exercise an imaginary power with the utmost responsibility, damaging only himself. When we are first introduced to the ‘man of learning’ in chapter XL, he appears to be that rarity, an exemplary human being as well as a sage. He is attentive to the needs of others, unlike the academic philosopher of Rambler 24, who is ‘unmoved by the loudest call of social nature, for want of considering that men are designed for the succour and comfort of each other’ and ‘who has so far abstracted himself from the species, as to partake neither of the joys nor griefs of others,’ preferring instead the pursuit of meteorology (Yale III. pp. 133–4). The astronomer on the other hand is not deaf to the ‘call of social nature’, and his priorities accord with those of the author of Rambler 24 and 180. Imlac bears witness to his altruism:
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“His integrity and benevolence are equal to his learning. His deepest researches and most favourite studies are willingly interrupted for any opportunity of doing good by his counsel or his riches. To his closest retreat, at his most busy moments, all are admitted that want his assistance: ‘For though I exclude idleness and pleasure, I will never,’ says he, ‘bar my doors against charity. To man is permitted the contemplation of the skies, but the practice of virtue is commanded.’” (Yale XVI. pp. 142–3)
Modern editors of Rasselas have glossed that final sentence with two Milton-related passages, from Rambler 180 and the ‘Life of Milton’, the first pertaining to Raphael’s advice in Paradise Lost and the second to Of Education.42 Other critics have also incorporated the Raphael allusion into their interpretations of this episode, finding it especially appropriate because of the connection with astronomy.43 After all, the occasion of Raphael’s advice to Adam is their astronomical discourse, prompted by Adam’s questions about the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. Raphael concludes: Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, Leave them to God above, him serve and fear; Of other creatures, as him pleases best, Wherever placed, let him dispose: joy thou In what he gives to thee, this Paradise And thy fair Eve; heaven is for thee too high To know what passes there; be lowly wise: Think only what concerns thee and thy being; Dream not of other worlds …
Paradise Lost VIII. lines 167–75
In Rambler 180, Johnson paraphrases this speech: Raphael, in return to Adam’s enquiries into the courses of the stars and the revolutions of heaven, counsels him to withdraw his mind from idle speculations, and employ his faculties upon nearer and more interesting objects, the survey of his own life, the subjection of his passions, the knowledge of duties which must daily be performed, and the detection of dangers which must daily be incurred. (Yale V. p. 183)
He itemises these ‘objects’ in such a way as to conflate this passage in the reader’s memory with another piece of angelic homily, Michael’s words to Adam in the final book: This having learned, thou hast attained the sum Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the stars Thou knewst by name …
Paradise Lost XII. lines 575–7
Again, the link with astronomy is prominent, knowledge of the stars serving as a metonymy for all kinds of scientia which are subsumed under ‘all
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nature’s works, / Or works of God in heaven, air, earth, or sea’ (lines 578–9). According to Johnson, ‘This angelick counsel [Raphael’s] every man of letters should always have before him’ (Yale V. p. 183). Yet it needs to be stressed that neither Raphael nor Michael – nor the Rambler – exclude or belittle the desire for knowledge, when it is undertaken in the right spirit.44 ‘To ask or search I blame thee not’ begins Raphael (Paradise Lost VIII. line 66); ‘I am far from any intention to limit curiosity, or confine the labours of learning to arts of immediate and necessary use’ declares the Rambler (Yale V. p. 183). So how is the astronomer at fault exactly? It should be noticed that it is he, not Imlac, who actually echoes the angelic counsel, in the process distinguishing between what is permitted and what is commanded. Indeed, his privileging of ethics over science in its modern sense hints at the point that Johnson was to reiterate in the ‘Life of Milton’ (as Rasselas editors have observed): the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind … we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. (Lives I. pp. 248–9)
But throughout Rasselas we are required to attend not only to what people say, but to how they live. Is the astronomer yet another character who discourses like an angel, but who lives like a man? Surely there is a qualitative difference in treatment between the astronomer and the other examples of those who fail in this respect, since the astronomer does not betray his essential principles. What happens to him is tragic misadventure, a kind of occupational hazard, rather than satiric reversal. Johnson’s psychological astuteness and literary skill are never more in evidence than in the sequence of chapters where Imlac and the reader are let into the astronomer’s terrible secret, the fantasy that tortures him all the more intensely because of his genuine ‘integrity and benevolence’ (Yale XVI. p. 142). Unlike the overreacher of tradition, he takes no pleasure in power for its own sake; his intentions are altruistic, his will is ‘to do good’, and one of the inherent ironies of his situation is that he cannot hit upon a better arrangement of the universe than that which already exists. The difficulty in applying Raphael’s advice too closely to this episode, and making the astronomer guilty of ‘the sin which Adam is warned against’,45 is that it becomes too strongly judgemental. Raphael’s dismissive description of those misguided seekers who attempt to probe into God’s secrets: … if they list to try Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
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His laughter at their quaint opinions wide Hereafter, when they come to model heaven And calculate the stars, how they will wield The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances …
Paradise Lost VIII. lines 75–82
foreshadows the futility of the astronomer’s calculations, which he himself comes to recognise; but the dismissiveness is not Johnson’s. Milton’s God may laugh, but Johnson does not. Indeed, such a response from Nekayah and Pekuah is gravely rebuked. To align the astronomer with the builders of the Tower of Babel is to represent his aspiration in too harsh a light. If anything, Johnson readjusts the Miltonic perspective by throwing so much emphasis on compassion in this case. The astronomer is afflicted rather than guilty. Although he comes to feel that he has made the wrong choice of vocation – ‘“I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind” ’ (Yale XVI. p.161) – this is counterbalanced by his endeavour, however misguided, to apply these sciences impartially to the benefit of humanity (in the twenty-first century he would be striving to avert the consequences of global warming). Given Johnson’s own experience of melancholy and fear of madness, it is unsurprising that generations of readers have recognised an empathy between author and astronomer,46 reinforced by the chapter on ‘The dangerous prevalence of imagination’. There but for the grace of God … is surely the intended reaction (though perhaps the reader of the library copy, who pencilled ‘Me!’ in the margin of this chapter, takes it too far). What saves the astronomer is common humanity. Again the later books of Paradise Lost come to mind, in that the agent who does most to recall him from the abyss of depression and despair is a woman, Pekuah, whose influence is not unlike the influence of Eve upon Adam in its benign aspects. It begins with a model of intellectual intimacy between man and woman which Milton had adapted for the prelapsarian relationship of Adam and Eve, and which Johnson himself had rehearsed in Irene: that of preceptor and pupil. When Eve withdraws from the conversation between Adam and Raphael, it is because she prefers to receive angelic instruction mediated through her husband: Yet went she not, as not with such discourse Delighted, or not capable her ear Of what was high: such pleasure she reserved, Adam relating, she sole auditress …
Paradise Lost VIII. lines 48–51 [my italics]
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In a verbal echo, Imlac professes himself doubtful that Pekuah will prove herself ‘a very capable auditress’ of the astronomer’s tuition (Yale XVI. p.159).47 Yet she proves him wrong, and in so doing sets the astronomer on the road to recovery. What marks that recovery is his integration into the little group of travellers, through the tried and tested therapy of occupation and companionship. From this point onwards, he complements Imlac as, so to speak, an elder of the tribe. Notably, it is his contribution (in conjunction with the episode of the old man) that turns their thoughts in a new and solemn direction: It is significant … that it is Rasselas’ Astronomer, now restored to sanity and human affairs, who recommends the visit to the Catacombs and comments on the infinity of God’s powers.48
T h e pu r s u i t of k now l e d g e : ‘t h e c hoic e of e t e r n i t y ’ The visit to the catacombs precipitates the discourse on the nature of the soul, in which Imlac argues the orthodox case for ‘the immateriality of mind’ (Yale XVI. p. 170) and its corollary, the immortality of the soul. The intellectual contexts of the debate have been extensively investigated: Kolb concentrates on a range of ‘writers between (say) 1675 and 1750’49 (that is, post-Milton), but the doctrine, or ‘heresy’, of mortalism, the belief that the soul dies with the body, has earlier seventeenth-century proponents, notoriously Richard Overton, whose tract, Mans Mortalitie, came out in its earliest version in 1643/4. This tract has been claimed to influence Milton’s thinking on the subject.50 Mortalism per se does not contradict belief in immortality, since if the soul dies with the body it can also be resurrected with the body, but it has an obvious association with materialism. As Johnson’s astronomer observes, ‘“The nature of the soul is still disputed amidst all our opportunities of clearer knowledge: some yet say, that it may be material, who, nevertheless, believe it to be immortal” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 169). It is the issue of materialism that Imlac vigorously disputes, yoking together the soul’s immateriality and its immortality, as Johnson himself had done in the funeral sermon written for his wife (Yale XIV. p. 264). Whether, or how far, Milton subscribes to the mortalist argument is another question that is ‘still disputed amidst all our opportunities of clearer knowledge’. Among these opportunities is the discovery of De Doctrina Christiana, although the clarity of knowledge has been clouded for modern scholars by the problem of authorship.51 There is no reason, and
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no evidence, for Johnson’s detecting this particular heresy in the author of Paradise Lost (he was of course unaware of the existence of De Doctrina, and its attribution to Milton). But that leaves the larger issue of whether he might still regard Milton as the kind of philosophic materialist whose views are attacked in Rasselas, chapter XLVIII. Nothing in his critical writings on Paradise Lost seems to suggest this. Quite the reverse, in fact: although the evidence for Milton’s materialism adduced by modern Miltonists accounts for what Johnson felt to be ‘The confusion of spirit and matter’ in Paradise Lost, the alleged confusion could not arise if Johnson were not assuming that Milton believed in angels as immaterial agents (Lives I. p. 290).52 If we now perceive that Imlac’s philosophy of the soul clashes with Milton’s materialism, the concept of the soul’s Creator which underwrites this discussion nevertheless resembles the rational God of Paradise Lost. When the astronomer warns ‘“ let us not … too arrogantly limit the Creator’s power” ’ in discussing what may or may not be possible, Imlac retorts that ‘“It is no limitation of omnipotence” ’ to suppose that the Creator does not deal in logical inconsistencies (Yale XVI. p. 172). Milton would surely agree. He would also agree that although the Creator has power to destroy what he has made, his unwillingness to do so is a test of faith. Nekayah’s spiritual anxiety – ‘“But the Being … whom I fear to name, the Being which made the soul, can destroy it” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 174) – is prefigured by the Son’s question to the Father, but the Son’s question expects the answer no: … Or wilt thou thyself Abolish thy creation, and unmake, For him, what for thy glory thou hast made?
Paradise Lost III. lines 162–4
The Son has faith that God’s goodness and greatness preclude such annihilation. Likewise, the angels later affirm that, although Omnipotence manifests itself both in creation and destruction, ‘to create/ Is greater than created to destroy’ (Paradise Lost VII. lines 606–7). In Rasselas, Imlac responds to Nekayah with a characteristically muted and oblique appeal to the same faith: “He, surely, can destroy it,” answered Imlac, “since, however unperishable, it receives from a superiour nature its power of duration. That it will not perish by any inherent cause of decay, or principle of corruption, may be shown by philosophy; but philosophy can tell no more. That it will not be annihilated by him that made it, we must humbly learn from higher authority.” (Yale XVI. p. 1744)
The ‘higher authority’, like the Being invoked here and elsewhere in Rasselas, remains nameless; but it is the same authority that Milton overtly
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asserts throughout Paradise Lost. What differs is the tentativeness with which Johnson, and his characters, approach the realm of divine knowledge, accepting its mystery. Similarly, the much-discussed displacement of ‘the choice of life’ by ‘the choice of eternity’ at the close of this deeply meditative chapter remains mysterious, although its theological nuances appear inescapable. At the very least, it suggests the possibility of human free-will as contributing to the divine scheme of salvation, another profoundly Miltonic emphasis. But Johnson as narrator withdraws imaginatively from any more explicit contemplation of the Four Last Things. The phrase ‘the choice of eternity’ is left to reverberate in the stillness of the cavernous catacombs, as the company return to Cairo.53 ‘T h e c onc lus ion, i n w h ic h no t h i ng i s c onc l u de d’ If the discourse on the nature of the soul does not conclude Rasselas, what are we to make of the ultimate self-revoking chapter, ‘The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded’? Readers have disagreed over almost every aspect of Johnson’s short fiction, its meaning and purpose, its genre, its philosophy of life, and the role of religion; few have not been baffled and intrigued by its ending. A breakthrough in modern criticism came with the recognition that a return to Abyssinia does not presuppose a return to the Happy Valley, a recognition that disrupts the assumed circularity of the narrative structure.54 In both the title and content of this coda, Johnson takes to an extreme the resistance of finality – the finality which always oppressed him.55 Milton, it should be remembered, is also a master of endings that resist finality, that open up to new beginnings. Earlier in Rasselas, Johnson had alluded to the closing lines of Paradise Lost when the prince declared ‘“I have here the world before me” ’ (Yale XVI. p. 68). A number of readers have noted the allusion; the critics who have perhaps integrated it most eloquently into an interpretation of Johnson’s reworking of the archetypal pattern of Milton’s epic are Paul Fussell and Earl R. Wasserman. In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, Fussell offers a brilliant exposition of Rasselas as situated ‘in that secular wasteland lying between Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.’ He elaborates the secularist theme: Self-expelled from the fertile but boring Happy Valley of uniform satisfactoriness, the young travelers set out on their distinctly secular quest prepared with all the wrong, rationalistic questions to ask. After a series of comical disappointments whose effects might have been salutary, these ingenus arrive finally at an uneasy ‘decision’ to return to something like their starting point. They cannot return to
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the Happy Valley any more than Adam and Eve can return to Eden: it is forbidden by law, divine on the one hand, secular on the other. They could, however, return to Abyssinia wiser and therefore perhaps happier than they left it, but they do not, quite. The reason they do not is spoken over and over by the repeated action of ironic reversal which constitutes in little the action of Rasselas as a whole.56
Although Fussell compares their situation with that of Adam and Eve as exiles from paradise, since the Happy Valley is no true paradise in the first place, all they have to lose is an illusion – and the loss of illusions is part of Johnson’s design upon the reader. Fussell’s sceptical reading of the last chapter implies that Johnson is indeed revising the ending of Paradise Lost. By placing it in a secular perspective, he may occlude the possibility of regaining even a paradise within. Earl R. Wasserman takes this argument for a rewriting of Paradise Lost a stage further. It is not simply that Johnson secularises ‘the Miltonic pattern of the Fortunate Fall’, but, more subtly, that he deconstructs it to show the impossibility of doing so: He has invoked the Christian design not, as Fielding did, in order to secularize it and translate it into a design for the happy earthly life, but, on the contrary, to reveal that it cannot be secularized and to explode the design and assumptions of a Tom Jones.
For Wasserman, the episodes of the astronomer and the old man are the key to understanding this objective: By means of the Astronomer and the old man, Johnson has, in effect, rescued the original Christian pattern of the Fortunate Fall from the novelistic secularized version, which he has formally repudiated. Man does not leave Paradise Hall or the Happy Valley to repossess it securely through the acquisition of Wisdom; he acquires Heaven through the wisdom that the “choice of eternity,” not the “choice of life,” is essential.57
Although this thought-provoking argument is developed in terms of a very specific literary and ideological agenda, ultimately it returns us to the simplicity of Boswell’s belief, that ‘Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal’ (Life I. p. 342). Yet whether it is read in a secular or religious context, the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall is itself by no means unproblematic, and in purely narrative terms neither Milton nor Johnson actually ends by asserting or denying it. Interestingly, both writers present ‘the choice of eternity’ or the ‘paradise within’ as a possibility only for the future. They insert these key phrases not at the narrative climax (or anti-climax), but before it.
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Indeed, at the close of both Milton’s epics, the triumph, although asserted, is deferred. In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve departing from Paradise are as human in their limitations, hopes, and fears as anyone in Rasselas:58 Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and providence their guide: They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.
Paradise Lost XII. lines 645–9
In Paradise Regained, the angels hymn the Son’s future glory, but he himself ‘unobserved/ Home to his mother’s house private returned’ (IV. lines 638–9). Stripped of dogma, the final lines of Paradise Lost and the closing paragraphs of Rasselas are curiously similar in their low-key plainness, their acceptance of how things are. Humanly speaking, the protagonists set out, or, in the case of Rasselas, resolve to set out, because (in the old cliché) life must go on. After the younger characters in Rasselas have voiced their ‘various schemes of happiness’, the chapter concludes: Imlac and the astronomer were contented to be driven along the stream of life without directing their course to any particular port. Of these wishes that they had formed they well knew that none could be obtained. They deliberated a while what was to be done, and resolved, when the inundation should cease, to return to Abissinia. (Yale XVI. p. 176)
Providence, for them, takes the form of the Nile, ‘the Father of waters’ (Yale XVI. p. 7), which conflates with the metaphor, ‘the stream of life’. Having recognised the futility of their imaginary choices, they nevertheless make a real choice: to do something – ‘to return to Abissinia’ – and to do it together. If for some of them a kind of innocence has been lost, like Adam and Eve they have not lost the capacity for companionship (and for the imagination that, if dangerous, makes life worth living). The quiet, wry accent of disillusion permeates this chapter; but it is not a totally disabling disillusion. Possibly it was Milton, rather than Shakespeare, from whom Johnson learned something of the art of the inconclusive conclusion.59 In writing Rasselas, Johnson gives fictional form to a philosophical enquiry into the nature of innocence and experience, the quest for happiness, the pursuit and value of knowledge, and the relation between reason and choice: all matters of profound concern to Milton. Paradise Lost is not
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the only literary paradigm available,60 but there is a sense in which Johnson does rewrite it for his own century, and in a different genre, by negotiating with its text at many key points in his narrative. Reading Johnson’s fable with Paradise Lost in your head may or may not make you a better interpreter of its meaning; it certainly enriches and complicates the reader’s involvement with Rasselas.
Ch apter 4
‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty’: the 1770s tracts
Like Milton before him, Johnson voluntarily put his writing talents at the service of contemporary politics. The familiar form of the political pamphlet is virtually a default mode for many early modern writers, but in the case of Milton and Johnson it is a conscious choice that becomes part of their literary – not just their political – identity. Johnson of course starts as a working journalist. In comparison with the body of work produced by Milton in the 1640s and 1650s following the trajectory of the English Revolution, Johnson’s political writings are much more miscellaneous, charting the highs and lows of the Hanoverian decades from the 1730s to the 1770s. While Milton, with hindsight, could fashion his prose works into a kind of magnum opus on the subject of liberty1 – his other epic, as it has been called – Johnson’s remain stubbornly occasional, even in one or two cases the product of a one-night stand as it were, unacknowledged by their progenitor. They resist easy classification, even in partypolitical or ideological terms, and shade off at the edges into his other writing.2 Milton tends to write from a single viewpoint. Johnson, on the other hand, can inhabit the skin of those whose political ideas clash with his own – a skill honed by his Parliamentary Debates – and, like the barrister manqué he sometimes felt himself to be, he can argue a case from either side. Nevertheless, however occasional these writings, as we would expect of Johnson he consistently appeals to general principle as the bedrock of his arguments. The ultimate sources of these general principles are not so different from Milton’s, though Johnson draws contrasting conclusions and applications. One such source is his reading of history.3 If the responsible political writer believes himself to play a part in history in the making, if his work attempts not only to reflect but also to intervene in historical processes by influencing the governed or shaming the government into a particular course of action, then how he interprets past history is crucial to his authority. For Johnson, Milton and his politics are part of that past, which 82
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can be rejected but never ignored. And in the 1770s the political situation looked as if it might replay some of the conflicts that were associated with the earlier turbulent period: in particular, conflicts over constitutional authority and the challenge of radicalism under the name of liberty. In response to aspects of that situation, Johnson wrote a sequence of political tracts in the first half of the decade. Although in general his political prose does not gather itself as obviously as Milton’s into continuous and cumulative commentary centred on identifiable major themes, this group is an exception; Johnson chose to publish them collectively in 1776 under the title of Political Tracts. Coincidentally, this is a group of particular interest to any reader tracking Johnson in Milton’s snow. Or is it coincidental? Bruce Redford’s magisterial study of these tracts suggests that it is far from being so.4 I have argued in relation to Areopagitica that Johnson’s interest in Milton’s prose was of long standing, and that he alludes to Miltonic arguments and tropes in some of his earlier writings. However, in the 1770s, Johnson’s political stance in general has become more conservative and right-wing, more unequivocally supportive of the reigning monarch and more actively opposed to dissemination of Milton’s ‘democratical works’ – that is, the prose.5 It is not therefore the prose that furnishes him with a rhetorical resource. In this, the only collection of political tracts which Johnson himself saw through the press, it is allusion to Milton’s poetry that threads through the rhetoric to add glitter to the polemical argument. It is no coincidence that this should happen in a decade when Johnson is inhabiting the textual world of Milton perhaps more constantly and more intensely than ever before, as is shown by the revisions of the Dictionary in 1773, and the ‘Life of Milton’.6 What is perhaps more surprising is that Johnson’s intimacy with Paradise Lost should spill over into the Political Tracts. Certainly the effect of this should be kept in proportion. After all, we are talking about a small body of work. But out of the four pamphlets, only one – Taxation No Tyranny, 1775 – contains no direct Miltonic allusion, and even it can be regarded as revisiting the debatable ground of the great seventeenth-century conflicts over constitutional government and the rights of the governed.7 When Johnson rejects libertarian arguments supporting the American cause and dismisses ‘the delirious dream of republican fanaticism’ (Yale X. p. 428), in a sense he is using the preliminary skirmishes of the American Revolution to fight again the paper wars of the English Revolution (for example, in restating the theory of sovereignty, and scrutinising the hypothetical origins of government). Even his most notorious slur on the double standards of the American
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colonists – ‘how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ (Yale X. p. 454) – anticipates his withering observation on a similar double standard in Milton’s political and domestic life – ‘they who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it’ (Lives I. p. 276). In eighteenth-century political discourse, as for the seventeenth century and Milton, ‘liberty’ is the key to a whole code of beliefs, particularly liable to abuse because it can mean all things to all men.8 Whatever their subject, all these late political writings strive to deconstruct this discourse of liberty and to clear the mind of cant. Johnson himself signals this by his provocative choice of epigraph for Political Tracts, taken from Claudianus and asserting that, contrary to republican dogma, ‘liberty is never more pleasingly conspicuous than under a virtuous king’ (numquam libertas gratior extat quam sub Rege pio).9 All the tracts question the validity of political rhetoric and are therefore self-referential. Because he is always extraordinarily conscious of linguistic register, Johnson is more than capable of turning his opponents’ verbal artillery back on themselves. In the first tract, The False Alarm (1770), he tackles the Wilkes affair. John Wilkes, convicted under the law for ‘seditious libel and obscenity’, was excluded from the House of Commons, although his Middlesex constituency went on stubbornly electing him as their MP; this had become a cause célèbre which was distinguished precisely by its inflated rhetoric of English patriotism and liberty. Indeed the rallying cry of his supporters makes ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ synonymous.10 Johnson retaliates with a deliberately reasoned defence of the constitutional rights of Parliament, upholding their authority against the rights of the electorate,11 and appealing to ‘the great and pregnant principle of political necessity’ (Yale X. p. 325) – which Milton might have described as ‘necessity, / The tyrant’s plea’ (Paradise Lost IV. lines 393–4). His defence is perfectly legal and constitutional (insofar as the constitutional status quo can be ascertained).12 It challenges the anti-authoritarian arguments not just of the Wilkites, but implicitly those of their revolutionary predecessors: ‘If the possibility of abuse be an argument against authority, no authority ever can be established; if the actual abuse destroys its legality, there is no legal government now in the world’ (Yale X. p. 322). Johnson knew what the historical outcome of such abuse could be. As he once remarked to Sir Adam Fergusson, in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a s overeign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head. (Life II. p. 170)
And the shadow of the seventeenth-century rebellion lies across his characterisation of the supporters of Wilkes. Although it is not his only historical referent – he also cites earlier class-based peasant revolts – his
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language when describing their collective identity and motivation recalls seventeenth-century sectarianism more powerfully than in any other context:13 The quiet of the nation has been for years disturbed by a faction, against which all factions ought to conspire; for its original principle is the desire of levelling; it is only animated under the name of zeal, by the natural malignity of the mean against the great. (Yale X. p. 341 [my italics])
Later the memory of earlier conflicts surfaces in the passage in defence of George III, where he makes comparisons with previous kings, beginning with Charles II and ending with his father, Charles I: these low-born railers have attacked not only the authority, but the character of their Sovereign, and have endeavoured, surely without effect, to alienate the affections of the people from the only king, who, for almost a century, has much appeared to desire, or much endeavoured to deserve them. They have insulted him with rudeness and with menaces … with which scarcely the open hostilities of rebellion ventured to vilify the unhappy Charles, even in the remarks on the cabinet of Naseby. (Yale X. p. 342)
Nevertheless, these are cutprice rebels. The title of the pamphlet is The False Alarm. Whereas the drama of the English revolution was played out as tragedy, Johnson implies that the Wilkes affair is being played out as savage farce. His skilfully placed Miltonic allusion to the war in heaven bears this out.14 Of all the books of Paradise Lost, Book VI is the one that Johnson is least disposed to take seriously: The confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narration of the war of heaven fills it with incongruity; and the book, in which it is related, is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased. (Lives I. pp. 290–1)
Yet it is this very ‘incongruity’ that makes Milton’s narrative available to him as a satirist. There is nothing new in a political pamphleteer demonising his opponents; but for Johnson to demonise the opposition as Miltonic demons not only scores a point, but casts light on his politicised reading of Paradise Lost itself, and his readiness in the right context to accept the identification of the fallen angels with the revolutionaries. In this particular context, he is ridiculing the ineffectuality of petitions as a means of rallying popular support and bringing down Parliament (democratic processes get short shrift generally): Since this expedient … has produced so little effect, let us consider the opposition as no longer formidable. The great engine has recoiled upon them. They thought
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that “the terms they sent were terms of weight,” which would have “amazed all and stumbled many”; but the consternation is now over, and their foes “stand upright,” as before. (Yale X. p. 340)
The passage from which Johnson is quoting is in the original richly, and doubly, ironic; Belial addresses Satan: To whom thus Belial in like gamesome mood. Leader, the terms we sent were terms of weight, Of hard contents, and full of force urged home, Such as we might perceive amused them all, And stumbled many, who receives them right, Had need from head to foot well understand; Not understood, this gift they have besides, They show us when our foes walk not upright.
Paradise Lost VI. lines 620–7
Johnson might remember Addison’s remark that Belial is ‘celebrated in the Battel of Angels for nothing but that Scoffing Speech’.15 Earlier in Paradise Lost Milton had already cast the silken-tongued Belial as the archetypal sophist, his defining role in Book II – or, as we might say, the political spin doctor avant la lettre: … his tongue dropped manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest counsels …
Paradise Lost II. lines 112–15
No warrior, he turns artillery into a play on words, ‘terms of weight’, signifying the fall of language into doubleness. Inevitably, the fallen angels’ gloating meets a terrible reprisal from the ‘eternal might’ (VI. line 630) they scorn; and of course Johnson’s point in adapting the passage is precisely to underscore the satisfying irony of that reversal, when the forces of legitimate authority stand firm – ‘upright’ – against rebellion. In his contemporary setting, it is a purely rhetorical, not a military, reversal, and that is why the choice of Belial’s speech, rather than any other lines from Book VI, is so appropriate. Beyond that, for the reader familiar with his source, it establishes a shadowy paradigm of the perennial political as well as religious myth, the forces of darkness ranged against the victorious forces of light. Not that Johnson is likely to intend the full implications of that paradigm: George III does not stand in for an offended deity hurling the might of his government against satanic Wilkites. Johnson exaggerates for limited satiric purposes, and Milton’s version of the war in heaven licenses such satire. His scorn for the ‘rabble’ in this pamphlet (and others) matches that of the older Milton, and, as Redford argues, when he compares the
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Wilkite supporters with the fallen angels, it is not to aggrandize but to belittle them.16 Indeed, his final comparison of the Wilkes affair with historical precedents, including the English Revolution, represents the present unrest as a squalid and trivial dispute: One part of the nation has never before contended with the other, but for some weighty and apparent interest. If the means were violent, the end was great. The civil war was fought for what each army called and believed the best religion, and the best government … We are now disputing, with almost equal animosity, whether Middlesex shall be represented or not by a criminal from a jail. (Yale X. p. 343)
To have Johnson looking back at the English Civil War as setting a benchmark for principled conflict is in its way extraordinary, though he expresses a similar opinion in 1775 (Life II. p. 369). It can be explained by his view of Wilkes’s supporters as ‘the sectaries, the natural fomenters of sedition, and confederates of the rabble, of whose religion little now remains but hatred of establishments’ (Yale X. p. 344) – in other words, degenerate descendants of seventeenth-century puritanism. Although The False Alarm deploys a range of historical allusions, those to the English Revolution, edged by the brilliant Paradise Lost insult, cut closest to the bone. Although it is not the next pamphlet in chronological order, The Patriot (1774) reads rather like an appendage to The False Alarm. It was written in similar circumstances, to gratify and support Johnson’s friend, Henry Thrale, MP for Southwark, who was standing for re-election. On its topical interest in relation to the earlier tract, Donald J. Greene writes ‘the most impressive [comment] is Johnson’s contrast between the noise made over the Wilkes affair and the quiet adoption of Grenville’s Elections Act’ (Yale X. pp. 387–8). But what links it more profoundly with The False Alarm is Johnson’s criticism of the misuse of political rhetoric. As the ironically simple title implies, ‘patriot’ is as tainted as ‘liberty’ in eighteenth-century usage, circulating widely as part of a debased verbal currency (Yale X. pp. 388–9). To highlight the disjunction between word and sense, Johnson prefaces his pamphlet with a quatrain from Milton’s sonnet XII, ‘On the Detraction which followed upon my Writing Certain Treatises’: They bawl for freedom in their senseless mood, [my italics] Yet still revolt when truth would set them free, License they mean, when they cry liberty, For who loves that must first be wise and good.
lines 9–12: Yale X. p. 389
The ‘Certain Treatises’ were the divorce tracts, which Johnson, like many others, regarded as Milton’s personal axe-grinding; but the choice of
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quotation is political, not personal.17 Greene asserts that ‘This was anything but a novel epigraph for a political pamphlet in the eighteenth century’ (Yale X. p. 389, note 1), without, however, citing any other examples. If so, Johnson sharpens a commonplace by its shrewd application. (He even heightens the irony, deliberately or accidentally, by substituting ‘Yet’ for the original conjunction ‘And’ in line 10.) It is the lexicographer, the scourge of cant, who relishes Milton’s classical distinction between ‘license’ and ‘liberty’. Indeed, he uses three of these lines in the Dictionary to illustrate the first meaning of ‘license’ as ‘Exorbitant liberty; contempt of legal and necessary restraint’ – this in spite of the fact that Johnson the literary critic did not rate Sonnet XII highly. Not only does Johnson borrow his epigraph from Milton, but the language of the pamphlet itself is stamped by a political typecasting that recalls to the reader Johnson’s view of Milton’s politics and Milton’s creation of Satan. When redefining the possible meanings of ‘Patriot’ in popular usage in order to expose them (Yale X. pp. 390–1), Johnson attributes to false patriots precisely those motives of self-regard, hatred of authority per se, and ‘sense of injured merit’ which Milton attributes to Satan and which Johnson was later to assign to Milton himself. His profile of ‘The Patriot’ includes demagoguery, warmongering, and support for rebellion. He also attacks a hypocritical intolerance of liberty for others which he associates with Protestant Dissent (Yale X. p. 393). Naturally Johnson’s concern in an electioneering pamphlet is to aim at topical targets. But his indictment of the perceived gap between rhetoric and reality transcends the immediate circumstances and climaxes in a gesture that is itself a triumph of rhetoric. The 1770s British electorate find themselves metamorphosed into Hell’s deluded angels, as, having begun with a Milton sonnet, he concludes on a quotation from Paradise Lost: it is surely not too much to expect, that the nation will recover from its delusion, and unite in a general abhorrence of those who, by deceiving the credulous with fictitious mischiefs, overbearing the weak by audacity of falsehood, by appealing to the judgment of ignorance, and flattering the vanity of meanness, by slandering honesty and insulting dignity, have gathered round them whatever the kingdom can supply of base, and gross, and profligate; and “raised by merit to this bad eminence,” arrogate to themselves the name of Patriots. (Yale X. pp. 399–400)
The parallel with Milton’s Satan as consummate politician, occupying the foremost place in the kingdom of the damned by virtue of a deeply ironical ‘merit’ (Paradise Lost II. lines 5–6), confirms Johnson’s consistent connection between abuse of power and abuse of language. For all
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Satan’s fiction of freedom, hell is not a free state, for only the truth can set free (John 8:32). License he means when he cries liberty. However, in The Patriot Johnson does not identify an individual satanic figure among the opposition. This is collective demonisation. In fact, although the style may be reminiscent of an earlier satiric mode,18 his political writing of the 1770s is generally less ad hominem than much early modern political polemic, which contributes to its impressiveness. An exception might be made of the interim pamphlet, Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands (1771), since it does have an identifiable individual adversary – although, paradoxically, he is finally unidentifiable, cloaked under the pseudonym of Junius.19 In this anti-war tract, Johnson is responding on behalf of the government to attacks on its accommodation with Spain over the Falklands crisis, attacks spearheaded by Junius in his letter of January 30, 1771, published in the Public Advertiser. Oddly, Junius himself does not use Miltonic allusion as a polemical weapon;20 but for Johnson’s purposes Paradise Lost is an inspired choice of source, given Milton’s treatment of the literary discourse of heroism. Undergirding the argument of Thoughts on … Falkland’s Islands is a powerful critique of the glorification of war, compressed into the blazing passages contrasting superficial heroic fantasies with the futile and unheroic wastage of human life, not even on the field of battle – ‘The life of a modern soldier is ill represented by heroic fiction’ (Yale X. p. 370). Jeremy Black places this critique in the context of ‘the Tory tradition in foreign policy’ as opposed to Whig interventionism and expansionism (he also reminds us of Johnson’s contrary position as a younger man when he was against ‘Walpole’s alleged appeasement of Spain’).21 Obviously, party considerations can be taken into account. Yet Johnson’s diatribe against ‘heroic fiction’ goes beyond these, as it goes beyond the specific crisis. As James T. Boulton puts it in an earlier study: His classical references, his allusions to Pope and Milton, his general appeal to a cultivated audience … all suggest that he speaks with the authority of learning and intelligence, that he can see beyond the immediate facts as isolated phenomena and can see them in a large context where universal moral truths – principally that peace is the most desirable human condition – are of pre-eminent importance.22
‘Universal moral truths’ cut little ice with many modern critics. But the tenor of Johnson’s argument has literary antecedents, not merely political bias. (And, indeed, literary successors: perhaps not until the First World War is Johnson’s eloquence and precision in confronting the myth of war
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with the actuality to be equalled or surpassed.) If poetry is responsible for inculcating the questionable ideal of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it can also powerfully question that ideal. Johnson’s distrust of traditional heroics finds strong support in Milton’s famous challenge to the entire epic and chivalric ethos in Paradise Lost. And it is to Paradise Lost that Johnson turns at the height of his anti-war polemic in Thoughts on … Falkland’s Islands. His denunciation of war profiteers is, appropriately, far more bitter than his criticism of those misled into thinking of war ‘as little more than a splendid game’ (Yale X. p. 370). The latter are guilty of a failure to imagine the actual consequences of war; but the former deliberately exploit its consequences, fattening on what Milton, writing of an earlier conflict, had called ‘all this waste of wealth, and loss of blood’ (Sonnet XII, line 14). In Johnson’s words: If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and after bleeding in the battle grew rich by the victory, he might shew his gains without envy. But at the conclusion of a ten years war, how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes and the expence of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors and whose palaces rise like exhalations. (Yale X. p. 371)
Here Johnson alludes to the building of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost: Anon out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a temple …
Paradise Lost I. lines 710–13
The word ‘exhalation’ (illustrated by this same quotation in the Dictionary) is particularly apposite, because it sets up an associative image of ill-omen – ‘An exhalation could become a meteor or comet, ominous for man’23 – which climaxes in the comet metaphor later applied to Junius, the villain of the piece. With ‘his gift for vituperation’, Junius appears a promising candidate for a satanic role (one anonymous assailant assigns him ‘Hell-forg’d Weapons’).24 Johnson, more imaginatively, has it both ways. He simultaneously invokes the satanic comparison and denies Junius its charisma, contemptuously deflating his political importance. Among the cats-cradle of literary allusions that he weaves to snare his opponent are threads of Virgil, Shakespeare, and Pope.25 The most striking, however, derives from Paradise Lost, and indeed, as Johnson would realise, from Virgil and Tasso
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reinvented in Paradise Lost.26 In Book II, Milton describes Satan in a superb epic simile: Incensed with indignation Satan stood Unterrified, and like a comet burned, That fires the length of Ophiucus huge In the Arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war.
Paradise Lost II. lines 707–11
Johnson slightly adapts the wording of the last half-lines, and turns epic simile into a devastating mock-heroic metaphor: Junius is an unusual phaenomenon on which some have gazed with wonder and some with terrour, but wonder and terrour are transitory passions. He will soon be more closely viewed or more attentively examined, and what folly has taken for a comet that from its flaming hair shook pestilence and war, enquiry will find to be only a meteor formed by the vapours of putrefying democracy, and kindled into flame by the effervescence of interest struggling with conviction; which having plunged its followers in a bog, will leave us enquiring why we regarded it. (Yale X. pp. 377–8)
Milton’s Satan is likewise destined for a humiliating denouement within the narrative of Paradise Lost itself, a denouement which is not only individual but collective, and which Johnson reserves for his own finale. In the original allusion to the building of Pandemonium, the pattern of implicit comparison between a warmongering, profiteering eighteenthcentury Britain and Milton’s hell has another fundamental appositeness. The provider of the materials for the building of Pandemonium is Mammon, ‘the least erected spirit that fell/ From heaven’ (Paradise Lost I. lines 679–80): Johnson accuses his countrymen of serving not God but Mammon – the profiteers represent only an extreme example of a self-interest that underwrites the pursuit of the ‘national interest’ and imperialist ambitions.27 Nor does Johnson leave it at that. In the closing stages of his argument, he returns with renewed vehemence to attack those who are dissatisfied with what to all reasonable people appears an acceptable and peaceable outcome, ‘those who having fixed their hopes on publick calamities, sat like vultures waiting for a day of carnage’ (Yale X. p. 384). Again he reaches into his memory of Paradise Lost, but in this instance to point a contrast rather than make a direct analogy:28 When they found that all were happy in spite of their machinations, and the soft effulgence of peace shone out upon the nation, they felt no motion but that of sullen envy; they could not, like Milton’s prince of hell, abstract themselves a
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moment from their evil; as they have not the wit of Satan, they have not his virtue; they tried once again what could be done by sophistry without art, and confidence without credit. (Yale X. pp. 384–5)
In this passage, he is alluding to the moment in Eden just before the Fall, when Satan, overwhelmed by pleasure in Eve’s beauty and innocence, himself regresses to a strangely unselfconscious innocence of being: That space the evil one abstracted stood From his own evil, and for the time remained Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge …
Paradise Lost IX. lines 463–6
Like Satan in motivation (‘sullen envy’), they sink beneath him in the moral scale because their evil is unremitting. Indeed Johnson adopts, consciously or not, a tactic that Milton uses elsewhere in Paradise Lost. At the climax of Book II, when Satan undertakes the ‘hazard huge’ of his lone mission and the fallen angels unite in his acclaim, the narrator strikingly intervenes: Oh shame to men! Devil with devil damnedw Firm concord holds, men only disagree Of creatures rational, though under hope Of heavenly grace: and God proclaiming peace, Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife Among themselves, and levy cruel wars, Wasting the earth, each other to destroy …
Paradise Lost II. lines 496–502
It is perhaps surprising that Johnson does not avail himself directly of lines so close in spirit to his own anti-war rhetoric in Thoughts on … Falkland’s Islands. But in selecting the alternative passage from Book IX, he makes the same paradoxical point – that even Milton’s Satan, prince of evil, is incapable of such consistent atrocity as human beings ‘among themselves’. And a further, interestingly nuanced, reading of Paradise Lost emerges. If, for many readers of the ‘Life of Milton’, Johnson appears to resist, or at least profess unawareness of, the complicated attractiveness of Milton’s Satan, arguably this allusion suggests otherwise: ‘as they have not the wit of Satan, they have not his virtue’. For Johnson to concede wit and virtue to Satan – the qualities that make him more than stupidly evil, so to speak – betrays that he is not oblivious to the charisma of Milton’s creation. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the tract, Johnson reverts to the more simplistic equation of the opposition with the devils of Paradise Lost, this time to exult in their defeat and degradation. Seemingly he can afford to be loftily magnanimous, once their sting is drawn. ‘To be harmless though
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by impotence obtains some degree of kindness’, he writes, a remark that coincidentally applies very neatly to his description of attitudes to Milton after the Restoration (Lives I. p. 263). He continues: no man hates a worm as he hates a viper; they were once dreaded enough to be detested, as serpents that could bite; they have now shewn that they can only hiss, and may therefore quietly slink into holes, and change their slough unmolested and forgotten. (Yale X. p. 386)
Lipking, who notes the Miltonic image, implies that Johnson protests too much: Protesting that there is nothing to fear, Johnson seems haunted by enemies who lurk in the sewers or under the ground and feed on his own sickly fancies. Each patriot harbors a serpent; in this passage, as in the description of Junius and elsewhere throughout the pamphlets, the real antagonist seems to be Milton’s Satan. We have come a long way from the Falklands.29
Yet the provenance of the image is a reminder of Satan’s humiliation and defeat. What rises in Johnson’s imagination here is the scene of the great dramatic reversal in Paradise Lost Book X, when Satan returns in triumph to his followers in hell, and his would-be heroic oratory with its resounding peroration – ‘what remains, ye gods,/ But up and enter now into full bliss’ – is met not by acclaim but by ‘A dismal universal hiss, the sound/ Of public scorn’ (Paradise Lost X. lines 502–3, 508–9). In context, this defeat of expectation, with the sardonic rhyming of ‘bliss’ against ‘hiss’, is extraordinarily effective. As Johnson paraphrases it, ‘they can only hiss’ [my italics]. Another significant point is the nature of Satan’s humiliation. It strikes not only at his form, ironically transformed into ‘a monstrous serpent’, but at the very source of his strength, his rhetorical powers. Deprived first of a response from his audience, he is then deprived of language itself: he would have spoke, But hiss for hiss returned with forkèd tongue To forkèd tongue, for now were all transformed Alike, to serpents …
Paradise Lost X. lines 517–20
This is exactly what Johnson is aiming at, metaphorically speaking, in the late political writings: the silencing of perverted rhetoric. At the close of Thoughts on … Falkland’s Islands, with the support of Milton, he can imagine its achievement. One purpose of gathering together the allusions to Paradise Lost in this political context is to consider their implications for Johnson’s reading of Milton’s poem. In the later ‘Life of Milton’, when criticising the epic, he
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does not offer a politicised reading even of Satan.30 Redford asserts that in the 1770s tracts ‘Johnson links what he keeps separate in his Life – politics like Milton’s on the one hand and rebelliousness like Satan’s on the other.’31 Certainly, the pamphlets make it clear that Johnson – as might be expected – is perfectly ready to entertain a political interpretation of Satan and the fallen angels, and that he is especially alive to its relevance and uses for political rhetoric. In fact, on one occasion at least, this also surfaces in the ‘Life of Milton’, where Johnson does associate the political Milton with Satan (Lives I. p. 251). But as a critic of Paradise Lost, he has other aims, and it is to his criticism that I now turn.
Pa r t II
Johnson the critic: assessing Milton’s achievement
Ch apter 5
‘Phantoms which cannot be wounded’: the Lauder affair
Johnson’s known critical engagement with Milton might be said to begin at Oxford, when as an undergraduate he translated the accolade of another great English poet and critic who was to influence his thinking and literary taste. In his epigram on Milton for the significantly dated 1688 edition of Paradise Lost, John Dryden had set a benchmark for his eighteenthcentury successors, combining patriotism and classicism: Three Poets, in three distant Ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The First in loftiness of thought Surpass’d; The Next in Majesty; in both the Last. The force of Nature cou’d no farther goe: To make a Third she joyned the former two.1
The comparison between Paradise Lost and ancient epic, initiated by Milton himself, was to become a staple of Milton criticism; Dryden puts it more succinctly and elegantly than most, and perhaps it was that epigrammatic elegance that appealed to the young Johnson. His own rendering has been both praised and criticised.2 Johnson himself not only retained it in his capacious memory, but quoted it to Boswell many years later in another university city, Aberdeen (Life V. p. 86). At the very least, this implies that he does not object to Dryden’s tribute to Milton’s exalted status among English poets. Yet his first significant intervention in the scholarly industry that had grown up around Paradise Lost by the time he was middle-aged is linked to a blatant attempt to destroy that status, to topple Milton from his pedestal as ‘the BRITISH HOMER’.3 This is, of course, the notorious Lauder affair – or scandal, controversy, debacle or brouhaha, as it has been variously termed. It figures, also variously, in Johnson biographies: Johnson’s role in one of the most famous plagiarism cases of the early modern period requires explanation, and from the outset that role was linked with his general attitude to Milton. The 97
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story has so many ramifications for the world of scholarship that even now it provides a particularly juicy case history for theorists.4 Its central instigator, William Lauder, is a bizarre figure, combining grotesquerie, malignity, and pathos. Indeed he appears almost as a real-life antecedent to the Dickensian creation, Silas Wegg, being ‘A literary man – with a wooden leg’ and, like Wegg, ‘ranged with that very numerous class of impostors, who are … determined to keep up appearances’.5 Maimed by an accident on a golf-course in his native Scotland, Lauder came south to seek his fortune as a genuinely literary man, a Latin scholar, and went on to commit a quintessential literary crime. The facts are not in dispute. Lauder embarked upon what seemed at first to be a perfectly bona fide project, seeking to identify sources for Paradise Lost among modern neo-Latin texts, just as commentators and editors had done with classical sources. The alleged results of this source-hunting were first of all published as a series of contributions to the Gentleman’s Magazine from 1747 onwards,6 and then collected and extended in book form as An Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns, in his Paradise Lost (1749/50). Possibly the piecemeal nature of the original publication encouraged credulity: the initial impression is of a sober, even dry, assessment of the evidence by comparing extended passages from Masenius, Grotius, et al. If read at a sitting in its book form, Lauder’s piling of Pelius on Ossa, Scots poetry on European (‘even a Batavian divine [Staphorstius] could not escape him’), becomes more suspicious. Milton, it seems, ranged the literary earth, seeking whom he would devour, until exposed by Lauder, at his triumphant climax, as ‘not inferior, perhaps, to the most unlicensed plagiary that ever wrote’.7 Indeed, Lauder lurches into an extraordinary biographical diversion, implicating Milton’s nephew and daughters in his conspiracy theory. Edward Phillips’s Theatrum poetarum (1675) is evidently a coded catalogue, ‘nothing else, but a short account of all the poetical authors in his uncle’s library’. Like many conspiracy theories, this depends on what is missing – Lauder deduces a cover-up from the works, such as Cats’s Paradisus, that Phillips cunningly omits, in order, claims Lauder, not to encourage ‘the curiosity of scholars’. Milton’s notorious treatment of his daughters reinforces the theory: he taught them to read without understanding what they read, because he ‘well knew the loquacious and incontinent spirit of the sex, and the danger, on that account, of intrusting them with so important a secret as his unbounded plagiarism’.8 Unfortunately for Lauder, ‘the curiosity of scholars’ was aroused well before the actual publication of his book.9 The querying of his credentials,
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and the progressive demolition of his case, culminated in John Douglas’s resoundingly titled Milton Vindicated From the Charge of Plagiarism, Brought against him by Mr. Lauder, and Lauder himself convicted of several Forgeries and gross Impositions on the Public (1750/51). For it was Lauder who turned out to be the guilty party: in a satisfying and symmetrical poetic justice, Lauder is exposed as tampering with texts by interpolating lines from William Hog’s 1690 Latin translation of Paradise Lost into the supposed parallel passages from other authors. The proofs were irrefutable; Lauder was brought down by his own method of textual comparison. However, the question of motive is more complicated, both as regards Lauder himself and those who were taken in by his imposture, especially Johnson. Lauder’s nationality, his politics, his disability, his impoverishment, would be more than enough to account for the chip on his shoulder, but he aggravated his disadvantages by a temperament that was both aggressive and defensive. In trying to explain his spite against Milton, he is as successful or unsuccessful as Milton’s own Satan trying to explain his spite against God. Scholars have sought reasons, from a quip by Pope in the Dunciad to the political animus of a defeated Jacobite, for his anti-Milton campaign.10 No doubt there was more than one contributory factor, but in the end Lauder seems to want to discredit Milton just because he is Milton (hence his second bite at the poisoned cherry in King Charles Vindicated from the Charge of Plagiarism, 1754). According to his booksellers, Payne and Bouquet, when they confronted him with Douglas’s charge, he felt and showed no remorse: ‘He has this Day admitted the Charge, but with great Insensibility.’11 Sensibility was, however, to be supplied by Johnson, in A Letter to the Reverend Mr. Douglas, Occasioned by his Vindication of Milton (1751), which – or the greater part of which – Johnson dictated to Lauder ‘acknowledging his fraud in terms of suitable contrition’ (Life I. p. 229). The contrition may not have been simply vicarious.12 Surprisingly, in view of his habitual scepticism, Johnson was one of those deceived by Lauder’s allegations of Milton’s plagiarism. More, he had given support in 1747 to Lauder’s Proposals for an edition of Grotius’s Adamus Exul, and had written a Preface, later attached in emended form to the infamous Essay itself. That the idea of an edition of Adamus Exul should have attracted Johnson as an admirer of Grotius is understandable.13 Demonstrably, this work could have a perfectly legitimate connection to Paradise Lost. But Johnson’s failure to recognise the point at which Lauder’s fanaticism pushes him over the edge into fraudulence appears less excusable, and has excited much
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speculation. What was it about Lauder that entangled Johnson in the p lagium, the net from which plagiarism takes its name? One explanation is that he was predisposed to accept Lauder’s case for a mixture of motives, personal, political, and literary.14 Johnson’s praiseworthy humanitarianism, his breadth of sympathy for those who are now described as marginalised, and his readiness to extend help to the most recalcitrant, must have played some part. Physical imperfection in human beings (even in an inanimate object like a chair) seemed to bring out a kind of fellow-feeling in Johnson. His own brief comment, written as an impromptu self-defence in his copy of Francis Blackburne’s attacking Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton (1780) is interesting: ‘In the business of Lauder I was deceived, partly by thinking the man too frantick to be fraudulent.’15 He admits to a psychological misreading of Lauder (but not of Milton). ‘Frantick’ Lauder certainly was, as anyone who reads all the material in the case can scarcely doubt. Nonetheless his plausibility should not be underestimated: the fraud is not immediately obvious. Johnson’s use of ‘partly’ is honest and intriguing. Was he also influenced by political affinities with Lauder, and a shared antagonism towards Milton’s republicanism? His biographer John Hawkins implies as much, connecting Johnson’s Milton criticism in The Rambler and the Lauder affair; at the club meeting when the proof sheets of Lauder’s Essay were inspected: I could all along observe that Johnson seemed to approve, not only of the design but of the argument, and seemed to exult in a persuasion, that the reputation of Milton was likely to suffer by this discovery. That he was not privy to the imposture I am well persuaded, but that he wished well to the argument must be inferred from the preface, which indubitably was written by Johnson.16
Joseph Towers makes the same inference more blatantly in 1786 (and Hazlitt repeats the allegation in 1819): It can hardly be doubted, but that his aversion to Milton’s politics, was the cause of that alacrity, with which he joined with Lauder, in his infamous attack on our great epic poet, and which induced him to assist him in that transaction.17
However, there is a literary as well as a political and cultural dimension, and perhaps it is on literary grounds that the case for defending Johnson is, paradoxically, both strongest and weakest. As so often, Boswell constitutes himself as Johnson’s advocate against other biographers or critics. In his narrative of the Lauder affair (which of course antedated his personal acquaintance with Johnson by some twelve years), he is avowedly partisan.
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Lauder’s motive is inscrutable ‘unless it were a vain notion of his superiority, in being able, by whatever means, to deceive mankind’ (Life I. p. 229). In contrast, Johnson acted in transparently good faith. Boswell scores a point by juxtaposing the Preface to Lauder’s Essay – written ‘in full persuasion of Lauder’s honesty’ – and the ‘Postscript recommending, in the most persuasive terms, a subscription for the relief of a grand-daughter of Milton’. He quotes the Postscript, remarking: Surely this is inconsistent with “enmity towards Milton,” which Sir John Hawkins imputes to Johnson upon this occasion … Is it possible for any man of clear judgement to suppose that Johnson, who so nobly praised the poetical excellence of Milton in a Postscript to this very “discovery,” as he then supposed it, could, at the same time, exult in a persuasion that the great poet’s reputation was likely to suffer by it? This is an inconsistency of which Johnson was incapable; nor can any thing more be fairly inferred from the Preface, than that Johnson, who was alike distinguished for ardent curiosity and love of truth, was pleased with an investigation by which both were gratified. That he was actuated by these motives, and certainly by no unworthy desire to depreciate our great epick poet, is evident from his own words …
and he proceeds to cite the passage from the Preface which compares the construction of a work of literary genius to a mighty architectural achievement (Life I. pp. 230–1). This is also broadly the line taken by modern defenders of Johnson, and it is easy to see its appeal.18 Lauder’s original research proposal is precisely the kind that quickens a genuine scholarly impulse: the aim is to investigate origins and analyse the transmission and transformation of literary and linguistic material, accompanied by the desire to observe the hidden processes of creation (a desire peculiarly appropriate to Paradise Lost). As Paul Baines wittily demonstrates in The House of Forgery with his chapter headings and subheadings,19 Paradise Lost is a perfect paradigm for a narrative of plagiarism dealing in original sin and forbidden knowledge. But this perception is itself the product of knowingness, of which Johnson might be presumed initially innocent. If Johnson’s Preface is read equally innocently, especially in its original form,20 its subsequent attachment to Lauder’s Essay becomes even more puzzling. No unprejudiced reader would immediately assume that the actuating motive is an antipathy to Milton. Richard Terry has put this most strongly, asserting that the Preface is ‘a contribution so innocent of Lauder’s actual design that it seems inconceivable that Johnson had ever perused the manuscript’.21 All that can be proved is guilt by association, not intent. Certainly the
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weakness in this defence is obvious: if Johnson were prepared to lend his credentials to Lauder, he should have examined Lauder’s text far more assiduously and tested the evidence. But Johnson was not alone. Lauder has respectable precedents for his source-hunting, and is prepared to lay claim to the support of some eminent men of letters – ‘The reverend Mr. Birch, Dr. Newton, the late Mr. Samuel Johnson, keeper of St. Martin’s library, and the present Mr. Samuel Johnson, author of the plan of a new universal English dictionary …’22 Johnson’s Preface constructs a picture not just of the ‘boundless veneration’ of an easily led general public, but of an informed inner circle of Miltonists, ‘men of genius and literature’ competing over Paradise Lost (‘who should most advance its honour, or best distinguish its beauties’). Johnson highlights their activities: ‘Some have revised editions, others have published commentaries, and all have endeavoured to make their particular studies in some degree subservient to this general emulation.’23 The final remark may hint at a possible reservation – should disinterested scholarship be ‘subservient to … general emulation’? – but there is no suggestion that the work itself is unworthy of this attention.24 In fact, its reputation is said to have prevailed over ‘the unpopularity of its author’. The whole thrust of the Preface is to encourage the continuation and consolidation of source study. Clearly, Johnson is not only familiar with, but takes professional interest in, the conjectures of commentators (the foundations of his own criticism of Paradise Lost are already laid): Mr. Voltaire tells us, without proof, that the first hint of Paradise lost was taken from a farce called Adamo … Dr. Pearce, that it was derived from an Italian tragedy called Il paradiso perso; and Mr. Peck, that it was borrowed from a wild Romance. Any of these conjectures may possibly be true, but as they stand without sufficient proof, it must be granted likewise, that they may all possibly be false …25
It is ironic that Johnson here invokes a standard of intellectual quality control that, applied to the work he is prefacing, would, and did, sink Lauder. Similarly, his attitude to the discovery of the Trinity MS reflects the value for Milton scholars of locating ‘the embryo of this great poem’;26 Lauder in contrast gloatingly perverts it to his own ends: tho’ that fatal manuscript of his was lately brought to light to reflect honour on him, for such the reverend Mr. Birch informed me was his view in making it public; yet, from the use I have made of it, it serves for a quite contrary purpose.27
Although Johnson accepts the possibility that Milton’s manuscript draft might simply record the plays of other authors, not his original ideas,
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he does not imply that the status of Paradise Lost is in any way compromised. On the contrary, he presents the prospect of recovering ‘the genuine source of Paradise lost’, ‘the prima stamina of this wonderful poem’,28 as one of pure intellectual excitement and pleasure, not opprobrium and scandal. We can compare the belief expressed in Rasselas, that ‘When the eye or the imagination is struck with any uncommon work the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed’ (Yale XVI. p. 113). So far, the argument of the Preface could be endorsed in principle by any literary scholar, Miltonists included. There remains the core passage of the piece, the one most frequently quoted (and showcased by Boswell in his speech for the defence): Among the inquiries to which this ardour of criticism has naturally given occasion, none is more obscure in itself, or more worthy of rational curiosity, than a retrospection of the progress of this mighty genius in the construction of his work, a view of the fabric gradually rising, perhaps from small beginnings, till its foundation rests in the centre, and its turrets sparkle in the skies; to trace back the structure through all its varieties to the simplicity of its first plan, to find what was first projected, whence the scheme was taken, how it was improved, by what assistance it was executed, and from what stores the materials were collected; whether its founder dug them from the quarries of nature, or demolished other buildings to embellish his own.29
Few source-hunters might have the imagination, or the temerity, to dignify the object of their efforts with such majestic metaphor. Having quoted the passage, Boswell demands ‘Is this the language of one who wished to blast the laurels of Milton?’ (Life I. p. 231). Later commentators return the expected negative answer. Fussell extends the ‘brilliant’ architectural metaphor, and links it with Johnson’s distinction between legitimate imitation and plagiary in Rambler 143: Since building materials are always the same stones, bricks, wood, and iron, they can just as well be taken from existing masterpieces as directly from the quarry. There is as little cause for imputations of “plagiarism” in literature as in architecture, as Johnson explains in Rambler 143 …30
Baines points out that Johnson’s metaphor displaces ‘Lauder’s vocabulary of theft’.31 And Fix also agrees with Boswell’s challenge: Johnson’s language consistently suggests that Milton improved upon his sources so decisively, so skillfully, that the discovery of any “assistance” by which Paradise Lost “was executed” could only redound to Milton’s credit.
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He detects a continuity between this and the much later passage on the ‘rudiments of Paradise Lost’ in the ‘Life of Milton’ (Lives I. p. 261), where, he claims, ‘Johnson again uses the language of gestation.’32 But this obscures an interesting difference of emphasis. ‘Gestation’ accurately applies to the organic process suggested by the words ‘embryo’ (Preface) and ‘seminal’, ‘pregnant’ and ‘growth’ (‘Life of Milton’); but in the Preface human art is the dominant metaphor. In Paradise Lost itself, Milton discriminates between different kinds of creative process, divine and human. In his first invocation, he images the former as gestation – the Holy Spirit ‘Dovelike satst brooding on the vast abyss / And mad’st it pregnant’ (I. lines 21–2). Architecture, however, tends to be a much more ambivalent trope for seventeenth-century poets. For better or worse, architects exploit natural materials (‘So Architects do square and hew, / Green Trees that in the Forest grew’).33 They can build to God’s glory, or to man’s vainglory. In choosing an architectural analogy for literary genius, especially in the context of the end justifying the means, Johnson may indeed intend to honour Milton unequivocally, and he has certainly dazzled the critics. But with reference to Paradise Lost, this particular image shines with a borrowed brilliance that casts a shadow. The nearest equivalent in the poem itself to Johnson’s description of ‘the fabric gradually rising, perhaps from small beginnings, till its foundation rests in the centre, and its turrets sparkle in the skies’ is the creation of Pandemonium from the quarries of Hell: Anon out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation … … The ascending pile Stood fixed her stately height …
Paradise Lost I. lines 710–11, 722–3
Milton deliberately enhances the role of Mulciber, the demonic architect: … the work some praise And some the architect: his hand was known In heaven by many a towered structure high, Where sceptred angels held their residence, And sat as princes …
Paradise Lost I. lines 731–5
Architecture has a place in heaven as well as in hell, but the dual role of the architect could hardly be better illustrated. In heaven, he participates in glorifying a divinely ordered hierarchy; in hell, he can only imitate, inventing in the older sense, and working with materials obtained from
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violating nature (Paradise Lost I. line 687). Nevertheless, humanly speaking, his edifice is still one of sublime beauty. Like many readers, Johnson was impressed by Milton’s description, enough to use it as illustration and allusion.34 Whether such an allusion exists in the passage from the Preface – whether there is even a shadow of conscious ambivalence – it is impossible to say. But the possibility of an unconscious echo cannot be ruled out. For Paradise Lost, of all texts, to be at the centre of a plagiary case seems peculiarly apropos. Central to the epic, and to its foundation myth, is the question of origins, and hence originality; authorship, and rebellion against, denial and displacement of, authorship. Baines speaks of ‘the central transgressive action of Paradise Lost with its original Satanic forger’.35 Satan, the ‘first grand thief ’ (Paradise Lost IV. line 192) is the father of plagiarists, who not only copies the divine works, but also denies their source. In claiming his own originality, his self-authorship, he attempts to erase the authorship of God. Further, he enacts the root sense of plagiarist, a kidnapper or seducer, trapping Eve in his rhetorical net. Lauder’s accusation of plagiarism levelled against Milton might appear to realign the author with his own Satan, an identification that eighteenth-century critics work hard to avoid by separating the demonic rebel from the divinely inspired genius. Viewed in this light, the outrage of many readers over Lauder’s apparent revelation that Paradise Lost is built on a lie is even more understandable. When Johnson remakes Lauder’s weasel praise of ‘that noble poet, who certainly is intitled to the highest praise, for raising so beautiful a structure’36 in his architectural metaphor, he may unwittingly have cast Milton more in the role of Mulciber. Be that as it may, he makes full amends in the confessional letter dictated to Lauder, A Letter to the Reverend Mr. Douglas, Occasioned by his Vindication of Milton (1751). More than most writers, Johnson had the acute sensibility to put himself in the place of the sinner, and express penitence with authenticity and dignity as he does here. He acknowledges that the injuries are not merely personal: they are ‘to Milton, to Truth, and to Mankind’; but he appeals to our fallen humanity, asking that ‘those who shall continue implacable, will examine their own Hearts whether they have not committed equal Crimes without equal Proofs of Sorrow, or equal Acts of Atonement’. And no lasting wrong has been done: ‘the Shade which began to gather on the Splendour of Milton’ he declares to be ‘totally dispersed’.37 But is it? Although the case against the poet of Paradise Lost is dismissed, Lauder has another string
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to his bow. So fixated is he on the idea of Milton as Satanic hypocrite that he returns to the charge in a different context, which uncannily replicates his own crime. For the eighteenth-century reading public at large, Milton’s Achilles’ heel is his defence of the regicide. Having failed to discredit him as a poet, Lauder must have felt on surer ground when he turned to politics. In the impenitently titled King Charles I Vindicated from the Charge of Plagiarism, Brought against him by Milton, and Milton himself convicted of Forgery and a gross Imposition on the Public (1754), Lauder accuses Milton of a piece of political chicanery. The substance of the accusation, that Milton suborned the printer of Eikon Basilike to interpolate a prayer from Sidney’s Arcadia, so that Charles I might be exposed as a plagiarist by the perpetrator of the forgery, seems in the circumstances richly ironic. But Lauder is not the only begetter in this instance. The accusation had been given currency by Thomas Birch’s examination of the evidence in his 1738 edition, the Complete Collection of the prose works, although Birch was to reach a different conclusion about its probability in 1753. It was to outlast the Lauder affair, and, most damagingly for those who want to exonerate Johnson from injustice to Milton, it was repeated in Johnson’s ‘Life of Milton’ (Lives I. p. 254). But here the explanation is undeniably political. In a biographical context, Johnson alludes to the suspicion when discussing how political pressures can subvert conscience. For him, the Pamela prayer seems like a smoking gun, pointing towards Milton’s possible guilt in this particular instance; but this is entirely separate from the charge of plagiarism in the context of Paradise Lost, which Johnson does not revisit in the ‘Life’.38 However, Johnson may revive uncomfortable memories of the Lauder affair in its immediate aftermath, when he considers the responsibilities of a critic in Rambler 93, dated 5 February, 1751. This essay is embedded in a series of essays in which for the first time he makes a major critical engagement with the poetry of Paradise Lost; and it may be significant that he uses it to issue a kind of Critics’ Charter for dealing with dead authors: Upon these authors the critick is, undoubtedly, at full liberty to exercise the strictest severity, since he endangers only his own fame, and, like Aeneas when he drew his sword in the infernal regions, encounters phantoms which cannot be wounded. He may indeed pay some regard to established reputation; but he can by that shew of reverence consult only his own security, for all other motives are now at an end. (Yale IV. p. 134)
The timing of this is suggestive, following the exposure of the most notorious eighteenth-century attempt to wound the reputation of one of the
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most intimidating of literary ghosts. Milton’s reputation was certainly established, but for that very reason it provoked attention from a determined iconoclast like Lauder. Did Johnson, in claiming the critic’s right to mount such attacks – at his own risk – have recent events in mind? If so, he may be indirectly reassuring himself that the Lauder affair has not debarred him from exercising to the full his licence to criticise Paradise Lost in good faith.
Ch apter 6
Cutting a Colossus: Johnson’s criticism of Paradise Lost
So far as posterity is concerned, what sets in stone Johnson’s critical opinions of Paradise Lost is his ‘Life of Milton’ in Lives of the Poets. But these lapidary verdicts are carved out of a lifetime’s reading of Milton’s epic: they take shape, as it were, from the continual crashing of the ocean of Johnson’s mind against the Miltonic cliffs. Yet although there is something direct and elemental, even violent, in the encounter between critic and text, this metaphor images only a half-truth. Paradise Lost is not a natural phenomenon, as Johnson’s own choice of metaphor emphasises. He describes Milton’s colossal creation as precisely that, a Colossus cut by genius from a rock. For a critic to tackle such a textual Colossus, the mass of material has to be broken down into separate components; and where better to start than with what welds a poem together, its versification? The fact that Paradise Lost ‘rhymes not’ had caused contention from the outset, prompting the printer to elicit a notably unapologetic apologia from the author.1 It is with the subject of versification that Johnson himself begins his formal criticism of Paradise Lost. Pro s ody In the modern era, cases of alleged plagiarism like the Lauder affair can still make news headlines; it is harder to imagine any modern periodical, even a literary one, devoting a series of issues to a technical investigation of metre. Yet scarcely had the furore over Lauder’s defamation of Milton died down, than Johnson chose that medium in which to make his next intervention in Milton criticism.2 Nor is it the case that in so doing he is retreating to neutral territory, for eighteenth-century arguments about metre can generate considerable heat, if not always light, and are often ideologically laden. In Johnson’s own experience, a shared taste in metre can bond unlikely allies: 108
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He enlarged very convincingly upon the excellence of rhyme over blank verse in English poetry. I mentioned to him that Dr. Adam Smith, in his lectures upon composition, when I studied under him in the College of Glasgow, had maintained the same opinion strenuously, and I repeated some of his arguments. JOHNSON. ‘Sir, I was once in company with Smith, and we did not take to each other; but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have HUGGED him.’ (Life I. pp. 427–8)
But the general assumption is that the metrically like-minded will also turn out to be politically like-minded.3 This can also be linked to individual temperament: Lonsdale suggests that SJ’s objections to blank verse on linguistic and metrical grounds can seem at times to cover some deeper temperamental uneasiness about its loss of predictability and ‘distinctness’. (Lives I. p. 436)
Alternatively, his difficulties with the metre have been accounted for by early conditioning: his ear – T. S. Eliot’s ‘specialized ear’4 – was accustomed to the Augustan couplet and therefore unwilling to accommodate the sound of blank verse in non-dramatic genres. A modern analogy might be drawn with musical traditionalists who have problems with atonality. All these explanations are interesting and plausible, yet none seems quite to get to the deepest root of Johnson’s problem with blank verse in general and Milton’s in particular, perhaps because there is no single root. Why doesn’t Johnson seem to hear the music of Paradise Lost as we do (or think we do)? Or indeed as a number of other eighteenth-century readers, such as Samuel Say or William Cowper, hear it? Whatever the answer, his attitude affects his criticism of Milton’s poetry, and his capacity to experience it as poetry. And this is where the Rambler essays offer important evidence. This sequence of essays conducts a rigorous and sustained exercise in close textual reading, and for that reason alone they set up an interesting methodological contrast with the later ‘Life of Milton’. In Rambler 86, Johnson prepares the ground with an elaborate preamble, staking his claim to a critical space which, he claims, Addison has left virtually vacant in his celebrated Spectator series: Addison, though he has considered this poem under most of the general topicks of criticism, has barely touched upon the versification …
probably not because it was ‘unworthy of his notice’ but because … being the first who undertook to display the beauties, and point out the defects of Milton, he had many objects at once before him, and passed willingly over those which were most barren of ideas, and required labour, rather than genius. (Yale IV. pp. 88–9)
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Johnson’s tactics are shrewd. Like any modern academic, he identifies what he says is a gap in the market; he also identifies the chief authority in the field, to whom he defers, but whom at the same time he challenges; and he modestly deprecates his undertaking, while asserting its necessity. None of this should be taken entirely at face value, least of all the first. Far from a gap in the market, there is a glut of studies of Miltonic prosody after Addison. If we take only one decade, from 1739 to 1749, these include William Benson’s Letters concerning Poetical Translations, and Virgil’s and Milton’s Arts of Verse (1739); Edward Manwaring’s Of Harmony and Numbers (1744); James Harris’s Three Treatises (1744); Samuel Say’s Essay on the Harmony, Variety, and Power of Numbers (1745); and John Mason’s Essay on the Power of Numbers, and the Principles of Harmony in Poetical Compositions (1749). Naturally, Milton editors and commentators also weigh in on the subject of versification, from Bentley and the elder Jonathan Richardson in the early 1730s to Thomas Newton in the first variorum edition of Paradise Lost (1749, second edition 1750). Writing in 1751, Johnson mentions none of these by name,5 but he adopts a similar method of demonstration from quoted examples, and (up to a point) similar assumptions and terminology. Eighteenth-century experts on prosody may differ sharply in their judgement of Milton’s blank verse technique, but they ‘are unanimous in interpreting Milton as writing an analogue of the classical prosody’.6 Johnson likewise takes this premise as given: Milton formed his scheme of versification by the poets of Greece and Rome, whom he proposed to himself for his models so far as the difference of his language from theirs would permit the imitation. (Yale IV. p. 110)
And there’s the rub: English verse on this model must always struggle to match its gold standard, and inevitably fall short, because of ‘inconveniencies, which it is no reproach to Milton not to have overcome, because they are in their own nature insuperable; but against which he has struggled with so much art and diligence, that he may at least be said to have deserved success’ (Yale IV. p. 110). What Johnson does reproach Milton with is that, to his ear, the struggle is too much in evidence; as he was to write of Gray, ‘His art and his struggle are too visible, and there is too little appearance of ease and nature’ (Lives IV. p. 183). Milton’s characteristic liberties with metre – inverted stresses and substitutions, the use of elision, the irregularity of the caesura – have ‘left our harsh cadences yet harsher’ (Yale IV. p. 102). Worse, by his choice of measure he courts the ‘danger of losing the very form of verse’ (Yale IV.
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p. 111). Johnson is far from alone in singling out these features of Milton’s blank verse, but some of the writers on harmony and numbers seem able to accommodate them within a more liberal theory of prosodic effects. Even Johnson has to concede that perfectly regular metre would soon pall in a long poem: if irregularity damages the harmony of individual lines, they are sacrificed not only so that monotony may be avoided, but also to heighten awareness ‘of the harmony of the pure measure’ (Yale IV. p. 90). He illustrates the principle from the passage beginning: Thus at their shady lodge arriv’d, both stood, Both turn’d, and under open sky ador’d The God that made both sky, air, earth, and heav’n …
Paradise Lost IV. lines 720–22
Johnson describes the double strong stress on the syllables ‘both stood / Both turn’d’ as ‘licentious’7 in its departure from the basic rhythm of the iambic pentameter; although he does not find this instance as displeasing to the ear as some others, he concludes in Rambler 86 that frequent violations of regularity set a bad precedent: … a poet who, not having the invention or knowledge of Milton, has more need to allure his audience by musical cadences, should seldom suffer more than one aberration from the rule in any single verse. (Yale IV. p. 92)
Although he implies that Milton is the exception who can rise above the rules of prosody, he also gives the impression that if we were to read Milton for the musical cadences, we would hang ourselves; we must read him for the invention and knowledge. In contrast, William Benson invites the reader to share a different perception of how cadence reinforces invention by quoting the same passage. According to Benson, the repetition of heavily stressed monosyllables – ‘both stopt [sic]/ Both turn’d’ – ‘has a wonderful Effect’: This artful Manner of writing makes the Reader see them Stop and Turn to worship God before they went into their Bower.8
The key phrase is ‘makes the Reader see …’, and it highlights a fundamental difference between Johnson’s view of the function of verse and the view held by those writers who do read Paradise Lost for the sound as well as the sense. Perhaps the most divisive principle in eighteenth-century prosodic theory is that formulated by Pope in his Essay on Criticism: ‘The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense’ (line 365).9 A number of commentators on Paradise Lost, such as the Richardsons, enthusiastically endorse it as an
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explanation of the poem’s prosodic peculiarities, while others, such as Richard Bentley,10 are pulled in conflicting directions. Predictably, the elder Jonathan Richardson plunges joyfully into this wonderful world of creative sound effects – ‘Sound is abundantly more Expressive of the Sense than is Commonly Imagin’d’ – and he goes so far as to link it directly with the flexibility of blank verse, its indeterminate status between verse and prose (precisely the indeterminacy that troubles Johnson): Verse and Prose have Each their Peculiar Musick, and whether One, or the Other ’tis Different according to the Subject. All kinds of Verses have Sounds of their Own; Blank Verse comes nearest to Prose, and as the Prose of Some Writers Approaches Verse, Milton’s Blank Verse, That of Paradise Lost, has the Beauty of Both; it has the Sweetness of Measure, without stopping the Voice at the end of the Line, or Any where else but as the Sense requires; One Verse runs into Another, and the Period concludes in any part of a Line Indifferently, and as if ’twas his Choice ’tis very often Not at the End of One or of a Couplet, as is too Frequent with Those who write in Rime.11
Richardson’s apprehension of the ways in which syntax can play against rhythm, and the necessity of thinking in units larger than the line, seems more modern than, say, William Benson’s attempt to have it both ways. Benson strenuously tries to defend Milton’s blank verse, but he betrays an instinct that rhyme is the poetic norm. However, he has no difficulty with ‘The adapting the Sound to the Sense.’ ‘Who does not hear the Warbling of a Brook, the Rustling of Wings, the rough Sound of Trumpets and Clarions and the soft one of Flutes and Recorders in the following Lines?’ he asks rhetorically, listing various examples.12 As well as evoking sounds, Miltonic verse enacts movements: Who does not see Porpoises and Dolphins tumbling about in the Ocean when he reads this Line? [Paradise Lost VII. lines 409–12] … How does the Line labour when the Elephant is working himself through the stiff Clay, whilst the lesser Animals sprout up as it were in an Instant! (Paradise Lost VII. lines 470–2)13
Samuel Say likewise starts from the principle that ‘propriety of numbers’ ‘consists in Sounds adapted to the Sense’ but his metrical analysis is more sensitive on the whole than Benson’s. His choice of illustrations and technical explanations of their effect suggest a fine ear; and he recognises that the conditioning of ‘Modern Readers’ to expect harmony in the sense of regularity can limit their capacity actually to hear what Milton is doing. Like Johnson later in Rambler 86 (Yale IV. p. 93), he appropriates an image from Milton’s own sonnet addressed to the musician, Henry Lawes, to criticise crass scansion:
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… to scan With Midas’ ears, committing short and long;
but he uses it to criticise those who, like Bentley, reject the perceived irregularity of Milton’s metre, not as Johnson does to criticise irregular metre itself.14 Although Johnsonians have argued persuasively that his objections to irregularity are fundamentally ethical or political – in other words, ideologically based – it is nevertheless true that in the Rambler essays he not only expresses considerable respect for Milton’s artistry, but approaches the material first and foremost as a technician. He is playing the prosodists at their own game of minute metrical dissection, though with one eye on the possible tedium to a general reader. Numbering the streaks of the prosodic tulip may result in either ‘frighting us with rugged science, or amusing us with empty sound’ (Yale IV. p. 110). Yet the technicalities clearly interest him. He wants to understand how successfully Milton, as a kind of verse engineer, copes with what seems an intractable problem of adaptation, wiring up the metrical system of one language to another. What ultimately justifies the procedure must be the creation of ‘that harmony that adds force to reason, and gives grace to sublimity; that shackles attention, and governs passion’ (Yale IV. p. 99). So to speak, the physics of metre help to explain the metaphysical laws of harmony. Both as a poet and as a lexicographer, Johnson himself had worked intensively and intimately with the grain of the English language; he has earned the right to speak as an expert. In Rambler 88, he addresses specific concerns of the prosodists – the acceptability or otherwise of the English monosyllabic line, Milton’s use of elision and hypermetrical lines – primarily on the basis of how English has developed, and how it sounds (as opposed to classical and Romance languages). He appeals to ‘the genius of the English tongue’, and it is by this criterion that he judges Milton, brushing aside more lenient critics in the process: Milton … seems to have somewhat mistaken the nature of our language, of which the chief defect is ruggedness and asperity, and has left our harsh cadences yet harsher. (Yale IV. p. 102)
In this essay, he admits neither of the standard defences of Milton’s ‘harsh cadences’, namely their contribution to aural variety and to meaning.15 At the conclusion, his objection on linguistic grounds mutates into an objection on generic grounds. Milton has mistaken not only the nature of his chosen language, but also the nature of his chosen genre: the
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vagaries of blank verse are acceptable in drama, which is brought ‘by that relaxation of metrical rigour nearer to prose’, but not in heroic poetry (Yale IV. p. 104). At this point, technical vocabulary does acquire resonances associated with broader discourses, yet even here Johnson does not overtly identify Milton’s poetic liberties as a possible metaphor for other kinds of liberty. Certainly he exhibits disquiet over the failure to police boundaries, but the boundaries in question remain specifically linguistic and generic. Indeed, in his next essay on the subject, Rambler 90, Johnson questions the usual assumption that blank verse liberates the poet, asserting that ‘Milton was constrained within the narrow limits of a measure not very harmonious in the utmost perfection’ (Yale IV. p. 111) – a statement that seems to contradict the supposed political subtext. The simpler theory is that Johnson genuinely finds greater pleasure in English verse with end-rhyme, because it sounds to him more like poetry. That does not mean that he cannot hear other kinds of verbal music. In the same essay, his discussion of the caesura, which probably strikes a modern reader as extraordinarily mechanical, suddenly breaks out into an expression of personal pleasure that is plainer and more striking than some of the Miltonists’ rhapsodies: Some passages which conclude at this stop [on the sixth syllable of the line], I could never read without some strong emotions of delight or admiration. (Yale IV. p. 115)
What matters is less how he rationalises these emotions, as the fact that he experiences them. Indeed the essay reaches its climax with a tribute to Milton, qualified by the customary caveats regarding the limits of language and the need to compare like with like, but astonishing nonetheless in at last putting Milton’s artistry on a level with his intellectual eminence: If the poetry of Milton be examined, with regard to the pauses and flow of his verses into each other, it will appear, that he has performed all that our language would admit; and the comparison of his numbers with those who have cultivated the same manner of writing, will show that he excelled as much in the lower as the higher parts of his art, and that his skill in harmony was not less than his invention or his learning. (Yale IV. p. 115)
But Johnson has not yet finished with the verse of Paradise Lost. Possibly the most important essays in this sequence are Ramblers 92 and 94, where he decisively confronts the fashionable critical approach to reading Milton’s blank verse, based on the principle of sound echoing sense.16 The problem of subjective judgement is an ancient one in criticism and aesthetics; and
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for Johnson it is inextricably entwined with the larger problem that always fascinates him, the prevalence of imagination: There is nothing in the art of versifying so much exposed to the power of imagination as the accommodation of the sound to the sense, or the representation of particular images, by the flow of the verse in which they are expressed. (Yale IV. p. 122)
Having already tested the ground and found it unable to bear much if any intellectual weight, he proceeds to demolish the kind of impressionistic criticism in vogue among many eighteenth-century (and later) admirers of Paradise Lost. He does not deny that ‘The general resemblance of the sound to the sense is to be found in every language which admits of poetry’ (Yale IV. p. 135: my italics). As a poet himself, how could he? Nor does he exclude the appropriate use of onomatopoeia, of which he cites as an example, ‘the creaking of hell-gates’ in Paradise Lost II. lines 879–82 (Yale IV. p. 139). But if he trusts the writer to know what he is doing, his scepticism is fully aroused by the reader’s tendency to over-interpret sound-effects, superseding the writer’s control of his text: It is scarcely to be doubted, that on many occasions we make the musick which we imagine ourselves to hear; that we modulate the poem by our own disposition, and ascribe to the numbers the effects of the sense. (Yale IV. p. 136)
Sometimes he does accept a previously observed correspondence of sound to sense, such as the sound of flowing water evoked in Paradise Lost V. lines 195–6 (Yale IV. p. 137); sometimes he rejects a reading such as Newton’s note on Paradise Lost I. line 209, ‘So stretch’d out huge in length the archfiend lay’: ‘The length of this verse, consisting of so many monosyllables, and pronounc’d so slowly, is excellently adapted to the subject that it would describe.’17 Johnson reasons that this confuses duration and space – a logical observation (Yale IV. p. 142). But poetry is not necessarily logical. On a metaphorical and indeed linguistic level, the temporal and spatial can appear to coalesce, as in the phrase ‘stretch’d out’. The modern critic, Wayne Shumaker, writing on ‘Auditory Perception’ in Paradise Lost, speaks of ‘the creation, in the poetry, of acoustic effects which are metaphorical equivalents of meanings’ [my italics], a concept for which Johnson has no equivalent.18 As with his response to Lycidas, a deliberately literalist logic intervenes to block off and suffocate the rhetorical power of metaphor. Arguably, Johnson’s own readings do not escape subjectivity, for instance when he criticises Milton for not matching the sound to the sense: In another place [Paradise Lost XI. lines 847–9], he describes the gentle glide of ebbing waters in a line remarkably rough and halting. (Yale IV. p. 141)
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Arguably, too, he does not always take sufficient note of subtly discriminated contexts. He finds fault with Milton for having ‘given in two passages very minute descriptions of angelick beauty; but though the images are nearly the same, the numbers will be found upon comparison very different’ (Yale IV. p. 137). But the passages he quotes, Paradise Lost III. lines 636–42 and V. lines 277–87, describe respectively Satan, the fallen angel, in the guise of a stripling cherub, and Raphael, the unfallen angel, gloriously manifesting himself to Adam in Paradise. If the former really does have lines ‘remarkably defective in harmony’ compared to the latter ‘which equally delights the ear and imagination’ (Yale IV. p. 138), that may reflect the incongruity between Satan’s appearance and essence in contrast with the perfect harmony of Raphael’s. It is difficult to judge by ear alone the validity of eighteenth-century readings, without knowing how Paradise Lost was read aloud. If any variation at all from a metrical norm is admitted, it is almost if not entirely impossible to eliminate subjectivity in interpretation. What does need emphasising is that, while Johnson may criticise specific effects, he goes extraordinarily far in finding reasons to exonerate Milton’s verse, and to rescue it from the perceived excesses of his admirers. Indeed he credits Milton with considerable metrical sophistication and knowledge, as ‘both a musician and a critick’ (Yale IV. p. 137). He concludes this series of essays with a characteristic and dramatic peroration, shifting the argument to suggest that in the scheme of things there are far more important priorities than prosody: Milton, indeed, seems only to have regarded this species of embellishment so far as not to reject it when it came unsought; which would often happen to a mind so vigorous, employed upon a subject so various and extensive. He had, indeed, a greater and a nobler work to perform; a single sentiment of moral or religious truth, a single image of life or nature, would have been cheaply lost for a thousand echoes of the cadence to the sense; and he who had undertaken to “vindicate the ways of God to man,” [a double misquotation19] might have been accused of neglecting his cause, had he lavished much of his attention upon syllables and sounds. (Yale IV. pp. 142–3)
Though it could be a rhetorical gesture (of the kind that so maddened Milton-lovers like Anna Seward),20 I think that Johnson means what he says here. Not that he considers prosody a trivial matter – certainly it is too important to be left to critics of the Dick Minim variety – but that it has to be kept in perspective. Dick Minim, Johnson’s comic creation in the Idler, typifies the Milton critic who leaps on a bandwagon and is derailed by excessive enthusiasm. He adheres all too uncritically to the opinions he derives from others, most
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disastrously when it comes to versification: ‘He is the great investigator of hidden beauties, and is particularly delighted when he finds “the sound an echo to the sense”’ (Yale II. p. 188). Naturally he is of the blank verse persuasion, and ‘From blank verse he makes an easy transition to Milton’ (Yale II. p. 191), his contempt for ‘the monkish barbarity of rhyme’ parroting Milton’s own. He plumes himself on being the ideal Milton reader: Milton is the only writer whose books Minim can read for ever without weariness. What cause it is that exempts this pleasure from satiety he has long and diligently enquired, and believes it to consist in the perpetual variation of the numbers, by which the ear is gratified and the attention awakened. The lines that are commonly thought rugged and unmusical, he conceives to have been written to temper the melodious luxury of the rest, or to express things by a proper cadence: for he scarcely finds a verse that has not this favourite beauty … (Yale II. p. 191)
After this exaggeration of views that Johnson had more seriously countered in the Rambler essays, all that remains is to nail down Minim’s critical pretensions with a parody of close reading. What matters most to Minim are his own excited sensations: … he declares that he could shiver in a hot-house when he reads that … the ground Burns frore, and cold performs th’ effect of fire. And that when Milton bewails his blindness, the verse So thick a drop serene has quench’d these orbs, has, he knows not how, something that strikes him with an obscure sensation like that which he fancies would be felt from the sound of darkness.
(Yale II. pp. 191–2)
Minim – or more likely Johnson – quotes imprecisely, yet the point is made. Johnson parodies, with cruel accuracy, an excess of sensibility that softens and rots the critical faculty. The critic flaunts his heightened perceptions – dying of a rose in aromatic pain – without achieving analytical clarity or precision (and not every modern critic escapes moments of Minimalist folly).21 Johnson’s target is the theory that sanctions such practices, and the fact that Milton is the focus is no accident. Minim follows trends, he does not set them, and he ‘is not so confident of his rules of judgment as not very eagerly to catch new light from the name of the author’ (Yale II. p. 192) – like those readers of Lycidas who delude themselves into thinking they enjoy it because they know that it is by Milton
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(Lives I. p. 279). Minim may seem fatuous, but his guidance to the hopeful student which makes the latter resolve ‘to follow his genius, and to think how Milton would have thought’ (Yale II. p. 193) suggests a pernicious influence, and a warning to all Milton imitators. Long before Lives of the Poets, in this Idler essay22 Johnson is attacking not Milton but the eighteenth-century cult of Milton. The extent to which that cult identifies Milton’s blank verse with the sacredness of his subject is apparent in a work published in the same year as the Minim essays, Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). Young ingeniously applies the Fall paradigm to the history of prosody: in his version, the transition from ancient metre to modern rhyme enacts a Fall, and if Pope is the Lucifer who falls from the Homeric heaven, then Milton is the saviour who restores ‘deathless, divine harmony’: … what we mean by blank verse, is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaim’d, reinthron’d in the true language of the Gods; who never thunder’d, nor suffer’d their Homer to thunder, in Rhime …23
By the time that Johnson writes the ‘Life of Milton’, Minim’s brand of criticism (never exactly fresh) might be expected to seem stale. In fact, the public enthusiasm for Paradise Lost (and its metre) has, if anything, intensified. Amongst poets and critics, Thomas Gray and Lord Kames continue to sustain the defence of Milton’s versification on the grounds of its imaginative freedom.24 Since Johnson’s own views on prosody have not changed, it is his criticism that may appear increasingly conservative and old-fashioned. In the ‘Life of Milton’, he no longer feels the need for – or is prepared to devote space to – the kind of close analysis he offers in The Rambler. But his judgements on Milton’s versification summarise his original position, which, if anything, has become more hardline. The remarks on blank verse scattered throughout the Lives of the Poets with very few exceptions reinforce a negative attitude, though it should be remembered that in most cases he is dealing with practitioners who are far inferior to Milton.25 However, he makes it clear in virtually every instance that the choice of blank verse can only make inferior poetry worse: ‘the disgust which blank verse, encumbering and encumbered, superadds to an unpleasing subject, soon repels the reader, however willing to be pleased’ (Lives IV. p. 125). Even in the case of a poet of Pope’s stature, it can only be ‘adopted with great imprudence, and, I think, without due consideration of the nature of our language’
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(Lives IV. p. 51). Milton himself would have benefited ‘if he had written after the improvements made by Dryden’ (Lives II. p. 69). As for lesser poets, Johnson can be scathing about attempts either to parody or to imitate Miltonic numbers. Yet if the cumulative effect is of his settled aversion to blank verse, an aversion which in the Lives – unlike the Rambler essays – tends to be asserted rather than argued, there are occasional exceptions. He praises Thomson because he breaks away from the Miltonic model and does something original with the form in The Seasons, ‘one of the works in which blank verse seems properly used’ (Lives IV. p. 104). Does Paradise Lost itself come into this category? Johnson’s remark in the ‘Life of J. Philips’ suggests that it does, and that Milton is not to blame for his imitators. Philips’s error is to suppose that he is imitable, to believe … that the numbers of Milton, which impress the mind with veneration, combined as they are with subjects of inconceivable grandeur, could be sustained by images which at most can rise only to elegance. Contending angels may shake the regions of heaven in blank verse … (Lives II. p. 70)
(the final sentence wonderfully combines prose rhythm and meaning). For Johnson, ‘If blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is crippled prose’ (Lives III. p. 119): Milton’s blank verse is nothing if not gorgeous. In the ‘Life of Milton’, Johnson locks horns with Milton himself rather than goring and tossing his eighteenth-century acolytes. Taking as his starting point Milton’s famous defence of his metre, he surveys succinctly the history of English blank verse, repeating the allegation (originally Dryden’s)26 that Milton ‘finding blank verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading himself that it is better’ (Lives I. p. 294). He then rehearses his reasons for believing that, in English, it is not better, reasons already canvassed in the Rambler essays. Fundamentally, his case rests on the nature of the English language, and its difference from ‘languages melodiously constructed’: ‘The musick of the English heroick line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost’ (Lives I. p. 294). To clinch his argument, he appeals to experience, the experience of listening to verse read aloud, and for the last time attacks the familiar defence of the critical opposition: The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin. Blank verse, said an ingenious critick, seems to be verse only to the eye. (Lives I. p. 294)
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In Rambler 90, Johnson had also made the ear the criterion. He was accustomed to poetry spoken in informal social settings as well as in the theatre; and, in all fairness, he has a point. To read blank verse well does require skill, and an inexperienced reader may all too easily turn it into mangled prose. What Johnson fails to credit sufficiently in non-dramatic blank verse is the potential for greater subtleties than end-rhyme in itself can provide. In reading aloud, declamation may be the default mode, but it is far from being the only option. In addition, as some fine modern criticism has proved, Milton can exploit devices such as internal rhymes and the line-ending itself with greater freedom and complexity than the couplet would allow.27 But for Johnson, this very flexibility strands blank verse in a limbo where it has the worst of both worlds, not the best: it ‘has neither the easiness of prose, nor the melody of numbers, and therefore tires by long continuance’ (Lives I. p. 294). In his century, the opportunity to experience Paradise Lost in rhyme was not far to seek: beginning with Dryden in The State of Innocence, there was no shortage of eager adaptors.28 But his last word on the prosody of Paradise Lost once more acknowledges the uniqueness of Milton: But, whatever be the advantage of rhyme, I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is … (Lives I. p. 294)
Griffin’s comment on the language he uses is characteristically acute: ‘Johnson’s verb is significant: Milton robs him of his usually magisterial control over his subject and his own reaction.’29 Yet, if he capitulates, it is not total capitulation, more a dignified gesture that leaves his principles intact. Having crossed swords with an opponent worthy of his steel, Johnson finally salutes Milton as a hero who ‘like other heroes … is to be admired rather than imitated’ (Lives I. p. 294). The eighteenth-century obsession with the prosody of Paradise Lost has been admired and shared by relatively few modern Miltonists, with some distinguished exceptions. This reflects larger changes in literary culture: because of the major shift in how poetry is written and read in the modern period, it seems unlikely that the controversy over the relative merits of blank verse and rhyme will ever resurface. Yet both forms are alive and well. It might have astonished Johnson (though perhaps proving his point about the dramatic efficacy of blank verse) that in the early twenty-first century, an adaptation of Paradise Lost30 retaining much of its original verse form could be commercially, and successfully, staged for audiences. And critics still cite Johnson on Milton’s prosody.31
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Dic t ion Johnson’s resistance to Miltonic blank verse is at least consistent with his own avoidance of it in his non-dramatic poetry. However, as Miltonists gleefully or indignantly note, his strictures on Milton’s language can be levelled against his own style (pots and kettles come to mind). When he accuses Milton of forming a style ‘by a perverse and pedantick principle’, of forcing English into an excessively Latinate mode (Lives I. p. 293), he makes an accusation often directed against himself by contemporaries and later critics.32 As with metre, more is at stake than a mere technicality, for the use of language is tied in with national identity. The Englishness of Milton and Johnson is crucial to their position in the canon of English literature. For his eighteenth-century readers, Milton is the most serious contender that British culture has to put forward in the epic stakes; Johnson is the single-handed rival of the French Academy in his making of the Dictionary of the English Language. In the case of Paradise Lost, it is precisely because of the constantly reiterated comparison with Homer and Virgil that the linguistic issue becomes so prominent. From the late seventeenth century onwards, Paradise Lost had been treated as if it were a classical text, with the result that its linguistic features play a very prominent part in the various commentaries and editions. For this and other reasons, it came to be taken for granted that Milton was indeed writing a kind of hybrid language heavily influenced by Latin and Greek idiom, though whether this was to be approved or deplored was a matter of taste and principle.33 By the time he writes the paragraphs on diction in the ‘Life of Milton’, Johnson is summarising conclusions that are common critical currency, but which require him to take sides in a sometimes acrimonious debate. Of the available critical sources, Johnson singles out Addison by name as his target. But Addison’s Spectator essays of 1712, while influential, represent only one voice among many. It is Milton’s editors and commentators who construct the foundations on which critics build. Patrick Hume had set the standard for etymological investigation of the language of Paradise Lost in 1695; Bentley, to whom nothing is sacred, effectively remakes the diction of Paradise Lost in his own image under the rubric of ‘a Restoration of the Genuine Milton’ (Preface, 1732); Pearce and others, reacting against Bentley, review the text and endorse Milton’s coinage of words; the Richardsons revel in Milton’s verbal profusion; and so it continues. Bentley, in fact, did Milton criticism and editing a service, by forcing those who would refute his conjectures to produce close textual analysis in defence of the original readings.34 Milton’s defenders and detractors
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form up in predictable battle lines on the subject of language: twenty years before Bentley, Addison remarks that ‘the learned World is very much divided upon Milton as to this Point,’ and the divisions persist.35 But they do not fundamentally dissent from Johnson’s later formulation, ‘Through all his greater works, there prevails an uniform peculiarity of Diction’ (Lives I. p. 293). According to Milton’s admirers, the reason for this peculiarity lies not so much in his acknowledged mastery of other languages – in which, though eminent, he is not unique – as in the sublimity of his subject. For Jonathan Richardson, Milton’s linguistic abilities are a means to an end, empowering him to create a new language, ‘Miltonick English’ – ‘Milton’s Language is English, but ’tis Milton’s English; ’tis Latin, ’tis Greek English’ – a language that needs to be created to serve ‘that Sublimity of Subject in which he perpetually Engages his Readers’.36 Clearly aware of this rationale, Johnson goes on the attack in the ‘Life of Milton’. But, oddly perhaps, he makes Addison represent the collective judgement of ‘those who can find nothing wrong in Milton’ – oddly, because although Addison does justify Milton’s deliberate stylistic elevation and departure from idiomatic English, he also thinks that ‘his Stile, tho’ admirable in general, is in some places too much stiffened and obscured by the frequent use of those Methods’.37 Indeed, Johnson’s direct quote – ‘Our language, says Addison, sunk under him’ (Lives I. p. 293) – comes from the paper in which Addison analyses stylistic defects: the sublimity of Paradise Lost strains the resources of English beyond its capacity to cope ‘without having Recourse to … Foreign Assistances’. Like God’s fallen creation, Milton’s native language cannot bear the blaze of his divine genius: Our Language sunk under him, and was unequal to that greatness of Soul, which furnished him with such glorious Conceptions.38
When criticising Milton’s metre in The Rambler, Johnson had similarly imputed its deficiencies to the nature of the English language. However, in the case of diction, he will not accept this excuse. He demolishes the defence based on sublimity of subject or greatness of soul, by relying on the evidence of Milton’s prose as well as his verse to demonstrate that the ‘perverse and pedantick principle’ is a conscious choice: ‘He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom’ (my italics: Lives I. p. 293). Relatively few eighteenth-century readers, as Johnson knew, would care to claim that Milton’s prose polemic is furnished with glorious conceptions. Not until the advent of modern scholarship has the prose style been fully reassessed in relation to its historical and linguistic context;39 for the eighteenth century,
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that context is at once too distant and too close. Yet, arguably, Johnson is in a better position than most to appreciate both contexts. His work on the Dictionary had developed an acute awareness of how language inevitably evolves, and the processes that shape it. Among the influences he considers in his Preface to the Dictionary is an education that privileges ‘skill in ancient or in foreign tongues’: he adds ‘He that has long cultivated another language, will find its words and combinations croud upon his memory’, with the result that he ‘will obtrude borrowed terms and exotick expressions’ (Yale XVIII. p. 108). Milton certainly fits this category.40 Long before writing the ‘Life of Milton’, Johnson had linked Milton with Sir Thomas Browne to exemplify a particular phase of English linguistic history, a phase which for him was characterised by excessive individuality and instability: our language … was considered by every writer as a subject on which he might try his plastick skill, by moulding it according to his own fancy. MILTON, in consequence of this encroaching licence, began to introduce the Latin idiom: and BROWNE, though he gave less disturbance to our structures and phraseology, yet poured in a multitude of exotick words.41
It is not hard to see why Johnson should have misgivings over linguistic innovations that seem to be driven by sheer eccentricity, and that threaten to swamp native language habitats with aggressively exotic foreign immigrants. Milton offends against both patriotism and the principle of accessibility for the ‘unlearned reader’42 (Lives I. p. 293). Yet, in Johnson’s Proposals for his Shakespeare edition, where he points out that only someone well-versed in seventeenth-century literature can judge its linguistic innovations – ‘Addison himself has been … unsuccessful in enumerating the words with which Milton has enriched our language’ (Yale VII. p. 54: my italics) – the use of ‘enriched’ implies a positive gain. In the ‘Life of Milton’, Johnson gives no actual examples of Milton’s transgressive diction. But for a multitude of Miltonic examples, we have only to go to his Dictionary, recently published in its fourth edition (1773): modern technology makes the size of that multitude immediately obvious. And plethora gives rise to paradox: how is it that a writer, who is described by eighteenth-century admirers and detractors alike as using English in an unEnglish way, features so prominently in the great lexicographer’s illustration of English usage? (Incidentally, Milton is the leading exemplar in ‘A Grammar of the English Tongue’ as well as in the fourth edition of the Dictionary, though Johnson is careful to point out where his grammar is ‘rather … poetical than regular’.)43
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The surge in Milton quotations, especially quotations from Paradise Lost, in the fourth edition of the Dictionary might be explained in various ways. Allen Reddick offers a thesis that foregrounds not only Johnson’s own engagement with the poem, but, more controversially, the intended effect on users of this edition. His general deduction seems absolutely justified: The predominance of Johnson’s borrowings and the extent of the quoting imply that he was possessed in a profound way by the poem, as if its lines suggested fresh meanings or significance, linguistic, spiritual, or otherwise, for him at this later stage of his life.44
The possible effect on dictionary users is more difficult (if not impossible) to demonstrate conclusively. Yet Johnson’s burdened sense of responsibility for his project, in particular the choice and arrangement of quotations, is fully manifested in the original Preface. He recalls his early idealism – ‘When first I collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word’ – and says with wistful irony that he started with the vision of a poet, though he was ‘doomed at last to wake a lexicographer’ (Yale XVIII. pp. 93, 100). Inevitably the ideal becomes compromised, but it still determines principles of inclusion and exclusion. Milton’s name appears in the section of the Preface where Johnson advances his patriotic credentials and the Dictionary’s bid for immortality: I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle. (Yale XVIII. p. 110)
Milton is the only poet on this distinguished shortlist;45 and clearly it is his poetry, not his prose, that Johnson has in mind. Quotations from the prose in the Dictionary are few and far between. Reddick explains this as effectively a form of ideological censorship, comparing Johnson’s attitude to Hobbes – ‘“I might have quoted Hobbes as an authority in language … but I scorned, sir, to quote him at all; because I did not like his principles.”’46 This makes it all the more interesting that comparable censorship does not seem to be exercised on the much more powerful text of Paradise Lost: we might expect, for instance, that Johnson would avoid illustration from the notoriously political Nimrod passage (Paradise Lost XII. lines 24–8), but he cites it under ‘arrogate’. An additional explanation that might be offered for the overwhelming predominance of Milton’s poetry in the Dictionary
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is that his ‘authority in language’ simply cannot be ignored. Paradise Lost alone has a massive stylistic influence on later writing. Apart from the sheer quantity of quotations (this in itself implies that Johnson regards Milton’s poetry as being in the mainstream of English usage), the treatment of these quotations reinforces the point. To return to the Preface: when Johnson states that ‘foreign idiom’ has to be included in an English dictionary as a matter of record, he appends a characteristic value-judgement on its use: The words which our authours have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion, or lust of innovation, I have registred as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives. (Yale XVIII. p. 85)
On the basis of the passages in the ‘Life of Browne’ and the ‘Life of Milton’, we would naturally expect Milton’s language to incur such censure. An examination of Johnson’s practice suggests otherwise. Of course he registers singular words derived from Latin for which Milton is cited as sole authority, sometimes via the commentators: for example, on ‘ardours’ taken as a synonym for ‘seraphim’, a sense given by Robert Thyer in Newton’s variorum edition of Paradise Lost, Johnson observes, ‘This is only used by Milton.’ Or he notes of the verb ‘amerce’, a word taken over from legal discourse by Spenser and Milton, that ‘Sometimes it is used, in imitation of the Greek construction, with the particle “of ”’, citing Paradise Lost I. lines 609–10. But where is the censure or warning against ‘useless foreigners’? Moreover, while Miltonic examples do figure largely, as we might assume, in illustrations of more exotic or abstruse vocabulary, they also figure largely in illustrations of the most ordinary everyday ‘native’ words: from the nuts and bolts of language (the preposition ‘at’ for instance) to frequently used basic vocabulary of Germanic origin (‘same’, ‘see’, ‘self’), Milton’s poetry proves itself to be crafted from robustly English material. Nor does Johnson’s expanded choice of quotations for the fourth edition rely upon random recollection; as Reddick has established, he makes methodical use of Alexander Cruden’s ‘Verbal Index’, printed with the Newton Paradise Lost, just as for Biblical quotations he makes use of Cruden’s more famous Concordance – but with a crucial difference: Johnson used this index to direct him to usable passages in the text (unlike the case of Cruden’s Concordance, he could not simply lift passages directly from the index, which only supplied locations of word usage), extracting from the poem long and generous illustrations of word usage, occasionally including some of Newton’s commentary on the poem.47
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The significance of this procedure is clear and startling. The ‘Verbal Index’ is not just a mechanical tool: it sends Johnson back to critical reading of the text, and to an assessment of the nuances of its verbal choices, an assessment which is at least as rigorous as that of the many commentaries on Paradise Lost. Once the dotted lines of thousands of individual words are joined up, the fourth edition of the Dictionary supplies a kind of equivalent to these commentaries. Indeed, his contemporaries recognised this potential in the first edition. The compiler of A Familiar Explanation of the Poetical Works of Milton (1762) uses it as a resource in conjunction with Addison’s critical essays and Newton’s edition of Paradise Lost. As the Rev. Mr. Dodd observes in his Preface, ‘The Explanation of mere Words are generally taken from Mr. Johnson’s very useful Dictionary, and that in reference only to the Sense wherein Milton applies them.’48 Evidently Johnson’s linguistic appraisal of Paradise Lost is more deeply embedded in his lexicon than in the obvious source, his literary criticism. He says in the ‘Life of Milton’ that ‘in displaying the excellence of Milton, I have not made long quotations, because of selecting beauties there had been no end’ (Lives I. p. 288), an assertion paralleling his dry analogy in the ‘Preface to Shakespeare’: ‘he that tries to recommend [Shakespeare] by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen’ (Yale VII. p. 62). But as lexicographer, not critic, he had already made his selection on the grand scale – a selection which, in Milton’s case, seriously qualifies his insistence in the ‘Life’ that the diction of the poetry is essentially unEnglish. Even in the relevant passages of the ‘Life of Milton’, we feel, as so often with Johnson, the strong deep undertow of contradiction. After appearing to judge the style of poetry and prose by the same standard, his resistance to the ‘perverse and pedantick principle’ suddenly collapses: … but such is the power of his poetry, that his call is obeyed without resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and a nobler mind, and criticism sinks in admiration. (Lives I. p. 293)
For those who see Johnson’s complex responses to Milton in terms of a power struggle, the connotations of ‘captivity’ tend to be negative.49 But superimposed on the agonistic image of male combat leading to enforced submission is a somewhat different metaphor, that of poetry’s power to seduce. Johnson or the reader may still be a Samson figure, but he is overcome not by Harapha but by Dalila. Johnson clings to the notion that Milton’s linguistic creation is outlandish and exotic – ‘what Butler calls
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a Babylonish Dialect, in itself harsh and barbarous’ – but it is a creation capable of transformation, ‘made by exalted genius, and extensive learning, the vehicle of so much instruction and so much pleasure, that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity’ (Lives I. p. 293). Again this echoes earlier judgements,50 but Johnson adds an unexpectedly erotic simile. Milton’s genius transfigures his ‘Babylonish Dialect’, making it a thing of grace, a jolie laide. Yet, as with sexual bondage, there is one way of escape from this captivity: through mockery. In the ‘Life of J. Philips’, we find Johnson turning to The Splendid Shilling for light relief: To degrade the sounding words and stately construction of Milton, by an application to the lowest and most trivial things, gratifies the mind with a momentary triumph over that grandeur which hitherto held its captives in admiration … (Lives II. p. 69)
But he recognises that a law of diminishing returns applies to this kind of parody;51 the escape is temporary – ‘a momentary triumph’ – the captivity constantly renewed. In Johnson’s final verdict on the subject of diction in the ‘Life of Milton’, grandeur eclipses deformity: Whatever be the faults of his diction, he cannot want the praise of copiousness and variety: he was master of his language in its full extent; and has selected the melodious words with such diligence, that from his book alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned. (Lives I. p. 293)
This is the rationale on which the representation of Milton’s poetry in the Dictionary rests. In praise, as in condemnation, Johnson is saying nothing new about Milton’s style (towards the end of the previous century, Charles Gildon had declared that Milton ‘discovers himself a perfect, unimitable Master of Language’),52 but he says it with the weight of his authority as a lexicographer, not only as a critic. Understandably, perhaps, critics of Johnson and admirers of Milton underline the condemnation and edit out the praise. What the majority of earlier critics fail to question is the truism itself, the belief that Milton’s style is an alien form of English modelled on the classical languages. Monboddo, indeed, goes further than Johnson in claiming that the major shaping force is Greek, rather than Latin or Italian: ‘it is evident, that not only his English, but his Latin, is cut upon Greek, as much, or perhaps more, than that written by any Roman’.53 He sneers at Johnson’s lack of scholarship and taste, which, he alleges, accounts for the ‘Babylonish Dialect’ insult. The perception that Johnson represents an entirely hostile and dismissive response to Milton’s grand style persists into the modern period, providing ammunition for the skirmishes of the Milton controversy. ‘The
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essence of the permanent censure of Milton is, I believe, to be found in Johnson’s essay’ asserts T. S. Eliot, including diction under that permanent censure.54 Ironically, although the twentieth-century rehabilitation of the grand style begins with a return to eighteenth-century editors and commentators,55 the assumption that Johnson is a hostile witness has gone virtually unchallenged. In the last half-century, this revaluation of Milton’s language has been accelerated by linguistic studies that radically dispute the long-standing premise that Milton’s syntax and diction are unEnglish.56 One approach suggested by Johnson has indeed been implemented, the suggestion that Milton’s prose as well as his verse needs to be examined; but, contrary to his supposition, the result has been to question, rather than confirm, the ‘Latinity’ of both.57 Conversely, from another angle, the research of John K. Hale has demonstrated the value of Milton’s multilingualism in relation to his choice of English as his creative medium: ‘his languages came to intersect where they could best intersect, within his English’.58 When it comes to Paradise Lost, Hale prefers to move away from the context of ‘eighteenth-century editors or twentieth-century critical warfare,’ and to focus instead on the pleasure of reading Paradise Lost in full awareness of its linguistic complexity59 – a pleasure of which Johnson was also fully capable, and which, however perversely, he acknowledges. Just because Johnson is such an authoritative figure, it is his name that is attached to an assessment of Milton’s style that is now considered at best obsolete, at worst actively pernicious. For one of the best modern analysts of Milton’s language, Johnson’s ‘foreign idiom’ phrase flags an untenable position; he is seen as the most influential transmitter of ‘the malign legacy of eighteenth-century scholarship’.60 More mildly, one of the best of Milton’s modern editors reminds us that ‘To the extent that we have historical dictionaries, we are in a better position than Dr Johnson to estimate the degree of Milton’s Latinity.’61 What I propose is that Johnson’s own work as an historical lexicographer should be taken more seriously in Milton scholarship, and used to qualify his contentious, if not entirely one-sided, commentary on diction in the ‘Life of Milton’. F or m a n d s u bj e c t Johnson’s brief treatment of Milton’s verse and style in the ‘Life of Milton’, however provocative, has aroused less controversy in the history of Milton studies than the heart of his critical project, when he confronts Paradise Lost as a whole, combining form and subject. Here he addresses problems that remain at the core of many readers’ experience; indeed, the very attempt to comprehend it as a totality is part of
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the problem. The sense that in Paradise Lost we are dealing not with one poem but with two in one, text and anti-text as it were, persists in critical readings; and, in what has been called the ‘New Milton Criticism’, the pressure for a paradigm shift has led to insistence on conflict, contradiction, and indeterminacy.62 Johnson’s own habit of antithetical thinking is deeply ingrained. His chosen method of balancing excellencies against defects – the method that he had also applied to Shakespeare – appears to offer a means of explicating tensions inherent in the text itself, and in his response to it.63 But it does not quite work out like that. We might expect positive and negative to form a clearly defined structural antithesis. Yet what strikes many readers are the difficulties of perceiving how exactly they are related, and of constructing from individual components a coherent view of a single poem. We are conscious of critical praise and condemnation permeating each other, so that judgements seem to reverse themselves, destabilising rather than supporting the argument as a whole. To complicate matters further, there are Johnson’s silences to account for, the critical problems he refuses to acknowledge, or acknowledges only indirectly. He begins systematically with formal considerations which are part of the technical equipment of any eighteenth-century critic working within broadly neoclassical parameters. But this strategy for asserting authority and intellectual control over the material gradually disintegrates under the pressure of a more fundamental power, the power of poetry to disturb and evade critical categories. In theory, according to Johnson, pleasure and truth, imagination and reason, unite in the art of poetry (Lives I. p. 282); in practice, these abstractions may tear each other apart. It is almost as if Johnson sets out to measure this epic by the standard criteria for judging epics, only to be blown off course by the force of poetry itself. It cannot be said that he underestimates his task however: I am now to examine Paradise Lost; a poem, which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance the second, among the productions of the human mind. (Lives I. p. 282)
Like his predecessors, Johnson starts his formal analysis with genre. As they all recognise, Paradise Lost as an English epic consciously challenges comparison and contrast with classical epic. Interested as he is in creative choices and processes, Johnson had already remarked in the Lauder preface on the fact that the concept of Paradise Lost was originally attached to a different genre, that of drama; and in the ‘Life of Milton’ he reproduces the outlines from the Trinity manuscript first published by Thomas Birch in 1738 (Lives I. pp. 258–61).64 But in his main criticism he accepts the traditional generic
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hierarchy which accords epic the highest place, and follows an organised scheme of generic topics very similar to that of Addison. In his highly influential sequence of general papers on Paradise Lost published in the Spectator, Addison had focused in turn on fable/action, characters, sentiment, and language, concluding with an examination of defects, divided under the same headings. Johnson deviates from this pattern only by placing the moral first, after the example of Le Bossu which was endorsed by Dryden.65 At this stage of his discussion, he appears deliberately to hold back any personal involvement. As he remarks of Satan, ‘his expressions are commonly general’ (Lives I. p. 284). Only when he later returns to these topics under the rubric of censure, not praise, does he probe the more problematic nature of Milton’s literary choices. It seems as if, writing formally under the dictates of a conventional neoclassical scheme, Johnson writes in fetters, not at liberty. That is not to say that there is nothing of interest in his formalist criticism of Paradise Lost. Johnson is too acutely intelligent, and writes too well, to be accused of simply going through the motions, ticking the boxes. But he makes it clear that he is very aware of the limitations of such criticism as practised by his predecessors. As Lonsdale observes, Johnson ‘distances himself with mild irony from epic theory, while continuing to adopt its topics’ (Lives I. p. 418). One reason for this distancing may simply be weariness (which anyone who has read much eighteenthcentury criticism of Paradise Lost might appreciate). But it is also prompted by his sense that this academic quibbling is largely beside the point: The questions, whether the action of the poem be strictly one, whether the poem can be properly termed heroick, and who is the hero, are raised by such readers as draw their principles of judgement rather from books than from reason. (Lives I. p. 285)
Nevertheless, Johnson does not disdain to adjudicate on the identity of the hero, crisply dismissing the ‘established practice’ that leads Dryden to rule out Adam, and thereby implying that the poem centres on humanity: there is no reason why the hero should not be unfortunate … however, if success be necessary, Adam’s deceiver was at last crushed; Adam was restored to his Maker’s favour, and therefore may securely resume his human rank. (Lives I. pp. 285–6)
So far, Johnson has taken issue only with Milton’s critics; he has said little or nothing to offend the most ardent general reader of Paradise Lost. Even where the critics are concerned, his commentary has been more often consensual and constructive than controversial. He goes out of his way to repeat and strengthen Addison’s defence of the integrity of Milton’s design.66 More strikingly still, in view of his reservation about Milton’s
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self-representation in his inductions (Lives I. p. 268), he follows Addison and Voltaire in stressing their poetic value.67 Here Johnson appeals to a fundamental principle in his own criticism, the response of the common reader:68 … superfluities so beautiful, who would take away? or who does not wish that the author of the Iliad had gratified succeeding ages with a little knowledge of himself? Perhaps no passages are more frequently or more attentively read than those extrinsick paragraphs; and, since the end of poetry is pleasure, that cannot be unpoetical with which all are pleased. (Lives I. p. 285)
If he feels that the induction to Book IX is one instance where poetry does not unite pleasure and (biographical) truth, even so the inductions give access to the creative mind. Indeed, it is precisely when he turns his full attention to the nature of the mind that created Paradise Lost, that we can recognise a strong involvement with the idea of imagination which always fascinated him. The key that unlocks the combination of the Miltonic imagination, the imaginary worlds it creates, and the reader’s imaginative response, is the concept of the sublime, a very familiar term in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Influenced by Longinus, whose treatise was popularised by contemporary translations, Milton critics from Dryden onwards had attached the concept to Paradise Lost in particular.69 It is Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) which gives it a new theoretic dimension rooted in psychology, using Paradise Lost to demonstrate the hypothesis.70 Johnson once described the Enquiry to Boswell as ‘an example of true criticism’ (Life II. p. 90). What Burke offered him is an intellectual explanation of his emotional response. Given the already established tradition of praising the sublimity of Paradise Lost, together with Burke’s own explicit connections of his theory with Milton’s Satan, Death, and Deity, it must have appeared to him to account for the irresistible power that Milton’s poem exerts over the mind, and for his own enforced attraction and repulsion: ‘The characteristick quality of his poem is sublimity … He can please when pleasure is required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish’ (Lives I. p. 286). Johnson amplifies the judgement in a very Burkean passage on Milton’s genius: He seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others; the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful: he therefore chose a subject on which too much could not be said, on which he might tire his fancy without the censure of extravagance. (Lives I. p. 286)
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Despite, or perhaps because of, his distrust of ‘the dangerous prevalence of imagination’, he pays homage to a creative faculty operating dangerously and delightedly at the full extent of its powers. Milton travels his imagined cosmos like one of his own angels, or (though Johnson would not admit the comparison) like Deity itself bringing it into being: Milton’s delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven. (Lives I. p. 287)
The description recalls earlier rhetorical flights in The Rambler and Rasselas (and possibly also owes something to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition).71 Delight and danger are experienced by both narrator and reader; and Johnson repeats the word ‘delight’, even when he brings the soaring poet back to the reality which he has just described as ‘a scene too narrow for his mind’: But he could not be always in other worlds: he must sometimes revisit earth, and tell of things visible and known. When he cannot raise wonder by the sublimity of his mind, he gives delight by its fertility. (Lives I. p. 287)
Here Johnson seems to echo metaphoric transitions in Paradise Lost itself, in the inductions to Books III and VII where the narrator revisits the realm of light or his ‘native element’ (III. lines 13 and 21; VII. line 16). Nor does he hesitate to give Milton credit for managing the transition successfully: ‘Whatever be his subject, he never fails to fill the imagination.’ But – and the reader learns always to expect a ‘but’ in Johnson’s criticism – this is followed by a qualification, the famous ‘spectacles of books’ passage in which Johnson expands his earlier point that Milton’s genius may preclude the less glamorous talent of painting things as they are: But his images and descriptions of the scenes or operations of Nature do not seem to be always copied from original form, nor to have the freshness, raciness, and energy of immediate observation. He saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it, through the spectacles of books; and on most occasions calls learning to his assistance. (Lives I. p. 287)
A number of critics have taken the statement out of context, to explain the difference in Johnson’s attitude to Shakespeare and his attitude to Milton – with some justification, since Johnson’s phrase wittily reverses Dryden’s aphoristic description of Shakespeare.72 But in this context, Johnson defines nature rather more narrowly than in his Shakespeare criticism. When Johnson gives examples of what he means here, it becomes obvious that his
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main target is very specific, a favourite bête noire of his, the use of mythological allusion: Eden compared to ‘the vale of Enna, where Proserpine was gathering flowers’ or Satan compared with Ulysses (Lives I. p. 287). Other eighteenth-century commentators – Addison, Voltaire, Bentley – also find fault with ‘those frequent Glances at the Heathen Mythology’ – mitigated in Addison’s case by the fact that Milton himself in places emphasises that they are ‘fabulous.’73 But Johnson, normally so vehement against this kind of allusion especially when it contaminates Christian poetry, is, as Lonsdale says, ‘here unexpectedly tolerant’ of their use (Lives I. p. 423). Indeed, his defence – that ‘they contribute variety to the narration, and produce an alternate exercise of the memory and the fancy’ (Lives I. p. 287) – receives full support from both early commentaries and many later studies. His examples are shrewdly chosen, for the links between Satan and classical heroism and between Eden and the Proserpine myth have opened up a rich vein of commentary. In his commentary on formal aspects of Paradise Lost, Johnson accepts that, on the whole, Milton has successfully resolved the problems presented by the challenge of adapting the epic genre to biblical material. This contrasts sharply with his judgement of Cowley’s Davideis. It is impossible to ignore the piquant parallel between his critiques of the two contemporary English biblical epics, one an unfinished and neglected failure, the other a resounding triumph. The reasons for these different outcomes are bound to interest Johnson as a critic, all the more so because he notes that Milton admired Cowley, and apparently borrowed from the Davideis in his description of Satan (Lives I. pp. 228–9 and p. 275). In criticising Cowley’s ill-fated epic venture in the ‘Life of Cowley’, he makes general points about the inhibiting difficulties of writing on biblical subjects which ought to be equally relevant to Milton’s more audacious undertaking: Sacred History has been always read with submissive reverence, and an imagination over-awed and controlled. We have been accustomed to acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentick narrative, and to repose on its veracity with such humble confidence, as suppresses curiosity. We go with the historian as he goes, and stop with him when he stops. All amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that which is already sufficient for the purposes of religion, seems not only useless, but in some degree profane. (Lives I. p. 223)
Taken seriously – and there is no doubt of Johnson’s seriousness – this cuts the very ground of Milton’s epic from under the reader’s feet. Its authenticity in the face of Scripture is annihilated, its learning is vain, its sublimity profanity. Imagination should not be ‘crouded’ but ‘over-awed and controlled.’ How can this position be reconciled intellectually with what Johnson says of Paradise Lost?
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Modern critics have offered solutions to the apparent paradox, suggesting that Paradise Lost occupies a unique category. For Hinnant, Johnson’s customary scepticism is modified ‘to the point where Milton’s epic begins to take on something of the characteristic of revealed truth’;74 for Fix, Johnson reads it primarily from a religious perspective ‘that helps the poem transcend any discussion of its literary merits or defects’.75 Both cite the later passage from the ‘Life of Milton’ which seems strikingly at variance with the dogmatic generalisations in the ‘Life of Cowley’:76 Whoever considers the few radical positions which the Scriptures afforded him, will wonder by what energetick operation he expanded them to such extent, and ramified them to so much variety, restrained as he was by religious reverence from licentiousness of fiction. (Lives I. p. 289)
Johnson wants to have it both ways. But can he? Expansion and restraint, biblical ‘fact’ and fiction, pull in opposite directions; and if one thing is certain, it is that there is a great deal of invented material in Paradise Lost that has no warranty from canonical scripture. What does stand out clearly is how crucial to Johnson’s criticism of both seventeenth-century biblical epics is his belief in the Bible as the unique sacred text. Fix makes an attempt to save Johnson from the appearance of inconsistency by glossing this passage: ‘Milton elaborates the story of Genesis by extending scripture’s truth, not by writing a substitute version of it.’77 But it might be objected that this is a distinction impossible to verify. Is Milton’s Heavenly Muse more reliable as a mediator of scriptural truth because Milton’s poetry is so much better than Cowley’s? We may prefer to accept that Johnson as critic and believer cannot be consistent on this point. Among early Milton critics, Johnson is far from singular in thinking that the moral sentiments of biblical epic ought to be superior to ancient epic, because their basis is scriptural revelation (Lives I. pp. 287 and 423). Yet he recognises that this does not per se ensure literary quality, and also that the literature of a Christian culture is not guaranteed to reflect Christian moral values (he calls Italian epic in evidence). However, Milton’s epic does pass this ultimate test. Johnson’s closing recapitulation of his positive verdicts generously and fully confirms his sense that Paradise Lost succeeds as a great mimesis of biblical truth. It is all the more ironic that almost all the serious difficulties that Johnson experiences in reading Paradise Lost spring not from its form but its subject. Unquestionably, as critics both sympathetic and unsympathetic to the ‘Life of Milton’ have recognised, part of his difficulty is personal, not theoretical. For a man troubled by unusually intense religious anxieties, such ‘known truths’ expose him to emotions that he would
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rather repress, or express only in direct intercourse with his Creator and Saviour.78 Any literary treatment of a sacred subject is difficult for him to deal with dispassionately, the more so if it threatens his control of imagination. Yet these anxieties, when translated into critical terms, are not unprecedented. One of the earliest critical responses to Paradise Lost, by a reader far closer to Milton in every way than Johnson could possibly be, articulates similar misgivings. Andrew Marvell’s prefatory poem to the 1674 edition succinctly describes both the ‘vast Design’ and the doubt it provokes: Messiah Crown’d, Gods Reconcil’d Decree, Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree, Heav’n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument Held me a while misdoubting his Intent, That he would ruine (for I saw him strong) The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song …
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Marvell overcame his doubts. Johnson’s can be read into his treatment of ‘the defects and faults’ of Paradise Lost. He declares at the outset that ‘it is the business of impartial criticism to discover’ these flaws, but this is precisely the area of his analysis to which so many Miltonists have attributed partiality or outright hostility. Yet the procedure, as already remarked, is a very curious one, because of its intimate relationship to the praise that precedes it; Johnson appears at times virtually to rewrite praise as condemnation, or to insert passages (like that previously quoted on Milton’s expansion of Scripture) which appear as unequivocal commendation. If Johnson’s analysis of defects is set beside Addison’s paper on defects (Spectator 297), we see that although he is still in dialogue with Addison at certain points, he has moved beyond neoclassical niceties. Addison retains his original headings; Johnson’s priorities have changed. The problems that Paradise Lost poses for Johnson are inherent in its subject; but, as he has pointed out earlier, the subject ought to be the poem’s greatest asset: It is justly remarked by Addison, that this poem has, by the nature of its subject, the advantage above all others, that it is universally and perpetually interesting. All mankind will, through all ages, bear the same relation to Adam and to Eve, and must partake of that good and evil which extend to themselves. (Lives I. p. 285)
Yet Johnson seems unable to apply this to his own experience as reader: in the context of the ‘Life of Milton’ at least, where he heads the catalogue of defects with the reiterated, and damning, charge that the plan of Paradise
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Lost lacks human interest. It is clear from his description that it is the unique situation of Adam and Eve which, in his view, creates an insuperable barrier to the reader’s involvement: The plan of Paradise Lost has this inconvenience, that it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman who act and suffer, are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself; he has, therefore, little natural curiosity or sympathy. (Lives I. p. 289)
By including all readers in this response, and by insisting that no effort of imagination is adequate, he challenges contradiction, even violent contradiction. Yet, setting aside the difference that belief or unbelief might make to the reader’s response, it should be acknowledged that Johnson identifies a genuine literary problem with the material that Milton has chosen to work upon. He is not the first, nor the last, to do so.80 He had already incorporated Addison’s point about restricted human personae, and hinted at a further difficulty: ‘A state of innocence we can only conceive, if indeed, in our present misery, it be possible to conceive it’ (Lives I. p. 288: my italics). In the ‘Life of Cowley’, he not only anticipates the problem, but extends it to ‘the whole system of life, while the Theocracy was yet visible’: biblical history presents such a remote and alien mode of existence … that it is difficult even for imagination to place us in the state of them whose story is related, and by consequence their joys and griefs are not easily adopted, nor can the attention be often interested in any thing that befals them. (Lives I. p. 224)
If, on this basis, Cowley’s task is difficult, Milton’s is impossible. Moreover, with this extension, Johnson’s observation would cover virtually the entire narrative of Paradise Lost. What Johnson does not consider in any detail in the ‘Life of Milton’ are the subtle strategies that Milton uses to counteract the ‘inconvenience’ that he identifies. As he must have realised, critics before him do identify certain of these strategies. For example, a number of them recognise that one way of investing the Fall narrative with dramatic interest and conflict is to humanise the fallen angels. According to Dennis, if these angels do not quite exhibit ‘downright human Inclinations and Affections’ like the Greek deities, nevertheless ‘The Passions of Milton’s Devils have enough of Humanity in them to make them delightful …’81 Satan of course presents the most challenging case. Although eighteenth-century readers are less likely to be carried away by the magnificence of Satan than the Romantics, they respond to his
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impressiveness, his ‘human interest’, as do poets, satirists, and artists. That Johnson himself is not immune to satanic wit and charm is evident from other contexts. He is also haunted by demonic poetry. When he broods on imagined annihilation, he adapts Belial’s lines ‘for who would lose,/ Though full of pain, this intellectual being’ (Paradise Lost II. lines 146–7).82 In old age and distress of mind and body, he rejects Satan’s self-deceiving bravado: ‘That the mind is its own place is the boast of a fallen angel, that had learned to lie’ (Letters IV. p. 191). His appropriation of Satan’s invective against the sun has already been noted. Not surprisingly, he questions John Clarke’s censure of Milton’s demonic discourse as ‘defiling his own Invention, and the Minds of his Readers with such abominable Stuff, as ought to have no Admission into the Thoughts of Men, upon any Pretence whatever’.83 As is often remarked, in writing of Satan’s characterisation and language he avoids (surely deliberately) any implication that the republican poet might either glamorise or identify with the chief rebel angel. While acknowledging that Milton faces a challenge – ‘To make Satan speak as a rebel, without any such expressions as might taint the reader’s imagination, was indeed one of the great difficulties in Milton’s undertaking’ – he asserts that ‘he has extricated himself with great happiness’ (Lives I. p. 284). Unfortunately, in contrast to the many modern critics who have written exhaustively on Milton’s Satan and his effect on the reader, Johnson does not explain exactly how Milton achieves this Houdini feat of extrication. Clearly it has to do with the management of language. It is as though Milton quarantines the satanic rhetoric, preventing it from infecting the imagination. In Johnson’s view, this is possible because ‘The language of rebellion cannot be the same with that of obedience’, but he ignores the possibility that the political language of rebellion can appear identical with the language of liberty, that, as David Norbrook has contended, ‘In a certain sense … Milton is indeed, not necessarily of the devil’s party, but certainly of its language.’ Norbrook also cites the response of a seventeenth-century reader that anticipates Clarke’s accusation: he mistakes the maine of Poesy, to put such long & horrible Blasphemyes in the Mouth of Satan, as no man that feares God can endure to Read it, or without a poysonous Impression.84
Johnson’s position in this instance is closer to that of Milton himself in Areopagitica, that books will not corrupt the virtuous reader. But while he finds Satan’s ‘humanity’ unproblematic, the reverse is true of Adam and Eve. If Milton’s difficulty with Satan was not to ‘taint the reader’s imagination’ – a difficulty successfully surmounted, in Johnson’s opinion – then
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his difficulty with the unfallen Adam and Eve is how to engage the imagination at all. It is here that Johnson locates the greatest failure of Paradise Lost. In so doing, he is controverting a great mass of evidence accumulated in the history of the text’s reception that readers – though admittedly not all readers – have indeed found it possible to make the effort of imagination that allows them to engage passionately with human transactions in Milton’s Paradise. If the prelapsarian relationship of Adam and Eve is, by definition, beyond any reader’s experience, it is self-evidently not beyond imagination, as the very existence of Paradise Lost testifies. It does not even depend on the commitment to Christian doctrine that Johnson subsequently puts forward as the only possible basis for our empathy. Perhaps the most curious feature of the argument that is bracketed between Johnson’s two notorious dismissals of human interest is that it is scarcely a critical argument at all. He makes no effort at this point to analyse Milton’s literary representation of unfallen human psychology and relationships. This contrasts sharply with other eighteenth-century criticism and commentaries, and cannot be explained simply by his preferred method of general, rather than specifically textual, commentary. Apart from anything else, we might expect Johnson to comment on that relationship as a paradigm of marriage. For a variety of reasons, many eighteenth-century readers find the marriage of Adam and Eve a ‘transaction in which [they] can be engaged’: as an ideal to aspire to, as an exploration of gender difference, and, last but not least, as a vicarious experience of innocent eroticism (a topic on which Johnson maintains dignified silence). Logically, if Johnson is right about the unavoidable tedium of unfallen human experience, then it is only with the Fall itself that Milton’s Adam and Eve can interest us as readers. Addison had put it in a different light: after the Fall, Adam and Eve become part of ordinary humanity; it is the representation of innocence that gives Milton his opportunity for literary originality: We see Man and Woman in the highest Innocence and Perfection, and in the most abject State of Guilt and Infirmity. The two last Characters are, indeed, very common and obvious, but the two first are not only more magnificent, but more new than any Characters either in Virgil or Homer, or indeed in the whole Circle of Nature.85
Later in this essay, he makes the point, picked up by Johnson, that our ground of identification with Adam and Eve is ultimately doctrinal rather than literary (‘We have an actual Interest in every thing they do, and no less than our utmost Happiness is concerned’); but the literary interest is greater for Addison before the Fall. It is therefore not surprising that he
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discovers much to admire and comment upon in his papers on the relevant books of Paradise Lost. Nor is it surprising that it is Addison and Steele who set the eighteenth-century trend for regarding Adam’s and Eve’s relationship as the ideal pattern of love and marriage even for a fallen world.86 However, this sympathetic projection of a cultural ideal upon the text of Paradise Lost may distort perceptions. When eighteenth-century readers find human manners in Milton’s prelapsarian paradise, they tend to sentimentalise Adam and Eve, turning them into a genteel example of how eighteenth-century courtship and marriage should be conducted. Addison himself is guilty of this when he sums up the erotic speeches of the couple in Book IV: ‘In a word, they are the Gallantries of Paradise.’87 ‘Gallantries’ is precisely the wrong social register, reminiscent of Dryden’s State of Innocence. But Addison is far from being the only reader to feel that ‘human manners’ in a social sense appear to exist prior to the Fall. A small but significant example is the manuscript annotation in a copy of Bentley’s edition (BL. C.134.h.1.), which remarks upon Paradise Lost VIII. 40, ‘Eve’s withdrawing here, a great Instance of ye Suitableness of manners’ – for all the world as if she is leaving the gentlemen to their port. In contrast, if we turn to Johnson’s description of their discourse, it may seem blandly generalised, but it avoids Addison’s coyness: Their love is pure benevolence and mutual veneration; their repasts are without luxury, and their diligence without toil. Their addresses to their Maker have little more than the voice of admiration and gratitude. Fruition left them nothing to ask, and Innocence left them nothing to fear. (Lives I. p.284)
What will strike many modern readers is that Johnson defines innocence largely as a lack – which is consistent with lack of human interest – and that he omits any indication whatever of the emotional undercurrents, the adjustments, the tensions, that Adam and Eve have to negotiate in their relationship even before the Fall. We miss the complexity that is analysed by other critics. This is a fortiori true of the major source of these tensions, namely gender difference. In modern criticism, Milton’s construction of gender has become a central and often divisive issue. Eighteenth-century critics, while in the main starting from different premises, were certainly aware of this issue, as commentary on key passages, such as the Narcissus episode of Eve’s creation, or the separation scene, indicates.88 Although there are surprises, such as Bentley’s celebrated emendation of the line ‘He for God only, she for God in him’ to ‘… She for God AND Him’ and the responses of women readers to Paradise Lost demonstrated by Joseph Wittreich,89 predictably most commentators do not question the traditional gender
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hierarchy that they assume Milton upholds. Johnson in particular has been held responsible for promulgating the image of Milton as misogynist, largely because he connects Milton’s attitude in his books with his behaviour in his life.90 Admittedly, little in his criticism of Paradise Lost seems to counteract that assumption: indeed, his one direct comment on gender claims that ‘Both before and after the Fall, the superiority of Adam is diligently sustained’ (Lives I. p. 284). However, he does not share the eighteenth-century reader’s fascination with Adam as perfect man. On one occasion (Life IV. pp. 72–3) Boswell reports asking Johnson to decide a dispute between him and Mrs Thrale on ‘whether Shakspeare [in Hamlet] or Milton had drawn the most admirable picture of a man’; Johnson supported Boswell’s candidate, Shakespeare. Eve has stronger appeal: Irene proves that Johnson is far from impervious to the fascination of female otherness. But when he writes of Adam and Eve in the ‘Life’, it is not their difference that comes across most strongly, but what unites them. Perhaps the strangest and most revealing slip – if that is what it is – is a single proleptic phrase in the paragraph where he is declaring their profound separation from us as readers: ‘The man and woman who act and suffer, are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know’ (Lives I. p. 289: my italics). Act and suffer: no other verbs could identify them more closely with human experience, or demolish more dramatically the distance that Johnson asserts. What, then, are the reasons for Johnson’s vehement denial of a human interest that seems irrepressible? One possibility is that he is rejecting an inappropriate response which characterises much of the earlier close reading of Paradise Lost. It is not so much that it is impossible to empathise with Milton’s creation of unfallen humanity, as that he believes that it should be impossible. To put it another way, Johnson’s difficulty is not with Milton’s literary representation of a man and a woman living in the state of innocence, but with the concept of sinlessness itself. Not only is it presumptuous to imagine being in such a state, but the very attempt exacerbates consciousness of its opposite, the burden of sin and guilt. His chosen strategy of largely general criticism exempts him from the kind of minute interrogation of textual detail (for example, Adam’s lack of facial hair) which obsesses many of those who discover too much, rather than too little, human interest in a prelapsarian Adam and Eve. He reserves close reading of the verbal texture for the Dictionary. In the ‘Life of Milton’ his assertions that Paradise Lost lacks human interest frame an argument which relocates the interest in the reader’s psychology, rather than that of the characters (an approach which in certain respects anticipates the
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strongly influential Milton criticism of Stanley Fish).91 Johnson leads into the subject of the human condition as it is, the contemplation of our own mortality and our ultimate destiny, ‘truths’ which ‘are too important to be new’: the acting and suffering of Adam and Eve affect us all (and Johnson throughout these paragraphs uses the first person plural advisedly). It is not surprising that he should experience such a train of thought as too traumatic to be pleasurable: ‘in the description of heaven and hell we are surely interested, as we are all to reside hereafter either in the regions of horror or of bliss’ (Lives I. p. 289). His way of dealing with it is to assign it to a different category of experience from the literary.92 Paradoxically, the doctrinal truths fundamental to Paradise Lost are at once too familiar and too mysterious for poetry to communicate: ‘The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick for ornament’ (Lives II. p. 53). They have a place in our lives which is more serious than literary recreation: Of the ideas suggested by these awful scenes, from some we recede with reverence, except when stated hours require their association; and from others we shrink with horrour, or admit them only as salutary inflictions, as counterpoises to our interests and passions. (Lives I. p. 289)
In fact, Paradise Lost did have a privileged status in the devotional routine of Sunday observance, which would include Johnson’s ‘stated hours’; this has been associated with Addison’s practice of publishing his Paradise Lost essays on Saturdays. 93 Fix suggests that ‘Johnson was the first major critic of Paradise Lost … who allowed religious ideas profoundly to shape his critical response to the poem.’94 But instead of being uplifted by these religious ideas (as Jonathan Richardson so patently is)95 Johnson is cast down. He experiences sublimity as a direct psychological effect; yet, translated into religious experience, the effect is the opposite of the heightened emotional excitement associated with the aesthetic ‘sublime’. If ‘poetical pleasure’ and ‘poetical terrour’ are human constructions to be humanly conceived, The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them in passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration. (Lives I. p. 289)
But then, it seems, he recalls himself to the fact that he is confronting a literary artefact which, as he has already acknowledged, is utterly exceptional in its capacity to rise to the demands of its religious subject. Praise breaks in once more. It is the very violence of these intellectual reversals at this stage of his argument that measures Johnson’s depth of disturbance.
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It is also measured by his refusal to raise any questions about Milton’s theology. Indeed, it is because he accepts that theology implicitly that he is so disturbed by the poem. If, like a number of modern critics, he had been able to treat Milton’s God as a purely literary construct, his criticism might have taken a very different direction. As it is, though not totally silent on the subject of God, his rare allusions are extremely circumspect and reverential. Certainly this avoids major pitfalls: as Fowler notes dryly, ‘Some critics call the portrayal of God in PL a failure, without considering how ludicrous it would be to call it a success, or a good likeness.’96 Yet not all eighteenth-century critics share Johnson’s restraint. Dennis finds the divine discourse ‘flat’: God, he remarks, is incapable of the sublime, because he is incapable of admiration or terror (though he notes that Milton’s God does lapse into sublimity on occasion).97 For Addison, Milton is naturally inhibited by his subject: One may, I think, observe that the Author proceeds with a kind of Fear and Trembling, whilst he describes the Sentiments of the Almighty. He dares not give his Imagination its full play …98
Others, such as John Clarke, feel that Milton ought not to have proceeded at all – ‘shall a Man, a poor short-sighted Creature, dare to bring down the most High into a Scene of Diversion, and assign him his Part of Acting and Speaking, as if he were a proper Judge of what is fit for him to do, and to say …’99 Voltaire, in complete contrast, demands rhetorically … who would not be pleased … above all with that sublime Wisdom which Milton exerts, whenever he dares to describe God, and to make him speak? He seems indeed to draw the Picture of the Almighty, as like as human Nature can reach to, through the mortal Dust in which we are clouded.100
Naturally, none of these commentators were in a position to deduce Milton’s theology from De Doctrina Christiana. But eighteenth-century commentators were certainly aware that Milton’s theology is central to his justification of God, especially in Paradise Lost, Book III. If Addison and Thyer serenely endorse his orthodoxy,101 controversies over Milton’s theological affinities, and their effect on Paradise Lost – for instance, the accusation of heresy with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity – erupt very early in the history of Milton criticism and are not even now finally resolved.102 It was the charge that Paradise Lost is contaminated by Arianism, and therefore theologically corrupt, which sparked off acrimonious exchanges in the Gentleman’s Magazine correspondence of 1738–39. Earlier and later critics could afford to treat putative heresy more casually, if they notice it at all. Dennis had already remarked, without any obvious
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shock, ‘that Milton was a little tainted with Socinianism … ’tis evident, that he look’d upon the Son of God as a created Being’.103 Robert Potter verges on flippancy: ‘Milton is any thing or nothing; Trinitarian, Arian, Socinian, or neither, as suited his poetry; and I know not but he would have been Mahometan, or Diabolian, had Cromwell … commanded it: therefore the instruction we look for in Paradise Lost, can hardly be eminent respecting the faith of this great master.’104 Not everyone can take it so lightly, and this is yet another example of eighteenth-century Milton readers starting a critical controversy that would run and run. In view of his close connections with Edward Cave and the Gentleman’s Magazine in the late 1730s, Johnson must have been awar