The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750)

by Samuel Johnson

INTRODUCTION

The pieces reproduced in this little volume are now beginning to bid for notice from their third century of readers. At the time they were written, although Johnson had already done enough miscellaneous literary work to fill several substantial volumes, his name, far from identifying an "Age", was virtually unknown to the general public. The Vanity of Human Wishes was the first of his writings to bear his name on its face. There were some who knew him to be the author of the vigorous satire, London, and of the still more remarkable biographical study, An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage; and a few interested persons were aware that he was engaged in compiling an English Dictionary, and intended to edit Shakespeare. He was also, at the moment, attracting brief but not over-favorable attention as the author of one of the season's new crop of tragedies at Drury Lane. But The Vanity of Human Wishes and The Rambler were a potent force in establishing Johnson's claim to a permanent place in English letters. The Vanity appeared early in January, 1749; The Rambler ran from March 20, 1749/50 to March 14, 1752. With the exception of five numbers and two quoted letters, the periodical was written entirely by Johnson.

As moral essays, the Ramblers deeply stirred some readers and bored others. Young Boswell, not unduly saturnine in temperament, was profoundly impressed by them and determined on their account to seek out the author. Taine, a century later, discovered that he already knew by heart all they had to teach and warned his readers away from them. Generally speaking, they were valued as they deserved by the eighteenth century and undervalued by the nineteenth. The first half of the twentieth has shown a marked impulse to restore them, as a series, to a place of honor second only to the work of Addison and Steele in the same form. Raleigh, in 1907, paid discriminating tribute to their humanity. If read, he observed, against a knowledge of their author's life, "the pages of The Rambler are aglow with the earnestness of dear-bought conviction, and rich in conclusions gathered not from books but from life and suffering." And later: "We come to closer quarters with Johnson in the best pages of The Rambler than in the most brilliant of the conversations recalled by Boswell. The hero of a hundred fights puts off his armour, and becomes a wise and tender confessor." Latterly, the style of Johnson's essays has been subjected to a closer scrutiny than ever before. What Taine found as inflexible and inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life and movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly, Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of The Rambler with Johnson's reading for the Dictionary, and how, having mastered the words of the experimental scientists of the previous century, Johnson proceeded to put them to original uses, generating with them new stylistic overtones in contexts now humorously precise, now philosophically metaphorical, employing them now for purposes of irony and satire, and again for striking directly home to the roots of morality and religion. In a playful mood, he is never more characteristic than when he is his own mimic, propounding with mock seriousness some preposterous theory like that of the intellectual advantages of living in a garret:

I have discovered … that the tenuity of a defecated air at a proper distance from the surface of the earth accelerates the fancy, and sets at liberty those intellectual powers which were before shackled by too strong attraction, and unable to expand themselves under the pressure of a gross atmosphere. I have found dullness to quicken into sentiment in a thin ether, as water, though not very hot, boils in a receiver partly exhausted; and heads, in appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon rising ground, as the flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out into stiffness and extension.

This is one side of his genius; but another, and profounder, appears in the eloquent simplicity of such a passage as the following, against our fears of lessening ourselves in the eyes of others:

The most useful medicines are often unpleasing to the taste. Those who are oppressed by their own reputation will, perhaps, not be comforted by hearing that their cares are unnecessary. But the truth is that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted to himself. While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom, perhaps, not one appears to deserve our notice, or excite our sympathy, we should remember that we likewise are lost in the same throng; that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is, to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten.

When we approach Johnson's poetry, the revolution of taste becomes a more acute consideration. It seems very nearly impossible to compare or contrast eighteenth-century poetry and that of the twentieth without wilfully tipping the scales in one direction or the other, judgment in this area being so much influenced by preference. But let us begin with titles. For a start, let us take, from a recent Pulitzer Prize-winner: "The Day's No Rounder Than Its Angles Are", and "Don't Look Now But Mary Is Everybody"; from another distinguished current volume, these: "The Trance", "Lost", "Meeting"; from another, "After This, Sea", "Lineman Calling", "Meaning Motion"; and from a fourth, "Terror", "Picnic Remembered", "Eidolon", and "Monologue at Midnight". Here are individual assertions, suggestive of individual ways of looking at things; here are headings that signalize particular events in the authors' experience,—moments' monuments. Beside them, Johnson's title, "The Vanity of Human Wishes", looks very dogged and downright.

Titles are not poems but they have a barometric function. The modern titles cited above are evocative of a world with which, for the past century and a half, we have been growing increasingly familiar. This air we are accustomed to breathe: it requires no unusual effort of adjustment from us. We readily understand that we are being invited to participate in a private experience and, by sharing it, to help in giving it as much universality as may be. It is by no means easy for readers of to-day to reverse the process, to start with the general and find in it their personal account. We are more likely to feel a resentment, or at least a prejudice, against the writer who solicits our attention to a topic without even the pretense of novelty.

Johnson's generation would have found it equally hard to see the matter from our point of view, or to allow that the authors of the poems named above were being less than impudent or at best flippant in thus brazenly obtruding their private experience, undisguised, before the reader. We ought, moreover, to realize that in this judgment they would have the suffrages of all previous generations, including the greatest writers, from classical times down to their own. It is we who are singular, not they. Quite apart from considerations of moral right or wrong, of artistic good or bad, it obviously, therefore, behooves us to try to cultivate a habit of mind free from initial bias against so large a proportion of recorded testimony.

Very early in The Rambler Johnson remarks characteristically that "men more frequently require to be reminded than informed." He believed this, and his generation believed it, because they thought that human nature changed little from age to age. The problems of conduct that confront the living individual have been faced countless times by his predecessors, and the accumulated experience of mankind has arrived at conclusions which in the main are just and therefore helpful to-day. The most important truths are those which have been known for a very long time. For that very reason they tend to be ignored or slighted unless they are restated in such a way as to arrest attention while they compel assent. Hence the best writing is that which most successfully resolves the paradox of combining the sharpest surprise with the widest recognition. Such an ideal is so difficult of attainment that, inevitably, many who subscribed to it succeeded only in unleavened platitude and others rejected it for the easier goal of novelty.

In this most difficult class The Vanity of Human Wishes has won a respectable place. It is freighted with a double cargo, the wisdom of two great civilizations, pagan and Christian. Although based upon Juvenal's tenth Satire, it is so free a paraphrase as to be an original poem. The English reader who sets it against Dryden's closer version will sense immediately its greater weight. It is informed with Johnson's own sombre and most deeply rooted emotional responses to the meaning of experience. These, although emanating from a devout practising Christian and certainly not inconsistent with Christianity, neither reflect the specific articles of Christian doctrine nor are lightened by the happiness of Christian faith: they are strongly infused with classical resignation.

The poem is difficult as well as weighty. At times its expression is so condensed that the meaning must be wrestled for. Statements so packed as, for example,

Fate wings with ev'ry wish th' afflictive dart,
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art,

do not yield their full intention to the running reader. One line, indeed,—the eighth from the end (361)—has perhaps never been satisfactorily explained by any commentator. (The eighteenth paragraph of Johnson's first sermon might go far to clarify it.) But such difficulties are worth the effort they demand, because there is always a rational and unesoteric solution to be gained.

The work as a whole has form, is shapely, even dramatic; but it is discontinuous and episodic in its conduct, and is most memorable in its separate parts. No one can forget the magnificent "set pieces" of Wolsey and Charles XII; but hardly less noteworthy are the two parallel invocations interspersed, the one addressed to the young scholar, the other to young beauties "of rosy lips and radiant eyes",—superb admonitions both, each containing such felicities of grave, compacted statement as will hardly be surpassed. The assuaging, marmoreal majesty of the concluding lines of the poem are a final demonstration of the virtue of this formal dignity in poetry. If it did not appear invidious, one would like to quote by way of contrast some lines oddly parallel, but on a pitch deliberately subdued to a less rhetorical level, from what is indubitably one of the very greatest poems written in our own century, Mr. Eliot's Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

From The Vanity of Human Wishes:

Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to heav'n the measure and the choice,
Safe in his pow'r, whose eyes discern afar
The secret ambush of a specious pray'r.
Implore his aid, in his decisions rest,
Secure whate'er he gives, he gives the best….
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:
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.

The Vanity of Human Wishes is reproduced from a copy in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; the Rambler papers from copies in possession of Professor E.N. Hooker. The lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets are quoted with the permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Bertrand H. Bronson University of California Berkeley