Rasselas

Rasselas

Samuel Johnson

I will give you rest.’

“I have just now read a physical book which inclines me to think that a strong infusion of the bark would do you good. Do, dear mother, try it.

“Pray, send me your blessing, and forgive all that I have done amiss to you. And whatever you would have done, and what debts you would have paid first, or anything else that you would direct, let Miss put it down; I shall endeavour to obey you.

“I have got twelve guineas to send you” [six were borrowed. There was a note in Johnson’s Diary of six guineas repaid to Allen, the printer, who had lent them when he wanted to send money to his dying mother], “but unhappily am at a loss how to send it to-night. If I cannot send it to-night, it will come by the next post.

“Pray, do not omit anything mentioned in this letter. God bless you for ever and ever.

“I am, “Your dutiful Son,

“_Jan._ 13, 1759.”

That is the personal side of the tale of _Rasselas_. In that way Johnson suddenly, on urgent pressure, carried out a design that had been in his mind. The success of Eastern tales, written as a form of moral essay, in the _Rambler_ and _Adventurer_, upon suggestion, no doubt, of Addison’s _Vision of Mirza_, had prompted him to express his view of life more fully than in essay form by way of Oriental apologue; and his early work on Father Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, caused him to choose Abyssinia for the land in which to lay his fable.

But Johnson’s _Rasselas_ has also a close relation to the time when it was written, as Johnson himself had to the time in which he lived. From the beginning of the century—and especially, in England, since the beginning of the reign of George the Second—there had been a growing sense of the ills of life, associated in some minds with doubt whether there could be a just God ruling this unhappy world. Hard problems of humanity pressed more and more on earnest minds. The feeling expressed in Johnson’s _Vanity of Human __Wishes_ had deepened everywhere by the year 1759. This has intense expression in _Rasselas_, where all the joys of life, without active use of the energies of life, can give no joy; and where all uses of the energies of men are for the attainment of ideals worthless or delusive. This life was to Johnson, and to almost all the earnest thinkers of his time, unhappy in itself—a school-house where the rod was ever active. But in its unhappiness Johnson found no power that could overthrow his faith. To him this world was but a place of education for the happiness that would be to the faithful in the world to come. There was a great dread for him in the question, Who shall be found faithful? But there was no doubt in his mind that the happiness of

man is to be found only beyond the grave. This was a feeling spread through Europe in the darkness gathering before the outburst of the storm of the great French Revolution. Even Gray, in his _Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, regarded Eton boys at their sports as “little victims,” unconscious of the doom of miseries awaiting them in life. Thus Johnson’s _Rasselas_ is a book doubly typical. We have in it the spirit of the writer when it best expressed the spirit of his time.

H. M.

CHAPTER I