'The Various Vicissitudes of Human Life'

The book I have most heavily annotated, underlined and otherwise vandalized – even more than Ulysses – is the Penguin paperback edition of Dr. Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) I bought for an English literature class in 1971. The spine broke long ago, and the two-volumes-in-one is held together with a rubber band. Though unreadable, I keep it for sentimental reasons – as a book I love and as my introduction to Johnson’s work. Thanks to the same professor, I first read Boswell’s Life, and my life was changed.

I’ve been reading Lives of the Novelists (1825) by Walter Scott, whom I know solely as a historical novelist. As a kid I read the best-known of his Waverley Novels, Ivanhoe (1820). Hugely popular in his day, I suspect only a few academics read him much today, though Guy Davenport was a great admirer. Along with Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, Scott includes a chapter devoted to Johnson, including his only novel, Rasselas. Scott, as a Scot, had reason to ignore or dismiss Johnson, who famously goofed on his countrymen: “What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?” But Scott admired him supremely among English writers and perhaps among Englishmen:

“When we consider the rank which Dr. Johnson held, not only in literature, but in society, we cannot help figuring him to ourselves as the benevolent giant of some fairy tale, whose kindnesses and courtesies are still mingled with a part of the rugged ferocity imputed to the fabulous sons of Anak; or rather, perhaps, like a Roman Dictator, fetched from his farm, whose wisdom and heroism still relished of his rustic occupation.”

Scott was the prolific author of three-decker novels, but he adores Rasselas, which is shorter than some of the chapters in his books. “It was composed in solitude and sorrow,” Scott writes, “and the melancholy cast of feeling which it exhibits, sufficiently evinces the temper of the author's mind.” At the age of fifty, Johnson wrote the book in a one-week fit of inspiration and labor to pay for his mother’s funeral. Scott writes:

“The work can scarce be termed a narrative, being in a great measure void of incident; it is rather a set of moral dialogues on the various vicissitudes of human life, its follies, its fears, its hopes, its wishes, and the disappointment in which all terminate. The style is in Johnson's best manner; enriched and rendered sonorous by the triads and quaternions which he so much loved, and balanced with an art which perhaps he derived from the learned Sir Thomas Brown[e].”

In 1756, Johnson published his life of Browne. Perhaps there was influence. Both men, Browne and Johnson, were masters of prose, but Browne is more lush and flamboyant a writer. Johnson’s prose in Rasselas is more plain-spoken and aphoristic (the reason I underlined so much of it).  As Imlac, Johnson’s stand-in, says: “A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.” That’s all of Johnson in nine words.