Flesh in the Age of Reason (27 page)

Next he meets a rationalist philosopher, who explains how happiness consists in following the dictates of reason. Imlac, however, soon disabuses him: these theorists ‘discourse like angels, but they live like men’. Watching the reactions of one to the death of his daughter, Rasselas sees how worthless is his philosophy.

What, then, of the pastoral idyll, with smiling shepherds tending their frisking flocks? This bucolic bliss proves as illusory as the palace of Reason once Rasselas finds ‘that their hearts were cankered with discontent’, for ‘they considered themselves as condemned to labour for the luxury of the rich’. Nor is the hermit’s cave any better, since a recluse confesses he has been able to shun the world’s vices only by avoiding
it altogether: ‘My fancy riots in scenes of folly, and I lament that I have lost so much, and have gained so little.’

Continuing his quest for the grand arcanum of happiness, Rasselas concludes that it must lie in power: how splendid to rule a kingdom and make all one’s subjects happy! But he is soon cured when he sees a once-powerful provincial governor being led in chains.

Contemplate the pyramids, Imlac tells him, ‘the most pompous monuments of Egyptian greatness’. Men are little concerned with the present: they spend their time either regretting the past or laying plans for the future, and that is even true of the Pharaohs:

A king, whose power is unlimited and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life, by seeing thousands labouring without end, and one stone, for no purpose laid upon another.

And thus the pyramids stand as timeless monuments to the futility of absolute power.

Finally the prince is taken to meet one who has spent all his life in the study of astronomy: here, surely, must true happiness lie! Moreover he claims astonishing powers: he can direct the weather and control the course of the sun – at his command the Nile will flood. But in exercising such measureless powers, he has made the melancholy discovery, that if he makes the rain fall here, deserts appear somewhere else. Man, it seems, can never see the consequences of his actions, and good intentions are not enough. The astronomer is obviously crazy. ‘Of the uncertainties of our present state,’ observes Imlac, ‘the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.’ And if reason is so undependable, how much more so is imagination, which leads men to dream up airy schemes for improvement which are little better than madness.

The final chapter is a ‘Conclusion, in which Nothing is Concluded’; but all have learnt one thing, that whatever goals man sets himself, none will ever be fully attained. Like
Candide
,
Rasselas
teaches the
vanity of human ambitions and traces the bounds of reason. Johnson distanced himself from fatuous Enlightenment notions of progress: a sombre acceptance of human limitations followed from his vision of the dignity of the soul and the burdens of free will. Yet even these proved elusive.

In June 1766 Henry and Hester Thrale unexpectedly called on their new friend Johnson, then in his mid-fifties, and were horrified to find him grovelling before a clergyman, ‘beseeching God to continue to him the use of his understanding’. The embarrassed minister fled, whereupon Johnson cried out ‘so wildly’ in self-condemnation that Henry Thrale ‘involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth’.

He was in the throes of mental collapse. Indeed, for all his renowned John Bull qualities, the great bear was no stranger to depression, that ‘general disease of my life’. ‘My health has been, from my twentieth year, such as has seldom afforded me a single day of ease,’ he reflected in old age, and though he certainly did not escape
physical
ailments – chronic bronchitis, gout, dropsy, a stroke – it was clearly his melancholy which he had in mind.

His spirits first failed him in 1729. Kicking his heels at his parental home (that ‘house of discord’), Johnson sank into suicidal lethargy, ‘overwhelmed’, Boswell put it, ‘with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved.’ What intensified melancholy’s terrors was the clumsy interference of his godfather, Dr Swynfen: the young Johnson was aghast to hear that doctor’s prognosis of probable future madness. Profound melancholy crushed him again after the death of his wife Elizabeth (Tetty) in 1753 and then once more during the 1760s. On one occasion in 1764, for example, Dr Adams found him ‘in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room’.

Welcomed into the Thrales’ household and brightened by Boswell, Johnson enjoyed something of an Indian summer, but even then the spectre of breakdown continued to haunt him. In 1768 he entrusted a padlock to Hester Thrale’s care, and three years later jotted in his
diary: ‘
De pedicis et manicis insana cogitatio
’ (‘an insane thought about fetters and manacles’). Mind-forg’d manacles were paralysing him with fears of ruin and future confinement, culminating in 1773 in a terrible letter written in French to Hester Thrale, begging her to exercise discipline and governance over his ‘fancied insanity’.

Johnson saw himself as the victim of a ‘vile melancholy, inherited from my father’. ‘When I survey my past life,’ he confided to his diary on Easter Day 1777, ‘I discover nothing but a barren waste of time with some disorders of body and disturbance of the mind, very near to madness.’ Such reflections were not incidental flourishes but a regular minor key. Following his exposure of
The Vanity of Human Wishes
,
Rasselas
had been, as we have seen, a sustained anatomy of self-delusion, lacking even
Candide
’s guarded optimism about cultivating gardens; and the lay sermons of the
Rambler
and the
Idler
exposed both the ‘vacuity of existence’ and the pathology of escapism.

For certain of Johnson’s contemporaries, the blues were a treasured identity badge. The new men of feeling prized self-absorbed melancholy as the poet’s genius or the spring of sensitivity. Boswell (as we shall see) freely indulged his sensibilities in this direction. Johnson, however, would have no truck with this ‘foolish notion that melancholy is a proof of acuteness’; as can be seen in his attack on Soame Jenyns, he detested whatever trivialized real suffering. Boswell might think he could safely cultivate his ‘turn for melancholy’, because (he had it on medical advice) melancholy was a distemper quite distinct from derangement proper. But Johnson had no such confidence, dreading melancholy as the slippery slope down into the very abyss of lunacy. The distinction was paper-thin – in fact, all in the mind. And, as Hester Thrale pointed out, such fears further fuelled his anxieties: ‘Mr Johnson’s health had always been bad since I first knew him, and his over-anxious care to retain without blemish the perfect sanity of his mind, contributed much to disturb it.’

Thus Johnson’s melancholy was no mere literary caprice, it suffused the man. Everyone found him bizarre: peculiar in bulk, demeanour, gait, reactions. In dubbing him ‘a respectable Hottentot’, Lord Chesterfield aptly if snootily evoked the wild man within, a
caged animal charged with pent-up energy: Ursa Major. Overbearing, dictatorial, truculent, a boor who talked for victory, tossing and goring his adversaries, Johnson united pride with abjection, lethargy (lying abed till the afternoon) with bouts of physical frenzy (an habitual midnight rambler, he was still climbing trees in his fifties). Always ‘in extremes’, he wolfed down his food (‘madmen are all sensual’) or was mortifyingly abstinent: what always escaped him was steady moderation.

The strain of living ‘in extremes’ etched itself onto his very appearance, for all to see. Running into Johnson for the first time, Hogarth ‘perceived a person standing at a window in the room shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner, and concluded that he was an ideot’. Fanny Burney was no less staggered. ‘He is, indeed, very ill-favoured, tall and stout but stoops terribly’, she wrote: ‘He is almost bent double. His mouth is almost constantly opening and shutting as if he were chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers and twisting his hands. His body is in constant agitation, see-sawing up and down.’ By middle age, Johnson had developed a repertoire of fantastic tics, spasms and mannerisms – ‘a convulsionary’ was Thomas Tyers’ verdict, evidently with religious fanatics in mind. ‘He often had convulsive starts and odd gesticulations,’ observed his stepdaughter, Lucy Porter, ‘which tended to excite at once surprise and ridicule’ – muttering under his breath, kneading bits of orange peel together, making clucking noises, obsessively fingering posts as he lurched along the street. ‘He had another particularity,’ added Boswell,

some superstitious habit, which he had contracted early, and from which he had never called upon his reason to disentangle him. This was his anxious care to go out or in at a door or passage, by a certain number of steps from a certain point, or at least so as that either his right or left foot (I am not certain which), should constantly make the first actual movement when he came close to the door or passage.

Johnson was thus riddled with phobias and grotesque compulsions. He even developed superstitions like fretting over adding milk to his
tea on Good Friday, and Mrs Thrale sometimes discovered him buried in fantastical arithmetic:

When Mr Johnson felt his fancy, or fancied he felt it, disordered, his constant recurrence was to the study of arithmetic; and one day that he was totally confined to his chamber, and I enquired what he had been doing to divert himself, he showed me a calculation which I could scarce be made to understand, so vast was the plan of it, and so very intricate were the figures: no other indeed than that the national debt, computing it at one hundred and eighty million sterling, would, if converted into silver, serve to make a meridian of that material, I forget how broad, for the globe of the whole earth, the real globe.

Here is a man
sui generis
, deaf to polite mores, oppressed by bugbears: ‘The great business of his life’, judged Reynolds, ‘was to escape from himself; this disposition he considered as the disease of his mind.’ For Johnson thought himself prone to derangement: ‘I have been mad all my life, at least not sober.’ How are we to explain this melancholy?

Common sense suggests a simple solution: no wonder Johnson was odd and melancholy, he had good reason. He was a man apart, scarred from birth by physical stigmata, big-boned and clumsy, blighted by scrofula, half-blind in his left eye and half-deaf in his left ear. Yet he also – overcompensation? – towered above his fellow schoolboys in acuteness, memory, argumentation and powers of speech. Always different, he could not shake off the dread of isolation or the torment of talent thwarted, and his fighting instinct never relaxed. Starting out in life as ‘nothing and nobody’, hating his Oxonian poverty (where he was ‘rude and violent’, his companions mistaking his ‘bitterness’ for ‘frolick’) but then humiliated by being forced to quit, he spent the bloom of youth adrift and then failed as a schoolmaster. And when he finally found his feet it was by undertaking soul-destroying Grub Street hack-work. In a poignant aside in
The Lives of the English Poets
, he wrote of Pope that he ‘was one of those few whose labour is their pleasure’. For Johnson, by contrast, hounded by publishers and creditors, labour was a trial, even a
curse; and unlike his erstwhile pupil David Garrick, who had trudged with him to London to seek his fortune, recognition came late to Johnson: ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depress’d,’ runs the
leitmotif
of
London
. Until he was in his fifties, he was struggling for life in the water, being arrested at least once for debt, and want dogged him till the granting of his pension. Moreover, after the death of Tetty grief and loneliness became his companions. Proud and combative, Johnson sometimes exulted in a triumph, as in his rasping put-down to Lord Chesterfield; but life always threatened to become stale, flat and wearisome.

Johnson believed his wretchedness, far from being exceptional, was the true human epitome: ‘Every man will readily confess that his own condition discontents him.’ It was a theme of which he never tired: ‘the general lot of mankind is misery,’ explained his
Life of Mr Richard Savage
, it is ‘the condition of our present state, that pain should be more fixed and permanent than pleasure’; ‘life’, he instructed Boswell, ‘is progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.’ So many disappointments rained down as to be bearable only when gilded by pretence: ‘The world, in its best state, is nothing more than a large assembly of beings, combining to counterfeit happiness which they do not feel, employing every art and contrivance to embellish life, and to hide their real condition from the eyes of one another.’ Did he here betray fear that someone, somewhere, was genuinely happy? But if he was suspiciously swift to prick others’ illusions, his scorn for the glib optimism of such coxcombs as Soame Jenyns was surely merited. In
A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil
(1757), Jenyns had argued in favour of the Leibnizian doctrine of cosmic optimism as versified in Pope’s
Essay on Man
: all was for the best, and such supposed evils as illness and disability were only apparent, being integral to the grand scheme of benevolence instituted by a omnipotent Deity. Johnson damned Jenyns’s views as specious rationalizations which made a mockery of suffering, and exposed such ‘philosophy’ as trivializing, an insult to real affliction.