Shorter Novels, Eighteenth Century Part 1

Shorter Novels, Eighteenth Century.

by Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole and William Beckford.

INTRODUCTION

The three novels collected here all belong to the later years of the eighteenth century. The first represents what may be called the last stand of Augustanism before that riot of fancy and imagination, as exemplified by the other two tales, that ushered in the Romantic Revival. Thus in _Ra.s.selas_ we have Johnson, with the fort.i.tude of Atlas, supporting the miseries of the world on his broad shoulders; Horace Walpole shutting us up in his _Castle of Otranto_, away from reality and all reasonableness; and Beckford, in _Vathek_, transporting us on his magic carpet to the court of the grandson of Haroun al Raschid, and thence to a region of perdition and eternal fire, where all memory of Augustanism is irretrievably lost.

They are strange company these three books, but they are nevertheless infallible indexes to the taste of their time. The fact that _Ra.s.selas_ in 1759 met with such enormous success and that _The Castle of Otranto_ four years later met with perhaps an equal success, indicates as plainly as anything could that although people had not lost their admiration for Johnson, they were already tiring of "good sense" and quite willing to give free play to those wilder impulses in their natures that Augustanism had sought to discipline. But this time the tide turned with a vengeance! The grave Wordsworth, a romantic himself, is found deploring the "frantic novels" of this time, although Sh.e.l.ley's young and fiery imagination seized upon them with avidity, and, in _Zastrozzi_, he wrote an even more frantic one himself. But it was _The Castle of Otranto_, written in conscious reaction against the domesticities and sentiment of Richardson, with its plea that the material of the novel could be taken from anything _but_ the events of ordinary life, that opened the gates onto the land of Romance. And in its train came all the rest of the "Gothic" and "terror"

novelists--Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, Charles Maturin--to mention only those who are now chiefly remembered. _Vathek_, however, stands alone, without predecessors or immediate followers, belonging to a quite un-English tradition, although the Oriental tale in one shape or another had quite a vogue in the eighteenth century--if we may include such things as Collins's _Persian Eclogues_ and Goldsmith's Chinaman, or even _Ra.s.selas_ itself, which, at least, has a nominal setting in the East.

_Ra.s.selas_ was written, as every one knows, during the evenings of a week, when Johnson "had occasion for thirty pounds on Monday night," as he wrote to the printer on 20 January, 1759. His mother had just died and he sat down in his Gough Square garret to earn the necessary money for her funeral and for paying off the few debts she had left. Her death, we are told, was a great loss to Johnson, and it is wonderful that what he wrote under pressure at that time should be free not only from bitterness but from a complaint of any kind. Melancholy it certainly is, but melancholy with a rare elevation of mind and no more weighed down with thought--a rather foolish charge that is sometimes levelled against it--than is any work that deals profoundly with the major problems of life. It has also been said of _Ra.s.selas_, with more reason, that it is a test of the reader's capacity to appreciate the peculiar qualities of Johnson's thought. These qualities, as any one who takes the trouble to a.n.a.lyse them can see for himself, are a square face to face att.i.tude to life that takes things as they come, realizing the futility of attempting "a choice of life," and if without overmuch hope for the future, at least free from the disintegration of high hopes disappointed. There is nothing pedantic or high-flown in this att.i.tude which, with a n.o.ble solemnity, enabled Johnson to bear up against all odds and to steer right on. Undeniably there is sustenance to be got from _Ra.s.selas_. And if its author has certain qualities in common with his own "solemn elephant reposing in the shade," they are, one feels, the product of a character that, like Donne's elephant, could hardly be dislodged without the noise and cataclysm of a whole town undermined--whereas much of the style of to-day, which despises what it calls "Johnsonese," could be blown away with a puff of wind. What obtuseness there is in Johnson's att.i.tude of mind is due to the qualities that he shared with "the giant of beasts," a slow-movingness and an apparent lack of the more intricate nerves of feeling. Compare his prose with its ant.i.thesis, that of Donne, who, for all his medieval theology, was more modern in the working of his mind than Johnson; for whereas the author of _Ra.s.selas_ will bring you surely and by slow degrees to a conclusion, the mind of the author of _Death's Duel_ and the sermons seems to antic.i.p.ate all conclusions at once with the rapidity and circuitousness of a thousand ants. Johnson will attack a problem broadside on, and it is to him we come for substantial resistance against life, but to Donne we go for an inward and self-conscious activity that undermines it. Yet one would read _Ra.s.selas_ ten times for every single reading of Donne's sermons, which are as the fire of the spirit consuming.

Taken altogether, then, _Ra.s.selas_ is a prose _Vanity of Human Wishes_, a disquisition on the limitations of life rather than a novel holding our attention by a sequence of events. How characteristic is the pa.s.sage on the pyramids! Only Johnson, who kept his head among the Highland mountains, could have written as he does here, summing up, in these two sentences, his whole att.i.tude towards happiness and material possessions:

I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. 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.

Surely that is magnificent prose, and no one else could have written with just that fine balance and that same elevation of mind--unless it was Browne, also pitying the builder of the pyramids in _Hydriotaphia_.

To pa.s.s on to _The Castle of Otranto_ from _Ra.s.selas_ is like going from the reality and reasonable order of Kew Gardens, with its n.o.ble lawns and splendidly cultivated trees, into some side-show of artificial medievalism, complete with ghosts in rattling armour, skeletons and knights, at the White City or the old Earl's Court Exhibition. At a step we leave behind us the familiar light of day for a castle of uneasy spirits with the wind whining through its battlements. Otranto is such a castle, indeed, as never existed and its people were never anywhere but inside its walls. It is a Gothic "shocker" which is neither truly Gothic nor shocking; for its terror-apparatus has ceased to make us tremble and its chivalrous cant and heroical sentiments no longer quicken our heart.

And yet there is something about this absurd tale that still holds our attention--a spark of genius perhaps that occasionally flashes out through the cracks in the rusty armour and the turret windows; and it is this that hurries it impetuously to its climax of furious bathos not altogether without the sweep of tragedy. Yet did one not know beforehand that the book was written in good faith, there would be every excuse for mistaking it for an uproarious parody of the old type of medieval romance.

To Sir Walter Scott, however, Horace Walpole's castle was anything but an occasion for mirth. Evidently writing against the general opinion of the book at that time, he says, in his chapter on Walpole in _The Lives of the Novelists_, that it is doing the author an injustice to suppose that his sole purpose was to terrorize his readers. Walpole's intention was, he a.s.sures us, to depict the social life of the Middle Ages about the time of the first Crusade, although he admits that "by the too frequent recurrence of his prodigies, Mr. Walpole ran, perhaps, his greatest risk of awakening _la raison froide_, that cold common sense, which he justly deemed the greatest enemy of the effect which he hoped to produce." But it does not require very much cold common sense to discern that, for all this supernatural paraphernalia, _The Castle of Otranto_, unlike Mrs. Radcliffe's books, lacks atmosphere--the first essential in preparing the mind for legendary happenings. It is simply foolish to bring what purport to be supernatural phenomena into broad daylight and then to expect us to believe in their reality. But when Scott writes of "the gigantic and preposterous figures dimly visible in the defaced tapestry--the remote clang of the distant doors which divide him from living society--the deep darkness which involves the high and fretted roof of the apartment--the dimly-seen pictures of ancient knights, renowned for their valour, and perhaps for their crimes--the varied and indistinct sounds which disturb the silent desolation of a half-deserted mansion," he at once awakes the imagination and creates an atmosphere pregnant with the foreboding of invisible presences that prepares the reader to believe almost anything. Scott can raise our hair in a sentence, but all Walpole's bleeding statues and sighing pictures can only move us to a certain mild amus.e.m.e.nt. It is obvious, too, that in his generous tribute to Walpole, Scott was carried away by a conception of his own of what his predecessor _might_ have done.

Moreover, he was anxious to own his debt to Walpole for introducing an element into the novel that he himself was to develop in a way that is still unsurpa.s.sed. For nowadays, although Walpole, and his immediate follower Clara Reeve, with her _Old English Baron_ (1777), actually introduced it, it is not of Walpole or Reeve that we think when the historical novel is mentioned, but of Scott. But being the first attempt of its kind on any serious scale, it is natural that Scott should have respected _The Castle of Otranto_, although we of to-day, having the whole varied wealth of Scott's imagination behind us, as well as the work of his many followers, find it harder to give Walpole the just measure of praise that, in spite of attendant absurdities, is his due.

The mysterious inconsistencies of _Vathek_ (1786) have been sufficiently remarked. But every fresh reader cannot help being struck by the strange contrast between the cynical flippancies of the earlier portions and the sombre grandeur and moral conviction inspiring the scenes in the Hall of Eblis. Should we take _Vathek_ merely as an extravaganza with a moral turn--which only serves to make it the more macabre--in which the characters, not being responsible for their actions, are scarcely culpable; or should we take it as an allegory of the vanity of unrestrained desires and inordinate ambition promoting "that blind curiosity which would transgress the bounds of wisdom the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge"? Perhaps Beckford did not intend his tale to be interpreted too solemnly. Some indication of his att.i.tude is given in a letter to Henley dated 23 April, 1785, in which, speaking of the most innocent of his characters, he says: "I have always thought Nouronihar too severely punished, and if I knew how conveniently, would add a crime or two to her share. What say you?" But it would be a mistake to imagine that Beckford was in any way ashamed of his production--far from it!--and it may be that, like Voltaire, he was in the habit of saying the most serious things flippantly. As it is, Vathek himself with his basilisk glance and outrageous appet.i.te is partly a figure of fun, and, by his black magic and pact with the powers of darkness, partly an Oriental Faust, helped on to d.a.m.nation by his mother, the Princess Carathis, who with her insane thirst for supernatural dominion is a more ghastly Lady Macbeth. But however we regard the enigma of _Vathek_, Beckford's real claim to remembrance rests on the half-dozen pages at the end of the book, where his description of the Hall of Eblis has been compared to Milton's Pandemonium, Eblis himself being considered as a kind of inferior Satan.

And perhaps there is a touch of _Salammbo_ as well, as Vathek and Nouronihar stand before the ruins of Istakar, with their intolerable mystery and deathly stillness under the moon.

Thus, if _The Castle of Otranto_ has suffered rather badly in its pa.s.sage through time, although it will always remain one of the chief curiosities of our literature, and if we cannot altogether make up our minds about _Vathek_, there can be no doubt whatever of the permanent value of _Ra.s.selas_. It is a greater and more subtle book than it is commonly thought to be. Too many people know only Boswell's Johnson--here we have Johnson himself, discussing marriage, the art of flying, and the soul. And what strikes us most in re-reading him now, quite apart from the style which is essentially of its period, is the modernity of his thought. Even more than most profound thinkers who are modern for all time by having reached a certain depth of consciousness that never changes, Johnson in certain pa.s.sages of his book astonishes by the way in which he has antic.i.p.ated the conclusions of contemporary thinkers. His conception of the mind is essentially modern, showing it as at once the creator and destroyer of all values and systems, and yet "the continuance of reason" being uncertain--although madness is determined only by the degree to which one idea or one set of ideas predominates to the exclusion of others--he says, in effect, with Pirandello--"That's the truth if you think it is!" But realizing the final inefficacy of any one system of belief, and being deficient in real faith, he was content, like his own Imlac, "to be driven along the stream of life, without directing his course to any particular port."

And so _Ra.s.selas_ ends, as all good discussions on life must, with a conclusion "in which nothing is concluded."

PHILIP HENDERSON.

_For biographical notes on the authors and short bibliographies see the beginning of each story._

THE HISTORY OF Ra.s.sELAS

PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA

BY

DOCTOR JOHNSON

SAMUEL JOHNSON

The house in which Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September, 1709, still stands at the corner of the market-place in Lichfield. His father was a small bookseller in that town, so that from the first Johnson grew up in the company of books. So widely had he read by the time he went to Oxford at the age of eighteen that his tutor told him "he was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there."

Although "miserably poor" and subject to fits of melancholy that were at times divided only by a thin part.i.tion from madness, and cursed by a kind of St. Vitus's dance and by scrofula which had disfigured his face and deprived him of the use of one eye, Johnson determined to "fight his way by his literature and his wit." After leaving Oxford, he made various unsuccessful attempts to get regular employment. At the age of twenty-six he married a widow twenty years his senior, who, according to Garrick, was "a fat woman with red painted cheeks, fantastic dress, and affected manners." But the marriage was a love match on both sides, and in spite of ridicule Johnson's affection remained constant and unshakable. His wife brought him a meagre fortune, and with this he opened a school for "young gentlemen" near Lichfield. But the number of his pupils never exceeded seven, of whom the Garrick brothers were two.

So early in 1737 he set out for London with three acts of a tragedy, _Irene_, which he offered to Drury Lane without success. In the following year he began writing his parliamentary debates for _The Gentleman's Magazine_. In 1744 he wrote his powerful _Life of Savage_--forty-eight octavo pages at a sitting. In 1747 he issued the plan of his dictionary inscribed to Lord Chesterfield and began work on it at Gough Square. Two years later Garrick produced _Irene_ at Drury Lane, and although it brought Johnson quite a nice little sum of money, it was judged on the whole to be a failure. In 1750, "while he was bearing his burden with dull patience and beating the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution," he began writing _The Rambler_, which appeared twice a week and lasted for two years. Mrs. Johnson died in March 1751 and Johnson wrote a sermon for her funeral that was never preached. By 1755 the dictionary was ready for publication, and Chesterfield, who had ignored the prospectus, delivered himself of a few flippant remarks at Johnson's expense in _The World_. It was on account of this that he brought down on his head the formidable letter of February the seventh. The dictionary appeared in two volumes on 15 April. In 1759 Johnson's mother died, and he wrote _Ra.s.selas_ to pay the expenses of the funeral. Three years later, with the accession of George the Third, he received a pension of 300 a year, and from that time he was free of pecuniary troubles and able to spend the rest of his life talking in the midst of a brilliant company. Among his friends were Gibbon, Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith, Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, R. B.

Sheridan, and Sir William Jones, the Orientalist. At this time he lived with Miss Williams, the blind orphan daughter of a man of learning, and a Mr. Levett, "an obscure practiser in physic."

It is unnecessary to detail the events of the remaining twenty-two years, as they were pa.s.sed in comparative indolence. His friendship with Henry Thrale began about 1759, and the Thrales' fine house at Streatham Park became, until 1782, Johnson's chief asylum. The Thrales, he said, "soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched." On 16 May, 1768, he met Boswell. The famous journey to the Highlands was made in 1773, and in 1774 he visited Wales, and the next year Paris. After 1782 his health rapidly declined, and he died after an attack of dropsy on 13 December, 1784, in Bolt Court, Fleet Street.

His chief works are as follows: A translation of Lobo's _Voyage to Abyssinia_, 1735. _London_, 1738. _Life of Savage_, 1744. _Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth_, 1745. _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, 1749.

_Irene_, 1749. _A Dictionary of the English Language_, 1755. _The History of Ra.s.selas, Prince of Abyssinia_, 1759. _A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland_, 1775. _Lives of the English Poets_, 1779.

See Boswell, Johnson's Letters, ed. by Birkbeck Hill, Essay on Life and Genius by Arthur Murphy, Anecdotes by Madame Piozzi, Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay, Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, also _Johnson and his Critics_ by Birkbeck Hill.

CHAPTER I

DESCRIPTION OF A PALACE IN A VALLEY

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Ra.s.selas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Ra.s.selas was the fourth son of the mighty emperor, in whose dominions the Father of Waters begins his course; whose bounty pours down the streams of plenty, and scatters over half the world the harvests of Egypt.

According to the custom which has descended from age to age among the monarchs of the torrid zone, Ra.s.selas was confined in a private palace, with the other sons and daughters of Abyssinian royalty, till the order of succession should call him to the throne.

The place which the wisdom or policy of antiquity had destined for the residence of the Abyssinian princes, was a s.p.a.cious valley in the kingdom of Amhara, surrounded on every side by mountains, of which the summits overhang the middle part. The only pa.s.sage by which it could be entered, was a cavern that pa.s.sed under a rock, of which it has long been disputed whether it was the work of nature or of human industry.

The outlet of the cavern was concealed by a thick wood, and the mouth which opened into the valley was closed with gates of iron, forged by the artificers of ancient days, so ma.s.sy that no man could without the help of engines open or shut them.

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. This lake discharged its superfluities by a stream, which entered a dark cleft of the mountain on the northern side, and fell with dreadful noise from precipice to precipice till it was heard no more.

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 gra.s.s, or browse 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 sprightly 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.

The valley, wide and fruitful, supplied its inhabitants with the necessaries of life, and all delights and superfluities were added at the annual visit which the emperor paid his children, when the iron gate was opened to the sound of music, and, during eight days, every one that resided in the valley was required to propose whatever might contribute to make seclusion pleasant, to fill up the vacancies of attention, and lessen the tediousness of time. Every desire was immediately granted.

All the artificers of pleasure were called to gladden the festivity; the musicians exerted the power of harmony, and the dancers showed their activity before the princes, in hope that they should pa.s.s their lives in this blissful captivity, to which those only were admitted whose performance was thought able to add novelty to luxury. Such was the appearance of security and delight which this retirement afforded, that they to whom it was new always desired that it might be perpetual; and as those on whom the iron gate had once closed were never suffered to return, the effect of longer experience could not be known. Thus every year produced new schemes of delight, and new compet.i.tors for imprisonment.

The palace stood on an eminence, raised about thirty paces above the surface of the lake. It was divided into many squares or courts, built with greater or less magnificence, according to the rank of those for whom they were designed. The roofs were turned into arches of ma.s.sy stone, joined by a cement that grew harder by time; and the building stood from century to century, deriding the solst.i.tial rains and equinoctial hurricanes, without need of reparation.

This house, which was so large as to be fully known to none but some ancient officers who successively inherited the secrets of the place, was built as if suspicion herself had dictated the plan. To every room there was an open and secret pa.s.sage; every square had a communication with the rest, either from the upper stories by private galleries, or by subterranean pa.s.sages from the lower apartments. Many of the columns had unsuspected cavities, in which a long race of monarchs had reposited their treasures. They then closed up the opening with marble, which was never to be removed but in the utmost exigencies of the kingdom; and recorded their acc.u.mulations in a book, which was itself concealed in a tower, not entered but by the emperor, attended by the prince who stood next in succession.

CHAPTER II