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Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide,
In thy most need to go by thy side.
EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
Founded 1906 by J. M. Dent (d. 1926)
Edited by Ernest Rhys (d. 1946)
No. 856
FICTION
SHORTER NOVELS
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
PHILIP HENDERSON · IN 3 VOLS.
VOL. 3 · EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
SHORTER NOVELS
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
RASSELAS--THE CASTLE OF
OTRANTO--VATHEK
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. INC.
All rights reserved
Type-set and bound in Great Britain
at The Temple Press Letchworth
and printed in Belgium
by Drukkerij Omega Antwerp
for
J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
Aldine House Bedford St. London
First published in this edition 1903
Last reprinted 1948
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 _Rasselas_ we have Johnson, with the fortitude 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 _Rasselas_
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 Shelley'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 _Rasselas_ itself, which, at least, has a nominal
setting in the East.
_Rasselas_ 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 _Rasselas_, 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 analyse them can see for himself, are a square face
to face attitude 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 attitude
which, with a noble solemnity, enabled Johnson to bear up against all
odds and to steer right on. Undeniably there is sustenance to be got
from _Rasselas_. 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 attitude 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 antithesis, 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 _Rasselas_ 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 anticipate 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
_Rasselas_ ten times for every single reading of Donne's sermons, which
are as the fire of the spirit consuming.
Taken altogether, then, _Rasselas_ 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 passage
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 attitude 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 pass on to _The Castle of Otranto_ from _Rasselas_ is like going from
the reality and reasonable order of Kew Gardens, with its noble 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 assures 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 amusement. 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 unsurpassed. 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 attitude 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 appetite 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 damnation 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 _Salammbô_ 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
passage 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 _Rasselas_. 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 passages of his book astonishes
by the way in which he has anticipated 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 _Rasselas_ 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._
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA. By
Samuel Johnson 1
THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, A GOTHIC STORY. By Horace
Walpole 97
VATHEK, AN ARABIAN TALE. By William Beckford 193
NOTES TO VATHEK 279
THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS
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 partition 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 _Rasselas_ 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 passed 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 Rasselas, 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 Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia.
Rasselas 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, Rasselas 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 spacious valley in the
kingdom of Amhara, surrounded on every side by mountains, of which the
summits overhang the middle part. The only passage by which it could be
entered, was a cavern that passed 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 massy 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 grass, 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 pass 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 competitors 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 massy
stone, joined by a cement that grew harder by time; and the building
stood from century to century, deriding the solstitial 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 passage; every square had a communication
with the rest, either from the upper stories by private galleries, or by
subterranean passages 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 accumulations 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.