Narratives of Hope, Fictions of Happiness: Samuel Johnson and Enlightenment Experience

Perhaps no writer in the Christian tradition narrated so fervently the promises of hope while registering so bleakly the impossibilities of happiness as did Samuel Johnson. When asked, for example, if man is ever happy, Johnson dogmatically thundered, "Never, but when he is drunk" (Boswell 618). In his Dictionary he defines happiness as "Felicity; state in which the desires are satisfied" (1:2.1128). In the Happy Valley of Rasselas, however, where "every desire was immediately granted," Johnson makes it quite clear that the young Prince of Abissinia is most certainly not happy. Laments Rasselas, "I am hungry and thirsty like [a beast], but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fullness" (YE 16:13). For Rasselas, at least, the satisfaction of desires--Johnson's own definition of happiness--obviously does not bring happiness. Hester Lynch Piozzi narrates this anecdote that demonstrates Johnson's uncompromising position: Mr. Johnson did not like any one who said they were happy, or who said any one else was so. "It's all cant (he would cry), the dog knows he is miserable all the time." A friend whom he loved exceedingly, told him on some occasion notwithstanding, that his wife's sister was really happy. [...] "If your sister-in-law is really the contented being she professes herself Sir, (said he), her life gives the lie to every research of humanity; for she is happy without health, without beauty, money, and without understanding." (181-82) Clearly not Johnson's finest moment of compassion, this hyperbolic conversational explosion finds more tempered expression in Adventurer#120, where Johnson writes that "misery is the lot of man, that our present state is a state of danger and infelicity. When we take the most distant prospect of life, what does it present us but a chaos of unhappiness, a confused and tumultuous scene of labour and contest, disappointment and defeat?" (YE 2:493). Consider now Johnson's unwavering reliance on hope. One immediately thinks of the conclusion to "The Vanity of Human Wishes," which registers the boon of Christian hope. After cataloguing the miseries that attend every station of life, the poet asks: "Where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find?" (342). (1) Enumerating such comforting qualities as "Patience" (362) and "Faith, that panting for a happier Seat" (363), Johnson brings the poem to an end on a note of optimism: "With these celestial Wisdom calms the Mind, / And makes the Happiness she does not find" (367-68). The penultimate chapter of Rasselas also comes to mind, where Princess Nekayah asserts, "To me [...] the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity" (YE 16:122). To some extent both "Vanity" and Rasselas terminate their dreary, pessimistic surveys of the human condition by reorienting readers from considerations of the present to expectations of the future, for hope, specifically Christian hope, as Johnson writes in Rambler #203, "is the chief blessing of man" (YE 5:295). So why this categorical renunciation of happiness on earth and wholesale investment in hope? Why does Johnson imply that happiness and Christian hope cannot coexist? Johnson's struggles with depression have been well documented. His breakdowns after his withdrawal from Oxford and during his later life constitute metaphorical bookends that encase persistent bouts with mania. Walter Jackson Bate's expansive biography mines the depths of Johnson's moments of despair. Without a doubt Johnson's anguished disposition accounts for much of the skepticism pervading his happiness discourse as well as his representations of the denouement of hope. Without underestimating the insights that have emerged from copious scholarship on Johnson's psychology, this essay will chart a different course, locating Johnson's happiness/Christian hope opposition not only in his tortured psychological disposition but also in a general frame of mind that Johnson shared with many of his Enlightenment contemporaries. …