An Ideal of Greatness: Ethical Implications in Johnson's Critical Vocabulary

Abstract

Imlac's description of true literary greatness in Rasselas, chapter X, is a statement with an elevated call for something more than the ordinary neoclassic propriety. The demand which emerges from his speech is for two salient criteria of greatness: power and comprehensiveness of mind in a writer's "knowledge of nature," and the deeply moral outlook of the writer who in his normative preoccupations "must be acquainted likewise with all the modes of life." The poet must survey the "inexhaustible variety" of the "appearances of nature": nothing in the outer world "can be useless ... every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth"; but comprehensive knowledge is "only half the task of the poet": he is also obliged to "consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state"; he must rise to the general and write "as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind." When Imlac speaks thus he voices Johnson's own longing for greatness; Johnson's "idea of poetry was magnificent indeed," Mrs. Thrale states, "and very fully was he persuaded of its superiority over every other talent bestowed by heaven on man." Still, Prince Rasselas, faced with Imlac's sweeping ideal of the poet's function, can only exclaim "Enough! thou hast convinced me, that no human being can ever be a poet." Imlac and Rasselas speak for two sides of Johnson's thought on literature; there is a yearning for impossible excellence, and a certain irony and self-awareness which does not allow the idealization to go too far. "No human being" can ever be a poet of this order because no human can ever deal always and fully with the infinitely strenuous ethical responsibility. Yet in all his critical writing Johnson gauges authors against such a model of the universal poet, and marks off deficiencies. This paper will explore his critical demand for vigorous intellection and a manly moral seriousness which interpenetrate to reinforce one another—his craving for the seamless fusion of ethical and literary qualities in a piece of writing—by examining a selection of his key critical terms.