The Decline of the Heroic: from London to The Vanity of Human Wishes

Abstract

Johnson devoted other poems besides Irene to the dialectic of domination and servitude. London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, his adaptations of Juvenal’s third and tenth satires, published in 1738 and 1748, are similarly preoccupied with antitheses of hope and fear, bravery and cunning, heroic and servile states of consciousness. But where London adopts a position complementary to that of Irene, The Vanity of Human Wishes represents a decided change in point of view. This change is most apparent in its attitude toward the illusion of self-sufficiency that is at the centre of the heroic idea. In the Grecian world of Irene and the English world of London, this illusion is very much alive, enshrined in the contrast between a corrupt and servile present and a heroic past. Even though this past is clearly marked as past, as vanished, it nonetheless embodies the stillliving myth of a founding simplicity, self-mastery, and self-identity. But in The Vanity of Human Wishes, this distinction between corrupt present and heroic past virtually collapses, as the will-to-power becomes inscribed in a universalizing syntax of servile human wishes in which there is neither origin nor end.