ALTHOUGH there is not space for particular analysis, the inclusion of Rasselas in this fresh reprinting of Johnsonian selections offers occasion for a brief word on that masterpiece. The context of the book can be found where we commenced, in Johnson's diaries, so full, as we saw, of agonizing self-reproach in the periodic reviews of his spiritual state on private anniversaries and at intimate crises like the death of a near relation. His mother's imminent death, in the Lichfield house her son had not revisited in twenty years, touched the core of his emotional life and stirred into motion the whole train of early memories, which led to prolonged and somber meditation on the disparity between youth's hopes and plans, performance actual or possible in maturity, and the ultimate values accessible to man. To these reflections he decided to give the outward clothing of a currently popular literary genre, the Eastern Tale; but the autobiographical motivation is never long concealed. If, as he later told Reynolds, he composed the work in the evenings of that final week of his mother's life, in mid-January, 1759, he composed it as Mozart wrote down a symphony, with the whole work in mind, and with the pen travelling as fast as it could drive. The maturity of the ideas and the precision of their expression are proof of an inward ripeness that required no further deliberation.
But the reader should be warned neither to expect a story nor to judge the book as such. Basically, Rasselas is a philosophical dialogue, of which the narrative outline advances the argument by providing the leads and transitional matter in the schematic conduct of the discourse. The voices in this enquiry are for the most part undifferentiated tonally, and bear labels chiefly in order to give a semblance of dramatic interchange to rational demonstration, and thus to lighten the proofs. One by one, in their appointed sequence as the work moves deliberately forward, the rush-lights of hypothetical earthly happiness gleam ahead of us but, when we come close to them, gutter out and leave us in the uncertain, but not unpeopled, dark. The surprising thing is that in its inexorably disillusioning course the book displays no bitterness nor cynicism, nor even impatience with youthful expectations or confident ignorance. The author's blend, condensed in the serene Imlac, of tested wisdom, sympathetic forbearance, and ironic compassion, leaves in our minds an abiding, pervasive impression of transcendent benevolence, under whose powerful spell we are half reconciled to the vanity of human wishes.