The Merry-Thought | Page 4

might help in providing a lively and piquant context for the serious artistic production of writers like Gay and Swift.
The announced "publisher" of this olio was one Hurlothrumbo, a character drawn from the theatrical piece of that name by Samuel Johnson of Cheshire (1691-1773). Professor Guffey has proposed that James Roberts, for whom the four parts were printed, "was almost certainly the collector of the graffiti" and that the name of Hurlothrumbo was invoked in order to attract some of the attention that Samuel Johnson of Cheshire and his play were still receiving two years after the play's first performance and publication.[5] But Roberts would appear an unlikely candidate for the role of editor;[6] I would suggest, rather, the possibility of a more direct and active connection with Samuel Johnson of Cheshire: that he was himself likely the compiler of the four parts of The Merry-Thought and that, whatever the individual versifiers may have intended, this infamous collection of graffiti--as collection--shares very closely with Johnson's other work a spirit of wild variety, eccentric juxtaposition, and essential anarchism that is meant to lead, not to clever parody of polite literature, but to a new, almost apocalyptic vision of the sublime.
[Footnote 5: See ARS 216, x, n. 12. Professor Guffey offers parallels between The Merry-Thought and Hurlothrumbo in "Graffiti, Hurlo Thrumbo, and the Other Samuel Johnson," Forum: A Journal of the Humanities and Fine Arts 17 (1979): 35-47.]
[Footnote 6: Michael Treadwell has demonstrated that the "trade publishers" of the eighteenth century, such as James Roberts, acted almost exclusively as binders and distributors of books and were therefore different in kind from the printers and booksellers, who were directly involved in the selection and production process. Roberts and the other "trade publishers" dealt almost exclusively in "works belonging to others," and Treadwell singles out Roberts as the purest example. Despite putting his name to "literally thousands of works," he never purchased any of the copyrights on works during his long career. See "London Trade Publishers, 1675-1750," Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982): 99-134.]
At the first level, Hurlothrumbo: Or, The Super-Natural (1729) itself appears to be quite simply a parody, in this case of opera in the form of a work mixing dialogue and song in a manner similar to but much wilder than Gay's Beggar's Opera. Johnson's apparent takeoff on the heroics of opera managed to include in its attack a commentary upon the absurdity of contemporary tragedy as well as some specific references to those works that aimed at the sublime. Lines like "This World is all a Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill pav'd with Diamonds" (48) seem to call the very nature of metaphor into question, especially when juxtaposed with other delirious lines such as "Rapture is the Egg of Love, hatched by a radiant Eye" (14) or by songs such as that sung by the king on contemplating the effects of swallowing gunpowder and brandy together:
Then Lightning from the Nostrils flies. Swift Thunder-bolts from Anus, and the Mouth will break, With Sounds to pierce the Skies, and make the Earth to quake. (P. 42)
Hurlothrumbo may be mostly nonsense, but from the standpoint of literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a revolt against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities with graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity.
Had Johnson's intention been something as relatively uncomplicated as literary parody he would have achieved some minor fame in a century which could boast any number of geniuses who had specialized in deriding the pretentiousness of the more established literary forms, particularly tragedy, the epic, and the pastoral. But Johnson of Cheshire lacked the aesthetic distance required of sustained irony and had a grander purpose in mind. His tradition was not that of the parodist but rather that of the visionary--the mystic whose tendency is to merge the high and the low, the sublime and the absurd, within a single work.[7] He was not attacking the extravagant rants of the heroic play as Fielding was to do in his Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) or reflecting on opera and pastoral as Gay had done in The Beggar's Opera (1728); rather he was trying, however unsuccessfully, to maintain his own work at the highest reaches of sublimity. He was like one of Pope's "Flying Fishes," who "now and then rise upon their fins and fly out of the Profound; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom."[8]
[Footnote 7: See Martin Pops, "The Metamorphosis of Shit," Salmagundi 56 (1982): 27-61.]
[Footnote 8: Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous, in Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 54.]
In his preface to The Blazing Comet; or the Beauties of the Poets(1732), Johnson of Cheshire noted that "the same thought that makes the Fool laugh, may make