The Merry-Thought | Page 5

the wise Man sigh" (ix). Given such an equivocal approach to the ways in which the audience responded to his work, the poet could easily shrug off audience laughter to his most "Sublime" lines. He was always ready "to leap up in Extasy; and dip ... [his] Pen in the Sun" (iv). Parts of Hurlothrumbo, particularly the scene between Lady Flame and Wildfire (both of whom are described in the list of characters as "mad") in which Wildfire threatens to cast off his clothes and "run about stark naked" (48), bear an odd resemblance to "The King's Cameleopard" in Huckleberry Finn. But the disconnected verbal structure, along with the music and dancing, achieves a strange mixture that must have amused and, to a certain extent, bemused its audience.
Johnson called upon "Variety" as his most important artistic principle, and he developed his ideas on this subject in A Vision of Heaven(1738), a work which bears a striking resemblance to William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.[9] Johnson argues that all surface appearances are merely a form of "Hieroglyphic" concealing a true vision of things (6). His narrator is capable of what Blake was to call "mental flight," and there is a particularly vivid passage in which the stars are seen as throwing down "freezing Daggers" at the poor starving children in the streets and another in which we encounter an aged woman who wields a broom against spiders and against all the young women who threaten to come near the narrator (26).[10] The mystic temperament is often capable of making connections between the spiritual and the excremental,[11] between the sublime and the bathos of "Thunder-bolts from Anus." Blake, we should recall, has poems depicting himself defecating.[12]
[Footnote 9: Without suggesting that Blake may have known of Johnson's work, I would nevertheless note the similarity of certain sections. Like Blake, Johnson mingled comedy and satire in his vision.]
[Footnote 10: Compare Blake's "The Mental Traveler," The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman and Harold Bloom (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 476-77.]
[Footnote 11: See Pops, 31.]
[Footnote 12: Blake, Poetry and Prose, 491.]
Whether Johnson actually collected The Merry-Thought or not, the reasons for the association of these volumes with his name should then be clear enough. While Fielding might appropriate the title "Scriblerus Secundus" by way of staking out a line of descent for his humor and satire, Hurlothrumbo was so thoroughly connected with Johnson and his play that I can see no reason why he should not be considered the likely editor of such a varied and eccentric collection of verse and prose as The Merry-Thought. That the "Variety" bears no resemblance to that of serious art, however, should be as obvious as the difference between a William Blake and a Samuel Johnson of Cheshire. As William Hogarth was to remark, "variety uncomposed, and without design is confusion and deformity."[13]
[Footnote 13: The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 35.]
Of course, miscellanies by their very nature are likely to be organized according to principles of variety. What makes The Merry-Thoughtdifferent from those appealing to polite taste is the wide swings of emotion that prompt the writers of these poems and catch the compiler's fancy. As we have seen, the verses themselves vary from the grossest comments on shit to the most passionate expressions of love. That the one is likely to appear on the walls of latrines and the other to be cut in glass by a diamond is part of what Johnson would have called the "Hieroglyphic" significance of this collection. In Johnson's plays, there is the odd mixture of vulgarity and sublimity, the comic and the serious, the satirical and the nonsensical. If his dramas bear a resemblance to Jarry's Ubu Roi, so The Merry-Thought resembles the kind of anthology that Jarry might have put together to illustrate the absurd anarchy of the human spirit. Johnson, on the other hand, regarded this seeming anarchy of human thoughts and feelings optimistically as an emblem of human spirituality.
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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Part 2 ("The SECOND EDITION") and Part 3 of The Merry-Thought are reproduced in photographic facsimile from the copies in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Shelf Mark: *PR1195/H8H9/1731). They are bound together with Part 1 ("the Third Edition; with very Large Additions and Alterations"), which was published as ARS 216 in 1982. A typical type page (pt. 2. p. 7) measures 154 x 87 mm. Part 4 is reproduced from the copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Shelf Mark: Douce T. 168[5]).

The
MERRY-THOUGHT:
or, the
Glass-Window and Bog-House
MISCELLANY.
Taken from
The Original Manuscripts written in Diamond by Persons of the first Rank and Figure in Great Britain; relating to Love, Matrimony, Drunkenness, Sobriety, Ranting, Scandal, Politicks, Gaming, and many other Subjects, Serious and Comical.
Faithfully Transcribed from the Drinking-Glasses and Windows in