The Merry-Thought | Page 5

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 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.
University of California,
Los Angeles

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