The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) | Page 2

... that the tenuity of a defecated air at a proper
distance from the surface of the earth accelerates the fancy, and sets at
liberty those intellectual powers which were before shackled by too
strong attraction, and unable to expand themselves under the pressure
of a gross atmosphere. I have found dullness to quicken into sentiment
in a thin ether, as water, though not very hot, boils in a receiver partly
exhausted; and heads, in appearance empty, have teemed with notions
upon rising ground, as the flaccid sides of a football would have
swelled out into stiffness and extension.
This is one side of his genius; but another, and profounder, appears in
the eloquent simplicity of such a passage as the following, against our
fears of lessening ourselves in the eyes of others:
The most useful medicines are often unpleasing to the taste. Those who
are oppressed by their own reputation will, perhaps, not be comforted
by hearing that their cares are unnecessary. But the truth is that no man
is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little
he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the
attention of others is attracted to himself. While we see multitudes
passing before us, of whom, perhaps, not one appears to deserve our
notice, or excite our sympathy, we should remember that we likewise
are lost in the same throng; that the eye which happens to glance upon
us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost
which we can reasonably hope or fear is, to fill a vacant hour with
prattle, and be forgotten.
When we approach Johnson's poetry, the revolution of taste becomes a
more acute consideration. It seems very nearly impossible to compare
or contrast eighteenth-century poetry and that of the twentieth without
wilfully tipping the scales in one direction or the other, judgment in this
area being so much influenced by preference. But let us begin with

titles. For a start, let us take, from a recent Pulitzer Prize-winner: "The
Day's No Rounder Than Its Angles Are", and "Don't Look Now But
Mary Is Everybody"; from another distinguished current volume, these:
"The Trance", "Lost", "Meeting"; from another, "After This, Sea",
"Lineman Calling", "Meaning Motion"; and from a fourth, "Terror",
"Picnic Remembered", "Eidolon", and "Monologue at Midnight". Here
are individual assertions, suggestive of individual ways of looking at
things; here are headings that signalize particular events in the authors'
experience,--moments' monuments. Beside them, Johnson's title, "The
Vanity of Human Wishes", looks very dogged and downright.
Titles are not poems but they have a barometric function. The modern
titles cited above are evocative of a world with which, for the past
century and a half, we have been growing increasingly familiar. This
air we are accustomed to breathe: it requires no unusual effort of
adjustment from us. We readily understand that we are being invited to
participate in a private experience and, by sharing it, to help in giving it
as much universality as may be. It is by no means easy for readers of
to-day to reverse the process, to start with the general and find in it
their personal account. We are more likely to feel a resentment, or at
least a prejudice, against the writer who solicits our attention to a topic
without even the pretense of novelty.
Johnson's generation would have found it equally hard to see the matter
from our point of view, or to allow that the authors of the poems named
above were being less than impudent or at best flippant in thus brazenly
obtruding their private experience, undisguised, before the reader. We
ought, moreover, to realize that in this judgment they would have the
suffrages of all previous generations, including the greatest writers,
from classical times down to their own. It is we who are singular, not
they. Quite apart from considerations of moral right or wrong, of
artistic good or bad, it obviously, therefore, behooves us to try to
cultivate a habit of mind free from initial bias against so large a
proportion of recorded testimony.
Very early in The Rambler Johnson remarks characteristically that
"men more frequently require to be reminded than informed." He

believed this, and his generation believed it, because they thought that
human nature changed little from age to age. The problems of conduct
that confront the living individual have been faced countless times by
his predecessors, and the accumulated experience of mankind has
arrived at conclusions which in the main are just and therefore helpful
to-day. The most important truths are those which have been known for
a very long time. For that very reason they tend to be ignored or
slighted unless they are restated in such a way as to arrest attention