Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

We can now see that Webster, an American, had a much deeper knowledge than Johnson. (In our day, the
Oxford Dictionary
is the best; it is the historical dictionary of the language.) Johnson owed his fame to the dictionary. He ended up being known as “Dictionary Johnson.” WhenBoswell first saw Johnson in a bookstore, they identified him by his nickname, “Dictionary,” which also was because of how he looked.
    Johnson was poor for many years—for a time, he carried on a kind of epistolary duel with Lord Chesterfield that would later appear in his poem“London”: the garret and the jail, and after them, the patron. 8 Around that time he publishes an edition ofShakespeare. Actually, this is one of his last works. His prologue is devoid of reverence, and he points out all the defects of Shakespeare’s work. Johnson also wrote a tragedy in which Mohammed makes an appearance, and a short novel,
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
, which has been compared to
Candide
, by Voltaire. During his final years, Johnson gives up literature and spends his time holding conversations in a tavern, where he emerges as the chief, or rather, dictator, of a literary salon that forms around him. Samuel Johnson, having abandoned his literary career, showed himself to be one of the great English spirits.

CLASS 9

    RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA, BY SAMUEL JOHNSON. THE LEGEND OF THE BUDDHA. OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. LEIBNIZ AND VOLTAIRE.

    WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1966
    Today we will discuss the story of
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
. This is not the most characteristic of Johnson’s works. His letter to Lord Chesterfield is much more characteristic, as are several articles in
The Rambler
, or the preface to the
Dictionary
, or the preface to his critical edition of Shakespeare. 1 But [
Rasselas
] is the most readily accessible work for you, for there is a version by Mariano de Vedia y Mitre, and anyway it is a very easy read: it can be read in one afternoon. 2 It is said that Johnson wrote it to pay for his mother’s burial, after he wrote the dictionary, when he was already the most famous man of letters in England (but he was not a rich man). Let’s begin with the title:
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
. And let us remember a significant fact: that one of the first—or
the
first—publications of Samuel Johnson was a translation of
A Voyage to Abyssinia
by the Portuguese Jesuit,Lobo, which Johnson did not do directly but instead worked from a French version. 3 The important thing for us now is the fact that Johnson knew specific information about Abyssinia, for he had translated a book about that country. However, in his short novel, or long short story,
Rasselas
, he at no point uses his knowledge of Abyssinia. Now, we shouldn’t think this was an oversight by Johnson, or that he forgot. That would be completely absurd in the case of a man like him. We should think about his concept of literature—so different from our contemporary concept—and we should stop there. There is, anyway, one chapter of
Rasselas
in which one of the characters, the poet Imlac, explains his concept of poetry. And, apparently, since Johnson—who was many things—was never an inventor of character, Imlac expresses in this chapter—titled “A Dissertation Upon Poetry”—Johnson’s concept of poetry, of literature in general, we could say. Prince Rasselas asks the wise poet Imlac what poetry is, what is its nature, and Imlac tells him that the role of the poet is not to count the stripes on a tulip or linger over the many shades of green of the foliage. The poet should not deal with the individual but rather with the generic, for the poet is writing for posterity. He says that the poet must not concern himself with what is local, with what belongs to one class, one region, one nation. For since poetry has that lofty mission to be eternal, the poet should worry not about problems—Johnson did not use the word “problem,” for at that time that word was used specifically for mathematics—not about the concerns of his era, but rather should seek out the eternal, the eternal passions of man, as well as subjects such as the brevity of human life, the vicissitudes of destiny, the hopes we have for immortality, sins, virtues, etcetera.
    In other words, Johnson had a concept of literature that was very different from the contemporary one, from ours. Now people instinctively feel that each poet belongs to his nation, to his class, to his time. But Johnson