Yet Johnson does not seem to have been ashamed of the story. If he had been he need not have repeated it. Nevertheless, although he had not seen her for some years, he was deeply affected at his mother's death. Still such bereavements are in nature and this one would not be worth recalling were it not that, in order to pay some debts which she had left, he wrote, in the evenings of one week, Rasselas, in some ways the most interesting of all his works.

The story of Rasselas is that of a young prince of Abyssinia who, brought up in a secluded Happy Valley, becomes discontented with the dullness of his life, and, in company with the philosopher, Imlac, sallies out into the world, meets with various adventures and various people and learns, as one would expect a Johnsonian character to learn, that there is little happiness to be found anywhere and that one station and one place are much the same as another. He returns therefore to Abyssinia.

In Rasselas comes Johnson's curious prophecy of flying. Perhaps, too, it shows him at his best in his use of the antithetical style. Take for instance the saying of the astronomer, "To man is permitted the contemplation of the skies, but the practice of virtue is commanded." The distinction, though true and important, is doubtless not original. Indeed, Johnson himself makes it again when, in his Life of Milton, he says, "We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance." Yet it could not have been more neatly put. It is a lesson for every schoolmaster. Rasselas contains, too, much sound political advice and should be studied by all whose enthusiasm is inclined to destroy their sense of proportion. Take that great mixture of cynicism and wisdom in which Imlac lays down his political philosophy.

Sir," said Imlac, "your ardour is the natural effect of virtue animated by youth: the time will come when

THE RAMBLER

you will acquit your father and perhaps hear with less impatience of the governor. Oppression is in the Abissinian dominions neither frequent nor tolerated: but no form of government has yet been discovered by which cruelty can be wholly prevented. Subordination supposes power on one part and subjection on the other; and if power be in the hands of men it will sometimes be abused. The vigilance of the supreme magistrate may do much, but much will still remain undone. He can never know all the crimes that are committed, and can seldom punish all that he knows."

Rasselas is a good, readable, moralist's book.

A few days before its publication appeared Voltaire's Candide. Between the two works is some similarity. In Candide a Westphalian gentleman wanders over the world in search of happiness, as Rasselas wanders over the world in Johnson's book. There is a philosopher, Dr. Pangloss, as there is a philosopher, Imlac, in Rasselas. Both Rasselas and Candide fail in their quests. From these resemblances it has been argued that Johnson must have at least heard of Candide and Johnson's denial has been necessary in order to save him from the suspicion of plagiarism.

It is hard to see how any can have made such a charge, even though Johnson himself thought that there was a similarity in the two books. Candide was a work written in answer to Rousseau's complaints of Voltaire's alleged atheism. The Rousseauan argument was that man was good (though corrupted by institutions), and that therefore the God Who made him must be good. To refute, or, rather, to satirise, the first step in that argument Candide was written.

It is a task into which any man with a certain zest for baseness would wade eagerly. Such a zest Voltaire certainly had. Even his noblest humanitarian tirades are often, one

cannot but feel, inspired more by hatred of the judge than by love of the prisoner. And, if we remember that it was a frank satire, it is unfair to object that even this wretched world is not peopled by cads quite so impossible as those into whose clutches, one after another, Candide is made to fall. The Rousseauans had been responsible for the generalisation that man was good. It was a fair refutation of that generalisation to produce individuals who were bad and to show that their existence was not inconceivable.

At the same time one cannot help noting, if only for amusement, all the familiar Voltairean formula. When Dr. Pangloss has to be stricken with a venereal disease, it has to be explained that a Jesuit formed one link in the chain by which the disease descended to him from a sailor of Christopher Columbus. An illegitimate child inevitably discovers the Pope to be her father. When, for relief, one decent character is introduced, he is of course made to be an anabaptist. No one wishes to hold an extravagant brief for the Churchmen of the eighteenth century. Still, even in the eighteenth century Jesuits were not the only people who infected others with diseases, nor did popes alone beget illegitimate daughters. The Christian virtues were not the quite exclusive monopoly of people outside the Christian Church.

Yet in excuse for Voltaire it must be remembered how much weaker was the intellectual defence of the Christian faith in the France of his day than it is to-day. The Church in France was, in his lifetime, "under the water, to quote Mr. Belloc's phrase. Voltaire himself was a man of no historical imagination. He was unable to realise that there had ever been a time when her rôle was very different from that played by the Gallicanised emasculation which had survived from the triumphs of Louis XIV. Nor was he a metaphysician. By consequence it was never driven into his mind that the Christian religion possessed a metaphysics

as well as an organisation. To point out that there were a lot of bad priests—as there certainly were—and to make a joke or two about Habakkuk were, he thought, all that was necessary for its demolition.

However to raise these objections is merely to say that the book is by Voltaire. And to say that is to say that it will certainly suffer from his faults and as certainly possess also his merits. Of these the largest are memorableness and lucidity. One may contrast the two books by saying that Rasselas contains much more that is worth remembering and Candide much more that one does remember.

Candide is, as I have said, a satire. The incidents in it are therefore purposely exaggerated and impossible. The object of Rasselas is different. Johnson has no especial thesis of another to refute. He merely wishes to show that man's search after happiness is not normally successful. Rasselas therefore is made to fall into the company of people exaggeratedly going about their ordinary business. This is a difference which gives an entirely different nature to the two works.

That Johnson would have been on the side of Voltaire in his controversy with Rousseau is certain. Himself, in his essay on those doctrines which Soame Jenyns had copied from Pope, he has refuted a similar, if not exactly the same, optimism. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a sane man who really thought that the goodness of God was to be deduced from the goodness of this world nor would it be easy to find at all a wise one who did not agree that in this world, if you looked at it as an end, there was a great deal more pain than pleasure. Doubtless

God's in His heaven;

All's right with the world.

The sane man argues that, because "God's in His heaven," therefore we must believe that, ultimately and

incomprehensibly,

all's right with the world." The fool argues that "all's right with the world," and therefore "God's in His heaven.'

Johnson believed in the goodness of God for a reason purely metaphysical. Evil was a privation of good, and therefore a limitation. It was, then, a contradiction in terms to speak of a Being unlimited but evil. God was good" because of the absence of any reason for His being other "—not because, but in spite of, this world. The evils of the world were very real and very terrible, but they were no reason for abandoning faith in God. Cancer was a great evil, but you did not cure yourself of cancer by becoming an atheist.

Johnson then differed from Rousseau radically. From Voltaire he only differed in so far as Voltaire stopped short at his refutation of Rousseau, imagining that he had refuted all that there was to refute. For Candide has never really sought for happiness at all; he has merely sought for sensation. And Voltaire's work proves, if it proves anything, that the mere searcher after sensation can never attain to satisfaction-which is a truth, but a very small truth.

Johnson knew well all that Voltaire knew. Life at the best was an affair of very great sadness. Life, if the consolations of religion were a cheat, was an unfaceable evil. If this impermanence is all, what is life but a melancholy record of loved things lost and loved friends lost? What sane ambition can a man have in it save the ambition to predecease those for whom he cares?

Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religious hopes, as he declines into imbecility and feels pains and sorrows crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless miseries in which every reflection must plunge him