Abstract
Desire is the term which Johnson employs to describe the motive force by which the mind is driven to break out of the circle of idleness and illusion and engage in a confrontation with the world. Whereas the perceiving consciousness of the ‘spectator’ or ‘rambler’ seeks merely to study and comprehend the world, the desiring mind of the ‘adventurer’ seeks to appropriate it, to make it its own. Johnson’s most detailed discussion of desire occurs in Rambler, No. 49. Paul Alkon observes that Rambler, No. 49, contains ‘a very full treatment of “mental anatomy’”, making an important distinction between the ‘natural passions that are universal constants in human nature’ and the ‘artificial passions that do not necessarily appear or play the same part in everybody’.1 Johnson’s distinction between natural and artificial passions comprise two out of what might be described as four stages in the growth of the human mind. These stages encompass the movement of the mind from the natural appetites of the infant in the first stage to the universal struggle for emulation that is characteristic of the adult in the final stage.
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Notes
This denial of an original authority brings Johnson into substantial agreement with those rational, secular theorists of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) who defined the origin of society as a product of artifice or contrivance rather than natural instinct. On Johnson’s affinities with these philosophers, see Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, p. 195. Johnson’s ideas about the origin and development of political societies can be found in his contributions to Sir Robert Chamber’s Vinerian lectures. See E. L. McAdam, Jr, Doctor Johnson and the English Law (Syracuse University Press, 1951) pp. 81–120.
Thomas M. Curley in ‘Johnson’s Secret Collaboration’ in The Unknown Samuel Johnson, eds John J. Burke and Donald Kay (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) pp. 95–6, accepts McAdam’s conclusion that Johnson may have influenced Chambers’s lectures but believes that McAdams’s assumption that Johnson dictated random passages may be misleading. In this study, the only passages cited from the Vinerian lectures are those that are consistent with the point of view expressed elsewhere in Johnson’s writings.
On this tradition, see Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden (New York: Columbia University Press: London: Chatto & Windus, 1962); and my ‘All for Love and the Heroic Ideal’, Genre, XVI (1983) 57–74.
The approach of this chapter as well as its title were suggested by Serge Doubrovsky’s Corneille et la dialectique du héros (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).
The argument that the play is undramatic has been advanced by several critics. Among them, Bertrand Bronson, Johnson Agonistes (Berkeley: University of California Press,1965), finds an ‘untheatrical quality of imagination’ in Irene (p. 123); Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, describes the play as ‘not coherently organized or sharply pointed’ (p. 79); and, above all,
Leopold Damrosch, Jr, Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (Princeton University Press, 1972) holds that the play is bookish, boring and untragic (pp. 109–38).
Irene has been defended by Marshall Waingrow, ‘The Mighty Moral of Irene’ in From Sensibility to Romanticism, Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle (London: Oxford University Press, 1970; first published 1965), who praises Johnson for his portrayal of Cali and Irene as complex and mixed characters, pp. 79–92;
and by Phillip Clayton, ‘Samuel Johnson’s Irene: an Elaborate Curiosity’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 19 (1974) 121–35, who insists that while the diction of the play is flawed, it conforms to the dramatic unities.
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© 1988 Charles H. Hinnant
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Hinnant, C.H. (1988). Desire, Emulation and the Dialectic of Domination and Servitude in Irene . In: Samuel Johnson: An Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19208-3_3
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