For Samuel Johnson, the imagination aspires to generality: “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.” (“Preface to Shakespeare”). As much as we may yearn for freaks of novelty, deviations from the pattern of things, we come to rest upon what is expected, commonplace, and (to our minds) universal. For Johnson, the most enduring representations of what is particular in life stand upon a ground of what is most general.

We are more accustomed these days to approving the relish for the “minute particulars” that William Blake insists are the proper object of imaginative endeavors. We expect poetry and literature that, honoring the sovereignty of the quotidian, pulls us into the sensorium of the moment. We are heirs to the rich legacy of the realist novelists of Johnson’s own era and the poets immediately following his life.

But Johnson would not deny that the imagination requires particulars for its sustenance. He is not suggesting that Shakespeare provides us with universal symbols. Instead, as a critic, Johnson is suggesting that Shakespeare can be addressed in the terms of a moralist: that he illustrates those abstract passions and virtues that arise wherever we find human life, in its single acts: “hope,” “greed,” “generosity,” “courage,” “prudence,” “zeal,” “ambition.” But for Johnson, it is not enough to say that these—or any in the general class of moral feelings to which they belong—are animated by human life: instead, they in turn animate life, having within themselves principles of force and between themselves dynamics of behavior. We might say that this is personification, and that is what Donald Davie, in an essential piece of criticism on Johnson, does say: 

Another sort of generalized name, just the same in principle, is used by the poet to describe the phenomena of human behavior and feeling. These again are personifications, personified passions such as Scorn, Anger, Envy, Sloth, and personified moral principles, Honor, Charity, Virtue, Tolerance. These words cause the modern reader the same discomfort as words like ‘grove.’ For he is conditioned by his reading of the European novel, reading which has instructed him how many different histories and processes, what different sorts of attitude and outlook, are herded under the one blanketing term, ‘Envy’, or ‘Shame’, or ‘Anger’; and, again, what different sorts of behavior must, at a push, be approved alike as ‘virtue’ or condemned alike as ‘vice.’ But Johnson or Goldsmith was not concerned with those features which make a man unique, but with those which he has in common with his fellows. (44, Purity of Diction in English Verse)

Personification, yes, but even though they are on the same plane of existence, acting upon humans and upon one another, these elements of general human nature are persons without personality or character; “Hope” does not itself hope, “Anger” does not rise to anger, and so on. Johnson’s greatest poem, his imitation of Juvenal’s tenth satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” affords clarity on this point—and on much else. It is the focus of this post, and I quote from its opening here (I preserve the original capitalization):

Let observation with extensive View,

Survey Mankind, from China to Peru;

Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife,

And watch the busy Scenes of crowded Life;

Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate,

O’erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate,

Where wav’ring Man, betray’d by vent’rous Pride

To tread the dreary Paths without a Guide,

As treach’rous Phantoms in the Mist delude,

Shuns fancied Ills, or chases airy Good.

How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice,

Rules the bold Hand, or prompts the suppliant Voice,

How Nations sink, by darling Schemes oppress’d,

When Vengeance listens to the Fool’s request.

Fate wings with ev’ry Wish th’ afflictive Dart,

Each Gift of Nature, and each Grace of Art,

With fatal Heat impetuous Courage glows,

With fatal Sweetness Elocution flows,

Impeachment stops the Speaker’s pow’rful Breath,

And restless Fire precipitates on Death.  (ll. 1-20)

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The key to what is happening with this supposed “personification” comes in the final seven lines of the passage. “Vengeance listens” undoubtedly suggests Vengeance has natural human capacities, as does “Fate wings with ev’ry Wish,” but “fatal Heat impetuous Courage glows” and “fatal Sweetness Elocution flows” suggest instead processes from the scientific laboratory or the natural world, and “restless Fire precipitates on Death” drives all the way into the realm of scientific discovery with the chemical metaphor “precipitates” next to “Fire,” but it drags along with it the human “restless.”  Seventy-five years ago, the critic W.K. Wimsatt wrote a study of how Johnson time and again does the same thing, and Donald Davie, expanding on Wimsatt’s work, in his essay “The Language of Science and the Language of Literature”: 

Wimsatt shows, from a close study of Johnson’s Dictionary, that as lexicographer Johnson set out quite deliberately to assist this adoption into the language of the erstwhile specialized terminology of the sciences, attracting such words out of the laboratory into the drawing-room…as Wimsatt shows, the prevailingly abstract, Latinate, and sesquipedalian character of Johnson’s style, especially in The Rambler is brought about very largely by his consistent use of these words which he called ‘philosophic’ [referring to Natural Philosophy]. Now, the essays in The Rambler are moral disquisitions, and have nothing to do with the natural sciences, except occasionally for purposes of illustration. How, then, could Johnson use so many scientific words in a non-scientific context? He could do so only by extending their significations, and giving them a metaphorical as well as a literal bearing. So, when ‘acrimony’ is used, it still means literally what it meant in the laboratory, ‘corrosiveness’; but it means metaphorically, in the context of moral disquisition, ‘severity, bitterness of thought or language. (85, Older Masters)

In “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” we see this sort of natural philosophical language animating the moral nouns alongside language of human behavior, and it reminds us that Johnson is not asking us to imagine moral nouns as characters, but is asking us to recognize them as a distinct class of beings, an abstraction from human life and a distillation from it—and most of all, that he is repeatedly urging us to imagine them as having concrete substance, alternately resisting and impinging on what people do. They do not provide generalized accounts of the particular actions from which they emanate, or explain particular actions by recourse to more general categories, but instead they participate in any number of particular actions, elemental in their constancy. Johnson invests them with the very qualities of minute particularity that Blake prizes; they are forces and features in life’s landscape.  They depend upon human behaviors but cannot be reduced to the human; they are of the human, but act upon humans as alien agents. They allow for Johnson to imagine what alienates us from ourselves, our wills, our reason, and our best interests:

In gay Hostility, and barb’rous Pride,

With half Mankind embattled at his Side,

Great Xerxes comes to seize the certain Prey,

And starves exhausted Regions in his Way;

Attendant Flatt’ry counts his Myriads o’er,

Till counted Myriads sooth his Pride no more;

Fresh Praise is try’d till Madness fires his Mind,

The Waves he lashes, and enchains the Wind;

New Pow’rs are claim’d, new Pow’re are still bestow’d,

Till rude Resistance lops the spreading God (ll. 225-234)

The “Pride” is Xerxes’ but it comes to have a life apart from him, as “Flatt’ry” has a life apart from Xerxes’ attendant sycophants. Donald Davie writes that “prsonification and generalization are justifiable according as they are ‘worked for.”  Such a way of putting it implies what Davie has just asserted about the personified abstractions at the end of Johnson’s “Prologue to A Word to the Wise”: “They come at the end of the poem because they have been worked for in the rest.” But “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is Johnson’s masterpiece; in it, as we’ve seen, the personifications themselves do the work at the start, and so Davie’s principle cannot be said to hold. Quite to the contrary, the work done by (as opposed to for) the abstracted “personifications” at the start of the poem enriches these lines, making it possible to read “Flatt’ry” as an entity, active and self-contained, rather than a behavior. More clearly, in these lines, because of the precedent Johnson has established earlier in the poem, in “Madness fires his Mind,” we can take “Madness” to be not only a condition of the mind, but a foreign agent descending on it, true to the experience of madness that is both within the mind and an invasion of its usual state. Against this, the subsequent line, “the Waves he lashes, and enchains the Wind” is given strange significance: the madness of Xerxes consists in lowering the forces of the natural world to the level of human agency, but in this confusion over the extent of human agency we are reminded that humans are likewise incapable of exercising agency over the abstractions that populate the poem. Time and again, Johnson urges us to recognize that these abstractions emerge from, but cannot be equated to, human acts: they are greater even than their sums, like emergent properties from a complex system. “Till rude Resistance lops the spreading God” is perfect example: “Resistance” does the work on its own terms, not merely being humans resisting. One of the peaks of the poem is the account of Cardinal Wolsey:

In full-blown Dignity see Wolsey stand,

Law in his Voice, and Fortune in his Hand;

To him the Church, the Realm, their Pow’rs consign,

Thro’ him the Rays of regal Bounty shine,

Turn’d by his Nod the Stream of Honour flows,

His Smile alone Security bestows;

Still to new Heights his restless Wishes tow’r;

Claim leads to Claim, and Pow’r advances Pow’r;

Till Conquest unresisted ceas’d to please, 

And Rights submitted, left him none to seize. (ll. 99-108)

In these lines, the abstractions are objectified rather than personified, so subservient are they are to Wolsey’s power. When we read “Law in his Voice,” we are reminded that the abstractions do indeed emanate from human conduct, but the fact that his voice contains law, that it has circumscribed it and delimited it, is in fact a testament to Wolsey’s astonishing success: the measure of his power is not his control over people, but over these abstract entities. “Fortune in his Hand” works similarly, where “fortune” is a substitute for “wealth” and for the wheel of fortune that he holds, but also where “in his Hand” suggests that he embodies, containing within his hand, the power of that abstract personification of Fortune. The conceit culiminates in “thro’ him the Rays of regal Bounty Shine,” so that Wolsey himself personifies the abstractions. Then in the lines that follow, Wolsey is pushed out of the poem entirely: he has become so idenfitied with these abstractions that there is no need to speak of him, until we are told that “Rights submitted, left him none to seize”: he has been sated not only by Rights but by abstract forces, and this is too much, too great a threat:

At length his Sov’reign frowns—the Train of State

Mark the keen Glance, and watch the Signs to hate. (ll. 109-110)

His Sov’reign, being himself the embodiment of Sov’reignty, must respond, and as he is bereft of power, what had been abstractions in his person becomes, in the poem, solid objects in his hands:

Where-e’er he turns he meets a Stranger’s Eye,

His Suppliants scorn him, and his Followers fly;

At once is lost the Pride of aweful State,

The golden Canopy, the glitt’ring Plate,

The regal Palace, the luxurious Board,

The liv’ried Army, and the menial Lord.

With Age, with Cares, with Maladies oppress’d,

He seeks the Refuge of Monastic Rest.

Grief aids Disease, remember’d Folly stings,

And his last Sighs reproach the Faith of Kings. (ll.111-120)

“Pride of aweful State” is the last appearance of the abstractions, soon reduced to a list of riches that lack the power of Pride’s fellow abstractions. Plate, palace, board…these are available to the touch of  a hand, but his was a hand that once held, or contained, Fortune itself. The final point of contact between Wolsey’s body and the abstractions is “last Sighs reproach the Faith of Kings,” where “reproach” denies touch but nonetheless affords an interchange between “Sighs” and “Faith.” It is not only Wolsey and the King who have been disjoined, but Wolsey’s person and the personifications; this is the last moment during which he can claim power over them.

It would be truer to say that abstractions are embodied rather than personified. Embodied, they sometimes possess agency and intent, but also, at other times, follow what might seem natural laws in their effects. Embodied, they can be set within invasively intimate relation to the human frame:

Unnumber’d Maladies his Joints invade,

Lay Siege to Life and press the dire Blockade;

But unextinguish’d Av’rice still remains,

And dreaded Losses aggravate his Pains;

He turns, with anxious Heart and cripled Hands,

His Bond of Debt, and Mortgages of Lands;

Or views his Coffers with suspicious Eyes,

Unlocks his Gold, and counts it till he dies. (ll. 283-290)

“Av’rice” is not among the unnumber’d Maladies—what distinguishes it is that Johnson sets it on the side of “Life” that is under siege: it “still remains,” untouched by the “Maladies.” We can say that it is embodied in the personage of this passage, but also that the personage of this passage has become embodied in Avarice. Avarice personifies the person, and this person personifies Avarice. Identifying them as Johnson does establishes their difference, in that Avarice and the individual cannot be collapsed into each other if the latter is to be at the mercy of the former. 

For good or ill—though mostly, in “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” for ill—humans are in thrall to embodied abstractions. The general condition of human life is submission to phenomena that, though general, take hold of individuals with the force of distinct presences. The moralist poet (and essayist) reckons what they consist of and how they behave as individuals reckon with, and wrestle against, their influence as real entitities with undeniable forces and dynamics that cannot be dismissed as mere figures of speech. Instead, in “The Vanity of Human Wishes” Johnson offers an account of human affairs that requires that he exercise his powers of imagination to depict those mental and moral entities that gain potency in their influence over how humans imagine the world: “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is after all an account of how mistakenly people conceive of value, estimate future realities, and live at the mercy of their imaginations of what might be and what ought to be. It is a poem about the betrayals of the imagination—a preoccupation latent throughout Johnson’s writings—and, being a poem, takes seriously that it can and should redress those betrayals by means of the imagination itself. 

“The Vanity of Human Wishes” is not a narrowly political poem: it concerns itself with a reality of human experience that defines politics along with much that is not political. But this means that it is a political poem among other things. It presents an account of life that bears on an account of political life, and inherent to that account is a way of talking about, writing about, making sense of, those moral abstractions to which we are beholden in our talking, writing, and sense-making about the world. The upshot of Johnson’s way of embodying moral feelings and abstractions is that it permits us to judge the conduct and choices of other people without simply judging other people, as if these moral feelings and abstractions that mislead them are inherent to who they are. To those who would dismiss the reality of these entities in favor of value-neutral explanations of the social sciences, for instance, Johnson might reply that once we judge phenomena as right and wrong, better and worse, whatever the sociological, psychological, or economic account, we are left needing the sorts of ethical terms and moral nouns that Johnson transforms—all the more if we are to acknowledge that the behavior of others is, understood from within the first-person perspective, measured by a sense of the good that, mistaken or corrupted, requires normative categories for a full accounting.  We are simply not afforded the luxury (if it would be that) of declining these terms at all; the burden we carry is how to place them in our imaginative accounts of those we live among. Taking up the mantle that Johnson has set before us, and forcing ourselves to participate in the serious play of metaphors that insists that Vanity, Fear, Avarice, Power are active bodies moving against and upon us, we  are given something that cannot lay claim to being a final, correct explanation, but that instead can force us to revise our descriptions and judgments of the phenomena that we seek to explain. 

In an essay on Philip Massinger, T.S. Eliot offered a principle of dramatic ability: “the dramatist need not understand people; but he must be exceptionally aware of them” (Selected Essays, 212). It might be said that, to function in a democracy, none of us need fully to understand people, in the sense of being able to explain them, but we must do more to be aware of them and also to be aware of ourselves—and, going further still, one of the lessons of Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes”  might be that it is not enough to only be aware of people, but to be aware of those strange abstract presences that people, including we ourselves, live among.

--By Owen Boynton 

Bibliography

Donald Davie, “The Language of Science and the Language of Literature: 1740-43,” Older Masters: Essays and Reflections on English and American Literature (Continuum Press, 1992)

Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (Chatto and Windus, 1952)

Eliot, T.S. “Philip Massinger,” Selected Essays (Faber, 1951)

Johnson, Samuel, The Complete English Poems, ed. J.D. Fleeman (Penguin, 1971)

Johnson, Samuel, The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford, 2000)