Utopian Fantasies vs.

Real Happiness in Samuel

Johnson’s “Rasselas”
theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/08/utopian-fantasies-vs-real-happiness-samuel-johnson-rasselas-mitchell-
kalpakgian.html
Mitchell Kalpakgian September 1, 2018

In Samuel Johnson’s novel Rasselas, the eponymous character discovers that happiness does
not derive from a beautiful place, luxurious palace, or constant entertainment, but depends
upon a composed state of mind in possession of truth…

Throughout the eighteenth century

novel theories of happiness and utopian
ideas of perfect societies gained
respectability and popularity. The
exploration of the New World in the
discoveries of North and South America
in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries produced a genre of writing
known as travel literature, notorious for
its fictional account of voyages claimed
to be authentic accounts based on
recorded data and empirical evidence.
From these books of travel readers encountered reports that idealized the Noble
Savage and Happy Indian and learned of primitive, undeveloped cultures uncorrupted
by the vices of European nations.

Travel books portrayed the representatives of civilization—corrupt rulers, greedy

merchants, devious lawyers, foolish philosophers, and mad scientists as the agents of
vice and folly formed by immoral societies responsible for war, disease, poverty, and
crime—a condition that Jonathan Swift portrays through the eyes of Gulliver, the great
worldwide traveler who witnesses warmongering Lilliputians who bicker about which
end of the egg to break first, the king of Brobdingnag horrified at the English use of
gunpowder and the machinations of politicians, scientists (“Projectors”) studious about
experiments to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, and innovators experimenting
with novel theories of building houses from the roof and prolonging life by reducing
speech and using objects to communicate.

Gulliver, once the man of the Enlightenment in quest of knowledge, the proponent of
progress and science, and the champion and advocate of the British way of life,
undergoes a dramatic conversion after he discovers the primitive society of the horses
during his final voyage to the country of the Houyhnhnms—an image of the Noble
Savage unspoiled by the greed, malice, fraud, lust, envy, drunkenness, and sexually
transmitted diseases of Western civilization. The horses have no constitutional
government, no courts of law, no educational institutions, no commercial transactions,
and no need for physicians. Like the horses whom he praises for their rational,

1/4
benevolent, pure way of life, Gulliver too wishes to “return to Nature,” exchange his
English heritage for a primitive life, and live the rest of his days in an absolute utopia
rather than continue in the barbaric land of Yahoos in England.

Rousseau propagated the notion that man is naturally good and that society, not fallen
man with original sin, is the source of all evil. He advocated a retreat from the baneful
influences of society to recover original innocence. Travel literature also produced the
caricatures of the civilized as the agents of evil and the Noble Savages as paragons of
innocence and purity without the temptations of worldly influences ruining their
natural goodness as if they were not affected by original sin or possessed a fallen
human nature subject to the lures of the world, the flesh, and the Devil. Like Jonathan
Swift, a fellow classicist, Dr. Samuel Johnson repudiated these prevalent ideas of his
age as farfetched nonsense and illusory fantasies with no basis in experience, history,
or tradition. Rasselas, Johnson’s own travel book that avoids all the notorious faults of
mediocre travel writers guilty of promoting the impression of relative truth with the
phrase “Different nations have different customs,” depicts the truths of human
happiness in the most universal sense—ones that remain constant for all people in all
times in all places.

In his “Preface” to Father Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, Johnson clarifies the criteria for
travel literature at its best and praises the Portuguese Jesuit’s travel book for many
reasons. First, it avoids extremes with “no romantic absurdities or incredible fictions,”
and it “tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability.” Second, the travel writer
makes observations “as he saw them” and “consulted his senses, not his imagination,”
avoiding exaggeration and sensationalism. Third, the book does not idealize or
romanticize primitive life or presume to depict a utopian society or perfect people, “no
Hottentots without religion, polity, or articulate language; no Chinese perfectly polite,
and completely skilled in all sciences.” Lastly, Father Lobo honestly depicts the
universal human condition and recognizes that “wherever human nature is to be
found, there is a mixture of virtue and vice, a contest of passion and reason.” Johnson
incorporates all these standards in his own version of a travel book in the search for
human happiness in Rasselas.

When the story begins, Rasselas, the prince of Abysinnia, lives in a palace in Happy
Valley designed to afford its inhabitants the perfect ideal of a utopian existence.
Securely protected by mountains from the evils of the outside world, constantly
entertained by diversions and pleasures, and surrounded by peaceful tranquility and
natural beauty, Rasselas dwells in an environment of paradise replete with trees,
flowers, fruits, and pastures: “Every desire was immediately granted; all the artificers
of pleasure were called to gladden the festivity.” However, despite a life of luxury,
abundance, and leisure without toil or responsibilities, Rasselas suffers unhappiness in
the valley designed to be a utopian paradise. Although Happy Valley gratifies the five
senses and satisfies all the bodily and material needs with delights and comforts, he
experiences no happiness because he suffers restlessness, boredom, idleness,
melancholy, and daydreaming. Though the body basks in rest and comfort, the mind
finds no peace or solace.

Rasselas discovers that happiness does not derive from a beautiful place, luxurious
2/4
palace, or constant entertainment but depends upon a composed state of mind in
possession of truth. When he sees the lambs and kids chasing each other in the
pasture, Rasselas realizes the need for a goal to direct his life and a sense of
accomplishment in its achievement: “I fancy that I should be happy if I had something
to pursue.” However, satiated with pleasure and lulled by idleness, Rasselas dreads the
monotony of every day with its repetitious activities. He complains, “I find one day and
one hour exactly like another…. I have already enjoyed too much; give me something
to desire.” The first truth about human happiness Rasselas discovers is the need for
mental stimulation to resist the intellectual stagnation of a life that requires no
thought or effort to achieve goals.

He uncovers a second truth about happiness: The mind needs variety and contrast, a
change from work to play and from leisure to activity to gain the right balance of
moderation. Once Rasselas occupies his mind in exploring ways to escape from the
Happy Valley and seek “the choice of life” (the secret of happiness) in the larger world
outside the valley, he curbs the restlessness and boredom that burden him. Motivated
by a worthy goal and filled with enthusiasm, Rasselas no longer laments the tedious
passage of time: “The time, however, passed cheerfully away: in the morning he rose
with new hope, in the evening applauded his own diligence, and in the night slept
sound after his fatigue.” In the course of these ten months of adventure into new
territory, Rasselas escapes the tedium of repetition because his search leads to new
interests, a discovery of places “replete with wonders” and various animals and plants
that captured his interest and “diversified his thoughts.”

Rasselas learns more truths about happiness from an older inhabitant of the Happy
Valley, the sage Imlac who accompanies the prince in his travels into the wider world in
the quest for knowledge of happiness. Imlac, based on his varied life as a merchant,
sailor, and scholar, has gained knowledge of men and manners that grant him wisdom
about the human condition and the truth about human nature. He educates Rasselas
about the importance the life of the mind—the possession of truth—plays in the
attainment of happiness: “Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure…”
because all persons by nature delight in learning and acquiring new ideas, and
ignorance “is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of
attraction.” Like the body that needs activity, the mind too needs movement. The mind
flourishes when it learns from diverse sources of knowledge like travel, conversation,
and books and from varied experiences and conversations with people from all social
classes, educational levels, and different professions. Imlac summarizes his advice
about the mind’s health in the pursuit of happiness in two statements: “… we grow
more happy as our minds take a wider range” and “I am less unhappy than the rest
because I have a mind replete with images which I can vary and combine at pleasure.”

In other words, nothing can come from nothing. A life of the mind kept in motion
always adds to its repertory of knowledge to keep it “replete with images”—ideas,
memories, impressions—from the myriad of sources that enrich the life of thought.

3/4
Whether it is leaving the Happy Valley and seeing the sights of Cairo and the pyramids,
conversing with Imlac to learn from his wisdom, or visiting the shepherds to
understand the pastoral life, Rasselas enlarges his range of thought, supplies his mind
with more images for reflection, and keeps his life active and engaged to prevent
stagnation and apathy. As a result of his experience both in and out of the Happy
Valley, his conversations with Epicureans, Stoics, shepherds, rulers, and philosophers,
and the rich and the poor, Rasselas gains an honest, realistic idea about happiness
gathered from real life, not abstract theories.

The first universal truth that strikes him is that no place is utopia—neither the Happy
Valley, the palace of the Bassa of Egypt, nor the quiet pastures of the shepherds. None
of these places satisfies all man’s emotional, mental, or material needs. Rasselas gains
a second invaluable truth: no human being is ever perfectly happy or escapes some
degree of restlessness or unfulfilled desires—neither the learned astronomer nor the
ignorant maids in the harem, neither political rulers nor simple shepherds, neither the
hermit nor the married. A third truth Rasselas discovers is “the insufficiency of human
enjoyments” to satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart—an insight he
acquires from his visit to the pyramids, a monument to “that hunger of imagination
which preys incessantly upon life and must be always appeased by some
employment.” Even the wealthiest and most powerful, who count their possessions
but have nothing to do, must invent some activity, wasteful or frivolous, to divert the
boredom or restlessness that oppresses them. This insufficiency of human pleasures
to gratify the longings of the soul for infinite happiness awaits fulfillment in the next
life that Rasselas’ sister Nekayah calls “the choice of eternity.”

Although human life is not utopia or paradise but “a state in which much is to be
endured and little to be enjoyed,” as Imlac observes, it offers greater or lesser degrees
of happiness depending on the practice of the art of living. Those who live an active
rather than an idle life, who stock their minds with images and value the importance of
knowledge in living a life in truth rather than daydreams, who live in a wider, varied
world of social interaction and exchange with others to increase learning rather than
exist in the seclusion of a narrow valley dominated by the dangers of the imagination
fantasizing about utopias—these are the simple, timeless, universal truths about
happiness that have passed the test of time and resist all the fabrications about ideal
societies and perfect human beings devoid of original sin.

In Memoriam: Mitchell Kalpakgian passed away on August 28, 2018.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of

culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere
civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of
modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

4/4