On the verso of fol. 163 of the British Museum manuscript notes for his “Life of Pope,” transcribed by Harriet Kirkley in her A Biographer at Work (2002), Johnson jots down a key heading for future elaboration: It reads starkly “Madness of Dennis.”Footnote ¹ In another location within Johnson’s Shakespearean criticism of 1765, Dennis appears as one of the “petty minds” famed for “petty cavils.” In another, sixteen years later, he is a “formidable assailant.” Dennis’s contemporaries knew him as “the Critic” or they poked fun at his thunderous demeanor in the character of “Sir Tremendous.” Pope called Dennis “a furious old Critic by profession.” All critics, without exception, have their ridiculous side, and perhaps the entire business of criticism – in some lights – will always seem an incitement to laughter: Johnson’s portrait of Dick Minim in his Idler papers of 1759 suggests why mild manners are not enough; and the fruitful interplay between criticism and satire in the eighteenth century, as Dennis’s own work suggests, can hardly be overstated.Footnote ² Yet there is no reason in principle why a critical windbag such as Dennis cannot from time to time be impressively astute – indeed “formidable.” Viewing the criticism of Dennis through the prism of Samuel Johnson’s reveals a complicated array of defects and merits. Its outline throws a surprising light on the character of both critics.

Shakespeare, Addison and the Critical Value of Petty Minds

Sweeping aside the objections to Shakespeare made by Thomas Rymer and Voltaire, Johnson refers brusquely in his Preface to Shakespeare to Dennis’s criticism of Shakespeare’s neglect of character decorum – the principle that the personages of dramatic works should be depicted according to the established hierarchies of their society and profession. The run-in to the key paragraph is disarmingly neutral:

To which Johnson replies in the telling language of his core critical convictions:

The climax of the paragraph comes with an expressive drive that moves beyond literature to a doctrine equally pertinent to the visual arts: “These are the petty cavils of petty minds; a poet overlooks the casual distinction of country and condition, as a painter, satisfied with the figure, neglects the drapery” (Works vii, pp. 65–66). In the second half of his discussion of Cowley’s Pindarique Odes Johnson hands on this wisdom of surface and depth, of variation and permanence, to the contemporary master of figure and drapery Sir Joshua Reynolds, who later commended the thought to students of portraiture in his Royal Academy Discourses on Art; but Johnson is also responding here to Dennis’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespear of 1712.Footnote ³ He condemns Dennis outspokenly for his narrow requirements; but there is a sense in which the passage could not have happened in the absence of such as Dennis. He stands as an historical prerequisite (in the company of Rymer and Voltaire) for the Johnson whose forthright challenge to decorum on behalf of Shakespeare we esteem in the Preface. If Dennis does nothing else to influence the criticism of Johnson, he contributes to the provocations that shifted Johnson in 1751 from thinking tragedy should have “heroes” (Rambler 156, Works v, p. 70) to his unqualified approval for the fact that Shakespeare “has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men who act and speak as the reader thinks he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion” (Works vii, p. 64). The remark signifies the tipping point in Johnson’s critical career from passive advocacy of a conventional theory of “manners” to prefiguration of a “general nature” that underpins the Lives and was later remodelled in Wordsworth’s revolutionary series of writings accompanying his Lyrical Ballads.

Johnson’s argument with Dennis assists this transition. He calls on the same formulation while examining Dennis’s attack on the most celebrated eighteenth-century tragedy obedient to decorum, and again he responds to Dennis’s critical stimulation. Addison’s Cato (1712) had offered Johnson the opportunity in his Preface to Shakespeare for a vivid comparison between a poet of manners and the superior dramatic vitality of a poet of nature. On the “manners,” we have observed that Johnson follows in the footsteps of both Rapin and Boileau in demanding a stronger appeal to the heart:

At the time of the Idler (1759) Johnson had considered “many lines” in the soliloquy of Cato “easy poetry” where “natural thoughts are expressed without violence to the language” (Works ii, pp. 241, 239). But by the “Life of Addison” (1781) the same lines had come to seem “too smooth” for Johnson’s endorsement (Lives, vol. iii, p. 36). Recognizing the historical importance of the play, Johnson quotes a lengthy passage in his “Addison” from Dennis’s Remarks upon Cato: A Tragedy (1713), and having procured a copy of the Remarks from his project manager for the Lives, the ever-diligent John Nichols, Johnson embeds his extract from Dennis within his respectful but unenthusiastic appraisal of the play. The work, according to Johnson, while “unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius,” “is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama”: “rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language, than a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or possible in human life … its success has introduced or confirmed among us the use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance, and chill philosophy” (Lives, vol. iii, pp. 26–27). With these reservations in his mind, contemplating Addison prompts Johnson to suggest the mix of contrarian strength and weakness in Dennis: “The universality of applause,” he explains, “however it might quell the censure of common mortals, had no other effect than to harden Dennis in fixed dislike; but his dislike was not merely capricious. He found and shewed many faults; he shewed them indeed with anger, but he found them with acuteness” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 27).

The quotations from Dennis are the longest Johnson makes from any critic in the Lives, and they are punctuated by his running commentary upon them. Dennis had fallen out with Addison after the latter’s comments in Spectator 40 regarding the unfounded obligations of “poetical justice” (Critical Works, vol. ii, pp. 18–22),Footnote ⁴ and Johnson takes issue with Dennis’s complaint that the characters of Cato “are not natural, or reasonable” (Critical Works, vol. ii, p. 66). But with the double negative of one who must concede a point, he adds that “It is … not useless to consider what he says of the manner in which Cato receives the account of his son’s death” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 28).Footnote ⁵ The line from Cato Johnson has in mind epitomizes the “noble” Roman’s salutation: “Thanks to the gods! My boy has done his duty,” and the scene proceeds with Cato’s stirringly heroic and splendidly patriotic cry: “let not a private loss | Afflict your hearts. ’Tis Rome requires our tears.” With the logic of a common humanity that Johnson must approve, Dennis had complained that “for a man to receive the news of his son’s death with dry eyes, and to weep at the same time for the calamities of his country, is a wretched affectation” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 29). Johnson’s sentiments on professions of patriotism are famously scathing, and the forthright verdict of Dennis may seem extremely agreeable good sense.

A paragraph later Johnson suggests how the merciless jocularity of Dennis’s criticism of Cato can, after all, provide a source of enjoyment:

Johnson noted that beyond the point where Dennis had blamed the conduct and sentiments of Cato, “he then amused himself with petty cavils, and minute objections” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 36). But while he gives expression to a certain amount of wry amusement at Dennis’s critical irascibility over small misdemeanors, Johnson also preserves some genuine respect for the perceptiveness of his predecessor, and he confesses qualified admiration for Dennis’s acuteness. The skill and vigor of the old dead critic are typically found in company with his inflammatory darts. And with the complicity of a Johnson also prone to “delight in critical controversy” they are qualities that rescue Dennis from the forgotten and unlamented of critical history.

The wranglings that made Dennis the critical Menace of his day never did conduce to general fondness; but there is something you have to admire. Though the tone of Johnson’s accolade is ironic, Dennis is not of the “common mortals.” “His criticism,” writes Johnson of the Cato critique, “though sometimes intemperate, was often irrefragable” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 12). “Irrefragable” Johnson defined in his Dictionary as “Not to be confuted; superior to argumental opposition.” Given Johnson’s own propensity to the “argumental” (as indeed in his dealings with Dennis), this is again significant praise. Dennis’s onslaught on Cato has the precarious vitality of the inveterate controversialist aiming to vanquish a foe. But there appeared to Johnson a self-defeating quality in Dennis’s insatiable appetite for critical fisticuffs. The attack, he suggests, “ought to rescue [Dennis’s] criticism from oblivion; though, at last, it will have no other life than it derives from the work which it endeavors to oppress” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 27).

This remark defines Dennis as prey to powerful, self-destructive energies; he is a critic ever on the rampage. He may sometimes rampage rightly, but Dennis seals his fate historically through his critical bad manners, and Johnson weighs his judgment in an attempt to think equitably about critical history. The world has moved on. Politeness has made gains. Addisonian civility has won out over the vindictively raucous spirit of Grub Street and the pedantic or paranoid obsessions of its rival voices. Certainly, some of the principles that Dennis approved – his insistence on “probability” and on “poetical justice” – were still actively commended in Johnson’s day. But if Johnson engages them at all in his own criticism, it is to sidestep, reinterpret, or dismiss them.

We have earlier seen that Johnson vigorously defends Shakespeare against the accusation that he had neglected the dramatic unities of time and place, and he willingly accedes to Dennis’s criticism on the pointless observing of them in Cato. His famously withering satire exposes the logical fallacies underlying the mistaken rationalizations still entertained (in 1765) to explain the “delight of tragedy” (Works vii, p. 78). Even Addisonian tragedy proves that such pleasure can work as well on the page as it does on the stage: “what voice or what gesture,” writes Johnson, “can hope to add dignity or force to the soliloquy of Cato” (Works vii, p. 79). But in the course of the Preface Johnson also draws attention to the “labour” Shakespeare seems typically to exert in his tragic scenes, and he points to the ease and durability of the comic scenes and to his “disposition” for comedy (Works vii, p. 69). This latter insight Johnson borrowed from Rymer. Dennis, for his part, had claimed in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespear (1712) that “Tho’ Shakespear succeeded very well in Comedy, yet his principal Talent and his chief Delight was Tragedy” (Critical Works, vol. ii, p. 13). Johnson seems to reverse this claim in the Preface. He writes of Shakespeare – with more consistent interest in motivation and inspiration than Dennis – that “His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct” (Works vii, p. 69). But “skill” is not mere technical expertise in this usage, implying that Johnson perversely demotes tragedy below comedy. The term carries the force of “knowledge” – as in the Latin scientia. The difference is that Dennis makes an evaluative comparison while Johnson describes how the tragedy and comedy come about.

But the conversation is worth having. Indeed, when in the Preface Johnson is reflecting on the ways in which Shakespeare compares in originality with Homer, he quotes Dennis, who has an authority on technical matters of literary language that Johnson could respect:

But then the note of dissent is sounded:

This leads in turn to Johnson’s classic account in the Preface of Shakespeare having discovered the degree to which the smoothness and harmony of the English language could be softened (Works vii, pp. 90–91). On the development of the language of literature Dennis can once again assist the evolution of Johnsonian thought.

When, likewise, Johnson is coming to terms with the acute emotional pain induced by the death of Cordelia in King Lear, his own uneasy deliberations return him to the criticism of Dennis. Johnson observes with some equivocation that “Dennis has remarked, whether justly or not, that to secure the favorable reception of Cato, ‘the town was poisoned with much false and abominable criticism,’ and that endeavours had been used to discredit and decry poetical justice” (Critical Works, vol. ii, p. 43; Works viii, p. 704).Footnote ⁶ Johnson is never so outspoken in his endorsement of “poetical justice” as Dennis, so that, for example, when he is entertaining the charge that Hamlet wants “poetical justice,” he suggests that the play might be better accused of wanting “poetical probability” (Works viii, p. 1011). But it is Dennis, of all the critics that Johnson could have answered on this point, who enters, and complicates, the argument on King Lear. The context is one where Johnson is exposed by the tragedy to a degree of personal distress he might wish himself spared, and where his distinctions are made with unusual delicacy. Whether Johnson agrees with Dennis’s temperamental resort to theory and law or not, he appreciates – if we are not to despair – the human need for “poetical justice” to be done.

A quotation from Dryden concludes Johnson’s commentary on Dennis’s criticism of Cato: “There is, as Dryden expresses it, perhaps too much horse-play in his raillery; but if his jests are coarse, his arguments are strong.” And yet with all this “argumental” strength, time has passed, the public judgment on Dennis has been handed down, and while “Cato is read,” “the critick is neglected” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 36). Johnson’s apologia for a figure doomed by critical history to be remembered mainly as a “Dunce,” and immortalized by Pope’s mock epic of his middle and later years, forms part of his dialogue with a critical past that Dennis had presided over, and distinguishes his personal engagement with a critic from that past who appears a dauntingly serious but traditionally ludicrous figure. Isaac Disraeli was later to write that “Dennis attained to the ambiguous honour of being distinguished as ‘The Critic,’ and he may yet instruct us how the moral influences the literary character, and how a certain talent that can never mature into genius, like the pale fruit that hangs in the shade, ripens only into sourness.”Footnote ⁷ The figure of “The Critic” is memorialized on various occasions in the period’s pictorial satire,Footnote ⁸ and Disraeli graphically records an anecdote concluding with a recollection of Dennis’s violent temper and his explosion of pique on taking offense at some or other disagreeable remark:

Disraeli extends a tradition of mocking Dennis’s ill-nature that had included Addison. Writing before the appearance of Cato in The Tatler 165 (Saturday April 29, 1710), Addison had sketched Sir Timothy Tittle as a partial fit for Dennis’s character: “Of this shallow Species [of pedants],” he complains, “there is not a more importunate, empty, and conceited Animal, than that which is generally known by the Name of Critick”:

Steele, too, was to add his own ridicule to the mix. In The Theatre of 1720, he devotes a whole paper to a barely disguised satirical portrait of Dennis: “He has the face and surliness of a Mastiff, which has often saved him from being treated like a Cur; till some more sagacious than ordinary found his nature, and used him accordingly. Unhappy being! Terrible without, fearful within! Not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but a sheep in a wolf’s.”Footnote ¹⁰ Such caricatures have taken hold. In a recent essay on the comedy of Johnson’s critical writing, David Nunnery observes that “one of the finest comic touches in the Lives [of Johnson] is the frequent reappearance of the ever-aggrieved John Dennis as a force of malignity, a trope that unites his targets like comrades in a siege, and that by means of repetition becomes thoroughly laughable.”Footnote ¹¹

But this verdict does not do justice to the Dennis whose ambiguities Johnson has placed in the scales. In taking Dennis seriously, Johnson widens attention from the personality, besmirched directly or indirectly by Addison and Steele, and later by Disraeli et al., to Dennis’s observations on particular literary works, and he gives credit to the forensic insights and their unusual level of textual detail. Dennis lacks the wit and panache of Rymer and he was not feared as Dryden once feared Rymer. Yet Dennis was himself not easily subdued by his contemporary. When Rymer attacked Shakespeare’s Othello and Julius Caesar in his Short View of Tragedy (1692), Dennis accused him of attempting not to reform but rather to “ruine the English Drama” (Critical Works, vol. i, p. 11).Footnote ¹² Johnson referred to Rymer in his “Life of Dryden” as exhibiting “the ferocity of a tyrant,” suggesting the powerful energy behind Rymer’s criticism when set against the majestic quality of Dryden’s (Lives, vol. ii, p. 120). Dennis is more irritably didactic than either. Once he has embarked on his strategies of logical exposure, his ranting prolixity always teeters on the edge of the absurd; but Dennis is also more copious as a critic than Rymer, and he addresses a greater range of works and problems. His criticism has survived as an extensive corpus. These are perhaps among the reasons why, in 1776, contrary to Tom Davies’s opinion that they would not sell, Johnson could recommend the late-stage collection and publication of his Critical Works. “Dr. Johnson seemed to think otherwise” is Boswell’s record of Johnson’s difference of opinion with Davies on the likely market for Dennis half a century after his death (Boswell, vol. iii, p. 40).Footnote ¹³

Dennis as Formidable Assailant: Johnson on Pope

For all that he counselled in favor of republication, Johnson pulled no punches about Dennis’s criticism: He thought the treatment of Blackmore, for example, “insolent and contemptuous” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 76); but his most notable entanglement concerns Dennis’s criticisms of Pope. Dennis, whom Johnson styles “the perpetual persecutor of all his studies” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 28), had commented on a number of Pope’s early poems including (in the same document) The Temple of Fame, Windsor Forest and the translation of Homer (1717; Critical Works, vol. ii, pp. 115–58). On the first of these poems, Johnson notes intriguingly that among Dennis’s remarks, “the most reasonable is, that some of the lines represent motion as exhibited by sculpture” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 11). “Trees starting from their Roots, a Mountain rolling into a Wall, and a Town rising like an Exhalation,” writes Dennis, “are Things that are not to be shown in Sculpture. Neither Painting, nor Sculpture, can show Local Motion” (Critical Works, vol. ii, p. 143).

That Johnson should pick up on Dennis’s unusual insight into a logical distinction between the potential of the poetic and the plastic arts is interesting and Dennis has rightly attracted interest on this count.Footnote ¹⁴ But the most illuminating Johnsonian reactions concern Dennis’s belated savaging (in 1728) of the Rape of the Lock, and his rampant satire of Pope’s Essay on Criticism when the poem came out (1711). The Remarks on the Rape of the Lock are a backlash provoked by Dennis’s appearance in The Dunciad, and his comments show how willingly Johnson was able to refine his position relative to Dennis’s original criticisms. Charles H. Hinnant has noted of Johnson that “even in instances like The Rape of the Lock where the voice of the consensus gentium appears to be overwhelming, a dissenting voice (in this case, that of John Dennis) is allowed to be heard.”Footnote ¹⁵ Dennis’s charge against the Rape that the poem displays the “want of a moral” whereby it is inferior to Boileau’s seventeenth-century mock-epic Le lutrin (“The Writing Desk”), Johnson concludes is “without justice”: “Perhaps neither Pope nor Boileau has made the world much better than he found it; but if they both succeeded, it were easy to tell who would have deserved most from publick gratitude.” Johnson then spells out the rueful “moral” or mock-moral (it’s hard to say which):

On Dennis’s criticism that the machinery of the poem “is superfluous,” Johnson is less ready to brand the allegation mistaken: “To this charge an efficacious answer is not easily made. The sylphs cannot be said to help or oppose, and it must be allowed to imply some want of art, that their power has not been sufficiently intermingled with the action. Other parts may likewise be charged with want of connection.” Dennis is right in a way: “Those perhaps are faults,” Johnson concedes (Lives, vol. iv, p. 72). In the Dictionary he defines “efficacious” as “Productive of effects; powerful to produce the consequence intended.” Yet “formidable assailant” though he is, Dennis misses the spirit of the poem.Footnote ¹⁶ Johnson’s appeal to its charms requires a device rare in his criticism – the exclamation mark: “but what are such faults to so much excellence!” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 72). For a rational encounter with “argumental opposition” Johnson substitutes a commendatory gesture.

Pope’s Essay on Criticism, analysed in Dennis’s Reflections Critical and Satyrical, upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay upon Criticism, inspires a pitiless exercise in demolition (and is interestingly at odds with the reaction of Addison). Dennis launched his assault with great vigor soon after the appearance of Pope’s poem, his first to be separately published, on May 15, 1711. However, it is apparent that Dennis’s pamphlet (of June 20, 1711) betrays evidence of the pot calling the kettle black. Pope, Dennis complains, is “a pedantick Slave to Authority and Opinion” (Reflections, in Critical Works, vol. i, p. 398). The Essay is the youthful poem that Addison was to praise (or “damn with faint praise”) in his Spectator 253 review of December 20, 1711.Footnote ¹⁷ Johnson writes in his “Life of Pope” that Addison had addressed the poem “with sufficient liberality,” and he suggests that Addison’s opinion “met with so much favour as enraged Dennis.” But as detailed in the Yale edition of the Lives (and cited here), the fact that Dennis wrote in advance of Addison means that chronology is against such a reading. In any event the ad hominem slight on Dennis in the Essay is amplified in Pope’s unattributed The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris (1713). Here the author imagines Dennis angrily consuming the Essay in Lintot’s shop with “much Frowning,” and when coming across the lines “Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past, | Turn’d Criticks next, and prov’d plain Fools at last” (lines 36–37), he was excited to “a terrible Fury”: “By G—d he means Me.”Footnote ¹⁸

While taken aback by Pope’s poetic precocity, Dennis was offended by such personal references (intended or imagined) to this capacity to fly off the handle critically. The tendency is caught in the reddening visage of “Appius,” the Roman name overwriting the “Dennis” struck out in the manuscript.Footnote ¹⁹ The allusion is to Appius Claudius Crassus, a celebrated ratifier of laws, and to the character in Dennis’s unsuccessful play of 1709 Appius and Virginia. Both references suggest the reasons why, in Johnson’s report of the Reflections, Dennis thought himself attacked “in a clandestine manner” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 6).Footnote ²⁰ The satirical Narrative of Dr. Norris, Dennis’s physician, called to treat his insane behavior, observes that: “his Room was hung with old Tapestry, which had several Holes in it, caus’d … by his having cut out of it the Heads of divers Tyrants, the Fierceness of whose Visages had much provoked Him.”Footnote ²¹ Pope had depicted Dennis poetically as one who has actually taken on the facial likeness of those who had made him angry. He “stares, Tremendous! with a threatening Eye, | Like some fierce Tyrant in Old Tapestry!” (lines 586–87).Footnote ²²

That Johnson should again quote Dennis in the “Life of Pope” (1781), and should do so at length, supports his intuition that the old critic’s works could be collected to advantage, contra the commercial instincts of the bookseller. Johnson encourages readers of the Lives to sample Dennis and to experience his verbal logic, and it is very much the logical plane on which Johnson sought to engage with Pope. While the manner is splenetic (“The pamphlet is such as rage might be expected to dictate” [Lives, vol. iv, p. 6]), Johnson can sympathize with Dennis’s grouse about Pope’s definition of “wit,” and the account of its two meanings, even if he writes with heavy irony that Dennis, “not content with argument … will have a little mirth, and triumphs over the first couplet [of the quoted lines] in terms too elegant to be forgotten.” “Elegant” the terms are not. Dennis, travestying the image, responds sarcastically to Pope’s notion that wit and judgment, though “ever … at strife,” yet “want each others’ aid, like Man and Wife”: “By the way, what rare numbers are here! Would not one swear that this youngster had espoused some antiquated Muse, who had sued out a divorce on account of impotence from some superannuated sinner; and having been p—xed by her former spouse, has got the gout in her decrepit age, which makes her hobble so damnably” (Dennis as quoted in Lives, vol. iv, p. 7).Footnote ²³“This,” writes Johnson tersely, “was the man who would reform a nation sinking into barbarity” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 7).

By his quickness to condemn the minutest flaws in the precocious young poet, Dennis displays a pernickety spirit. But courtesy Lintot, Pope was apparently made privy to the criticism of Dennis prior to the publication of the Reflections and he annotated the pamphlet. Dennis had touched a nerve in the similarly pernickety Pope, who then made a series of draft corrections as a codicil to the manuscript of the Essay.Footnote ²⁴ In the “Second Edition” of 1713, if by no means on every point, he corrected the poem in partial compliance with Dennis’s detailed remarks. Pope conceded in a letter to his friend John Caryll: “To give the man his due, he has objected to one or two lines with reason, and I will alter them in case of another edition.”Footnote ²⁵ (There are, as a matter of fact, some fourteen alterations in this “Second Edition” that seem to owe their origin to Dennis’s pamphlet.Footnote ²⁶) Pope must on such occasions seem to share with Johnson a measure of respect for a critic whose shrewdness is more abrasive than the mild-mannered “Muse’s Handmaid” he commends (Essay, line 102).Footnote ²⁷ Johnson’s summary of the relationship between the two writers is given at the end of a quoted paragraph consisting of insults aimed at William Walsh, the poetic mentor extolled in elegiac mode by Pope: “Thus began the hostility between Pope and Dennis, which, though it was suspended for a short time, never was appeased. Pope seems, at first, to have attacked him wantonly; but though he always professed to despise him, he discovers, by mentioning him very often, that he felt the force of his venom” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 7). As to Dennis’s “force,” something similar could be said of the generosity with which Johnson quotes from the critical works in his Lives. The practice – of “mentioning him very often” – is unusual enough for Johnson to feel a defence is required.

It tends to go unremarked, at the same time, that Pope’s Essay is termed a “Late Rhapsody” by Dennis. In his Spectator review of the poem Addison obscures an aspect of its distinction when he calls the Essay an “Art” (after Horace’s Ars poetica and Boileau’s L’art poétique [“The Art of Poetry,” 1674]).Footnote ²⁸ This is a category mistake. And if Dennis’s “Rhapsody” is designed to accuse Pope of disorder, he finds the right term to suggest the poem’s culturally subversive effects. His outrage testifies to a quality that the polished generosity of Addison’s treatment refuses (or cunningly seeks to suppress). Even while arraigning Pope, Dennis seems to respond to the poem’s dramatic energies and transitions – between satire, exaltation, brilliant imagery, magical thinking, wise words of moral advice, musicality, blunt truths and poetic flights. Addison’s reaction to the Essay in Spectator 253 is by contrast assimilative, aligning it with existing verse essays by Roscommon (on “Translated Verse”) and another unnamed piece from the last age “on the art of poetry.”Footnote ²⁹ Dennis’s sense of the poem as a “Rhapsody” thereby comes discernibly closer to a true aesthetic description of the poem’s immediacy than do many critics, then or now, who have looked to the Essay for a neoclassical theory or have sought a philosophical argument analogous to that of the Essay on Man. As far as the poem is philosophical, it equates more easily to the vagrant essayistic spirit of Montaigne. The rhapsodic quality is echoed in Johnson’s celebration of the poem in his “Life of Pope”:

Johnson, following Pope’s own advice in the Essay, writes (rhapsodically) of his author in “the same Spirit that [his] Author writ” (line 234).

In Fairness to the Critical Past

That such rich material of critical exchange existed between the two critics may, then, be one reason why Johnson is willing to engage at so many points with Dennis’s outspoken observations and to quote many pages from Dennis’s exhausting, inexhaustible, critical prose. Doubtless, as the compositional methods and textual variety of the Lives would in general suggest, Johnson was often ready to recruit the opinions of other commentators. This is sometimes to place them in context, to refute them, or sometimes to have them stand proxy for his own. Roger Lonsdale notes that both the London Magazine and Horace Walpole “accused SJ of quoting Dennis’s “ill-natured” critique [of Addison’s Cato] merely to pad out his volume” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 271n.). “[H]e … has reprinted Dennis’s “Criticism on Cato,” writes Walpole in a letter to the Rev. William Mason, “to save time and swell his pay.”Footnote ³⁰ But the interjections that Johnson makes accord Dennis the critical capital he needs to participate worthily in the critical conversations and motley textual fabric of the Lives.

Dennis’s critical writings have staged something of a comeback in recent years – albeit for reasons more to do with historical interest in their content (what they say or what contemporary theory they subscribe to) than on account of the durability that defines the challenge of Johnson’s criticism today.Footnote ³¹ David Womersley’s anthology Augustan Critical Writing (1997) prints two essays by Dennis with the object of recuperating figures unfairly falling victim to the “Tory” satire of Pope, Swift and their circle.Footnote ³² Yet Dennis’s political sympathies (as against his serious critical deficiencies) might not be principally responsible for his historical marginalization. In his recent and monumental study Queen Anne: Patron of Arts, James A. Winn includes one reference only to Dennis in nearly 800 pages of commentary on the period, and he makes no mention of the prolific aesthetic achievements of a critical writer at an energetic peak during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14). The vociferous antagonist of Pope and the scourge of many lesser poets remains scarcely visible.Footnote ³³ The Critical Works of Dennis that Johnson promoted never materialized, or not until E. N. Hooker’s edition of 1939.

Yet in any examination of the artistic or critical productions of the first decade of the eighteenth century, Dennis cannot easily be set aside. He remains historically salient for his interest in the psychology of the poetic response and in promoting the “sublime,” a term and concept that was to become of central importance in the development of aesthetic theory in the middle and later years of the eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁴ Celebrated by Boileau in his Traité du sublime (“Treatise on the Sublime”) of 1674, the “sublime” found a further theoretical extension in 1757 via the famous treatise of Edmund Burke.Footnote ³⁵ While less a devotee of the concept than his friend Joseph Warton, Johnson deployed an appeal to the sublime in his diagnosis of the faults of the Metaphysical poets, on the conditions for devotional poetry in his discussion of Edmund Waller and in his characterization of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Lives, vol. i, p. 201; vol. ii, p. 53; vol. i, p. 286). Alongside Addison and Dryden, Dennis was an enthusiastic advocate for both Milton and Shakespeare, and in ways that Johnson could not ignore.Footnote ³⁶ Shakespeare, after all, is the first writer of whom Johnson offered the sort of comprehensive judgment that typifies his mature criticism, while on the few occasions where passages from any particular author are addressed at length or in depth in the periodical criticism, Milton receives more extensive attention than any other single writer, whether ancient or modern.

Throughout their careers, the two critics share a habit of dedicated attention to textual particulars, and they are able to focus sharp pairs of eyes on poets’ abuses of the logic of language. Both Dennis and Johnson instantiate the professional, social and moral role of the critic – on which topic Johnson’s Idler papers on Dick Minim (60 and 61) offer the wisest and wittiest of subversive treatments. Dennis may be less elegant than his contemporary Dryden; but Dennis’s creative works tended not to generate the accusations of vested interest and special pleading detected in the circuitous prefaces of Dryden or in his embarrassingly suppliant Dedications to the Great. Nor is his criticism the self-defensive bluster that marks the invective of William Wycherley.Footnote ³⁷ And it is doubtless true that Dennis’s taste for critical controversy, and his habit of fearless provocation, mean that the memory of him we inherit is perhaps excessively defined by the hostile terms of those he offended. While he is subject to the satire of Addison, Steele, Pope and others (of various political persuasions), his manner is in fact sometimes less wanting in sensitivity than his reputation has tended to suggest. The counterbalance to his aggression is a capacity for critical delight. Succinct he is not, but he can at times display the equipoise of a perfectly graceful contemporary critical prose. Consider the following from Dennis’s early (1692) Preface to his translation of Ovid’s The Passion of Byblis:

Dennis doubtless became more discomposed as he aged, and the same might be said of Pope’s corresponding vituperative disdain for the poetic and critical world in his later years. But Dennis sometimes seems to deserve the accolade of “Impartial Critick,” the independently minded persona he claimed for himself.

Johnson’s character of Dennis as a “formidable assailant” appears for such reasons not simply ironic. The sparks of humor in Johnson’s appraisal do not obliterate the “argumental” vigor of a critical past for which Johnson is almost nostalgic. There is doubtless more than a hint of disapproval in his characterizations; but though Dennis’s rancorous manner is often tiresome, this is perhaps ultimately more congenial to Johnsonian taste than the temperamental suavity and courteous facility of Addison. We have seen that Dennis is quoted in the “Life of Addison” for “those who delight in critical controversy” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 29), and, like Johnson, he arrogated to himself the task of the critic as controversialist and fearless antagonist. There may be nothing like the subtlety and composure of Johnson; but Dennis too, in his own day, had been willing to go out on a limb. He risks name-calling; he takes the flak and reenters the fray; he was not of those who, when offended beside other victims of The Dunciad, “grumbled in secret” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 34).

This appetite for combat represents a tradition in the modes of criticism that Johnson never completely abandoned. The art of criticism in his own time had become progressively associated with essays on belles lettres, with the techniques of rhetorical analysis, with an education in philosophical concepts and with advances in antiquarian scholarship. Freshly minted theoretical dissertations on what we would now call “aesthetics” – on “genius,” “taste,” “originality,” “imagination” and so forth – had seemed to make inroads into the old-fashioned judgmentalist habits of rejecting, comparing and preferring. Indeed, Johnson’s independence in style and approach from these various movements and divisions may have helped cement his sympathy with Dennis’s achievement. The attention to general principle on the one hand and to close reading on the other is a fusion that Johnson could only admire.

Dennis may be a windbag: perusing him at length in the two large volumes of E. N. Hooker’s Critical Works is a test of endurance. Johnson would doubtless sympathize on this score with today’s readers of Dennis, such as they are. He observes that Dennis attacked Blackmore’s epic of Prince Arthur “by a formal criticism, more tedious and disgusting than the work which he condemns” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 76). And “Tediousness,” as we know from Johnson’s comments on Matthew Prior in the Lives, “is the most fatal of all faults” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 60). What Johnson intends by his judgment can be illustrated at the local level from the prose rhythms that recall the sound of a table being repeatedly thumped. This oppressive and deterrent demeanor appears when Dennis is defining heroic poetry, echoing in chapter 1 of the Remarks on Prince Arthur (1696) the influential theories of René le Bossu’s Traité du poeme épique (“Treatise on the Epic Poem,” 1675). The definitional booming belongs to the section “Of an Epick Poem in general” and confirms Dennis as the comical “Sir Tremendous” of Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot’s Three Hours after Marriage (1717):

Dennis may be “tedious”: reading through the full text of his Remarks is for those with time on their hands, patient devotion to an eighteenth-century scholarly specialism and an unusually accommodating boredom threshold. But Johnson could prize to a high degree the place that Dennis had in the origin narrative of the English critical tradition; of this he was himself the heir and consummate professional beneficiary. (His own definition of the epic poem, introducing an analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost, also draws on Bossu, and if gentler in tone, is not very different in the principles it recalls [Lives, vol. i, pp. 282–83].) Paul D. Cannan has summed up Dennis’s historical importance very judiciously, observing that “Far more than any other writer before Pope and Addison, Dennis specifically outlined the role of the critic and the purpose of criticism, effectively establishing the profession of criticism in England.”Footnote ³⁸ Being fair to critics of the past, as to the Blackmores of poetical history, was for Johnson now part of this profession.

Thomas Warton’s History

With all that divides them, Dennis and Johnson respond to poetry and to poets by reference to their respective standards of artistic failure and success. The primary purpose of their critical mission they see as the advocacy and defense of their poetical judgment in the court of literary opinion. But by Johnson’s day, an important broadening of the role available to the literary critic is the telling of the story of poetry, a narrating of its kind over time. The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of Eighteenth Century (1774–91), by the Poet Laureate and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and the Society of Antiquaries Thomas Warton, develops the possibilities of a poetical “history” against a contemporary background rich in biographical dictionaries and editions of poetical “beauties.” Warton’s History of English Poetry in three volumes (with the fragments of a fourth unfinished volume) charts an enterprise in scholarly curiosity, and with Warton we move from assimilation of the past of poetry via poetical translation, imitation and cultural integration to its distantiation.Footnote ¹ His antiquarian’s perspective enlivens cultural comparison: “We look back,” writes Warton in his preface, “on the savage condition of our ancestors with the triumph of superiority.” And he continues: “we are pleased to mark the steps by which we have been raised from rudeness to elegance: and our reflections on this subject are accompanied with a conscious pride, arising in great measure from a tacit comparison of the infinite disproportion between the feeble efforts of remote ages, and our present improvements in knowledge” (Warton’s History, vol. i, p. i). Warton’s formula for the writing of history recalls the digressive character of his brother Joseph’s method as a literary critic. He describes his historical procedure as walking the line between the thematic and the merely annalistic:

An alternative scheme for a taxonomic history, devised by Pope, was transmitted to Warton personally via his fellow poets William Mason and Thomas Gray; but he rejected it in favor of the narrative-digressive compromise he describes here.Footnote ² Working to this plan, he determines not to exclude drama from the purview of poetry, but not to deviate too far in its direction either; he defends his practice of lavish quotation (the giving of “specimens” of poetry) on the grounds that many of the early poems are hitherto unknown. His history functions as an act of scholarly mediation between the early native texts and a developing taste in the present of the eighteenth century for nonclassical antiquity: this Warton’s History partly serves and partly calls into being.Footnote ³

In his comments on Thomas Gray’s widely celebrated Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1751; Lives, vol. iv, p. 184), Johnson in the Lives of the Poets famously appeals to, and rejoices to concur with, the experience of the “common reader”; but Warton writes his poetical history on the understanding that many will not actually have read the poetical texts he historicizes or know the poets, even when they know of them. In this respect his history falls somewhere between a narrative of poetical development, tradition and innovation from the eleventh century, and a sampler, an anthology or a variety of “beauties.” Yet like his brother he cannot resist the urge to bring more examples in. We find him having consciously to restrain this tendency:

That said, the temptation to compile a “general repository” regularly gets the better of him – there is often an outburst of deep personal enthusiasm which fights against and temporarily retards the narrative flow. Warton feels patriotically duty-bound to bring all his findings into the light, and he regrets the parlous state of neglect for the jewels of English literary and poetical creativity buried in the archives: “I cannot however help observing, that English literature and English poetry suffer, while so many pieces of this kind still remain concealed and forgotten in our MSS. libraries” (Warton’s History, vol. i, pp. 208–09). In the modern age, writes Warton, historical and critical values are connected closely. The condition of present culture is at stake: “the curiosity of the antiquarian is connected with taste and genius, and his researches tend to display the progress of human manners, and to illustrate the history of society” (Warton’s History, vol. i, p. 209).Footnote ⁴

The fraternal relation between Thomas and Joseph reflects and encourages the new audience for early texts and binds historical enquiry to the cultivation of taste. But Warton’s appeal to “the curious reader” (Warton’s History, vol. i, p. 2 n. d) does not target a naive or uneducated audience. The lavish footnotes and detailed scholarly citation invite specialist verification; they allow Warton to identify sources with the exactness his peers might expect. Drawing on some seven hundred manuscripts, he suggests parallels between early texts and the borrowings from them made by later English poets. Much of his scholarship is displaced into the notes, though not to the point where the main text is completely decongested. As explained by David Fairer in the Introduction to his modern facsimile edition of the History, there remains the sense of a “work in progress” (Warton’s History, vol. i, p. 34). Mason and Walpole both record their contemporary experience of “wading through” the history as readers (Introduction, Warton’s History, vol. i, pp. 37–38).

As in the extended adjudication on the satires of Hall and Marston appearing in the fragment of a fourth volume (see esp. vol. iv, pp. 67–68), much of this history consists of careful, detailed commentaries on individual poems. Such a habit of exposition incorporates many astute critical remarks, and fine formulations expressive of a highly developed poetical taste. But Warton does not overlook the obligation of a history (as it is from time to time held in common with the obligations of the critic) to rise to a totalizing oversight of a whole period or phase of English poetical culture: Warton begins the opening section (xliv) of the unfinished fourth volume by noting that “More poetry was written in the single reign of Elizabeth than in the two preceding centuries,” and he explains the broader cultural causes of such poetical efflorescence. He insists upon a logic of history operative within the textual disorder and contextual unknowns of the past, and he acknowledges the fertile circumstances for poetical composition, the coming together of diverse conditions whose union is conducive to poetic creativity.

However digressive and opportunistic, or however weighed down by citations and notes, Warton’s historical method means that he measures the rational relation of historical causes to historical effects:

Warton, we see, brings a sense of logical concatenation, and an awareness of social context, to the chronological evolution of poetry.

Johnson as Poetical Historian: The Lives of the Poets

Pat Rogers has noted that Johnson wrote no such formal history as Warton’s and felt no guilt at not doing so.Footnote ⁵ But there is no doubting Johnson’s deep historical interests in the literary past as such. Johnson wrote personal histories in his role as a biographer; he worked on the Harleian Library catalogue; he engaged with the Ossian fraud, and with the Chattertonian issues of textual authenticity: All such activities testify to historical, indeed textual-historicist, concerns not dissimilar to Warton’s. His sense of the history of the language from its earliest manifestations informs his Dictionary etymologies and is resurgent in his notes to the language of Shakespeare. All his works convey an apprehension of the reality and remains of the past, and most prominently the literary past, as a source of comparison with the present.

Johnson’s sense of its history is that poetry develops, as Warton also concluded, from an unimproved to an improved (if far from ideal) state. Wordsworth in the next generation was to conduct a revolt against his own poetical past that draws lines of division; but Johnson charts a “progress of poetry”: Individual poets, such as Roscommon, give freely of their wares to an appreciative posterity of readers and of other poets and “may be numbered among the benefactors to English literature” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 23). Generosity of spirit is accorded to both points on the historical scale. Successive poets each make their contribution independently to this expanding transhistorical community. Originality and innovation are thrown into relief by the historical point of view that sets fresh achievements in time. This pattern comes out memorably in Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (1765):

Again, and also in the Preface, he writes: “To [Shakespeare] we must ascribe the praise, unless Spenser may divide it with him, of having first discovered to how much smoothness and harmony the English language could be softened” (Works vii, p. 90).

This sensitivity to the decisive turns of history, and the credit that is owed to the poets who made them, shapes the narrative of the Lives of the Poets (1779–81), where historical understanding serves the purposes of criticism by supplying luminous comparisons.Footnote ⁶ Johnson can write of the young William Congreve that “Among all the efforts of early genius which literary history records, I doubt whether any one can be produced that more surpasses the common limits of nature than the plays of Congreve” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 68); and again, it is Congreve’s originality to which Johnson accords praise: “Congreve has merit of the highest kind; he is an original writer, who borrowed neither the models of his plot, nor the manner of his dialogue” (Lives, vol. iii, pp. 70–71).

The temporal depth of perspective is apparent from the very beginning of the Lives. Johnson reassesses the past of the seventeenth-century poetical scene for the present: “About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets” (Lives, vol. i, pp. 199–200). Johnson writes historically when he thinks about the impact of the Metaphysicals upon later poets: “When their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more imitators, than time has left behind. Their immediate successors, of whom any remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Cleveland, and Milton” (Lives, vol. i, p. 202). We see how a particular phase in poetry bifurcates and trifurcates into different kinds of consequent innovation:

Sometimes, noticing how original a poet has been makes Johnson willing to suspend judgments of value to put on record the importance of formal changes. Thus “Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled Alexandrines at pleasure with the common heroick of ten syllables, and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious” (Lives, vol. i, p. 233). Sometimes, literary-historical knowledge must check unwarranted claims to originality. Of Butler’s Hudibras: “We must not … suffer the pride which we assume as the countrymen of Butler to make any encroachment upon justice, nor appropriate those honours which others have a right to share. The poem of Hudibras is not wholly English; the original idea is to be found in the history of Don Quixote” (Lives, vol. i, p. 215). Here we apprehend how the historical, political and social context necessary to appreciate old poetry can erode with the passage of time:

Historical knowledge is again the crucial divider between past and present in the “Life of Dryden.” Johnson is explaining the different conditions of authorship imposed by the changing of taste over time: “in Dryden’s time the drama was very far from that universal approbation which it has now obtained” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 97). Observing an historical fact, that “The playhouse was abhorred by the Puritans,” transmutes into the controlled employment of historical imagination. What undoubtedly “was” leads to what it is reasonable to deduce “would have” been: “A grave lawyer would have debased his dignity, and a young trader would have impaired his credit, by appearing in those mansions of dissolute licentiousness” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 97).

Johnson comments with unmitigated admiration on poets who effect changes for the good of poetry that cannot be reversed. Dryden was the great watershed in English poetry for Johnson:

A little later, after a glance at Jonson, Feltham, Sandys, Holyday and Cowley, Johnson concludes that “It was reserved for Dryden to fix the limits of poetical liberty, and give us just rules and examples of translation” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 125).

Thus the great writer builds on the small advances of his minor predecessors; his eminence is the historical effect of an historical cause. Denham “appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines and interpreting single words” (Lives, vol. i, p. 239). Such pathbreaking poets, quite minor in themselves, give the progress of poetry a helping hand; they prepare the way for great geniuses to thrive and to realize their greatness, and they contribute to the general wellbeing of poetry. So Denham (again) wrote versions of Virgil which “are not pleasing; but they taught Dryden to please better” (Lives, vol. i, p. 239). Roscommon, “very much to his honour,” is (“perhaps”) “the only correct writer in verse before Addison” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 200). John Philips, in The Splendid Shilling, “has the uncommon merit of an original design” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 69), while in general it can be said that “if he had written after the improvements made by Dryden, it is reasonable to believe that he would have admitted a more pleasing modulation of numbers into his work” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 69). Matthew Prior, commendably, “was one of the first that resolutely endeavoured at correctness” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 62), and at the time he composed his verses, “we had not recovered from our Pindarick infatuation” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 63): “what he received from Dryden [in versification] he did not lose” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 62). Waller, for his part, “added something to our elegance of diction” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 55). It may only be “something,” but it matters.

Johnson in this spirit offers a corrective to general opinion on the overlooked “thoughts” of Waller’s poems, which had “that grace of novelty, which they are now often supposed to want by those who, having already found them in later books, do not know or enquire who produced them first. This treatment is unjust. Let not the original author lose by his imitators” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 54). And in order that his reader might see for herself what Waller’s originality amounts to, Johnson then quotes a “specimen” from Fairfax’s translation of the Gerusalemme liberata of Tasso, which “after Mr. Hoole’s translation, will perhaps not be soon reprinted” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 55). Johnson was conscious from the example of Dryden that a writer could over time lose himself in his own luster.

Like Warton, Johnson is careful to distinguish the knowable from the probable. In the “Life of Roscommon” he responds to an anecdote attributed by Fenton to Aubrey that “ought not … to be omitted, because better evidence of a fact cannot easily be found than is here offered, and it must be by preserving such relations that we may at last judge how much they are to be regarded” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 18). Johnson is willing to correct nonliterary historians when they seem inaccurate on matters pertaining to literature. He takes Clarendon to task in his “Life of Waller” for mistaking the time when Waller began to write poetry (Lives, vol. ii, p. 45).

Method and Audience in the History of Poetry

The major works of Warton and Johnson suggest, then, distinct but related forms of a hybrid balance – criticism functioning as history, history as criticism – that is essential to the history of poetry. But the Lives also functions independently of the historical imperatives that guide Warton. The deficiencies of the biographical procedure, as against the historical, reflect Johnson’s tragic sense of the passage of time in human life: “History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but Lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever (“Life of Addison,” in Lives, vol. iii, p. 18). Johnson’s temperamental difference from Warton’s exuberant delight in novelty and discovery is marked by a philosophical resignation in the face of his contracted task: “To adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious and troublesome; it requires indeed no great force of understanding, but often depends upon enquiries which there is no opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand” (“Life of Dryden,” in Lives, vol. ii, p. 98).

At the cost of a more tensioned argument, Warton frequently reminds us of his personal contact with early books and with original manuscripts, the ones he had “at hand.” The implicit invitation is to check his conclusions and those of other textual historians on whom he has drawn. While Johnson often makes plain enough the origins of the information he has acquired, or comments on its reliability, he does not construct a textual apparatus for his sources. Perhaps because the Lives, when separately printed, remains at some level in the implied service to an edition of the poets, he feels no particular obligation to do more. It is not that Johnson did not take trouble or consult widely, particularly on the biographical details of poets’ lives. But the life in literature that is lived by Johnson is less marked by the dusty tedium of the library stacks. It seems more suggestive of the free conversational exchange of critical opinion on the basis of what comes “at hand” in the moment of composition, as a proxy for what – in the process of talk – comes to mind.

These different methods speak to different, but overlapping, readerships. Both critics employ quotation to bring lost literature to the notice of readers. Warton included many long illustrative quotations in his text and yet more in his notes. While quotation is particularly rich in the “Life of Cowley,” Johnson quotes throughout the Lives many poems in part or entire. In the “Life of Dryden,” for example, he reprints Luke Milbourne’s strictures on Dryden’s Virgil because, although “the world has forgotten his book,” “his attempt has given him a place in literary history” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 144). Johnson’s reasons for reproducing long quotations from Dryden’s Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco resemble Warton’s determination to satisfy the “curious reader”: “as the pamphlet, though Dryden’s, has never been thought worthy of republication, and is not easily to be found, it may gratify curiosity to quote it more largely” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 85). The quotation extends to several pages of rant at the expense of the tragedy, and is rounded off with one of the shortest sentences in the entire Lives of the Poets. Johnson can bear the travesty of critical writing no longer: “Enough of Settle” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 93).

When Johnson at one point quotes some long passages from Pope’s translation of the Iliad in order to compare versions, he checks himself and calls the process to a halt: “Of these specimens every man who has cultivated poetry, or who delights to trace the mind from the rudeness of its first conceptions to the elegance of its last, will naturally desire a greater number; but most other readers are already tired, and I am not writing only to poets and philosophers” (“Life of Pope,” in Lives, vol. iv, p. 23). Johnson’s source of information is generally his own memory, or the recollections and findings of other scholars, and often acquired via personal contact, conversation and correspondence.

A great deal that Warton discusses in the early stages of his History has not survived within the literary canon. It may, however, remain of great interest to (say) specialists in medieval literature, and what Warton unearths, prints or reprints often inspired the work of poets who came to be regarded as classics and who have survived better. Johnson, whose curiosity concerning poetry’s past is held in tension with his strong antipathy of good to bad, has by comparison done more to unburden the present of the past. Yet a pattern of development is shared with Warton, who can appeal to a similar process of clarification and refinement of the poetical language. At the commencement of section ii he writes:

As is also true in Johnson’s conception of poetical history, the sense of poetic improvement depends upon the state of the language. The opening of section iii seems to suggest what is lost as well as gained as linguistic barbarism is left behind: “the character of our poetical composition began to be changed about the reign of the first Edward … a taste for ornamental and even exotic expression gradually prevailed over the rude simplicity of the native English phraseology” (Warton’s History, vol. i, p. 109).

From time to time Warton can suggest how the improvement in historical method is related to a more analytical and skeptical approach to literary evidence:

As an historical vision of the intelligence informing narrative method, this resonates with the comments in the Preface to Shakespeare where Johnson reflects on the intellectual context of Shakespeare’s time when “The tales, with which the infancy of learning was satisfied, exhibited only the superficial appearances of action, related the events but omitted the causes, and were formed for such as delighted in wonders rather than truth” (Works vii, p. 88).

In his discussion of the medieval religious drama, Warton objects to the impropriety of treating religious themes comically: “an enlightened age would not have chosen such subjects for theatrical exhibition” (Warton’s History, vol. i, pp. 242–43). Johnson had likewise objected to the mixing of poetry with religion in certain of the later English poets, including Cowley. The unfinished biblical epic the Davideis does not escape the exercise of Cowley’s irrepressibly lighthearted wit (Lives, vol. i, pp. 223–24). Congeniality of mind emerges in Warton’s allusion to the first page of Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary, where he pays an eloquent compliment to Johnson for his combination of historical perspective and critical faculties: “The most illustrious ornament of the reign of Edward the third, and of his successor Richard the second, was Jeffrey Chaucer; a poet with whom the history of our poetry is by many supposed to have commenced; and who has been pronounced, by a critic of unquestionable taste and discernment, to be the first English versifier who wrote poetically” (Warton’s History, vol. i, p. 341).Footnote ⁷

Johnson saw himself as contributing to “the history of our poetry” at least partly in Warton’s sense: as a record of scholarship made manifest within a narrative organization. In the advertisement to the Lives, while laying claim to historical form for his critical biographies, Johnson can apologize for possible inaccuracies when dating works in the “Life of Dryden”: “In this minute kind of History, the succession of facts is not easily discovered” (Lives, vol. i, p. 189). And he complains at the beginning of the “Life of Cowley” that in his biography of the poet, Thomas Sprat had produced “a funeral oration rather than a history” (Lives, vol. i, p. 191). In his own writing about Cowley – attempting to rebalance praise and blame – Johnson perhaps thought he had produced something worthier of the term. He may not have formalized his conception, but Johnson sees how time changes the way time itself is conceived.Footnote ⁸ Thus “the gradual change of manners,” he writes, “though imperceptible in the process, appears great when different times, and those not very distant, are compared” (“Life of Dryden,” in Lives, vol. ii, p. 110). In Johnson’s historical outlook, resembling in some ways that of the philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood in the twentieth century, one looks into the self and the common ground of human nature to understand the past: “We do not always know our own motives,” Johnson avers, on the reasons for the “false magnificence” of Dryden’s plays (Lives, vol. ii, p. 149), including himself in the plural possessive.

Memorial and Research in Poetical History

As I shall examine in more detail in Chapter 10, it is well known that Johnson’s Lives became something other, formally, than its author had first set out to make them, and his great work of literary biography blends the ambitions of literary criticism with what is in practice a history of English poetry covering 150 years. In this, Johnson stands markedly apart from the recent historians of poetry whose points of reference are the waning of Neoclassicism, the rise of Romanticism or the significance of the Preromantic. His critical deliberations start and end as life-narratives of the poets, and the essential human interest of the author is at the center of every discussion. Of course, certain genres, such as epic or pastoral, are recurrent themes in the Lives, and on special topics such as occasional poetry, rhyme as against blank verse, devotional verse, sound and sense, or translation, he can wax almost as digressive as Warton. (The character of “work in progress,” applied to Warton’s History, might be only slightly less apt to account for the diverse materials that are gathered in the Lives, harnessed from other sources, imported, recycled, contracted out or appended. As we shall see in Chapter 9, the great twenty-first-century editions of the Lives have helped bring out this character.)

When the chronological order of the Lives was adjusted according to the dates of the deaths of the poets, the change – the effect of which I again explore in Chapter 10 – was perhaps one with which Johnson would have been happy to comply. His respect for the orderings of time, as a condition of mental organization, is memorably recorded in his Preface to The Preceptor (1748), an educational essay where Johnson describes “chronology and history” as “one of the most natural delights of the human mind” (Works xx, p. 180). We shall see that Johnson’s critical biographies together express the collective project of the English poets, with their failures, false starts and dead ends noted on the way. To this narrative his own verse had made a distinguished contribution that he cannot for obvious reasons examine.

But although Johnson is denied the opportunity to discuss his personal additions to poetry of the eighteenth century, the history he outlines within the Lives is informed by his witness testimony to literary-historical facts not substantially open to dispute. Johnson regenerates in the Lives a conception of the poetical past as a stable consensus inherited from the previous age and then extended into a world of near-contemporary poets. The moral meaning of this Johnsonian version of history builds on the narrative sketched in lines that Dryden and Soame translated vis-à-vis English poetry from Boileau’s L’art poétique (lines 111–20, 131–42).Footnote ⁹ In their English rendition of the French critical poem Dryden and Soame had substituted Waller for Malherbe. According to Johnson, writing in his “Life of Waller” a century later:

This processionary, tutelary, dynastic, collaborative history embedded within the Lives is conceived with the hindsight of someone seeming to stand at the end of history. Johnson shares with Warton the sense of cause and consequence, of a rise and of a fall, of episodes, of ends achieved, of lines of development exhausted, of ancient possibilities closed off for good and of new avenues cleared.Footnote ¹⁰ Although Warton died before his work was complete, a “grand narrative” is the task of both writers. Thus Dryden, sustained by many minor poets, gave something to English poetry which it had never had before and performed a radical transformation: “What was said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden, lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit, he found it brick, and he left it marble” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 155).

Pope perfected what Dryden had begun. With Milton we have an English epic that ranks with the classical productions of Greece and Rome and a going forward in European poetry as a regress to its roots. With Gray we see (in Johnson’s considered judgment) a disintegration, a withering and a petering out; with James Thomson – as if for the first time – we make contact with the realities of rural nature as one might see them with one’s own eyes (Lives, vol. iv, p. 103). (Wordsworth, who credits Johnson with little or nothing in the development of his own taste and the relation of that taste to his practice as a poet, could not dissent.Footnote ¹¹) With the Metaphysicals we have the exemplar of a poetical fashion which arrived as an Italian import, overwhelmed poetical style for a while in the seventeenth century and then passed into history, leaving its traces, as such phenomena always must – not an aberration quite, but not quite part of the greater continuum either. Roughly speaking, the earlier Lives record the improvements in poetry in the first half of the chronological range they cover; the later ones suggest how poetry has begun to fall away; how a refined style can become overrefined; and how the progress of correctness cools the poetical spirit. Thus a turn of the narrative comes in the “Life of Addison” at the moment where Johnson is commenting on the success of Addison’s tragedy of Cato of 1712, a play which “has introduced or confirmed among us the use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance, and chill philosophy” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 27); “The versification which he had learned from Dryden,” writes Johnson, “he debased rather than refined … his lines are very smooth in Rosamond, and too smooth in Cato” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 36).

Throughout the Lives poets are born, write poetry, and die, sometimes prematurely and sometimes with little lasting to show for their efforts. Johnson locates their printed texts within a moral and comic narrative of human aspiration, triumph, absurdity, disappointment and desire; and if Warton saw the history of poetry as giving access to the history of society, Johnson’s context is more psychological than social while his subject matter is already in the public domain. For all their efforts in the search for fame, time very quickly erases the work of most poets, relieving the present from the dead weight of a past we do not need as active minds in the present. The consequence is that for Johnson the moral meaning of poetical history is not, as for Warton, preeminently tied to the “free exertion of research” (Warton’s History, vol. i, p. v) – the scholar’s heroic struggle against forgetting conceived as an antiquarian effort of cultural completion and inclusion. Nor, similarly, is it the retrieval of as much embalmed or decomposed trace material as Warton can gather from the manuscript graveyards of the past to vary, delight, instruct and enrich the present. The forgetting, as Paul Ricoeur reminds us, lest we forget, throws into relief the need for critical memorials, and Johnson’s many memorializations of poets in the Lives show he well understood this.Footnote ¹² Johnson’s consolatory conception of poetry suggests that the process of selecting, rejecting and preferring – from among the many candidates of poetical history – is the prerequisite on which life in the present depends.Footnote ¹³ And in his simultaneously dramatic and philosophical role as a source and end and test of Johnson’s heartfelt criteria, Shakespeare must once more enter the picture. I turn now therefore from the artistry of literary history to Shakespeare’s dramatic encapsulation of thought.