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.