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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the well-known passage from Rasselas Johnson made Imlac say that the poet must “neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may-have remarked, and another neglected, for those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness”; but twenty-two years later in the Lives of the Poets, Johnson praised Thomson as a poet who “thinks always as a man of genius,” who looks on Nature and Life “with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet; the eye that distinguishes, in every thing presented to its view, whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute. The reader of the Seasons wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shows him.” The Seasons, then, was good poetry because Thomson did not neglect the minuter discriminations which one may have remarked and another neglected, and because he presented characteristics which had not been “alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness.” Whether these two critical remarks are inconsistent, and if they are, to what degree, are questions to be answered only when we are sure of the meaning of the famous passage in Rasselas. What, precisely, did Johnson mean by the rather unfortunate metaphor of the tulip? What is the background of the conflict in literary criticism between the grandeur of generality and the power of particularity? And where did Johnson stand in that conflict?
1 First ed. (London, 1756), i, 42-43, 48-49.
2 Nos. 76, 79, and 82.
3 Houghton W. Taylor has recently traced the shift in critical theory about characterization: from the eighteenth-century notions about the superiority of the generalized to the nineteenth-century preference for particularity. See “ ‘Particular Character’: An Early Phase of Literary Evolution,” PMLA, lx (March, 1945), 161-174.
4 One other reason for examining the passage in Rasselas with the help of the Life of Cowley is that Cowley's poetry more than that of any other of the metaphysicals may have been in the back of Johnson's mind when he made Imlac warn against “numbering the streaks.” In the Life, complaining of the absence of passion in the Mistress, Johnson said, “His poetical account of the virtues of plants, and colours of flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity.” In books iii and iv of Plantarum Cowley came near to numbering the streaks. Although the following two passages are not really characteristic of the eleven poems on flowers, they may be what Johnson remembered when he wrote the Life of Cowley, or may at least be illustrative of what Imlac warned against:
5 The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1935).
6 Or whoever wrote the treatise attributed to him. The quotations in this paper are from the translation by W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1935).
7 London, 1747.
8 Op. cit., p. 100, n. 47.
9 This and other quotations from the Rhetoric are from Lane Cooper's The Rhetoric of Aristotle (New York, 1932).
10 All quotations from Quintilian are from the translation of H. E. Butler in the edition of the Loeb Classical Library (London, 1920).
11 The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869), bk. iii, ch. iii, p. 155.
12 The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward N. Hooker (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1939), i, 338-363.
13 Translated by Lane Cooper, in Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (New York, 1913).
14 Pt. iv, sec. iii.
15 “The Tendency toward Platonism in Neo-Classical Esthetics,” in ELE, i (1934), pp. 91-119.
16 The Critical Works of John Dennis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1939, 1943), ii, ci.
17 All quotations from Longinus are from the translation by W. Rhys Roberts, Longinus On the Sublime (Cambridge, 1935).
18 Ch. 10.
19 Ch. 6; Hooker, i, 218.
20 Ch. 5; i, 105.
21 The Picturesque (London, 1927).
22 Ch. 4; in 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1763), i, 307.
23 Ch. 21; iii, 222.
24 Ibid., iii, 192-193.
25 Bk. ii, ch. 7; in 2nd ed. (London, 1801), ii, 88, 103.
26 Ibid., ii, 136-137.
27 Bk. iii, ch. 1, sec. 2, pt. 2; ii, 183.
28 Lecture xl, in Lectures on Rhetoric, which though not published until 1783, had been delivered at Edinburgh during the preceding twenty-four years.
29 Lecture iv.
30 First ed. (London, 1774), ii, 185-187.
31 Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, xxi (1936).
32 Lecture xl.
33 Life of Milton.