Critical Occasions: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, and the History of Criticism by Philip Smallwood (review)

Mr. Smallwood asserts that certain “kinds of stories” have come to be told about literary criticism in the eighteenth century, largely because of long-standing histories of criticism that have survived without sufficient “modification,” narrative laws that privilege a forward-thinking teleology in any history’s construction, and biases, rumors, and “rampant literary gossip.” Critical Occasions views all three of these circumstances as diminishing the contributions of the Augustan literary critics. Employing carefully selected “exemplifications” alongside advances in twentieth-century historiography to challenge traditional assumptions about the limited nature of Augustan criticism, the book is a corrective: it “perform[s] a culturally necessary rapprochement between the philosophy of history and the study of eighteenth-century criticism that are for the time being kept subtractively apart.” In rewriting the history of literary ideas, essentially, Mr. Smallwood argues that Augustan thought is more continuous than previous accounts have recognized.

“[H]ow (in theory and in practice) [can] the old, dead critics of the Augustan past of a world well lost . . . be read in the most vital spirit—one that is true to their place in history, and simultaneously responsive to the needs of the present?” Mr. Smallwood begins with this query, but his criticism extends beyond what this quotation suggests. Going against the “prevailing historicism,” he “grapples more directly with the successive, spontaneous responses (the events-in-lives, unfolding through time).” Such “occasions,” as he sees them, resist historical labeling and offer fresh readings of classic texts. Using Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, Mr. Smallwood parallels “major” Augustan critics alongside European influences to prove continuity.

Dryden’s contribution, Mr. Smallwood maintains, presently exists for the contemporary reader in two modes: “seeing for oneself” and “mediated, represented, and revealed” by present critical history. While the latter typically construes Dryden as having little-to-nothing to offer, Mr. Smallwood argues the opposite by employing the historiography paradigms proposed by R. G. Collingwood, Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricouer, “whose thinking about historical form has the potential to admit Dryden’s own past in criticism as an element within our present.” He also situates Dryden in relation to the critics that he read (Rymer and specifically French thinkers like Bouhours, Rene Rapin, and Boileau). For Mr. Smallwood, these influences prove “more culturally penetrating and durable than the historicization of Dryden within ‘neoclassical,’ ‘Romantic,’ or ‘pre-Romanticist’ norms.”

Mr. Smallwood begins his discussion of An Essay on Criticism by charting Pope’s ill-fated reception in existent critical histories. He argues that the Essay’s “reformulations of Bouhours, of Rapin and of other past critical texts [Erasmus and Boileau] re-enact criticism as an historical value in his poem,” and thus advance “a radical theory of history,” akin to Gadamer and Jauss. For Mr. Smallwood, “The Essay, under its aspect as a poem, synthesizes a diverse past context of incalculably various, indeterminate possibilities for literary criticism, and consequently fixes a totality (“criticism”) within a system of pastness and presence”; “The criteria we need to identify [Pope’s] role in European criticism are consequent on narratives his poem can help us find.”

To remedy what conventional criticism regards as Johnson’s disparaging remarks on Shakespeare, as well as his generally critical tone, Mr. Smallwood examines his exchanges with Joseph Warton. He studies receptions of Johnson’s writing in European criticism as well as eighteenth-century visual satire, specifically James Gillray’s print “Sin, Death, and the Devil,” which Mr. Smallwood believes clarifies Johnson’s judgments in the Life of Milton. Mr. Smallwood wants Johnson to be read “dialogically” rather than intellectually (he wants Johnson to be seen as more than just a nationalist writer), and he wants his contribution to be recognized in fields as far-reaching as literary theory and aesthetics.

Chapter Five contains Mr. Smallwood’s most philosophical rumination on the nature of history and criticism. Here, he contends that criticism is best seen...