Ridiculous Critics: Augustan Mockery of Critical Judgment by Philip Smallwood and Min Wild (review)

In their lively new book Mr. Smallwood and Ms. Wild celebrate the way that satire and criticism often merged as they evolved in the eighteenth century. The notion of eighteenth-century comedy about critics may immediately bring to mind the would-be bestial and coprophilic tastemakers in A Tale of a Tub or The Dunciad. But Ridiculous Critics demonstrates that the famous Scriblerian satire of contemporary critics in fact grew from and helped nurture a tradition of writing criticism in which critics were viewed with humor and even self-mockery.

The core of the book is a collection of forty-two instances of critical humor, short texts and excerpts in many genres, from the late seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. The authors are familiar—among many others, Rochester, Wycherley, Smart, Parnell, and Sarah Fielding, the sole female author. Yet even passages from canonical works look a little different in this context, as the intimacy and antagonism between novelists and critics come more sharply into focus.

Brief, accessible introductions for each entry in the anthology underscore the imaginative, appealing qualities of eighteenth-century critical ridicule, including its wide range of amusing animal tropes. Other issues suggested by the primary texts are overlooked, however. Disagreements over the value of wit versus judgment are obviously at play in the ridicule of "'rule and compass' critics," aping critics, whose "borrow'd Wit becomes the Mouth as ill as borrow'd Clothes the Body," and rash critics, would-be wits of a different sort, who "rush in where Angels fear to tread." Questions about passion's relation to reason are elicited as well, in the many witticisms on the barely suppressed jealousy that closes critics' hearts to the excellence of what lies before them. The critics' central role in the emerging print culture is another important but neglected theme. Smart and Richard Rolt warn that critics should be aware that the hacks whom they condemn support a vast network of tradespeople: "if the whole race of scribblers were to be extinguished, what would become of the letter-founders, the printers, the publishers, the hawkers, the paper-makers, the ink-makers, and the trunk-makers?" In Goldsmith's outrageous syllogism: "The public are a parcel of blockheads, and all blockheads are critics, and all critics are spiders, and spiders are a set of reptiles that all the world despises."

Also largely overlooked, yet wonderfully suggested by the anthology entries, are the intricate formal links between satire and criticism. Not only do eighteenth-century literary critics and satirists equally embrace their capacity to make judgments, but humor apparently draws the latter to the former: pedantic critics may be the original straight men. Speaking in the voice of his eloquent midwife-critic persona, Smart collapses the distinction between satirists and mean-spirited critics in order to elevate those capable of appreciation: "A little Wit, and a great deal of Illnature, will furnish a Man for Satire; but the greatest instance of Wit is to commend well." In several works included in the anthology, the satirist, in criticizing critics, becomes one himself.

Samuel Johnson, the focus of Mr. Smallwood's previous book, is Ridiculous Critics' unofficial hero too, the model of the professional comic-critic. While this discussion is among the book's most interesting, it is unfortunately beyond the Scriblerian's range. More to the point, perhaps, is the authors' interest in chastising contemporary literary critics. Though several entries in the anthology remind us that critics have been accused of humorlessness ever since Zoilus was dubbed "the scourge of Homer," they argue in a substantial closing essay that the pompous self-importance of critics has been particularly egregious in recent decades with the rise of postmodernism and many other -isms as well. They propose that, by listening carefully to the many irreverent Augustans whose "mirth has no need for morality," we can and should learn to "loosen up."

It is disappointing that Ridiculous Critics [End...