The Background and Development in English Criticism of the Theories of Generality and Particularity

Abstract

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?

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