16 - Generality and particularity

Summary

Writers in the eighteenth century had much to say about the relative status of the general and the particular, but if one were simply to summarize their views on this topic, the complications and contradictions would seem exasperating if not inexplicable. To make sense of what is going on, one has to recognize that in this instance a literary-critical question is inseparable from a philosophical one, and also that discussions of it usually carry a polemical charge.

Modern accounts of the topic have until recently been shaped by the assumptions of mid-twentieth-century poetics. Reneé Wellek wrote in 1955:

Most modern critics want poetry to be concrete, visual, precise, and not abstract or universal … Some preromantic critics can be shown to be the first to have decidedly rejected the older view of poetry as abstract, universal, and wary of the ‘streaks of the tulip, the shades of the verdure.’ The shift happened late in the eighteenth century, and we have not returned to the neoclassical ideal.

(History, I, p. 4)

In this formulation, a critic like Samuel Johnson (whose words Wellek is quoting) is understood to be a devotee of ‘the neoclassical ideal’, in which the universal is equated with the abstract, and is opposed to the concrete and visual which ‘we’, together with certain ‘preromantic’ critics, prefer.

Such an account seriously misrepresents Johnson in a way that is symptomatic of the New Critical recension of Romantic aesthetics, and that continues to colour accounts of the eighteenth century. Now that New Critical assumptions are fading into the past, however, it is possible to address the question more dispassionately.