ABSTRACT
The important critic is the person who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems. The past of criticism is all the criticism there has ever been; more often, however, when we think of the critical past we are thinking of criticism written in advance of the present by more than fifty or one hundred years. The broad perspectives of critical historians on the Augustan writers are reflected with equal negativity in the perspectives of modern critics on the precise historical value of Samuel Johnson. Statements by Johnson are taken out of the context of Johnson's individual achievement by the Cambridge History (as that of a critical life worthy of historical treatment on its own terms) to be re-absorbed into the fabric of eighteenth-century critical theory. Thus the possibilities of Johnson's contribution to criticism are shrunken by history.
