APPENDIX 615
JOHNSON; AND “THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE”
[This passage in the MS. follows i. § 252 (p. 227), where it is said that the reading of Johnson “saved me for ever from false thoughts and futile speculations”:-]
And to this day, when I am putting down the aphorisms which I hold most vital for the early guidance of youth or girl through the giddiness and glitter of the lying world, I cannot tell whether the thoughts which I most endeavour to fasten for them are Johnson’s or my own.
Only a week or two since, I find that by curious chance I pencilled in the last leaf of this volume of the Idler, (read during breakfast in bed) the first words which occurred to me for the title of this book, “Sketches of scenes and hours which I hold worthy of memory.” Out of this same volume the reader will perhaps have patience with me, while I transcribe the few passages which have been to myself, cardinally protective, and which-in page after page of my own most careful writings-are in various lights expanded, applied, and with my best skill in every hearing of them farther fortified.
[The MS. does not, however, transcribe the passages from the Idler.]
I am amazed to find, as I re-write these passages, how much they had convinced and fortified me in all that afterwards I most desired to convince others of:-and I am a little proud to find on re-reading some detached passages of those first Architectural essays, that it had indeed been the substance, not the manner, of Johnson which had chiefly been seized on by me, and that, with the principles I had learned from him, there are already formed convictions of my own, from which in after life I never saw cause to swerve, on matters in nature and in art of which Johnson was totally insentient. The following passage in the concluding paper of December 1838, gives a sufficient instance of the extent to which I had already carried the theories of ornament which were developed exactly ten years afterwards in the Seven Lamps,1 and it shows also that I had already quite definitely taken my own manner in writing; not at all an imitation of Johnson’s calculated periods, but a carelessly connected throwing out of thoughts as they came into my head, modulating the sentence in any time or rhythm that suited them, and only, when I began to lose breath, finishing it off with a neatly tied knot or melodious flourish:-
[The passage is § 250 in The Poetry of Architecture, Vol. I. pp. 183-184: “When Nature determines on decorating a piece of projecting rock ... gratifying the natural requirements of the mind for the same richness in the execution of the designs of men, which it has found on a near approach lavished so abundantly, in a distant view subdued so beautifully into the large effect of the designs of Nature.”]
The passage immediately following this may also be perhaps read with interest, containing as it does nearly the sum of heresies objected to by
1 [Chap, iv., § 15 (Vol. VIII. p. 154).]
[Version 0.04: March 2008]