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So far, then, as he may be held to have borne witness to the need of
ideas, Johnson was clearly in the right. It was when he came to ask,
What is the nature of those ideas, and how does the artist or the
critic arrive at them? that he began to go astray. Throughout he assumes
that the principles of art--and that, not only in their general bearing
(proportion, harmony, and the like), but in their minuter details-are
fixed and invariable. To him they form a kind of case-law, which is
to be extracted by the learned from the works of a certain number of
"correct writers", ancient and modern; and which, once established,
is binding for all time both on the critic and on those he summons to
his bar. In effect, this was to declare that beauty can be conceived
in no other way than as it presented itself, say, to Virgil or to Pope.
It was to lay the dead hand of the past upon the present and the future.
More than this. The models that lent themselves to be models, after
the kind desired by Johnson, were inevitably just those it was most
cramping and least inspiring to follow.


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