painter and the mad architect emphasize the personal, social, and artistic consequences of attempting to build without rules, talent, or even a clear need to build. But within the poem, allusions to Horace are often much more elusive. He usually succeeds best in keeping close to Horace when citing the most general principles. Thus Horace's attack on bombast and timidity ("professus grandia turget;/serpit humi tutus nimium timidusque procellae," 11. 27-28) occasions an attack on misunderstood magnificence and on stodginess:

Similarly clear are Gwynn's adaptations of such commonplaces as the need to subordinate parts to the whole (p. 8) or for consistency of style (p. 15). Again, Horace asks whether a good poem is the product of nature or art—of native talent or of training—and denies that either is adequate alone (11. 408-418). Gwynn raises the same question about the architect, although in the first person, and answers,

Since such ambivalence as this is not appropriate to his purpose, he, unlike Horace, begins almost immediately to stress a course of study that will result in mastery of the rules.

This last rhetorical tactic points to one serious problem which Horace poses for Gwynn—that of assuming an appropriate stance for defending the rules. The tone of Horace's epistle to the Pisos is familiar without being condescending. He writes as an experienced poet and critic to fellow writers, delivering his pronouncements freely and confidently, but without dogmatism. Gwynn is neither an equal writing to equals nor an experienced architect, confident of his qualifications to instruct the world. At one moment he acknowledges the "Judgment's Height" of the addressee (p. 28), the next he holds himself up as possessing a skill worthy of emulation, and proceeds to deliver a lesson in the tone of a schoolmaster: "Those Things which seem of little Consequence,/ And slight and trivial ..." (p. 32). Horace's wit, his reliance upon his audience to grasp the implications of his many examples, and his avoidance of positiveness subvert Gwynn's purpose, as he reveals frequently in contradictory outbursts and in shifts in tone. Yet in one important passage Horace provides him with a stance and a theme which help him prop up the rules. After discussing pardonable faults (11. 347-365) Horace addresses Piso's elder son, compliments him for his wisdom and training, and reminds him of the activities in which mediocrity may be tolerated. This serves as a contrast to poetry: "mediocribus esse poetis/ non homines, non di, non concessere columnae" (11. 372-373). For once Horace is almost uncompromising enough for Gwynn's purposes. He adopts a similarly magisterial tone, but reorders Horace's materials so that the emphasis is more fully on this principle:

Especially significant here is his insistence that the "Law of Science" will "no Mediocrity admit," for Horace discusses poetic practice rather than the rules which aid it. Secondly, the belabored inference drawn from the principle in the final couplet has no precedent at all in Horace. Gwynn has made every effort to place the rules outside the realm of human eccentricity and to give them the stature of "Nature's Laws."

Considering that the tenets of humanist architectural theory are traditionally classified very differently from those of literary criticism, as Gwynn acknowledges in his "Preface" (p. iii), he manages to accommodate them surprisingly well to the organization of the Ars Poetica. A good example is his treatment of Horace's discussion of the transitoriness of language, as of all things, and the necessary dominance of the rules of usage (11. 46-72). The most obvious parallel is the inevitable ruin of the pompous buildings which men erect (p. 11). But he develops none of the botanical analogies which Horace used to illustrate the rhythms of life and death (11. 60-69), for his purpose is to emphasize instead the parallel between usus and the architectural concept of "use." Horace insists, "multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque/ quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus" (11. 70-71). Gwynn elaborates on this:

Horace and Gwynn both think of "use" operating as a kind of historical necessity causing the resurrection of a rule or a form. Gwynn adds to this the concept, drawn from Vitruvius and his commentators, that the rules of architecture prescribe forms which satisfy particular uses and reflect directly the strengths and limitations of building materials and techniques. These are the major premises of Gwynn's assertion that "on Nature's perfect Plan,/ I form my System" (p. 31). To buttress this confidence in rules he develops the parallels between Horace's history of poetry (11. 73-98) and the history of architecture. Cecrops, the first king of Athens, is to architectural practice what Homer is to heroic poetry. Daedalus is to the theory of architecture what Archilochus is to the meter of dramatic poetry (pp. 11-12). The emphasis on the giving and systematizing of rules, although without precedent in Horace, reflects the same preoccupation with the authority of origins as John Wood's Origins of Building, Pope's Essay on Criticism, or even Locke's Two Treatises on Government for that matter.

Horace provides less precise correspondences for one of the most important rules. Vitruvius's rule of decor (De Architectura, I, ii, 5) is only generally parallel to the rules governing decorum of language, characterization, and genre. Gwynn nevertheless introduces all of its major implications. It dictates the observing of clear correspondences between a building's form and its use, inhabitant, and site (or "situation," to use the eighteenth-century term). It is based upon the notion that architectural styles have recognizable social, ethical, religious, and aesthetic attributes. The attributes, which evoke predictable psychological responses, express the uses which the styles were created to satisfy and the cultures in which they were developed. One brief passage beginning "If to adapt your Fabrick, you would choose,/ To suit the Builder's Genius, or his Use" (pp. 15-16) effectively summarizes the primary dictates of decor. The architect has to choose forms and ornaments having attributes in common with the social station and character traits of the builder of a residence,12 with the deity to whom a temple is dedicated, with a building's function, or with the landscape in which it is placed. Thus, for example, the heavy, plain Tuscan order is appropriate for "A little Structure; built for Use alone," the "gaiety" of the middle Ionic order for a country villa, and the "delicacy" of the Corinthian order for an elegant church or palace (p. 25). An architect's skill is most often measured in the poem by his adherence to decor.

One violator of decor serves as a focus in an important passage wherein Gwynn tries to integrate Vitruvius and Horace while making a transition to one of his central concerns, the peculiarly English reinterpretation of decorum of situation. In discussing the difficulty of treating traditional subjects in novel ways, Horace compares an erring "scriptor cyclicus olim" with Homer, summarizes some general principles, and then turns to a consideration of how to win public applause (11. 119-178). Gwynn is more suspicious of originality than Horace (p. 17), and uses Ripley as an example of one who erred in trying to avoid customary forms. Ripley's Custom House (1718) and Admiralty building (1723-26) become the equivalent of the Cyclic poet's bad verse, while Morris, Flitcroft, Gibbs, Leoni, and Ware become the modern Homers of architecture (p. 18). Gwynn ends the verse paragraph with Horace's theme of suiting the parts to the whole. With Ripley's performance as a background Gwynn turns to architecture's most fundamental rules:

These lines may be construed as the architect's equivalent of Horace's advice for winning applause. But in fact the entire verse paragraph which these lines introduce is simply a paraphrase of Vitruvius (I, iii, 2. Cf. Wotton's remark, "Wel-building hath three Conditions, Commodity, Firmnesse, and Delight").13 The leap which follows the introduction of these three principles has no precedent in Horace, but it does in Vitruvius, whose De Architectura is notorious for its eccentric organization and abrupt transitions. Immediately following this passage in Vitruvius is his chapter on the "salubrity of sites" (I, iv).

It is ironical that where Gwynn is closest to Vitruvius in one respect he departs most radically from him in another. Vitruvius's attention is almost exclusively on the physical requirements of sites for maintaining men's health and comfort; Gwynn's is on the requirements for maintaining men's psychological well-being. His conceptions of decorum of situation begin with Vitruvius and the Renaissance demands that a site be healthy, that it permit efficient transportation, and that, if possible, it provide raw materials for building, rich lands for crops and pastures, and natural beauty conducive to ease and contemplation. Gwynn emphasizes this last point, building upon perceptions of nature nourished on Thomson's Seasons, and upon a psychology drawn largely from the Earl of Shaftesbury (pp. 19-22). In his earlier Essay on Harmony. As it relates chiefly to Situation in Building he quotes Shaftesbury on the title page, acknowledges his debt to Thomson, and quotes long passages from The Seasons to illustrate various rural "situations."14 In The Art of Architecture he follows Morris's example in writing his own verse in language imitative of Thomson's (except for one direct quotation, "From the moist Meadow; to the brown-brow'd Hill"). The verbal precision of his poetic epithets, and the analysis of perception which they imply, help to distinguish the sensory, aesthetic, and emotional effects of a wide variety of disparate experiences, and thus make possible the identification of those attributes that guide an architect in choosing a mode appropriate to a site. The perfect fitting of a building to its site, as of the parts to a whole, will result in what Gwynn calls "Ideal Harmony," for it "ariseth from such Numbers, Parts, or Proportions, which may be resolved in the Mind, and ranged together in Order, by Contemplation."15

For Gwynn such harmony still has quite clear religious and moral implications, although he does not, like Morris, attribute to it a specifically religious function. Yet since the rules are supposedly based upon natural laws, violations of them betray a failure to appreciate divine harmony, the highest object of human contemplation. This accounts for the indignation Gwynn reveals in attacking mad architects and patrons at the end of the poem, even if it also reveals his obtuseness in failing to perceive the causes of his outrage. But, then, Gwynn was no Alexander Pope, either as a poet or as a thinker.16

The Ohio State University

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. (return)
Both James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins briefly discuss Johnson's relations with Gwynn in their biographies of Johnson. The fullest accounts of Gwynn's life and professional activities are those in the DNB and in H. M. Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of English Architects, 1660-1830 (London, 1954), pp. 254-256. Both attribute the poem to him. I am much indebted throughout this introduction to Colvin for information on the architects mentioned in the poem.

2. (return)
For an estimate of the