There is no better example of the direct effect of Horace than the part
played in the discipline of letters by the _Ars Poetica_. This work is a
literary _causerie_ inspired in part by the reading of Alexandrian
criticism, but in larger part by experience. In it the author's
uppermost themes, as in characteristic manner he allows himself to be
led on from one thought to another, are unity, consistency, propriety,
truthfulness, sanity, and carefulness. Such has been its power by reason
of inner substance and outward circumstance that it has been at times
exalted into a court of appeal hardly less authoritative than Aristotle
himself, from whom in large part it ultimately derives.
We have seen how the Pleiad, with Du Bellay and Ronsard leading, seized
upon the classics as a means of elevating the literature of France, and
how the treatise of Du Bellay which was put forth as their manifesto was
full of matter from the _Ars Poetica_, which two years previously has
served Sibilet also, whose work Du Bellay attacked. A century later,
Boileau's _L'Art Poétique_ testifies again to the inspiration of Horace,
who is made the means of riveting still more firmly upon French drama,
for good or ill, the strict rules that have always governed it; and by
the time of Boileau's death the program of the Pleiad is revived a
second time by Jean Baptiste Rousseau. Opitz and Gottsched in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are for Germany what Du Bellay and
Boileau were for France in the sixteenth and seventeenth. Literary Spain
of the latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was under the same
influence. The Spanish peninsula, according to Menéndez y Pelayo, has
produced no fewer than forty-seven translations of the _Ars Poetica_.
Even in England, always less tractable in the matter of rules than the
Latin countries, Ben Jonson and his friends are in some sort another
Pleiad, and the treatise possesses immense authority throughout the
centuries. We turn the pages of Cowl's _The Theory of Poetry in
England_, a book of critical extracts illustrating the development of
poetry "in doctrines and ideas from the sixteenth century to the
nineteenth century," and note Ben Jonson and Wordsworth referring to or
quoting Horace in the section on Poetic Creation; Dryden and Temple
appealing to him and Aristotle on the Rules; Hurd quoting him on Nature
and the Stage; Roger Ascham, Ben Jonson, and Dryden citing him as an
example on Imitation; Dryden and Chapman calling him master and
law-giver on Translation; Samuel Johnson referring to him on the same
subject; and Ben Jonson and Dryden using him on Functions and Principles
of Criticism. "Horace," writes Jonson, "an author of much civility, ...
an excellent and true judge upon cause and reason, not because he
thought so, but because he knew so out of use and experience." Pope, in
the _Essay on Criticism_, describes with peculiar felicity both Horace's
critical manner and the character of the authority, persuasive rather
than tyrannical, which he exercises over Englishmen:
"H_orace still charms with graceful negligence_,
A_nd without method talks us into sense_;
W_ill, like a friend, familiarly convey_
T_he truest notions in the easiest way_."
But the dynamic power of the _Ars Poetica_ will be still better
appreciated if we assemble some of its familiar principles. Who has not
heard of and wondered at the hold the "Rules" have had upon modern
drama, especially in France,--the rule of five acts, no more and no
less; the rule of three actors only, liberalized into the rule of
economy; the rule of the unities in time, place, and action; the rule
against the mingling of the tragic and comic "kinds"; the rule against
the artificial dénouement? Who has not heard of French playwrights
composing "with one eye on the clock" for fear of violating the unity of
time, or of their delight in the writing of drama as in "a difficult
game well played?" If Alexandrian criticism, and, back of it, Aristotle,
were ultimately responsible for the rules, Horace was their disseminator
in later times, and was looked up to as final authority. Who has not
heard and read repeatedly the now common-place injunctions to be
appropriate and consistent in character-drawing; to avoid, on the one
hand, clearness at the cost of diffuseness, and, on the other, brevity
at the cost of obscurity; to choose subject-matter suited to one's
powers; to respect the authority of the masterpiece and to con by night
and by day the great Greek exemplars; to feel the emotion one wishes to
rouse; to stamp the universal with the mark of individual genius; to be
straightforward and rapid and omit the unessential; to be truthful to
life; to keep the improbable and the horrible behind the scenes; to be
appropriate in meter and diction; to keep clear of the fallacy of poetic
madness; to look for the real sources of successful writing in sanity,
depth of knowledge, and experience with men; to remember the mutual
indispensability of genius and cultivation; to combine the pleasant and
the useful; to deny one's self the indulgence of mediocrity; never to
compose unless under inspiration; to give heed to solid critical
counsel; to lock up one's manuscript for nine years before giving it to
the world; to destroy what does not measure up to the ideal; to take
ever-lasting pains; to beware of the compliments of good-natured
friends? Not less familiar are the apt figurative illustrations of the
woman beautiful above and an ugly fish below, the purple patch, the
painter who would forever put in his cypress tree, the amphora that came
out a pitcher, the dolphin in the wood and the boar in the waters, the
sesquipedalian word, the mountains in travail and the birth of the
ridiculous mouse, the plunge _in medias res_, the praiser of the good
old times, the exclusion of sane poets from Helicon, the counsellor who
himself can write nothing, but will serve as whetstone for genius, the
nodding of Homer.
Nor did the effects of this diffusion of Horatian precept consist merely
in restraint upon the youthful and the impulsive, or confine themselves
to the drama, with which the _Ars Poetica_ was mainly concerned. The
persuasive and authoritative counsels of the Roman poet have entered, so
to speak, into the circulatory system of literary effort and become part
of the life-blood of modern enlightenment. Their great effect has been
formative: the cultivation of character in literature.