"
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 denouement? 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.
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