In France the rigorism of Boileau was followed by the rebellion of Du Bos, who unhesitatingly declared that "men will always prefer poetry which moves them to that composed according to rule,"[33] and the like heresies. In 1730, De la Motte made war against the unities of time and place, asserting as the most general, and even superior to that of action, the unity of interest.[34] Batteux tended to make free with the rules; and Voltaire, though he opposed De la Motte and declared the three unities to be the "three great laws of good sense," uttered some bold sentiments in his Essay on Epic Poetry, and it was he who remarked that "tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux," and that the best kind is "celui qui est le mieux traité." Diderot was in certain respects a forerunner of Romanticism, and with him must be mentioned Friedrich Melchior Grimm, who was influenced by him. A breath of liberty was wafted into Italy by Metastasio, Bettinelli, Baretti and Cesarotti: in 1766 Buonafede notes in his Epistola della libertà poetica that when erudite persons "define epic poetry, or comedy, or odes, they ought to frame as many definitions as there are compositions and authors."[35] In Germany the first to rise in rebellion against the rules (opposing Gottsched and his disciples) were the representatives of the Swiss school.[36] In England, after examining the definitions by which critics endeavoured to distinguish epic poetry from other compositions, Home wrote, "It affords no little diversion to watch so many profound critics hunting after that which does not exist. They presuppose—without shadow of proof—that there exists a precise criterion by which to distinguish epic poetry from all other kinds of composition. But literary compositions melt one into another like colours: and if in their stronger shades it is easy to recognize them, they are susceptible of such variety and of so many different forms that it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins."[37]
Romanticism and the "strict kinds": Berchet, V. Hugo.
Literary thought between the late eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, that is to say from" the period of genius" to that of romanticism properly so called, rose in rebellion against separate individual rules and against all rules as such. But to describe the battles fought, and their more important episodes; to recount the names of captains victorious or discomfited, or to deplore the excesses committed by the conquerors, is no part of our present task. Upon the ruins of the strict kinds, the "genres tranchés" beloved by Napoleon[38] (a Romanticist in the art of war, but a Classicist in poetry), flourished the drama, the romance and every other mixed kind: upon the ruins of the three unities, flourished the unity of ensemble. Italy made her protest against rules of style in Berchet's famous Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo (1816); and France made hers somewhat later in Victor Hugo's preface to Cromwell (1827). Henceforth men discussed not the kinds, but Art. What is the unity of ensemble but the demand of art itself, which is always an ensemble, a synthesis? What else is the principle, introduced by August Wilhelm Schlegel and adopted by Manzoni and other Italian romanticists, to the effect that form of component parts must be "organic not mechanical, resulting from the nature of the subject and its interior development ... not from the impress of an external and extraneous stamp"?[39]
Their persistence in philosophical theories.
But it would be quite wrong to suppose that this victory over the rhetoric of kinds was either the cause or the consequence of a final victory over its philosophical presuppositions. In pure theory, none of the critics above named wholly abandoned the kinds and the rules. Berchet admitted four elementary forms, that is four fundamental kinds, in poetry; lyrical, didactic, epic and dramatic, claiming for the poet only the right of "uniting and fusing together the elementary forms in a thousand fashions."[40] Manzoni's only real quarrel was with those rules "founded on special facts instead of on general principles; on the authority of rhetoricians instead of reason."[41] Even De Sanctis was satisfied with a concept somewhat vague, though true enough at bottom: "the most important rules are not those capable of being applied to every content, but those which draw their force ex visceribus caussæ, from the very heart of the content itself."[42] Even more diverting than the spectacle which had delighted Home, is the sight of German philosophy according the honour of a dialectical deduction to the empirical classification of kinds. We shall give two examples, each representing one extreme end of the chain:
Fr. Schelling.
Schelling at the beginning of the century (1803), and Hartmann at the end (1890). One section of Schelling's Philosophy of Art is devoted to "the construction of individual poetic kinds"; in it he remarks that were he to follow the historical order, Epic would come first; whereas in the scientific order the Lyric occupies the first place: indeed, if poetry is the representation of the infinite in the finite, the Lyric, in which difference prevails (the finite, the subject), is its first moment, corresponding with the first power of the ideal series, reflexion, knowledge, consciousness, whereas Epic corresponds with the second power, action.[43] From Epic, which is par excellence the objective kind (as being the identity of subjective and objective), derive the Elegy and the Idyl if subjectivity be placed in the object and objectivity in the poet: if objectivity be placed in the object and subjectivity in the poet, didactic poetry results.[44] To these differentiations of the Epic, Schelling adds the romantic or modern Epic, the poem of chivalry; the novel; and the experiments in an epic of ordinary life such as the Luisa of Voss and the Hermann and Dorothea of Goethe; and, co-ordinate with all the foregoing, the Comedia of Dante, "an epic kind in itself" (eine epische Gattung für sich). Finally, from the union on a higher plane of Lyric with Epic, liberty with necessity, arises the third form, the Drama, the reconciliation of antitheses in a totality, "supreme incarnation of the essence and the in-itself of all art."[45]
E. von Hartmann.
In Hartmann's Philosophy of the Beautiful, poetry is divided into spoken poetry and read poetry. The former is subdivided into Epic, Lyric and Dramatic, with further subdivisions of Epic into plastic Epic, or strictly epic Epic, and pictorial or lyrical Epic; of Lyric into epical Lyric, lyrical Lyric and dramatic Lyric; of Dramatic into lyrical Drama, epic Drama and dramatic Drama. Read poetry (Lese poesie) is again subdivided into predominantly epical, lyrical or dramatic form with tertiary partitions of the affecting, the comic, the tragic and humorous; and into poems "to be read at a sitting" (like the short story) or to be taken up again and again (like the novel).[46]
The kinds in the schools.