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:
"Horace still charms with graceful negligence,
And without method talks us into sense;
Will, like a friend, familiarly convey
The 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.