Davideis
"David is the least part of the Poem," and there is want of the "one illustrious and perfect action which properly is the subject of an Epick Poem": all failing through ignorance or negligence of the Fundamental Rules or Laws of Aristotle. But he contemptuously passes over Milton without 'mention.' Réné Rapin, that great French oracle of whom Dryden said, in the Preface to his own conversion of
Paradise Lost
into an opera, that he was 'alone sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the Art of Writing,' Réné Rapin in the work translated and introduced by Rymer, worshipped in Aristotle the one God of all orthodox critics. Of his Laws he said,
'There is no arriving at Perfection but by these Rules, and they certainly go astray that take a different course.... And if a Poem made by these Rules fails of success, the fault lies not in the Art, but in the Artist; all who have writ of this Art, have followed no other Idea but that of Aristotle.'
Again as to Style,
'to say the truth, what is good on this subject is all taken from Aristotle, who is the only source whence good sense is to be drawn, when one goes about to write.'
This was the critical temper Addison resolved to meet on its own ground and do battle with for the honour of that greatest of all Epic Poets to whom he fearlessly said that all the Greeks and Latins must give place. In so doing he might suggest here and there cautiously, and without bringing upon himself the discredit of much heresy,—indeed, without being much of a heretic, —that even the Divine Aristotle sometimes fell short of perfection. The conventional critics who believed they kept the gates of Fame would neither understand nor credit him. Nine years after these papers appeared, Charles Gildon, who passed for a critic of considerable mark, edited with copious annotation as '
the Laws of Poetry
' (1721), the Duke of Buckingham's 'Essay on Poetry,' Roscommon's 'Essay on Translated Verse,' and Lord Lansdowne 'on Unnatural Flights in Poetry,' and in the course of comment Gildon said that