IDEA OF LAW IX POETRY 693 



action like that found in the plays of ^Eschylus and Shakespeare. The 

 action of the poetic drama in Greece and England was a reflection of 

 widespread popular energy, of freedom of thought, speech, and deed, 

 of national greatness and patriotism, exalted by an inward sense of 

 power and by the defeat of such foreign enemies as Xerxes and Philip 

 II. No such inspiring air of liberty stirred the imagination of France 

 in the seventeenth century. With what feelings would Louis XIV., 

 retaining in his memory his youthful experiences of the Frondist wars, 

 have witnessed on the stage the sufferings of legitimate kings, de- 

 prived, as in Richard II. and Macbeth, of their thrones and lives by 

 the usurpation of ambitious subjects? How would his monarchical 

 pride have revolted against such a spectacle as King Lear, stripped of 

 his last shred of authority, the sport of the elements, the companion 

 in adversity of fools and madmen ! What woiild the Jesuits have 

 said to the daring doubts and speculations of Hamlet's conscience ? 

 Absolutism and centralization called for another order of dramatic 

 exhibition in France. Driven from her free range in external Nature, 

 the Muse of Tragedy retired into the recesses of the human soul, whose 

 inner conflicts she might represent without rousing the political sus- 

 picion of king or cardinal. Yet even here she was haunted by the 

 phantoms of her own self-consciousness. The overpowering sense of 

 the authority of Aristotle, the anticipation of the verdict of the asso- 

 ciated critics of the Academy, the oppressive idea of a dramatic stand- 

 ard formed by ancient models of unrivalled excellence, all these 

 influences co-operated to make ihe French dramatist voluntarily fetter 

 himself in his imitation of nature. The Law of the Three "Tnities is 

 an illustration of the tendency in the French character, as developed 

 by the history of France, to repress the liberties of imagination by the 

 analysis of Logic. 



As the French la\v of the stage is defined by Corneille in his Dis- 

 course on the Unities, so the law of French literary taste is expounded 

 by Boileau in the Art Poetif/ur. Critics are apt to undervalue poems 

 of the class of Horace's. Art Po< ti<-a and Pope's E.^n;/ on Criticism, 

 because they regard them as abstract treatises on taste, containing 

 cold and commonplace maxims of composition: wherea- their real 

 interest and importance lie in the fact that tlu'v are declaration- of 

 law bv a victorious literarv party. The . I /< Tin-lim and the Epistle 

 to Align*/ us were manifestoes of the HVllcnisiiig party in Roman 

 literature, directed against those who favored the rude facilitv of poof? 

 like Lucilius and Plautus. The E*xai/ an Crif!c>*m is an argumerv'" in 

 verse against the taste represented by the Metaphysical Poets of the 

 seventeenth century in England. More suggestive than either of 

 these poems, because more relentless and uncompromising, the Art 

 Pot'/i</ne stands out prominently a- the final declaration of Law. by 

 the literary representatives of the French bourgeoisie, in alliance with 



