718 POETEY 



rule of the Unities of Time and Place is not to be found in the 

 Poetics of that philosopher ; the only Unity, on the necessity of which 

 Aristotle insists as a la\v of dramatic poetry, is Unity of Action. The 

 first mention of the law of Unity of Time is in the commentary of 

 Scaliger on the Poetics, published in 1561, where the principle is 

 deduced by mere inference from casual expressions of Aristotle; the 

 law of Unity of Place is in like manner inferred quite arbitrarily 

 and for the first time by Castelvetro, in his edition of the Poetics, 

 published in 1571; Aristotle nowhere lays down such a rule in his 

 treatise, nor did the Greek dramatists observe it in practice. Corneille 

 was the first dramatist to proclaim his submission to rules dictated to 

 him by the two Italian critics: he defended his practice by reasoning, 

 but he only succeeded in establishing it, because it fell in with the 

 taste of the logical, and rather prosaic, French genius, which com- 

 pletely misinterpreted Aristotle's use of the term Imitation. 



Once more : let us even suppose Aristotle to have been the author 

 of "'the rules," as Pope imagined; this fact would not have obliged 

 English dramatists, on any rational theory of authority, to obey his 

 particular edicts. The Law of the Three Unities could at most have 

 been classed with Aristotle's by-laws, such as his requirements for the 

 form of the perfect tragedy, or for the character of the ideal tragic 

 hero; and these, as I have before urged, being derived from his 

 observation solely of the practice of the Greek stage, have no applica- 

 tion whatever to the form and structure of the drama in other nations, 

 which is based on conceptions of the Universal in Xature in many 

 respects fundamentally different from the ideas of the Greeks. 



Had Pope been better acquainted with the meaning of Aristotle, he 

 would have perceived that, provided his countrymen conformed to the 

 philosopher's grand principle of imitating the Universal in Xature, 

 they were quite right to imitate it according to the law imposed upon 

 them by their national character and history. So long as they obeyed 

 in a philosophic spirit their own municipal law of art. they might 

 despise foreign laws without incurring the reproach of insular bar- 

 barism. The application of the French "' rules " to a play like Hamlet 

 which caused Voltaire to call Shakespeare a drunken savage, shows 

 an ignorance of the methods of art actually employed by the English 

 poet which recoils on the head of the French critic; and though Boi- 

 Icau pronounced dictatorially that it was impossible to write an epic 

 upon a Scripture subject, yet the logical impossibility of the critic 

 was overcome, without any violation of the true laws of Poetry, in Mil- 

 ton's Paradise Lost To attempt to confine the liberties of the poet 

 by any a priori system of critical legislation is. as I have said more 

 than once, worse than useless. Genius must be left to find out the law 

 for itself. 



Xot that this implies that there is no law beyond the will of genius. 



