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It has been accepted and observed. 'Not by the people for whom it was written. The learned Hypatia has surely not forgotten, that within sixty years after the Ars Poetica was written, Annaeus Seneca, or whosoever wrote that very bad tragedy called the Medea, found it so necessary that she should, in despite of Horace, kill her children before the people, that he actually made her do it!
Yet, for all this, I am not one of those who feel that in a family everything should bend to the sway of these little people. They are the worst of tyrants in such houses: still, where children are, though the fact must not appear to them, nothing must be done without a wise thought of them. Here, as in all high art, the old motto is in force, "Ars est celare artem."
Aristotle at the beginning had made clear that the essential element in drama is movement, a movement which could have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Horace The remains of Roman literary criticism are not so philosophical as are the Greek. The treatise of Horace is not in Aristotle's sense a poetic; it is an ars poetica.
I respect the evidence of my contemporaries, but I cannot forget the sayings of the Father of medicine, Ars longa, judicium diffcile. I am not presuming to express an opinion concerning Veratrum viride, which was little heard of when I was still practising medicine.
Ars, to the Roman, meant a body of rules which a practitioner would find useful as a guide in composing. As a practitioner himself, Horace is more interested in the craft of poetry than in its philosophy or theory. He writes as a poet to young men who desire to become poets. The essence of poetry he ignores or takes for granted.
Here was a mighty plant flowering twice a year and giving its seed to the four winds. Every July and January its erection was celebrated in the imperial republic. Vergilius stood beside the emperor that day when, at the Ars Pacis Augustas, he addressed the people.
He who has the servant, as we say at home, has also the wagon and the oxen; and I reminded him of the verse of Catullus: 'Tu quoque fac simile: ars deluditur arte."
He uttered a short, low, laugh, unobserved, perhaps, by any one but myself; and, pushing through the atmosphere of sacres and mille tonnerres, which filled that pandaemonium, strode quickly to the door. I felt as if a load had been taken from my bosom, when he was gone. Reddere person ae scit convenientia cuique. Horace: Ars Poetica.
Widely different from him, Raymond Lulle or de Lulle, an unbridled schoolman, in his Ars magna invented a reasoning machine, analogous to an arithmetical machine, in which ideas were automatically deduced from one another as the figures inscribe themselves on a counter.
It is quite unintelligible to me that the ancient critics should have placed him so low. Horace's notice of him in the Ars Poetica is quite ridiculous. There is, to be sure, the "magnum loqui;" but the great topic insisted on is the skill of Aeschylus as a manager, as a property-man; the judicious way in which he boarded the stage; the masks, the buskins, and the dresses.
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