" Guarini, too, said that "the world judges
poetry, and its sentence is without appeal."
Strangely enough, it was priest-ridden Spain that all through the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led the van of revolt against the
rules and precepts of the grammarians. While Torquato Tasso remained the
miserable slave of grammarians unworthy to lick the dust from his feet,
Lope de Vega slyly remarked that when he wrote his comedies, he locked
up the givers of precepts with six keys, that they might not reproach
him. J.B. Marino declared that he knew the rules better than all the
pedants in the world; "but the true rule is to know when to break the
rules, in accordance with the manners of the day and the taste of the
age." Among the most acute writers of the end of the seventeenth century
is to be mentioned Gravina, who well understood that a work of art must
be its own criterion, and said so clearly when praising a contemporary
for a work which did not enter any one of the admitted categories.
Unfortunately Gravina did not clearly formulate his views.
France of the eighteenth century produced several writers like Du Bos,
who declared that men will always prefer the poems that move them, to
those composed according to rule. La Motte combated the unities of place
and time, and Batteux showed himself liberal in respect to rules.
Voltaire, although he opposed La Motte and described the three unities
as the three great laws of good sense, was also capable of declaring
that all styles but the tiresome are good, and that the best style is
that which is best used.
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