Letters to His Son 1752 | Page 8

all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses,
which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should
engage to have more action and less declamation; and not to cram and
crowd things together, to almost a degree of impossibility, from a too
scrupulous adherence to the unities. The English should restrain the
licentiousness of their poets, and the French enlarge the liberty of theirs;
their poets are the greatest slaves in their country, and that is a bold
word; ours are the most tumultuous subjects in England, and that is
saying a good deal. Under such regulations one might hope to see a
play in which one should not be lulled to sleep by the length of a
monotonical declamation, nor frightened and shocked by the barbarity
of the action. The unity of time extended occasionally to three or four
days, and the unity of place broke into, as far as the same street, or
sometimes the same town; both which, I will affirm, are as probable as
four-and-twenty hours, and the same room.
More indulgence too, in my mind, should be shown, than the French

are willing to allow, to bright thoughts, and to shining images; for
though, I confess, it is not very natural for a hero or a princess to say
fine things in all the violence of grief, love, rage, etc., yet, I can as well
suppose that, as I can that they should talk to themselves for half an
hour; which they must necessarily do, or no tragedy could be carried on,
unless they had recourse to a much greater absurdity, the choruses of
the ancients. Tragedy is of a nature, that one must see it with a degree
of self-deception; we must lend ourselves a little to the delusion; and I
am very willing to carry that complaisance a little farther than the
French do.
Tragedy must be something bigger than life, or it would not affect us.
In nature the most violent passions are silent; in tragedy they must
speak, and speak with dignity too. Hence the necessity of their being
written in verse, and unfortunately for the French, from the weakness of
their language, in rhymes. And for the same reason, Cato the Stoic,
expiring at Utica, rhymes masculine and feminine at Paris; and fetches
his last breath at London, in most harmmonious and correct blank
verse.
It is quite otherwise with Comedy, which should be mere common life,
and not one jot bigger. Every character should speak upon the stage,
not only what it would utter in the situation there represented, but in the
same manner in which it would express it. For which reason I cannot
allow rhymes in comedy, unless they were put into the mouth, and
came out of the mouth of a mad poet. But it is impossible to deceive
one's self enough (nor is it the least necessary in comedy) to suppose a
dull rogue of an usurer cheating, or 'gross Jean' blundering in the finest
rhymes in the world.
As for Operas, they are essentially too absurd and extravagant to
mention; I look upon them as a magic scene, contrived to please the
eyes and the ears, at the expense of the understanding; and I consider
singing, rhyming, and chiming heroes, and princesses, and philosophers,
as I do the hills, the trees, the birds, and the beasts, who amicably
joined in one common country dance, to the irresistible turn of
Orpheus's lyre. Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason
at the door with my half guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and
my ears.
Thus I have made you my poetical confession; in which I have

acknowledged as many sins against the established taste in both
countries, as a frank heretic could have owned against the established
church in either, but I am now privileged by my age to taste and think
for myself, and not to care what other people think of me in those
respects; an advantage which youth, among its many advantages, hath
not. It must occasionally and outwardly conform, to a certain degree, to
establish tastes, fashions, and decisions. A young man may, with a
becoming modesty, dissent, in private companies, from public opinions
and prejudices: but he must not attack them with warmth, nor
magisterially set up his own sentiments against them. Endeavor to hear,
and know all opinions; receive them with complaisance; form your own
with coolness, and give it with modesty.
I have received a letter from Sir John Lambert, in which he requests me
to use my interest to procure him the remittance of Mr. Spencer's
money, when he goes abroad and also desires to know to whose
account he is to place the postage of my letters. I