This principle of the _idem in alio_, so widely diffused through all
the higher revelations of art, it is peculiarly requisite to bear in mind
when looking at Grecian tragedy, because no form of human composition
employs it in so much complexity. How confounding it would have been to
Addison, if somebody had told him, that, substantially, he had himself
committed the offence (as he fancied it) which he charged so bitterly upon
the Italian opera; and that, if the opera had gone farther upon that road
than himself, the Greek tragedy, which he presumed to be so prodigiously
exalted beyond modern approaches, had gone farther even than the opera.
Addison himself, when writing a tragedy, made this violation (as he would
have said) of nature, made this concession (as _I_ should say) to a
higher nature, that he compelled his characters to talk in metre. It is
true this metre was the common iambic, which (as Aristotle remarks) is the
most natural and spontaneous of all metres; and, for a sufficient reason,
in all languages. Certainly; but Aristotle never meant to say that it was
natural for a gentleman in a passion to talk threescore and ten iambics
_consecutively_: a chance line might escape him once and away; as we
know that Tacitus opened one of his works by a regular dactylic hexameter
in full curl, without ever discovering it to his dying day (a fact which
is clear from his never having corrected it); and this being a very
artificial metre, _a fortiori_ Tacitus might have slipped into a simple
iambic.
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