authors of antiquity: "Nature was our great Poet's Mistress;
her alone has he followed as his Conductress."

Such a view is emancipatory. Free the critic from the idea that nature
and the ancients are the same and that reason and the laws ascribed to
the ancients are identical, and he is ready to look at modern literature
with an independent judgment and to see what it is like and what it is
worth in and by itself. Release the critic from the necessity of
regarding nature as universal order and reason as the directive of this
order, and, whatever the loss in philosophic concept, he is ready for a
more specific and particular investigation that turns its attention to
basic human behavior and the basic ways of the mind as the criterion by
which to judge artistic representation. No need now for quaint parallels
with the ancients to justify modern practice, nor for scholarly
arguments to prove learning; all that is required is to prove adherence
to common nature and common rationality. This is the ground upon which
Anonymous stands, and it is the ground upon which Morgann is to stand
when he gives us the "Falstaff of Nature," and Johnson when he presents
Shakespeare as the dramatist who is "above all modern writers the poet
of nature," whose "persons act and speak by the influence of those
general passions by which all minds are agitated," whose "drama is the
mirror of life," in which his readers may find "human sentiments in
human language," whose practices are to be judged not by appeal to the
rules of criticism, but by reference to the author's design and the
great law of nature and reason.

This position opens the way for further advances. Thus, beginning with
the assumption that the mind of the spectator or the reader is the chief
arbiter in such matters, Anonymous gives us what is perhaps the most
enlightened comment on probability and illusion to be found in the
period between Dryden and Coleridge. His test for probability is what
the imagination will readily accept; and the imagination, he says, will
bear a "strong Imposition." Reason, to be sure, demands that actions and
speeches shall be "natural"--but natural within the framework of the
situation and character as established by the dramatist on the
imaginative level. The author's words on illusion recall the passage in
Dryden about reason's suffering itself to be "hoodwinked" by imaginative
presentation, foreshadow Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief,"