Blackmore's preface to Prince Arthur (1695) is a long plea for the reformation of poetry, whose "true and genuine End is, by universal Confession, the Instruction of our Minds and Regulation of our Manners...." One is not surprised, when toward the end he names his authorities, that they turn out to be Rapin, Le Bossu, Dacier (as commentators on Aristotle and Horace) and "our own excellent Critick, Mr. Rymer."[13] W.J. who translated Le Bossu in 1695, dedicated his work to Blackmore. In his preface he linked Blackmore and Dacier as proponents of the thesis that poetry's "true Use and End is to instruct and profit the world more than to delight and please it."[14] And Jeremy Collier himself quoted Dacier from time to time, and on one occasion invoked his commentary on Horace, "The Theater condemned as inconsistent with Prudence and Religion," as one of many answers to the unrepentant Congreve.[15]
But besides starting these minor controversies Dacier's preface states some of the typical themes of neo-Aristotelian criticism: the idea that proper tragedy is based on a fable that imitates an "Allegorical and Universal Action" intended "to Form the Manners," a view that closely relates tragic fable to epic fable as interpreted by Le Bossu;[16] that modern tragedy, being concerned with individuals and their intrigues, cannot be universal and is therefore necessarily defective; that love is an improper subject for tragedy; that the Aristotelian katharsis proposes as its end not the expulsion of passions from the soul, but the moderation of excessive passions and the inuring of the audience to the inevitable calamities of life, and so on. Finally, he is nowhere more typical of French critics in his time than in his vigorous defense of the rules, which he declares are valid because of the nature of poetry which, being an art, must have an end, and there must necessarily be some way to arrive at it; because of the authority of Aristotle, whose knowledge of our passions equipped him to give rules for poetry; because of the illustrious works from which Aristotle deduced his rules; because of the quality of the poetry that they produce when followed; because, since they are drawn from "the common Sentiment of Mankind," they must be reasonable; because nothing can please that is not conformable to the rules, "for good Sense and right Reason, is of all Countries and places;" and finally "because they are the Laws of Nature who always acts uniformly, reviews them incessantly, and gives them a perpetual Existence." It is his simultaneous appeal to the authority of the ancients, to the consensus gentium, to general nature, and to good sense that makes Dacier seem to us to represent the final phase of French neo-classical critical theory.
Samuel Holt Monk
University of Minnesota
Notes to the Introduction
[1] Willard H. Durham, ed., Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, New Haven, 1915, pp. 62-72.
[2] Tatler 165.
[3] Spectator 592.
[4] For Dacier in England see A.F.B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (1660-1830) , Paris, 1925, pp. 286-288. As late as 1895, S. H. Butcher, in Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, mentioned Dacier frequently, if only to disagree with him as often as he mentioned him.
[5] Thomas Rymer, Critical Works (ed. C.A. Zimansky), New Haven, 1956, p. 83.