AndrÉ Dacier's PoËtique d'Aristote Traduite en FranÇois avec des Remarques was published in Paris in 1692. His translation of Horace with critical remarks (1681-1689) had helped to establish his reputation in both France and England. Dryden, for example, borrowed from it extensively in his Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693). No doubt this earlier work assured a ready reception and a quick response to the commentary on Aristotle: how ready and how quick is indicated by the fact that within a year of its publication in France Congreve could count on an audience's recognizing a reference to it. In the Double Dealer (II, ii) Brisk says to Lady Froth: "I presume your ladyship has read Bossu?" The reply comes with the readiness of a clichÉ: "O yes, and Rapine and Dacier upon Aristotle and Horace." A quarter of a century later Dacier's reputation was still great enough to allow Charles Gildon to eke out the second part of his Complete Art of Poetry (1718) by translating long excerpts from the Preface to the "admirable" Dacier's Aristotle.[1] Addison ridiculed the pedantry of Sir Timothy Tittle (a strict Aristotelian critic) who rebuked his mistress for laughing at a play: "But Madam," says he, "you ought not to have laughed; and I defie any one to show me a single rule that you could laugh by.... There are such people in the world as Rapin, Dacier, and several others, that ought to have spoiled your mirth."[2] But the scorn is directed at the pupil, not the master, whom Addison considered a "true critic."[3] A work so much esteemed was certain to be translated, and so in 1705 an English version by an anonymous translator was published.

It cannot be claimed that Dacier's Aristotle introduced any new critical theories into England. Actually it provides material for little more than an extended footnote on the history of criticism in the Augustan period. Dacier survived as an influence only so long as did a respect for the rules; and he is remembered today merely as one of the historically important interpreters—or misinterpreters—of the Poetics.[4] He was, however, the last Aristotelian formalist to affect English critical theory, for the course of such speculation in the next century was largely determined by other influences. None the less, his preface and his commentary are worth knowing because they express certain typically neo-classical ideas about poetry, especially dramatic poetry, which were acceptable to many men in England and France at the end of the seventeenth century. Dacier's immediate and rather special influence on English criticism may be observed in Thomas Rymer's proposal to introduce the chorus into English tragedy and in the admiration which the moralistic critics at the turn of the century felt for his theories.

In the very year of its publication Rymer read with obvious approbation Dacier's PoËtique d'Aristote. In the preface to A Short View of Tragedy (1692) he announced that "we begin to understand the Epick Poem by means of Bossu; and Tragedy by Monsieur Dacier."[5] That Rymer admired Dacier's strict formalism is plain, but he was especially moved by the French critic's argument that the chorus is the essential part of true tragedy, since it is necessary both for vraisemblance and for moral instruction.[6] He therefore boldly proposed that English tragic poets should henceforth use the chorus in the manner of the ancients, since it is "the root and original, and ... certainly always the most necessary part of Tragedy."[7] Moreover he praised (as had Dacier) the example of Racine, who had introduced the chorus into the plays that he had written for private performance, by the young ladies of St. Cyr—Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691). As is well known, he even went so far as to write the synopsis of what inevitably would have been an absurd Aeschylean tragedy on the defeat of the Armada.[8]

Rymer's proposal provoked a public debate, which was begun by John Dennis, at that time an almost unknown young critic. Though The Impartial Critick (1693) was directed against Rymer (who had given grave offence to Dryden and others by his attack on Shakespeare in the Short View), Dennis knew Dacier's ideas intimately, and his discussion of the chorus in the first and the fourth dialogues, is more directly a refutation of the French than of the English critic.[9] This lively treatise established whatever intimacy existed between young Dennis and the aging Dryden.[10]

Though Dryden avoided any extended public argument with Rymer, he obviously knew both the Short View and Dacier's Aristotle. In the Parallel of Poetry and Painting (1695), he followed Rymer's lead in equating Dacier, the critic of tragedy ("in his late excellent Translation of Aristotle and his notes upon him"[11]) with Le Bossu, the framer of "exact rules for the Epic Poem...." But he disagreed with Dacier's opinions on the chorus and explained away Racine's use of it on the sensible grounds that Esther had not been written for public, but for private performances which gave occasion to the young ladies of St. Cyr "of entertaining the king with vocal music, and of commending their voices."[12] He also suggested the practical consideration that plays with choruses would bankrupt any company of actors because it would be necessary to provide a number of costumes for the additional players and to enlarge the stage (and consequently the theater) to make room for the choral dances.

Dacier's insistence that the primary function of poetry is to instruct and that pleasure is merely an aid to that end could easily be distorted into a crudely moralistic view of the art. Doubtless it was this that recommended the treatise to minor critics and poets who were creating the atmosphere out of which came Jeremy Collier's attack on contemporary dramatists in 1698.

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.

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.

[6] This view, announced in the Preface, was elaborately argued by Dacier in Remarque 27, Ch. XIX.

[7] Rymer, op. cit., p. 84. Zimansky, in his introduction and notes, discusses the influence of Dacier on Rymer and other English critics.

[8] Ibid. p. 84 and pp. 80-93.

[9] John Dennis, Critical Works (ed. Edward N. Hooker), Baltimore (1939-43), I, 30-35. For a succinct account of the English controversy about the chorus see ibid., I, 437-438. Though Dennis did not agree with Dacier on this point, he admired him. As late as 1726, in the preface to The Stage Defended, he quoted Dacier's preface and spoke of him as "that most judicious Critick." Ibid., II, 309.

[10] John Dryden, Letters (ed. C.E. Ward), Duke University Press, 1942, pp. 71-72. Hooker has noticed the similarity of two of Dennis's opinions to views expressed by Dryden in his then unpublished "Heads of an Answer" to Rymer's Tragedies of the Last Age, 1678.

[11] W.P. Ker, Essays of John Dryden, Oxford, 1926, II, 136.

[12] Ker, II, 144. Cf. Dennis's similar remark in The Impartial Critick, Hooker, I, 31. Racine, in his preface to Esther, said nothing doctrinaire about the use of the chorus. He merely mentioned that it had occurred to him to introduce the chorus in order to imitate the ancients and to sing the praises of the true God.

[13] J.E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford, 1908-09, III, 227 and 240.

[14] Treatise of the Epick Poem, London, 1695, sig. [A 3] verso- A 4, recto.

[15] Jeremy Collier, "A Defence of the Short View.... Being a Reply to Mr. Congreve's Amendments," A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage, etc., London, 1738, p. 251.

[16] TraitÉ du PoËme Epique, I, ch. vi and vii.