equently 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