Page:Monsieur Bossu's Treatise of the epick poem - Le Bossu (1695).djvu/83

Book I. looking for his Hero in some History or other, and undertakes to rehearse a particular Action this Hero has done, as we see in Silius Italicus, Lucan, Statius, and in the Authors of the Adventures of Hercules and Theseus, which Aristotle takes notice of. They did not make any general or universal Platform without Names, but made it altogether singular. For how could any one write like Silius, without thinking on the particular Action and Name of Hannibal? Call him as much as you will, in your Platform, a Certain Man, yet still this Certain Man is determinately Hannibal. You are so far from taking away his Name, that after you have once nam'd him, you afterwards use a Pronoun or some other Word which signifies him, instead of the Term Hannibal, which you are loth to repeat. Thus Aristotle does not order the Names to be taken away (which can never be done) but he only orders to feign an Action without Names, to make it at first universal, as he instances in the Odysseïs and Iphigenia.

Here is a great deal of Difference between Fiction and a down-right Lye; and between a Thing's being Probable, and its being no more than Probable. The Poet is order'd to feign, but no body desires him to tell Lyes. He is told, that he is oblig'd to Probability, and not to Truth; but no one says, that the Probability he is oblig'd to by his Art is incompatible with the Truth. The Truth of an Action does not give him the Name of Poet, nor does it rob him of it: and, as Aristotle says, an Author is as much a Poet, though the Incidents he relates did really happen: Because whatsoever has been done, is capable of all the Probability, and all the Possibility, which the Art requires, and of being such as ought to be feign'd.

This makes so little an Alteration in the Nature of Things, that even the Author of a Fable is not always satisfied with making a bare Narration of the Action he feigns, but sometimes sets it off with all the Truth 'tis capable of. Anciently this was very com-