YrSuj1

Importance
The functions of the original preface
One can attribute high value to a subject by demonstrating its
importance and - inseparable from that - the usefulness of
examining it. This is the standard practice - well known to
ancient orators - of auxesis, or amplificatio [magnification or
overstatement]: "This matter is more serious than it seems, it is
exemplary, it calls into question lofty principles, fairness is at
stake/' and so forth. See Thucydides showing that the Peloponnesian
War (or Livy, the Punic Wars) is the greatest conflict in
human history; see Montesquieu asserting at the head of VEsprit
des lois, "If my work meets with success, I shall owe much of it
to the majesty of my subject/' 2 Documentary usefulness: to preserve
the memory of past achievements (Herodotus, Thucydides,
Livy, Froissart). Intellectual usefulness: Thucydides, "Whoever
shall wish to have a clear view both of the events which have
happened and of those which will some day, in all human
probability, happen again in the same or a similar way";
Montesquieu, "... that men were able to cure themselves of their
prejudices. Here I call prejudices not what makes one unaware
of certain things but what makes one unaware of oneself";
Rousseau (the preamble of the Neuchatel manuscript of the
Confessions), "[I portray myself so that] people can have at least
one thing to compare themselves with; so that everyone may
know himself and one other, and I will be this other." Moral
usefulness, the whole immense topos of the edifying role of
dramatic fiction: see the preface to Racine's Phedre, "I have
composed [no tragedy] where virtue has been more emphasised
than in this play. The least faults are severely punished in it. ...
Such is the proper aim that any man who works for the public
should cherish"; the preface to Moliere's Tartuffe, "If the function
of comedy is to cure men's vices"; the preface to La Bruyere's
Caracteres, "We should neither write nor speak but to instruct";
or even, paradoxically or not, the preface to the younger Crebillon's
Egarements du cceur et de Vesprit, "[The novel must become]
a picture of human life, in which we censured vice and folly."
We will meet this theme of moral usefulness again in connection
with later prefaces, in which it is deployed even more - right on
2 This is where, humbly transgressing the rule of modesty, he continues, "...
still, I do not believe that I have totally lacked genius."
199