liliJlMIIIMIIiMfi-;! aNi f liili!r»l ioH-0 If 13 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY DATE DUE ADD L '^ rt<-i(-i a. .._ \Ji\\\ \ ■** ^WT" % ^ / ^ 1 /■ / / •*• 1 GAYLORD PRINTED IN U S A ;?t-i6--^ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924096755594 ARISTOTLE ON THE ART OF POETRY AN AMPLIFIED VERSION WITH SUPPLEMENTARY ILLUSTRATIONS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH BY LANE COOPER ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY GINN AND COMPANY BOSTON • NEW YORK ■ CHICAGO ■ LONDON COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY LANE COOPER ALL EIGHTS RESERVED 413.6 !tjiir\ro& GINN AND COMPANY ■ PRO- PRIETORS • BOSTON ■ U;s.A. :i/ TO ALBERT S. COOK PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE IN YALE UNIVERSITY WHO HAS RENDERED INESTIMABLE SERVICES TO HIS NATION IN PROMOTING THE CULTIVATION OF POETRY AND SOUND LEARNING PREFACE This amplified rendering of the Poetics of Aristotle, I hope, will be useful to the student of literature in general, and perhaps not without suggestiveness even to scholars in the ancient classics. Primarily, however, it is designed for certain students of English that I meet with, who are capable of deriving profit from the substance of the treatise, but gain less on a first ac- quaintance with it in any modern translation than their efforts commonly deserve. Accordingly, my chief aim has been to make the subject matter of the work as intelligible as I thought it could be made for a first perusal by a kind of reader whose difficulties and initial mistakes I have come to know as a teacher of English. To this end I have employed a number of expedients, some of which may need a word of explanation. First of all, then, the original text has here been divided and expanded. The Poetics as it has come down to us may represent a part of Aristotle's notes for a set of lectures, or per- haps for a dialogue ; though now and then it seems more like the uneven memoranda of some person^ who attended the lectures. However this may be, and apart from any difficulties inherent in the subject, the treatise does not furnish easy reading. Superficially, it has the look of a continuous discourse without much articulation PREFACE This amplified rendering of the Poetics of Aristotle, I hope, will be useful to the student of literature in general, and perhaps not without suggestiveness even to scholars in the ancient classics. Primarily, however, it is designed for certain students of English that I meet with, who are capable of deriving profit from the substance of the treatise, but gain less on a first ac- quaintance with it in any modern translation than their efforts commonly deserve. Accordingly, my chief aim has been to make the subject matter of the work as intelligible as I thought it could be made for a first perusal by a kind of reader whose difficulties and initial mistakes I have come to know as a teacher of English. To this end I have employed a number of expedients, some of which may need a word of explanation. First of all, then, the original text has here been divided and expanded. The Poetics as it has come down to us may represent a part of Aristotle's notes for a set of lectures, or per- haps for a dialogue ; though now and then it seems more like the uneven memoranda of some person who attended the lectures. However this may be, and apart from any difficulties inherent in the subject, the treatise does not furnish easy reading. Superficially, it has the look of a continuous discourse without much articulation vi PREFACE in the parts ; it is divided into chapters, to be sure, yet in such a way that transitions in the thought are not always obvious. Of the special topics, again, though some are carefully expounded and amply illustrated, others are dismissed with a sentence or two. In partic- ular, the citations and other illustrations occasionally amount to the barest jottings, as ' Here is an example from the Bath Scene ' — the example not being added. When the illustrative matter only adds to the darkness of an abstract principle, how great is that darkness ! The present version aims to indicate the chief divisions unmistakably, and, by a running marginal gloss and certain interpolations, the lesser divisions and transitions as well ; to render many of the examples less enig- matical ; and, in short, without seriously distorting the perspective of the original, to supply such information as may be needed at the moment for a better, if not a complete and final, understanding of the individual thoughts and their sequence. The reader that I have in mind may not be very systematic in the use of scholarly apparatus ; he might even neglect the assistance of a foot-note. In order to perform my intended office for him, I have not scrupled to expand the wording in passages where, if unalert, he might otherwise advance too quickly. Far from hoping to rival the excellent terseness of Bywater's translation, or the smoothness (sometimes deceptive) of Butcher's, I have generally been willing to delay the reader at the risk of circumlocution, or by explicit repetition of a thought which is implicitly carried along in the Greek, and have even dared to interrupt the PREFACE vii sequence by comments, long or short, where my stxi- dents in the past have gone astray. In this way, for example, the unwary will not at the outset miss the emphasis one ought to lay upon the tragic catharsis or the tragic hamartia ; and certain misconceptions that frequently arise during the first perusal of the treatise, and -tend to become rooted impressions, may likewise be avoided — for instance, the common mis- understanding of what Aristotle says on the relative importance of ' character ' and " plot '. On the other hand, nO point has been made of calling attention to discrepancies in the Poetics, except where they are particularly troublesome ; still, not all of the minor ones have been passed over in silence. Furthermore, an attempt has been made to suggest that the principles of Aristotle have a wider application than his own « illustrations, drawn solely from Greek literature, may serve to reveal ; and not only the main principles, but some of the lesser as well. It is proper, of course, to observe that his ideal of perfect tragedy is not independent of the, traditions of the Attic drama, or of local usage on the stage of his own day. At the same time, it is the experience of those who concern themselves with the Poetics that, allowance being made for the tentative method underlying certain of its appar- ently hard and fast conclusions, the treatise gains new significance for the student of modern literature with every re-examination. It seems desirable that the pos- sibility of this wider application should, so to speak, be discovered from the first. I have therefore intro- duced sundry illustrations from familiar sources, chiefly viii PREFACE English, which may do away with any presupposition that the work can have no bearing, say, upon the modern "romantic' drama. For example, Aristotle holds that to be on the verge of committing a deed of horror knowingly, and yet to refrain, makes an undesirable sit- uation in tragedy. His reasons may or may not seem cogent at first glance ; but the situation itself can be illustrated as well by the instance of Hubert and Arthur in King John as by that of Haemon and Creon in An- tigone ; probably it is illustrated in Hamlet. My sup- plementary examples could readily be multiplied, but that would distend the translation, and might not leave enough to the ingenuity of the reader. Doubtless some of them could be replaced to advantage ; I can only say that in supplying examples I have tried to work in the spirit of the original, where the illustrative matter is sim- ple and direct rather than always meticulously precise. My additions are more extensive in the earlier part of the work, and decrease toward the close. I cannot hope that their tone, or style, will please the more experienced student of the Poetics; but it will not disturb the reader that I specially have in mind, for whose sake the additions have been printed in the same kind of type as the rest of the translation. It would be easy, on a second reading, to skip most of the interpolations, for the longer ones have all been enclosed in brackets, and the shorter ones also, when they interrupt the thought rather than help the reader on. Sometimes, as here and there in Chapter 25, it would be hard to draw the line between such liberties as a translator ordinarily may take in filling out the PREFACE ix sense of his interpretation and the hberties I have wished to take for the execution of a special purpose. In passages where the first person singular of the origi- nal has been avoided (and as applying to Aristotle it has been avoided throughout), and in paragraphs or sen- tences where things implicit from a preceding paragraph or sentence have been repeated, the use of brackets would generally interfere with the clearness or fluency which the changes from the original are intended to promote. My use of parentheses varies. It may not be improper to say that the notion of thus interpreting the Poetics may fairly be called my own ; for I had examined neither Goulston nor Castel- vetro before I finished translating, and had no nearer prototype in mind than Dryden, or Pope, or Byron, in their adaptations of the treatises on poetry by Horace and Boileau, or Vida and Boileau in their adaptations of Horace. Needless to remark, I have not essayed the task of a poet like Dryden or Boileau, though I may have wished to do in a humble fashion for Aristotle what Hookham Frere so brilliantly accomplished for Aristophanes. Being a student of English, with only a general training in Greek, I have made liberal use of the means of interpretation which the taste and industry of specialists on Aristotle have provided. These means, including the contributions of Vahlen, I have regarded as virtually selected and assembled for me in the masterly edition of the Poetics by Professor Bywater (Clarendon Press, 1909), from whose conception of the text I have but seldom intentionally departed (and then X PREFACE in favor of traditional readings), and whose notes and translation I have steadily consulted. Sometimes — not too often, I hope — where he has found the inevitable English equivalent of a word or phrase in the Greek, I have followed his rendering. Here and there I have borrowed also from the version of Pro- fessor Margoliouth — more rarely from that of Butcher — or sought help in the Latin of Tyrwhitt. In eluci- dating Chapter 25,1 have availed myself of the analysis in the dissertation by Dr. Carroll. The example from Burke which is inserted in Chapter 17 was suggested by Professor Herbert Richards in the Classical Review for May, 1910 ; in fact, I have tried to profit by several reviews of Bywater's edition. Certain other matters, textual and the like, which are not suitable for discussion here, I hope to treat of later in a separate article. For the present, two of them may be briefly mentioned. If my version of the pas- sage and its context is correct, Bywater's suggested transposition of four lines in Chapter 18 (his most considerable change in the text of the Poetics) is un- warranted. The presumption, of course, is in favor of the traditional sequence, and I am inclined to think my interpretation of the sequence unassailable. As for the tale of Mitys' statue in Chapter 9, I have rendered^e passage in accordance with Aristotle's use of the verb Oempeiv, and especially with his use of it in this treatise, disregarding the similar story in Plu- tarch, with the light it has been supposed to shed on the meaning of a word in the Poetics. I take this to be the wiaely disseminated tale, which appears in many PREFACE XI variant forms (for example, Moliere's Don Juan, ou le Fes tin de Pierre), of the murder avenged by the statue of the victim. It only remains for me to record my sense of in- debtedness to several of my friends and pupils who have aided and encouraged me in the prosecution of this work ; and in particular to my colleagues Professor Joseph Q. Adams, Professor Horace L. Jones, and Professor Frank Thilly, through whose taste and caution I have avoided a number of infelicities, and it may be of positive errors. LANE COOPER Cornell University CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION Character and Value of the Poetics . . . xv ARISTOTLE ON THE ART OF POETRY I. Epic Poetry and Tragedy, and Comedy, con- sidered IN General as Forms of Imitative Art . . . . ... I II. Tragedy defined. The Principles of its Construction . . .... 17 III. Epic Poetry. The Principles of its Con- struction -77 IV. Problems in Criticism. The Principles of their Solution 85 INDEX 97 INTRODUCTION CHARACTER AND VALUE OF THE POETICS Without Art, Nature can ne'er be perfect ; and'without Nature, Art can claim no being. But our poet must beware that his study be not only to learn of himself ; for he that shall affect to do that confesseth his ever having a fool to his master. He must read many, but ever the best and choicest : those that can teach him anything he must ever account his masters and reverence ; among whom Horace and (he that taught him) Aristotle deserved to be the first in estimation. Aristotle was the first accurate critic and truest judge — nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had ; for he noted the vices of all knowledges, in all creatures, and out of many men's perfections in a science he formed still one Art. So he taught us two offices together: how we ought to judge rightly of others, and what we ought to imitate specially in our- selves. But all this in vain without a i:xatural wit, and a poetical nature in chief ; for no man so soon as he knows this, or reads it, shall be able to write the better ; but as he is adapted to it by Nature he shall grow the perfecter writer. — Ben Jonson.^ I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar ; but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro [on Aristotle], Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what ' decorum ' is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers 1 Discoveries, ed. Castelain, p. 127. Castelain notes the sources of Jonson's free adaptations, in Stobaeus and Heinsius. XV xvi INTRODUCTION be, and show them what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of poetry, both in divine and human things. — MlLTON.'^ Truly, Aristotle himself, in his Discourse of Poesy, plainly de- termineth this question, saying that poetry is . . . more philo- sophical and more studiously serious than history. His reason is, because poesy dealeth . . . with the universal consideration, and the history with ... the particular. . . . Which reason of his, as all his, is most full of reason. — Sidney." I adopt with full faith the principle of Aristotle, that poetry as poetry is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident. . . . To this accidentality I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle pronounces to be . . . the most intense, weighty, and philosophical product of human art ; adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. — ■ Coleridge.' Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing. It is so : its object is truth, not indi- vidual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion. — Wordsworth.* Aristotle has spoken so much and so solidly upon the force of imitation, in his Poetics^ that it makes any further discourse upon this subject the less necessary. — Burke.' The book, taken as it is, with perhaps an occasional side-light from some of his other works, is intelligible enough ; after a brief introduction, he gives us in outline all that he has to say on the subject immediately before him, the technique of the Drama and the Epic. He tells one, in fact, how to construct a good play and a good epic, just as in the Rhetoric he tells one how to make a good speech. And in doing this, he has succeeded in formulating ^ Of Education, ed. Lockwood, p. 22. 2 Defense of Poesy, ed. Cook, pp. 18, 19. ° Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross, 2. 33, loi. * Lyrical Ballads, ed. Littledale, p. 238. * On the Sublime and Beautiful i. i6. INTRODUCTION xvii once for all the great first principles of dramatic art, the canons of dramatic logic which even the most adventurous of modern drama- tists can only at his peril forget or set at naught. — BywATER.^ Next after the masterpieces of Hellenic art, including literary art, the Poetics of Aristotle is the most signifi- cant thing for the study of literature that has come down to us from Greek civilization. First of all, it represents the definitive judgment of the Greeks themselves upon two, and perhaps the leading two, Hellenic inventions, Epic Poetry and Tragic Drama. Though ample evi- dence be wanting as to the existence of other strictly scientific investigations into the nature of poetry, that is, before Aristotle, and contemporary with him, we may assume that here as elsewhere in the round of know- ledge he is far from being an isolated scholar, but sys- tematizes and completes the work of predecessors, with an eye to the best thought and practice of his own time — and yet, unquestionably, with great independence of judgment. Another work of Aristotle in the same field, a dialogue On Poets, has not, it is commonly believed, survived. And if, in addition, one-half or one-third of the Poetics itself is lost, we should not wonder at the disappearance of similar works by lesser men. Indica- tions that Aristotle has considered not merely traditional and popular notions of the drama and the epic, but theories of literature of contemporary scholars as well, are not absent from the Poetics; see, for example, Chapters 25 and 26. It might be interesting to specu- late how much of this contemporary criticism filtered 1 Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, p. viii. xviii INTRODUCTION down through the Alexandrian critics to Horace, and perhaps later, through channels we no longer can trace, to the Italian commentators of the Renaissance, in whom we find unexpected, yet seemingly conventional, modi- fications of Aristotle's doctrines ; but the salient fact for us is this, that if literary criticism in a broad sense begins with Aristophanes and Plato, in the narrower sense it begins with this work of Aristotle on poetry, which for ancient Greece is representative and final. The treatise is important, secondly, because directly or indirectly it has commanded more attention than any other book of literary criticism, so that the course of literary history subsequent to it is unintelligible without an acquaintance with the Poetics at first hand, whether in the original or through a translation. But further, the work has a permanent value, quite apart from historical considerations. Aristotle's funda- mental assumptions, and the generalizations upon which he mainly insists, are as true of any modern literature as they are of his own. That a work of art, for instance, — a drama, or the like — may be compared to a living organism, every part of whose, structure is dependent upon the function of the whole, is a conception having validity for the ages. And the same may be affirmed of his contention that poetry has its own standard of correctness or fitness, and is to be judged primarily by its own laws. Of the minor generalizations, one that nowadays is often challenged concerns the social station of the tragic hero. It is maintained that Aristotle, hav- ing no prevision of the modern deniocratic movement, could hold no true opinion respecting the average man. INTRODUCTION xix or the man in humble circumstances, as compared with the man of distinguished birth and position, in an im- portant tragic role. To this it may be replied that Aris- totle had formed, and elsewhere expressed, a very just estimate of the relation of individual worth to external goods and hereditary name ; that the age of Pericles, in which high tragedy flourished, was notably demo- cratic ; that Euripides had represented men of humble birth in tragedy ; and that Aristotle's own age, three generations after Euripides, and an age of despotism, took a somewhat unusual interest in burgher life upon the stage. It is easy to believe that many problems which are thought to be peculiar to the modern drama had been discussed, and were settled, in the theory of Aristotle's time, and that the desirability, or undesira- bility, of choosing a tragic hero from the lower walks of life was among the mooted questions. After all, how little of the ancient Greek drama do we really know ! — except for fragments, perhaps one-tenth of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, from among all the writers of tragedy in their age, and of the tragedies intervening between Euripides and Aristotle, virtually nothing unless it be the Rhesus, if the authorship of that is still in dispute. The generalizations of the Poetics were based upon a varied literature which has mostly disappeared. The treatise is further valuable for its method and perspective. Simply and directly it lays emphasis upon what is of first importance : upon the vital structure of a poem rather than the metre ; upon the end and aim of tragedy in its effect upon the emotions rather XX INTRODUCTION than the history of the Chorus (for the Chorus, by Aris- totle's time, may have counted for less than it subse- quently does in the Roman closet-drama). The manner of presentation is not rhapsodical. Profound thoughts, in the main clear, are expressed in language suited to a scientific inquiry. There may be little, indeed, to sug- gest the ease and grace of style for which other works of Aristotle were commended in antiquity. Though the central thought of the Poetics, that the plot is the soul of tragedy, is an imaginative conception, a metaphor, in this work we need look for no ornate prose such as Shelley and Ruskin give way to in dealing with fine art. The tone of Aristotle may rather be compared to that of Leonardo da Vinci in his treatise on painting ; and his procedure is a model of the way in which one ought to study a literary type. So far as we may gather, his mode of investigating the laws of poetry must have been somewhat as follows. Starting with the Platonic assumption that a literary form, an oration, for example, or a tragedy, has the nature of a living organism, Aristotle advanced to the position that each distinct kind of literature must have a definite and characteristic activity or function, and that this specific function or determinant principle must be equivalent to the effect which the form produces upon a competent observer ; that is, form and function being as it were interchangeable terms, the organism is what it does to the person who is capable of judging what it does or ought to do. Then further, beginning again with the general literary estimates, in a measure naive, but in a measure also learned, that had become more or INTRODUCTION xxi less crystallized during the interval between the age of the Attic drama and his own time, and that enabled him to assign tentative values to one play and another, the great critic found a way to select out of a large extant literature a small number of tragedies which must neces- sarily conform more nearly than the rest to the ideal type. As in the Politics, which is based upon researches among a great number of municipal constitutions, yet with emphasis upon a few, so in the Poetics his induc- tions for tragedy must repose upon a collection of in- stances as exhaustive as he knew how to make it without loss of perspective ; that is, his observation was inclu- sive so that he might not pass over what since the days of Bacon we have been accustomed to think of as ' cru- cial instances '. By a penetrating scrutiny of these crucial instances in tragedy, he still more narrowly defined what ought to be the proper effect of this kind of literature upon the ideal spectator, namely, the effect which he terms the catharsis of pity and fear, the purgation of two disturbing emotions. Then, reasoning from func- tion back to form, and from form again to function, he would test each select tragedy, and every part of it, by the way in which the part and the whole conduced to this emotional relief. In this manner, he arrived at the conception of an ideal structure for tragedy, a pattern which, though never fully realized in any existing Greek drama, must yet constitute the standard for all of its kind. He proceeded, in fact, as does the anatomist, whose representation of the normal skeleton and mus- cles is an act of the imagination, ascending from the actual to an ideal truth, and is never quite realized in xxii INTRODUCTION any individual, though nearly realized in what one would consider a normal man ; or perhaps as does the sculp- tor, who by an imaginative synthesis combines the ele- ments which he has observed in the finest specimens of humanity into a form more perfect than nature ever succeeds in producing. Finally, the Poetics, if it be sympathetically studied, may be thought to have a special value at the present time, when a school has arisen, led by the ingenious Professor Croce, whose notion seems to be that there really are no types in art, and hence no standards of in- terpretation and criticism save the aim of the individual writer or painter. In his tractate Of Education, Milton alludes to some ' antidote ' in one part of literature to an evil tendency in another. Whenever the Poetics of Aristotle receives the attention it demands, it serves as an antidote to anarchy in criticism. We turn to a few separate points which the student may note before reading the translation. I. Poetry, for Aristotle, is a genus which is sharply divided into species, the noblest of which is tragedy. Taken together, these species — tragedy, comedy, the epic, and others, if others there were — would constitute the genus, without any surplus or residuum. He could not think of any poetry independent of some distinct kind of poem. Nor should we ; though we might include in the genus, as separate forms, certain kinds of lyric poems which he would doubtless include, not under poetry, but music. Through a confusion of thought which he escapes, we often loosely speak of imaginative literature as comprising "poetry and the drama' — as INTRODUCTION xxiii if the drama were not poetry — when we probably ought to say " lyrical, narrative, and dramatic poetry '. Or we carelessly talk of " a dramatic poem ', when we actually mean, not comedy or tragedy, but something short of it — a narrative poem, for example, verging upon drama, but not^ully realizing either form. One thinks of cer- tain works of Browning which are neither truly narra- tive nor truly dramatic poems (that is, dramas), but in a confused way represent both types. Here one must try to discover which of two or three types is uppermost in the poet's mind, decide whether it fulfils the purpose of an epic, or of some other kind of poetry, and judge accordingly. The work must either be a poem, or not a poem ; if it is poetry, it must be some species of poetry, or else a hybrid. 2. Aristotle was the son of a physician, and, though he took all knowledge for his province, had himself a special or hereditary interest in medicine. 'That his thinking in the Poetics is tinctured by this interest is clear from his conception of tragedy as a purgative of distressing emotions. But there are not a few more casual allusions to the same department of knowledge. Early in the treatise, Empedocles is referred to as one who threw the facts of medicine into verse, but did not thereby become a poet ; yet when Aristotle reaches the subject of diction in poetry, he cites figures of speech, on blood-letting and the use of the knife, from this same medical versifier. On one occasion, he mentions a riddle descriptive of a doctor cupping a patient ; on another, he recalls the parallel lines in Aeschylus and Euripides on the wounded foot of Philoctetes. Again, a faulty xxiv INTRODUCTION arrangement or disturbance in the parts of a tragedy re- minds him of the dislocation of joints and the singular appearance of the whole body when a limb is out of place. His interest in medicine, however, is subordinate to his studies in the wider subject of zoology, and to his occupation with biology in the most general sense. Since he compiled an encyclopedic work on animals that even now is instructive, we are not astonished at his dwelling on the Platonic comparison of a poem to a living creature. The form or essential structure is to a poem what the soul, or ' form ' (as he would call it), of an animal is to its body. Doubtless this is a concep- tion in which the philosophy of Socrates and Plato has a commoh ground with that of Aristotle ; it seems to be a fundamental conception for all human thought. At any rate, there is a fundamental notion in the Aristo- telian philosophy that the universe itself must be likened to an animal, having the Deity as its principle of life. All nature thus becomes a work of art whose soul, or form, or creative principle, is God. 3. To Aristotle, then, soul and Body are the inner and outer aspects of one and the same object, so that the inmost meaning of a thing is vitally connected with its outer manifestation. According to circumstances, he will lay stress upon one aspect or the other. Similarly, with him, a given word may have a deeper or a more superficial meaning. Thus the hamartia, or short- coming, in the tragic hero may refer to something within the man, or to an outward act, a particular shortcoming or case of misjudgment, which brings about his downfall. The same is true of the word mimesis, or imitation. INTRODUCTION xxv 4. This word mimesis is likely to cause trouble on a first reading of the Poetics. To begin with, it implies, but does not signify, the prime activity of the poet, or of the.rdrtist ir^ the widest sense — what we might call the poeti6,or artistic imagination. It implies the existence of this imagination, but does not directly stand for such a powerv- It signifies the copying by the poet or artist of the thiSig he has imagined, the representing of his image in a medium — language, or pigments, or musical notes — which may be perceived by the senses. This is its primary rtieaning. The poet has his conception of a story, or the musician has his conception of a theme, and he puts this conception into rhythmical language or musical notes. He does not copy the work of another ; he imitates or embodies the inner form or soul of his own making in an outer medium for the senses of his audience. Nor does he copy any work of nature. Thus Cicero, speaking of Phidias, says : ' Neither did this artist, when he carved the image of Jupiter or Minerva, set before him any one human figure as a pattern which he was to copy ; but'having a more perfect idea of beauty fixed in his mind, this he steadily contemplated, and to the imitation 6j this all his skill and labor were directed.' ^ So much for the inner meaning of the word. Out- wardly, mimesis means the result of the poet's effort, the imitation as it at length appears to the senses, the finished work of art — Oedipus the King of Sophocles, the statue as Phidias left it, or, let us say, Leonardo's portrait of Mona Lisa. 1 Translation by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fifteen Discourses on Art, The Third Discourse. xxvi INTRODUCTION 5 . The idea of a transformation of personality, in the agents of a drama or an epic, is not entirely alien to the Poetics. The opinion frequently is heard that an element of difference in the modern from the ancient drama con- sists in what we term development of character. Now it is true that the scope of a play like Macbeth or King Lear does afford an opportunity for some display of the successive stages in the history of a nioral deterioration or advance in the persons of the drama ; though it may be questioned whether our interest in this process is not more of an intellectual than a truly emotional or artistic interest. In any case, the tragic change of fortune, from happiness to misery, or the reverse, as described in the treatise, miust involve a modification in the spirit of the hero ; and the transformation of will and feeling in Creon, Oedipus, and the rest — that is, in the tragedies upon which Aristotle's work is founded — is adequate to the end of arousing pity and fear. But we should not search in the Poetics for anything on the education of the hero beyond his enlightenment with respect to a given tragic situation. 6. It will now be proper to mention the great dis- crepancy in the treatise, between the general statement that the best tragedy is one with an unhappy ending, and the more particular assertion, that the best tragic situation is the one in which some person is about to injure a blood-relative unwittingly, and discovers the identity of his intended victim in time to draw back. One explanation of the discrepancy I have suggested within brackets in the( translation (pp. 47, 48). Another is that of Professor Bywater, who maintains that Aristotle INTRODUCTION xxvii is not quite the unerring writer we commonly deem liim, and is capable of inconsistency in larger as well as smaller details. Still another would be that we possibly have in the treatise merely the notes of a student, taken down from oral delivery. Now it often happens that a student records but a part of what is said on one occa- sion, and but a part of what is said on another upon a similar topic, vfithout the necessary qualifications in either case, and in such a way that his notes contain a glaring contradiction, though the lecturer may in some fashion, tacitly it may be, have provided against an inconsistency. Still another is this, and I give it because it helps to characterize the Poetics as a whole. The method of the work, though it leads to sure results in the main, is often tentative enough, with a balancing of arguments as in a dialogue. Indeed, the treatise is thought to bear some relation, we do not know exactly what, to a lost dialogue of Aristotle On Poets, which may have been an earlier production. But for a few indications of the style of a lecturer, it would not be impossible to fancy that the Poetics itself in some way contained the materials of a dialogue, in which discrepant views on poetry were stated and discussed. Certainly, as in the discussion pro and con of the respective claims of tragedy and the epic in Chapter 26, there are signs of the influence of dialectical procedure, even though the work were intended as a monologue. Bearing this in mind, one might suggest an explanation of the difficulty as follows. Aristotle doubtless preferred Sophofcles' Oediptis the King, with its unhappy ending, and with~4ts other excellences, to xxviii INTRODUCTION all other tragedies, and was ready to accord the palm to this type of poem. But he had, as we may gather from the frequent references to Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians, a very high regard for this latter play, too, so that it was one of the examples most often before him in his search for the ideal plot ; and so soon as he gives his attention to this type of drama (in which the deed of horror is averted), he is bent upon explaining its excellence, if he can find a psychological basis for its satisfactory emotional effect. Accordingly, he would tend to represent the claims of this type with a good deal of skill and force. If he were sufficiently influenced by the spirit of the dialogue form, his argument might be very deceptive, for he is a Greek and something of a casuist. Yet in the end he would throw the balance in favor of the play with the unhappy ending ; just as in Chapter 26, though he makes out a strong case for epic poetry, and alludes to the supremacy of Homer, he nevertheless decides that tragedy is the higher kind of art. This explanation is obviously hypothetical, but not entirely out of keeping with the one I have offered in the translation. Thus much may be said by way of general introduction to an English rendering of the Poetics designed for the sort of reader I have mentioned in the Preface. If more is needed for a student lacking any considerable famil- iarity with Greek literature, I may refer him, out of a wide choice, to an article on Greek Drama and the Dance, by G. Warre Cornish, in the Fortnightly Review for February, 191 3, and to another, entitled Aristotle's Views on Music and their Relation to Modem Ideas INTRODUCTION xxix by R. H. Bradley, in the Westminster Review of the same date. And I cannot forbear to mention as a work at once popular, scientific, and indispensable to an understanding of the Greek drama, the third edition of Haigh's The Attic Theatre (Clarendon Press, 1907). The inspiring volume of Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, is so well known in this country that I scarcely need to name it. ARISTOTLE ON THE ART OF POETRY I EPIC POETRY AND TRAGEDY, AND COMEDY, CONSIDERED IN GENERAL AS FORMS OF IMITATIVE ART In this work, we propose to discuss the nature of the Chapter i poetic art in general, and to treat of its different species in particular, with regard to the essential quality or function of each species — which is equivalent to the Poetry; its proper and characteristic effect of each upon the trained structure ana sensibilities of the judicious. Accordingly, we shall ex- amine that organic structure of the whole which is indis- pensable to the production of an ideally effective poem, including the number and nature of the constituent parts, together with such other matters as fall within the same inquiry respecting form and function. [It will be observed that the treatise as it has come down to us carries out only a part of what we might expect from this program. The work apparently is incomplete. It contains, indeed, a discussion of the characteristic emotional effect of tragic poetry, that is, of tragedy proper and, mainly by implication, such epic poems as resemble tragedy in their seriousness ; but it 2 ARISTOTLE does not explain the effect, emotional or intellectual, of comedy. Nor does it treat of the special powers or functions of the several kinds of lyric poetry, or of the characteristic quality in such works of the poetic imagi- nation as the Socratic dialogues of Plato ; though there is passing allusion both to lyrical forms and the dialogue. Lyric poetry Aristotle might have chosen to discuss in a work more directly concerned with the art of music ; comedy he must have treated at length in a section of the present work that is lost. The part that remains owes its unity to the emphasis that is laid upon tragedy as the highest and typical form of serious poetry.] Turning first to the conception of poetry in general, we may follow the natural order, and begin with what Art is an Tm- is fundamental, the principle of artistic imitation. Epic resentation Poctry and Tragedy, as well as Comedy and Dithy- L a Medium' rambic Poetry, and for the most part the music of the artfsT*^*"^ flute and lyre, in their general nature are forms of imi- tation ; that is, they represent, or imitate, something through an arrangement of words or notes. But, having this in common, that they all are forms of imitation, at , the same time they differ from one another in three respects ; there are differences in : (i) The Means by which they imitate — the "medium', as for example, language or melody. (2) The Objects as these are represented — one art may represent the same object as better, and another worse, than the object ordinarily is. (3) The Manner in which these objects are imitated — Tragedy, for example, directly presents the actions of men, whereas Epic Poetry relates such actions. THE ART OF POETRY 3 As for the Means, we may instance those who by conscious art, or mere habitual practice, represetit the l. The Means I • 1 J. An example nkenesses of many objects through the medium of line frompainting and color ; or those who for their medium of imitation employ the voice. Similarly in the arts that have been From singing mentioned above, taken as a group, the imitation of the objects is produced in the medium of rhythm and lan- guage and melody, these three media being used either singly or in certain combinations. Thus in the music Frominstru- r.in 11 1 T 11 1 niental music 01 the flute or the lyre, the media are melody and rhythm combined ; as in any other arts having a similar effect — for instance, imitative piping. In the art of dancing, the medium is rhythm alone, without melody ; From the art for the dancers also represent human character, and what men do and undergo ; and the medium of this imitation is rhythm in bodily movement. Now there is an Art, the subject of this general dis- An Art whose Medium is cussion, in which the medium of imitation is language Language alone, without melody, and that, too, whether the lan- guage be non-metrical or metrical ; if it be metrical language, there may be one single form of verse, or several forms together. For this inclusive art of imita- tion in language, common usage up to the present has no name ; since we have no term that might be applied in common to the farcical prose dramas of Sophron or Xenarchus and an imaginary dialogue of the traditional Socrates. And we should still be at a loss for a com- mon term even if the imitation in these cases employed the medium of iambic, elegiac, or any other such metre, verse is not People have a way, it is true, of connecting the word thing in the Poet, that is, ' maker ', with the name of one or another resentatioa' 4 ARISTOTLE kind of verse, so that they talk of " elegiac poets ', and ~ epic ' or hexameter " poets ', as if it were not the prin- ciple of imitation that characterized the artist — as if one might term them all poets indiscriminately because of the metre. The custom is followed even when a work on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse ; people call the author a poet. But the Iliad of Homer and the versified natural science of Empedocles really have nothing in common save the metre ; hence, if it is proper to style Homer a poet, Empedocles must be classed as a natural scientist rather than a poet. [A similar distinction might be drawn between the poetry of Wordsworth and the versified botany of Erasmus Darwin.] And the same kind of reasoning would hold even if an author in his poetic imitation were to include every sort of metre, as is actually done in the Centaur of Chaeremon, a rhapsody in which all kinds are mingled. We could not, for example, term Chaeremon an ' elegiac poet ' ; yet we must recognize that he falls under the general category of the poets. [In the foregoing digression on metre, Aristotle clearly regards verse, not as essential to poetry, but as the customary adjunct of the art. It is the principle of imitation that is essential, and the embodiment in metrical or non-metrical language is a secondary con- sideiration. But it should be remarked that he offers no real support to the inference that rhythm in the larger sense, as distinguished from metres (which are 'species of rhythm'), is of little consequence in poetic imitation. The medium of the " nameless ' art which includes the Dialogues of Plato and the Iliad of THE ART OF POETRY S Homer may be metrical language, or non-metrical, but in both cases it is rhythmical. At the same time, he does not venture to call " a Socratic Dialogue ' a poem, or to regard the imaginative art which imitates in non- metrical, though perhaps rhythmical, language as ' poetry '. The inclusive art, he says, has not yet re- ceived a name. At the end of the digression he tacitly conforms to the usage of his time, and accepts metre as characteristic of poetry. Modern writers, as Shelley, are often willing to use the word ' poetry ' as a generic term covering the rhythmical language of Plato and the English Bible as well as the strictly metrical language of Homer and Milton. In the German word dichtung we have an inclusive term corresponding to Aristotle's general notion of artistic imitation in the medium of language.] We may turn, then, from these distinctions in the arts which employ their several media either singly or in combinations of two each, to consider, lastly, certain other arts which combine all the media enumerated, Arts that em- r, , ploy the three namely, rhythm, melody, and verse. Such are the arts meaiaof of Dithyrambic and Nomic Poetry, and Tragedy and Mefoa™'ana Comedy. But in these, again, there is a difference ; for ^°"^ in Dithyrambic and Nomic Poetry all three of the media are employed together, whereas in Tragedy and Comedy they are brought in separately, one after another. [More strictly, there is, in the successive parts of a drama, a preponderance of one medium over another.] These, then, may be regarded as the differences in the arts so far as concerns the media through which the imitation is accomplished. ARISTOTLE Chapter 2 2. The Ob- jects: Men in Action Men either above or below the average Or average Men A correspond- ing difference in the arts Accordingly, we may proceed to the Objects which the imitator represents. The primary objects of artistic imitation are human beings in action, men performing or undergoing something. [This will be found gener- ally true, even where at first glance the objects imitated may seem to be other than human, as in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth, the Idylls of Theocritus, or. the Birds of Aristophanes. So also in fables and bes- tiaries, the thing primarily imitated is human nature acting or being acted upon.] And the agents must be either of a higher or a lower type ; for virtually all the distinctions in human character are derived from the primary distinction between goodness and badness which divides the human race. It follows that, in the imitation, the agents must be represented as better than we our- selves, or worse, or some such men as we. Thus, to take an illustration from the painters, Polygnotus de- picted men better than the average, Pauson men worse than the average, and Dionysius men like ourselves. [Similarly, the subjects of Raphael are of a higher type, while those of Hogarth are of a lower, and those of the Dutch portraitists are near to the average level of humanity.] It is clear that each of the modes of imitation we have noted will admit of these differences of elevation in the Object as imitated, and that each will become a separate art through this difference in representing the object as higher, or lower, or midway between the two extremes. Such diversities are possible even in dancing and flute-playing and lyre-playing. And they are pos- sible also in the art, hitherto nameless, which employs THE ART OF POETRY 7 metrical or non-metrical language, without melody, as its medium. [That is, they are possible in dichtung.] Thus the agents represented by Homer are better than we ; the agents in the epic of the commonplace by Cleophon are on the average level ; and those in the mock-heroic travesty of Homer by Hegemon of Thasos — who was the first to engage in the literature of parody — are below the average, as are the personages in the mock-heroic Diliad of Nicochares. [Similarly, the knights in Spenser's Faerie Queene are agents of a higher type ; the monks in Frere's King Arthur and His Round Table are of a lower type ; and the agents in the modern realistic novel for the most part are per- sons like ourselves.] The same distinction holds good in Dithyrambs and Nomes — for example, in the higher types represented by . . . [the name is missing] and the lower types of Argas ; and it is illustrated by the differ- ence in the treatment of Polyphemus by Timotheus, who elevated the type, and Philoxenus, who rendered the Cyclops ignoble. Now, so far as the objects of the imitation are concerned, the nobility of the agents is Herein we ' what distinguishes Tragedy from Comedy. Comedy ference tends to represent the agents as worse, and Tragedy as Tragedy and better than the men of the present day. comedy There is yet a third difference in these several arts, chapter 3 touching the Manner in which each kind of Object is imitated ; for the Manner may vary in three ways. Let 3. The , . r 1 • • Manner us suppose three cases in which the object of the imita- tion remains the same (say, heroic men in action), and the medium also (say, metrical language). Under these conditions, (i) the poet may produce his imitation by ARISTOTLE A summary of the differ- Suggesting points of similarity in the leading Tragic, Epic, and Comic Poets Digression on the etymology of 'Drama' and on the alleged origins of Comedy and Tragedy speaking now in narrative, and now in an assumed r61e, as Homer does ; or (2) he may continue speaking throughout in the same person, without change ; or (3) the whole story may be represented , in the form of an action carried on by several persons as in real life. There are, then, as was said at the beginning, these three differences by which the several kinds of artistic imitation are distinguished : a difference in the medium of imitation ; a difference in the objects ; and a differ- ence in the manner. The distinction enables us to point out corresponding lines of similarity in certain kinds of art. Thus, in respect to the objects repre- sented, the dramatist Sophocles is akin to the epic poet Homer, for both of them represent agents of a higher type ; and in respect to the manner of imitation, the tragedies of Sophocles are akin to the comedies of Aristophanes, since both poets present the agents di- rectly as experiencing and doing in person. Indeed, according to the Dorians — who base their opinion on linguistic grounds — herein lies the reason why come- dies and tragedies are called ' dramas ', namely, because in both kinds of poetry men are represented as act- ing (drontes, from the verb dran). Hence also the Dorians lay claim to the invention of Tragedy as well as Comedy ; for Comedy is claimed by the Megarians (= Dorians) — by those of Greece, who contend that it arose among them at the time when Megara became a democracy, and on the other hand by the Megarians of Sicily, on the ground that the first true comic poet, Epicharmus, was a Sicilian who lived much earlier THE ART OF POETRY 9 than the Attic comic poets Chionides and Magnes ; and Tragedy likewise is claimed by certain of the Dorians in the Peloponnese (i.e., the Sicyonians). Now these claims are put forward as resting upon the ety- mology of the words comedy and drama. Their term for rural hamlets, the Dorians say, is not demes, as with the Athenians, but comae , and they assume that comedians acquired their name, not from comazein, ' to revel ', but from their habit of strolling about from vil- lage to village {cata comas), when a lack of apprecia- tion forced them out of the city. As for the etymology of ' drama ', they allege that the Dorian word for " to act ' is not prattein, as with the Athenians, but dran. [It is to be observed that Aristotle neither accepts nor censures the argument of ' the Dorians '. Just before mentioning it, he uses participial forms of both dran and prattein together, in order to emphasize the thought that men in action, whether doing or suffering, are alike essential to both kinds of drama. In his subse- quent definition of Tragedy, he uses the participle of dran when he describes the manner of imitation as ' in the form of action '. — He does not suggest an ety- mology for " tragedy '. The Greek word is compounded of elements signifying " goat-song ', that is, a perform- ance by men disguised as satyrs. — Notwithstanding the assumption of the Dorians, ' comedy ' seems to be connected by derivation with the word comazein, ' to revel ', and with the Comus, or wandering dance of the Phallic worshippers.] Let this suffice, then, on the number and nature of the differences in the various kinds of artistic imitation. lO ARISTOTLE Chapter 4 1/ Poetry has its origin in two natural instincts 1 . The im- pulse to imi- tate 2. The natu- ral delight in the results The pleasure in the process of recognition There is also a natural in- stinct for harmony and rhythm As to its general origin, we may say that Poetry has sprung from two causes, each of them a thing inherent in human nature. The first is the habit of imitation ; for to imitate is instinctive with mankind ; and man is superior to the other animals, for one thing, in that he is the most imitative of creatures, and learns at first by imitation. Secondly, all men take a natural pleasure in the products of imitation — a pleasure to which the facts of experience bear witness ; for even when the original objects are repulsive, as the most objectionable of the lower animals, or dead bodies, we still delight to con- template their forms as represented in a picture with the utmost fidelity. [One is reminded of the corpse in Rembrandt's painting, ' The Lesson in Anatomy '.] The explanation of this delight lies in a further char- acteristic of our species, the appetite for learning; for among human pleasures that of learning is the keenest — not only to the scholarly, but to the rest of mankind as well, no matter how limited their capacity. Accord- ingly, the reason why men delight in a picture is that in the act of contemplating it they are acquiring knowl- edge and drawing inferences — as when they exclaim : ' Why, that is so and so ! ' Consequently, if one does not happen to have seen the original, any pleasure that arises from the picture will be due, not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, or the coloring, or some similar cause. To imitate, then, is natural in us as men ; just as our sense of musical harmony and our sense of rh)rthm are natural — and it is to be noted that metre plainly falls under the general head of rhythm. In the beginning. THE ART OF POETRY 1 1 therefore, being possessed of these natural endowments, men originated poetry, the process of generation com- ing about by gradual and, in the main, slight advances upon the first naVve improvisations. So much for the origin of the art in general. More particularly, now, Poetry broke up into two Two main varieties, corresponding to a difference of personal poetry character in the authors ; for the graver spirits would represent noble actions, while the meaner would, repre- sent the doings of the ignoble. And whereas others composed hymns and panegyrics, the latter sort at first produced lampoons. We are unable, it is true, to men- tion a poem in the satirical vein by any of the poets before Homer, though there probably were many sa- tirists among them. But from Homer down, we can name various instances of satirical poetry — for ex- ample, the Homeric Margites, and similar works of other poets. In the early satirical poems, its inherent originofiam- • 1 -i- 1 1 ■ • 1 • 1 1 '''^'' satire suitability brought into use an iambic metre ; and the reason why we employ the term ' iambic ' for satirical to-day is that these poets formerly lampooned, or ' iambized ', one another in this metre. Of the early poets, accordingly, some became writers of iambic verse, and others of heroic. But Homer, who shared in both tendencies, was Homer ex- celled fcoth superior to the other poets of either class. As tor his in the serious supremacy in the serious style, he stands alone, not comic vein only through the general excellence of his imitations, but through their dramatic quality as well ; for he makes his personages live before us. So also was he superior in the comic vein, since he first marked out 12 ARISTOTLE the general lines of Comedy, by rendering the ludicrous — and not personal satire — dramatic ; for his mock- heroic Margites stands in the same relation to Comedy as the Iliad and Odyssey to Tragedy. When Tragedy and Comedy came into existence, however, those poets whose natural bent was toward lower subjects no longer took up lampooning, but be- came writers of comedy ; and the graver spirits no longer became epic poets, but producers of tragedy. And the reason was that these newer forms were grander, and were held in greater esteem. [Assuming, now, that Tragedy as a whole has reached the stage of a complete artistic form, Aristotle dis- misses any question as to the completeness or incom- pleteness of development in the various constituent parts.] Whether in respect to its formative elements Tragedy has developed as far as need be, would con- stitute a separate inquiry ; the question would have to be decided in and for itself, and also in relation to the theatres. [The investigation suggested by Aristotle might involve a study, for example, of the develop- ment of the Chorus : had the function of this been curtailed as far as might be, considering its original importance, and as far as need be, considering the right way of presenting a tragedy before an audience .?] y Evolution of Tragedy at all events originated in improvisations, Tragedy ^^ ^j^ Comedy also ; for Tragedy goes back to the improvising poet-leaders in the dithyrambic chorus of satyrs ; and Comedy to the leaders of the Phallic song and dance, the performance of which is still to be found as a custom in many of the cities. And from this THE ART OF POETRY 13 beginning, Tragedy progressed little by little, as the suc- cessive authors gradually improved upon what preceded them. Finally the development ceased, when Tragedy, through a long series of changes, had attained to its natural form. The princip al c hanges were three. t^(i) From the single spokesman of the primitive form, innovations Aeschylus increased the number of actors to two [we ^ ^ must bear in mind that one actor might take several parts in a play] ; he diminished the part taken by the Chorus — -that is, he reduced the amount of choral chanting ; and he made the spoken dialogue the chief element in the play. 1^2) Sophocles brought about the ofsophocies innovation of three actors, and was the first to make use of painted scenery. 1-^3) Furthermore, there was a change in the magnitude of the action represented ; for the little plots of the primitive form were abandoned ; a gain in and, with its development out of the satyr-dance. Tragedy |ig^ty° also discarded the grotesque early diction. Thus, at a late period however, it assumed its characteristic eleva- tion of tone. At the same time, the trochaic tetrameter gave way to an iambic measure. Indeed, the reason for the early use of the trochaic tetrameter was that Tragedy retained its connection with satyrs, and was more nearly allied to choral dancing than at present. But so soon as the element of spoken discourse entered a more suit- ^ able metre : in, nature herself suggested the appropriate metre — the iambic the iambic ; for this is the readiest metre in speaking, as may be seen in ordinary conversation, where we are apt to fall into an iambic measure. [That something similar is true in English one may discover by listening for an iambic beat in everyday speech.] On the other 14 ARISTOTLE Fourth, a group of minor matters Chapter 5 The Agents in Comedy, and the nature of the Ludicrous No data for the early stages of Comedy hand, our talk seldom runs into hexameters, and only when we depart from our usual cadence. 1^4) Still another change was the increase in the number of epi- sodes constituting the action. But as to this and the other, adventitious, embellishments of Tragedy, and their traditional origin, let the general account which has been given be regarded as including them ; for very likely it would prove a long task to follow all these matters out in detail. [The history of the tragic costume might be one of the things which Aristotle here refuses to discuss. A moment later he is reminded of the comic mask.J As for Comedy, this, as we have said, is an artistic imitation of men of an inferior moral bent; faulty, however, not in any or every way, but only in so far as their shortcomings are ludicrous ; for the Ludicrous is a species or part, not all, of the Ugly. It may be de- scribed as that kind of shortcoming and deformity which does not strike us as painful, and causes no harm to others ; a ready example is afforded by the comic mask, which is ludicrous, being ugly and dis- torted, without any suggestion of pain. While the successive changes which Tragedy under- went, and the authors of these changes, have not escaped notice, there is no record of the early develop- ment of Comedy, for the reason that this form of drama was not at first seriously regarded as a matter of public concern. Not until late in its progress was the comic poet provided by the magistrate with a chorus ; until then the performers were simply unpaid volunteers. And it had already taken definite shape by the time we THE ART OF POETRY 15 begin to have a record of those who are termed poets in this kind. Who was responsible for the introduction of masks, or prologues, or more than one actor — con- cerning these and other like details we are in ignorance. But we know that the framing of plots was due to Yet two im- Epicharmus and Phormis, and hence originated in lie kSomi" ' Sicily ; and that, of Athenian poets. Crates was the first to discard personal satire, constructing, instead, plots of an impersonal nature and general comic value. As we have seen. Epic Poetry has thus much in common with Tragedy : it is an imitation, in a lofty kind of verse, of serious events. Still there is a differ- General at- ence, on the metrical side, in the medium of imitation, tween^the*" as well as a difference in the manner; for thelEpic Tragedy employs one and the same metre throughout, namely the hexameter [whereas Tragedy employs more than one metrel and Epic Poetry is in the form of a tale that is tolH, and not, like Tragedy, of an action directly presented. And there is further a difference in length [the Odyssey, for example, contains about eight times as many lines as Sophocles' Oedipus the King] ; for the Epic is not restricted to any fixed limit of time. [The time that elapses in the action proper of the Iliad is about forty-five days, in that of the Odyssey, forty- two.] Writers of Tragedy, on the other hand, endeavor to represent the action as taking place within a period of twenfy-four hours (that is, within a period of one apparent revolution of the sun), or at all events try to avoid exceeding this limit by very much. This dif- ference in respect to time exists at present; but at first tragic and epic poets were alike in not restricting 1 6 ARISTOTLE themselves to any special limits. Finally, Epic Poetry and Tragedy differ in respect to their constituent parts ; for some parts [four] are common to both forms, and some [two] are peculiar to Tragedy (see p. 79). All the parts of an Epic are to be found in Tragedy ; but not all the parts of Tragedy are included in the Epic. It A critic of follows that a person who can tell what is good or bad judglTan Ep^c art in the composition of a Tragedy can do the same "''" for Epic Poetry too. [Aristotle, as we see, remarks that in practice the Greek tragic poets of his own day (seventy years after the death of Euripides) try to confine the action within certain limits of time. This is a purely scientific obser- vation ; it is what he finds true in dramas he has examined. He neither commends nor censures the practice. He is not at this point giving advice either to poets or critics. Accordingly, the supposed law or rule of " the unity of time ', concerning which not a little has been heard since the Italian theories of poetry in the sixteenth century (followed by Corneille, Racine, and others in France), finds slender justification in the present treatise. As for its supposed corollary, "the unity of place ', there is no mention of such a thing in Aristotle ; and whatever his contemporaries may have done, the elder tragic poets did not invariably con- fine the action to one place. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, for example, the scene shifts from Delphi to Athens ; and there is an obvious change of place in the Ajax of Sophocles.] II TRAGEDY DEFINED. THE PRINCIPLES OF ITS CONSTRUCTION We are to reserve until later any more extended dis- Chapter 6 cussion of the Epic, that form of poetry which employs hexameter verse, and of Comedy, and are to deal first with Tragedy, the main topic of the present treatise. As a preliminary, we may frame a definition of the essence of Tragedy, in the main by putting together things already said. A Tragedy, then, is an artistic imitation of an action Definition of that is serious, complete in itself, and of an adequate '^^' ^ magnitude ; so much for the object which is imitated. As for the medium, the imitation is produced in lan- guage embellished in more than one way, one kind of embellishment being introduced separately in one part, and another kind in another part of the whole. As for the manner, the imitation is itself in the form of an action directly presented, not narrated. And as for the proper function resulting from the imitation of such an object in such a medium and manner, it is to arouse the emotions of pity and fear in the audience ; and to arouse this pity and fear in such a way as to effect that special purging off and relief {catharsis) of these two emotions which is the characteristic of Tragedy. [Pity and fear are two from among the general class of 17 1 8 ARISTOTLE disturbing emotions which it is the office of the various arts severally to relieve.] Explanation By 'language embellished in more than one way' ifsheaunl is meant language which is simply rhythmical or met- ^*^*' rical, language which is delivered in recitative, and language which is uttered in song. And by the sepa- rate introduction of one kind of embellished language in one part, and of another kind in another part, is meant that some portions of the tragedy (e.g., pro- logue and episode) are rendered in verse alone, with- out being sung or chanted, and other portions again (e.g., parode and stasimon) in the form of singing or chanting. [A tragedy being wholly in metrical language, the actors as well as the Chorus in delivering it em- ployed, by turns, song, speech, and an intermediate mode of utterance — ' recitative ' — like chanting or in- toning. The lyrical passages were nearly always sung. Passages of iambic trimeter were spoken. Other pas- sages were given in recitative to the accompaniment of the flute.] [The several elements in Aristotle's definition of tragedy are gathered from his previous remarks, as he says ; save that hitherto the only possible reference to the function of tragedy, its effect upon the audience, or reader, is contained in the opening words of the treatise, where he promises to discuss the specific func- tion of each kind of poetry. In the definition, he implies that other forms of art — we might instance comedy — have as their special end or pleasure the relief of others of the general class of disturbing emo- tions to which pity and fear belong. THE ART OF POETRY 19 The effect of tragedy upon the emotions is not merely something that took place in a former age, or among the Greeks alone ; it may be observed at all times, and in virtually all persons, including the reader of this sentence. However much the malign influence of a narrowly intellectual education may check the native motions of the heart, few indeed must be they who are hopelessly bereft of all pleasure in the tragic catharsis. For generations, it is true, there has been a debate over the precise meaning one should attach to Aristotle's phrase — a debate that frequently has turned upon the study of words apart from things, and on the whole has not been sufficiently concerned with the actual experience of audiences, or rather of specially qualified judges, during the presentation of good trag- edy and immediately thereafter. But if the words of Aristotle describe an effect which really occurs, it must be that a person of intelligence and normal sympathies will undergo, and be able to mark, the experience, not only in witnessing the best tragedy, but even in read- ing it. The student of the Poetics might render his notion of the tragic catharsis more exact by an at- tempt to observe his own emotions when he reads, or re-reads, Sophocles' Oedipus the King or Shakespeare's Othello. Furthermore, one might collect and examine the utterances of poets and other men of unusual sensibility on the feelings which tragic stories have aroused in them ; — not primarily such conscious explanations of the Aristotelian catharsis as that of Milton in his pre- face to Samson Agonistes. This, though important, is a 20 ARISTOTLE s different kind of evidence from the lines in the first of Milton's Latin Elegies — thus translated by Cowper : I gaze, and grieve, still cherishing my grief ; At times, e'en bitter tears yield sweet relief. Similar spontaneous illustrations of the tragic pleasure have come from other English poets ; for example, Wordsworth, in the Dedication preceding The White Doe of Rylstone : t,i • .u •^ -^ Pleasmg was the smart, And the tear precious in compassion shed ; and Coleridge, in Loi^e : She wept with pity and delight. It is probable also that a study of emotional suspense and its relief in the audience, by an experimental psy- chologist, would throw light upon the passage in Aris- totle. For the present, however, no explanation could prove more helpful to the general reader than a part of Bywater's note, his language being followed almost verbatim : In Greek physiology and pathology, catharsis is a very general term for a physical clearance or discharge, the removal by art or an effort of nature of some bodily product, which, if allowed to remain, would cause discomfort or harm. The catharsis of the soul as described in the Politics of Aristotle is a similar process in reference to certain emotions — the tacit assumption being ap- parently that the emotions in question are analogous to those peccant humors in the body which, according to the ancient hu- moral theory of medicine, have to be expelled from the system by the appropriate catharsis. With some adaptation of the state- ments and hints in Politics 8. 7, as thus interpreted, it is not difficult to recover the outlines at any rate of the Aristotelian theory of the cathartic effect of tragedy. Pity and fear are ele- ments in human nature, and in some men they are present in a THE ART OF POETRY 21 disquieting degree. With these latter the tragic excitement is a necessity ; but it is also in a certain sense good for all. It serves as a sort of medicine, producing a catharsis to lighten and relieve the soul of the accumulated emotion within it ; and as the relief is wanted, there is always a harmless pleasure attending the process of relief. It must be added that pleasure, to Aristotle, signifies, not a passive state of being, but a form of activity. In his working definition he does not allude to the element of pleasure in the tragic relief. As he develops his thought, we become aware that the relief is itself a form of pleasure ; so that the characteristic effect of tragedy may be referred to as either one or the other. We discover, too, that there are certain satisfactions contributory to the main effect ; for example, the pleas- ure of discovery or recognition, when we learn the author of a deed or the upshot of an incident ; the pleasure of astonishment, when the outcome of a series of events is unexpected, yet is seen to be inevitable ; and the pleasure derived from ' embellished language ', that is, from the rhythm and music of tragedy. Furthermore, the pleasure is explained negatively : the play must not offend us with effects that are revolting, or with events that run counter to our sense of what is reasonable and likely.] Advancing now from the synthetic definition of Tragedy, we proceed to analyze the elements that sepa- six constitu- v rately demand the attention of the tragic poet. Since in Tragedy: there are dramatis personae who produce the author's imitation of an action, it necessarily follows that (i) every- thing pertaining to the appearance of the actors on the 1. spectacle stage — including costume, scenery, and the like — will 22 ARISTOTLE constitute an element in the technique of tragedy ; and 8. Melody that (2) the composition of the music (" Melody '), and 3. Diction (3) the Composition in words (' Diction '), will constitute two further elements, as Melody and Diction represent the medium in which the action is imitated. By Diction is meant, in this connection, the fitting together of the words in metre ; as for Melody (= ' Song '), the meaning is too obvious to need explanation. But furthermore, the original object of the imitation is an action of men. In the performance, then, the imitation, which is also an action, must be carried on by agents, the dramatis personae. And these agents must necessarily be endowed by the poet with certain distinctive qualities both of (4) Moral Character (ethos) and (5) Intellect {dianoia) — one might say, of heart and head ; for it is from a man's moral bent, and from the way in which he reasons, that we are led to ascribe goodness or badness, success or failure, to his acts. Thus, as there are two natural causes, moral bent and thought, of the particular deeds of men, so there are the same two natural causes of their success or failure in life. And the tragic poet must take cognizance of this. Finally, the action which the poet imitates is repre- 6 . Plot sented in the tragedy by (6) the Fable or Plot. And accord- ing to our present distinction, Plot means that synthesis of the particular incidents which gives form or being to the tragedy as a whole ; whereas Moral Bent is that which leads us to characterize the agents as morally right or wrong in what they do ; and Intellect (or ' Thought ') is that which shows itself whenever they prove a particular point, or, it may be, avouch some general truth. The person- ality of the agents is resolved into two elements : 4. Ethos 6. Dianoia THE ART OF POETRY 23 In every tragedy, therefore, there are six constitutive elements, according to the quahty of which we judge the excellence of the work as a whole : Plot (6) ; Moral Dis- summary of the siz position (4) ; Diction (3) ; Intellect (S) ; Spectacle (i) ; Melody (2). _Two of them. Melody and Diction, con- cern the medium of imitation ; one. Spectacle, the man- ner ; and three. Plot, Moral Disposition, and Intellect, the objects/jThere can be no other elements. These constitutive elements, accordingly, not a few of the tragic poets, so to speak, have duly employed [in spite of what adverse critics may assert (see p. 62)] ; for, indeed, every drama must contain certain things that are meant for the eye, as well as the elements of Moral Disposition, Plot, Diction, Melody, and Intellect. [That element of a drama which is here called moral bent or disposition (ethos) is often rendered into Eng- lish by the word ' character '. There is a danger, which Aristotle himself does not always avoid, of confusing character in this narrower sense with personality, and hence of identifying character with agent. From this confusion there often results a misunderstanding of Aristotle's subsequent remarks upon the relative impor- tance of plot and moral bent (character in the narrower sense). In dealing with this point it is undesirable to refer to the dramatis personae as " characters ' ; one would do well to use the word ' agents ' instead, and to bear in mind that the personality of the agents is divided by Aristotle into two separate elements, corresponding to qualities of heart and head respectively. If at first we make the most of this distinction, we shall not go far astray in later passages where it is not so carefully 24 ARISTOTLE Tragedy an imitation of Action and Life Relation of Plot to the End of Traged/ preserved. What Aristotle next specifically maintains is that, among the six elements, plot or action is of greater importance than the moral bent of the agents ; he might equally well have said it was of greater importance than their faculty of reason, i.e., than " Thought'.] The most important of the constitutive elements is the Plot, that is, the organization of the incidents of the story ; for Tragedy in its essence is an imitation, not of men as such, but of action and life, of happiness and misery. And happiness and misery are not states of being, but forms of activity ; the end for which we live is some form of activity, not the realization of a moral quality. Men are better or worse, according to their moral bent ; but they become happy or miserable in their actual deeds. In a play, consequently, the agents do not perform for the sake of representing their indi- vidual dispositions ; rather, the display of moral char- acter is included as subsidiary to the things that are done. So thatLthe incidents of the action, and the structural ordering of these incidents, constitute the end and purpose of the tragedy.! [This structure is the in- ward ' form ' or essence, wmch corresponds to the out- ward function, the catharsis of pity and fear.J Here, as elsewhere, the final purpose is the main thing. Such is the importance of this element that, we may add, whereas Tragedy cannot exist without action, it is possible to construct a tragedy in which the agents have no distinctive moral bent. In fact, the works of most of the modern tragic poets, from the time of Euripides on, are lacking in the element of character. Nor is the de- fect confined to tragic poets : it is common among poets THE ART OF POETRY 25 in general. And there is a similar defect among the contempo- painters — in Zeuxis, for example, as contrasted with lacking in Polygnotus ; for Polygnotus excels in the representation ^ "^ of the ethical element, whereas the pictures of Zeuxis are in this respect wholly deficient. [In the same way, one might compare the vigorous delineation of ethical qualities in Rembrandt with the absence of this power in Rubens. Among English poets of all sorts, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth serve to exem- plify the presence of this quality ; it is relatively lacking in Dryden, Shelley, and Byron.] Again, one may string together a series of speeches in which the moral bent of the agents is delineated in excellent verse and diction, and with excellent order in the thoughts, and yet fail to produce the essential effect success in of Tragedy as already described. One is much more does'not'pro- likely to produce this effect with a tragedy, however de- ^f^^ Success ficient in these respects, if it has a plot — that is, an ^\*onaoes artistic ordering of the incidents. In addition to all this, the most vital features of Tragedy, by which the inter- est and emotions of the audience are most powerfully aroused — that is, reversals of fortune, and discoveries Reversals !• 1 - 1 • /■ r 1 1 '"'* Discov- of the identity of agents — are parts of the plot or eries belong action. It is significant, too, that beginners in the art become proficient in versification and in the delineation of personal traits before they are able to combine the Mastery of . ., r ■, ■ ■ rr ■ 1 1 TT • Plot is the incidents of the action into an effective whole. Herein artist's flnai the progress of the individual dramatist repeats the his- tory of the art ; for almost all the early poets succeeded compare the -^ , . , , . history of better with these two elements than m the formation thetragicart of plots. 26 ARISTOTLE Central thougbt of the treatise Elements in the order of importance : 1. Plot 2. Ethos 3. Dianoia Ethos and Dianoia dif- ferentiated by their oat- ward mani- festations (i) The Plot, then, is the First Principle, and as it were the very Soul of Tragedy. (2) And the element of Character is second in im- portance. — There is a parallel in the art of painting : the most beautiful colors, laid on with no order, will not give as much pleasure as the simplest figure done in outline. — Tragedy is an imitation of an action : mainly on account of this action does it become, in the second place, an imitation of personal agents. (3) Third in importance comes the Intellectual ele- ment. This corresponds to the power of the agent to say what can be said, or what is fitting to be said, in a given situation. It is that element in the speeches of a drama which is supplied by the study of Politics and the art of Rhetoric ; for the older tragic poets [e.g., Sophocles] made their heroes express themselves like statesmen, whereas the modern [including Eurip- ides] make theirs use the devices of the rhetoricians. [The utterances which Sophocles puts into the mouth of Oedipus and Creon are simple and statesmanlike ; the opening speech of Dionysus in the Bacchae of Euripides is rhetorical. One might also compare the ad- dress of Othello to the Duke and Senators with the anti- thetical declamation of Dryden's Aurengzebe on the hollowness of life.] This Intellectual element must be clearly distinguished from the Ethical element in the drama, for the latter includes only such things as reveal the moral bias of the agents — their tendency to choose or to avoid a certain line of action, in cases where the motive is not otherwise evident. Hence the poet has no call to employ the ethical element in speeches where THE ART OF POETRY 27 the agent is neither choosing nor avoiding a Une of action. The Intellectual element, on the other hand, is manifested in everything the agents say to prove or dis- prove a special point, and in every utterance they make by way of generalization. [Of course the two elements may show themselves in the same passage. However, the moral bias of lago is revealed by Shakespeare when lago resolves upon a monstrous undoing of the. Moor. And dianoia is manifested when Othello, arguing from the false evidence of the handkerchief, infers that Des- demona is unfaithful. As for generalizations, dianoia is exemplified in the maxims uttered by various persons in Oedipus the King; thus, the Second Messenger: ' Those griefs smart worst which are seen to be of our own choice.'] (4) Next in importance among the four essential 4. Diction constituents comes the Diction. This, as has been ex- plained, means the interpretation of the sentiments of the agents in the form of language, and is essentially the same thing whether the language is metrical or not. [Compare Wordsworth : ' There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.'] (5) Of the two elements remaining. Melody is the 5. Meioay more important, since it occupies the chief place among the accessory pleasures of Tragedy. (6) The element of Spectacle, though it arouses the 6. spectacle interest of the audience, is last in importance, since it demands the lowest order of artistic skill, and is least connected with the art of poetry as such. A tragedy can produce its effect independently of a stage performance 28 ARISTOTLE Chapter 7 Proper con- struction of the Plot Definitions a Whole and actors — that is, when it is read ; and besides, the business of preparing the stage and the actors is the affair of the costumer rather than of poets. Having thus distinguished the six constitutive ele- ments, we are now to discuss, as the first and most im- portant consideration in the art of Tragedy, the proper organization of the incidejjts into a plot that will have the ideal tragic eff ectjAccording to the definition (p. 1 7), a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, forming a whole of a sufficient magnitude or extent ; for a thing may be a whole and yet wanting in magnitude. Now a Whole is that which has (i) a Beginning, (2) a Middle, and (3) an End. (i) A Beginning (= X) is that which does not itself A Beginning come after anything else in a necessary sequence, but after which some other thing (= Y) does naturally exist or come to pass. (3) An End (= Z), on the contrary, is that which An End naturally comes after something else (= Y) in either a necessary or a usual sequence, but has nothing else following it. (2) A Middle (= Y) is that which naturally comes A Middle after something else (= X), and is followed by a third thing (= Z). A well-constructed plot, therefore, can neither begin nor end where and when the poet happens to like. It must conform to the principles just enunciated. [Com- pare Socrates in the Phaedms of Plato : ' You will allow that every discourse ought to be a living creature, hav- ing a body of its own and a head and feet; there THE ART OF POETRY 29 should be a middle, beginning, and end, adapted to one another and to the whole ? '] And further, as to Magnitude : to be beautiful, a living organism, or any other individual thing made up piot is iike of parts, must possess not only an orderly arrangement of a living of these parts, but also a proper magnitude ; for beauty "^*°^*™ depends upon these two qualities, size and order. Hence an extremely minute creature cannot be beautiful to us ; for we see the whole in an almost infinitesimal moment of time, and lose the pleasure that comes from a dis- To be beauti- tinct perception of order in the parts. Nor could a havemagni- creature of vast dimensions be beautiful to us — a beast, oraer, yet say, one thousand miles in length ; for in that case the ^° g'* *''° eye could not take all of the object in at once — we should see the parts, but not the unity of the whole. In the same way, then, as an inanimate object made up of parts, or a living creature, must be of such a size that the parts and the whole may be easily taken in by the eye, just so must the plot of a tragedy have a proper The natural length, so that the parts and the whole may be easily embraced by the memory. The artificial limits, of course, as these are determined by the conditions of stage pres- Artificial entation, and by the power of attention in an audience, do not concern the art of poetry as such. If it were necessary to present one hundred tragedies in succes- sion [an exaggerated illustration], they would doubtless have to be timed with water-clocks— as some say was for- merly the custom. The artistic limit, set by the nature The artistic <■ . ■~^ limit of the thing itself, is this : So long as the plot is per- spicuous throughout, the greater the length of the story, I ^ the more beautiful will it be on account of its magnitude. | 30 ARISTOTLE An adequate limit Chapter 8 Unity of Hero is not Unity of Plot Examples of the mistake Homer did not make it But to define the matter in a general way, an adequate limit for the magnitude of the plot is this : Let the length be such that the hero may fall from happiness to mis- fortune, or rise from misfortune to happiness, through a series of incidents linked together in a probable or inevitable sequence. The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some sup- pose, in having one man as the hero ; for the number of accidents that befall the individual man is endless, and some of them cannot be reduced to unitjj^^o, too, during the life of any one man, he performs many deeds which cannot be brought together in the form of a unified action. We see, therefore, the faulty choice of subject in such poets as have written a Heracleid or a Theseid, or the like ; they suppose that, since Heracles or Theseus was a single person, the story of Heracles or Theseus must have unity. [The fault is illustrated in Beowulf 2inA in Byron's Don Juan.'] Homer, on the contrary, whether by conscious art or native' insight, evidently understood the correct method, for he excels the rest of the epic poets in this as in all other respects. Thus, in composing a story of Odysseus, he did not make his plot include all that ever happened to Odysseus. For example, it befell this hero to receive a gash from a boar on Mount Parnassus ; and it befell him also to feign madness at the time of the mustering against Ilium ; but what he suffered in the former case and what he did in the latter are incidents between which there was no necessary or probable connection. [Hence the poet did not join them. — As a matter of fact, the first of them has a minor place in the Odyssey (Book 19), THE ART OF POETRY 3 1 and the second has none.] Instead of joining discon- nected incidents, Homer took for the subject of the Odyssey an actionyith the kind of unity here described [comprising a sequence of events in the delayed return of the hero and his vengeance upon the intruders in his house] ; and the subject chosen for the Iliad is Hke- wise unified. [It is a sequence of events connected with the wrath of Achilles. The plot of Paradise Lost also is unified.] For, as in the other imitative arts, painting and the rest, so in poetry, the object of the imitation in each case is a unit ; therefore in an epic or a tragedy, the plot, which is an imitation of an action, must repre- sent an action that is organically unified, the structural unity like order of the incidents being such that transposing or ingboay removing any one of them will dislocate and disorgan- ize the whole. Every part must be necessary, and in its place ; for a thing whose presence or absence makes no perceptible difference is not an organic part of the whole. From what has been said, it is clear that the office of Chapter 9 the Poet consists in displaying, not what actually has hap- pened, but what in a given situation might well happen The Poet ^ , . ., , . , P represents — a sequence of events that is possible m the sense of ueai Truth being either credible or inevitable. In other words, the Poet is not a Historian ; for the two differ, not in the He is not a . Historian fact that one writes m metrical, and the other m non- metrical, language. For example, you might turn the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with metre no less than without it. The essential distinction lies in this, that the Historian relates what has happened, and the Poet represents 32 ARISTOTLE Poetry more philosophic than His- tory; it is Universal History deals with the Particular The Univer- sal in the New Comedy what might happen — what is typical. Poetry, there- fore, is something more philosophic and of a higher seriousness than History ; for Poetry tends rather to express what is universal, whereas History relates par- ticular events as such. [Aristotle could hardly have forgotten the philosophic element at the beginning of Herodotus, or the dramatic organization of events in Thucydides ; but as he is distinguishing the general characteristics of poetry and history, he is bound to emphasize the first concern of the historian, namely, the actual events of the past and their actual sequence. The historian does not neglect the chronological order of events when there is no necessary or seeming con- nection between them ; the poet must.j By an exhi- bition of what is universal or typical is meant the representation of what a certain type of person is likely or is bound to say or do in a given situation. This is the aim of the Poet, though at the same time he attaches the names of specific persons to the types. As distin- guished from the universal, the particular, which is the subject matter of history, consists of what an actual person, Alcibiades or the like, actually did or under- went. That Poetry represents the universal has become clear enough in the present stage of Comedy [the ' New Comedy ' ] ; for the comic poets first combine plots out of probable incidents, and then supply such names for the agents as chance to fit the types — in contrast to the old iambic lampooners, whose method was to begin with particular individuals. In Tragedy, however, the poets still keep to the names of persons [Orestes, Agamemnon, and the like] THE ART OF POETRY 33 who are said to have existed. The reason is that what The reason we accept as true we regard as possible. That which n°anfe^8 in" " never has come to pass we do not necessarily take to ^'^^'^^ be possible ; but what we believe to have happened is manifestly possible — if it were impossible, it would not have occurred. Still, even in Tragedy there are cases where only one or two of the personages are familiar, More rarely, the rest having names invented by the poet ; and there weii as inci- are yet other plays where none of the names are familiar, invented Such is the Antheus of Agathon, in which both the inci- dents and the names were devised by the poet ; nor do they give less pleasure on that account. Accordingly, in his choice of subjects no poet is rigorously bound to adhere to the traditional stories upon which tragedies have been written. Indeed, it would be absurd to feel so constrained, since even such stories as are traditional are familiar to but few, and yet give pleasure to any one. [Shakespeare for the most part took subjects in some measure tradi- tional ; for example, Hamlet 2x\d Julius Caesar.'] From all this it is evident that the Poet [the Greek word signifies ' Maker '] is a maker of plots more than a maker of verses, inasmuch as he is a poet by virtue of The Poet priinarily imitating some object, and the objects he imitates are constructive actions. And even if he happens to take a subject from history, he is none the less a poet for that ; for there is nothing to hinder certain actual events from possessing the ideal quality of a probable or necessary sequence ; and it is by virtue of representing this quality in such events that he is their poet. Plots and actions, as we shall see, are either Involved or Uninvolved. Of the uninvolved, the purely episodic 34 ARISTOTLE Episodic plots are the worst, a plot being called ' episodic ' when worst"* * there is neither probability nor necessity in the se- quence of incident. [Such a plot is that of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.\ A bad poet will construct this kind of plot through his own want of insight ; a good poet, in order to meet the requirements of the actors. Since his work must be presented on the stage, and occupy a certain length of time, a good poet often stretches out the plot beyond its inherent capacity, and by the inser- tion of unnecessary matter is forced to distort the proper sequence of incident. But to proceed with the parts of the definition of Tragedy. Tragedy is an imitation not only of a com- plete action, but of incidents that arouse pity and fear; Pity ana and such incidents affect us most powerfully when we Fear aroused . , . . , . , byanunex- are not expectmg them, if at the same time they are come having caused by One another. For we are struck with more desf^"' wonder if we find a causal relation in unexpected tragic occurrences than if they came about of themselves and in no special' sequence ; since even pure coincidences seem most marvellous if there is something that looks like design in them. For example, while the man who had been the cause of Mitys' death was looking at Mitys' statue in Argos, the statue fell over and killed him ; such things do not impress people as being the result of mere chance. Plots, therefore, that illustrate the principle of necessity or probability in the sequence of incident are better than others. Chapter 10 But plots are either Uninvolved or Involved, since the actions which are imitated in the plots may readily be divided into the same two classes. Now we may call an THE ART OF POETRY 35 action Uninvol ved when the incidents follow one another, umnvoived as explained above, in a single continuous movement scribed [if there once was a definition (p. 33), it now is missing] ; that is, when the change of fortune comes to the hero without a Reversal of Situation and without a Discovery (or identification) of some person or fact at first un- recognized. [Such an action is represented in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus.] An Involved action An involved is one in which the change of fortune is attended by such Reversal, or by such Discovery, or by both. And each of these two incidents should arise from the struc- ture of the plot itself ; that is, each should be the neces- sary or probable result of the incidents that have gone before, and not merely follow them in point of time — for in the sequence of events there is a vast difference between post hoc and propter hoc. A Reversal of Situation is a change in some part of chapter 11 the action from one state of affairs to its precise oppo- site — as has been said (p. 30), from good fortune to Reversal or 1 , , , 1 Peripetia ill, or from ill to good; and a change that takes place in the manner just described, namely, in a necessary or probable sequence of incident. To illustrate : in the Oedipus the King of Sophocles, the Messenger comes to cheer Oedipus by removing his fears as to his par- entage on his mother's side, but, by disclosing whose son the hero really is, brings about the opposite state of affairs for him — that is, brings about the change from happiness to misery. [The illustration as the treatise gives it does not coincide with the situation in Sophocles' tragedy as we know it. — A reversal may constitute the main turning-point of a drama, as in 36 ARISTOTLE Macbeth, where the murder of Duncan brings about the opposite of what Macbeth intends ; or it may be subsidiary, as in King Lear, where the promise of good fortune in the coming of the army from France turns to further misery for Lear through the defeat of this army and the death of Cordelia.] Of the opposite change, from misery to happiness, there is an example in the Lynceus of Theodectes : when Lynceus is being led off to die, and Danaus follows to be his execu- tioner, it comes about, as a result of the previous inci- dents of the drama, that Lynceus is saved and Danaus executed. [Inasmuch as Danaus also suffers a change of fortune, this instance likewise illustrates the twofold reversal in opposite directions. A similar case in Shakespeare is the reversal in Act 4 of The Merchant of Venice : here the argument of Portia at first cheers Shylock and discourages Antonio, but eventually frees Antonio from the dread of death and plunges Shylock into misery.] Discovery A Discovery, as the word itself indicates, is a tran- sition from ignorance to knowledge, and hence a passing into love or hate on the part of those agents who are marked for happiness or misfortune. The best form of The best form Discovery is a recognition of the identity of persons, of Discovery i , , , r r ■. ■, attended by reversals of fortune — such a reversal as attends the Discovery of Oedipus' true parentage in the Oedipus the King. [A recognition, with a reversal of fortune from bad to good, occurs in the Biblical story of Joseph, when the Governor of Egypt is revealed to the other sons of Jacob as their brother, occasioning love between the agents, and a change for the family THE ART OF POETRY 37 of Joseph from misery to happiness.] There are, of course, other forms of Discovery besides this ; some such transition from ignorance to knowledge may come about with reference to inanimate, even casual things. [A suggested discovery of something trivial is found in The Marble Faun of Hawthorne; though one never learns whether Donatello had, or had not, pointed ears.] It is also possible to discover whether some person has done, or not done, a particular deed [for example, whether it was Oedipus who killed Laius]. But the form of Discovery most intimately connected with the plot, and with the action irriitated, is the one we have specially mentioned ; for the Discovery bringing love or hate, and the Reversal bringing happiness or misery, will occasion either pity or fear; and by our definition it is these emotions that the tragic imitation is to arouse. Furthermore, this kind of Discovery will be instrumen- tal in bringing about the happy or unhappy ending of the action as a whole. Now since, in this case, the Discovery means a recognition of persons [rather than objects or deeds], there are two possibilities : (i) X may Two possi- learn the identity of Y, when Y already knows the Discovery identity of X ; or (2) X and Y may each have to learn the identity of the other. [Thus (i) in the Odyssey Odysseus knows the identity of Polyphemus ; but Polyphemus does not know that of Odysseus. The hero, however, foolishly reveals his own name to Poly- phemus, who is then enabled to call down the wrath of Poseidon upon 'Odysseus, the son of Laertes'. Simi- larly, Joseph knew his brethren when they appeared in Egypt, but eventually revealed himself to them.] 38 ARISTOTLE Parts of the Plot: 1. Reversal 2. Discovery 3. Suffering Chapter 12 Formative Elements of Tragedy Quantitative Parts of Tragedy (2) An example of the second possibility is in Euripi- des' Iphigenia among the Taurians : Iphigenia is made known to Orestes through her desire to send a letter in her own name to ' Orestes, son of Agamemnon ' ; and another Discovery is required to reveal Orestes to her. Two parts of the plot, then, Reversal and Discovery, represent these things in the action, and have been sufficiently explained. A third part is Suffering [the ' moving accident '] : this may be defined as an incident of a destructive or painful sort, such as violent death, physical agony, woundings, and the like. [In Oedipus the King, the suicide of Jocasta, and the blinding of Oedipus, self-inflicted, fall under the head of ' Suffer- ing'; in Othello, the murder of Desdemona, and the suicide of the Moor.] Mention previously was made (pp. 2i ff.) of the six parts of Tragedy as a whole — those six formative ele- ments which are to be used by the poet. We come now to the division of a tragedy into its quantitative parts — the members that may be separated in the text (see p. i8). These are: (i) Prologue; (2) Episode; (3) Exode; (4) Choric Song ; this choral portion being divided into (a) Parode and (b) Stasimon. These divisions are com- mon to all tragedies. [What Aristotle next says of the choral portion doubtless applied rather to Greek tragedy subsequent to Euripides than to such elder dramatists as are known to us.] Though Parode and Stasimon, with the other divisions, are common to all, in some tragedies only are there (c) Songs from the Stage by one or more of the actors (i.e., not by the Chorus), and Commoe, or songs by the actors and Chorus together. THE ART OF POETRY 39 (i) The Prologue is the entire part of the tragedy from the beginning to the Parode of the Chorus. (2) An Episode is one of those entire parts of a tragedy, each of which intervenes between two whole choral songs. (3) The Exode is that entire part of a tragedy which follows after the last choral song, and reaches to the end. (4) Of the choral portion, (a) the Parode is the first undivided utterance of the Chorus ; (b) a Stasimon is a song of the Chorus, not in anapaestic or trochaic metre ; and (c) a Commos is a song of lamentation in which the Chorus and one or more actors unite. These, then, are the parts into which Tragedy is divided quantitatively, or according to its sections. The parts which are to be employed as formative elements have already been mentioned. Following what has been said up to this point (esp. chapter 13 pp. 33-38), we must next discuss that ideal structure of the plot which will bring about the fullest measure of The laeai „ ,.,-,,., . , , structure for tragic effect, (i) What is the poet to aim at, and what the function is he to avoid, in the construction of his plots .■• In " ^*^^ ^ other words, (2) what are the specific sources of the tragic catharsis ? In the most perfect tragedy, as we have seen (pp. 25, 34_37)^ the synthesis of the incidents must be, not uninvolved, but involved, and this synthesis must be imitative of events that arouse pity and fear — for therein lies the distinctive function of this kind of imi- tation. When we take this function as a standard, it is clear that there are three forms of plot to be avoided. 40 ARISTOTLE Three forms (i) Good and just men are not to be represented as avoided" "^ falling from happiness into misery ; for such a spectacle does not arouse fear or pity in us — it is simply revolt- ing. (2) Nor must evil men be represented as rising from ill fortune to prosperity ; for this is the most un- tragic situation of all. It does not stir our general human sympathy, nor arouse tragic pity or tragic fear. (3) Nor, again, may an excessively wicked man be represented as falling from prosperity into misfortune. Such a course of events may arouse in us some measure of human sympathy, but not the emotions of pity and Definition of fear. For, to define : Pity is what we feel at a misfor- '' tune that is out of proportion to the faults of a man ; Of Fear and Fear is what we feel when misfortune comes upon one like ourselves. Now the excessively wicked man deserves misery in proportion ; and since his wicked- ness exceeds the average, he is not like one of our- selves. Accordingly, in this third situation there is nothing to arouse either pity or fear. There remains, A fourth, then, (4) the case of the man intermediate between ideal situ- , , • , 1 i - ation these extremes : a man not superlatively good and just, nor yet one whose misfortune comes about through vice and depravity ; but a man who is brought low through some error of judgment or shortcoming, one from the number of the highly renowned and prosperous — such a person as Oedipus of the line of Thebes, Thyestes of Pelops' line, and the eminent men of other noted families. [For many, the tragic flaw of the hero, described as an " error of judgment ', or a ' shortcoming ', needs im- mediate illustration. The single Greek word, hamartia, THE ART OF POETRY 41 lays the emphasis upon the want of insight within the man, but is elastic enough to mean also the outward fault resulting from it. In the Odyssey, Book i, the human frailty which is said to bring sufferings beyond the ordinary lot of man is represented in translation by " blindness of heart '. In much the same way, Sophocles makes Creon, in Antigone, attribute the woes that have come upon him and his household to " the wretched blindness of my counsels ' ; and the Sophoclean story of Oedipus turns upon a certain blindness of impulse, which at length is recognized by the hero himself — whereupon he puts out his own eyes. In general, we have primarily to do with a certain moral bent in the hero, toward goodness in the main, but undisciplined ; hence a shortcoming which tends to show itself in faulty action at critical points in his career. If right action is the result of sympathetic in- sight, as in the poet himself, faulty action in the hero may be described as the result of the opposite quality ; and this quality will have a dual nature, compounded of something in the " head ' and something in the " heart ' of the agent — in other words, the quality will be 'blind- ness of heart'. Under this general flaw may be gathered the specific flaws of various heroes, for example : ' the wrath of Achilles ' in the Iliad; the overweening curios- ity and presumption of Odysseus in the encounter with the Cyclops ; ' Man's first disobedience ' in Paradise Lost ; the jealousy of Othello ; the ambition of Mac- beth ; the rashness of Lear. It is this flaw in the inward eye which mars the vision of heroes whose penetra- tion otherwise is keen, such as Oedipus and Hamlet, 42 ARISTOTLE The single, unhappy issue is best Traditional tales of tragic down- fall Euripides' choice of unhappy endings is right making their outward activity at critical junctures some- times too slow and sometimes too hasty. The conception in the Poetics of the ideal tragic hero with his imperfect insight, proper for tragedy, may be contrasted with the ideal man of the Nicoma- chean Ethics, whose natural bent has been corrected, whose clarity of judgment enables him to perform the right action at the right time, and whose career, as a result, is likely to be prosperous.] To be perfectly tragic, accordingly, the Plot must not, as some hold, have a double issue, fortunate for the good, unfortunate for the bad, but a single one. And the change of fortune must be, not a rise from misery to happiness, but just the contrary, a fall from happiness to misery ; and this fall must come about, not through depravity, but through a serious defect in judgment, or shortcoming in conduct, in a person either as good as the average of mankind, or better than that rather than worse. In support of this view the history of the drama itself is significant. In the early days the tragic poets were satisfied with any stories that came in their way ; but now the practice has narrowed down to traditions concerning a few houses, and the best trag- edies are founded on the legends of Alcmeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and similar personages who have been either the movers or the victims in some signal overthrow of fortune. From practice as well as theory, then, we argue that the ideal tragedy will have a plot of this type. Those critics, therefore, are in error who blame Euripides for adhering to this plan in his tragedies, since many of THE ART OF POETRY 43 them have the unhappy ending. It is, as we have said, the correct procedure. And the best proof of its correct- ness is this : when they are put upon the stage and acted, such plays, if they have been properly worked out, are seen to have the most tragic effect ; and Eurip- ides, even if his procedure be faulty in every other respect [as some maintain], is yet, through the unhappy ending, certainly the most tragic of poets on the stage. Second in excellence comes the form of construction which some of the critics rank first, where the thread of the plot is double, as in the Odyssey, and there is a The douwe happy and an unhappy ending for the better and the so good worse agents respectively. It is rated first, however, only through the inability of the general audience to endure the highest tragic tension ; for the poets follow the general taste, and cater to the wishes of the specta- ^ tors. But the pleasure arising from this double structure is not the distinctive pleasure of Tragedy. It is rather one that belongs to Comedy, where the deadliest of legendary foes, like Orestes and Aegisthus, become friends, and quit the stage without any one slaying or being slain. [Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello furnish examples of the tragic ending. In The Mer- chant of Venice we have the double issue for the good and bad. In many of Scott's novels, Ivanhoe, for in- stance, the author, sharing the weakness of the public, avoids the single unhappy ending. The Bride of Lam- mermoor, however, is tragic in the Aristotelian sense.] The effect of fear and pity may be produced by means chapter 14 that pertain simply to stage presentation [such as the dreadful costume and menacing attitudes of the Furies, 44 ARISTOTLE Tragic effect or the wretched appearance of Telephus, or of Lear in spectfraiar the Storm] ; but it may also arise from the structure and StMic ' '^'* incidents of the tragedy, which is the preferable way, and is the mark of a better poet. For the Plot should be so constructed that, even without help from the eye, one who simply hears the play recited must feel the chill of fear, and be stirred with pity, at what occurs. The effect is In fact, these are just the emotions one would feel in physioVogicai listening to the story of Oedipus the King [or Otkello] off the stage. To bring about this emotional effect by spectacular means is less a matter of the poetic art, and depends upon adventitious assistance. But those who employ the means of the stage to produce what strikes us as being merely monstrous, without being terrible, are absolute strangers to the art of Tragedy ; for not every kind of pleasure is to be sought from a tragedy, but only that specific pleasure which is characteristic of this art. [Aristotle is passing from the first of the two con- siderations mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 13 (p. 39) to the second ; that is, from the question. What is the poet to aim at, and to avoid, in the general con- struction of his plots ? to the question. What are the specific sources of the tragic catharsis? Obviously, the questions are interdependent, yet they may be distinguished.] Since the pleasure which is characteristic of Tragedy comes from the arousing of pity and fear, and since the poet must produce this pleasure through an imitation of some action, it is clear that the tragic quality must be impressed upon the incidents that make up the story. THE ART OF POETRY 45 Let us consider, then, what kinds of occurrence strike us specific as terrible, or rather what kinds of terrible occurrences Kt^and* strike us as piteous. When persons are involved in ^°" some deed of horror, they must be either (i) friends, or (2) enemies, or (3) indifferent to one another. Now when (2) an enemy injures, or wishes to injure, an enemy, there is nothing to arouse our pity either in his deed or his intention, except in so far as concerns the suffering of the one who is injured. And the same is true when (3) the persons are indifferent to each other. But when (i) the tragic incident (i.e., ' Suffer- ing ' — see p. 38) occurs within the circle of those who are bound by natural ties — when murder or the like is a deed of done or intended by brother upon brother, son upon voiving father, mother upon son, or son upon mother, — pity is tions"'* aroused ; and such are the situations the tragic poet must look for in the traditional stories. The general framework of these stories, then, the poet must not dis- turb: Clytaemnestra must be slain by her son Orestes, and The poet is Eriphyle by her son Alcmeon. At the same time, the by tradition, poet must select for himself from the materials of tradi- seiect°a™d^ tion, and he must employ the given materials with skill. "f°h'skm* Let us explain more clearly what is meant by the skilful use of material ; for example, the tale of a deed of violence among friends. This may be treated in several ways. The deed may be done, as in the various , , \ , 1- 1 1 • J ■ possibilities early poets, (i) by a person aware 01 what he is doing, to another who knows the identity of the doer, as is the case also in Euripides ; for he makes Medea kill her children with premeditation, while they recognize her as their slayer. [Similarly in Shakespeare, Othello 46 ARISTOTLE of set purpose kills his wife, and she recognizes her husband as her murderer.] Or the deed may be done (2) by persons ignorant of the terrible nature of what they are doing, who afterwards discover their relationship with the victims ; as Oedipus, in Sophocles' version of the tale, kills a man who he subsequently learns was his father. In this case, however, the deed lies outside of the drama proper. But it may be included in the drama ; as Alcmeon unwittingly kills his mother Eriphyle in the version of that story by Astydamas ; or as Telegonus in- jures his unrecognized father in the Odysseus Wounded of (.?) Sophocles. Still a third possibility of treatment is this : (3) a person meditating some irreparable injury to another, unaware of their relationship, may discover the identity of his victim in time to avoid the deed. [A variation of the first possibility is to intend some injury to a near relative whose identity is known, and then to draw back from the deed.] This list exhausts the possible ways of treating the material in question ; for the deed must either be done, or not done ; and the persons must either be aware, or not aware, of what they are doing. Of all the possibilities, the worst is the situation in which some one, aware of the relationship, is about to The least do another a deadly injury, and does not do it. The biuty situation is revolting to our sense of natural affection ; and it is not tragic — pity is not aroused — because the intended victim does not suffer. Accordingly, the per- sonages of Tragedy do not act in this way save in rare instances — as when Haemon, in Sophocles' Antigone, pursues his father Creon with intent to kill, and then THE ART OF POETRY 47 desists. [In Shakespeare, Hamlet seems about to kill his uncle at prayer, and then refrains. This and other instances of inaction in the same play are in keeping with Hamlet's 'moral bent'. Aristotle would distinguish between the artistic handling of the incident and the wrong choice of such incidents to begin with.] A second Abetter ... , . 1 . 1 1 . ■ . situation situation, not so bad, is that m which the victim is known, as in the first case, but the act which is in- tended is also performed [as in The Libation- Pour ers of Aeschylus, where Orestes fulfils his purpose of kill- ing his mother, Clytaemnestra]. Better yet is the situa- tion where the deed is done by a person who does not recognize his victim, and discovers the relationship after- wards ; for this is not revolting to our sense of natural a stui affection, and the Discovery will have the proper effect of astounding us. [This is the situation in Oedipus the King.] But the best of all is the third of the pos- The best sit- sible methods of treatment. This is exemplified in the Cresphontes of Euripides, where Merope is about to slay her son, and does not slay him, but discovers his identity ; in the same author's Iphigenia among the Taurians, where the sister, Iphigenia, is about to sac- rifice her brother, Orestes, but discovers who he is before it is too late ; and in the Helle, where the son is on the point of giving up his mother [ t to the enemy], and recognizes her just in time. [It is difficult to explain the discrepancy between this preference of an imminent horror with a happy issue and the equally decided preference in Chapter 1 3 (e.g., pp. 42-43) of a plot with an unhappy ending. There, it is true, Aristotle was thinking of the course 48 ARISTOTLE and effect of the tragedy as a whole, and here he is thinking of the emotional effect of a specific incident within the tragedy ; his examples of the various situa- tions seem to show that it may or may not be the basic incident of the whole work. To have an immi- nent horror with a happy issue as the crucial incident in a tragedy would seem to be incompatible with an unhappy ending of the play as a whole. In the most perfect tragedy Aristotle knows, Oedipus the King, which yet comes short of the ideal tragedy of the Poetics, the basic incident of horror is treated in the second-best way, the deed being done in ignorance, and the discovery coming later. As the killing of his father by Oedipus thus lies among the events anterior to the drama proper, the shock to our sense of natural affection is diminished, yet the play can end unhappily.] The fact that the traditional stories must be kept as they are, and that the deed of horror must preferably be treated in one way rather than another, will explain why tragedies, as we noted above (p. 42), have come to be restricted to the tales of a few families only. In searching the old stories for themes, it was through fortune rather than art that the poets came to embody incidents of this tragic kind in their plots. And for want of invention, they are still obliged to have re- course to the tales of those famihes in which such deeds of horror occurred. In our consideration of tragic effect, enough has now been said concerning the proper synthesis of the inci- dents in the plot, and the kind of stories to be used as materials. THE ART OF POETRY 49 We turn, then, to the moral dispositions of the agents, chapter is In respect to these, there are four things for the poet to aim at. First and foremost, the agents must be The Ethos of (i) good. The Ethical element will be present in a must be good tragedy if, as was said (pp. 26, 27), by speech or act the agents manifest a certain moral bent in what they choose to do or avoid ; and the ethos will be good if the habit of choice is good. [' Good ' means good in its kind, performing its function, good for something.] Such goodness is possible in all types of humanity — even in a woman or a slave, though woman is perhaps an inferior type, and the slave quite worthless. (2) They it must be must be true to type. There is, for example, a type of manly valor and eloquence ; but it would be inappropri- ate for the poet to represent a woman as valorous in this way, or as masterly in argument. (3) Thirdly, they True to Life must be true to life, which is something different from making them good or true to type, as these terms have just been defined. (4) Fourthly, they must be consist- seif-con- ent, true to their own nature throughout the play. Even if the original person whom the poet is representing (as Achilles) should happen to be inconsistent, and should be taken as an example of that t3rpe, still the representation should be consistently inconsistent. It must have unity. The following are illustrations of a failure to observe one or other of these four principles. There is an in- stance (i) of baseness — a baseness not required by the plot — in the person of Menelaus in Euripides' Orestes; an example (2) of what is unsuitable and untrue to type [in this case the manly type] in the lament of Odysseus in the Scylla of Q) Timotheus ; and another [in this 5° ARISTOTLE The inner man and the succession of his words and acts Digression : natural se- quence, not mechanical artifice case the feminine type] in the too masterly speech by the heroine in Euripides' Melanippe the Wise; and an example [see No. 4, above] of inconsistency in Euripi- des' Iphigenia at Aulis. In this, the Iphigenia who at first pleads for her life is by no means the same sort of individual as the Iphigenia who later is ready to meet her death. [No example is given of No. 3, what is un- true to real life ; the notion of this kind of propriety is implicit in the next paragraph. We may add some ex- amples of all four defects : (i) of a baseness beyond what is necessary for the plot, in the Edmund and Regan of King Lear ; (2) of what is inappropriate to the manly t3rpe, in the Richard of King Richard the Second, and to the womanly, Aristotle might say, in the clever speech of Portia at the trial in The Merchant of Venice ; (3) of inconsistency, in the Oliver at the beginning and end of As You Like It; (4) of what is untrue to life, in the personages of Shelley's Cenci throughout.] As in combining the incidents of the plot, so also in representing the character of the agents, the poet must seek after a necessary or probable relation between one thing and another. That is, a certain kind of person must speak or act in a certain fashion as the necessary or probable outcome of his inward nature ; and thus one thing will follow another in a necessary or prob- able sequence. — From this it is clear that the solution of dramatic situations should come to pass from the progress of the story itself ; it should not be brought about by a mechanical device (like the Deus ex Machind), as when Euripides' Medea is concluded by the escape of the heroine in an aerial chariot drawn by dragons, or THE ART OF POETRY Si as in the Iliad, Book 2, where the Greeks are withheld from a premature homeward voyage through the inter- vention of the goddess. These arbitrary devifces must be reserved for matters lying outside of the drama proper, to explain such occurrences in the past as are beyond the range of human knowledge (for example, in a pro- The place for logue by a god), or such events in the future as need to be urai foretold and announced ; — for we credit the gods with seeing all things, both past and future. In the events of the drama itself there should be nothing that does not square with our reason; but if an irrational element For the cannot be avoided, it must lie outside of the tragedy proper, as in the case of Sophocles' Oedipus the King. [Long before the opening of this drama, Oedipus un- wittingly killed his father Laius, King of Thebes. On reaching Thebes, he was himself made King, unwittingly married his own mother, the Queen, and reigned in ignorance of the facts for a period of years, this igno- rance being essential to the plot. In Aristotle's view, it is " improbable ' that Oedipus never should have learned the circumstances attending the death of his own prede- cessor ; but, lying among the antecedents of the drama proper, the irrational element does not obtrude itself upon our notice. It may be added that Sophocles repre- sents Oedipus as a man who, though astute, has a slug- gish mind for obvious things until some external stimulus plunges him into an over-hasty investigatioru — There is an irrational element in the stoty of the pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice; and to Shakespeare's age it might seem ' improbable ' that a Jew should be allowed to push his claim for such a bond in open court. 52 ARISTOTLE — After this digression on mechanical artifice and the irrational, Aristotle further discusses the proper repre- sentation of the agents.] Since Tragedy is an imitation of men better than the ordinary, it is necessary for the tragic poet to observe the method of good portrait-painters ; for they reproduce the distinctive features of the original, and yet, while preserving the likeness of a man, ennoble him in the The poet picture. So, too, the poet in imitating men who are must depict ■ , , ■ ^ ^^ ■ c ■ the tragic quicK to anger, or are easy-gomg, or have other infirmi- ennobiem ties of disposition, must represent them as such, and character y^j. ^g j^jj^^j ^^^ honorable. [There is a jotting in the Greek text for an example of tragic obstinacy ; it has been taken to refer to Achilles, who was also ' quick to anger', yet noble.] Thus do Agathon and Homer represent Achilles. [Compare Ruskin: 'The main fea- tures in the character of Achilles are its intense desire of justice and its tenderness of affection. And in that bitter song of the /Had, this man, though aided con- tinually by the wisest of the gods, and burning with the desire of justice in his heart, becomes yet, through ill- governed passion, the most unjust of men ; and, full of the deepest tenderness in his heart, becomes yet, through ill-governed passion, the most cruel of men.' Ruskin, we see, changes the emphasis, not only of Aristotle, but of the Iliad itself, the first word of which is "Wrath'. Achilles' obstinate anger, the cause of the main ac- tion, is relieved and ennobled by other traits such as Ruskin describes. In like manner, Shakespeare depicts the jealousy of Othello, but makes him otherwise kind and honorable.] THE ART OF POETRY S3 These principles the tragic poet must continually bear in mind, and, in addition, such principles of stage effect as are necessarily dependent upon the art of poetry [as contrasted with the art of the costumer, or the like] ; since here also it is often possible to make mistakes. On this head, however, enough has been said in a work already published. [The reference may be to the lost dialogue of Aristotle On Poets.'] The general nature of Discovery has been explained chapter 16 above (pp. 36-37). We may now examine the several species, (i) The first and least artistic kind of Discov- Discovery: ery, which at the same time is the one most frequently employed — owing to a lack of invention in the poets, — is recognition by marks or tokens. Of these, some 1. By Marks are congenital, such as ' the spear-head the Earth-born have on them ', or bright stars like those that Carcinus employs in his Thyestes — a birth-mark on the shoulder of the race of Pelops. Others, again, are acquired after birth ; and of this class, some are marks on the body, as scars, and some are external tokens, necklaces, etc., and things like the ark, in which the sons of Tyro were exposed, that brings about the discovery in Sophocles' Tyro. [The objection to these means of recognition lies in the fact that they are mechanical devices, and savor of the ' improbable '. The recognition should arise as a probable or necessary consequence of the antecedent events in the drama. Bodily marks are convincing evi- dence of identity to a certain type of mind — for exam- ple, to doubting Thomas in the New Testament. An instance of the use of external tokens is in The Winters Tale: " The mantle of Queen Hermione, her jewel 54 ARISTOTLE about the neck of it, the letters of Antigonus found with it, which they know to be his character'.] Even these marks or tokens, however, may be used by the poet in a better way or a worse. Thus the hero in the Odyssey is made known, through his scar, in one way to the nurse [that is, in the natural course of things, when in the Bath Scene she comes to wash the limb], and in another way to the herdsmen [that is, in a worse, because more arbitrary, fashion, since Odysseus displays the scar in order to convince them of his identity]. Those discoveries are less artistic in which signs are used as a final means of convincement, and so are all such as require a formal proof of identity; those are better in which the recognition comes about by a natural turn of events, as in the Bath Scene. 2. Arbitrary The second kind are Discoveries arbitrarily intro- DiBC0V6ri6s other than duced by the poet [that is, again, not growing out of ^ ° ™° the sequence of events], and for that reason inartistic. Thus in Iphigenia among the Taurians, Euripides simply makes Orestes disclose his own identity ; and whereas his sister reveals who she is in a natural way, by trying to send the letter to Orestes, the latter is made to say what the poet wishes, and not what the sequence of events might demand. Accordingly, this fault is not far remove'd from the one just mentioned, since Orestes could easily have been made to establish his identity with tokens also. A similar instance is the ' voice of the shuttle ' in Sophocles' Tereus [by which was disclosed the wrong that had been done to Philo- mela — an arbitrary disclosure, not arising from the antecedent part of the play]. THE ART OF POETRY 55 The third kind is Discovery through the memory, 3. Discovery when the inward man, stirred by hearing or seeing Memories something famihar, is led to display his feelings. For example, in the Cypria of Dicaeogenes, the hero bursts into tears when he sees the picture. And in the Lay of Alcinous in the Odyssey, when he hears the harper chant the adventure of the wooden horse, Odysseus is reminded of the past, and weeps ; and thus, in both cases, there comes about a recognition. [In the case of Odysseus, Alcinous, seeing him weep at a tale of the heroes at Ilium, inquires, and receives a direct answer, concerning his identity. In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, Satan, beholding Eden and the glory of the sun, recalls his own former happiness and glory, and through " the bitter memorie of what he was ' becomes disfigured with passion ; whereupon ' his gestures fierce . . . and mad demeanor ' are marked by Uriel, eventually leading to a recognition of Satan by all the guardian angels.] The fourth kind is Discovery by a process of reason- 4. Discovery ing. One example is m\ The Libation-Pourers of Aes- chylus, where Electra in effect argues thus : " Some one with hair like mine has come ; no one has hair like mine but Orestes ; therefore it is he that has come/] Another is the suggestion made by Polyidus the Sophist for the second discovery in Iphigenia among the Tau- rians ; it would be natural for Orestes to reflect : " My sister was sacrificed at Aulis, and now it is my lot to be sacrificed also ' ; whereupon Iphigenia would recog- nize him as her brother. [In this way, the discovery would be brought about, not by a meretricious expedi- ent (see p. 54, No. 2), but in a more " probable ' way ; by Inference 56 ARISTOTLE still, not as a result of preceding events in this drama.] Another is that in the Tydeus of Theodectes, where the father says : " I who came to find a son, am my- self to perish ' — and thus discloses his identity. Still another is that in The Daughters of Phineus. In this, the women, when they saw the place, inferred what was to be their fate : ' We were exposed here, and here too we are to die.' [.? Whereupon they were recognized.] s. Fancied Related to Discovery by inference is a kind of ' fic- caused^by titious Discovery ' where the poet causes A to be recog- deceptiM nized by B through the false inference of B [or through a logical deception practised upon B by A]. There is a case of this in Odysseus with the False Tidings \) i.e., Odysseus in disguise, bringing false tidings of himself], where he [.' Odysseus in the garb of a Beggar] says : ' I shall know the bow ' — which [.? as Beggar] he had not seen ; but to depict the other person as recognizing Odysseus from this is, for the poet, to represent a false inference. [Compare what is said (pp. 82-83) o^i the right or poetical way of representing a lie. The form of reference to Odysseus with the False Tidings recalls Aristotle's manner of referring to the books or lays of the Odyssey, and hence may indicate a lay in some lost epic, if not in a lost version of the Odyssey itself. Pos- sibly the ' fictitious ' recognition should be illustrated from Book 23 of the Odyssey as we have it, where the hero reveals his identity to his doubting spouse. Odysseus says in effect : ' I shall so describe our nuptial bed ' — which as Beggar he had not seen — ' that you will know it is Odysseus who is speaking.' His circumstantial description of the bed, which he could give if he were THE ART OF POETRY 57 her husband, leads her, not to the legitimate inference that he might be her husband, but to the unwarranted inference that he must be. In other words, a recognition is eifected through a logical fallacy.] But of all Discoveries, the best is the kind that grows 6. The test out of the very nature of the incidents, when an as- ooveryanses tounding revelation comes about from probable ante- actum itself cedents, as in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. And there is an example in Iphigenia am.ong the Taurians (when his sister is revealed to Orestes), since it is natural she should wish to dispatch a letter home. Among the discoveries in this class are the only ones that dispense with arbitrary indications of identity and necklaces, etc. [This is scarcely true.] The next best are those (see No. 4) that come about through a process of reasoning. [Compare the rest of the passage quoted under No. i from The Winter s Tale : ' The majesty of the creature in resemblance of the mother, the affection of nobleness which nature shows above her breeding, and many other evidences proclaim her with all certainty to be the king's daughter.' However, the discovery as a whole falls under the censure of No. i.] When actually constructing his Plots and elaborating chapter 17 them in the Diction, the poet should endeavor as far as he can to visualize what he is representing. In this way, practical seeing everything with the utmost vividness, just as if work of he were an actual spectator of the events he is portray- ™"i">"°e ing, he will devise what is suitable, and run the least danger of overlooking inconsistencies. The need of such 1. how to , ,,riii 11 avoid incon- a practice is shown by the fault that brought down cen- gmities in sure upon Carcinus, when he made Amphiaraus return 58 ARISTOTLE 2. How to succeed in delineating emotion from the temple ; an inconsistency which would escape the notice of one who was not visualizing. On the stage, however, the play was a failure, for the audience took offense at the oversight. [It is impossible to explain wherein the inconsistency lay. — Bradley has called at- tention to the number and grossness of the incongruities in King Lear, for example : ' Why in the world should Gloucester, when expelled from his castle, wander pain- fully all the way to Dover, simply in order to destroy himself ? ' That is to say, perhaps Shakespeare here failed to visualize the action.] So far as he is able, the poet should also assume the very attitudes and gestures appropriate to the emotions of the agents ; for among authors with the same natural ability, they will be most convincing who themselves experience the feelings they represent. The poet who himself feels distress or anger will represent distress or anger with the most lifelike reality. [Compare Burke : ' I have often observed that on mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frighted, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that pas- sion whose appearance I endeavored to imitate ; nay, I am convinced it is hard to avoid it, though one strove to separate the passion from its correspondent gestures.'] Two kinds Hcnce the art of poetry requires either a certain natural of poetic , . . . , temperament plasticity in the poct, or else a touch of madness. Poets of the first sort readily assume one personality after an- other ; those of the second involuntarily pass into various states of emotional excitement. [This important distinc- tion is often neglected in discussions on the nature of the poet — as if the poetic temperament were the same THE ART OF POETRY 59 in all. One might instance Shakespeare as a poet of the plastic sort, and Marlowe as the kind with a touch of madness.] As for the story, whether it be traditional or his own invention, the poet should first make a general brief or outline of the whole, and then extend this by the inser- First one tion of episodes. How one may take a bird's-eye view an outline of the whole may be illustrated from Euripides' Iphi- genia among the Tmirians, the general plan of which is this : A certain maiden has been offered in sacrifice ; has mysteriously vanished from the sight of those who were sacrificing her ; and has been transported to a foreign land, where it is the custom to offer up all strangers to the goddess. Here she is appointed priest- ess of this rite. Some time later it chances that the brother of this priestess arrives. — The fact, however, that the oracle for a certain reason bade him go thither does not lie within the general plan of the story, and his design of obedience in coming is outside of the drama proper. — Upon his arrival he is seized, and, on the point of being sacrificed, reveals his identity ; either as Euripides arbi- trarily makes him disclose it himself, or, following the suggestion of Polyidus, by the not unnatural reflection : ' As my sister was offered in sacrifice, so must I be also ' ; and so the Discovery leads to his preservation. When the general outline has been determined, and fitting traditional names have been supplied for the ' agents, the next thing is to fill in the scheme with par-" Then an in ticular episodes. Now care must be taken that the epi- sodes are appropriate to the action and the agents. In Iphigenia among the Taiirians, for example, Orestes' fit of madness, leading to his capture, is an appropri- ate episode [since it is in keeping with the traditional the episodes 6o ARISTOTLE Orestes pursued by Furies] ; and so is the ruse of sav- ing his Hfe by pretending that he must be purified of his madness before he can be sacrificed. The episodes must also be of an appropriate length. In dramas, they are short; in the epic, it is they that serve to extend the poem. The main plan of the Odyssey, for example, is not long : A certain man has been absent from home for many years ; he is dogged by Poseidon ; and he is left companionless. Meanwhile, The plan of affairs at home are in evil case : his substance is being wasted by e yssey gyj(.Q,.g ^ jjjg ^jrife, who have also formed a conspiracy to kill his son. Tempest-tossed, the man himself at length arrives, reveals who he is to certain persons, and attacks his enemies, the outcome being that he is preserved, and they perish. This is the essential argument of the Odyssey ; all the rest is in the nature of episode. Chapter 18 To every tragedy there pertain (i) a Complication and (2) an Unravelling, or Denouement. The incidents Complication lying outside of the drama proper, and often certain of ana D^noue- ,?. ..... ^ ^ ' ment the incidents withm it, form the Complication ; the rest of the play constitutes the Denouement. More speci- fically, by Complication is meant everything from the be- ginning of the story up to that critical point, the last in a series of incidents, out of which comes the change of fortune ; by Denouement, everything from the beginning of the change of fortune to the end of the play. In the Lynceus of Theodectes, for example, the Complication embraces the incidents anterior to the drama proper, the seizure of the child Abas, and then the seizure of the parents ; and the Denouement extends from the indict- ment for murder to the end. [In Iphigenia among the THE ART OF POETRY 6i Taurians the critical point, after which the Denouement begins, is found in the recognition of Orestes by his sister. This point in a play, unfortunately, is sometimes called the ' climax '. A much better term is crisis. The crisis in Oedipus the King- occurs in the meeting between Oedipus, the Herdsman, and the Messenger, at the end of which the hero is plunged into misery ; the words of the Herdsman to Oedipus in line 1 1 8 1 , ' Know that thou wast born to misery ', mark the transition precisely. What Aristotle says of Complication and Denouement can sel- dom be so exactly applied to the modern drama. Yet in Shakespeare and others it is instructive to look for the point from which the fortunes of the hero decline or rise — for the transition, that is, between what one calls the ' Rising ' and the ' Falling ' Action ; as in Othello, Act 2, Scene i, or Act 3, Scene 3. J Four different sources of tragic effect have been dis- Four species of Tragedy, cussed ; namely : Reversal and Discovery (see pp. 3 5-38), according to taken together; the Tragic Incident (i.e.. Suffering — the Tragic" see pp. 38, 45-47) ; Moral Bent, or Character, in the ^'"^ agents (see pp. 40, 5 2) ; and Spectacular Means (see pp. 43, 44). Corresponding to the relative prominence of one or another of these factors in a play, there are four Species of Tragedy : (i) The Involved, where the whole Tragedy of play is a Reversal and Recognition [this is substantially true of Sophocles' Electro]. (2) The Tragedy of Suffer- of suffering ing ; for example, the plays having Ajax or Ixion as hero. (3) The Tragedy in which the nature of the agents of character is paramount ; as Sophocles' Women of Phthia, and the Peleus (?) of the same author. (4) Then there is a fourth of spectacle kind in which the Spectacular element is very important; 62 ARISTOTLE as Aeschylus' Daughters of Phorcys and the Prometheus [another satyric drama, probably by Aeschylus — not the Prometheus Bound], and all plays having their scene laid in Hades. [Where the course of the drama is ' un- involved ', not to say ' episodic ', any tragic effect a play may have is likely to arise from some element other than plot — for instance, from the " spectacle '. The principle of division being positive, according to the actual source of the effect, we must not look for a species of tragedy called ' uninvolved ' ; yet see p. 79.] In the light of all this, one concludes that the poet must do his best to combine every element of interest in a tragedy, or, fail- ing that, the most effective elements, and as many as possible. [Spectacle, of course, is the least important.] The effort is especially desirable at present, because of Unfair de- the unfaimcss of contemporary criticism. Just because contemporary among his predecessors there have been authors who ""*"'* were successful, each of them, in the use of some one source of interest, it is expected that the individual poet of to-day will surpass them all in their several lines of The fair excellence. But in comparing one tragedy with another, basis of com- parison is that IS, in pointing out similarities and differences in the Xt ^^ " handling of material, the fairest way is to take the plots as a basis of criticism. And this, of course, amounts The poet to comparing Complication with Complication, and Z?/- must excel intheunrav- nouement with Denouement. Many dramatists succeed wen^sinthe in the Complication, and then fail in the Unravelling. omp ca ion [Shakggpeare is not always careful in working out the latter part of his dramas, especially his comedies — for example, in As You Like It.] But the poet must show his mastery of construction in both. THE ART OF POETRY 63 The poet must likewise remember what has been said The tragic more than once, and not employ an entire epical scheme, SvoidTmui- that is, a multiple story, for the subject of a tragedy, ^'p''**""^ One should not, for example, try to dramatize the whole story of the Iliad. In the Epic, owing to its scale, every part assumes its proper magnitude ; but when the entire thing is reduced to the scale of a drama, the result is far below one's expectations. This is obvious in the ill success of those dramatists who have taken everything in the downfall of Ilium as the subject of one tragedy, and not, like Euripides, a single phase to a play, or the entire legend of Niobe, instead of a portion, like Aes- chylus ; for they have all either utterly failed, or at best made a poor showing on the stage. Even Agathon [who has been praised (p. 5 2) for his delineation of Achilles] failed simply on this account. [An objection may be lodged against Antony and Cleopatra on the ground that Shakespeare has, here compressed materials suffi- cient for an epic into a tragedy. Of course the scale of plays like this and King Lear is larger than that of Attic tragedy.] Contemporary poets, however, show marvellous skill Further criti- _ , ,1 . , , . . cism of the m constructing Reversals, and also unmvolved situations, later Greek Tr3.£rcclv with a view to producing the effects they desire, their aim being to arouse the tragic emotions and a general human sympathy. This sympathy is aroused when a hero combining intelligence with villainy, like Sisyphus, is outwitted, or when one is brought low who is brave and unjust. [Such cases, reminding us of Shakespeare's Richard the Third, are not typical, however — that is, in the Aristotelian sense, not ' probable '.] The outcome 64 ARISTOTLE is probable only in Agathon's sense : it is likely, he says, that many unlikely things will occur. The poet The Chorus should be regarded as one of the actors ; the Chorus it should be an integral part of the whole, and take its actors " share in the action. The model is the practice of Soph- ocles, and not Euripides. In subsequent poets the choral songs in a tragedy have no more connection with the plot than with that of any other play. Accordingly, at the present day, the Chorus sing mere interludes, a practice that goes back to Agathon. And yet, what real difference is there between introducing a song that is foreign to the action and attempting to fit a speech, or a whole episode, from one drama into another ? Chapter 19 The Other formative elements of Tragedy (pp. 21-23) have now been discussed [especially Plot and Ethos], and it remains to speak of Diction and Intellect. onDianoia, As for the Intellectual element, we may assume what consult Aris- . . , ^ . . , ^, . .... totie'swork IS Said ot it m the treatise on Rhetoric, to which in- on Rhetoric • j . ■ i i i ^t i quiry the topic more properly belongs. [In that treatise, Aristotle says : ' Rhetoric rfiay be defined as a faculty of discovering all the possible means of persuasion in any subject.'] The Intellectual element includes every- thing that is to be effected by the language of the agents — in their efforts to prove and to refute ; to arouse one another's emotions, such as pity, or fear, or anger, or the like ; and to exaggerate or to discount the impor- tance of things. [One may illustrate thus : Shakespeare makes Claudius attempt to prove to Hamlet that his grief for his father is obstinate ; .he makes lago work upon the jealousy of Othello ; Sophocles makes Jocasta minimize the importance of calling the Herdsman. THE ART OF POETRY 65 Beneath what Claudius, lago, and Jocasta say Ues the Intellectual element. The poet must employ and repre- sent it in the right way.] It is evident, too, that the same underlying forms of thought must be in operation when- ever the poet makes the agents try by their acts to arouse pity or alarm in one another, or to give these acts an air of importance or naturalness. [If Shakespeare makes Hamlet wish his actions to seem strange, then beneath what Hamlet does, as well as beneath what he says, lies the Intellectual element.] The only difference is that The poet's the act must produce its effect on the other personages manoia in without verbal explanation ; whereas if a speech be em- I^ent says ployed, the author must see to it that the effect is pro- "'' ^""^ duced by the agent's speaking, and that it comes from the particular language the agent uses ; for what point would there be in having A make a speech if B already saw things in the desired light, quite apart from any- thing that might be said 1 Among the subjects of inquiry bearing on Diction, one Diction is the Modes of Spoken Utterance, including such mat- ters as the difference between a command and a prayer, a simple statement and a threat, a question and an answer, and so forth. A knowledge of such distinctions, how- Remote con- ....... . ^ , . e siSerations ever, falls withm the provmce of the interpreter, not 01 the poet, and is the concern of the general theorist on some art like Elocution. Whether the poet knows these things, or is ignorant of them, they do not directly touch his art, nor do they offer any ground for objections that are worth considering. For example, why should any one find fault with the opening of the Iliad: ' Sing, Goddess, of the wrath ', etc. .? — to which Protagoras 66 ARISTOTLE Chapter 20 Diction proper, as related to the Art of Poetry The Parts of Diction 1. The Ulti- mate Ele- ment, or Letter Vowels, Semivowels, and Mutes objected on the ground that, whereas Homer thinks he is uttering a prayer, actually he is giving a command ; since to bid one do or not do a thing, says Protagoras, is an order. We may pass over this inquiry, therefore, as pertaining to another art, and not to the art of Poetry. The Diction proper, taken as a whole, is made up of the following parts. [The list begins with the smallest elements and proceeds synthetically to the largest com- posite factors of discourse — from the indivisible sound and the syllable, to the entire poem considered as a uni- fied utterance.] (i) The Ultimate Element (or Letter) ; (2) the Primary Combination of ultimate elements (not quite a ' Syllable ') ; (3) the Connective Particle ; (4) the Separative Particle ; (5) the Noun ; (6) the Verb ; (7) the Inflection ; (8) the Speech [or unified Utterance, from a phrase to a poem]. The Ultimate Element (or Letter) is an indivisible sound — not every such sound, but a sound of such a nature that it may unite with others of its kind to form an intelligible word. The lower animals also utter indi- visible sounds, but none that are elementary in the present sense. These elementary sounds are divided into (a) Vowels, (b) Semivowels, and (c) Mutes, (a) A Vowel is an element having an audible sound without the ad- dition of another element, (b) A Semivowel is an ele- ment — as S or R — having an audible sound when another element is added to it. (c) A Mute is an ele- ment — as G or D — having no sound in and for itself, but becoming audible by an addition ^ — of elements, that is, that have some sound of their own. The elementary sounds differ in several ways : (a) they are produced by THE ART OF POETRY 6j different positions of the mouth, or in different parts of other ait- it ; (b) they are aspirated, or not aspirated, or inter- mediate ; (c) they are long, or short, or intermediate ; and, furthermore, (d) they have an acute, or grave, or intermediate stress. A consideration of the details be- longs to the theorists on Metre. A Syllable is a non-significant sound composed of a 2. ThePri- Mute and a letter having a sound (a Vowel or Semi- wnation vowel) ; for the combination GR, without the A, is just as truly a syllable as when A is added, in GRA. But a consideration of the various forms of the Syllable like- wise belongs to the theory of Metre. [Aristotle now passes from the indivisible elements of spoken sounds, and the primary combinations of these in syllables, to higher combinations, the elements of the phrase or sentence. These are either particles which have no meaning when taken by themselves, or elements, such as nouns and verbs, which have a significance of their own.] A Connective Particle is (a) a non-significant sound 3. Thecon- , ,- . 7 1-1 ■ 1 1 ■ 1 nective Par- — such as men, de, tot, de — which neither hinders nor tide causes the formation of one significant sound (expres- sion) out of two or more others [e.g., a single clause, or the like, out of a noun and a verb], and which, if the expression stand by itself, must not be inserted as the first word. [When we form the expression Gnothi seau- ton — " Know thyself ' — the process is neither helped nor hindered by the insertion of de ; but if the particle be inserted, it must not stand first.] Or it is a non- significant sound — like amphi, peri, etc. — with (b) the function of combining two or more significant sounds 68 ARISTOTLE 4. The Sepa- rative Par- ticle 3. The Noun or Name- word into one expression [as a preposition serves to unite its noun with a verb]. A Separative Particle (i.e., sentence-connective and disjunctive particle) is a non-significant sound which marks the beginning, end, or division of an expression, and whose natural place is at either end of the expres- sion or in the middle. [We turn now to those elements which have a significance in themselves.] A Noun [or name- word, including nouns, adjectives, etc.] is a composite significant sound, with no reference to time, no part of which is significant by itself ; for even when a noun is made up of two others, we do not attach separate meanings to the parts. For example, when we use the name " Theodore ' (" god-given '), we do not associate the notion of " gift ' with the down. 6. The verb A Verb is a composite significant sound, no part of which is significant by itself any more than the parts of a Noun, but which involves the notion of time. Whereas a name (' Noun ') like ' man ' or " white ' does not indi- cate the notion of when, a Verb like ' walks ' or ' has walked ' indicates not only the idea of walking, but, in addition, that of time present or past. An Inflection of a Noun or Verb is that element by which the word means "of or " to ' a thing, and the like ; or by which it stands for one or many — as " man ' or ' men ' ; or by which it indicates the mode of utter- ance, as in a question or a command. Thus " Did walk .? ' or " Walk ! ' is an inflection, of the last sort, of the Verb ' to walk '. A Speech (or unified Utterance) is a composite sig- nificant sound, of which at least some of the parts (as 7 . The In flection THE ART OF POETRY 69 nouns or verbs) are significant in themselves. Such a 8. The composite utterance is not always made up of Nouns (or synthetic names) and Verbs ; it may, for example, be without a ""^"^^""^ Verb, as in the definition of Man : " A biped land ani- mal.' However, there will always be a part that stands for some person or thing, as ' Cleon ', in the sentence, ' Cleon is walking.' A Speech (sentence or whole utter- ance) may be a unit in either of two ways : (a) it may two ways oi signify one thing; or (b) the unity may be brought unuy'"^ about through the linking together of more than one utterance. Thus the Iliad is one utterance through the binding together of a number ; and the definition of Man is a unit because it signifies one thing. Nouns (or name-words) are of two kinds, (a) Simple chapter 21 and (b) Compound. By Simple are meant those that are formed of non-significant elements, as the word ge Nouns or (' earth '). A Compound noun may be made up of a sig- Their tor- nificant and a non-significant part — though the distinc- ^p°e-' tion is lost when the parts are united ; or it may be Compound made up of two parts, both of which, taken by them- selves, are significant. A Compound noun may also be triple or quadruple, or multiple, in form, like most of the amplified Q bombastic) names Q. in comedy), such as 'Hermo-caico-xanthus '. [Compare " Poly-machaero- plagides ', in Plautus' adaptation from the New Comedy of Greece.] Whatever the formation, a Noun (or name) is either (i) the Current Term for a thing ; or (2) a Strange (or rare) Word ; or (3) a Metaphor ; or (4) an Ornamental Word ; or (5) a Newly-coined Word ; or a word that is (6) Lengthened, or (7) Curtailed, or (8) Altered. 70 ARISTOTLE 1. Current By a Current Term is meant the word that is used Terms for a thing by the people we know ; by a Strange (or 8. strange rare) Word, one that is used in another region. It is obvious that the same word may be both Strange and Current, though not with reference to the same region. The word sigynon (" lance '), for example, is current in Cyprus, but rare at Athens. 3. Metaphor: Metaphor consists in the application to one thing of the name that belongs to another : (a) the name of the genus may be applied to a subordinate species ; (b) the name of the species may be applied to the inclusive ge- nus ; (c) under the same genus, the name of one species may be applied to another ; or (d) there may be a trans- ference of names on grounds of analogy (or proportion). (a) The transference of a name from the genus to a species is illustrated in " Here stands my ship ' ; for to be at anchor is one species of the genus standing. (b) That from species to genus, in ' Of a truth, ten thousand noble deeds hath Odysseus wrought ' ; where ten thoicsand is a particular large number, used instead of a large number in general. (c) That from species to species, in ' With a knife of bronze drawing away the life-blood ', and in " Cutting with the unwearing bronze ' ; where the poet (? Emped- ocles) uses drawing for cutting, and cutting for draw- ing, when both terms are species of the genus removing. [The notion may be this : a surgeon cuts with a knife, and draws blood with a cupping-instrument, blood being removed in either case. The medical poet is able to substitute either of the two specific words for the other.] (d) By Metaphor formed on the basis of analogy (or THE ART OF POETRY 71 proportion) is meant the case when a second term, B, Proportional is to a first, A, as a fourth, D, is to a third, C ; where- '""^p"" upon the fourth term, D, may be substituted for the second, B, or the second, B, for the fourth, D. Some- times, too, the poet will qualify the metaphorical word by adding to it the term (-f-A or + C) to which the non- figurative term is relative. To illustrate : the drinking- bowl (B) is to Dionysus (A) as the shield (D) is to Ares (C). Accordingly, the bowl (B) may be called tAe shield (D) of Dionysus, and the shield (D) the bowl (B) of Ares. Or another illustration : old age (B) is to life (A) as evening (D) is to the day (C). Hence one will speak of the evening (D) as the old age (B) of the day — or as Empedocles does ; and of old age (B) as the evening (D) of life — or as ' the sunset of life '. In certain cases, the language may contain no actual word corresponding to one of the terms in the proportion, but the figure never- theless will be employed. For example, when a fruit casts forth its seed the action is called " sowing ', but the action of the sun in casting forth its flame has no special name. Yet this nameless action (B) is to the sun (A) as sowing (D) is to the fruit (C) ; and hence we have the expression of the poet, ' sowing a god-created flame '. There is still another way in which this kind of meta- phor may be used. We may substitute one term, B, for another, D, and then subtract some characteristic attri- bute of B. For example, one might call the shield (D), not the bowl (B) of Ares, but " the wineless bowl '. [The Ornamental Word is not discussed. It may [4. omamen- mean the superior or more beautiful word, where there is a choice among synonyms.] 72 ARISTOTLE 6. Newly- coined Words 6. Length- ened Words 7. Curtailed Words 8. Altered Words Gender of Nouns A Newly-coined Word is one that is wholly unknown to any region, and is applied to something by an in- dividual poet ; for there seem to be certain words of this origin — as emyges for ' horns ', and areter for ' priest '. [Thus Spenser is said to have coined the word blatant i\ A Lengthened Word is one in which a customary short vowel is made long, or in which an extra syllable is inserted. Thus poleos is lengthened from poleos (the short e becoming long) ; and Peleiadeo from Peleidou (by change of vowel-length and insertion of syllables). A Curtailed Word is one from which some part has been removed ; for example : kri (for krithe), do (for doma), and ops, in 'Mia ginetai amphoteron ops ' (for opsis). An Altered Word is one in which the poet, having left some part unchanged, remodels the rest; for ex- ample, dexiteron is altered from dexion in ' dexiteron cata mason '. The Nouns (or name-words), whether current, meta- phorical, curtailed, or the hke, are either Masculine, Feminine, or Neuter. All nouns ending in N, R, or S, or in combinations of S, that is, Psi (PS) or Xi (KS), are masculine. All ending in Eta (E) or Omega (O), which are always long, or in A, among the vowels that sometimes are long, are feminine. Accordingly, among the letters of the alphabet there are just as many mas- culine as feminine terminations (that is, three of each) ; for Psi and Xi count as S. No noun ends in a mute or in either of the short vowels Epsilon (E) and Omicron (O). Only three nouns end in I, namely. THE ART OF POETRY 73 ■meli, kommi, zxiA peperi. Five end in Y. The neuters end in the vowels that admit of lengthening, or in N, R, or S. In respect to Diction, the ideal for the poet is to be Chapter 22 clear without being mean. The clearest diction is that which is wholly made up of current terms (the ordinary words for things). But a style so composed is mean ; choice of witness the poetry of Cleophon or Sthenelus. [Some Theideaus of the poetry of Crabbe would furnish another illustra- DistiSctfon"* tion. And compare Kipling in " The female of the species ', etc.] But the language attains majesty and distinction when the poet makes use of terms that are less familiar : rare words, metaphors, lengthened forms — everything that deviates from the ordinary usage. Yet if one composes in a diction of such terms alone, the result will be either a riddle or an unnatural jargon Not a riddle or a jargon — a riddle if the language be nothing but metaphors, and a jargon if it be nothing but words that are strange (dialect words and the like). Indeed, the very essence of a riddle consists in describing an actual occurrence by an impossible combination of words. Now this can- not be done through any arrangement of words in their primary meanings, but it can through their metaphorical substitutes. For example : " A man I saw gluing bronze on a man with fire ' [an enigmatical description of blood-letting with a vacuum in a cup of bronze], and the like. A similar combination of strange words only would be a jargon. The poet, then, should employ a certain admixture of these expressions that deviate from the ordinary; for distinction and elevation of style will result from 74 ARISTOTLE How to se- cure Clear- ness; how Distinction the use of such means as the strange word, the meta- phor, the ornamental word [? the nobler, when there are synonyms], and the rest ; and clearness will arise from such part of the language as is in common use. Very important in helping to make the style clear without loss of distinction are the lengthened, curtailed, and altered forms of words. Their deviation from the cus- tomary forms will lend the quality of distinction ; and the element they have in common with the ordinary usage will give clearness. Those critics are in the Modifications wrong, therefore, who censure such a modification of of Usage ae- , • i • , i r fended from usage, and ridicule the poet for resortmg to it — as when the elder Euclid said it was easy enough to make poetry if they would let you lengthen out words as you pleased. So he caricatured the practice in the sentences : and I saw Epichares a-walking Marathon-wards ; Ouk an g' eramenos ton ekeinou elleboron; Use and Abuse are different tilings — which he read as verses. [The text of the second line is corrupt.] An obtrusive employment of the device of lengthening words becomes, of course, ridicu- lous ; but the same thing is true of any similar styHstic procedure. The principle of moderation should govern the use of every element of diction ; for with metaphors also, and strange words, and the rest, a like effect will ensue if they are used without propriety, and with the aim of causing laughter. The proper use of lengthened forms is a different thing; as may be seen in Epic Poetry, if we take a verse and substitute therein the common forms of the THE ART OF POETRY 75 words. And a similar test should be made with the a test of the strange word, and with metaphors and the rest. One ationsfrom' has only to replace them by the terms of ordinary ^'""'''°*'7 usage, and the truth of our remarks will be obvious. For example, the same iambic line occurs in Aeschylus and Euripides, though in Aeschylus it is commonplace ; but Euripides, by the substitution of just one word — a strange word in place of the ordinary — has rendered the line beautiful. Aeschylus in his Philoctetes makes the hero say : The cancer that is eating the flesh of my foot ; Euripides replaces ' is eating ' by ' feasts on '. Or take the line uttered by the Cyclops in the Odyssey : Lo, now, a dwarf, a man of no worth, and a weakling ; and fancy some one reciting it in the terms of ordinary usage : See, now, a small man, feeble, and unprepossessing. Or take the line : And placed ' for him (Odysseus) an unseemly settle and a meagre table; and suppose it to be read thus : And brought him a sorry chair and a small table. Or substitute for ' the sea-beach bellows ', in the Iliad, " the beach is roaring '. Again, Ariphrades used to ridicule the tragedians for locutions which no one as in the would employ in ordinary conversation ; for example, Tragedy,"' " from the house away ' — instead of " away from the frJae^ensiwe house ' ; 'of thee ', instead of ' yours ' ; ego de nin, instead of ego d' auten; 'Achilles about', instead of 76 ARISTOTLE A Command of Metaphor is the mark of genius ' about Achilles ' ; and so on. [Compare Wordsworth : ' That glides the dark hills under.'] It is just because these expressions are not ordinary that they give distinction to the language ; and that is the point Ariphrades failed to catch. It is, indeed, important to make the right use of each of the elements mentioned — lengthened, cur- tailed, and altered words — as well as of compounds and strange words. But most important by far is it to have a command of metaphor. This is the one thing the poet cannot learn from others. It is the mark of genius ; for to coin good metaphors involves an insight into the resemblances between objects that are super- ficially unlike. Of the several kinds we have noted, compound words are best adapted to the dithyramb, strange words varieties of to heroic metre [that is, to epic poetry! , and metaphors to Diction for ... L ' r r .; j> r different lambic metre [that is, to the tragic dialogue]. In Heroic poetry, it is true, all the special forms may be used. But iambic verse, as far as may be, represents the spoken language, and hence employs only the kinds of words one would use in oratory ; that is, the current term, the metaphor, and the ornamental (or ? superior) word. Herewith we close the discussion of Tragedy, or the art of imitation in the form of action. Metres Ill EPIC POETRY. THE PRINCIPLES OF ITS CONSTRUCTION And now for the form of poetry which is purely nar- chapter 23 rative, or the art which imitates in metrical language as its sole medium. ( In the Epic, as in Tragedy, the story should be con- what the structed on dramatic principles : everything should turn cimunon^w^th about a single action, one that is a whole, and is organ- ^"^^seay ically perfect — having a beginning, and a middle, and an end. In this way, just as a living animal, individual and perfect, has its own beauty, so the poem will arouse in us its own characteristic form of pleasure. So much is obvious from what has gone before. Putting the thing negatively, we may say that the plot of an Epic must be unlike what we commonly find in histories, it is not a , . , ^ . . 1 . , Chronicle which of necessity represent, not a single action, but some one period, with all that happened therein to one or more persons, however unrelated the several occurrences may have been. For example : the Battle of Salamis took place at the same time as the defeat of the Carthaginians in Sicily ; but the two events did not converge to the same end. And similarly, one event may immediately follow another in point of time, and yet there may be no sequence leading to one issue. Nevertheless, one may venture to say, most of the 77 78 ARISTOTLE Homer a model in his choice of subject Mistakes in choice hy other Epic Poets Chapter 24 epic poets commit this very fault of making their plots like chronicles. In precisely this respect, therefore, Homer, as we already have said (p. 30), manifestly transcends the other epic poets. Far from taking all the legend of Ilium for his theme, he did not attempt to deal even with the War in its entirety, although this had a defi- nite beginning and end. Very likely he thought that the story would be too long to be easily grasped as a whole — or, if it were not too long, that it would be too complicated from the variety of the incidents. As it is, he has selected a single phase of the war for his main action, and employs a number of the other incidents by way of episode ; for example, he diversifies his narra- tive with the Catalogue of the Ships, and so forth. Of the other epic poets, some take for their subject all the deeds of one hero ; others all the events in one period ; and others a single action, but one with a multiplicity of/ parts. / This last is what was done by the author of the Cypria, and by the author of the Little Iliad. The con- sequence *s that the Iliad and the Odyssey each furnish materials for but a single tragedy, or at most for two ; while the Cypria supplies subjects for a number ; and the Little Iliad for eight or more : an Award of the Arms, a Philoctetes, a Neoptolemus, a Eurypylus, a Mendicant Odysseus, a Spartan Women, a Sack of Ilium, a Sailing of the Fleet — one might add a Sinon and a Trojan Wom-en. Furthermore, there must be the same varieties of Epic Poetry as of Tragedy. That is, an Epic plot must be either (i) Uninvolved or (2) Involved, or the stoiy THE ART OF POETRY 79 must be one (3) of Suffering or (4) of Character. [The Four species division corresponds in the last three points with the poetiy similar division under tragedy (pp. 61-62), but not in the first. The epic with an uninvolved plot may rank in Aristotle's mind with the kind of tragedy in which the effect is mainly dependent upon ' Spectacle ', the plot being, perhaps, episodic ; otherwise there is a more troublesome discrepancy.] The Constituent Parts, also, of the Epic must be the same as in Tragedy — save that the poet does not use the elements of Melody and Spectacle ; [for there necessarily are Reversals and Dis^ constituents coveries and Sufferings in this form of poetry as in that, [the Epic ana And the Intellectual Processes and the Diction must he " ^"^^^^ artistically worked out. These elements were all first used by Homer, who laid the proper emphasis on them severally ; for each of his poems is a model of construc- tion — the Iliad of an uninvolved plot and a story of tragic suffering ; the Odyssey of an involved plot (since there are Discoveries throughout) and a story of char- acter. And in addition to these excellences, each of the poems surpasses all others in point of Diction and Thought. [The excellence in point of " Thought ' is shown, for example, in the structure of the speeches. So much, then, for similarities between the epic and tragedy.] But Epic Poetry differs from Tragedy (i) in the length The Epic dif- of the composition, and (2) in the metre. As for the Tragedy in length, an adequate limit has already been suggested ^- ^^et^* j[gp._2gj,_30) : it must be possible for us to embrace the beginning and end of the story in one view. Now this condition would be met if the poem were shorter than 8o ARISTOTLE The advan- tage of Length S. Metre: the Heroic Its advan- tage the old epics — if it were about as long as one of the groups of three tragedies presented for a single hearing. [Say, 3500 — 4000 lines in all; the Otestean Trilogy of Aeschylus runs to 3795.] But through its capacity for extension, Epic Poetry has a great and peculiar advantage ; for in a tragedy it is not possible to repre- sent a number of incidents in the action as carried on simultaneously — the poet is limited to the one thing done on the stage by the actors who are there. But in the Epic, because of the narrative form, he may repre- sent a number of incidents as simultaneous occurrences ; and these, if they are relevant to the action, materially add to the poem. The increase in bulk tends to the advantage of the Epic in grandeur, and in variety of interest for the hearer through diversity of incident in the episodes. Uniformity of incident quickly satiates the audience, and makes tragedies fail on the stage^;^ j As for the metre. Epic Poetry has appropriated the heroic (hexameter verse) as a result of experience. And the fitness of this measure might be critically tested ; for if any one were to produce a narrative poem in another metre, or in several others, the incongruity would be obvious. Of all metres, in fact, the heroic is the stateliest and most impressive. On this account, it most readily admits the use of strange words and meta- phors (see p. 76) ; for in its tolerance of forms that are out of the ordinary, narrative poetry goes beyond the other kinds. The iambic and trochaic measures, on the other hand, are the concomitants of motion, the trochaic being appropriate to dancing, and the iambic expres- sive of life and action. [Accordingly, neither is suited THE ART OF POETRY 8i to the stately epic] Still more unfitting would it be to compose an epic in a hotchpotch of metres after the fashion of Chaeremon's rhapsody. Hence no one ever has written a long story in any other metre than the heroic. Rather, nature herself, as we have said (cf . p. 1 3), teaches us to select the proper kind of verse for such a story. ^ Homer, so worthy of praise in other respects, is espe- ' cially admirable in that he alone among epic poets is not unaware of the part to be taken by the author himself in his work. The poet should, in fact, say as little as The Epic , ■ . . ■ • 1 • 1 , , Poet is not may be m his own person, smce m his personal utter- toobtmae ances he is not an imitative artist. Now the rest of the hl^work" epic poets continually appear in their own works, and their snatches of artistic imitation are few and far be- tween. But Homer, after a brief preliminary, straight- way brings in a man, or a woman, or some other type — no one of them vague, but each sharply differentiated^ [The preliminaries of Milton are longer and more personal.] Some element of the marvellous unquestionably has a place in Tragedy ; but the irrational (or illogical), which is the chief factor in the marvellous, and which must so piace of the far as possible be excluded from Tragedy, is more freely ana even tie admitted in the Epic, since the persons of the story are the Epu ' '° not actually before our eyes. Take the account of the pursuit of Hector in the Iliad. On the stage, the scene would be ridiculous : Achilles running after Hector all alone, beneath the walls of Troy ; the Grecian warriors halting instead of following, and Achilles shaking his head to warn them not to throw darts at their foe. 82 ARISTOTLE ' ( In the narrative, however, since we do not combine the| circumstances into one picture, the absurdity of thej situation is not perceived. ' The Marvel- That the marvclIous is a source of pleasure may' people tell be Seen by the way in which people add to a story ; for ■ they always embellish the facts with striking details, in | the belief that it will gratify the listeners. Yet it is| Homer above all who has shown the rest of us how a How to rep- He ought to be told. The essence of the method is the ; resent a lie artistically use of a fallacy in reasoning, as follows. Suppose that [ whenever A exists or comes to pass, B must exist orj occur ; men think, if the consequent B exists, the ante- cedent A must also — but the inference is illegitimate. For the poet, accordingly, the right method is this : if | the antecedent A is untrue, and if there is something ! else, B, which would necessarily exist or occur if A were true, one must add on the B ; for, knowing the added detail to be true, we ourselves mentally proceed to the fallacious inference that the antecedent A is like- wise true. We may take an instance from the BaiA Scene in the Odyssey. [Here, Odysseus, disguised in rags, wishes to convince Penelope that he, the Beggar, has seen the real Odysseus alive =A, a falsehood. Accordingly, he adds an accurate description of the hero's clothing, etc., = B. Penelope knows B to be true, since the garments came from her. If A were true, that is, if the Beggar had seen Odysseus, the natural consequence, B, would be a true description of the clothing. From the truth of B, Penelope mistakenly infers the occurrence of A, and believes the Beg- gar. The illusion, which is partly shared by any one THE ART OF POETRY 83 who hears the story, witnesses to the artistic method of the poet.] A sequence of events which, though actually impos- The poet sible, looks reasonable should be preferred by the poet a probawe to what, though really possible, seems incredible. The toan^increa- story [whether of an epic or a tragedy] should not be },"ity°°^'" made up of incidents which are severally improbable ; one should rather aim to include no irrational element whatsoever^ At any rate, if an irrational element is unavoidable, it should lie outside of the story proper — as the hero's ignorance in Oedipus the King of the way in which Laius met his death. It should not lie within the story — like the anachronism in Sophocles' Electra, where a legendary hero is described as being killed at the modern P3^hian games ; or like the silence of (?) Telephus in The Mysians of (.?) Aeschylus, where The irra- the man comes all the way from Tegea to Mysia with- out speaking. Accordingly, it is ridiculous for a poet to say that his stoiy would be ruined if such incidents were left out ; he has no _business to construct such a plot to begin with. Butjif he does set out to repre- m chosen at sent an irrational incident, and if he obviously could be treated have treated it in a way less offensive to our notions ^^ of probability, his fault is worse than ridiculous, lying not in his choice of an object to imitate, but in his art as an imitator. In the hands of an inferior poet, how as in Homer manifest and intolerable would the improbabilities be- come which we find even in the Odyssey, at the point where the hero is set ashore. [Earnestly desiring to see his native land, Odysseus nevertheless sleeps from the time he leaves the land of the Phaeacians until 84 ARISTOTLE after they have disembarked him on his own island, 1 and gone away ; although " the vessel in full course ran ashore, half her keel's length high.'] As it is. Homer conceals the absurdity, and renders the incident charm- ing, by means of his other excellences [in particular by the elaborate description of the nocturnal voyage, and of the haven and cave at Ithaca]. The place of Elaborate Diction, however, is to be used only when ' Ornate , . , , r i Diction the action pauses, and no purposes and arguments oi the agents are to be displayed. Conversely, where the pur- poses and reasonings of the agents need to be revealed, a too ornate Diction will obscure them. IV PROBLEMS IN CRITICISM. THE PRINCIPLES OF THEIR SOLUTION [Various allusions have been made to the current and anterior criticism, more or less unsound, of poets and poetry — for example, to the injustice of comparing tragedies upon some basis other than the plot, and to the ridiculing of the epic poets by the elder Euclid, and of tragic diction by Ariphrades. We now come to a discussion of the way in which critical objections ought really to be formulated, and of the laws by which, in special cases, the poet is to be adjudged right or wrong. Aristotle is constructive and conserva- tive in spirit, and the discussion amounts to a defence of poetry, above all, that of Homer, against destructive criticism.] As to Problems in criticism, and the respective Solu- Chapter 25 tions of them : they rest upon certain underlying prin- ciples, and the number and nature of these will be clear if we take account of the following considerations. (i) The poet, as we have seen, is an imitator, just like a painter or any other maker of likenesses [e.g., a sculptor! ; of necessity, therefore, he must, in all in- i . principle r 1 1 ■ ^ / X ,, of the Object stances, represent one oi three objects (ci. pp. 2, o) : oftheimita- (a) Things as they once were, or are now [historical or scientific truth] ; (b) Things as they are said or 85 86 ARISTOTLE thought to be [tradition and common belief] ; (c) Things as they ought to be [the typical — aesthetic truth]. 2. Principle (2) The poct's medium of expression is the Diction, of j;he Me- unadorned, or with an admixture of strange words and metaphors — indeed, there are various modifications of 3. Principle ordinary usage that we concede to the poets. (3) Fur- correctness. thermore, the standard of correctness is not the same ftenaLa^of* in Poetry as in Politics ; it is different in Poetry from its own ^j^^j. jj^ ^j^y. Q(.j^gj. ^^^ |-^ citizen who fulfilled his duty to the State and in private Hfe would satisfy the stand- ard of correctness in Politics and Ethics ; but to satisfy the standard of correctness in tragedy, for example, the hero must come short of perfect justice and goodness. Cf. p. 42.] Within the limits of poetry there can be Two kinds of two kiuds of crrors, the one (a) directly involving the Poetry art, the other (b) adventitious. If the poet has chosen something for the object of his imitation, and through want of capacity fails properly to represent what he has in mind, this is (a) a fault in his art itself. But let us suppose that he has made an incorrect choice in the object he wishes to represent ; let us suppose, for ex- ample, that he wishes to represent a moving horse with both right legs thrown forward ; or suppose that he makes a mistake in any other special branch of know- ledge — medicine or the like; or let the impossible objects which he represents be what they may. If he succeeds in duly imitating the object which he has in mind, his mistake is not (a) one that concerns the Poetic Art itself. It is (b) adventitious. These, then, are the considerations from which one must proceed in answer- ing the strictures of the critics. THE ART OF POETRY 87 Let us first consider the strictures relating to the Poetic Art itself. If impossibilities have been repre- sented, the poet is guilty of a fault. Yet such impossi- impossiwi- bilities may still be justified, if their representation serves justifled^in the purpose of the art itself — for we must remember ^^ what has been said of the end of poetry ; that is, they are justified if they give the passage they are in, or some other passage, a more astounding effect. The pursuit of Hector (see p. 81) is a case in point, being justified by the poetic effect. But if the ends of poetry could have Yet the Poet been as well or better subserved by scientific accuracy, to make no the error is not justified ; for the poet ought if possible ™* * ° to make no mistakes whatever. Again, when an error is found, one must always ask: Is the mistake adventitious, arising from ignorance in some special field of knowledge, or does it concern the is the fault _... ii-ri- ■ i-i r 1 Intrinsic or art of imitation as such ? If a painter thinks a female Adventitious deer has horns, for example, that is less of an error than to fail in representing his actual conception. Furthermore, it may be objected that the representa- tion of the poet is not true [i.e., to things as they are or have been]. The answer to this may be that they Poetic Tmth are represented as they ought to be [that they are typical] ; just as Sophocles affirmed that he himself drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides men as they are. But if the representation be true neither to fact nor to the ideal, the answer may be that it accords with current legends and popular behef : ' People say so.' The unedifying poetical tales about the gods, for instance, are, very possibly, neither true nor the pref- erable thing to relate ; in fact, they may be as false and 88 ARISTOTLE immoral as Xenophanes declares. But they certainly are in keeping with popular belief. Of still other things which are objected to in poetry, one may possibly say, not that they are better than the fact here and now, but that the fact was so at the time [historical truth]. Such is the case with the description of the arms of Diomed and his companions in the Iliad: ' Their spears were driven into the ground, erect upon the spikes of the butts ' [the practice described in Homer is not better than the method familiar to his critics, but it accords with historical truth] ; for that was the custom then, as it is in Illyria even now. As for the question whether something said or done by some one in a poem is proper or not : to answer this Artistic we must not merely consider the intrinsic quality of the act or utterance, to see whether it is noble or base in itself ; we must also consider (a) the person who does or says the thing, (b) the person to whom it is done or said, or (c) when, or (d) in whose interest, or (e) with what motive, it is done or said. Thus we must exam- ine any questionable word or act, to see whether the motive of the agent is to secure some greater good or to avert a greater evil. [The speeches of Satan in Paradise Lost are not morally good in themselves. They have " semblance of worth, not substance '. But the first, for example, is poetically good. We must bear in mind that it is addressed by (a) the Father of Lies to (b) another demon, (c) nine days after their plunge into Hell, (d) in the interest of the speaker, (e) with the motive of bettering his condition.] The justice or injustice of other criticisms must be Propriety THE ART OF POETRY 89 decided by the principles of poetic diction. For exam- ple, objection may be raised to a passage because the critic fails to see that the poet is using (a) a strange a. An appeal word. At the beginning of the Iliad, the angry god is of the " represented as first assailing the oureas. Now by oureas '"**'"™ Homer may possibly mean not mules, but sentinels. [The critics found it difficult to believe that Apollo's arrows would strike the camp-animals before the men.] And when the poet says of Dolon, ' He was ill-favored of figure ', the meaning may be, not that his body was deformed, but that his face was ugly ; for well-figtcred is the Cretan expression for well-featured. [The ques- tion apparently was raised : If Dolon was deformed, how could he also be ' swift of foot ' ?] So, too, ' Mix the drink livelier ' may mean, not ' Mix it stronger ', as though for sots, but " Mix it quicker '. Other difficulties may be explained under this head, if we regard the language as (b) metaphorical. Homer b. Metaphors says : ' Now all gods and men were sleeping through the night ' ; and at the same time he tells us : " And whenever he looked at the Trojan plain, he marvelled at the sound of flutes and pipes.' [I.e., some men were awake.J The difficulty may be resolved if we regard all as used metaphorically for many, since all is a species of the genus many. So also we may explain, ' And she alone hath no part in the baths of Ocean' ; for the other northern constellations that do not set are not familiar like the Great Bear, and the one which is very familiar may be figuratively called the only one. Again, a passage that is censured may be defended after a study of the pronunciation. Thus didomen de hoi 90 ARISTOTLE c. Testing the Pronun- ciation a. Testing the Punctu- ation e. Possible Ambiguities in Giammat f . An appeal to Special Usage (' We grant him his prayer ') has been criticized as mak- ing Zeus a liar ; and to men hou cataputhetai ombro (' the wood of which ' — oak and pine — ' is rotted with rain), as not being scientifically true. In such cases the solution of the difficulty may be hke that of Hip- pias the Thasian, who changed the accent to didomen, and the breathing to ou : ' Grant him his prayer ' — where the lying rests with the deceptive dream, rather than with Zeus ; and ' is not rotted with rain ' — which is true of oak and pine. Other difficulties one may solve by considering (d) the punctuation, as in the sentence of Empedocles : ' Sud- denly things became mortal that before had learnt to be immortal and things unmixed before mixed.' [If the passage is censured when a comma follows ' unmixed ', perhaps the comma ought to precede " mixed '.] Or we may have to consider (e) the grammatical ambiguity of an expression, as in the passage : ' Of the night pleon two watches are spent ' ; if pleon means " more than' two watches, the phrase contradicts 'but a third part still remains'. But the solution may be that the expression means "full two watches '. Or we may have to appeal (f) to the custom of lan- guage. Just as we now call wine and water ' wine ', so Homer in speaking of ' the greave of new-wrought tin ', from which the spear rebounded, may mean a metallic alloy of tin. And as we call workers in iron chalkeas (' braziers '), so Homer may call Ganymede the ' wine- pourer to Zeus ', although the gods drink, not wine, but nectar. This difficulty, however, may be resolved as an instance of (b) metaphor. THE ART OF POETRY 91 Finally, a passage in dispute may be defended through an appeal to (g) the several possibilities of meaning in a g. Possiwe single word — as distinguished from (e) ambiguities in °'"°''°y™* grammar. When a word seems to involve some incon- sistency, one should consider the different senses it may bear in its context. For example : ' There ' (at or in the third and golden layer of the shield) " scketo' ("stuck' or 'stayed ') "the spear of bronze.' One should ask in how many ways we may take scketo. [Homer says that the spear pierced two layers, and implies that the next re- mained unpierced ; but if the spear stuck in the third layer, it must have pierced that also. The alleged in- consistency disappears if we consider that scketo may also mean stayed: ' There stayed the spear of bronze.'] In other words, the right procedure is just the oppo- Right and site of the method condemned by Glaucon, who says of ^aurf to"" certain critics : ' They begin with some unwarranted ''"ticism assumption, and having pronounced judgment in a matter, they go on to argue from this ; and if what the poet says does not agree with what they happen to think, they censure his supposed misstatement.' Such is the fashion in which the question about Icarius, in the Odyssey, has been handled. The critics begin by imagining that he was a Lacedaemonian, and accord- ingly they think it strange that his grandson, Telemachus, did not meet him on the journey to Lacedaemon. But perhaps the case may be as the Cephallenians say ; for their story is that Odysseus took a wife from Cephal- lenia, and that her father's name was not Icarius, but Icadius. It is doubtless a mistake of the critics that has given rise to the problem. 92 ARISTOTLE The test for alleged im- possibilities For alleged improbabil- ities For alleged contradic- tions in language Where the critic had best look for errors In general, questions as to the poet's use of impossi- bilities must be decided by an appeal either to (a) the end of Poetry, or to (b) ideal truth, or to (c) what is commonly believed. For the ends of Poetry, (a) a thing really im- possible, yet on the face of it convincing, is preferable' to one that, though possible, does not win belief. And if such men as Zeuxis painted be called too beautiful, the pictures may be defended as (b) true to the ideal ; for the type necessarily excels the average and actual. What the critics term improbable one must judge by an appeal to popular belief, and by an attempt to show that on occasion the thing may not be improbable ; for [as Agathon suggested (see p. 64)] it is likely that something improbable will now and then occur. As for alleged contradictions in the poet's language, these we must scrutinize as one deals with sophistical refutations in an argument ; that is, as is done in dialectics. Then we can see whether the poet in his several statements refers to the same thing, in the same relation, and in the same sense, and can judge whether or not he has contradicted what he himself says, or what a person of intelligence normally assumes as true. The censure of the critic is just, however, when it is directed against improbability in the plot, and, similarly, against depravity in the agents ; that is, when there is no inner necessity for a base agent, and when the irrational element serves no artistic purpose. Thus there is no ade- quate reason for Aegeus' appearing in Euripides' Medea, and none for the baseness of Menelaus in his Orestes. We see, accordingly, that all the strictures of critics are reducible to five species. Objections are raised THE ART OF POETRY 93 against poetry on the ground that something is either (i) impossible, (2) irrational (improbable), (3) morally summary hurtful, (4) contradictory, or (5) contrary to artistic cor- Five sources rectness. The answers to these objections must be sought under one or another of the heads enumerated above Three Main (see pp. 85-86). And these answers are twelve in num- ations ber. [The twelve problems and answers apparently cor- Twelve , ... , , , . / ^ T 1 special Prob- respond to criticisms that touch the poetic art (i) directly, lems ana (2) indirectly ; or that touch the poet as an imitator of things (3) as they were or are, (4) as they are said or thought to be, (5) as they ought to be ; or that bear on (6) strange words, (7) metaphors, (8) pronunciation, (9) punctuation, (10) grammatical ambiguity, (11) cus- tom of language, (12) different meanings of the same word.] The question finally suggests itself : Which is the Chapter 26 higher form of art. Epic Poetry or Tragedy .? Those who favor the Epic may argue thus : The less vulgar a General form is the higher ; and that which addresses the better which is audience is always the less vulgar. [Compare Milton : Epic"' ' Fit audience find though few.'] If this be so, it is ob- ^''^^^^^ vious that a pantomimic art like Tragedy is exceedingly vulgar ; for [so the argument runs] the performers sup- pose that unless they throw in something of their own, the audience will not understand what is meant, and hence they indulge in all sorts of bodily motions. [Com- pare Hamlet's advice to the Players : ' Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently.'] An inferior flute-player, for instance, when throwing the discus is to be represented, will twist and twirl like the athlete himself ; or if he is playing the Scylla, he will 94 ARISTOTLE The Case clutch at the leader of the Chorus. Tragedy, then, is T?ag°ay said to be an art of this kind, and to He under the same condemnation as the earUer actors passed upon the next generation. Thus Mynniscus used to call Callippides ' the Ape ', for overacting his parts ; and the actor Pin- darus, too, got a similar reputation. And as the later generation is held to be worse than the earlier among the actors, so the whole art of Tragedy, which is later than the Epic, is considered inferior to it. So we are told that the Epic is addressed to a cultivated audience, which does not need gestures and postures, and Tragedy to an audience that is inferior and does. Accordingly, if Tragedy is a vulgar art, it evidently is the lower form. The Answer The reply to this argument is twofold, (i) First, is Twofold , ■' ° „, ^ ' then, as to gesture and movement, (a) The censure at- taches, not to the art of the poet as such, but to the art 1. As to of his interpreter. And it touches the interpreter of gestures Epic as well as Tragic poetry ; for the epic reciter may likewise overdo the gesticulation — as did Sosistratus ; and it may be overdone in a singing contest — as by Mnasitheus the Opuntian. (b) In artistic representation, we are not to condemn all bodily movement ; otherwise we should have to con- demn outright the art of Dancing. What we must object to is the attitudes and gestures of the ignoble — the very objection that was brought against Callippides. The same criticism is passed on certain actors of to-day, who in assuming the r61e of women are said to lack the bearing of ladies. (c) It is quite possible for Tragedy to produce its characteristic effect without any movement or gesture, in THE ART OF POETRY 9S just the same way as Epic Poetry; for if we merely read a play, its quality becomes evident. Accordingly, if it be true that Tragedy is superior in all other respects, this alleged weakness need not be present. (2) Secondly, one must argue in favor of Tragedy 2. Tragedy (a) that it contains every element found in Epic Poetry ciMiv'eVcom- — since it may have a use even for the epic metre ; and effective^ that in addition (see pp. 27, 79) it has no inconsiderable elements of its own in Spectacular effects and in Music — and through the music the characteristic pleasure is distinctly heightened. Next, (b) the greater vividness of Tragedy is felt when we read the play as well as when we see it acted. Furthermore, (c) the tragic imitation attains its end in less space. And this may be deemed an advantage, since the concentrated effect is more delightful than one which is long drawn out, and so diluted. Consider the result, for example, if one were to lengthen out Oedipus the King into the number of lines in the Iliad. And again, (d) the unity of action is less strict in the epic poets, as is shown by the number of subjects for tragedies derived from any one of their works. Conse- quently, if an epic poet takes a strictly unified story, either he will tell it briefly, and it will seem abrupt, or he will make it conform to the usual heroic scale, and then it will seem thin and watery. By a less strict unity in an epic [even the best] is meant a case in which the story is made up of a plurality of actions. Thus the Iliad has many such parts, and the Odyssey also ; and each of these parts is of some magnitude. Nevertheless these two poems are as perfect in structure as the nature of 96 ARISTOTLE the Epic will permit ; and the action represented in each is as nearly as may be a unit. The Final If, then, Tragedy is superior to the Epic in all these respects, and particularly in fulfilling its special function as a form of poetry ; and if we recall, as we must (see pp. 43-44), that the two forms of serious poetry are to give us, not any chance pleasure, but the definite pleas- ure we have mentioned — it is clear that Tragedy, since it attains the poetic end more effectively than the Epic, is the higher form of the two. Conclusion So much for Tragedy and Epic Poetry as forms of Poetry in general ; for their several kinds and constitu- ent parts, with the number and nature of each ; for the causes of success or failure in the two forms ; and for critical objections, and the solutions to be employed in rejoinder. INDEX OF PROPER NAMES [References to Aristotle, to the Poetics, and to three names at the end of the Preface are omitted ; also a reference to the Deity, in the Introduction.] Abas 60 Achilles 31, 41, 49, 52, 63, 75, 76,81 Aegeus 92 Aegisthus 43 Aeschylus xix, xxiii, 13, 16, 35, 47. 55' 62, 63, 75, 80, 83 Agamemnon 32, 38 Agathon 33, 52, 63, 64, 92 Ajax 61 Ajax, Sophocles' i5 Alcibiades 32 Alcinous 55 Alcmeon 42, 45, 46 Amphiaraus 57 Aniheus, Agathon's 33 Antigone, Sophocles' viii, 41, 46 Antigonus 54 Antonio 36 Antony and Cleopatra 63 Apollo 89 Ares 71 Argas 7 Argos 34 Ariphrades 75, 76, 85 Aristophanes ix, xviii, 6, 8 Aristotle's Theory of Poetry, etc., Butcher's xxix Aristotle's Views on Music, etc., R. H. Bradley's xxviii Arthur in King John viii Astydamas 46 As You Like It 50, 62 Athenians 9 Athens 16, 70 Attic Theatre, Haigh's xxix Aulis 55 Aurengzebe, Dryden's 26 Award of the Arms 78 Bacchae, Euripides' 26 Bacon xxi Bath Scene in the Odyssey vi, 54, 82 Beowulf 30 Bible 5 Biographia Literaria, Coleridge's xvi n. Birds, Aristophanes' 6 Boileau ix Bradley, A. C. 58 Bradley, R. H. xxix Bride of Lamviermoor, Scott's 43 Browning xxiii Burke x, xvi, 58 Butcher vi, x, xxix Byron ix, 25, 30 Bywater vi, ix, x, xvii, xxvi, 20 Callippides 94 Carcinus 53, 57 Carroll, Mitchell x Carthaginians 77 Castelain xv n. Castelvetro ix, xv Catalogue of the Ships in the Iliad 78 Cenci, Shelley's 50 Centaur, Chaeremon's 4 Cephallenia 91 Cephallenians 91 Chaeremon 4, 81 Chaucer 25 Chionides 9 97 98 INDEX Cicero xxv Classical Review X Claudius 64, 65 Cleon 69 Cleophon 7, 73 Clytaemnestra 45, 47 Coleridge xvi, 20 Cook xvi n. Cordelia 36 Corneille 16 Cornish, G. Warre xxviii Cowper 20 Crabbe 73 Crates 15 Creon viii, xxvi, 26, 41, 46 Cresphontes, Euripides' 47 Croce, B. xxii Cypria 78 Cyfria, Dicaeogenes' 55 Cyprus 70 Danaus 36 Darwin, Erasmus 4 Daughters of Phineus 56 Daughters of Phorcys, Aeschy- lus' 62 Defense of Poesy, Sidney's xvi n. Delphi 16 Desdemona 27, 38 Dialogues, Plato's 4 Dicaeogenes 55 Diliad, Nicochares' 7 Diomed 88 Dionysius 6 Dionysus 26, 71 Discoveries, Ben Jonson's xv Doctor Faustus, Marlowe's 34 Dolon 89 Donatello, in Hawthorne's Marble Faun 37 Don fuan, Byron's 30 Don Juan, Moliire's xi Dorians 8, g Dover 58 Dryden ix, 25, 26 Duncan 36 Eden 55 Edmund 50 Education, Of See Of Education Egypt 37 Electra 55 Electra, Sophocles' 61, 83 Empedocles xxiii, 4, 70, 71, 90 Epichares 74 Epicharmus 8, 1 5 Eriphyle 45, 46 Ethics, See Nicomachean Ethics Euclid, the elder 74, 85 Eumenides, Aeschylus' 16 Euripides xix, xxiii, xxviii, i6, 24, 26, 38, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 5o> 54, 59' 63. 64, 75, 87, 92 Eurypylus 78 Faerie Queene, Spenser's 7 Faustus. See Doctor Faustus Fifteen Discourses on Art, Sir Joshua Reynolds' xxv n. Fortnightly Review xxviii France 16 Frere, J. H. ix Furies 43, 60 Ganymede 90 Glaucon 91 Gloucester 58 Goulston ix Governor of Egypt 36 Greece xviii, 8, 69 Greek Drama and the Dance, Cornish's xxviii Greeks xvii, 19, 51 Hades 62 Haemon viii, 46 Haigh xxix Hamlet 41, 47, 64, 65, 93 Hamlet viii, 33, 43 Hawthorne 37 Hector 81, 87 Hegemon of Thasos 7 Heinsius xv n. Hell 88 Helle 47 Heracleid 30 Heracles 30 Herdsman in Oedipus the King 61, 64 Hermione 53 INDEX 99 Hermo-caico-xanthus 69 Herodotus 31, 32 Hippias of Thasos go Hogarth 6 Homer xxviii, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 30, 31, 52, 66, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 91 Horace ix, xv, xviii Hubert in King John viii lago 27, 64, 65 Icadius 91 Icarius 91 Idylls of Theocritus 6 Iliad ^, 12, 15, 31, 41, 51, 52, 63, 65. 69, 75. 78, 79. 81, 88, 89, 95 Ilium 30, 55, 63, 78 Illyria 88 Iphigenia 38, 47, 50, 55 Iphigenia among the Taurians^ Euripides' xxviii, 38, 47, 54, 55. 57. 59. 60, 61 Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides' 50 Ithaca 84 Ivanhoe 43 Ixion 61 Jacob 36 Jocasta 38, 64, 65 Jonson, Ben xv and n. Joseph 36, 37 Julius Caesar 33 Jupiter XXV King Arthur and His Round Table, Frere's 7 King John viii King Lear xxvi, 36, 43, 50, 58, 63 King Richard the Second 50 King Richard the Third 63 KipUng 73 Lacedaemon 91 Lacedaemonian 91 Laertes 37 Laius 37, 51, 83 Lay oj Alcinous in the Odyssey 55 Lear 36, 41, 44 Lear. See King Lear Leonardo da Vinci xx, xxv ' Lesson in Anatomy ', Rem- brandt's 10 Libation-Pourers, Aeschylus' 47, 55 Littledale, H. xvi n. Little Iliad 78 Lockwood xvi n. Love, Coleridge's 20 Lynceus 36 Lynceus of Theodectes 36, 60 Lyrical Ballads xvi n., 6 Macbeth 36, 41 Macbeth xxvi, 36, 43 Magnes 9 Marathon 74 Marble Faun, Hawthorne's 37 Margites, the Homeric 11, 12 Margoliouth x Marlowe 34, 59 Mazzoni xv Medea 45 Medea, Euripides' 50, 92 Megara 8 Megarians 8 Melanippethe Wise, Euripides' 50 Meleager 42 Mendicant Odysseus 78 Menelaus 49, 92 Merchant of Venice 36, 43, 50, Ji Merope 47 Messenger in Oedipus the King 35.61 Milton xvi, xxii, 5, 19, 20, 25, 81,93 Minerva xxv Mitys X, 34 Mnasitheus of Opus 94 Moli^re xi Mona Lisa xxv Mynniscus 94 Mysia 83 Mysians, Aeschylus' 83 U'eoptolcTnus 78 New Testament 53 Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's Niobe 63 lOO INDEX Odysseus 30, 37, 41, 49, 54, 55, 56, 70, 75, 82, 83, 91 Odysseus -with the False Tidings 56 Odysseus Wounded, Sophocles' 46 Odyssey 12, 15, 30, 31, 37, 41, 43, 54, 55, 56, 60, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83. 91. 95 Oedipus xxvi, 26, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 46, 48, 51, 61 Oedipus the King, Sophocles' XXV, xxvii, 15, 19, 27, 35, 36, 38, 44, 47.48, SI. 57.61.83,95 Of Education, Milton's xvi n., xxii Oliver in As You Like It 50. On Poets, Aristotle's dialogue xvii, xxvii, 53 On ike Sublime and Beautiful, Burke xvi n. Orestean Trilogy of Aeschylus 80 Orestes 32, 38, 42, 43, 45, 47, 54, 55. 57. 59. 60, 61 Orestes, Euripides' 49, 92 Othello 26, 27, 38, 41, 45, 52, 64 Othello 19, 38, 43, 44, 61 Paradise Lost 31, 41, 55, 88 Parnassus 30 Pauson 6 Peleideo 72 Peleidou 72 Peleus, Sophocles' 61 Peloponnese g Pelops 40, 53 Penelope 82 Pericles xix Phaeacians 83 Pkaedrus, Plato's 28 Phidias xxv Philoctetes xxiii Philoctetes 78 Philoctetes, Aeschylus' 75 Philomela 54 Philoxenus 7 Phorrais 15 Pindarus, the actor 94 Plato xviii, xx, xxiv, 2, 4, 5, 28 Plautus 69 Plutarch x Poets. See On Poets Politics, Aristotle's xxi, 20 Polygnotus 6, 25 Polyidus the Sophist 55, 59 Poly-machaero-plagides 69 Polyphemus (Cyclops) 7, 37, 41, 75 Pope ix Portia 36, 50 Poseidon 37, 60 Prometheus, Aeschylus' 62 Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus' 35.62 Protagoras 65, 66 Racine 16 Raphael 6 Regan 50 Rembrandt 10, 25 Reynolds, Sir Joshua xxv n. Rhesus xix Rhetoric, Aristotle's xvi, 64 Richard II 50 Richards, Herbert x Rubens 25 Ruskin xx, 52 Sack of IliuTn 78 Sailing of the Pleet 78 Salamis 77 Samson Agonistes 19 Satan, Milton's 55, 88 Scott 43 Scylla 93 Scylla of Timotheus 49 Second Messenger in Oedipus the King 27 Shakespeare 19, 25, 27, 33, 36, 45. 47. 51. 52. 58, 59. 61, 62, 63, 64, 65 Shawcross xvi n. Shelley xx, 5, 25, 50 Shylock 36 Sicily 8, 1 5, 77 Sicyonians 9 Sidney, Sir Philip xvi Sinon 78 Sisyphus 63 Socrates xxiv, 3, 28 INDEX lOl Sophocles xix, xxvii, 8, 13, 15, 16, 19, 26, 35, 41, 46, 51, 53, 54, 57, 61, 64, 83, 87 Sophron 3 Sosistratus 94 Spartan Women 78 Spenser 7, 72 Sthenelus 73 Stobaeus xv n. Stiblime and Beautiful. See On the Sublime and Beautiful Tasso XV Tegea S3 Telegonus 46 Telemachus 91 Telephus 42, 44, 83 Tereus, Sophocles' 54 Thebes 40, 51 Theocritus 6 Theodectes 36, 56, 60 Theodore 68 Theseid 30 Theseus 30 Thomas 53 Thucydides 32 Thyestes 40, 42 Thyestes of Carcinus 53 Timotheus 7, 49 Trojan Women 78 Troy 81 Tydeus of Theodectes 56 Tyro 53 Tyro, Sophocles' 53 Tyrwhitt x Uriel, Milton's 55 Vahlen ix Vida ix Vinci. See Leonardo da Vinci Westminster Review xxix White Doe of Rylsione, Words- worth's 20 Winter's Tale 53, 57 Women of Phthia, Sophocles' 61 Wordsworth xvi, 4, 6, 20, 25, 27, 76 Xenarchus 3 Xenophanes 88 Zeus 90 Zeuxis 25, 92 JL'iiiiUilHUiiiiii!;