The Poetics by Aristotle (android based ebook reader txt) 📖
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each other’, no doubt the phrase, as Aristotle’s own examples show,
would primarily suggest to a Greek feuds between near relations. Yet
some of the meaning is lost if one translates simply ‘within the
family’.
There is another series of obscurities or confusions in the Poetics
which, unless I am mistaken, arises from the fact that Aristotle was
writing at a time when the great age of Greek tragedy was long past,
and was using language formed in previous generations. The words and
phrases remained in the tradition, but the forms of art and activity
which they denoted had sometimes changed in the interval. If we date
the Poetics about the year 330 B.C., as seems probable, that is more
than two hundred years after the first tragedy of Thespis was produced
in Athens, and more than seventy after the death of the last great
masters of the tragic stage. When we remember that a training in music
and poetry formed a prominent part of the education of every wellborn
Athenian, we cannot be surprised at finding in Aristotle, and to a
less extent in Plato, considerable traces of a tradition of technical
language and even of aesthetic theory.
It is doubtless one of Aristotle’s great services that he conceived so
clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a
history. But no writer, certainly no ancient writer, is always
vigilant. Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he
takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is
sometimes deceived by them. Thus there seem to be cases where he has
been affected in his conceptions of fifth-century tragedy by the
practice of his own day, when the only living form of drama was the
New Comedy.
For example, as we have noticed above, true Tragedy had always taken
its material from the sacred myths, or heroic sagas, which to the
classical Greek constituted history. But the New Comedy was in the
habit of inventing its plots. Consequently Aristotle falls into using
the word mythos practically in the sense of ‘plot’, and writing
otherwise in a way that is unsuited to the tragedy of the fifth
century. He says that tragedy adheres to ‘the historical names’ for an
aesthetic reason, because what has happened is obviously possible and
therefore convincing. The real reason was that the drama and the myth
were simply two different expressions of the same religious kernel (p.
44). Again, he says of the Chorus (p. 65) that it should be an
integral part of the play, which is true; but he also says that it’
should be regarded as one of the actors’, which shows to what an
extent the Chorus in his day was dead and its technique forgotten. He
had lost the sense of what the Chorus was in the hands of the great
masters, say in the Bacchae or the Eumenides. He mistakes, again, the
use of that epiphany of a God which is frequent at the end of the
single plays of Euripides, and which seems to have been equally so at
the end of the trilogies of Aeschylus. Having lost the living
tradition, he sees neither the ritual origin nor the dramatic value of
these divine epiphanies. He thinks of the convenient gods and
abstractions who sometimes spoke the prologues of the New Comedy, and
imagines that the God appears in order to unravel the plot. As a
matter of fact, in one play which he often quotes, the _Iphigenia
Taurica_, the plot is actually distorted at the very end in order to
give an opportunity for the epiphany.[1]
[1] See my Euripides and his Age, pp. 221-45.
One can see the effect of the tradition also in his treatment of the
terms Anagnorisis and Peripeteia, which Professor Bywater translates
as ‘Discovery and Peripety’ and Professor Butcher as ‘Recognition and
Reversal of Fortune’. Aristotle assumes that these two elements are
normally present in any tragedy, except those which he calls ‘simple’;
we may say, roughly, in any tragedy that really has a plot. This
strikes a modern reader as a very arbitrary assumption. Reversals of
Fortune of some sort are perhaps usual in any varied plot, but surely
not Recognitions? The clue to the puzzle lies, it can scarcely be
doubted, in the historical origin of tragedy. Tragedy, according to
Greek tradition, is originally the ritual play of Dionysus, performed
at his festival, and representing, as Herodotus tells us, the
‘sufferings’ or ‘passion’ of that God. We are never directly told what
these ‘sufferings’ were which were so represented; but Herodotus
remarks that he found in Egypt a ritual that was ‘in almost all points
the same’. [1] This was the well-known ritual of Osiris, in which the
god was torn in pieces, lamented, searched for, discovered or
recognized, and the mourning by a sudden Reversal turned into joy. In
any tragedy which still retained the stamp of its Dionysiac origin,
this Discovery and Peripety might normally be expected to occur, and
to occur together. I have tried to show elsewhere how many of our
extant tragedies do, as a matter of fact, show the marks of this
ritual.[2]
[1] Cf. Hdt. ii. 48; cf. 42,144. The name of Dionysus must not be
openly mentioned in connexion with mourning (ib. 61, 132, 86). This
may help to explain the transference of the tragic shows to other
heroes.
[2] In Miss Harrison’s Themis, pp. 341-63.
I hope it is not rash to surmise that the much-debated word
_katharsis_, ‘purification’ or ‘purgation’, may have come into
Aristotle’s mouth from the same source. It has all the appearance of
being an old word which is accepted and re-interpreted by Aristotle
rather than a word freely chosen by him to denote the exact phenomenon
he wishes to describe. At any rate the Dionysus ritual itself was a
katharmos or katharsis—a purification of the community from the
taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and
death. And the words of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in Chapter
VI might have been used in the days of Thespis in a much cruder and
less metaphorical sense. According to primitive ideas, the mimic
representation on the stage of ‘incidents arousing pity and fear’ did
act as a katharsis of such ‘passions’ or ‘sufferings’ in real life.
(For the word pathemata means ‘sufferings’ as well as ‘passions’.)
It is worth remembering that in the year 361 B.C., during Aristotle’s
lifetime, Greek tragedies were introduced into Rome, not on artistic
but on superstitious grounds, as a katharmos against a pestilence
(Livy vii. 2). One cannot but suspect that in his account of the
purpose of tragedy Aristotle may be using an old traditional formula,
and consciously or unconsciously investing it with a new meaning, much
as he has done with the word mythos.
Apart from these historical causes of misunderstanding, a good teacher
who uses this book with a class will hardly fail to point out numerous
points on which two equally good Greek scholars may well differ in the
mere interpretation of the words. What, for instance, are the ‘two
natural causes’ in Chapter IV which have given birth to Poetry? Are
they, as our translator takes them, (1) that man is imitative, and (2)
that people delight in imitations? Or are they (1) that man is
imitative and people delight in imitations, and (2) the instinct for
rhythm, as Professor Butcher prefers? Is it a ‘creature’ a thousand
miles long, or a ‘picture’ a thousand miles long which raises some
trouble in Chapter VII? The word zoon means equally ‘picture’ and
‘animal’. Did the older poets make their characters speak like
‘statesmen’, politikoi, or merely like ordinary citizens, politai,
while the moderns made theirs like ‘professors of rhetoric’? (Chapter
VI, p. 38; cf. Margoliouth’s note and glossary).
It may seem as if the large uncertainties which we have indicated
detract in a ruinous manner from the value of the Poetics to us as a
work of criticism. Certainly if any young writer took this book as a
manual of rules by which to ‘commence poet’, he would find himself
embarrassed. But, if the book is properly read, not as a dogmatic
text-book but as a first attempt, made by a man of astounding genius,
to build up in the region of creative art a rational order like that
which he established in logic, rhetoric, ethics, politics, physics,
psychology, and almost every department of knowledge that existed in
his day, then the uncertainties become rather a help than a
discouragement. The.g.ve us occasion to think and use our
imagination. They make us, to the best of our powers, try really to
follow and criticize closely the bold gropings of an extraordinary
thinker; and it is in this process, and not in any mere collection of
dogmatic results, that we shall find the true value and beauty of the
Poetics.
The book is of permanent value as a mere intellectual achievement; as
a store of information about Greek literature; and as an original or
first-hand statement of what we may call the classical view of
artistic criticism. It does not regard poetry as a matter of
unanalysed inspiration; it makes no concession to personal whims or
fashion or ennui. It tries by rational methods to find out what is
good in art and what makes it good, accepting the belief that there is
just as truly a good way, and many bad ways, in poetry as in morals or
in playing billiards. This is no place to try to sum up its main
conclusions. But it is characteristic of the classical view that
Aristotle lays his greatest stress, first, on the need for Unity in
the work of art, the need that each part should subserve the whole,
while irrelevancies, however brilliant in themselves, should be cast
away; and next, on the demand that great art must have for its subject
the great way of living. These judgements have often been
misunderstood, but the truth in them is profound and goes near to the
heart of things.
Characteristic, too, is the observation that different kinds of art
grow and develop, but not indefinitely; they develop until they
‘attain their natural form’; also the rule that each form of art should
produce ‘not every sort of pleasure but its proper pleasure’; and the
sober language in which Aristotle, instead of speaking about the
sequence of events in a tragedy being ‘inevitable’, as we bombastic
moderns do, merely recommends that they should be ‘either necessary or
probable’ and ‘appear to happen because of one another’.
Conceptions and attitudes of mind such as these constitute what we may
call the classical faith in matters of art and poetry; a faith which
is never perhaps fully accepted in any age, yet, unlike others, is
never forgotten but lives by being constantly criticized, re-asserted,
and rebelled against. For the fashions of the ages vary in this
direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central
road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.
G. M
ARISTOTLE ON THE ART OF POETRY
1Our subject being Poetry, I propose to speak not only of the art in
general but also of its species and their respective capacities; of
the structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number and
nature of the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of any other
matters in the same line of inquiry. Let us follow the natural order
and begin with the primary facts.
Epic poetry and Tragedy, as also Comedy, Dithyrambic poetry, and most
flute-playing and lyre-playing, are all, viewed as a whole,
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