The Poetics, Aristotle [ebook reader for surface pro TXT] 📗

it occurs ‘amid affections’ or ‘among people who love

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

1

Our 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,