IX
RHETORIC AND POETICS

RHETORIC

The Greeks were both a politically minded and a litigious race, and the arts of speech were as useful a passport to influence with them as they are in a modern democracy; while it was in accordance with their restless spirit of intellectual curiosity that the theory of speaking received from them more attention than it does in modern communities in which its practice is no less important. Several ‘Arts of Speech’ had been written before Aristotle’s time; he complains, however, that they had all neglected the argumentative element in oratory and had attended to extraneous matters such as the production of emotion in the hearers. He himself recognises the part played by the appeal to emotion, but insists that the emotion must be produced by the speech itself and not by the cheap adventitious devices common in the Greek law-courts.¹ In fact, he connects this defect of previous writers on oratory with their pre-occupation with the oratory of the courts rather than with the more noble political branch of the art. In both these respects he undertakes to improve upon his predecessors.² The argumentative element in oratory is emphasised at the outset and throughout. Rhetoric is described as a counterpart or a branch of dialectic.³ Its connexion is with dialectic rather than with scientific demonstration; like the former it deals with arguments which do not presuppose the knowledge of any particular science but can be used and followed by any intelligent man. In principle oratory, like dialectic, can discuss any subject whatever, but in practice it is for the most part confined to the subjects about which men deliberate and thus it is connected with another science besides logic; it is ‘an offshoot of dialectic and of the study of character which may properly be called politics,’⁴ taking its form from the first and its matter from the second.

Rhetoric is ‘the power to see the possible ways of persuading people about any given subject.’⁵ Persuasives are of two kinds— the extra-technical which already exist and have only to be used (such as witnesses, the torture, documentary evidence), and the technical, which have to be invented by the speaker. Of the latter there are three species, those bearing on the character of the speaker (i.e. devices of speech by which he induces his hearers to form a favourable opinion of his character), those which consist in the arousing of emotion in the hearers, and those which produce proof or its appearance by sheer force of argument The third species of persuasive is considered first. It has two main subspecies—example, the rhetorical counter-part of induction, and enthymeme, the rhetorical counterpart of syllogism.⁶ Of these the latter is the rhetorical method par excellence, ‘the body of persuasion.’⁷ ‘Arguments by example are no less persuasive, but enthymemes win more applause.’⁸ The mode of argument to beused is of course dictated by the conditions under which the orator works. Now the subjects he has to deal with are the sort of things we deliberate about, in so far as these fall outside the scope of the definite arts and sciences; and the people he has to address are people who cannot follow a long train of reasoning. He will therefore deal with probabilities (since certainties are not matters of deliberation), and he will use short trains of reasoning, taking premises for granted when they are likely to be admitted rather than deducing them from first principles.

Enthymemes are of two main kinds. There are the specific arguments dealing with the subject-matter of some science, e.g. ethics or physics, and the general arguments drawn from theliterally the places in which arguments are to be found, the regions, as it were, which they haunt. In proportion as a speaker uses specific arguments, he is deserting the province of rhetoric; but in view of the comparatively small number of general arguments available Aristotle allows the speaker to use specific arguments as well, and proposes to discuss these first. In view of the conditions under which the speaker works, they will mostly be drawn from ethics and politics.⁹ But first he distinguishes three branches of rhetoric. The hearer may be either a spectator or a judge, and a judge of acts either in the past or in the future. Thus there is (1) the oratory of the counsellor, showing some future course to be expedient or harmful; (2) that of the advocate, showing some past act to be legal or illegal; (3) ‘show’ oratory, whose object is to show the nobility or baseness of something treated as existing in the present. The political speaker, Aristotle remarks with grave irony, may admit that the course he advocates is unjust, but he must on no account admit that it is inexpedient; the advocate may allow that his client has behaved harmfully, but never that he has broken the law; the panegyrist may admit that the subject of his eulogium is unmindful of his own interest, but must at all costs claim for him moral rectitude.¹⁰

Aristotle proceeds to indicate the sorts of argument appropriate in political oratory (I. 4–8), in declamation (I. 9), and in pleading in the law-courts (I. 10–14), with an appendix on the ‘extratechnical’ proofs already mentioned (I. 15). The substance of these chapters is a sort of popular political and moral philosophy which is sometimes interesting for purposes of comparison with his scientific views expressed elsewhere (e.g. the forensic section throws light on the doctrines of the Ethics about responsibility and justice); but Aristotle is careful to point out the purely popular character of what he here says about such subjects. ‘In so far as anyone tries to construct either dialectic or rhetoric not as a knack but as a science, he will unconsciously destroy their nature by passing over, in his attempt to reconstruct them, into sciences of definite subject-matters, and not of mere arguments.’¹¹ The last chapter furnishes a lively and amusing account of various tricks of the advocate’s trade such as the appeal from written to unwritten law; it illustrates perhaps better than any other passage the characteristic of rhetoric which Aristotle has duly noted, that it ‘proves opposites.’¹²

So far he has been dealing with the ‘specific proofs’ drawn from ethics and politics.¹³ Instead of proceeding, as might be expected, to the ‘commonplaces’ of argument, he now turns to the other main persuasives—those by which the speaker conveys a favourable impression of his own character (II. 1), and those by which he arouses various emotions in his hearers (II. 2–11); we do not reach the commonplaces till ch. 18. Chs. 12–17 form a section dealing with ‘character’ in a different way from that in which it has hitherto been referred to. It treats of the characters to be expected in hearers in view of their youth or age and of their position in respect of the gifts of fortune— characters to which the speaker will naturally adapt his way of speaking, so as to produce in his hearers the emotions he wishes to produce; this section is thus subsidiary to that which precedes it. In chs. 18 and 19 Aristotle comes at last to the ‘commonplaces’ of oratory, the ‘regions’ within whidh the most general arguments are to be found. These are four in number —‘the possible and impossible’ and ‘the future,’ specially appropriate to political oratory; ‘the past,’ specially appropriate to forensic speech; and ‘magnitude’ (induding comparative magnitude), specially appropriate to declamation. Each of these regions yields a variety of general arguments; e.g. ‘if a thing is possible, its contrary is also possible’; ‘if a thing is possible, its like is also possible’; ‘if what is harder is possible, so is what is easier.’ Aristotle next turns to something still more general, the ‘common persuasives’ or forms into which all rhetorical argument whatever falls, example (ch. 20) and enthymeme (chs. 21–24). The latter includes the or general moral sentiment, which is the major premise or the conclusion of a syllogism with the rest left unexpressed. In ch. 23 we find a fresh set of twenty-eight in number, quite distinct from the four mentioned in chs. 18 and 19. The relation of these two sets to one another is something of a puzzle, which can perhaps best be explained by supposing the Rhetoric to represent the notes for more than one course of lectures. The topics of ch. 23 are a selection from those enumerated in the Topics—there is the topic of ‘contraries,’ that of ‘similar inflexions’, that of ‘relative terms,’ that of ‘a fortiori,’ etc. We have also (ch. 24) a list of fallacies akin to that in the Sophistici Elenchi. Finally there is an account of the modes of refutation (ch. 25), and an appendix setting aside two possible misconceptions (ch. 26).

The second book ends and the third begins with an entirely new division of the contents of the art of rhetoric, into the material of persuasion (i.e. the subjects hitherto dealt with— argument, character, emotion), style, and arrangement. This looks like a piece of patchwork, and Diels has argued¹⁴ with much probability that the third book was originally an independent work on style and arrangement, which Aristotle later tacked on to the two books on the subject-matter of oratory.

Style is treated of in chs. 2–12, arrangement in chs. 13–19. Elocution, the management of the voice as regards loudness, pitch, and rhythm, is first briefly dismissed as extra-technical and as being necessary only owing to the vulgarity of audiences. With regard to style, Aristotle points out that the early rhetoricians had imitated the diction of the poets, but that prose style is essentially different from that of poetry. It is peculiarly absurd, he adds, for prose-writers to imitate the diction of poetry just when the poets themselves have adopted a style more conformable to that of ordinary speech.¹⁵

The essential virtues of style are that it should be in the first place clear, and in the second appropriate, i.e. neither mean nor pompous. Aristotle first considers the bearing of this on the choice of words. Clearness is secured by using the ordinary, straight-forward word for expressing your thought, but something more than this is required; to avoid meanness you must introduce something of the ornate and exotic, ‘for men wonder at what is at a distance from them, and the wonderful is pleasant.’¹⁶ But prose does not admit so much of this as poetry, since its theme is lower; even in poetry we do not like stilted language in the mouth of a slave or a very young man. You must lower or raise your tone in accordance with the dignity of your subject, and you must do this unobserved. Your speech must seem natural, just as a supreme actor’s voice always seems to be that of the character he is playing.’ Aristotle notes Euripides’ exquisite power of producing a poetical effect by careful selection of the commonest words. The unusual words, the compound words, the coined words of poetry must be avoided; only what everyone uses—ordinary words and metaphors—must be used by the orator.¹⁷ At all costs the use of ornament which is stale and frigid must be avoided.¹⁸

From the choice of single words Aristotle proceeds to the combination of them into sentences. The headings here are grammatical purity (ch. 5), dignity (6), propriety (7), rhythmical harmony (8), the construction of periods (9), liveliness (10, 11) and the styles suitable to the three divisions of rhetoric— political, judicial, declamatory (12). These chapters contain many acute and true observations, which have since become the commonplaces of works on style; we must be content to note a few points which have perhaps not become so hackneyed. Aristotle insists that prose should be rhythmical without being metrical. Too pronounced a rhythm will seem artificial and will divert attention from the orator’s meaning; a speech entirely without rhythm seems a limitless stretch of words. Dactyls and spondees are too lofty for prose; the iambus is too much the rhythm of everyday speech; the trochee is too tripping a measure, Aristotle declares therefore for the pæonic rhythm, which is not the basis of a definite metre and is therefore less noticeable than the other rhythms. He advocates the combination—o o o at the beginning and o o o—at the end of the sentence. In dealing with the larger rhythm of the whole sentence he prefers the compact periodic style to the loosely-knit style of Herodotus. He notes the value of antithesis, balance, and assonance in knitting the sentence into a period with beginning, middle, and end. He recognises the superiority of language which ‘brings things before our eyes,’ which ‘represents things in action.’ How much more vivid is ‘with all the bloom of youth upon him’ than ‘a foursquare man’!¹⁹

Turning to the subject of arrangement, Aristotle ridicules the current elaborate division of speeches into parts some of which were in fact peculiar to certain classes of speech. The essential parts are two—to state your case, and to prove it. But he is willing to admit at most Isocrates’ division of the speech into exordium, statement of the case, proof, peroration. These are dealt with in the following chapters with reference to all three kinds of oratory—political, judicial, declamatory; exordium in chs. 14. 15, statement in 16, proof in 17 (with an appendix on the use of questioning in ch. 18), peroration in 19.

The Rhetoric may seem at first sight to be a curious jumble of literary criticism with second-rate logic, ethics, politics, and jurisprudence, mixed by the cunning of one who knows well how the weaknesses of the human heart are to be played upon. In understanding the book it is essential to bear in mind its purely practical purpose. It is not a theoretical work on any of these subjects; it is a manual for the speaker. The subject interested the Greeks very deeply. Aristotle was, as he himself says, less of a pioneer here than in some other directions. But his work attained an enormous authority; his doctrines appear over and over again in the works of Greek, Roman, and modern writers on the subject. Much of what he says applies only to the conditions of Greek society, but very much is permanently true. If the Rhetoric has now less life in it than most of Aristotle’s works, it is probably because speakers are nowadays (and rightly) inclined to rely on natural talent and experience rather than on instruction, and because hearers, though as easily swayed by rhetoric as ever, are rather ashamed of the fact and not much interested in knowing how the trick is done. For these reasons we have dealt very briefly with the book, and have been content to give an account of its general plan which may perhaps help readers to find their way about in it.

POETICS²⁰

The Poetics, on the other hand, is among the most living of Aristotle’s works. None of his works has attracted the attention of a more brilliant company of interpreters, and of none has the meaning been more keenly disputed. And if nothing of his had been left to us but this tiny fragment—on a subject, too, far removed from his main interests—we should still recognise its author as one of the greatest of analytic thinkers.

The term has more than one meaning in Aristotle. In its most general sense it includes the useful and the fine arts as opposed to the art of life and to science. In the Poetics it has a narrower meaning. It belongs to the genus of ‘imitation,’²¹ which is coextensive with the fine arts; but it is not the whole of this genus. A distinction is drawn²² between the arts which imitate by means of colour and shape and those which imitate by the voice, and the latter expression answers roughly to what Aristotle would call poetry as opposed to the plastic arts; but only roughly, for we should have to generalise ‘voice’ into ‘sound’ so as to bring in instrumental music, and we should have to generalise still further so as to bring in dancing. What then is it that is common to music, dancing, and what we call poetry, and that leads Aristotle to form them into a single group? He does not tell us, in so many words, but his meaning may be seen by considering the principles on which he subdivides the group. These principles are the means, the objects, and the manner of imitation.²³ (1) The means appropriate to the group are rhythm, language, and tune, and what these have in common is temporal succession, as opposed to the spatial extension by which painting and sculpture produce their effects. Visible spatial phenomena of course play their part in drama, but in Aristotle’s opinion this is a very subsidiary part;²⁴ he would, we may conjecture, have thought it no great loss if the actors did their work behind a screen.²⁵

Rhythm	Dancing.
Language	Prose-imitation (mimes, Socratic dialogues).
Rhythm + language	Elegies, epics.
Rhythm + tune	Instrumental music.
Rhythm + language + tune	Lyrics, tragedy, comedy.26

Tune never exists without rhythm, and the seven possible combinations of the three means are thus reduced to five. ‘Poetry’ therefore has the following divisions:

It is pointed out that what distinguishes poetry from prose is not metre but its being an ‘imitation’; fictitious sketches of character and manners like the mimes are poetry though they are unmetrical, and Empedocles is not a poet though he writes in metre. What then is imitation? Aristotle never tells us. He takes over the word from Plato as part of the stock-in-trade of literary criticism. For Plato art is the imitation of sensible things by means of a copy at a lower level of reality.²⁷ And this leads him to condemn art on two grounds. The artist is always pretending to be someone else. If he describes a battle, he is falsely claiming to know how battles should be fought. If he puts words into Achilles’ mouth, he is pretending to be Achilles. ‘Life, in Plato’s state,’ it has been well said,²⁸ ‘was divided into sections, like the squares upon a chessboard; and justice, the characteristic virtue of his community, was to move on your own squares, and never trespass upon your neighbour’s. But the poet is a trespasser.’ And secondly, the artist never imitates reality directly; he imitates sensible things, which are but the faint shadows of reality, Aristotle does not explicitly controvert this view, but he supplies materials for its correction.²⁹ What art imitates is ‘characters and emotions and actions,³⁰—not the sensible world, but the world of man’s mind. Of all the arts the least imitative, that which can least be charged with merely trying to duplicate something already existing, is music; but for Aristotle it is the most imitative.³¹ This can only mean that it is the most expressive, that which most successfully embodies emotion, or (to speak more strictly, since emotion exists only in souls) which most effectively arouses in others emotions akin to those felt or imagined by the artist. The same conclusion follows if we consider the difference of the means adopted by different arts. All the poetic arts ‘imitate’ action, but drama evidently reproduces it much the most completely, and if the others aimed at reproduction they would be wasting their time in using such inferior means. Once more, the famous saying that ‘poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars’³² points the same lesson. Poetry does not aim at reproducing an individual thing, but at giving a new embodiment to a universal truth. There is, of course, danger in this notion of poetry as universal. It easily degenerates into the view that poetry should present general types of character denuded of the individual traits which make both real people and fictitious characters interesting and delightful. Aristotle’s doctrine has often been so interpreted. But to interpret him so is to think of the universal simply as that which ‘can be predicated of more things than one’³³ and to forget that for Aristotle the universal is the necessary.³⁴ History describes events in which the necessary sequence of effect on cause is obscured by a thousand casual interventions; poetry, and particularly tragedy, depicts the inevitable dependence of destiny on character. We shall see that on the whole Aristotle is true to this principle in his consideration of tragedy. Yet he does not entirely shake off the influence of the term ‘imitation.’ If he had, he would probably have chosen another word. And we shall see evidences of its ill effect on his thought.

We must return to his division of poetry into its kinds. (2) The second principle of division is this. The imitator imitates men in action, and these either above, on, or below the level of ordinary human nature.³⁵ This is an independent principle dividing each of the previously recognised kinds of poetry into three. Its chief value for Aristotle is that it enables him to distinguish tragedy, the depiction of good characters, from comedy, the depiction of bad.³⁶ He will later refine on this account. Comedy depicts men worse than the average ‘not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly; the ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others.’³⁷ And tragedy depicts characters good indeed, but not so much above ourselves as to lose our sympathy.³⁸ And further, within each kind of poetry there are practitioners who depict higher and others who depict lower types of character.³⁹

This classification of the characters depicted in poetry as good or bad indicates how much Aristotle is influenced by the moralistic tendency in aesthetic criticism which is always the earliest to emerge and is particularly strong in Plato. Aristotle admits bad characters in drama, but only when they are necessitated by the plot,⁴⁰ and only in subordinate roles. He has no conception of the possibility of a hero who like Macbeth or Richard III or Satan wins our interest by sheer intensity. His thought is of course conditioned by the traditions of Greek drama; but a character like that of Clytemnestra might, if he had sufficiently considered it, have led him to substitute ‘greatness’ or ‘intensity’ for ‘goodness.’

(3) Thirdly, imitations—but clearly this applies only to those which use language, to poetry in our sense—are divided into the narrative and the dramatic.⁴¹ This furnishes a distinction between epic and drama additional to and more important than that supplied by the first principle of division; in drama action is imitated by action.

Aristotle next⁴² traces the origin of poetry, and of drama in particular. Poetry owes its origin to two primitive instincts—the instinct to imitate, and the instinct to delight in imitations made by others. We delight in them—and the remark indicates Aristotle’s freedom from a purely duplicative notion of imitation -even when the things imitated are in themselves painful, Aristotle explains this second instinct, in too intellectualistic a way, as a form of the instinct to seek knowledge, which is the beginning of all mental progress; the pleasure, we are told, lies in recognising what the work of art is meant to represent. But incidentally he lights on another and an equally important source of the pleasure we take in works of art—the sensuous delight in such things as colour, tune, and rhythm.

Springing from these origins, poetry broke up into kinds according to the differences of character in poets. ‘The graver among them would represent noble actions…and the meaner sort the actions of the ignoble.’⁴³ And so on the one hand were produced invectives, on the other hymns, panegyrics, and epic. Ultimately the two streams of movement culminated in comedy and tragedy respectively, ‘because these new modes of art were grander and of more esteem than the old.’⁴⁴ More precisely, tragedy and comedy arose from the introduction of an improvised spoken part in connexion with dithyrambs and phallic songs respectively. The early connexion of tragedy with the dance is also noted.

Epic poetry and tragedy agree in being imitations ‘of serious subjects in a grand kind of verse’;⁴⁵ they differ in that (1) epic is in a single kind of verse and in narrative form, and (2) epic has no fixed limit of time, whereas tragedy ‘endeavours to keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the sun, or something near that.’⁴⁶ Aristotle is here taking account of the actual difference of length, in Greek as in later practice, between drama and epic, and deriving it from the greater duration of the action depicted. This passage, Aristotle’s supposed statement of the ‘unity of time,’ does not state a canon of his own but merely a historical fact about the practice of the Greek drama—though he would doubtless have thought unity of time conducive to the ‘unity of action’ which is the only unity he insists on.⁴⁷ The reference to the ‘unity of place’ is equally slight;⁴⁸ he merely says that tragedy cannot represent actions which happen simultaneously in different places. Thirdly (3) epic and drama differ also in their constituents. Drama uses the means of tune in addition to the rhythm and language used by epic.

Aristotle now proceeds⁴⁹ to define tragedy. It is ‘the imitation of an action that is good and also complete in itself and of some magnitude; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear wherewith to accomplish its purgation of such emotions.’⁵⁰ With parts of this definition we are already familiar —with the genus (imitation) and with the differential referring to the object, means, and manner of imitation; ‘language with pleasant accessories’ is explained as meaning ‘language +rhythm+tune.’ ‘Each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work’ refers to the fact that tragedy, unlike the dithyramb, uses tune only in the choral parts.⁵¹ These differentiae are enough to distinguish tragedy from all other forms in Greek and probably in any literature, but Aristotle adds other characteristics. (1) The action represented must be complete, i.e. it must have beginning, middle, and end. It must not be the sort of composition in which one can see no reason why it should begin or end where it does.⁵² It must have a beginning which is comparatively intelligible in itself and does not forcibly provoke the question ‘how did this come to be?’; an end which is satisfying and does not provoke the question ‘and then?’; and a middle which is necessitated by the beginning and necessitates the end. And further (2) it must have a certain magnitude.⁵³ Aristotle is always sure that each thing, whether it be a ship, a city, or a work of art, has an appropriate limit of size. In particular, beauty depends on size; if the object be too small, ‘our perception becomes indistinct as it approaches instantaneity’; if too large, ‘the unity and wholeness of it is lost to the beholder.’ As a beautiful visible whole must be of a size to be taken in by the eye, a good tragic plot must be of a length to be taken in by the memory. The arousing of interest being cumulative, the action must have a certain length in order to arouse our interest to the full; it must not go bevond a certain length, or interest will be dissipated through fatigue. This differentia marks tragedy off from the slight improvisations out of which it historically arose; but at the same time it distinguishes good tragedy from bad. The two differentiae together are interesting, because it is here that Aristotle most explicitly refers to the formal conditions of the beauty at which the dramatist, like every other artist, is assumed to aim. Of the three conditions of beauty mentioned elsewhere,⁵⁴ ‘symmetry’ is omitted, perhaps as more appropriate to the piastic arts. The condition with regard to beginning, middle, and end is identified with ‘order.’⁵⁵ And in the rule with regard to size we may recognise the third condition, ‘limitation.’ (3) To be complete, the definition must mention the final cause of tragedy, and this Aristotle does by naming purgation as its aim. A whole library has been written on this famous doctrine. The main opposition is between the views which take to be a metaphor drawn from ceremonial purification, and the object of tragedy to be a moral one, the purification of the emotions, and those which take to be a metaphor drawn from the purgation of evil bodily humours,⁵⁶ and the object assigned to tragedy to be non-moral. The former view has the support of many famous names, and is chiefly associated with that of Lessing. The latter view found support as early as the Renaissance and has been placed almost beyond dispute by the arguments of Bernays.⁵⁷

We may distinguish a direct and an ulterior object of tragedy. Its direct object is to arouse pity and fear, pity for the past and present sufferings of the hero, fear for those which loom before him. It has sometimes been thought, on the strength of passages in the Rhetoric,⁵⁸ that while the spectator’s pity is for the hero, his fear is for himself—fear lest a like fate should befall him.⁵⁹ But no ordinary spectator is likely to fear the fate of, for instance, Aristotle’s typical hero OEdipus. To make sense of this hypothesis, the fear has to be generalised into a vague fear of the unknown fate that lies before each of us; but of this there is no trace in Aristotle. In fact he directly says that the fear is for the hero.⁶⁰ True, in order that we should feel it the hero must be ‘like our selves,’ but this is because without some degree of likeness we cannot feel sympathetic fear for him.

That tragedy arouses pity and fear is a matter of common knowledge, and was one of the main bases of Plato’s attack on it; by stimulating emotion, he said, tragedy makes us more emotional and weak. Aristotle implicitly answers him by saying that the further effect of tragedy is not to make us more emotional but to purge away emotion. That this is the meaning of is shown by two passages in the Politics⁶¹ in which Aristotle describes certain kinds of music—called ‘orgiastic’ or ‘enthusiastic’ in opposition to others which are ‘ethical’ or else ‘practical’ (i.e. imitative of character or of action)—as aiming not at instruction nor at relaxation, but at ‘The feeling which takes a violent form in some souls exists more or less in all—e.g. pity and fear, and again enthusiasm. For this emotion also has its victims but as a result of the sacred melodies we see them—when they have felt the influence of the melodies that excite the soul to mystic frenzy—restored as though they had found healing and purgation. This same treatment, then, must be applied to those who are specially liable to pity or fear or in general to emotion, and to all others in so far as each is susceptible to such emotions; all need to be in a manner purged and their souls lightened and delighted. Just in this way the purgative melodies also give an innocent pleasure to mankind.’ This passage further refers to the Poetics for a fuller account of the reference is doubtless to the missing second book.

Three things are to be noted here—(1) that cathartic melodies are distinguished from those which are ethical and aim at ‘instruction,’ i.e. at improvement of character. This is itself almost enough to refute those who make Aristotle’s account of tragedy a moralistic one involving the purification of the passions. The aim under which that of tragedy is subsumed is pleasure. The fine arts in general are among those which aim at pleasure, in distinction from the useful arts which produce the necessaries of life and from the sciences which aim at knowledge.⁶² But the pleasure arising from is a specific one, distinct from that of mere relaxation and amusement.⁶³ The tragic poet must aim at producing the pleasure aroused by relief from pity and fear, and no other. Whether Aristotle definitely recognised aesthetic pleasure as a species included under pleasure in general, and including the pleasures produced by the various arts, is doubtful. (2) The language is medical, and more clearly seen to be medical the more closely it is examined in connexion with Aristotle’s biological works and the Hippocratean writings.⁶⁴ (3) Aristotle’s usage elsewhere shows that ‘the purgation of such emotions’ probably means ‘the removal of them,’ not (as has more usually been supposed) ‘the removal of the inferior elements in them.’ But it does not mean the entire removal of them; Aristotle would not think it good for a man to be entirely freed from all tendency to fear or to pity; ‘there are things which we ought to fear,’⁶⁵ and things which we ought to pity. It means ‘the removal of them in so far as they are in excess.’ There is nothing in the medical associations of that forbids this interpretation, and common sense is in its favour.

The process hinted at bears a strong resemblance to the ‘abreaction,’ the working-off of strong emotion, to which psychoanalysts attach importance. There is this difference, however, that what they try to bring about in abnormal cases Aristotle describes as the effect of tragedy on the normal spectator. Do most men in fact go about with an excessive tendency to pity and fear? And are they in fact relieved by witnessing the sufferings of the tragic hero? That we somehow benefit by seeing or reading a great tragedy, and that it is by pity and fear that it produces its effect, is beyond doubt; but is not the reason to be found elsewhere? Is it that people deficient in pity and fear because their lives give little occasion for such feelings are for once taken out of themselves and made to realise the heights and depths of human experience? Is not this enlarging of our experience, and the accompanying teaching of ‘self-knowledge and self-respect,’⁶⁶ the real reason of the value which is placed upon tragedy? Aristotle’s account is probably true of natures which tend to be constantly oppressed by the dark side of human life. And it is not quite the ordinary man that he has in view, for the ordinary man likes happy endings, which Aristotle rates low.⁶⁷

From the definition of tragedy Aristotle passes to enumerate its elements. These are, in order of importance, the following: (A) elements involved in the object represented—Plot, Character. Thought; (B) elements involved in the means of representation—Diction (including the two means formerly described as language and rhythm). Melody; (C) the element involved in the manner of representation—Spectacle (with special reference to the makeup of the actors). Aristotle is at pains to show that plot is more important than character and thought, and this has provoked the criticism of those who hold character to be the chief element in a play (or in a novel). Plot (it is argued), if divorced from character and thought, is reduced to a set of movements performed by persons of no particular moral or intellectual quality; and such a plot—an intrigue carried on by lay figures—has no artistic value. The antithesis is surely an absurd one. How could the creatures of the stage go through their evolutions without some sort of purpose and some degree of intelligence being implied in what they do? And how can character be manifested without some plot? We must not push the abstraction to these extremes, Aristotle’s meaning is to be discovered by noting (1) that the opposition between plot and character is an example of that between actuality and potentiality. Character when opposed to plot is just character-in-so-far-as-it-is-inactive, and in accordance with his metaphysical principles⁶⁸ Aristotle is bound to give the preference to plot, which is character-inaction. ⁶⁹ And it is surely true that most playgoers care a great deal more for an interesting plot, even when the characters are commonplace, than for ingeniously or profoundly sketched characters who do nothing in particular. (2) For the most part Aristotle uses ‘character’ and ‘thought’ in the Poetics of the revelation of character and thought in languag.⁷⁰ Now it would be agreed that the most significant dramatic expression of moral and intellectual quality is in action. ‘Plot’ thus absorbs into itself the most important part of character and thought and becomes beyond doubt the chief element in the play. ‘Character’ and ‘thought’ become the merely supplementary revelation in speech of what is best revealed in action; ‘thought’ is expressly said to be more a matter for rhetoric than for the theory of poetry.⁷¹

With regard to the other elements we may note that Aristotle describes melody as the greatest of the ‘sweetenings’ of tragedy, i.e. as only an accessory though a very pleasant one, and the ‘spectacle’ as the most extra-technical⁷² of all the elements; he recognises that the tragic effect does not require actual performance of the play. Returning to plot, Aristotle points out⁷³ that its unity does not consist in its having one man as its subject. Many incidents in a life are irrelevant to one another. ‘The story… must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole.’⁷⁴ This is the one unity which Aristotle prescribes, and no better prescription could possibly be given. Thus ‘the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen.’⁷⁵ It is in this sense, with reference to its internal unity and not to generality, that Aristotle describes poetry as saying things more universal than what history tells us.⁷⁶ Tragedy adheres to the historic names only because what has happened before obviously can happen and for that reason carries conviction; and in point of fact it sometimes departs with success from this tradition.

So far Aristotle has been explaining what is meant by calling tragedy the imitation of a complete action. But it is also an imitation of incidents arousing pity and fear. Such incidents have the greatest effect ‘when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another.’⁷⁷ Incidents of this kind may be summed up under the heads of ‘reversal of fortune’ and ‘discovery,’ the two characteristics of a complex as opposed to a simple plot.⁷⁸ Every true tragedy implies, indeed, a change from happiness to unhappiness or from unhappiness to happiness; by ‘reversal of fortune’ Aristotle means such a change within the limits of a single act or scene, as in the OEdipus Tyrannus when the messenger reveals OEdipus’ parentage. The third special element in plot to which Aristotle calls attention is ‘suffering,’ i.e. murders, tortures, and the like performed on the stage.⁷⁹

The best tragedy, he assumes,⁸⁰ will be complex in the sense defined. Three kinds of plot are to be avoided. ‘A good man must not be seen passing from happiness to misery, or a bad man from misery to happiness. The first situation is not fear-inspiring or piteous, but simply odious to us. The second is the most untragic that can be…it does not appeal either to the human feeling in us, or to our pity, or to our fears. Nor on the other hand should an extremely bad man be seen falling from happiness into misery. Such a story may arouse the human feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity or fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves.’⁸¹ The proper tragic hero, then, is ‘the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment⁸² —a man, too, who is in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity.’⁸³ Aristotle’s preference for this scheme is no doubt partly based on the OEdipus Tyrannus, which is as much his favourite drama as the Antigone was Hegel’s. The scheme is beyond doubt an eminently tragic one; witness, for example, Othello. But others are perhaps as good. It is difficult to bring Antigone or Cordelia under it⁸⁴; they belong rather to the first of the types which Aristotle rejects—rejects, indeed, not as bad but as not the best. And Macbeth and Richard III seem to show that the third type rejected by Aristotle can be as tragic as any, while Coriolanus and Antony, Hamlet and Lear show the downfall of noble characters through faults of will rather than of judgment.

Aristotle proceeds⁸⁵ to specify the kind of situation most calculated to inspire pity or fear. The person who plans or does the tragic deed must be a friend or relative of him to whom it is (or is to be) done, not an enemy nor indifferent to him. In the ideal plot he will plan the deed in ignorance of the relation, and discover the relation just in time.

Six forms of ‘discovery’ are enumerated,⁸⁶ and the palm is given to that which arises not from any ‘artifice of signs and necklaces,’ but ‘when the great surprise comes about through a probable incident,’⁸⁷ as in the OEdipus Tyrannus and the Iphigenia in Tauris. In showing the importance of the poet’s putting himself in the place of his characters, Aristotle throws out an interesting division of poets into two kinds. ‘Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him; the former can easily assume the required mood, and the latter may be actually beside himself with emotion.’⁸⁸ We have here something not unlike the classical and the romantic type, or in Nietzsche’s language the Apolline and the Dionysiac; and it is much to be regretted that Aristotle does not develop the suggestion. Another interesting classification is that of tragedies into tragedies of reversal of fortune and discovery, tragedies of suffering, those of character, and those of spectacle, As far as possible, all these elements of interest should be combined.⁸⁹ The folly of attempting to pack the whole of an epic story into one tragedy is well pointed out.⁹⁰

With regard to ‘character’ four rules are laid down.⁹¹ The characters must be good (though, as we have seen, not too good); they must be appropriate—e.g. to their sex; they must be like the legendary original; they must be consistent even if it be only in inconsistency. Above all, in character as in plot the necessary or the probable must be aimed at; speech and action must flow from character. For the proper way of indicating the ‘thought’ of the persons of the drama Aristotle refers us to the Rhetoric.⁹² What he has to say about ‘diction’ is partly an interesting analysis of the ‘parts of speech,’⁹³ partly a number of suggestions⁹⁴ as to how poetry is to combine clearness with dignity by a judicious admixture of ordinary language with unusual forms, and above all with metaphor. ‘This is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.’⁹⁵

A true feeling for the characteristics of different literary forms is shown by the chapters in which Aristotle compares epic poetry with tragedy. The two are alike in the necessity for unity of action, which marks them both off from history;⁹⁶ alike too in that they have the same species—simple and complex, stories of character and stories of suffering, etc.—and the same elements, except that epic dispenses with song and with spectacle. They differ (1) in length. While the same general principle holds good, that the work must be capable of being taken in at one view, epic can run to greater length, since the narrative form enables it to describe a number of simultaneous incidents. This gives the epic ‘grandeur, and also variety of interest and room for episodes of diverse kinds,’⁹⁷ such as tend to ruin drama by force of satiety. They differ (2) in metre. Nature herself has taught epic poetry to use ‘the gravest and weightiest of metres—which makes it more tolerant than the rest of strange words and metaphors.’⁹⁸ (3) The epic ‘affords more opening for the improbable, the chief factor in the marvellous, because in it the agents are not visibly before one. The pursuit of Hector would be ridiculous on the stage…but in the poem the absurdity is overlooked.’⁹⁹ Yet, even in epic, improbabilities are justified only if they serve the end of poetry itself by making the effect more astounding.

Which of the two, then, is the higher art?¹⁰⁰ Current opinion placed tragedy lower than epic because of the vulgar overacting which had become the fashion. Aristotle rules this objection out as irrelevant, and gives the palm to tragedy on the following grounds. (1) It is a richer form than the epic because music and the spectacle add to the effect. (2) It has a greater vividness even when read. (3) It attains its effect with greater concentration. (4) It has greater unity of action. And (5) it produces more completely the specific effect of poetry—the pleasure that arises from pity and fear.

Tragedy and epic are the only forms of poetry of which much is said in the Poetics. There is a chapter on the history of comedy,¹⁰¹ and its nature seems to have been discussed in the missing second book. The chief other matter contained in that book was the full account of which we should give so much to have; comedy was probably described as effecting a purgation of the tendency to laughter, as tragedy does of pity and fear. Of lyric poetry only the dithyramb and the nome are mentioned, and these but incidentally; Aristotle no doubt held the lyric to belong to the theory of music rather than to that of poetry. The Poetics is therefore far from being a theory of poetry in general, still less a theory of fine art. No complete or even entirely consistent aesthetic theory can be elicited from it. Yet it contains perhaps a greater number of pregnant ideas on art than any other book. It marks the beginning of the deliverance from two mistakes which have over and over again marred aesthetic theory—the tendency to confuse aesthetic with moral judgments, and the tendency to think of art as duplicative or photographic of reality. There is clearly implicit in Aristotle’s words the recognition of beauty as good independent of material and of moral interests alike; but he has not succeeded in working has way to a definitc statement of its nature.

done

NOTES

1 E.g. the introduction of weeping widows and orphans.

2 Rhet. I. 1.

3 1354 ^aI, 1356 ^a30.

4 1356 ^a25. Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric owes much to Plato’s definition of it in the Phaedrus as a philosophical science founded on dialectic and on psychology, and to the practice of rhetoric by the Academy on those lines.

5 1355 ^b26.

6 Cf. p. 41.

7 1354 ^a15.

8 1356 ^b22.

9 I. 2. is defined as ‘that under which many enthymemes fall’ (1403 ^a19). are also called ‘the constituent elements of argument’ (ib.). Cicero and Quintilian compare them to the haunts of game, to veins or mines where metals may be looked for, and to stores which may be drawn upon (Cic. Top. 2. 7; de Or. II. 34. 147, 41. 174; de Fin. IV. 4. 10; Quint. V. 10. 20–22).

10 I.3

11 1359 ^b12–16.

12 1355 ^b29–36.

13 But he incidentally applies the of ‘comparative magnitude’ to expediency in I. 7 and to justice in I. 14; cf. 1393 ^a8–16.

14 Abhandl. d. K. preuss, Akad. d. Wiss. 1886.

15 III. 1.

16 1404 ^b11.

17 III. 2.

18 III. 3.

19 1411 ^b24–29.

20 The following account of the Poetics owes much to Mr. R.P.Hardie’s article in Mind (N.S.) IV 350–364.

21 1447 ^a13–16.

22 Ib. 18–20.

23 Ib. 17.

24 1450, ^b16–20, 1453 ^b3–11, 1462 ^a10–13, 17.

25 If we take account of the wider sense of ‘rhythm’ in which it is distinguished from metre, and it is said that even prose should have rhythm (Rhet. 1408 ^b30), rhythm is the means common to all that A. calls poetry.

26 1447 ^a23-^b29.

27 It is, of course, hard to say how far the views expressed by Socrates in the Republic represent Plato’s own belief.

28 Prickard, A. on the Art of Poetry, 33.

29 As, indeed, Plato himself does abundantly.

30 1447 ^a28.

31 Fol. 1340 ^a18-^b19.

32 1451 ^b5–7.

33 E.g. De Int. 17 a39.

34 E.g. An. Post. I. 6.

35 Poet.ch. 2.

36 1448 ^a16–18.

37 1449 ^a32–35.

38 1453 ^a7–8.

39 1448 ^a11–16, 1460 ^b33–35.

40 1454 ^a28, 1461 ^b19–21.

41 Ch. 3 Cf. Pl. Rep., 392d-394b.

42 Ch. 4.

43 1448 ^b25.

44 1449 ^a5.

45 ^b9 (Bywater’s reading).

46 ^b12.

47 Chs. 8–11.

48 1459 ^a22–26.

49 Ch. 6.

50 I.e. (I think) of ‘other emotions of pity and fear.’

51 Cf. 1447 ^b27.

52 1450 ^b23–34.

53 34–1451 ^a15.

54 Met. 1078 ^a36.

55 1450 ^b35.

56 The comparison of the effect of poetry to the expulsion of evil humours by medicine is as old as Gorgias (Hel. Enc. 8–14). But he has no doctrine of the expulsion of passion by its arousal.

57 Milton expresses an intermediate view. ‘Tragedy, as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems; therefore said by Aristotle to be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terrour, to purge the mind of those and such-like passions; that is to temper or reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is Nature herself wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion, for so, in physick, things of melancholick hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours’ (Pref. to Samson Agonistes). Cf.—

‘His servants he, with new acquist Of true experience, from this great event With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind, all passion spent’ (Samson Agon. ad fin.)

On the origin of Milton’s view cf. Bywater in J. of P. XXVII. 267–275.

58 1382 ^b26, 1386 ^a26.

59 Lessing, Hamb. Dram. St. 75.

60 1453 ^a5.

61 1341 ^a21–25, ^b32–1342 ^a16.

62 Met. 981 ^b21, cf. Poet. 1448 b13, 18, 1460 ^a17, 1462 ^a16, ^b1.

63 Pol. 1341 ^b38–41, 1342 ^a16–28; Poet. 1453 ^a35, ^b10, 1459 ^a21, 1462 ^b13.

64 There are several passages in ancient literature which confirm this interpretation; Plut. Qu. conv. 3. 8. 657 A, Arist. Quint. De Musica 3. 25 (p.13 Jan), Iambl. De Myst. 1. II, 3. 9 (ed. Parthey), Proclus in Plat. Remp. 1 pp. 42, 49 f., Kroll.

65 E.N. 1115 ^a12.

66 Shelley, Defence of Poetry in Prose Works (ed. Forman) III. 116 (quoted by E.F.Carritt, Theory of Beauty, 140.).

67 1453 ^a23–39.

68 Met. Θ. 9.

69 1450 ^aa16–23.

70 1450 ^a6, 29, ^b5, 9, 11, 1456 ^a36. Cf. particularly 1450 b8. ‘Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents… where that is not obvious,’ i.e. from the action. Only in 1454 ^a18 does ‘character’ include the revelation of character in action.

71 1456 ^a34–36, cf. 1450 ^b6–8.

72 .Cf. the in the Rhetoric, 1355 ^b35, 1404 ^a16. Spectacle here answers to elocution there.

73 1451 ^a16.

74 Ib. 31–34.

75 Ib. 36.

76 ^b6.

77 1452 ^a4.

78 Ch. 10.

79 Ch. 11.

80 1452 b30–32.

81 Ib. 34–1453 ^a6.

82 must, it appears, be confined to error of judgment. is used in that sense, E.N. 1135 +12–18, Rhet. 1374 ^b6; and is often used of intellectual error. It is sometimes used of defects of character (E.N. 1115 ^b15, 1119 ^a34, 1148 ^a3), but that meaning seems to be here precluded by 1453 ^a15. A great defect of character could hardly be opposed to

83 1453 ^a7–10.

84 Hegel’s attempt to show that Antigone’s fate springs from her own fault is surely mistaken. In tragedy, as in real life, human fortunes are often so interlocked that people suffer for the faults of others; and the theme is none the less tragic for that.

85 Ch. 14.

86 Ch. 16.

87 1455 ^a16–20.

88 a32–34.

89 ^b32–1456 ^a4.

90 1456 ^a10–19.

91 Ch. 15.

92 1456 ^a34.

93 Chs. 20, 21.

94 Ch. 22.

95 1459 ^a6 8.

96 Ch. 23.

97 1459 ^b28–30.

98 ^b34–36.

99 1460 ^a12–17.

100 Ch. 26.

101 Ch. 5.