Poetics of Aristotle

POETICS OF ARISTOTLE, The. The 'Poetics) of Aristotle, historically, and doubt less intrinsically, is the most important of ex tant works in literary criticism. Its relation to prior and contemporary treatises on poetry, in cluding an Aristotelian dialogue 'On Poets,' is uncertain; yet this one surviving a garbled fragment on comedy, of Peripatetic, if not strictly Aris totelian, origin.

The history of the prover down to the 8th century is very obscure. Aristotle's theory doubtless influenced his pupil, the emi nent tragic poet Theodectes, and, through an other pupil, Theophrastus, probably influenced Menander and the New Comedy. Through a Greek channel such as Neoptolemus of Panum, his doctrines, somewhat altered, found their way into the Poetica> of Horace. During the Middle Ages the (Poetics' was known to scholars in the East, being translated into Syriac in the 8th century. Upon an 11th cen tury translation from the Syriac into Arabic was based the 'Commentary of Averrhoes,> which was rendered into Hebrew, and, by Her mannus Alemannus, into Latin, and through the Latin became known to Roger Bacon and, doubtless, other European scholars. Our earliest Greek manuscript (the best) dates from about the year 1000, but the (Poetics' was not among the philosophical works which were translated from the Greek into Latin in the 13th century.

In the second half of the 15th century the Greek text was studied, in a number of manu scripts, in Italy. A translation appeared in 1498, and the editio princeps in 1508. Through Italian editors and commentators (as Castel vetro) a knowledge of the was trans mitted to other parts of Europe, and therewith sundry misconceptions as to the so-called Aris totelian (rules" for the drama. Thus in the 17th century, French tragic poets, as Corneille and Racine, were obsessed with a belief in the ((three unities' of atime," ((place" and the action of a drama, it was thought, should not only be unified, but should be represented as occurring within the space of revolu tion of the sun," and all in one place — whereas Aristotle, duly insisting• upon unity of action, says nothing whatever about any aunity of place,* and merely notes that the tragic poets of his day (70 years after the death of Euripides) aimed to confine the time repre sented in a play to none revolution of the sun,* and that the earlier Greek dramatists did not. Milton, in his conception of the tragic °cathar sis," similarly follows the Italian commen tators; the end of tragedy is to stir the mind to pity and fear, and by raising them, ato purge the mind of those and such-like passions*: when he adds, athat is, to temper and reduce them to just measure,' he departs from Aristotle, whose conception was strictly medical — the tragic purge is complete, it leaves no residuum of fear and pity. The worst misconception, however, was peculiar neither to the Renaissance nor to the Middle Ages. To deem the a set of (rules*

imposed upon the free activity of the poet is a mistake that is made whenever the value of the treatise is dimly discerned, and its firm general izations are not seen to be mingled with tenta tive suggestions and casual remarks which sometimes contradict one another. The correct attitude may be seen in Ben Jonson, who says (following Heinsius) : (Those that can teach him [the poet) 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. . . . But all this in vain without a natural 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.* For our own day, the best of modern editors says: aThe book, taken as it is, with perhaps an occasional side-light from some of his [Aristotle's) other works, is intelligible enough; after a brief introduction, he gives us in out line all that he has to say on the subject im mediately 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 suc ceeded in formulating once for all the great first principles of dramatic art, the canons of dramatic logic which even the most adventurous of modern dramatists can only at his peril for get or set at nauet." To Aristotle, omer is the greatest of poets, but tragedy the highest form of poetry. In tragedy, the nearest approach to his ideal is Sophocles' Rex,' though he pays much attention to Euripides' With Homer and Sophocles he mentions Aristo phanes; though his conception of comedy and tragedy was modified by the practice of his own age, his theory of the poetic art was in the main founded upon a study of these three. Of /Eschylus, for some reason, he has little to say. Lyrical poetry he does not discuss, doubtless because to a Greek it fell under the art, not of poetry, but of music.

Aristotle conceives of poetry and the other arts as forms of (limitation." As a painter imitates a human figure in pigments, or as a i sculptor imitates a man in bronze or in stone, so a tragic poet imitates an action — something done or suffered by human beings — in the medium of rhythmical language. This action is the very ((soul" of the tragedy; the moral bias of the agents (shown in their habit of choice) is, like their ways of reasoning and explaining, subservient to the plot taken as a whole. The plot or action must be unified and complete — this is the only ((unity" demanded by Aristotle. ((Oneness' of hero — the only other ((unity" mentioned by him — does not make a story an organic work of art. A good story is, in fact, like a living creature, no part of which could 'be transposed or removed, and to which nothing could be added, without dis torting the whole. It follows that the poet (the Greek word means maker) is a °maker* of plots rather than a versifier. What counts in the poet, then, is what we should call the constructive imagination. And in the finished work, what counts is the effect of the whole upon the competent judge — the arousal in him of the proper emotions (as by a reversal of fortune brought about through a flaw of char acter in some hero), and the right sort of pleasure in their relief (when we thrill with fear and melt with Pity as the hero moves toward his doom and falls). To Aristotle our pleasure in art is allied to the pleasure we de rive from the nrocess of learning in general, and hence he dwells on the importance of °Discoveries* of identity in (CEdipus Rex) and the Consult Bywater's edition, (Aristotle on the Art of Poetry> (Oxford 1909) and Cooper's (Amplified Version> (Bos ton 1913).