Chapter xvi applies the principle of consistency to “recognitions,” or

“discoveries.”[44]

Best discovery of all, however, is that which arises from the actions themselves, when the surprise comes as a natural result, as in the _Œdipus_ of Sophocles and in the _Iphigenia_.[45]

Chapters xvii and xviii turn to the actual processes of dramaturgy, to the work of the playwright. This is concerned mainly with plot; but first Aristotle urges the fundamental necessity of visualizing.

One must compose plots and work them out in the “lines” by putting [the scenes] before his eyes ... and as far as possible by acting out, even with the gestures.[46]...

His stories, whether already made or of his own making, he must first set out in general (i.e., make a scenario), then put in the incidents and carry out.[47]...

Every tragedy has both complication and solution, the events that precede [the opening scene] and often some of those within the play constituting the complication, and the rest the solution. By complication I mean all from the beginning to that scene which is just before the change in the hero’s fortunes; by solution, all from the beginning of the change to the end [of the play].[48]...

It is necessary to remember what I have said often and not make a tragedy an epic system—by epic I mean aggregative—as if one should dramatize the whole story of the Iliad.[49]...

The chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors, be a part of the whole and share in the action, be not as in Euripides, but as in Sophocles.[50]

Visualizing actively at every stage, the playwright is to compose his plot before he works out his lines. He is to determine his play by the method of solution, to avoid the extensiveness of epic, and to make even the chorus contributory to the plot.

The bearing of the meager observations on the logical element and on diction (xix-xxii) will be clear from the tabular view.[51] They are not distinctive except in the saying “the greatest is the being metaphorical”;[52] and they have surprisingly little on dramatic rhythms.

The third section of the _Poetic_ (xxiii-xxvi) defines epic and compares it with tragedy.

As to metrical narrative, its plots [severally] should have the movement of drama in focusing on an action whole and complete with beginning, middle, and end, that [each] may give its proper pleasure as an organic unity, and not be composed as history, which has to exhibit not a single action, but a single time, whatever chanced to happen in this period to one person or to more.[53]

The general likeness of epic to drama, then, is in interpretative focus, as distinct from the chronicle method of history. Story, as well as drama, selects in order to unify. Moreover (xxiv) story, too, as well as drama, has its crises, its recognitions, its emotional outbursts. The epic poet, if he have something of Homer’s skill, can make his characters express themselves without intruding his explanations. These are general likenesses throughout the whole poetic field. For characteristic differences, epic has the advantages of scope and variety. It gains from the marvelous, which can generally be suggested better than it can be represented.[54] These points are as significant to-day as in the time of Aristotle. Not so the defense (xxv) of epic against certain typical objections which smack more of the schoolmaster than of the critic. To argue whether a given epic story were possible or probable or promotive of good morals was in fact one of the regular elementary exercises of the later schools. The closing exaltation of drama over epic[55] is summary, indeed; but that is natural, since the points, having been made before, are here simply reviewed comparatively. The idea of intensity through unity is a logical conclusion of the _Poetic_ as a whole.

II

From Aristotle’s introductory grouping of drama with music and dance, throughout his long discussion of plot, runs the idea of movement. The dramatic mode of imitation is to set human life in motion before us and to heighten our sense of living by carrying it through to a significant issue. Has this idea animated other drama than the Greek? Is its vitality shown by its permanence? Is it essential? As all art heightens our impressions of life and our sense of living, so the art of the dramatist in particular heightens and extends our sense of human life by vicarious experience. Its object is to make us feel human experience more widely and more intensely. All the technic of the stage, whether ancient or modern, whether simple or elaborate, has for its main object this sort of creative imitation. The dramatist tries to induce and to hold the illusion of actual experience. In so far as he succeeds, we forget that we are in the theater; we imagine that we are seeing a reality more real than we can piece out of our fragmentary glimpses at men and women; and in his greatest successes we almost pass from spectators to actors. Toward this result how important is Aristotle’s idea of movement, his doctrine that plot is a progressive synthesis of actions, unified but never static?

Those who have superficially thought of Greek drama as static, who may even have pictured it as statuesque, can hardly have studied the great play of Sophocles that Aristotle offers as an example, _Œdipus the King_.

Laius, King of Thebes, and his wife Jocasta cast out their infant son Œdipus to die. But the shepherd commissioned to do away the child gave it instead to a stranger, who carried it to Corinth. There the little Œdipus, fostered by a Corinthian couple, was brought up as their son. In the strength of his manhood setting forth to make his own way, he met in a narrow pass another traveler who haughtily bade him yield passage. The dispute warmed to blows. Œdipus killed him. It was his own father Laius. Proceeding to Thebes, Œdipus found the throne vacant and the city in terror of the monster Sphinx. He silenced the Sphinx, and, hailed by the people as their deliverer, he became their king and married the widowed queen Jocasta, his own mother. But Apollo having in time sent a pestilence upon Thebes, Œdipus was besought by the people to be once more their savior. His emissary to the oracle, Creon his brother-in-law, brought back word that Thebes must put away the unclean person who had slain Laius. By searching investigation Œdipus discovered that he himself was the pollution, that he had slain his own father and married his own mother, that not only he but his children were accursed, that the outlawry which he had invoked upon the guilty fell upon his own head. Thereupon he put out his eyes in an agony of horror, after Jocasta had killed herself, and groped his way from Thebes led by his wretched daughters.

This is the legend. Its events extend over many years. Which of them shall be chosen for the stage as having most dramatic value? Which to an audience can be made most significant; and how shall these vital scenes be arranged in such continuous and progressive movement as will convey, and at the same time enhance, our sense of the movement of life? Sophocles with his own dramatic skill, but in the form typical of all the best Greek tragedy, arranged his whole action within the compass of its last poignant hours. Omitting nothing that is emotionally essential, nothing that is essential to clear understanding, he yet relegated some events to the background in order to represent fully the great crisis. He gathers together the whole visible action into an hour and a half on the stage and a half-dozen persons; and in this brief compass he unfolds that action with increasing intensity by making every scene move from the last and to the next, on to the awful close.

The Theban people, represented by the chorus supplicating their savior king, rehearses his great achievements for their deliverance. Œdipus in the strong confidence of his power and his mission stands before his palace like a god. At the end of the play he is led slowly from that palace a broken man. But the composition of the play is not mere reversal for contrast. Between the first scene and the last, action moves without haste, but without delay or interruption. The vigorous and self-reliant king chafes at the cryptic response brought from the oracle by Creon; he is indignant, then furious, at the tragic silence of the seer Tiresias. His quick intelligence scents a plot between the two. Breaking through the interposition of Jocasta, he wins from her false hopes while he gives her no less unwittingly the premonition of doom. Once suspecting, however darkly, he must know, he will know, he knows a dreadful part, he knows more, he knows all. So this great play, though it is focused on a single day, though it excludes all the past history and the development of character, is never static. It is never for a moment tableau. Because of its compression it moves not less, but more.

For that is why Aristotle insists that the dramatic action should be self-consistent, limited in scope. The object of dramatic unity is not bareness, but fulness and continuity. It is to give time for full and intense realization of what actual life merely hints interruptedly. It is to give us human life undisturbed and uninterrupted, so that we may see it clearly and whole. We are to have the illusion of actual experience, yes, but of larger and deeper experience than we can get from the mere reproduction of facts or from the cross-currents of life itself. Like every other art, drama is a simplification of life because it is an interpretation. The dramatic simplification is seen by Aristotle to consist essentially in moving from revealing crisis to revealing crisis up to a final revelation. It excludes all the accidental and the irrelevant that embarrass our actual movements; it tells what has happened through what is happening; it cuts to the quick. It takes those moments only in which a man is himself, suppressing those in which he is indistinguishable from other men. But it does not leap or halt between; it brings out our real sequences. It reveals life to us by showing the emotional connection of its great moments.

That such dramatic unity became sometimes a bondage in seventeenth-century French classical drama was due not to any defect of the Aristotelian principle, but partly to making the practise too rigidly a code, and still more to stiffening the movement into tableau. The classical French application of the principle of dramatic unity is not, as has often been pointed out, altogether Aristotelian. Least of all is it Aristotelian when it hinders dramatic movement. French classical tragedy when it is cold—and to think of it as generally cold is a prejudice—is static; it is feeble in movement. The free movement, not to say the loose movement, of Elizabethan plays, which was hailed by Hugo and other Romanticists as a deliverance from the classical code, is indeed better than tableau; but it is compatible with bad playwriting. He would be rash who should assert that Elizabethan plays are in general more effective dramatically than French classical plays. Rather, since the two traditions bring out different dramatic values, each has something to learn from the other. But it is plain that the progress of the Elizabethans in dramaturgy was in the direction of unity, of more highly organized movement. To see this we need go no farther than Shakspere. The difference between his earlier plays and _Othello_ is largely a difference in unification. _Othello_ by itself is sufficient proof of the value of dramatic unity for dramatic intensity. And with or without unity, with the Greek and the French focus of time or the Elizabethan lapse of years, drama demands movement from scene to scene. The value of unity is only to heighten this sense of movement.

Drama, of course, has its differences of age and of race. We are not to think that at its best it must always be Greek. One of the large differences between ancient drama and modern is, indeed, a difference of emphasis. Ancient drama relies more on plot, modern drama on characterization. The ancient playwright had above all, for his theater, to realize the emotional values of a situation by seeing that his play was well put together; the modern playwright has sometimes, in a theatre giving opportunity for facial expression, relied far more on realizing his persons, on writing what the actor calls a good part. Nevertheless, though playwriting does not always need the compactness of Greek form, many modern plays have chosen this compactness, this closely organized movement, for intensity.[56]

Undoubtedly such dramatic composition demands of the playwright definiteness of interpretation. His selection, his limiting of time and place, his leading from scene to scene, are only the technical means of realizing his emotional intention. He is trying to show us human life, not in random and interrupted glimpses, not in the jumble and discord of its surface, not in aimless and frustrated movements, but in the animating emotions of its crises. In order to represent crises, he is compelled to show us wherein they are critical; in order to give to emotion full expression, he must make it significant. Rather it is this significance which first caught his attention, which gave him the conception of his play and guided his realization. If his dramatic movement halts or lapses, the reason may lie deeper than technic in uncertainty of intention; and if on the other hand he is able to sustain it and carry it through, the fundamental reason is that his conception of its issue is strong and clear.[57]

This presumption has more than once been challenged. Why must the dramatist have an intention, a theme? Why may he not simply represent life? Represent life he not only may, but must, to the extent that he must reflect life, not reflect _on_ it; but what is represented? Life in its multitudinous complexity, its unfulfilled intentions, life as it whirls past and escapes us? That is a task beyond drama. No playwright has ever represented life except as he saw it, or made his representation intelligible without interpretation. And as the dramatist has to interpret in order to compose, so the audience wishes to be led up to some issue. We desire not mere emotional excitement, but emotional release. Else the pity and fear, to use Aristotle’s words, will not bring us purgation. A play shows us life in critical moments, and these are moral moments, moments of the clash of wills. Drama assumes free will, and its movement is by motives. Motivation, on which Aristotle so much insist, is to make the issue convincing. The dramatic representation of life is creative imitation largely in proportion as it thus moves to an end; and the typically dramatic end is not blind fate, but poetic justice.

Poetic justice sums up what Aristotle means by saying that “poetry is something more philosophical and more serious than history.” It means the truth revealed beneath facts, the real cause and effect moving beneath the surface. An audience, desiring deeper emotional experience than it achieves through daily observation, desires especially to see how its sharper conflicts issue. It asks of the dramatist not only sight, but insight. It is not satisfied with “mere reversal.” “The mere spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us.” The same criticism is implied in Stevenson’s objection to Meredith’s _Richard Feverel_, that it “began to end well” and then cheated us.

The convincing close, expressing the playwright’s intention and resulting from the whole course of action, is thus a fair measure of what used to be called problem plays. It measures how far they are in Aristotle’s sense serious, how far they are penetrative and significant, in a word how far they are tragic. Each disclosure, each critical scene of the dramatic progress, having its full emotional value separately and for itself, leads on to the next. Such planning for momentum is not only Aristotelian; it is permanently dramatic.

Creative imitation of human life, thus moving us along that course of actions which is both the means and the measure of creative power, makes drama of all the arts most poignant. Whether it is, as it has always seemed to its devotees, the highest form of poetic, at least its appeal is at once the largest and the most direct. In the very persons of men and women it speaks to us by face and gesture, by the message, the imagery, and the rhythm of words, most of all by the order of its actions. Plato, indeed, would have us draw from this the moral that our own lives should be ordered poetically, that is creatively, that we should control and direct our lives to harmonious movement.

For we are ourselves according to our power poets of a tragedy at once fairest and best. Every social order[58] becomes for us an artistic creation[59] of the fairest and best life, which we say to be essentially the truest tragedy.[60]

FOOT-NOTES:

[1] The best recent editions of the _Poetic_ for English readers are: (1) S. H. Butcher, _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, text, translation, notes, essays, London, 1895, 4th edition, 1911 (text with translation issued separately); (2) Ingram Bywater, _Aristotle on the Art of Poetry_, text, translation, introduction, commentary, Oxford, 1909. For other translations and for a select bibliography see Butcher. Lane Cooper has added to his “amplified version with supplementary illustrations for students of English,” Boston, 1913, an essay (1923) on _Meaning and Influence_.

[2] _Reconstruction in Philosophy_, New York, 1920, chapter iii.

[3] _L’évolution créatrice_, chapter i.

[4] I say this without forgetting that the _Poetic_ as we have it is probably but a part. If a part, it is still self-consistent, as I have tried to show in the tabular view below.

[5] viii, 206, 232.

[6] See Chapter i.

[7] See page 4.

[8] See page 42.

[9] See page 27.

[10] This analysis is intended to supplement, and in some cases to emend, the outlines of Butcher and of Bywater by bringing out the significance of the parts in relation.

[11] ποιητικῆς. The adjective means generally active, productive, creative, _efficiens_, as commonly in Aristotle’s philosophy, in Dionysius and Demetrius, and in Plotinus. Specially it means poetic, as of diction. The noun ἡ ποιητικὴ (with τέχνη understood) includes all imaginative composition in words.

[12] Bywater (page vii), protesting against too generalizing interpretations, goes to the other extreme of undue restriction. That the treatment is philosophical and intends to suggest large inferences appears from both its plan and its language. Certainly the _Poetic_ is technical; but no less certainly it is theoretical.

[13] The interpretation of Bywater.

[14] ἤθη καὶ πάθη καὶ πράξεις, 1447 a, where Aristotle is speaking of dancing.

[15] See foot-note 11 above.

[16] In Chapter ix, 1451 b, Aristotle says: “It is evident from the above that the poet should be rather the poet of his plots than of his verses, inasmuch as he is a poet by virtue of his imitation, and it is actions that he imitates.”

[17] Butcher (pages 110-124) in pointing out that the Greek phrase for the fine arts is _imitative arts_ (μιμητικαὶ τέχναι or μιμήσεις), says that Aristotle applies it specifically only to poetry and music. In this opening chapter of the _Poetic_ he evidently means to include dancing. That Aristotle had no thought of “bare imitation,” of that reproductive copying which Ruskin confused with artistic truth, has been remarked also by other critics. Butcher adds suggestively, though not with strict reference to the text, that to imitate nature was for Aristotle not to evoke the mere background which romanticism has taught us to spell with a capital N, but to work in nature’s ways. Nature (φύσις) in Aristotle is not the sensible world, but “the creative force, the productive principle.” So the immediate objects of poetic imitation are human characters, emotions, and actions, not as objective phenomena, but as expressions of human will. “The common original,” Butcher concludes, “is human life ... essential activity of the soul.” Though this is true to the underlying idea of the _Poetic_, Aristotle does not use any single phrase corresponding to “imitation of nature.”

[18] 1449 b.

[19] 1450 a.

[20] 1450 b.

[21] Σπουδαῖος, which of persons means _earnest_; of things, what we mean by _serious_ in such phrases as a _serious proposal_ and _serious consideration_.

[22] Bywater makes one item, “as having magnitude, complete in itself.” Butcher makes two items, “complete, _and_ of a certain magnitude.” The former seems closer to the Greek text and, on the whole, more consistent with the context; but both renderings give much the same meaning ultimately.

[23] The distinction has lately been pointed by Mr. Hardy’s _Dynasts_. This, whatever else may be thought of it, is not “complete as to size,” but indeterminate. Doubtless that is why it is styled an “epic-drama.” Certainly, for all its “enhanced utterance” and occasionally striking dialogue, it is not, by any definition, a drama.

[24] Bywater, pages 152-161, has discussed this phrase amply, and in an appendix, 361-365, has compiled with their dates the successive critical translations.

[25] vii. 1450 b.

[26] 1451 a.

[27] viii-ix, 1451 a-1451 b.

[28] The verb here translated _make_ corresponds to the noun _poet_. The insistence brought about by the repetition will be made clear by rendering the words italicized _creator_ and _create_, or, to revive an older use, _maker_ and _make_.

[29] ix. 1451 b.

[30] ix. 1451 b.

[31] ix. 1452 a.

[32] περιπέτεια.

[33] ἀναγνώρισις.

[34] xi. 1452 b.

[35] Both Butcher and Bywater so interpret; but Butcher’s rendering “tragic incident” seems hardly to meet the context. Bywater’s rendering “suffering” seems preferable if we may venture to interpret it as meaning, more generally than Bywater suggests, the working out of the plot to its full emotional expression. So taken, it corresponds to the climax of pity and fear, as “reversal” and “recognition” correspond to the preceding complication.

[36] xii. 1452 b. This has been challenged as an interpolation. It is at least meager and, as it were, impatient, as is the corresponding section in the _Rhetoric_ (III. xiii. 1414 b) on the formal parts of an oration.

[37] διπλοῦν. The context seems to show that this means _divided_ in interest and issue, insufficiently focused. Aristotle does not mean that the plot should not be complicated; for at the opening of this chapter he says that the plot of the perfect tragedy is not simple, but complicated (μὴ ἁπλῆν ἀλλὰ πεπλεγμένην). What he adds here is that the complication should not be such as to divide our sympathy. The plot should not, indeed, be simple; but it should be single.

[38] xiii. 1453 a.

[39] xv.

[40] xiv. 1453 b. ἐξ αὐτῆς τῆς συστάσεως τῶν πραγμάτων.

[41] See the tabular view, page 136.

[42] I follow Bywater’s note, pages 227-228.

[43] 1454 b.

[44] ἀναγνώρισις. 1454 b. “This and the next two chapters form a sort of Appendix; they discuss a series of special points and rules of construction which had been omitted in the sketch of the general theory of the μῦθος.” Bywater, page 233. I am not convinced of an interruption here. What seems to me the bearing of this chapter and the following on the discussion of consistency from Chapter xiii on is indicated in the tabular view on page 136.

[45] 1455 a.

[46] xvii. 1455 a.

[47] xvii. 1455 b.

[48] xviii. 1455 b.

[49] xviii. 1456 a.

[50] xviii. 1456 a.

[51] Page 138. As to whether xx is an interpolation, see Bywater.

[52] xxii. 1459 a.

[53] xxiii. 1459 a.

[54] A most striking exemplification of this is _Paradise Lost_.

[55] Sainte-Beuve, _Étude sur Virgile_, vii. page 151, disputes the superiority of drama to epic.

[56] The most familiar instances are certain plays of Ibsen. Of plays recently on the stage, Bernstein’s _Voleur_, Mirbeau’s _Les affaires sont les affaires_, Besier’s _Don_, Kenyon’s _Kindling_, show that this type of dramatic movement is not confined to any particular school. Of plays that on the contrary dispense with this and rely mainly on characterization the most familiar to Americans is the dramatization of _Rip Van Winkle_ used by Joseph Jefferson.

[57] The paragraph is adapted from the author’s _College Composition_, page 248.

[58] πολιτεία.

[59] μίμησις.

[60] _Laws_ 817 b; quoted by Bywater on Aristotle’s _Poetic_, 1450 a.