CHAPTER VI

THE _POETIC_ OF ARISTOTLE[1]

Veneration of Aristotle has been impatiently classed with “other mediæval superstitions,” both by those who disliked authority and by those who revolted against the inlaying and overlaying of his text with centuries of interpretations. Since the Renaissance the _Poetic_ has, indeed, fared in this regard somewhat as the Bible; and in both cases those deviations from the original intention are widest, perhaps, which have arisen from “private interpretation,” from missionary zeal more anxious to read _into_ the text than to read _in_ it. What may be called on the other hand communal interpretation, the consentient application of Aristotle’s ideas to the typical problems of a whole group or period, constitutes an important guide in the history of criticism. Both kinds of interpretation imply in the original an extraordinary fertility. This vitality, it is also clear, is of principles, of ideas set forth not only as classifying, but as constructive. The principles have been from time to time crystallized in rules; and some of the rules, having been found restrictive or even inhibitory, have thereupon been flung aside. But again and again a return to Aristotle’s _Poetic_ for orientation of practise and of criticism has vindicated it as constructive. It is not what Professor Dewey has lately called a “closed system.”[2] It has exceptionally little of that mathematically abstract method which Bergson[3] found unsatisfying for survey of human activities in time. Rather its method is inductive. It examines how imaginative conceptions have been so composed and so expressed as to kindle, direct, and sustain the imagination of an audience; and its formulation is typically like what modern science calls an hypothesis, that is a generalization interpreting facts so far as they are known, and fruitful in their further investigation.

To reinterpret the _Poetic_ in 1924, therefore, should be not merely to reconsider the drama and the epic of Aristotle’s time, valuable as this is historically, but according to Aristotle’s intention to consider what makes drama, our own as well as his, and what vitally moves it to possess an audience. Each interpretation of so fundamental a work must have its own preoccupations. The French interpretations of the seventeenth century had an emphasis different from that of the Italian of the sixteenth; and we in turn must see with our own eyes. But the correction that therefore becomes necessary, lest we make Aristotle say what we wish, lies in the text itself. Fortunately the _Poetic_ is short enough to be read attentively in two hours; and its terms, though translated somewhat variously, sometimes imperfectly, now and then perversely, really demand not so much erudition as patience, attention to the context, and some acquaintance with the processes of art. The _Poetic_ should be read consecutively as a whole and then scrutinized in its parts. Interrupted though it is here and there, in some few places even fragmentary, it nevertheless progresses as a whole.[4] As to its terms, the best precaution is to remember that they mean to express the processes of actual composition and the results of the actual representation of drama or of the actual recitation of epic. In this sense the book is practical. It is not, as Bywater implies,[5] the less theoretical; but it deals with the composing as well as with the thing composed.

That Aristotle’s survey of human expression included a _Poetic_ as well as a _Rhetoric_ is our chief witness to a division[6] oftener implied in ancient criticism than stated explicitly. Rhetoric meant to the ancient world the art of instructing and moving men in their affairs; poetic the art of sharpening and expanding their vision. To borrow a French phrase,[7] the one is composition of ideas; the other, composition of images. In the one field life is discussed; in the other it is presented. The type of the one is a public address, moving us to assent and action; the type of the other is a play, showing us in action moving to an end of character. The one argues and urges; the other represents. Though both appeal to imagination, the method of rhetoric is logical; the method of poetic, as well as its detail, is imaginative. To put the contrast with broad simplicity, a speech moves by paragraphs; a play moves by scenes. A paragraph is a logical stage in a progress of ideas; a scene is an emotional stage in a progress controlled by imagination. Both rhetoric and poetic inculcate the art of progress; but the progress of poetic is distinct in kind. Its larger shaping is not controlled by considerations of _inventio_ and _dispositio_,[8] nor its detail by the cadences of the period.[9] In great part, though not altogether, it has its own technic. The technic of drama in Aristotle’s day was already mature and was actively developing. The technic of narrative, in epic derived from the great example of Homer, in “mime” and dialogue still experimental, was less definite. To set forth the whole technic, the principles of imaginative composition, in a single survey is the object of Aristotle’s _Poetic_.

TABULAR VIEW OF THE _POETIC_ OF ARISTOTLE[10]

_The first section moves from definition of poetic in general to the mode of drama_ (chapters i-v.)