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The Poetics

Aristotle

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Section 1 of 27
ARISTOTLE
ON THE ART OF POETRY



TRANSLATED BY
INGRAM BYWATER


WITH A PREFACE BY
GILBERT MURRAY



OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
FIRST PUBLISHED 1920
REPRINTED 1925, 1928, 1932, 1938, 1945, 1947
1951, 1954, 1959. 1962 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




PREFACE


In the tenth book of the _Republic_, when Plato has completed his final
burning denunciation of Poetry, the false Siren, the imitator of
things which themselves are shadows, the ally of all that is low and
weak in the soul against that which is high and strong, who makes us
feed the things we ought to starve and serve the things we ought to
rule, he ends with a touch of compunction: 'We will give her
champions, not poets themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to
make her defence in plain prose and show that she is not only
sweet--as we well know--but also helpful to society and the life of
man, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. For we shall be gainers, I
take it, if this can be proved.' Aristotle certainly knew the passage,
and it looks as if his treatise on poetry was an answer to Plato's
challenge.

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
They nearly all need study and comment, and at times help from a good
teacher, before they yield up their secret. And the _Poetics_ cannot
be accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary.
It originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and
Epic, the other with Comedy and other subjects. We possess only the
first.  For another, even the book we have seems to be unrevised and
unfinished. The style, though luminous, vivid, and in its broader
division systematic, is not that of a book intended for publication.
Like most of Aristotle's extant writing, it suggests the MS. of an
experienced lecturer, full of jottings and adscripts, with occasional
phrases written carefully out, but never revised as a whole for the
general reader. Even to accomplished scholars the meaning is often
obscure, as may be seen by a comparison of the three editions recently
published in England, all the work of savants of the first eminence,
[1] or, still more strikingly, by a study of the long series of
misunderstandings and overstatements and corrections which form the
history of the _Poetics_ since the Renaissance.

[1] Prof. Butcher, 1895 and 1898; Prof. Bywater, 1909; and Prof.
Margoliouth, 1911.


But it is of another cause of misunderstanding that I wish principally
to speak in this preface. The great edition from which the present
translation is taken was the fruit of prolonged study by one of the
greatest Aristotelians of the nineteenth century, and is itself a
classic among works of scholarship. In the hands of a student who
knows even a little Greek, the translation, backed by the commentary,
may lead deep into the mind of Aristotle. But when the translation is
used, as it doubtless will be, by readers who are quite without the
clue provided by a knowledge of the general habits of the Greek
language, there must arise a number of new difficulties or
misconceptions.

To understand a great foreign book by means of a translation is
possible enough where the two languages concerned operate with a
common stock of ideas, and belong to the same period of civilization.
But between ancient Greece and modern England there yawn immense
gulfs of human history; the establishment and the partial failure of
a common European religion, the barbarian invasions, the feudal
system, the regrouping of modern Europe, the age of mechanical
invention, and the industrial revolution. In an average page of French
or German philosophy nearly all the nouns can be translated directly
into exact equivalents in English; but in Greek that is not so.
Scarcely one in ten of the nouns on the first few pages of the
_Poetics_ has an exact English equivalent. Every proposition has to be
reduced to its lowest terms of thought and then re-built. This is a
difficulty which no translation can quite deal with; it must be left
to a teacher who knows Greek. And there is a kindred difficulty which
flows from it. Where words can be translated into equivalent words,
the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation
which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style
of Aristotle.  I have sometimes played with the idea that a ruthlessly
literal translation, helped out by bold punctuation, might be the
best. For instance, premising that the words _poesis_, _poetes_ mean
originally 'making' and 'maker', one might translate the first
paragraph of the _Poetics_ thus:--

MAKING: kinds of making: function of each, and how the Myths ought to
be put together if the Making is to go right.

Number of parts: nature of parts: rest of same inquiry.

Begin in order of nature from first principles.

Epos-making, tragedy-making (also comedy), dithyramb-making (and most
fluting and harping), taken as a whole, are really not Makings but
Imitations. They differ in three points; they imitate (a) different
objects, (b) by different means, (c) differently (i.e. different
manner).

Some artists imitate (i.e. depict) by shapes and colours. (Obs.
sometimes by art, sometimes by habit.) Some by voice. Similarly the
above arts all imitate by rhythm, language, and tune, and these either
(1) separate or (2) mixed.

Rhythm and tune alone, harping, fluting, and other arts with same
effect--e.g. panpipes.

Rhythm without tune: dancing. (Dancers imitate characters, emotions,
and experiences by means of rhythms expressed in form.)

Language alone (whether prose or verse, and one form of verse or
many): this art has no name up to the present (i.e. there is no name
to cover mimes and dialogues and any similar imitation made in
iambics, elegiacs, &c. Commonly people attach the 'making' to the
metre and say 'elegiac-makers', 'hexameter-makers,' giving them a
common class-name by their metre, as if it was not their imitation
that makes them 'makers').


Such an experiment would doubtless be a little absurd, but it would
give an English reader some help in understanding both Aristotle's
style and his meaning.

For example, there i.e.lightenment in the literal phrase, 'how the
myths ought to be put together.' The higher Greek poetry did not make
up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the
myths. Again, the literal translation of _poetes_, poet, as 'maker',
helps to explain a term that otherwise seems a puzzle in the
_Poetics_.  If we wonder why Aristotle, and Plato before him, should
lay such stress on the theory that art is imitation, it is a help to
realize that common language called it 'making', and it was clearly
not 'making' in the ordinary sense. The poet who was 'maker' of a
Fall of Troy clearly did not make the real Fall of Troy. He made an
imitation Fall of Troy. An artist who 'painted Pericles' really 'made
an imitation Pericles by means of shapes and colours'. Hence we get
started upon a theory of art which, whether finally satisfactory or
not, is of immense importance, and are saved from the error of
complaining that Aristotle did not understand the 'creative power' of
art.

As a rule, no doubt, the difficulty, even though merely verbal, lies
beyond the reach of so simple a tool as literal translation. To say
that tragedy 'imitate.g.od men' while comedy 'imitates bad men'
strikes a modern reader as almost meaningless. The truth is that
neither 'good' nor 'bad' is an exact equivalent of the Greek. It would
be nearer perhaps to say that, relatively speaking, you look up to the
characters of tragedy, and down upon those of comedy. High or low,
serious or trivial, many other pairs of words would have to be called
in, in order to cover the wide range of the common Greek words. And
the point is important, because we have to consider whether in Chapter
VI Aristotle really lays it down that tragedy, so far from being the
story of un-happiness that we think it, is properly an imitation of
_eudaimonia_--a word often translated 'happiness', but meaning
something more like 'high life' or 'blessedness'. [1]

[1] See Margoliouth, p. 121.  By water, with most editors, emends the
text.

Another difficult word which constantly recurs in the _Poetics_ is
_prattein_ or _praxis_, generally translated 'to act' or 'action'. But
_prattein_, like our 'do', also has an intransitive meaning 'to fare'
either well or ill; and Professor Margoliouth has pointed out that it
seems more true to say that tragedy shows how men 'fare' than how they
'act'. It shows thei.e.periences or fortunes rather than merely their
deeds. But one must not draw the line too bluntly. I should doubt
whether a classical Greek writer was ordinarily conscious of the
distinction between the two meanings. Certainly it i.e.sier to regard
happiness as a way of faring than as a form of action. Yet Aristotle
can use the passive of _prattein_ for things 'done' or 'gone through'
(e.g. 52a, 22, 29: 55a, 25).

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern
attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word. Greek was
very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of
grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon
dictionaries. An instance is provided by Aristotle's famous saying
that the typical tragic hero is one who falls from high state or fame,
not through vice or depravity, but by some great _hamartia_.
_Hamartia_ means originally a 'bad shot' or 'error', but is currently
used for 'offence' or 'sin'. Aristotle clearly means that the typical
hero is a great man with 'something wrong' in his life or character;
but I think it is a mistake of method to argue whether he means 'an
intellectual error' or 'a moral flaw'. The word is not so precise.

Similarly, when Aristotle says that a deed of strife or disaster is
more tragic when 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
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