ARISTOTLE ON POETRY.*
IT is one of the ironies of literature, which would have de- lighted the heart of a Greek tragedian, that while Plato the idealist, the dreamer, the mystic, the prose-poet of Greek philosophy, in his ideal Republic found no place for the poets, Aristotle the anatomist, the fact-collector, the critical philo- sopher, the earliest of the school of exact science, should have devoted one of his works to a Defence of Poetry. Partly, perhaps, this may be attributed to the desire of every shoe- maker to escape from his last. Plato may have banished the poets because he felt that he and they were two of a trade, and could never agree in the narrow bounds of a Greek city-republic; while Aristotle took a holiday in an essay on Poetry from his cabinet of curiosities and natural-history collections. They remind us of the story of the magazine editor who asked a poet and a mathematician for contributions, and received a scientific essay from the poet, and a romance from the mathematician.
Yet, in truth, Plato and Aristotle were moved in opposite directions by the same cause. Plato told the poets to go because they did not make for righteousness : for Homer exhibited a religion and conception of the Deity which the best thought of the age of Plato had not only outgrown, but found repulsive; while the tragedians showed heroes over- come by the passions and pains of common men, which Plato wished to eradicate. Aristotle, on the other hand, defended the poets because they did make for righteousness, by puri- fying and moderating the passions, the excessive violence and
• Aristotle on the. Art of Poetry. By A. 0. Prickard. London : Macmillan and Co.
indulgence of which, and not their existence, were immoral and harmful to the character. The fact is, that in this respect as in many others, Aristotle has to us the advantage over Plato of being more modern. Plato wished to banish the poets in precisely the same spirit that the Puritans actnally tried to banish them in the seventeenth century, or as some of our modern Puritans would like to banish the novel now. Poetry, to his as to their minds, was mixed up with the memory of miracle-plays and a superstitious theology. Aristotle looks at the theatre rather from the point of view of modern experience. Mr. Prickard has well brought this out in the elegant and scholarly work before us :—" Plato's last word to the poet is go.' Aristotle's word is of welcome. We will trust you, he says in effect, and we will trust human nature. Our citizens have wholesome human appetites, and if you were to offer them garbage, they would not consent to feed upon it. Their digestion is vigorous, and man's common food will be good enough to nourish them."
But though Aristotle is more modern than Plato, he can teach us moderns but little. The narrowness of the vision, and the limited character of Aristotle's conception in poetry as in politics, is astounding. Just as in politics he cannot conceive of a State which is too large to hear the voice of a single town-crier, so in poetry his views are bounded by the horizon of the plays acted at Athens. Whether by accident or design, his idea of poetry is practically confined to tragedy, and he cannot conceive of a tragedy which is not founded on one of the Greek myths ; and he gives the most important place in the elements of a good tragedy to plot, and the most important place in plot to "recognition." This is very much as if Mr. Prickard were to lay down that the melodrama was the only or highest form of the drama ; that it must always turn on a Biblical story, and its crowning incident must be some modification of the "strawberry-mark scene" in Box and Cox ! So important did Aristotle regard this working-out of the "Have you a strawberry-mark ? Then you're my long-lost brother" notion, that he devoted a whole chapter to it ; and he actually praises the absurd scene in .2Eschylus's Chcephom, where Electra is made to recognise her long-lost brother Orestes partly by the fact that her feet fit his footprints,—a mode of re- semblance which would make the modern lover exclaim, "Beetle- crushers, by Jove !" and flee to other climes. Moreover, by insisting on the importance of plot—and a plot, it must be remembered, the essential elements of which were fixed by tradition, and therefore known beforehand—Aristotle is, as Mr. Prickard points out, a bad critic even of Greek plays, as he excludes .2Eschylus's Prometheus, which has no plot. And the absurd price put upon recognition makes Aristotle raise to the highest rank of Greek plays the tedious and repulsive ffdipus Tyrannus. "What," asks Mr. Prickard, "does Aristotle contribute to our knowledge about poetry as a whole ?" The answer appears to be, "Very little." He does not define poetry, and so far as he describes it, his description amounts to this, that a poet is "an imitator in myths put into metre,"—a definition which would exclude our best poetry, including Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark."
"Perhaps," says Mr. Prickard, "none of Aristotle's con- tributions to our general understanding of Poetry is more fruitful than his profound saying that 'Poetry is more serious and more philosophical than History, because it deals with universal truth, not with that which lies in details." But except when explained in a non-natural sense, this profound truth is in fact profound nonsense. The very essence of success in poetry, as in history, is to be particular. No one is moved by an ode to eyebrows in general ; any one may be moved by a doleful ballad made to his mistress's eyebrows. Poetry moves us, no doubt, by appealing to that which is universal in us—namely, our common human feelings—but it only does so as history does, or oratory, through the particular. The poet, like the orator, who merely indulges in vain fine phrases or odes to Duty or Pleasure, misses his audience as much as the mere Dryasdust historian who sins in the opposite direction by giving merely the bare facts and annals of history. The successful poet, like the successful orator, historian, or novelist, attains his success by reaching the heart through the representation of some particular incident or mode of feeling. The Syracusan expedition in Thucydides, the defence of Londonderry in Macaulay, move us in precisely the same way as the Agamemnon or King Lear, as Shelley's " Skylark " or Tennyson's "Maud." As Mr. Prickard quotes :— " Sunt laerhme rernm, et mentem mortalia tangunt."
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