The Poetics - Aristotle (romance book recommendations txt) 📗
- Author: Aristotle
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instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted
without causing pain.
Though the successive changes in Tragedy and their authors are not
unknown, we cannot say the same of Comedy; its early stages passed
unnoticed, because it was not as yet taken up in a serious way. It was
only at a late point in its progress that a chorus of comedians was
officially granted by the archon; they used to be mere volunteers. It
had also already certain definite forms at the time when the record of
those termed comic poets begins. Who it was who supplied it with
masks, or prologues, or a plurality of actors and the like, has
remained unknown. The invented Fable, or Plot, however, originated in
Sicily, with Epicharmus and Phormis; of Athenian poets Crates was the
first to drop the Comedy of invective and frame stories of a general
and non-personal nature, in other words, Fables or Plots.
Epic poetry, then, has been seen to agree with Tragedy to thi.e.tent,
that of being an imitation of serious subjects in a grand kind of
verse. It differs from it, however, (1) in that it is in one kind of
verse and in narrative form; and (2) in its length—which is due to
its action having no fixed limit of time, whereas Tragedy endeavours
to keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the sun, or
something near that. This, I say, is another point of difference
between them, though at first the practice in this respect was just
the same in tragedies as i.e.ic poems. They differ also (3) in their
constituents, some being common to both and others peculiar to
Tragedy—hence a judge of good and bad in Tragedy is a judge of that
i.e.ic poetry also. All the parts of an epic are included in Tragedy;
but those of Tragedy are not all of them to be found in the Epic.
6Reserving hexameter poetry and Comedy for consideration hereafter, let
us proceed now to the discussion of Tragedy; before doing so, however,
we must gather up the definition resulting from what has been said. A
tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also,
as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable
accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work;
in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity
and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. Here
by ‘language with pleasurable accessories’ I mean that with rhythm and
harmony or song superadded; and by ‘the kinds separately’ I mean that
some portions are worked out with verse only, and others in turn with
song.
I. As they act the stories, it follows that in the first place the
Spectacle (or stage-appearance of the actors) must be some part of the
whole; and in the second Melody and Diction, these two being the means
of their imitation. Here by ‘Diction’ I mean merely this, the
composition of the verses; and by ‘Melody’, what is too completely
understood to require explanation. But further: the subject
represented also is an action; and the action involves agents, who
must necessarily have their distinctive qualities both of character
and thought, since it is from these that we ascribe certain qualities
to their actions. There are in the natural order of things, therefore,
two causes, Character and Thought, of their actions, and consequently
of their success or failure in their lives. Now the action (that which
was done) is represented in the play by the Fable or Plot. The Fable,
in our present sense of the term, is simply this, the combination of
the incidents, or things done in the story; whereas Character is what
makes us ascribe certain moral qualities to the agents; and Thought is
shown in all they say when proving a particular point or, it may be,
enunciating a general truth. There are six parts consequently of every
tragedy, as a whole, that is, of such or such quality, viz. a Fable or
Plot, Characters, Diction, Thought, Spectacle and Melody; two of them
arising from the means, one from the manner, and three from the
objects of the dramatic imitation; and there is nothing else besides
these six. Of these, its formative elements, then, not a few of the
dramatists have made due use, as every play, one may say, admits of
Spectacle, Character, Fable, Diction, Melody, and Thought.
II. The most important of the six is the combination of the incidents
of the story.
Tragedy i.e.sentially an imitation not of persons but of action and
life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the
form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of
activity, not a quality. Characte.g.ves us qualities, but it is in
our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse. In a play
accordingly they do not act in order to portray the Characters; they
include the Characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the
action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of
the tragedy; and the end i.e.erywhere the chief thing. Besides this,
a tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without
Character. The tragedies of most of the moderns are characterless—a
defect common among poets of all kinds, and with its counterpart in
painting in Zeuxis as compared with Polygnotus; for whereas the latter
is strong in character, the work of Zeuxis is devoid of it. And again:
one may string together a series of characteristic speeches of the
utmost finish as regards Diction and Thought, and yet fail to produce
the true tragi.e.fect; but one will have much better success with a
tragedy which, however inferior in these respects, has a Plot, a
combination of incidents, in it. And again: the most powerful elements
of attraction in Tragedy, the Peripeties and Discoveries, are parts of
the Plot. A further proof is in the fact that beginners succeed
earlier with the Diction and Characters than with the construction of
a story; and the same may be said of nearly all the early dramatists.
We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul,
so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come
second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful
colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a
simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait. We maintain that Tragedy
is primarily an imitation of action, and that it is mainly for the
sake of the action that it imitates the personal agents. Third comes
the element of Thought, i.e. the power of saying whatever can be said,
or what is appropriate to the occasion. This is what, in the speeches
in Tragedy, falls under the arts of Politics and Rhetoric; for the
older poets make their personages discourse like statesmen, and the
moderns like rhetoricians. One must not confuse it with Character.
Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the
agents, i.e. the sort of thing they seek or avoid, where that is not
obvious—hence there is no room for Character in a speech on a purely
indifferent subject. Thought, on the other hand, is shown in all they
say when proving or disproving some particular point, or enunciating
some universal proposition. Fourth among the literary elements is the
Diction of the personages, i.e. as before explained, the expression of
their thoughts in words, which is practically the same thing with
verse as with prose. As for the two remaining parts, the Melody is the
greatest of the pleasurable accessories of Tragedy. The Spectacle,
though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the parts, and has
least to do with the art of poetry. The tragi.e.fect is quite
possible without a public performance and actors; and besides, the
getting-up of the Spectacle is more a matter for the costumier than
the poet.
7Having thus distinguished the parts, let us now consider the proper
construction of the Fable or Plot, as that is at once the first and
the most important thing in Tragedy. We have laid it down that a
tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a
whole of some magnitude; for a whole may be of no magnitude to speak
of. Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A
beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else,
and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which
is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual
consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which
is by nature after one thing and has also another after it. A
well-constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any
point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just
described. Again: to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole
made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its
arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude.
Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible either
(1) in a very minute creature, since our perception becomes indistinct
as it approaches instantaneity; or (2) in a creature of vast
size—one, say, 1,000 miles long—as in that case, instead of the
object being seen all at once, the unity and wholeness of it is lost
to the beholder.
Just in the same way, then, as a beautiful whole made up of parts, or
a beautiful living creature, must be of some size, a size to be taken
in by the eye, so a story or Plot must be of some length, but of a
length to be taken in by the memory. As for the limit of its length,
so far as that is relative to public performances and spectators, it
does not fall within the theory of poetry. If they had to perform a
hundred tragedies, they would be timed by water-clocks, as they are
said to have been at one period. The limit, however, set by the actual
nature of the thing is this: the longer the story, consistently with
its being comprehensible as a whole, the finer it is by reason of its
magnitude. As a rough general formula, ‘a length which allows of the
hero passing by a series of probable or necessary stages from
misfortune to happiness, or from happiness to misfortune’, may suffice
as a limit for the magnitude of the story.
8The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having
one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man,
some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner
there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one
action. One sees, therefore, the mistake of all the poets who have
written a Heracleid, a Theseid, or similar poems; they suppose
that, because Heracles was one man, the story also of Heracles must be
one story. Homer, however, evidently understood this point quite well,
whether by art or instinct, just in the same way as he excels the rest
i.e.ery other respect. In writing an Odyssey, he did not make the
poem cover all that ever befell his hero—it befell him, for instance,
to get wounded on Parnassus and also to feign madness at the time of
the call to arms, but the two incidents had no probable or necessary
connexion with one another—instead of doing that, he took an action
with a Unity of the kind we are describing as the subject of
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