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ings which it contemplates are not part of itself, and that there is no shame in its praising and pitying the unseasonable grief of another who professes to be a good man. the contrary, the pleasure which it experiences it considers to be so much gain, and it will not allow its contempt for the poem as a whole to rob it of this pleasure. For only a very few can realize that the character of our own emotions must be affected by the manner in which we participate in the emotions of others. Yet it is so, for if we let our own sense of pity grow strong by feeding upon the griefs of others, it is not easy to restrain it in the case of our own sufferings.'1

And what applies to pity applies also to love and anger, and to all the manifestations of desire, pain, and pleasure; for poetic imitation waters and cherishes the passions when they ought to wither, and makes them govern when they ought to be kept in subjection, in order that we may become better and happier, instead of worse and more miserable.' '

There are two considerations, however, which explain in part, though they do not justify, the severity of Plato's criticism of Greek poetry and the Greek poets.

In the first place, it is necessary to remember the importance of the function which Greek poetry in general, and the Greek drama in particular, was called upon to perform. At the time at which Plato wrote, and in the society to which he addressed himself, the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, and the representations of the dramatists, performed func

tions which are to-day entrusted to agencies as diverse as the pulpit, the press, the stage, and literature in general. And if Plato, in asking from poetry the high morality of the professor of religion, the practical knowledge of the fourth estate,' and the enchantments of fancy, was asking too much, the fault lay as much in circumstances as in himself. In the second place, he had a great love of poetry. Like an ardent lover he not only sees keenly, but feels bitterly, the defects in his mistress. And in making his estimate of the qualities of poetry this bitterness is uppermost in his mind, and makes his criticism proportionately severe. But even thus, when he hardens his heart and deals roughly with her, the underlying tenderness will at times appear. He will be glad if a reconciliation can be effected. He is eager for some literary champion to appear, and prove him in the wrong; 'for the cause of righteousness will gain much, if poetry can be made the vehicle of duty as well as of pleasure.'

1

What is really the most serious fault in this estimate of poetry, considered as a piece of literary criticism, is the failure to recognize and appreciate what was good in the poets whose works were before him the fact that only the bad is selected, the immoral actions of the gods, and the deceitfulness, cowardice, and unscrupulous action of the heroes in Homer, and the exaggeration and misrepresentation of the appeal to the emotions in the drama. It was,

1 607.

perhaps, only natural that he should express no admiration for a beauty of style, and a structural perfection, which were elementary characteristics of Greek art, but how can we pardon him for giving no hint of the interpretative power of Æschylus' ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα ; or of the lyric sweetness of Sophocles' 'Love unconquered ; or of the supreme pathos of the death of the faithful hound that raised himself in recognition of his master, Odysseus, and then lay down to die? Why does he tell us nothing of the splendid presentation of the doctrine of retribution for sin given by the Attic tragedians, or of the portraiture of Nausicaa's innocence, and Penelope's constancy, by Homer? Was there no moral purpose to be discerned here? Nevertheless the ideal of a literature which, in point of teaching, is indistinguishable from philosophy, embodies a loftier conception of the functions of poetry than any which is contained in the Poetics, and it is one which, as I have already remarked, is essentially in harmony with our modern aspirations.

How was it, then, that Plato, having got so far, failed in his criticism of Greek poetry to discern the connection between the 'imaginative reason' and the spiritual teachings of philosophy? Probably because the common conception of human life prevalent in the Hellenic era was one in which man's activity was regarded as coterminous with his physical existence, and it was only a reflection of this kind of life that was expected in poetry. It was

just here that his misconception of the character of artistic representation, as shown in the charge of unreality which he brings against poetry and art, was most disastrous. He assumed that poetry and art, being only imitations of material existences, could contain nothing but a reflection of this common conception of the life of man. To adopt the form of a remark of Aristotle, he first assumed that the poets' view of life was material, and then blamed them because their view, being spiritual, did not answer the tests of resemblance to material reality by which alone he measured their work. In short, Plato, in recognizing literature and art as vehicles of knowledge, assumed that their method was identical with the method of his own dialectic: it remained for Aristotle to distinguish between the method of art and the method of logic, and, in so doing, to point out in what respect a resemblance between the productions of art and the external reality upon which they were based was to be expected.

CHAPTER II

ARISTOTLE CONSIDERS POETRY AS A BRANCH OF ART

ARISTOTLE takes the subject out of the regions of morals and politics, and confines its scope by limitations which arise naturally in the course of his account of the origin and methods of art. His broadest conception of art is, however, to be found in the Ethics,' where he defines an art as ‘a union of a productive faculty and reason.' In the Poetics he explains the nature of this dual origin. The 'imitation' which he, in common with Plato, finds to be the basis of its manifestations, is traced to a primitive impulse which can be separated from the love of knowledge; and he clearly distinguishes between the method of poetry and the method of history, even when they both employ the same instrument-words without metre or musical accompaniment. 'The business of the poet,' he says, 'is to tell not what has happened, but what could happen, and what is possible, either from its probability, or from its necessary connection with what has gone before. The historian and the poet do not differ in using or not using metre-for the

11140. Ταὐτὸν ἂν εἴη τέχνη καὶ ἕξις μετὰ λόγου ἀληθοῦς ποιητική.