SOURCE: "The Poetic of Aristotle," in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic, Peter Smith, 1959, pp. 132-66.

[In the following essay, Baldwin offers a general overview of Aristotle's Poetics, discussing in particular the role of imitation in Aristotle's poetic theory.]

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.¹ 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 Bergson³ 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 division⁶ 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 ARISTOTLE¹⁰

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

1. The art of poetry                Chapter
   1. is one of the arts that imitate men in action
      1. belonging with instrumental music and dancing                              ii
         1. as using rhythm and melody besides words
   2. has two typical modes                iii
      1. narrative
      2. drama
         1. tragedy
         2. comedy
   3. developed historically               iv
      1. from the instincts of imitation and rhythm
      2. toward
         1. idealizing what men may be
            1. as in epic and tragedy
         2. satirizing what men are
            1. as in lampoons and comedy
         3. differentiation of form
            1. drama tending toward unity of plot
                                                        v
               1. through the successive improvements of Eschylus and Sophocles
            2. but keeping variety in verse.

      The second section discusses plot as the mainspring of tragedy (chapters vi-xviii)

2. In the mode of drama, tragedy
   1. (definition) is an imitation of an action
                                              vi
      1. serious
      2. determinate
      3. in language enhanced by rhythm, melody, and song
      4. by action, not by narrative
      5. issuing in emotional catharsis
   2. is primarily plot
      1. the subsidiary elements being character, diction, thought, spectacle (including make-up), and song
      2. (definition) Plot is a course of action planned to move causally from a beginning through a middle to an end
                                                 vii
      3. Plot is thus animated
         1. not merely by one main person
                                                    viii
         2. but by such consistency
            1. as arises from truth, as distinct from facts                                      ix
            2. as is opposed to the episodic
            3. as is necessary to the catharsis
      4. Plot may be complicated by reversal or recognition                               x
         1. arising causally from the plot itself
                                                    xi
         2. and has as a third element emotion and suffering
      5. Plot is the consistent working out, in an illustrious personage, of some human error to its issue
         1. Prologue, episode, etc., are merely formal parts                                   xii
         2. Plot is not mere reversal of fortune in a character altogether good or bad
                                                    xiii
            1. for consistency, plot should be single, not divided by reversal to make a "happy ending"
               1. as in inferior tragedies
               2. and in comedy
         3. Plot achieves catharsis by its own consistency                            xiv
            1. not by spectacular means
            2. for the effect of fear and pity arises from the clash of motive with circumstance
         4. Plot imposes consistency also on characterization                       xv
            1. generally consistency with
               1. goodness
               2. the moral habit of the class
               3. the received idea of the particular person
               4. itself; i. e., actions must be clearly motivated
            2. particularly consistency with the causal weaving of the plot
               1. excluding the deus ex machina
         5. Plot is the true measure of the various kinds of recognition                    xvi
            1. The least artistic is recognition by bodily marks
            2. No better is mere disclosure
            3. A third, by recollection, arises from some incident in the plot
            4. A fourth is through the inference of the persona:
            5. But the best of all is that which arises causally from the course of the action
      6. Plot, in the actual process of playwriting
         1. demands a habit of visualizing
                                                    xvii
            1. furthered by the dramatist's acting out of his own scenes
         2. begins in the dramatist's mind with a scenario
            1. for the amplifying incidents must be fewer than in epic
         3. is worked out as complication and solution                              xviii
            1. This is the technical point in which tragedies are similar or dissimilar
            2. The four typical kinds of tragedy, i. e., (a) those that depend mainly on reversal and recognition, (b) on emotion, (c) on character, (d) on spectacle, show the four elements of interest which the dramatist should seek to combine
         4. precludes the extensiveness of epic
         5. involves making the chorus one of the actors
            1. not a mere singer of interludes
   3. The subsidiary element of thought, the rhetorical element in tragedy, includes the effects produced directly by persuasive speech, as distinct from those produced by action.                               xix
   4. The subsidiary element of diction, to set aside what belongs under delivery, includes letters, syllables, connectives, nouns and verbs (with their inflection), and word-combinations.                        xx
      1. Words may be classified as
                                                 xxi
         1. single or double
         2. ordinary or extraordinary (figurative, coined, etc.)
         3. masculine or feminine
      2. Virtue in the choice of words consists in being clear without being colorless                                         xxii
         1. Though extreme or habitual deviation from ordinary use is a fault, occasional deviation is necessary to distinction
         2. Though it is a great thing to use variations of diction with propriety, the greatest thing is to be master of metaphor.

      The third section defines epic and compares it with tragedy (chapters xxiii-xxvi).

3. In the mode of narrative, epic
   1. has some general likeness to tragedy
                                              xxiii
      1. in that its [component] stories should be single, complete, having beginning, middle, and end
         1. giving the pleasure of a living whole
         2. not following the method of history
            1. as inferior poets do, but not Homer
      2. in that it may be simple or complex, emphasize either character or emotion, and has some of the same elements as tragedy
                                                 xxiv
   2. differs in length and in meter
      1. Its characteristic advantages are scope and variety
      2. The respective meters are the result of experience in appropriateness
   3. shows in Homer the superiority of making the characters reveal themselves without explanation
   4. can make freer use of the marvelous
      1. by vividness of description
      2. from the fact that the causal sense is weaker in reading or merely listening than in witnessing stage representation
   5. may be defended against the typical charges that it is impossible, improbable, corrupting, contradictory, or artistically incorrect                                xxv
   6. is inferior to tragedy                    xxvi
      1. The charge that tragedy is more vulgar and exaggerated applies not to tragedy, but to acting
      2. It has fewer elements of appeal
         1. lacking music and spectacle
      3. It is less vivid than tragedy read [much less than tragedy acted]
      4. It is less concentrated [and so less intense]
         1. lacking dramatic unity

I

The principle of poetic art is imitation. Its two kinds are drama in several forms and that other kind which ranges from epic to dialogue and which has no single generic name. All its forms in both kinds—tragedy, comedy, dithyramb in the one; epic, mime, dialogue in the other—are grouped with the arts of the flute, the lyre, and the dance, and apart from those of painting and singing. Thus begins Aristotle's Poetic with that chapter of definition which, as in the Rhetoric, opens and illuminates the whole subject.

As to poetic art¹¹ I propose to discuss what it is in itself and in the capacity of each of its species, how plots must be organized if the poem is to succeed, furthermore the number and nature of the parts, and similarly whatever else falls within the same inquiry, beginning systematically with first principles.¹²

Epic and tragedy, comedy also and the [dramatic ¹³] art of the dithyramb, and most of the art of the flute and of the lyre are all, taken together, imitations. They differ one from another in three respects: in the means of imitation, in the object, or in the mode [i. e., all are essentially imitation; in imitation they are generally alike, and in imitation they are specifically different].

For as there are those who by colors and outlines imitate various objects in their portrayals, whether by art or by practise, and others who imitate through the voice, so also in the arts mentioned above. All [these] make their imitation by rhythm, by language, and by music, whether singly or in combination. Thus only rhythm and music are used in the art of the flute, of the lyre, and in such other arts, similar in capacity, as that of the pipes. Rhythm itself, without music, [suffices for] the art of the dancers; for by ordered rhythms they imitate both character and emotion and action [i. e., dancing compasses the whole scope of representation]. Words alone, whether prose or verse of whatever kind, are used by an art which is to this day without a name. We have no common name for the mime of Sophron or Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogue. Nor should we have one if the imitation were in trimeters or elegiacs or some other kind of verse.… [For it is not verse, Aristotle goes on to say, that makes poetry, but imitation.]

So much for differentiation. There are some arts that use all the means mentioned above, i. e., rhythm, music, and verse, e. g., dithyrambic and nomic poetry and also both tragedy and comedy; but they differ in that the first two use all the means in combination, whereas the latter use now one, now another. Therefore I differentiate these arts by their respective means of imitation.

To proceed surely from this opening chapter, it is evidently necessary to grasp what Aristotle means first by imitation, secondly by that nameless art which uses only words, thirdly by classifying the art of poetry with that of music and that of the dance.

By imitation Aristotle means just what the word means most simply and usually, but also and more largely the following of the ways of human nature, the representation or the suggestion of men's characters, emotions, and actions.¹⁴ At its lowest, imitation is mimicry; at its highest, creation. The latter is often implied in the Greek word poetic.¹⁵ Poetic is one of the fine arts. By whatever means, in whatever forms, it is a direct showing of life, as distinct from any account of life through experiment or reasoning. The artist enhances our impressions of life by the suggestions of music or of story, the representations of dance or of drama. All these ways are called by Aristotle imitation because they follow the movements of human life. It is noteworty that he presents imitation primarily as a constructive or progressive principle. The more obvious imitation achieved by a single phrase, a single melody, or a single dance-movement is reserved for later discussion of detail.¹⁶ The poet is a maker, as indeed he was called by our Elizabethans as well as by the Greeks, in the sense that he is creative. Poet, poetry, poetic, all are used by Aristotle with this broad implication of creative composition,¹⁷ of "imitating men in action."

Secondly, Aristotle specifies as kinds of the poetic art tragedy and comedy, which belong together as drama, and on the other hand epic, mime, dialogue, which also belong together, but have no common name. We lack, he says, a generic name for those forms of poetic art which, however various, are alike in having for their sole means of imitation words. The generic name that Aristotle desired to cover all prose and all metrical compositions in which the imitation is through words alone is still to seek. Yet that the genus is distinct through many varieties of form is even clearer to-day than in his time. The imitation of dancing and of all forms of drama is through representation; the imitation of music without words is through suggestion. Now so is the imitation of words without music. True, the words in the latter case carry something besides imitation; they convey ideas; but in so far as they achieve imitation, they do so by suggestion, and it is this suggestive imitation that makes them poetic. What is needed, then, is a term to cover all composition in words that proceeds by suggestion. Perhaps the nearest term in modern English is narrative. Using narrative widely enough to include, as in common modern use it often does include, dialogue and description, we have the term that Aristotle desired. Story would serve if it were not often used of the plot of a play or of an account in a newspaper. Narrative usually connotes a distinct method. A distinguishing generic term is more important to-day than in the time of Aristotle. Modern authors have developed narrative in directions little explored by the ancients. We have thus a variety of narrative forms which was quite unknown to Aristotle. Still, through all this variety, runs what he discerned as a common controlling method, the method of suggestion. In this fundamental Gulliver's Travels and the Sentimental Journey and The Lady of the Lake, to take examples as different as possible, belong together; and together they belong apart from Othello.

Thirdly, what is the significance of grouping all these forms of poetic art with music and dancing? Painting, which even in Aristotle's day was a fine art, is mentioned only as an analogy from another group. Singing, or chanting, also is only mentioned for analogy, perhaps because it is not creative. Architecture may have been omitted as being primarily at that time a useful art; but sculpture was both a fine art and, perhaps most obviously of all arts, imitative. Though we need not assume that Aristotle intended here a comprehensive classification of the arts, it is clear that he intended to group poetic art with the arts of music and dancing. Nor is his principle of division far to seek. Clearly he regards poetic as one of the arts of movement in time, and as distinct from the static arts of line and color, balance, mass, and pose. True, music and dance entered largely into early Greek drama and were still present in the drama of Aristotle's time; but that fact does not explain the grouping together of "epic, tragedy, comedy, dithyramb, flute-playing, and lyre-playing," with the later inclusion of dancing. Aristotle does not say that these occur together; and the mention of epic precludes any such interpretation. He says that they are alike. He saw all poetic art, especially drama, as primarily an art of movement. What is implied here in the opening chapter is carried out consistently, in doctrine and in terms, through the whole book. No one should deny a certain fundamental likeness among all the arts; but the likeness is not in technic except among those arts which have like "means" of expression, such as "rhythm, language, and music." Modern application of terms from architecture and painting to drama and story has spread no little confusion. Aristotle will have us think along right lines; and, as in his Rhetoric, the first chapter is the most important of all. We are to think of poetic composition not as structure, but as movement.

[Chapter ii differentiates the epic and the tragic art, which idealize "men in action" by seeking higher types of manhood and exhibiting men's aspirations, from the comic art, which exaggerates human failings. Chapter iii differentiates the two typical modes of poetic imitation as the narrative and the dramatic. Chapters iv and v, starting from the common impulses toward imitation, toward music, and toward rhythm, summarize the history of tragedy and of comedy. The conclusion is that tragedy differs from epic not only in proceeding by representation instead of narrative, but by being focused on a short period of time, normally twenty-four hours; in a word, by being intensive. Thus we arrive at the famous analysis of the essentials and the elements of tragedy.]

A tragedy,¹⁸ then, is an imitation of an action that is (1) serious and, (2) as to size, complete, (3) in language enhanced as may be appropriate to each part, (4) in the form of action, not of narrative, (5) through pity and fear effecting its catharsis of such emotions.… Every tragedy,¹⁹ therefore, must have six constituents, according to which we estimate its quality: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and music.

The greatest of these is the plan of the actions (the plot); for tragedy is an imitation not of men, but of action and life … and the end [for which we live] is a certain form of action, not a quality. By their characters men are what they are; but by their actions they are happy or the reverse. [In a play] therefore they do not act in order to imitate character; they include character for the sake of the actions. Hence the actions and their plot are the end of tragedy; and the end is greatest of all. Furthermore, without action there may not be tragedy; without character there may be … By stringing together speeches expressive of character and well made as to diction and thought you will not achieve the tragic function. Much rather is it achieved by a tragedy which, however deficient in these, has plot and plan of actions. Besides, those things by which tragedy moves us most, scenes of reversal and of discovery, are parts of the plot. A further proof is that novices in dramaturgy can put a fine point on diction and characterization before they compose deeds; and it is the same with nearly all the early dramatists. The principle and, as it were, the soul of tragedy is plot.

Second is character … Third²⁰ is thought, i. e., the ability to say what is necessary and appropriate, which in public address is the function of politics and rhetoric.… Characterization is what shows habit of mind … Thought appears in formal reasoning.

Fourth is diction, i. e., the expression of meaning in words, which is essentially the same in verse as in prose.

Of the remaining elements, melody is the greatest of enhancements; and spectacle, though moving, is [in general] the least artistic and [in particular] has the least to do with the art of the drama.

The history of criticism involved in the successive interpretations of this much discussed section and the following may be postponed, The immediate concern is the meaning of the definition and the division for dramaturgy, i. e., for the actual composition of a tragedy and for the analysis of tragedy in terms of composition. Aristotle begins with the subject-matter. The theme itself must be tragic, and is so if it is first serious and secondly complete within its own extent. A playwright considering the possibilities of such-and-such material is to ask first whether it is serious. The Greek word²¹ means not solemn in the sense of sad, but such as to interest the composer and the audience by its importance. It might be rendered humanly significant. The question, Is there drama here? becomes, then, first of all, Is there action here that will engage emotional participation? That is the first question; for it is fundamental.

Secondly, is this action dramatically manageable as to extent? Will it finish within the time of a drama, come to its issue, focus; or is its interest such as to demand more extensive development in time; in a word, is it a drama plot or an epic plot? The epic of "much-enduring Odysseus" demands extent of time; the tragedy of Oedipus, compression of time. Complete²² here means concluded, i. e., susceptible, within dramatic limits, of a conclusion emotionally satisfying. To be dramatic, the action must be self-consistent and self-determining. Tragedy is characteristically intensive.²³

So far our tragedy has no words; it may even do without them. Nevertheless in its higher ranges it expresses itself also through suggestive language. In the third place, then, tragedy uses the whole range of "enhanced utterance," i. e., rhythm, and occasionally music and song. In conception a tragedy must be significant and complete; in expression it may be variously suggestive.

The fourth distinction of tragedy is its characteristic movement, which is acting, not narrative. The process of drama is representation; the process of story is suggestion. Drama shows men and women doing; story tells what they did. That is essentially dramatic, then, which is best brought home by actual representation. In this regard imaginative conceptions of human life differ essentially. Some are best conveyed by the indirect but abundant suggestions of narrative; others have their poignancy only through the few direct strokes of visible action.

Finally, tragedy is defined by its effect, the tragic catharsis. Tragedy "through pity and fear achieves its purgation of such emotions."²⁴ It is complete, then, not only in action, but in emotion. Emotion is not merely aroused; it is satisfied; it is carried through to a release. Tragedy is thus thoroughly emotional, more emotional than any other form of art. It is emotional not incidentally, but essentially; for it offers not merely emotional excitement, but emotional satisfaction. As all art enhances by imitation our impressions of life, so tragedy reveals our motives and moves us onward through vicarious experience. We yearn toward our fellows moved as we are, only more deeply; we fear in some great crisis what obscurely threatens us all day by day; and we know the inevitable end not with our minds, but with our awakened hearts.

From definition of tragedy by its essential characteristics Aristotle proceeds to enumeration of its constituents. Of these the sine qua non is plot. The insistence on this is so ample and so convincing as hardly to need interpretation. Characterization comes second. Third is the expression of thought, as distinct from the expression of emotion or of character. The persons of the play not only reveal their individualities; they have also occasion to expound or persuade, and here poetic leans on rhetoric. For drama, though its movement is imaginative, though it primarily expresses emotion and character, cannot dispense with logic. Fourth is diction. Here again it is noteworthy that Aristotle puts this fourth, though tyros, he says, can master it before they can manage plot. Whether the diction be verse or prose he regards as negligible at this point. With the same brevity he enumerates finally musical and scenic accompaniments. What he enlarges upon is plot and characterization, and upon plot as the essential and determining factor.

These distinctions made, let us thereupon discuss of what sort the plan of the actions (the plot) must be, since this is both the first and the greatest [constituent] of tragedy. We have shown tragedy to be imitation of an action complete and whole which has a certain magnitude. Though there is such a thing as a whole without any appreciable magnitude, we mean by a whole that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something else naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by causal necessity or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. Plots that are well planned, therefore, are such as do not begin or end at haphazard, but conform to the types just described.²⁵

Plot, then, is what makes a play "complete and whole"; it is a planned sequence of actions. Aristotle's terms connote, not space and structure, but time and causal movement. The beginning is the point at which the cause is set in motion; the end is the result; the middle is the course from the one to the other. Plot is thus a significant course of action determined by permanent impulses; it imitates, not the mere surface movements of life, but its undercurrents. It is not a "slice of life," such as the experience of this day or that, but a course of life, moving from a "serious" crisis of determining emotions, through actions that carry these emotions out, to the final action in which they are seen to issue. Plot gives us what we often miss in actual experience, and consequently seek in the vicarious experience of drama, a sense of progress to completion. Experience is interrupted and complicated; drama moves steadily on a single course. Plot is the means by which dramatic art simplifies life, in order from the facts of life to extract the truth.

Furthermore, plot means technically management of a significant course of action within a practicable time. The tragedy must be long enough to show the action as progressive, yet short enough to be grasped as a single whole. "Beginning, end, middle" are thus very practical considerations. Every playwright considers every plot in this aspect. Where is he to take hold in order to make the situation clear? What final action is, for his conception, the inevitable end? What are the stages between, leading one to another, in which the action will best be seen as a progressive course? Without limiting his consideration to the time-rules of the actual dramatic competitions of his day, Aristotle seeks

the limit determined by the very nature of the act; the greater, within the limits of clearness, the finer by its scope. To define roughly, that scope is sufficient within which the sequence of events according to probability or necessity may change from ill fortune to good, or from good to ill.²⁶

What Aristotle finds necessary is time enough to make the action convincing, to carry out the dramatic consequences to their conclusion. Compressed within too short a time-lapse, the plot may remain fragmentary; stretched out too long, it may sag or trail. "Beginning, end, middle," then, constitute a formula for plot.

A plot does not gain unity by being, as some think, all about one person… For as in the other imitative arts, the imitation is unified by being of one thing, so also the plot, since it is an imitation of an action, must be the imitation of an action which is one and entire and whose parts are so composed of acts that the transposition or omission of any part would disjoin and dislocate the whole [That, indeed is what we mean by a part]; for a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference is no part of the whole.

From what has now been said it is plain that the function of a poet is this, to tell not the things that have happened, but such things as may happen, things possible as being probable or necessary. The historian and the poet differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and none the less it would be history, with verse or without. No, the difference is in this, that the one tells the things that have happened; the other, such things as may happen.²⁷

Consistency of plot, consistency of characterization also, as Aristotle goes on to show, imply that the poet interprets. He is not merely a recorder. The acts … of his personœ are not statistics; they are parts of the consistent presentation of a single whole. Every one of them, quite differently from the acts of real life, is seen to be significant. In thus including the significant and excluding the insignificant, the poet interprets according to his conception of the springs of action. He simplifies life according to his view of causes and motives, "according to probability or necessity."

In this the poet differs from the historian more generally. Tragedy is true to life not by rehearsing what men have done, but by revealing in significant action what men do, what they must do, being the men that the dramatist shows them to be. History records a man's deeds, and reasons from this evidence; drama directly represents the doer doing what he should do "according to probability or necessity." Plot, then, implies actions shaped to a unifying consistency. It imitates life; but it imitates by creative interpretation.

Therefore poetry is something more philosophical and more serious than history; for poetry speaks rather in universals, history in singulars. By universal I mean what such or such a man will say or do according to probability or necessity.… It is evident from these considerations that the poet must be rather a poet of plots than of verses. He is a poet by virtue of imitation; and what he imitates are actions. Even if he chance to make²⁸ history, none the less for that is he a poet; for nothing hinders some historical events from being just what they should be according to probability or possibility, and it is [only] in that aspect of them that he is their poet.²⁹

That dramatic composition is thus primarily the devising of a convincing sequence is seen conversely when the sequence is defective.

Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. By an episodic plot I mean one in which the sequence of the episodes is not determined by probability or necessity. Actions of this sort are composed by bad poets through their own fault, and by good ones on account of the players; for as they compose for competitive presentation, and stretch a plot beyond its capacity, they are often compelled to twist the sequence.³⁰

The essential dramatic force, then, is sequence, steady onward movement to a convincing issue. Scenes merely episodic, however vivid or clever each may be in itself, weaken this essential force. The episodic fault, whether it arise from weakness in the composer or from an actor's insistence on having a "part" to suit himself rather than to suit the play, makes the worst plays because it is a fault at the source.

Finally on cogency of plot depend the tragic pity and fear. The catharsis depends on our feeling the issue to be inevitable. Unexpected to the actors it may be, and most strikingly; but it cannot be fortuitous. While it is surprising to them, it must be satisfying to us as the outcome of their action.

Considering the imitation as not only of a complete action, but also of events arousing fear and pity, we find these too at their height when they are [at once] unexpected [by the dramatis personoœ] and consequential. For so we shall be more struck than by what happens of itself or by chance.³¹

["Reversal" or "recognition," Aristotle goes on in chapters x and xi, if the plot is so far complicated, must arise from the plot itself, not be merely added.]

Two parts of the plot, then, reversal and discovery, are such as has been shown; a third is [actual] suffering … action destructive or painful, such as deaths on the stage, tortures, wounds, and the like.³⁴

This latter passage is tantalizingly brief. So far as the context shows, suffering is used here to denote single scenes of unusually violent action. Why should such a scene be called a "part of the plot"? The word [pathos] is used generally—and in the plural it is used repeatedly throughout the earlier chapters of this work—to mean emotion. Emotion is not a part of the plot in the sense that reversal or recognition may be a part. Rather it is a pervasive principle and an object. Suffering, to translate the singular noun so, may be regarded as a part of the plot in the sense that it may be an element of tragedy. So taking it, we may suppose Aristotle to countenance here such scenes of violence as were more familiar on the Elizabethan stage than on the Greek.³⁵. At any rate, Aristotle here inserts a chapter³⁶ on the formal parts (prologue, episode, exodus, etc.), before proceeding with the methods by which the plot may be worked out.

Chapter xiii insists that the vital principle of plot is causal consistency. This rules out mere reversal. A turning-point … is, indeed, characteristic of drama. There is usually and typically a crisis, in which the hero's fortunes turn from good to bad; but this reversal will not suffice by itself. The mere turn of fortune does not achieve the catharsis of pity and fear.

There remains, then, the [hero] between [the typically virtuous man and the typically depraved], a man neither exceptional in virtue and righteousness nor falling into adversity by vice and depravity, but by some error, a man among those who live in renown and prosperity, such as Œdipus or Thyestes or other illustrious men of such families.

The perfect [tragic] plot, therefore, must be single, not, as some say, double;³⁷ the change of fortune not from adversity to prosperity, but on the contrary from prosperity to adversity; not through depravity, but through great error on the part of a man either such as we have described or rather better than worse.³⁸

Why this insistence on character in the midst of the discussion of plot? Why the iteration of "not through depravity, but through error"? Because, as Aristotle shows below,³⁹ plot implies consistency of characterization, but more fundamentally because consistency of plot has for its very beginning and mainspring the realization of a central figure like ourselves progressively winning our sympathy. The essence of plot is motivation. What moves us is never mere luck, never mere surprise, but the causation that springs from human will. Consistency of plot means clear causation; and causation in drama is the working of will. So the first consideration is the title rôle, the main "part." He or she should be illustrious because the action is thereby conspicuous and partly known in advance; but his course of action must be moved by springs that we feel in ourselves. Macbeth is a warrior of an elder day and a king; but we, though neither warriors nor kings, feel the perversion of his manhood as like enough to our own to purify us through pity and fear.

Fear and pity may, indeed, be aroused by mere spectacle, but they may also be aroused from the very plan of the actions,⁴⁰ and the latter is superior and shows a better dramatist.

This is the second consideration of consistency. First, the best tragedy springs from a great personal will gone wrong; secondly, it springs from a compelling progress of actions, from the plot itself. It depends not on the shock of this violent deed or that, but on the causal movement of the whole.

Character is discussed in chapter xv as a distinct topic, but still with reference to plot. For throughout this section, especially from chapter xiii on, the topic is consistency.⁴¹ Consistency, though it refers primarily to plot, must also include characterization. In general, characterization must be consistent with the morality of the individual purpose, with the moral habit of the social group, with the received idea of the person, and finally with itself.⁴² In particular,

it is necessary in the characters, as in the plan of the actions, to seek always the inevitable or the probable, so that the saying or doing of such-and-such things by such-and-such a person, just as the happening of this event after that, shall be inevitable or probable. Evidently, therefore, the solutions also [as well as the complications] of plots must come about from the plot itself, and not, as in the Medea … by the deus ex machina.⁴³

In a word, consistency of characterization is part of the causal weaving of the plot.

Chapter xvi applies the principle of consistency to "recognitions," or "discoveries."⁴⁴

Best discovery of all, however, is that which arises from the actions themselves, when the surprise comes as a natural result, as in the Œdipus of Sophocles and in the Iphigenia.⁴⁵

Chapters xvii and xviii turn to the actual processes of dramaturgy, to the work of the playwright. This is concerned mainly with plot; but first Aristotle urges the fundamental necessity of visualizing.

One must compose plots and work them out in the "lines" by putting [the scenes] before his eyes … and as far as possible by acting out, even with the gestures.⁴⁶. …

His stories, whether already made or of his own making, he must first set out in general (i. e., make a scenario), then put in the incidents and carry out.⁴⁷ …

Every tragedy has both complication and solution, the events that precede [the opening scene] and often some of those within the play constituting the complication, and the rest the solution. By complication I mean all from the beginning to that scene which is just before the change in the hero's fortunes; by solution, all from the beginning of the change to the end [of the play].⁴⁸ …

It is necessary to remember what I have said often and not make a tragedy an epic system—by epic I mean aggregative—as if one should dramatize the whole story of the Iliad.⁴⁹ …

The chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors, be a part of the whole and share in the action, be not as in Euripides, but as in Sophocles.⁵⁰

Visualizing actively at every stage, the playwright is to compose his plot before he works out his lines. He is to determine his play by the method of solution, to avoid the extensiveness of epic, and to make even the chorus contributory to the plot.

The bearing of the meager observations on the logical element and on diction (xix-xxii) will be clear from the tabular view.⁵¹ They are not distinctive except in the saying "the greatest is the being metaphorical";⁵² and they have surprisingly little on dramatic rhythms.

The third section of the Poetic (xxiii-xxvi) defines epic and compares it with tragedy.

As to metrical narrative, its plots [severally] should have the movement of drama in focusing on an action whole and complete with beginning, middle, and end, that [each] may give its proper pleasure as an organic unity, and not be composed as history, which has to exhibit not a single action, but a single time, whatever chanced to happen in this period to one person or to more.⁵³

The general likeness of epic to drama, then, is in interpretative focus, as distinct from the chronicle method of history. Story, as well as drama, selects in order to unify. Moreover (xxiv) story, too, as well as drama, has its crises, its recognitions, its emotional outbursts. The epic poet, if he have something of Homer's skill, can make his characters express themselves without intruding his explanations. These are general likenesses throughout the whole poetic field. For characteristic differences, epic has the advantages of scope and variety. It gains from the marvelous, which can generally be suggested better than it can be represented.⁵⁴ These points are as significant to-day as in the time of Aristotle. Not so the defense (xxv) of epic against certain typical objections which smack more of the schoolmaster than of the critic. To argue whether a given epic story were possible or probable or promotive of good morals was in fact one of the regular elementary exercises of the later schools. The closing exaltation of drama over epic⁵⁵ is summary, indeed; but that is natural, since the points, having been made before, are here simply reviewed comparatively. The idea of intensity through unity is a logical conclusion of the Poetic as a whole.

II

From Aristotle's introductory grouping of drama with music and dance, throughout his long discussion of plot, runs the idea of movement. The dramatic mode of imitation is to set human life in motion before us and to heighten our sense of living by carrying it through to a significant issue. Has this idea animated other drama than the Greek? Is its vitality shown by its permanence? Is it essential? As all art heightens our impressions of life and our sense of living, so the art of the dramatist in particular heightens and extends our sense of human life by vicarious experience. Its object is to make us feel human experience more widely and more intensely. All the technic of the stage, whether ancient or modern, whether simple or elaborate, has for its main object this sort of creative imitation. The dramatist tries to induce and to hold the illusion of actual experience. In so far as he succeeds, we forget that we are in the theater; we imagine that we are seeing a reality more real than we can piece out of our fragmentary glimpses at men and women; and in his greatest successes we almost pass from spectators to actors. Toward this result how important is Aristotle's idea of movement, his doctrine that plot is a progressive synthesis of actions, unified but never static?

Those who have superficially thought of Greek drama as static, who may even have pictured it as statuesque, can hardly have studied the great play of Sophocles that Aristotle offers as an example, Œdipus the King.

Laius, King of Thebes, and his wife Jocasta cast out their infant son Œdipus to die. But the shepherd commissioned to do away the child gave it instead to a stranger, who carried it to Corinth. There the little Œdipus, fostered by a Corinthian couple, was brought up as their son. In the strength of his manhood setting forth to make his own way, he met in a narrow pass another traveler who haughtily bade him yield passage. The dispute warmed to blows. Œdipus killed him. It was his own father Laius. Proceeding to Thebes, Œdipus found the throne vacant and the city in terror of the monster Sphinx. He silenced the Sphinx, and, hailed by the people as their deliverer, he became their king and married the widowed queen Jocasta, his own mother. But Apollo having in time sent a pestilence upon Thebes, Œdipus was besought by the people to be once more their savior. His emissary to the oracle, Creon his brother-in-law, brought back word that Thebes must put away the unclean person who had slain Laius. By searching investigation Œdipus discovered that he himself was the pollution, that he had slain his own father and married his own mother, that not only he but his children were accursed, that the outlawry which he had invoked upon the guilty fell upon his own head. Thereupon he put out his eyes in an agony of horror, after Jocasta had killed herself, and groped his way from Thebes led by his wretched daughters.

This is the legend. Its events extend over many years. Which of them shall be chosen for the stage as having most dramatic value? Which to an audience can be made most significant; and how shall these vital scenes be arranged in such continuous and progressive movement as will convey, and at the same time enhance, our sense of the movement of life? Sophocles with his own dramatic skill, but in the form typical of all the best Greek tragedy, arranged his whole action within the compass of its last poignant hours. Omitting nothing that is emotionally essential, nothing that is essential to clear understanding, he yet relegated some events to the background in order to represent fully the great crisis. He gathers together the whole visible action into an hour and a half on the stage and a half-dozen persons; and in this brief compass he unfolds that action with increasing intensity by making every scene move from the last and to the next, on to the awful close.

The Theban people, represented by the chorus supplicating their savior king, rehearses his great achievements for their deliverance. Œdipus in the strong confidence of his power and his mission stands before his palace like a god. At the end of the play he is led slowly from that palace a broken man. But the composition of the play is not mere reversal for contrast. Between the first scene and the last, action moves without haste, but without delay or interruption. The vigorous and self-reliant king chafes at the cryptic response brought from the oracle by Creon; he is indignant, then furious, at the tragic silence of the seer Tiresias. His quick intelligence scents a plot between the two. Breaking through the interposition of Jocasta, he wins from her false hopes while he gives her no less unwittingly the premonition of doom. Once suspecting, however darkly, he must know, he will know, he knows a dreadful part, he knows more, he knows all. So this great play, though it is focused on a single day, though it excludes all the past history and the development of character, is never static. It is never for a moment tableau. Because of its compression it moves not less, but more.

For that is why Aristotle insists that the dramatic action should be self-consistent, limited in scope. The object of dramatic unity is not bareness, but fulness and continuity. It is to give time for full and intense realization of what actual life merely hints interruptedly. It is to give us human life undisturbed and uninterrupted, so that we may see it clearly and whole. We are to have the illusion of actual experience, yes, but of larger and deeper experience than we can get from the mere reproduction of facts or from the cross-currents of life itself. Like every other art, drama is a simplification of life because it is an interpretation. The dramatic simplification is seen by Aristotle to consist essentially in moving from revealing crisis to revealing crisis up to a final revelation. It excludes all the accidental and the irrelevant that embarrass our actual movements; it tells what has happened through what is happening; it cuts to the quick. It takes those moments only in which a man is himself, suppressing those in which he is indistinguishable from other men. But it does not leap or halt between; it brings out our real sequences. It reveals life to us by showing the emotional connection of its great moments.

That such dramatic unity became sometimes a bondage in seventeenth-century French classical drama, was due not to any defect of the Aristotelian principle, but partly to making the practise too rigidly a code, and still more to stiffening the movement into tableau. The classical French application of the principle of dramatic unity is not, as has often been pointed out, altogether Aristotelian. Least of all is it Aristotelian when it hinders dramatic movement. French classical tragedy when it is cold—and to think of it as generally cold is a prejudice—is static; it is feeble in movement. The free movement, not to say the loose movement, of Elizabethan plays, which was hailed by Hugo and other Romanticists as a deliverance from the classical code, is indeed better than tableau; but it is compatible with bad playwriting. He would be rash who should assert that Elizabethan plays are in general more effective dramatically than French classical plays. Rather, since the two traditions bring out different dramatic values, each has something to learn from the other. But it is plain that the progress of the Elizabethans in dramaturgy was in the direction of unity, of more highly organized movement. To see this we need go no farther than Shakspere. The difference between his earlier plays and Othello is largely a difference in unification. Othello by itself is sufficient proof of the value of dramatic unity for dramatic intensity. And with or without unity, with the Greek and the French focus of time or the Elizabethan lapse of years, drama demands movement from scene to scene. The value of unity is only to heighten this sense of movement.

Drama, of course, has its differences of age and of race. We are not to think that at its best it must always be Greek. One of the large differences between ancient drama and modern is, indeed, a difference of emphasis. Ancient drama relies more on plot, modern drama on characterization. The ancient playwright had above all, for his theater, to realize the emotional values of a situation by seeing that his play was well put together; the modern playwright has sometimes, in a theatre giving opportunity for facial expression, relied far more on realizing his persons, on writing what the actor calls a good part. Nevertheless, though playwriting does not always need the compactness of Greek form, many modern plays have chosen this compactness, this closely organized movement, for intensity.⁵⁶

Undoubtedly such dramatic composition demands of the playwright definiteness of interpretation. His selection, his limiting of time and place, his leading from scene to scene, are only the technical means of realizing his emotional intention. He is trying to show us human life, not in random and interrupted glimpses, not in the jumble and discord of its surface, not in aimless and frustrated movements, but in the animating emotions of its crises. In order to represent crises, he is compelled to show us wherein they are critical; in order to give to emotion full expression, he must make it significant. Rather it is this significance which first caught his attention, which gave him the conception of his play and guided his realization. If his dramatic movement halts or lapses, the reason may lie deeper than technic in uncertainty of intention; and if on the other hand he is able to sustain it and carry it through, the fundamental reason is that his conception of its issue is strong and clear.⁵⁷

This presumption has more than once been challenged. Why must the dramatist have an intention, a theme? Why may he not simply represent life? Represent life he not only may, but must, to the extent that he must reflect life, not reflect on it; but what is represented? Life in its multitudinous complexity, its unfulfilled intentions, life as it whirls past and escapes us? That is a task beyond drama. No playwright has ever represented life except as he saw it, or made his representation intelligible without interpretation. And as the dramatist has to interpret in order to compose, so the audience wishes to be led up to some issue. We desire not mere emotional excitement, but emotional release. Else the pity and fear, to use Aristotle's words, will not bring us purgation. A play shows us life in critical moments, and these are moral moments, moments of the clash of wills. Drama assumes free will, and its movement is by motives. Motivation, on which Aristotle so much insists, is to make the issue convincing. The dramatic representation of life is creative imitation largely in proportion as it thus moves to an end; and the typically dramatic end is not blind fate, but poetic justice.

Poetic justice sums up what Aristotle means by saying that "poetry is something more philosophical and more serious than history." It means the truth revealed beneath facts, the real cause and effect moving beneath the surface. An audience, desiring deeper emotional experience than it achieves through daily observation, desires especially to see how its sharper conflicts issue. It asks of the dramatist not only sight, but insight. It is not satisfied with "mere reversal." "The mere spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us." The same criticism is implied in Stevenson's objection to Meredith's Richard Feverel, that it "began to end well" and then cheated us.

The convincing close, expressing the playwright's intention and resulting from the whole course of action, is thus a fair measure of what used to be called problem plays. It measures how far they are in Aristotle's sense serious, how far they are penetrative and significant, in a word how far they are tragic. Each disclosure, each critical scene of the dramatic progress, having its full emotional value separately and for itself, leads on to the next. Such planning for momentum is not only Aristotelian; it is permanently dramatic.

Creative imitation of human life, thus moving us along that course of actions which is both the means and the measure of creative power, makes drama of all the arts most poignant. Whether it is, as it has always seemed to its devotees, the highest form of poetic, at least its appeal is at once the largest and the most direct. In the very persons of men and women it speaks to us by face and gesture, by the message, the imagery, and the rhythm of words, most of all by the order of its actions. Plato, indeed, would have us draw from this the moral that our own lives should be ordered poetically, that is creatively, that we should control and direct our lives to harmonious movement.

For we are ourselves according to our power poets of a tragedy at once fairest and best. Every social order becomes for us an artistic creation of the fairest and best life, which we say to be essentially the truest tragedy.⁶⁰

Notes

¹ The best recent editions of the Poetic for English readers are: (1) S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, text, translation, notes, essays, London, 1895, 4th edition 1911 (text with translation issued separately); (2) Ingram Bywater, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, text, translation, introduction, commentary, Oxford, 1909. For other translations and for a select bibliography see Butcher. Lane Cooper has added to his "amplified version with supplementary illustrations for students of English," Boston, 1913, an essay (1923) on Meaning and Influence.

²Reconstruction in Philosophy, New York, 1920, chapter iii.

³L'évolution créatrice, chapter. i.

⁴ I say this without forgetting that the Poetic as we have it is probably but a part. If a part, it is still self-consistent, as I have tried to show in the tabular view below.

⁵ viii, 206, 232.

⁶ See Chapter i.

⁷ See page 4.

⁸ See page 42.

⁹ See page 27.

¹⁰ This analysis is intended to supplement, and in some cases to emend, the outlines of Butcher and of Bywater by bringing out the significance of the parts in relation.

¹¹ [poiētikēs]. The adjective means generally active, productive, creative, efficiens, as commonly in Aristotle's philosophy, in Dionysius and Demetrius, and in Plotinus. Specially it means poetic, as of diction. The noun [ne poiētikē] … includes all imaginative composition in words.

¹² Bywater (page vii), protesting against too generalizing interpretations, goes to the other extreme of undue restriction. That the treatment is philosophical and intends to suggest large inferences appears from both its plan and its language. Certainly the Poetic is technical; but no less certainly it is theoretical.

¹³ The interpretation of Bywater.

¹⁴ … 1447 a, where Aristotle is speaking of dancing.

¹⁵ See foot-note 11 above.

¹⁶ In Chapter ix, 1451 b, Aristotle says: "It is evident from the above that the poet should be rather the poet of his plots than of his verses, inasmuch as he is a poet by virtue of his imitation, and it is actions that he imitates."

¹⁷ Butcher (pages 110-124) in pointing out that the Greek phrase for the fine arts is imitative arts.…, says that Aristotle applies it specifically only to poetry and music. In this opening chapter of the Poetic he evidently means to include dancing. That Aristotle had no thought of "bare imitation," of that reproductive copying which Ruskin confused with artistic truth, has been remarked also by other critics. Butcher adds suggestively, though not with strict reference to the text, that to imitate nature was for Aristotle not to evoke the mere background which romanticism has taught us to spell with a capital N, but to work in nature's ways. Nature … in Aristotle is not the sensible world, but "the creative force, the productive principle." So the immediate objects of poetic imitation are human characters, emotions, and actions, not as objective phenomena, but as expressions of human will. "The common original," Butcher concludes, "is human life … essential activity of the soul." Though this is true to the underlying idea of the Poetic, Aristotle does not use any single phrase corresponding to "imitation of nature."

¹⁸ 1449 b.

¹⁹ 1450 a.

²⁰ 1450 b.

²¹ [Spoudaīcs,] which of persons means earnest; of things, what we mean by serious in such phrases as a serious proposal and serious consideration.

²² Bywater makes one item, "as having magnitude, complete in itself." Butcher makes two items, "complete, and of a certain magnitude." The former seems closer to the Greek text and, on the whole, more consistent with the context; but both renderings give much the same meaning ultimately.

²³ The distinction has lately been pointed by Mr. Hardy's Dynasts. This, whatever else may be thought of it, is not "complete as to size," but indeterminate. Doubtless that is why it is styled an "epic-drama." Certainly, for all its "enhanced utterance" and occasionally striking dialogue, it is not, by any definition, a drama.

²⁴ Bywater, pages 152-161, has discussed this phrase amply, and in an appendix, 361-365, has compiled with their dates the successive critical translations.

²⁵ vii. 1450 b.

²⁶ 1451 a.

²⁷ viii-ix, 1451 a-1451 b.

²⁸ The verb here translated make corresponds to the noun poet. The insistence brought about by the repetition will be made clear by rendering the words italicized creator and create, or, to revive an older use, maker and make.

²⁹ ix. 1451 b.

³⁰ ix. 1451 b.

³¹ iX. 1452 a. …

³⁴ xi. 1452 b.

³⁵ Both Butcher and Bywater so interpret; but Butcher's rendering "tragic incident" seems hardly to meet the context. Bywater's rendering "suffering" seems preferable if we may venture to interpret it as meaning, more generally than Bywater suggests, the working out of the plot to its full emotional expression. So taken, it corresponds to the climax of pity and fear, as "reversal" and "recognition" correspond to the preceding complication.

³⁶ xii. 1452 b. This has been challenged as an interpolation. It is at least meager and, as it were, impatient, as is the corresponding section in the Rhetoric (III. xiii. 1414 b) on the formal parts of an oration.

³⁷ … The context seems to show that this means divided in interest and issue, insufficiently focused. Aristotle does not mean that the plot should not be complicated; for at the opening of this chapter he says that the plot of the perfect tragedy is not simple, but complicated.… What he adds here is that the complication should not be such as to divide our sympathy. The plot should not, indeed, be simple; but it should be single.

³⁸ xiii. 1453 a.

³⁹ xv.

⁴⁰ xiv. 1453 b.…

⁴¹ See the tabular view, page 136.

⁴² I follow Bywater's note, pages 227-228.

⁴³ 1454 b.

⁴⁴ … 1454 b. "This and the next two chapters form a sort of Appendix; they discuss a series of special points and rules of construction which had been omitted in the sketch of the general theory of the [muthos]." Bywater, page 233. I am not convinced of an interruption here. What seems to me the bearing of this chapter and the following on the discussion of consistency from Chapter xiii on is indicated in the tabular view on page 136.

⁴⁵ 1455 a.

⁴⁶ xvii. 1455 a.

⁴⁷ xvii. 1455 b.

⁴⁸ xviii. 1455 b.

⁴⁹ xviii. 1456 a.

⁵⁰ xviii. 1456 a.

⁵¹ Page 138. As to whether xx is an interpolation, see Bywater.

⁵² xxii. 1459 a.

⁵³ xxiii. 1459 a.

⁵⁴ A most striking exemplification of this is Paradise Lost.

⁵⁵ Sainte-Beuve, Étude sur Virgile, vii. page 151, disputes the superiority of drama to epic.

⁵⁶ The most familiar instances are certain plays of Ibsen. Of plays recently on the stage, Bernstein's Voleur, Mirbeau's Les affaires sont les affaires, Besier's Don, Kenyon's Kindling, show that this type of dramatic movement is not confined to any particular school. Of plays that on the contrary dispense with this and rely mainly on characterization the most familiar to Americans is the dramatization of Rip Van Winkle used by Joseph Jefferson.

⁵⁷ The paragraph is adapted from the author's College Composition, page 248.…

⁶⁰Laws 817 b; quoted by Bywater on Aristotle's Poetic, 1450 a.