SOURCE: "Aristotle on the Purposes of Literature," in Articles on Aristotle: 4. Psychology and Aesthetics, edited by Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji, Duckworth, 1979, pp. 166-75.

[In the following essay, Gulley studies Aristotle's use of the term "imitation" and the relationship between that which the dramatic or literary artist represents and that which is "true."]

In beginning this inaugural lecture I am aware that the notion of inauguration carries the notion of what is propitious. To inaugurate, in its literal Latin sense, is to take omens from the flight of birds. It has a transferred sense of consecrating a place or installing a person in office. In this sense the implication is that the ceremonial omens are favourable. Here are two modern dictionary definitions of it:¹ (i) to begin or initiate under favourable circumstances, with a good deed or omen, or with propitious exercises; (ii) to commence or enter upon, especially something beneficial.

This suggests that, in an inaugural lecture, I should say something about the beneficial nature of what I am entering upon and indicate in what respects the omens are favourable for me. It suggests also, perhaps, since my profession is to provide students with a classical education, that I should indicate the benefits of a classical education.

But this would be too extensive a programme for the occasion. What I propose to do is to give you a sample of Greek thought. It is a piece of analysis by a Greek philosopher. The philosopher is Aristotle. The analysis is highly original. Its influence on European literary theory has been considerable. Perhaps these are good enough reasons for looking at it today. But I have a further reason for selecting this piece of analysis. Its conclusions have their place in Aristotle's views about what constitutes a truly beneficial education. In this respect they can serve to illustrate what I consider to be a distinctive feature of an education in the classics. If I say something, however briefly, about this when I have dealt with the analysis, I will be meeting in some part the strictly inaugural requirements of my lecture.

The piece of Aristotelian analysis I want to discuss is part of his analysis of what he calls the poiêtikê technê, the poetic art. The Greek phrase has a generic sense which gives it much wider application than the English 'poetic art'. It means the art of producing or constructing something. It embraces products such as beds and pots and temples and tables as well as literary products. Before Aristotle, there was a specific use of it to refer to literary composition in verse, and a similarly specific use of the noun poiêtês for the verse composer, specific uses which have largely prevailed in English since we took over the Greek words. Aristotle is not happy about this specific sense. Granting that there is a literary species of poiêtikê technê, why should metrical form be a distinctive quality of it? For it was clear to Aristotle that the specifically literary art he wished to analyse included instances not written in verse, for example a Socratic dialogue, and excluded others which were written in verse, for example Empedocles' scientific work On Nature (Poet. 1447b9-20).² Nor was Aristotle happy about the use of a generic term—poiêtikê—for a literary species. But he accepts the difficulty of finding a suitable specific term. As he points out, no one up to his time had found one (1447b9). He himself does not offer one.

We have had the same difficulty in English. Perhaps it will serve as an advance indication of the kind of literary field Aristotle wants to define if we look briefly at two English candidates for a title for this field. The first is 'literature' in the narrow modern sense which makes the more generic term do duty for the more specific. In this sense 'literature' is used chiefly, in Webster's dictionary phrase,³ 'of writings distinguished by artistic form or emotional appeal', as opposed to those which are technical or erudite or informational or utilitarian. We sometimes add the adjective 'imaginative' when we use 'literature' in this sense. It is the sense we have principally in mind when we speak of a student of English or French or German 'literature'. We think of such students as readers of novelists and dramatists and poets rather than of historians and philosophers and scientists. This narrow use of 'literature' indicates fairly well, I think, the subject of Aristotle's analysis.

The other candidate is 'fiction' in its literary use. This is an altogether neater and more specific term. In its basic literary significance as a Latin term it comes very close to what Aristotle wants to analyse as an art. Unfortunately, modern English uses of the word make it unsatisfactory in several respects. Its most popular use excludes its application to all dramatic and most poetic literature (I use 'poetic' here in the usual English sense). Its scholarly use is much wider but still, I think, too narrow as an indication of the full range of Aristotle's poiêtikê technê. Scholars readily classify Hamlet as fiction. Most of them fight shy of the term when it comes to the Sonnets. And I am not sure that Aristotle would have wanted to rule out the Sonnets. However, despite the lack of a precise specific term, whether in Greek or English, to indicate the range of Aristotle's subject, perhaps these preliminary remarks will serve as a rough indication of it.

Let me now turn to Aristotle's analysis. He begins in his brisk, systematic way by classifying the poiêtikê technê as a form of imitation (mîmêsis; 1447al6). He specifies its medium as language. He adds that this is both a prose and a verse medium. It is not verse, he says, which distinctively marks off the literary artist from other writers. It is the imitative nature of his art (1447bl5, 1451b28-29). And having made this obviously basic distinction, Aristotle rather blandly leaves us to infer, partly from examples he gives of non-imitative literature, what he means here by imitation.

Here are his examples (1447b16-20, 1451a38-b5). A work on medicine or natural science is non-imitative. A work on history is non-imitative. And Aristotle emphasises that putting such works into verse does not make them imitative works. So we can see that the literary artist's field of operation is non-factual and non-theoretical. At least it is not his job to give information about matters of fact or to provide a scientific explanation of what is already established in its structure. The distinction, then, between non-imitative and imitative literature (I use 'literature' here in the broad sense) is a distinction between literature which uses language descriptively to refer to what is already there to be described or explained, and literature which is the product of a poiêtikê technê. And in Aristotle's analysis the literary significance of the phrase poiêtikê technê, the art of making or constructing or creating something, entails that what the artist directly expresses in language is, in the broadest sense of the word, fictional. The artist makes it up. So that there is a close connection between using language to imitate something and using it to present what is fictional. It would appear that it is only through fictions that you use language to imitate something.

Now when Aristotle uses 'imitation' as a term to describe what the artist is attempting to do he is using a term which was used readily by the Greeks in reference to literary works. Down to Aristotle's time the Greeks were accustomed not so much to the private reading of literature as to literary performances, whether dramatic performances or the public recitations of a rhapsode. Both the actor and the rhapsode were readily thought of as imitators (see Plato, Rep. 392cff.). As we ourselves might say when watching a dramatic performance: That isn't really Macbeth strutting about up there. It's Willie Morgan dressed up. He is dressed up to look like Macbeth, indeed he is attempting to behave like Macbeth, to represent him. It is this Willie Morgan level of imitation which made the idea of imitation in reference to literature familiar to the Greeks. But this level does not interest Aristotle. As he points out (1462all-13; see also 1450bl9-20), the dramatic poet can achieve his aim whether you watch his story enacted by Willie Morgan and company or you read it. What interests Aristotle is the usefulness of the notion of imitation, or representation as we would more naturally call it, once the Willie Morgan level is removed.

You cannot apply the Willie Morgan analogy at another level in any simple and straightforward way. You cannot say that as Willie Morgan represents Macbeth, so Macbeth represents someone else. But you can say that what Macbeth does and says, and the various events put into his life by the artist, represent something other than what is directly presented by the artist, that is, what is directly described through the conventional references of his language. As Aristotle has indicated, this direct kind of description is proper to an entirely different kind of literature. But the imitative literary artist, in presenting his fictions, is giving significance to those fictions by making them represent something else. So what are his fictions intended to represent?

Aristotle's initial answer to this is a broad specification of the field of operation for representations. He says that the field is human behaviour (1448al, 27-8). This is a sound enough answer. Certainly it is sound as a generalisation from the Greeks' past practice in the art of literature. But it is clear that Aristotle had further grounds for specifying this field as proper for the work of the literary artist. Most importantly, he recognised that it is a field with a high degree of variability in its events (EN [Ethica Nicomachea] 1094b14-19). Patterns of behaviour differ from individual to individual. And no one individual is likely to follow a perfectly regular and consistent pattern. There is no set pattern. Nor are there agreed rules for commending or condemning this pattern rather than that. A wide range of moral attitudes is possible. This makes the field of human behaviour the richest possible field for literary invention. It satisfies the important condition that wide freedom in inventing patterns of events inside it remains compatible with plausibility.

There is one more specification which Aristotle makes about the field—that it is the moral aspects of human behaviour which the literary artist is especially concerned with (1448al-5). We must not take this in too narrow a sense. Aristotle's point is that the aspects of human behaviour which are fundamental for the artist's purposes are those which are capable of engaging our moral sympathy or antipathy in any way. It is essential for the artist to prompt reactions of approval or disapproval, whether with regard to what a character says or does or with regard to what happens to him. If Hamlet passes the salt, this directly serves the artist's purposes only in respect of any moral significance it has, for example if Hamlet passes the salt as salt, knowing it to be poison, to someone he intends to kill, or if he passes it as a pre-arranged signal for removing the king's head. Similarly, when Tolstoy describes Anna Karenina's abrupt death at the railway station, his intention is not to illustrate that people who throw themselves under railway trains lose their lives. As Aristotle would have said, that sort of truth belongs to non-imitative literature, perhaps a treatise on physiology. What Tolstoy and Aristotle consider to be relevant to the artist's purposes are those aspects of her death which engage our moral sympathies, for example our sense of the bad luck or the unfair treatment which brought her to suicide. It is an engagement of our emotions which is essential in what is represented, not the provision of information.

This specification of the representational field gives a broad indication of what is represented in literary art. We can be more specific if we take into account what Aristotle says about the artist's concern with the universal. He says (1451b5-10) that the literary artist tries to express what is universal rather than what is particular; he presents particular events and particular people; but he intends them to represent the kind of things which certain kinds of people say and do. It is in this respect, Aristotle says, that the literary artist's construction is 'more philosophical' than history.

This Aristotelian notion of the universalising aim of literature is now a very familiar one. Here are some simple examples. In his Preface to Chuzzlewit Dickens says that at the time of its composition Mrs Sarah Gamp was a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness, and that Mrs Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of a hospital nurse. Moreover, the events making up the fictional lives of these two characters are intended by Dickens to represent certain general moral truths about the behaviour of people of this kind, for example that it is socially undesirable that the treatment of sick people should be left to this kind of person. Similarly, Jonas Chuzzlewit is representative of a bad type of character resulting from a bad type of education. And note that Dickens says that the recoil of Jonas' vices on the old man who educated him 'is not a mere piece of poetical justice, but the extreme exposition of a direct truth'.

This last statement makes explicit that what Jonas' fictional fortunes represent can be formulated as a general moral truth. Dickens is inviting us to agree that, while in his fictional world the truth or falsity of what takes place is irrelevant, yet the fictional image can represent what is generally true and in that way point obliquely to what it does not express directly.

In most respects Dickens' remarks indicate well enough what Aristotle means when he says that the literary artist expresses what is universal, and that his work is more philosophical than the historian's. Aristotle is saying that the literary artist's fictions are designed to prompt generalisations. They are designed to prompt us to see that what Agamemnon, for example, is doing in this particular situation is the sort of thing which that sort of man is likely to do in that sort of situation. By this means they are designed to prompt generalisations about recurring patterns of events in human life—'pride goes before a fall' and 'he who hesitates is lost' are two very trite examples. This is the sort of thing a Greek chorus tends to talk about in order to prompt the audience to make the right inferences from what is presented to what is represented.

But in one important respect it would be misleading to take Dickens' remarks as a guide to Aristotle's meaning. Dickens claims that his fictions represent what is true. Aristotle makes no such claims for the literary artist. He claims that his work is more philosophical than the historian's. But this does not imply, nor is it intended to imply, that the literary artist has some special insight into the nature of things or that he aims in his work to represent the truth. Aristotle himself explains that it is in respect of its tendency to express what is universal rather than what is particular that he describes the literary artist's work as 'more philosophical' than the historian's. His explanation sufficiently specifies the meaning of 'more philosophical' here. To be 'more philosophical' is to have a greater propensity towards sophia ('wisdom') than the other man. And at the beginning of his Metaphysics (Meta. 981a25-b20) Aristotle illustrates what it means to say that one man is 'wiser' than another. He illustrates from a number of examples that one person is properly called 'wiser' than another in so far as he has a better grasp of general principles. A doctor is reckoned 'wiser' in the field of medicine than the man who just knows that he has stomach-ache. A master-builder is reckoned 'wiser' than the man who humps the stones. Similarly, a liter-particular facts. For it is part of his job to make generalisations within his operational field of human life and behaviour.

I have given a good deal of emphasis to this point. For it is important not to read into Aristotle's mention of 'philosophical' any grandiose conception of the literary artist as a speculative thinker. Conceptions of that kind have been the source of much of the misguided idealisation of Aristotle's views on literature since the Renaissance. The kind of idealisation I have in mind is illustrated by Wordsworth, in his Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. He presents Aristotle's view as the view 'that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing'.⁴ He goes on: 'It is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; … carried alive into the heart by passion'. Aristotle would have approved of the terms 'general' and 'operative'. He would have approved of Wordsworth's link between these terms and specifically emotional effects. But he would have dissociated himself from the views that 'Poetry is the most philosophical of all writing' and that 'its object is truth'. Admittedly Wordsworth offers the first view as one which has been 'told' to him. But he really should have checked it.

One thing which is abundantly clear about Aristotle's literary universals is that it is not their truth-value which is a criterion for their validity. It is their evocative function, their value in arousing attitudes of fear and pity, surprise and admiration, amusement and indignation. When Aristotle gives his fine analysis of what is the best tragedy he is giving an analysis of the most effective means of achieving certain emotional effects. In the case of tragedy the emotions to be aroused are pity and fear (1449b27). And the artist's aim is not simply to arouse them but also to regulate them. Aristotle recognises that what the artist represents has not merely what I have called an evocative capacity in affecting the emotions. It has also a regulative capacity. It is this latter capacity which Aristotle's notion of katharsis (1449b28) or purgation of emotion is concerned with. Whatever else we might think of this notion as a piece of psychology, it does at least include the valuable insight that imaginative literature can regulate the quality and the intensity of particular emotions so as to achieve what are considered desirable results. It is here, according to Aristotle, that we should look for the purposes of literature. Aristotle is right. All literary art is propagandist in its aims. Accepting this, Aristotle considers it important that its emotional effects should be good effects.

In furthering this purpose the literary universals act as essential middlemen. For the artist is appealing, through his fictions, to what Aristotle calls philanthrôpia (1452b38, 1453a2, 1456a21), fellow-feeling, the kind of community of emotions and interests which Conrad, in his own discussion of the purposes of fiction, calls 'solidarity'.⁵ Hence it is by generalising his appeal, by so constructing his fictions that they can represent the general rather than the particular, that the artist gains the emotional effects he wants. As regards the truth-value of what is represented, Aristotle's view is that it is not the artist's proper aim to try to represent what is true in his field of operation, that is, the field of moral behaviour. In this field it is the job of the moral philosopher to enquire into the problem of what general propositions can be established as true. And it is the aim of the moral philosopher, not the literary artist, to present the truth as he sees it, if he chooses to put his inquiries into writing. The guideline for the artist, in Aristotle's view, is not what is, but what can be (1451a36 ff.). And according to the genre he is working in he has to judge what can plausibly be represented, that is, he must avoid anything improbable or irrational which is likely to thwart his aim of engaging his readers' sympathies. In this field of moral behaviour, as indeed in any other, Aristotle would have thought it a curiously oblique and superfluously elaborate method, with no advantages of either clarity or precision, to employ imitative literature to achieve a presentation-of-truth aim.

There are many varied reasons for the tendency in much European criticism since the Renaissance to idealise Aristotle's views on the aims of the literary artist. One reason is that his views were often overlaid by the didactic Roman ideals of Horace's Ars Poetica. Another, which I have already noted, is that Aristotle's remarks about the literary artist's 'more philosophical' approach readily lent themselves to metaphysical dressing-up. It became very easy to put forward as a basically Aristotelian view the didactic notion that the poet's job was to communicate to others his vision of the truth. The literary attitudes of Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare, provide a simple illustration of this.⁶ Aristotelian notions are reflected in many parts of this Preface, as they are in the Wordsworth Preface. Shakespeare's characters, says Johnson, 'are commonly species'. 'They act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated.' But note that Johnson asserts as a general principle, in Horatian vein, that the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. He does not, of course, mean instruction in any and every field. He means moral instruction, through the representation of moral truths which the artist implicitly invites his readers to accept. Indeed he raps Shakespeare's knuckles very sharply for giving more attention to pleasing than to instructing, and for 'sacrificing virtue to convenience' as he puts it. What he means by this is that Shakespeare's plays represent general views about the relation between virtue and happiness which he, Johnson, considers to be false. The poet should limit himself, he says, to what he calls 'just representations of human nature'. This will rule out 'irregular combinations of fanciful This will rule out 'irregular combinations of fanciful invention'. The mind can only repose, Johnson says, on 'the stability of truth'.

This last remark is a particularly interesting example of the kind of metaphysical idealism grafted on to Aristotle's views on literature by English critics. Notice how readily an individual critic's moral convictions can be equated with the stability of truth and used to determine what are just representations and what combinations of the artist's invention are regular. There is no immediately obvious implausibility in this. And what goes for the critic goes for the author. In the infinitely varied field of moral behaviour and moral attitudes the author has as much freedom in claiming truth for the general views which he intends his fictions to represent as he has in constructing his fictions. And in each respect much freedom is compatible with plausibility. Thus the equation of what is represented with what is true is easy to make. It is not only easy. It is extremely tempting to make it in the case of fictional literature. It is a token of the value of the fictions. We respect the truth. And it is understandable that the frequent criticism that fictional literature presents what is false should be taken as a criticism that it is lacking in value. Hence the temptation to maintain that, while what is directly presented cannot claim to be true, yet what is represented can claim to be true. Indeed it is sometimes claimed as one of the strengths of a representational theory that it effectively by-passes the criticism that the first-level symbolism of fiction is false and trivial. It does so by claiming truth for its second-level symbolism.

I think it is one of the great merits of Aristotle's theory that he avoids this temptation. He was very well aware of the kind of criticism I have mentioned. In the Poetics he deals explicitly with a number of such criticisms (1460b6 ff.). And it is worth looking briefly at his answer to them. It will serve to make a little more precise his views on this important question of the truth-aims of the literary artist. The main criticism Aristotle had to meet was that literature was lacking in serious purpose and value because it was a tissue of false statements, of absurdities and impossibilities. This sort of criticism can take two forms. It can be argued that the fictional statements made by the literary artist are necessarily false. Or it can be argued that his statements are in fact false; they can be shown to be false by reference to what is in fact the case. Let us look at the first form. If I say that Mr Micawber was recklessly improvident, or that Mr Squeers was unpopular with his pupils, or that Mrs Gamp was ungrammatical in speech, I am saying what is true only in the trivial sense of stating correctly what Dickens portrays as being the case. It is nonsense to ask whether the statements are true in any sense which implies that Mr Micawber or Mr Squeers or Mrs Gamp at some time existed, and were, respectively, improvident, unpopular, and ungrammatical. And since it is nonsense to ask this, it might be argued that Dickens is not writing about anyone, either in these cases or in the case of his other fictional characters, and that whatever he states to be the case with regard to them is necessarily false. His imaginative fictions might on this ground be criticised as at best profitless and at worst calculated to misguide and deceive.

The other form of criticism—that the literary artist's statements are in fact false—was used in a variety of ways by Plato in the Republic (377B ff., 598D ff.). Here are some of Aristotle's own examples of this kind of criticism, taken from the Poetics (1460b18 ff.). It might be argued, he says, that the literary artist is guilty of technical inaccuracies in his work, for example in medical detail, or that he makes false theological assumptions, or that he is grossly idealistic in depicting the moral behaviour of his characters, or that he describes what is impossible or irrational, for example the behaviour of the Greeks and Trojans in standing idly by while Achilles pursues Hector, or, as we might add ourselves, Alice drinking out of the bottle and shooting up in size.

Neither Aristotle nor any other Greek, as far as I know, distinguished these two forms of criticism. But I think it likely that the frequent criticism in Greece, dating from as early as the eighth century B.C. (cf Hesiod, Theogonia 27-8), that poets were liars sometimes confused the two forms of criticism in its attitudes and allowed one to intensify the other. Aristotle realised the importance of meeting this criticism. His distinction between imitative and non-imitative literature enables him to do this. Non-imitative literature, as we have seen, uses its language descriptively, with reference to what is already there to be described or explained. It is the statements of this kind of literature to which truth or falsity apply as the proper standards of correctness. If the criticism that the statements of fiction are necessarily false had been made explicit in Greece, Aristotle's answer to it would rightly have been that it is not their function to be true or false; the criteria of truth and falsity do not apply to them.

This kind of answer comes out clearly when Aristotle is dealing with the second form of criticism—that the statements of fiction are in fact false. What is to be noted about this form of criticism is that, unlike the first; it can be applied not only to what is directly presented by the literary artist but also to what he implicitly represents through his fictions. Aristotle's answer to it applies to both these levels. His answer (1460b14 ff.) is that it is what is artistically correct which matters, not any other kind of correctness, not, for example, the kind of correctness we call truth. And an artist's fictions are artistically correct if their construction is such as to achieve certain emotional effects. The appropriate emotional effects will differ from one literary genre to another. But in no genre will the truth of what is represented be a criterion for success in evoking the emotions. The literary artist's working criterion is not truth, but plausibility.

Aristotle is shrewdly perceptive in what he says about the varying limits, from one literary genre to another, of what is artistically plausible. In tragedy you soon lose the sympathy of your audience if you introduce events which fly in the face of natural laws or if the behaviour of your characters transgresses all psychological probability. Tragedy is too close to the facts of life for that. In epic the area of plausibility is a good deal wider (1460a11ff.). Homer, says Aristotle, tells the best tall stories. He knows how to give an air of conviction to the impossible. And this, as Aristotle says in his familiar dictum, is better than failing to give conviction of what is possible (1460a26-27, 1461b11-12). The golden rule is to observe the limits of plausibility appropriate to the genre in which you are working. And you must be consistent in this. Oedipus cannot be transplanted to the Mad Hatter's tea party nor Mrs Gamp to The Cherry Orchard. Nor would we forgive Miss Austen if Mr Darcy suddenly committed hara-kiri in the hall at Petersfield.

All that Aristotle says on this score of what is artistically correct is well said. Much of it concerns the proper application of this criterion at the level of what is directly presented by the literary artist. But what makes it especially important for the literary artist to have a good eye for what he can plausibly present is the fact that the particularities of his fiction represent what is universal, and succeed in their aim only if these representations too have the requisite plausibility. Plausibility in detail at level one governs plausibility at level two. Such general views about human behaviour and the human situation as are represented by the artist need make no claim to be true. But they must have sufficient plausibility to gain the emotional effects the artist is seeking.

Perhaps you remember the man Brown in Conrad's Lord Jim, the 'latter-day buccaneer' as Conrad calls him, who 'sails in his rotten schooner into Jim's history, a blind accomplice of the Dark Powers'. Brown's part in Jim's history illustrates what Conrad, in a letter to Bertrand Russell, called his 'deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world'.⁷ And there are other things which Conrad wants to represent through Jim's fictional experiences, general views about the psychology of cowardice and self-esteem and self-discipline. Conrad tells us, in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, what purposes he thinks the literary artist serves by his representations. Much of what he says is remarkably Aristotelian in spirit, especially his distinctions between the artist and the thinker or scientist, and his thesis that the essential appeal of fiction as an art is to temperament and not, as he puts it, 'to that part of our being which is dependent on wisdom'. Yet in the end Conrad cannot resist making the claim that the artist, like the thinker or scientist, seeks the truth, and that what the artist reveals through his fictions is 'all the truth of life'. Thus Conrad provides yet another illustration of the metaphysical idealisation of the Aristotelian view of literary art. An interesting reflection of the influence of this idealising tradition is found in Webster's dictionary definition of 'imitation' (op. cit., s.v.) in its aesthetic sense. It is, says Webster, 'a simulation of life or reality in art; imaginative embodiment of the ideal form of reality'. Webster adds that this is 'a use following Aristotle'. But notice the metaphysical transformation of Aristotle's notion of imitation.

I have spent a long time discussing Aristotle's view of the relation between what the literary artist represents and what is true. Yet it is a point of special importance in any consideration of literary values. In upholding the values of imaginative literature post-Renaissance European criticism has always tended to use the 'in-sight-into-the-truth' card as its trump-card. Aristotle's views on the values of literature are also decisively influenced by his acceptance of the value of this card. For the reason why Aristotle gives a comparatively low value-rating to literature is that he considers the 'in-sight-into-the-truth' card to be a card which the literary artist can never legitimately play.

You may ask why the lack of any such card in your hand entails that you have a comparatively poor hand. The answer lies in the end to which the playing of the card is directed. This determines the comparative value of your cards. And in the large game of human life the value of imaginative literature has to be measured against other activities or studies in relation to the end of life. That is how Aristotle measured it. Naturally and straightforwardly Aristotle, like any other Greek thinker, makes his value judgments in relation to some conception of human excellence—aretê—in a broad moral sense. Equally naturally he looks at human excellence functionally and starts from the notion of man as a rational animal (EN 1097b25 ff.) And perhaps it is equally natural again, since Aristotle is a philosopher, that he finished with a conception of human excellence in terms of what he considers to be the highest intellectual activities (ibid., 1177a12 ff). This is not the occasion for considering the metaphysical and other grounds on which Aristotle bases his grading of intellectual activities. But his conclusion is that the wisdom which is the distinctive mark of human excellence is found through the pursuit of truth in high realms of theory—in physics, in mathematics, in metaphysics, and in theology (Meta. 982a5 ff., 1026a6-32). Literature cannot measure up to these. In Aristotle's view the proper methods and aims of literature are such that neither the practice nor the study of it calls for the exercise of high intellectual activity. It does not have the pursuit of truth as its aim. Even if it did have such an aim it does not operate in a field in which any properly scientific method is applicable. Nor is it a field which can provide objects of study with a high metaphysical grading. As Aristotle puts it, man may be the best of the animals but he is not metaphysically the best of objects (EN 1141a33-b2).

Now all this does not mean that for Aristotle imaginative literature is without value. He values it for its capacity to refine and extend our emotional sensibilities. And he values its capacity to regulate those sensibilities. Indeed, since literary works are artificial things, producible in an enormous range of patterns, Aristotle sees that their regulative function can be socially and politically important. In his Politics (1340a ff.) he recognises, more generally than in the Poetics, that imitations or representations, whether in music or literature, can be used in a system of education to regulate emotion and hence character to an approved pattern. In this way they can further human excellence, at the practical level of character training. And this constitutes, for Aristotle, the final purpose of imaginative literature.

We may disagree, of course, with Aristotle's hierarchy of values, a hierarchy which puts literature and music in the kitchen, logic and mathematics in the diningroom, and philosophy and theology in the drawingroom. We may think there are good grounds for adjusting these value-ratings. But any changes which may be made in the comparative value-ratings do not invalidate in any way Aristotle's ideal of the educated man as one who does not spend his time exclusively in the kitchen or the dining-room or the drawing-room but spends time in them all and recognises the relative value of each of them for the furtherance of the good life.

This is an ambitious ideal of education. Yet it must not be thought that it is in any way exceptional in the world of classical civilisation. It can fairly be said to be the standard type of ideal in Greek and Roman thought. There are, naturally enough, movements up and down in the value-rating of this or that subject of study. In respect of particular value-rating the contrast between Greek and Roman ideals is in fact a fairly sharp one. Yet the Greek educational ideal of the truly wise man remains unchanged in Rome in certain fundamental respects. It is still an ideal of human excellence in a broad moral sense. It has the same comprehensiveness in the range of studies thought to be necessary for realising the ideal and the same resistance to specialisation. And each field of study is evaluated in relation to the common moral end which it serves.

I hope I will not be thought guilty of special pleading if I say that this classical ideal of education finds its clearest and indeed most appropriate exemplification in classical studies. The student of classics studies a civilisation. He studies its languages and literature, its religion and philosophy, its history and art. I consider this to be valuable and beneficial for much the same reasons as Aristotle when he put forward his own educational ideals. I think too that there is an increasing recognition nowadays that what best educates a university student for life and leisure—and perhaps too for business—is to work in this kind of broad and varied and demanding field of study. This recognition is reflected in the curricula of some of the universities, especially the newer universities, as well as in the discussions of professional educationists. It is a trend which Aristotle and I wholeheartedly support.

Notes

¹Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd edn., s.v.

² Subsequent references to Aristotle's text are to the Poetics, unless otherwise stated.

³Op. cit., s.v. Surprisingly omitted from the third edition.

⁴Wordsworth's Poetical Works, ed. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1944), Vol. 2, pp. 394-5.

⁵ In his Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus.

⁶ Quotations from the Yale edition of Johnson's Works, Vol 7 (New Haven, 1968), pp. 59 ff.

⁷ Quoted by Russell in his essay on Conrad in Portraits from Memory (London, 1956).