BOOKS.
THE POETICS OF ARISTOTLE.*
THE Poetics of Aristotle is undoubtedly, as Sir J. Sandys has, observed, a work which was "without a rival in Greek litera- ture as a model of literary criticism until, in the Roman age,. we ultimately reached the famous treatise On the Sublime."" At the revival of Greek study in the sixteenth Century half a. score editions or translations poured from the presses of Florence and of Venice, while the present volume is enriched by a Latin rendering of the Arabic version of Abu 'b-Bashar. Matta, "published before A..1). 932," which comes to us from. " a copy in the possession of the philosopher Abu 'Ali ibm Sarah, who lectured in Baghdad in the year A.D. 1009," the Arabic version being itself made from a Syriac translation * 'f'ur Poetics of Artiatotio. By D. S. Margollouth, Laudian Professor el at Oxford. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [lea..8d. net.] which "we shall probably be right in assigning to the sixth eentury.". But in spite of these testimonials to its interest the treatise was till lately, we think, little known in England ; so that when S. H. Butcher published Aristotle's Theory of _Poetry and Fine Art in 1894 he noted that "it was just a itundred years since a critical text of the Poetics had been published in Great Britain." That admirable volume, how- ever, in which exact scholarship and literary grace seem to save found their perfect union, restored the Poetics to their proper place in general esteem, and to-day criticism of the drama almost seems maimed and incomplete unless it is rounded off by a maxim from Aristotle.
But henceforth those who quote him will need to walk very warily. Ancient writers, as is well known, were never weary of praising "the golden stream of his eloquence," while to most modern readers his style seems a very model of harsh, .crabbed, awkward condensation, so that the theory bas often Seen put forward that the works of Aristotle, as we possess 'them, are not • his "published discourses,"- as known to :antiquity, but rather, as it were, the skeleton notes on which those discourses were built up ; and now, in dealing with the Poetics, Professor Margoliouth puts forward a somewhat similar theory in a very striking and even startling form. The treatise, he asserts, belongs definitely to the class of writings known as "esoteric," which are of set purpose so composed as not to be " understanded of the vulgar," so that the work should really be compared with "the esoteric litera- ture of the East," and studied as, for instance, you might study "the grammatical aphorisms or stltras of Panini, no _sentence of which would, without teaching, be understood even by one whose native language was Sanskrit." In fact, the famous question, Intelligis, guae legis? exactly applies to it, for to the ordinary reader its words are either meaningless or misleading "unless some one should guide him," while to afford such guidance it is necessary to know thoroughly the whole vast corpus of Aristotelian learning, so as at once to catch the clue to each dark and perplexing Baying. For example, we are told on one occasion that certain difficulties an poetry may be resolved by considering " the common custom of speech," and then comes this cryptic utterance: 4' Thus they any a dilution OilY fampapivor) is wine, whence the Leif-verse greaves of new-wrought tin,' " which we must leave as a puzzle to the reader, because we wish to illustrate Pro- fessor Margoliouth's views by a less curious but more import- ant example.
There are, perhaps, no words better known to literary students than those in which Aristotle defines tragedy, which we print here along with two renderings :—
Airn, ogy Tpeeptdia 1.4fihne-ts rpciteals criravSarar Taelar Adyeeos filutqapn Arhfq, xeopis bail:rut? Tap eia(4. iv Tar Aopfois, 8p4rrier gal sFl at' ilerrwryoXias, ai JMou KrA cptifiou rfprefvoutra 11-64 Tocakow wecenpairaw raeapoly.
"Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, ,complete; and of a certain magnitude ; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play ; in the form of action, not of narra- tive; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of those .emotions."—Butcher.
"A tragedy is, then, the portrayal of an imaginary chapter of (heroic life, complete and of some length, in language sweetened nn different parts in all known ways, in dramatic, not narrative form, indirectly through pity and terror righting mental disorders of this type."—Margoltiouth.
It is plain here, we think; that in making a carefully worded pronouncement of supreme interest—for to determine the mature of tragedy, rather than of poetry in general, is the real purpose of the Poetics—Aristotle has so expressed him- self as to convey to two students of the first rank a meaning which is strikingly divergent ; but for reasons of space we can .only consider the final phrase which has been, as Butcher remarks, "the centre of a great historic discussion," and to which he himself devotes an essay of thirty pages, in which there are no words wasted. For centuries, indeed, Aristotle was thought to indicate that the purpose of tragedy was " a purification of the passions" as a whole; and so Sir Philip .Sidney, Corneille, Racine, and Leasing took the passage. Milton, however, who was at once a scholar and a poet, saw more clearly, saying that, according to Aristotle, tragedy is 64 Of power, by raising pity and fear, to purge the mind of those and suchlike passions ; that is, to temper or reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passages well imitated," pretty much as "in physick things of melancholick hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours." And Butcher, largely accepting Milton's hint that tragedy provides a sort of " homceopathic cure" for pity and fear, speaks of the tragic "katharsis " as a process by which " the painful element in the pity and fear of reality is purged away,' or by which, as he puts it elsewhere, "human fear and human pity, under the excitation of art, are dissolved in.joy, and the pain escapes in the purified "—because unselfish—" tide of human sympathy." But in spite of all discussions this much- quoted phrase is still, we think, a puzzle to most people, ant must remain so, if Professor Margoliouth is right, until they study, as Milton very possibly had studied, "the thirtieth of Aristotle's Problems which deals with the black bile." For " if black bile, which is by nature cold, abound in the body in that condition, it occasions apoplexies, numbness, despair, and fear," and it is on the temperature of this humour—to the belief in which our word " melancholy " bears witness—that our mental condition largely depends. 'When it is heated, for instance, religious excitement may follow, and Aristotle notes in the Politics, as Pluto had done before him in the Laws, that this excitement is often soothed not by quiet but by impas- sioned and orgiastic music, the external agitation calming and counteracting the internal one. And similarly, says Professor Margoliouth—for it is here that he goes further than Butcher or his predecessor Bernays—when the black bile is cold,when we feel creepy and miserable ; then the true remedy, according to Aristotle, is to hear a tragedy, just because he holds that it "drives out an internal by an external chill," and so helps to bring the temperature of the black bile to a normal state by the process which is called " katharsis." For that unhappy word, which in its traditional rendering as "purgation" is painfully suggestive of pills and powders, is in Greek medicine applied to the expulsion not merely of noxious substances, but also of noxious qualities, such as excessive heat or cold, the object of the physician being to re- store that " equilibrium between heat and cold" in which health was supposed to consist, so that the tragic rr katharsis " is in no way a " purgation " or even " puri- fication," but the driving away of an internal by an ex- ternal chill, with a consequent restoration to health and happiness.
Now what the positive truth of Aristotle's theory may be, and whether to-day a person suffering from despondency would be relieved by seeing ' Hamlet,' it is not for us here to determine ; but certainly Professor Margoliouth's explanation seems to fit in exactly with Aristotle's theory of medicine and also with the general tendency of the Greeks to regard music, dancing, and poetry (all of which were combined in tragedy) less as aesthetic pleasures than as potent drugs pos- sessed of various sedative, intoxicating, and other virtues. And if we seem to have devoted too much space to the con- sideration of a single point our defence must be that it was impossible to do otherwise. For this remarkable volume is so full at once of profound learning and of original thought, it touches on so many interesting and difficult questions con- nected with literature and the fine arts, that to criticise it as it deserves would need half a dozen experts and as many articles. To take a single instance, the suggestion that the word "tragic "is derived from TpayiCeep, which used of the voice means "to be cracked," and so to have that "irregularity of pitch which is pathetic and found in great crises and great sorrows," so that " tragedy " is really " a howling and wailing," upsets by itself a hundred theories that have been held in connexion with " goats " and " goat-skins." And we can only say that Professor Margoliouth's monumental work is indispensable to any one who wishes really to understand one of the most interesting pieces of writing in all literature, though at the same time we should wish to enter a demurrer against a two strict application to the treatise of the word "esoteric." There is much in the Poetics which is extremely obscure, but there is much also that is absolutely clear, and we should hesitate to apply the term " esoteric " to it, just as we should hesitate to apply it to certain por- tions of the New Testament, merely because they contain some hard parables, some dark sayings, and some obscure allusions.
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