makes it good, accepting the belief that there is just as truly
a good way, and many bad ways, in poetry as in morals or in playing
billiards. This is no place to try to sum up its main conclusions.
But it is characteristic of the classical view that Aristotle lays his
greatest stress, first, on the need for Unity in the work of art, the
need that each part should subserve the whole, while irrelevancies,
however brilliant in themselves, should be cast away; and next, on the
demand that great art must have for its subject the great way of living.
These judgements have often been misunderstood, but the truth in them is
profound and goes near to the heart of things.

Characteristic, too, is the observation that different kinds of art grow
and develop, but not indefinitely; they develop until they 'attain their
natural form'; also the rule that each form of art should produce 'not
every sort of pleasure but its proper pleasure'; and the sober language
in which Aristotle, instead of speaking about the sequence of events
in a tragedy being 'inevitable', as we bombastic moderns do, merely
recommends that they should be 'either necessary or probable' and
'appear to happen because of one another'.

Conceptions and attitudes of mind such as these constitute what we may
call the classical faith in matters of art and poetry; a faith which is
never perhaps fully accepted in any age, yet, unlike others, is never
forgotten but lives by being constantly criticized, re-asserted, and
rebelled against. For the fashions of the ages vary in this direction
and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was
struck out by the imagination of Greece.

G. M

ARISTOTLE ON THE ART OF POETRY

1

Our subject being Poetry, I propose to speak not only of the art in
general but also of its species and their respective capacities; of the
structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number and nature of
the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of any other matters in
the same line of inquiry. Let us follow the natural order and begin with
the primary facts.

Epic poetry and Tragedy, as also Comedy, Dithyrambic poetry, and most
flute-playing and lyre-playing, are all, viewed as a whole, modes of
imitation. But at the same time they differ from one another in three
ways, either by a difference of kind in their means, or by differences
in the objects, or in the manner of their imitations.

I. Just as