ced lecturer, full of
jottings and adscripts, with occasional phrases written carefully
out, but never revised as a whole for the general reader. Even to
accomplished scholars the meaning is often obscure, as may be seen by a
comparison of the three editions recently published in England, all the
work of savants of the first eminence, (1) or, still more strikingly, by
a study of the long series of misunderstandings and overstatements
and corrections which form the history of the _Poetics_ since the
Renaissance.

(1) Prof. Butcher, 1895 and 1898; Prof. Bywater, 1909; and Prof.
Margoliouth, 1911.

But it is of another cause of misunderstanding that I wish principally
to speak in this preface. The great edition from which the present
translation is taken was the fruit of prolonged study by one of the
greatest Aristotelians of the nineteenth century, and is itself a
classic among works of scholarship. In the hands of a student who knows
even a little Greek, the translation, backed by the commentary, may lead
deep into the mind of Aristotle. But when the translation is used, as it
doubtless will be, by readers who are quite without the clue provided
by a knowledge of the general habits of the Greek language, there must
arise a number of new difficulties or misconceptions.

To understand a great foreign book by means of a translation is possible
enough where the two languages concerned operate with a common stock
of ideas, and belong to the same period of civilization. But between
ancient Greece and modern England there yawn immense gulfs of human
history; the establishment and the partial failure of a common European
religion, the barbarian invasions, the feudal system, the regrouping
of modern Europe, the age of mechanical invention, and the industrial
revolution. In an average page of French or German philosophy nearly all
the nouns can be translated directly into exact equivalents in English;
but in Greek that is not so. Scarcely one in ten of the nouns on the
first few pages of the _Poetics_ has an exact English equivalent. Every
proposition has to be reduced to its lowest terms of thought and then
re-built. This is a difficulty which no translation can quite deal with;
it must be left to a teacher who knows Greek. And there is a kindred
difficulty which flows from it. Where words can be translated into
equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed;
but no translation which aims at being written