nd in
it must be of the forms just described. Again: to be beautiful, a living
creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a
certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain
definite magnitude. Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore
impossible either (1) in a very minute creature, since our perception
becomes indistinct as it approaches instantaneity; or (2) in a creature
of vast size--one, say, 1,000 miles long--as in that case, instead of
the object being seen all at once, the unity and wholeness of it is lost
to the beholder.

Just in the same way, then, as a beautiful whole made up of parts, or a
beautiful living creature, must be of some size, a size to be taken in
by the eye, so a story or Plot must be of some length, but of a length
to be taken in by the memory. As for the limit of its length, so far as
that is relative to public performances and spectators, it does not fall
within the theory of poetry. If they had to perform a hundred tragedies,
they would be timed by water-clocks, as they are said to have been at
one period. The limit, however, set by the actual nature of the thing is
this: the longer the story, consistently with its being comprehensible
as a whole, the finer it is by reason of its magnitude. As a rough
general formula, 'a length which allows of the hero passing by a series
of probable or necessary stages from misfortune to happiness, or from
happiness to misfortune', may suffice as a limit for the magnitude of
the story.

8

The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one
man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of
which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are
many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action.
One sees, therefore, the mistake of all the poets who have written a
_Heracleid_, a _Theseid_, or similar poems; they suppose that, because
Heracles was one man, the story also of Heracles must be one story.
Homer, however, evidently understood this point quite well, whether
by art or instinct, just in the same way as he excels the rest in every
other respect. In writing an _Odyssey_, he did not make the poem cover
all that ever befell his hero--it befell him, for instance, to get
wounded on Parnassus and also to feign madness at the time of the call
to arms, but the two incidents had no probable or necessary connexion
with one anot