utility of spectacle, the Tractate goes on to the quantitative parts of comedy: prologue, choricon, episode, and exode. It ends by differentiating Old, New, and Middle Comedy. (In Shakespeare, the Falstaff-episodes are of the 'old' type, The Comedy of Errors is of the 'new,' and The Tempest is intermediate.)

In our limited space one could only hint at a few of the ways in which the Tractate throws light upon both ancient and modern comedy. The fragment belongs to the Peripatetic tradition; I incline to share the belief of English scholars, as opposed to German, that in essentials it represents some part of Aristotle's work on poetry.

V. MAIN TENETS OF ARISTOTLE

REGARDING POETRY

FOR modern readers a difficult postulate of Aristotle is that of imitation. To us the word suggests a servile copy; we think ill of an artist who is not 'original': the poet should look at things for himself, and express them in his own way. A like objection is brought against imitative art by the Socrates of Plato's Ion and Republic: ideas, the true realities, exist in the mind of God alone; even visible objects are imperfect copies of the truth; and the artist imitates these imperfect copies in a false semblance of a bed or table, so that his work is at two removes from the true idea. With Aristotle, the artist does look at reality; life is the very thing the poet represents. The painter imitates, not a particular bed or table, but the true idea thereof. 'I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject,' said Wordsworth; he steadily contemplated men in action, and thus imitated universal forms. Aristotle may have no term for our

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'creative imagination,' but his concept implies an artistic activity amounting to creative vision.

The result of this activity is something vital. A work of art is like a living organism. The thought is not peculiar to Aristotle, having already occurred to Plato, and indeed is basic in any fruitful theory of art. The poet is like the Creator in giving to a work of art the organic quality we find in the works of nature. And art completes nature. Omitting the accidental or superfluous, the artist seeks the end toward which nature is striving, and completes the effort in a rounded whole. The artist, however, represents the idea in a medium chosen by himself. The animal is one thing, its representation in words or pigments another. This organic comparison is perhaps more consistently worked out in the Poetics than in any other critical treatise we know. It appears even in chance-allusions. When dwelling on the need of structure in a poem, Aristotle will compare a disjointed work of art to an animal that has suffered a painful and striking dislocation of a limb.

The structure of the whole is vital, the medium in which the artist works less impor

tant. Whether one chooses metrical language, or merely writes in prose, is of no great significance. The question is, does the writer use his imagination? Does he represent men engaged in a great and unified action, with its parts duly fitted together? English has no accepted term for the literary artist in imaginative prose, as Aristotle found no Greek word embracing prose dramas and imaginary dialogues. German, however, uses dichtung for poetical or imaginative composition whether in verse or prose.

The characteristic of poetry being the typical representation of men in action, Aristotle insists on the 'probability' of that action. Does the poet represent what may or, better, must occur, given the agents and the initial situation? What follows must not merely be possible. Possibly a clever villain like Richard III, or a brave wrong-doer like Macbeth, will be outwitted or worsted; but intelligence and courage are likely to succeed, and hence the failure of such persons is not typical, being neither probable nor necessary. The artist may render it more plausible through a sequence of events, but the initial situation is not promising. Probability in the sequence,

is, of course, the poet's major concern, according to Aristotle. Nowadays we think of probability and possibility in a vague way as related to things in general. Aristotle mainly thinks of a consequent as probable or necessary in relation to definite antecedents. Before you may have a dramatic incident B, you must have an A from which it naturally or inevitably springs, and so on throughout the play.

Thus the hero falls as the natural outcome of an ethical flaw or some grave misjudgment in a crisis of his tragic hamartia. The word, borrowed from archery, later appears as the New Testament equivalent for 'sin.' Lear misses the mark through his 'hideous rashness' in dividing his kingdom and misjudging the loyal Cordelia. Fierce and obstinate wrath in Achilles, with Agamemnon's error in seizing the girl Briseis, brings on all the woes of the Iliad. The point is illustrated in all great tragic stories; Saintsbury thinks Aristotle's insistence on it his chief contribution to critical theory. But it may have been noted by Greek critics in treatises that are lost, for the hamartia is a matter of conscious art in the poets, as in Sophocles' delineation of Edipus or of

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