easy association on a bright flat surface. Horace may never have studied the Poetics, yet he surely recognized some of his doctrines as Aristotelian. But he certainly read Plato; he mingles drafts from the Dialogues with the thought of Aristotle as interpreted at Alexandria. One Neoptolemus of Parium having embodied notable matters from Aristotle in a Greek versified treatise, Horace may be following this, or a similar source, for his main ideas, and even in style, apart from his own felicitous banter. His clear-cut maxims also reflect personal observation of men and poetry; they are generalizations, not platitudes.

Aristotle, unlike Horace, says little of genius, and nothing on the need of it in the would-be poet, on the conjoint offices of nature and art, or on polishing one's verses and long withholding them from publication. Of these Alexandrian commonplaces, one may have been known to Horace in the Greek lines formerly ascribed to Simylus, a poet of the Middle Comedy: 'Nature without art will not suffice for any work, nor yet will art suffice if natural gifts be wanting.' The stress of Horace on the mechanics of verse, on the dual function of poetry in profit and delight, and

on propriety and variety of style, does not savor of Aristotle's Poetics. But the sound remarks on organic unity, dramatic action, the evolution of the plot, the consistent presentation of character, and the emotional effect of tragedy, are Aristotelian; and similarly the high place assigned to the successful dramatist. The observations on comedy supplement the Poetics, but as they deal with Roman adaptations of the New Greek Comedy, and as Horace on the Old Greek Comedy is stereotyped and vague, he does not reflect the substance of the Tractatus Coislinianus.

The latter tradition survives in the scholiasts on Aristophanes, who also ineptly utilize terms from Aristotle's Rhetoric; while the tradition of our Poetics is a trickling in the sand of scholiasts and grammarians in general. We have small means of following it in the GræcoRoman world after the time of Horace. Vestiges of Aristotelian theory in Strabo (64 B. c.— A. D. C. 21) are seen in his excellent criticism of Homer as poet and geographer; Strabo shares the view that poetry should teach as well as please, yet he is closer to the Poetics than is Horace. Somewhat later, the concept

of imitation is misunderstood by Plutarch (A. D. c. 46–c. 120), in whose time the principles of Aristotle seem to have been distorted by intermediate compends and text-books.

VIII. THE POETICS IN THE
MIDDLE AGES

IN the fourth-century Latin grammarians, a popular definition of tragedy, ascribed to Theophrastus, but perhaps originally in Aristotle's dialogue On Poets, has replaced the technical definition of the Poetics. This popular notion found in Diomedes and Donatus prevailed throughout the Middle Ages. Thus Dante unites the ideas of tragedy and comedy in the grammarians with Horatian precepts, adding flavor with a borrowed allusion to the Senecan tragedies, which it seems he had not read. In mediæval writers the distinction between narrative poetry and dramatic is hardly felt. The usual conception appears in a gloss by Chaucer on his translation of Boethius: "Tragedy is to seyn a dite of a prosperity for a time that endeth in wrecchidnesse.' It is amplified in the Monk's Prologue:

Tragedie is to seyn a certain storie,
As olde bookes maken us memorie,
Of him that stood in great prosperitie,

THE POETICS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

And is yfallen out of heigh degree
Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly.
And they ben versified communely
Of six feet, which men clepen exametron.
In prose eek been endyted many oon,
And eek in metre, in many a sondry wyse.

The hero is of high estate; the play or tale begins in calm; then suddenly comes irreparable harm. The medieval notion survives well into the Renaissance, underlying, for example, much of the Elizabethan drama. Indeed, it still survives in the popular usage by which sheer accident or brutal murder is called a 'tragedy.'

For Western Europe in the earlier Middle Ages there is no history of the Poetics. Shreds of Aristotle's thought may have drifted down, unrecognized, along with the Ars Poetica, which contains Aristotelian doctrines in popular form, and was later the one important ancient critical treatise read by Dante. Even in the Renaissance, and almost to our own times, the lively epistle of Horace has had better success than the Greek treatise with readers in general. But when the Poetics again became known, and was studied in Italy,