There is, however, one important difference between the two philosophers which must be noted, because it concerns Aristotle's chief contribution to the philosophy of fine art. Plato had in the Republic proposed to expel florid, languishing, or unduly exciting forms of music not only from the schoolroom, but from life altogether, on the ground of their unwholesome tendency to foster an unstable and morbid character in those who enjoy them. For the same reason he had proposed the entire suppression of tragic drama. Aristotle has a theory which is directly aimed against this overstrained Puritanism. He holds that the exciting and sensational art which would be very bad as daily food may be very useful as an occasional medicine for the soul. He would retain even the most sensational forms of music on account of what he calls their "purgative" value. In the same spirit he asserts that the function of tragedy, with its sensational representations of the calamities of its heroes, is "by the vehicle of fear and pity to purge our minds of those and similar emotions." The explanation of the theory is to be sought in the literal sense of the medical term "purgative." According to the medical view which we have already found influencing his ethical doctrine, health consists in the maintenance of an equality between the various ingredients of the body. Every now and again it happens that there arise superfluous accretions of some one ingredient, which are not carried away in the normal routine of bodily life. These give rise to serious derangement of function and may permanently injure the working of the organism, unless they are removed in time by a medicine which acts as a purge, and clears the body of a superfluous accumulation. The same thing also happens in the life of the soul. So long as we are in good spiritual health our various feelings and emotional moods will be readily discharged in action, in the course of our daily life. But there is always the possibility of an excessive accumulation of emotional "moods" for which the routine of daily life does not provide an adequate discharge in action. Unless this tendency is checked we may contract dangerously morbid habits of soul. Thus we need some medicine for the soul against this danger, which may be to it what a purgative is to the body.
Now it was a well-known fact, observed in connection with some of the more extravagant religious cults, that persons suffering from an excess of religious frenzy might be cured homoeopathically, so to say, by artificially arousing the very emotion in question by the use of exciting music. Aristotle extends the principle by suggesting that in the artificial excitement aroused by violently stimulating music or in the transports of sympathetic apprehension and pity with which we follow the disasters of the stage-hero, we have a safe and ready means of ridding ourselves of morbid emotional strain which might otherwise have worked havoc with the efficient conduct of real life.
The great value of this defence of the occasional employment of sensation as a medicine for the soul is obvious. Unhappily it would seem to have so dominated Aristotle's thought on the functions of dramatic art as to blind him to what we are accustomed to think the nobler functions of tragedy. No book has had a more curious fate than the little manual for intending composers of tragedies which is all that remains to us of Aristotle's lectures on Poetry. This is not the place to tell the story of the way in which the great classical French playwrights, who hopelessly misunderstood the meaning of Aristotle's chief special directions, but quite correctly divined that his lectures were meant to be an actual Vade Mecum for the dramatist, deliberately constructed their masterpieces in absolute submission to regulations for which they had no better reasons than that they had once been given magisterially by an ancient Greek philosopher. But it may be worth while to remark that the worth of Aristotle's account of tragedy as art-criticism has probably been vastly overrated. From first to last the standpoint he assumes, in his verdicts on the great tragic poets, is that of the gallery. What he insists on all through, probably because he has the purgative effect of the play always in his mind, is a well-woven plot with plenty of melodramatic surprise in the incidents and a thoroughly sensational culmination in a sense of unrelieved catastrophe over which the spectator can have a good cry, and so get well "purged" of his superfluous emotion. It is clear from his repeated allusions that the play he admired above all others was the King Oedipus of Sophocles, but it is equally clear that he admired it not for the profound insight into human life and destiny or the deep sense of the mystery of things which some modern critics have found in it, but because its plot is the best and most startling detective story ever devised, and its finale a triumph of melodramatic horror.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The English reader who wishes for further information about Aristotle and his philosophy may be referred to any or all of the following works:--
E. Zeller.--Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics. English translation in 2 vols. by B. F. C. Costelloe and J. H. Muirhead. London. Longmans & Co.
*E. Wallace.--Outlines of the Philosophy of Aristotle. Cambridge University Press.
G. Grote.--Aristotle. London. John Murray.
*W. D. Ross.--The Works of Aristotle translated into English, vol. viii., Metaphysics. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
*A. E. Taylor.--Aristotle on his Predecessor. (Metaphysics, Bk. I., translated with notes, &c.) Chicago. Open Court Publishing Co.