2. Moral Improvement through Precept and Example
The ancients believed that great poetry produces moral improvement in the reader. Before the judgment seat of Dionysos, as is recorded in The Frogs of Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Euripides engage in an interesting and instructive dispute. "Come," says Aeschylus, "tell me what are the points for which we praise a noble poet." Euripides replies, "For his ready wit and his wise counsels and because he trains the townsfolk to be better citizens and worthier men."[[268]] Aeschylus then goes on to show that he has merited well of his countrymen because he has preached the military virtues and his dramas have been full of Ares. Euripides he accuses of softening the moral fibre of the Athenians by introducing on the stage immoral plots and love-sick women. Such drama Aeschylus asserts to be immoral in its effect. "For boys a school teacher is provided; but we, the poets, are teachers of men."[[269]]
This represents the well-nigh universal Greek opinion. Poetry inspires, teaches, makes better men. A further example of this idea is furnished by Timocles. "Our spirit," says one of the characters in the drama, "forgetting its own sorrows in sympathizing with the misfortunes of others, receives at the theatre instruction and pleasure at one time."[[270]]
The real opinions of Plato are here difficult to discover. In the Protagoras, however, he puts into the mouth of that famous sophist an exposition of the conventional Greek opinion.
When a boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate them and desire to become like them.[[271]]
It is in the Republic, of course, that Plato enunciates his capital objections to poetry. The first objection is that poetry as an imitative art is three removes from truth. The divine powers, for instance, create the idea of a table--the only true table. A carpenter makes a particular table which is not the real, but only an appearance. A graphic artist making a picture of this appearance is only an imitator of appearances. "And the tragic poet is an imitator and therefore thrice removed from the king and from the truth."[[272]] The second objection which Plato raises against poetry is that poetry is addressed to the passional element in man. The man of noble spirit and philosophy will not lament his misfortunes, especially in public, while the lower orders of intellect are likely to express all their feelings with greater freedom, and thus furnish the poet with easier subjects for imitation. Consequently poetry has the power of harming the good, for a good man will be in raptures at the excellences of the poet who stirs his feelings most by representing a hero in an emotional condition. As a result, when he himself suffers sorrow or is moved by his own passions, it becomes more difficult for him to repress his feelings.[[273]] Plato thus examines the popular contention that the study of poetry educates the moral character of a man, and still maintaining that it should be a moral force for good, demonstrates to his own satisfaction that it fails to have the supposed beneficial effect because it is three removes from truth, and because it encourages unrestrained emotionalism in conduct. Plato's moral standard of poetry is even better illustrated, perhaps, by the kind of poetry which he does not ban from his ideal commonwealth. "We must remain firm in our conviction," he says, "that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our state." As his utmost concession to poetry, he will admit her if her defenders can prove "not only that she is pleasant, but also useful to states and to human life."[[274]] According to a later view, to be sure, Plato has been thought to justify pleasure of a most refined and exalted variety as an end of art. "The view which identifies the pleasant and the just and the good and the noble has an excellent moral and religious tendency."[[275]] In view, however, of other pronouncements, such an endeavor to father upon him the hedonistic theory of the purpose of art seems strained and ineffective.
It was to justify poetry against the attacks of Plato that Aristotle advanced a hedonistic view of poetry and propounded his theory of katharsis. Nowhere in the Poetics does Aristotle explicitly state that the function of poetry is to give pleasure. Indirect evidence, however, is plentiful. For instance, Aristotle justifies poetry as an imitative art because children learn by imitation and the pleasure in imitation is universal.[[276]] Furthermore, plot in tragedy is more important than character; for in painting, a confused mass of colors gives less pleasure than a chalk drawing of a portrait.[[277]] Beauty in any art depends in a measure on magnitude; therefore a play must not be too short.[[278]] Most of the tragic poets of Greece derived their plots from a limited number of well known stories. But Aristotle justifies Agathon for departing from this custom and making both his plot and characters fictitious, for the plays of Agathon give none the less pleasure.[[279]] But not all pleasure, he says, is appropriate to tragedy. In comedy we are pleased to see enemies walk off the stage as friends, but in tragedy the "pleasure which the poet should afford is that which comes from pity and fear through imitation."[[280]] Marvels, too, and wonders in poetry he justifies because "the wonderful is pleasing; as may be inferred from the fact that everyone tells a story with additions of his own, knowing that his hearers like it. It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully."[[281]] And at the very end of the Poetics, where he is endeavoring to prove that tragedy is a higher art than epic, he does so by showing that drama has all the epic elements, and in addition music and spectacle, which produce the most vivid of pleasures. Moreover the drama is more compact; "for the concentrated effect is more pleasurable than one which is diluted."[[282]] Thus, in the Poetics, Aristotle takes a non-moral attitude toward literature, although in the Politics[[283]] he grants that poetry and music are eminently serviceable in conveying moral instruction to young people. His mature attitude is well illustrated in contrast with that of Aristophanes. Aristophanes criticises Euripides severely as a perverter of Athenian morality. Aristotle mentions Euripides about twenty times in the Poetics, and frequently criticises him adversely, not, however, for his evil moral influence, but because he uses his choruses badly, and is faulty in character-drawing.
In answer to Plato's second objection to poetry, that it encourages unrestrained emotionalism, Aristotle propounded his theory of katharsis. "Tragedy," he says, "is an imitation of an action ... through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions."[[284]] That Aristotle had in mind an analogy with medicine is better understood from a passage in the Politics which describes the beneficial effect of music on patients suffering from religious ecstasy. The stimulating music furnishes the patient with an outlet for the expression of his religious fervor. Afterwards, says Aristotle, the patients "fall back into their normal state, as if they had undergone a medical or purgative treatment."[[285]] Thus the theory of katharsis seems to have the same basis as the modern psychological theory which encourages the expression of emotions in their milder form lest, if inhibited, they gather added power and finally burst disastrously through all restraints. Consequently, although hedonist theorists have been anxious to establish katharsis on a purely aesthetic foundation, it seems that the theory has inescapable moral implications. To be sure, Aristotle in the same section of the Politics says that the emotional result of katharsis is "harmless joy," and in the Poetics he says that pity and fear produce the appropriate pleasure of tragedy. Nevertheless Aristotle is answering Plato's objections to unrestrained emotionalism, and by his theory of katharsis endeavors to show not only that the emotional excitation of tragedy is harmless to the spectator, but that it is actually good for him.
But if the spectator is to derive these emotional excitations from tragedy, his aesthetic experience cannot be passive. Aristotle recommends as the ideal tragic hero a man not preeminently good nor unusually depraved, but a man between these extremes; "for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves."[[286]] Evidently, then, through his imagination the spectator must in a lively fashion participate in the action of the drama. Not only is he present at the action, even when he reads the drama, but he identifies himself with the hero and vicariously experiences his emotions.
But neither the hedonism of Aristotle, nor his defense of poetry on moral grounds through his theory of katharsis, is usual in Greek criticism. Isocrates and Xenophon adhere to the usual opinion. Isocrates believes that Homer was prized by the earlier Greeks because his poems instilled a hatred of the barbarians, and kindled in the hearts of the readers a desire to emulate the heroes who fought against Troy.[[287]] One might think that the hatred of the barbarians was not the highest degree of morality, but perhaps for the political integrity of Greece it was. That Homer especially was supposed to have a moral influence is illustrated also by Xenophon. Niceratus, in the Symposium, is telling the diners of what knowledge he is most proud. "My father," he says, "in his pains to make me a good man, compelled me to learn the whole of Homer's poems."[[288]]