Then, too, Aristotle’s use of his material is quite astonishingly judicious. In almost every single instance we might |The doctrine of ἁμαρτία.| expect his limitations to do him more harm than they have done. He might, for instance, with far more excuse than Wordsworth, have fallen into Wordsworth’s error of considering metre not merely as not essential to poetry, but as only accidentally connected with it. And it is also extremely remarkable how little, on the whole, his ethical preoccupation carries him away. He exhibits it; but it does not blind him (as it had blinded even Plato) to the fact that the special end of Art is pleasure, that the perfection of literature is not an end in itself but a means to an end. Even more surprising is the acuteness, the sufficiency, and the far-reaching character of his doctrine of the Tragic ἁμαρτία. For there can be no question that he has here hit on the real differentia of tragedy—a differentia existing as well in the tragedy of Character, which he rather pooh-poohs, and in the Romantic tragedy which he did not know, and on his actual principles was bound to disapprove if he had known it, as in the Classical. Shakespeare joins hands with Æschylus (and both stand thus more sharply contrasted with inferior tragedians than in any other point) in making their chief tragic engine “the pity of it,” the sense that there is infinite excuse, but no positive justification, for the acts which bring their heroes and heroines to misfortune. Wherever the tragedian, of whatever style and time, has hit this ἁμαρτία, this human and not disgusting “fault,” he has triumphed; wherever he has missed it, he has failed, in proportion to the breadth of his miss.
With respect to the minor and verbal points of the Poetics there is less to say, because there is very much less of them: |The Rhetoric.| and what there is to say had better be said when we have considered the contents of the other great critical book, the Rhetoric, which may be taken as holding, if not intentionally yet actually, something of the same position towards Prose as that which the Poetics holds towards verse.
Before giving an analysis of this book,[[44]] to match that given above of the Poetics, a few words may properly be said to justify |Meaning and range of “Rhetoric.”| what may seen to be the rather arbitrary proceeding of, on the one hand, attaching to Rhetoric a sense avowedly somewhat different from Aristotle’s, and on the other dropping consideration of the major part of what he has actually written in it.
It is a mistake to force too much the bare meanings of words; but I suppose one may, without much danger of controversy, take the bare meaning of Rhetoric to be “speechcraft.” Now, it is not difficult to prove that, in Aristotle’s time, speechcraft practically included the whole of prose literature, if not the whole of literature. Poems were recited; histories were read out; the entire course of scientific and philosophic education and study went on by lecture or by dialogue. Nay, it is perhaps not fanciful to point out that the very words for reading, ἀναγιγνώσκω and ἐπιλέγομαι seem to represent it as at best a secondary and parasitic process, a “going over again” of something previously said and heard.[[45]]
Yet though this is an important point, and has been rather too commonly overlooked, it is no doubt inferior in gravity to the universally recognised fact that the importance of speechcraft proper, of oratory, was in Greece such as it is now only possible dimly to realise. Every public and private right of the citizen depended upon his power to speak or the power of somebody else to speak for him; a tongue-tied person not only had no chance of rising in the State, but was liable to be insulted, and plundered, and outraged in every way. To some it has seemed that the great and almost fatal drawback to that Athenian life, which in not a few ways was life in a sort of Earthly Paradise, was the incessant necessity of either talking or being talked to. It was therefore not in the least wonderful that the first efforts—those of the Sicilian sophists (or others)—to reduce to something like theory the art of composition, of arranging words effectively, should be directed to spoken words, and to spoken words more particularly under the all-important conditions of the public meeting and the law court—by no means neglecting the art of persuasion, as practicable in the Porch, or the Garden, or the private supper-room. That prose literature—that all literature—has for its object to give pleasure dawned later upon men. Aristotle and persons much earlier than Aristotle—Corax and Tisias themselves—would probably have acknowledged that prose, like poetry, ought to please, but only as a further means to a further end, persuasion. Its object was to make men do something—pass or negative such a law, bring in such a verdict, appoint such an officer, or (in the minor cases) believe or disbelieve such a tenet, adopt or shun such a course of conduct. Even in poetry, as we have seen, the ethical preoccupation partly obscured the clear æsthetic doctrine—you were to be purged as well as pleased, and pleased in order that you might be purged. But in prose the pleasure became still more subsidiary, ancillary, facultative. You were first of all to be “persuaded.”
Now, if this be taken as granted, and if, further, we keep in mind Aristotle’s habit of sticking to the facts before him, we |The contents of the book.| shall not be in the least surprised to find that the Rhetoric contains a great deal of matter which has either the faintest connection with literary criticism, or else no connection with it at all. It is true that of the three subjects which the Rhetoric treats, pistis (means of persuasion), lexis (style), and taxis (arrangement), the second belongs wholly and the third very mainly to our subject, while it would be by no means impossible for an ingenious arguer to make good the position that pistis, with no extraordinary violence of transition, may be laid at least under contribution for that attractive quality which all literature as a pleasure-giving art must have. But in actual handling Pistis has two out of the three books, and is treated, as a rule, from a point of view which leaves matters purely literary out of consideration altogether—"The Characteristics of Audiences," “The Colours of Good and Evil,” “The Passions as likely to exist in an Audience,” “The Material of Enthymeme” (the special rhetorical syllogism), and so forth.
Only in the third book (which, by the way, is shorter than either of the other two) do we get beyond these counsels to the advocate and the public speaker, into the Higher Rhetoric which concerns all prose literature and even some poetry. And even then we meet with a sort of douche of cold water which may not a little dash those who have not given careful heed to the circumstances of the case.
Inquiry into the sources and means of persuasion (our author admits graciously, but with a touch of superiority which, |Attitude to lexis.| as we shall see, accentuates itself later) does not quite exhaust Rhetoric. It must also discuss style and arrangement. But style is a modern thing, and, rightly considered, something ad captandum.[[46]] Indeed Aristotle never seems to keep it quite clear from mere elocution or delivery—from the art of the actor as contradistinguished from that of the writer. He remarks that he has dealt with style fully in his Poetics; and as he has certainly not done so in the Poetics which we have, this is an argument that they are incomplete, though by no means that they are spurious. But it is almost impossible to mistake the touch of patronage, not to say of scorn, with which he deals with it here, and we need not doubt that, if we had the other handling to which he refers, something of the same sort would appear there. The fact is, that the Greeks of this period were what we may call High-fliers; anything that had the appearance of being “mechanical,” anything that seemed to subject the things of the spirit to something not wholly of the spirit, they regarded with suspicion and impatience, which rather suggests the objection of some theologians to good works. Words, like colours, materials of sculpture and architecture, and the like, were “filthy rags”; and if Aristotle’s common-sense carried him a little less far in this direction than his master Plato’s philosophical enthusiasm, it certainly carried him some way.
This same common-sense, however, seldom deserted him, and it makes sometimes wholly for good, sometimes a little less |Vocabulary—"Figures".| so, throughout the treatise. At the very outset he commits himself to that definition of style as being first of all clear—as giving the meaning of the writer—which has so often captivated noble wits down to Coleridge’s time, and even since, but which yet is clearly wrong, for “two and two make four” is the a per se of clearness, and there is uncommonly little style in it notwithstanding. That he himself saw this objection cannot be doubted, for he hastens to add[[47]] that it must be not only clear, but neither too low nor too far above the subject, thus producing a useful and perfectly just distinction between the styles of poetry and prose. And then he gives us, as he had done in the Poetics, one of those distinctions of his which are so valuable—the distinction of vocabulary into what is κύριον or current (which conduces to clearness), and what is ξένον or unfamiliar (which conduces to elevation). Let us note that this, like the ἁμαρτία theory in the Poetics, is one of Aristotle’s great critical achievements. But the note of greatness may perhaps be discovered less in the attention which from this point he begins to pay to Metaphor. Not of course that metaphor is not a very important thing; but that the example of ticking it off in this fashion with a name spread rapidly in Rhetoric, and became a mere nuisance. Even Quintilian, who spoke words of wit and sense about the Greek mania for baptising new Figures, submitted to them to some extent: and any one who wishes to appreciate the need of Butler’s jest to the effect that
“all a rhetorician’s rules