The Poetics of Aristotle eBook

The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy:  Character holds the second place.  A similar fact is seen in painting.  The most beautiful colours, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait.  Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.

Third in order is Thought,—­that is, the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in given circumstances.  In the case of oratory, this is the function of the Political art and of the art of rhetoric:  and so indeed the older poets make their characters speak the language of civic life; the poets of our time, the language of the rhetoricians.  Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids.  Speeches, therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character.  Thought, on the other hand, is found where something is proved to be. or not to be, or a general maxim is enunciated.

Fourth among the elements enumerated comes Diction; by which I mean, as has been already said, the expression of the meaning in words; and its essence is the same both in verse and prose.

Of the remaining elements Song holds the chief place among the embellishments.

The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry.  For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors.  Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.

VII

These principles being established, let us now discuss the proper structure of the Plot, since this is the first and most important thing in Tragedy.

Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude.  A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.  An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.  A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.  A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.