Page:Aristotle s Poetics Bywater.djvu/19



text of the Poetics has been supposed to have suffered more seriously than most prose Greek texts in the process of transmission; and many scholars accordingly have allowed themselves a very free hand in dealing with its difficulties. One cannot help suspecting, however, that not a few of their doubts and suspicions start from a certain preconceived idea, inherited from the Middle Ages, of the general character of the Aristotelian writings—that the 'master of them that know' could never for a moment forget his logic; that his mind worked with all the sureness of a machine; and that a treatise of his must not only have been written throughout on the straightest lines, but also have left his hands as free from oversights and inconsistencies as a modern published work is expected to be. The untenableness of these assumptions, as thus stated, is obvious, and no one, I imagine, would confess to them in so many words. But it is impossible to read much of the current criticism on the Poetics without seeing that its working hypothesis is in many instances what I have said.

Aristotle, with all his scientific formalism, is even as a thinker much more human than we are apt to suppose; his writing, too, is marked by great inequalities, passages of admirable lucidity and finish being often followed by a stretch of text in a style so curt and crabbed as to be the despair of his interpreters, ancient as well as modern. The Poetics begin fairly well, but as the work advances there are signs of failing attention to form, and the statement becomes in places little better than a series of notes. The continuity also of the exposition is frequently broken by