Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/367

 Aristotle's treatise on poetry. 341 First, and principally, they should be good (xpYja-Ta). Now manners, or character, belong, as we have said before, to any speech or action that manifests a certain disposition; and they are bad, or good, as the disposition manifested is bad {(f>avXr]), or good (xpw^l)- This goodness of manners may be found in persons of every description : the manners of a woman, or of a slave, may be good ; though, in general, women are, perhaps, rather bad than good, and slaves altogether bad. The second requisite is propriety (ra dpixoTTovra). There is a manly character of bravery and fierceness, which cannot, with propriety, be given to a woman. The third requisite is resemblance {ro 6}xoiov) : for this is a different thing from their being good and proper, as above described. The fourth is uniformity (ro d/xaXov) : for even though the model of the poet's imitation be some person of un-uniform manners, still that person must be represented as uniformly un-uniform (o/xaXws avoj/xaXov oet eti/ai). We have an example of manners unnecessarily had in the character of Menelaus in the Tragedy of Orestes; of improper and unbecoming manners, in the lamentation of Ulysses in Scylla, and in the speech of Melanippe : of un-uniform manners, in the Iphigenia at Aulis ; for there the Iphigenia, who supplicates for life, has no resemblance to the Iphi- genia of the conclusion. In the manners, as in the fable, the poet should always aim either at what is necessary or what is probable; so that such a character shall appear to speak or act necessarily, or probably, in such a manner, and this event to be the necessary or probable consequence of that. — Hence it is evident that the development also of a plot should arise out of the plot itself, and not depend upon machinery, as in the Medea, or in the incidents relative to the sailing away from Troy, in the Iliad. The proper application of machinery is to such circumstances as are extra- neous to the drama; such as either happened before the time of the action, and could not, by human means, be known; or are to hapj^eu after, and require to be foretold : for to the gods we attribute the knowledge of all things. But nothing improbable should be admitted in the incidents of the fable ; or, if it cannot be avoided, it should, at tains the -qdri, has by some accident, not purposely, been removed from its proper place before c. xix., and has been placed in the middle of the doctrine of the ixvOos, to the great confusion of the reader. This is not the only phenomenon of this kind. The most recent editor of Theon has rightly indicated a similar transposition. The same has long been recognized in Varro's books de lingua Latlna; many MSS. of Cicero de Oratore are in still worse plight ; and, although we do not find this in Aristotle's Rhetoric, we have there an example of a particular kind : in iii. ] 6, there was manifestly a gap, and all the MSS. have repeated there a passage of twenty lines from I. 9."— J. W. D.