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THREE:INTRODUCTIONOn this day, August 8th, the reign of terror was still in full force. There were repeated threats to burn the town and to kill the inhabitants if they objected to do work or to deliver certain goods, especially wine and gin, of which thousands of bottles were requisitioned daily. Several times a day they were summoned by a bell and informed what the invader wanted, the necessary threats being added to the command. And the inhabitants, in mortal fear, no longer trusted each other, but searched each other's houses for things that might be delivered to satisfy the Germans.
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THREE:In like manner, Lucretius rejects the theory that living bodies are made up of the four elements, much as he admires110 its author, Empedocles. It seemed to him a blind confusion of the inorganic with the organic, the complex harmonies of life needing a much more subtle explanation than was afforded by such a crude intermixture of warring principles. If the theory of Anaxagoras fares no better in his hands, it is for the converse reason. He looks on it as an attempt to carry back purely vital phenomena into the inorganic world, to read into the ultimate molecules of matter what no analysis can make them yieldthat is, something with properties like those of the tissues out of which animal bodies are composed.
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THREE:The Poetics of Aristotle contains some hints on the subject of composition which entitle it to be mentioned in the present connexion. The deficiencies, even from a purely theoretical point of view, of this work, once pronounced infallible, have at last become so obvious that elaborate hypotheses have been constructed, according to which the recension handed down to us is a mere mutilated extract from the original treatise. Enough, however, remains to convince us that poetry was not, any more than eloquence, a subject with which Aristotle was fitted to cope. He begins by defining it, in common with all other art, as an imitation. Here, we at once recognise the spirit of a philosophy, the whole power and interest of which lay in knowledge; and, in fact, he tells us that the love of art is derived from the love of knowledge. But the truth seems to be that aesthetic enjoyment is due to an ideal exercise of our faculties, among which the power of perceiving identities is sometimes, though not always, included. That the materials of which every artistic creation is composed are taken from the world of our experience makes no difference; for it is by the new forms in which they are arranged that we are interested, not because we remember having met them in301 some natural combination already. Aristotle could not help seeing that this was true in the case of music at least; and he can only save his principle by treating musical effects as representations of passions in the soul. To say, however, that musical pleasure arises from a perception of resemblance between certain sounds and the emotions with which they are associated, would be an extremely forced interpretation; the pleasure is due rather to a sympathetic participation in the emotion itself. And when Aristotle goes on to tell us that the characters imitated in epic and dramatic poetry may be either better or worse than in ordinary life, he is obviously admitting other aesthetic motives not accounted for by his general theory. If, on the other hand, we start with ideal energising as the secret of aesthetic emotion, we can easily understand how an imaginary exaltation of our faculties is yielded by the spectacle of something either rising above, or falling below, the level on which we stand. In the one case we become momentarily invested with the strength put into action before our eyes; in the other, the consciousness of our own superiority amounts to a fund of reserve power, which not being put into action, is entirely available for ideal enjoyment. And, if this be the correct view, it will follow that Aristotle was quite wrong when he declared the plot to be more important than the characters of a drama. The reason given for his preference is, even on the principles of his own philosophy, a bad one. He says that there can be plot without character-drawing, but never character-drawing without plot. Yet he has taught us elsewhere that the human soul is of more value than the physical organism on which its existence depends. This very parallel suggests itself to him in his Poetics; but, by an almost inconceivable misjudgment, it is the plot which he likens to the soul of the piece, whereas in truth it should be compared to the body. The practice and preference of his own time may have helped to mislead him, for he argues (rather inconsistently, by the way) that plot302 must be more indispensable, as young writers are able to construct good stories before they are able to portray character; and more artistic, as it was developed much later in the historical evolution of tragedy. Fortunately for us, the Alexandrian critics were guided by other canons of taste, or the structurally faulty pieces of Aeschylus might have been neglected, and the ingeniously constructed pieces of Agathon preserved in their place.
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THREE:The stranger had a pleasant, round face, with eyes that twinkled in spite of the creases around them that showed worry. No wonder he was worried, Sandy thought: having deserted the craft they had foiled in its attempt to get the gems, the man had returned from some short foray to discover his craft replaced by another.
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THREE:"You would be prepared to swear that in a court of law?"
