What, for instance, are the 'two
natural causes' in Chapter IV which have given birth to Poetry? Are
they, as our translator takes them, (1) that man is imitative, and (2)
that people delight in imitations? Or are they (1) that man is
imitative and people delight in imitations, and (2) the instinct for
rhythm, as Professor Butcher prefers? Is it a 'creature' a thousand
miles long, or a 'picture' a thousand miles long which raises some
trouble in Chapter VII? The word _zoon_ means equally 'picture' and
'animal'. Did the older poets make their characters speak like
'statesmen', _politikoi_, or merely like ordinary citizens, _politai_,
while the moderns made theirs like 'professors of rhetoric'? (Chapter
VI, p. 38; cf. Margoliouth's note and glossary).
It may seem as if the large uncertainties which we have indicated
detract in a ruinous manner from the value of the _Poetics_ to us as a
work of criticism. Certainly if any young writer took this book as a
manual of rules by which to 'commence poet', he would find himself
embarrassed. But, if the book is properly read, not as a dogmatic
text-book but as a first attempt, made by a man of astounding genius,
to build up in the region of creative art a rational order like that
which he established in logic, rhetoric, ethics, politics, physics,
psychology, and almost every department of knowledge that existed in
his day, then the uncertainties become rather a help than a
discouragement.
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