These judgements have often been
misunderstood, but the truth in them is profound and goes near to the
heart of things.
Characteristic, too, is the observation that different kinds of art
grow and develop, but not indefinitely; they develop until they
'attain their natural form'; also the rule that each form of art should
produce 'not every sort of pleasure but its proper pleasure'; and the
sober language in which Aristotle, instead of speaking about the
sequence of events in a tragedy being 'inevitable', as we bombastic
moderns do, merely recommends that they should be 'either necessary or
probable' and 'appear to happen because of one another'.
Conceptions and attitudes of mind such as these constitute what we may
call the classical faith in matters of art and poetry; a faith which
is never perhaps fully accepted in any age, yet, unlike others, is
never forgotten but lives by being constantly criticized, re-asserted,
and rebelled against. For the fashions of the ages vary in this
direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central
road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.
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