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memory of the tribe and men no longer lived in common, led’ to written poems, not simply because writing was invented, but because the needs that demanded writing also demanded that poetry be detached from the collective festival and be enjoyed by men alone. With Euripides even drama becomes a closet art. Plato, however, was Only conscious of this in a general way, as expressed in his condemnation of books and the art of writing. Plato’s criticisms are like D. H. Lawrence’s, they reach back to the past, to the time of an undifferentiated society and collective emotion. They are correct but useless because the critic is unaware that what he condemns is’a product of a class differentiation rooted in economy. He does not therefore reach forward to a solution of present difficulties, but backwards to a time before those difficulties arose. But one cannot put back the clock of history.

      Plato is the most charming, humane and civilised of Fascist philosophers, corresponding to a time before the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War had made reaction murderously bitter. In this respect he is an Athenian Hegel. No reactionary philosopher of to-day could attain Plato’s urbanity or charm. This is Plato’s conception of the poet:

       Socrates is speaking to Ion, a rhapsodist

      It is a divine influence which moves you, like that which resides in the stone called Magnet by Euripides, and Heraclea by the people. For not only does this stone possess the power of attracting iron rings, but it can communicate to them the power of attracting other rings; so that you may see sometimes a long chain of rings and other iron substances, attached and suspended one to the other by this influence. And as the power of the stone circulates through all the links of the series, and attaches each to each, so the Muse, communicating through those whom she has first inspired, to all others capable of that first enthusiasm, creates a chain and a succession. For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art, but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a sate of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own. Thus the composers of lyrical poetry create those admired songs of theirs in a state of divine insanity, like the Corybantes, who lose all control of their reason in the enthusiasm of the sacred dance; and, during this supernatural possession, are excited to the rhythm and harmony which they communicate to men Like the Bacchantes who, when possessed by the god, draw honey and milk from the rivers, in which, when they come to their senses, they find nothing but simple water. For the souls of the poets, as poets tell us, have this peculiar ministration in the world. They tell us that these souls, flying like bees from flower to flower, and wandering over the gardens and the meadows and the honey-flowing fountains of the Muses, return to us laden with the sweetness of melody; and, arrayed as they are in the plumes of rapid imagination, they speak truth, For a poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains in him. For whilst a man retains any portion of the thing called reason, he is utterly incompetent to produce poetry or to vaticinate. Every rhapsodist or poet, whether dithyrambic, encomastic, choral, epic, or iambic, is excellent in proportion to the extent of his participation in the divine influence, and the degree in which the Muse itself has descended upon him. In other respects, poets may be sufficiently ignorant and incapable. For they do not compose according to any art which they have acquired, but from the impulse of the divinity within them; for did they know any rules of criticism according to which they could compose beautiful verses upon any one subject, they would be able to exert the same faculty in respect to all or any other The god seems purposely to have deprived all poets, prophets, and soothsayers of every particle of reason and understanding, the better to adapt them to their employment as his ministers and interpreters; and that we, their auditors, may acknowledge that those who write so beautifully, are possessed, and address us inspired by the god:¹

      Here Plato shows poetry to be something different in kind from conscious rhetoric, the art of persuation, which, according to Greek views, could be reduced to rule and learned. But poetry can never be learned, for according to Plato it is not a conscious function, with rules of criticism, but an inpouring of the god, and he is sufficiently near to primitive culture to place the poet beside the prophet and the soothsayer. Moreover, according to Plato’s view this inspiration is not only essential for the poet, but for his reader. The rhapsodist who declaims him, and the auditor who is affected by him, must also be inspired by the god. In other words, not only the writing but also the appreciation’ of poetry is an unconscious (or irrational) function. To Plato all deception is a form of enchantment. Poets are wizards wielding quasi-religious powers. Plato’s symbol of the magnetised rings well expresses the collective character of primitive poetry. In contrast to Aristotle, Plato the idealist is concerned with the enjoyment rather than the function of poetry.

      Aristotle, however, is uninterested in the poet’s mind, and does not concern himself with whether or not the creation and appreciation of poetry is a conscious function. He judges it by results, by poems. He systematises them, analyses them, and reduces them to rule. He finds that mimesis is the distinguishing features of Poetics, and he investigates the rules for producing a convincing and successful mimesis.

      Unlike Plato, he goes further. As befits a philosopher who studied the constitutions of existing states, he asks: what is the social function of tragedy?

      His answer is well known. Its effect is cathartic—purging. The answer is somewhat enigmatic, once one attempts to go behind it. It is tempting to give to the expression a modern interpretation. It has been suggested, for example, that this is merely the basic therapy of Freudism—therapy by abreaction—in a Greek dress. This is on the one hand an over-refinement of Aristotle, and on the other hand a misunderstanding of what therapy by abreaction actually is. Poetic creations, like other phantasies, may be the vehicle of neurotic conflicts or complexes. But a phantasy is the cloak whereby the “censor” hides the unconscious complex. So far from this process being cathartic, it is the opposite according to Freud’s own principles. To cure the basic complex by abreaction the phantasy must be stripped of its disguise and the infantile and archaic kernel laid bare.

      Thus the poetic construct, according to Freud’s own empirical discoveries, cannot represent an abreactive therapy even for the poet. But Aristotle visualises tragedy as cathartic for the spectators. Even if the poetic phantasy did have an abreactive effect on the poet, it is impossible that every spectator should have, not only the same complex as the poet, but the same associations, which analysis shows are generally highly personal.

      Hence followers of Freud who suggest that Aristotle’s catharsis is the equivalent of Freud’s therapy by abreaction, not only misunderstand Aristotle, but also are imperfectly acquainted with the empirical discoveries on which psychoanalysis rests.

      It is best, in fact, not to go behind Aristotle’s simple conception, until we ourselves are clear as to the function of poetry, and can compare Aristotle’s ideas with our own How Aristotle arrived at his definition is fairly clear. On the one hand he saw tragedy arousing unpleasant emotions in the spectator—fear and anxiety and grief. On the other hand these same spectators went away feeling the better for it, so much so that they returned for more. The emotions, though unpleasant, had done them good. In the same way unpleasant medicaments do people good, and perhaps Aristotle went further, and visualised the tragedy concentrating and driving out of the mind the unpleasant emotions, just as a purge concentrates and drives out of the body the unpleasant humours. This highly practical attitude towards tragedy is not only, as it seems to me, healthy, and good literary criticism, but essentially Greek. If the tragedy did not make the Athenians feel better, in spite of its tragedy, it was bad. The tragic poet who made them weep bitterly at the fate of their fellow Hellenes in Persia was fined. A similar imposition suggests itself for our own purely sentimental war literature.

      This, then, was the intelligent Greek view of literature as the differentiation, carried so far in our own culture, had just begun. On the one hand Rhetoric, the art of persuation, exercised consciously and appreciated consciously, an art which was simply ordinary conversation hypostatised by the hypostasis of the city-state. On the other hand Poetics, a mimesis whose success in imitating reality can be judged by the poignancy of the emotions roused, just as if the auditors were really concerned in it. Both Plato and Aristotle agree here. But in Plato’s view no rules can be

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