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AUDIENCES— POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
two sorts of people, the free and the well-instructed, the rude, the mean mechanics, and hired servants, and a long collection of the like, there must be some music and some spectacles to please and soothe them; for their minds are as it were perverted from their natural habits, so also is there an unnatural harmony, and overcharged music, which is accommodated to their taste; but what is according to nature gives pleasure to everyone, therefore those who are to contend upon the theatre should be allowed to use this species of music.' Aristotle wrote when the Greek City-State was already in decline. The Alexandrinian Mass-State was just making its appearance.
Plato's austere, authoritarian Utopianism banned, as we have seen on preceding pages of this book, the non-magical poetry from his State ideal. Aristotle, the greatest analyst of the Greek civilisation, did not — in contrast to Plato — separate norm from reality. Apart from the above-quoted passage of the Politics, in which he incidentally refers to his Poetics, Aristotle's dramatic theory and his exposition of the social function of dramatic poetry take always as starting-point the things which he saw or, perhaps better, which show themselves. The pivotal point of Aristotle's Catharsis theory is the philosophical acknowledgement of an audience which has the need of being purified.
But there can be no doubt that even Aristotle's realism abhorred the artistic decline of the contemporary Athenian theatre into amusement-art. In the same sense in which Aristotle refused to accept the early Mass-State of the Hellenic world as State proper, so he deprecated the compromise with a cheap and easy audience. One need only read Chapter XIII of the Poetics to understand the moral purpose of his dramatic theory which — to repeat — should never have been separated from the whole and synthetic meaning of his social philosophy. 'Hence it is necessary that a plot which is well constructed should be rather single than twofold . . . and that the change should not be into prosperity from adversity, but on the contrary into adversity from prosperity, not through depravity, but through some great error . . . But the proof of this is what has taken place. For of old the poets adopted any casual fables; but now (my italics) the most beautiful tragedies are composed about a few families . . . and such other persons as happen either to have suffered, or done things of a dreadful nature. The tragedy, therefore, which is the most beautiful according to art, is of this construction. Hence they erroneously blame Euripides, accusing him of having done this in his tragedies, and for making many of them terminate in misfortune. For this method is . . . right. . . . And Euripides, though he does not manage other
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