Note 17 — Chapter VI · THE POETIC OF ARISTOTLE[1]

Butcher (pages 110-124) in pointing out that the Greek phrase for the fine arts is imitative arts (μιμητικαὶ τέχναι or μιμήσεις), says that Aristotle applies it specifically only to poetry and music. In this opening chapter of the Poetic he evidently means to include dancing. That Aristotle had no thought of “bare imitation,” of that reproductive copying which Ruskin confused with artistic truth, has been remarked also by other critics. Butcher adds suggestively, though not with strict reference to the text, that to imitate nature was for Aristotle not to evoke the mere background which romanticism has taught us to spell with a capital N, but to work in nature’s ways. Nature (φύσις) in Aristotle is not the sensible world, but “the creative force, the productive principle.” So the immediate objects of poetic imitation are human characters, emotions, and actions, not as objective phenomena, but as expressions of human will. “The common original,” Butcher concludes, “is human life ... essential activity of the soul.” Though this is true to the underlying idea of the Poetic, Aristotle does not use any single phrase corresponding to “imitation of nature.”