Nor need we expect to get any further. Criticism, in any full and fertile sense of the word, implies in all cases a considerable body of existing literature, in almost all cases the possibility of comparing literatures in different languages. The Greeks were but accumulating (though accumulating with marvellous rapidity) the one; they had as yet no opportunity of the other, and it must be confessed that they did not welcome the opportunity with any eagerness when it came. All the more glory to them that, when as yet the accumulation was but proceeding, they produced such work in the kind as that of Plato and Aristophanes; that at the first halt they made such astonishing, if in some ways such necessarily incomplete, use of what had been accumulated, as in the next chapter we shall see was made by Aristotle. CHAPTER III. ARISTOTLE. AUTHORSHIP OF THE CRITICISM ATTRIBUTED TO ARISTOTLE—ITS SUBJECT-MATTER—ABSTRACT OF THE ‘POETICS’—CHARACTERISTICS, GENERAL—LIMITATIONS OF RANGE—ETHICAL TWIST—DRAWBACKS RESULTING—OVERBALANCE OF MERIT—THE DOCTRINE OF ἁμαρτία—THE ‘RHETORIC’—MEANING AND RANGE OF “RHETORIC”—THE CONTENTS OF THE BOOK—ATTITUDE TO “LEXIS”—VOCABULARY: “FIGURES”—A DIFFICULTY—“FRIGIDITY”—ARCHAISM—STOCK EPITHET AND PERIPHRASIS—FALSE METAPHOR—SIMILE—“PURITY”—“ELEVATION”—PROPRIETY—PROSE RHYTHM—LOOSE AND PERIODIC STYLE, ETC.—GENERAL EFFECT OF THE ‘RHETORIC’—THE “HOMERIC PROBLEMS”—VALUE OF THE TWO MAIN TREATISES—DEFECTS AND DRAWBACKS IN THE ‘POETICS’—AND IN THE ‘RHETORIC’—MERITS OF BOTH—“IMITATION”—THE END OF ART: THE οἰκεία ἡδονή—THEORY OF ACTION—AND OF ἁμαρτία—OF POETIC DICTION. The uncomfortable conditions which have prevailed during the examination of Greek criticism during the Pre-Aristotelian [Sidenote: _Authorship of the criticism attributed to Aristotle._] age disappear almost entirely when we come to Aristotle himself. Hitherto we have had either no texts at all, mere fragments and titles, or else documents fairly voluminous and infinitely interesting as literature, but as criticism indirect, accidental, and destitute of professional and methodical character. With the _Rhetoric_ and the _Poetics_ in our hands, no such complaints are any longer possible. It is true that in both cases certain other drawbacks, already glanced at, still exist, and that the _Poetics_, if not the _Rhetoric_, is obviously incomplete. But both, and especially the shorter and more fragmentary book, give us so much that it is almost unreasonable to demand more—nay, that we can very fairly, and with no rashness, divine what the “more” would have been like if we had it. In these two books the characteristics of Greek criticism, such as it was and such as probably in any case it must have been, are revealed as clearly as by a whole library.