[12] xxxv. Beside this may be set for contrast the bitter satire of Lucian’s _Rhetorum præceptor_, which declares the practical equipment for success in oratory to be effrontery, a loud voice, a store of strange words, stock allusions, and sheer gab. CHAPTER VI THE _POETIC_ OF ARISTOTLE[1] Veneration of Aristotle has been impatiently classed with “other mediæval superstitions,” both by those who disliked authority and by those who revolted against the inlaying and overlaying of his text with centuries of interpretations. Since the Renaissance the _Poetic_ has, indeed, fared in this regard somewhat as the Bible; and in both cases those deviations from the original intention are widest, perhaps, which have arisen from “private interpretation,” from missionary zeal more anxious to read _into_ the text than to read _in_ it. What may be called on the other hand communal interpretation, the consentient application of Aristotle’s ideas to the typical problems of a whole group or period, constitutes an important guide in the history of criticism. Both kinds of interpretation imply in the original an extraordinary fertility. This vitality, it is also clear, is of principles, of ideas set forth not only as classifying, but as constructive. The principles have been from time to time crystallized in rules; and some of the rules, having been found restrictive or even inhibitory, have thereupon been flung aside. But again and again a return to Aristotle’s _Poetic_ for orientation of practise and of criticism has vindicated it as constructive. It is not what Professor Dewey has lately called a “closed system.”[2] It has exceptionally little of that mathematically abstract method which Bergson[3] found unsatisfying for survey of human activities in time. Rather its method is inductive. It examines how imaginative conceptions have been so composed and so expressed as to kindle, direct, and sustain the imagination of an audience; and its formulation is typically like what modern science calls an hypothesis, that is a generalization interpreting facts so far as they are known, and fruitful in their further investigation.