The convincing close, expressing the playwright’s intention and resulting from the whole course of action, is thus a fair measure of what used to be called problem plays. It measures how far they are in Aristotle’s sense serious, how far they are penetrative and significant, in a word how far they are tragic. Each disclosure, each critical scene of the dramatic progress, having its full emotional value separately and for itself, leads on to the next. Such planning for momentum is not only Aristotelian; it is permanently dramatic. Creative imitation of human life, thus moving us along that course of actions which is both the means and the measure of creative power, makes drama of all the arts most poignant. Whether it is, as it has always seemed to its devotees, the highest form of poetic, at least its appeal is at once the largest and the most direct. In the very persons of men and women it speaks to us by face and gesture, by the message, the imagery, and the rhythm of words, most of all by the order of its actions. Plato, indeed, would have us draw from this the moral that our own lives should be ordered poetically, that is creatively, that we should control and direct our lives to harmonious movement. For we are ourselves according to our power poets of a tragedy at once fairest and best. Every social order[58] becomes for us an artistic creation[59] of the fairest and best life, which we say to be essentially the truest tragedy.[60] FOOT-NOTES: [1] The best recent editions of the _Poetic_ for English readers are: (1) S. H. Butcher, _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, text, translation, notes, essays, London, 1895, 4th edition, 1911 (text with translation issued separately); (2) Ingram Bywater, _Aristotle on the Art of Poetry_, text, translation, introduction, commentary, Oxford, 1909. For other translations and for a select bibliography see Butcher. Lane Cooper has added to his “amplified version with supplementary illustrations for students of English,” Boston, 1913, an essay (1923) on _Meaning and Influence_. [2] _Reconstruction in Philosophy_, New York, 1920, chapter iii. [3] _L’évolution créatrice_, chapter i. [4] I say this without forgetting that the _Poetic_ as we have it is probably but a part. If a part, it is still self-consistent, as I have tried to show in the tabular view below. [5] viii, 206, 232. [6] See Chapter i. [7] See page 4. [8] See page 42. [9] See page 27. [10] This analysis is intended to supplement, and in some cases to emend, the outlines of Butcher and of Bywater by bringing out the significance of the parts in relation. [11] ποιητικῆς. The adjective means generally active, productive, creative, _efficiens_, as commonly in Aristotle’s philosophy, in Dionysius and Demetrius, and in Plotinus. Specially it means poetic, as of diction. The noun ἡ ποιητικὴ (with τέχνη understood) includes all imaginative composition in words.