§ I. On the æsthetic line he discusses the _elements_ of a tragedy: plot, character, thought, diction, scenery, and song. Of the last three he has little to say. But on one of them he makes an interesting remark. “Third in order is Thought—that is, the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in given circumstances.... The older poets made their characters speak the language of civic life; the poets of our time, the language of the rhetoricians.”[128] This prophesies from afar of Seneca and his like. As for character, it must be good, appropriate, true to life, and consistent. Concerning Plot, which he rightly calls “the soul of a tragedy,”[129] Aristotle is of course far more copious. The salient points alone can be set down here:— (_a_) “The proper magnitude is comprised within such limits, that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.”[130] (_b_) “The plot ... must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that if anyone of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.”[131] A tragedy must be an organism. It therefore follows that “of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst ... in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence”.[132] He is recommending the “Unity of Action”. (_c_) “Plots are either Simple or Complex.... An action ... I call Simple, when the change of fortune takes place without Reversal (or Recoil) of the Action and without Recognition. A Complex Action is one in which the change is accompanied by such Reversal, or by Recognition, or by both.”[133] Reversal we shall meet again. By Recognition Aristotle means not merely such Recognition-scenes as we find in the crisis of the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ (though such are the best) but “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune”.[134] (_d_) “Two parts, then, of the plot—Reversal and Recognition—turn upon surprises. A third part is the Tragic Incident. The Tragic Incident is a distinctive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds, and the like.”[135] In the words “death on the stage”—or “before the audience” (the phrase[136] has no bearing on the stage-controversy), Aristotle casually but completely overthrows another critical convention, that in ancient Tragedy deaths take place only “behind the scenes”. In the extant plays, not only do Alcestis and Hippolytus “die on the stage” in their litters, but Ajax falls upon his sword. (_e_) The best subject of Tragedy is the change from good fortune to bad in the life of some eminent man not conspicuously good and just, whose misfortune, however, is due not to wickedness but to some error or weakness.[137]