Critical objections answered

The poet, like the painter, must imitate one of three things: things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. From this three-way division, most critical difficulties can be resolved. If a poet describes the impossible, the error may be justified if the artistic end is thereby attained — a probable impossibility is to be preferred to an improbable possibility. If the description is not true to fact, the poet may reply that he describes things as they ought to be, or as they are said to be. If a point of natural science is wrong, it may be wrong only in an accidental sense (not knowing that a hind has no horns is less serious than painting it inartistically).

Other difficulties depend on the correct understanding of words and context. A word may be a rare usage or dialectal form that looks wrong to the critic but is legitimate in the poet's dialect. An expression may be metaphorical — "all gods and men were sleeping" while one passage says the poet was awake — which looks contradictory until the sleeping is understood as a metaphor for night's stillness. A difficulty may be resolved by attention to accent, breathing, or punctuation. An expression may be ambiguous and the critic has assumed one sense when the other is intended.

Things that sound contradictory should be examined by the same rules as in dialectical refutation: is the same thing meant, in the same relation, and in the same sense? The element of the irrational, and depravity of character, may be justly censured when there is no inner necessity for introducing them — Euripides's introduction of Aegeus in the Medea is irrational; Menelaus's villainy in the Orestes is gratuitous. But the same elements may be justified if they serve the artistic end of the work.

The five sources from which critical objections are drawn are enumerated at the end: things are censured as (1) impossible, (2) irrational, (3) morally harmful, (4) contradictory, or (5) contrary to artistic correctness. Each has its appropriate defence; none is an automatic disqualification. The chapter establishes a systematic hermeneutics for reading difficult texts — a procedure for charitable and rigorous criticism that assumes the author may be right and the critic mistaken.