What Recognition is has been already explained.
We will now enumerate its kinds.
First, the least artistic form, which, from poverty of
wit, is most commonly employed — recognition by signs.
Of these some are
congenital, such as 'the spear which the earth-born race bear on
their bodies,'
or the stars
introduced by Carcinus in his Thyestes.
Others are
acquired after birth; and of these some are bodily marks,
as scars;
some external tokens, as necklaces, or the little
ark in the Tyro by which the discovery is effected.
Even
these admit of more or less skilful treatment.
Thus in
the recognition of Odysseus by his scar, the discovery is
made in one way by the nurse, in another by the swine-
herds.
The use of tokens for the express purpose of proof
— and, indeed, any formal proof with or without tokens
— is a less artistic mode of recognition.
A better kind
is that which comes about by a turn of incident, as in
the Bath Scene in the Odyssey.
Next come the recognitions invented at will by the
poet, and on that account wanting in art.
For example,
Orestes in the Iphigenia reveals the fact that he is
Orestes.
She, indeed, makes herself known by the letter;
but he, by speaking himself, and saying what the poet,
not what the plot requires.
This, therefore, is nearly
allied to the fault above mentioned: — for Orestes might
as well have brought tokens with him. And in the Tereus of
Sophocles the 'voice of the shuttle.'
The third kind depends on memory when the sight of
some object awakens a feeling: as in the Cyprians of
Dicaeogenes, where the hero breaks into tears on seeing
the picture;
or again in the 'Lay of Alcinous,' where
Odysseus, hearing the minstrel play the lyre, recalls the
past and weeps;
and hence the recognition.
The fourth kind is by process of reasoning. Thus in
the Choëphori: — 'Some one resembling me has come:
no one resembles me but Orestes: therefore Orestes has
come.'
Such too is the discovery made by Iphigenia
in the play of Polyidus the Sophist.
It was a natural
reflexion for Orestes to make, 'So I too must die at the
altar like my sister.'
So, again, in the Tydeus of
Theodectes, the father says, 'I came to find my son, and
I lose my own life.'
So too in the Phineidae: the
women, on seeing the place, inferred their fate: — 'Here
we are doomed to die, for here we were cast forth.'
Again, there is a composite kind of recognition involving
false inference on the part of one of the characters, as in
the Odysseus Disguised as a Messenger.
A said that
no one else was able to bend the bow; hence B
(the disguised Odysseus) imagined that A would recognize
the bow which, in fact, he had not seen; and to bring
about a recognition by this means — the expectation that A
would recognize the bow — is false inference.
But, of all recognitions, the best is that which arises
from the incidents themselves, where the startling dis-
covery is made by natural means.
Such is that in the
Oedipus of Sophocles, and in the Iphigenia;
for it was
natural that Iphigenia should wish to dispatch a letter.
These recognitions alone dispense with the artificial aid
of tokens or amulets.
Next
come the recognitions by process of reasoning.
Poetics. Aristotle. S. H. Butcher (Translator). London. 1911.
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