20
It is much the same also in painting; if a man smeared a canvas with the loveliest colors at random, it would not give as much pleasure as an outline in black and white.Selection and design are necessary for any work of representation.
21
And it is mainly because a play is a representation of action that it also for that reason represents people.
22
Third comes thought. This means the ability to say what is possible and appropriate. It comes in the dialogue and is the function of the statesman’s or the rhetorician’s art.Cf. chapter 6.
23
The old writers made their characters talk like statesmen,Or in the style of ordinary people, without obvious rhetorical artifice. the moderns like rhetoricians.
24
Character is that which reveals choiceπροαίρεσις is a technical term in Aristotle’s ethics, corresponding to our use of the term Will, the deliberate adoption of any course of conduct or line of action. It is a man’s will or choice in the sense that determines the goodness or badness of his character. If character is to be revealed in drama, a man must be shown in the exercise of his will, choosing between one line of conduct and another, and he must be placed in circumstances in wbich the choice is not obvious, i.e., circumstances in which everybody’s choice would not be the same. The choice of death rather than disbonourable wealth reveals character; the choice of a nectarine rather than a turnip does not., shows what sort of thing a man chooses or avoids in circumstances where the choice is not obvious, so those speeches convey no character in which there is nothing whatever which the speaker chooses or avoids.
25
Thought you find in speeches which contain an argument that something is or is not, or a general expression of opinion.
