, where sister and brother are in a like
position; and in _Helle_, where the son recognizes his mother, when on
the point of giving her up to her enemy.

This will explain why our tragedies are restricted (as we said just now)
to such a small number of families. It was accident rather than art that
led the poets in quest of subjects to embody this kind of incident in
their Plots. They are still obliged, accordingly, to have recourse to
the families in which such horrors have occurred.

On the construction of the Plot, and the kind of Plot required for
Tragedy, enough has now been said.

15

In the Characters there are four points to aim at. First and foremost,
that they shall be good. There will be an element of character in the
play, if (as has been observed) what a personage says or does reveals a
certain moral purpose; and a good element of character, if the
purpose so revealed is good. Such goodness is possible in every type
of personage, even in a woman or a slave, though the one is perhaps an
inferior, and the other a wholly worthless being. The second point is to
make them appropriate. The Character before us may be, say, manly; but
it is not appropriate in a female Character to be manly, or clever. The
third is to make them like the reality, which is not the same as their
being good and appropriate, in our sense of the term. The fourth is to
make them consistent and the same throughout; even if inconsistency
be part of the man before one for imitation as presenting that form
of character, he should still be consistently inconsistent. We have an
instance of baseness of character, not required for the story, in
the Menelaus in _Orestes_; of the incongruous and unbefitting in the
lamentation of Ulysses in _Scylla_, and in the (clever) speech of
Melanippe; and of inconsistency in _Iphigenia at Aulis_, where Iphigenia
the suppliant is utterly unlike the later Iphigenia. The right thing,
however, is in the Characters just as in the incidents of the play to
endeavour always after the necessary or the probable; so that whenever
such-and-such a personage says or does such-and-such a thing, it shall
be the probable or necessary outcome of his character; and whenever
this incident follows on that, it shall be either the necessary or the
probable consequence of it. From this one sees (to digress for a moment)
that the Denouement also should arise out of the plot itself, arid
not depend on a stage-artifice, as in