Cle.Very true.
Ath.Then,if such be our principles,we must assert that imitation is not to be judged of by pleasure and false opinion;and this is true of all equality,for the equal is not equal or the symmetrical symmetrical,because somebody thinks or likes something,but they are to be judged of by the standard of truth,and by no other whatever.
Cle.Quite true.
Ath.Do we not regard all music as representative and imitative?
Cle.Certainly.
Ath.Then,when any one says that music is to be judged of by pleasure,his doctrine cannot be admitted;and if there be any music of which pleasure is the criterion,such music is not to be sought out or deemed to have any real excellence,but only that other kind of music which is an imitation of the good.
Cle.Very true.
Ath.And those who seek for the best kind of song and music ought not to seek for that which is pleasant,but for that which is true;and the truth of imitation consists,as we were saying,in rendering the thing imitated according to quantity and quality.
Cle.Certainly.
Ath.And every one will admit that musical compositions are all imitative and representative.Will not poets and spectators and actors all agree in this?
Cle.They will.
Ath.Surely then he who would judge correctly must know what each composition is;for if he does not know what is the character and meaning of the piece,and what it represents,he will never discern whether the intention is true or false.
Cle.Certainly not.
Ath.And will he who does not know what is true be able to distinguish what is good and bad?My statement is not very clear;but perhaps you will understand me better if I put the matter in another way.
Cle.How?
Ath.There are ten thousand likenesses of objects of sight?
Cle.Yes.
Ath.And can he who does not know what the exact object is which is imitated,ever know whether the resemblance is truthfully executed?
I mean,for example,whether a statue has the proportions of a body,and the true situation of the parts;what those proportions are,and how the parts fit into one another in due order;also their colours and conformations,or whether this is all confused in the execution:
do you think that any one can know about this,who does not know what the animal is which has been imitated?
Cle.Impossible.
Ath.But even if we know that the thing pictured or sculptured is a man,who has received at the hand of the artist all his proper parts and colours and shapes,must we not also know whether the work is beautiful or in any respect deficient in beauty?
Cle.If this were not required,Stranger,we should all of us be judges of beauty.
Ath.Very true;and may we not say that in everything imitated,whether in drawing,music,or any other art,he who is to be a competent judge must possess three things;-he must know,in the first place,of what the imitation is;secondly,he must know that it is true;and thirdly,that it has been well executed in words and melodies and rhythms?
Cle.Certainly.
Ath.Then let us not faint in discussing the peculiar difficulty of music.Music is more celebrated than any other kind of imitation,and therefore requires the greatest care of them all.For if a man makes a mistake here,he may do himself the greatest injury by welcoming evil dispositions,and the mistake may be very difficult to discern,because the poets are artists very inferior in character to the Muses themselves,who would never fall into the monstrous error of assigning to the words of men the gestures and songs of women;nor after combining the melodies with the gestures of freemen would they add on the rhythms of slaves and men of the baser sort;nor,beginning with the rhythms and gestures of freemen,would they assign to them a melody or words which are of an opposite character;nor would they mix up the voices and sounds of animals and of men and instruments,and every other sort of noise,as if they were all one.But human poets are fond of introducing this sort of inconsistent mixture,and so make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of those who,as Orpheus says,"are ripe for true pleasure."The experienced see all this confusion,and yet the poets go on and make still further havoc by separating the rhythm and the figure of the dance from the melody,setting bare words to metre,and also separating the melody and the rhythm from the words,using the lyre or the flute alone.
For when there are no words,it is very difficult to recognize the meaning of the harmony and rhythm,or to see that any worthy object is imitated by them.And we must acknowledge that all this sort of thing,which aims only at swiftness and smoothness and a brutish noise,and uses the flute and the lyre not as the mere accompaniments of the dance and song,is exceedingly coarse and tasteless.The use of either instrument,when unaccompanied,leads to every sort of irregularity and trickery.This is all rational enough.But we are considering not how our choristers,who are from thirty to fifty years of age,and may be over fifty,are not to use the Muses,but how they are to use them.And the considerations which we have urged seem to show in what way these fifty year-old choristers who are to sing,may be expected to be better trained.For they need to have a quick perception and knowledge of harmonies and rhythms;otherwise,how can they ever know whether a melody would be rightly sung to the Dorian mode,or to the rhythm which the poet has assigned to it?
Cle.Clearly they cannot.
Ath.The many are ridiculous in imagining that they know what is in proper harmony and rhythm,and what is not,when they can only be made to sing and step in rhythm by force;it never occurs to them that they are ignorant of what they are doing.Now every melody is right when it has suitable harmony and rhythm,and wrong when unsuitable.
Cle.That is most certain.
Ath.But can a man who does not know a thing,as we were saying,know that the thing is right?