Complete Works (285 page)

C
LINIAS
: You mention these three choruses, sir: what are they? We are not very clear what you mean to say about them.

A
THENIAN
: But the greater part of the discussion we have had so far has been precisely for their sake!

C
LINIAS
: We still haven’t seen the point. Could you try to elucidate [e] still further?

A
THENIAN
: If we remember, we said at the beginning of our discussion
¹³
that all young things, being fiery and mettlesome by nature, are unable to keep their bodies or their tongues still—they are always making uncoordinated noises and jumping about. No other animal, we said, ever develops a sense of order in either respect; man alone has a natural ability to
[665]
do this. Order in movement is called ‘rhythm’, and order in the vocal sounds—the combination of high and low notes—is called ‘harmony’; and the union of the two is called ‘a performance by a chorus’. We said that the gods took pity on us and gave us Apollo and the Muses as companions and leaders of our choruses; and if we can cast our minds back, we said that their third gift to us was Dionysus.

C
LINIAS
: Yes, of course we remember.

A
THENIAN
: Well, we’ve mentioned the choruses of Apollo and the Muses; the remaining one, the third, must be identified as belonging to Dionysus. [b]

C
LINIAS
: What! You had better explain yourself: a chorus of elderly men dedicated to Dionysus sounds a weird and wonderful idea, at any rate at first hearing. Are men of more than thirty and even fifty, up to sixty, really going to dance in honor of Dionysus?

A
THENIAN
: You are absolutely right—to show how this could be reasonable in practice does need, I think, some explanation.

C
LINIAS
: It certainly does.

A
THENIAN
: Are we agreed on the conclusions we have reached so far?

[c] C
LINIAS
: Conclusions about what?

A
THENIAN
: About this—that every man and child, free-man and slave, male and female—in fact, the whole state—is in duty bound never to stop repeating to each other the charms
¹⁴
we have described. Somehow or other, we must see that these charms constantly change their form; at all costs they must be continually varied, so that the performers always long to sing the songs, and find perpetual pleasure in them.

C
LINIAS
: Agreed: that’s exactly the arrangement we want.

[d] A
THENIAN
: This last chorus is the noblest element in our state; it carries more conviction than any other group, because of the age and discernment of its members. Where, then, should it sing its splendid songs, if it is to do most good? Surely we are not going to be silly enough to leave this question undecided? After all, this chorus may well prove to be consummate masters of the noblest and most useful songs.

C
LINIAS
: No; if that’s really the way the argument is going, we certainly can’t leave this undecided.

A
THENIAN
: So what would be a suitable method of procedure? See if this will do.

C
LINIAS
: What, then?

[e] A
THENIAN
: As he grows old, a man becomes apprehensive about singing; it gives him less pleasure, and if it should happen that he cannot avoid it, it causes him an embarrassment which grows with the increasingly sober tastes of his advancing years. Isn’t that so?

C
LINIAS
: Indeed it is.

A
THENIAN
: So naturally he will be even more acutely embarrassed at standing up and singing in front of the varied audience in a theater. And if men of that age were forced to sing in the same condition as members of choruses competing for a prize—lean and on a diet after a course of voice-training—then of course they would find the performance positively unpleasant and humiliating, and would lose every spark of enthusiasm.

[666]
C
LINIAS
: Yes, that would be the inevitable result.

A
THENIAN
: So how shall we encourage them to be enthusiastic about singing? The first law we shall pass, surely, is this: children under the age of eighteen are to keep off wine entirely. We shall teach them that they must treat the violent tendencies of youth with due caution, and not pour fire on the fire already in their souls and bodies until they come to undertake the real work of life. Our second law will permit the young man under [b] thirty to take wine in moderation, but he must stop short of drunkenness and bibulous excesses. When he reaches his thirties, he should regale himself at the common meals, and invoke the gods; in particular, he should summon Dionysus to what is at once the play-time and the prayer-time of the old, which the god gave to mankind to help cure the crabbiness of age. This is the gift he gave us to make us young again: we forget our [c] peevishness, and our hard cast of mind becomes softer and grows more malleable, just like iron thrust in a fire. Surely any man who is brought into that frame of mind would be ready to sing his songs (that is ‘charms’, as we’ve called them often enough) with more enthusiasm and less embarrassment? I don’t mean in a large gathering of strangers, but in a comparatively small circle of friends.

C
LINIAS
: Certainly.

A
THENIAN
: As a method of inducing them to join us in our singing, there wouldn’t be anything you could particularly object to in this. [d]

C
LINIAS
: By no means.

A
THENIAN
: But what sort of philosophy of music will inspire their songs? Obviously, it will have to be one appropriate to the performers.

C
LINIAS
: Of course.

A
THENIAN
: And the performers are men of almost divine distinction. What notes would be appropriate for them? Those produced by the choruses?

C
LINIAS
: Well, sir, we Cretans, at any rate—and the same goes for the Spartans—would hardly be up to singing any song except those we learned to sing by growing familiar with them in our choruses.

A
THENIAN
: Naturally enough. In cold fact, you have failed to achieve [e] the finest kind of song. You organize your state as though it were a military camp rather than a society of people who have settled in towns, and you keep your young fellows together like a herd of colts at grass. Not a man among you takes his own colt and drags him, furiously protesting, away from the rest of the herd; you never put him in the hands of a private groom, and train him by combing him down and stroking him. You entirely fail to lavish proper care on an education which will turn him out not merely a good soldier but a capable administrator of a state and its towns.
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Such a man is, as we said early on, a better fighter than those of Tyrtaeus, precisely because he does not value courage as the principal element in virtue: he consistently relegates it to
fourth
place wherever he finds it, whether in the individual or the state.

C
LINIAS
: I suspect, sir, you are being rather rude about our legislators again.

A
THENIAN
: If I am, my dear fellow, it is entirely unintentionally. But if you don’t mind, we ought to follow where the argument leads us. If we know of any music that is of finer quality than the music of choruses and the public theaters, we ought to try to allocate it to these older people. [b] They are, as we said, embarrassed at the other kind; but music of the highest quality is just what they are keen to take part in.

C
LINIAS
: Yes, indeed.

A
THENIAN
: The most important point about everything that has some inherent attractive quality must be
either
this very quality
or
some kind of ‘correctness’
or
(thirdly) its usefulness. For instance, I maintain that eating and drinking and taking nourishment in general are accompanied by the [c] particular attractive quality that we might call pleasure; as for their usefulness and ‘correctness’, we invariably speak of the ‘wholesomeness’ of the foods we serve, and in their case the most ‘correct’ thing in them is precisely this.

C
LINIAS
: Quite.

A
THENIAN
: An element of attractiveness—the pleasure we feel—goes with the process of learning, too. But what gives rise to its ‘correctness’ and usefulness, its excellence and nobility, is its accuracy.

C
LINIAS
: Exactly.

A
THENIAN
: What about the arts of imitation, whose function is to produce [d] likenesses? When they succeed in doing this, it will be quite proper to say that the pleasure—if any—that arises out of and accompanies that success constitutes the attractive quality of these arts.

C
LINIAS
: Yes.

A
THENIAN
: Generally speaking, I suppose, the ‘correctness’ in such cases would depend not so much on the pleasure given, as on the accurate representation of the size and qualities of the original?

C
LINIAS
: Well put.

A
THENIAN
: So pleasure would be the proper criterion in one case only. A work of art may be produced with nothing to offer by way of usefulness [e] or truth or accuracy of representation (or harm, of course). It may be produced solely for the sake of this element that normally accompanies the others, the attractive one. (In fact, it is when this element is associated with none of the others that it most genuinely deserves the name ‘pleasure’.)

C
LINIAS
: You mean only harmless pleasure?

A
THENIAN
: Yes, and it is precisely this that I call ‘play’, when it has no particular good or bad effect that deserves serious discussion.

C
LINIAS
: Quite right.

A
THENIAN
: And we could conclude from all this that no imitation at all should be judged by reference to incorrect opinions about it or by the criterion of the pleasure it gives. This is particularly so in the case of
[668]
every sort of equality. What is equal is equal and what is proportional is proportional, and this does not depend on anyone’s opinion that it is so, nor does it cease to be true if someone is displeased at the fact. Accuracy, and nothing else whatever, is the only permissible criterion.

C
LINIAS
: Yes, that is emphatically true.

A
THENIAN
: So do we hold that all music is a matter of representation and imitation?

C
LINIAS
: Of course.

A
THENIAN
: So when someone says that music is judged by the criterion of pleasure, we should reject his argument out of hand, and absolutely [b] refuse to go in for such music (if any were ever produced) as a serious
genre.
The music we ought to cultivate is the kind that bears a resemblance to its model, beauty.

C
LINIAS
: Very true.

A
THENIAN
: These people, then, who are anxious to take part in the finest possible singing, should, apparently, look not for a music which is sweet, but one which is correct; and correctness, as we said, lies in the imitation and successful reproduction of the proportions and characteristics of the model.

C
LINIAS
: It does indeed.

A
THENIAN
: This is certainly so in the case of music: everyone would admit that all musical compositions are matters of imitation and representation. In [c] fact, composers, audiences and actors would register universal agreement on this point, wouldn’t they?

C
LINIAS
: Certainly.

A
THENIAN
: So it looks as if a man who is not to go wrong about a given composition must appreciate what it is, because failure to understand its nature—what it is trying to do and what in fact it is a representation of—will mean that he gets virtually no conception of whether the author has achieved his aim correctly or not.

C
LINIAS
: No, virtually none, naturally.

A
THENIAN
: And if he cannot gauge the correctness of the composition, [d] surely he won’t be able to judge its moral goodness or badness? But this is all rather obscure. Perhaps this would be a clearer way of putting it.

C
LINIAS
: What?

A
THENIAN
: There are, of course, thousands of representations that strike the eye?

C
LINIAS
: Yes.

A
THENIAN
: Now, imagine someone who didn’t know the character of each of the objects that are imitated and represented. Would he ever be able to estimate the correctness of the finished article? This is the sort of point I have in mind: does it preserve the overall proportions of the body and the position of each of its various parts? Does it hit off the proportions [e] exactly and keep the parts in their proper positions relative to one another? And what of their colors and contours? Have all these features been reproduced higgledy-piggledy? Do you think that if a man did not know the character of the creature represented he would ever be able to assess these points?

C
LINIAS
: Of course not.

A
THENIAN
: What if we knew that the thing molded or painted is a man,
[669]
and that all his parts with their colors and contours have been caught by the artist’s skill? Suppose a man knows all that; is he without further ado necessarily ready to judge whether the work is beautiful or falls short of beauty in some respect?

C
LINIAS
: In that case, sir, pretty well all of us would be judges of the quality of a representation.

A
THENIAN
: You have hit the nail on the head. So anyone who is going to be a sensible judge of any representation—in painting and music and every other field—should be able to assess three points: he must know, [b] first,
what
has been represented; second, how
correctly
it has been copied; and then, third, the
moral value
of this or that representation produced by language, tunes and rhythms.