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Athenian. 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?
Cleinias. If this were not required, Stranger, we should all of us be judges
of beauty.
Athenian. 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?
Cleinias. Certainly.
Athenian. 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.
1362
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book The Complete Plato"
The Complete Plato
- Title
- The Complete Plato
- Author
- Plato
- Date
- ~347 B.C.
- Language
- English
- License
- PD
- Size
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Pages
- 1612
- Keywords
- Philosophy, Antique, Philosophie, Antike, Dialogues, Metaphysik, Metaphysics, Ideologie, Ideology, Englisch
- Categories
- Geisteswissenschaften
- International