CHAPTER IX
ART, MUSIC, AND POETRY
Since poetry, music, singing, and dancing were the chief components of a Hellenic boy’s education, the æsthetic canons by which these were regulated came to be of great importance in the moral history of Hellas, and were the objects of much thought and inquiry on the part of the educational theorists. It is hard for a modern reader to understand the attitude which Plato and Aristotle adopt towards poetry, art, and music, partly owing to the way in which these subjects are neglected in many modern schools, and still more owing to the immense changes which have taken place both in the subjects themselves and in their relations to the State as a whole.
In ancient Hellas art, literature, and music were addressed to the whole citizen-body, not to a cultured upper class. The epics were recited to crowds that might number thousands. The choral lyrics were danced and sung by large choruses in the presence of a whole city. Tragedy and Comedy were acted before the whole Athenian populace, swollen by crowds from every part of Hellas. The great orations were spoken either to the national assembly, where every grown man might be present, or to a jury of several hundred citizens. So with Hellenic art. The statues and pictures were not created for private drawing-rooms, but for public temples, colonnades, or gymnasia.
Thus it was national, not individual taste which was the standard of Hellenic art and literature: they had to follow the taste of the city, not of a clique. But every city in Hellas, as in the Italy of the Renaissance, had an intense individuality of its own, which dominated its poets, artists, and musicians. The art-schools of the islands, of Argos, of Athens were as distinct from one another as those of Venice, Florence, Perugia. The greater centres had types of music so far distinct that they required different instruments. Language, character, and politics in like manner presented a different aspect in each community. But underneath this ubiquitous local individuality lay the fundamental distinction between the Dorian, on the one hand, and the Ionian, with whom for æsthetic purposes may be classed the Aeolian, on the other. For Hellenism began to run its course in two distinct channels, the Doric and the Ionic.[680]
The Doric characteristics were the sacrifice of the detail and the individual to the whole and the community, a love of terseness and simplicity, a strong sense of harmony, order, and proportion, a hatred of complexity, mystery, vagueness, and luxury, and a preference for the perfect body over the developed intellect. The Dorians were essentially one-sided, and lacking in imagination, intellect, and invention; they were strong conservatives, and any innovation was repugnant to them.
The Ionians were a very different people. Individualism was strong in them from the first. They had a tendency to floridity, to exaggeration of detail, and to luxury. A quick-witted and imaginative race, they were fond of perpetual innovation. Versatility was characteristic of them. They preferred intellectual to physical success. Their imagination outran their powers of execution. They had none of the solidity of the less brilliant Dorian, none of his discipline, self-restraint, directness, or perseverance. They were his inferiors in most physical and ethical qualities, his superiors in all intellectual pursuits.
Till the fifth century the two conflicting types exercise little influence upon one another. The Ionians produce a sensuous, dreamy, refined, and imaginative sculpture; the Dorians a series of physically excellent but wholly unintellectual athlete-statues. The Aeolians produce the personal lyrics of love and wine; the Dorians the choral poetry of athletic triumphs and gymnastic dances. The Dorians can claim the ethical and collectivist philosophy of Pythagoras; the Ionians the intellectual and individualist philosophy of the so-called Ionian schools.
Athens during this period was purely Ionic, as her statues, the remains of which are now being recovered from the rubbish heaps where Xerxes threw them, abundantly testify. Further evidence comes from the style of dress shown in these statues and in other works of art of the period: it is almost oriental.[681] The statues reveal an excess of detail and over-refinement: the most common type was a draped woman. The Dorians, on the other hand, were most successful in the nude male type; and the great Aeginetan school quite failed to represent the goddess Athena.
The same principle of differentiation applied to music as well as to art, in Hellas: the Dorian, the Ionian, the Aeolian, as well as the neighbouring Phrygian and Lydian, each produced a type of their own, or “harmony,” as it was called. Each “harmony” bore the mark of the “ethos,” or moral character, of the tribe or race which produced it, plainly and unmistakably. Music in early Hellas must have been of a primitive type, and an acute musical ear had not yet been developed by long training. Consequently, the average Hellenic audience was in the position of the utterly unmusical man of modern times: the complicated music of modern masters would have been wholly unintelligible to them, and the only meanings which they could extract from music were certain broad ethical impressions. The unmusical man is stirred by a good marching tune, moved to a certain depression by a dirge or dead march, enlivened and excited by a rollicking bacchanalian song, and reduced to a solemn and half-religious frame of mind by the tones of a great organ. So with the average Hellene: he extracted this amount of impressions from his music, and no more. Any idea of music as the voice of the unutterable was quite foreign to his mind; in fact, he disliked any music that was unaccompanied by singing: tunes without words were unknown in earlier Hellas.
How these different harmonies were produced, by what combination of notes and scales each was regulated, may be left to the specialists: it is one of those questions which will probably never be settled conclusively. The fact remains that they existed, each with an unmistakable moral characteristic of its own. But what exactly the moral characteristic of each was, is rendered doubtful by the conflicting evidence of different writers; probably, as musical taste changed and developed, the same “harmony” came to cause a different impression. Plato’s ear, accustomed to the prevalent Dorian, found the Lydian doleful and depressing; Aristotle and his contemporaries, more used to softer music, praised it as valuable for educational purposes.[682] Herakleides of Pontos,[683] who made a special study of music, gives, in a fragment, a sketch of the old Hellenic “harmonies.” The Dorian, according to him, was manly, dignified, stern, and robust, not effeminate nor merry nor variegated nor versatile.[684] The Aeolic, afterwards called “Hypo-Dorian,” was haughty and pretentious, rather conceited, not, however, base in any way, but inflated and confident. It was the right music for “woman, wine, and song.” The Ionic, representing the old Ionic character before the race degenerated, was passionate, headstrong, contentious, showing no signs of benevolence or merriment, but revealing a certain hardness of heart and temperament. It was not florid nor cheerful, but austere and harsh, with a not ignoble dignity which fitted it to accompany Tragedy. Later, the race and the “harmony” seem to have degenerated, and are charged with being luxurious and effeminate. There used also to be a Locrian “harmony,” which was used by Pindar and Simonides, but afterwards it fell into contempt and died out.
Besides these purely Hellenic types, there were two which came from barbarian races, the Lydian and the Phrygian. Of the Lydian there were several varieties. The Mixed-Lydian was doleful and suitable to dirges: it made the audience feel mournful and grave. The Syntono-Lydian was very similar. The pure Lydian is rejected as effeminate by Plato;[685] but Aristotle, resting on the musical experts, declares that it involves order and arrangement (κόσμος) and is well adapted for education. About the Phrygian opinion is still more divided. Plato commends it. According to him it suitably represents the notes and accents of a self-controlled man “in peaceful and unconstrained circumstances, trying to persuade some one or making a request, praying to a god or advising a man, or giving his attention to the request or advice or arguments of some one else; and if he attains his object, not puffed up, but in all things acting, and accepting the consequences of his actions, with moderation and self-control.” The philosopher then goes on to reject the flute, as suitable only to hysterical enthusiasm. But this, as Aristotle pointed out, was inconsistent. For the Phrygian harmony and the flute went hand in hand: the wild orgies of Dionusos and other worships of an enthusiastic nature were usually accompanied by the flute and could only be set to the Phrygian harmony. The dithyramb, for instance, could only be set in this way; when Philoxenos definitely tried to write one to the Dorian, he slid back without being able to prevent it into the Phrygian. Aristotle therefore, accounting it an enthusiastic harmony, reserves it as a “purge” (κάθαρσις), which, by providing under well-regulated conditions an occasional outlet for hysteria, will work such affections out of the system for a long period: at the end of which another dose will be required.[686]
In Hellas music was held to be an efficacious medicine for the ills alike of body, soul, and mind. Even the grave and learned philosopher Theophrastos, the pupil of Aristotle, asserted that the Phrygian “harmony” on the flute was the proper means of curing lumbago.[687] Pindar states that Apollo “gives to men and women cures for grievous sickness, and invented the harp, and gives the Muse to whom he will, bringing warless peace into the heart”:[688] the god of medicine is the son of the god of the harp. The Pythagorean philosopher Kleinias, when he was in a bad temper, used to take up his harp, saying, “I am calming myself.”[689] He and his school regarded the harp as the true means of attaining that peace and solemn orderliness of soul which as true Dorian musicians they desired. Lukourgos produced at Sparta the state of mind necessary to enable his reforms to be carried, by sending from Crete a lyric poet named Thales, whose songs, by their calm and orderly tune and rhythm, were an incentive to discipline and concord: by this means the Spartans were imperceptibly calmed in character.[690] The Arcadians, according to their compatriot Polubios, from ancient times onwards “made music their foster-brother” from their cradles till they were thirty years of age, in order to counteract the brutalising tendencies of their rough life and harsh climate; and the inhabitants of one district, Kunaitha, which neglected this preventive, were notorious for their wickedness.[691]
Thus music came to be regarded as the best means of forming character. It was only necessary to apply the right sort of “harmony” to the young and susceptible personality, and the right “ethos” would be produced. The Dorian was most in request for educational purposes: its merits were universally recognised. For it “suitably represented the notes and accents of a brave man in the presence of war or of any other violent action, going to meet wounds or death or fallen into any other misfortune, facing his fate with unflinching resolution.”[692] Of the others, as has been said, Plato preferred the Phrygian and Aristotle the Lydian.
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Not only beautiful music, but beautiful art also, was believed to produce, by an unconscious but irresistible influence, beautiful characters in those who came into contact with it; while, on the other hand, bad art, as well as bad music, was the cause of vice and low moral ideals.[693] This, they naturally thought, was particularly true in the case of children, who are so sensitive to all external influences; moreover, it is the early impressions that make most difference in a man’s life. To serve this educational end, the Hellenes expected every statue and painting, as well as every poem and tune, to have ἦθος, that is, according to Aristotle’s definition,[694] to be such that its moral purpose was manifest to the average man. For this purpose Hellenic art had to become impersonal: the great statues represent a single trait of character. The smaller individualising traits are omitted: the single trait chosen is then idealised and carried to its utmost possible development. This produced a single and easily intelligible effect. The frieze on the Parthenon represented the perfect knight in various attitudes, not So-and-so and Somebody-else. The same idealised abstractions can be traced in the “Theseus” of the Pediment, and in most of the dramas of Sophocles.
The realisation of this artistic ideal was made possible by the fusion of the two currents, Doric and Ionic. At the end of the sixth century a wave of Doricism passes over Athens, and the first competent athlete-sculptors arise there. A second wave came in the middle of the next century, in the period of Perikles. The Dorian characteristics now dominate Attic artists alike in poetry, sculpture, and vase-painting. Aeschylus had possessed the best traits of the Ionic temperament, chastened by the great crisis of the Persian wars: his imagination is half oriental, and he has often been compared to a Hebrew prophet. But the canons of Sophocles are purely Doric, as are those of Pheidias. The mixture of Doric ethics with Ionic imagination produces the great age of Hellenic art and literature. With art in such an educative condition, the effect of the great public buildings and temples, which adorned even quite humble villages, and of the glorious statues of which every temple, agora, and gymnasium formed a perfect treasure-house, must have been very great upon the Hellenes, who were probably the most susceptible of all peoples to artistic influences. Moderns vaguely realise that a great Gothic Cathedral does direct the emotions quite perceptibly. The more susceptible Athenians must have been much more strongly influenced by the Parthenon and the Propulaia. In fact, it is related that Epaminondas declared that his countrymen could never become great unless they removed these buildings bodily to Thebes. Strangers visiting Athens were so overcome by her architectural glories that they thought her the natural capital of the world—an effect which Perikles may well have intended. Great works of art produce great effects: it is not unnatural to suppose that smaller works produce a not inconsiderable, if smaller, effect. Modern theorists often declare that the pictures and wall-paper of the nursery ought to be in the best taste. Plato and Aristotle ruled that everything, however humble, which surrounds the growing child should be in accordance with the best canons of art, since art influenced morality so strongly. “Ought we not to keep an eye,” says Plato,[695] “on the craftsmen also, and prevent them from representing moral evil or disorderliness or bad taste or lack of grace or lack of harmony either in their imitations of animals or in their buildings or in any other object of their craft? If they are unable to carry out our directions in this matter, ought we not to expel them from the community, lest boys who are brought up in the bad pasture of these bad representations may pluck poison daily from everything around them, and little by little insensibly accumulate a large amount of evil in their souls? Must we not rather search for such craftsmen as are able, by their native genius, to discover what is beautiful and graceful? For in this way our children, dwelling in a region of health, will be influenced for good by every sound and every sight of these works of beauty, inhaling as it were a healthy breeze that blows to them from a goodly land.” Every article of furniture, every detail of architecture, is to take its part in educating the citizens. But if art and music are so potent a factor in education, they require to be carefully regulated: a depravation of popular taste, which will cause a depravation of the dependent artists, will by its educating influence increase the national decadence both of taste and of morals, in an ever-widening degree.
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Poetry had at least an equally potent influence upon contemporary ethics. The works of the great poets were the chief medium of education, and large quantities of them were learned by heart in all the elementary schools.[696] What the boys learned, they then recited, with as much dramatic action as they were capable of: the rhapsodes provided them with models. Thus the boys really acted the poets as far as they could. Acting was a new thing in Hellas in Solon’s time, and it was received with apprehension. When Thespis first acted one of his plays, Solon asked him if he was not ashamed to tell such lies in public, making himself out to be what he was not. Thespis replied that it was only in fun. Then Solon struck the ground with his stick and said, “We shall soon find this fun of yours invading our commercial transactions.” Later, when Peisistratos obtained the bodyguard, to which he owed his tyranny, by pretending to have been wounded by his enemies, Solon said the stratagem was a case of acting.[697] This objection was echoed by Plato, and is not wholly unjustified by the course of history. For the great vice of Hellenic life was its insincerity: it is impossible to tell how far a Hellene is in earnest. It is this vice which ruins their oratory; it is this which, in later times, made the “hungry little Greek” the type of a fawning liar in Roman opinion. It was not only in recitations that acting played a great part. The dances were essentially dramatic: it was this quality which enabled them to give birth to the drama. In the war-dance all the gestures and attitudes of attack and defence in actual battle were represented. The Dionysiac dances were originally the acts of devotees trying to assimilate themselves to the god in his sufferings and triumphs.
How vividly a Hellene entered into the dramatisation may be seen from the case of the rhapsode Ion. When he recited Homer, his eyes filled with water and his hair stood on end; and his audience were in much the same condition. The effect in the “Mimetic” dances, where music, gestures, rhythm, and poetry all combined to produce a single impression, must have been greater still; the audience, as well as the performers, must often have been quite carried away. Such performances were very frequent. Is it unnatural to suppose that such frequent assimilation had an important effect on the Hellenes, with their artistic temperament and great susceptibility? At any rate, Plato, Aristotle, and Aristophanes, not to mention lesser names, believed that it had.
Among these potent poetic influences, the drama must certainly not be forgotten. Sokrates regarded the Clouds of Aristophanes as a far more deadly attack upon his career than anything that Anutos and Meletos could say. To Plato, the theatre plays the part of the “Great Sophist,” the educating influence which forms the opinion and the character of the young.
It must be remembered that Hellenic poetry enshrined the religion of the race: this fact gave it an enormous influence. The characters in Aeschylus and Sophocles are divine or semi-divine; many of the audience in the theatre were wont to revere Agamemnon or Theseus; all paid worship to Athena and Apollo. The Athenian drama was sacred to a Hellene as is the play at Oberammergau to a Christian. Had Shakespeare dramatised the Bible, modern children might have recited his speeches and acted his plays with somewhat similar feelings to those with which Hellenic boys recited Homer or Aeschylus. Suppose Shakespeare had thus dramatised the story of Esau and Jacob, and an imaginative child was set to learn Jacob’s speeches and repeat them; suppose he was also in the habit of hearing them recited by a first-class actor who knew how to bring out the minuter traits of character.[698] Is it not, at any rate, quite rational to argue that the child would gradually absorb some of these traits of character, just as children often pick up the peculiarities of nurses and others with whom they have no hereditary connection? Might not underhand habits be reasonably attributed to frequent acting of the part of Jacob? Yet in ancient Hellas the influence was much stronger, for the people were more susceptible and the characters were believed to be half-divine.
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Thus in ancient Hellas music, art, and poetry had an immense effect on the characters and morals of the race. This influence may well have been exaggerated by Hellenic thinkers. Damon the musician declared that every change in artistic standards produced a change in the tone and constitution of a State; and Plato agreed with him.[699] The danger of such innovations is a large part of the theme of the Laws, and, in a less degree, of the Republic. Sparta accepted this attitude and forbade all change. The opinion was certainly widely held, and must have rested on experience.
Just as the thinkers were beginning to realise this principle, it happened that a very great change in the artistic canons did take place. Sophocles is succeeded by Euripides, Pheidias by Praxiteles: music suffers a similar transformation. Idealism gives way to realism: Sophocles and Pheidias had represented men as they ought to be, Euripides and Praxiteles represent them as they are. Poets and sculptors still pretend to be delineating deities, but in reality they are delineating contemporary life.[700] Their creations not only cease to be idealised, they cease to have only a single trait. The “Hermes” of Praxiteles is a dreamy but vigorous young Athenian who might have been met in the Akademeia or Lukeion; the “Herakles” of Euripides is now a homicidal maniac, now a reckless mercenary.[701] The characters become human by losing their divineness. In the next generation the divine names are dropped, and Menander can depict contemporary life without having to call his characters Orestes or Phaidra. Music also ceased to be so severely separated off into types. All manner of musical innovations arise, which it is very hard for a modern to grasp. But the result is clear enough. It became no longer possible to detect the ethical meaning of a tune: music was becoming complex, just as characters in drama and sculpture were becoming complex. It was also more homely in subject. It became daringly “mimetic” also, imitating all the sounds of nature. This was an age of daring experiments, and musicians shared the general movement.
To the Conservative party in Hellas and to the educational theorists these changes naturally appeared ruinous. In their opinion, Euripides was practically parodying the Bible and making divine characters share all the follies and weaknesses, and use the homely language, of mere men. Boys, learning such poetry by heart, would cease to have ideals: everything would be commonplace to them. They would recite the most homely language, and act the most homely parts, under the idea that they were half-divine. Moreover, with the attack of the new school upon the old religion, the more immoral parts of Hellenic mythology were brought into undue prominence. Euripides seems to have chosen some questionable subjects; the dithyrambic poets were worse, and chose themes quite unsuitable for children to act or hear. And music ceased to have any ethical value; it was all trills and onomatopœia. Such changes meant a revolution in the results of education.
The poet Aristophanes is the first to raise his voice against the change. A few months before the utter ruin of Athens, he produces the Frogs, which really repeats the attack of the Clouds, with Euripides instead of Sokrates for the defendant. The poet is attacked as at once the prophet of the new culture of the Sophists and of the new artistic standards. The following are some of the chief faults which Aristophanes finds with the new school represented by Euripides:[702] (1) an undignified style of music, worthy only of the bones as an accompaniment; (2) its habit of mixing all sorts of incongruous musical rubbish together, “lewd love-songs, drinking catches of Meletos, Karian flute-music, dirges, and dances”; (3) its trills or shakes, as in εἰειειειειλίσσετε; (4) its mixture of incongruous pictures, “dolphins, spiders, halcyons, prophet-chambers, and race-courses,” pathos and bathos, commonplace and solemnity; (5) bad metre, licenses of every sort, and frequent “resolved” feet. As a parody of its habitual incongruity Aristophanes gives:
“O God of the sea, that’s what it is. O ye neighbours, behold yon monstrous deed: Gluke’s gone off with my cock. Nymphs, ye daughters of the hills! Mary Ann, lend a hand.”
Aristophanes’ voice comes with a certain pathos, for the play is the last utterance of Periclean Athens, just at the point of falling and trying to find a scapegoat on whom to lay the responsibility of its ruin: and the scapegoat chosen is the new artistic and musical standard. The Ionic temperament had, in fact, broken away from all restraint. The Doric canons of order, symmetry, regularity, and solidity were thrown aside. Everything antique was treated with disdain; all authority was rejected with scorn. No standards, ethical or artistic, were tolerated. Perpetual change, daily novelty, became the one desire of Athens. The foundations of belief, the bases of the moral code, were broken down. The whole world seemed to be crumbling away, and nothing was arising to take its place. Spectators became dizzy with the eternal fluctuations. What wonder if they turned longing eyes towards the one centre of gravity in Hellas, towards the one place where politics, art, and ethics retained their old stability, towards Sparta? So Sparta becomes the philosopher’s ideal, and it is the Spartan canon that Plato tries to reimpose on Ionicism running riot.[703] The fault which he finds with contemporary art and music is that they simply try to please and amuse the audience, not to educate and improve it.[704] They are like parents who try to soothe a fractious child with sweetmeats when his health requires castor oil. But the poets and artists are the slaves of the mob which pays them. They must be freed from this control, and made the servants of the government. Strict canons must be drawn up, which they must follow on pain of being expelled from the State. The canons must be drawn up by a select body of experts; the mob is incapable of judging in such matters; the critic must guide their taste, not follow it.[705] Good music and art must bear the stamp of a good “ethos,” and, since men appreciate the character most which most resembles their own, it will be the good man who will most appreciate good music:[706] so the good man becomes the standard. In order to point his moral, Plato sketches the history of the Athenian drama, showing how its dependence on popular opinion ruined it[707]:—
“At the time of the Persian wars Athens was a limited democracy, with the magistracies arranged according to a property qualification. The spirit of obedience and discipline prevailed in those days, and was strengthened by the dread of Persia. The populace willingly obeyed the laws that fixed the artistic and musical standards. By these regulations the different types of song and accompaniment, hymns or prayers to the gods, lamentations, pæans, dithyrambs, and so forth were kept quite distinct, no one being allowed to mix them together; the standard, too, was not fixed, as now, by the shouts and stampings and confused applause of the mob, but every one listened in silence until the end of the play, the educated classes from preference, and boys and their paidagogoi, and the mob generally, under the direction of the rod. Thus the mass of the citizens were ready to obey in an orderly manner, not venturing to make noisy criticisms. In course of time some poets, who ought to have known better, led the way in breaking down these laws. Frenzied and distracted by their desire for pleasure, they mixed lamentations with hymns and pæans with dithyrambs, they imitated the flute on the lyre, they confused everything with everything else. Blinded by ignorance, they lied and said that there was no question of accuracy of representation in music: the only standard was the pleasure of the hearer, whatever sort of man he might be. With such style of poetry, and arguments to match, they inspired the many with contempt for the laws of Art, and gave them the idea that they were capable of criticising it. So the audience was no longer silent but noisy, since it supposed that it knew what was good and what was bad. Art was no longer governed by good taste, but by the bad taste of the mob. Nor was this the worst of it. From Art the infection spread to other spheres, and every one began to think that he knew everything, and consequently to break the laws. For, thinking themselves wiser than the laws, they no longer feared them.… Next comes a refusal to obey the Archons, then contempt for the orders of parents and elders, then a desire to be free from the restraints of a constitution. The end is utter contempt for oaths and covenants and the gods.”
It is the lack of order and system in contemporary music which Plato dislikes.[708] In modern dances, he complains, manly words are set to effeminate tunes or gestures, and the voices of men and beasts and instruments are mixed together into a confused and unintelligible hodgepodge.[709] Music without words is equally detestable. Music that runs on without the proper pauses and loves mere speed and meaningless clamour, using flutes and harps without words, is in the worst taste. The meaning must be quite plain.
Music must also be good. Poets say much that is good, much that is bad: they are irresponsible beings.[710] The State ought to appoint censors who will reject all unsuitable poems and tunes and dances. Those which are already in existence must be selected and expurgated. If this ruins the poetry, never mind: moral tone is far more important than poetical skill. In fact, poetry ought to be written by moral citizens without any regard being paid to their poetical talents: it would also be well if they did not compose till they were fifty![711] A sketch of a Platonic Censor re-editing Homer is given in Books ii. and iii. of the Republic: his methods are drastic.
But Plato’s chief denunciation is reserved for the “mimetic” or imitative aspect of poetry. The poet teaches “posing.” Homer, when he described the siege of Troy, is posing as a skilled tactician (as his admirers often claimed that he was), when really the silence of history proves that he was nothing of the sort. So too the painter who represents a plough is posing as an authority upon agriculture: question him, and he will prove to be completely ignorant of the subject. Both poetry and painting are a fraud and a deception; by their pretence of knowledge, they encourage the mind in the habit, to which it is so prone, of accepting vague opinions as certainties without testing their truth.[712] They foster that belief in the sense-perceptions which it is the object of Platonic education to destroy.
But the poet not only poses himself: he makes his audience, his reader, his performer pose. The boy who recites the dying speech of Aias in Sophocles’ play is posing as Aias, pretending to be Aias, and adopting the tone and the traits of Aias. The boy who dances in the dithyramb Semelé is trying to enter into Semelé’s feelings and moods, being helped by the music and the gestures and the words.[713] Such posing, if begun in early years, will invade the character and change it: the boy will become like the personages whom he is accustomed to act. Hence Plato lays down strict laws dealing with the recitations and dances of the young.[714] “If they speak in character, it must only be in the character of those who are, what they themselves must be when they are grown up, brave, temperate, pious gentlemen. They must have no skill in taking unsuitable characters, lest from their dramatic representation of what is vulgar and base they become infected with the reality of vulgarity and baseness. For imitation, if begun in early years and carried far, sinks into a boy’s habits and nature, and influences his voice, his gestures, and his ideas.… So boys must not be allowed to take the character of a woman, young or old, abusing her husband or blaspheming against the gods or uttering lamentations,—certainly not of a woman in sickness or in love or in pangs; nor the character of slaves performing slavish duties; nor of bad men, cowards, insulting or mocking one another, using foul language, drunk or sober; nor yet of madmen.”[715] It will be seen that this will exclude much of Hellenic drama, especially of the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes. Comedy, according to Plato, should only be acted by foreigners, and should serve as an awful warning of everything that a gentleman ought not to do. The new music is subjected to similar rules. “Boys must not imitate blacksmiths at the forge, or craftsmen occupied in any trade, or sailors rowing, or boatswains giving them orders, or anything of the sort; nor yet horses neighing, or bulls roaring, or the noise of rivers or the sea or thunder or wind or hail or chariot-wheels or pulleys or trumpets or flutes or pipes …; nor the sounds made by dogs and sheep and birds.” So the proper style of poetry for educational purposes will be mostly narrative, with occasional dramatisation of virtuous men. To accompany this simplified and purified poetry only the Dorian and Phrygian “harmonies” will be required: all the others may be rejected. Simple instruments alone will be wanted: many-stringed lyres and the flute can be banished. The seven-stringed lyre and the shepherd’s pipe will be left.
Plato finds it too difficult to carry these principles into rhythm, since he is not an expert in the subject. But he thinks that the metres could be regulated in accordance with his canons; the expert Damon declared that some had a demoralising tendency.
As a whole, Plato’s aim is to restore Doric standards, to combat amateurism and dabbling, by which boys were made Jacks-of-all-trades, and above all to insist that the refined few ought to set the standard of taste in matters musical, literary, and artistic, not the unrefined many. With his view may be contrasted Perikles’ boast to the Athenian people, “We can all criticise adequately, if we cannot all invent,” and Aristotle’s belief that a crowd judges better than an individual because its judgment is compounded of many judgments.
But when we come to Aristotle the creative instinct of the Hellenic nation, apart from a few gifted individuals, is dead. To him and his contemporaries music and painting are no longer rendered necessary parts of education owing to the irresistible craving of an artistic temperament for expression. Listen to his theory. Painting gives boys an eye for beauty, and prevents them from being cheated in art-dealing: there is no inward compulsion to paint. Boys had better learn to sing and play, since children must needs make a noise. All they really need is the power of criticising professional music. This power, unluckily, cannot be acquired without personal study. But let them drop their music as soon as they can, or they might be mistaken for vulgar professionals. Such words could hardly have been addressed to a nation that was still musical and artistic. So Aristotle’s æsthetic criticism is really a study of the past, the discussion of a dead age. He has no natural affinity for such things himself: he prefers to sum up the opinions of experts. Consequently his remarks on the subject are scientific but no more; for a real appreciation of the Hellenic artistic and musical spirit it is necessary to go to Plato, who combated it so fiercely just because he was more in sympathy with it than suited his philosophic desires.
PLATE X. A.
IN A RIDING-SCHOOL
From a Kulix by Euphronios, now in the Louvre. Hartwig’s Meisterschalen, Plate 53.
PLATE X. B.
IN A RIDING-SCHOOL
From a Kulix by Euphronios, now in the Louvre. Hartwig’s Meisterschalen, Plate 53.
[680] The characteristics are sketched in Thuc. i. 70. Cp. the difference between Florence and Venice in Renaissance Italy.
[681] See also Thuc. i. 6; Athen. 512 B.C.
[682] No doubt all the theorists had a fatal temptation to judge the harmony by the opinion which they held of the race which produced it. The Lydian may have recovered prestige during the fourth century, for it included Karian, and Karia became a great power under Mausolos.
[683] Athen. 624 C.
[684] It is the only true Hellenic harmony (Plato, Lach. 188 D).
[685] Plato’s opinion of the harmonies is in Rep. 398-399. Aristotle, who professes only to summarise the views of experts, discusses them in Pol. viii. 7.
[686] Plato apparently accepts this principle with regard to the Korubantic dances (Laws, 790 D).
[687] Athen. 624 b.
[688] Pind. P. 5. 60-63. Cp. the story of Saul and David.
[689] Athen. 624 a.
[690] Plut. Luk. 4.
[691] Pol. iv. 20. 2.
[692] Plato, Rep. 399 A.
[693] Londoners must devoutly hope that the Hellenic theory is false.
[694] Aristot. Rhet. ii. 21. 16.
[695] Plato, Rep. 401 B.
[696] A poetical education probably develops the imagination at the expense of the logical mind. Plato is a good instance of this: his imagination, against his will, outweighs his reason. It may be this personal experience which gives so much bitterness to his attack on poetry.
[697] Plut. Solon, 29. 30.
[698] Children have a natural tendency to act, and need little inducement or instruction.
[699] Plato, Rep. 424 C.
[700] So in the later Renaissance the “Madonna” is the artist’s wife.
[701] According to Dr. Verrall.
[702] Aristoph. Frogs, 1301, 1340.
[703] Ionicism = Herakleiteanism, πάντα ῥεῖ. Doricism = Parmenideanism, τὸ πᾶν μένει.
[704] Plato, Gorg. 501-502; Polit. 288 C.
[705] Plato, Laws, 657-659.
[706] Ibid. 656.
[707] Ibid. 698-701 C.
[708] The essence of dancing is that it is orderly movement; of singing that it is orderly sound (Laws, 654).
[709] Plato, Laws, 669-70.
[710] Ibid. 800-802.
[711] Ibid. 829 c.
[712] Consequently the painter and the poet are, in Plato’s opinion, allies of the Sophist.
[713] This is true, in a less degree, of the audience. Cp. Plutarch’s account of the Spartans (Lac. Inst. 239 A): “They did not listen to tragedies or comedies, in order that neither in earnest nor in jest they might hear men gainsaying the laws.”
[714] Plato, Rep. 395 ff.
[715] Plato holds that no one likes to imitate his inferiors; so the good man will not care to imitate any but the good. He ascribes this attitude to the Deity.