23 PLATO'S "MUSIC" RICHTER' [See Letters 82 and 83] I MUST pause here to collect the meaning thus far. Education, properly so called, begins in earliest infancy, by making the child like what it should like, and hate what it should hate (as, for instance, like milk, and dislike gin; like playing with animals, dislike hunting them; like playing in clean water, and dislike dirt; like hearing truth, and dislike being deceived; and so on), but that these rightly-formed instincts are likely to pass away in advancing life, unless maintained by discipline under three Gods, of which music, the art of motion in the voice, is that which preserves virtue in the soul; and gymnastic, the art of the motion of the limbs, that which preserves virtue in the body.* The last point to be dwelt on in the Platonic teaching is the vital principle that all our singing is to be with the help and fellowship of certain Gods-namely, the Muses, Apollo, and Dionysus. Translating this into a faith acceptable (whether we accept it or not) by faithful Christians it means that all good music must be sung by the help and companionship of angels. Suppose we at all believed in angels, and in their guardianship of children, and guidance of men, we should be interested in trying to conceive their different ranks, and the kind of fellowship they have with us, and with the lower animals. Of which the only * Now this, however useful, is an illogical decision; for, to be accurate in terms, it should run that music, being wise motion of the voice, preserves the virtue of the voice; and gymnastic, being wise motion of the limbs, preserves the virtue of the limbs. But logic would only here lead us into false forms (as it always does when it becomes a guide instead of a method). Plato is essentially right, though informal. Music is not the movement of the voice only, but the production of a new condition in external things (sound), and is not at all an opposite to gymnastic, but a different art altogether, acting, not on its instrument, the mouth, but on the ear and intellect, while gymnastic re-acts only on its own instrument, the limbs, and affects the moral disposition only, not the intellect ; and practically, on the whole, the one disciplines (as Plato says it does) the soul, and the other the body. 1 [These passages are printed from proofs of Fors "over matter," headed "Take out and keep."] |