10: PLATO'S AESTHETICS

     Right speech, then, and rightness of harmony and form and
     rhythm minister to goodness of nature; not that good-nature
     which we so call with a soft name, being really silliness,
     but the frame of mind which in very truth is rightly and
     fairly ordered in regard to the moral habit.--Most certainly
     he said.--Must not these qualities, then, be everywhere
     pursued by the young men if they are to do each his own
     business?--Pursued, certainly.--Now painting, I suppose, is
     full of them (those qualities which are partly ethical, partly
     aesthetic) and all handicraft such as that; the weaver's art
     is full of them, and the inlayer's art and the building of
     houses, and the working of all the other apparatus of life;
     moreover the nature of our own bodies, and of all other living
     things.  For in all these, rightness or wrongness of form is
     inherent.  And wrongness of form, and the lack of rhythm, the
     lack of harmony, are fraternal to faultiness of mind and charac-
     ter, and the opposite qualities to the opposite condition--the
     temperate and good character:--fraternal, aye! and copies of
     them.--Yes, entirely so: he said.--

     Must our poets, then, alone be under control, and compelled to
     work the image of the good into their poetic works, or not to
     work among us at all; or must the other craftsmen too be
     controlled, and restrained from working this faultiness and
     intemperance and illiberality and formlessness of character
     whether into the images of living creatures, or the houses
     they build, or any other product of their craft whatever;
     or must he who is unable so to do be forbidden to practise
     his art among us, to the end that our guardians may not,
     nurtured in images of vice as in a vicious pasture, cropping
     and culling much every day little by little from many sources,
     composing together some one great evil in their own souls, go
     undetected?  Must we not rather seek for those craftsmen who
     have the [278] power, by way of their own natural virtue, to
     track out the nature of the beautiful and seemly, to the end
     that, living as in some wholesome place, the young men may
     receive good from every side, whencesoever, from fair works
     of art, either upon sight or upon hearing anything may strike,
     as it were a breeze bearing health from kindly places, and
     from childhood straightway bring them unaware to likeness and
     friendship and harmony with fair reason?--Yes: he answered: in
     this way they would be by far best educated.--Well then, I said,
     Glaucon, on these grounds is not education in music of the
     greatest importance--because, more than anything else, rhythm
     and harmony make their way down into the inmost part of the
     soul, and take hold upon it with the utmost force, bringing
     with them rightness of form, and rendering its form right, if
     one be correctly trained; if not, the opposite? and again
     because he who has been trained in that department duly, would
     have the sharpest sense of oversights (tôn paraleipomenôn)+ and
     of things not fairly turned out, whether by art or nature (mê
     kalôs dêmiourgêthentôn ê mê kalôs phyntôn)+ and disliking them,
     as he should, would commend things beautiful, and, by reason of
     his delight in these, receiving them into his soul, be nurtured
     of them, and become kalokagathos,+ while he blamed the base,
     as he should, and hated it, while still young, before he was
     able to apprehend a reason, and when reason comes would welcome
     it, recognising it by its kinship to himself--most of all one
     thus taught?--Yes: he answered: it seems to me that for reasons
     such as these their education should be in music.  Republic, 400.

Understand, then, the poetry and music, the arts and crafts, of the City of the Perfect--what is left of them there, and remember how the Greeks themselves were used to say that "the half is more than the whole." Liken its music, if you will, to Gregorian music, and call to mind the kind of architecture, military or monastic again, that must be built to such music, and then the kind of colouring that will fill its [279] jealously allotted space upon the walls, the sort of carving that will venture to display itself on cornice or capital. The walls, the pillars, the streets--you see them in thought! nay, the very trees and animals, the attire of those who move along the streets, their looks and voices, their style--the hieratic Dorian architecture, to speak precisely, the Dorian manner everywhere, in possession of the whole of life. Compare it, for further vividness of effect, to Gothic building, to the Cistercian Gothic, if you will, when Saint Bernard had purged it of a still barbaric superfluity of ornament. It seems a long way from the Parthenon to Saint Ouen "of the aisles and arches," or Notre-Dame de Bourges; yet they illustrate almost equally the direction of the Platonic aesthetics. Those churches of the Middle Age have, as we all feel, their loveliness, yet of a stern sort, which fascinates while perhaps it repels us. We may try hard to like as well or better architecture of a more or less different kind, but coming back to them again find that the secret of final success is theirs. The rigid logic of their charm controls our taste, as logic proper binds the intelligence: we would have something of that quality, if we might, for ourselves, in what we do or make; feel, under its influence, very diffident of our own loose, or gaudy, or literally insignificant, decorations. "Stay then," says the Platonist, too sanguine perhaps,-- "Abide," he says to youth, "in these [280] places, and the like of them, and mechanically, irresistibly, the soul of them will impregnate yours. With whatever beside is in congruity with them in the order of hearing and sight, they will tell (despite, it may be, of unkindly nature at your first making) upon your very countenance, your walk and gestures, in the course and concatenation of your inmost thoughts."

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