man. When pleasure and pain, and love and hate, are rightly implanted in
the yet unconscious soul, and after the attainment of reason are
discovered to be in harmony with her, this harmony of the soul is virtue,
and the preparatory stage, anticipating reason, I call education. But the
finer sense of pleasure and pain is apt to be impaired in the course of
life; and therefore the Gods, pitying the toils and sorrows of mortals,
have allowed them to have holidays, and given them the Muses and Apollo
and Dionysus for leaders and playfellows. All young creatures love motion
and frolic, and utter sounds of delight; but man only is capable of taking
pleasure in rhythmical and harmonious movements. With these education
begins; and the uneducated is he who has never known the discipline of the
chorus, and the educated is he who has. The chorus is partly dance and
partly song, and therefore the well-educated must sing and dance well. But
when we say, 'He sings and dances well,' we mean that he sings and dances
what is good. And if he thinks that to be good which is really good, he
will have a much higher music and harmony in him, and be a far greater
master of imitation in sound and gesture than he who is not of this
opinion. 'True.' Then, if we know what is good and bad in song and dance,
we shall know what education is? 'Very true.' Let us now consider the
beauty of figure, melody, song, and dance. Will the same figures or sounds
be equally well adapted to the manly and the cowardly when they are in
trouble? 'How can they be, when the very colours of their faces are
different?' Figures and melodies have a rhythm and harmony which are
adapted to the expression of different feelings (I may remark, by the way,
that the term 'colour,' which is a favourite word of music-masters, is not
really applicable to music). And one class of harmonies is akin to courage
and all virtue, the other to cowardice and all vice. 'We agree.' And do
all men equally like all dances? 'Far otherwise.' Do some figures, then,
appear to be beautiful which are not? For no one will admit that the forms
of vice are more beautiful than the forms of virtue, or that he prefers