The barbarian, to turn the Greek masterpiece into a stupid wail! Was it irreverence on his part? No, but it was incapacity. His ear, trained in accordance with other rules, was unable to take pleasure in artless sounds which had become strange and even disagreeable owing to their great age. What my friend lacked, what we all lack is the perception of those primitive niceties which have been stifled by the centuries. To enjoy the Hymn to Apollo, we should have to go back to the simplicity of soul which one day made me think the buzzing of the onion-stalks delightful. And that we shall never do. But, if our music need not draw its inspiration from the Delphic marbles, our statuary and our architecture will always find models of incomparable perfection in the work of the Greeks. The art of sounds, having no prototype imposed on it by natural facts, is liable to change: with our fickle tastes, that which is perfect in music to-day becomes vulgar and commonplace to-morrow. The art of forms, on the contrary, being based on the immutable foundation of reality, always sees the beautiful where previous centuries saw it. There is no musical type anywhere, not even in the song of the Nightingale, celebrated by Buffon [54] in grandiloquent terms. I have no wish to shock anybody; but why should I not give my opinion? Buffon’s style and the Nightingale’s song both leave me cold. The first has too much rhetoric about it and not enough sincere emotion. The second, a magnificent jewel-case of ill-assorted pearls of sound, makes so slight an appeal to the soul that a penny jug, filled with water and furnished with a whistle, will enable the lips of a child to reproduce the celebrated songster’s finest trills. A little earthenware machine, warbling at the player’s will, rivals the Nightingale. Above the bird, that glorious production of a vibrating air-column, creatures roar and bray and grunt, until we come to man, who alone speaks and really sings. Below the bird, they croak or are silent. The bellows of the lungs have two efflorescences separated by enormous empty spaces filled with formless sounds. Lower down still is the insect, which is much earlier in date. This first-born of the dwellers on the earth is also the first singer. Deprived of the breath which could set the vocal cords vibrating, it invents the bow and friction, of which man is later to make such wonderful use. Various Beetles produce a noise by sliding one rugged surface over another. The Capricorn moves his corseleted segment over its junction with the rest of the thorax; the Pine Cockchafer, [55] with his great fan-shaped antennæ, rubs his last dorsal segment with the edge of his wing-cases; the Copris [56] and many more know no other method. To tell the truth, these scrapers do not produce a musical sound, but rather a creaking like that of a weathercock on its rusty pin, a thin, sharp sound with no resonance in it.