Other artists as well as poets should be warned against meanness or
unseemliness. Sculpture and painting equally with music must conform to
the law of simplicity. He who violates it cannot be allowed to work in
our city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens. For our guardians
must grow up, not amid images of deformity which will gradually poison
and corrupt their souls, but in a land of health and beauty where they
will drink in from every object sweet and harmonious influences. And of
all these influences the greatest is the education given by music,
which finds a way into the innermost soul and imparts to it the sense
of beauty and of deformity. At first the effect is unconscious; but
when reason arrives, then he who has been thus trained welcomes her as
the friend whom he always knew. As in learning to read, first we
acquire the elements or letters separately, and afterwards their
combinations, and cannot recognize reflections of them until we know
the letters themselves;—in like manner we must first attain the
elements or essential forms of the virtues, and then trace their
combinations in life and experience. There is a music of the soul which
answers to the harmony of the world; and the fairest object of a
musical soul is the fair mind in the fair body. Some defect in the
latter may be excused, but not in the former. True love is the daughter
of temperance, and temperance is utterly opposed to the madness of
bodily pleasure. Enough has been said of music, which makes a fair
ending with love.