that one can know only what one has learned from others, or what one has found from oneself: in order to have learned from others, one must have wished to receive lessons; in order to have found, one must have wished to seek; but one cannot reasonably desire to learn or to seek only for what one believes one does not know. If one imposes upon oneself this important point, and if one imagines oneself knowing that of which one is ignorant, one must judge it wholly useless to learn or to seek, and then ignorance is incurable: it is madness to style oneself doctor concerning things that one has neither learned nor sought after, and of which one can consequently have no knowledge. It is Plato who has made this irresistible reasoning, and who has drawn this conclusion: that all the mistakes that man commits come from that sort of ignorance which makes him believe that he knows what he does not know.[1]
From time immemorial this sort of ignorance has been quite considerable; but I believe that it will never again show itself to the extent it did among us some centuries ago. Men hardly free from the mire of barbarism, without being given the time either to acquire or to seek after any true knowledge of antiquity, have offered themselves boldly as its judges and have declared that the great men who have made it illustrious were either ignorant, imposters, fanatics, or fools. Here, I see musicians who seriously assure me that the Greeks were rustics in the way of music; that all that can be said of the wonders effected by this art is idle talk, and that we have not a village fiddler who could not produce as much effect as Orpheus, Terpander, or Timotheus, if he had similar auditors.[2] There, are the critics who*
- ↑ In Alcibiad., i.
- ↑ Voyez Burette, Mém, de l'Acad. des Belles-Lett., t. v.; Laborde, Essai sur la Musique, t. i., introd., p. 20. Our painters have hardly treated Greek painting better; and perhaps if the Pythian Apollo and the Chaste Venus had not again astonished Europe, but had disappeared as did the masterpieces of Polygnotus and of Zeuxis,
