The Decticus: his Instrument 



ception 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 in- 

 spiration 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 na- 

 tural 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 con- 

 trary, being based on the immutable founda- 

 tion 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, cele- 

 brated by Buffon 1 in grandiloquent terms. 



1 Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), the 

 foremost French naturalist and one of the foremost 

 French writers, though his style, as Fabre rightly sug- 

 gests, was nothing less than pompous. He was the 

 originator, in the speech delivered at his reception into 

 the French academy, of the famous aphorism, " Le style 

 est I'homme meme." Translator's Note. 



253 



