The new style was looked upon as the reawakening of the most effective music, ancient Greek music:indeed, in accordance with the universal and popular conception of the Homeric as the primitive world,
这种新风格被目为最动人的音乐，古希腊音乐之苏醒：真的，照一般通俗解释，荷马世界是原始世界，
they could abandon themselves to the dream of having descended once more into the paradisiacal beginnings of mankind,where music also must have had that unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence of which the poets, in their pastoral plays, could give such touching accounts.
所以他们可以纵情梦想，以为再度落到人类发源的乐土，在那里音乐也必然具有无可超越的纯粹性，力量，以及诗人们在牧歌剧中那么动人地吟咏的那种纯洁生活。
Here we can see into the innermost development of this thoroughly modern variety of art, the opera:art here responds to a powerful need, but it is a nonaesthetic need:
这里，我们洞见这种真正现代艺术——歌剧——的内部发展。这里，艺术是出于一种强烈的要求，但这是非审美的要求：
the yearning for the idyllic, the faith in the primordial existence of the artistic and good man.
憧憬着牧歌的生活，相信史前时代有爱好艺术的良善的人们。
The recitative was regarded as the rediscovered language of this primitive man;opera as the rediscovered country of this idyllically or heroically good creature,
吟诵调被视为重新发现的原始人的语言；歌剧被视为新从寻获的牧歌式或史诗式好人的国土，
who simultaneously with every action follows a natural artistic impulse,who accomplishes his speech with a little singing,in order that he may immediately break forth into full song at the slightest emotional excitement.
那些好人一举一动都同时遵从着自然的艺术冲动，一言一语至少唱出一些东西，所以感情稍有波动，便立刻尽情高歌一曲。
It is now a matter of indifference to us that the humanists of the time combated the old ecclesiastical conception of man as inherently corrupt and lost,with this newly created picture of the paradisiacal artist:
当时的人文学者就用这种乐土艺术家的新塑形象，来反对教会之视人为本身腐化堕落的生灵的陈旧观念。在今日这对我们固然是无足轻重；
so that opera is to be understood as the opposition dogma of the good man,but may also, at the same time, provide a consolation for that pessimism which,
所以，我们应该说，歌剧是良善人们所提出的相反信条，但与此同时，它也对悲观主义提供一点安慰，
owing to the frightful uncertainty of all conditions of life, attracted precisely the serious-minded men of the time.
当此人生无常触目惊心的时代，正是仁人志士深深感到悲观失望的。