book itself the piquant proposition recurs time and again, that the

existence of the world is _justified_ only as an æsthetic phenomenon.

Indeed, the entire book recognises only an artist-thought and

artist-after-thought behind all occurrences,--a "God," if you will,

but certainly only an altogether thoughtless and unmoral artist-God,

who, in construction as in destruction, in good as in evil, desires

to become conscious of his own equable joy and sovereign glory; who,

in creating worlds, frees himself from the _anguish_ of fullness

and _overfullness,_ from the _suffering_ of the contradictions

concentrated within him. The world, that is, the redemption of God

_attained_ at every moment, as the perpetually changing, perpetually

new vision of the most suffering, most antithetical, most contradictory

being, who contrives to redeem himself only in _appearance:_ this

entire artist-metaphysics, call it arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if

you will,--the point is, that it already betrays a spirit, which is

determined some day, at all hazards, to make a stand against the

_moral_ interpretation and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the

first time, a pessimism "Beyond Good and Evil" announces itself, here

that "perverseness of disposition" obtains expression and formulation,

against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling beforehand his

angriest imprecations and thunderbolts,--a philosophy which dares to

put, derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of phenomena, and

not only among "phenomena" (in the sense of the idealistic _terminus

technicus_), but among the "illusions," as appearance, semblance,

error, interpretation, accommodation, art. Perhaps the depth of this

_antimoral_ tendency may be best estimated from the guarded and

hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout this

book,--Christianity, as being the most extravagant burlesque of the

moral theme to which mankind has hitherto been obliged to listen. In

fact, to the purely æsthetic world-interpretation and justification

taught in this book, there is no greater antithesis than the Christian

dogma, which is _only_ and will be only moral, and which, with

its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness of God,

relegates--that is, disowns, convicts, condemns--art, _all_ art, to

the realm of _falsehood._ Behind such a mode of thought and valuation,

which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to art, I always experienced

what was _hostile to life,_ the wrathful, vindictive counterwill to

life itself: for all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics,

necessity of perspective and error. From the very first Christianity

was, essentially and thoroughly, the nausea and surfeit of Life for

Life, which only disguised, concealed and decked itself out under the

belief in "another" or "better" life. The hatred of the "world," the

curse on the affections, the fear of beauty and sensuality, another

world, invented for the purpose of slandering this world the more,

at bottom a longing for. Nothingness, for the end, for rest, for the

"Sabbath of Sabbaths"--all this, as also the unconditional will of

Christianity to recognise _only_ moral values, has always appeared to

me as the most dangerous and ominous of all possible forms of a "will

to perish"; at the least, as the symptom of a most fatal disease, of

profoundest weariness, despondency, exhaustion, impoverishment of

life,--for before the tribunal of morality (especially Christian, that

is, unconditional morality) life _must_ constantly and inevitably be

the loser, because life _is_ something essentially unmoral,--indeed,

oppressed with the weight of contempt and the everlasting No, life

_must_ finally be regarded as unworthy of desire, as in itself

unworthy. Morality itself what?--may not morality be a "will to

disown life," a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle of

decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning of the end? And,

consequently, the danger of dangers?... It was _against_ morality,

therefore, that my instinct, as an intercessory-instinct for life,

turned in this questionable book, inventing for itself a fundamental

counter--dogma and counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely

_anti-Christian._ What should I call it? As a philologist and man of

words I baptised it, not without some liberty--for who could be sure

of the proper name of the Antichrist?--with the name of a Greek god: I

called it _Dionysian._

6.

You see which problem I ventured to touch upon in this early work?...

How I now regret, that I had not then the courage (or immodesty?) to

allow myself, in all respects, the use of an _individual language_

for such _individual_ contemplations and ventures in the field of

thought--that I laboured to express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian

formulæ, strange and new valuations, which ran fundamentally counter

to the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as to their taste!

What, forsooth, were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy? "What gives"--he

says in _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ II. 495--"to all tragedy

that singular swing towards elevation, is the awakening of the

knowledge that the world, that life, cannot satisfy us thoroughly,

and consequently is _not worthy_ of our attachment In this consists

the tragic spirit: it therefore leads to _resignation_." Oh, how

differently Dionysos spoke to me! Oh how far from me then was just

this entire resignationism!--But there is something far worse in this

book, which I now regret even more than having obscured and spoiled

Dionysian anticipations with Schopenhauerian formulæ: to wit, that, in

general, I _spoiled_ the grand _Hellenic problem,_ as it had opened

up before me, by the admixture of the most modern things! That I

entertained hopes, where nothing was to be hoped for, where everything

pointed all-too-clearly to an approaching end! That, on the basis of

our latter-day German music, I began to fable about the "spirit of

Teutonism," as if it were on the point of discovering and returning

to itself,--ay, at the very time that the German spirit which not so

very long before had had the will to the lordship over Europe, the

strength to lead and govern Europe, testamentarily and conclusively

_resigned_ and, under the pompous pretence of empire-founding,

effected its transition to mediocritisation, democracy, and "modern

ideas." In very fact, I have since learned to regard this "spirit of

Teutonism" as something to be despaired of and unsparingly treated,

as also our present _German music,_ which is Romanticism through and

through and the most un-Grecian of all possible forms of art: and

moreover a first-rate nerve-destroyer, doubly dangerous for a people

given to drinking and revering the unclear as a virtue, namely, in

its twofold capacity of an intoxicating and stupefying narcotic. Of

course, apart from all precipitate hopes and faulty applications to

matters specially modern, with which I then spoiled my first book, the

great Dionysian note of interrogation, as set down therein, continues

standing on and on, even with reference to music: how must we conceive

of a music, which is no longer of Romantic origin, like the German; but

of _Dionysian_?...

7.

--But, my dear Sir, if _your_ book is not Romanticism, what in

the world is? Can the deep hatred of the present, of "reality"

and "modern ideas" be pushed farther than has been done in your

artist-metaphysics?--which would rather believe in Nothing, or in

the devil, than in the "Now"? Does not a radical bass of wrath and

annihilative pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal vocal

art and aural seduction, a mad determination to oppose all that "now"

is, a will which is not so very far removed from practical nihilism

and which seems to say: "rather let nothing be true, than that _you_

should be in the right, than that _your_ truth should prevail!"

Hear, yourself, my dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever

so unlocked ears, a single select passage of your own book, that

not ineloquent dragon-slayer passage, which may sound insidiously

rat-charming to young ears and hearts. What? is not that the true

blue romanticist-confession of 1830 under the mask of the pessimism

of 1850? After which, of course, the usual romanticist finale at once

strikes up,--rupture, collapse, return and prostration before an old

belief, before _the_ old God.... What? is not your pessimist book

itself a piece of anti-Hellenism and Romanticism, something "equally

intoxicating and befogging," a narcotic at all events, ay, a piece of

music, of _German_ music? But listen:

Let us imagine a rising generation with this undauntedness

of vision, with this heroic impulse towards the prodigious,

let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-slayers,

the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all

the effeminate doctrines of optimism, in order "to live

resolutely" in the Whole and in the Full: _would it not be

necessary_ for the tragic man of this culture, with his

self-discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a new

art, _the art of metaphysical comfort,_ tragedy as the

Helena belonging to him, and that he should exclaim with

Faust:

"Und sollt ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,

In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?"[1]

"Would it not be _necessary_?" ... No, thrice no! ye young

romanticists: it would _not_ be necessary! But it is very probable,

that things may _end_ thus, that _ye_ may end thus, namely "comforted,"

as it is written, in spite of all self-discipline to earnestness and

terror; metaphysically comforted, in short, as Romanticists are wont to

end, as _Christians...._ No! ye should first of all learn the art of

earthly comfort, ye should learn to _laugh,_ my young friends, if ye

are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will perhaps,

as laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the

devil--and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of

that Dionysian ogre, called _Zarathustra_:

"Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do

not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good

dancers--and better still if ye stand also on your heads!

"This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--I

myself have put on this crown; I myself have consecrated my

laughter. No one else have I found to-day strong enough for

this.

"Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one,

who beckoneth with his pinions, one ready for flight,

beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a blissfully

light-spirited one:--

"Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher,

no impatient one, no absolute one, one who loveth leaps and

side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown!

"This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--to

you my brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing have I

consecrated: ye higher men, _learn,_ I pray you--to laugh!"

_Thus spake Zarathustra_, lxxiii. 17, 18, and 20.

SILS-MARIA, OBERENGADIN, _August_ 1886.

[1]

And shall not I, by mightiest desire,

In living shape that sole fair form acquire?

SWANWICK, trans. of _Faust._

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC

FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER.

In order to keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements,

and misunderstandings to which the thoughts gathered in this essay

will give occasion, considering the peculiar character of our æsthetic

publicity, and to be able also to write the introductory remarks

with the same contemplative delight, the impress of which, as the

petrifaction of good and elevating hours, it bears on every page, I

form a conception of the moment when you, my highly honoured friend,

will receive this essay; how you, say after an evening walk in the

winter snow, will behold the unbound Prometheus on the title-page,

read my name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever this essay may

contain, the author has something earnest and impressive to say, and,

moreover, that in all his meditations he communed with you as with one

present and could thus write only what befitted your presence. You

will thus remember that it was at the same time as your magnificent

dissertation on Beethoven originated, viz., amidst the horrors and

sublimities of the war which had just then broken out, that I collected

myself for these thoughts. But those persons would err, to whom this

collection suggests no more perhaps than the antithesis of patriotic

excitement and æsthetic revelry, of gallant earnestness and sportive

delight. Upon a real perusal of this essay, such readers will, rather

to their surprise, discover how earnest is the German problem we have

to deal with, which we properly place, as a vortex and turning-point,

in the very midst of German hopes. Perhaps, however, this same class

of readers will be shocked at seeing an æsthetic problem taken so

seriously, especially if they can recognise in art no more than a merry

diversion, a readily dispensable court-jester to the "earnestness

of existence": as if no one were aware of the real meaning of this

confrontation with the "earnestness of existence." These earnest ones

may be informed that I am convinced that art is the highest task and

the properly metaphysical activity of this life, as it is understood by

the man, to whom, as my sublime protagonist on this path, I would now

dedicate this essay.

BASEL, _end of the year_ 1871.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

1.

We shall have gained much for the science of æsthetics, when once we

have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate

certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound

up with the duplexity of the _Apollonian_ and the _Dionysian:_ in

like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes,

involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening

reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose

to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of

art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of

their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus,

the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in

the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the

art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music,

that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel

to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually

inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in

them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over

by their mutual term "Art"; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle

of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through

this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian

art-work of Attic tragedy.

In order to bring these two tendencies within closer range, let us

conceive them first of all as the separate art-worlds of _dreamland_

and _drunkenness;_ between which physiological phenomena a contrast

may be observed analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and

the Dionysian. In dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius,

the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men, in

dreams the great shaper beheld the charming corporeal structure of

superhuman beings, and the Hellenic poet, if consulted on the mysteries

of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested dreams and would

have offered an explanation resembling that of Hans Sachs in the

Meistersingers:--

Mein Freund, das grad' ist Dichters Werk,

dass er sein Träumen deut' und merk'.

Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn

wird ihm im Traume aufgethan:

all' Dichtkunst und Poeterei

ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei.[1]

The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of

which every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all

plastic art, and in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of

poetry also. We take delight in the immediate apprehension of form; all

forms speak to us; there is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous.

But, together with the highest life of this dream-reality we also have,

glimmering through it, the sensation of its appearance: such at least

is my experience, as to the frequency, ay, normality of which I could

adduce many proofs, as also the sayings of the poets. Indeed, the man

of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath this reality in

which we live and have our being, another and altogether different

reality lies concealed, and that therefore it is also an appearance;

and Schopenhauer actually designates the gift of occasionally regarding

men and things as mere phantoms and dream-pictures as the criterion of

philosophical ability. Accordingly, the man susceptible to art stands

in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher to

the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for from

these pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these processes

he trains himself for life. And it is perhaps not only the agreeable

and friendly pictures that he realises in himself with such perfect

understanding: the earnest, the troubled, the dreary, the gloomy, the

sudden checks, the tricks of fortune, the uneasy presentiments, in

short, the whole "Divine Comedy" of life, and the Inferno, also pass

before him, not merely like pictures on the wall--for he too lives and

suffers in these scenes,--and yet not without that fleeting sensation

of appearance. And perhaps many a one will, like myself, recollect

having sometimes called out cheeringly and not without success amid the

dangers and terrors of dream-life: "It is a dream! I will dream on!" I

have likewise been told of persons capable of continuing the causality

of one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights:

all of which facts clearly testify that our innermost being, the common

substratum of all of us, experiences our dreams with deep joy and

cheerful acquiescence.

This cheerful acquiescence in the dream-experience has likewise been

embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: for Apollo, as the god of

all shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god. He, who (as the

etymology of the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of

light, also rules over the fair appearance of the inner world of

fantasies. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast

to the only partially intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep

consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dream, is at

the same time the symbolical analogue of the faculty of soothsaying

and, in general, of the arts, through which life is made possible and

worth living. But also that delicate line, which the dream-picture must

not overstep--lest it act pathologically (in which case appearance,

being reality pure and simple, would impose upon us)--must not be

wanting in the picture of Apollo: that measured limitation, that

freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calmness of the

sculptor-god. His eye must be "sunlike," according to his origin; even

when it is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of his beauteous

appearance is still there. And so we might apply to Apollo, in an

eccentric sense, what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in the veil

of Mâyâ[2]: _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. p. 416: "Just as in

a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with

howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his

frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits

quietly supported by and trusting in his _principium individuationis_."

Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken faith in

this _principium_ and the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have

received their sublimest expression; and we might even designate Apollo

as the glorious divine image of the _principium individuationis,_

from out of the gestures and looks of which all the joy and wisdom of

"appearance," together with its beauty, speak to us.

In the same work Schopenhauer has described to us the stupendous _awe_

which seizes upon man, when of a sudden he is at a loss to account for

the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, in that the principle of reason,

in some one of its manifestations, seems to admit of an exception.

Add to this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost

depths of man, ay, of nature, at this same collapse of the _principium

individuationis,_ and we shall gain an insight into the being of

the _Dionysian,_ which is brought within closest ken perhaps by the

analogy of _drunkenness._ It is either under the influence of the

narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples

tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature

with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of

which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness. So also

in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing

in number, were borne from place to place under this same Dionysian

power. In these St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers we again perceive

the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their previous history in Asia

Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacæa. There are some,

who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such

phenomena as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted

by the consciousness of their own health: of course, the poor wretches

do not divine what a cadaverous-looking and ghastly aspect this very

"health" of theirs presents when the glowing life of the Dionysian

revellers rushes past them.

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the covenant between man

and man again established, but also estranged, hostile or subjugated

nature again celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Of

her own accord earth proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of

prey approach from the desert and the rocks. The chariot of Dionysus is

bedecked with flowers and garlands: panthers and tigers pass beneath

his yoke. Change Beethoven's "jubilee-song" into a painting, and, if

your imagination be equal to the occasion when the awestruck millions

sink into the dust, you will then be able to approach the Dionysian.

Now is the slave a free man, now all the stubborn, hostile barriers,

which necessity, caprice, or "shameless fashion" has set up between

man and man, are broken down. Now, at the evangel of cosmic harmony,

each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, blended with

his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil of Mâyâ has been

torn and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious

Primordial Unity. In song and in dance man exhibits himself as a member

of a higher community, has forgotten how to walk and speak, and is on

the point of taking a dancing flight into the air. His gestures bespeak

enchantment. Even as the animals now talk, and as the earth yields milk

and honey, so also something super-natural sounds forth from him: he

feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted and elated

even as the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams. Man is no

longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of

all nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness to the

highest gratification of the Primordial Unity. The noblest clay, the

costliest marble, namely man, is here kneaded and cut, and the chisel

strokes of the Dionysian world-artist are accompanied with the cry of

the Eleusinian mysteries: "Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den

Schöpfer, Welt?"[3]

[1]

My friend, just this is poet's task:

His dreams to read and to unmask.

Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealed

In dream to man will be revealed.

All verse-craft and poetisation

Is but soothdream interpretation.

[2] Cf. _World and Will as Idea,_ 1. 455 ff., trans, by

Haldane and Kemp.

[3]

Ye bow in the dust, oh millions?

Thy maker, mortal, dost divine?

Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth Symphony.--TR.

2.

Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and his antithesis,

the Dionysian, as artistic powers, which burst forth from nature

herself, _without the mediation of the human artist,_ and in which

her art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way:

first, as the pictorial world of dreams, the perfection of which

has no connection whatever with the intellectual height or artistic

culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken reality, which likewise

does not heed the unit man, but even seeks to destroy the individual

and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness. Anent these immediate

art-states of nature every artist is either an "imitator," to wit,

either an Apollonian, an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an artist

in ecstasies, or finally--as for instance in Greek tragedy--an artist

in both dreams and ecstasies: so we may perhaps picture him, as in

his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abnegation, lonesome and

apart from the revelling choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through

Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, _i.e._, his oneness

with the primal source of the universe, reveals itself to him _in a

symbolical dream-picture_.

After these general premisings and contrastings, let us now approach

the _Greeks_ in order to learn in what degree and to what height

these _art-impulses of nature_ were developed in them: whereby

we shall be enabled to understand and appreciate more deeply the

relation of the Greek artist to his archetypes, or, according to the

Aristotelian expression, "the imitation of nature." In spite of all the

dream-literature and the numerous dream-anecdotes of the Greeks, we can

speak only conjecturally, though with a fair degree of certainty, of

their _dreams._ Considering the incredibly precise and unerring plastic

power of their eyes, as also their manifest and sincere delight in

colours, we can hardly refrain (to the shame of every one born later)

from assuming for their very dreams a logical causality of lines and

contours, colours and groups, a sequence of scenes resembling their

best reliefs, the perfection of which would certainly justify us, if a

comparison were possible, in designating the dreaming Greeks as Homers

and Homer as a dreaming Greek: in a deeper sense than when modern man,

in respect to his dreams, ventures to compare himself with Shakespeare.

On the other hand, we should not have to speak conjecturally, if asked

to disclose the immense gap which separated the _Dionysian Greek_ from

the Dionysian barbarian. From all quarters of the Ancient World--to

say nothing of the modern--from Rome as far as Babylon, we can prove

the existence of Dionysian festivals, the type of which bears, at

best, the same relation to the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr,

who borrowed his name and attributes from the goat, does to Dionysus

himself. In nearly every instance the centre of these festivals lay

in extravagant sexual licentiousness, the waves of which overwhelmed

all family life and its venerable traditions; the very wildest beasts

of nature were let loose here, including that detestable mixture of

lust and cruelty which has always seemed to me the genuine "witches'

draught." For some time, however, it would seem that the Greeks

were perfectly secure and guarded against the feverish agitations

of these festivals (--the knowledge of which entered Greece by all

the channels of land and sea) by the figure of Apollo himself rising

here in full pride, who could not have held out the Gorgon's head to

a more dangerous power than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian. It

is in Doric art that this majestically-rejecting attitude of Apollo

perpetuated itself. This opposition became more precarious and even

impossible, when, from out of the deepest root of the Hellenic nature,

similar impulses finally broke forth and made way for themselves:

the Delphic god, by a seasonably effected reconciliation, was now

contented with taking the destructive arms from the hands of his

powerful antagonist. This reconciliation marks the most important

moment in the history of the Greek cult: wherever we turn our eyes

we may observe the revolutions resulting from this event. It was

the reconciliation of two antagonists, with the sharp demarcation

of the boundary-lines to be thenceforth observed by each, and with

periodical transmission of testimonials;--in reality, the chasm was

not bridged over. But if we observe how, under the pressure of this

conclusion of peace, the Dionysian power manifested itself, we shall

now recognise in the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, as compared with

the Babylonian Sacæa and their retrogression of man to the tiger and

the ape, the significance of festivals of world-redemption and days of

transfiguration. Not till then does nature attain her artistic jubilee;

not till then does the rupture of the _principium individuationis_

become an artistic phenomenon. That horrible "witches' draught" of

sensuality and cruelty was here powerless: only the curious blending

and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revellers reminds one of

it--just as medicines remind one of deadly poisons,--that phenomenon,

to wit, that pains beget joy, that jubilation wrings painful sounds out

of the breast. From the highest joy sounds the cry of horror or the

yearning wail over an irretrievable loss. In these Greek festivals a

sentimental trait, as it were, breaks forth from nature, as if she must

sigh over her dismemberment into individuals. The song and pantomime

of such dually-minded revellers was something new and unheard-of in

the Homeric-Grecian world; and the Dionysian _music_ in particular

excited awe and horror. If music, as it would seem, was previously

known as an Apollonian art, it was, strictly speaking, only as the

wave-beat of rhythm, the formative power of which was developed to

the representation of Apollonian conditions. The music of Apollo was

Doric architectonics in tones, but in merely suggested tones, such

as those of the cithara. The very element which forms the essence of

Dionysian music (and hence of music in general) is carefully excluded

as un-Apollonian; namely, the thrilling power of the tone, the uniform

stream of the melos, and the thoroughly incomparable world of harmony.

In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the highest exaltation

of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced

struggles for utterance--the annihilation of the veil of Mâyâ, Oneness

as genius of the race, ay, of nature. The essence of nature is now

to be expressed symbolically; a new world of symbols is required;

for once the entire symbolism of the body, not only the symbolism of

the lips, face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of dancing which

sets all the members into rhythmical motion. Thereupon the other

symbolic powers, those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony,

suddenly become impetuous. To comprehend this collective discharge

of all the symbolic powers, a man must have already attained that

height of self-abnegation, which wills to express itself symbolically

through these powers: the Dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is therefore

understood only by those like himself! With what astonishment must the

Apollonian Greek have beheld him! With an astonishment, which was all

the greater the more it was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that

all this was in reality not so very foreign to him, yea, that, like

unto a veil, his Apollonian consciousness only hid this Dionysian world

from his view.

3.

In order to comprehend this, we must take down the artistic structure,

of the _Apollonian culture,_ as it were, stone by stone, till we behold

the foundations on which it rests. Here we observe first of all the

glorious _Olympian_ figures of the gods, standing on the gables of this

structure, whose deeds, represented in far-shining reliefs, adorn its

friezes. Though Apollo stands among them as an individual deity, side

by side with others, and without claim to priority of rank, we must not

suffer this fact to mislead us. The same impulse which embodied itself

in Apollo has, in general, given birth to this whole Olympian world,

and in this sense we may regard Apollo as the father thereof. What was

the enormous need from which proceeded such an illustrious group of

Olympian beings?

Whosoever, with another religion in his heart, approaches these

Olympians and seeks among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity,

for incorporeal spiritualisation, for sympathetic looks of love, will

soon be obliged to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed.

Here nothing suggests asceticism, spirituality, or duty: here only

an exuberant, even triumphant life speaks to us, in which everything

existing is deified, whether good or bad. And so the spectator will

perhaps stand quite bewildered before this fantastic exuberance of

life, and ask himself what magic potion these madly merry men could

have used for enjoying life, so that, wherever they turned their eyes,

Helena, the ideal image of their own existence "floating in sweet

sensuality," smiled upon them. But to this spectator, already turning

backwards, we must call out: "depart not hence, but hear rather what

Greek folk-wisdom says of this same life, which with such inexplicable

cheerfulness spreads out before thee." There is an ancient story that

king Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise _Silenus,_

the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When at last he fell

into his hands, the king asked what was best of all and most desirable

for man. Fixed and immovable, the demon remained silent; till at last,

forced by the king, he broke out with shrill laughter into these words:

"Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye

compel me to say to you what it were most expedient for you not to

hear? What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be

born, not to _be_, to be _nothing._ The second best for you, however,

is soon to die."

How is the Olympian world of deities related to this folk-wisdom? Even

as the rapturous vision of the tortured martyr to his sufferings.

Now the Olympian magic mountain opens, as it were, to our view and

shows to us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors

of existence: to be able to live at all, he had to interpose the

shining dream-birth of the Olympian world between himself and them.

The excessive distrust of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira

throning inexorably over all knowledge, the vulture of the great

philanthropist Prometheus, the terrible fate of the wise Œdipus, the

family curse of the Atridæ which drove Orestes to matricide; in short,

that entire philosophy of the sylvan god, with its mythical exemplars,

which wrought the ruin of the melancholy Etruscans--was again and again

surmounted anew by the Greeks through the artistic _middle world_ of

the Olympians, or at least veiled and withdrawn from sight. To be able

to live, the Greeks had, from direst necessity, to create these gods:

which process we may perhaps picture to ourselves in this manner: that

out of the original Titan thearchy of terror the Olympian thearchy of

joy was evolved, by slow transitions, through the Apollonian impulse to

beauty, even as roses break forth from thorny bushes. How else could

this so sensitive people, so vehement in its desires, so singularly

qualified for _sufferings_ have endured existence, if it had not been

exhibited to them in their gods, surrounded with a higher glory?

The same impulse which calls art into being, as the complement and

consummation of existence, seducing to a continuation of life, caused

also the Olympian world to arise, in which the Hellenic "will" held

up before itself a transfiguring mirror. Thus do the gods justify the

life of man, in that they themselves live it--the only satisfactory

Theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is regarded

as that which is desirable in itself, and the real _grief_ of the

Homeric men has reference to parting from it, especially to early

parting: so that we might now say of them, with a reversion of the

Silenian wisdom, that "to die early is worst of all for them, the

second worst is--some day to die at all." If once the lamentation is

heard, it will ring out again, of the short-lived Achilles, of the

leaf-like change and vicissitude of the human race, of the decay of

the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long for a

continuation of life, ay, even as a day-labourer. So vehemently does

the "will," at the Apollonian stage of development, long for this

existence, so completely at one does the Homeric man feel himself with

it, that the very lamentation becomes its song of praise.

Here we must observe that this harmony which is so eagerly contemplated

by modern man, in fact, this oneness of man with nature, to express

which Schiller introduced the technical term "naïve," is by no means

such a simple, naturally resulting and, as it were, inevitable

condition, which _must_ be found at the gate of every culture leading

to a paradise of man: this could be believed only by an age which

sought to picture to itself Rousseau's Émile also as an artist,

and imagined it had found in Homer such an artist Émile, reared at

Nature's bosom. Wherever we meet with the "naïve" in art, it behoves

us to recognise the highest effect of the Apollonian culture, which

in the first place has always to overthrow some Titanic empire and

slay monsters, and which, through powerful dazzling representations

and pleasurable illusions, must have triumphed over a terrible depth

of world-contemplation and a most keen susceptibility to suffering.

But how seldom is the naïve--that complete absorption, in the beauty

of appearance--attained! And hence how inexpressibly sublime is

_Homer,_ who, as unit being, bears the same relation to this Apollonian

folk-culture as the unit dream-artist does to the dream-faculty of

the people and of Nature in general. The Homeric "naïveté" can be

comprehended only as the complete triumph of the Apollonian illusion:

it is the same kind of illusion as Nature so frequently employs to

compass her ends. The true goal is veiled by a phantasm: we stretch out

our hands for the latter, while Nature attains the former through our

illusion. In the Greeks the "will" desired to contemplate itself in the

transfiguration of the genius and the world of art; in order to glorify

themselves, its creatures had to feel themselves worthy of glory;

they had to behold themselves again in a higher sphere, without this

consummate world of contemplation acting as an imperative or reproach.

Such is the sphere of beauty, in which, as in a mirror, they saw their

images, the Olympians. With this mirroring of beauty the Hellenic will

combated its talent--correlative to the artistic--for suffering and for

the wisdom of suffering: and, as a monument of its victory, Homer, the

naïve artist, stands before us.

4.

Concerning this naïve artist the analogy of dreams will enlighten us to

some extent. When we realise to ourselves the dreamer, as, in the midst

of the illusion of the dream-world and without disturbing it, he calls

out to himself: "it is a dream, I will dream on"; when we must thence

infer a deep inner joy in dream-contemplation; when, on the other hand,

to be at all able to dream with this inner joy in contemplation, we

must have completely forgotten the day and its terrible obtrusiveness,

we may, under the direction of the dream-reading Apollo, interpret

all these phenomena to ourselves somewhat as follows. Though it is

certain that of the two halves of life, the waking and the dreaming,

the former appeals to us as by far the more preferred, important,

excellent and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that which alone is

lived: yet, with reference to that mysterious ground of our being of

which we are the phenomenon, I should, paradoxical as it may seem, be

inclined to maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of dream

life. For the more clearly I perceive in nature those all-powerful art

impulses, and in them a fervent longing for appearance, for redemption

through appearance, the more I feel myself driven to the metaphysical

assumption that the Verily-Existent and Primordial Unity, as the

Eternally Suffering and Self-Contradictory, requires the rapturous

vision, the joyful appearance, for its continuous salvation: which

appearance we, who are completely wrapt in it and composed of it, must

regard as the Verily Non-existent,--_i.e.,_ as a perpetual unfolding

in time, space and causality,--in other words, as empiric reality.

If we therefore waive the consideration of our own "reality" for the

present, if we conceive our empiric existence, and that of the world

generally, as a representation of the Primordial Unity generated every

moment, we shall then have to regard the dream as an _appearance of

appearance,_ hence as a still higher gratification of the primordial

desire for appearance. It is for this same reason that the innermost

heart of Nature experiences that indescribable joy in the naïve artist

and in the naïve work of art, which is likewise only "an appearance of

appearance." In a symbolic painting, _Raphael_, himself one of these

immortal "naïve" ones, has represented to us this depotentiating of

appearance to appearance, the primordial process of the naïve artist

and at the same time of Apollonian culture. In his _Transfiguration,_

the lower half, with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, the

helpless, terrified disciples, shows to us the reflection of eternal

primordial pain, the sole basis of the world: the "appearance" here

is the counter-appearance of eternal Contradiction, the father of

things. Out of this appearance then arises, like an ambrosial vapour, a

visionlike new world of appearances, of which those wrapt in the first

appearance see nothing--a radiant floating in purest bliss and painless

Contemplation beaming from wide-open eyes. Here there is presented to

our view, in the highest symbolism of art, that Apollonian world of

beauty and its substratum, the terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we

comprehend, by intuition, their necessary interdependence. Apollo,

however, again appears to us as the apotheosis of the _principium

individuationis,_ in which alone the perpetually attained end of the

Primordial Unity, its redemption through appearance, is consummated: he

shows us, with sublime attitudes, how the entire world of torment is

necessary, that thereby the individual may be impelled to realise the

redeeming vision, and then, sunk in contemplation thereof, quietly sit

in his fluctuating barque, in the midst of the sea.

This apotheosis of individuation, if it be at all conceived as

imperative and laying down precepts, knows but one law--the individual,

_i.e.,_ the observance of the boundaries of the individual,

_measure_ in the Hellenic sense. Apollo, as ethical deity, demands

due proportion of his disciples, and, that this may be observed, he

demands self-knowledge. And thus, parallel to the æsthetic necessity

for beauty, there run the demands "know thyself" and "not too much,"

while presumption and undueness are regarded as the truly hostile

demons of the non-Apollonian sphere, hence as characteristics of the

pre-Apollonian age, that of the Titans, and of the extra-Apollonian

world, that of the barbarians. Because of his Titan-like love for

man, Prometheus had to be torn to pieces by vultures; because of his

excessive wisdom, which solved the riddle of the Sphinx, Œdipus had

to plunge into a bewildering vortex of monstrous crimes: thus did the

Delphic god interpret the Grecian past.

So also the effects wrought by the _Dionysian_ appeared "titanic" and

"barbaric" to the Apollonian Greek: while at the same time he could

not conceal from himself that he too was inwardly related to these

overthrown Titans and heroes. Indeed, he had to recognise still more

than this: his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation,

rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge, which

was again disclosed to him by the Dionysian. And lo! Apollo could not

live without Dionysus! The "titanic" and the "barbaric" were in the

end not less necessary than the Apollonian. And now let us imagine to

ourselves how the ecstatic tone of the Dionysian festival sounded in

ever more luring and bewitching strains into this artificially confined

world built on appearance and moderation, how in these strains all

the _undueness_ of nature, in joy, sorrow, and knowledge, even to

the transpiercing shriek, became audible: let us ask ourselves what

meaning could be attached to the psalmodising artist of Apollo, with

the phantom harp-sound, as compared with this demonic folk-song! The

muses of the arts of "appearance" paled before an art which, in its

intoxication, spoke the truth, the wisdom of Silenus cried "woe! woe!"

against the cheerful Olympians. The individual, with all his boundaries

and due proportions, went under in the self-oblivion of the Dionysian

states and forgot the Apollonian precepts. The _Undueness_ revealed

itself as truth, contradiction, the bliss born of pain, declared itself

but of the heart of nature. And thus, wherever the Dionysian prevailed,

the Apollonian was routed and annihilated. But it is quite as certain

that, where the first assault was successfully withstood, the authority

and majesty of the Delphic god exhibited itself as more rigid and

menacing than ever. For I can only explain to myself the _Doric_ state

and Doric art as a permanent war-camp of the Apollonian: only by

incessant opposition to the titanic-barbaric nature of the Dionysian

was it possible for an art so defiantly-prim, so encompassed with

bulwarks, a training so warlike and rigorous, a constitution so cruel

and relentless, to last for any length of time.

Up to this point we have enlarged upon the observation made at the

beginning of this essay: how the Dionysian and the Apollonian, in ever

new births succeeding and mutually augmenting one another, controlled

the Hellenic genius: how from out the age of "bronze," with its Titan

struggles and rigorous folk-philosophy, the Homeric world develops

under the fostering sway of the Apollonian impulse to beauty, how this

"naïve" splendour is again overwhelmed by the inbursting flood of the

Dionysian, and how against this new power the Apollonian rises to the

austere majesty of Doric art and the Doric view of things. If, then,

in this way, in the strife of these two hostile principles, the older

Hellenic history falls into four great periods of art, we are now

driven to inquire after the ulterior purpose of these unfoldings and

processes, unless perchance we should regard the last-attained period,

the period of Doric art, as the end and aim of these artistic impulses:

and here the sublime and highly celebrated art-work of _Attic tragedy_

and dramatic dithyramb presents itself to our view as the common

goal of both these impulses, whose mysterious union, after many and

long precursory struggles, found its glorious consummation in such a

child,--which is at once Antigone and Cassandra.

5.

We now approach the real purpose of our investigation, which aims

at acquiring a knowledge of the Dionyso-Apollonian genius and his

art-work, or at least an anticipatory understanding of the mystery of

the aforesaid union. Here we shall ask first of all where that new

germ which subsequently developed into tragedy and dramatic dithyramb

first makes itself perceptible in the Hellenic world. The ancients

themselves supply the answer in symbolic form, when they place _Homer_

and _Archilochus_ as the forefathers and torch-bearers of Greek poetry

side by side on gems, sculptures, etc., in the sure conviction that

only these two thoroughly original compeers, from whom a stream of

fire flows over the whole of Greek posterity, should be taken into

consideration. Homer, the aged dreamer sunk in himself, the type

of the Apollonian naïve artist, beholds now with astonishment the

impassioned genius of the warlike votary of the muses, Archilochus,

violently tossed to and fro on the billows of existence: and modern

æsthetics could only add by way of interpretation, that here the

"objective" artist is confronted by the first "subjective" artist.

But this interpretation is of little service to us, because we know

the subjective artist only as the poor artist, and in every type and

elevation of art we demand specially and first of all the conquest

of the Subjective, the redemption from the "ego" and the cessation

of every individual will and desire; indeed, we find it impossible

to believe in any truly artistic production, however insignificant,

without objectivity, without pure, interestless contemplation. Hence

our æsthetics must first solve the problem as to how the "lyrist" is

possible as an artist: he who according to the experience of all ages

continually says "I" and sings off to us the entire chromatic scale of

his passions and desires. This very Archilochus appals us, alongside

of Homer, by his cries of hatred and scorn, by the drunken outbursts

of his desire. Is not just he then, who has been called the first

subjective artist, the non-artist proper? But whence then the reverence

which was shown to him--the poet--in very remarkable utterances by the

Delphic oracle itself, the focus of "objective" art?

_Schiller_ has enlightened us concerning his poetic procedure by a

psychological observation, inexplicable to himself, yet not apparently

open to any objection. He acknowledges that as the preparatory state

to the act of poetising he had not perhaps before him or within him a

series of pictures with co-ordinate causality of thoughts, but rather

a _musical mood_ ("The perception with me is at first without a clear

and definite object; this forms itself later. A certain musical mood

of mind precedes, and only after this does the poetical idea follow

with me.") Add to this the most important phenomenon of all ancient

lyric poetry, _the union,_ regarded everywhere as natural, _of the

lyrist with the musician,_ their very identity, indeed,--compared

with which our modern lyric poetry is like the statue of a god without

a head,--and we may now, on the basis of our metaphysics of æsthetics

set forth above, interpret the lyrist to ourselves as follows. As

Dionysian artist he is in the first place become altogether one with

the Primordial Unity, its pain and contradiction, and he produces the

copy of this Primordial Unity as music, granting that music has been

correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world; but now, under

the Apollonian dream-inspiration, this music again becomes visible

to him as in a _symbolic dream-picture._ The formless and intangible

reflection of the primordial pain in music, with its redemption in

appearance, then generates a second mirroring as a concrete symbol or

example. The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity in the

Dionysian process: the picture which now shows to him his oneness with

the heart of the world, is a dream-scene, which embodies the primordial

contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial joy, of

appearance. The "I" of the lyrist sounds therefore from the abyss of

being: its "subjectivity," in the sense of the modern æsthetes, is a

fiction. When Archilochus, the first lyrist of the Greeks, makes known

both his mad love and his contempt to the daughters of Lycambes, it is

not his passion which dances before us in orgiastic frenzy: we see

Dionysus and the Mænads, we see the drunken reveller Archilochus sunk

down to sleep--as Euripides depicts it in the Bacchæ, the sleep on the

high Alpine pasture, in the noonday sun:--and now Apollo approaches and

touches him with the laurel. The Dionyso-musical enchantment of the

sleeper now emits, as it were, picture sparks, lyrical poems, which in

their highest development are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.

The plastic artist, as also the epic poet, who is related to him, is

sunk in the pure contemplation of pictures. The Dionysian musician

is, without any picture, himself just primordial pain and the

primordial re-echoing thereof. The lyric genius is conscious of a

world of pictures and symbols--growing out of the state of mystical

self-abnegation and oneness,--which has a colouring causality and

velocity quite different from that of the world of the plastic artist

and epic poet. While the latter lives in these pictures, and only in

them, with joyful satisfaction, and never grows tired of contemplating

them with love, even in their minutest characters, while even the

picture of the angry Achilles is to him but a picture, the angry

expression of which he enjoys with the dream-joy in appearance--so

that, by this mirror of appearance, he is guarded against being unified

and blending with his figures;--the pictures of the lyrist on the other

hand are nothing but _his very_ self and, as it were, only different

projections of himself, on account of which he as the moving centre

of this world is entitled to say "I": only of course this self is

not the same as that of the waking, empirically real man, but the

only verily existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things,

by means of the images whereof the lyric genius sees through even to

this basis of things. Now let us suppose that he beholds _himself_

also among these images as non-genius, _i.e.,_ his subject, the whole

throng of subjective passions and impulses of the will directed to a

definite object which appears real to him; if now it seems as if the

lyric genius and the allied non-genius were one, and as if the former

spoke that little word "I" of his own accord, this appearance will no

longer be able to lead us astray, as it certainly led those astray who

designated the lyrist as the subjective poet. In truth, Archilochus,

the passionately inflamed, loving and hating man, is but a vision of

the genius, who by this time is no longer Archilochus, but a genius

of the world, who expresses his primordial pain symbolically in the

figure of the man Archilochus: while the subjectively willing and

desiring man, Archilochus, can never at any time be a poet. It is by no

means necessary, however, that the lyrist should see nothing but the

phenomenon of the man Archilochus before him as a reflection of eternal

being; and tragedy shows how far the visionary world of the lyrist may

depart from this phenomenon, to which, of course, it is most intimately

related.

_Schopenhauer,_ who did not shut his eyes to the difficulty presented

by the lyrist in the philosophical contemplation of art, thought he

had found a way out of it, on which, however, I cannot accompany him;

while he alone, in his profound metaphysics of music, held in his

hands the means whereby this difficulty could be definitely removed:

as I believe I have removed it here in his spirit and to his honour.

In contrast to our view, he describes the peculiar nature of song

as follows[4] (_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. 295):--"It is

the subject of the will, _i.e.,_ his own volition, which fills the

consciousness of the singer; often as an unbound and satisfied desire

(joy), but still more often as a restricted desire (grief), always as

an emotion, a passion, or an agitated frame of mind. Besides this,

however, and along with it, by the sight of surrounding nature, the

singer becomes conscious of himself as the subject of pure will-less

knowing, the unbroken, blissful peace of which now appears, in contrast

to the stress of desire, which is always restricted and always needy.

The feeling of this contrast, this alternation, is really what the

song as a whole expresses and what principally constitutes the lyrical

state of mind. In it pure knowing comes to us as it were to deliver us

from desire and the stress thereof: we follow, but only for an instant;

for desire, the remembrance of our personal ends, tears us anew from

peaceful contemplation; yet ever again the next beautiful surrounding

in which the pure will-less knowledge presents itself to us, allures

us away from desire. Therefore, in song and in the lyrical mood,

desire (the personal interest of the ends) and the pure perception of

the surrounding which presents itself, are wonderfully mingled with

each other; connections between them are sought for and imagined; the

subjective disposition, the affection of the will, imparts its own

hue to the contemplated surrounding, and conversely, the surroundings

communicate the reflex of their colour to the will. The true song is

the expression of the whole of this mingled and divided state of mind."

Who could fail to see in this description that lyric poetry is here

characterised as an imperfectly attained art, which seldom and only

as it were in leaps arrives at its goal, indeed, as a semi-art, the

essence of which is said to consist in this, that desire and pure

contemplation, _i.e.,_ the unæsthetic and the æsthetic condition, are

wonderfully mingled with each other? We maintain rather, that this

entire antithesis, according to which, as according to some standard

of value, Schopenhauer, too, still classifies the arts, the antithesis

between the subjective and the objective, is quite out of place in

æsthetics, inasmuch as the subject _i.e.,_ the desiring individual who

furthers his own egoistic ends, can be conceived only as the adversary,

not as the origin of art. In so far as the subject is the artist,

however, he has already been released from his individual will, and has

become as it were the medium, through which the one verily existent

Subject celebrates his redemption in appearance. For this one thing

must above all be clear to us, to our humiliation _and_ exaltation,

that the entire comedy of art is not at all performed, say, for our

betterment and culture, and that we are just as little the true authors

of this art-world: rather we may assume with regard to ourselves, that

its true author uses us as pictures and artistic projections, and that

we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art--for

only as an _æsthetic phenomenon_ is existence and the world eternally

_justified:_--while of course our consciousness of this our specific

significance hardly differs from the kind of consciousness which the

soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented thereon.

Hence all our knowledge of art is at bottom quite illusory, because, as

knowing persons we are not one and identical with the Being who, as the

sole author and spectator of this comedy of art, prepares a perpetual

entertainment for himself. Only in so far as the genius in the act of

artistic production coalesces with this primordial artist of the world,

does he get a glimpse of the eternal essence of art, for in this state

he is, in a marvellous manner, like the weird picture of the fairy-tale

which can at will turn its eyes and behold itself; he is now at once

subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.

[4] _World as Will and Idea,_ I. 323, 4th ed. of Haldane and

Kemp's translation. Quoted with a few changes.

6.

With reference to Archilochus, it has been established by critical

research that he introduced the _folk-song_ into literature, and,

on account thereof, deserved, according to the general estimate of

the Greeks, his unique position alongside of Homer. But what is this

popular folk-song in contrast to the wholly Apollonian epos? What

else but the _perpetuum vestigium_ of a union of the Apollonian and

the Dionysian? Its enormous diffusion among all peoples, still further

enhanced by ever new births, testifies to the power of this artistic

double impulse of nature: which leaves its vestiges in the popular

song in like manner as the orgiastic movements of a people perpetuate

themselves in its music. Indeed, one might also furnish historical

proofs, that every period which is highly productive in popular songs

has been most violently stirred by Dionysian currents, which we must

always regard as the substratum and prerequisite of the popular song.

First of all, however, we regard the popular song as the musical mirror

of the world, as the Original melody, which now seeks for itself a

parallel dream-phenomenon and expresses it in poetry. _Melody is

therefore primary and universal,_ and as such may admit of several

objectivations, in several texts. Likewise, in the naïve estimation of

the people, it is regarded as by far the more important and necessary.

Melody generates the poem out of itself by an ever-recurring process.

_The strophic form of the popular song_ points to the same phenomenon,

which I always beheld with astonishment, till at last I found this

explanation. Any one who in accordance with this theory examines a

collection of popular songs, such as "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," will find

innumerable instances of the perpetually productive melody scattering

picture sparks all around: which in their variegation, their abrupt

change, their mad precipitance, manifest a power quite unknown to the

epic appearance and its steady flow. From the point of view of the

epos, this unequal and irregular pictorial world of lyric poetry must

be simply condemned: and the solemn epic rhapsodists of the Apollonian

festivals in the age of Terpander have certainly done so.

Accordingly, we observe that in the poetising of the popular song,

language is strained to its utmost _to imitate music;_ and hence a

new world of poetry begins with Archilochus, which is fundamentally

opposed to the Homeric. And in saying this we have pointed out the

only possible relation between poetry and music, between word and

tone: the word, the picture, the concept here seeks an expression

analogous to music and now experiences in itself the power of music.

In this sense we may discriminate between two main currents in the

history of the language of the Greek people, according as their

language imitated either the world of phenomena and of pictures, or the

world of music. One has only to reflect seriously on the linguistic

difference with regard to colour, syntactical structure, and vocabulary

in Homer and Pindar, in order to comprehend the significance of this

contrast; indeed, it becomes palpably clear to us that in the period

between Homer and Pindar the _orgiastic flute tones of Olympus_ must

have sounded forth, which, in an age as late as Aristotle's, when

music was infinitely more developed, transported people to drunken

enthusiasm, and which, when their influence was first felt, undoubtedly

incited all the poetic means of expression of contemporaneous man

to imitation. I here call attention to a familiar phenomenon of our

own times, against which our æsthetics raises many objections. We

again and again have occasion to observe how a symphony of Beethoven

compels the individual hearers to use figurative speech, though the

appearance presented by a collocation of the different pictorial

world generated by a piece of music may be never so fantastically

diversified and even contradictory. To practise its small wit on such

compositions, and to overlook a phenomenon which is certainly worth

explaining, is quite in keeping with this æsthetics. Indeed, even if

the tone-poet has spoken in pictures concerning a composition, when for

instance he designates a certain symphony as the "pastoral" symphony,

or a passage therein as "the scene by the brook," or another as the

"merry gathering of rustics," these are likewise only symbolical

representations born out of music--and not perhaps the imitated objects

of music--representations which can give us no information whatever

concerning the _Dionysian_ content of music, and which in fact have

no distinctive value of their own alongside of other pictorical

expressions. This process of a discharge of music in pictures we have

now to transfer to some youthful, linguistically productive people, to

get a notion as to how the strophic popular song originates, and how

the entire faculty of speech is stimulated by this new principle of

imitation of music.

If, therefore, we may regard lyric poetry as the effulguration of

music in pictures and concepts, we can now ask: "how does music

_appear_ in the mirror of symbolism and conception?" _It appears as

will,_ taking the word in the Schopenhauerian sense, _i.e.,_ as the

antithesis of the æsthetic, purely contemplative, and passive frame

of mind. Here, however, we must discriminate as sharply as possible

between the concept of essentiality and the concept of phenominality;

for music, according to its essence, cannot be will, because as such it

would have to be wholly banished from the domain of art--for the will

is the unæsthetic-in-itself;--yet it appears as will. For in order to

express the phenomenon of music in pictures, the lyrist requires all

the stirrings of passion, from the whispering of infant desire to the

roaring of madness. Under the impulse to speak of music in Apollonian

symbols, he conceives of all nature, and himself therein, only as the

eternally willing, desiring, longing existence. But in so far as he

interprets music by means of pictures, he himself rests in the quiet

calm of Apollonian contemplation, however much all around him which

he beholds through the medium of music is in a state of confused and

violent motion. Indeed, when he beholds himself through this same

medium, his own image appears to him in a state of unsatisfied feeling:

his own willing, longing, moaning and rejoicing are to him symbols by

which he interprets music. Such is the phenomenon of the lyrist: as

Apollonian genius he interprets music through the image of the will,

while he himself, completely released from the avidity of the will, is

the pure, undimmed eye of day.

Our whole disquisition insists on this, that lyric poetry is dependent

on the spirit of music just as music itself in its absolute sovereignty

does not _require_ the picture and the concept, but only _endures_

them as accompaniments. The poems of the lyrist can express nothing

which has not already been contained in the vast universality and

absoluteness of the music which compelled him to use figurative

speech. By no means is it possible for language adequately to render

the cosmic symbolism of music, for the very reason that music stands

in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial

pain in the heart of the Primordial Unity, and therefore symbolises a

sphere which is above all appearance and before all phenomena. Rather

should we say that all phenomena, compared with it, are but symbols:

hence _language,_ as the organ and symbol of phenomena, cannot at all

disclose the innermost essence, of music; language can only be in

superficial contact with music when it attempts to imitate music; while

the profoundest significance of the latter cannot be brought one step

nearer to us by all the eloquence of lyric poetry.

7.

We shall now have to avail ourselves of all the principles of art

hitherto considered, in order to find our way through the labyrinth,

as we must designate _the origin of Greek tragedy._ I shall not be

charged with absurdity in saying that the problem of this origin has

as yet not even been seriously stated, not to say solved, however

often the fluttering tatters of ancient tradition have been sewed

together in sundry combinations and torn asunder again. This tradition

tells us in the most unequivocal terms, _that tragedy sprang from the

tragic chorus,_ and was originally only chorus and nothing but chorus:

and hence we feel it our duty to look into the heart of this tragic

chorus as being the real proto-drama, without in the least contenting

ourselves with current art-phraseology--according to which the chorus

is the ideal spectator, or represents the people in contrast to the

regal side of the scene. The latter explanatory notion, which sounds

sublime to many a politician--that the immutable moral law was embodied

by the democratic Athenians in the popular chorus, which always carries

its point over the passionate excesses and extravagances of kings--may

be ever so forcibly suggested by an observation of Aristotle: still

it has no bearing on the original formation of tragedy, inasmuch

as the entire antithesis of king and people, and, in general, the

whole politico-social sphere, is excluded from the purely religious

beginnings of tragedy; but, considering the well-known classical

form of the chorus in Æschylus and Sophocles, we should even deem

it blasphemy to speak here of the anticipation of a "constitutional

representation of the people," from which blasphemy others have not

shrunk, however. The ancient governments knew of no constitutional

representation of the people _in praxi,_ and it is to be hoped that

they did not even so much as "anticipate" it in tragedy.

Much more celebrated than this political explanation of the chorus is

the notion of A. W. Schlegel, who advises us to regard the chorus, in

a manner, as the essence and extract of the crowd of spectators,--as

the "ideal spectator." This view when compared with the historical

tradition that tragedy was originally only chorus, reveals itself

in its true character, as a crude, unscientific, yet brilliant

assertion, which, however, has acquired its brilliancy only through

its concentrated form of expression, through the truly Germanic bias

in favour of whatever is called "ideal," and through our momentary

astonishment. For we are indeed astonished the moment we compare our

well-known theatrical public with this chorus, and ask ourselves if it

could ever be possible to idealise something analogous to the Greek

chorus out of such a public. We tacitly deny this, and now wonder

as much at the boldness of Schlegel's assertion as at the totally

different nature of the Greek public. For hitherto we always believed

that the true spectator, be he who he may, had always to remain

conscious of having before him a work of art, and not an empiric

reality: whereas the tragic chorus of the Greeks is compelled to

recognise real beings in the figures of the stage. The chorus of the

Oceanides really believes that it sees before it the Titan Prometheus,

and considers itself as real as the god of the scene. And are we to

own that he is the highest and purest type of spectator, who, like the

Oceanides, regards Prometheus as real and present in body? And is it

characteristic of the ideal spectator that he should run on the stage

and free the god from his torments? We had believed in an æsthetic

public, and considered the individual spectator the better qualified

the more he was capable of viewing a work of art as art, that is,

æsthetically; but now the Schlegelian expression has intimated to us,

that the perfect ideal spectator does not at all suffer the world of

the scenes to act æsthetically on him, but corporeo-empirically. Oh,

these Greeks! we have sighed; they will upset our æsthetics! But once

accustomed to it, we have reiterated the saying of Schlegel, as often

as the subject of the chorus has been broached.

But the tradition which is so explicit here speaks against Schlegel:

the chorus as such, without the stage,--the primitive form of

tragedy,--and the chorus of ideal spectators do not harmonise. What

kind of art would that be which was extracted from the concept of the

spectator, and whereof we are to regard the "spectator as such" as the

true form? The spectator without the play is something absurd. We fear

that the birth of tragedy can be explained neither by the high esteem

for the moral intelligence of the multitude nor by the concept of the

spectator without the play; and we regard the problem as too deep to be

even so much as touched by such superficial modes of contemplation.

An infinitely more valuable insight into the signification of the

chorus had already been displayed by Schiller in the celebrated Preface

to his Bride of Messina, where he regarded the chorus as a living wall

which tragedy draws round herself to guard her from contact with the

world of reality, and to preserve her ideal domain and poetical freedom.

It is with this, his chief weapon, that Schiller combats the ordinary

conception of the natural, the illusion ordinarily required in

dramatic poetry. He contends that while indeed the day on the stage is

merely artificial, the architecture only symbolical, and the metrical

dialogue purely ideal in character, nevertheless an erroneous view

still prevails in the main: that it is not enough to tolerate merely

as a poetical license _that_ which is in reality the essence of all

poetry. The introduction of the chorus is, he says, the decisive step

by which war is declared openly and honestly against all naturalism

in art.--It is, methinks, for disparaging this mode of contemplation

that our would-be superior age has coined the disdainful catchword

"pseudo-idealism." I fear, however, that we on the other hand with our

present worship of the natural and the real have landed at the nadir

of all idealism, namely in the region of cabinets of wax-figures. An

art indeed exists also here, as in certain novels much in vogue at

present: but let no one pester us with the claim that by this art the

Schiller-Goethian "Pseudo-idealism" has been vanquished.

It is indeed an "ideal" domain, as Schiller rightly perceived,

upon--which the Greek satyric chorus, the chorus of primitive tragedy,

was wont to walk, a domain raised far above the actual path of

mortals. The Greek framed for this chorus the suspended scaffolding of

a fictitious _natural state_ and placed thereon fictitious _natural

beings._ It is on this foundation that tragedy grew up, and so it

could of course dispense from the very first with a painful portrayal

of reality. Yet it is, not an arbitrary world placed by fancy betwixt

heaven and earth; rather is it a world possessing the same reality

and trustworthiness that Olympus with its dwellers possessed for the

believing Hellene. The satyr, as being the Dionysian chorist, lives

in a religiously acknowledged reality under the sanction of the myth

and cult. That tragedy begins with him, that the Dionysian wisdom of

tragedy speaks through him, is just as surprising a phenomenon to us

as, in general, the derivation of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps

we shall get a starting-point for our inquiry, if I put forward the

proposition that the satyr, the fictitious natural being, is to the

man of culture what Dionysian music is to civilisation. Concerning

this latter, Richard Wagner says that it is neutralised by music even

as lamplight by daylight. In like manner, I believe, the Greek man of

culture felt himself neutralised in the presence of the satyric chorus:

and this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that

the state and society, and, in general, the gaps between man and man

give way to an overwhelming feeling of oneness, which leads back to

the heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort,--with which, as I have

here intimated, every true tragedy dismisses us--that, in spite of

the perpetual change of phenomena, life at bottom is indestructibly

powerful and pleasurable, this comfort appears with corporeal lucidity

as the satyric chorus, as the chorus of natural beings, who live

ineradicable as it were behind all civilisation, and who, in spite of

the ceaseless change of generations and the history of nations, remain

for ever the same.

With this chorus the deep-minded Hellene, who is so singularly

qualified for the most delicate and severe suffering, consoles

himself:--he who has glanced with piercing eye into the very heart of

the terrible destructive processes of so-called universal history, as

also into the cruelty of nature, and is in danger of longing for a

Buddhistic negation of the will. Art saves him, and through art life

saves him--for herself.

For we must know that in the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its

annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence, there is

a _lethargic_ element, wherein all personal experiences of the past

are submerged. It is by this gulf of oblivion that the everyday world

and the world of Dionysian reality are separated from each other. But

as soon as this everyday reality rises again in consciousness, it is

felt as such, and nauseates us; an ascetic will-paralysing mood is

the fruit of these states. In this sense the Dionysian man may be

said to resemble Hamlet: both have for once seen into the true nature

of things,--they have _perceived,_ but they are loath to act; for

their action cannot change the eternal nature of things; they regard

it as shameful or ridiculous that one should require of them to set

aright the time which is out of joint. Knowledge kills action, action

requires the veil of illusion--it is this lesson which Hamlet teaches,

and not the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams who from too much reflection,

as it were from a surplus of possibilities, does not arrive at action

at all. Not reflection, no!--true knowledge, insight into appalling

truth, preponderates over all motives inciting to action, in Hamlet as

well as in the Dionysian man. No comfort avails any longer; his longing

goes beyond a world after death, beyond the gods themselves; existence

with its glittering reflection in the gods, or in an immortal other

world is abjured. In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived,

man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of

existence, he now understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia, he

now discerns the wisdom of the sylvan god Silenus: and loathing seizes

him.

Here, in this extremest danger of the will, _art_ approaches, as a

saving and healing enchantress; she alone is able to transform these

nauseating reflections on the awfulness or absurdity of existence

into representations wherewith it is possible to live: these are the

representations of the _sublime_ as the artistic subjugation of the

awful, and the _comic_ as the artistic delivery from the nausea of

the absurd. The satyric chorus of dithyramb is the saving deed of

Greek art; the paroxysms described above spent their force in the

intermediary world of these Dionysian followers.

8.

The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of our more recent time, is the

offspring of a longing after the Primitive and the Natural; but mark

with what firmness and fearlessness the Greek embraced the man of

the woods, and again, how coyly and mawkishly the modern man dallied

with the flattering picture of a tender, flute-playing, soft-natured

shepherd! Nature, on which as yet no knowledge has been at work,

which maintains unbroken barriers to culture--this is what the Greek

saw in his satyr, which still was not on this account supposed to

coincide with the ape. On the contrary: it was the archetype of

man, the embodiment of his highest and strongest emotions, as the

enthusiastic reveller enraptured By the proximity of his god, as the

fellow-suffering companion in whom the suffering of the god repeats

itself, as the herald of wisdom speaking from the very depths of

nature, as the emblem of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the

Greek was wont to contemplate with reverential awe. The satyr was

something sublime and godlike: he could not but appear so, especially

to the sad and wearied eye of the Dionysian man. He would have been

offended by our spurious tricked-up shepherd, while his eye dwelt

with sublime satisfaction on the naked and unstuntedly magnificent

characters of nature: here the illusion of culture was brushed away

from the archetype of man; here the true man, the bearded satyr,

revealed himself, who shouts joyfully to his god. Before him the

cultured man shrank to a lying caricature. Schiller is right also

with reference to these beginnings of tragic art: the chorus is a

living bulwark against the onsets of reality, because it--the satyric

chorus--portrays existence more truthfully, more realistically, more

perfectly than the cultured man who ordinarily considers himself as the

only reality. The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, like

some fantastic impossibility of a poet's imagination: it seeks to be

the very opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and must for

this very reason cast aside the false finery of that supposed reality

of the cultured man. The contrast between this intrinsic truth of

nature and the falsehood of culture, which poses as the only reality,

is similar to that existing between the eternal kernel of things, the

thing in itself, and the collective world of phenomena. And even as

tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of

this kernel of existence, notwithstanding the perpetual dissolution of

phenomena, so the symbolism of the satyric chorus already expresses

figuratively this primordial relation between the thing in itself and

phenomenon. The idyllic shepherd of the modern man is but a copy of the

sum of the illusions of culture which he calls nature; the Dionysian

Greek desires truth and nature in their most potent form;--he sees

himself metamorphosed into the satyr.

The revelling crowd of the votaries of Dionysus rejoices, swayed by

such moods and perceptions, the power of which transforms them before

their own eyes, so that they imagine they behold themselves as

reconstituted genii of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the

tragic chorus is the artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon,

which of course required a separation of the Dionysian spectators from

the enchanted Dionysians. However, we must never lose sight of the fact

that the public of the Attic tragedy rediscovered itself in the chorus

of the orchestra, that there was in reality no antithesis of public

and chorus: for all was but one great sublime chorus of dancing and

singing satyrs, or of such as allowed themselves to be represented by

the satyrs. The Schlegelian observation must here reveal itself to us

in a deeper sense. The chorus is the "ideal spectator"[5] in so far as

it is the only _beholder,_[6] the beholder of the visionary world of

the scene. A public of spectators, as known to us, was unknown to the

Greeks. In their theatres the terraced structure of the spectators'

space rising in concentric arcs enabled every one, in the strictest

sense, to _overlook_ the entire world of culture around him, and in

surfeited contemplation to imagine himself a chorist. According to

this view, then, we may call the chorus in its primitive stage in

proto-tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian man: a phenomenon

which may be best exemplified by the process of the actor, who, if he

be truly gifted, sees hovering before his eyes with almost tangible

perceptibility the character he is to represent. The satyric chorus

is first of all a vision of the Dionysian throng, just as the world

of the stage is, in turn, a vision of the satyric chorus: the power

of this vision is great enough to render the eye dull and insensible

to the impression of "reality," to the presence of the cultured men

occupying the tiers of seats on every side. The form of the Greek

theatre reminds one of a lonesome mountain-valley: the architecture of

the scene appears like a luminous cloud-picture which the Bacchants

swarming on the mountains behold from the heights, as the splendid

encirclement in the midst of which the image of Dionysus is revealed to

them.

Owing to our learned conception of the elementary artistic processes,

this artistic proto-phenomenon, which is here introduced to explain

the tragic chorus, is almost shocking: while nothing can be more

certain than that the poet is a poet only in that he beholds himself

surrounded by forms which live and act before him, into the innermost

being of which his glance penetrates. By reason of a strange defeat in

our capacities, we modern men are apt to represent to ourselves the

æsthetic proto-phenomenon as too complex and abstract. For the true

poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure, but a vicarious image

which actually hovers before him in place of a concept. The character

is not for him an aggregate composed of a studied collection of

particular traits, but an irrepressibly live person appearing before

his eyes, and differing only from the corresponding vision of the

painter by its ever continued life and action. Why is it that Homer

sketches much more vividly[7] than all the other poets? Because he

contemplates[8] much more. We talk so abstractly about poetry, because

we are all wont to be bad poets. At bottom the æsthetic phenomenon is

simple: let a man but have the faculty of perpetually seeing a lively

play and of constantly living surrounded by hosts of spirits, then he

is a poet: let him but feel the impulse to transform himself and to

talk from out the bodies and souls of others, then he is a dramatist.

The Dionysian excitement is able to impart to a whole mass of men

this artistic faculty of seeing themselves surrounded by such a host

of spirits, with whom they know themselves to be inwardly one. This

function of the tragic chorus is the _dramatic_ proto-phenomenon: to

see one's self transformed before one's self, and then to act as if

one had really entered into another body, into another character. This

function stands at the beginning of the development of the drama.

Here we have something different from the rhapsodist, who does not

blend with his pictures, but only sees them, like the painter, with

contemplative eye outside of him; here we actually have a surrender

of the individual by his entering into another nature. Moreover this

phenomenon appears in the form of an epidemic: a whole throng feels

itself metamorphosed in this wise. Hence it is that the dithyramb is

essentially different from every other variety of the choric song. The

virgins, who with laurel twigs in their hands solemnly proceed to

the temple of Apollo and sing a processional hymn, remain what they

are and retain their civic names: the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus

of transformed beings, whose civic past and social rank are totally

forgotten: they have become the timeless servants of their god that

live aloof from all the spheres of society. Every other variety of

the choric lyric of the Hellenes is but an enormous enhancement of

the Apollonian unit-singer: while in the dithyramb we have before us

a community of unconscious actors, who mutually regard themselves as

transformed among one another.

This enchantment is the prerequisite of all dramatic art. In this

enchantment the Dionysian reveller sees himself as a satyr, _and as

satyr he in turn beholds the god,_ that is, in his transformation he

sees a new vision outside him as the Apollonian consummation of his

state. With this new vision the drama is complete.

According to this view, we must understand Greek tragedy as the

Dionysian chorus, which always disburdens itself anew in an Apollonian

world of pictures. The choric parts, therefore, with which tragedy is

interlaced, are in a manner the mother-womb of the entire so-called

dialogue, that is, of the whole stage-world, of the drama proper. In

several successive outbursts does this primordial basis of tragedy beam

forth the vision of the drama, which is a dream-phenomenon throughout,

and, as such, epic in character: on the other hand, however, as

objectivation of a Dionysian state, it does not represent the

Apollonian redemption in appearance, but, conversely, the dissolution

of the individual and his unification with primordial existence.

Accordingly, the drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian

perceptions and influences, and is thereby separated from the epic as

by an immense gap.

The _chorus_ of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the mass of the people

moved by Dionysian excitement, is thus fully explained by our

conception of it as here set forth. Whereas, being accustomed to the

position of a chorus on the modern stage, especially an operatic

chorus, we could never comprehend why the tragic chorus of the Greeks

should be older, more primitive, indeed, more important than the

"action" proper,--as has been so plainly declared by the voice of

tradition; whereas, furthermore, we could not reconcile with this

traditional paramount importance and primitiveness the fact of the

chorus' being composed only of humble, ministering beings; indeed, at

first only of goatlike satyrs; whereas, finally, the orchestra before

the scene was always a riddle to us; we have learned to comprehend at

length that the scene, together with the action, was fundamentally

and originally conceived only as a _vision,_ that the only reality

is just the chorus, which of itself generates the vision and speaks

thereof with the entire symbolism of dancing, tone, and word. This

chorus beholds in the vision its lord and master Dionysus, and is thus

for ever the _serving_ chorus: it sees how he, the god, suffers and

glorifies himself, and therefore does not itself _act_. But though its

attitude towards the god is throughout the attitude of ministration,

this is nevertheless the highest expression, the Dionysian expression

of _Nature,_ and therefore, like Nature herself, the chorus utters

oracles and wise sayings when transported with enthusiasm: as

_fellow-sufferer_ it is also the _sage_ proclaiming truth from out the

heart of Nature. Thus, then, originates the fantastic figure, which

seems so shocking, of the wise and enthusiastic satyr, who is at the

same time "the dumb man" in contrast to the god: the image of Nature

and her strongest impulses, yea, the symbol of Nature, and at the same

time the herald of her art and wisdom: musician, poet, dancer, and

visionary in one person.

Agreeably to this view, and agreeably to tradition, _Dionysus,_ the

proper stage-hero and focus of vision, is not at first actually present

in the oldest period of tragedy, but is only imagined as present:

_i.e.,_ tragedy is originally only "chorus" and not "drama." Later

on the attempt is made to exhibit the god as real and to display the

visionary figure together with its glorifying encirclement before the

eyes of all; it is here that the "drama" in the narrow sense of the

term begins. To the dithyrambic chorus is now assigned the task of

exciting the minds of the hearers to such a pitch of Dionysian frenzy,

that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not behold

in him, say, the unshapely masked man, but a visionary figure, born

as it were of their own ecstasy. Let us picture Admetes thinking in

profound meditation of his lately departed wife Alcestis, and quite

consuming himself in spiritual contemplation thereof--when suddenly

the veiled figure of a woman resembling her in form and gait is led

towards him: let us picture his sudden trembling anxiety, his agitated

comparisons, his instinctive conviction--and we shall have an analogon

to the sensation with which the spectator, excited to Dionysian frenzy,

saw the god approaching on the stage, a god with whose sufferings he

had already become identified. He involuntarily transferred the entire

picture of the god, fluttering magically before his soul, to this

masked figure and resolved its reality as it were into a phantasmal

unreality. This is the Apollonian dream-state, in which the world

of day is veiled, and a new world, clearer, more intelligible, more

striking than the former, and nevertheless more shadowy, is ever born

anew in perpetual change before our eyes. We accordingly recognise in

tragedy a thorough-going stylistic contrast: the language, colour,

flexibility and dynamics of the dialogue fall apart in the Dionysian

lyrics of the chorus on the one hand, and in the Apollonian dream-world

of the scene on the other, into entirely separate spheres of

expression. The Apollonian appearances, in which Dionysus objectifies

himself, are no longer "ein ewiges Meer, ein wechselnd Weben, ein

glühend Leben,"[9] as is the music of the chorus, they are no longer

the forces merely felt, but not condensed into a picture, by which

the inspired votary of Dionysus divines the proximity of his god: the

clearness and firmness of epic form now speak to him from the scene,

Dionysus now no longer speaks through forces, but as an epic hero,

almost in the language of Homer.

[5] Zuschauer.

[6] Schauer.

[7] Anschaulicher.

[8] Anschaut.

[9] An eternal sea, A weaving, flowing, Life, all glowing.

_Faust,_ trans. of Bayard Taylor.--TR.

9.

Whatever rises to the surface in the dialogue of the Apollonian part

of Greek tragedy, appears simple, transparent, beautiful. In this

sense the dialogue is a copy of the Hellene, whose nature reveals

itself in the dance, because in the dance the greatest energy is merely

potential, but betrays itself nevertheless in flexible and vivacious

movements. The language of the Sophoclean heroes, for instance,

surprises us by its Apollonian precision and clearness, so that we at

once imagine we see into the innermost recesses of their being, and

marvel not a little that the way to these recesses is so short. But

if for the moment we disregard the character of the hero which rises

to the surface and grows visible--and which at bottom is nothing but

the light-picture cast on a dark wall, that is, appearance through and

through,--if rather we enter into the myth which projects itself in

these bright mirrorings, we shall of a sudden experience a phenomenon

which bears a reverse relation to one familiar in optics. When, after

a vigorous effort to gaze into the sun, we turn away blinded, we have

dark-coloured spots before our eyes as restoratives, so to speak;

while, on the contrary, those light-picture phenomena of the Sophoclean

hero,--in short, the Apollonian of the mask,--are the necessary

productions of a glance into the secret and terrible things of nature,

as it were shining spots to heal the eye which dire night has seared.

Only in this sense can we hope to be able to grasp the true meaning of

the serious and significant notion of "Greek cheerfulness"; while of

course we encounter the misunderstood notion of this cheerfulness, as

resulting from a state of unendangered comfort, on all the ways and

paths of the present time.

The most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the hapless _Œdipus,_

was understood by Sophocles as the noble man, who in spite of his

wisdom was destined to error and misery, but nevertheless through

his extraordinary sufferings ultimately exerted a magical, wholesome

influence on all around him, which continues effective even after

his death. The noble man does not sin; this is what the thoughtful

poet wishes to tell us: all laws, all natural order, yea, the moral

world itself, may be destroyed through his action, but through this

very action a higher magic circle of influences is brought into play,

which establish a new world on the ruins of the old that has been

overthrown. This is what the poet, in so far as he is at the same time

a religious thinker, wishes to tell us: as poet, he shows us first of

all a wonderfully complicated legal mystery, which the judge slowly

unravels, link by link, to his own destruction. The truly Hellenic

delight at this dialectical loosening is so great, that a touch of

surpassing cheerfulness is thereby communicated to the entire play,

which everywhere blunts the edge of the horrible presuppositions of the

procedure. In the "Œdipus at Colonus" we find the same cheerfulness,

elevated, however, to an infinite transfiguration: in contrast to

the aged king, subjected to an excess of misery, and exposed solely

as a _sufferer_ to all that befalls him, we have here a supermundane

cheerfulness, which descends from a divine sphere and intimates to

us that in his purely passive attitude the hero attains his highest

activity, the influence of which extends far beyond his life, while

his earlier conscious musing and striving led him only to passivity.

Thus, then, the legal knot of the fable of Œdipus, which to mortal

eyes appears indissolubly entangled, is slowly unravelled--and the

profoundest human joy comes upon us in the presence of this divine

counterpart of dialectics. If this explanation does justice to the

poet, it may still be asked whether the substance of the myth is

thereby exhausted; and here it turns out that the entire conception

of the poet is nothing but the light-picture which healing nature

holds up to us after a glance into the abyss. Œdipus, the murderer of

his father, the husband of his mother, Œdipus, the interpreter of the

riddle of the Sphinx! What does the mysterious triad of these deeds

of destiny tell us? There is a primitive popular belief, especially

in Persia, that a wise Magian can be born only of incest: which

we have forthwith to interpret to ourselves with reference to the

riddle-solving and mother-marrying Œdipus, to the effect that when

the boundary of the present and future, the rigid law of individuation

and, in general, the intrinsic spell of nature, are broken by prophetic

and magical powers, an extraordinary counter-naturalness--as, in this

case, incest--must have preceded as a cause; for how else could one

force nature to surrender her secrets but by victoriously opposing her,

_i.e.,_ by means of the Unnatural? It is this intuition which I see

imprinted in the awful triad of the destiny of Œdipus: the very man

who solves the riddle of nature--that double-constituted Sphinx--must

also, as the murderer of his father and husband of his mother, break

the holiest laws of nature. Indeed, it seems as if the myth sought to

whisper into our ears that wisdom, especially Dionysian wisdom, is

an unnatural abomination, and that whoever, through his knowledge,

plunges nature into an abyss of annihilation, must also experience

the dissolution of nature in himself. "The sharpness of wisdom turns

round upon the sage: wisdom is a crime against nature": such terrible

expressions does the myth call out to us: but the Hellenic poet touches

like a sunbeam the sublime and formidable Memnonian statue of the myth,

so that it suddenly begins to sound--in Sophoclean melodies.

With the glory of passivity I now contrast the glory of activity which

illuminates the _Prometheus_ of Æschylus. That which Æschylus the

thinker had to tell us here, but which as a poet he only allows us to

surmise by his symbolic picture, the youthful Goethe succeeded in

disclosing to us in the daring words of his Prometheus:--

"Hier sitz' ich, forme Menschen

Nach meinem Bilde,

Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,

Zu leiden, zu weinen,

Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich,

Und dein nicht zu achten,

Wie ich!"[10]

Man, elevating himself to the rank of the Titans, acquires his culture

by his own efforts, and compels the gods to unite with him, because

in his self-sufficient wisdom he has their existence and their limits

in his hand. What is most wonderful, however, in this Promethean

form, which according to its fundamental conception is the specific

hymn of impiety, is the profound Æschylean yearning for _justice_:

the untold sorrow of the bold "single-handed being" on the one hand,

and the divine need, ay, the foreboding of a twilight of the gods, on

the other, the power of these two worlds of suffering constraining

to reconciliation, to metaphysical oneness--all this suggests most

forcibly the central and main position of the Æschylean view of

things, which sees Moira as eternal justice enthroned above gods and

men. In view of the astonishing boldness with which Æschylus places the

Olympian world on his scales of justice, it must be remembered that

the deep-minded Greek had an immovably firm substratum of metaphysical

thought in his mysteries, and that all his sceptical paroxysms could

be discharged upon the Olympians. With reference to these deities,

the Greek artist, in particular, had an obscure feeling as to mutual

dependency: and it is just in the Prometheus of Æschylus that this

feeling is symbolised. The Titanic artist found in himself the

daring belief that he could create men and at least destroy Olympian

deities: namely, by his superior wisdom, for which, to be sure, he had

to atone by eternal suffering. The splendid "can-ing" of the great

genius, bought too cheaply even at the price of eternal suffering,

the stern pride of the _artist_: this is the essence and soul of

Æschylean poetry, while Sophocles in his Œdipus preludingly strikes up

the victory-song of the _saint_. But even this interpretation which

Æschylus has given to the myth does not fathom its astounding depth of

terror; the fact is rather that the artist's delight in unfolding, the

cheerfulness of artistic creating bidding defiance to all calamity,

is but a shining stellar and nebular image reflected in a black sea

of sadness. The tale of Prometheus is an original possession of the

entire Aryan family of races, and documentary evidence of their

capacity for the profoundly tragic; indeed, it is not improbable that

this myth has the same characteristic significance for the Aryan

race that the myth of the fall of man has for the Semitic, and that

there is a relationship between the two myths like that of brother and

sister. The presupposition of the Promethean myth is the transcendent

value which a naïve humanity attach to _fire_ as the true palladium

of every ascending culture: that man, however, should dispose at will

of this fire, and should not receive it only as a gift from heaven,

as the igniting lightning or the warming solar flame, appeared to the

contemplative primordial men as crime and robbery of the divine nature.

And thus the first philosophical problem at once causes a painful,

irreconcilable antagonism between man and God, and puts as it were

a mass of rock at the gate of every culture. The best and highest

that men can acquire they obtain by a crime, and must now in their

turn take upon themselves its consequences, namely the whole flood of

sufferings and sorrows with which the offended celestials _must_ visit

the nobly aspiring race of man: a bitter reflection, which, by the

_dignity_ it confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic

myth of the fall of man, in which curiosity, beguilement, seducibility,

wantonness,--in short, a whole series of pre-eminently feminine

passions,--were regarded as the origin of evil. What distinguishes

the Aryan representation is the sublime view of _active sin_ as the

properly Promethean virtue, which suggests at the same time the ethical

basis of pessimistic tragedy as the _justification_ of human evil--of

human guilt as well as of the suffering incurred thereby. The misery in

the essence of things--which the contemplative Aryan is not disposed

to explain away--the antagonism in the heart of the world, manifests

itself to him as a medley of different worlds, for instance, a Divine

and a human world, each of which is in the right individually, but

as a separate existence alongside of another has to suffer for its

individuation. With the heroic effort made by the individual for

universality, in his attempt to pass beyond the bounds of individuation

and become the _one_ universal being, he experiences in himself the

primordial contradiction concealed in the essence of things, _i.e.,_

he trespasses and suffers. Accordingly crime[11] is understood by

the Aryans to be a man, sin[12] by the Semites a woman; as also, the

original crime is committed by man, the original sin by woman. Besides,

the witches' chorus says:

"Wir nehmen das nicht so genau:

Mit tausend Schritten macht's die Frau;

Doch wie sie auch sich eilen kann

Mit einem Sprunge macht's der Mann."[13]

He who understands this innermost core of the tale of

Prometheus--namely the necessity of crime imposed on the titanically

striving individual--will at once be conscious of the un-Apollonian

nature of this pessimistic representation: for Apollo seeks to pacify

individual beings precisely by drawing boundary lines between them,

and by again and again calling attention thereto, with his requirements

of self-knowledge and due proportion, as the holiest laws of the

universe. In order, however, to prevent the form from congealing to

Egyptian rigidity and coldness in consequence of this Apollonian

tendency, in order to prevent the extinction of the motion of the

entire lake in the effort to prescribe to the individual wave its path

and compass, the high tide of the Dionysian tendency destroyed from

time to time all the little circles in which the one-sided Apollonian

"will" sought to confine the Hellenic world. The suddenly swelling

tide of the Dionysian then takes the separate little wave-mountains of

individuals on its back, just as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan

Atlas, does with the earth. This Titanic impulse, to become as it were

the Atlas of all individuals, and to carry them on broad shoulders

higher and higher, farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the

Dionysian have in common. In this respect the Æschylean Prometheus is

a Dionysian mask, while, in the afore-mentioned profound yearning for

justice, Æschylus betrays to the intelligent observer his paternal

descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and of the boundaries

of justice. And so the double-being of the Æschylean Prometheus, his

conjoint Dionysian and Apollonian nature, might be thus expressed in

an abstract formula: "Whatever exists is alike just and unjust, and

equally justified in both."

Das ist deine Welt! Das heisst eine Welt![14]

[10]

"Here sit I, forming mankind

In my image,

A race resembling me,--

To sorrow and to weep,

To taste, to hold, to enjoy,

And not have need of thee,

As I!"

(Translation in Hæckel's _History of the Evolution of Man._)

[11] _Der_ Frevel.]

[12] _Die_ Sünde.

[13]

We do not measure with such care:

Woman in thousand steps is there,

But howsoe'er she hasten may.

Man in one leap has cleared the way.

_Faust,_ trans. of Bayard Taylor.--TR.

[14] This is thy world, and what a world!--_Faust._

10.

It is an indisputable tradition that Greek tragedy in its earliest

form had for its theme only the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for

some time the only stage-hero therein was simply Dionysus himself.

With the same confidence, however, we can maintain that not until

Euripides did Dionysus cease to be the tragic hero, and that in fact

all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage--Prometheus, Œdipus,

etc.--are but masks of this original hero, Dionysus. The presence of a

god behind all these masks is the one essential cause of the typical

"ideality," so oft exciting wonder, of these celebrated figures. Some

one, I know not whom, has maintained that all individuals are comic as

individuals and are consequently un-tragic: from whence it might be

inferred that the Greeks in general _could_ not endure individuals on

the tragic stage. And they really seem to have had these sentiments:

as, in general, it is to be observed that the Platonic discrimination

and valuation of the "idea" in contrast to the "eidolon," the image,

is deeply rooted in the Hellenic being. Availing ourselves of Plato's

terminology, however, we should have to speak of the tragic figures of

the Hellenic stage somewhat as follows. The one truly real Dionysus

appears in a multiplicity of forms, in the mask of a fighting hero

and entangled, as it were, in the net of an individual will. As the

visibly appearing god now talks and acts, he resembles an erring,

striving, suffering individual: and that, in general, he _appears_

with such epic precision and clearness, is due to the dream-reading

Apollo, who reads to the chorus its Dionysian state through this

symbolic appearance. In reality, however, this hero is the suffering

Dionysus of the mysteries, a god experiencing in himself the sufferings

of individuation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a boy he was

dismembered by the Titans and has been worshipped in this state

as Zagreus:[15] whereby is intimated that this dismemberment, the

properly Dionysian _suffering,_ is like a transformation into air,

water, earth, and fire, that we must therefore regard the state of

individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering, as

something objectionable in itself. From the smile of this Dionysus

sprang the Olympian gods, from his tears sprang man. In his existence

as a dismembered god, Dionysus has the dual nature of a cruel

barbarised demon, and a mild pacific ruler. But the hope of the epopts

looked for a new birth of Dionysus, which we have now to conceive of in

anticipation as the end of individuation: it was for this coming third

Dionysus that the stormy jubilation-hymns of the epopts resounded. And

it is only this hope that sheds a ray of joy upon the features of a

world torn asunder and shattered into individuals: as is symbolised in

the myth by Demeter sunk in eternal sadness, who _rejoices_ again only

when told that she may _once more_ give birth to Dionysus In the views

of things here given we already have all the elements of a profound and

pessimistic contemplation of the world, and along with these we have

the _mystery doctrine of tragedy_: the fundamental knowledge of the

oneness of all existing things, the consideration of individuation as

the primal cause of evil, and art as the joyous hope that the spell of

individuation may be broken, as the augury of a restored oneness.

It has already been intimated that the Homeric epos is the poem

of Olympian culture, wherewith this culture has sung its own song

of triumph over the terrors of the war of the Titans. Under the

predominating influence of tragic poetry, these Homeric myths are now

reproduced anew, and show by this metempsychosis that meantime the

Olympian culture also has been vanquished by a still deeper view of

things. The haughty Titan Prometheus has announced to his Olympian

tormentor that the extremest danger will one day menace his rule,

unless he ally with him betimes. In Æschylus we perceive the terrified

Zeus, apprehensive of his end, in alliance with the Titan. Thus, the

former age of the Titans is subsequently brought from Tartarus once

more to the light of day. The philosophy of wild and naked nature

beholds with the undissembled mien of truth the myths of the Homeric

world as they dance past: they turn pale, they tremble before the

lightning glance of this goddess--till the powerful fist[16] of

the Dionysian artist forces them into the service of the new deity.

Dionysian truth takes over the entire domain of myth as symbolism of

_its_ knowledge, which it makes known partly in the public cult of

tragedy and partly in the secret celebration of the dramatic mysteries,

always, however, in the old mythical garb. What was the power, which

freed Prometheus from his vultures and transformed the myth into a

vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It is the Heracleian power of music:

which, having reached its highest manifestness in tragedy, can invest

myths with a new and most profound significance, which we have already

had occasion to characterise as the most powerful faculty of music. For

it is the fate of every myth to insinuate itself into the narrow limits

of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later

generation as a solitary fact with historical claims: and the Greeks

were already fairly on the way to restamp the whole of their mythical

juvenile dream sagaciously and arbitrarily into a historico-pragmatical

_juvenile history._ For this is the manner in which religions are

wont to die out: when of course under the stern, intelligent eyes of

an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical presuppositions of a religion are

systematised as a completed sum of historical events, and when one

begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myth, while at

the same time opposing all continuation of their natural vitality and

luxuriance; when, accordingly, the feeling for myth dies out, and its

place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations.

This dying myth was now seized by the new-born genius of Dionysian

music, in whose hands it bloomed once more, with such colours as it

had never yet displayed, with a fragrance that awakened a longing

anticipation of a metaphysical world. After this final effulgence

it collapses, its leaves wither, and soon the scoffing Lucians of

antiquity catch at the discoloured and faded flowers which the winds

carry off in every direction. Through tragedy the myth attains its

profoundest significance, its most expressive form; it rises once more

like a wounded hero, and the whole surplus of vitality, together with

the philosophical calmness of the Dying, burns in its eyes with a last

powerful gleam.

What meantest thou, oh impious Euripides, in seeking once more to

enthral this dying one? It died under thy ruthless hands: and then

thou madest use of counterfeit, masked myth, which like the ape of

Heracles could only trick itself out in the old finery. And as myth

died in thy hands, so also died the genius of music; though thou

couldst covetously plunder all the gardens of music--thou didst only

realise a counterfeit, masked music. And because thou hast forsaken

Dionysus. Apollo hath also forsaken thee; rout up all the passions from

their haunts and conjure them into thy sphere, sharpen and polish a

sophistical dialectics for the speeches of thy heroes--thy very heroes

have only counterfeit, masked passions, and speak only counterfeit,

masked music.

[15] See article by Mr. Arthur Symons in _The Academy,_ 30th

August 1902.

[16] Die mächtige Faust.--Cf. _Faust,_ Chorus of

Spirits.--TR.

11.

Greek tragedy had a fate different from that of all her older sister

arts: she died by suicide, in consequence of an irreconcilable

conflict; accordingly she died tragically, while they all passed away

very calmly and beautifully in ripe old age. For if it be in accordance

with a happy state of things to depart this life without a struggle,

leaving behind a fair posterity, the closing period of these older

arts exhibits such a happy state of things: slowly they sink out of

sight, and before their dying eyes already stand their fairer progeny,

who impatiently lift up their heads with courageous mien. The death of

Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left an immense void, deeply felt

everywhere. Even as certain Greek sailors in the time of Tiberius once

heard upon a lonesome island the thrilling cry, "great Pan is dead": so

now as it were sorrowful wailing sounded through the Hellenic world:

"Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself has perished with her! Begone, begone,

ye stunted, emaciated epigones! Begone to Hades, that ye may for once

eat your fill of the crumbs of your former masters!"

But when after all a new Art blossomed forth which revered tragedy as

her ancestress and mistress, it was observed with horror that she did

indeed bear the features of her mother, but those very features the

latter had exhibited in her long death-struggle. It was _Euripides_ who

fought this death-struggle of tragedy; the later art is known as the

_New Attic Comedy._ In it the degenerate form of tragedy lived on as a

monument of the most painful and violent death of tragedy proper.

This connection between the two serves to explain the passionate

attachment to Euripides evinced by the poets of the New Comedy, and

hence we are no longer surprised at the wish of Philemon, who would

have got himself hanged at once, with the sole design of being able

to visit Euripides in the lower regions: if only he could be assured

generally that the deceased still had his wits. But if we desire, as

briefly as possible, and without professing to say aught exhaustive on

the subject, to characterise what Euripides has in common with Menander

and Philemon, and what appealed to them so strongly as worthy of

imitation: it will suffice to say that the _spectator_ was brought upon

the stage by Euripides. He who has perceived the material of which the

Promethean tragic writers prior to Euripides formed their heroes, and

how remote from their purpose it was to bring the true mask of reality

on the stage, will also know what to make of the wholly divergent

tendency of Euripides. Through him the commonplace individual forced

his way from the spectators' benches to the stage itself; the mirror in

which formerly only great and bold traits found expression now showed

the painful exactness that conscientiously reproduces even the abortive

lines of nature. Odysseus, the typical Hellene of the Old Art, sank,

in the hands of the new poets, to the figure of the Græculus, who, as

the good-naturedly cunning domestic slave, stands henceforth in the

centre of dramatic interest. What Euripides takes credit for in the

Aristophanean "Frogs," namely, that by his household remedies he freed

tragic art from its pompous corpulency, is apparent above all in his

tragic heroes. The spectator now virtually saw and heard his double on

the Euripidean stage, and rejoiced that he could talk so well. But this

joy was not all: one even learned of Euripides how to speak: he prides

himself upon this in his contest with Æschylus: how the people have

learned from him how to observe, debate, and draw conclusions according

to the rules of art and with the cleverest sophistications. In general

it may be said that through this revolution of the popular language he

made the New Comedy possible. For it was henceforth no longer a secret,

how--and with what saws--the commonplace could represent and express

itself on the stage. Civic mediocrity, on which Euripides built all

his political hopes, was now suffered to speak, while heretofore the

demigod in tragedy and the drunken satyr, or demiman, in comedy, had

determined the character of the language. And so the Aristophanean

Euripides prides himself on having portrayed the common, familiar,

everyday life and dealings of the people, concerning which all are

qualified to pass judgment. If now the entire populace philosophises,

manages land and goods with unheard-of circumspection, and conducts

law-suits, he takes all the credit to himself, and glories in the

splendid results of the wisdom with which he inoculated the rabble.

It was to a populace prepared and enlightened in this manner that the

New Comedy could now address itself, of which Euripides had become

as it were the chorus-master; only that in this case the chorus of

spectators had to be trained. As soon as this chorus was trained to

sing in the Euripidean key, there arose that chesslike variety of the

drama, the New Comedy, with its perpetual triumphs of cunning and

artfulness. But Euripides--the chorus-master--was praised incessantly:

indeed, people would have killed themselves in order to learn yet more

from him, had they not known that tragic poets were quite as dead as

tragedy. But with it the Hellene had surrendered the belief in his

immortality; not only the belief in an ideal past, but also the belief

in an ideal future. The saying taken from the well-known epitaph, "as

an old man, frivolous and capricious," applies also to aged Hellenism.

The passing moment, wit, levity, and caprice, are its highest deities;

the fifth class, that of the slaves, now attains to power, at least in

sentiment: and if we can still speak at all of "Greek cheerfulness,"

it is the cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of consequence to

answer for, nothing great to strive for, and cannot value anything of

the past or future higher than the present. It was this semblance of

"Greek cheerfulness" which so revolted the deep-minded and formidable

natures of the first four centuries of Christianity: this womanish

flight from earnestness and terror, this cowardly contentedness with

easy pleasure, was not only contemptible to them, but seemed to be a

specifically anti-Christian sentiment. And we must ascribe it to its

influence that the conception of Greek antiquity, which lived on for

centuries, preserved with almost enduring persistency that peculiar

hectic colour of cheerfulness--as if there had never been a Sixth

Century with its birth of tragedy, its Mysteries, its Pythagoras and

Heraclitus, indeed as if the art-works of that great period did not at

all exist, which in fact--each by itself--can in no wise be explained

as having sprung from the soil of such a decrepit and slavish love

of existence and cheerfulness, and point to an altogether different

conception of things as their source.

The assertion made a moment ago, that Euripides introduced the

spectator on the stage to qualify him the better to pass judgment on

the drama, will make it appear as if the old tragic art was always

in a false relation to the spectator: and one would be tempted to

extol the radical tendency of Euripides to bring about an adequate

relation between art-work and public as an advance on Sophocles. But,

as things are, "public" is merely a word, and not at all a homogeneous

and constant quantity. Why should the artist be under obligations to

accommodate himself to a power whose strength is merely in numbers?

And if by virtue of his endowments and aspirations he feels himself

superior to every one of these spectators, how could he feel greater

respect for the collective expression of all these subordinate

capacities than for the relatively highest-endowed individual

spectator? In truth, if ever a Greek artist treated his public

throughout a long life with presumptuousness and self-sufficiency,

it was Euripides, who, even when the masses threw themselves at his

feet, with sublime defiance made an open assault on his own tendency,

the very tendency with which he had triumphed over the masses. If this

genius had had the slightest reverence for the pandemonium of the

public, he would have broken down long before the middle of his career

beneath the weighty blows of his own failures. These considerations

here make it obvious that our formula--namely, that Euripides brought

the spectator upon the stage, in order to make him truly competent to

pass judgment--was but a provisional one, and that we must seek for a

deeper understanding of his tendency. Conversely, it is undoubtedly

well known that Æschylus and Sophocles, during all their lives, indeed,

far beyond their lives, enjoyed the full favour of the people, and that

therefore in the case of these predecessors of Euripides the idea of

a false relation between art-work and public was altogether excluded.

What was it that thus forcibly diverted this highly gifted artist, so

incessantly impelled to production, from the path over which shone the

sun of the greatest names in poetry and the cloudless heaven of popular

favour? What strange consideration for the spectator led him to defy,

the spectator? How could he, owing to too much respect for the public

--dis-respect the public?

Euripides--and this is the solution of the riddle just propounded--felt

himself, as a poet, undoubtedly superior to the masses, but not to

two of his spectators: he brought the masses upon the stage; these

two spectators he revered as the only competent judges and masters

of his art: in compliance with their directions and admonitions, he

transferred the entire world of sentiments, passions, and experiences,

hitherto present at every festival representation as the invisible

chorus on the spectators' benches, into the souls of his stage-heroes;

he yielded to their demands when he also sought for these new

characters the new word and the new tone; in their voices alone he

heard the conclusive verdict on his work, as also the cheering promise

of triumph when he found himself condemned as usual by the justice of

the public.

Of these two, spectators the one is--Euripides himself, Euripides _as

thinker,_ not as poet. It might be said of him, that his unusually

large fund of critical ability, as in the case of Lessing, if it did

not create, at least constantly fructified a productively artistic

collateral impulse. With this faculty, with all the clearness and

dexterity of his critical thought, Euripides had sat in the theatre and

striven to recognise in the masterpieces of his great predecessors, as

in faded paintings, feature and feature, line and line. And here had

happened to him what one initiated in the deeper arcana of Æschylean

tragedy must needs have expected: he observed something incommensurable

in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive distinctness

and at the same time an enigmatic profundity, yea an infinitude, of

background. Even the clearest figure had always a comet's tail attached

to it, which seemed to suggest the uncertain and the inexplicable.

The same twilight shrouded the structure of the drama, especially the

significance of the chorus. And how doubtful seemed the solution of

the ethical problems to his mind! How questionable the treatment of

the myths! How unequal the distribution of happiness and misfortune!

Even in the language of the Old Tragedy there was much that was

objectionable to him, or at least enigmatical; he found especially

too much pomp for simple affairs, too many tropes and immense things

for the plainness of the characters. Thus he sat restlessly pondering

in the theatre, and as a spectator he acknowledged to himself that he

did not understand his great predecessors. If, however, he thought the

understanding the root proper of all enjoyment and productivity, he had

to inquire and look about to see whether any one else thought as he

did, and also acknowledged this incommensurability. But most people,

and among them the best individuals, had only a distrustful smile for

him, while none could explain why the great masters were still in the

right in face of his scruples and objections. And in this painful

condition he found _that other spectator,_ who did not comprehend,

and therefore did not esteem, tragedy. In alliance with him he could

venture, from amid his lonesomeness, to begin the prodigious struggle

against the art of Æschylus and Sophocles--not with polemic writings,

but as a dramatic poet, who opposed _his own_ conception of tragedy to

the traditional one.

12.

Before we name this other spectator, let us pause here a moment in

order to recall our own impression, as previously described, of the

discordant and incommensurable elements in the nature of Æschylean

tragedy. Let us think of our own astonishment at the _chorus_ and

the _tragic hero_ of that type of tragedy, neither of which we could

reconcile with our practices any more than with tradition--till we

rediscovered this duplexity itself as the origin and essence of Greek

tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic impulses, _the

Apollonian and the Dionysian_.

To separate this primitive and all-powerful Dionysian element from

tragedy, and to build up a new and purified form of tragedy on the

basis of a non-Dionysian art, morality, and conception of things--such

is the tendency of Euripides which now reveals itself to us in a clear

light.

In a myth composed in the eve of his life, Euripides himself most

urgently propounded to his contemporaries the question as to the

value and signification of this tendency. Is the Dionysian entitled

to exist at all? Should it not be forcibly rooted out of the Hellenic

soil? Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible: but the

god Dionysus is too powerful; his most intelligent adversary--like

Pentheus in the "Bacchæ"--is unwittingly enchanted by him, and

in this enchantment meets his fate. The judgment of the two old

sages, Cadmus and Tiresias, seems to be also the judgment of the

aged poet: that the reflection of the wisest individuals does not

overthrow old popular traditions, nor the perpetually propagating

worship of Dionysus, that in fact it behoves us to display at least a

diplomatically cautious concern in the presence of such strange forces:

where however it is always possible that the god may take offence

at such lukewarm participation, and finally change the diplomat--in

this case Cadmus--into a dragon. This is what a poet tells us, who

opposed Dionysus with heroic valour throughout a long life--in order

finally to wind up his career with a glorification of his adversary,

and with suicide, like one staggering from giddiness, who, in order

to escape the horrible vertigo he can no longer endure, casts himself

from a tower. This tragedy--the Bacchæ--is a protest against the

practicability of his own tendency; alas, and it has already been

put into practice! The surprising thing had happened: when the poet

recanted, his tendency had already conquered. Dionysus had already

been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by a demonic power

which spoke through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a certain sense,

only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor

Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called _Socrates._ This is

the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work of

Greek tragedy was wrecked on it. What if even Euripides now seeks to

comfort us by his recantation? It is of no avail: the most magnificent

temple lies in ruins. What avails the lamentation of the destroyer,

and his confession that it was the most beautiful of all temples? And

even that Euripides has been changed into a dragon as a punishment by

the art-critics of all ages--who could be content with this wretched

compensation?

Let us now approach this _Socratic_ tendency with which Euripides

combated and vanquished Æschylean tragedy.

We must now ask ourselves, what could be the ulterior aim of the

Euripidean design, which, in the highest ideality of its execution,

would found drama exclusively on the non-Dionysian? What other form of

drama could there be, if it was not to be born of the womb of music, in

the mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only _the dramatised epos:_

in which Apollonian domain of art the _tragic_ effect is of course

unattainable. It does not depend on the subject-matter of the events

here represented; indeed, I venture to assert that it would have been

impossible for Goethe in his projected "Nausikaa" to have rendered

tragically effective the suicide of the idyllic being with which he

intended to complete the fifth act; so extraordinary is the power of

the epic-Apollonian representation, that it charms, before our eyes,

the most terrible things by the joy in appearance and in redemption

through appearance. The poet of the dramatised epos cannot completely

blend with his pictures any more than the epic rhapsodist. He is still

just the calm, unmoved embodiment of Contemplation whose wide eyes see

the picture _before_ them. The actor in this dramatised epos still

remains intrinsically rhapsodist: the consecration of inner dreaming

is on all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.

How, then, is the Euripidean play related to this ideal of the

Apollonian drama? Just as the younger rhapsodist is related to the

solemn rhapsodist of the old time. The former describes his own

character in the Platonic "Ion" as follows: "When I am saying anything

sad, my eyes fill with tears; when, however, what I am saying is awful

and terrible, then my hair stands on end through fear, and my heart

leaps." Here we no longer observe anything of the epic absorption

in appearance, or of the unemotional coolness of the true actor,

who precisely in his highest activity is wholly appearance and joy

in appearance. Euripides is the actor with leaping heart, with hair

standing on end; as Socratic thinker he designs the plan, as passionate

actor he executes it. Neither in the designing nor in the execution is

he an artist pure and simple. And so the Euripidean drama is a thing

both cool and fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning; it is

impossible for it to attain the Apollonian, effect of the epos, while,

on the other hand, it has severed itself as much as possible from

Dionysian elements, and now, in order to act at all, it requires new

stimulants, which can no longer lie within the sphere of the two unique

art-impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The stimulants are

cool, paradoxical _thoughts_, in place of Apollonian intuitions--and

fiery _passions_--in place Dionysean ecstasies; and in fact, thoughts

and passions very realistically copied, and not at all steeped in the

ether of art.

Accordingly, if we have perceived this much, that Euripides did not

succeed in establishing the drama exclusively on the Apollonian, but

that rather his non-Dionysian inclinations deviated into a naturalistic

and inartistic tendency, we shall now be able to approach nearer to

the character _æsthetic Socratism._ supreme law of which reads about

as follows: "to be beautiful everything must be intelligible," as

the parallel to the Socratic proposition, "only the knowing is one

virtuous." With this canon in his hands Euripides measured all the

separate elements of the drama, and rectified them according to his

principle: the language, the characters, the dramaturgic structure, and

the choric music. The poetic deficiency and retrogression, which we

are so often wont to impute to Euripides in comparison with Sophoclean

tragedy, is for the most part the product of this penetrating critical

process, this daring intelligibility. The Euripidian _prologue_ may

serve us as an example of the productivity of this, rationalistic

method. Nothing could be more opposed to the technique of our stage

than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. For a single person to

appear at the outset of the play telling us who he is, what precedes

the action, what has happened thus far, yea, what will happen in

the course of the play, would be designated by a modern playwright

as a wanton and unpardonable abandonment of the effect of suspense.

Everything that is about to happen is known beforehand; who then

cares to wait for it actually to happen?--considering, moreover, that

here there is not by any means the exciting relation of a predicting

dream to a reality taking place later on. Euripides speculated quite

differently. The effect of tragedy never depended on epic suspense, on

the fascinating uncertainty as to what is to happen now and afterwards:

but rather on the great rhetoro-lyric scenes in which the passion and

dialectics of the chief hero swelled to a broad and mighty stream.

Everything was arranged for pathos, not for action: and whatever

was not arranged for pathos was regarded as objectionable. But what

interferes most with the hearer's pleasurable satisfaction in such

scenes is a missing link, a gap in the texture of the previous history.

So long as the spectator has to divine the meaning of this or that

person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations

and intentions, his complete absorption in the doings and sufferings

of the chief persons is impossible, as is likewise breathless

fellow-feeling and fellow-fearing. The Æschyleo-Sophoclean tragedy

employed the most ingenious devices in the first scenes to place in

the hands of the spectator as if by chance all the threads requisite

for understanding the whole: a trait in which that noble artistry is

approved, which as it were masks the _inevitably_ formal, and causes

it to appear as something accidental. But nevertheless Euripides

thought he observed that during these first scenes the spectator was

in a strange state of anxiety to make out the problem of the previous

history, so that the poetic beauties and pathos of the exposition

were lost to him. Accordingly he placed the prologue even before the

exposition, and put it in the mouth of a person who could be trusted:

some deity had often as it were to guarantee the particulars of the

tragedy to the public and remove every doubt as to the reality of the

myth: as in the case of Descartes, who could only prove the reality

of the empiric world by an appeal to the truthfulness of God and His

inability to utter falsehood. Euripides makes use of the same divine

truthfulness once more at the close of his drama, in order to ensure to

the public the future of his heroes; this is the task of the notorious

_deus ex machina._ Between the preliminary and the additional epic

spectacle there is the dramatico-lyric present, the "drama" proper.

Thus Euripides as a poet echoes above all his own conscious

knowledge; and it is precisely on this account that he occupies such

a notable position in the history of Greek art. With reference to his

critico-productive activity, he must often have felt that he ought

to actualise in the drama the words at the beginning of the essay of

Anaxagoras: "In the beginning all things were mixed together; then

came the understanding and created order." And if Anaxagoras with his

"νοῡς" seemed like the first sober person among nothing but drunken

philosophers, Euripides may also have conceived his relation to

the other tragic poets under a similar figure. As long as the sole

ruler and disposer of the universe, the νοῡς, was still excluded

from artistic activity, things were all mixed together in a chaotic,

primitive mess;--it is thus Euripides was obliged to think, it is thus

he was obliged to condemn the "drunken" poets as the first "sober" one

among them. What Sophocles said of Æschylus, that he did what was

right, though unconsciously, was surely not in the mind of Euripides:

who would have admitted only thus much, that Æschylus, _because_ he

wrought unconsciously, did what was wrong. So also the divine Plato

speaks for the most part only ironically of the creative faculty of the

poet, in so far as it is not conscious insight, and places it on a par

with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter; insinuating that

the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and

reason has deserted him. Like Plato, Euripides undertook to show to the

world the reverse of the "unintelligent" poet; his æsthetic principle

that "to be beautiful everything must be known" is, as I have said,

the parallel to the Socratic "to be good everything must be known."

Accordingly we may regard Euripides as the poet of æsthetic Socratism.

Socrates, however, was that _second spectator_ who did not comprehend

and therefore did not esteem the Old Tragedy; in alliance with him

Euripides ventured to be the herald of a new artistic activity. If,

then, the Old Tragedy was here destroyed, it follows that æsthetic

Socratism was the murderous principle; but in so far as the struggle is

directed against the Dionysian element in the old art, we recognise in

Socrates the opponent of Dionysus, the new Orpheus who rebels against

Dionysus; and although destined to be torn to pieces by the Mænads of

the Athenian court, yet puts to flight the overpowerful god himself,

who, when he fled from Lycurgus, the king of Edoni, sought refuge in

the depths of the ocean--namely, in the mystical flood of a secret

cult which gradually overspread the earth.

13.

That Socrates stood in close relationship to Euripides in the tendency

of his teaching, did not escape the notice of contemporaneous

antiquity; the most eloquent expression of this felicitous insight

being the tale current in Athens, that Socrates was accustomed to help

Euripides in poetising. Both names were mentioned in one breath by the

adherents of the "good old time," whenever they came to enumerating the

popular agitators of the day: to whose influence they attributed the

fact that the old Marathonian stalwart capacity of body and soul was

more and more being sacrificed to a dubious enlightenment, involving

progressive degeneration of the physical and mental powers. It is in

this tone, half indignantly and half contemptuously, that Aristophanic

comedy is wont to speak of both of them--to the consternation of

modern men, who would indeed be willing enough to give up Euripides,

but cannot suppress their amazement that Socrates should appear in

Aristophanes as the first and head _sophist,_ as the mirror and epitome

of all sophistical tendencies; in connection with which it offers the

single consolation of putting Aristophanes himself in the pillory, as a

rakish, lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without here defending the profound

instincts of Aristophanes against such attacks, I shall now indicate,

by means of the sentiments of the time, the close connection between

Socrates and Euripides. With this purpose in view, it is especially to

be remembered that Socrates, as an opponent of tragic art, did not

ordinarily patronise tragedy, but only appeared among the spectators

when a new play of Euripides was performed. The most noted thing,

however, is the close juxtaposition of the two names in the Delphic

oracle, which designated Socrates as the wisest of men, but at the same

time decided that the second prize in the contest of wisdom was due to

Euripides.

Sophocles was designated as the third in this scale of rank; he who

could pride himself that, in comparison with Æschylus, he did what

was right, and did it, moreover, because he _knew_ what was right. It

is evidently just the degree of clearness of this _knowledge,_ which

distinguishes these three men in common as the three "knowing ones" of

their age.

The most decisive word, however, for this new and unprecedented

esteem of knowledge and insight was spoken by Socrates when he

found that he was the only one who acknowledged to himself that he

_knew nothing_ while in his critical pilgrimage through Athens, and

calling on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he

discovered everywhere the conceit of knowledge. He perceived, to his

astonishment, that all these celebrities were without a proper and

accurate insight, even with regard to their own callings, and practised

them only by instinct. "Only by instinct": with this phrase we touch

upon the heart and core of the Socratic tendency. Socratism condemns

therewith existing art as well as existing ethics; wherever Socratism

turns its searching eyes it beholds the lack of insight and the

power of illusion; and from this lack infers the inner perversity and

objectionableness of existing conditions. From this point onwards,

Socrates believed that he was called upon to, correct existence;

and, with an air of disregard and superiority, as the precursor

of an altogether different culture, art, and morality, he enters

single-handed into a world, of which, if we reverently touched the hem,

we should count it our greatest happiness.

Here is the extraordinary hesitancy which always seizes upon us with

regard to Socrates, and again and again invites us to ascertain the

sense and purpose of this most questionable phenomenon of antiquity.

Who is it that ventures single-handed to disown the Greek character,

which, as Homer, Pindar, and Æschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as

Pythia and Dionysus, as the deepest abyss and the highest height, is

sure of our wondering admiration? What demoniac power is it which would

presume to spill this magic draught in the dust? What demigod is it to

whom the chorus of spirits of the noblest of mankind must call out:

"Weh! Weh! Du hast sie zerstört, die schöne Welt, mit mächtiger Faust;

sie stürzt, sie zerfällt!"[17]

A key to the character of Socrates is presented to us by the surprising

phenomenon designated as the "daimonion" of Socrates. In special

circumstances, when his gigantic intellect began to stagger, he got

a secure support in the utterances of a divine voice which then

spake to him. This voice, whenever it comes, always _dissuades._

In this totally abnormal nature instinctive wisdom only appears in

order to hinder the progress of conscious perception here and there.

While in all productive men it is instinct which is the creatively

affirmative force, consciousness only comporting itself critically

and dissuasively; with Socrates it is instinct which becomes critic;

it is consciousness which becomes creator--a perfect monstrosity

_per defectum!_ And we do indeed observe here a monstrous _defectus_

of all mystical aptitude, so that Socrates might be designated as

the specific _non-mystic,_ in whom the logical nature is developed,

through a superfoetation, to the same excess as instinctive wisdom

is developed in the mystic. On the other hand, however, the logical

instinct which appeared in Socrates was absolutely prohibited from

turning against itself; in its unchecked flow it manifests a native

power such as we meet with, to our shocking surprise, only among the

very greatest instinctive forces. He who has experienced even a breath

of the divine naïveté and security of the Socratic course of life in

the Platonic writings, will also feel that the enormous driving-wheel

of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, _behind_ Socrates, and

that it must be viewed through Socrates as through a shadow. And

that he himself had a boding of this relation is apparent from the

dignified earnestness with which he everywhere, and even before his

judges, insisted on his divine calling. To refute him here was really

as impossible as to approve of his instinct-disintegrating influence.

In view of this indissoluble conflict, when he had at last been brought

before the forum of the Greek state, there was only one punishment

demanded, namely exile; he might have been sped across the borders as

something thoroughly enigmatical, irrubricable and inexplicable, and so

posterity would have been quite unjustified in charging the Athenians

with a deed of ignominy. But that the sentence of death, and not mere

exile, was pronounced upon him, seems to have been brought about by

Socrates himself, with perfect knowledge of the circumstances, and

without the natural fear of death: he met his death with the calmness

with which, according to the description of Plato, he leaves the

symposium at break of day, as the last of the revellers, to begin a new

day; while the sleepy companions remain behind on the benches and the

floor, to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist. _The dying Socrates_

became the new ideal of the noble Greek youths,--an ideal they had

never yet beheld,--and above all, the typical Hellenic youth, Plato,

prostrated himself before this scene with all the fervent devotion of

his visionary soul.

[17]

Woe! Woe!

Thou hast it destroyed,

The beautiful world;

With powerful fist;

In ruin 'tis hurled!

_Faust,_ trans. of Bayard Taylor.--TR.

14.

Let us now imagine the one great Cyclopean eye of Socrates fixed on

tragedy, that eye in which the fine frenzy of artistic enthusiasm had

never glowed--let us think how it was denied to this eye to gaze with

pleasure into the Dionysian abysses--what could it not but see in the

"sublime and greatly lauded" tragic art, as Plato called it? Something

very absurd, with causes that seemed to be without effects, and

effects apparently without causes; the whole, moreover, so motley and

diversified that it could not but be repugnant to a thoughtful mind, a

dangerous incentive, however, to sensitive and irritable souls. We know

what was the sole kind of poetry which he comprehended: the _Æsopian

fable_: and he did this no doubt with that smiling complaisance with

which the good honest Gellert sings the praise of poetry in the fable

of the bee and the hen:--

"Du siehst an mir, wozu sie nützt,

Dem, der nicht viel Verstand besitzt,

Die Wahrheit durch ein Bild zu sagen."[18]

But then it seemed to Socrates that tragic art did not even "tell the

truth": not to mention the fact that it addresses itself to him who

"hath but little wit"; consequently not to the philosopher: a twofold

reason why it should be avoided. Like Plato, he reckoned it among the

seductive arts which only represent the agreeable, not the useful, and

hence he required of his disciples abstinence and strict separation

from such unphilosophical allurements; with such success that the

youthful tragic poet Plato first of all burned his poems to be able to

become a scholar of Socrates. But where unconquerable native capacities

bore up against the Socratic maxims, their power, together with the

momentum of his mighty character, still sufficed to force poetry itself

into new and hitherto unknown channels.

An instance of this is the aforesaid Plato: he, who in the condemnation

of tragedy and of art in general certainly did not fall short of

the naïve cynicism of his master, was nevertheless constrained by

sheer artistic necessity to create a form of art which is inwardly

related even to the then existing forms of art which he repudiated.

Plato's main objection to the old art--that it is the imitation of

a phantom,[19] and hence belongs to a sphere still lower than the

empiric world--could not at all apply to the new art: and so we find

Plato endeavouring to go beyond reality and attempting to represent

the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality. But Plato, the thinker,

thereby arrived by a roundabout road just at the point where he had

always been at home as poet, and from which Sophocles and all the old

artists had solemnly protested against that objection. If tragedy

absorbed into itself all the earlier varieties of art, the same

could again be said in an unusual sense of Platonic dialogue, which,

engendered by a mixture of all the then existing forms and styles,

hovers midway between narrative, lyric and drama, between prose and

poetry, and has also thereby broken loose from the older strict law

of unity of linguistic form; a movement which was carried still

farther by the _cynic_ writers, who in the most promiscuous style,

oscillating to and fro betwixt prose and metrical forms, realised also

the literary picture of the "raving Socrates" whom they were wont to

represent in life. Platonic dialogue was as it were the boat in which

the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself together with all her

children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly obsequious to the

one steersman, Socrates, they now launched into a new world, which

never tired of looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession.

In very truth, Plato has given to all posterity the prototype of a new

form of art, the prototype of the _novel_ which must be designated as

the infinitely evolved Æsopian fable, in which poetry holds the same

rank with reference to dialectic philosophy as this same philosophy

held for many centuries with reference to theology: namely, the rank of

_ancilla._ This was the new position of poetry into which Plato forced

it under the pressure of the demon-inspired Socrates.

Here _philosophic thought_ overgrows art and compels it to cling close

to the trunk of dialectics. The _Apollonian_ tendency has chrysalised

in the logical schematism; just as something analogous in the case

of Euripides (and moreover a translation of the _Dionysian_ into the

naturalistic emotion) was forced upon our attention. Socrates, the

dialectical hero in Platonic drama, reminds us of the kindred nature

of the Euripidean hero, who has to defend his actions by arguments and

counter-arguments, and thereby so often runs the risk of forfeiting

our tragic pity; for who could mistake the _optimistic_ element

in the essence of dialectics, which celebrates a jubilee in every

conclusion, and can breathe only in cool clearness and consciousness:

the optimistic element, which, having once forced its way into tragedy,

must gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions, and necessarily impel it

to self-destruction--even to the death-leap into the bourgeois drama.

Let us but realise the consequences of the Socratic maxims: "Virtue is

knowledge; man only sins from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy":

these three fundamental forms of optimism involve the death of tragedy.

For the virtuous hero must now be a dialectician; there must now be a

necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, between

belief and morality; the transcendental justice of the plot in Æschylus

is now degraded to the superficial and audacious principle of poetic

justice with its usual _deus ex machina_.

How does the _chorus,_ and, in general, the entire Dionyso-musical

substratum of tragedy, now appear in the light of this new

Socrato-optimistic stage-world? As something accidental, as a readily

dispensable reminiscence of the origin of tragedy; while we have

in fact seen that the chorus can be understood only as the cause of

tragedy, and of the tragic generally. This perplexity with respect to

the chorus first manifests itself in Sophocles--an important sign that

the Dionysian basis of tragedy already begins to disintegrate with

him. He no longer ventures to entrust to the chorus the main share

of the effect, but limits its sphere to such an extent that it now

appears almost co-ordinate with the actors, just as if it were elevated

from the orchestra into the scene: whereby of course its character

is completely destroyed, notwithstanding that Aristotle countenances

this very theory of the chorus. This alteration of the position of

the chorus, which Sophocles at any rate recommended by his practice,

and, according to tradition, even by a treatise, is the first step

towards the _annihilation_ of the chorus, the phases of which follow

one another with alarming rapidity in Euripides, Agathon, and the New

Comedy. Optimistic dialectics drives, _music_ out of tragedy with the

scourge of its syllogisms: that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy,

which can be explained only as a manifestation and illustration of

Dionysian states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as the

dream-world of Dionysian ecstasy.

If, therefore, we are to assume an anti-Dionysian tendency operating

even before Socrates, which received in him only an unprecedentedly

grand expression, we must not shrink from the question as to what

a phenomenon like that of Socrates indicates: whom in view of the

Platonic dialogues we are certainly not entitled to regard as a purely

disintegrating, negative power. And though there can be no doubt

whatever that the most immediate effect of the Socratic impulse tended

to the dissolution of Dionysian tragedy, yet a profound experience of

Socrates' own life compels us to ask whether there is _necessarily_

only an antipodal relation between Socratism and art, and whether the

birth of an "artistic Socrates" is in general something contradictory

in itself.

For that despotic logician had now and then the feeling of a gap, or

void, a sentiment of semi-reproach, as of a possibly neglected duty

with respect to art. There often came to him, as he tells his friends

in prison, one and the same dream-apparition, which kept constantly

repeating to him: "Socrates, practise music." Up to his very last days

he solaces himself with the opinion that his philosophising is the

highest form of poetry, and finds it hard to believe that a deity will

remind him of the "common, popular music." Finally, when in prison,

he consents to practise also this despised music, in order thoroughly

to unburden his conscience. And in this frame of mind he composes

a poem on Apollo and turns a few Æsopian fables into verse. It was

something similar to the demonian warning voice which urged him to

these practices; it was because of his Apollonian insight that, like a

barbaric king, he did not understand the noble image of a god and was

in danger of sinning against a deity--through ignorance. The prompting

voice of the Socratic dream-vision is the only sign of doubtfulness

as to the limits of logical nature. "Perhaps "--thus he had to ask

himself--"what is not intelligible to me is not therefore unreasonable?

Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is banished?

Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of and supplement to

science?"

[18]

In me thou seest its benefit,--

To him who hath but little wit,

Through parables to tell the truth.

[19] Scheinbild = ειδολον.--TR.

15.

In the sense of these last portentous questions it must now be

indicated how the influence of Socrates (extending to the present

moment, indeed, to all futurity) has spread over posterity like an

ever-increasing shadow in the evening sun, and how this influence

again and again necessitates a regeneration of _art,_--yea, of art

already with metaphysical, broadest and profoundest sense,--and its own

eternity guarantees also the eternity of art.

Before this could be perceived, before the intrinsic dependence of

every art on the Greeks, the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, was

conclusively demonstrated, it had to happen to us with regard to these

Greeks as it happened to the Athenians with regard to Socrates. Nearly

every age and stage of culture has at some time or other sought with

deep displeasure to free itself from the Greeks, because in their

presence everything self-achieved, sincerely admired and apparently

quite original, seemed all of a sudden to lose life and colour

and shrink to an abortive copy, even to caricature. And so hearty

indignation breaks forth time after time against this presumptuous

little nation, which dared to designate as "barbaric" for all time

everything not native: who are they, one asks one's self, who, though

they possessed only an ephemeral historical splendour, ridiculously

restricted institutions, a dubious excellence in their customs, and

were even branded with ugly vices, yet lay claim to the dignity and

singular position among the peoples to which genius is entitled among

the masses. What a pity one has not been so fortunate as to find the

cup of hemlock with which such an affair could be disposed of without

ado: for all the poison which envy, calumny, and rankling resentment

engendered within themselves have not sufficed to destroy that

self-sufficient grandeur! And so one feels ashamed and afraid in the

presence of the Greeks: unless one prize truth above all things, and

dare also to acknowledge to one's self this truth, that the Greeks,

as charioteers, hold in their hands the reins of our own and of

every culture, but that almost always chariot and horses are of too

poor material and incommensurate with the glory of their guides, who

then will deem it sport to run such a team into an abyss: which they

themselves clear with the leap of Achilles.

In order to assign also to Socrates the dignity of such a leading

position, it will suffice to recognise in him the type of an unheard-of

form of existence, the type of the _theoretical man,_ with regard

to whose meaning and purpose it will be our next task to attain

an insight. Like the artist, the theorist also finds an infinite

satisfaction in what _is_ and, like the former, he is shielded by this

satisfaction from the practical ethics of pessimism with its lynx eyes

which shine only in the dark. For if the artist in every unveiling

of truth always cleaves with raptured eyes only to that which still

remains veiled after the unveiling, the theoretical man, on the other

hand, enjoys and contents himself with the cast-off veil, and finds

the consummation of his pleasure in the process of a continuously

successful unveiling through his own unaided efforts. There would

have been no science if it had only been concerned about that _one_

naked goddess and nothing else. For then its disciples would have been

obliged to feel like those who purposed to dig a hole straight through

the earth: each one of whom perceives that with the utmost lifelong

exertion he is able to excavate only a very little of the enormous

depth, which is again filled up before his eyes by the labours of his

successor, so that a third man seems to do well when on his own account

he selects a new spot for his attempts at tunnelling. If now some one

proves conclusively that the antipodal goal cannot be attained in this

direct way, who will still care to toil on in the old depths, unless he

has learned to content himself in the meantime with finding precious

stones or discovering natural laws? For that reason Lessing, the most

honest theoretical man, ventured to say that he cared more for the

search after truth than for truth itself: in saying which he revealed

the fundamental secret of science, to the astonishment, and indeed,

to the vexation of scientific men. Well, to be sure, there stands

alongside of this detached perception, as an excess of honesty, if not

of presumption, a profound _illusion_ which first came to the world

in the person of Socrates, the imperturbable belief that, by means

of the clue of causality, thinking reaches to the deepest abysses of

being, and that thinking is able not only to perceive being but even

to _correct_ it. This sublime metaphysical illusion is added as an

instinct to science and again and again leads the latter to its limits,

where it must change into _art; which is really the end, to be attained

by this mechanism_.

If we now look at Socrates in the light of this thought, he appears to

us as the first who could not only live, but--what is far more--also

die under the guidance of this instinct of science: and hence the

picture of the _dying, Socrates_, as the man delivered from the fear of

death by knowledge and argument, is the escutcheon, above the entrance

to science which reminds every one of its mission, namely, to make

existence appear to be comprehensible, and therefore to be justified:

for which purpose, if arguments do not suffice, _myth_ also must be

used, which I just now designated even as the necessary consequence,

yea, as the end of science.

He who once makes intelligible to himself how, after the death of

Socrates, the mystagogue of science, one philosophical school succeeds

another, like wave upon wave,--how an entirely unfore-shadowed

universal development of the thirst for knowledge in the widest

compass of the cultured world (and as the specific task for every

one highly gifted) led science on to the high sea from which since

then it has never again been able to be completely ousted; how

through the universality of this movement a common net of thought

was first stretched over the entire globe, with prospects, moreover,

of conformity to law in an entire solar system;--he who realises all

this, together with the amazingly high pyramid of our present-day

knowledge, cannot fail to see in Socrates the turning-point and vortex

of so-called universal history. For if one were to imagine the whole

incalculable sum of energy which has been used up by that universal

tendency,--employed, _not_ in the service of knowledge, but for the

practical, _i.e.,_ egoistical ends of individuals and peoples,--then

probably the instinctive love of life would be so much weakened in

universal wars of destruction and incessant migrations of peoples,

that, owing to the practice of suicide, the individual would perhaps

feel the last remnant of a sense of duty, when, like the native of

the Fiji Islands, as son he strangles his parents and, as friend, his

friend: a practical pessimism which might even give rise to a horrible

ethics of general slaughter out of pity--which, for the rest, exists

and has existed wherever art in one form or another, especially as

science and religion, has not appeared as a remedy and preventive of

that pestilential breath.

In view of this practical pessimism, Socrates is the archetype of

the theoretical optimist, who in the above-indicated belief in the

fathomableness of the nature of things, attributes to knowledge and

perception the power of a universal medicine, and sees in error and

evil. To penetrate into the depths of the nature of things, and to

separate true perception from error and illusion, appeared to the

Socratic man the noblest and even the only truly human calling: just as

from the time of Socrates onwards the mechanism of concepts, judgments,

and inferences was prized above all other capacities as the highest

activity and the most admirable gift of nature. Even the sublimest

moral acts, the stirrings of pity, of self-sacrifice, of heroism,

and that tranquillity of soul, so difficult of attainment, which the

Apollonian Greek called Sophrosyne, were derived by Socrates, and his

like-minded successors up to the present day, from the dialectics of

knowledge, and were accordingly designated as teachable. He who has

experienced in himself the joy of a Socratic perception, and felt how

it seeks to embrace, in constantly widening circles, the entire world

of phenomena, will thenceforth find no stimulus which could urge him

to existence more forcible than the desire to complete that conquest

and to knit the net impenetrably close. To a person thus minded the

Platonic Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely new form

of "Greek cheerfulness" and felicity of existence, which seeks to

discharge itself in actions, and will find its discharge for the most