part in maieutic and pedagogic influences on noble youths, with a view

to the ultimate production of genius.

But now science, spurred on by its powerful illusion, hastens

irresistibly to its limits, on which its optimism, hidden in the

essence of logic, is wrecked. For the periphery of the circle of

science has an infinite number of points, and while there is still no

telling how this circle can ever be completely measured, yet the noble

and gifted man, even before the middle of his career, inevitably comes

into contact with those extreme points of the periphery where he stares

at the inexplicable. When he here sees to his dismay how logic coils

round itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail--then the

new form of perception discloses itself, namely _tragic perception,_

which, in order even to be endured, requires art as a safeguard and

remedy.

If, with eyes strengthened and refreshed at the sight of the Greeks, we

look upon the highest spheres of the world that surrounds us, we behold

the avidity of the insatiate optimistic knowledge, of which Socrates is

the typical representative, transformed into tragic resignation and the

need of art: while, to be sure, this same avidity, in its lower stages,

has to exhibit itself as antagonistic to art, and must especially have

an inward detestation of Dionyso-tragic art, as was exemplified in the

opposition of Socratism to Æschylean tragedy.

Here then with agitated spirit we knock at the gates of the present and

the future: will that "transforming" lead to ever new configurations

of genius, and especially of the _music-practising Socrates_? Will the

net of art which is spread over existence, whether under the name of

religion or of science, be knit always more closely and delicately,

or is it destined to be torn to shreds under the restlessly barbaric

activity and whirl which is called "the present day"?--Anxious, yet

not disconsolate, we stand aloof for a little while, as the spectators

who are permitted to be witnesses of these tremendous struggles and

transitions. Alas! It is the charm of these struggles that he who

beholds them must also fight them!

16.

By this elaborate historical example we have endeavoured to make it

clear that tragedy perishes as surely by evanescence of the spirit of

music as it can be born only out of this spirit. In order to qualify

the singularity of this assertion, and, on the other hand, to disclose

the source of this insight of ours, we must now confront with clear

vision the analogous phenomena of the present time; we must enter

into the midst of these struggles, which, as I said just now, are

being carried on in the highest spheres of our present world between

the insatiate optimistic perception and the tragic need of art. In

so doing I shall leave out of consideration all other antagonistic

tendencies which at all times oppose art, especially tragedy, and which

at present again extend their sway triumphantly, to such an extent that

of the theatrical arts only the farce and the ballet, for example, put

forth their blossoms, which perhaps not every one cares to smell, in

tolerably rich luxuriance. I will speak only of the _Most Illustrious

Opposition_ to the tragic conception of things--and by this I mean

essentially optimistic science, with its ancestor Socrates at the head

of it. Presently also the forces will be designated which seem to me

to guarantee _a re-birth of tragedy_--and who knows what other blessed

hopes for the German genius!

Before we plunge into the midst of these struggles, let us array

ourselves in the armour of our hitherto acquired knowledge. In

contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts from one

exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of every work of

art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks,

Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the living and conspicuous

representatives of _two_ worlds of art which differ in their intrinsic

essence and in their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as the

transfiguring genius of the _principium individuationis_ through

which alone the redemption in appearance is to be truly attained,

while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individuation

is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being,[20] to the

innermost heart of things. This extraordinary antithesis, which opens

up yawningly between plastic art as the Apollonian and music as the

Dionysian art, has become manifest to only one of the great thinkers,

to such an extent that, even without this key to the symbolism of the

Hellenic divinities, he allowed to music a different character and

origin in advance of all the other arts, because, unlike them, it is

not a copy of the phenomenon, but a direct copy of the will itself, and

therefore represents _the metaphysical of everything physical in the

world_, the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon. (Schopenhauer, _Welt

als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. 310.) To this most important perception

of æsthetics (with which, taken in a serious sense, æsthetics properly

commences), Richard Wagner, by way of confirmation of its eternal

truth, affixed his seal, when he asserted in his _Beethoven_ that

music must be judged according to æsthetic principles quite different

from those which apply to the plastic arts, and not, in general,

according to the category of beauty: although an erroneous æsthetics,

inspired by a misled and degenerate art, has by virtue of the concept

of beauty prevailing in the plastic domain accustomed itself to demand

of music an effect analogous to that of the works of plastic art,

namely the suscitating _delight in beautiful forms._ Upon perceiving

this extraordinary antithesis, I felt a strong inducement to approach

the essence of Greek tragedy, and, by means of it, the profoundest

revelation of Hellenic genius: for I at last thought myself to be in

possession of a charm to enable me--far beyond the phraseology of our

usual æsthetics--to represent vividly to my mind the primitive problem

of tragedy: whereby such an astounding insight into the Hellenic

character was afforded me that it necessarily seemed as if our proudly

comporting classico-Hellenic science had thus far contrived to subsist

almost exclusively on phantasmagoria and externalities.

Perhaps we may lead up to this primitive problem with the question:

what æsthetic effect results when the intrinsically separate

art-powers, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, enter into concurrent

actions? Or, in briefer form: how is music related to image and

concept?--Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner, with especial reference to

this point, accredits with an unsurpassable clearness and perspicuity

of exposition, expresses himself most copiously on the subject in

the following passage which I shall cite here at full length[21]

(_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. p. 309): "According to all

this, we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as

two different expressions of the same thing,[20] which is therefore

itself the only medium of the analogy between these two expressions,

so that a knowledge of this medium is required in order to understand

that analogy. Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the

world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related

indeed to the universality of concepts, much as these are related to

the particular things. Its universality, however, is by no means the

empty universality of abstraction, but of quite a different kind, and

is united with thorough and distinct definiteness. In this respect it

resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal

forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all

_a priori_, and yet are not abstract but perceptiple and thoroughly

determinate. All possible efforts, excitements and manifestations of

will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in

the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite

number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere

form, without the material, always according to the thing-in-itself,

not the phenomenon,--of which they reproduce the very soul and essence

as it were, without the body. This deep relation which music bears to

the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable

music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to

disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most

accurate and distinct commentary upon it; as also the fact that whoever

gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony seems to see

all the possible events of life and the world take place in himself:

nevertheless upon reflection he can find no likeness between the music

and the things that passed before his mind. For, as we have said, music

is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a

copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectivity

of the will, but the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore

represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, and

the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as

well call the world embodied music as embodied will: and this is the

reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real

life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance; all the

more so, to be sure, in proportion as its melody is analogous to the

inner spirit of the given phenomenon. It rests upon this that we are

able to set a poem to music as a song, or a perceptible representation

as a pantomime, or both as an opera. Such particular pictures of human

life, set to the universal language of music, are never bound to it

or correspond to it with stringent necessity, but stand to it only

in the relation of an example chosen at will to a general concept.

In the determinateness of the real they represent that which music

expresses in the universality of mere form. For melodies are to a

certain extent, like general concepts, an abstraction from the actual.

This actual world, then, the world of particular things, affords the

object of perception, the special and the individual, the particular

case, both to the universality of concepts and to the universality of

the melodies. But these two universalities are in a certain respect

opposed to each other; for the concepts contain only the forms, which

are first of all abstracted from perception,--the separated outward

shell of things, as it were,--and hence they are, in the strictest

sense of the term, _abstracta_; music, on the other hand, gives the

inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things. This

relation may be very well expressed in the language of the schoolmen,

by saying: the concepts are the _universalia post rem,_ but music gives

the _universalia ante rem,_ and the real world the _universalia in

re._--But that in general a relation is possible between a composition

and a perceptible representation rests, as we have said, upon the

fact that both are simply different expressions of the same inner

being of the world. When now, in the particular case, such a relation

is actually given, that is to say, when the composer has been able to

express in the universal language of music the emotions of will which

constitute the heart of an event, then the melody of the song, the

music of the opera, is expressive. But the analogy discovered by the

composer between the two must have proceeded from the direct knowledge

of the nature of the world unknown to his reason, and must not be an

imitation produced with conscious intention by means of conceptions;

otherwise the music does not express the inner nature of the will

itself, but merely gives an inadequate imitation of its phenomenon: all

specially imitative music does this."

We have therefore, according to the doctrine of Schopenhauer, an

immediate understanding of music as the language of the will, and

feel our imagination stimulated to give form to this invisible and

yet so actively stirred spirit-world which speaks to us, and prompted

to embody it in an analogous example. On the other hand, image and

concept, under the influence of a truly conformable music, acquire a

higher significance. Dionysian art therefore is wont to exercise--two

kinds of influences, on the Apollonian art-faculty: music firstly

incites to the _symbolic intuition_ of Dionysian universality, and,

secondly, it causes the symbolic image to stand forth _in its fullest

significance._ From these facts, intelligible in themselves and not

inaccessible to profounder observation, I infer the capacity of music

to give birth to _myth,_ that is to say, the most significant exemplar,

and precisely _tragic_ myth: the myth which speaks of Dionysian

knowledge in symbols. In the phenomenon of the lyrist, I have set forth

that in him music strives to express itself with regard to its nature

in Apollonian images. If now we reflect that music in its highest

potency must seek to attain also to its highest symbolisation, we must

deem it possible that it also knows how to find the symbolic expression

of its inherent Dionysian wisdom; and where shall we have to seek for

this expression if not in tragedy and, in general, in the conception of

the _tragic_?

From the nature of art, as it is ordinarily conceived according to

the single category of appearance and beauty, the tragic cannot be

honestly deduced at all; it is only through the spirit of music that

we understand the joy in the annihilation of the individual. For in

the particular examples of such annihilation only is the eternal

phenomenon of Dionysian art made clear to us, which gives expression

to the will in its omnipotence, as it were, behind the _principium

individuationis,_ the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and in

spite of all annihilation. The metaphysical delight in the tragic

is a translation of the instinctively unconscious Dionysian wisdom

into the language of the scene: the hero, the highest manifestation

of the will, is disavowed for our pleasure, because he is only

phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected

by his annihilation. "We believe in eternal life," tragedy exclaims;

while music is the proximate idea of this life. Plastic art has an

altogether different object: here Apollo vanquishes the suffering of

the individual by the radiant glorification of the _eternity of the

phenomenon_; here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life;

pain is in a manner surreptitiously obliterated from the features of

nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature

speaks to us with its true undissembled voice: "Be as I am! Amidst the

ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally creative primordial mother,

eternally impelling to existence, self-satisfying eternally with this

change of phenomena!"

[20] Cf. _World and Will as Idea,_ I. p. 339, trans. by

Haldane and Kemp.

[21] That is "the will" as understood by Schopenhauer.--TR.

17.

Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the eternal joy of

existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind

phenomena. We are to perceive how all that comes into being must be

ready for a sorrowful end; we are compelled to look into the terrors of

individual existence--yet we are not to become torpid: a metaphysical

comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the transforming

figures. We are really for brief moments Primordial Being itself,

and feel its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence; the

struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear to us as

something necessary, considering the surplus of innumerable forms of

existence which throng and push one another into life, considering

the exuberant fertility of the universal will. We are pierced by the

maddening sting of these pains at the very moment when we have become,

as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial joy in existence,

and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility

and eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy

living beings, not as individuals, but as the _one_ living being, with

whose procreative joy we are blended.

The history of the rise of Greek tragedy now tells us with luminous

precision that the tragic art of the Greeks was really born of the

spirit of music: with which conception we believe we have done justice

for the first time to the original and most astonishing significance of

the chorus. At the same time, however, we must admit that the import of

tragic myth as set forth above never became transparent with sufficient

lucidity to the Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers; their

heroes speak, as it were, more superficially than they act; the myth

does not at all find its adequate objectification in the spoken word.

The structure of the scenes and the conspicuous images reveal a deeper

wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts: the same

being also observed in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for instance, in an

analogous manner talks more superficially than he acts, so that the

previously mentioned lesson of Hamlet is to be gathered not from his

words, but from a more profound contemplation and survey of the whole.

With respect to Greek tragedy, which of course presents itself to us

only as word-drama, I have even intimated that the incongruence between

myth and expression might easily tempt us to regard it as shallower

and less significant than it really is, and accordingly to postulate

for it a more superficial effect than it must have had according to

the testimony of the ancients: for how easily one forgets that what

the word-poet did not succeed in doing, namely realising the highest

spiritualisation and ideality of myth, he might succeed in doing

every moment as creative musician! We require, to be sure, almost by

philological method to reconstruct for ourselves the ascendency of

musical influence in order to receive something of the incomparable

comfort which must be characteristic of true tragedy. Even this musical

ascendency, however, would only have been felt by us as such had

we been Greeks: while in the entire development of Greek music--as

compared with the infinitely richer music known and familiar to us--we

imagine we hear only the youthful song of the musical genius intoned

with a feeling of diffidence. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests

say, eternal children, and in tragic art also they are only children

who do not know what a sublime play-thing has originated under their

hands and--is being demolished.

That striving of the spirit of music for symbolic and mythical

manifestation, which increases from the beginnings of lyric poetry to

Attic tragedy, breaks off all of a sudden immediately after attaining

luxuriant development, and disappears, as it were, from the surface

of Hellenic art: while the Dionysian view of things born of this

striving lives on in Mysteries and, in its strangest metamorphoses and

debasements, does not cease to attract earnest natures. Will it not one

day rise again as art out of its mystic depth?

Here the question occupies us, whether the power by the counteracting

influence of which tragedy perished, has for all time strength enough

to prevent the artistic reawaking of tragedy and of the tragic view

of things. If ancient tragedy was driven from its course by the

dialectical desire for knowledge and the optimism of science, it might

be inferred that there is an eternal conflict between _the theoretic_

and _the tragic view of things,_ and only after the spirit of science

has been led to its boundaries, and its claim to universal validity

has been destroyed by the evidence of these boundaries, can we hope

for a re-birth of tragedy: for which form of culture we should have to

use the symbol _of the music-practising Socrates_ in the sense spoken

of above. In this contrast, I understand by the spirit of science the

belief which first came to light in the person of Socrates,--the belief

in the fathomableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.

He who recalls the immediate consequences of this restlessly

onward-pressing spirit of science will realise at once that _myth_

was annihilated by it, and that, in consequence of this annihilation,

poetry was driven as a homeless being from her natural ideal soil.

If we have rightly assigned to music the capacity to reproduce myth

from itself, we may in turn expect to find the spirit of science on

the path where it inimically opposes this mythopoeic power of music.

This takes place in the development of the _New Attic Dithyramb,_ the

music of which no longer expressed the inner essence, the will itself,

but only rendered the phenomenon insufficiently, in an imitation by

means of concepts; from which intrinsically degenerate music the truly

musical natures turned away with the same repugnance that they felt

for the art-destroying tendency of Socrates. The unerring instinct of

Aristophanes surely did the proper thing when it comprised Socrates

himself, the tragedy of Euripides, and the music of the new Dithyrambic

poets in the same feeling of hatred, and perceived in all three

phenomena the symptoms of a degenerate culture. By this New Dithyramb,

music has in an outrageous manner been made the imitative portrait of

phenomena, for instance, of a battle or a storm at sea, and has thus,

of course, been entirely deprived of its mythopoeic power. For if it

endeavours to excite our delight only by compelling us to seek external

analogies between a vital or natural process and certain rhythmical

figures and characteristic sounds of music; if our understanding is

expected to satisfy itself with the perception of these analogies, we

are reduced to a frame of mind in which the reception of the mythical

is impossible; for the myth as a unique exemplar of generality

and truth towering into the infinite, desires to be conspicuously

perceived. The truly Dionysean music presents itself to us as such

a general mirror of the universal will: the conspicuous event which

is refracted in this mirror expands at once for our consciousness to

the copy of an eternal truth. Conversely, such a conspicious event is

at once divested of every mythical character by the tone-painting

of the New Dithyramb; music has here become a wretched copy of the

phenomenon, and therefore infinitely poorer than the phenomenon itself:

through which poverty it still further reduces even the phenomenon for

our consciousness, so that now, for instance, a musically imitated

battle of this sort exhausts itself in marches, signal-sounds, etc.,

and our imagination is arrested precisely by these superficialities.

Tone-painting is therefore in every respect the counterpart of true

music with its mythopoeic power: through it the phenomenon, poor in

itself, is made still poorer, while through an isolated Dionysian music

the phenomenon is evolved and expanded into a picture of the world.

It was an immense triumph of the non-Dionysian spirit, when, in the

development of the New Dithyramb, it had estranged music from itself

and reduced it to be the slave of phenomena. Euripides, who, albeit in

a higher sense, must be designated as a thoroughly unmusical nature,

is for this very reason a passionate adherent of the New Dithyrambic

Music, and with the liberality of a freebooter employs all its

effective turns and mannerisms.

In another direction also we see at work the power of this

un-Dionysian, myth-opposing spirit, when we turn our eyes to the

prevalence of _character representation_ and psychological refinement

from Sophocles onwards. The character must no longer be expanded into

an eternal type, but, on the contrary, must operate individually

through artistic by-traits and shadings, through the nicest precision

of all lines, in such a manner that the spectator is in general no

longer conscious of the myth, but of the mighty nature-myth and the

imitative power of the artist. Here also we observe the victory of

the phenomenon over the Universal, and the delight in the particular

quasi-anatomical preparation; we actually breathe the air of a

theoretical world, in which scientific knowledge is valued more highly

than the artistic reflection of a universal law. The movement along

the line of the representation of character proceeds rapidly: while

Sophocles still delineates complete characters and employs myth for

their refined development, Euripides already delineates only prominent

individual traits of character, which can express themselves in violent

bursts of passion; in the New Attic Comedy, however, there are only

masks with _one_ expression: frivolous old men, duped panders, and

cunning slaves in untiring repetition. Where now is the mythopoeic

spirit of music? What is still left now of music is either excitatory

music or souvenir music, that is, either a stimulant for dull and

used-up nerves, or tone-painting. As regards the former, it hardly

matters about the text set to it: the heroes and choruses of Euripides

are already dissolute enough when once they begin to sing; to what pass

must things have come with his brazen successors?

The new un-Dionysian spirit, however, manifests itself most clearly in

the _dénouements_ of the new dramas. In the Old Tragedy one could feel

at the close the metaphysical comfort, without which the delight in

tragedy cannot be explained at all; the conciliating tones from another

world sound purest, perhaps, in the Œdipus at Colonus. Now that the

genius of music has fled from tragedy, tragedy is, strictly speaking,

dead: for from whence could one now draw the metaphysical comfort? One

sought, therefore, for an earthly unravelment of the tragic dissonance;

the hero, after he had been sufficiently tortured by fate, reaped a

well-deserved reward through a superb marriage or divine tokens of

favour. The hero had turned gladiator, on whom, after being liberally

battered about and covered with wounds, freedom was occasionally

bestowed. The _deus ex machina_ took the place of metaphysical comfort.

I will not say that the tragic view of things was everywhere completely

destroyed by the intruding spirit of the un-Dionysian: we only know

that it was compelled to flee from art into the under-world as it were,

in the degenerate form of a secret cult. Over the widest extent of the

Hellenic character, however, there raged the consuming blast of this

spirit, which manifests itself in the form of "Greek cheerfulness,"

which we have already spoken of as a senile, unproductive love of

existence; this cheerfulness is the counterpart of the splendid

"naïveté" of the earlier Greeks, which, according to the characteristic

indicated above, must be conceived as the blossom of the Apollonian

culture growing out of a dark abyss, as the victory which the Hellenic

will, through its mirroring of beauty, obtains over suffering and the

wisdom of suffering. The noblest manifestation of that other form of

"Greek cheerfulness," the Alexandrine, is the cheerfulness of the

_theoretical man_: it exhibits the same symptomatic characteristics as

I have just inferred concerning the spirit of the un-Dionysian:--it

combats Dionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve myth, it

substitutes for metaphysical comfort an earthly consonance, in fact, a

_deus ex machina_ of its own, namely the god of machines and crucibles,

that is, the powers of the genii of nature recognised and employed in

the service of higher egoism; it believes in amending the world by

knowledge, in guiding life by science, and that it can really confine

the individual within a narrow sphere of solvable problems, where he

cheerfully says to life: "I desire thee: it is worth while to know

thee."

18.

It is an eternal phenomenon: the avidious will can always, by means

of an illusion spread over things, detain its creatures in life

and compel them to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of

knowledge and the vain hope of being able thereby to heal the eternal

wound of existence; another is ensnared by art's seductive veil of

beauty fluttering before his eyes; still another by the metaphysical

comfort that eternal life flows on indestructibly beneath the whirl of

phenomena: to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful

illusions which the will has always at hand. These three specimens of

illusion are on the whole designed only for the more nobly endowed

natures, who in general feel profoundly the weight and burden of

existence, and must be deluded into forgetfulness of their displeasure

by exquisite stimulants. All that we call culture is made up of these

stimulants; and, according to the proportion of the ingredients, we

have either a specially _Socratic_ or _artistic_ or _tragic culture_:

or, if historical exemplifications are wanted, there is either an

Alexandrine or a Hellenic or a Buddhistic culture.

Our whole modern world is entangled in the meshes of Alexandrine

culture, and recognises as its ideal the _theorist_ equipped with

the most potent means of knowledge, and labouring in the service of

science, of whom the archetype and progenitor is Socrates. All our

educational methods have originally this ideal in view: every other

form of existence must struggle onwards wearisomely beside it, as

something tolerated, but not intended. In an almost alarming manner the

cultured man was here found for a long time only in the form of the

scholar: even our poetical arts have been forced to evolve from learned

imitations, and in the main effect of the rhyme we still recognise the

origin of our poetic form from artistic experiments with a non-native

and thoroughly learned language. How unintelligible must _Faust,_ the

modern cultured man, who is in himself intelligible, have appeared to a

true Greek,--Faust, storming discontentedly through all the faculties,

devoted to magic and the devil from a desire for knowledge, whom we

have only to place alongside of Socrates for the purpose of comparison,

in order to see that modern man begins to divine the boundaries of

this Socratic love of perception and longs for a coast in the wide

waste of the ocean of knowledge. When Goethe on one occasion said to

Eckermann with reference to Napoleon: "Yes, my good friend, there is

also a productiveness of deeds," he reminded us in a charmingly naïve

manner that the non-theorist is something incredible and astounding to

modern man; so that the wisdom of Goethe is needed once more in order

to discover that such a surprising form of existence is comprehensible,

nay even pardonable.

Now, we must not hide from ourselves what is concealed in the heart

of this Socratic culture: Optimism, deeming itself absolute! Well, we

must not be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen,--if society,

leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually

begins to tremble through wanton agitations and desires, if the belief

in the earthly happiness of all, if the belief in the possibility of

such a general intellectual culture is gradually transformed into the

threatening demand for such an Alexandrine earthly happiness, into

the conjuring of a Euripidean _deus ex machina._ Let us mark this

well: the Alexandrine culture requires a slave class, to be able to

exist permanently: but, in its optimistic view of life, it denies the

necessity of such a class, and consequently, when the effect of its

beautifully seductive and tranquillising utterances about the "dignity

of man" and the "dignity of labour" is spent, it gradually drifts

towards a dreadful destination. There is nothing more terrible than

a barbaric slave class, who have learned to regard their existence

as an injustice, and now prepare to take vengeance, not only for

themselves, but for all generations. In the face of such threatening

storms, who dares to appeal with confident spirit to our pale and

exhausted religions, which even in their foundations have degenerated

into scholastic religions?--so that myth, the necessary prerequisite

of every religion, is already paralysed everywhere, and even in this

domain the optimistic spirit--which we have just designated as the

annihilating germ of society--has attained the mastery.

While the evil slumbering in the heart of theoretical culture gradually

begins to disquiet modern man, and makes him anxiously ransack the

stores of his experience for means to avert the danger, though not

believing very much in these means; while he, therefore, begins to

divine the consequences his position involves: great, universally

gifted natures have contrived, with an incredible amount of thought, to

make use of the apparatus of science itself, in order to point out the

limits and the relativity of knowledge generally, and thus definitely

to deny the claim of science to universal validity and universal ends:

with which demonstration the illusory notion was for the first time

recognised as such, which pretends, with the aid of causality, to be

able to fathom the innermost essence of things. The extraordinary

courage and wisdom of _Kant_ and _Schopenhauer_ have succeeded in

gaining the most, difficult, victory, the victory over the optimism

hidden in the essence of logic, which optimism in turn is the basis of

our culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently unobjectionable

_æterna veritates,_ believed in the intelligibility and solvability of

all the riddles of the world, and treated space, time, and causality

as totally unconditioned laws of the most universal validity, Kant, on

the other hand, showed that these served in reality only to elevate the

mere phenomenon, the work of Mâyâ, to the sole and highest reality,

putting it in place of the innermost and true essence of things, thus

making the actual knowledge of this essence impossible, that is,

according to the expression of Schopenhauer, to lull the dreamer still

more soundly asleep (_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. 498). With

this knowledge a culture is inaugurated which I venture to designate as

a tragic culture; the most important characteristic of which is that

wisdom takes the place of science as the highest end,--wisdom, which,

uninfluenced by the seductive distractions of the sciences, turns

with unmoved eye to the comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to

apprehend therein the eternal suffering as its own with sympathetic

feelings of love. Let us imagine a rising generation with this

undauntedness of vision, with this heroic desire for the prodigious,

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

daring spirit 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,--namely, tragedy, as the Hellena

belonging to him, and that he should exclaim with Faust:

Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,

In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?[21]

But now that the Socratic culture has been shaken from two directions,

and is only able to hold the sceptre of its infallibility with

trembling hands,--once by the fear of its own conclusions which it at

length begins to surmise, and again, because it is no longer convinced

with its former naïve trust of the eternal validity of its foundation,

--it is a sad spectacle to behold how the dance of its thought always

rushes longingly on new forms, to embrace them, and then, shuddering,

lets them go of a sudden, as Mephistopheles does the seductive Lamiæ.

It is certainly the symptom of the "breach" which all are wont to speak

of as the primordial suffering of modern culture that the theoretical

man, alarmed and dissatisfied at his own conclusions, no longer dares

to entrust himself to the terrible ice-stream of existence: he runs

timidly up and down the bank. He no longer wants to have anything

entire, with all the natural cruelty of things, so thoroughly has he

been spoiled by his optimistic contemplation. Besides, he feels that

a culture built up on the principles of science must perish when it

begins to grow _illogical,_ that is, to avoid its own conclusions.

Our art reveals this universal trouble: in vain does one seek help by

imitating all the great productive periods and natures, in vain does

one accumulate the entire "world-literature" around modern man for

his comfort, in vain does one place one's self in the midst of the

art-styles and artists of all ages, so that one may give names to them

as Adam did to the beasts: one still continues the eternal hungerer,

the "critic" without joy and energy, the Alexandrine man, who is in

the main a librarian and corrector of proofs, and who, pitiable wretch

goes blind from the dust of books and printers' errors.

[21] Cf. Introduction, p. 14.

19.

We cannot designate the intrinsic substance of Socratic culture more

distinctly than by calling it _the culture of the opera_: for it is in

this department that culture has expressed itself with special naïveté

concerning its aims and perceptions, which is sufficiently surprising

when we compare the genesis of the opera and the facts of operatic

development with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and Dionysian.

I call to mind first of all the origin of the _stilo rappresentativo_

and the recitative. Is it credible that this thoroughly externalised

operatic music, incapable of devotion, could be received and cherished

with enthusiastic favour, as a re-birth, as it were, of all true music,

by the very age in which the ineffably sublime and sacred music of

Palestrina had originated? And who, on the other hand, would think of

making only the diversion-craving luxuriousness of those Florentine

circles and the vanity of their dramatic singers responsible for the

love of the opera which spread with such rapidity? That in the same

age, even among the same people, this passion for a half-musical

mode of speech should awaken alongside of the vaulted structure

of Palestrine harmonies which the entire Christian Middle Age had

been building up, I can explain to myself only by a co-operating

_extra-artistic tendency_ in the essence of the recitative.

The listener, who insists on distinctly hearing the words under the

music, has his wishes met by the singer in that he speaks rather than

sings, and intensifies the pathetic expression of the words in this

half-song: by this intensification of the pathos he facilitates the

understanding of the words and surmounts the remaining half of the

music. The specific danger which now threatens him is that in some

unguarded moment he may give undue importance to music, which would

forthwith result in the destruction of the pathos of the speech and

the distinctness of the words: while, on the other hand, he always

feels himself impelled to musical delivery and to virtuose exhibition

of vocal talent. Here the "poet" comes to his aid, who knows how to

provide him with abundant opportunities for lyrical interjections,

repetitions of words and sentences, etc.,--at which places the singer,

now in the purely musical element, can rest himself without minding the

words. This alternation of emotionally impressive, yet only half-sung

speech and wholly sung interjections, which is characteristic of the

_stilo rappresentativo,_ this rapidly changing endeavour to operate

now on the conceptional and representative faculty of the hearer, now

on his musical sense, is something so thoroughly unnatural and withal

so intrinsically contradictory both to the Apollonian and Dionysian

artistic impulses, that one has to infer an origin of the recitative

foreign to all artistic instincts. The recitative must be defined,

according to this description, as the combination of epic and lyric

delivery, not indeed as an intrinsically stable combination which

could not be attained in the case of such totally disparate elements,

but an entirely superficial mosaic conglutination, such as is totally

unprecedented in the domain of nature and experience. _But this was

not the opinion of the inventors of the recitative:_ they themselves,

and their age with them, believed rather that the mystery of antique

music had been solved by this _stilo rappresentativo,_ in which, as

they thought, the only explanation of the enormous influence of an

Orpheus, an Amphion, and even of Greek tragedy was to be found. The new

style was regarded by them as the re-awakening of the most effective

music, the Old Greek music: indeed, with the universal and popular

conception of the Homeric world _as the primitive world,_ they could

abandon themselves to the dream of having descended once more into the

paradisiac beginnings of mankind, wherein music also must needs have

had the unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence of which the poets

could give such touching accounts in their pastoral plays. Here we see

into the internal process of development of this thoroughly modern

variety of art, the opera: a powerful need here acquires an art, but

it is a need of an unæsthetic kind: the yearning for the idyll, the

belief in the prehistoric existence of the artistic, good man. The

recitative was regarded as the rediscovered language of this primitive

man; the opera as the recovered land of this idyllically or heroically

good creature, who in every action follows at the same time a natural

artistic impulse, who sings a little along with all he has to say, in

order to sing immediately with full voice on the slightest emotional

excitement. It is now a matter of indifference to us that the humanists

of those days combated the old ecclesiastical representation of man

as naturally corrupt and lost, with this new-created picture of the

paradisiac artist: so that opera may be understood as the oppositional

dogma of the good man, whereby however a solace was at the same time

found for the pessimism to which precisely the seriously-disposed

men of that time were most strongly incited, owing to the frightful

uncertainty of all conditions of life. It is enough to have perceived

that the intrinsic charm, and therefore the genesis, of this new form

of art lies in the gratification of an altogether unæsthetic need, in

the optimistic glorification of man as such, in the conception of the

primitive man as the man naturally good and artistic: a principle of

the opera which has gradually changed into a threatening and terrible

_demand,_ which, in face of the socialistic movements of the present

time, we can no longer ignore. The "good primitive man" wants his

rights: what paradisiac prospects!

I here place by way of parallel still another equally obvious

confirmation of my view that opera is built up on the same principles

as our Alexandrine culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man,

of the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising

facts in the whole history of art. It was the demand of thoroughly

unmusical hearers that the words must above all be understood, so

that according to them a re-birth of music is only to be expected

when some mode of singing has been discovered in which the text-word

lords over the counterpoint as the master over the servant. For the

words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic

system as the soul is nobler than the body. It was in accordance with

the laically unmusical crudeness of these views that the combination

of music, picture and expression was effected in the beginnings of

the opera: in the spirit of this æsthetics the first experiments

were also made in the leading laic circles of Florence by the poets

and singers patronised there. The man incapable of art creates for

himself a species of art precisely because he is the inartistic man

as such. Because he does not divine the Dionysian depth of music, he

changes his musical taste into appreciation of the understandable

word-and-tone-rhetoric of the passions in the _stilo rappresentativo,_

and into the voluptuousness of the arts of song; because he is unable

to behold a vision, he forces the machinist and the decorative artist

into his service; because he cannot apprehend the true nature of the

artist, he conjures up the "artistic primitive man" to suit his taste,

that is, the man who sings and recites verses under the influence

of passion. He dreams himself into a time when passion suffices to

generate songs and poems: as if emotion had ever been able to create

anything artistic. The postulate of the opera is a false belief

concerning the artistic process, in fact, the idyllic belief that every

sentient man is an artist. In the sense of this belief, opera is the

expression of the taste of the laity in art, who dictate their laws

with the cheerful optimism of the theorist.

Should we desire to unite in one the two conceptions just set forth

as influential in the origin of opera, it would only remain for us to

speak of an _idyllic tendency of the opera_: in which connection we

may avail ourselves exclusively of the phraseology and illustration of

Schiller.[22] "Nature and the ideal," he says, "are either objects of

grief, when the former is represented as lost, the latter unattained;

or both are objects of joy, in that they are represented as real.

The first case furnishes the elegy in its narrower signification,

the second the idyll in its widest sense." Here we must at once call

attention to the common characteristic of these two conceptions in

operatic genesis, namely, that in them the ideal is not regarded as

unattained or nature as lost Agreeably to this sentiment, there was

a primitive age of man when he lay close to the heart of nature,

and, owing to this naturalness, had attained the ideal of mankind in

a paradisiac goodness and artist-organisation: from which perfect

primitive man all of us were supposed to be descended; whose faithful

copy we were in fact still said to be: only we had to cast off some

few things in order to recognise ourselves once more as this primitive

man, on the strength of a voluntary renunciation of superfluous

learnedness, of super-abundant culture. It was to such a concord of

nature and the ideal, to an idyllic reality, that the cultured man

of the Renaissance suffered himself to be led back by his operatic

imitation of Greek tragedy; he made use of this tragedy, as Dante made

use of Vergil, in order to be led up to the gates of paradise: while

from this point he went on without assistance and passed over from an

imitation of the highest form of Greek art to a "restoration of all

things," to an imitation of man's original art-world. What delightfully

naïve hopefulness of these daring endeavours, in the very heart of

theoretical culture!--solely to be explained by the comforting belief,

that "man-in-himself" is the eternally virtuous hero of the opera,

the eternally fluting or singing shepherd, who must always in the end

rediscover himself as such, if he has at any time really lost himself;

solely the fruit of the optimism, which here rises like a sweetishly

seductive column of vapour out of the depth of the Socratic conception

of the world.

The features of the opera therefore do not by any means exhibit the

elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss, but rather the cheerfulness of

eternal rediscovery, the indolent delight in an idyllic reality which

one can at least represent to one's self each moment as real: and in

so doing one will perhaps surmise some day that this supposed reality

is nothing but a fantastically silly dawdling, concerning which every

one, who could judge it by the terrible earnestness of true nature

and compare it with the actual primitive scenes of the beginnings of

mankind, would have to call out with loathing: Away with the phantom!

Nevertheless one would err if one thought it possible to frighten

away merely by a vigorous shout such a dawdling thing as the opera,

as if it were a spectre. He who would destroy the opera must join

issue with Alexandrine cheerfulness, which expresses itself so naïvely

therein concerning its favourite representation; of which in fact

it is the specific form of art. But what is to be expected for art

itself from the operation of a form of art, the beginnings of which

do not at all lie in the æsthetic province; which has rather stolen

over from a half-moral sphere into the artistic domain, and has been

able only now and then to delude us concerning this hybrid origin? By

what sap is this parasitic opera-concern nourished, if not by that

of true art? Must we not suppose that the highest and indeed the

truly serious task of art--to free the eye from its glance into the

horrors of night and to deliver the "subject" by the healing balm of

appearance from the spasms of volitional agitations--will degenerate

under the influence of its idyllic seductions and Alexandrine

adulation to an empty dissipating tendency, to pastime? What will

become of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and Apollonian in such

an amalgamation of styles as I have exhibited in the character of the

_stilo rappresentativo_? where music is regarded as the servant, the

text as the master, where music is compared with the body, the text

with the soul? where at best the highest aim will be the realisation

of a paraphrastic tone-painting, just as formerly in the New Attic

Dithyramb? where music is completely alienated from its true dignity

of being, the Dionysian mirror of the world, so that the only thing

left to it is, as a slave of phenomena, to imitate the formal character

thereof, and to excite an external pleasure in the play of lines and

proportions. On close observation, this fatal influence of the opera

on music is seen to coincide absolutely with the universal development

of modern music; the optimism lurking in the genesis of the opera and

in the essence of culture represented thereby, has, with alarming

rapidity, succeeded in divesting music of its Dionyso-cosmic mission

and in impressing on it a playfully formal and pleasurable character: a

change with which perhaps only the metamorphosis of the Æschylean man

into the cheerful Alexandrine man could be compared.

If, however, in the exemplification herewith indicated we have rightly

associated the evanescence of the Dionysian spirit with a most

striking, but hitherto unexplained transformation and degeneration of

the Hellene--what hopes must revive in us when the most trustworthy

auspices guarantee _the reverse process, the gradual awakening of

the Dionysian spirit_ in our modern world! It is impossible for the

divine strength of Herakles to languish for ever in voluptuous bondage

to Omphale. Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power

has arisen which has nothing in common with the primitive conditions

of Socratic culture, and can neither be explained nor excused

thereby, but is rather regarded by this culture as something terribly

inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile,--namely, _German music_ as

we have to understand it, especially in its vast solar orbit from

Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. What even under the most

favourable circumstances can the knowledge-craving Socratism of our

days do with this demon rising from unfathomable depths? Neither by

means of the zig-zag and arabesque work of operatic melody, nor with

the aid of the arithmetical counting board of fugue and contrapuntal

dialectics is the formula to be found, in the trebly powerful light[23]

of which one could subdue this demon and compel it to speak. What

a spectacle, when our æsthetes, with a net of "beauty" peculiar to

themselves, now pursue and clutch at the genius of music romping

about before them with incomprehensible life, and in so doing display

activities which are not to be judged by the standard of eternal beauty

any more than by the standard of the sublime. Let us but observe these

patrons of music as they are, at close range, when they call out so

indefatigably "beauty! beauty!" to discover whether they have the marks

of nature's darling children who are fostered and fondled in the lap

of the beautiful, or whether they do not rather seek a disguise for

their own rudeness, an æsthetical pretext for their own unemotional

insipidity: I am thinking here, for instance, of Otto Jahn. But let the

liar and the hypocrite beware of our German music: for in the midst

of all our culture it is really the only genuine, pure and purifying

fire-spirit from which and towards which, as in the teaching of the

great Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double orbit-all

that we now call culture, education, civilisation, must appear some day

before the unerring judge, Dionysus.

Let us recollect furthermore how Kant and Schopenhauer made it

possible for the spirit of _German philosophy_ streaming from the

same sources to annihilate the satisfied delight in existence of

scientific Socratism by the delimitation of the boundaries thereof; how

through this delimitation an infinitely profounder and more serious

view of ethical problems and of art was inaugurated, which we may

unhesitatingly designate as _Dionysian_ wisdom comprised in concepts.

To what then does the mystery of this oneness of German music and

philosophy point, if not to a new form of existence, concerning the

substance of which we can only inform ourselves presentiently from

Hellenic analogies? For to us who stand on the boundary line between

two different forms of existence, the Hellenic prototype retains the

immeasurable value, that therein all these transitions and struggles

are imprinted in a classically instructive form: except that we, as

it were, experience analogically in _reverse_ order the chief epochs

of the Hellenic genius, and seem now, for instance, to pass backwards

from the Alexandrine age to the period of tragedy. At the same time

we have the feeling that the birth of a tragic age betokens only a

return to itself of the German spirit, a blessed self-rediscovering

after excessive and urgent external influences have for a long time

compelled it, living as it did in helpless barbaric formlessness, to

servitude under their form. It may at last, after returning to the

primitive source of its being, venture to stalk along boldly and freely

before all nations without hugging the leading-strings of a Romanic

civilisation: if only it can learn implicitly of one people--the

Greeks, of whom to learn at all is itself a high honour and a rare

distinction. And when did we require these highest of all teachers more

than at present, when we experience _a re-birth of tragedy_ and are in

danger alike of not knowing whence it comes, and of being unable to

make clear to ourselves whither it tends.

[22] Essay on Elegiac Poetry.--TR.

[23] See _Faust,_ Part 1.1. 965--TR.

20.

It may be weighed some day before an impartial judge, in what time and

in what men the German spirit has thus far striven most resolutely to

learn of the Greeks: and if we confidently assume that this unique

praise must be accorded to the noblest intellectual efforts of Goethe,

Schiller, and Winkelmann, it will certainly have to be added that

since their time, and subsequently to the more immediate influences of

these efforts, the endeavour to attain to culture and to the Greeks by

this path has in an incomprehensible manner grown feebler and feebler.

In order not to despair altogether of the German spirit, must we not

infer therefrom that possibly, in some essential matter, even these

champions could not penetrate into the core of the Hellenic nature,

and were unable to establish a permanent friendly alliance between

German and Greek culture? So that perhaps an unconscious perception

of this shortcoming might raise also in more serious minds the

disheartening doubt as to whether after such predecessors they could

advance still farther on this path of culture, or could reach the goal

at all. Accordingly, we see the opinions concerning the value of Greek

contribution to culture degenerate since that time in the most alarming

manner; the expression of compassionate superiority may be heard

in the most heterogeneous intellectual and non-intellectual camps,

and elsewhere a totally ineffective declamation dallies with "Greek

harmony," "Greek beauty," "Greek cheerfulness." And in the very circles

whose dignity it might be to draw indefatigably from the Greek channel

for the good of German culture, in the circles of the teachers in the

higher educational institutions, they have learned best to compromise

with the Greeks in good time and on easy terms, to the extent often of

a sceptical abandonment of the Hellenic ideal and a total perversion of

the true purpose of antiquarian studies. If there be any one at all in

these circles who has not completely exhausted himself in the endeavour

to be a trustworthy corrector of old texts or a natural-history

microscopist of language, he perhaps seeks also to appropriate Grecian

antiquity "historically" along with other antiquities, and in any case

according to the method and with the supercilious air of our present

cultured historiography. When, therefore, the intrinsic efficiency

of the higher educational institutions has never perhaps been lower

or feebler than at present, when the "journalist," the paper slave

of the day, has triumphed over the academic teacher in all matters

pertaining to culture, and there only remains to the latter the often

previously experienced metamorphosis of now fluttering also, as a

cheerful cultured butterfly, in the idiom of the journalist, with the

"light elegance" peculiar thereto--with what painful confusion must the

cultured persons of a period like the present gaze at the phenomenon

(which can perhaps be comprehended analogically only by means of the

profoundest principle of the hitherto unintelligible Hellenic genius)

of the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the re-birth of tragedy?

Never has there been another art-period in which so-called culture

and true art have been so estranged and opposed, as is so obviously

the case at present. We understand why so feeble a culture hates true

art; it fears destruction thereby. But must not an entire domain of

culture, namely the Socratic-Alexandrine, have exhausted its powers

after contriving to culminate in such a daintily-tapering point as our

present culture? When it was not permitted to heroes like Goethe and

Schiller to break open the enchanted gate which leads into the Hellenic

magic mountain, when with their most dauntless striving they did not

get beyond the longing gaze which the Goethean Iphigenia cast from

barbaric Tauris to her home across the ocean, what could the epigones

of such heroes hope for, if the gate should not open to them suddenly

of its own accord, in an entirely different position, quite overlooked

in all endeavours of culture hitherto--amidst the mystic tones of

reawakened tragic music.

Let no one attempt to weaken our faith in an impending re-birth of

Hellenic antiquity; for in it alone we find our hope of a renovation

and purification of the German spirit through the fire-magic of music.

What else do we know of amidst the present desolation and languor

of culture, which could awaken any comforting expectation for the

future? We look in vain for one single vigorously-branching root, for

a speck of fertile and healthy soil: there is dust, sand, torpidness

and languishing everywhere! Under such circumstances a cheerless

solitary wanderer could choose for himself no better symbol than the

Knight with Death and the Devil, as Dürer has sketched him for us, the

mail-clad knight, grim and stern of visage, who is able, unperturbed

by his gruesome companions, and yet hopelessly, to pursue his terrible

path with horse and hound alone. Our Schopenhauer was such a Dürerian

knight: he was destitute of all hope, but he sought the truth. There is

not his equal.

But how suddenly this gloomily depicted wilderness of our exhausted

culture changes when the Dionysian magic touches it! A hurricane

seizes everything decrepit, decaying, collapsed, and stunted; wraps

it whirlingly into a red cloud of dust; and carries it like a vulture

into the air. Confused thereby, our glances seek for what has vanished:

for what they see is something risen to the golden light as from

a depression, so full and green, so luxuriantly alive, so ardently

infinite. Tragedy sits in the midst of this exuberance of life,

sorrow and joy, in sublime ecstasy; she listens to a distant doleful

song--it tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are: _Wahn, Wille,

Wehe_[21]--Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and

in the re-birth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic man is past:

crown yourselves with ivy, take in your hands the thyrsus, and do not

marvel if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Dare now

to be tragic men, for ye are to be redeemed! Ye are to accompany the

Dionysian festive procession from India to Greece! Equip yourselves for

severe conflict, but believe in the wonders of your god!

21.

Gliding back from these hortative tones into the mood which befits

the contemplative man, I repeat that it can only be learnt from the

Greeks what such a sudden and miraculous awakening of tragedy must

signify for the essential basis of a people's life. It is the people

of the tragic mysteries who fight the battles with the Persians: and

again, the people who waged such wars required tragedy as a necessary

healing potion. Who would have imagined that there was still such a

uniformly powerful effusion of the simplest political sentiments, the

most natural domestic instincts and the primitive manly delight in

strife in this very people after it had been shaken to its foundations

for several generations by the most violent convulsions of the

Dionysian demon? If at every considerable spreading of the Dionysian

commotion one always perceives that the Dionysian loosing from the

shackles of the individual makes itself felt first of all in an

increased encroachment on the political instincts, to the extent of

indifference, yea even hostility, it is certain, on the other hand,

that the state-forming Apollo is also the genius of the _principium

individuationis,_ and that the state and domestic sentiment cannot live

without an assertion of individual personality. There is only one way

from orgasm for a people,--the way to Indian Buddhism, which, in order

to be at all endured with its longing for nothingness, requires the

rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the

individual; just as these in turn demand a philosophy which teaches how

to overcome the indescribable depression of the intermediate states by

means of a fancy. With the same necessity, owing to the unconditional

dominance of political impulses, a people drifts into a path of

extremest secularisation, the most magnificent, but also the most

terrible expression of which is the Roman _imperium_.

Placed between India and Rome, and constrained to a seductive choice,

the Greeks succeeded in devising in classical purity still a third form

of life, not indeed for long private use, but just on that account for

immortality. For it holds true in all things that those whom the gods

love die young, but, on the other hand, it holds equally true that they

then live eternally with the gods. One must not demand of what is most

noble that it should possess the durable toughness of leather; the

staunch durability, which, for instance, was inherent in the national

character of the Romans, does not probably belong to the indispensable

predicates of perfection. But if we ask by what physic it was possible

for the Greeks, in their best period, notwithstanding the extraordinary

strength of their Dionysian and political impulses, neither to exhaust

themselves by ecstatic brooding, nor by a consuming scramble for empire

and worldly honour, but to attain the splendid mixture which we find

in a noble, inflaming, and contemplatively disposing wine, we must

remember the enormous power of _tragedy,_ exciting, purifying, and

disburdening the entire life of a people; the highest value of which

we shall divine only when, as in the case of the Greeks, it appears

to us as the essence of all the prophylactic healing forces, as the

mediator arbitrating between the strongest and most inherently fateful

characteristics of a people.

Tragedy absorbs the highest musical orgasm into itself, so that it

absolutely brings music to perfection among the Greeks, as among

ourselves; but it then places alongside thereof tragic myth and the

tragic hero, who, like a mighty Titan, takes the entire Dionysian world

on his shoulders and disburdens us thereof; while, on the other hand,

it is able by means of this same tragic myth, in the person of the

tragic hero, to deliver us from the intense longing for this existence,

and reminds us with warning hand of another existence and a higher

joy, for which the struggling hero prepares himself presentiently by

his destruction, not by his victories. Tragedy sets a sublime symbol,

namely the myth between the universal authority of its music and the

receptive Dionysian hearer, and produces in him the illusion that music

is only the most effective means for the animation of the plastic world

of myth. Relying upon this noble illusion, she can now move her limbs

for the dithyrambic dance, and abandon herself unhesitatingly to an

orgiastic feeling of freedom, in which she could not venture to indulge

as music itself, without this illusion. The myth protects us from the

music, while, on the other hand, it alone gives the highest freedom

thereto. By way of return for this service, music imparts to tragic

myth such an impressive and convincing metaphysical significance as

could never be attained by word and image, without this unique aid;

and the tragic spectator in particular experiences thereby the sure

presentiment of supreme joy to which the path through destruction and

negation leads; so that he thinks he hears, as it were, the innermost

abyss of things speaking audibly to him.

If in these last propositions I have succeeded in giving perhaps only a

preliminary expression, intelligible to few at first, to this difficult

representation, I must not here desist from stimulating my friends to a

further attempt, or cease from beseeching them to prepare themselves,

by a detached example of our common experience, for the perception of

the universal proposition. In this example I must not appeal to those

who make use of the pictures of the scenic processes, the words and the

emotions of the performers, in order to approximate thereby to musical

perception; for none of these speak music as their mother-tongue,

and, in spite of the aids in question, do not get farther than the

precincts of musical perception, without ever being allowed to touch

its innermost shrines; some of them, like Gervinus, do not even reach

the precincts by this path. I have only to address myself to those

who, being immediately allied to music, have it as it were for their

mother's lap, and are connected with things almost exclusively by

unconscious musical relations. I ask the question of these genuine

musicians: whether they can imagine a man capable of hearing the third

act of _Tristan und Isolde_ without any aid of word or scenery, purely

as a vast symphonic period, without expiring by a spasmodic distention

of all the wings of the soul? A man who has thus, so to speak, put his

ear to the heart-chamber of the cosmic will, who feels the furious

desire for existence issuing therefrom as a thundering stream or most

gently dispersed brook, into all the veins of the world, would he not

collapse all at once? Could he endure, in the wretched fragile tenement

of the human individual, to hear the re-echo of countless cries of

joy and sorrow from the "vast void of cosmic night," without flying

irresistibly towards his primitive home at the sound of this pastoral

dance-song of metaphysics? But if, nevertheless, such a work can be

heard as a whole, without a renunciation of individual existence, if

such a creation could be created without demolishing its creator--where

are we to get the solution of this contradiction?

Here there interpose between our highest musical excitement and the

music in question the tragic myth and the tragic hero--in reality only

as symbols of the most universal facts, of which music alone can speak

directly. If, however, we felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as a

symbol would stand by us absolutely ineffective and unnoticed, and

would never for a moment prevent us from giving ear to the re-echo of

the _universalia ante rem._ Here, however, the _Apollonian_ power, with

a view to the restoration of the well-nigh shattered individual, bursts

forth with the healing balm of a blissful illusion: all of a sudden

we imagine we see only Tristan, motionless, with hushed voice saying

to himself: "the old tune, why does it wake me?" And what formerly

interested us like a hollow sigh from the heart of being, seems now

only to tell us how "waste and void is the sea." And when, breathless,

we thought to expire by a convulsive distention of all our feelings,

and only a slender tie bound us to our present existence, we now hear

and see only the hero wounded to death and still not dying, with his

despairing cry: "Longing! Longing! In dying still longing! for longing

not dying!" And if formerly, after such a surplus and superabundance of

consuming agonies, the jubilation of the born rent our hearts almost

like the very acme of agony, the rejoicing Kurwenal now stands between

us and the "jubilation as such," with face turned toward the ship which

carries Isolde. However powerfully fellow-suffering encroaches upon us,

it nevertheless delivers us in a manner from the primordial suffering

of the world, just as the symbol-image of the myth delivers us from the

immediate perception of the highest cosmic idea, just as the thought

and word deliver us from the unchecked effusion of the unconscious

will. The glorious Apollonian illusion makes it appear as if the very

realm of tones presented itself to us as a plastic cosmos, as if even

the fate of Tristan and Isolde had been merely formed and moulded

therein as out of some most delicate and impressible material.

Thus does the Apollonian wrest us from Dionysian universality and fill

us with rapture for individuals; to these it rivets our sympathetic

emotion, through these it satisfies the sense of beauty which longs for

great and sublime forms; it brings before us biographical portraits,

and incites us to a thoughtful apprehension of the essence of life

contained therein. With the immense potency of the image, the concept,

the ethical teaching and the sympathetic emotion--the Apollonian

influence uplifts man from his orgiastic self-annihilation, and

beguiles him concerning the universality of the Dionysian process

into the belief that he is seeing a detached picture of the world,

for instance, Tristan and Isolde, and that, _through music,_ he will

be enabled to _see_ it still more clearly and intrinsically. What can

the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish when it can even excite in

us the illusion that the Dionysian is actually in the service of the

Apollonian, the effects of which it is capable of enhancing; yea, that

music is essentially the representative art for an Apollonian substance?

With the pre-established harmony which obtains between perfect drama

and its music, the drama attains the highest degree of conspicuousness,

such as is usually unattainable in mere spoken drama. As all the

animated figures of the scene in the independently evolved lines

of melody simplify themselves before us to the distinctness of the

catenary curve, the coexistence of these lines is also audible in the

harmonic change which sympathises in a most delicate manner with the

evolved process: through which change the relations of things become

immediately perceptible to us in a sensible and not at all abstract

manner, as we likewise perceive thereby that it is only in these

relations that the essence of a character and of a line of melody

manifests itself clearly. And while music thus compels us to see more

extensively and more intrinsically than usual, and makes us spread out

the curtain of the scene before ourselves like some delicate texture,

the world of the stage is as infinitely expanded for our spiritualised,

introspective eye as it is illumined outwardly from within. How can

the word-poet furnish anything analogous, who strives to attain this

internal expansion and illumination of the visible stage-world by a

much more imperfect mechanism and an indirect path, proceeding as he

does from word and concept? Albeit musical tragedy likewise avails

itself of the word, it is at the same time able to place alongside

thereof its basis and source, and can make the unfolding of the word,

from within outwards, obvious to us.

Of the process just set forth, however, it could still be said

as decidedly that it is only a glorious appearance, namely the

afore-mentioned Apollonian _illusion,_ through the influence of which

we are to be delivered from the Dionysian obtrusion and excess.

In point of fact, the relation of music to drama is precisely the

reverse; music is the adequate idea of the world, drama is but the

reflex of this idea, a detached umbrage thereof. The identity between

the line of melody and the lining form, between the harmony and the

character-relations of this form, is true in a sense antithetical to

what one would suppose on the contemplation of musical tragedy. We

may agitate and enliven the form in the most conspicuous manner, and

enlighten it from within, but it still continues merely phenomenon,

from which there is no bridge to lead us into the true reality, into

the heart of the world. Music, however, speaks out of this heart; and

though countless phenomena of the kind might be passing manifestations

of this music, they could never exhaust its essence, but would always

be merely its externalised copies. Of course, as regards the intricate

relation of music and drama, nothing can be explained, while all may

be confused by the popular and thoroughly false antithesis of soul and

body; but the unphilosophical crudeness of this antithesis seems to

have become--who knows for what reasons--a readily accepted Article of

Faith with our æstheticians, while they have learned nothing concerning

an antithesis of phenomenon and thing-in-itself, or perhaps, for

reasons equally unknown, have not cared to learn anything thereof.

Should it have been established by our analysis that the Apollonian

element in tragedy has by means of its illusion gained a complete

victory over the Dionysian primordial element of music, and has made

music itself subservient to its end, namely, the highest and clearest

elucidation of the drama, it would certainly be necessary to add the

very important restriction: that at the most essential point this

Apollonian illusion is dissolved and annihilated. The drama, which, by

the aid of music, spreads out before us with such inwardly illumined

distinctness in all its movements and figures, that we imagine we

see the texture unfolding on the loom as the shuttle flies to and

fro,--attains as a whole an effect which _transcends all Apollonian

artistic effects._ In the collective effect of tragedy, the Dionysian

gets the upper hand once more; tragedy ends with a sound which could

never emanate from the realm of Apollonian art. And the Apollonian

illusion is thereby found to be what it is,--the assiduous veiling

during the performance of tragedy of the intrinsically Dionysian

effect: which, however, is so powerful, that it finally forces

the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to talk

with Dionysian wisdom, and even denies itself and its Apollonian

conspicuousness. Thus then the intricate relation of the Apollonian and

the Dionysian in tragedy must really be symbolised by a fraternal union

of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; Apollo,

however, finally speaks the language of Dionysus; and so the highest

goal of tragedy and of art in general is attained.

22.

Let the attentive friend picture to himself purely and simply,

according to his experiences, the effect of a true musical tragedy. I

think I have so portrayed the phenomenon of this effect in both its

phases that he will now be able to interpret his own experiences. For

he will recollect that with regard to the myth which passed before

him he felt himself exalted to a kind of omniscience, as if his

visual faculty were no longer merely a surface faculty, but capable

of penetrating into the interior, and as if he now saw before him,

with the aid of music, the ebullitions of the will, the conflict of

motives, and the swelling stream of the passions, almost sensibly

visible, like a plenitude of actively moving lines and figures, and

could thereby dip into the most tender secrets of unconscious emotions.

While he thus becomes conscious of the highest exaltation of his

instincts for conspicuousness and transfiguration, he nevertheless

feels with equal definitiveness that this long series of Apollonian

artistic effects still does _not_ generate the blissful continuance in

will-less contemplation which the plasticist and the epic poet, that

is to say, the strictly Apollonian artists, produce in him by their

artistic productions: to wit, the justification of the world of the

_individuatio_ attained in this contemplation,--which is the object

and essence of Apollonian art. He beholds the transfigured world of

the stage and nevertheless denies it. He sees before him the tragic

hero in epic clearness and beauty, and nevertheless delights in his

annihilation. He comprehends the incidents of the scene in all their

details, and yet loves to flee into the incomprehensible. He feels the

actions of the hero to be justified, and is nevertheless still more

elated when these actions annihilate their originator. He shudders at

the sufferings which will befall the hero, and yet anticipates therein

a higher and much more overpowering joy. He sees more extensively and

profoundly than ever, and yet wishes to be blind. Whence must we derive

this curious internal dissension, this collapse of the Apollonian apex,

if not from the _Dionysian_ spell, which, though apparently stimulating

the Apollonian emotions to their highest pitch, can nevertheless force

this superabundance of Apollonian power into its service? _Tragic

myth_ is to be understood only as a symbolisation of Dionysian wisdom

by means of the expedients of Apollonian art: the mythus conducts the

world of phenomena to its boundaries, where it denies itself, and seeks

to flee back again into the bosom of the true and only reality; where

it then, like Isolde, seems to strike up its metaphysical swan-song:--

In des Wonnemeeres

wogendem Schwall,

in der Duft-Wellen

tönendem Schall,

in des Weltathems

wehendem All--

ertrinken--versinken

unbewusst--höchste Lust![24]

We thus realise to ourselves in the experiences of the truly æsthetic

hearer the tragic artist himself when he proceeds like a luxuriously

fertile divinity of individuation to create his figures (in which sense

his work can hardly be understood as an "imitation of nature")--and

when, on the other hand, his vast Dionysian impulse then absorbs the

entire world of phenomena, in order to anticipate beyond it, and

through its annihilation, the highest artistic primal joy, in the bosom

of the Primordial Unity. Of course, our æsthetes have nothing to say

about this return in fraternal union of the two art-deities to the

original home, nor of either the Apollonian or Dionysian excitement

of the hearer, while they are indefatigable in characterising the

struggle of the hero with fate, the triumph of the moral order of the

world, or the disburdenment of the emotions through tragedy, as the

properly Tragic: an indefatigableness which makes me think that they

are perhaps not æsthetically excitable men at all, but only to be

regarded as moral beings when hearing tragedy. Never since Aristotle

has an explanation of the tragic effect been proposed, by which an

æsthetic activity of the hearer could be inferred from artistic

circumstances. At one time fear and pity are supposed to be forced to

an alleviating discharge through the serious procedure, at another time

we are expected to feel elevated and inspired at the triumph of good

and noble principles, at the sacrifice of the hero in the interest of

a moral conception of things; and however certainly I believe that for

countless men precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy,

it as obviously follows therefrom that all these, together with their

interpreting æsthetes, have had no experience of tragedy as the highest

_art._ The pathological discharge, the catharsis of Aristotle, which

philologists are at a loss whether to include under medicinal or moral

phenomena, recalls a remarkable anticipation of Goethe. "Without a

lively pathological interest," he says, "I too have never yet succeeded

in elaborating a tragic situation of any kind, and hence I have rather

avoided than sought it. Can it perhaps have been still another of the

merits of the ancients that the deepest pathos was with them merely

æsthetic play, whereas with us the truth of nature must co-operate in

order to produce such a work?" We can now answer in the affirmative

this latter profound question after our glorious experiences, in which

we have found to our astonishment in the case of musical tragedy

itself, that the deepest pathos can in reality be merely æsthetic play:

and therefore we are justified in believing that now for the first time

the proto-phenomenon of the tragic can be portrayed with some degree

of success. He who now will still persist in talking only of those

vicarious effects proceeding from ultra-æsthetic spheres, and does not

feel himself raised above the pathologically-moral process, may be left

to despair of his æsthetic nature: for which we recommend to him, by

way of innocent equivalent, the interpretation of Shakespeare after the

fashion of Gervinus, and the diligent search for poetic justice.

Thus with the re-birth of tragedy the _æsthetic hearer_ is also

born anew, in whose place in the theatre a curious _quid pro quo_

was wont to sit with half-moral and half-learned pretensions,--the

"critic." In his sphere hitherto everything has been artificial and

merely glossed over with a semblance of life. The performing artist

was in fact at a loss what to do with such a critically comporting

hearer, and hence he, as well as the dramatist or operatic composer

who inspired him, searched anxiously for the last remains of life

in a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of enjoyment. Such

"critics," however, have hitherto constituted the public; the student,

the school-boy, yea, even the most harmless womanly creature, were

already unwittingly prepared by education and by journals for a similar

perception of works of art. The nobler natures among the artists

counted upon exciting the moral-religious forces in such a public,

and the appeal to a moral order of the world operated vicariously,

when in reality some powerful artistic spell should have enraptured

the true hearer. Or again, some imposing or at all events exciting

tendency of the contemporary political and social world was presented

by the dramatist with such vividness that the hearer could forget his

critical exhaustion and abandon himself to similar emotions, as, in

patriotic or warlike moments, before the tribune of parliament, or

at the condemnation of crime and vice:--an estrangement of the true

aims of art which could not but lead directly now and then to a cult

of tendency. But here there took place what has always taken place

in the case of factitious arts, an extraordinary rapid depravation

of these tendencies, so that for instance the tendency to employ the

theatre as a means for the moral education of the people, which in

Schiller's time was taken seriously, is already reckoned among the

incredible antiquities of a surmounted culture. While the critic got

the upper hand in the theatre and concert-hall, the journalist in the

school, and the press in society, art degenerated into a topic of

conversation of the most trivial kind, and æsthetic criticism was used

as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and moreover piteously

unoriginal sociality, the significance of which is suggested by the

Schopenhauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there has never

been so much gossip about art and so little esteem for it. But is it

still possible to have intercourse with a man capable of conversing on

Beethoven or Shakespeare? Let each answer this question according to

his sentiments: he will at any rate show by his answer his conception

of "culture," provided he tries at least to answer the question, and

has not already grown mute with astonishment.

On the other hand, many a one more nobly and delicately endowed by

nature, though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian

in the manner described, could tell of the unexpected as well as

totally unintelligible effect which a successful performance of

_Lohengrin,_ for example, exerted on him: except that perhaps every

warning and interpreting hand was lacking to guide him; so that the

incomprehensibly heterogeneous and altogether incomparable sensation

which then affected him also remained isolated and became extinct, like

a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy. He then divined what the

æsthetic hearer is.

[24]

In the sea of pleasure's

Billowing roll,

In the ether-waves

Knelling and toll,

In the world-breath's

Wavering whole--

To drown in, go down in--

Lost in swoon--greatest boon!

23.

He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to how he is related to the

true æsthetic hearer, or whether he belongs rather to the community

of the Socrato-critical man, has only to enquire sincerely concerning

the sentiment with which he accepts the _wonder_ represented on the

stage: whether he feels his historical sense, which insists on strict

psychological causality, insulted by it, whether with benevolent

concession he as it were admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible

to childhood, but relinquished by him, or whether he experiences

anything else thereby. For he will thus be enabled to determine how

far he is on the whole capable of understanding _myth,_ that is to

say, the concentrated picture of the world, which, as abbreviature of

phenomena, cannot dispense with wonder. It is probable, however, that

nearly every one, upon close examination, feels so disintegrated by

the critico-historical spirit of our culture, that he can only perhaps

make the former existence of myth credible to himself by learned

means through intermediary abstractions. Without myth, however, every

culture loses its healthy, creative natural power: it is only a horizon

encompassed with myths which rounds off to unity a social movement.

It is only by myth that all the powers of the imagination and of the

Apollonian dream are freed from their random rovings. The mythical

figures have to be the invisibly omnipresent genii, under the care of

which the young soul grows to maturity, by the signs of which the man

gives a meaning to his life and struggles: and the state itself knows

no more powerful unwritten law than the mythical foundation which

vouches for its connection with religion and its growth from mythical

ideas.

Let us now place alongside thereof the abstract man proceeding

independently of myth, the abstract education, the abstract usage,

the abstract right, the abstract state: let us picture to ourselves

the lawless roving of the artistic imagination, not bridled by any

native myth: let us imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred

primitive seat, but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities, and

has to nourish itself wretchedly from the other cultures--such is the

Present, as the result of Socratism, which is bent on the destruction

of myth. And now the myth-less man remains eternally hungering among

all the bygones, and digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig

for them even among the remotest antiquities. The stupendous historical

exigency of the unsatisfied modern culture, the gathering around one of

countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge--what does

all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical

home, the mythical source? Let us ask ourselves whether the feverish

and so uncanny stirring of this culture is aught but the eager seizing

and snatching at food of the hungerer--and who would care to contribute

anything more to a culture which cannot be appeased by all it devours,

and in contact with which the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment

is wont to change into "history and criticism"?

We should also have to regard our German character with despair and

sorrow, if it had already become inextricably entangled in, or even

identical with this culture, in a similar manner as we can observe it

to our horror to be the case in civilised France; and that which for

a long time was the great advantage of France and the cause of her

vast preponderance, to wit, this very identity of people and culture,

might compel us at the sight thereof to congratulate ourselves that

this culture of ours, which is so questionable, has hitherto had

nothing in common with the noble kernel of the character of our people.

All our hopes, on the contrary, stretch out longingly towards the

perception that beneath this restlessly palpitating civilised life and

educational convulsion there is concealed a glorious, intrinsically

healthy, primeval power, which, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at

intervals in stupendous moments, and then dreams on again in view of

a future awakening. It is from this abyss that the German Reformation

came forth: in the choral-hymn of which the future melody of German

music first resounded. So deep, courageous, and soul-breathing, so

exuberantly good and tender did this chorale of Luther sound,--as the

first Dionysian-luring call which breaks forth from dense thickets

at the approach of spring. To it responded with emulative echo the

solemnly wanton procession of Dionysian revellers, to whom we are

indebted for German music--and to whom we shall be indebted for _the

re-birth of German myth._

I know that I must now lead the sympathising and attentive friend to

an elevated position of lonesome contemplation, where he will have

but few companions, and I call out encouragingly to him that we must

hold fast to our shining guides, the Greeks. For the rectification

of our æsthetic knowledge we previously borrowed from them the two

divine figures, each of which sways a separate realm of art, and

concerning whose mutual contact and exaltation we have acquired a

notion through Greek tragedy. Through a remarkable disruption of both

these primitive artistic impulses, the ruin of Greek tragedy seemed

to be necessarily brought about: with which process a degeneration

and a transmutation of the Greek national character was strictly in

keeping, summoning us to earnest reflection as to how closely and

necessarily art and the people, myth and custom, tragedy and the state,

have coalesced in their bases. The ruin of tragedy was at the same

time the ruin of myth. Until then the Greeks had been involuntarily

compelled immediately to associate all experiences with their myths,

indeed they had to comprehend them only through this association:

whereby even the most immediate present necessarily appeared to them

_sub specie æterni_ and in a certain sense as timeless. Into this

current of the timeless, however, the state as well as art plunged

in order to find repose from the burden and eagerness of the moment.

And a people--for the rest, also a man--is worth just as much only as

its ability to impress on its experiences the seal of eternity: for

it is thus, as it were, desecularised, and reveals its unconscious

inner conviction of the relativity of time and of the true, that is,

the metaphysical significance of life. The contrary happens when a

people begins to comprehend itself historically and to demolish the

mythical bulwarks around it: with which there is usually connected

a marked secularisation, a breach with the unconscious metaphysics

of its earlier existence, in all ethical consequences. Greek art and

especially Greek tragedy delayed above all the annihilation of myth:

it was necessary to annihilate these also to be able to live detached

from the native soil, unbridled in the wilderness of thought, custom,

and action. Even in such circumstances this metaphysical impulse still

endeavours to create for itself a form of apotheosis (weakened, no

doubt) in the Socratism of science urging to life: but on its lower

stage this same impulse led only to a feverish search, which gradually

merged into a pandemonium of myths and superstitions accumulated from

all quarters: in the midst of which, nevertheless, the Hellene sat with

a yearning heart till he contrived, as Græculus, to mask his fever with

Greek cheerfulness and Greek levity, or to narcotise himself completely

with some gloomy Oriental superstition.

We have approached this condition in the most striking manner since the

reawakening of the Alexandro--Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century,

after a long, not easily describable, interlude. On the heights there

is the same exuberant love of knowledge, the same insatiate happiness

of the discoverer, the same stupendous secularisation, and, together

with these, a homeless roving about, an eager intrusion at foreign

tables, a frivolous deification of the present or a dull senseless

estrangement, all _sub speci sæculi,_ of the present time: which

same symptoms lead one to infer the same defect at the heart of

this culture, the annihilation of myth. It seems hardly possible to

transplant a foreign myth with permanent success, without dreadfully

injuring the tree through this transplantation: which is perhaps

occasionally strong enough and sound enough to eliminate the foreign

element after a terrible struggle; but must ordinarily consume itself

in a languishing and stunted condition or in sickly luxuriance. Our

opinion of the pure and vigorous kernel of the German being is such

that we venture to expect of it, and only of it, this elimination of

forcibly ingrafted foreign elements, and we deem it possible that

the German spirit will reflect anew on itself. Perhaps many a one

will be of opinion that this spirit must begin its struggle with the

elimination of the Romanic element: for which it might recognise an

external preparation and encouragement in the victorious bravery and

bloody glory of the late war, but must seek the inner constraint in the

emulative zeal to be for ever worthy of the sublime protagonists on

this path, of Luther as well as our great artists and poets. But let

him never think he can fight such battles without his household gods,

without his mythical home, without a "restoration" of all German things

I And if the German should look timidly around for a guide to lead

him back to his long-lost home, the ways and paths of which he knows

no longer--let him but listen to the delightfully luring call of the

Dionysian bird, which hovers above him, and would fain point out to him

the way thither.

24.

Among the peculiar artistic effects of musical tragedy we had to

emphasise an Apollonian _illusion,_ through which we are to be saved

from immediate oneness with the Dionysian music, while our musical

excitement is able to discharge itself on an Apollonian domain and

in an interposed visible middle world. It thereby seemed to us that

precisely through this discharge the middle world of theatrical

procedure, the drama generally, became visible and intelligible from

within in a degree unattainable in the other forms of Apollonian art:

so that here, where this art was as it were winged and borne aloft by

the spirit of music, we had to recognise the highest exaltation of its

powers, and consequently in the fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus

the climax of the Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.

Of course, the Apollonian light-picture did not, precisely with this

inner illumination through music, attain the peculiar effect of the

weaker grades of Apollonian art. What the epos and the animated stone

can do--constrain the contemplating eye to calm delight in the world

of the _individuatio_--could not be realised here, notwithstanding

the greater animation and distinctness. We contemplated the drama

and penetrated with piercing glance into its inner agitated world of

motives--and yet it seemed as if only a symbolic picture passed before

us, the profoundest significance of which we almost believed we had

divined, and which we desired to put aside like a curtain in order to

behold the original behind it. The greatest distinctness of the picture

did not suffice us: for it seemed to reveal as well as veil something;

and while it seemed, with its symbolic revelation, to invite the

rending of the veil for the disclosure of the mysterious background,

this illumined all-conspicuousness itself enthralled the eye and

prevented it from penetrating more deeply He who has not experienced

this,--to have to view, and at the same time to have a longing

beyond the viewing,--will hardly be able to conceive how clearly and

definitely these two processes coexist in the contemplation of tragic

myth and are felt to be conjoined; while the truly æsthetic spectators

will confirm my assertion that among the peculiar effects of tragedy

this conjunction is the most noteworthy. Now let this phenomenon of the

æsthetic spectator be transferred to an analogous process in the tragic

artist, and the genesis of _tragic myth_ will have been understood. It

shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the full delight in appearance

and contemplation, and at the same time it denies this delight and

finds a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the visible

world of appearance. The substance of tragic myth is first of all an

epic event involving the glorification of the fighting hero: but whence

originates the essentially enigmatical trait, that the suffering in

the fate of the hero, the most painful victories, the most agonising

contrasts of motives, in short, the exemplification of the wisdom of

Silenus, or, æsthetically expressed, the Ugly and Discordant, is always

represented anew in such countless forms with such predilection, and

precisely in the most youthful and exuberant age of a people, unless

there is really a higher delight experienced in all this?

For the fact that things actually take such a tragic course would

least of all explain the origin of a form of art; provided that art

is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a

metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside

thereof for its conquest. Tragic myth, in so far as it really belongs

to art, also fully participates in this transfiguring metaphysical

purpose of art in general: What does it transfigure, however, when it

presents the phenomenal world in the guise of the suffering hero? Least

of all the "reality" of this phenomenal world, for it says to us: "Look

at this! Look carefully! It is your life! It is the hour-hand of your

clock of existence!"

And myth has displayed this life, in order thereby to transfigure it

to us? If not, how shall we account for the æsthetic pleasure with

which we make even these representations pass before us? I am inquiring

concerning the æsthetic pleasure, and am well aware that many of

these representations may moreover occasionally create even a moral

delectation, say under the form of pity or of a moral triumph. But he

who would derive the effect of the tragic exclusively from these moral

sources, as was usually the case far too long in æsthetics, let him not

think that he has done anything for Art thereby; for Art must above all

insist on purity in her domain. For the explanation of tragic myth the

very first requirement is that the pleasure which characterises it must

be sought in the purely æsthetic sphere, without encroaching on the

domain of pity, fear, or the morally-sublime. How can the ugly and the

discordant, the substance of tragic myth, excite an æsthetic pleasure?

Here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a daring bound into a

metaphysics of Art. I repeat, therefore, my former proposition, that

it is only as an æsthetic phenomenon that existence and the world,

appear justified: and in this sense it is precisely the function of

tragic myth to convince us that even the Ugly and Discordant is an

artistic game which the will, in the eternal fulness of its joy, plays

with itself. But this not easily comprehensible proto-phenomenon of

Dionysian Art becomes, in a direct way, singularly intelligible, and

is immediately apprehended in the wonderful significance of _musical

dissonance:_ just as in general it is music alone, placed in contrast

to the world, which can give us an idea as to what is meant by the

justification of the world as an æsthetic phenomenon. The joy that the

tragic myth excites has the same origin as the joyful sensation of

dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primitive joy experienced

in pain itself, is the common source of music and tragic myth.

Is it not possible that by calling to our aid the musical relation of

dissonance, the difficult problem of tragic effect may have meanwhile

been materially facilitated? For we now understand what it means to

wish to view tragedy and at the same time to have a longing beyond the

viewing: a frame of mind, which, as regards the artistically employed

dissonance, we should simply have to characterise by saying that we

desire to hear and at the same time have a longing beyond the hearing.

That striving for the infinite, the pinion-flapping of longing,

accompanying the highest delight in the clearly-perceived reality,

remind one that in both states we have to recognise a Dionysian

phenomenon, which again and again reveals to us anew the playful

up-building and demolishing of the world of individuals as the efflux

of a primitive delight, in like manner as when Heraclitus the Obscure

compares the world-building power to a playing child which places

stones here and there and builds sandhills only to overthrow them again.

Hence, in order to form a true estimate of the Dionysian capacity of

a people, it would seem that we must think not only of their music,

but just as much of their tragic myth, the second witness of this

capacity. Considering this most intimate relationship between music

and myth, we may now in like manner suppose that a degeneration and

depravation of the one involves a deterioration of the other: if it be

true at all that the weakening of the myth is generally expressive of

a debilitation of the Dionysian capacity. Concerning both, however,

a glance at the development of the German genius should not leave

us in any doubt; in the opera just as in the abstract character of

our myth-less existence, in an art sunk to pastime just as in a life

guided by concepts, the inartistic as well as life-consuming nature

of Socratic optimism had revealed itself to us. Yet there have been

indications to console us that nevertheless in some inaccessible abyss

the German spirit still rests and dreams, undestroyed, in glorious

health, profundity, and Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk in

slumber: from which abyss the Dionysian song rises to us to let us

know that this German knight even still dreams his primitive Dionysian

myth in blissfully earnest visions. Let no one believe that the German

spirit has for ever lost its mythical home when it still understands so

obviously the voices of the birds which tell of that home. Some day it

will find itself awake in all the morning freshness of a deep sleep:

then it will slay the dragons, destroy the malignant dwarfs, and waken

Brünnhilde--and Wotan's spear itself will be unable to obstruct its

course!

My friends, ye who believe in Dionysian music, ye know also what

tragedy means to us. There we have tragic myth, born anew from

music,--and in this latest birth ye can hope for everything and forget

what is most afflicting. What is most afflicting to all of us, however,

is--the prolonged degradation in which the German genius has lived

estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs. Ye

understand my allusion--as ye will also, in conclusion, understand my

hopes.

25.

Music and tragic myth are equally the expression of the Dionysian

capacity of a people, and are inseparable from each other. Both

originate in an ultra Apollonian sphere of art; both transfigure a

region in the delightful accords of which all dissonance, just like

the terrible picture of the world, dies charmingly away; both play

with the sting of displeasure, trusting to their most potent magic;

both justify thereby the existence even of the "worst world." Here

the Dionysian, as compared with the Apollonian, exhibits itself as

the eternal and original artistic force, which in general calls into

existence the entire world of phenomena: in the midst of which a new

transfiguring appearance becomes necessary, in order to keep alive the

animated world of individuation. If we could conceive an incarnation

of dissonance--and what is man but that?--then, to be able to live

this dissonance would require a glorious illusion which would spread

a veil of beauty over its peculiar nature. This is the true function

of Apollo as deity of art: in whose name we comprise all the countless

manifestations of the fair realm of illusion, which each moment render

life in general worth living and make one impatient for the experience

of the next moment.

At the same time, just as much of this basis of all existence--the

Dionysian substratum of the world--is allowed to enter into the

consciousness of human beings, as can be surmounted again by the

Apollonian transfiguring power, so that these two art-impulses are

constrained to develop their powers in strictly mutual proportion,

according to the law of eternal justice. When the Dionysian powers rise

with such vehemence as we experience at present, there can be no doubt

that, veiled in a cloud, Apollo has already descended to us; whose

grandest beautifying influences a coming generation will perhaps behold.

That this effect is necessary, however, each one would most surely

perceive by intuition, if once he found himself carried back--even in

a dream--into an Old-Hellenic existence. In walking under high Ionic

colonnades, looking upwards to a horizon defined by clear and noble

lines, with reflections of his transfigured form by his side in shining

marble, and around him solemnly marching or quietly moving men, with

harmoniously sounding voices and rhythmical pantomime, would he not in

the presence of this perpetual influx of beauty have to raise his hand

to Apollo and exclaim: "Blessed race of Hellenes! How great Dionysus

must be among you, when the Delian god deems such charms necessary

to cure you of your dithyrambic madness!"--To one in this frame of

mind, however, an aged Athenian, looking up to him with the sublime

eye of Æschylus, might answer: "Say also this, thou curious stranger:

what sufferings this people must have undergone, in order to be able

to become thus beautiful! But now follow me to a tragic play, and

sacrifice with me in the temple of both the deities!"

APPENDIX.

[Late in the year 1888, not long before he was overcome by his sudden

attack of insanity, Nietzsche wrote down a few notes concerning

his early work, the _Birth of Tragedy._ These were printed in his

sister's biography (_Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches,_ vol. ii. pt.

i. pp. 102 ff.), and are here translated as likely to be of interest

to readers of this remarkable work. They also appear in the _Ecce

Homo._--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.]

"To be just to the _Birth of Tragedy_(1872), one will have to forget

some few things. It has _wrought effects,_ it even fascinated through

that wherein it was amiss--through its application to _Wagnerism,_

just as if this Wagnerism were symptomatic of _a rise and going up._

And just on that account was the book an event in Wagner's life: from

thence and only from thence were great hopes linked to the name of

Wagner. Even to-day people remind me, sometimes right in the midst of

a talk on _Parsifal,_ that _I_ and none other have it on my conscience

that such a high opinion of the _cultural value_ of this movement came

to the top. More than once have I found the book referred to as 'the

_Re_-birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music': one only had an ear

for a new formula of _Wagner's_ art, aim, task,--and failed to hear

withal what was at bottom valuable therein. 'Hellenism and Pessimism'

had been a more unequivocal title: namely, as a first lesson on the

way in which the Greeks got the better of pessimism,--on the means

whereby they _overcame_ it. Tragedy simply proves that the Greeks were

_no_ pessimists: Schopenhauer was mistaken here as he was mistaken

in all other things. Considered with some neutrality, the _Birth of

Tragedy_ appears very unseasonable: one would not even dream that

it was _begun_ amid the thunders of the battle of Wörth. I thought

these problems through and through before the walls of Metz in cold

September nights, in the midst of the work of nursing the sick; one

might even believe the book to be fifty years older. It is politically

indifferent--un-German one will say to-day,--it smells shockingly

Hegelian, in but a few formulæ does it scent of Schopenhauer's

funereal perfume. An 'idea'--the antithesis of 'Dionysian _versus_

Apollonian'--translated into metaphysics; history itself as the

evolution of this 'idea'; the antithesis dissolved into oneness

in Tragedy; through this optics things that had never yet looked

into one another's face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and

_comprehended_ through one another: for instance, Opera and Revolution.

The two decisive _innovations_ of the book are, on the one hand, the

comprehension of the _Dionysian_ phenomenon among the Greeks (it gives

the first psychology thereof, it sees therein the One root of all

Grecian art); on the other, the comprehension of Socratism: Socrates

diagnosed for the first time as the tool of Grecian dissolution, as

a typical decadent. 'Rationality' _against_ instinct! 'Rationality'

at any price as a dangerous, as a life-undermining force! Throughout

the whole book a deep hostile silence on Christianity: it is neither

Apollonian nor Dionysian; it _negatives_ all _æsthetic_ values (the

only values recognised by the _Birth of Tragedy),_ it is in the widest

sense nihilistic, whereas in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit

of _affirmation_ is reached. Once or twice the Christian priests are

alluded to as a 'malignant kind of dwarfs,' as 'subterraneans.'"

2.

"This beginning is singular beyond measure. I had for my own inmost

experience _discovered_ the only symbol and counterpart of history,--I

had just thereby been the first to grasp the wonderful phenomenon

of the Dionysian. And again, through my diagnosing Socrates as a

decadent, I had given a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk

the trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would run of being

weakened by some moralistic idiosyncrasy--to view morality itself as a

symptom of decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the first rank in

the history of knowledge. How far I had leaped in either case beyond

the smug shallow-pate-gossip of optimism _contra_ pessimism! I was

the first to see the intrinsic antithesis: here, the _degenerating_

instinct which, with subterranean vindictiveness, turns against life

(Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense

already the philosophy of Plato, all idealistic systems as typical

forms), and there, a formula of _highest affirmation,_ born of fullness

and overfullness, a yea-saying without reserve to suffering's self,

to guilt's self, to all that is questionable and strange in existence

itself. This final, cheerfullest, exuberantly mad-and-merriest Yea to

life is not only the highest insight, it is also the _deepest,_ it

is that which is most rigorously confirmed and upheld by truth and

science. Naught that is, is to be deducted, naught is dispensable; the

phases of existence rejected by the Christians and other nihilists are

even of an infinitely higher order in the hierarchy of values than

that which the instinct of decadence sanctions, yea durst _sanction._

To comprehend this _courage_ is needed, and, as a condition thereof, a

surplus of _strength_: for precisely in degree as courage _dares_ to

thrust forward, precisely according to the measure of strength, does

one approach truth. Perception, the yea-saying to reality, is as much

a necessity to the strong as to the weak, under the inspiration of

weakness, cowardly shrinking, and _flight_ from reality--the 'ideal.'

... They are not free to perceive: the decadents have _need_ of the

lie,--it is one of their conditions of self-preservation. Whoso not

only comprehends the word Dionysian, but also grasps his _self_ in

this word, requires no refutation of Plato or of Christianity or of

Schopenhauer--_he smells the putrefaction._"

3.

"To what extent I had just thereby found the concept 'tragic,' the

definitive perception of the psychology of tragedy, I have but lately

stated in the _Twilight of the Idols,_ page 139 (1st edit.): 'The

affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and severe problems,

the will to life, enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice

of its highest types,--_that_ is what I called Dionysian, that is

what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of the _tragic_ poet.

Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not to purify from a

dangerous passion by its vehement discharge (it was thus that Aristotle

misunderstood it); but, beyond terror and pity, _to realise in fact_

the eternal delight of becoming, that delight which even involves in

itself the _joy of annihilating!_[1] In this sense I have the right

to understand myself to be the first _tragic philosopher_--that is,

the utmost antithesis and antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. Prior

to myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian into the

philosophic pathos: there lacks the _tragic wisdom,_--I have sought

in vain for an indication thereof even among the _great_ Greeks of

philosophy, the thinkers of the two centuries _before_ Socrates. A

doubt still possessed me as touching _Heraclitus,_ in whose proximity

I in general begin to feel warmer and better than anywhere else. The

affirmation of transiency _and annihilation,_ to wit the decisive

factor in a Dionysian _philosophy,_ the yea-saying to antithesis

and war, to _becoming,_ with radical rejection even of the concept

'_being,_'--that I must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking

hitherto, the nearest to my own. The doctrine of 'eternal recurrence,'

that is, of the unconditioned and infinitely repeated cycle of all

things--this doctrine of Zarathustra's _might_ after all have been

already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the portico[2] which

inherited well-nigh all its fundamental conceptions from Heraclitus,

shows traces thereof."

[Illustration: _Facsimile of Nietzsches handwriting._]

4.

"In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In fine, I see no reason

whatever for taking back my hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let

us cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my assault upon two

millenniums of anti-nature and man-vilification succeeds! That new

party of life which will take in hand the greatest of all tasks, the

upbreeding of mankind to something higher,--add thereto the relentless

annihilation of all things degenerating and parasitic, will again make

possible on earth that _too-much of life,_ from which there also must

needs grow again the Dionysian state. I promise a _tragic_ age: the

highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will be born anew, when

mankind have behind them the consciousness of the hardest but most

necessary wars, _without suffering therefrom._ A psychologist might

still add that what I heard in my younger years in Wagnerian music had

in general naught to do with Wagner; that when I described Wagnerian

music I described what _I_ had heard, that I had instinctively to

translate and transfigure all into the new spirit which I bore within

myself...."

[1] Mr. Common's translation, pp. 227-28.

[2] Greek: στοά.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

While the translator flatters himself that this version of Nietzsche's

early work--having been submitted to unsparingly scrutinising eyes--is

not altogether unworthy of the original, he begs to state that he

holds twentieth-century English to be a rather unsatisfactory vehicle

for philosophical thought. Accordingly, in conjunction with his

friend Dr. Ernest Lacy, he has prepared a second, more unconventional

translation,--in brief, a translation which will enable one whose

knowledge of English extends to, say, the period of Elizabeth, to

appreciate Nietzsche in more forcible language, because the language of

a stronger age. It is proposed to provide this second translation with

an appendix, containing many references to the translated writings of

Wagner and Schopenhauer; to the works of Pater, Browning, Burckhardt,

Rohde, and others, and a summmary and index.

For help in preparing the present translation, the translator wishes

to express his thanks to his friends Dr. Ernest Lacy, Litt.D.; Dr.

James Waddell Tupper, Ph.D.; Prof. Harry Max Ferren; Mr. James M'Kirdy,

Pittsburg; and Mr. Thomas Common, Edinburgh.

WILLIAM AUGUST HAUSSMANN, A.B., Ph.D.