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Title: The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism

Author: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Editor: Oscar Levy

Translator: William A. Haussmann

Release date: March 4, 2016 [eBook #51356]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIRTH OF
TRAGEDY; OR, HELLENISM AND PESSIMISM ***

THE

BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
OR

HELLENISM AND PESSIMISM
By

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
TRANSLATED BY

WM. A. HAUSSMANN, PH.D.

The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

The First Complete and Authorised English Translation

Edited by Dr Oscar Levy

Volume One

T.N. FOULIS

13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET

EDINBURGH: AND LONDON

1910

CONTENTS.
BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM
FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

INTRODUCTION.[1]

Frederick Nietzsche was born at Röcken near Lützen, in the Prussian
province of Saxony, on the 15th of October 1844, at 10 a.m. The day
happened to be the anniversary of the birth of Frederick-William IV., then
King of Prussia, and the peal of the local church-bells which was intended
to celebrate this event, was, by a happy coincidence, just timed to greet my
brother on his entrance into the world. In 1841, at the time when our father
was tutor to the Altenburg Princesses, Theresa of Saxe-Altenburg,
Elizabeth, Grand Duchess of Olden-burg, and Alexandra, Grand Duchess
Constantine of Russia, he had had the honour of being presented to his
witty and pious sovereign. The meeting seems to have impressed both
parties very favourably; for, very shortly after it had taken place, our father
received his living at Röcken "by supreme command." His joy may well be
imagined, therefore, when a first son was born to him on his beloved and
august patron's birthday, and at the christening ceremony he spoke as
follows:—"Thou blessed month of October!—for many years the most
decisive events in my life have occurred within thy thirty-one days, and
now I celebrate the greatest and most glorious of them all by baptising my
little boy! O blissful moment! O exquisite festival! O unspeakably holy
duty! In the Lord's name I bless thee!—With all my heart I utter these
words: Bring me this, my beloved child, that I may consecrate it unto the
Lord. My son, Frederick William, thus shalt thou be named on earth, as a
memento of my royal benefactor on whose birthday thou wast born!"
Our father was thirty-one years of age, and our mother not quite nineteen,
when my brother was born. Our mother, who was the daughter of a
clergyman, was good-looking and healthy, and was one of a very large
family of sons and daughters. Our paternal grandparents, the Rev. Oehler
and his wife, in Pobles, were typically healthy people. Strength, robustness,
lively dispositions, and a cheerful outlook on life, were among the qualities

which every one was pleased to observe in them. Our grandfather Oehler
was a bright, clever man, and quite the old style of comfortable country
parson, who thought it no sin to go hunting. He scarcely had a day's illness
in his life, and would certainly not have met with his end as early as he did
—that is to say, before his seventieth year—if his careless disregard of all
caution, where his health was concerned, had not led to his catching a
severe and fatal cold. In regard to our grand-mother Oehler, who died in her
eighty-second year, all that can be said is, that if all German women were
possessed of the health she enjoyed, the German nation would excel all
others from the standpoint of vitality. She bore our grandfather eleven
children; gave each of them the breast for nearly the whole of its first year,
and reared them all It is said that the sight of these eleven children, at ages
varying from nineteen years to one month, with their powerful build, rosy
cheeks, beaming eyes, and wealth of curly locks, provoked the admiration
of all visitors. Of course, despite their extraordinarily good health, the life
of this family was not by any means all sunshine. Each of the children was
very spirited, wilful, and obstinate, and it was therefore no simple matter to
keep them in order. Moreover, though they always showed the utmost
respect and most implicit obedience to their parents—even as middle-aged
men and women—misunderstandings between themselves were of constant
occurrence. Our Oehler grandparents were fairly well-to-do; for our
grandmother hailed from a very old family, who had been extensive land-
owners in the neighbourhood of Zeitz for centuries, and her father owned
the baronial estate of Wehlitz and a magnificent seat near Zeitz in Pacht.
When she married, her father gave her carriages and horses, a coachman, a
cook, and a kitchenmaid, which for the wife of a German minister was then,
and is still, something quite exceptional. As a result of the wars in the
beginning of the nineteenth century, however, our great-grandfather lost the
greater part of his property.
Our father's family was also in fairly comfortable circumstances, and
likewise very large. Our grandfather Dr. Nietzsche (D.D. and
Superintendent) married twice, and had in all twelve children, of whom
three died young. Our grandfather on this side, whom I never knew, must
certainly have been a distinguished, dignified, very learned and reserved
man; his second wife—our beloved grandmother—was an active-minded,
intelligent, and exceptionally good-natured woman. The whole of our
father's family, which I only got to know when they were very advanced in

years, were remarkable for their great power of self-control, their lively
interest in intellectual matters, and a strong sense of family unity, which
manifested itself both in their splendid readiness to help one another and in
their very excellent relations with each other. Our father was the youngest
son, and, thanks to his uncommonly lovable disposition, together with other
gifts, which only tended to become more marked as he grew older, he was
quite the favourite of the family. Blessed with a thoroughly sound
constitution, as all averred who knew him at the convent-school in
Rossleben, at the University, or later at the ducal court of Altenburg, he was
tall and slender, possessed an undoubted gift for poetry and real musical
talent, and was moreover a man of delicate sensibilities, full of
consideration for his whole family, and distinguished in his manners.
My brother often refers to his Polish descent, and in later years he even
instituted research-work with the view of establishing it, which met with
partial success. I know nothing definite concerning these investigations,
because a large number of valuable documents were unfortunately
destroyed after his breakdown in Turin. The family tradition was that a
certain Polish nobleman Nicki (pronounced Nietzky) had obtained the
special favour of Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, and had received the
rank of Earl from him. When, however, Stanislas Leszcysski the Pole
became king, our supposed ancestor became involved in a conspiracy in
favour of the Saxons and Protestants. He was sentenced to death; but,
taking flight, according to the evidence of the documents, he was ultimately
befriended by a certain Earl of Brühl, who gave him a small post in an
obscure little provincial town. Occasionally our aged aunts would speak of
our great-grandfather Nietzsche, who was said to have died in his ninety-
first year, and words always seemed to fail them when they attempted to
describe his handsome appearance, good breeding, and vigour. Our
ancestors, both on the Nietzsche and the Oehler side, were very long-lived.
Of the four pairs of great-grandparents, one great-grandfather reached the
age of ninety, five great-grandmothers and-fathers died between eighty-two
and eighty-six years of age, and two only failed to reach their seventieth
year.
The sorrow which hung as a cloud over our branch of the family was our
father's death, as the result of a heavy fall, at the age of thirty-eight. One
night, upon leaving some friends whom he had accompanied home, he was

met at the door of the vicarage by our little dog. The little animal must have
got between his feet, for he stumbled and fell backwards down seven stone
steps on to the paving-stones of the vicarage courtyard. As a result of this
fall, he was laid up with concussion of the brain, and, after a lingering
illness, which lasted eleven months, he died on the 30th of July 1849. The
early death of our beloved and highly-gifted father spread gloom over the
whole of our childhood. In 1850 our mother withdrew with us to Naumburg
on the Saale, where she took up her abode with our widowed grandmother
Nietzsche; and there she brought us up with Spartan severity and simplicity,
which, besides being typical of the period, was quite de rigeur in her
family. Of course, Grand-mamma Nietzsche helped somewhat to temper her
daughter-in-law's severity, and in this respect our Oehler grandparents, who
were less rigorous with us, their eldest grandchildren, than with their own
children, were also very influential. Grandfather Oehler was the first who
seems to have recognised the extraordinary talents of his eldest grandchild.
From his earliest childhood upwards, my brother was always strong and
healthy; he often declared that he must have been taken for a peasant-boy
throughout his childhood and youth, as he was so plump, brown, and rosy.
The thick fair hair which fell picturesquely over his shoulders tended
somewhat to modify his robust appearance. Had he not possessed those
wonderfully beautiful, large, and expressive eyes, however, and had he not
been so very ceremonious in his manner, neither his teachers nor his
relatives would ever have noticed anything at all remarkable about the boy;
for he was both modest and reserved.
He received his early schooling at a preparatory school, and later at a
grammar school in Naumburg. In the autumn of 1858, when he was
fourteen years of age, he entered the Pforta school, so famous for the
scholars it has produced. There, too, very severe discipline prevailed, and
much was exacted from the pupils, with the view of inuring them to great
mental and physical exertions. Thus, if my brother seems to lay particular
stress upon the value of rigorous training, free from all sentimentality, it
should be remembered that he speaks from experience in this respect. At
Pforta he followed the regular school course, and he did not enter a
university until the comparatively late age of twenty. His extraordinary gifts
manifested themselves chiefly in his independent and private studies and
artistic efforts. As a boy his musical talent had already been so noticeable,

that he himself and other competent judges were doubtful as to whether he
ought not perhaps to devote himself altogether to music. It is, however,
worth noting that everything he did in his later years, whether in Latin,
Greek, or German work, bore the stamp of perfection—subject of course to
the limitation imposed upon him by his years. His talents came very
suddenly to the fore, because he had allowed them to grow for such a long
time in concealment. His very first performance in philology, executed
while he was a student under Ritschl, the famous philologist, was also
typical of him in this respect, seeing that it was ordered to be printed for the
Rheinische Museum. Of course this was done amid general and grave
expressions of doubt; for, as Dr. Ritschl often declared, it was an unheard-of
occurrence for a student in his third term to prepare such an excellent
treatise.
Being a great lover of out-door exercise, such as swimming, skating, and
walking, he developed into a very sturdy lad. Rohde gives the following
description of him as a student: with his healthy complexion, his outward
and inner cleanliness, his austere chastity and his solemn aspect, he was the
image of that delightful youth described by Adalbert Stifter.
Though as a child he was always rather serious, as a lad and a man he was
ever inclined to see the humorous side of things, while his whole being, and
everything he said or did, was permeated by an extraordinary harmony. He
belonged to the very few who could control even a bad mood and conceal it
from others. All his friends are unanimous in their praise of his exceptional
evenness of temper and behaviour, and his warm, hearty, and pleasant laugh
that seemed to come from the very depths of his benevolent and affectionate
nature. In him it might therefore be said, nature had produced a being who
in body and spirit was a harmonious whole: his unusual intellect was fully
in keeping with his uncommon bodily strength.
The only abnormal thing about him, and something which we both inherited
from our father, was short-sightedness, and this was very much aggravated
in my brother's case, even in his earliest schooldays, owing to that
indescribable anxiety to learn which always characterised him. When one
listens to accounts given by his friends and schoolfellows, one is startled by
the multiplicity of his studies even in his schooldays.

In the autumn of 1864, he began his university life in Bonn, and studied
philology and theology; at the end of six months he gave up theology, and
in the autumn of 1865 followed his famous teacher Ritschl to the University
of Leipzig. There he became an ardent philologist, and diligently sought to
acquire a masterly grasp of this branch of knowledge. But in this respect it
would be unfair to forget that the school of Pforta, with its staff of excellent
teachers—scholars that would have adorned the chairs of any University—
had already afforded the best of preparatory trainings to any one intending
to take up philology as a study, more particularly as it gave all pupils ample
scope to indulge any individual tastes they might have for any particular
branch of ancient history. The last important Latin thesis which my brother
wrote for the Landes-Schule, Pforta, dealt with the Megarian poet Theognis,
and it was in the rôle of a lecturer on this very subject that, on the 18th
January 1866, he made his first appearance in public before the
philological society he had helped to found in Leipzig. The paper he read
disclosed his investigations on the subject of Theognis the moralist and
aristocrat, who, as is well known, described and dismissed the plebeians of
his time in terms of the heartiest contempt The aristocratic ideal, which was
always so dear to my brother, thus revealed itself for the first time.
Moreover, curiously enough, it was precisely this scientific thesis which
was the cause of Ritschl's recognition of my brother and fondness for him.
The whole of his Leipzig days proved of the utmost importance to my
brother's career. There he was plunged into the very midst of a torrent of
intellectual influences which found an impressionable medium in the fiery
youth, and to which he eagerly made himself accessible. He did not,
however, forget to discriminate among them, but tested and criticised the
currents of thought he encountered, and selected accordingly. It is certainly
of great importance to ascertain what those influences precisely were to
which he yielded, and how long they maintained their sway over him, and it
is likewise necessary to discover exactly when the matured mind threw off
these fetters in order to work out its own salvation.
The influences that exercised power over him in those days may be
described in the three following terms: Hellenism, Schopenhauer, Wagner.
His love of Hellenism certainly led him to philology; but, as a matter of
fact, what concerned him most was to obtain a wide view of things in
general, and this he hoped to derive from that science; philology in itself,

with his splendid method and thorough way of going to work, served him
only as a means to an end.
If Hellenism was the first strong influence which already in Pforta obtained
a sway over my brother, in the winter of 1865-66, a completely new, and
therefore somewhat subversive, influence was introduced into his life with
Schopenhauer's philosophy. When he reached Leipzig in the autumn of
1865, he was very downcast; for the experiences that had befallen him
during his one year of student life in Bonn had deeply depressed him. He
had sought at first to adapt himself to his surroundings there, with the hope
of ultimately elevating them to his lofty views on things; but both these
efforts proved vain, and now he had come to Leipzig with the purpose of
framing his own manner of life. It can easily be imagined how the first
reading of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea worked upon this
man, still stinging from the bitterest experiences and disappointments. He
writes: "Here I saw a mirror in which I espied the world, life, and my own
nature depicted with frightful grandeur." As my brother, from his very
earliest childhood, had always missed both the parent and the educator
through our father's untimely death, he began to regard Schopenhauer with
almost filial love and respect. He did not venerate him quite as other men
did; Schopenhauer's personality was what attracted and enchanted him.
From the first he was never blind to the faults in his master's system, and in
proof of this we have only to refer to an essay he wrote in the autumn of
1867, which actually contains a criticism of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
Now, in the autumn of 1865, to these two influences, Hellenism and
Schopenhauer, a third influence was added—one which was to prove the
strongest ever exercised over my brother—and it began with his personal
introduction to Richard Wagner. He was introduced to Wagner by the latter's
sister, Frau Professor Brockhaus, and his description of their first meeting,
contained in a letter to Erwin Rohde, is really most affecting. For years, that
is to say, from the time Billow's arrangement of Tristan and Isolde for the
pianoforte, had appeared, he had already been a passionate admirer of
Wagner's music; but now that the artist himself entered upon the scene of
his life, with the whole fascinating strength of his strong will, my brother
felt that he was in the presence of a being whom he, of all modern men,
resembled most in regard to force of character.

Again, in the case of Richard Wagner, my brother, from the first, laid the
utmost stress upon the man's personality, and could only regard his works
and views as an expression of the artist's whole being, despite the fact that
he by no means understood every one of those works at that time. My
brother was the first who ever manifested such enthusiastic affection for
Schopenhauer and Wagner, and he was also the first of that numerous band
of young followers who ultimately inscribed the two great names upon their
banner. Whether Schopenhauer and Wagner ever really corresponded to the
glorified pictures my brother painted of them, both in his letters and other
writings, is a question which we can no longer answer in the affirmative.
Perhaps what he saw in them was only what he himself wished to be some
day.
The amount of work my brother succeeded in accomplishing, during his
student days, really seems almost incredible. When we examine his record
for the years 1865-67, we can scarcely believe it refers to only two years'
industry, for at a guess no one would hesitate to suggest four years at least.
But in those days, as he himself declares, he still possessed the constitution
of a bear. He knew neither what headaches nor indigestion meant, and,
despite his short sight, his eyes were able to endure the greatest strain
without giving him the smallest trouble. That is why, regardless of seriously
interrupting his studies, he was so glad at the thought of becoming a soldier
in the forthcoming autumn of 1867; for he was particularly anxious to
discover some means of employing his bodily strength.
He discharged his duties as a soldier with the utmost mental and physical
freshness, was the crack rider among the recruits of his year, and was
sincerely sorry when, owing to an accident, he was compelled to leave the
colours before the completion of his service. As a result of this accident he
had his first dangerous illness.
While mounting his horse one day, the beast, which was an uncommonly
restive one, suddenly reared, and, causing him to strike his chest sharply
against the pommel of the saddle, threw him to the ground. My brother then
made a second attempt to mount, and succeeded this time, notwithstanding
the fact that he had severely sprained and torn two muscles in his chest, and
had seriously bruised the adjacent ribs. For a whole day he did his utmost to
pay no heed to the injury, and to overcome the pain it caused him; but in the
end he only swooned, and a dangerously acute inflammation of the injured

tissues was the result. Ultimately he was obliged to consult the famous
specialist, Professor Volkmann, in Halle, who quickly put him right.
In October 1868, my brother returned to his studies in Leipzig with double
joy. These were his plans: to get his doctor's degree as soon as possible; to
proceed to Paris, Italy, and Greece, make a lengthy stay in each place, and
then to return to Leipzig in order to settle there as a privat docent. All these
plans were, however, suddenly frustrated owing to his premature call to the
University of Bale, where he was invited to assume the duties of professor.
Some of the philological essays he had written in his student days, and
which were published by the Rheinische Museum, had attracted the
attention of the Educational Board at Bale. Ratsherr Wilhelm Vischer, as
representing this body, appealed to Ritschl for fuller information. Now
Ritschl, who had early recognised my brother's extraordinary talents, must
have written a letter of such enthusiastic praise ("Nietzsche is a genius: he
can do whatever he chooses to put his mind to"), that one of the more
cautious members of the council is said to have observed: "If the proposed
candidate be really such a genius, then it were better did we not appoint
him; for, in any case, he would only stay a short time at the little University
of Bale." My brother ultimately accepted the appointment, and, in view of
his published philological works, he was immediately granted the doctor's
degree by the University of Leipzig. He was twenty-four years and six
months old when he took up his position as professor in Bale,—and it was
with a heavy heart that he proceeded there, for he knew "the golden period
of untrammelled activity" must cease. He was, however, inspired by the
deep wish of being able "to transfer to his pupils some of that
Schopenhauerian earnestness which is stamped on the brow of the sublime
man." "I should like to be something more than a mere trainer of capable
philologists: the present generation of teachers, the care of the growing
broods,—all this is in my mind. If we must live, let us at least do so in such
wise that others may bless our life once we have been peacefully delivered
from its toils."
When I look back upon that month of May 1869, and ask both of friends
and of myself, what the figure of this youthful University professor of four-
and-twenty meant to the world at that time, the reply is naturally, in the first
place: that he was one of Ritschl's best pupils; secondly, that he was an
exceptionally capable exponent of classical antiquity with a brilliant career

before him; and thirdly, that he was a passionate adorer of Wagner and
Schopenhauer. But no one has any idea of my brother's independent attitude
to the science he had selected, to his teachers and to his ideals, and he
deceived both himself and us when he passed as a "disciple" who really
shared all the views of his respected master.
On the 28th May 1869, my brother delivered his inaugural address at Bale
University, and it is said to have deeply impressed the authorities. The
subject of the address was "Homer and Classical Philology."
Musing deeply, the worthy councillors and professors walked homeward.
What had they just heard? A young scholar discussing the very justification
of his own science in a cool and philosophically critical spirit! A man able
to impart so much artistic glamour to his subject, that the once stale and arid
study of philology suddenly struck them—and they were certainly not
impressionable men—as the messenger of the gods: "and just as the Muses
descended upon the dull and tormented Boeotian peasants, so philology
comes into a world full of gloomy colours and pictures, full of the deepest,
most incurable woes, and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful and
brilliant godlike figure of a distant, blue, and happy fairyland."
"We have indeed got hold of a rare bird, Herr Ratsherr," said one of these
gentlemen to his companion, and the latter heartily agreed, for my brother's
appointment had been chiefly his doing.
Even in Leipzig, it was reported that Jacob Burckhardt had said: "Nietzsche
is as much an artist as a scholar." Privy-Councillor Ritschl told me of this
himself, and then he added, with a smile: "I always said so; he can make his
scientific discourses as palpitatingly interesting as a French novelist his
novels."
"Homer and Classical Philology"—my brother's inaugural address at the
University—was by no means the first literary attempt he had made; for we
have already seen that he had had papers published by the Rheinische
Museum; still, this particular discourse is important, seeing that it
practically contains the programme of many other subsequent essays. I
must, however, emphasise this fact here, that neither "Homer and Classical
Philology," nor The Birth of Tragedy, represents a beginning in my brother's
career. It is really surprising to see how very soon he actually began
grappling with the questions which were to prove the problems of his life. If

a beginning to his intellectual development be sought at all, then it must be
traced to the years 1865-67 in Leipzig. The Birth of Tragedy, his maiden
attempt at book-writing, with which he began his twenty-eighth year, is the
last link of a long chain of developments, and the first fruit that was a long
time coming to maturity. Nietzsche's was a polyphonic nature, in which the
most different and apparently most antagonistic talents had come together.
Philosophy, art, and science—in the form of philology, then—each certainly
possessed a part of him. The most wonderful feature—perhaps it might
even be called the real Nietzschean feature—of this versatile creature, was
the fact that no eternal strife resulted from the juxtaposition of these
inimical traits, that not one of them strove to dislodge, or to get the upper
hand of, the others. When Nietzsche renounced the musical career, in order
to devote himself to philology, and gave himself up to the most strenuous
study, he did not find it essential completely to suppress his other
tendencies: as before, he continued both to compose and derive pleasure
from music, and even studied counterpoint somewhat seriously. Moreover,
during his years at Leipzig, when he consciously gave himself up to
philological research, he began to engross himself in Schopenhauer, and
was thereby won by philosophy for ever. Everything that could find room
took up its abode in him, and these juxtaposed factors, far from interfering
with one another's existence, were rather mutually fertilising and
stimulating. All those who have read the first volume of the biography with
attention must have been struck with the perfect way in which the various
impulses in his nature combined in the end to form one general torrent, and
how this flowed with ever greater force in the direction of a single goal.
Thus science, art, and philosophy developed and became ever more closely
related in him, until, in The Birth of Tragedy, they brought forth a "centaur,"
that is to say, a work which would have been an impossible achievement to
a man with only a single, special talent. This polyphony of different talents,
all coming to utterance together and producing the richest and boldest of
harmonies, is the fundamental feature not only of Nietzsche's early days,
but of his whole development. It is once again the artist, philosopher, and
man of science, who as one man in later years, after many wanderings,
recantations, and revulsions of feeling, produces that other and rarer
Centaur of highest rank—Zarathustra.
The Birth of Tragedy requires perhaps a little explaining—more particularly
as we have now ceased to use either Schopenhauerian or Wagnerian terms

of expression. And it was for this reason that five years after its appearance,
my brother wrote an introduction to it, in which he very plainly expresses
his doubts concerning the views it contains, and the manner in which they
are presented. The kernel of its thought he always recognised as perfectly
correct; and all he deplored in later days was that he had spoiled the grand
problem of Hellenism, as he understood it, by adulterating it with
ingredients taken from the world of most modern ideas. As time went on, he
grew ever more and more anxious to define the deep meaning of this book
with greater precision and clearness. A very good elucidation of its aims,
which unfortunately was never published, appears among his notes of the
year 1886, and is as follows:—
"Concerning The Birth of Tragedy.—A book consisting of mere experiences
relating to pleasurable and unpleasurable æsthetic states, with a
metaphysico-artistic background. At the same time the confession of a
romanticist the sufferer feels the deepest longing for beauty—he begets it;
finally, a product of youth, full of youthful courage and melancholy.
"Fundamental psychological experiences: the word 'Apollonian' stands for
that state of rapt repose in the presence of a visionary world, in the presence
of the world of beautiful appearance designed as a deliverance from
becoming; the word Dionysos, on the other hand, stands for strenuous
becoming, grown self-conscious, in the form of the rampant voluptuousness
of the creator, who is also perfectly conscious of the violent anger of the
destroyer.
"The antagonism of these two attitudes and the desires that underlie them.
The first-named would have the vision it conjures up eternal: in its light
man must be quiescent, apathetic, peaceful, healed, and on friendly terms
with himself and all existence; the second strives after creation, after the
voluptuousness of wilful creation, i.e. constructing and destroying. Creation
felt and explained as an instinct would be merely the unremitting inventive
action of a dissatisfied being, overflowing with wealth and living at high
tension and high pressure,—of a God who would overcome the sorrows of
existence by means only of continual changes and transformations,—
appearance as a transient and momentary deliverance; the world as an
apparent sequence of godlike visions and deliverances.

"This metaphysico-artistic attitude is opposed to Schopenhauer's one-sided
view which values art, not from the artist's standpoint but from the
spectator's, because it brings salvation and deliverance by means of the joy
produced by unreal as opposed to the existing or the real (the experience
only of him who is suffering and is in despair owing to himself and
everything existing).—Deliverance in the form and its eternity (just as Plato
may have pictured it, save that he rejoiced in a complete subordination of
all too excitable sensibilities, even in the idea itself). To this is opposed the
second point of view—art regarded as a phenomenon of the artist, above all
of the musician; the torture of being obliged to create, as a Dionysian
instinct.
"Tragic art, rich in both attitudes, represents the reconciliation of Apollo
and Dionysos. Appearance is given the greatest importance by Dionysos;
and yet it will be denied and cheerfully denied. This is directed against
Schopenhauer's teaching of Resignation as the tragic attitude towards the
world.
"Against Wagner's theory that music is a means and drama an end.
"A desire for tragic myth (for religion and even pessimistic religion) as for a
forcing frame in which certain plants flourish.
"Mistrust of science, although its ephemerally soothing optimism be
strongly felt; the 'serenity' of the theoretical man.
"Deep antagonism to Christianity. Why? The degeneration of the Germanic
spirit is ascribed to its influence.
"Any justification of the world can only be an æsthetic one. Profound
suspicions about morality (—it is part and parcel of the world of
appearance).
"The happiness of existence is only possible as the happiness derived from
appearance. ('Being' is a fiction invented by those who suffer from
becoming.)
"Happiness in becoming is possible only in the annihilation of the real, of
the 'existing,' of the beautifully visionary,—in the pessimistic dissipation of
illusions:—with the annihilation of the most beautiful phenomena in the
world of appearance, Dionysian happiness reaches its zenith."

The Birth of Tragedy is really only a portion of a much greater work on
Hellenism, which my brother had always had in view from the time of his
student days. But even the portion it represents was originally designed
upon a much larger scale than the present one; the reason probably being,
that Nietzsche desired only to be of service to Wagner. When a certain
portion of the projected work on Hellenism was ready and had received the
title Greek Cheerfulness, my brother happened to call upon Wagner at
Tribschen in April 1871, and found him very low-spirited in regard to the
mission of his life. My brother was very anxious to take some decisive step
to help him, and, laying the plans of his great work on Greece aside, he
selected a small portion from the already completed manuscript—a portion
dealing with one distinct side of Hellenism,—to wit, its tragic art. He then
associated Wagner's music with it and the name Dionysos, and thus took the
first step towards that world-historical view through which we have since
grown accustomed to regard Wagner.
From the dates of the various notes relating to it, The Birth of Tragedy must
have been written between the autumn of 1869 and November 1871—a
period during which "a mass of æsthetic questions and answers" was
fermenting in Nietzsche's mind. It was first published in January 1872 by E.
W. Fritsch, in Leipzig, under the title The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit
of Music. Later on the title was changed to The Birth of Tragedy, or
Hellenism and Pessimism.
ELIZABETH FORSTER-NIETZSCHE.

WEIMAR, September 1905.
[1] This Introduction by E. Förster-Nietzsche, which appears in the front of the
first volume of Naumann's Pocket Edition of Nietzsche, has been translated and
arranged by Mr. A. M. Ludovici.

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM.

I.

Whatever may lie at the bottom of this doubtful book must be a question of
the first rank and attractiveness, moreover a deeply personal question,—in

proof thereof observe the time in which it originated, in spite of which it
originated, the exciting period of the Franco-German war of 1870-71. While
the thunder of the battle of Wörth rolled over Europe, the ruminator and
riddle-lover, who had to be the parent of this book, sat somewhere in a nook
of the Alps, lost in riddles and ruminations, consequently very much
concerned and unconcerned at the same time, and wrote down his
meditations on the Greeks,—the kernel of the curious and almost
inaccessible book, to which this belated prologue (or epilogue) is to be
devoted. A few weeks later: and he found himself under the walls of Metz,
still wrestling with the notes of interrogation he had set down concerning
the alleged "cheerfulness" of the Greeks and of Greek art; till at last, in that
month of deep suspense, when peace was debated at Versailles, he too
attained to peace with himself, and, slowly recovering from a disease
brought home from the field, made up his mind definitely regarding the
"Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music."—From music? Music and
Tragedy? Greeks and tragic music? Greeks and the Art-work of pessimism?
A race of men, well-fashioned, beautiful, envied, life-inspiring, like no
other race hitherto, the Greeks—indeed? The Greeks were in need of
tragedy? Yea—of art? Wherefore—Greek art?...
We can thus guess where the great note of interrogation concerning the
value of existence had been set. Is pessimism necessarily the sign of
decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and weakened instincts?—as was
the case with the Indians, as is, to all appearance, the case with us "modern"
men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual
predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existence, owing
to well-being, to exuberant health, to fullness of existence? Is there perhaps
suffering in overfullness itself? A seductive fortitude with the keenest of
glances, which yearns for the terrible, as for the enemy, the worthy enemy,
with whom it may try its strength? from whom it is willing to learn what
"fear" is? What means tragic myth to the Greeks of the best, strongest,
bravest era? And the prodigious phenomenon of the Dionysian? And that
which was born thereof, tragedy?—And again: that of which tragedy died,
the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, contentedness and cheerfulness of
the theoretical man—indeed? might not this very Socratism be a sign of
decline, of weariness, of disease, of anarchically disintegrating instincts?
And the "Hellenic cheerfulness" of the later Hellenism merely a glowing
sunset? The Epicurean will counter to pessimism merely a precaution of the

sufferer? And science itself, our science—ay, viewed as a symptom of life,
what really signifies all science? Whither, worse still, whence—all science?
Well? Is scientism perhaps only fear and evasion of pessimism? A subtle
defence against—truth! Morally speaking, something like falsehood and
cowardice? And, unmorally speaking, an artifice? O Socrates, Socrates, was
this perhaps thy secret? Oh mysterious ironist, was this perhaps thine—
irony?...

2.

What I then laid hands on, something terrible and dangerous, a problem
with horns, not necessarily a bull itself, but at all events a new problem: I
should say to-day it was the problem of science itself—science conceived
for the first time as problematic, as questionable. But the book, in which my
youthful ardour and suspicion then discharged themselves—what an
impossible book must needs grow out of a task so disagreeable to youth.
Constructed of nought but precocious, unripened self-experiences, all of
which lay close to the threshold of the communicable, based on the
groundwork of art—for the problem of science cannot be discerned on the
groundwork of science,—a book perhaps for artists, with collateral
analytical and retrospective aptitudes (that is, an exceptional kind of artists,
for whom one must seek and does not even care to seek ...), full of
psychological innovations and artists' secrets, with an artists' metaphysics in
the background, a work of youth, full of youth's mettle and youth's
melancholy, independent, defiantly self-sufficient even when it seems to
bow to some authority and self-veneration; in short, a firstling-work, even
in every bad sense of the term; in spite of its senile problem, affected with
every fault of youth, above all with youth's prolixity and youth's "storm and
stress": on the other hand, in view of the success it had (especially with the
great artist to whom it addressed itself, as it were, in a duologue, Richard
Wagner) a demonstrated book, I mean a book which, at any rate, sufficed
"for the best of its time." On this account, if for no other reason, it should be
treated with some consideration and reserve; yet I shall not altogether
conceal how disagreeable it now appears to me, how after sixteen years it
stands a total stranger before me,—before an eye which is more mature, and
a hundred times more fastidious, but which has by no means grown colder
nor lost any of its interest in that self-same task essayed for the first time by

this daring book,—to view science through the optics of the artist, and art
moreover through the optics of life....

3.

I say again, to-day it is an impossible book to me,—I call it badly written,
heavy, painful, image-angling and image-entangling, maudlin, sugared at
times even to femininism, uneven in tempo, void of the will to logical
cleanliness, very convinced and therefore rising above the necessity of
demonstration, distrustful even of the propriety of demonstration, as being a
book for initiates, as "music" for those who are baptised with the name of
Music, who are united from the beginning of things by common ties of rare
experiences in art, as a countersign for blood-relations in artibus.—a
haughty and fantastic book, which from the very first withdraws even more
from the profanum vulgus of the "cultured" than from the "people," but
which also, as its effect has shown and still shows, knows very well how to
seek fellow-enthusiasts and lure them to new by-ways and dancing-
grounds. Here, at any rate—thus much was acknowledged with curiosity as
well as with aversion—a strange voice spoke, the disciple of a still
"unknown God," who for the time being had hidden himself under the hood
of the scholar, under the German's gravity and disinclination for dialectics,
even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian; here was a spirit with strange
and still nameless needs, a memory bristling with questions, experiences
and obscurities, beside which stood the name Dionysos like one more note
of interrogation; here spoke—people said to themselves with misgivings—
something like a mystic and almost mænadic soul, which, undecided
whether it should disclose or conceal itself, stammers with an effort and
capriciously as in a strange tongue. It should have sung, this "new soul"—
and not spoken! What a pity, that I did not dare to say what I then had to
say, as a poet: I could have done so perhaps! Or at least as a philologist:—
for even at the present day well-nigh everything in this domain remains to
be discovered and disinterred by the philologist! Above all the problem,
that here there is a problem before us,—and that, so long as we have no
answer to the question "what is Dionysian?" the Greeks are now as ever
wholly unknown and inconceivable....

4.

Ay, what is Dionysian?—In this book may be found an answer,—a
"knowing one" speaks here, the votary and disciple of his god. Perhaps I
should now speak more guardedly and less eloquently of a psychological
question so difficult as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A
fundamental question is the relation of the Greek to pain, his degree of
sensibility,—did this relation remain constant? or did it veer about?—the
question, whether his ever-increasing longing for beauty, for festivals,
gaieties, new cults, did really grow out of want, privation, melancholy,
pain? For suppose even this to be true—and Pericles (or Thucydides)
intimates as much in the great Funeral Speech:—whence then the opposite
longing, which appeared first in the order of time, the longing for the ugly,
the good, resolute desire of the Old Hellene for pessimism, for tragic myth,
for the picture of all that is terrible, evil, enigmatical, destructive, fatal at
the basis of existence,—whence then must tragedy have sprung? Perhaps
from joy, from strength, from exuberant health, from over-fullness. And
what then, physiologically speaking, is the meaning of that madness, out of
which comic as well as tragic art has grown, the Dionysian madness?
What? perhaps madness is not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, of
decline, of belated culture? Perhaps there are—a question for alienists—
neuroses of health? of folk-youth and youthfulness? What does that
synthesis of god and goat in the Satyr point to? What self-experience what
"stress," made the Greek think of the Dionysian reveller and primitive man
as a satyr? And as regards the origin of the tragic chorus: perhaps there
were endemic ecstasies in the eras when the Greek body bloomed and the
Greek soul brimmed over with life? Visions and hallucinations, which took
hold of entire communities, entire cult-assemblies? What if the Greeks in
the very wealth of their youth had the will to be tragic and were pessimists?
What if it was madness itself, to use a word of Plato's, which brought the
greatest blessings upon Hellas? And what if, on the other hand and
conversely, at the very time of their dissolution and weakness, the Greeks
became always more optimistic, more superficial, more histrionic, also
more ardent for logic and the logicising of the world,—consequently at the
same time more "cheerful" and more "scientific"? Ay, despite all "modern
ideas" and prejudices of the democratic taste, may not the triumph of
optimism, the common sense that has gained the upper hand, the practical
and theoretical utilitarianism, like democracy itself, with which it is
synchronous—be symptomatic of declining vigour, of approaching age, of

physiological weariness? And not at all—pessimism? Was Epicurus an
optimist—because a sufferer?... We see it is a whole bundle of weighty
questions which this book has taken upon itself,—let us not fail to add its
weightiest question! Viewed through the optics of life, what is the meaning
of—morality?...

5.

Already in the foreword to Richard Wagner, art—-and not morality—is set
down as the properly metaphysical activity of man; in the book itself the
piquant proposition recurs time and again, that the existence of the world is
justified only as an æsthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the entire book
recognises only an artist-thought and artist-after-thought behind all
occurrences,—a "God," if you will, but certainly only an altogether
thoughtless and unmoral artist-God, who, in construction as in destruction,
in good as in evil, desires to become conscious of his own equable joy and
sovereign glory; who, in creating worlds, frees himself from the anguish of
fullness and overfullness, from the suffering of the contradictions
concentrated within him. The world, that is, the redemption of God attained
at every moment, as the perpetually changing, perpetually new vision of the
most suffering, most antithetical, most contradictory being, who contrives
to redeem himself only in appearance: this entire artist-metaphysics, call it
arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if you will,—the point is, that it already betrays a
spirit, which is determined some day, at all hazards, to make a stand against
the moral interpretation and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the first
time, a pessimism "Beyond Good and Evil" announces itself, here that
"perverseness of disposition" obtains expression and formulation, against
which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling beforehand his angriest
imprecations and thunderbolts,—a philosophy which dares to put,
derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of phenomena, and not only
among "phenomena" (in the sense of the idealistic terminus technicus), but
among the "illusions," as appearance, semblance, error, interpretation,
accommodation, art. Perhaps the depth of this antimoral tendency may be
best estimated from the guarded and hostile silence with which Christianity
is treated throughout this book,—Christianity, as being the most extravagant
burlesque of the moral theme to which mankind has hitherto been obliged
to listen. In fact, to the purely æsthetic world-interpretation and justification

taught in this book, there is no greater antithesis than the Christian dogma,
which is only and will be only moral, and which, with its absolute
standards, for instance, its truthfulness of God, relegates—that is, disowns,
convicts, condemns—art, all art, to the realm of falsehood. Behind such a
mode of thought and valuation, which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to
art, I always experienced what was hostile to life, the wrathful, vindictive
counterwill to life itself: for all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics,
necessity of perspective and error. From the very first Christianity was,
essentially and thoroughly, the nausea and surfeit of Life for Life, which
only disguised, concealed and decked itself out under the belief in "another"
or "better" life. The hatred of the "world," the curse on the affections, the
fear of beauty and sensuality, another world, invented for the purpose of
slandering this world the more, at bottom a longing for. Nothingness, for the
end, for rest, for the "Sabbath of Sabbaths"—all this, as also the
unconditional will of Christianity to recognise only moral values, has
always appeared to me as the most dangerous and ominous of all possible
forms of a "will to perish"; at the least, as the symptom of a most fatal
disease, of profoundest weariness, despondency, exhaustion,
impoverishment of life,—for before the tribunal of morality (especially
Christian, that is, unconditional morality) life must constantly and
inevitably be the loser, because life is something essentially unmoral,—
indeed, oppressed with the weight of contempt and the everlasting No, life
must finally be regarded as unworthy of desire, as in itself unworthy.
Morality itself what?—may not morality be a "will to disown life," a secret
instinct for annihilation, a principle of decay, of depreciation, of slander, a
beginning of the end? And, consequently, the danger of dangers?... It was
against morality, therefore, that my instinct, as an intercessory-instinct for
life, turned in this questionable book, inventing for itself a fundamental
counter—dogma and counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely anti-
Christian. What should I call it? As a philologist and man of words I
baptised it, not without some liberty—for who could be sure of the proper
name of the Antichrist?—with the name of a Greek god: I called it
Dionysian.

6.

You see which problem I ventured to touch upon in this early work?... How
I now regret, that I had not then the courage (or immodesty?) to allow
myself, in all respects, the use of an individual language for such individual
contemplations and ventures in the field of thought—that I laboured to
express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulæ, strange and new
valuations, which ran fundamentally counter to the spirit of Kant and
Schopenhauer, as well as to their taste! What, forsooth, were
Schopenhauer's views on tragedy? "What gives"—he says in Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung, II. 495—"to all tragedy that singular swing towards
elevation, is the awakening of the knowledge that the world, that life,
cannot satisfy us thoroughly, and consequently is not worthy of our
attachment In this consists the tragic spirit: it therefore leads to
resignation." Oh, how differently Dionysos spoke to me! Oh how far from
me then was just this entire resignationism!—But there is something far
worse in this book, which I now regret even more than having obscured and
spoiled Dionysian anticipations with Schopenhauerian formulæ: to wit, that,
in general, I spoiled the grand Hellenic problem, as it had opened up before
me, by the admixture of the most modern things! That I entertained hopes,
where nothing was to be hoped for, where everything pointed all-too-clearly
to an approaching end! That, on the basis of our latter-day German music, I
began to fable about the "spirit of Teutonism," as if it were on the point of
discovering and returning to itself,—ay, at the very time that the German
spirit which not so very long before had had the will to the lordship over
Europe, the strength to lead and govern Europe, testamentarily and
conclusively resigned and, under the pompous pretence of empire-founding,
effected its transition to mediocritisation, democracy, and "modern ideas."
In very fact, I have since learned to regard this "spirit of Teutonism" as
something to be despaired of and unsparingly treated, as also our present
German music, which is Romanticism through and through and the most
un-Grecian of all possible forms of art: and moreover a first-rate nerve-
destroyer, doubly dangerous for a people given to drinking and revering the
unclear as a virtue, namely, in its twofold capacity of an intoxicating and
stupefying narcotic. Of course, apart from all precipitate hopes and faulty
applications to matters specially modern, with which I then spoiled my first
book, the great Dionysian note of interrogation, as set down therein,
continues standing on and on, even with reference to music: how must we

conceive of a music, which is no longer of Romantic origin, like the
German; but of Dionysian?...

7.

—But, my dear Sir, if your book is not Romanticism, what in the world is?
Can the deep hatred of the present, of "reality" and "modern ideas" be
pushed farther than has been done in your artist-metaphysics?—which
would rather believe in Nothing, or in the devil, than in the "Now"? Does
not a radical bass of wrath and annihilative pleasure growl on beneath all
your contrapuntal vocal art and aural seduction, a mad determination to
oppose all that "now" is, a will which is not so very far removed from
practical nihilism and which seems to say: "rather let nothing be true, than
that you should be in the right, than that your truth should prevail!" Hear,
yourself, my dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever so unlocked ears, a
single select passage of your own book, that not ineloquent dragon-slayer
passage, which may sound insidiously rat-charming to young ears and
hearts. What? is not that the true blue romanticist-confession of 1830 under
the mask of the pessimism of 1850? After which, of course, the usual
romanticist finale at once strikes up,—rupture, collapse, return and
prostration before an old belief, before the old God.... What? is not your
pessimist book itself a piece of anti-Hellenism and Romanticism, something
"equally intoxicating and befogging," a narcotic at all events, ay, a piece of
music, of German music? But listen:

Let us imagine a rising generation with this undauntedness of vision,
with this heroic impulse towards the prodigious, let us imagine the
bold step of these dragon-slayers, the proud daring with which they
turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism, in order
"to live resolutely" in the Whole and in the Full: would it not be
necessary for the tragic man of this culture, with his self-discipline to
earnestness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical
comfort, tragedy as the Helena belonging to him, and that he should
exclaim with Faust:
"Und sollt ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?"[1]

"Would it not be necessary?" ... No, thrice no! ye young romanticists: it
would not be necessary! But it is very probable, that things may end thus,
that ye may end thus, namely "comforted," as it is written, in spite of all
self-discipline to earnestness and terror; metaphysically comforted, in short,
as Romanticists are wont to end, as Christians.... No! ye should first of all
learn the art of earthly comfort, ye should learn to laugh, my young friends,
if ye are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will perhaps, as
laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the devil—
and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of that Dionysian
ogre, called Zarathustra:

"Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your
legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers—and better still if ye
stand also on your heads!
"This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown—I myself have
put on this crown; I myself have consecrated my laughter. No one else
have I found to-day strong enough for this.
"Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one, who beckoneth with
his pinions, one ready for flight, beckoning unto all birds, ready and
prepared, a blissfully light-spirited one:—
"Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher, no
impatient one, no absolute one, one who loveth leaps and side-leaps: I
myself have put on this crown!
"This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown—to you my
brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated: ye higher
men, learn, I pray you—to laugh!"
Thus spake Zarathustra, lxxiii. 17, 18, and 20.

SILS-MARIA, OBERENGADIN, August 1886.
[1]
And shall not I, by mightiest desire,
In living shape that sole fair form acquire?
SWANWICK, trans. of Faust.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC

FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER.

In order to keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements, and
misunderstandings to which the thoughts gathered in this essay will give
occasion, considering the peculiar character of our æsthetic publicity, and to
be able also to write the introductory remarks with the same contemplative
delight, the impress of which, as the petrifaction of good and elevating
hours, it bears on every page, I form a conception of the moment when you,
my highly honoured friend, will receive this essay; how you, say after an
evening walk in the winter snow, will behold the unbound Prometheus on
the title-page, read my name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever this
essay may contain, the author has something earnest and impressive to say,
and, moreover, that in all his meditations he communed with you as with
one present and could thus write only what befitted your presence. You will
thus remember that it was at the same time as your magnificent dissertation
on Beethoven originated, viz., amidst the horrors and sublimities of the war
which had just then broken out, that I collected myself for these thoughts.
But those persons would err, to whom this collection suggests no more
perhaps than the antithesis of patriotic excitement and æsthetic revelry, of
gallant earnestness and sportive delight. Upon a real perusal of this essay,
such readers will, rather to their surprise, discover how earnest is the
German problem we have to deal with, which we properly place, as a vortex
and turning-point, in the very midst of German hopes. Perhaps, however,
this same class of readers will be shocked at seeing an æsthetic problem
taken so seriously, especially if they can recognise in art no more than a
merry diversion, a readily dispensable court-jester to the "earnestness of
existence": as if no one were aware of the real meaning of this confrontation
with the "earnestness of existence." These earnest ones may be informed
that I am convinced that art is the highest task and the properly

metaphysical activity of this life, as it is understood by the man, to whom,
as my sublime protagonist on this path, I would now dedicate this essay.
BASEL, end of the year 1871.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

1.

We shall have gained much for the science of æsthetics, when once we have
perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of
intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the
duplexity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: in like manner as
procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual
conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names
we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent observer the
profound mysteries of their view of art, not indeed in concepts, but in the
impressively clear figures of their world of deities. It is in connection with
Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that
there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims,
between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of
music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run
parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually
inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them
the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their
mutual term "Art"; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic
will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually
generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy.
In order to bring these two tendencies within closer range, let us conceive
them first of all as the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness;
between which physiological phenomena a contrast may be observed
analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In
dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius, the glorious divine
figures first appeared to the souls of men, in dreams the great shaper beheld

the charming corporeal structure of superhuman beings, and the Hellenic
poet, if consulted on the mysteries of poetic inspiration, would likewise
have suggested dreams and would have offered an explanation resembling
that of Hans Sachs in the Meistersingers:—
Mein Freund, das grad' ist Dichters Werk,
dass er sein Träumen deut' und merk'.
Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn
wird ihm im Traume aufgethan:
all' Dichtkunst und Poeterei
ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei.[1]
The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of which
every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art, and in
fact, as we shall see, of an important half of poetry also. We take delight in
the immediate apprehension of form; all forms speak to us; there is nothing
indifferent, nothing superfluous. But, together with the highest life of this
dream-reality we also have, glimmering through it, the sensation of its
appearance: such at least is my experience, as to the frequency, ay,
normality of which I could adduce many proofs, as also the sayings of the
poets. Indeed, the man of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath
this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether
different reality lies concealed, and that therefore it is also an appearance;
and Schopenhauer actually designates the gift of occasionally regarding
men and things as mere phantoms and dream-pictures as the criterion of
philosophical ability. Accordingly, the man susceptible to art stands in the
same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher to the reality of
existence; he is a close and willing observer, for from these pictures he
reads the meaning of life, and by these processes he trains himself for life.
And it is perhaps not only the agreeable and friendly pictures that he
realises in himself with such perfect understanding: the earnest, the
troubled, the dreary, the gloomy, the sudden checks, the tricks of fortune,
the uneasy presentiments, in short, the whole "Divine Comedy" of life, and
the Inferno, also pass before him, not merely like pictures on the wall—for
he too lives and suffers in these scenes,—and yet not without that fleeting
sensation of appearance. And perhaps many a one will, like myself,
recollect having sometimes called out cheeringly and not without success
amid the dangers and terrors of dream-life: "It is a dream! I will dream on!"

I have likewise been told of persons capable of continuing the causality of
one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights: all of
which facts clearly testify that our innermost being, the common substratum
of all of us, experiences our dreams with deep joy and cheerful
acquiescence.
This cheerful acquiescence in the dream-experience has likewise been
embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: for Apollo, as the god of all
shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god. He, who (as the etymology of
the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of light, also rules over
the fair appearance of the inner world of fantasies. The higher truth, the
perfection of these states in contrast to the only partially intelligible
everyday world, ay, the deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping
in sleep and dream, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the
faculty of soothsaying and, in general, of the arts, through which life is
made possible and worth living. But also that delicate line, which the
dream-picture must not overstep—lest it act pathologically (in which case
appearance, being reality pure and simple, would impose upon us)—must
not be wanting in the picture of Apollo: that measured limitation, that
freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calmness of the
sculptor-god. His eye must be "sunlike," according to his origin; even when
it is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of his beauteous appearance
is still there. And so we might apply to Apollo, in an eccentric sense, what
Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in the veil of Mâyâ[2]: Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung, I. p. 416: "Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded in every
direction, rising and falling with howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits
in a boat and trusts in his frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows
the individual sits quietly supported by and trusting in his principium
individuationis." Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken
faith in this principium and the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have
received their sublimest expression; and we might even designate Apollo as
the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, from out of the
gestures and looks of which all the joy and wisdom of "appearance,"
together with its beauty, speak to us.
In the same work Schopenhauer has described to us the stupendous awe
which seizes upon man, when of a sudden he is at a loss to account for the
cognitive forms of a phenomenon, in that the principle of reason, in some

one of its manifestations, seems to admit of an exception. Add to this awe
the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost depths of man, ay, of
nature, at this same collapse of the principium individuationis, and we shall
gain an insight into the being of the Dionysian, which is brought within
closest ken perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness. It is either under the
influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men
and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all
nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation
of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness. So also in
the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in
number, were borne from place to place under this same Dionysian power.
In these St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers we again perceive the Bacchic
choruses of the Greeks, with their previous history in Asia Minor, as far
back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacæa. There are some, who, from lack
of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such phenomena as "folk-
diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the consciousness
of their own health: of course, the poor wretches do not divine what a
cadaverous-looking and ghastly aspect this very "health" of theirs presents
when the glowing life of the Dionysian revellers rushes past them.
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the covenant between man
and man again established, but also estranged, hostile or subjugated nature
again celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Of her own
accord earth proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of prey approach
from the desert and the rocks. The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with
flowers and garlands: panthers and tigers pass beneath his yoke. Change
Beethoven's "jubilee-song" into a painting, and, if your imagination be
equal to the occasion when the awestruck millions sink into the dust, you
will then be able to approach the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man,
now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or
"shameless fashion" has set up between man and man, are broken down.
Now, at the evangel of cosmic harmony, each one feels himself not only
united, reconciled, blended with his neighbour, but as one with him, as if
the veil of Mâyâ has been torn and were now merely fluttering in tatters
before the mysterious Primordial Unity. In song and in dance man exhibits
himself as a member of a higher community, he has forgotten how to walk
and speak, and is on the point of taking a dancing flight into the air. His
gestures bespeak enchantment. Even as the animals now talk, and as the

earth yields milk and honey, so also something super-natural sounds forth
from him: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted
and elated even as the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams. Man
is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of all
nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest
gratification of the Primordial Unity. The noblest clay, the costliest marble,
namely man, is here kneaded and cut, and the chisel strokes of the
Dionysian world-artist are accompanied with the cry of the Eleusinian
mysteries: "Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?"[3]
[1]
My friend, just this is poet's task:
His dreams to read and to unmask.
Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealed
In dream to man will be revealed.
All verse-craft and poetisation
Is but soothdream interpretation.
[2] Cf. World and Will as Idea, 1. 455 ff., trans, by Haldane and Kemp.
[3]
Te bow in the dust, oh millions?
Thy maker, mortal, dost divine?
Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth Symphony.—TR.

2.

Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and his antithesis, the
Dionysian, as artistic powers, which burst forth from nature herself, without
the mediation of the human artist, and in which her art-impulses are
satisfied in the most immediate and direct way: first, as the pictorial world
of dreams, the perfection of which has no connection whatever with the
intellectual height or artistic culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken
reality, which likewise does not heed the unit man, but even seeks to
destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness.
Anent these immediate art-states of nature every artist is either an
"imitator," to wit, either an Apollonian, an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian,
an artist in ecstasies, or finally—as for instance in Greek tragedy—an artist
in both dreams and ecstasies: so we may perhaps picture him, as in his
Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abnegation, lonesome and apart
from the revelling choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through

Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e., his oneness with the
primal source of the universe, reveals itself to him in a symbolical dream-
picture.
After these general premisings and contrastings, let us now approach the
Greeks in order to learn in what degree and to what height these art-
impulses of nature were developed in them: whereby we shall be enabled to
understand and appreciate more deeply the relation of the Greek artist to his
archetypes, or, according to the Aristotelian expression, "the imitation of
nature." In spite of all the dream-literature and the numerous dream-
anecdotes of the Greeks, we can speak only conjecturally, though with a fair
degree of certainty, of their dreams. Considering the incredibly precise and
unerring plastic power of their eyes, as also their manifest and sincere
delight in colours, we can hardly refrain (to the shame of every one born
later) from assuming for their very dreams a logical causality of lines and
contours, colours and groups, a sequence of scenes resembling their best
reliefs, the perfection of which would certainly justify us, if a comparison
were possible, in designating the dreaming Greeks as Homers and Homer as
a dreaming Greek: in a deeper sense than when modern man, in respect to
his dreams, ventures to compare himself with Shakespeare.
On the other hand, we should not have to speak conjecturally, if asked to
disclose the immense gap which separated the Dionysian Greek from the
Dionysian barbarian. From all quarters of the Ancient World—to say
nothing of the modern—from Rome as far as Babylon, we can prove the
existence of Dionysian festivals, the type of which bears, at best, the same
relation to the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, who borrowed his name
and attributes from the goat, does to Dionysus himself. In nearly every
instance the centre of these festivals lay in extravagant sexual
licentiousness, the waves of which overwhelmed all family life and its
venerable traditions; the very wildest beasts of nature were let loose here,
including that detestable mixture of lust and cruelty which has always
seemed to me the genuine "witches' draught." For some time, however, it
would seem that the Greeks were perfectly secure and guarded against the
feverish agitations of these festivals (—the knowledge of which entered
Greece by all the channels of land and sea) by the figure of Apollo himself
rising here in full pride, who could not have held out the Gorgon's head to a
more dangerous power than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian. It is in

Doric art that this majestically-rejecting attitude of Apollo perpetuated
itself. This opposition became more precarious and even impossible, when,
from out of the deepest root of the Hellenic nature, similar impulses finally
broke forth and made way for themselves: the Delphic god, by a seasonably
effected reconciliation, was now contented with taking the destructive arms
from the hands of his powerful antagonist. This reconciliation marks the
most important moment in the history of the Greek cult: wherever we turn
our eyes we may observe the revolutions resulting from this event. It was
the reconciliation of two antagonists, with the sharp demarcation of the
boundary-lines to be thenceforth observed by each, and with periodical
transmission of testimonials;—in reality, the chasm was not bridged over.
But if we observe how, under the pressure of this conclusion of peace, the
Dionysian power manifested itself, we shall now recognise in the Dionysian
orgies of the Greeks, as compared with the Babylonian Sacæa and their
retrogression of man to the tiger and the ape, the significance of festivals of
world-redemption and days of transfiguration. Not till then does nature
attain her artistic jubilee; not till then does the rupture of the principium
individuationis become an artistic phenomenon. That horrible "witches'
draught" of sensuality and cruelty was here powerless: only the curious
blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revellers reminds one
of it—just as medicines remind one of deadly poisons,—that phenomenon,
to wit, that pains beget joy, that jubilation wrings painful sounds out of the
breast. From the highest joy sounds the cry of horror or the yearning wail
over an irretrievable loss. In these Greek festivals a sentimental trait, as it
were, breaks forth from nature, as if she must sigh over her dismemberment
into individuals. The song and pantomime of such dually-minded revellers
was something new and unheard-of in the Homeric-Grecian world; and the
Dionysian music in particular excited awe and horror. If music, as it would
seem, was previously known as an Apollonian art, it was, strictly speaking,
only as the wave-beat of rhythm, the formative power of which was
developed to the representation of Apollonian conditions. The music of
Apollo was Doric architectonics in tones, but in merely suggested tones,
such as those of the cithara. The very element which forms the essence of
Dionysian music (and hence of music in general) is carefully excluded as
un-Apollonian; namely, the thrilling power of the tone, the uniform stream
of the melos, and the thoroughly incomparable world of harmony. In the
Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the highest exaltation of all his

symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for
utterance—the annihilation of the veil of Mâyâ, Oneness as genius of the
race, ay, of nature. The essence of nature is now to be expressed
symbolically; a new world of symbols is required; for once the entire
symbolism of the body, not only the symbolism of the lips, face, and
speech, but the whole pantomime of dancing which sets all the members
into rhythmical motion. Thereupon the other symbolic powers, those of
music, in rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony, suddenly become impetuous.
To comprehend this collective discharge of all the symbolic powers, a man
must have already attained that height of self-abnegation, which wills to
express itself symbolically through these powers: the Dithyrambic votary of
Dionysus is therefore understood only by those like himself! With what
astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have beheld him! With an
astonishment, which was all the greater the more it was mingled with the
shuddering suspicion that all this was in reality not so very foreign to him,
yea, that, like unto a veil, his Apollonian consciousness only hid this
Dionysian world from his view.

3.

In order to comprehend this, we must take down the artistic structure of the
Apollonian culture, as it were, stone by stone, till we behold the foundations
on which it rests. Here we observe first of all the glorious Olympian figures
of the gods, standing on the gables of this structure, whose deeds,
represented in far-shining reliefs, adorn its friezes. Though Apollo stands
among them as an individual deity, side by side with others, and without
claim to priority of rank, we must not suffer this fact to mislead us. The
same impulse which embodied itself in Apollo has, in general, given birth
to this whole Olympian world, and in this sense we may regard Apollo as
the father thereof. What was the enormous need from which proceeded such
an illustrious group of Olympian beings?
Whosoever, with another religion in his heart, approaches these Olympians
and seeks among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity, for
incorporeal spiritualisation, for sympathetic looks of love, will soon be
obliged to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed. Here
nothing suggests asceticism, spirituality, or duty: here only an exuberant,

even triumphant life speaks to us, in which everything existing is deified,
whether good or bad. And so the spectator will perhaps stand quite
bewildered before this fantastic exuberance of life, and ask himself what
magic potion these madly merry men could have used for enjoying life, so
that, wherever they turned their eyes, Helena, the ideal image of their own
existence "floating in sweet sensuality," smiled upon them. But to this
spectator, already turning backwards, we must call out: "depart not hence,
but hear rather what Greek folk-wisdom says of this same life, which with
such inexplicable cheerfulness spreads out before thee." There is an ancient
story that king Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus,
the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When at last he fell into
his hands, the king asked what was best of all and most desirable for man.
Fixed and immovable, the demon remained silent; till at last, forced by the
king, he broke out with shrill laughter into these words: "Oh, wretched race
of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to say to you
what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is for
ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second
best for you, however, is soon to die."
How is the Olympian world of deities related to this folk-wisdom? Even as
the rapturous vision of the tortured martyr to his sufferings.
Now the Olympian magic mountain opens, as it were, to our view and
shows to us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of
existence: to be able to live at all, he had to interpose the shining dream-
birth of the Olympian world between himself and them. The excessive
distrust of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira throning inexorably over
all knowledge, the vulture of the great philanthropist Prometheus, the
terrible fate of the wise Œdipus, the family curse of the Atridæ which drove
Orestes to matricide; in short, that entire philosophy of the sylvan god, with
its mythical exemplars, which wrought the ruin of the melancholy Etruscans
—was again and again surmounted anew by the Greeks through the artistic
middle world of the Olympians, or at least veiled and withdrawn from sight.
To be able to live, the Greeks had, from direst necessity, to create these
gods: which process we may perhaps picture to ourselves in this manner:
that out of the original Titan thearchy of terror the Olympian thearchy of joy
was evolved, by slow transitions, through the Apollonian impulse to beauty,
even as roses break forth from thorny bushes. How else could this so

sensitive people, so vehement in its desires, so singularly qualified for
sufferings have endured existence, if it had not been exhibited to them in
their gods, surrounded with a higher glory? The same impulse which calls
art into being, as the complement and consummation of existence, seducing
to a continuation of life, caused also the Olympian world to arise, in which
the Hellenic "will" held up before itself a transfiguring mirror. Thus do the
gods justify the life of man, in that they themselves live it—the only
satisfactory Theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is
regarded as that which is desirable in itself, and the real grief of the
Homeric men has reference to parting from it, especially to early parting: so
that we might now say of them, with a reversion of the Silenian wisdom,
that "to die early is worst of all for them, the second worst is—some day to
die at all." If once the lamentation is heard, it will ring out again, of the
short-lived Achilles, of the leaf-like change and vicissitude of the human
race, of the decay of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero
to long for a continuation of life, ay, even as a day-labourer. So vehemently
does the "will," at the Apollonian stage of development, long for this
existence, so completely at one does the Homeric man feel himself with it,
that the very lamentation becomes its song of praise.
Here we must observe that this harmony which is so eagerly contemplated
by modern man, in fact, this oneness of man with nature, to express which
Schiller introduced the technical term "naïve," is by no means such a
simple, naturally resulting and, as it were, inevitable condition, which must
be found at the gate of every culture leading to a paradise of man: this could
be believed only by an age which sought to picture to itself Rousseau's
Émile also as an artist, and imagined it had found in Homer such an artist
Émile, reared at Nature's bosom. Wherever we meet with the "naïve" in art,
it behoves us to recognise the highest effect of the Apollonian culture,
which in the first place has always to overthrow some Titanic empire and
slay monsters, and which, through powerful dazzling representations and
pleasurable illusions, must have triumphed over a terrible depth of world-
contemplation and a most keen susceptibility to suffering. But how seldom
is the naïve—that complete absorption, in the beauty of appearance—
attained! And hence how inexpressibly sublime is Homer, who, as unit
being, bears the same relation to this Apollonian folk-culture as the unit
dream-artist does to the dream-faculty of the people and of Nature in
general. The Homeric "naïveté" can be comprehended only as the complete

triumph of the Apollonian illusion: it is the same kind of illusion as Nature
so frequently employs to compass her ends. The true goal is veiled by a
phantasm: we stretch out our hands for the latter, while Nature attains the
former through our illusion. In the Greeks the "will" desired to contemplate
itself in the transfiguration of the genius and the world of art; in order to
glorify themselves, its creatures had to feel themselves worthy of glory;
they had to behold themselves again in a higher sphere, without this
consummate world of contemplation acting as an imperative or reproach.
Such is the sphere of beauty, in which, as in a mirror, they saw their images,
the Olympians. With this mirroring of beauty the Hellenic will combated its
talent—correlative to the artistic—for suffering and for the wisdom of
suffering: and, as a monument of its victory, Homer, the naïve artist, stands
before us.

4.

Concerning this naïve artist the analogy of dreams will enlighten us to some
extent. When we realise to ourselves the dreamer, as, in the midst of the
illusion of the dream-world and without disturbing it, he calls out to
himself: "it is a dream, I will dream on"; when we must thence infer a deep
inner joy in dream-contemplation; when, on the other hand, to be at all able
to dream with this inner joy in contemplation, we must have completely
forgotten the day and its terrible obtrusiveness, we may, under the direction
of the dream-reading Apollo, interpret all these phenomena to ourselves
somewhat as follows. Though it is certain that of the two halves of life, the
waking and the dreaming, the former appeals to us as by far the more
preferred, important, excellent and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that
which alone is lived: yet, with reference to that mysterious ground of our
being of which we are the phenomenon, I should, paradoxical as it may
seem, be inclined to maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of
dream life. For the more clearly I perceive in nature those all-powerful art
impulses, and in them a fervent longing for appearance, for redemption
through appearance, the more I feel myself driven to the metaphysical
assumption that the Verily-Existent and Primordial Unity, as the Eternally
Suffering and Self-Contradictory, requires the rapturous vision, the joyful
appearance, for its continuous salvation: which appearance we, who are
completely wrapt in it and composed of it, must regard as the Verily Non-

existent,—i.e., as a perpetual unfolding in time, space and causality,—in
other words, as empiric reality. If we therefore waive the consideration of
our own "reality" for the present, if we conceive our empiric existence, and
that of the world generally, as a representation of the Primordial Unity
generated every moment, we shall then have to regard the dream as an
appearance of appearance, hence as a still higher gratification of the
primordial desire for appearance. It is for this same reason that the
innermost heart of Nature experiences that indescribable joy in the naïve
artist and in the naïve work of art, which is likewise only "an appearance of
appearance." In a symbolic painting, Raphael, himself one of these
immortal "naïve" ones, has represented to us this depotentiating of
appearance to appearance, the primordial process of the naïve artist and at
the same time of Apollonian culture. In his Transfiguration, the lower half,
with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, the helpless, terrified
disciples, shows to us the reflection of eternal primordial pain, the sole
basis of the world: the "appearance" here is the counter-appearance of
eternal Contradiction, the father of things. Out of this appearance then
arises, like an ambrosial vapour, a visionlike new world of appearances, of
which those wrapt in the first appearance see nothing—a radiant floating in
purest bliss and painless Contemplation beaming from wide-open eyes.
Here there is presented to our view, in the highest symbolism of art, that
Apollonian world of beauty and its substratum, the terrible wisdom of
Silenus, and we comprehend, by intuition, their necessary interdependence.
Apollo, however, again appears to us as the apotheosis of the principium
individuationis, in which alone the perpetually attained end of the
Primordial Unity, its redemption through appearance, is consummated: he
shows us, with sublime attitudes, how the entire world of torment is
necessary, that thereby the individual may be impelled to realise the
redeeming vision, and then, sunk in contemplation thereof, quietly sit in his
fluctuating barque, in the midst of the sea.
This apotheosis of individuation, if it be at all conceived as imperative and
laying down precepts, knows but one law—the individual, i.e., the
observance of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic
sense. Apollo, as ethical deity, demands due proportion of his disciples, and,
that this may be observed, he demands self-knowledge. And thus, parallel to
the æsthetic necessity for beauty, there run the demands "know thyself" and
"not too much," while presumption and undueness are regarded as the truly

hostile demons of the non-Apollonian sphere, hence as characteristics of the
pre-Apollonian age, that of the Titans, and of the extra-Apollonian world,
that of the barbarians. Because of his Titan-like love for man, Prometheus
had to be torn to pieces by vultures; because of his excessive wisdom,
which solved the riddle of the Sphinx, Œdipus had to plunge into a
bewildering vortex of monstrous crimes: thus did the Delphic god interpret
the Grecian past.
So also the effects wrought by the Dionysian appeared "titanic" and
"barbaric" to the Apollonian Greek: while at the same time he could not
conceal from himself that he too was inwardly related to these overthrown
Titans and heroes. Indeed, he had to recognise still more than this: his entire
existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden substratum
of suffering and of knowledge, which was again disclosed to him by the
Dionysian. And lo! Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The "titanic"
and the "barbaric" were in the end not less necessary than the Apollonian.
And now let us imagine to ourselves how the ecstatic tone of the Dionysian
festival sounded in ever more luring and bewitching strains into this
artificially confined world built on appearance and moderation, how in
these strains all the undueness of nature, in joy, sorrow, and knowledge,
even to the transpiercing shriek, became audible: let us ask ourselves what
meaning could be attached to the psalmodising artist of Apollo, with the
phantom harp-sound, as compared with this demonic folk-song! The muses
of the arts of "appearance" paled before an art which, in its intoxication,
spoke the truth, the wisdom of Silenus cried "woe! woe!" against the
cheerful Olympians. The individual, with all his boundaries and due
proportions, went under in the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states and
forgot the Apollonian precepts. The Undueness revealed itself as truth,
contradiction, the bliss born of pain, declared itself but of the heart of
nature. And thus, wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was
routed and annihilated. But it is quite as certain that, where the first assault
was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god
exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever. For I can only
explain to myself the Doric state and Doric art as a permanent war-camp of
the Apollonian: only by incessant opposition to the titanic-barbaric nature
of the Dionysian was it possible for an art so defiantly-prim, so
encompassed with bulwarks, a training so warlike and rigorous, a
constitution so cruel and relentless, to last for any length of time.

Up to this point we have enlarged upon the observation made at the
beginning of this essay: how the Dionysian and the Apollonian, in ever new
births succeeding and mutually augmenting one another, controlled the
Hellenic genius: how from out the age of "bronze," with its Titan struggles
and rigorous folk-philosophy, the Homeric world develops under the
fostering sway of the Apollonian impulse to beauty, how this "naïve"
splendour is again overwhelmed by the inbursting flood of the Dionysian,
and how against this new power the Apollonian rises to the austere majesty
of Doric art and the Doric view of things. If, then, in this way, in the strife
of these two hostile principles, the older Hellenic history falls into four
great periods of art, we are now driven to inquire after the ulterior purpose
of these unfoldings and processes, unless perchance we should regard the
last-attained period, the period of Doric art, as the end and aim of these
artistic impulses: and here the sublime and highly celebrated art-work of
Attic tragedy and dramatic dithyramb presents itself to our view as the
common goal of both these impulses, whose mysterious union, after many
and long precursory struggles, found its glorious consummation in such a
child,—which is at once Antigone and Cassandra.

5.

We now approach the real purpose of our investigation, which aims at
acquiring a knowledge of the Dionyso-Apollonian genius and his art-work,
or at least an anticipatory understanding of the mystery of the aforesaid
union. Here we shall ask first of all where that new germ which
subsequently developed into tragedy and dramatic dithyramb first makes
itself perceptible in the Hellenic world. The ancients themselves supply the
answer in symbolic form, when they place Homer and Archilochus as the
forefathers and torch-bearers of Greek poetry side by side on gems,
sculptures, etc., in the sure conviction that only these two thoroughly
original compeers, from whom a stream of fire flows over the whole of
Greek posterity, should be taken into consideration. Homer, the aged
dreamer sunk in himself, the type of the Apollonian naïve artist, beholds
now with astonishment the impassioned genius of the warlike votary of the
muses, Archilochus, violently tossed to and fro on the billows of existence:
and modern æsthetics could only add by way of interpretation, that here the
"objective" artist is confronted by the first "subjective" artist. But this

interpretation is of little service to us, because we know the subjective artist
only as the poor artist, and in every type and elevation of art we demand
specially and first of all the conquest of the Subjective, the redemption from
the "ego" and the cessation of every individual will and desire; indeed, we
find it impossible to believe in any truly artistic production, however
insignificant, without objectivity, without pure, interestless contemplation.
Hence our æsthetics must first solve the problem as to how the "lyrist" is
possible as an artist: he who according to the experience of all ages
continually says "I" and sings off to us the entire chromatic scale of his
passions and desires. This very Archilochus appals us, alongside of Homer,
by his cries of hatred and scorn, by the drunken outbursts of his desire. Is
not just he then, who has been called the first subjective artist, the non-artist
proper? But whence then the reverence which was shown to him—the poet
—in very remarkable utterances by the Delphic oracle itself, the focus of
"objective" art?
Schiller has enlightened us concerning his poetic procedure by a
psychological observation, inexplicable to himself, yet not apparently open
to any objection. He acknowledges that as the preparatory state to the act of
poetising he had not perhaps before him or within him a series of pictures
with co-ordinate causality of thoughts, but rather a musical mood ("The
perception with me is at first without a clear and definite object; this forms
itself later. A certain musical mood of mind precedes, and only after this
does the poetical idea follow with me.") Add to this the most important
phenomenon of all ancient lyric poetry, the union, regarded everywhere as
natural, of the lyrist with the musician, their very identity, indeed,—
compared with which our modern lyric poetry is like the statue of a god
without a head,—and we may now, on the basis of our metaphysics of
æsthetics set forth above, interpret the lyrist to ourselves as follows. As
Dionysian artist he is in the first place become altogether one with the
Primordial Unity, its pain and contradiction, and he produces the copy of
this Primordial Unity as music, granting that music has been correctly
termed a repetition and a recast of the world; but now, under the Apollonian
dream-inspiration, this music again becomes visible to him as in a symbolic
dream-picture. The formless and intangible reflection of the primordial pain
in music, with its redemption in appearance, then generates a second
mirroring as a concrete symbol or example. The artist has already
surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process: the picture which

now shows to him his oneness with the heart of the world, is a dream-scene,
which embodies the primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together
with the primordial joy, of appearance. The "I" of the lyrist sounds therefore
from the abyss of being: its "subjectivity," in the sense of the modern
æsthetes, is a fiction. When Archilochus, the first lyrist of the Greeks,
makes known both his mad love and his contempt to the daughters of
Lycambes, it is not his passion which dances before us in orgiastic frenzy:
we see Dionysus and the Mænads, we see the drunken reveller Archilochus
sunk down to sleep—as Euripides depicts it in the Bacchæ, the sleep on the
high Alpine pasture, in the noonday sun:—and now Apollo approaches and
touches him with the laurel. The Dionyso-musical enchantment of the
sleeper now emits, as it were, picture sparks, lyrical poems, which in their
highest development are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.
The plastic artist, as also the epic poet, who is related to him, is sunk in the
pure contemplation of pictures. The Dionysian musician is, without any
picture, himself just primordial pain and the primordial re-echoing thereof.
The lyric genius is conscious of a world of pictures and symbols—growing
out of the state of mystical self-abnegation and oneness,—which has a
colouring causality and velocity quite different from that of the world of the
plastic artist and epic poet. While the latter lives in these pictures, and only
in them, with joyful satisfaction, and never grows tired of contemplating
them with love, even in their minutest characters, while even the picture of
the angry Achilles is to him but a picture, the angry expression of which he
enjoys with the dream-joy in appearance—so that, by this mirror of
appearance, he is guarded against being unified and blending with his
figures;—the pictures of the lyrist on the other hand are nothing but his very
self and, as it were, only different projections of himself, on account of
which he as the moving centre of this world is entitled to say "I": only of
course this self is not the same as that of the waking, empirically real man,
but the only verily existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things, by
means of the images whereof the lyric genius sees through even to this basis
of things. Now let us suppose that he beholds himself also among these
images as non-genius, i.e., his subject, the whole throng of subjective
passions and impulses of the will directed to a definite object which appears
real to him; if now it seems as if the lyric genius and the allied non-genius
were one, and as if the former spoke that little word "I" of his own accord,
this appearance will no longer be able to lead us astray, as it certainly led

those astray who designated the lyrist as the subjective poet. In truth,
Archilochus, the passionately inflamed, loving and hating man, is but a
vision of the genius, who by this time is no longer Archilochus, but a genius
of the world, who expresses his primordial pain symbolically in the figure
of the man Archilochus: while the subjectively willing and desiring man,
Archilochus, can never at any time be a poet. It is by no means necessary,
however, that the lyrist should see nothing but the phenomenon of the man
Archilochus before him as a reflection of eternal being; and tragedy shows
how far the visionary world of the lyrist may depart from this phenomenon,
to which, of course, it is most intimately related.
Schopenhauer, who did not shut his eyes to the difficulty presented by the
lyrist in the philosophical contemplation of art, thought he had found a way
out of it, on which, however, I cannot accompany him; while he alone, in
his profound metaphysics of music, held in his hands the means whereby
this difficulty could be definitely removed: as I believe I have removed it
here in his spirit and to his honour. In contrast to our view, he describes the
peculiar nature of song as follows[4] (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I. 295):
—"It is the subject of the will, i.e., his own volition, which fills the
consciousness of the singer; often as an unbound and satisfied desire (joy),
but still more often as a restricted desire (grief), always as an emotion, a
passion, or an agitated frame of mind. Besides this, however, and along
with it, by the sight of surrounding nature, the singer becomes conscious of
himself as the subject of pure will-less knowing, the unbroken, blissful
peace of which now appears, in contrast to the stress of desire, which is
always restricted and always needy. The feeling of this contrast, this
alternation, is really what the song as a whole expresses and what
principally constitutes the lyrical state of mind. In it pure knowing comes to
us as it were to deliver us from desire and the stress thereof: we follow, but
only for an instant; for desire, the remembrance of our personal ends, tears
us anew from peaceful contemplation; yet ever again the next beautiful
surrounding in which the pure will-less knowledge presents itself to us,
allures us away from desire. Therefore, in song and in the lyrical mood,
desire (the personal interest of the ends) and the pure perception of the
surrounding which presents itself, are wonderfully mingled with each other;
connections between them are sought for and imagined; the subjective
disposition, the affection of the will, imparts its own hue to the
contemplated surrounding, and conversely, the surroundings communicate

the reflex of their colour to the will. The true song is the expression of the
whole of this mingled and divided state of mind."
Who could fail to see in this description that lyric poetry is here
characterised as an imperfectly attained art, which seldom and only as it
were in leaps arrives at its goal, indeed, as a semi-art, the essence of which
is said to consist in this, that desire and pure contemplation, i.e., the
unæsthetic and the æsthetic condition, are wonderfully mingled with each
other? We maintain rather, that this entire antithesis, according to which, as
according to some standard of value, Schopenhauer, too, still classifies the
arts, the antithesis between the subjective and the objective, is quite out of
place in æsthetics, inasmuch as the subject i.e., the desiring individual who
furthers his own egoistic ends, can be conceived only as the adversary, not
as the origin of art. In so far as the subject is the artist, however, he has
already been released from his individual will, and has become as it were
the medium, through which the one verily existent Subject celebrates his
redemption in appearance. For this one thing must above all be clear to us,
to our humiliation and exaltation, that the entire comedy of art is not at all
performed, say, for our betterment and culture, and that we are just as little
the true authors of this art-world: rather we may assume with regard to
ourselves, that its true author uses us as pictures and artistic projections, and
that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art—for
only as an æsthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally
justified:—while of course our consciousness of this our specific
significance hardly differs from the kind of consciousness which the
soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented thereon. Hence all
our knowledge of art is at bottom quite illusory, because, as knowing
persons we are not one and identical with the Being who, as the sole author
and spectator of this comedy of art, prepares a perpetual entertainment for
himself. Only in so far as the genius in the act of artistic production
coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he get a glimpse of
the eternal essence of art, for in this state he is, in a marvellous manner, like
the weird picture of the fairy-tale which can at will turn its eyes and behold
itself; he is now at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and
spectator.
[4] World as Will and Idea, I. 323, 4th ed. of Haldane and Kemp's translation.
Quoted with a few changes.

6.

With reference to Archilochus, it has been established by critical research
that he introduced the folk-song into literature, and, on account thereof,
deserved, according to the general estimate of the Greeks, his unique
position alongside of Homer. But what is this popular folk-song in contrast
to the wholly Apollonian epos? What else but the perpetuum vestigium of a
union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Its enormous diffusion among
all peoples, still further enhanced by ever new births, testifies to the power
of this artistic double impulse of nature: which leaves its vestiges in the
popular song in like manner as the orgiastic movements of a people
perpetuate themselves in its music. Indeed, one might also furnish historical
proofs, that every period which is highly productive in popular songs has
been most violently stirred by Dionysian currents, which we must always
regard as the substratum and prerequisite of the popular song.
First of all, however, we regard the popular song as the musical mirror of
the world, as the Original melody, which now seeks for itself a parallel
dream-phenomenon and expresses it in poetry. Melody is therefore primary
and universal, and as such may admit of several objectivations, in several
texts. Likewise, in the naïve estimation of the people, it is regarded as by far
the more important and necessary. Melody generates the poem out of itself
by an ever-recurring process. The strophic form of the popular song points
to the same phenomenon, which I always beheld with astonishment, till at
last I found this explanation. Any one who in accordance with this theory
examines a collection of popular songs, such as "Des Knaben Wunderhorn,"
will find innumerable instances of the perpetually productive melody
scattering picture sparks all around: which in their variegation, their abrupt
change, their mad precipitance, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic
appearance and its steady flow. From the point of view of the epos, this
unequal and irregular pictorial world of lyric poetry must be simply
condemned: and the solemn epic rhapsodists of the Apollonian festivals in
the age of Terpander have certainly done so.
Accordingly, we observe that in the poetising of the popular song, language
is strained to its utmost to imitate music; and hence a new world of poetry
begins with Archilochus, which is fundamentally opposed to the Homeric.
And in saying this we have pointed out the only possible relation between

poetry and music, between word and tone: the word, the picture, the
concept here seeks an expression analogous to music and now experiences
in itself the power of music. In this sense we may discriminate between two
main currents in the history of the language of the Greek people, according
as their language imitated either the world of phenomena and of pictures, or
the world of music. One has only to reflect seriously on the linguistic
difference with regard to colour, syntactical structure, and vocabulary in
Homer and Pindar, in order to comprehend the significance of this contrast;
indeed, it becomes palpably clear to us that in the period between Homer
and Pindar the orgiastic flute tones of Olympus must have sounded forth,
which, in an age as late as Aristotle's, when music was infinitely more
developed, transported people to drunken enthusiasm, and which, when
their influence was first felt, undoubtedly incited all the poetic means of
expression of contemporaneous man to imitation. I here call attention to a
familiar phenomenon of our own times, against which our æsthetics raises
many objections. We again and again have occasion to observe how a
symphony of Beethoven compels the individual hearers to use figurative
speech, though the appearance presented by a collocation of the different
pictorial world generated by a piece of music may be never so fantastically
diversified and even contradictory. To practise its small wit on such
compositions, and to overlook a phenomenon which is certainly worth
explaining, is quite in keeping with this æsthetics. Indeed, even if the tone-
poet has spoken in pictures concerning a composition, when for instance he
designates a certain symphony as the "pastoral" symphony, or a passage
therein as "the scene by the brook," or another as the "merry gathering of
rustics," these are likewise only symbolical representations born out of
music—and not perhaps the imitated objects of music—representations
which can give us no information whatever concerning the Dionysian
content of music, and which in fact have no distinctive value of their own
alongside of other pictorical expressions. This process of a discharge of
music in pictures we have now to transfer to some youthful, linguistically
productive people, to get a notion as to how the strophic popular song
originates, and how the entire faculty of speech is stimulated by this new
principle of imitation of music.
If, therefore, we may regard lyric poetry as the effulguration of music in
pictures and concepts, we can now ask: "how does music appear in the
mirror of symbolism and conception?" It appears as will, taking the word in

the Schopenhauerian sense, i.e., as the antithesis of the æsthetic, purely
contemplative, and passive frame of mind. Here, however, we must
discriminate as sharply as possible between the concept of essentiality and
the concept of phenominality; for music, according to its essence, cannot be
will, because as such it would have to be wholly banished from the domain
of art—for the will is the unæsthetic-in-itself;—yet it appears as will. For in
order to express the phenomenon of music in pictures, the lyrist requires all
the stirrings of passion, from the whispering of infant desire to the roaring
of madness. Under the impulse to speak of music in Apollonian symbols, he
conceives of all nature, and himself therein, only as the eternally willing,
desiring, longing existence. But in so far as he interprets music by means of
pictures, he himself rests in the quiet calm of Apollonian contemplation,
however much all around him which he beholds through the medium of
music is in a state of confused and violent motion. Indeed, when he beholds
himself through this same medium, his own image appears to him in a state
of unsatisfied feeling: his own willing, longing, moaning and rejoicing are
to him symbols by which he interprets music. Such is the phenomenon of
the lyrist: as Apollonian genius he interprets music through the image of the
will, while he himself, completely released from the avidity of the will, is
the pure, undimmed eye of day.
Our whole disquisition insists on this, that lyric poetry is dependent on the
spirit of music just as music itself in its absolute sovereignty does not
require the picture and the concept, but only endures them as
accompaniments. The poems of the lyrist can express nothing which has not
already been contained in the vast universality and absoluteness of the
music which compelled him to use figurative speech. By no means is it
possible for language adequately to render the cosmic symbolism of music,
for the very reason that music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial
contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the Primordial Unity, and
therefore symbolises a sphere which is above all appearance and before all
phenomena. Rather should we say that all phenomena, compared with it,
are but symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena,
cannot at all disclose the innermost essence, of music; language can only be
in superficial contact with music when it attempts to imitate music; while
the profoundest significance of the latter cannot be brought one step nearer
to us by all the eloquence of lyric poetry.

7.

We shall now have to avail ourselves of all the principles of art hitherto
considered, in order to find our way through the labyrinth, as we must
designate the origin of Greek tragedy. I shall not be charged with absurdity
in saying that the problem of this origin has as yet not even been seriously
stated, not to say solved, however often the fluttering tatters of ancient
tradition have been sewed together in sundry combinations and torn asunder
again. This tradition tells us in the most unequivocal terms, that tragedy
sprang from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing
but chorus: and hence we feel it our duty to look into the heart of this tragic
chorus as being the real proto-drama, without in the least contenting
ourselves with current art-phraseology—according to which the chorus is
the ideal spectator, or represents the people in contrast to the regal side of
the scene. The latter explanatory notion, which sounds sublime to many a
politician—that the immutable moral law was embodied by the democratic
Athenians in the popular chorus, which always carries its point over the
passionate excesses and extravagances of kings—may be ever so forcibly
suggested by an observation of Aristotle: still it has no bearing on the
original formation of tragedy, inasmuch as the entire antithesis of king and
people, and, in general, the whole politico-social sphere, is excluded from
the purely religious beginnings of tragedy; but, considering the well-known
classical form of the chorus in Æschylus and Sophocles, we should even
deem it blasphemy to speak here of the anticipation of a "constitutional
representation of the people," from which blasphemy others have not
shrunk, however. The ancient governments knew of no constitutional
representation of the people in praxi, and it is to be hoped that they did not
even so much as "anticipate" it in tragedy.
Much more celebrated than this political explanation of the chorus is the
notion of A. W. Schlegel, who advises us to regard the chorus, in a manner,
as the essence and extract of the crowd of spectators,—as the "ideal
spectator." This view when compared with the historical tradition that
tragedy was originally only chorus, reveals itself in its true character, as a
crude, unscientific, yet brilliant assertion, which, however, has acquired its
brilliancy only through its concentrated form of expression, through the
truly Germanic bias in favour of whatever is called "ideal," and through our

momentary astonishment. For we are indeed astonished the moment we
compare our well-known theatrical public with this chorus, and ask
ourselves if it could ever be possible to idealise something analogous to the
Greek chorus out of such a public. We tacitly deny this, and now wonder as
much at the boldness of Schlegel's assertion as at the totally different nature
of the Greek public. For hitherto we always believed that the true spectator,
be he who he may, had always to remain conscious of having before him a
work of art, and not an empiric reality: whereas the tragic chorus of the
Greeks is compelled to recognise real beings in the figures of the stage. The
chorus of the Oceanides really believes that it sees before it the Titan
Prometheus, and considers itself as real as the god of the scene. And are we
to own that he is the highest and purest type of spectator, who, like the
Oceanides, regards Prometheus as real and present in body? And is it
characteristic of the ideal spectator that he should run on the stage and free
the god from his torments? We had believed in an æsthetic public, and
considered the individual spectator the better qualified the more he was
capable of viewing a work of art as art, that is, æsthetically; but now the
Schlegelian expression has intimated to us, that the perfect ideal spectator
does not at all suffer the world of the scenes to act æsthetically on him, but
corporeo-empirically. Oh, these Greeks! we have sighed; they will upset our
æsthetics! But once accustomed to it, we have reiterated the saying of
Schlegel, as often as the subject of the chorus has been broached.
But the tradition which is so explicit here speaks against Schlegel: the
chorus as such, without the stage,—the primitive form of tragedy,—and the
chorus of ideal spectators do not harmonise. What kind of art would that be
which was extracted from the concept of the spectator, and whereof we are
to regard the "spectator as such" as the true form? The spectator without the
play is something absurd. We fear that the birth of tragedy can be explained
neither by the high esteem for the moral intelligence of the multitude nor by
the concept of the spectator without the play; and we regard the problem as
too deep to be even so much as touched by such superficial modes of
contemplation.
An infinitely more valuable insight into the signification of the chorus had
already been displayed by Schiller in the celebrated Preface to his Bride of
Messina, where he regarded the chorus as a living wall which tragedy draws

round herself to guard her from contact with the world of reality, and to
preserve her ideal domain and poetical freedom.
It is with this, his chief weapon, that Schiller combats the ordinary
conception of the natural, the illusion ordinarily required in dramatic poetry.
He contends that while indeed the day on the stage is merely artificial, the
architecture only symbolical, and the metrical dialogue purely ideal in
character, nevertheless an erroneous view still prevails in the main: that it is
not enough to tolerate merely as a poetical license that which is in reality
the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus is, he says, the
decisive step by which war is declared openly and honestly against all
naturalism in art.—It is, methinks, for disparaging this mode of
contemplation that our would-be superior age has coined the disdainful
catchword "pseudo-idealism." I fear, however, that we on the other hand
with our present worship of the natural and the real have landed at the nadir
of all idealism, namely in the region of cabinets of wax-figures. An art
indeed exists also here, as in certain novels much in vogue at present: but
let no one pester us with the claim that by this art the Schiller-Goethian
"Pseudo-idealism" has been vanquished.
It is indeed an "ideal" domain, as Schiller rightly perceived, upon—which
the Greek satyric chorus, the chorus of primitive tragedy, was wont to walk,
a domain raised far above the actual path of mortals. The Greek framed for
this chorus the suspended scaffolding of a fictitious natural state and placed
thereon fictitious natural beings. It is on this foundation that tragedy grew
up, and so it could of course dispense from the very first with a painful
portrayal of reality. Yet it is, not an arbitrary world placed by fancy betwixt
heaven and earth; rather is it a world possessing the same reality and
trustworthiness that Olympus with its dwellers possessed for the believing
Hellene. The satyr, as being the Dionysian chorist, lives in a religiously
acknowledged reality under the sanction of the myth and cult. That tragedy
begins with him, that the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks through him,
is just as surprising a phenomenon to us as, in general, the derivation of
tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we shall get a starting-point for our
inquiry, if I put forward the proposition that the satyr, the fictitious natural
being, is to the man of culture what Dionysian music is to civilisation.
Concerning this latter, Richard Wagner says that it is neutralised by music
even as lamplight by daylight. In like manner, I believe, the Greek man of

culture felt himself neutralised in the presence of the satyric chorus: and
this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and
society, and, in general, the gaps between man and man give way to an
overwhelming feeling of oneness, which leads back to the heart of nature.
The metaphysical comfort,—with which, as I have here intimated, every
true tragedy dismisses us—that, in spite of the perpetual change of
phenomena, life at bottom is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable, this
comfort appears with corporeal lucidity as the satyric chorus, as the chorus
of natural beings, who live ineradicable as it were behind all civilisation,
and who, in spite of the ceaseless change of generations and the history of
nations, remain for ever the same.
With this chorus the deep-minded Hellene, who is so singularly qualified
for the most delicate and severe suffering, consoles himself:—he who has
glanced with piercing eye into the very heart of the terrible destructive
processes of so-called universal history, as also into the cruelty of nature,
and is in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will. Art saves
him, and through art life saves him—for herself.
For we must know that in the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its
annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence, there is a
lethargic element, wherein all personal experiences of the past are
submerged. It is by this gulf of oblivion that the everyday world and the
world of Dionysian reality are separated from each other. But as soon as
this everyday reality rises again in consciousness, it is felt as such, and
nauseates us; an ascetic will-paralysing mood is the fruit of these states. In
this sense the Dionysian man may be said to resemble Hamlet: both have
for once seen into the true nature of things, —they have perceived, but they
are loath to act; for their action cannot change the eternal nature of things;
they regard it as shameful or ridiculous that one should require of them to
set aright the time which is out of joint. Knowledge kills action, action
requires the veil of illusion—it is this lesson which Hamlet teaches, and not
the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams who from too much reflection, as it
were from a surplus of possibilities, does not arrive at action at all. Not
reflection, no!—true knowledge, insight into appalling truth, preponderates
over all motives inciting to action, in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian
man. No comfort avails any longer; his longing goes beyond a world after
death, beyond the gods themselves; existence with its glittering reflection in

the gods, or in an immortal other world is abjured. In the consciousness of
the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or
the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolism in the fate of
Ophelia, he now discerns the wisdom of the sylvan god Silenus: and
loathing seizes him.
Here, in this extremest danger of the will, art approaches, as a saving and
healing enchantress; she alone is able to transform these nauseating
reflections on the awfulness or absurdity of existence into representations
wherewith it is possible to live: these are the representations of the sublime
as the artistic subjugation of the awful, and the comic as the artistic delivery
from the nausea of the absurd. The satyric chorus of dithyramb is the saving
deed of Greek art; the paroxysms described above spent their force in the
intermediary world of these Dionysian followers.

8.

The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of our more recent time, is the offspring
of a longing after the Primitive and the Natural; but mark with what
firmness and fearlessness the Greek embraced the man of the woods, and
again, how coyly and mawkishly the modern man dallied with the flattering
picture of a tender, flute-playing, soft-natured shepherd! Nature, on which
as yet no knowledge has been at work, which maintains unbroken barriers
to culture—this is what the Greek saw in his satyr, which still was not on
this account supposed to coincide with the ape. On the contrary: it was the
archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and strongest emotions, as
the enthusiastic reveller enraptured By the proximity of his god, as the
fellow-suffering companion in whom the suffering of the god repeats itself,
as the herald of wisdom speaking from the very depths of nature, as the
emblem of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek was wont to
contemplate with reverential awe. The satyr was something sublime and
godlike: he could not but appear so, especially to the sad and wearied eye of
the Dionysian man. He would have been offended by our spurious tricked-
up shepherd, while his eye dwelt with sublime satisfaction on the naked and
unstuntedly magnificent characters of nature: here the illusion of culture
was brushed away from the archetype of man; here the true man, the
bearded satyr, revealed himself, who shouts joyfully to his god. Before him

the cultured man shrank to a lying caricature. Schiller is right also with
reference to these beginnings of tragic art: the chorus is a living bulwark
against the onsets of reality, because it—the satyric chorus—portrays
existence more truthfully, more realistically, more perfectly than the
cultured man who ordinarily considers himself as the only reality. The
sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, like some fantastic
impossibility of a poet's imagination: it seeks to be the very opposite, the
unvarnished expression of truth, and must for this very reason cast aside the
false finery of that supposed reality of the cultured man. The contrast
between this intrinsic truth of nature and the falsehood of culture, which
poses as the only reality, is similar to that existing between the eternal
kernel of things, the thing in itself, and the collective world of phenomena.
And even as tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal
life of this kernel of existence, notwithstanding the perpetual dissolution of
phenomena, so the symbolism of the satyric chorus already expresses
figuratively this primordial relation between the thing in itself and
phenomenon. The idyllic shepherd of the modern man is but a copy of the
sum of the illusions of culture which he calls nature; the Dionysian Greek
desires truth and nature in their most potent form;—he sees himself
metamorphosed into the satyr.
The revelling crowd of the votaries of Dionysus rejoices, swayed by such
moods and perceptions, the power of which transforms them before their
own eyes, so that they imagine they behold themselves as reconstituted
genii of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the
artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon, which of course required a
separation of the Dionysian spectators from the enchanted Dionysians.
However, we must never lose sight of the fact that the public of the Attic
tragedy rediscovered itself in the chorus of the orchestra, that there was in
reality no antithesis of public and chorus: for all was but one great sublime
chorus of dancing and singing satyrs, or of such as allowed themselves to
be represented by the satyrs. The Schlegelian observation must here reveal
itself to us in a deeper sense. The chorus is the "ideal spectator"[5] in so far
as it is the only beholder,[6] the beholder of the visionary world of the scene.
A public of spectators, as known to us, was unknown to the Greeks. In their
theatres the terraced structure of the spectators' space rising in concentric
arcs enabled every one, in the strictest sense, to overlook the entire world of

culture around him, and in surfeited contemplation to imagine himself a
chorist. According to this view, then, we may call the chorus in its primitive
stage in proto-tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian man: a
phenomenon which may be best exemplified by the process of the actor,
who, if he be truly gifted, sees hovering before his eyes with almost
tangible perceptibility the character he is to represent. The satyric chorus is
first of all a vision of the Dionysian throng, just as the world of the stage is,
in turn, a vision of the satyric chorus: the power of this vision is great
enough to render the eye dull and insensible to the impression of "reality,"
to the presence of the cultured men occupying the tiers of seats on every
side. The form of the Greek theatre reminds one of a lonesome mountain-
valley: the architecture of the scene appears like a luminous cloud-picture
which the Bacchants swarming on the mountains behold from the heights,
as the splendid encirclement in the midst of which the image of Dionysus is
revealed to them.
Owing to our learned conception of the elementary artistic processes, this
artistic proto-phenomenon, which is here introduced to explain the tragic
chorus, is almost shocking: while nothing can be more certain than that the
poet is a poet only in that he beholds himself surrounded by forms which
live and act before him, into the innermost being of which his glance
penetrates. By reason of a strange defeat in our capacities, we modern men
are apt to represent to ourselves the æsthetic proto-phenomenon as too
complex and abstract. For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical
figure, but a vicarious image which actually hovers before him in place of a
concept. The character is not for him an aggregate composed of a studied
collection of particular traits, but an irrepressibly live person appearing
before his eyes, and differing only from the corresponding vision of the
painter by its ever continued life and action. Why is it that Homer sketches
much more vividly[7] than all the other poets? Because he contemplates[8]
much more. We talk so abstractly about poetry, because we are all wont to
be bad poets. At bottom the æsthetic phenomenon is simple: let a man but
have the faculty of perpetually seeing a lively play and of constantly living
surrounded by hosts of spirits, then he is a poet: let him but feel the impulse
to transform himself and to talk from out the bodies and souls of others,
then he is a dramatist.

The Dionysian excitement is able to impart to a whole mass of men this
artistic faculty of seeing themselves surrounded by such a host of spirits,
with whom they know themselves to be inwardly one. This function of the
tragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see one's self
transformed before one's self, and then to act as if one had really entered
into another body, into another character. This function stands at the
beginning of the development of the drama. Here we have something
different from the rhapsodist, who does not blend with his pictures, but only
sees them, like the painter, with contemplative eye outside of him; here we
actually have a surrender of the individual by his entering into another
nature. Moreover this phenomenon appears in the form of an epidemic: a
whole throng feels itself metamorphosed in this wise. Hence it is that the
dithyramb is essentially different from every other variety of the choric
song. The virgins, who with laurel twigs in their hands solemnly proceed to
the temple of Apollo and sing a processional hymn, remain what they are
and retain their civic names: the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of
transformed beings, whose civic past and social rank are totally forgotten:
they have become the timeless servants of their god that live aloof from all
the spheres of society. Every other variety of the choric lyric of the Hellenes
is but an enormous enhancement of the Apollonian unit-singer: while in the
dithyramb we have before us a community of unconscious actors, who
mutually regard themselves as transformed among one another.
This enchantment is the prerequisite of all dramatic art. In this enchantment
the Dionysian reveller sees himself as a satyr, and as satyr he in turn
beholds the god, that is, in his transformation he sees a new vision outside
him as the Apollonian consummation of his state. With this new vision the
drama is complete.
According to this view, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian
chorus, which always disburdens itself anew in an Apollonian world of
pictures. The choric parts, therefore, with which tragedy is interlaced, are in
a manner the mother-womb of the entire so-called dialogue, that is, of the
whole stage-world, of the drama proper. In several successive outbursts
does this primordial basis of tragedy beam forth the vision of the drama,
which is a dream-phenomenon throughout, and, as such, epic in character:
on the other hand, however, as objectivation of a Dionysian state, it does
not represent the Apollonian redemption in appearance, but, conversely, the

dissolution of the individual and his unification with primordial existence.
Accordingly, the drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian
perceptions and influences, and is thereby separated from the epic as by an
immense gap.
The chorus of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the mass of the people moved
by Dionysian excitement, is thus fully explained by our conception of it as
here set forth. Whereas, being accustomed to the position of a chorus on the
modern stage, especially an operatic chorus, we could never comprehend
why the tragic chorus of the Greeks should be older, more primitive, indeed,
more important than the "action" proper,—as has been so plainly declared
by the voice of tradition; whereas, furthermore, we could not reconcile with
this traditional paramount importance and primitiveness the fact of the
chorus' being composed only of humble, ministering beings; indeed, at first
only of goatlike satyrs; whereas, finally, the orchestra before the scene was
always a riddle to us; we have learned to comprehend at length that the
scene, together with the action, was fundamentally and originally conceived
only as a vision, that the only reality is just the chorus, which of itself
generates the vision and speaks thereof with the entire symbolism of
dancing, tone, and word. This chorus beholds in the vision its lord and
master Dionysus, and is thus for ever the serving chorus: it sees how he, the
god, suffers and glorifies himself, and therefore does not itself act. But
though its attitude towards the god is throughout the attitude of
ministration, this is nevertheless the highest expression, the Dionysian
expression of Nature, and therefore, like Nature herself, the chorus utters
oracles and wise sayings when transported with enthusiasm: as fellow-
sufferer it is also the sage proclaiming truth from out the heart of Nature.
Thus, then, originates the fantastic figure, which seems so shocking, of the
wise and enthusiastic satyr, who is at the same time "the dumb man" in
contrast to the god: the image of Nature and her strongest impulses, yea, the
symbol of Nature, and at the same time the herald of her art and wisdom:
musician, poet, dancer, and visionary in one person.
Agreeably to this view, and agreeably to tradition, Dionysus, the proper
stage-hero and focus of vision, is not at first actually present in the oldest
period of tragedy, but is only imagined as present: i.e., tragedy is originally
only "chorus" and not "drama." Later on the attempt is made to exhibit the
god as real and to display the visionary figure together with its glorifying

encirclement before the eyes of all; it is here that the "drama" in the narrow
sense of the term begins. To the dithyrambic chorus is now assigned the
task of exciting the minds of the hearers to such a pitch of Dionysian frenzy,
that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not behold in him,
say, the unshapely masked man, but a visionary figure, born as it were of
their own ecstasy. Let us picture Admetes thinking in profound meditation
of his lately departed wife Alcestis, and quite consuming himself in spiritual
contemplation thereof—when suddenly the veiled figure of a woman
resembling her in form and gait is led towards him: let us picture his sudden
trembling anxiety, his agitated comparisons, his instinctive conviction—and
we shall have an analogon to the sensation with which the spectator, excited
to Dionysian frenzy, saw the god approaching on the stage, a god with
whose sufferings he had already become identified. He involuntarily
transferred the entire picture of the god, fluttering magically before his soul,
to this masked figure and resolved its reality as it were into a phantasmal
unreality. This is the Apollonian dream-state, in which the world of day is
veiled, and a new world, clearer, more intelligible, more striking than the
former, and nevertheless more shadowy, is ever born anew in perpetual
change before our eyes. We accordingly recognise in tragedy a thorough-
going stylistic contrast: the language, colour, flexibility and dynamics of the
dialogue fall apart in the Dionysian lyrics of the chorus on the one hand,
and in the Apollonian dream-world of the scene on the other, into entirely
separate spheres of expression. The Apollonian appearances, in which
Dionysus objectifies himself, are no longer "ein ewiges Meer, ein
wechselnd Weben, ein glühend Leben,"[9] as is the music of the chorus, they
are no longer the forces merely felt, but not condensed into a picture, by
which the inspired votary of Dionysus divines the proximity of his god: the
clearness and firmness of epic form now speak to him from the scene,
Dionysus now no longer speaks through forces, but as an epic hero, almost
in the language of Homer.

[5] Zuschauer.
[6] Schauer.
[7] Anschaulicher.
[8] Anschaut.
[9] An eternal sea, A weaving, flowing, Life, all glowing. Faust, trans. of Bayard
Taylor.—TR.

9.

Whatever rises to the surface in the dialogue of the Apollonian part of
Greek tragedy, appears simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the
dialogue is a copy of the Hellene, whose nature reveals itself in the dance,
because in the dance the greatest energy is merely potential, but betrays
itself nevertheless in flexible and vivacious movements. The language of
the Sophoclean heroes, for instance, surprises us by its Apollonian precision
and clearness, so that we at once imagine we see into the innermost recesses
of their being, and marvel not a little that the way to these recesses is so
short. But if for the moment we disregard the character of the hero which
rises to the surface and grows visible—and which at bottom is nothing but
the light-picture cast on a dark wall, that is, appearance through and
through,—if rather we enter into the myth which projects itself in these
bright mirrorings, we shall of a sudden experience a phenomenon which
bears a reverse relation to one familiar in optics. When, after a vigorous
effort to gaze into the sun, we turn away blinded, we have dark-coloured
spots before our eyes as restoratives, so to speak; while, on the contrary,
those light-picture phenomena of the Sophoclean hero,—in short, the
Apollonian of the mask,—are the necessary productions of a glance into the
secret and terrible things of nature, as it were shining spots to heal the eye
which dire night has seared. Only in this sense can we hope to be able to
grasp the true meaning of the serious and significant notion of "Greek
cheerfulness"; while of course we encounter the misunderstood notion of
this cheerfulness, as resulting from a state of unendangered comfort, on all
the ways and paths of the present time.
The most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the hapless Œdipus, was
understood by Sophocles as the noble man, who in spite of his wisdom was
destined to error and misery, but nevertheless through his extraordinary

sufferings ultimately exerted a magical, wholesome influence on all around
him, which continues effective even after his death. The noble man does not
sin; this is what the thoughtful poet wishes to tell us: all laws, all natural
order, yea, the moral world itself, may be destroyed through his action, but
through this very action a higher magic circle of influences is brought into
play, which establish a new world on the ruins of the old that has been
overthrown. This is what the poet, in so far as he is at the same time a
religious thinker, wishes to tell us: as poet, he shows us first of all a
wonderfully complicated legal mystery, which the judge slowly unravels,
link by link, to his own destruction. The truly Hellenic delight at this
dialectical loosening is so great, that a touch of surpassing cheerfulness is
thereby communicated to the entire play, which everywhere blunts the edge
of the horrible presuppositions of the procedure. In the "Œdipus at Colonus"
we find the same cheerfulness, elevated, however, to an infinite
transfiguration: in contrast to the aged king, subjected to an excess of
misery, and exposed solely as a sufferer to all that befalls him, we have here
a supermundane cheerfulness, which descends from a divine sphere and
intimates to us that in his purely passive attitude the hero attains his highest
activity, the influence of which extends far beyond his life, while his earlier
conscious musing and striving led him only to passivity. Thus, then, the
legal knot of the fable of Œdipus, which to mortal eyes appears indissolubly
entangled, is slowly unravelled—and the profoundest human joy comes
upon us in the presence of this divine counterpart of dialectics. If this
explanation does justice to the poet, it may still be asked whether the
substance of the myth is thereby exhausted; and here it turns out that the
entire conception of the poet is nothing but the light-picture which healing
nature holds up to us after a glance into the abyss. Œdipus, the murderer of
his father, the husband of his mother, Œdipus, the interpreter of the riddle of
the Sphinx! What does the mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny tell
us? There is a primitive popular belief, especially in Persia, that a wise
Magian can be born only of incest: which we have forthwith to interpret to
ourselves with reference to the riddle-solving and mother-marrying Œdipus,
to the effect that when the boundary of the present and future, the rigid law
of individuation and, in general, the intrinsic spell of nature, are broken by
prophetic and magical powers, an extraordinary counter-naturalness—as, in
this case, incest—must have preceded as a cause; for how else could one
force nature to surrender her secrets but by victoriously opposing her, i.e.,

by means of the Unnatural? It is this intuition which I see imprinted in the
awful triad of the destiny of Œdipus: the very man who solves the riddle of
nature—that double-constituted Sphinx—must also, as the murderer of his
father and husband of his mother, break the holiest laws of nature. Indeed, it
seems as if the myth sought to whisper into our ears that wisdom, especially
Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination, and that whoever, through
his knowledge, plunges nature into an abyss of annihilation, must also
experience the dissolution of nature in himself. "The sharpness of wisdom
turns round upon the sage: wisdom is a crime against nature": such terrible
expressions does the myth call out to us: but the Hellenic poet touches like
a sunbeam the sublime and formidable Memnonian statue of the myth, so
that it suddenly begins to sound—in Sophoclean melodies.
With the glory of passivity I now contrast the glory of activity which
illuminates the Prometheus of Æschylus. That which Æschylus the thinker
had to tell us here, but which as a poet he only allows us to surmise by his
symbolic picture, the youthful Goethe succeeded in disclosing to us in the
daring words of his Prometheus:—
"Hier sitz' ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich!"[10]
Man, elevating himself to the rank of the Titans, acquires his culture by his
own efforts, and compels the gods to unite with him, because in his self-
sufficient wisdom he has their existence and their limits in his hand. What is
most wonderful, however, in this Promethean form, which according to its
fundamental conception is the specific hymn of impiety, is the profound
Æschylean yearning for justice: the untold sorrow of the bold "single-
handed being" on the one hand, and the divine need, ay, the foreboding of a
twilight of the gods, on the other, the power of these two worlds of
suffering constraining to reconciliation, to metaphysical oneness—all this
suggests most forcibly the central and main position of the Æschylean view
of things, which sees Moira as eternal justice enthroned above gods and
men. In view of the astonishing boldness with which Æschylus places the

Olympian world on his scales of justice, it must be remembered that the
deep-minded Greek had an immovably firm substratum of metaphysical
thought in his mysteries, and that all his sceptical paroxysms could be
discharged upon the Olympians. With reference to these deities, the Greek
artist, in particular, had an obscure feeling as to mutual dependency: and it
is just in the Prometheus of Æschylus that this feeling is symbolised. The
Titanic artist found in himself the daring belief that he could create men and
at least destroy Olympian deities: namely, by his superior wisdom, for
which, to be sure, he had to atone by eternal suffering. The splendid "can-
ing" of the great genius, bought too cheaply even at the price of eternal
suffering, the stern pride of the artist: this is the essence and soul of
Æschylean poetry, while Sophocles in his Œdipus preludingly strikes up the
victory-song of the saint. But even this interpretation which Æschylus has
given to the myth does not fathom its astounding depth of terror; the fact is
rather that the artist's delight in unfolding, the cheerfulness of artistic
creating bidding defiance to all calamity, is but a shining stellar and nebular
image reflected in a black sea of sadness. The tale of Prometheus is an
original possession of the entire Aryan family of races, and documentary
evidence of their capacity for the profoundly tragic; indeed, it is not
improbable that this myth has the same characteristic significance for the
Aryan race that the myth of the fall of man has for the Semitic, and that
there is a relationship between the two myths like that of brother and sister.
The presupposition of the Promethean myth is the transcendent value which
a naïve humanity attach to fire as the true palladium of every ascending
culture: that man, however, should dispose at will of this fire, and should
not receive it only as a gift from heaven, as the igniting lightning or the
warming solar flame, appeared to the contemplative primordial men as
crime and robbery of the divine nature. And thus the first philosophical
problem at once causes a painful, irreconcilable antagonism between man
and God, and puts as it were a mass of rock at the gate of every culture. The
best and highest that men can acquire they obtain by a crime, and must now
in their turn take upon themselves its consequences, namely the whole flood
of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended celestials must visit the
nobly aspiring race of man: a bitter reflection, which, by the dignity it
confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the fall of
man, in which curiosity, beguilement, seducibility, wantonness,—in short, a
whole series of pre-eminently feminine passions,—were regarded as the

origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan representation is the sublime
view of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue, which suggests at the
same time the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy as the justification of
human evil—of human guilt as well as of the suffering incurred thereby.
The misery in the essence of things—which the contemplative Aryan is not
disposed to explain away—the antagonism in the heart of the world,
manifests itself to him as a medley of different worlds, for instance, a
Divine and a human world, each of which is in the right individually, but as
a separate existence alongside of another has to suffer for its individuation.
With the heroic effort made by the individual for universality, in his attempt
to pass beyond the bounds of individuation and become the one universal
being, he experiences in himself the primordial contradiction concealed in
the essence of things, i.e., he trespasses and suffers. Accordingly crime[11] is
understood by the Aryans to be a man, sin[12] by the Semites a woman; as
also, the original crime is committed by man, the original sin by woman.
Besides, the witches' chorus says:
"Wir nehmen das nicht so genau:
Mit tausend Schritten macht's die Frau;
Doch wie sie auch sich eilen kann
Mit einem Sprunge macht's der Mann."[13]
He who understands this innermost core of the tale of Prometheus—namely
the necessity of crime imposed on the titanically striving individual—will at
once be conscious of the un-Apollonian nature of this pessimistic
representation: for Apollo seeks to pacify individual beings precisely by
drawing boundary lines between them, and by again and again calling
attention thereto, with his requirements of self-knowledge and due
proportion, as the holiest laws of the universe. In order, however, to prevent
the form from congealing to Egyptian rigidity and coldness in consequence
of this Apollonian tendency, in order to prevent the extinction of the motion
of the entire lake in the effort to prescribe to the individual wave its path
and compass, the high tide of the Dionysian tendency destroyed from time
to time all the little circles in which the one-sided Apollonian "will" sought
to confine the Hellenic world. The suddenly swelling tide of the Dionysian
then takes the separate little wave-mountains of individuals on its back, just
as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, does with the earth. This
Titanic impulse, to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, and to

carry them on broad shoulders higher and higher, farther and farther, is what
the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common. In this respect the
Æschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, while, in the afore-mentioned
profound yearning for justice, Æschylus betrays to the intelligent observer
his paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and of the
boundaries of justice. And so the double-being of the Æschylean
Prometheus, his conjoint Dionysian and Apollonian nature, might be thus
expressed in an abstract formula: "Whatever exists is alike just and unjust,
and equally justified in both."
Das ist deine Welt! Das heisst eine Welt![14]
[10]
"Here sit I, forming mankind
In my image,
A race resembling me,—
To sorrow and to weep,
To taste, to hold, to enjoy,
And not have need of thee,
As I!"
(Translation in Hæckel's History of the Evolution of Man.)
[11] Der Frevel.
[12] Die Sünde.
[13]
We do not measure with such care:
Woman in thousand steps is there,
But howsoe'er she hasten may.
Man in one leap has cleared the way.
Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor.—TR.
[14] This is thy world, and what a world!—Faust.

10.
It is an indisputable tradition that Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for
its theme only the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for some time the only
stage-hero therein was simply Dionysus himself. With the same confidence,
however, we can maintain that not until Euripides did Dionysus cease to be
the tragic hero, and that in fact all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage
—Prometheus, Œdipus, etc.—are but masks of this original hero, Dionysus.
The presence of a god behind all these masks is the one essential cause of
the typical "ideality," so oft exciting wonder, of these celebrated figures.
Some one, I know not whom, has maintained that all individuals are comic

as individuals and are consequently un-tragic: from whence it might be
inferred that the Greeks in general could not endure individuals on the
tragic stage. And they really seem to have had these sentiments: as, in
general, it is to be observed that the Platonic discrimination and valuation of
the "idea" in contrast to the "eidolon," the image, is deeply rooted in the
Hellenic being. Availing ourselves of Plato's terminology, however, we
should have to speak of the tragic figures of the Hellenic stage somewhat as
follows. The one truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of forms, in
the mask of a fighting hero and entangled, as it were, in the net of an
individual will. As the visibly appearing god now talks and acts, he
resembles an erring, striving, suffering individual: and that, in general, he
appears with such epic precision and clearness, is due to the dream-reading
Apollo, who reads to the chorus its Dionysian state through this symbolic
appearance. In reality, however, this hero is the suffering Dionysus of the
mysteries, a god experiencing in himself the sufferings of individuation, of
whom wonderful myths tell that as a boy he was dismembered by the Titans
and has been worshipped in this state as Zagreus:[15] whereby is intimated
that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering, is like a
transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, that we must therefore regard
the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering, as
something objectionable in itself. From the smile of this Dionysus sprang
the Olympian gods, from his tears sprang man. In his existence as a
dismembered god, Dionysus has the dual nature of a cruel barbarised
demon, and a mild pacific ruler. But the hope of the epopts looked for a new
birth of Dionysus, which we have now to conceive of in anticipation as the
end of individuation: it was for this coming third Dionysus that the stormy
jubilation-hymns of the epopts resounded. And it is only this hope that
sheds a ray of joy upon the features of a world torn asunder and shattered
into individuals: as is symbolised in the myth by Demeter sunk in eternal
sadness, who rejoices again only when told that she may once more give
birth to Dionysus In the views of things here given we already have all the
elements of a profound and pessimistic contemplation of the world, and
along with these we have the mystery doctrine of tragedy: the fundamental
knowledge of the oneness of all existing things, the consideration of
individuation as the primal cause of evil, and art as the joyous hope that the
spell of individuation may be broken, as the augury of a restored oneness.

It has already been intimated that the Homeric epos is the poem of
Olympian culture, wherewith this culture has sung its own song of triumph
over the terrors of the war of the Titans. Under the predominating influence
of tragic poetry, these Homeric myths are now reproduced anew, and show
by this metempsychosis that meantime the Olympian culture also has been
vanquished by a still deeper view of things. The haughty Titan Prometheus
has announced to his Olympian tormentor that the extremest danger will
one day menace his rule, unless he ally with him betimes. In Æschylus we
perceive the terrified Zeus, apprehensive of his end, in alliance with the
Titan. Thus, the former age of the Titans is subsequently brought from
Tartarus once more to the light of day. The philosophy of wild and naked
nature beholds with the undissembled mien of truth the myths of the
Homeric world as they dance past: they turn pale, they tremble before the
lightning glance of this goddess—till the powerful fist[16] of the Dionysian
artist forces them into the service of the new deity. Dionysian truth takes
over the entire domain of myth as symbolism of its knowledge, which it
makes known partly in the public cult of tragedy and partly in the secret
celebration of the dramatic mysteries, always, however, in the old mythical
garb. What was the power, which freed Prometheus from his vultures and
transformed the myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It is the
Heracleian power of music: which, having reached its highest manifestness
in tragedy, can invest myths with a new and most profound significance,
which we have already had occasion to characterise as the most powerful
faculty of music. For it is the fate of every myth to insinuate itself into the
narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some
later generation as a solitary fact with historical claims: and the Greeks
were already fairly on the way to restamp the whole of their mythical
juvenile dream sagaciously and arbitrarily into a historico-pragmatical
juvenile history. For this is the manner in which religions are wont to die
out: when of course under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox
dogmatism, the mythical presuppositions of a religion are systematised as a
completed sum of historical events, and when one begins apprehensively to
defend the credibility of the myth, while at the same time opposing all
continuation of their natural vitality and luxuriance; when, accordingly, the
feeling for myth dies out, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to
historical foundations. This dying myth was now seized by the new-born
genius of Dionysian music, in whose hands it bloomed once more, with

such colours as it had never yet displayed, with a fragrance that awakened a
longing anticipation of a metaphysical world. After this final effulgence it
collapses, its leaves wither, and soon the scoffing Lucians of antiquity catch
at the discoloured and faded flowers which the winds carry off in every
direction. Through tragedy the myth attains its profoundest significance, its
most expressive form; it rises once more like a wounded hero, and the
whole surplus of vitality, together with the philosophical calmness of the
Dying, burns in its eyes with a last powerful gleam.
What meantest thou, oh impious Euripides, in seeking once more to enthral
this dying one? It died under thy ruthless hands: and then thou madest use
of counterfeit, masked myth, which like the ape of Heracles could only trick
itself out in the old finery. And as myth died in thy hands, so also died the
genius of music; though thou couldst covetously plunder all the gardens of
music—thou didst only realise a counterfeit, masked music. And because
thou hast forsaken Dionysus. Apollo hath also forsaken thee; rout up all the
passions from their haunts and conjure them into thy sphere, sharpen and
polish a sophistical dialectics for the speeches of thy heroes—thy very
heroes have only counterfeit, masked passions, and speak only counterfeit,
masked music.
[15] See article by Mr. Arthur Symons in The Academy, 30th August 1902.
[16] Die mächtige Faust.—Cf. Faust, Chorus of Spirits.—TR.

11.

Greek tragedy had a fate different from that of all her older sister arts: she
died by suicide, in consequence of an irreconcilable conflict; accordingly
she died tragically, while they all passed away very calmly and beautifully
in ripe old age. For if it be in accordance with a happy state of things to
depart this life without a struggle, leaving behind a fair posterity, the
closing period of these older arts exhibits such a happy state of things:
slowly they sink out of sight, and before their dying eyes already stand their
fairer progeny, who impatiently lift up their heads with courageous mien.
The death of Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left an immense void, deeply
felt everywhere. Even as certain Greek sailors in the time of Tiberius once
heard upon a lonesome island the thrilling cry, "great Pan is dead": so now
as it were sorrowful wailing sounded through the Hellenic world: "Tragedy

is dead! Poetry itself has perished with her! Begone, begone, ye stunted,
emaciated epigones! Begone to Hades, that ye may for once eat your fill of
the crumbs of your former masters!"
But when after all a new Art blossomed forth which revered tragedy as her
ancestress and mistress, it was observed with horror that she did indeed bear
the features of her mother, but those very features the latter had exhibited in
her long death-struggle. It was Euripides who fought this death-struggle of
tragedy; the later art is known as the New Attic Comedy. In it the degenerate
form of tragedy lived on as a monument of the most painful and violent
death of tragedy proper.
This connection between the two serves to explain the passionate
attachment to Euripides evinced by the poets of the New Comedy, and
hence we are no longer surprised at the wish of Philemon, who would have
got himself hanged at once, with the sole design of being able to visit
Euripides in the lower regions: if only he could be assured generally that the
deceased still had his wits. But if we desire, as briefly as possible, and
without professing to say aught exhaustive on the subject, to characterise
what Euripides has in common with Menander and Philemon, and what
appealed to them so strongly as worthy of imitation: it will suffice to say
that the spectator was brought upon the stage by Euripides. He who has
perceived the material of which the Promethean tragic writers prior to
Euripides formed their heroes, and how remote from their purpose it was to
bring the true mask of reality on the stage, will also know what to make of
the wholly divergent tendency of Euripides. Through him the commonplace
individual forced his way from the spectators' benches to the stage itself;
the mirror in which formerly only great and bold traits found expression
now showed the painful exactness that conscientiously reproduces even the
abortive lines of nature. Odysseus, the typical Hellene of the Old Art, sank,
in the hands of the new poets, to the figure of the Græculus, who, as the
good-naturedly cunning domestic slave, stands henceforth in the centre of
dramatic interest. What Euripides takes credit for in the Aristophanean
"Frogs," namely, that by his household remedies he freed tragic art from its
pompous corpulency, is apparent above all in his tragic heroes. The
spectator now virtually saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage,
and rejoiced that he could talk so well. But this joy was not all: one even
learned of Euripides how to speak: he prides himself upon this in his contest

with Æschylus: how the people have learned from him how to observe,
debate, and draw conclusions according to the rules of art and with the
cleverest sophistications. In general it may be said that through this
revolution of the popular language he made the New Comedy possible. For
it was henceforth no longer a secret, how—and with what saws—the
commonplace could represent and express itself on the stage. Civic
mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, was now
suffered to speak, while heretofore the demigod in tragedy and the drunken
satyr, or demiman, in comedy, had determined the character of the
language. And so the Aristophanean Euripides prides himself on having
portrayed the common, familiar, everyday life and dealings of the people,
concerning which all are qualified to pass judgment. If now the entire
populace philosophises, manages land and goods with unheard-of
circumspection, and conducts law-suits, he takes all the credit to himself,
and glories in the splendid results of the wisdom with which he inoculated
the rabble.
It was to a populace prepared and enlightened in this manner that the New
Comedy could now address itself, of which Euripides had become as it
were the chorus-master; only that in this case the chorus of spectators had to
be trained. As soon as this chorus was trained to sing in the Euripidean key,
there arose that chesslike variety of the drama, the New Comedy, with its
perpetual triumphs of cunning and artfulness. But Euripides—the chorus-
master—was praised incessantly: indeed, people would have killed
themselves in order to learn yet more from him, had they not known that
tragic poets were quite as dead as tragedy. But with it the Hellene had
surrendered the belief in his immortality; not only the belief in an ideal past,
but also the belief in an ideal future. The saying taken from the well-known
epitaph, "as an old man, frivolous and capricious," applies also to aged
Hellenism. The passing moment, wit, levity, and caprice, are its highest
deities; the fifth class, that of the slaves, now attains to power, at least in
sentiment: and if we can still speak at all of "Greek cheerfulness," it is the
cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of consequence to answer for,
nothing great to strive for, and cannot value anything of the past or future
higher than the present. It was this semblance of "Greek cheerfulness"
which so revolted the deep-minded and formidable natures of the first four
centuries of Christianity: this womanish flight from earnestness and terror,
this cowardly contentedness with easy pleasure, was not only contemptible

to them, but seemed to be a specifically anti-Christian sentiment. And we
must ascribe it to its influence that the conception of Greek antiquity, which
lived on for centuries, preserved with almost enduring persistency that
peculiar hectic colour of cheerfulness—as if there had never been a Sixth
Century with its birth of tragedy, its Mysteries, its Pythagoras and
Heraclitus, indeed as if the art-works of that great period did not at all exist,
which in fact—each by itself—can in no wise be explained as having
sprung from the soil of such a decrepit and slavish love of existence and
cheerfulness, and point to an altogether different conception of things as
their source.
The assertion made a moment ago, that Euripides introduced the spectator
on the stage to qualify him the better to pass judgment on the drama, will
make it appear as if the old tragic art was always in a false relation to the
spectator: and one would be tempted to extol the radical tendency of
Euripides to bring about an adequate relation between art-work and public
as an advance on Sophocles. But, as things are, "public" is merely a word,
and not at all a homogeneous and constant quantity. Why should the artist
be under obligations to accommodate himself to a power whose strength is
merely in numbers? And if by virtue of his endowments and aspirations he
feels himself superior to every one of these spectators, how could he feel
greater respect for the collective expression of all these subordinate
capacities than for the relatively highest-endowed individual spectator? In
truth, if ever a Greek artist treated his public throughout a long life with
presumptuousness and self-sufficiency, it was Euripides, who, even when
the masses threw themselves at his feet, with sublime defiance made an
open assault on his own tendency, the very tendency with which he had
triumphed over the masses. If this genius had had the slightest reverence for
the pandemonium of the public, he would have broken down long before
the middle of his career beneath the weighty blows of his own failures.
These considerations here make it obvious that our formula—namely, that
Euripides brought the spectator upon the stage, in order to make him truly
competent to pass judgment—was but a provisional one, and that we must
seek for a deeper understanding of his tendency. Conversely, it is
undoubtedly well known that Æschylus and Sophocles, during all their
lives, indeed, far beyond their lives, enjoyed the full favour of the people,
and that therefore in the case of these predecessors of Euripides the idea of
a false relation between art-work and public was altogether excluded. What

was it that thus forcibly diverted this highly gifted artist, so incessantly
impelled to production, from the path over which shone the sun of the
greatest names in poetry and the cloudless heaven of popular favour? What
strange consideration for the spectator led him to defy, the spectator? How
could he, owing to too much respect for the public —dis-respect the public?
Euripides—and this is the solution of the riddle just propounded—felt
himself, as a poet, undoubtedly superior to the masses, but not to two of his
spectators: he brought the masses upon the stage; these two spectators he
revered as the only competent judges and masters of his art: in compliance
with their directions and admonitions, he transferred the entire world of
sentiments, passions, and experiences, hitherto present at every festival
representation as the invisible chorus on the spectators' benches, into the
souls of his stage-heroes; he yielded to their demands when he also sought
for these new characters the new word and the new tone; in their voices
alone he heard the conclusive verdict on his work, as also the cheering
promise of triumph when he found himself condemned as usual by the
justice of the public.
Of these two, spectators the one is—Euripides himself, Euripides as thinker,
not as poet. It might be said of him, that his unusually large fund of critical
ability, as in the case of Lessing, if it did not create, at least constantly
fructified a productively artistic collateral impulse. With this faculty, with
all the clearness and dexterity of his critical thought, Euripides had sat in
the theatre and striven to recognise in the masterpieces of his great
predecessors, as in faded paintings, feature and feature, line and line. And
here had happened to him what one initiated in the deeper arcana of
Æschylean tragedy must needs have expected: he observed something
incommensurable in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive
distinctness and at the same time an enigmatic profundity, yea an infinitude,
of background. Even the clearest figure had always a comet's tail attached
to it, which seemed to suggest the uncertain and the inexplicable. The same
twilight shrouded the structure of the drama, especially the significance of
the chorus. And how doubtful seemed the solution of the ethical problems
to his mind! How questionable the treatment of the myths! How unequal the
distribution of happiness and misfortune! Even in the language of the Old
Tragedy there was much that was objectionable to him, or at least
enigmatical; he found especially too much pomp for simple affairs, too

many tropes and immense things for the plainness of the characters. Thus
he sat restlessly pondering in the theatre, and as a spectator he
acknowledged to himself that he did not understand his great predecessors.
If, however, he thought the understanding the root proper of all enjoyment
and productivity, he had to inquire and look about to see whether any one
else thought as he did, and also acknowledged this incommensurability. But
most people, and among them the best individuals, had only a distrustful
smile for him, while none could explain why the great masters were still in
the right in face of his scruples and objections. And in this painful condition
he found that other spectator, who did not comprehend, and therefore did
not esteem, tragedy. In alliance with him he could venture, from amid his
lonesomeness, to begin the prodigious struggle against the art of Æschylus
and Sophocles—not with polemic writings, but as a dramatic poet, who
opposed his own conception of tragedy to the traditional one.

12.

Before we name this other spectator, let us pause here a moment in order to
recall our own impression, as previously described, of the discordant and
incommensurable elements in the nature of Æschylean tragedy. Let us think
of our own astonishment at the chorus and the tragic hero of that type of
tragedy, neither of which we could reconcile with our practices any more
than with tradition—till we rediscovered this duplexity itself as the origin
and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic
impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
To separate this primitive and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy,
and to build up a new and purified form of tragedy on the basis of a non-
Dionysian art, morality, and conception of things—such is the tendency of
Euripides which now reveals itself to us in a clear light.
In a myth composed in the eve of his life, Euripides himself most urgently
propounded to his contemporaries the question as to the value and
signification of this tendency. Is the Dionysian entitled to exist at all?
Should it not be forcibly rooted out of the Hellenic soil? Certainly, the poet
tells us, if only it were possible: but the god Dionysus is too powerful; his
most intelligent adversary—like Pentheus in the "Bacchæ"—is unwittingly
enchanted by him, and in this enchantment meets his fate. The judgment of

the two old sages, Cadmus and Tiresias, seems to be also the judgment of
the aged poet: that the reflection of the wisest individuals does not
overthrow old popular traditions, nor the perpetually propagating worship
of Dionysus, that in fact it behoves us to display at least a diplomatically
cautious concern in the presence of such strange forces: where however it is
always possible that the god may take offence at such lukewarm
participation, and finally change the diplomat—in this case Cadmus—into a
dragon. This is what a poet tells us, who opposed Dionysus with heroic
valour throughout a long life—in order finally to wind up his career with a
glorification of his adversary, and with suicide, like one staggering from
giddiness, who, in order to escape the horrible vertigo he can no longer
endure, casts himself from a tower. This tragedy—the Bacchæ—is a protest
against the practicability of his own tendency; alas, and it has already been
put into practice! The surprising thing had happened: when the poet
recanted, his tendency had already conquered. Dionysus had already been
scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by a demonic power which spoke
through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the
deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an
altogether new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the new antithesis: the
Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked
on it. What if even Euripides now seeks to comfort us by his recantation? It
is of no avail: the most magnificent temple lies in ruins. What avails the
lamentation of the destroyer, and his confession that it was the most
beautiful of all temples? And even that Euripides has been changed into a
dragon as a punishment by the art-critics of all ages—who could be content
with this wretched compensation?
Let us now approach this Socratic tendency with which Euripides combated
and vanquished Æschylean tragedy.
We must now ask ourselves, what could be the ulterior aim of the
Euripidean design, which, in the highest ideality of its execution, would
found drama exclusively on the non-Dionysian? What other form of drama
could there be, if it was not to be born of the womb of music, in the
mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only the dramatised epos: in which
Apollonian domain of art the tragic effect is of course unattainable. It does
not depend on the subject-matter of the events here represented; indeed, I
venture to assert that it would have been impossible for Goethe in his

projected "Nausikaa" to have rendered tragically effective the suicide of the
idyllic being with which he intended to complete the fifth act; so
extraordinary is the power of the epic-Apollonian representation, that it
charms, before our eyes, the most terrible things by the joy in appearance
and in redemption through appearance. The poet of the dramatised epos
cannot completely blend with his pictures any more than the epic
rhapsodist. He is still just the calm, unmoved embodiment of
Contemplation whose wide eyes see the picture before them. The actor in
this dramatised epos still remains intrinsically rhapsodist: the consecration
of inner dreaming is on all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.
How, then, is the Euripidean play related to this ideal of the Apollonian
drama? Just as the younger rhapsodist is related to the solemn rhapsodist of
the old time. The former describes his own character in the Platonic "Ion"
as follows: "When I am saying anything sad, my eyes fill with tears; when,
however, what I am saying is awful and terrible, then my hair stands on end
through fear, and my heart leaps." Here we no longer observe anything of
the epic absorption in appearance, or of the unemotional coolness of the
true actor, who precisely in his highest activity is wholly appearance and
joy in appearance. Euripides is the actor with leaping heart, with hair
standing on end; as Socratic thinker he designs the plan, as passionate actor
he executes it. Neither in the designing nor in the execution is he an artist
pure and simple. And so the Euripidean drama is a thing both cool and fiery,
equally capable of freezing and burning; it is impossible for it to attain the
Apollonian, effect of the epos, while, on the other hand, it has severed itself
as much as possible from Dionysian elements, and now, in order to act at
all, it requires new stimulants, which can no longer lie within the sphere of
the two unique art-impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The
stimulants are cool, paradoxical thoughts, in place of Apollonian intuitions
—and fiery passions—in place Dionysean ecstasies; and in fact, thoughts
and passions very realistically copied, and not at all steeped in the ether of
art.
Accordingly, if we have perceived this much, that Euripides did not succeed
in establishing the drama exclusively on the Apollonian, but that rather his
non-Dionysian inclinations deviated into a naturalistic and inartistic
tendency, we shall now be able to approach nearer to the character æsthetic
Socratism. supreme law of which reads about as follows: "to be beautiful

everything must be intelligible," as the parallel to the Socratic proposition,
"only the knowing is one virtuous." With this canon in his hands Euripides
measured all the separate elements of the drama, and rectified them
according to his principle: the language, the characters, the dramaturgic
structure, and the choric music. The poetic deficiency and retrogression,
which we are so often wont to impute to Euripides in comparison with
Sophoclean tragedy, is for the most part the product of this penetrating
critical process, this daring intelligibility. The Euripidian prologue may
serve us as an example of the productivity of this, rationalistic method.
Nothing could be more opposed to the technique of our stage than the
prologue in the drama of Euripides. For a single person to appear at the
outset of the play telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what has
happened thus far, yea, what will happen in the course of the play, would be
designated by a modern playwright as a wanton and unpardonable
abandonment of the effect of suspense. Everything that is about to happen is
known beforehand; who then cares to wait for it actually to happen?—
considering, moreover, that here there is not by any means the exciting
relation of a predicting dream to a reality taking place later on. Euripides
speculated quite differently. The effect of tragedy never depended on epic
suspense, on the fascinating uncertainty as to what is to happen now and
afterwards: but rather on the great rhetoro-lyric scenes in which the passion
and dialectics of the chief hero swelled to a broad and mighty stream.
Everything was arranged for pathos, not for action: and whatever was not
arranged for pathos was regarded as objectionable. But what interferes most
with the hearer's pleasurable satisfaction in such scenes is a missing link, a
gap in the texture of the previous history. So long as the spectator has to
divine the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or
that conflict of inclinations and intentions, his complete absorption in the
doings and sufferings of the chief persons is impossible, as is likewise
breathless fellow-feeling and fellow-fearing. The Æschyleo-Sophoclean
tragedy employed the most ingenious devices in the first scenes to place in
the hands of the spectator as if by chance all the threads requisite for
understanding the whole: a trait in which that noble artistry is approved,
which as it were masks the inevitably formal, and causes it to appear as
something accidental. But nevertheless Euripides thought he observed that
during these first scenes the spectator was in a strange state of anxiety to
make out the problem of the previous history, so that the poetic beauties and

pathos of the exposition were lost to him. Accordingly he placed the
prologue even before the exposition, and put it in the mouth of a person
who could be trusted: some deity had often as it were to guarantee the
particulars of the tragedy to the public and remove every doubt as to the
reality of the myth: as in the case of Descartes, who could only prove the
reality of the empiric world by an appeal to the truthfulness of God and His
inability to utter falsehood. Euripides makes use of the same divine
truthfulness once more at the close of his drama, in order to ensure to the
public the future of his heroes; this is the task of the notorious deus ex
machina. Between the preliminary and the additional epic spectacle there is
the dramatico-lyric present, the "drama" proper.
Thus Euripides as a poet echoes above all his own conscious knowledge;
and it is precisely on this account that he occupies such a notable position in
the history of Greek art. With reference to his critico-productive activity, he
must often have felt that he ought to actualise in the drama the words at the
beginning of the essay of Anaxagoras: "In the beginning all things were
mixed together; then came the understanding and created order." And if
Anaxagoras with his "νοῡς" seemed like the first sober person among
nothing but drunken philosophers, Euripides may also have conceived his
relation to the other tragic poets under a similar figure. As long as the sole
ruler and disposer of the universe, the νοῡς, was still excluded from artistic
activity, things were all mixed together in a chaotic, primitive mess;—it is
thus Euripides was obliged to think, it is thus he was obliged to condemn
the "drunken" poets as the first "sober" one among them. What Sophocles
said of Æschylus, that he did what was right, though unconsciously, was
surely not in the mind of Euripides: who would have admitted only thus
much, that Æschylus, because he wrought unconsciously, did what was
wrong. So also the divine Plato speaks for the most part only ironically of
the creative faculty of the poet, in so far as it is not conscious insight, and
places it on a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter;
insinuating that the poet is incapable of composing until he has become
unconscious and reason has deserted him. Like Plato, Euripides undertook
to show to the world the reverse of the "unintelligent" poet; his æsthetic
principle that "to be beautiful everything must be known" is, as I have said,
the parallel to the Socratic "to be good everything must be known."
Accordingly we may regard Euripides as the poet of æsthetic Socratism.
Socrates, however, was that second spectator who did not comprehend and

therefore did not esteem the Old Tragedy; in alliance with him Euripides
ventured to be the herald of a new artistic activity. If, then, the Old Tragedy
was here destroyed, it follows that æsthetic Socratism was the murderous
principle; but in so far as the struggle is directed against the Dionysian
element in the old art, we recognise in Socrates the opponent of Dionysus,
the new Orpheus who rebels against Dionysus; and although destined to be
torn to pieces by the Mænads of the Athenian court, yet puts to flight the
overpowerful god himself, who, when he fled from Lycurgus, the king of
Edoni, sought refuge in the depths of the ocean—namely, in the mystical
flood of a secret cult which gradually overspread the earth.

13.

That Socrates stood in close relationship to Euripides in the tendency of his
teaching, did not escape the notice of contemporaneous antiquity; the most
eloquent expression of this felicitous insight being the tale current in
Athens, that Socrates was accustomed to help Euripides in poetising. Both
names were mentioned in one breath by the adherents of the "good old
time," whenever they came to enumerating the popular agitators of the day:
to whose influence they attributed the fact that the old Marathonian stalwart
capacity of body and soul was more and more being sacrificed to a dubious
enlightenment, involving progressive degeneration of the physical and
mental powers. It is in this tone, half indignantly and half contemptuously,
that Aristophanic comedy is wont to speak of both of them—to the
consternation of modern men, who would indeed be willing enough to give
up Euripides, but cannot suppress their amazement that Socrates should
appear in Aristophanes as the first and head sophist, as the mirror and
epitome of all sophistical tendencies; in connection with which it offers the
single consolation of putting Aristophanes himself in the pillory, as a rakish,
lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without here defending the profound instincts of
Aristophanes against such attacks, I shall now indicate, by means of the
sentiments of the time, the close connection between Socrates and
Euripides. With this purpose in view, it is especially to be remembered that
Socrates, as an opponent of tragic art, did not ordinarily patronise tragedy,
but only appeared among the spectators when a new play of Euripides was
performed. The most noted thing, however, is the close juxtaposition of the
two names in the Delphic oracle, which designated Socrates as the wisest of

men, but at the same time decided that the second prize in the contest of
wisdom was due to Euripides.
Sophocles was designated as the third in this scale of rank; he who could
pride himself that, in comparison with Æschylus, he did what was right, and
did it, moreover, because he knew what was right. It is evidently just the
degree of clearness of this knowledge, which distinguishes these three men
in common as the three "knowing ones" of their age.
The most decisive word, however, for this new and unprecedented esteem
of knowledge and insight was spoken by Socrates when he found that he
was the only one who acknowledged to himself that he knew nothing while
in his critical pilgrimage through Athens, and calling on the greatest
statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he discovered everywhere the conceit
of knowledge. He perceived, to his astonishment, that all these celebrities
were without a proper and accurate insight, even with regard to their own
callings, and practised them only by instinct. "Only by instinct": with this
phrase we touch upon the heart and core of the Socratic tendency. Socratism
condemns therewith existing art as well as existing ethics; wherever
Socratism turns its searching eyes it beholds the lack of insight and the
power of illusion; and from this lack infers the inner perversity and
objectionableness of existing conditions. From this point onwards, Socrates
believed that he was called upon to, correct existence; and, with an air of
disregard and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether different culture,
art, and morality, he enters single-handed into a world, of which, if we
reverently touched the hem, we should count it our greatest happiness.
Here is the extraordinary hesitancy which always seizes upon us with
regard to Socrates, and again and again invites us to ascertain the sense and
purpose of this most questionable phenomenon of antiquity. Who is it that
ventures single-handed to disown the Greek character, which, as Homer,
Pindar, and Æschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and Dionysus, as
the deepest abyss and the highest height, is sure of our wondering
admiration? What demoniac power is it which would presume to spill this
magic draught in the dust? What demigod is it to whom the chorus of spirits
of the noblest of mankind must call out: "Weh! Weh! Du hast sie zerstört,
die schöne Welt, mit mächtiger Faust; sie stürzt, sie zerfällt!"[17]

A key to the character of Socrates is presented to us by the surprising
phenomenon designated as the "daimonion" of Socrates. In special
circumstances, when his gigantic intellect began to stagger, he got a secure
support in the utterances of a divine voice which then spake to him. This
voice, whenever it comes, always dissuades. In this totally abnormal nature
instinctive wisdom only appears in order to hinder the progress of conscious
perception here and there. While in all productive men it is instinct which is
the creatively affirmative force, consciousness only comporting itself
critically and dissuasively; with Socrates it is instinct which becomes critic;
it is consciousness which becomes creator—a perfect monstrosity per
defectum! And we do indeed observe here a monstrous defectus of all
mystical aptitude, so that Socrates might be designated as the specific non-
mystic, in whom the logical nature is developed, through a superfoetation,
to the same excess as instinctive wisdom is developed in the mystic. On the
other hand, however, the logical instinct which appeared in Socrates was
absolutely prohibited from turning against itself; in its unchecked flow it
manifests a native power such as we meet with, to our shocking surprise,
only among the very greatest instinctive forces. He who has experienced
even a breath of the divine naïveté and security of the Socratic course of life
in the Platonic writings, will also feel that the enormous driving-wheel of
logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates, and that it must
be viewed through Socrates as through a shadow. And that he himself had a
boding of this relation is apparent from the dignified earnestness with which
he everywhere, and even before his judges, insisted on his divine calling. To
refute him here was really as impossible as to approve of his instinct-
disintegrating influence. In view of this indissoluble conflict, when he had
at last been brought before the forum of the Greek state, there was only one
punishment demanded, namely exile; he might have been sped across the
borders as something thoroughly enigmatical, irrubricable and inexplicable,
and so posterity would have been quite unjustified in charging the
Athenians with a deed of ignominy. But that the sentence of death, and not
mere exile, was pronounced upon him, seems to have been brought about
by Socrates himself, with perfect knowledge of the circumstances, and
without the natural fear of death: he met his death with the calmness with
which, according to the description of Plato, he leaves the symposium at
break of day, as the last of the revellers, to begin a new day; while the
sleepy companions remain behind on the benches and the floor, to dream of

Socrates, the true eroticist. The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the
noble Greek youths,—an ideal they had never yet beheld,—and above all,
the typical Hellenic youth, Plato, prostrated himself before this scene with
all the fervent devotion of his visionary soul.
[17]
Woe! Woe!
Thou hast it destroyed,
The beautiful world;
With powerful fist;
In ruin 'tis hurled!
Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor.—TR.

14.

Let us now imagine the one great Cyclopean eye of Socrates fixed on
tragedy, that eye in which the fine frenzy of artistic enthusiasm had never
glowed—let us think how it was denied to this eye to gaze with pleasure
into the Dionysian abysses—what could it not but see in the "sublime and
greatly lauded" tragic art, as Plato called it? Something very absurd, with
causes that seemed to be without effects, and effects apparently without
causes; the whole, moreover, so motley and diversified that it could not but
be repugnant to a thoughtful mind, a dangerous incentive, however, to
sensitive and irritable souls. We know what was the sole kind of poetry
which he comprehended: the Æsopian fable: and he did this no doubt with
that smiling complaisance with which the good honest Gellert sings the
praise of poetry in the fable of the bee and the hen:—
"Du siehst an mir, wozu sie nützt,
Dem, der nicht viel Verstand besitzt,
Die Wahrheit durch ein Bild zu sagen."[18]
But then it seemed to Socrates that tragic art did not even "tell the truth":
not to mention the fact that it addresses itself to him who "hath but little
wit"; consequently not to the philosopher: a twofold reason why it should
be avoided. Like Plato, he reckoned it among the seductive arts which only
represent the agreeable, not the useful, and hence he required of his
disciples abstinence and strict separation from such unphilosophical
allurements; with such success that the youthful tragic poet Plato first of all
burned his poems to be able to become a scholar of Socrates. But where

unconquerable native capacities bore up against the Socratic maxims, their
power, together with the momentum of his mighty character, still sufficed to
force poetry itself into new and hitherto unknown channels.
An instance of this is the aforesaid Plato: he, who in the condemnation of
tragedy and of art in general certainly did not fall short of the naïve
cynicism of his master, was nevertheless constrained by sheer artistic
necessity to create a form of art which is inwardly related even to the then
existing forms of art which he repudiated. Plato's main objection to the old
art—that it is the imitation of a phantom,[19] and hence belongs to a sphere
still lower than the empiric world—could not at all apply to the new art: and
so we find Plato endeavouring to go beyond reality and attempting to
represent the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality. But Plato, the thinker,
thereby arrived by a roundabout road just at the point where he had always
been at home as poet, and from which Sophocles and all the old artists had
solemnly protested against that objection. If tragedy absorbed into itself all
the earlier varieties of art, the same could again be said in an unusual sense
of Platonic dialogue, which, engendered by a mixture of all the then
existing forms and styles, hovers midway between narrative, lyric and
drama, between prose and poetry, and has also thereby broken loose from
the older strict law of unity of linguistic form; a movement which was
carried still farther by the cynic writers, who in the most promiscuous style,
oscillating to and fro betwixt prose and metrical forms, realised also the
literary picture of the "raving Socrates" whom they were wont to represent
in life. Platonic dialogue was as it were the boat in which the shipwrecked
ancient poetry saved herself together with all her children: crowded into a
narrow space and timidly obsequious to the one steersman, Socrates, they
now launched into a new world, which never tired of looking at the
fantastic spectacle of this procession. In very truth, Plato has given to all
posterity the prototype of a new form of art, the prototype of the novel
which must be designated as the infinitely evolved Æsopian fable, in which
poetry holds the same rank with reference to dialectic philosophy as this
same philosophy held for many centuries with reference to theology:
namely, the rank of ancilla. This was the new position of poetry into which
Plato forced it under the pressure of the demon-inspired Socrates.
Here philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the
trunk of dialectics. The Apollonian tendency has chrysalised in the logical

schematism; just as something analogous in the case of Euripides (and
moreover a translation of the Dionysian into the naturalistic emotion) was
forced upon our attention. Socrates, the dialectical hero in Platonic drama,
reminds us of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero, who has to defend
his actions by arguments and counter-arguments, and thereby so often runs
the risk of forfeiting our tragic pity; for who could mistake the optimistic
element in the essence of dialectics, which celebrates a jubilee in every
conclusion, and can breathe only in cool clearness and consciousness: the
optimistic element, which, having once forced its way into tragedy, must
gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions, and necessarily impel it to self-
destruction—even to the death-leap into the bourgeois drama. Let us but
realise the consequences of the Socratic maxims: "Virtue is knowledge;
man only sins from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy": these three
fundamental forms of optimism involve the death of tragedy. For the
virtuous hero must now be a dialectician; there must now be a necessary,
visible connection between virtue and knowledge, between belief and
morality; the transcendental justice of the plot in Æschylus is now degraded
to the superficial and audacious principle of poetic justice with its usual
deus ex machina.
How does the chorus, and, in general, the entire Dionyso-musical
substratum of tragedy, now appear in the light of this new Socrato-
optimistic stage-world? As something accidental, as a readily dispensable
reminiscence of the origin of tragedy; while we have in fact seen that the
chorus can be understood only as the cause of tragedy, and of the tragic
generally. This perplexity with respect to the chorus first manifests itself in
Sophocles—an important sign that the Dionysian basis of tragedy already
begins to disintegrate with him. He no longer ventures to entrust to the
chorus the main share of the effect, but limits its sphere to such an extent
that it now appears almost co-ordinate with the actors, just as if it were
elevated from the orchestra into the scene: whereby of course its character
is completely destroyed, notwithstanding that Aristotle countenances this
very theory of the chorus. This alteration of the position of the chorus,
which Sophocles at any rate recommended by his practice, and, according
to tradition, even by a treatise, is the first step towards the annihilation of
the chorus, the phases of which follow one another with alarming rapidity
in Euripides, Agathon, and the New Comedy. Optimistic dialectics drives,
music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms: that is, it destroys

the essence of tragedy, which can be explained only as a manifestation and
illustration of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as the
dream-world of Dionysian ecstasy.
If, therefore, we are to assume an anti-Dionysian tendency operating even
before Socrates, which received in him only an unprecedentedly grand
expression, we must not shrink from the question as to what a phenomenon
like that of Socrates indicates: whom in view of the Platonic dialogues we
are certainly not entitled to regard as a purely disintegrating, negative
power. And though there can be no doubt whatever that the most immediate
effect of the Socratic impulse tended to the dissolution of Dionysian
tragedy, yet a profound experience of Socrates' own life compels us to ask
whether there is necessarily only an antipodal relation between Socratism
and art, and whether the birth of an "artistic Socrates" is in general
something contradictory in itself.
For that despotic logician had now and then the feeling of a gap, or void, a
sentiment of semi-reproach, as of a possibly neglected duty with respect to
art. There often came to him, as he tells his friends in prison, one and the
same dream-apparition, which kept constantly repeating to him: "Socrates,
practise music." Up to his very last days he solaces himself with the opinion
that his philosophising is the highest form of poetry, and finds it hard to
believe that a deity will remind him of the "common, popular music."
Finally, when in prison, he consents to practise also this despised music, in
order thoroughly to unburden his conscience. And in this frame of mind he
composes a poem on Apollo and turns a few Æsopian fables into verse. It
was something similar to the demonian warning voice which urged him to
these practices; it was because of his Apollonian insight that, like a barbaric
king, he did not understand the noble image of a god and was in danger of
sinning against a deity—through ignorance. The prompting voice of the
Socratic dream-vision is the only sign of doubtfulness as to the limits of
logical nature. "Perhaps "—thus he had to ask himself—"what is not
intelligible to me is not therefore unreasonable? Perhaps there is a realm of
wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art is even a
necessary correlative of and supplement to science?"
[18]
In me thou seest its benefit,—
To him who hath but little wit,

Through parables to tell the truth.
[19] Scheinbild = ειδολον.—TR.

15.

In the sense of these last portentous questions it must now be indicated how
the influence of Socrates (extending to the present moment, indeed, to all
futurity) has spread over posterity like an ever-increasing shadow in the
evening sun, and how this influence again and again necessitates a
regeneration of art,—yea, of art already with metaphysical, broadest and
profoundest sense,—and its own eternity guarantees also the eternity of art.
Before this could be perceived, before the intrinsic dependence of every art
on the Greeks, the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, was conclusively
demonstrated, it had to happen to us with regard to these Greeks as it
happened to the Athenians with regard to Socrates. Nearly every age and
stage of culture has at some time or other sought with deep displeasure to
free itself from the Greeks, because in their presence everything self-
achieved, sincerely admired and apparently quite original, seemed all of a
sudden to lose life and colour and shrink to an abortive copy, even to
caricature. And so hearty indignation breaks forth time after time against
this presumptuous little nation, which dared to designate as "barbaric" for
all time everything not native: who are they, one asks one's self, who,
though they possessed only an ephemeral historical splendour, ridiculously
restricted institutions, a dubious excellence in their customs, and were even
branded with ugly vices, yet lay claim to the dignity and singular position
among the peoples to which genius is entitled among the masses. What a
pity one has not been so fortunate as to find the cup of hemlock with which
such an affair could be disposed of without ado: for all the poison which
envy, calumny, and rankling resentment engendered within themselves have
not sufficed to destroy that self-sufficient grandeur! And so one feels
ashamed and afraid in the presence of the Greeks: unless one prize truth
above all things, and dare also to acknowledge to one's self this truth, that
the Greeks, as charioteers, hold in their hands the reins of our own and of
every culture, but that almost always chariot and horses are of too poor
material and incommensurate with the glory of their guides, who then will

deem it sport to run such a team into an abyss: which they themselves clear
with the leap of Achilles.
In order to assign also to Socrates the dignity of such a leading position, it
will suffice to recognise in him the type of an unheard-of form of existence,
the type of the theoretical man, with regard to whose meaning and purpose
it will be our next task to attain an insight. Like the artist, the theorist also
finds an infinite satisfaction in what is and, like the former, he is shielded
by this satisfaction from the practical ethics of pessimism with its lynx eyes
which shine only in the dark. For if the artist in every unveiling of truth
always cleaves with raptured eyes only to that which still remains veiled
after the unveiling, the theoretical man, on the other hand, enjoys and
contents himself with the cast-off veil, and finds the consummation of his
pleasure in the process of a continuously successful unveiling through his
own unaided efforts. There would have been no science if it had only been
concerned about that one naked goddess and nothing else. For then its
disciples would have been obliged to feel like those who purposed to dig a
hole straight through the earth: each one of whom perceives that with the
utmost lifelong exertion he is able to excavate only a very little of the
enormous depth, which is again filled up before his eyes by the labours of
his successor, so that a third man seems to do well when on his own account
he selects a new spot for his attempts at tunnelling. If now some one proves
conclusively that the antipodal goal cannot be attained in this direct way,
who will still care to toil on in the old depths, unless he has learned to
content himself in the meantime with finding precious stones or discovering
natural laws? For that reason Lessing, the most honest theoretical man,
ventured to say that he cared more for the search after truth than for truth
itself: in saying which he revealed the fundamental secret of science, to the
astonishment, and indeed, to the vexation of scientific men. Well, to be sure,
there stands alongside of this detached perception, as an excess of honesty,
if not of presumption, a profound illusion which first came to the world in
the person of Socrates, the imperturbable belief that, by means of the clue
of causality, thinking reaches to the deepest abysses of being, and that
thinking is able not only to perceive being but even to correct it. This
sublime metaphysical illusion is added as an instinct to science and again
and again leads the latter to its limits, where it must change into art; which
is really the end, to be attained by this mechanism.

If we now look at Socrates in the light of this thought, he appears to us as
the first who could not only live, but—what is far more—also die under the
guidance of this instinct of science: and hence the picture of the dying,
Socrates, as the man delivered from the fear of death by knowledge and
argument, is the escutcheon, above the entrance to science which reminds
every one of its mission, namely, to make existence appear to be
comprehensible, and therefore to be justified: for which purpose, if
arguments do not suffice, myth also must be used, which I just now
designated even as the necessary consequence, yea, as the end of science.
He who once makes intelligible to himself how, after the death of Socrates,
the mystagogue of science, one philosophical school succeeds another, like
wave upon wave,—how an entirely unfore-shadowed universal
development of the thirst for knowledge in the widest compass of the
cultured world (and as the specific task for every one highly gifted) led
science on to the high sea from which since then it has never again been
able to be completely ousted; how through the universality of this
movement a common net of thought was first stretched over the entire
globe, with prospects, moreover, of conformity to law in an entire solar
system;—he who realises all this, together with the amazingly high pyramid
of our present-day knowledge, cannot fail to see in Socrates the turning-
point and vortex of so-called universal history. For if one were to imagine
the whole incalculable sum of energy which has been used up by that
universal tendency,—employed, not in the service of knowledge, but for the
practical, i.e., egoistical ends of individuals and peoples,—then probably
the instinctive love of life would be so much weakened in universal wars of
destruction and incessant migrations of peoples, that, owing to the practice
of suicide, the individual would perhaps feel the last remnant of a sense of
duty, when, like the native of the Fiji Islands, as son he strangles his parents
and, as friend, his friend: a practical pessimism which might even give rise
to a horrible ethics of general slaughter out of pity—which, for the rest,
exists and has existed wherever art in one form or another, especially as
science and religion, has not appeared as a remedy and preventive of that
pestilential breath.
In view of this practical pessimism, Socrates is the archetype of the
theoretical optimist, who in the above-indicated belief in the
fathomableness of the nature of things, attributes to knowledge and

perception the power of a universal medicine, and sees in error and evil. To
penetrate into the depths of the nature of things, and to separate true
perception from error and illusion, appeared to the Socratic man the noblest
and even the only truly human calling: just as from the time of Socrates
onwards the mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences was prized
above all other capacities as the highest activity and the most admirable gift
of nature. Even the sublimest moral acts, the stirrings of pity, of self-
sacrifice, of heroism, and that tranquillity of soul, so difficult of attainment,
which the Apollonian Greek called Sophrosyne, were derived by Socrates,
and his like-minded successors up to the present day, from the dialectics of
knowledge, and were accordingly designated as teachable. He who has
experienced in himself the joy of a Socratic perception, and felt how it
seeks to embrace, in constantly widening circles, the entire world of
phenomena, will thenceforth find no stimulus which could urge him to
existence more forcible than the desire to complete that conquest and to knit
the net impenetrably close. To a person thus minded the Platonic Socrates
then appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of "Greek cheerfulness"
and felicity of existence, which seeks to discharge itself in actions, and will
find its discharge for the most 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 objiects 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,mdash;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."

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.

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