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?