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.