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]