what æsthetic effect results when the intrinsically separate
art-powers, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, enter into concurrent
actions? Or, in briefer form: how is music related to image and
concept?--Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner, with especial reference to
this point, accredits with an unsurpassable clearness and perspicuity
of exposition, expresses himself most copiously on the subject in
the following passage which I shall cite here at full length[21]
(_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. p. 309): "According to all
this, we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as
two different expressions of the same thing,[20] which is therefore
itself the only medium of the analogy between these two expressions,
so that a knowledge of this medium is required in order to understand
that analogy. Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the
world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related
indeed to the universality of concepts, much as these are related to
the particular things. Its universality, however, is by no means the
empty universality of abstraction, but of quite a different kind, and
is united with thorough and distinct definiteness. In this respect it
resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal
forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all
_a priori_, and yet are not abstract but perceptiple and thoroughly
determinate. All possible efforts, excitements and manifestations of
will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in
the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite
number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere
form, without the material, always according to the thing-in-itself,
not the phenomenon,--of which they reproduce the very soul and essence
as it were, without the body. This deep relation which music bears to
the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable
music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to
disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most
accurate and distinct commentary upon it; as also the fact that whoever
gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony seems to see
all the possible events of life and the world take place in himself:
nevertheless upon reflection he can find no likeness between the music
and the things that passed before his mind. For, as we have said, music
is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a
copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectivity
of the will, but the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore
represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, and
the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as
well call the world embodied music as embodied will: and this is the
reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real
life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance; all the
more so, to be sure, in proportion as its melody is analogous to the
inner spirit of the given phenomenon. It rests upon this that we are
able to set a poem to music as a song, or a perceptible representation
as a pantomime, or both as an opera. Such particular pictures of human
life, set to the universal language of music, are never bound to it
or correspond to it with stringent necessity, but stand to it only
in the relation of an example chosen at will to a general concept.
In the determinateness of the real they represent that which music
expresses in the universality of mere form. For melodies are to a
certain extent, like general concepts, an abstraction from the actual.
This actual world, then, the world of particular things, affords the
object of perception, the special and the individual, the particular
case, both to the universality of concepts and to the universality of
the melodies. But these two universalities are in a certain respect
opposed to each other; for the concepts contain only the forms, which
are first of all abstracted from perception,--the separated outward
shell of things, as it were,--and hence they are, in the strictest
sense of the term, _abstracta_; music, on the other hand, gives the
inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things. This
relation may be very well expressed in the language of the schoolmen,
by saying: the concepts are the _universalia post rem,_ but music gives
the _universalia ante rem,_ and the real world the _universalia in
re._--But that in general a relation is possible between a composition
and a perceptible representation rests, as we have said, upon the
fact that both are simply different expressions of the same inner
being of the world. When now, in the particular case, such a relation
is actually given, that is to say, when the composer has been able to
express in the universal language of music the emotions of will which
constitute the heart of an event, then the melody of the song, the
music of the opera, is expressive. But the analogy discovered by the
composer between the two must have proceeded from the direct knowledge
of the nature of the world unknown to his reason, and must not be an
imitation produced with conscious intention by means of conceptions;
otherwise the music does not express the inner nature of the will
itself, but merely gives an inadequate imitation of its phenomenon: all
specially imitative music does this."
We have therefore, according to the doctrine of Schopenhauer, an
immediate understanding of music as the language of the will, and
feel our imagination stimulated to give form to this invisible and
yet so actively stirred spirit-world which speaks to us, and prompted
to embody it in an analogous example. On the other hand, image and
concept, under the influence of a truly conformable music, acquire a
higher significance. Dionysian art therefore is wont to exercise--two
kinds of influences, on the Apollonian art-faculty: music firstly
incites to the _symbolic intuition_ of Dionysian universality, and,
secondly, it causes the symbolic image to stand forth _in its fullest
significance._ From these facts, intelligible in themselves and not
inaccessible to profounder observation, I infer the capacity of music
to give birth to _myth,_ that is to say, the most significant exemplar,
and precisely _tragic_ myth: the myth which speaks of Dionysian
knowledge in symbols. In the phenomenon of the lyrist, I have set forth
that in him music strives to express itself with regard to its nature
in Apollonian images. If now we reflect that music in its highest
potency must seek to attain also to its highest symbolisation, we must
deem it possible that it also knows how to find the symbolic expression
of its inherent Dionysian wisdom; and where shall we have to seek for
this expression if not in tragedy and, in general, in the conception of
the _tragic_?
From the nature of art, as it is ordinarily conceived according to
the single category of appearance and beauty, the tragic cannot be
honestly deduced at all; it is only through the spirit of music that
we understand the joy in the annihilation of the individual. For in
the particular examples of such annihilation only is the eternal
phenomenon of Dionysian art made clear to us, which gives expression
to the will in its omnipotence, as it were, behind the _principium
individuationis,_ the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and in
spite of all annihilation. The metaphysical delight in the tragic
is a translation of the instinctively unconscious Dionysian wisdom
into the language of the scene: the hero, the highest manifestation
of the will, is disavowed for our pleasure, because he is only
phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected
by his annihilation. "We believe in eternal life," tragedy exclaims;
while music is the proximate idea of this life. Plastic art has an
altogether different object: here Apollo vanquishes the suffering of
the individual by the radiant glorification of the _eternity of the
phenomenon_; here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life;
pain is in a manner surreptitiously obliterated from the features of
nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature
speaks to us with its true undissembled voice: "Be as I am! Amidst the
ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally creative primordial mother,
eternally impelling to existence, self-satisfying eternally with this
change of phenomena!"
[20] Cf. _World and Will as Idea,_ I. p. 339, trans. by
Haldane and Kemp.
[21] That is "the will" as understood by Schopenhauer.--TR.
17.
Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the eternal joy of
existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind
phenomena. We are to perceive how all that comes into being must be
ready for a sorrowful end; we are compelled to look into the terrors of
individual existence--yet we are not to become torpid: a metaphysical
comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the transforming
figures. We are really for brief moments Primordial Being itself,
and feel its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence; the
struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear to us as
something necessary, considering the surplus of innumerable forms of
existence which throng and push one another into life, considering
the exuberant fertility of the universal will. We are pierced by the
maddening sting of these pains at the very moment when we have become,
as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial joy in existence,
and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility
and eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy
living beings, not as individuals, but as the _one_ living being, with
whose procreative joy we are blended.
The history of the rise of Greek tragedy now tells us with luminous
precision that the tragic art of the Greeks was really born of the
spirit of music: with which conception we believe we have done justice
for the first time to the original and most astonishing significance of
the chorus. At the same time, however, we must admit that the import of
tragic myth as set forth above never became transparent with sufficient
lucidity to the Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers; their
heroes speak, as it were, more superficially than they act; the myth
does not at all find its adequate objectification in the spoken word.
The structure of the scenes and the conspicuous images reveal a deeper
wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts: the same
being also observed in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for instance, in an
analogous manner talks more superficially than he acts, so that the
previously mentioned lesson of Hamlet is to be gathered not from his
words, but from a more profound contemplation and survey of the whole.
With respect to Greek tragedy, which of course presents itself to us
only as word-drama, I have even intimated that the incongruence between
myth and expression might easily tempt us to regard it as shallower
and less significant than it really is, and accordingly to postulate
for it a more superficial effect than it must have had according to
the testimony of the ancients: for how easily one forgets that what
the word-poet did not succeed in doing, namely realising the highest
spiritualisation and ideality of myth, he might succeed in doing
every moment as creative musician! We require, to be sure, almost by
philological method to reconstruct for ourselves the ascendency of
musical influence in order to receive something of the incomparable
comfort which must be characteristic of true tragedy. Even this musical
ascendency, however, would only have been felt by us as such had
we been Greeks: while in the entire development of Greek music--as
compared with the infinitely richer music known and familiar to us--we
imagine we hear only the youthful song of the musical genius intoned
with a feeling of diffidence. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests
say, eternal children, and in tragic art also they are only children
who do not know what a sublime play-thing has originated under their
hands and--is being demolished.
That striving of the spirit of music for symbolic and mythical
manifestation, which increases from the beginnings of lyric poetry to
Attic tragedy, breaks off all of a sudden immediately after attaining
luxuriant development, and disappears, as it were, from the surface
of Hellenic art: while the Dionysian view of things born of this
striving lives on in Mysteries and, in its strangest metamorphoses and
debasements, does not cease to attract earnest natures. Will it not one
day rise again as art out of its mystic depth?
Here the question occupies us, whether the power by the counteracting
influence of which tragedy perished, has for all time strength enough
to prevent the artistic reawaking of tragedy and of the tragic view
of things. If ancient tragedy was driven from its course by the
dialectical desire for knowledge and the optimism of science, it might
be inferred that there is an eternal conflict between _the theoretic_
and _the tragic view of things,_ and only after the spirit of science
has been led to its boundaries, and its claim to universal validity
has been destroyed by the evidence of these boundaries, can we hope
for a re-birth of tragedy: for which form of culture we should have to
use the symbol _of the music-practising Socrates_ in the sense spoken
of above. In this contrast, I understand by the spirit of science the
belief which first came to light in the person of Socrates,--the belief
in the fathomableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.
He who recalls the immediate consequences of this restlessly
onward-pressing spirit of science will realise at once that _myth_
was annihilated by it, and that, in consequence of this annihilation,
poetry was driven as a homeless being from her natural ideal soil.
If we have rightly assigned to music the capacity to reproduce myth
from itself, we may in turn expect to find the spirit of science on
the path where it inimically opposes this mythopoeic power of music.
This takes place in the development of the _New Attic Dithyramb,_ the
music of which no longer expressed the inner essence, the will itself,
but only rendered the phenomenon insufficiently, in an imitation by
means of concepts; from which intrinsically degenerate music the truly
musical natures turned away with the same repugnance that they felt
for the art-destroying tendency of Socrates. The unerring instinct of
Aristophanes surely did the proper thing when it comprised Socrates
himself, the tragedy of Euripides, and the music of the new Dithyrambic
poets in the same feeling of hatred, and perceived in all three
phenomena the symptoms of a degenerate culture. By this New Dithyramb,
music has in an outrageous manner been made the imitative portrait of
phenomena, for instance, of a battle or a storm at sea, and has thus,
of course, been entirely deprived of its mythopoeic power. For if it
endeavours to excite our delight only by compelling us to seek external
analogies between a vital or natural process and certain rhythmical
figures and characteristic sounds of music; if our understanding is
expected to satisfy itself with the perception of these analogies, we
are reduced to a frame of mind in which the reception of the mythical
is impossible; for the myth as a unique exemplar of generality
and truth towering into the infinite, desires to be conspicuously
perceived. The truly Dionysean music presents itself to us as such
a general mirror of the universal will: the conspicuous event which
is refracted in this mirror expands at once for our consciousness to
the copy of an eternal truth. Conversely, such a conspicious event is
at once divested of every mythical character by the tone-painting
of the New Dithyramb; music has here become a wretched copy of the
phenomenon, and therefore infinitely poorer than the phenomenon itself:
through which poverty it still further reduces even the phenomenon for
our consciousness, so that now, for instance, a musically imitated
battle of this sort exhausts itself in marches, signal-sounds, etc.,
and our imagination is arrested precisely by these superficialities.
Tone-painting is therefore in every respect the counterpart of true
music with its mythopoeic power: through it the phenomenon, poor in
itself, is made still poorer, while through an isolated Dionysian music
the phenomenon is evolved and expanded into a picture of the world.
It was an immense triumph of the non-Dionysian spirit, when, in the
development of the New Dithyramb, it had estranged music from itself
and reduced it to be the slave of phenomena. Euripides, who, albeit in
a higher sense, must be designated as a thoroughly unmusical nature,
is for this very reason a passionate adherent of the New Dithyrambic
Music, and with the liberality of a freebooter employs all its
effective turns and mannerisms.
In another direction also we see at work the power of this
un-Dionysian, myth-opposing spirit, when we turn our eyes to the
prevalence of _character representation_ and psychological refinement
from Sophocles onwards. The character must no longer be expanded into
an eternal type, but, on the contrary, must operate individually
through artistic by-traits and shadings, through the nicest precision
of all lines, in such a manner that the spectator is in general no
longer conscious of the myth, but of the mighty nature-myth and the
imitative power of the artist. Here also we observe the victory of
the phenomenon over the Universal, and the delight in the particular
quasi-anatomical preparation; we actually breathe the air of a
theoretical world, in which scientific knowledge is valued more highly
than the artistic reflection of a universal law. The movement along
the line of the representation of character proceeds rapidly: while
Sophocles still delineates complete characters and employs myth for
their refined development, Euripides already delineates only prominent
individual traits of character, which can express themselves in violent
bursts of passion; in the New Attic Comedy, however, there are only
masks with _one_ expression: frivolous old men, duped panders, and
cunning slaves in untiring repetition. Where now is the mythopoeic
spirit of music? What is still left now of music is either excitatory
music or souvenir music, that is, either a stimulant for dull and
used-up nerves, or tone-painting. As regards the former, it hardly
matters about the text set to it: the heroes and choruses of Euripides
are already dissolute enough when once they begin to sing; to what pass
must things have come with his brazen successors?
The new un-Dionysian spirit, however, manifests itself most clearly in
the _dénouements_ of the new dramas. In the Old Tragedy one could feel
at the close the metaphysical comfort, without which the delight in
tragedy cannot be explained at all; the conciliating tones from another
world sound purest, perhaps, in the Œdipus at Colonus. Now that the
genius of music has fled from tragedy, tragedy is, strictly speaking,
dead: for from whence could one now draw the metaphysical comfort? One
sought, therefore, for an earthly unravelment of the tragic dissonance;
the hero, after he had been sufficiently tortured by fate, reaped a
well-deserved reward through a superb marriage or divine tokens of
favour. The hero had turned gladiator, on whom, after being liberally
battered about and covered with wounds, freedom was occasionally
bestowed. The _deus ex machina_ took the place of metaphysical comfort.
I will not say that the tragic view of things was everywhere completely
destroyed by the intruding spirit of the un-Dionysian: we only know
that it was compelled to flee from art into the under-world as it were,
in the degenerate form of a secret cult. Over the widest extent of the
Hellenic character, however, there raged the consuming blast of this
spirit, which manifests itself in the form of "Greek cheerfulness,"
which we have already spoken of as a senile, unproductive love of
existence; this cheerfulness is the counterpart of the splendid
"naïveté" of the earlier Greeks, which, according to the characteristic
indicated above, must be conceived as the blossom of the Apollonian
culture growing out of a dark abyss, as the victory which the Hellenic
will, through its mirroring of beauty, obtains over suffering and the
wisdom of suffering. The noblest manifestation of that other form of
"Greek cheerfulness," the Alexandrine, is the cheerfulness of the
_theoretical man_: it exhibits the same symptomatic characteristics as
I have just inferred concerning the spirit of the un-Dionysian:--it
combats Dionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve myth, it
substitutes for metaphysical comfort an earthly consonance, in fact, a
_deus ex machina_ of its own, namely the god of machines and crucibles,
that is, the powers of the genii of nature recognised and employed in
the service of higher egoism; it believes in amending the world by
knowledge, in guiding life by science, and that it can really confine
the individual within a narrow sphere of solvable problems, where he
cheerfully says to life: "I desire thee: it is worth while to know
thee."
18.
It is an eternal phenomenon: the avidious will can always, by means
of an illusion spread over things, detain its creatures in life
and compel them to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of
knowledge and the vain hope of being able thereby to heal the eternal
wound of existence; another is ensnared by art's seductive veil of
beauty fluttering before his eyes; still another by the metaphysical
comfort that eternal life flows on indestructibly beneath the whirl of
phenomena: to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful
illusions which the will has always at hand. These three specimens of
illusion are on the whole designed only for the more nobly endowed
natures, who in general feel profoundly the weight and burden of
existence, and must be deluded into forgetfulness of their displeasure
by exquisite stimulants. All that we call culture is made up of these
stimulants; and, according to the proportion of the ingredients, we
have either a specially _Socratic_ or _artistic_ or _tragic culture_:
or, if historical exemplifications are wanted, there is either an
Alexandrine or a Hellenic or a Buddhistic culture.
Our whole modern world is entangled in the meshes of Alexandrine
culture, and recognises as its ideal the _theorist_ equipped with
the most potent means of knowledge, and labouring in the service of
science, of whom the archetype and progenitor is Socrates. All our
educational methods have originally this ideal in view: every other
form of existence must struggle onwards wearisomely beside it, as
something tolerated, but not intended. In an almost alarming manner the
cultured man was here found for a long time only in the form of the
scholar: even our poetical arts have been forced to evolve from learned
imitations, and in the main effect of the rhyme we still recognise the
origin of our poetic form from artistic experiments with a non-native
and thoroughly learned language. How unintelligible must _Faust,_ the
modern cultured man, who is in himself intelligible, have appeared to a
true Greek,--Faust, storming discontentedly through all the faculties,
devoted to magic and the devil from a desire for knowledge, whom we
have only to place alongside of Socrates for the purpose of comparison,
in order to see that modern man begins to divine the boundaries of
this Socratic love of perception and longs for a coast in the wide
waste of the ocean of knowledge. When Goethe on one occasion said to
Eckermann with reference to Napoleon: "Yes, my good friend, there is
also a productiveness of deeds," he reminded us in a charmingly naïve
manner that the non-theorist is something incredible and astounding to
modern man; so that the wisdom of Goethe is needed once more in order
to discover that such a surprising form of existence is comprehensible,
nay even pardonable.