[23] See _Faust,_ Part 1.1. 965--TR.
20.
It may be weighed some day before an impartial judge, in what time and
in what men the German spirit has thus far striven most resolutely to
learn of the Greeks: and if we confidently assume that this unique
praise must be accorded to the noblest intellectual efforts of Goethe,
Schiller, and Winkelmann, it will certainly have to be added that
since their time, and subsequently to the more immediate influences of
these efforts, the endeavour to attain to culture and to the Greeks by
this path has in an incomprehensible manner grown feebler and feebler.
In order not to despair altogether of the German spirit, must we not
infer therefrom that possibly, in some essential matter, even these
champions could not penetrate into the core of the Hellenic nature,
and were unable to establish a permanent friendly alliance between
German and Greek culture? So that perhaps an unconscious perception
of this shortcoming might raise also in more serious minds the
disheartening doubt as to whether after such predecessors they could
advance still farther on this path of culture, or could reach the goal
at all. Accordingly, we see the opinions concerning the value of Greek
contribution to culture degenerate since that time in the most alarming
manner; the expression of compassionate superiority may be heard
in the most heterogeneous intellectual and non-intellectual camps,
and elsewhere a totally ineffective declamation dallies with "Greek
harmony," "Greek beauty," "Greek cheerfulness." And in the very circles
whose dignity it might be to draw indefatigably from the Greek channel
for the good of German culture, in the circles of the teachers in the
higher educational institutions, they have learned best to compromise
with the Greeks in good time and on easy terms, to the extent often of
a sceptical abandonment of the Hellenic ideal and a total perversion of
the true purpose of antiquarian studies. If there be any one at all in
these circles who has not completely exhausted himself in the endeavour
to be a trustworthy corrector of old texts or a natural-history
microscopist of language, he perhaps seeks also to appropriate Grecian
antiquity "historically" along with other antiquities, and in any case
according to the method and with the supercilious air of our present
cultured historiography. When, therefore, the intrinsic efficiency
of the higher educational institutions has never perhaps been lower
or feebler than at present, when the "journalist," the paper slave
of the day, has triumphed over the academic teacher in all matters
pertaining to culture, and there only remains to the latter the often
previously experienced metamorphosis of now fluttering also, as a
cheerful cultured butterfly, in the idiom of the journalist, with the
"light elegance" peculiar thereto--with what painful confusion must the
cultured persons of a period like the present gaze at the phenomenon
(which can perhaps be comprehended analogically only by means of the
profoundest principle of the hitherto unintelligible Hellenic genius)
of the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the re-birth of tragedy?
Never has there been another art-period in which so-called culture
and true art have been so estranged and opposed, as is so obviously
the case at present. We understand why so feeble a culture hates true
art; it fears destruction thereby. But must not an entire domain of
culture, namely the Socratic-Alexandrine, have exhausted its powers
after contriving to culminate in such a daintily-tapering point as our
present culture? When it was not permitted to heroes like Goethe and
Schiller to break open the enchanted gate which leads into the Hellenic
magic mountain, when with their most dauntless striving they did not
get beyond the longing gaze which the Goethean Iphigenia cast from
barbaric Tauris to her home across the ocean, what could the epigones
of such heroes hope for, if the gate should not open to them suddenly
of its own accord, in an entirely different position, quite overlooked
in all endeavours of culture hitherto--amidst the mystic tones of
reawakened tragic music.
Let no one attempt to weaken our faith in an impending re-birth of
Hellenic antiquity; for in it alone we find our hope of a renovation
and purification of the German spirit through the fire-magic of music.
What else do we know of amidst the present desolation and languor
of culture, which could awaken any comforting expectation for the
future? We look in vain for one single vigorously-branching root, for
a speck of fertile and healthy soil: there is dust, sand, torpidness
and languishing everywhere! Under such circumstances a cheerless
solitary wanderer could choose for himself no better symbol than the
Knight with Death and the Devil, as Dürer has sketched him for us, the
mail-clad knight, grim and stern of visage, who is able, unperturbed
by his gruesome companions, and yet hopelessly, to pursue his terrible
path with horse and hound alone. Our Schopenhauer was such a Dürerian
knight: he was destitute of all hope, but he sought the truth. There is
not his equal.
But how suddenly this gloomily depicted wilderness of our exhausted
culture changes when the Dionysian magic touches it! A hurricane
seizes everything decrepit, decaying, collapsed, and stunted; wraps
it whirlingly into a red cloud of dust; and carries it like a vulture
into the air. Confused thereby, our glances seek for what has vanished:
for what they see is something risen to the golden light as from
a depression, so full and green, so luxuriantly alive, so ardently
infinite. Tragedy sits in the midst of this exuberance of life,
sorrow and joy, in sublime ecstasy; she listens to a distant doleful
song--it tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are: _Wahn, Wille,
Wehe_[21]--Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and
in the re-birth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic man is past:
crown yourselves with ivy, take in your hands the thyrsus, and do not
marvel if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Dare now
to be tragic men, for ye are to be redeemed! Ye are to accompany the
Dionysian festive procession from India to Greece! Equip yourselves for
severe conflict, but believe in the wonders of your god!
21.
Gliding back from these hortative tones into the mood which befits
the contemplative man, I repeat that it can only be learnt from the
Greeks what such a sudden and miraculous awakening of tragedy must
signify for the essential basis of a people's life. It is the people
of the tragic mysteries who fight the battles with the Persians: and
again, the people who waged such wars required tragedy as a necessary
healing potion. Who would have imagined that there was still such a
uniformly powerful effusion of the simplest political sentiments, the
most natural domestic instincts and the primitive manly delight in
strife in this very people after it had been shaken to its foundations
for several generations by the most violent convulsions of the
Dionysian demon? If at every considerable spreading of the Dionysian
commotion one always perceives that the Dionysian loosing from the
shackles of the individual makes itself felt first of all in an
increased encroachment on the political instincts, to the extent of
indifference, yea even hostility, it is certain, on the other hand,
that the state-forming Apollo is also the genius of the _principium
individuationis,_ and that the state and domestic sentiment cannot live
without an assertion of individual personality. There is only one way
from orgasm for a people,--the way to Indian Buddhism, which, in order
to be at all endured with its longing for nothingness, requires the
rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the
individual; just as these in turn demand a philosophy which teaches how
to overcome the indescribable depression of the intermediate states by
means of a fancy. With the same necessity, owing to the unconditional
dominance of political impulses, a people drifts into a path of
extremest secularisation, the most magnificent, but also the most
terrible expression of which is the Roman _imperium_.
Placed between India and Rome, and constrained to a seductive choice,
the Greeks succeeded in devising in classical purity still a third form
of life, not indeed for long private use, but just on that account for
immortality. For it holds true in all things that those whom the gods
love die young, but, on the other hand, it holds equally true that they
then live eternally with the gods. One must not demand of what is most
noble that it should possess the durable toughness of leather; the
staunch durability, which, for instance, was inherent in the national
character of the Romans, does not probably belong to the indispensable
predicates of perfection. But if we ask by what physic it was possible
for the Greeks, in their best period, notwithstanding the extraordinary
strength of their Dionysian and political impulses, neither to exhaust
themselves by ecstatic brooding, nor by a consuming scramble for empire
and worldly honour, but to attain the splendid mixture which we find
in a noble, inflaming, and contemplatively disposing wine, we must
remember the enormous power of _tragedy,_ exciting, purifying, and
disburdening the entire life of a people; the highest value of which
we shall divine only when, as in the case of the Greeks, it appears
to us as the essence of all the prophylactic healing forces, as the
mediator arbitrating between the strongest and most inherently fateful
characteristics of a people.
Tragedy absorbs the highest musical orgasm into itself, so that it
absolutely brings music to perfection among the Greeks, as among
ourselves; but it then places alongside thereof tragic myth and the
tragic hero, who, like a mighty Titan, takes the entire Dionysian world
on his shoulders and disburdens us thereof; while, on the other hand,
it is able by means of this same tragic myth, in the person of the
tragic hero, to deliver us from the intense longing for this existence,
and reminds us with warning hand of another existence and a higher
joy, for which the struggling hero prepares himself presentiently by
his destruction, not by his victories. Tragedy sets a sublime symbol,
namely the myth between the universal authority of its music and the
receptive Dionysian hearer, and produces in him the illusion that music
is only the most effective means for the animation of the plastic world
of myth. Relying upon this noble illusion, she can now move her limbs
for the dithyrambic dance, and abandon herself unhesitatingly to an
orgiastic feeling of freedom, in which she could not venture to indulge
as music itself, without this illusion. The myth protects us from the
music, while, on the other hand, it alone gives the highest freedom
thereto. By way of return for this service, music imparts to tragic
myth such an impressive and convincing metaphysical significance as
could never be attained by word and image, without this unique aid;
and the tragic spectator in particular experiences thereby the sure
presentiment of supreme joy to which the path through destruction and
negation leads; so that he thinks he hears, as it were, the innermost
abyss of things speaking audibly to him.
If in these last propositions I have succeeded in giving perhaps only a
preliminary expression, intelligible to few at first, to this difficult
representation, I must not here desist from stimulating my friends to a
further attempt, or cease from beseeching them to prepare themselves,
by a detached example of our common experience, for the perception of
the universal proposition. In this example I must not appeal to those
who make use of the pictures of the scenic processes, the words and the
emotions of the performers, in order to approximate thereby to musical
perception; for none of these speak music as their mother-tongue,
and, in spite of the aids in question, do not get farther than the
precincts of musical perception, without ever being allowed to touch
its innermost shrines; some of them, like Gervinus, do not even reach
the precincts by this path. I have only to address myself to those
who, being immediately allied to music, have it as it were for their
mother's lap, and are connected with things almost exclusively by
unconscious musical relations. I ask the question of these genuine
musicians: whether they can imagine a man capable of hearing the third
act of _Tristan und Isolde_ without any aid of word or scenery, purely
as a vast symphonic period, without expiring by a spasmodic distention
of all the wings of the soul? A man who has thus, so to speak, put his
ear to the heart-chamber of the cosmic will, who feels the furious
desire for existence issuing therefrom as a thundering stream or most
gently dispersed brook, into all the veins of the world, would he not
collapse all at once? Could he endure, in the wretched fragile tenement
of the human individual, to hear the re-echo of countless cries of
joy and sorrow from the "vast void of cosmic night," without flying
irresistibly towards his primitive home at the sound of this pastoral
dance-song of metaphysics? But if, nevertheless, such a work can be
heard as a whole, without a renunciation of individual existence, if
such a creation could be created without demolishing its creator--where
are we to get the solution of this contradiction?
Here there interpose between our highest musical excitement and the
music in question the tragic myth and the tragic hero--in reality only
as symbols of the most universal facts, of which music alone can speak
directly. If, however, we felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as a
symbol would stand by us absolutely ineffective and unnoticed, and
would never for a moment prevent us from giving ear to the re-echo of
the _universalia ante rem._ Here, however, the _Apollonian_ power, with
a view to the restoration of the well-nigh shattered individual, bursts
forth with the healing balm of a blissful illusion: all of a sudden
we imagine we see only Tristan, motionless, with hushed voice saying
to himself: "the old tune, why does it wake me?" And what formerly
interested us like a hollow sigh from the heart of being, seems now
only to tell us how "waste and void is the sea." And when, breathless,
we thought to expire by a convulsive distention of all our feelings,
and only a slender tie bound us to our present existence, we now hear
and see only the hero wounded to death and still not dying, with his
despairing cry: "Longing! Longing! In dying still longing! for longing
not dying!" And if formerly, after such a surplus and superabundance of
consuming agonies, the jubilation of the born rent our hearts almost
like the very acme of agony, the rejoicing Kurwenal now stands between
us and the "jubilation as such," with face turned toward the ship which
carries Isolde. However powerfully fellow-suffering encroaches upon us,
it nevertheless delivers us in a manner from the primordial suffering
of the world, just as the symbol-image of the myth delivers us from the
immediate perception of the highest cosmic idea, just as the thought
and word deliver us from the unchecked effusion of the unconscious
will. The glorious Apollonian illusion makes it appear as if the very
realm of tones presented itself to us as a plastic cosmos, as if even
the fate of Tristan and Isolde had been merely formed and moulded
therein as out of some most delicate and impressible material.
Thus does the Apollonian wrest us from Dionysian universality and fill
us with rapture for individuals; to these it rivets our sympathetic
emotion, through these it satisfies the sense of beauty which longs for
great and sublime forms; it brings before us biographical portraits,
and incites us to a thoughtful apprehension of the essence of life
contained therein. With the immense potency of the image, the concept,
the ethical teaching and the sympathetic emotion--the Apollonian
influence uplifts man from his orgiastic self-annihilation, and
beguiles him concerning the universality of the Dionysian process
into the belief that he is seeing a detached picture of the world,
for instance, Tristan and Isolde, and that, _through music,_ he will
be enabled to _see_ it still more clearly and intrinsically. What can
the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish when it can even excite in
us the illusion that the Dionysian is actually in the service of the
Apollonian, the effects of which it is capable of enhancing; yea, that
music is essentially the representative art for an Apollonian substance?
With the pre-established harmony which obtains between perfect drama
and its music, the drama attains the highest degree of conspicuousness,
such as is usually unattainable in mere spoken drama. As all the
animated figures of the scene in the independently evolved lines
of melody simplify themselves before us to the distinctness of the
catenary curve, the coexistence of these lines is also audible in the
harmonic change which sympathises in a most delicate manner with the
evolved process: through which change the relations of things become
immediately perceptible to us in a sensible and not at all abstract
manner, as we likewise perceive thereby that it is only in these
relations that the essence of a character and of a line of melody
manifests itself clearly. And while music thus compels us to see more
extensively and more intrinsically than usual, and makes us spread out
the curtain of the scene before ourselves like some delicate texture,
the world of the stage is as infinitely expanded for our spiritualised,
introspective eye as it is illumined outwardly from within. How can
the word-poet furnish anything analogous, who strives to attain this
internal expansion and illumination of the visible stage-world by a
much more imperfect mechanism and an indirect path, proceeding as he
does from word and concept? Albeit musical tragedy likewise avails
itself of the word, it is at the same time able to place alongside
thereof its basis and source, and can make the unfolding of the word,
from within outwards, obvious to us.
Of the process just set forth, however, it could still be said
as decidedly that it is only a glorious appearance, namely the
afore-mentioned Apollonian _illusion,_ through the influence of which
we are to be delivered from the Dionysian obtrusion and excess.
In point of fact, the relation of music to drama is precisely the
reverse; music is the adequate idea of the world, drama is but the
reflex of this idea, a detached umbrage thereof. The identity between
the line of melody and the lining form, between the harmony and the
character-relations of this form, is true in a sense antithetical to
what one would suppose on the contemplation of musical tragedy. We
may agitate and enliven the form in the most conspicuous manner, and
enlighten it from within, but it still continues merely phenomenon,
from which there is no bridge to lead us into the true reality, into
the heart of the world. Music, however, speaks out of this heart; and
though countless phenomena of the kind might be passing manifestations
of this music, they could never exhaust its essence, but would always
be merely its externalised copies. Of course, as regards the intricate
relation of music and drama, nothing can be explained, while all may
be confused by the popular and thoroughly false antithesis of soul and
body; but the unphilosophical crudeness of this antithesis seems to
have become--who knows for what reasons--a readily accepted Article of
Faith with our æstheticians, while they have learned nothing concerning
an antithesis of phenomenon and thing-in-itself, or perhaps, for
reasons equally unknown, have not cared to learn anything thereof.
Should it have been established by our analysis that the Apollonian
element in tragedy has by means of its illusion gained a complete
victory over the Dionysian primordial element of music, and has made
music itself subservient to its end, namely, the highest and clearest
elucidation of the drama, it would certainly be necessary to add the
very important restriction: that at the most essential point this
Apollonian illusion is dissolved and annihilated. The drama, which, by
the aid of music, spreads out before us with such inwardly illumined
distinctness in all its movements and figures, that we imagine we
see the texture unfolding on the loom as the shuttle flies to and
fro,--attains as a whole an effect which _transcends all Apollonian
artistic effects._ In the collective effect of tragedy, the Dionysian
gets the upper hand once more; tragedy ends with a sound which could
never emanate from the realm of Apollonian art. And the Apollonian
illusion is thereby found to be what it is,--the assiduous veiling
during the performance of tragedy of the intrinsically Dionysian
effect: which, however, is so powerful, that it finally forces
the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to talk
with Dionysian wisdom, and even denies itself and its Apollonian
conspicuousness. Thus then the intricate relation of the Apollonian and
the Dionysian in tragedy must really be symbolised by a fraternal union
of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; Apollo,
however, finally speaks the language of Dionysus; and so the highest
goal of tragedy and of art in general is attained.
22.