according to his experiences, the effect of a true musical tragedy. I
think I have so portrayed the phenomenon of this effect in both its
phases that he will now be able to interpret his own experiences. For
he will recollect that with regard to the myth which passed before
him he felt himself exalted to a kind of omniscience, as if his
visual faculty were no longer merely a surface faculty, but capable
of penetrating into the interior, and as if he now saw before him,
with the aid of music, the ebullitions of the will, the conflict of
motives, and the swelling stream of the passions, almost sensibly
visible, like a plenitude of actively moving lines and figures, and
could thereby dip into the most tender secrets of unconscious emotions.
While he thus becomes conscious of the highest exaltation of his
instincts for conspicuousness and transfiguration, he nevertheless
feels with equal definitiveness that this long series of Apollonian
artistic effects still does _not_ generate the blissful continuance in
will-less contemplation which the plasticist and the epic poet, that
is to say, the strictly Apollonian artists, produce in him by their
artistic productions: to wit, the justification of the world of the
_individuatio_ attained in this contemplation,--which is the object
and essence of Apollonian art. He beholds the transfigured world of
the stage and nevertheless denies it. He sees before him the tragic
hero in epic clearness and beauty, and nevertheless delights in his
annihilation. He comprehends the incidents of the scene in all their
details, and yet loves to flee into the incomprehensible. He feels the
actions of the hero to be justified, and is nevertheless still more
elated when these actions annihilate their originator. He shudders at
the sufferings which will befall the hero, and yet anticipates therein
a higher and much more overpowering joy. He sees more extensively and
profoundly than ever, and yet wishes to be blind. Whence must we derive
this curious internal dissension, this collapse of the Apollonian apex,
if not from the _Dionysian_ spell, which, though apparently stimulating
the Apollonian emotions to their highest pitch, can nevertheless force
this superabundance of Apollonian power into its service? _Tragic
myth_ is to be understood only as a symbolisation of Dionysian wisdom
by means of the expedients of Apollonian art: the mythus conducts the
world of phenomena to its boundaries, where it denies itself, and seeks
to flee back again into the bosom of the true and only reality; where
it then, like Isolde, seems to strike up its metaphysical swan-song:--
In des Wonnemeeres
wogendem Schwall,
in der Duft-Wellen
tönendem Schall,
in des Weltathems
wehendem All--
ertrinken--versinken
unbewusst--höchste Lust![24]
We thus realise to ourselves in the experiences of the truly æsthetic
hearer the tragic artist himself when he proceeds like a luxuriously
fertile divinity of individuation to create his figures (in which sense
his work can hardly be understood as an "imitation of nature")--and
when, on the other hand, his vast Dionysian impulse then absorbs the
entire world of phenomena, in order to anticipate beyond it, and
through its annihilation, the highest artistic primal joy, in the bosom
of the Primordial Unity. Of course, our æsthetes have nothing to say
about this return in fraternal union of the two art-deities to the
original home, nor of either the Apollonian or Dionysian excitement
of the hearer, while they are indefatigable in characterising the
struggle of the hero with fate, the triumph of the moral order of the
world, or the disburdenment of the emotions through tragedy, as the
properly Tragic: an indefatigableness which makes me think that they
are perhaps not æsthetically excitable men at all, but only to be
regarded as moral beings when hearing tragedy. Never since Aristotle
has an explanation of the tragic effect been proposed, by which an
æsthetic activity of the hearer could be inferred from artistic
circumstances. At one time fear and pity are supposed to be forced to
an alleviating discharge through the serious procedure, at another time
we are expected to feel elevated and inspired at the triumph of good
and noble principles, at the sacrifice of the hero in the interest of
a moral conception of things; and however certainly I believe that for
countless men precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy,
it as obviously follows therefrom that all these, together with their
interpreting æsthetes, have had no experience of tragedy as the highest
_art._ The pathological discharge, the catharsis of Aristotle, which
philologists are at a loss whether to include under medicinal or moral
phenomena, recalls a remarkable anticipation of Goethe. "Without a
lively pathological interest," he says, "I too have never yet succeeded
in elaborating a tragic situation of any kind, and hence I have rather
avoided than sought it. Can it perhaps have been still another of the
merits of the ancients that the deepest pathos was with them merely
æsthetic play, whereas with us the truth of nature must co-operate in
order to produce such a work?" We can now answer in the affirmative
this latter profound question after our glorious experiences, in which
we have found to our astonishment in the case of musical tragedy
itself, that the deepest pathos can in reality be merely æsthetic play:
and therefore we are justified in believing that now for the first time
the proto-phenomenon of the tragic can be portrayed with some degree
of success. He who now will still persist in talking only of those
vicarious effects proceeding from ultra-æsthetic spheres, and does not
feel himself raised above the pathologically-moral process, may be left
to despair of his æsthetic nature: for which we recommend to him, by
way of innocent equivalent, the interpretation of Shakespeare after the
fashion of Gervinus, and the diligent search for poetic justice.
Thus with the re-birth of tragedy the _æsthetic hearer_ is also
born anew, in whose place in the theatre a curious _quid pro quo_
was wont to sit with half-moral and half-learned pretensions,--the
"critic." In his sphere hitherto everything has been artificial and
merely glossed over with a semblance of life. The performing artist
was in fact at a loss what to do with such a critically comporting
hearer, and hence he, as well as the dramatist or operatic composer
who inspired him, searched anxiously for the last remains of life
in a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of enjoyment. Such
"critics," however, have hitherto constituted the public; the student,
the school-boy, yea, even the most harmless womanly creature, were
already unwittingly prepared by education and by journals for a similar
perception of works of art. The nobler natures among the artists
counted upon exciting the moral-religious forces in such a public,
and the appeal to a moral order of the world operated vicariously,
when in reality some powerful artistic spell should have enraptured
the true hearer. Or again, some imposing or at all events exciting
tendency of the contemporary political and social world was presented
by the dramatist with such vividness that the hearer could forget his
critical exhaustion and abandon himself to similar emotions, as, in
patriotic or warlike moments, before the tribune of parliament, or
at the condemnation of crime and vice:--an estrangement of the true
aims of art which could not but lead directly now and then to a cult
of tendency. But here there took place what has always taken place
in the case of factitious arts, an extraordinary rapid depravation
of these tendencies, so that for instance the tendency to employ the
theatre as a means for the moral education of the people, which in
Schiller's time was taken seriously, is already reckoned among the
incredible antiquities of a surmounted culture. While the critic got
the upper hand in the theatre and concert-hall, the journalist in the
school, and the press in society, art degenerated into a topic of
conversation of the most trivial kind, and æsthetic criticism was used
as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and moreover piteously
unoriginal sociality, the significance of which is suggested by the
Schopenhauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there has never
been so much gossip about art and so little esteem for it. But is it
still possible to have intercourse with a man capable of conversing on
Beethoven or Shakespeare? Let each answer this question according to
his sentiments: he will at any rate show by his answer his conception
of "culture," provided he tries at least to answer the question, and
has not already grown mute with astonishment.
On the other hand, many a one more nobly and delicately endowed by
nature, though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian
in the manner described, could tell of the unexpected as well as
totally unintelligible effect which a successful performance of
_Lohengrin,_ for example, exerted on him: except that perhaps every
warning and interpreting hand was lacking to guide him; so that the
incomprehensibly heterogeneous and altogether incomparable sensation
which then affected him also remained isolated and became extinct, like
a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy. He then divined what the
æsthetic hearer is.
[24]
In the sea of pleasure's
Billowing roll,
In the ether-waves
Knelling and toll,
In the world-breath's
Wavering whole--
To drown in, go down in--
Lost in swoon--greatest boon!
23.
He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to how he is related to the
true æsthetic hearer, or whether he belongs rather to the community
of the Socrato-critical man, has only to enquire sincerely concerning
the sentiment with which he accepts the _wonder_ represented on the
stage: whether he feels his historical sense, which insists on strict
psychological causality, insulted by it, whether with benevolent
concession he as it were admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible
to childhood, but relinquished by him, or whether he experiences
anything else thereby. For he will thus be enabled to determine how
far he is on the whole capable of understanding _myth,_ that is to
say, the concentrated picture of the world, which, as abbreviature of
phenomena, cannot dispense with wonder. It is probable, however, that
nearly every one, upon close examination, feels so disintegrated by
the critico-historical spirit of our culture, that he can only perhaps
make the former existence of myth credible to himself by learned
means through intermediary abstractions. Without myth, however, every
culture loses its healthy, creative natural power: it is only a horizon
encompassed with myths which rounds off to unity a social movement.
It is only by myth that all the powers of the imagination and of the
Apollonian dream are freed from their random rovings. The mythical
figures have to be the invisibly omnipresent genii, under the care of
which the young soul grows to maturity, by the signs of which the man
gives a meaning to his life and struggles: and the state itself knows
no more powerful unwritten law than the mythical foundation which
vouches for its connection with religion and its growth from mythical
ideas.
Let us now place alongside thereof the abstract man proceeding
independently of myth, the abstract education, the abstract usage,
the abstract right, the abstract state: let us picture to ourselves
the lawless roving of the artistic imagination, not bridled by any
native myth: let us imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred
primitive seat, but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities, and
has to nourish itself wretchedly from the other cultures--such is the
Present, as the result of Socratism, which is bent on the destruction
of myth. And now the myth-less man remains eternally hungering among
all the bygones, and digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig
for them even among the remotest antiquities. The stupendous historical
exigency of the unsatisfied modern culture, the gathering around one of
countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge--what does
all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical
home, the mythical source? Let us ask ourselves whether the feverish
and so uncanny stirring of this culture is aught but the eager seizing
and snatching at food of the hungerer--and who would care to contribute
anything more to a culture which cannot be appeased by all it devours,
and in contact with which the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment
is wont to change into "history and criticism"?
We should also have to regard our German character with despair and
sorrow, if it had already become inextricably entangled in, or even
identical with this culture, in a similar manner as we can observe it
to our horror to be the case in civilised France; and that which for
a long time was the great advantage of France and the cause of her
vast preponderance, to wit, this very identity of people and culture,
might compel us at the sight thereof to congratulate ourselves that
this culture of ours, which is so questionable, has hitherto had
nothing in common with the noble kernel of the character of our people.
All our hopes, on the contrary, stretch out longingly towards the
perception that beneath this restlessly palpitating civilised life and
educational convulsion there is concealed a glorious, intrinsically
healthy, primeval power, which, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at
intervals in stupendous moments, and then dreams on again in view of
a future awakening. It is from this abyss that the German Reformation
came forth: in the choral-hymn of which the future melody of German
music first resounded. So deep, courageous, and soul-breathing, so
exuberantly good and tender did this chorale of Luther sound,--as the
first Dionysian-luring call which breaks forth from dense thickets
at the approach of spring. To it responded with emulative echo the
solemnly wanton procession of Dionysian revellers, to whom we are
indebted for German music--and to whom we shall be indebted for _the
re-birth of German myth._
I know that I must now lead the sympathising and attentive friend to
an elevated position of lonesome contemplation, where he will have
but few companions, and I call out encouragingly to him that we must
hold fast to our shining guides, the Greeks. For the rectification
of our æsthetic knowledge we previously borrowed from them the two
divine figures, each of which sways a separate realm of art, and
concerning whose mutual contact and exaltation we have acquired a
notion through Greek tragedy. Through a remarkable disruption of both
these primitive artistic impulses, the ruin of Greek tragedy seemed
to be necessarily brought about: with which process a degeneration
and a transmutation of the Greek national character was strictly in
keeping, summoning us to earnest reflection as to how closely and
necessarily art and the people, myth and custom, tragedy and the state,
have coalesced in their bases. The ruin of tragedy was at the same
time the ruin of myth. Until then the Greeks had been involuntarily
compelled immediately to associate all experiences with their myths,
indeed they had to comprehend them only through this association:
whereby even the most immediate present necessarily appeared to them
_sub specie æterni_ and in a certain sense as timeless. Into this
current of the timeless, however, the state as well as art plunged
in order to find repose from the burden and eagerness of the moment.
And a people--for the rest, also a man--is worth just as much only as
its ability to impress on its experiences the seal of eternity: for
it is thus, as it were, desecularised, and reveals its unconscious
inner conviction of the relativity of time and of the true, that is,
the metaphysical significance of life. The contrary happens when a
people begins to comprehend itself historically and to demolish the
mythical bulwarks around it: with which there is usually connected
a marked secularisation, a breach with the unconscious metaphysics
of its earlier existence, in all ethical consequences. Greek art and
especially Greek tragedy delayed above all the annihilation of myth:
it was necessary to annihilate these also to be able to live detached
from the native soil, unbridled in the wilderness of thought, custom,
and action. Even in such circumstances this metaphysical impulse still
endeavours to create for itself a form of apotheosis (weakened, no
doubt) in the Socratism of science urging to life: but on its lower
stage this same impulse led only to a feverish search, which gradually
merged into a pandemonium of myths and superstitions accumulated from
all quarters: in the midst of which, nevertheless, the Hellene sat with
a yearning heart till he contrived, as Græculus, to mask his fever with
Greek cheerfulness and Greek levity, or to narcotise himself completely
with some gloomy Oriental superstition.
We have approached this condition in the most striking manner since the
reawakening of the Alexandro--Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century,
after a long, not easily describable, interlude. On the heights there
is the same exuberant love of knowledge, the same insatiate happiness
of the discoverer, the same stupendous secularisation, and, together
with these, a homeless roving about, an eager intrusion at foreign
tables, a frivolous deification of the present or a dull senseless
estrangement, all _sub speci sæculi,_ of the present time: which
same symptoms lead one to infer the same defect at the heart of
this culture, the annihilation of myth. It seems hardly possible to
transplant a foreign myth with permanent success, without dreadfully
injuring the tree through this transplantation: which is perhaps
occasionally strong enough and sound enough to eliminate the foreign
element after a terrible struggle; but must ordinarily consume itself
in a languishing and stunted condition or in sickly luxuriance. Our
opinion of the pure and vigorous kernel of the German being is such
that we venture to expect of it, and only of it, this elimination of
forcibly ingrafted foreign elements, and we deem it possible that
the German spirit will reflect anew on itself. Perhaps many a one
will be of opinion that this spirit must begin its struggle with the
elimination of the Romanic element: for which it might recognise an
external preparation and encouragement in the victorious bravery and
bloody glory of the late war, but must seek the inner constraint in the
emulative zeal to be for ever worthy of the sublime protagonists on
this path, of Luther as well as our great artists and poets. But let
him never think he can fight such battles without his household gods,
without his mythical home, without a "restoration" of all German things
I And if the German should look timidly around for a guide to lead
him back to his long-lost home, the ways and paths of which he knows
no longer--let him but listen to the delightfully luring call of the
Dionysian bird, which hovers above him, and would fain point out to him
the way thither.
24.
Among the peculiar artistic effects of musical tragedy we had to
emphasise an Apollonian _illusion,_ through which we are to be saved
from immediate oneness with the Dionysian music, while our musical
excitement is able to discharge itself on an Apollonian domain and
in an interposed visible middle world. It thereby seemed to us that
precisely through this discharge the middle world of theatrical
procedure, the drama generally, became visible and intelligible from
within in a degree unattainable in the other forms of Apollonian art:
so that here, where this art was as it were winged and borne aloft by
the spirit of music, we had to recognise the highest exaltation of its
powers, and consequently in the fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus
the climax of the Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.
Of course, the Apollonian light-picture did not, precisely with this
inner illumination through music, attain the peculiar effect of the
weaker grades of Apollonian art. What the epos and the animated stone
can do--constrain the contemplating eye to calm delight in the world
of the _individuatio_--could not be realised here, notwithstanding
the greater animation and distinctness. We contemplated the drama
and penetrated with piercing glance into its inner agitated world of
motives--and yet it seemed as if only a symbolic picture passed before
us, the profoundest significance of which we almost believed we had
divined, and which we desired to put aside like a curtain in order to
behold the original behind it. The greatest distinctness of the picture
did not suffice us: for it seemed to reveal as well as veil something;
and while it seemed, with its symbolic revelation, to invite the
rending of the veil for the disclosure of the mysterious background,
this illumined all-conspicuousness itself enthralled the eye and
prevented it from penetrating more deeply He who has not experienced
this,--to have to view, and at the same time to have a longing
beyond the viewing,--will hardly be able to conceive how clearly and
definitely these two processes coexist in the contemplation of tragic
myth and are felt to be conjoined; while the truly æsthetic spectators
will confirm my assertion that among the peculiar effects of tragedy
this conjunction is the most noteworthy. Now let this phenomenon of the
æsthetic spectator be transferred to an analogous process in the tragic
artist, and the genesis of _tragic myth_ will have been understood. It
shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the full delight in appearance
and contemplation, and at the same time it denies this delight and
finds a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the visible
world of appearance. The substance of tragic myth is first of all an
epic event involving the glorification of the fighting hero: but whence
originates the essentially enigmatical trait, that the suffering in
the fate of the hero, the most painful victories, the most agonising
contrasts of motives, in short, the exemplification of the wisdom of
Silenus, or, æsthetically expressed, the Ugly and Discordant, is always
represented anew in such countless forms with such predilection, and
precisely in the most youthful and exuberant age of a people, unless
there is really a higher delight experienced in all this?
For the fact that things actually take such a tragic course would
least of all explain the origin of a form of art; provided that art
is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a
metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside
thereof for its conquest. Tragic myth, in so far as it really belongs
to art, also fully participates in this transfiguring metaphysical
purpose of art in general: What does it transfigure, however, when it
presents the phenomenal world in the guise of the suffering hero? Least
of all the "reality" of this phenomenal world, for it says to us: "Look
at this! Look carefully! It is your life! It is the hour-hand of your
clock of existence!"
And myth has displayed this life, in order thereby to transfigure it
to us? If not, how shall we account for the æsthetic pleasure with
which we make even these representations pass before us? I am inquiring
concerning the æsthetic pleasure, and am well aware that many of
these representations may moreover occasionally create even a moral
delectation, say under the form of pity or of a moral triumph. But he
who would derive the effect of the tragic exclusively from these moral
sources, as was usually the case far too long in æsthetics, let him not
think that he has done anything for Art thereby; for Art must above all
insist on purity in her domain. For the explanation of tragic myth the
very first requirement is that the pleasure which characterises it must
be sought in the purely æsthetic sphere, without encroaching on the
domain of pity, fear, or the morally-sublime. How can the ugly and the
discordant, the substance of tragic myth, excite an æsthetic pleasure?
Here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a daring bound into a
metaphysics of Art. I repeat, therefore, my former proposition, that
it is only as an æsthetic phenomenon that existence and the world,
appear justified: and in this sense it is precisely the function of
tragic myth to convince us that even the Ugly and Discordant is an
artistic game which the will, in the eternal fulness of its joy, plays
with itself. But this not easily comprehensible proto-phenomenon of
Dionysian Art becomes, in a direct way, singularly intelligible, and
is immediately apprehended in the wonderful significance of _musical
dissonance:_ just as in general it is music alone, placed in contrast
to the world, which can give us an idea as to what is meant by the
justification of the world as an æsthetic phenomenon. The joy that the
tragic myth excites has the same origin as the joyful sensation of
dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primitive joy experienced
in pain itself, is the common source of music and tragic myth.
Is it not possible that by calling to our aid the musical relation of
dissonance, the difficult problem of tragic effect may have meanwhile
been materially facilitated? For we now understand what it means to
wish to view tragedy and at the same time to have a longing beyond the
viewing: a frame of mind, which, as regards the artistically employed
dissonance, we should simply have to characterise by saying that we
desire to hear and at the same time have a longing beyond the hearing.
That striving for the infinite, the pinion-flapping of longing,
accompanying the highest delight in the clearly-perceived reality,
remind one that in both states we have to recognise a Dionysian
phenomenon, which again and again reveals to us anew the playful
up-building and demolishing of the world of individuals as the efflux
of a primitive delight, in like manner as when Heraclitus the Obscure
compares the world-building power to a playing child which places
stones here and there and builds sandhills only to overthrow them again.