farthest distance from pure music, efficient in itself, and purely
Dionysean? Let us imagine a passionate drama full of incidents which
carries away the spectator, and which is already sure of success
by its plot: what will "dramatic" music be able to add, if it does
not take away something? Firstly, it _will_ take away much: for in
every moment where for once the Dionysean power of music strikes
the listener, the eye is dimmed that sees the action, the eye that
became absorbed in the individuals appearing before it: the listener
now _forgets_ the drama and becomes alive again to it only when the
Dionysean spell over him has been broken. In so far, however, as music
makes the listener forget the drama, it is not yet "dramatic" music:
but what kind of music is that which is not _allowed_ to exercise
any Dionysean power over the listener? And how is it possible? It is
possible as _purely conventional symbolism,_ out of which convention
has sucked all natural strength: as music which has diminished to
symbols of remembrance: and its effect aims at reminding the spectator
of something, which at the sight of the drama must not escape him lest
he should misunderstand it: as a trumpet signal is an invitation for
the horse to trot. Lastly, before the drama commenced and in interludes
or during tedious passages, doubtful as to dramatic effect, yea,
even in its highest moments, there would still be permitted another
species of remembrance-music, no longer purely conventional, namely
_emotional-music,_ music, as a stimulant to dull or wearied nerves.
I am able to distinguish in the so-called dramatic music these two
elements only: a conventional rhetoric and remembrance-music, and a
sensational music with an effect essentially physical: and thus it
vacillates between the noise of the drum and the signal-horn, like
the mood of the warrior who goes into the battle. But now the mind,
regaling itself on pure music and educated through comparison, demands
a _masquerade_ for those two wrong tendencies of music; "Remembrance"
and "Emotion" are to be played, but in good music, which must be
in itself enjoyable, yea, valuable; what despair for the dramatic
musician, who must mask the big drum by good music, which, however,
must nevertheless have no purely musical, but only a stimulating
effect! And now comes the great Philistine public nodding its thousand
heads and enjoys this "dramatic music" which is ever ashamed of itself,
enjoys it to the very last morsel, without perceiving anything of its
shame and embarrassment. Rather the public feels its skin agreeably
tickled, for indeed homage is being rendered in all forms and ways to
the public! To the pleasure-hunting, dull-eyed sensualist, who needs
excitement, to the conceited "educated person" who has accustomed
himself to good drama and good music as to good food, without after all
making much out of it, to the forgetful and absent-minded egoist, who
must be led back to the work of art with force and with signal-horns
because selfish plans continually pass through his mind aiming at
gain or pleasure. Woe-begone dramatic musicians! "Draw near and view
your Patrons' faces! The half are coarse, the half are cold." "Why
should you rack, poor foolish Bards, for ends like these the gracious
Muses?"[2] And that the muses are tormented, even tortured and flayed,
these veracious miserable ones do not themselves deny!
We had assumed a passionate drama, carrying away the spectator, which
even without music would be sure of its effect. I fear that that in
it which is "poetry" and _not_ action proper will stand in relation
to true poetry as dramatic music to music in general: it will be
remembrance-and emotional-poetry. Poetry will serve as a means, in
order to recall in a conventional fashion feelings and passions,
the expression of which has been found by real poets and has become
celebrated, yea, normal with them. Further, this poetry will be
expected in dangerous moments to assist the proper "action,"--whether
a criminalistic horror-story or an exhibition of witchery mad with
shifting the scenes,--and to spread a covering veil over the crudeness
of the action itself. Shamefully conscious, that the poetry is only
masquerade which cannot bear the light of day, such a "dramatic"
rime-jingle clamours now for "dramatic" music, as on the other hand
again the poetaster of such dramas is met after one-fourth of the
way by the dramatic musician with his talent for the drum and the
signal-horn and his shyness of genuine music, trusting in itself and
self-sufficient. And now they see one another; and these Apollonian and
Dionysean caricatures, this _par nobile fratrum,_ embrace one another!
[1] A reference to Goethe's ballad, The Minstrel, st. 5:
"I sing as sings the bird, whose note The leafy bough is heard on. The
song that falters from my throat For me is ample guerdon." TR.
[2] A quotation from Goethe's "Faust": Part I., lines 91, 92, and 95,
96.--TR.
HOMER'S CONTEST
Preface to an Unwritten Book (1872)
When one speaks of "_humanity_" the notion lies at the bottom,
that humanity is that which _separates_ and distinguishes man from
Nature. But such a distinction does not in reality exist: the
"natural" qualities and the properly called "human" ones have grown
up inseparably together. Man in his highest and noblest capacities
_is_ Nature and bears in himself her awful twofold character. His
abilities generally considered dreadful and inhuman are perhaps indeed
the fertile soil, out of which alone can grow forth all humanity in
emotions, actions and works.
Thus the Greeks, the most humane men of ancient times, have in
themselves a trait of cruelty, of tiger-like pleasure in destruction:
a trait, which in the grotesquely magnified image of the Hellene, in
Alexander the Great, is very plainly visible, which, however, in their
whole history, as well as in their mythology, must terrify us who
meet them with the emasculate idea of modern humanity. When Alexander
has the feet of Batis, the brave defender of Gaza, bored through,
and binds the living body to his chariot in order to drag him about
exposed to the scorn of his soldiers, that is a sickening caricature of
Achilles, who at night ill-uses Hector's corpse by a similar trailing;
but even this trait has for us something offensive, something which
inspires horror. It gives us a peep into the abysses of hatred. With
the same sensation perhaps we stand before the bloody and insatiable
self-laceration of two Greek parties, as for example in the Corcyrean
revolution. When the victor, in a fight of the cities, according to
the _law_ of warfare, executes the whole male population and sells all
the women and children into slavery, we see, in the sanction of such a
law, that the Greek deemed it a positive necessity to allow his hatred
to break forth unimpeded; in such moments the compressed and swollen
feeling relieved itself; the tiger bounded forth, a voluptuous cruelty
shone out of his fearful eye. Why had the Greek sculptor to represent
again and again war and fights in innumerable repetitions, extended
human bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred or through the
recklessness of triumph, fighters wounded and writhing with pain, or
the dying with the last rattle in their throat? Why did the whole Greek
world exult in the fighting scenes of the "Iliad"? I am afraid, we do
not understand them enough in "Greek fashion," and that we should even
shudder, if for once we _did_ understand them thus.
But what lies, as the mother-womb of the Hellenic, _behind_ the Homeric
world? In the _latter,_ by the extremely artistic definiteness, and the
calm and purity of the lines we are already lifted far above the purely
material amalgamation: its colours, by an artistic deception, appear
lighter, milder, warmer; its men, in this coloured, warm illumination,
appear better and more sympathetic--but where do we look, if, no
longer guided and protected by Homer's hand, we step backwards into
the pre-Homeric world? Only into night and horror, into the products
of a fancy accustomed to the horrible. What earthly existence is
reflected in the loathsome-awful theogonian lore: a life swayed only
by the _children of the night,_ strife, amorous desires, deception,
age and death. Let us imagine the suffocating atmosphere of Hesiod's
poem, still thickened and darkened and without all the mitigations and
purifications, which poured over Hellas from Delphi and the numerous
seats of the gods! If we mix this thickened Boeotian air with the grim
voluptuousness of the Etruscans, then such a reality would _extort_
from us a world of myths within which Uranos, Kronos and Zeus and
the struggles of the Titans would appear as a relief. Combat in this
brooding atmosphere is salvation and safety; the cruelty of victory is
the summit of life's glories. And just as in truth the idea of Greek
law has developed from _murder_ and expiation of murder, so also nobler
Civilisation takes her first wreath of victory from the altar of the
expiation of murder. Behind that bloody age stretches a wave-furrow
deep into Hellenic history. The names of Orpheus, of Musæus, and
their cults indicate to what consequences the uninterrupted sight of
a world of warfare and cruelty led--to the loathing of existence, to
the conception of this existence as a punishment to be borne to the
end, to the belief in the identity of existence and indebtedness. But
these particular conclusions are not specifically Hellenic; through
them Greece comes into contact with India and the Orient generally. The
Hellenic genius had ready yet another answer to the question: what does
a life of fighting and of victory mean? and gives this answer in the
whole breadth of Greek history.
In order to understand the latter we must start from the fact that
the Greek genius admitted the existing fearful impulse, and deemed it
_justified;_ whereas in the Orphic phase of thought was contained the
belief that life with such an impulse as its root would not be worth
living. Strife and the pleasure of victory were acknowledged; and
nothing separates the Greek world more from ours than the _colouring,_
derived hence, of some ethical ideas, _e.g.,_ of _Eris_ and of _Envy_.
When the traveller Pausanius during his wanderings through Greece
visited the Helicon, a very old copy of the first didactic poem of the
Greeks, "The Works and Days" of Hesiod, was shown to him, inscribed
upon plates of lead and severely damaged by time and weather. However
he recognised this much, that, unlike the usual copies, it had _not_
at its head that little hymnus on Zeus, but began at once with the
declaration: "_Two_ Eris-goddesses are on earth." This is one of the
most noteworthy Hellenic thoughts and worthy to be impressed on the
new-comer immediately at the entrance-gate of Greek ethics. "One would
like to praise the one Eris, just as much as to blame the other, if
one uses one's reason. For these two goddesses have quite different
dispositions. For the one, the cruel one, furthers the evil war and
feud! No mortal likes her, but under the yoke of need one pays honour
to the burdensome Eris, according to the decree of the immortals. She,
as the elder, gave birth to black night. Zeus the high-ruling one,
however, placed the other Eris upon the roots of the earth and among
men as a much better one. She urges even the unskilled man to work, and
if one who lacks property beholds another who is rich, then he hastens
to sow in similar fashion and to plant and to put his house in order;
the neighbour vies with the neighbour who strives after fortune. Good
is this Eris to men. The potter also has a grudge against the potter,
and the carpenter against the carpenter; the beggar envies the beggar,
and the singer the singer."
The two last verses which treat of the _odium figulinum_ appear to
our scholars to be incomprehensible in this place. According to their
judgment the predicates: "grudge" and "envy" fit only the nature of
the evil Eris, and for this reason they do not hesitate to designate
these verses as spurious or thrown by chance into this place. For
that judgment however a system of Ethics other than the Hellenic must
have inspired these scholars unawares; for in these verses to the
good Eris Aristotle finds no offence. And not only Aristotle but the
whole Greek antiquity thinks of spite and envy otherwise than we do
and agrees with Hesiod, who first designates as an evil one that Eris
who leads men against one another to a hostile war of extermination,
and secondly praises another Eris as the good one, who as jealousy,
spite, envy, incites men to activity but not to the action of war to
the knife but to the action of _contest._ The Greek is _envious_ and
conceives of this quality not as a blemish, but as the effect of a
_beneficent_ deity. What a gulf of ethical judgment between us and him?
Because he is envious he also feels, with every superfluity of honour,
riches, splendour and fortune, the envious eye of a god resting on
himself, and he fears this envy; in this case the latter reminds him
of the transitoriness of every human lot; he dreads his very happiness
and, sacrificing the best of it, he bows before the divine envy.
This conception does not perhaps estrange him from his gods; their
significance on the contrary is expressed by the thought that with them
man in whose soul jealousy is enkindled against every other living
being, is _never_ allowed to venture into contest. In the fight of
Thamyris with the Muses, of Marsyas with Apollo, in the heart-moving
fate of Niobe appears the horrible opposition of the two powers, who
must never fight with one another, man and god.
The greater and more sublime however a Greek is, the brighter in him
appears the ambitious flame, devouring everybody who runs with him on
the same track. Aristotle once made a list of such contests on a large
scale; among them is the most striking instance how even a dead person
can still incite a living one to consuming jealousy; thus for example
Aristotle designates the relation between the Kolophonian Xenophanes
and Homer. We do not understand this attack on the national hero of
poetry in all its strength, if we do not imagine, as later on also with
Plato, the root of this attack to be the ardent desire to step into
the place of the overthrown poet and to inherit his fame. Every great
Hellene hands on the torch of the contest; at every great virtue a new
light is kindled. If the young Themistocles could not sleep at the
thought of the laurels of Miltiades so his early awakened bent released
itself only in the long emulation with Aristides in that uniquely
noteworthy, purely instinctive genius of his political activity, which
Thucydides describes. How characteristic are both question and answer,
when a notable opponent of Pericles is asked, whether he or Pericles
was the better wrestler in the city, and he gives the answer: "Even if
I throw him down he denies that he has fallen, attains his purpose and
convinces those who saw him fall."
If one wants to see that sentiment unashamed in its naïve expressions,
the sentiment as to the necessity of contest lest the State's welfare
be threatened, one should think of the original meaning of _Ostracism,_
as for example the Ephesians pronounced it at the banishment of
Hermodor. "Among us nobody shall be the best; if however someone is the
best, then let him be so elsewhere and among others." Why should not
someone be the best? Because with that the contest would fail, and the
eternal life-basis of the Hellenic State would be endangered. Later on
Ostracism receives quite another position with regard to the contest;
it is applied, when the danger becomes obvious that one of the great
contesting politicians and party-leaders feels himself urged on in
the heat of the conflict towards harmful and destructive measures and
dubious _coups d'état._ The original sense of this peculiar institution
however is not that of a safety-valve but that of a stimulant.
The all-excelling individual was to be removed in order that the
contest of forces might re-awaken, a thought which is hostile to the
"exclusiveness" of genius in the modern sense but which assumes that in
the natural order of things there are always _several_ geniuses which
incite one another to action, as much also as they hold one another
within the bounds of moderation. That is the kernel of the Hellenic
contest-conception: it abominates autocracy, and fears its dangers; it
desires as a _preventive_ against the genius--a second genius.
Every natural gift must develop itself by contest. Thus the Hellenic
national pedagogy demands, whereas modern educators fear nothing as
much as, the unchaining of the so-called ambition. Here one fears
selfishness as the "evil in itself"--with the exception of the
Jesuits, who agree with the Ancients and who, possibly, for that
reason, are the most efficient educators of our time. They seem to
believe that Selfishness, _i.e.,_ the individual element is only the
most powerful _agens_ but that it obtains its character as "good" and
"evil" essentially from the aims towards which it strives. To the
Ancients however the aim of the agonistic education was the welfare of
the whole, of the civic society. Every Athenian for instance was to
cultivate his Ego in contest, so far that it should be of the highest
service to Athens and should do the least harm. It was not unmeasured
and immeasurable as modern ambition generally is; the youth thought of
the welfare of his native town when he vied with others in running,
throwing or singing; it was her glory that he wanted to increase with
his own; it was to his town's gods that he dedicated the wreaths which
the umpires as a mark of honour set upon his head. Every Greek from
childhood felt within himself the burning wish to be in the contest
of the towns an instrument for the welfare of his own town; in this
his selfishness was kindled into flame, by this his selfishness was
bridled and restricted. Therefore the individuals in antiquity were
freer, because their aims were nearer and more tangible. Modern man, on
the contrary, is everywhere hampered by infinity, like the fleet-footed
Achilles in the allegory of the Eleate Zeno: infinity impedes him, he
does not even overtake the tortoise.
But as the youths to be educated were brought up struggling against
one another, so their educators were in turn in emulation amongst
themselves. Distrustfully jealous, the great musical masters, Pindar
and Simonides, stepped side by side; in rivalry the sophist, the higher
teacher of antiquity meets his fellow-sophist; even the most universal
kind of instruction, through the drama, was imparted to the people
only under the form of an enormous wrestling of the great musical and
dramatic artists. How wonderful! "And even the artist has a grudge
against the artist!" And the modern man dislikes in an artist nothing
so much as the personal battle-feeling, whereas the Greek recognises
the artist _only in such a personal struggle._ There where the modern
suspects weakness of the work of art, the Hellene seeks the source of
his highest strength! That, which by way of example in Plato is of
special artistic importance in his dialogues, is usually the result
of an emulation with the art of the orators, of the sophists, of the
dramatists of his time, invented deliberately in order that at the end
he could say: "Behold, I can also do what my great rivals can; yea
I can do it even better than they. No Protagoras has composed such
beautiful myths as I, no dramatist such a spirited and fascinating
whole as the Symposion, no orator penned such an oration as I put
up in the Georgias--and now I reject all that together and condemn
all imitative art! Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an
orator!" What a problem unfolds itself there before us, if we ask
about the relationship between the contest and the conception of the
work of art!--If on the other hand we remove the contest from Greek
life, then we look at once into the pre-Homeric abyss of horrible
savagery, hatred, and pleasure in destruction. This phenomenon alas!
shows itself frequently when a great personality was, owing to an
enormously brilliant deed, suddenly withdrawn from the contest and
became _hors de concours_ according to his, and his fellow-citizens'
judgment. Almost without exception the effect is awful; and if one
usually draws from these consequences the conclusion that the Greek was
unable to bear glory and fortune, one should say more exactly that he
was unable to bear fame without further struggle, and fortune at the
end of the contest. There is no more distinct instance than the fate
of Miltiades. Placed upon a solitary height and lifted far above every
fellow-combatant through his incomparable success at Marathon, he feels
a low thirsting for revenge awakened within himself against a citizen
of Para, with whom he had been at enmity long ago. To satisfy his
desire he misuses reputation, the public exchequer and civic honour and
disgraces himself. Conscious of his ill-success he falls into unworthy
machinations. He forms a clandestine and godless connection with Timo
a priestess of Demeter, and enters at night the sacred temple, from
which every man was excluded. After he has leapt over the wall and
comes ever nearer the shrine of the goddess, the dreadful horror of a
panic-like terror suddenly seizes him; almost prostrate and unconscious
he feels himself driven back and leaping the wall once more, he falls
down paralysed and severely injured. The siege must be raised and a
disgraceful death impresses its seal upon a brilliant heroic career,
in order to darken it for all posterity. After the battle at Marathon
the envy of the celestials has caught him. And this divine envy breaks
into flames when it beholds man without rival, without opponent, on
the solitary height of glory. He now has beside him only the gods--and
therefore he has them against him. These however betray him into a deed
of the Hybris, and under it he collapses.
Let us well observe that just as Miltiades perishes so the noblest
Greek States perish when they, by merit and fortune, have arrived from
the racecourse at the temple of Nike. Athens, which had destroyed the
independence of her allies and avenged with severity the rebellions
of her subjected foes, Sparta, which after the battle of Ægospotamoi
used her preponderance over Hellas in a still harsher and more cruel
fashion, both these, as in the case of Miltiades, brought about their
ruin through deeds of the Hybris, as a proof that without envy,
jealousy, and contesting ambition the Hellenic State like the Hellenic
man degenerates. He becomes bad and cruel, thirsting for revenge, and
godless; in short, he becomes "pre-Homeric"--and then it needs only a
panic in order to bring about his fall and to crush him. Sparta and
Athens surrender to Persia, as Themistocles and Alcibiades have done;
they betray Hellenism after they have given up the noblest Hellenic
fundamental thought, the contest, and Alexander, the coarsened copy and
abbreviation of Greek history, now invents the cosmopolitan Hellene,
and the so-called "Hellenism."
THE RELATION OF SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY TO A GERMAN CULTURE
Preface to an Unwritten Book (1872)
In dear vile Germany culture now lies so decayed in the streets,
jealousy of all that is great rules so shamelessly, and the general
tumult of those who race for "Fortune" resounds so deafeningly, that
one must have a strong faith, almost in the sense of _credo quia
absurdum est,_ in order to hope still for a growing Culture, and above
all--in opposition to the press with her "public opinion"--to be able
to work by public teaching. With violence must those, in whose hearts
lies the immortal care for the people, free themselves from all the
inrushing impressions of that which is just now actual and valid, and
evoke the appearance of reckoning them indifferent things. They must
appear so, because they want to think, and because a loathsome sight
and a confused noise, perhaps even mixed with the trumpet-flourishes
of war-glory, disturb their thinking, and above all, because they want
to _believe_ in the German character and because with this faith they
would lose their strength. Do not find fault with these believers if
they look from their distant aloofness and from the heights towards
their Promised Land! They fear those experiences, to which the kindly
disposed foreigner surrenders himself, when he lives among the Germans,
and must be surprised how little German life corresponds to those great
individuals, works and actions, which, in his kind disposition he
has learned to revere as the true German character. Where the German
cannot lift himself into the sublime he makes an impression less than
the mediocre. Even the celebrated German scholarship, in which a number
of the most useful domestic and homely virtues such as faithfulness,
self-restriction, industry, moderation, cleanliness appear transposed
into a purer atmosphere and, as it were, transfigured, is by no means
the result of these virtues; looked at closely, the motive urging to
unlimited knowledge appears in Germany much more like a defect, a gap,
than an abundance of forces, it looks almost like the consequence
of a needy formless atrophied life and even like a flight from the
moral narrow-mindedness and malice to which the German without such
diversions is subjected, and which also in spite of that scholarship,
yea still within scholarship itself, often break forth. As the true
virtuosi of philistinism the Germans are at home in narrowness of life,
discerning and judging; if any one will carry them above themselves
into the sublime, then they make themselves heavy as lead, and as such
lead-weights they hang to their truly great men, in order to pull them
down out of the ether to the level of their own necessitous indigence.
Perhaps this Philistine homeliness may be only the degeneration of
a genuine German virtue--a profound submersion into the detail, the
minute, the nearest and into the mysteries of the individual--but this
virtue grown mouldy is now worse than the most open vice, especially
since one has now become conscious, with gladness of the heart, of this
quality, even to literary self-glorification. Now the _"Educated"_
among the proverbially so cultured Germans and the _"Philistines"_
among the, as everybody knows, so uncultured Germans shake hands
in public and agree with one another concerning the way in which
henceforth one will have to write, compose poetry, paint, make music
and even philosophise, yea--rule, so as neither to stand too much aloof
from the culture of the one, nor to give offence to the "homeliness"
of the other. This they call now "The German Culture of our times."
Well, it is only necessary to inquire after the characteristic by which
that "educated" person is to be recognised; now that we know that his
foster-brother, the German Philistine, makes himself known as such to
all the world, without bashfulness, as it were, after innocence is lost.