I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy with the delight
of one who discovers a new world, which he has seen already in a dream.
I never take up Nietzsche without the surprise of finding something
familiar. Sometimes it is the answer to a question which I have only
asked; sometimes it seems to me that I have guessed at the answer. And,
in his restless energy, his hallucinatory, vision, the agility of this
climbing mind of the mountains, I find that invigoration which only a
"tragic philosopher" can give. "A sort of mystic soul," as he says of
himself, "almost the soul of a Mænad, who, troubled, capricious, and
half irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out something in a
foreign tongue."
The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the Greeks, as it
arose out of music through the medium of the chorus. We are apt to look
on the chorus in Greek plays as almost a negligible part of the
structure; as, in fact, hardly more than the comments of that "ideal
spectator" whom Schlegel called up out of the depths of the German
consciousness. We know, however, that the chorus was the original
nucleus of the play, that the action on which it seems only to comment
is no more than a development of the chorus. Here is the problem to
which Nietzsche endeavours to find an answer. He finds it, unlike the
learned persons who study Greek texts, among the roots of things, in the
very making of the universe. Art arises, he tells us, from the conflict
of the two creative spirits, symbolised by the Greeks in the two gods,
Apollo and Dionysus; and he names the one the Apollonian spirit, which
we see in plastic art, and the other the Dionysiac spirit, which we see
in music. Apollo is the god of dreams, Dionysus the god of intoxication;
the one represents for us the world of appearances, the other is, as it
were, the voice of things in themselves. The chorus, then, which arose
out of the hymns to Dionysus, is the "lyric cry," the vital ecstasy; the
drama is the projection into vision, into a picture, of the exterior,
temporary world of forms. "We now see that the stage and the action are
conceived only as vision: that the sole 'reality' is precisely the
chorus, which itself produces the vision, and expresses it by the aid of
the whole symbolism of dance, sound, and word." In the admirable phrase
of Schiller, the chorus is "a living rampart against reality," against
that false reality of daily life which is a mere drapery of
civilisation, and has nothing to do with the primitive reality of
nature. The realistic drama begins with Euripides; and Euripides, the
casuist, the friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the true
decadent, an "instrument of decomposition," the slayer of art, the
father of modern science), brings tragedy to an end, as he substitutes
pathos for action, thought for contemplation, and passionate sentiments
for the primitive ecstasy. "Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms,
an optimist dialectic drives the music out of tragedy: that is to say,
destroys the very essence of tragedy, an essence which can be
interpreted only as a manifestation and objectivation of Dionysiac
states, as a visible symbol of music, as the dream-world of a Dionysiac
intoxication." There are many pages, scattered throughout his work, in
which Pater has dealt with some of the Greek problems very much in the
spirit of Nietzsche; with that problem, for instance, of the "blitheness
and serenity" of the Greek spirit, and of the gulf of horror over which
it seems to rest, suspended as on the wings of the condor. That myth of
Dionysus Zagreus, "a Bacchus who had been in hell," which is the
foundation of the marvellous new myth of "Denys l'Auxerrois," seems
always to be in the mind of Nietzsche, though indeed he refers to it but
once, and passingly. Pater has shown, as Nietzsche shows in greater
detail and with a more rigorous logic, that this "serenity" was but an
accepted illusion, and all Olympus itself but "intermediary," an escape,
through the æsthetics of religion, from the trouble at the heart of
things; art, with its tragic illusions of life, being another form of
escape. To Nietzsche the world and existence justify themselves only as
an æsthetic phenomenon, the work of a god wholly the artist; "and in
this sense the object of the tragic myth is precisely to convince us
that even the horrible and the monstrous are no more than an æsthetic
game played with itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of its
joy." "The Will" is Schopenhauer's "Will," the vital principle. "If it
were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his astonishing figures of
speech, "to imagine a dissonance becoming a human being (and what is man
but that?), in order to endure life, this dissonance would need some
admirable illusion to hide from itself its true nature, under a veil of
beauty." This is the aim of art, as it calls up pictures of the visible
world and of the little temporary actions of men on its surface. The
hoofed satyr of Dionysus, as he leaps into the midst of these gracious
appearances, drunk with the young wine of nature, surly with the old
wisdom of Silenus, brings the real, excessive, disturbing truth of
things suddenly into the illusion; and is gone again, with a shrill
laugh, without forcing on us more of his presence than we can bear.
I have but touched on a few points in an argument which has itself the
ecstatic quality of which it speaks. A good deal of the book is
concerned with the latest development of music, and especially with
Wagner. Nietzsche, after his change of sides, tells us not to take this
part too seriously: "what I fancied I heard in the Wagnerian music has
nothing to do with Wagner." Few better things have been said about music
than these pages; some of them might be quoted against the "programme"
music which has been written since that time, and against the false
theory on which musicians have attempted to harness music in the shafts
of literature. The whole book is awakening; in Nietzsche's own words, "a
prodigious hope speaks in it."