No More Learning

Whatever rises to the surface in the dialogue of
the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, appears
simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the
dialogue is a copy of the Hellene, whose nature
reveals itself in the dance, because in the dance
the greatest energy is merely potential, but betrays
itself nevertheless in flexible and vivacious move-
ments. The language of the Sophoclean heroes,
for instance, surprises us by its Apollonian pre-
cision and clearness, so that we at once imagine we
see into the innermost recesses of their being, and
marvel not a little that the way to these recesses
is so short. But if for the moment we disregard
the character of the hero which rises to the surface
and grows visible—and which at bottom is nothing
but the light-picture cast on a dark wall, that is,
appearance through and through,—if rather we
enter into the myth which projects itself in these
bright mirrorings, we shall of a sudden experience
a phenomenon which bears a reverse relation to
one familiar in optics. When, after a vigorous
effort to gaze into the sun, we turn away blinded,


## p. 73 (#113) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 73
we have dark-coloured spots before our eyes as
restoratives, so to speak; while, on the contrary,
those, lipfrr-picture ph. e,pnmpna of the Sophoclean
hero,—in short, the Apollonian of the mask,—are
the necessary productions of a glance into the
secret and terrible things of nature, as it were
shining spots. . to_ heal the eye which dire night
has seared. Only in this sense can we hope to be
able to grasp the true meaning of the serious and
significant notion of " Greek cheerfulness "; while
of course we encounter the misunderstood notion
of this cheerfulness, as resulting from a state of
unendangered comfort, on all the ways and paths
of the present time.
The most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the
hapless CEdipus, was understood by Sophocles as
the noble man, who in spite of his wisdom was
destined to error and misery, but nevertheless
through his extraordinary sufferings ultimately
exerted a magical, wholesome influence on all
around him, which continues effective even after
his death. The noble man does not sinj. this is



what the thoughtful poet wishes to tell us:. all
laws, all natural order, yea, the moral world itself,
may be destroyed through his action, but through
this very action a higher magic circle of influences
is brought into play, which establish a new world
on the ruins of the old that has been overthrown.
This is what the poet, in so far as he is at the
same time a religious thinker, wishes to tell us:
as poet, he shows us first of all a wonderfully
complicated legal mystery, which the judge slowly
unravels, link by link, to his own destruction,


## p. 74 (#114) #############################################

74 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
The truly Hellenic delight at this dialectical loosen.
ing is so great, that a touch of surpassing cheer-
fulness is thereby communicated to the entire
play, which everywhere blunts the edge of the
horrible presuppositions of the procedure. In the
"GEdipus at Colonus" we find the same cheerfulness,
elevated, however, to an infinite transfiguration: in
contrast to the aged king, subjected to an excess
of misery, and exposed solely as a sufferer to all
that befalls him, we have here a supermundane
cheerfulness, which descends from a divine sphere
and intimates to us that in his purely passive atti-
tude the hero attains his highest activity, the influ-
ence of which extends far beyond his life, while his
earlier conscious musing and striving led him only
to passivity. Thus, then, the legal knot of the fable
of CEdipus, which to mortal eyes appears indis-
solubly entangled, is slowly unravelled—and the
profoundest human joy comes upon us in the
presence of this divine counterpart of dialectics. If
this explanation does justice to the poet, it may
still be asked whether the substance of the myth
is thereby exhausted; and here it turns out that
the entire conception of the poet is nothing but the
light-picture which healing nature holds up to us
after a glance into the abyss. CEdipus, the murderer
of his father, the husband of his mother, CEdipus,
the interpreter of the riddle of the Sphinx! What
does the mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny
tell us? There is a primitive popular belief, especi-
ally in Persia, that a wise Magian can be born only
of incest: which we have forthwith to interpret
to ourselves with reference to the riddle-solving


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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
75
and mother-marrying Edipus, to the effect that
when the boundary of the present and future, the
rigid law of individuation and, in general, the
intrinsic spell of nature, are broken by prophetic
and magical powers, an extraordinary counter-
naturalness—as, in this case, incest-must have
preceded as a cause; for how else could one force
nature to surrender her secrets but by victoriously
opposing her, i. e. , by means of the Unnatural? It
is this intuition which I see imprinted in the awful
triad of the destiny of Edipus: the very man who
solves the riddle of nature—that double-constituted
Sphinx—must also, as the murderer of his father
and husband of his mother, break the holiest laws
of nature. Indeed, it seems as if the myth sought
to whisper into our ears that wisdom, especially
Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination,
and that whoever, through his knowledge, plunges
nature into an abyss of annihilation, must also
experience the dissolution of nature in himself.
“The sharpness of wisdom turns round upon the
sage: wisdom is a crime against nature”: such
terrible expressions does the myth call out to us :
but the Hellenic poet touches like a sunbeam the
sublime and formidable Memnonian statue of the
myth, so that it suddenly begins to sound—in
Sophoclean melodies.
With the glory of passivity I now contrast
the glory of activity which illuminates the
Prometheus of Æschylus. That which Æschylus
the thinker had to tell us here, but which as
a poet he only allows us to surmise by his
symbolic picture, the youthful Goethe succeeded

**


## p. 76 (#116) #############################################

76
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
S
\
in disclosing to us in the daring words of his
Prometheus:—
"Hier sitz' ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich! " *
Man, elevating himself to the rank of the Titans,
acquires his culture by his own efforts, and com-
pels the gods to unite with him, because in his
self-sufficient wisdom he has their existence and
their limits in his hand. What is most wonderful,
however, in this Promethean form, which accord-
ing to its fundamental conception is the specific
hymn of impiety, is the profound ^Eschylean
yearning {ox justice: the untold sorrow of the bold
"single-handed being" on the one hand, and the
divine need, ay, the foreboding of a twilight of the
gods, on the other, the power of these two worlds
of suffering constraining to reconciliation, to meta-
physical oneness—all this suggests most forcibly
the central and main position of the ^Eschylean
* " Here sit I, forming mankind
In my image,
A race resembling me,—
To sorrow and to weep,
To taste, to hold, to enjoy,
And not have need of thee,
As I! "
(Translation in Hseckel's History of the Evolution of Man. )



## p. 77 (#117) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. JJ
N>
view of things, which sees Moira as eternal justice
enthroned above gods and men. In view of the
astonishing boldness with which ^Eschylus places
the Olympian world on his scales of justice, it
must be remembered that the deep-minded Greek
had an immovably firm substratum of meta-
physical thought in his mysteries, and that all his
sceptical paroxysms could be discharged upon the
Olympians. With reference to these deities, the
Greek artist, in particular, had an obscure feeling
as to mutual dependency: and it is just in the
Prometheus of ^Eschylus that this feeling is sym-
bolised. The Titanic artist found in himself the
daring belief that he could create men and at least
destroy Olympian deities: namely, by his superior
wisdom, for which, to be sure, he had to atone by
eternal suffering. The splendid "can-ing" of the
great genius, bought too cheaply even at the price
of eternal suffering, the stern pride of the artist:
this is the essence and soul of ^Eschylean poetry,
while Sophocles in his Qidipus preludingly strikes
up the victory-song of the saint. But even this
interpretation which ^Eschylus has given to the
myth does not fathom its astounding depth of
terror; the fact is rather that the artist's delight
in unfolding, the cheerfulness of artistic creating
bidding defiance to all calamity, is but a shining
stellar and nebular image reflected in a black sea
of sadness. The tale of Prometheus is an original
possession of the entire Aryan family of races, and
documentary evidence of their capacity for the
profoundly tragic; indeed, it is not improbable
that this myth has the same characteristic signifi-


## p. 78 (#118) #############################################

78
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
cance for the Aryan race that the myth of the fall
of man has for the Semitic, and that there is a
relationship between the two myths like that of
brother and sister. The presupposition of the
Promethean myth is the transcendent value which
a naïve humanity attach to fire as the true palla-
dium of every ascending culture: that man, how-
ever, should dispose at will of this fire, and should
not receive it only as a gift from heaven, as the
igniting lightning or the warming solar flame,
appeared to the contemplative primordial men as
crime and robbery of the divine nature. And thus
the first philosophical problem at once causes a
painful, irreconcilable antagonism between man
and God, and puts as it were a mass of rock at
the gate of every culture. The best and highest
that men can acquire they obtain by a crime, and
must now in their turn take upon themselves its
consequences, namely the whole flood of sufferings
and sorrows with which the offended celestials
must visit the nobly aspiring race of man: a bitter
reflection, which, by the dignity it confers on crime,
contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the
fall of man, in which curiosity, beguilement, sedu-
cibility, wantonness,—in short, a whole series of
pre-eminently feminine passions,—were regarded as
the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan
representation is the sublime view of active sin as
the properly Promethean virtue, which suggests at
the same time the ethical basis of pessimistic
tragedy as the justification of human evil of human
guilt as well as of the suffering incurred thereby.
The misery in the essence of things—which



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
79
the contemplative Aryan is not disposed to explain
away—the antagonism in the heart of the world,
manifests itself to him as a medley of different
worlds, for instance, a Divine and a human world,
each of which is in the right individually, but as
a separate existence alongside of another has to
suffer for its individuation. With the heroic effort
made by the individual for universality, in his
attempt to pass beyond the bounds of individuation
and become the one universal being, he experiences
in himself the primordial contradiction concealed in
the essence of things, i. e. , he trespasses and suffers.
Accordingly crime* is understood by the Aryans to
be a man, sin t by the Semites a woman; as also,
the original crime is committed by man, the original
sin by woman. Besides, the witches' chorus says:
“ Wir nehmen das nicht so genau:
Mit tausend Schritten macht's die Frau;
Doch wie sie auch sich eilen kann
Mit einem Sprunge macht's der Mann. " I
He who understands this innermost core of the
tale of Prometheus-namely, the necessity of crime į
imposed on the titanically striving individual—will
at once be conscious of the un-Apollonian nature -
of this pessimistic representation : for Apollo seeks
to pacify individual beings precisely by drawing
* Der Frevel.
+ Die Sünde.
I We do not measure with such care :
Woman in thousand steps is there,
But howsoe'er she hasten may,
Man in one leap has cleared the way.
Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor. —TR.



## p. 80 (#120) #############################################

80 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
/
boundary-lines between them, and by again and
again calling attention thereto, with his require-
ments of self-knowledge and due proportion, as the
holiest laws of the universe. In order, however, to
prevent the form from congealing to Egyptian
rigidity and coldness in consequence of this
Apollonian tendency, in order to prevent the
extinction of the motion of the entire lake in the
effort to prescribe to the individual wave its path and
compass, the high tide of the Dionysian tendency
destroyed from time to time all the little circles in
which the one-sided Apollonian "will" sought to
confine the Hellenic world. The suddenly swelling
tide of the Dionysian then takes the separate little
wave-mountains of individuals on its back, just as
the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, does
with the earth. This Titanic impulse, to become as
it were the Atlas of all individuals, and to carry them
on broad shoulders higher and higher, farther and
farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian
have in common. In this respect the ^Eschylean
Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, while, in the afore-
mentioned profound yearning for justice, ^Eschylus
betrays to the intelligent observer his paternal
descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and
of the boundaries of justice. And so the double-
being of the ^Eschylean Prometheus, his conjoint
Dionysian and Apollonian nature,might be thus ex-
pressed in an abstract formula: " Whatever exists is
alike just and unjust, and equally justified in both. "
Das ist deine Welt! Das heisst eine Welt! *
* This is thy world, and what a world! —Faust.


## p. 81 (#121) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
81
IO.
SHORAIRES DE RESTAURANT
It is an indisputable tradition that Greek
tragedy in its earliest form had for its theme only L-
the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for some
time the only stage-hero therein was simply
Dionysus himself. With the same confidence,
however, we can maintain that not until Euripides
did Dionysus cease to be the tragic hero, and
that in fact all the celebrated figures of the Greek
stage—Prometheus, Edipus, etc. —are but masks
of this original hero, Dionysus. The presence of
a god behind all these masks is the one essential
cause of the typical “ideality," so oft exciting
wonder, of these celebrated figures. Some one,
I know not whom, has maintained that all
individuals are comic as individuals and are
consequently un-tragic: from whence it might be
inferred that the Greeks in general could not
endure individuals on the tragic stage. And
they really seem to have had these sentiments :
as, in general, it is to be observed that the
Platonic discrimination and valuation of the
“idea” in contrast to the “eidolon," the image, is
deeply rooted in the Hellenic being. Availing
ourselves of Plato's terminology, however, we
should have to speak of the tragic figures of the
Hellenic stage somewhat as follows. The one
truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of
forms, in the mask of a fighting hero and entangled,
as it were, in the net of an individual will. As
the visibly appearing god now talks and acts,
he resembles an erring, striving, suffering in-



## p. 82 (#122) #############################################

/
82 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
7
dividual: and that, in general, he appears with
such epic precision and clearness, is due to the
dream-reading Apollo, who reads to the chorus
its Dionysian state through this symbolic appear-
ance. In reality, however, this hero is the
suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, a god
experiencing in himself the sufferings of individu-
ation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a
boy he was dismembered by the Titans and has
been worshipped in this state as Zagreus : * where-
by is intimated that this dismemberment, the
properly Dionysian suffering, is like a transforma-
tion into air, water, earth, and fire, thaLwsjnust
therefore regard the state of individuation as the
source and primal^ cause of. all sufferirigTas some-
thing obiectionable in itself. From lhfi. ^mile of
this Dionysus sprang the Olympian gods, from
his tears sprang man. In his existence as a
dismembered god, Dionysus has the dual nature
of a cruel barbarised demon, and a mild pacific
ruler. But the hope of the epopts looked for a
new birth of Dionysus, which we have now to
conceive of in anticipation as the end of individua-
tion: it was for this coming third Dionysus that
the stormy jubilation-hymns of the epopts re-
sounded. And it is only this hope that sheds
a ray of joy upon the features of a world torn
asunder and shattered into individuals: as is
symbolised in the myth by Demeter sunk in
eternal sadness, who rejoices again only when told
* See article by Mr. Arthur Symons in The Academy, 30th
August 1902.
^


## p. 83 (#123) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
83
that she may once more give birth to Dionysus,
In the views of things here given we already have
all the elements of a profound and pessimistic
contemplation of the world, and along with these
we have the mystery doctrine of tragedy: the
fundamental knowledge of the oneness of all
existing things, the consideration of individuation
as the primal cause of evil, and art as the joyous
hope that the spell of individuation may be
broken, as the augury of a restored oneness.
It has already been intimated that the Homeric
epos is the poem of Olympian culture, wherewith
this culture has sung its own song of triumph
over the terrors of the war of the Titans. Under
the predominating influence of tragic poetry, these
Homeric myths are now reproduced anew, and
show by this metempsychosis that meantime the
Olympian culture also has been vanquished by a
still deeper view of things. The haughty Titan Pro-
metheus has announced to his Olympian tormentor
that the extremest danger will one day menace
his rule, unless he ally with him betimes. In
Æschylus we perceive the terrified Zeus, appre-
hensive of his end, in alliance with the Titan.
Thus, the former age of the Titans is subsequently
brought from Tartarus once more to the light of
day. The philosophy of wild and naked nature
beholds with the undissembled mien of truth the
myths of the Homeric world as they dance past:
they turn pale, they tremble before the lightning
glance of this goddess—till the powerful fist * of

* Die mächtige Faust. -Cf. Faust, Chorus of Spirits. —TR.


## p. 83 (#124) #############################################

EIS E TRAEDT
Tires Inter he stjears wit
se
a ns is due to the
O S smisaris to the chorus
言 ​會
​三 ​mbolic appear-
ne si this hero is the
suisse James : mysteries, a god
um starings of individu-
E s e dos tel that as a
E S T : Ilans and has
S
U S :* where
= T I isasniement, the
EST S
i ka transforma-
JE GEESI that we must
Si tion as the
as some



## p. 83 (#125) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
that she may once more give birth to Dionysus,
In the views of things here given we already have
all the elements of a profound and pessimistic
contemplation of the world, and along with these
we have the mystery doctrine of tragedy: the
fundamental knowledge of the oneness of all
existing things, the consideration of individuation
as the primal cause of evil, and art as the joyous
hope that the spell of individuation may be
broken, as the augury of a restored oneness.
It has already been intimated that the Homeric
epos is the poem of Olympian culture, wherewith
this culture has sung its own song of triumph
over the terrors of the war of the Titans. Under
dominating influence of tragic poetry, these
myths are now reproduced anew, and
this metempsychosis that meantime the
culture also has been vanquished by a
view of things. The haughty Titan Pro-
announced to his Olympian tormentor
mest danger will one day menace
he ally with him betimes. In
erceive the terrified Zeus, appre-
nd, in alliance with the Titan.
hra nf the Titans is subsequently
more to the light of
d and naked nature
d mien of truth the
as they dance past:
efore the lightning
e powerful fist * of

horus of Spirits. -TR.


## p. 84 (#126) #############################################

84
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
the Dionysian artist forces them into the service
of the new deity. Dionysian truth takes over
the entire domain of myth as symbolism of its
knowledge, which it makes known partly in
the public cult of tragedy and partly in the
secret celebration of the dramatic mysteries,
always, however, in the old mythical garb. What
was the power, which freed Prometheus from his
vultures and transformed the myth into a vehicle
of Dionysian wisdom? It is the Heracleian
power of music: which, having reached its highest
manifestness in tragedy, can invest myths with a
new and most profound significance, which we
have already had occasion to characterise as the
most powerful faculty of music. For it is the
fate of every myth to insinuate itself into the
narrow limits of some alleged historical reality,
and to be treated by some later generation as
a solitary fact with historical claims: and the
Greeks were already fairly on the way to restamp
the whole of their mythical juvenile dream
sagaciously and arbitrarily into a historico-prag-
matical juvenile history. For this is the manner
in which religions are wont to die out: when of
course under the stern, intelligent eyes of an
orthodox dogmatism, the mythical presuppositions
of a religion are systematised as a completed sum
of historical events, and when one begins appre-
hensively to defend the credibility of the myth,
while at the same time opposing all continuation
of their natural vitality and luxuriance; when,
accordingly, the feeling for myth dies out, and its
place is taken by the claim of religion to historical
---
--


## p. 85 (#127) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 85
foundations. This dying myth was now seized
by the new-born genius of Dionysian music, in
whose hands it bloomed once more, with such
colours as it had never yet displayed, with
a fragrance that awakened a longing anticipa-
tion of a metaphysical world. After this final
effulgence it collapses, its leaves wither, and soon
the scoffing Lucians of antiquity catch at the
discoloured and faded flowers which the winds
carry off in every direction. Through tragedy the 1
myth attains its profoundest significance, its most
expressive form; it rises once more like a
wounded hero, and the whole surplus of vitality,
together with the philosophical calmness of the
Dying, burns in its eyes with a last powerful gleam.
What meantest thou, oh impious Euripides, in
seeking once more to enthral this dying one? It
died under thy ruthless hands: and then thou
madest use of counterfeit, masked myth, which
like the ape of Heracles could only trick itself
out in the old finery. And as myth died in thy
hands, so also died the genius of music; though
thou couldst covetously plunder all the gardens
of music—thou didst only realise a counterfeit,
masked music. And because thou hast forsaken
Dionysus, Apollo hath also forsaken thee; rout up
all the passions from their haunts and conjure
them into thy sphere, sharpen and polish a
sophistical dialectics for the speeches of thy
heroes — thy very heroes have only counterfeit,
masked passions, and speak only counterfeit,
masked music.


## p. 86 (#128) #############################################

86
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
11.
Greek tragedy had a fate different from that
of all her older sister arts: she died by suicide,
in consequence of an irreconcilable conflict ;
accordingly she died tragically, while they all
passed away very calmly and beautifully in ripe old
age. For if it be in accordance with a happy state
of things to depart this life without a struggle,
leaving behind a fair posterity, the closing period
of these older arts exhibits such a happy state of
things: slowly they sink out of sight, and before
their dying eyes already stand their fairer pro-
geny, who impatiently lift up their heads with
courageous mien. The death of Greek tragedy,
on the other hand, left an immense void, deeply
felt everywhere. Even as certain Greek sailors
in the time of Tiberius once heard upon a lone-
some island the thrilling cry, "great Pan is
dead”: so now as it were sorrowful wailing
sounded through the Hellenic world : “ Tragedy
is dead! Poetry itself has perished with her!
Begone, begone, ye stunted, emaciated epigones !
Begone to Hades, that ye may for once eat your
fill of the crumbs of your former masters ! ”
But when after all a new Art blossomed forth
which revered tragedy as her ancestress and
mistress, it was observed with horror that she did
indeed bear the features of her mother, but those
very features the latter had exhibited in her long
death-struggle. It was Euripides who fought this
death-struggle of tragedy; the later art is known
as the New Attic Comedy. In it the degenerate




## p. 87 (#129) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 87
form of tragedy lived on as a monument of the
most painful and violent death of tragedy proper.
This connection between the two serves to
explain the passionate attachment to Euripides
evinced by the poets of the New Comedy, and
hence we are no longer surprised at the wish of
Philemon, who would have got himself hanged at
once, with the sole design of being able to visit
Euripides in the lower regions: if only he could
be assured generally that the deceased still had
his wits. But if we desire, as briefly as possible,
and without professing to say aught exhaustive on
the subject, to characterise what Euripides has in
common with Menander and Philemon, and what
appealed to them so strongly as worthy of imita-
tion: it will suffice to say that the_ spectator <
was brought upon the stage by Euripides. He
who has perceived- the material of which the
Promethean tragic writers prior to Euripides
formed their heroes, and how remote from their
jmrpose it was to bring the true mask of j l^
reality on the stage, will also know what to make
of the wholly divergent tendency of Euripides.
Through him the commonplace individual forced
his way Trom~ the spectators' benches to the stage
itself; the mirror in which formerly only great
and bold traits found expression now showed the
painful exactness that conscientiously reproduces
even the abortive lines of nature. Odysseus, the
typical Hellene of the Old Art, sank, in the hands
of the new poets, to the figure of the Graeculus,
who, as the good-naturedly cunning domestic
slave, stands henceforth in the centre of dramatic


## p. 88 (#130) #############################################

88 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
interest. What Euripides takes credit for in the
Aristophanean "Frogs," namely, that by his
household remedies he freed tragic art from its
pompous corpulency, is apparent above all in his
tragic heroes. The spectator now virtually saw
and heard his double on the Euripidean stage, and
rejoiced that he could talk so well. But this joy
was not all: one even learned of Euripides how
to speak: he prides himself upon this in his
contest with ^Eschylus: how the people have
learned from him how to observe, debate, and
draw conclusions according to the rules of art and
with the cleverest sophistications. In general it
may be said that through this revolution of the
popular language he made the New Comedy
possible. For it was henceforth no longer a
secret, how—and with what saws—the common-
place could represent and express itself on the
stage. Civic mediocrity, on which Euripides
built all his political hopes, was now suffered to
speak, while heretofore the demigod in tragedy
and the drunken satyr, or demiman, in comedy,
had determined the character of the language.
And so the Aristophanean Euripides prides him-
self on having portrayed the common, familiar,
everyday life and dealings of the people, concern-
ing which all are qualified to pass judgment. If
now the entire populace philosophises, manages
land and goods with unheard-of circumspection,
and conducts law-suits, he takes all the credit to
himself, and glories in the splendid results of the
wisdom with which he inoculated the rabble.
It was to a populace prepared and enlightened


## p. 89 (#131) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
in this manner that the New Comedy could now
address itself, of which Euripides had become as
it were the chorus-master; only that in this case
the chorus of spectators had to be trained. As
soon as this chorus was trained to sing in the
Euripidean key, there arose that chesslike variety
of the drama, the New Comedy, with its perpetual
triumphs of cunning and artfulness. But Eurip-
ides — the chorus-master — was praised inces-
santly: indeed, people would have killed them-
selves in order to learn yet more from him, had
they not known that tragic poets were quite as
dead as tragedy. But with it the Hellene had
surrendered the belief in his immortality; not only
the belief in an ideal past, but also the belief in an
ideal future. The saying taken from the well-
known epitaph, “as an old man, frivolous and
capricious," applies also to aged Hellenism. The
passing moment, wit, levity, and caprice, are its
highest deities; the fifth class, that of the slaves,
now attains to power, at least in sentiment: and if
we can still speak at all of “ Greek cheerfulness," it
is the cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of
consequence to answer for, nothing great to strive
for, and cannot value anything of the past or future
higher than the present. It was this semblance of
“Greek cheerfulness” which so revolted the deep-
minded and formidable natures of the first four
centuries of Christianity: this womanish Alight
from earnestness and terror, this cowardly con.
tentedness with easy pleasure, was not only con-
temptible to them, but seemed to be a specifically
anti-Christian sentiment. And we must ascribe


## p. 90 (#132) #############################################

90 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
it to its influence that the conception of Greek
antiquity, which lived on for centuries, preserved
with almost enduring persistency that peculiar
hectic colour of cheerfulness—as if there had never
been a Sixth Century with its birth of tragedy, its
Mysteries, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, indeed
as if the art-works of that great period did not at
all exist, which in fact—each by itself—can in no
wise be explained as having sprung from the soil
of such a decrepit and slavish love of existence
and cheerfulness, and point to an altogether differ-
ent conception of things as their source.
The assertion made a moment ago, that Eurip-
ides introduced the spectator on the stage to
qualify him the better to pass judgment on the
drama^will make It appear as if the old tragic art
was always in a false relation to the spectator:
and one would be tempted to extol the radical
tendency of Euripides to bring about an adequate
relation between art-work and public as an advance
on Sophocles. But, as things are, "public" is
merely a word, and not at all a homogeneous and
constant quantity. Why should the artist be under
obligations to accommodate himself to a power
whose strength is merely in numbers? And if by
virtue of his endowments and aspirations he feels
himself superior to every one of these spectators,
how could he feel greater respect for the collect-
ive expression of all these subordinate capacities
than for the relatively highest-endowed individual
spectator? In truth, if ever a Greek artist treated
his public throughout a long life with presumptuous-
ness and self. sufficiency, it was Euripides, who,




## p. 91 (#133) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 91
even when the masses threw themselves at his feet,
with sublime defiance made an open assault on his
own tendency, the very tendency with which he
had triumphed over the masses. If this genius
had had the slightest reverence for the pande-
monium of the public, he would have broken down
long before the middle of his career beneath the
weighty blows of his own failures. These con-
siderations here make it obvious that our formula
—namely, that Euripides brought the spectator
upon the stage in order to make him truly com-
petent to pass judgment—was but a provisional
one, and that we must seek for a deeper under-
standing of his tendency. Conversely, it is un-
doubtedly well known that. /Eschylus and Sophocles
during all their lives, indeed, far beyond their
lives, enjoyed the full favour of the people, and
that therefore in the case of these predecessors of
Euripides the idea of a false relation between art-
work and public was altogether excluded. What
was it that thus forcibly diverted this highly gifted
artist, so incessantly impelled to production, from
the path over which shone the sun of the greatest
names in poetry and the cloudless heaven of
popular favour? What strange consideration for
the spectator led him to defy the spectator? How
could he, owing to too much respect for the public
—dis-respect the public?
.
Euripjdes—and this is the solution of the riddle
just propounded—felt himself, as a poet, un- 1
flnnhtprHy si]pprinr tr» \hp masses, but not to two /
of his spectators: he brought the masses upon
the stage; these two spectators he revered as the


## p. 92 (#134) #############################################

92 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
only competent judges and masters of his art: in
compliance with their directions and admonitions,
he transferred the entire world of sentiments,
passions, and experiences, hitherto present at every
festival representation as the invisible chorus on
the spectators' benches, into the souls of his stage-
heroes; he yielded to their demands when he also
sought for these new characters the new word and
the new tone; in their voices alone he heard the
conclusive verdict on his work, as also the cheering
promise of triumph when he found himself con-
demned as usual by the justice of the public.
Of these two spectators the one is—Euripides
himself, Euripides as thinker, not as poet. It
might be said of him, that his unusually large fund
of critical ability, as in the case of Lessing, if it did
not create, at least constantly fructified a product-
ively artistic collateral impulse. With this faculty,
with all the clearness and dexterity of his critical
thought, Euripides had sat in the theatre and
striven to recognise in the masterpieces of his great
predecessors, as in faded paintings, feature and
feature, line and line. And here had happened to
him what one initiated in the deeper arcana of
^Eschylean tragedy must needs have expected:
he observed something incommensurable in every
feature and in every line, a certain deceptive dis-
tinctness and at the same time an enigmatic pro-
fundity, yea an infinitude, of background. Even
the clearest figure had always a comet's tail attached
to it, which seemed to suggest the uncertain and
the inexplicable. The same twilight shrouded the
structure of the drama, especially the significance


## p. 93 (#135) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 93
of the chorus. And how doubtful seemed the
solution of the ethical problems to his mind!
How questionable the treatment of the myths!
How unequal the distribution of happiness and
misfortune! Even in the language of the Old
Tragedy there was much that was objectionable to
him, or at least enigmatical; he found especially
too much pomp for simple affairs, too many tropes
and immense things for the plainness of the
characters. Thus he sat restlessly pondering in
the theatre, and as a spectator he acknowledged
to himself that he did not understand his great
predecessors. If, however, he thought the under-
standing the root proper of all enjoyment and
productivity, he had to inquire and look about to
see whether any one else thought as he did, and
also acknowledged this incommensurability. But
most people, and among them the best individuals,
had only a distrustful smile for him, while none
could explain why the great masters were still in
the right in face of his scruples and objections.
And in this painful condition he found that other
spectator, who did not comprehend, and therefore
did not esteem, tragedy. In alliance with him he
could venture, from amid his lonesomeness, to begin
the prodigious struggle against the art of ^Eschylus
and Sophocles—not with polemic writings, but as
a dramatic poet, who opposed his own conception
of tragedy to the traditional one.



## p. 94 (#136) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
12.
Before we name this other spectator, let us
pause here a moment in order to recall our own
impression, as previously described, of the dis-
cordant and incommensurable elements in the
nature of Æschylean tragedy. Let us think of
our own astonishment at the chorus and the tragic
hero of that type of tragedy, neither of which
we could reconcile with our practices any more
than with tradition — till we rediscovered this
duplexity itself as the origin and essence of Greek
tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic
impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
To separate this primitive and all-powerful
Dionysian element from tragedy, and to build up
a new and purified form of tragedy on the basis
of a non-Dionysian art, morality, and conception
of things—such is the tendency of Euripides
which now reveals itself to us in a clear light.
In a myth composed in the eve of his life,
Euripides himself most urgently propounded to
his contemporaries the question as to the value
and signification of this tendency. Is the
Dionysian entitled to exist at all ? Should it not
be forcibly rooted out of the Hellenic soil ?
Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible:
but the god Dionysus is too powerful; his most
intelligent adversary — like Pentheus in the
“ Bacchæ "—is unwittingly enchanted by him,
and in this enchantment meets his fate. The
judgment of the two old sages, Cadmus and
Tiresias, seems to be also the judgment of the



## p. 95 (#137) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
95
aged poet: that the reflection of the wisest indi-
viduals does not overthrow old popular traditions,
nor the perpetually propagating worship of
Dionysus, that in fact it behoves us to display
at least a diplomatically cautious concern in the
presence of such strange forces: where however it
is always possible that the god may take offence
at such lukewarm participation, and finally change
the diplomat — in this case Cadmus — into a
dragon. This is what a poet tells us, who opposed
Dionysus with heroic valour throughout a long
life—in order finally to wind up his career with
a glorification of his adversary, and with suicide,
like one staggering from giddiness, who, in order
to escape the horrible vertigo he can no longer
endure, casts himself from a tower. This tragedy
—the Bacchae—is a protest against the practic-
ability of his own tendency; alas, and it has already
been put into practice! The surprising thing had
happened: when the poet recanted, his tendency
had already conquered. Dionysus had already
been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by
a demonic power which spoke through Euripides.
Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a
mask: the deity that spnke through him was
neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether
new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the
new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic,
and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked
on it^ What if even Euripides now seeks to
comfort us by his recantation? It is of no avail:
the most magnificent temple lies in ruins. What
avails the lamentation of the destroyer, and his
V



## p. 96 (#138) #############################################

96
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
confession that it was the most beautiful of all
temples ? And even that Euripides has been
changed into a dragon as a punishment by the
art-critics of all ages—who could be content with
this wretched compensation ?
Let us now approach this Socratic tendency
with which Euripides combated and vanquished
Æschylean tragedy.
We must now ask ourselves, what could be
the ulterior aim of the Euripidean design, which,
in the highest ideality of its execution, would
found drama exclusively on the non-Dionysian ?
What other form of drama could there be, if it
was not to be born of the womb of music, in the
mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only the
dramatised epos : in which Apollonian domain of
art the tragic effect is of course unattainable. It
does not depend on the subject-matter of the
events here represented ; indeed, I venture to assert
that it would have been impossible for Goethe
in his projected “Nausikaa” to have rendered
tragically effective the suicide of the idyllic being
with which he intended to complete the fifth act;
so extraordinary is the power of the epic-Apol-
lonian representation, that it charms, before our
eyes, the most terrible things by the joy in
appearance and in redemption through appearance.
The poet of the dramatised epos cannot completely
blend with his pictures any more than the epic
rhapsodist. He is still just the calm, unmoved em-
bodiment of Contemplation whose wide eyes see the
picture before them. The actor in this dramatised
epos still remains intrinsically rhapsodist : the con-




## p. 97 (#139) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. QJ
secration of inner dreaming is on all his actions,
so that he is never wholly an actor.
How, then, is the Euripidean play related to
this ideal of the Apollonian drama? Just as the
younger rhapsodist is related to the solemn
rhapsodist of the old time. The former describes
his own character in the Platonic "Ion" as
follows: "When I am saying anything sad, my
eyes fill with tears; when, however, what I am
saying is awful and terrible, then my hair stands,
on end through fear, and my heart leaps. " Herd
we no longer observe anything of the epic absorp-
tion in appearance, or of the unemotional coolness
of the true actor, who precisely in his highest
activity is wholly appearance and joy in appear-
ance. Euripides is the actor with leaping heart,
with hair standing on end; as Socratic thinker I
he designs the plan, as passionate actor he I
executes it. Neither in the designing nor in the .
execution is he an artist pure and simple. And
so the Euripidean drama is a thing both cool and
fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning; it is
impossible for it to attain the Apollonian effect of
the epos, while, on the other hand,it has severed itself
as much as possible from Dionysian elements, and
now, in order to act at all, it requires new stimu-
lants, which can no longer lie within the sphere of
the two unique art-impulses, the Apollonian and
the Dionysian. The stimulants are cool, para-
^doxical thoughts, in place of Apollonian infiiit. inng— ,
anS hery passions—in place of Dionysian ecstasies;
and in fact, thoughts and passions very realistically
copied, and not at all steeped in the ether of art.
G
I

:.


## p. 98 (#140) #############################################

§8 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
Accordingly, if we have perceived this much, that
Euripides did not succeed in establishing the drama
exclusively on the Apollonian, but that rather his
non-Dionysian inclinations deviated into a natural-
istic and inartistic tendency, we shall now be able
to approach nearer tothe character of asthetic.
_ Snrrathm^ the supreme law ot which reads about
as follows: "to be beautiful everything must be
intelligible," as the parallel to the Socratic proposi-
tion, " only the kfTowingone^is_virtuous. " With this
canon in his hands Euripides measured all the
separate elements of the drama, and rectified them
according to his principle: the language, the char-
acters, the dramaturgic structure, and the choric
music. The poetic deficiency and retrogression,
which we are so often wont to impute to Euripides
in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, is for the
most part the product of this penetrating critical
process, this daring intelligibility. The Euripidean
prologue may serve us as an example of the pro-
ductivity of this rationalistic method. Nothing
could be more opposed to the technique of our stage
than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. For
a single person to appear at the outset of the play
telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what
has happened thus far, yea, what will happen in the
course of the play, would be designated by a modern
playwright as a wanton and unpardonable abandon-
ment of the effect of suspense. Everything that is
about to happen is known beforehand; who then
cares to wait for it actually to happen ? —consider-
ing, moreover, that here there is not byanymeans the
exciting relation of a predicting dream to a reality
•v


## p. 99 (#141) #############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
99
taking place later on. Euripides speculated quite
differently. The effect of tragedy never depended
on epic suspense, on the fascinating uncertainty as
to what is to happen now and afterwards: but
rather on the great rhetoro-lyric scenes in which
the passion and dialectics of the chief hero swelled
to a broad and mighty stream. Everything was
arranged for pathos, not for action: and whatever
was not arranged for pathos was regarded as
objectionable. But what interferes most with the
hearer's pleasurable satisfaction in such scenes is a
missing link, a gap in the texture of the previous
history. So long as the spectator has to divine the
meaning of this or that person, or the presupposi-
tions of this or that conflict of inclinations and
intentions, his complete absorption in the doings
and sufferings of the chief persons is impossible,
as is likewise breathless fellow-feeling and fellow-
fearing. The Æschyleo-Sophoclean tragedy em-
ployed the most ingenious devices in the first scenes
to place in the hands of the spectator as if by
chance all the threads requisite for understanding
the whole: a trait in which that noble artistry is,
approved, which as it were masks the inevitably
formal, and causes it to appear as something acci-
dental. But nevertheless Euripides thought he
observed that during these first scenes the spectator
was in a strange state of anxiety to make out the
problem of the previous history, so that the poetic
beauties and pathos of the exposition were lost to
him. Accordingly he placed the prologue even
before the exposition, and put it in the mouth of a
person who could be trusted: some deity had often



## p. 100 (#142) ############################################

IOO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
•V
as it were to guarantee the particulars of the
tragedy to the public and remove every doubt as
to the reality of the myth: as in the case of
Descartes, who could only prove the reality of the
empiric world by an appeal to the truthfulness of
God and His inability to utter falsehood. Euripides
makes use of the same divine truthfulness once
more at the close of his drama, in order to ensure
to the public the future of his heroes; this is the
task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between
the preliminary and the additional epic spectacle
there is the dramatico-lyric present, the " drama"
proper.
Thus Euripides as a poet echoes above all his
own conscious knowledge; and it is precisely on
this account that he occupies such a notable position
in the history of Greek art. With reference to his
critico-productive activity, he must often have felt
that he ought to actualise in the drama the words
at the beginning of the essay of Anaxagoras: "In
the beginning all things were mixed together; then
came the understanding and created order. " And
if Anaxagoras with his " vov<s" seemed like the first
sober person among nothing but drunken philoso-
phers, Euripides may also have conceived his rela-
tion to the other tragic poets under a similar figure.
As long as the sole ruler and disposer of the universe,
the vov<;, was still excluded from artistic activity,
things were all mixed together in a chaotic, primi-
tive mess;—it is thus Euripides was obliged to think,
it is thus he was obliged to condemn the " drunken"
poets as the first " sober " one among them. What
Sophocles said of ^Eschylus, that he did what was
"V


## p. 101 (#143) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. IOI
right, though unconsciously, was surely not in the
mind of Euripides: who would have admitted only
thus much, that ^Eschylus, because he wrought
unconsciously, did what was wrong. So also the
divine Plato speaks for the most part only ironically
of the creative faculty of the poet, in so far as it is
not conscious insight, and places it on a par with
the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter;
insinuating that the poet is incapable of composing
until he has become unconscious and reason has
deserted him. Like Plato, Euripides undertook to
show to the world the reverse of the " unintelligent"
poet; his aesthetic principle that "to be beautiful
everything must be known" is, as I have said, the
parallel to the Socratic " to be good everything must
be known. " Accordingly we may regard Euripides
as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. Socrates, how-
ever, was that second spectator who did not compre-
hend and therefore did not esteem the Old Tragedy;
in alliance with him Euripides ventured to be the
herald of a new artistic activity. If, then, the Old
Tragedy was here destroyed, it follows that aesthetic
Socratism was the murderous principle; but in so
far as the struggle is directed against the Dionysian
element in the old art, we recognise in Socrates the
opponent of Dionysus, the new Orpheus who rebels
against Dionysus; and although destined to be
torn to pieces by the Maenads of the Athenian
court, yet puts to flight the overpowerful god him-
self, who, when he fled from Lycurgus, the king
of Edoni, sought refuge in the depths of the ocean
—namely, in the mystical flood of a secret cult
which gradually overspread the earth.


## p. 102 (#144) ############################################

102 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
13.
That Socrates stood in close relationship to
Euripides in the tendency of his teaching, did
not escape the notice of contemporaneous
antiquity; the most eloquent expression of this
felicitous insight being the tale current in Athens,
that Socrates was accustomed to help Euripides
in poetising. Both names were mentioned in one
breath by the adherents of the " good old time,"
whenever they came to enumerating the popular
agitators of the day: to whose influence they
attributed the fact that the old Marathonian
stalwart capacity of body and soul was more and
more being sacrificed to a dubious enlightenment,
involving progressive degeneration of the physical
and mental powers. It is in this tone, half
indignantly and half contemptuously, that Aristo-
phanic comedy is wont to speak of both of
them—to the consternation of modern men, who
would indeed be willing enough to give up
Euripides, but cannot suppress their amazement
that Socrates should appear in Aristophanes as
the first and head sophist, as the mirror and
epitome of all sophistical tendencies; in connec-
tion with which it offers the single consolation ot
putting Aristophanes himself in the pillory, as a
rakish, lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without here
defending the profound instincts of Aristophanes
against such attacks, I shall now indicate, by
means of the sentiments of the time, the close__
^connection between Socrates anrj Fiiripjdfts.
With this purpose in view, it is especially to be


## p. 103 (#145) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
103
remembered that Socrates, as an opponent of
tragic art, did not ordinarily patronise tragedy, but
only appeared among the spectators when a new
play of Euripides was performed. The most
noted thing, however, is the close juxtaposition
of the two names in the Delphic oracle, which
designated Socrates as the wisest of men, but at
the same time decided that the second prize in
the contest of wisdom was due to Euripides.
Sophocles was designated as the third in this
scale of rank; he who could pride himself that,
in comparison with Æschylus, he did what was
right, and did it, moreover, because he knew what
was right. It is evidently just the degree of
clearness of this knowledge, which distinguishes
these three men in common as the three “knowing
ones” of their age.
The most decisive word, however, for this
new and unprecedented esteem of knowledge and
insight was spoken by Socrates when he found
that he was the only one who acknowledged to
himself that he knew nothing; while in his critical
pilgrimage through Athens, and calling on the
greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he
discovered everywhere the conceit of knowledge.
He perceived, to his astonishment, that all these
celebrities were without a proper and accurate
insight, even with regard to their own callings,
and practised them only by instinct. “Only by
instinct”: with this phrase we touch upon the
heart and core of the Socratic tendency. Socrat. . .
ism condemns therewith existing art as well as
existing ethics; wherever Socratism turns its


## p. 104 (#146) ############################################

104 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
searching eyes it beholds the lack of insight and
the power of illusion; and from this lack infers
the inner perversity and objectionableness of
existing conditions. From this point onwards,
Socrates believed that he was called upon to
correct existence; and, with an air of disregard
and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether
different culture, art, and morality, he enters
single-handed into a world, of which, if we
reverently touched the hem, we should count it
our greatest happiness.
Here is the extraordinary hesitancy which
always seizes upon us with regard to Socrates,
and again and again invites us to ascertain
the sense and purpose of this most question-
able phenomenon of antiquity. Who is it that
ventures single-handed to disown the Greek char-
acter, which, as Homer, Pindar, and Æschylus,
as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and Dionysus,
as the deepest abyss and the highest height, is
sure of our wondering admiration? What de-
moniac power is it which would presume to spill
this magic draught in the dust? What demigod
is it to whom the chorus of spirits of the noblest
of mankind must call out: “Weh! Weh! Du
hast sie zerstört, die schöne Welt, mit mächtiger
Faust; sie stürzt, sie zerfällt! "*

troyed,
* Woe! Woe!
Thou has
The be
With p
In ruin
Faust
ard Ta


## p. 105 (#147) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 105
A key to the character of Socrates is presented
to us by the surprising phenomenon designated
as the "daimonion" of Socrates. In special
circumstances, when his gigantic intellect began
to stagger, he got a secure support in the utter-
ances of a divine voice which then spake to him.
This voice, whenever it comes, always dissuades.
In this totally abnormal nature instinctive wisdom
only appears in order to hinder the progress of
conscious perception here and there. While in
all productive men it is instinct which is the
creatively affirmative force, consciousness only
comporting itself critically and dissuasively; jvith
Socrates it is instinct which becomes critic, it is
_ consciousness which becomes creator—a perfect
monstrosity per defectum! And we do indeed
observe here a monstrous defectus of all mystical
aptitude, so that Socrates might be designated as
. the spsciSiQjlli^mysii^ in whom the logical nature
is developed, through a superfoetation, to the
same excess as instinctive wisdom is developed
in the mvstic. On the other hand, however, the
logical instinct which appeared in Socrates was
absolutely prohibited from turning against itself;
in its unchecked flow it manifests a native power
such as we meet with, to our shocking surprise,
only among the very greatest instinctive forces.
He who has experienced even a breath of the
divine naivete and security of the Socratic course
of life in the Platonic writings, will also feel that
the enormous driving-wheel of logical Socratism
is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates, and that
it must be viewed through Socrates as through a


## p. 106 (#148) ############################################

106
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
shadow. And that he himself had a boding of
this relation is apparent from the dignified earnest-
ness with which be everywhere, and even before
his judges, insisted on his divine calling. To
refute him here was really as impossible as to
approve of his instinct-disintegrating influence.
In view of this indissoluble conflict, when he had
at last been brought before the forum of the Greek
state, there was only one punishment demanded,
namely exile; he might have been sped across
the borders as something thoroughly enigmatical,
irrubricable and inexplicable, and so posterity would
have been quite unjustified in charging the Athenians
with a deed of ignominy. But that the sentence of
death, and not mere exile, was pronounced upon
him, seems to have been brought about by Socrates
himself, with perfect knowledge of the circum-
stances, and without the natural fear of death: he
met his death with the calmness with which,
according to the description of Plato, he leaves
the symposium at break of day, as the last of the
revellers, to begin a new day; while the sleepy
companions remain behind on the benches and
the floor, to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist.
The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the
noble Greek youths, -an ideal they had never
yet beheld,—and above all, the typical Hellenic
youth, Plato, prostrated himself before this scene
with all the fervent devotion of his visionary
soul.


## p. 107 (#149) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 10?
14.
Let us now imagine the one great Cyclopean
eye of Socrates fixed on tragedy, that eye in which
the fine frenzy of artistic enthusiasm had never
glowed—let us think how it was denied to this
eye to gaze with pleasure into the Dionysian
abysses—what could it not but see in the " sublime
and greatly lauded" tragic art, as Plato called it?
Something very absurd, with causes that seemed
to be without effects, and effects apparently with-
out causes; the whole, moreover, so motley and
diversified that it could not but be repugnant to a
thoughtful mind, a dangerous incentive, however,
to sensitive and irritable souls. We know what
was the sole kind of poetry which he compre-
hended: the Aisopian fable: and he did this no
doubt with that smiling complaisance with which
the good honest Gellert sings the praise of poetry
in the fable of the bee and the hen :—
"Du siehst an mir, wozu sie nutzt,
Dem, der nicht viel Verstand besitzt,
Die Wahrheit durch ein Bild zu sagen. " *
But then it seemed to Socrates that tragic art did
not eveaJitell the trutli": not to mention the
fact that it addresses itself to him who " hath but

little wit"; consequently not to the philosopher:
a twofold reason why it should be avoided. Like
* In me thou seest its benefit,—
To him who hath but little wit,
Through parables to tell the truth.


## p. 108 (#150) ############################################

108,
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
Plato, he reckoned it among the seductive arts
which only represent the agreeable, not the useful,
and hence he required of his disciples abstinence
and strict separation from such unphilosophical
allurements; with such success that the youthful
tragic poet Plato first of all burned his poems to
be able to become a scholar of Socrates. But
where unconquerable native capacities bore up
against the Socratic maxims, their power, to-
gether with the momentum of his mighty character,
still sufficed to force poetry itself into new and
hitherto unknown channels.
An instance of this is the aforesaid Plato: he,
who in the condemnation of tragedy and of art
in general certainly did not fall short of the naïve
cynicism of his master, was nevertheless constrained
by sheer artistic necessity to create a form of art
which is inwardly related even to the then exist-
ing forms of art which he repudiated. Plato's
main objection to the old art—that it is the
imitation of a phantom,* and hence belongs to
a sphere still lower than the empiric world—could
not at all apply to the new art: and so we find
Plato endeavouring to go beyond reality and
attempting to represent the idea which underlies
this pseudo-reality. But Plato, the thinker,
thereby arrived by a roundabout road just at
the point where he had always been at home as
poet, and from which Sophocles and all the old
artists had solemnly protested against that objec-
tion. If tragedy absorbed into itself all the
* Scheinbild=Eldodov. -TR.


## p. 109 (#151) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
109

earlier varieties of art, the same could again be
said in an unusual sense of Platonic dialogue,
which, engendered by a mixture of all the
then existing forms and styles, hovers midway
between narrative, lyric and drama, between prose ---
and poetry, and has also thereby broken loose
from the older strict law of unity of linguistic
form; a movement which was carried still farther
by the cynic writers, who in the most promiscuous
style, oscillating to and fro betwixt prose and
metrical forms, realised also the literary picture
of the “ raving Socrates” whom they were wont
to represent in life. Platonic dialogue was as it
were the boat in which the shipwrecked ancient
poetry saved herself together with all her children:
crowded into a narrow space and timidly obse-
quious to the one steersman, Socrates, they now
launched into a new world, which never tired of
looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession.
In very truth, Plato has given to all posterity
the prototype of a new form of art, the prototype bas
of the novel : which must be designated as the
infinitely evolved Æsopian fable, in which poetry
holds the same rank with reference to dialectic
philosophy as this same philosophy held for many
centuries with reference to theology : namely, the
rank of ancilla. This was the new position of
poetry into which Plato forced it under the
pressure of the demon-inspired Socrates.
Here philosophic thought overgrows art and
compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectics.
The Apollonian tendency has chrysalised in the
logical schematism ; just as something analogous


## p. 110 (#152) ############################################

110
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
in the case of Euripides (and moreover a trans-
lation of the Dionysian into the naturalistic
emotion) was forced upon our attention. Socrates,
the dialectical hero in Platonic drama, reminds us
of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero, who
has to defend his actions by arguments and
counter-arguments, and thereby so often runs the
risk of forfeiting our tragic pity; for who could
mistake the optimistic element in the essence of
dialectics, which celebrates a jubilee in every con-
clusion, and can breathe only in cool clearness
and consciousness: the optimistic element, which,
having once forced its way into tragedy, must
gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions, and
necessarily impel it to self-destruction—even to
the death-leap into the bourgeois drama. Let us
but realise the consequences of the Socratic
maxims: “Virtue is knowledge; man only sins
from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy":
these three fundamental forms of optimism involve
the death of tragedy. For the virtuous hero
must now be a dialectician; there must now be
a necessary, visible connection between virtue and
knowledge, between belief and morality; the
transcendental justice of the plot in Æschylus is
now degraded to the superficial and audacious
principle of “poetic justice” with its usual deus ex
machina.
How does the chorus, and, in general, the
entire Dionyso-musical substratum of tragedy,
now appear in the light of this new Socrato-
optimistic stage-world? As something accidental,
as a readily dispensable reminiscence of the origin



## p. 111 (#153) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
III
of tragedy; while we have in fact seen that the
chorus can be understood only as the cause of
tragedy, and of the tragic generally. This per-
plexity with respect to the chorus first manifests
itself in Sophocles—an important sign that the
Dionysian basis of tragedy already begins to
disintegrate with him. He no longer ventures
to entrust to the chorus the main share of the
effect, but limits its sphere to such an extent
that it now appears almost co-ordinate with the
actors, just as if it were elevated from the orchestra
into the scene: whereby of course its character
is completely destroyed, notwithstanding that
Aristotle countenances this very theory of the
chorus. This alteration of the position of the
chorus, which Sophocles at any rate recommended
by his practice, and, according to tradition, even
by a treatise, is the first step towards the annihila-
tion of the chorus, the phases of which follow one
another with alarming rapidity in Euripides,
Agathon, and the New Comedy. Optimistic
dialectics drives music out of tragedy with the
scourge of its syllogisms: that is, it destroys the
essence of tragedy, which can be explained only
as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian
states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as
the dream-world of Dionysian ecstasy.
If, therefore, we are to assume an anti-Diony-
sian tendency operating even before Socrates,
which received in him only an unprecedentedly
grand expression, we must not shrink from the
question as to what a phenomenon like that
of Socrates indicates : whom in view of the


## p. 112 (#154) ############################################

112 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
Platonic dialogues we are certainly not entitled
to regard as a purely disintegrating, negative
power. And though there can be no doubt
whatever that the most immediate effect of the
Socratic impulse tended to the dissolution of
Dionysian tragedy, yet a profound experience of
Socrates' own life compels us to ask whether
there is necessarily only an antipodal relation
between Socratism and art, and whether the birth
of an " artistic Socrates" is in general something
contradictory in itself.
For that despotic logician had now and then
the feeling of a gap, or void, a sentiment of semi-
reproach, as of a possibly neglected duty with
respect to art. There often came to him, as he
tells his friends in prison, one and the same
dream-apparition, which kept constantly repeating
to him: "Socrates, practise music. " Up to his
very last days he solaces himself with the opinion
that his philosophising is the highest form of
poetry, and finds it hard to believe that a deity
will remind him of the "common, popular music. "
Finally, when in prison, he consents to practise
also this despised music, in order thoroughly to
unburden his conscience. And in this frame of
mind he composes a poem on Apollo and turns
a few . <Esopian fables into verse. It was some-
thing similar to the demonian warning voice which
urged him to these practices ; it was because of his
Apollonian insight that, like a barbaric king, he
did not understand the noble image of a god and
was in danger of sinning against a deity—through
ignorance.