No More Learning

(Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
I. 310. ) To this most important perception of
aesthetics (with which, taken in a serious sense,
aesthetics properly commences), Richard Wagner,
by way of confirmation of its eternal truth, affixed
his seal, when he asserted in his Beethoven that
music must be judged according to aesthetic prin-
ciples quite different from those which apply to
the plastic arts, and not, in general, according to~
. the category ot beauty": although" ah erroneous
aesthetics, inspired by a misled and degenerate art,
has by virtue of the concept of beauty prevailing
in the plastic domain accustomed itself to demand
of music an effect analogous to that of the works
of plastic art, namely the suscitating of delight
in beautiful forms. Upon perceiving this extra-
ordinary antithesis, I felt a strong inducement to
approach the essence of Greek tragedy, and, by
means of it, the profoundest revelation of Hellenic
genius: for I at last thought myself to be in posses-
sion of a charm to enable me—far beyond the
phraseology of our usual aesthetics—to represent
vividly to my mind the primitive problem of
tragedy: whereby such an astounding insight into
the Hellenic character was afforded me that it
necessarily seemed as if our proudly comporting
classico-Hellenic science had thus far contrived
to subsist almost exclusively on phantasmagoria
and externalities.
Perhaps we may lead up to this primitive
problem with the question: what aesthetic effect
results when the intrinsically separate art-powers,


## p. 123 (#165) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 123
the Apollonian and the Dionysian, enter into con-
current actions? Or, in briefer form: how is
music related to image and concept? —Schopen-
hauer, whom Richard Wagner, with especial
reference to this point, accredits with an unsur-
passable clearness and perspicuity of exposition,
expresses himself most copiously on the subject
in the following passage which I shall cite here at
full length * (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I.
p. 309): "According to all this, we may regard
the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as
two different eyprp^inns nf the same thing. f which
is therefore itself the only medium of the analogy
between these two expressions, so that a know-
ledge of this medium is required in order to
understand that analogy. Music, therefore, if
regarded as an expression of the world, is in
the highest degree a universal language, which
is related indeed to the universality of concepts,
much as these are related to the particular things.
Its universality, however, is by no means the
empty universality of abstraction, but of quite a
different kind, and is united with thorough and
distinct definiteness. In this respect it resembles
geometrical figures and numbers, which are the
universal forms of all possible objects of experience
and applicable to them all a priori, and yet are
not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly
determinate. All possible efforts, excitements
* Cf. World and Will as Idea, 1. p. 339, trans, by Haldane
and Kemp.
+ That is " the will" as understood by Schopenhauer. —
Tr.



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124
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the
heart of man and that reason includes in the wide,
negative concept of feeling, may be expressed
by the infinite number of possible melodies, but
always in the universality of mere form, without
the material, always according to the thing-in-
itself, not the phenomenon, of which they repro-
duce the very soul and essence as it were, without
the body. This deep relation which music bears
to the true nature of all things also explains the .
fact that suitable music played to any scene,
action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose
to us its most secret meaning, and appears as
the most accurate and distinct commentary upon
it; as also the fact that whoever gives himself
up entirely to the impression of a symphony
seems to see all the possible events of life and
the world take place in himself: nevertheless
upon reflection he can find no likeness between
the music and the things that passed before his
mind. For, as we have said, music is distinguished
from all the other arts by the fact that it is not
a copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately,
the adequate objectivity of the will, but is the
direct copy of the will itself, and therefore
represents the metaphysical of everything physical
in the world, and the thing-in-itself of every
phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as well
call the world embodied music as embodied will:
and this is the reason why music makes every
picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of
the world, at once appear with higher significance;
all the more so, to be sure, in proportion as its



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
125
melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the
given phenomenon. It rests upon this that we
are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a
perceptible representation as a pantomime, or both
as an opera. Such particular pictures of human
life, set to the universal language of music, are
never bound to it or correspond to it with
stringent necessity, but stand to it only in the
relation of an example chosen at will to a general
concept. In the determinateness of the real
they represent that which music expresses in the
universality of mere form. For melodies are to
a certain extent, like general concepts, an abstrac-
tion from the actual. This actual world, then,
the world of particular things, affords the object
of perception, the special and the individual, the
particular case, both to the universality of con-
cepts and to the universality of the melodies.
But these two universalities are in a certain respect
opposed to each other; for the concepts contain
only the forms, which are first of all abstracted
from perception,—the separated outward shell of
things, as it were,—and hence they are, in the
strictest sense of the term, abstracta; music, on
the other hand, gives the inmost kernel which
precedes all forms, or the heart of things. This
relation may be very well expressed in the
language of the schoolmen, by saying: the con-
cepts are the universalia post rem, but music gives
the universalia ante rem, and the real world the
universalia in re. But that in general a relation
is possible between a composition and a perceptible
representation rests, as we have said, upon the


## p. 126 (#168) ############################################

126 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
fact that both are simply different expressions of
the same inner being of the world. When now,
in the particular case, such a relation is actually
given, that is to say, when the composer has been
able to express in the universal language of music
the emotions of will which constitute the heart of
an event, then the melody of the song, the music
'of the opera, is expressive. . But__the analogy
, , discovered by the composer bet weentruftwo must
1 _>(c have proceeded from the direct TaibwTecTge ot the
'"i . j^ature of the world unknown to his reason, and
must not be an imitation proaucea with conscious
intention by means ot conceptions j otherwise the
music does not express the inner nature of the
will itself, but merely gives an inadequate imita-
tion of its phenomenon: all specially imitative
music does this. "
We have therefore, according to the doctrine of
Schopenhauer, an immediate understanding of
music as the language of the will, and feel our
imagination stimulated to give form to this
invisible and yet so actively stirred spirit-world
which speaks to us, and prompted to embody it
in an analogous example. On the other hand,
image and concept, under the influence of a truly
conformable music, acquire a higher significance.
. Dionysian art therefore is wont to exercise two
kinds of influences on the Apollonian art-faculty:
music firstly incites to the symbolic intuition of
Dionysian universality, and, secondly, it causes the
symbolic image to stand forth in its fullest signific-
ance. From these facts, intelligible in themselves
and not inaccessible to profounder observation,



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 127
I infer the capacity of music to give birth to myth, *"'
that is to say, the most significant exemplar, and
precisely tragic myth: the myth which speaks of . | ^
Dionysian knowledge in symbols. In the pheno-'
menon of the lyrist, I have set forth that in him
music strives to express itself with regard to its
nature in Apollonian images. If now we reflect
that music in its highest potency must seek to
attain also to its highest symbolisation, we must
deem it possible that it also knows how to find
the symbolic expression of its inherent Dionysian
wisdom; and where shall we have to seek for this
expression if not in tragedy and, in general, in the
conception of the tragic?
From the nature of art, as it is ordinarily con-
ceived according to the single category of appear-
ance and beauty, the tragic cannot be honestly
deduced at all; it is only through the spirit of
music that we understand the joy in the annihila-
tion of the individual. For in the particular
examples of such annihilation only is the eternal
phenomenon of Dionysian art made clear to us,
which gives expression to the will in its omnipo-
tence, as it were, behind the principium individua-
tions, the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and
in spite of all annihilation. The metaphysical
delight in the tragic is a translation of the instinct-
ively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the
language of the scene: the hero, the highest
manifestation of the will, is disavowed for our
pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and
because the eternal life of the will is not affected
by his annihilation. "We believe in eternal life. "


## p. 128 (#170) ############################################

128
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
tragedy exclaims; while music is the proximate
idea of this life. Plastic art has an altogether
different object : here Apollo vanquishes the
suffering of the individual by the radiant glorifica-
tion of the eternity of the phenomenon; here beauty
triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain
is in a manner surreptitiously obliterated from the
features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic
symbolism the same nature speaks to us with its
true undissembled voice: “Be as I am! Amidst
the ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally
creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to
existence, self-satisfying eternally with this change
of phenomena! ”
17.
Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the
eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this
joy not in phenomena, but behind phenomena.
We are to perceive how all that comes into being
must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are com-
pelled to look into the terrors of individual exist-
ence—yet we are not to become torpid: a meta-
physical comfort tears us momentarily from the
bustle of the transforming figures. We are really
for brief moments Primordial Being itself, and feel
its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence;
the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena,
now appear to us as something necessary, consider-
ing the surplus of innumerable forms of existence
which throng and push one another into life, con-
sidering the exuberant fertility of the universal
will. We are pierced by the maddening sting of



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
129
these pains at the very moment when we have
become, as it were, one with the immeasurable
primordial joy in existence, and when we antici-
pate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and
eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we
are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but
as the one living being, with whose procreative joy
we are blended.
The history of the rise of Greek tragedy now
tells us with luminous precision that the tragic art
of the Greeks was really born of the spirit of music:
with which conception we believe we have done
justice for the first time to the original and most
astonishing significance of the chorus. At the
same time, however, we must admit that the im-
port of tragic myth as set forth above never
became transparent with sufficient lucidity to the
Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers;
their heroes speak, as it were, more superficially
than they act; the myth does not at all find its
adequate objectification in the spoken word. The
structure of the scenes and the conspicuous images
reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can
put into words and concepts: the same being also
observed in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for in-
stance, in an analogous manner talks more super-
ficially than he acts, so that the previously mentioned
lesson of Hamlet' is to be gathered not from his
words, but from a more profound contemplation
and survey of the whole. With respect to Greek
tragedy, which of course presents itself to us only
as word-drama, I have even intimated that the
incongruence between myth and expression might



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130
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
easily tempt us to regard it as shallower and less
significant than it really is, and accordingly to
postulate for it a more superficial effect than it
must have had according to the testimony of the
ancients: for how easily one forgets that what
the word-poet did not succeed in doing, namely
realising the highest spiritualisation and ideality
of myth, he might succeed in doing every moment
as creative musician! We require, to be sure,
almost by philological method to reconstruct for
ourselves the ascendency of musical influence in
order to receive something of the incomparable
comfort which must be characteristic of true
tragedy. Even this musical ascendency, however,
would only have been felt by us as such had we
been Greeks: while in the entire development of
Greek music—as compared with the infinitely
richer music known and familiar to us—we imagine
we hear only the youthful song of the musical
genius intoned with a feeling of diffidence. The
Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal
children, and in tragic art also they are only
children who do not know what a sublime play-
thing has originated under their hands andis
being demolished.
That striving of the spirit of music for symbolic
and mythical manifestation, which increases from
the beginnings of lyric poetry to Attic tragedy,
breaks off all of a sudden immediately after attain-
ing luxuriant development, and disappears, as it
were, from the surface of Hellenic art: while the
Dionysian view of things born of this striving lives
on in Mysteries and, in its strangest metamorphoses


## p. 131 (#173) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
131
and debasements, does not cease to attract earnest
natures. Will it not one day rise again as art out
of its mystic depth ?
Here the question occupies us, whether the power
by the counteracting influence of which tragedy
perished, has for all time strength enough to pre-
vent the artistic reawaking of tragedy and of the
tragic view of things. If ancient tragedy was
driven from its course by the dialectical desire for
knowledge and the optimism of science, it might
be inferred that there is an eternal conflict betweenii
the theoretic and the tragic view of things, and only IL
after the spirit of science has been led to its
boundaries, and its claim to universal validity has
been destroyed by the evidence of these boundaries,
can we hope for a re-birth of tragedy; for which
form of culture we should have to use the symbol
of the music-practising Socrates in the sense spoken
of above. In this contrast, I understand by the
spirit of science the belief which first came to light !
in the person of Socrates,—the belief in the fathom-
ableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.
He who recalls the immediate consequences of
this restlessly onward-pressing spirit of science
will realise at once that myth was annihilated by_ !
it, and that, in consequence of this annihilation,
poetry was driven as a homeless being from her
natural ideal soil. If we have rightly assigned to
music the capacity to reproduce myth from itself,
we may in turn expect to find the spirit of science on
the path where it inimically opposes this mythopoeic
power of music. This takes place in the develop-
ment of the New Attic Dithyramb, the music of




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132
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
.
which no longer expressed the inner essence, the
will itself, but only rendered the phenomenon in-
sufficiently, in an imitation by means of concepts;
from which intrinsically degenerate music the truly
musical natures turned away with the same re-
pugnance that they felt for the art-destroying
tendency of Socrates. The unerring instinct of
Aristophanes surely did the proper thing when
it, comprised Socrates himself, the tragedy of
Euripides, and the music of the new Dithyrambic
poets in the same feeling of hatred, and perceived in
all three phenomena the symptoms of a degenerate
culture. By this New Dithyramb, music has in an
outrageous manner been made the imitative portrait
of phenomena, for instance, of a battle or a storm
at sea, and has thus, of course, been entirely
deprived of its mythopoeic power. For if it
endeavours to excite our delight only by com-
pelling us to seek external analogies between a
vital or natural process and certain rhythmical
figures and characteristic sounds of music; if our
understanding is expected to satisfy itself with
the perception of these analogies, we are reduced
to a frame of mind in which the reception of the
mythical is impossible; for the myth as a unique
exemplar of generality and truth towering into
the infinite, desires to be conspicuously perceived.
The truly Dionysian music presents itself to us as
such a general mirror of the universal will : the
conspicuous event which is refracted in this mirror
expands at once for our consciousness to the copy
of an eternal truth. Conversely, such a con-
spicious event is at once divested of every mythical



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
133
character by the tone-painting of the New
Dithyramb; music has here become a wretched
copy of the phenomenon, and therefore infinitely
poorer than the phenomenon itself: through which
poverty it still further reduces even the phenomenon
for our consciousness, so that now, for instance,
a musically imitated battle of this sort exhausts
itself in marches, signal-sounds, etc. , and our
imagination is arrested precisely by these super-
ficialities. Tone-painting is therefore in every
respect the counterpart of true music with its
mythopoeic power : through it the phenomenon,
poor in itself, is made still poorer, while through
an isolated Dionysian music the phenomenon is
evolved and expanded into a picture of the world.
It was an immense triumph of the non-Dionysian
spirit, when, in the development of the New
Dithyramb, it had estranged music from itself and
reduced it to be the slave of phenomena. Euripides,
who, albeit in a higher sense, must be designated
as a thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very
reason a passionate adherent of the New Dithy-
rambic Music, and with the liberality of a freebooter
employs all its effective turns and mannerisms.
In another direction also we see at work the
power of this un-Dionysian, myth-opposing spirit,
when we turn our eyes to the prevalence of
character representation and psychological refine-
ment from Sophocles onwards. The character
must no longer be expanded into an eternal type,
but, on the contrary, must operate individually
through artistic by-traits and shadings, through
the nicest precision of all lines, in such a manner


## p. 134 (#176) ############################################

134
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
that the spectator is in general no longer conscious
of the myth, but of the mighty nature-myth and
the imitative power of the artist. Here also we
observe the victory of the phenomenon over the
Universal, and the delight in the particular quasi-
anatomical preparation; we actually breathe the
air of a theoretical world, in which scientific
knowledge is valued more highly than the artistic
reflection of a universal law. The movement
along the line of the representation of character
proceeds rapidly: while Sophocles still delineates
complete characters and employs myth for their
refined development, Euripides already delineates
only prominent individual traits of character, which
can express themselves in violent bursts of passion;
in the New Attic Comedy, however, there are only
masks with one expression : frivolous old men,
duped panders, and cunning slaves in untiring re-
petition. Where now is the mythopoeic spirit of
music? What is still left now of music is either
excitatory music or souvenir music, that is, either
a stimulant for dull and used-up nerves, or tone-
painting. As regards the former, it hardly matters
about the text set to it: the heroes and choruses
of Euripides are already dissolute enough when
once they begin to sing; to what pass must things
have come with his brazen successors ?
The new un-Dionysian spirit, however, manifests
itself most clearly in the dénouements of the new
dramas. In the Old Tragedy one could feel at the
close the metaphysical comfort, without which the
delight in tragedy cannot be explained at all; the
conciliating tones from another world sound purest,




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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
135
perhaps, in the dipus at Colonus. Now that the
genius of music has fled from tragedy, tragedy is,
strictly speaking, dead: for from whence could one
now draw the metaphysical comfort ? One sought
therefore, for an earthly unravelment of the tragic
dissonance; the hero, after he had been sufficiently
tortured by fate, reaped a well-deserved reward
through a superb marriage or divine tokens of
favour. The hero had turned gladiator, on whom,
after being liberally battered about and covered
with wounds, freedom was occasionally bestowed.
The deus ex machina took the place of metaphysical
comfort. I will not say that the tragic view of
things was everywhere completely destroyed by the
intruding spirit of the un-Dionysian: we only know
that it was compelled to flee from art into the
under-world as it were, in the degenerate form of a
secret cult. Over the widest extent of the Hellenic
character, however, there raged the consuming
blast of this spirit, which manifests itself in the form
of “Greek cheerfulness," which we have already
spoken of as a senile, unproductive love of exists
ence; this cheerfulness is the counterpart of the
splendid “naïveté" of the earlier Greeks, which, ac-
cording to the characteristic indicated above, must be
conceived as the blossom of the Apollonian culture
growing out of a dark abyss, as the victory which
the Hellenic will, through its mirroring of beauty,
obtains over suffering and the wisdom of suffering.
The noblest manifestation of that other form of
“Greek cheerfulness,” the Alexandrine, is the cheer-
fulness of the theoretical man: it exhibits the same
symptomatic characteristics as I have just inferred



## p. 136 (#178) ############################################

I36 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
f
concerning the spirit of the un-Dionysian :—it com-
bats Dionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve
myth, it substitutes for metaphysical comfort an
earthly consonance, in fact, a deus ex machina of its
own, namely the god of machines and crucibles,
that is, the powers of the genii of nature recognised
and employed in the service of higher egoism; it
believes in amending the world by knowledge, in
guiding life by science, and that it can really con-
fine the individual within a narrow sphere of solv-
able problems, where he cheerfully says to life: "I
desire thee: it is worth while to know thee. "
18.
It is an eternal phenomenon: the avidious will
can always, by means of an illusion spread over
things, detain its creatures in life and compel them
to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of
,knowledge and the vain hope of being able thereby
to heal the eternal wound of existence; another. is
ensnared by art's seductive veil of beauty. ilutt£ring
before his eyes; still anothrr hy the rn eta physical
comfort that eternal life flows on indestructibly
beneath the whirl of phenomena. ! , to say nothing
of the more ordinary and almost more powerful
illusions which the will has always at hand. These
three specimens of illusion are on thewhole designed
only for the more nobly endowed natures, who in
general feel profoundly the weight and burden of
existence, and must be deluded into forgetfulness
of their displeasure by exquisite stimulants. All
that we call culture is made up. of these stimulant;



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
137
and, according to the proportion of the ingredients,
we have either a specially Socratic or artistic or
tragic culture: or, if historical exemplifications are
wanted, there is either an Alexandrine or a Hele
lenic or a Buddhistic culture.
Our whole modern world is entangled in the
meshes of Alexandrine culture, and recognises as
its ideal the theorist equipped with the most potent
means of knowledge, and labouring in the service
of science, of whom the archetype and progenitor
is Socrates. All our educational methods have
originally this ideal in view : every other form
of existence must struggle onwards wearisomely
beside it, as something tolerated, but not intended.
In an almost alarming manner the cultured man
was here found for a long time only in the form of
the scholar: even our poetical arts have been forced b
to evolve from learned imitations, and in the main
effect of the rhyme we still recognise the origin of
our poetic form from artistic experiments with a
non-native and thoroughly learned language. How
unintelligible must Faust, the modern cultured man,
who is in himself intelligible, have appeared to a true
Greek,—Faust, storming discontentedly through all
the faculties, devoted to magic and the devil from a
desire for knowledge, whom we have only to place
alongside of Socrates for the purpose of comparison,
in order to see that modern man begins to divine
the boundaries of this Socratic love of perception
and longs for a coast in the wide waste of the ocean
of knowledge. When Goethe on one occasion said
to Eckermann with reference to Napoleon : "Yes,
my good friend, there is also a productiveness of


## p. 138 (#180) ############################################

138 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
deeds," he reminded us in a charmingly naive
manner that the non-theorist is something incred-
ible and astounding to modern man; so that the
wisdom of Goethe is needed once more in order to
discover that such a surprising form of existence is
comprehensible, nay even pardonable.
Now, we must not hide from ourselves what is
concealed in the heart of this Socratic culture: Op-
timism, deeming itself absolute! Well, we must not
be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen,—
if society, leavened to the very lowest strata by this
kind of culture, gradually begins to tremble through
wanton agitations and desires. jf. Jhr hrliof in thr
earthly happiness of all, if the belief in the possi-
bility of such a general intellectual culture is gradu-
^ ally transformed into the threatening• dernand for
such an Alexandrine earthly happiness, into the
conjuring of a Euripidean dj>u* pr. mnj. Mnn. Let
us mark this well: the Alexandrine culturerequires
a slave class, to be able to exist permanently: but,
in its optimistic view of life, it denies the necessity
of such a class, and conse
of its beautifully seductive and tranquillising utter-
dances about the ^dignity of man " ancfthe" dignity"
of labour" is spent, it gradually drifts towards a )
dreadful destination. There is nothing more terrible
than a barbaric slave class, who have learned to
regard their existence as an injustice, and now pre-
pare to take vengeance, not only for themselves, but
for all generations. In the face of such threaten-
ing storms, who dares to appeal with confident
spirit to our pale and exhausted religions, which
even in their foundations have degenerated into



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
139
scholastic religions ? —so that myth, the necessary
prerequisite of every religion, is already paralysed
everywhere, and even in this domain the optimistic
spirit—which we have just designated as the anni-
hilating germ of society-has attained the mastery.
While the evil slumbering in the heart of theor-
etical culture gradually begins to disquiet modern
man, and makes him anxiously ransack the stores
of his experience for means to avert the danger,
though not believing very much in these means ;
while he, therefore, begins to divine the conse-
quences his position involves : great, universally
gifted natures have contrived, with an incredible
amount of thought, to make use of the apparatus
of science itself, in order to point out the limits
and the relativity of knowledge generally, and thus
definitely to deny the claim of science to universal
validity and universal ends: with which demon-
stration the illusory notion was for the first time
recognised as such, which pretends, with the aid
of causality, to be able to fathom the innermost
essence of things. The extraordinary courage
and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer have suc-
ceeded in gaining the most difficult victory, the
victory over the optimism hidden in the essence
of logic, which optimism in turn is the basis of our
culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently
unobjectionable æternæ veritates, believed in the
intelligibility and solvability of all the riddles of L.
the world, and treated space, time, and causality
as totally unconditioned laws of the most universal
validity, Kant, on the other hand, showed that
these served in reality only to elevate the mere



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140
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
phenomenon, the work of Mâyâ, to the sole and
highest reality, putting it in place of the inner-
most and true essence of things, thus making the
actual knowledge of this essence impossible, that
is, according to the expression of Schopenhauer,
to lull the dreamer still more soundly asleep (Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung, l. 498). With this
knowledge a culture is inaugurated which I venture
to designate as a tragic culture; the most import-
! ant characteristic of which is that wisdom takes
the place of science as the highest end-wisdom,
which, uninfluenced by the seductive distractions
of the sciences, turns with unmoved eye to the
comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to
apprehend therein the eternal suffering as its own
with sympathetic feelings of love. Let us imagine
a rising generation with this undauntedness of
vision, with this heroic desire for the prodigious,
let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-
slayers, the proud and daring spirit with which
they turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines
of optimism in order “to live resolutely” in the
Whole and in the Full: would it not be necessary
for the tragic man of this culture, with his self-
discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a
new art, the art of metaphysical comfort,—namely,
tragedy, as the Hellena belonging to him, and that
he should exclaim with Faust:

Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt? *
* Cf. Introduction, p. 14.



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 141
But now that the Socratic culture has been
shaken from two directions, and is only able to
hold the sceptre of its infallibility with trembling
hands,—once by the fear of its own conclusions
which it at length begins to surmise, and again,
because it is no longer convinced with its former
naive trust of the eternal validity of its foundation,
—it is a sad spectacle to behold how the dance of
its thought always rushes longingly on new forms,
to embrace them, and then, shuddering, lets them
go of a sudden, as Mephistopheles does the seduc-
tive Lamiae. It is certainly the symptom of the
"breach" which all are wont to speak of as the
primordial suffering of modern culture that the
theoretical man, alarmed and dissatisfied at his
own conclusions, no longer dares to entrust him-
self to the terrible ice-stream of existence: he runs
timidly up and down the bank. He no longer
wants to have anything entire, with all the natural
cruelty of things, so thoroughly has he been
spoiled by his optimistic contemplation. Besides,
he feels that a culture built up on the principles
of science must perish when it begins to grow
illogical, that is, to avoid its own conclusions.
Our art reveals this universal trouble: in vain does
one seek help by imitating all the great productive
periods and natures, in vain does one accumulate
the entire " world-literature" around modern man
for his comfort, in vain does one place one's self in
the midst of the art-styles and artists of all ages,
so that one may give names to them as Adam
did to the beasts: one still continues the eternal
hungerer, the " critic " without joy and energy, the


## p. 142 (#184) ############################################

142
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
Alexandrine man, who is in the main a librarian
and corrector of proofs, and who, pitiable wretch
goes blind from the dust of books and printers'
errors.
19.
We cannot designate the intrinsic substance of
Socratic culture more distinctly than by calling it
the culture of the opera : for it is in this depart-
ment that culture has expressed itself with special
naïveté concerning its aims and perceptions,
which is sufficiently surprising when we compare
the genesis of the opera and the facts of operatic
development with the eternal truths of the
Apollonian and Dionysian. I call to mind first
of all the origin of the stilo rappresentativo and
the recitative. Is it credible that this thoroughly
externalised operatic music, incapable of devotion,
could be received and cherished with enthusiastic
favour, as a re-birth, as it were, of all true music,
by the very age in which the ineffably sublime
and sacred music of Palestrina had originated ?
And who, on the other hand, would think of
making only the diversion-craving luxuriousness
of those Florentine circles and the vanity of their
dramatic singers responsible for the love of the
opera which spread with such rapidity? That in
the same age, even among the same people, this
passion for a half-musical mode of speech should
awaken alongside of the vaulted structure of
Palestrine harmonies which the entire Christian
Middle Age had been building up, I can explain


## p. 143 (#185) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 143
to myself only by a co-operating extra-artistic
tendency in the essence of the recitative.
The listener, who insists on distinctly hearing
the words under the music, has his wishes met by
the singer in that he speaks rather than sings,
and intensifies the pathetic expression of the
words in this half-song: by this intensification of
the pathos he facilitates the understanding of the
words and surmounts the remaining half of the
music. The specific danger which now threatens
him is that in some unguarded moment he may
give undue importance to music, which would
forthwith result in the destruction of the pathos
of the speech and the distinctness of the words:
while, on the other hand, he always feels himself
impelled to musical delivery and to virtuose
exhibition of vocal talent. Here the "poet"
comes to his aid, who knows how to provide him
with abundant opportunities for lyrical inter-
jections, repetitions of words and sentences, etc. ,
—at which places the singer, now in the purely
musical element, can rest himself without mind-
ing the words. This alternation of emotionally
impressive, yet only half. sung speech and wholly
sung interjections, which is characteristic of the
stilo rappresentativo, this rapidly changing en-
deavour to operate now on the conceptional and
representative faculty of the hearer, now on his
musical sense, is something so thoroughly un-
natural and withal so intrinsically contradictory
both to the Apollonian and Dionysian artistic
impulses, that one has to infer an origin of the
recitative foreign to all artistic instincts. The


## p. 144 (#186) ############################################

144 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
f
recitative must be defined, according to this
description, as the combination of epic and lyric
delivery, not indeed as an intrinsically stable
combination which could not be attained in the
case of such totally disparate elements, but an
entirely superficial mosaic conglutination, such as
is totally unprecedented in the domain of nature
and experience.
But this was not the opinion of
the inventors of the recitative: they themselves, and
their age with them, believed rather that the
mystery of antique music had been solved by
this stilo rappresentativo, in which, as they thought,
the only explanation of the enormous influence of
an Orpheus, an Amphion, and even of Greek
tragedy was to be found. The new style was
regarded by them as the re-awakening of the
most effective music, the Old Greek music:
indeed, with the universal and popular conception
of the Homeric world as the primitive world, they
could abandon themselves to the dream of having
descended once more into the paradisiac beginnings
of mankind, wherein music also must needs have
had the unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence
of which the poets could give such touching
accounts in their pastoral plays. Here we see
into the internal process of development of this
thoroughly modern variety of art, the opera: a
powerful need here acquires an art, but it is a
need of an unaesthetic kind: the yearning for the
idyll, the belief in the prehistoric existence of the
artistic, good man. The recitative was regarded
as the redisgpvrrpd language of this primitive
man; the- ^ppra. . as the recovered land of this


## p. 145 (#187) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
145
idyllically or heroically good creature, who in
every action follows at the same time a natural
artistic impulse, who sings a little along with all
he has to say, in order to sing immediately with
full voice on the slightest emotional excitement.
It is now a matter of indifference to us that
the humanists of those days combated the old
ecclesiastical representation of man as naturally
corrupt and lost, with this new-created picture of
the paradisiac artist : so that opera may be under-
stood as the oppositional dogma of the good man,
whereby however a solace was at the same time
found for the pessimism to which precisely the
seriously-disposed men of that time were most
strongly incited, owing to the frightful uncertainty
of all conditions of life. It is enough to have
perceived that the intrinsic charm, and therefore
the genesis, of this new form of art lies in the
gratification of an altogether unæsthetic need, in
the optimistic glorification of man as such, in the
conception of the primitive man as the man
naturally good and artistic: a principle of the
opera which has gradually changed into a
threatening and terrible demand, which, in face of
the socialistic movements of the present time, we
can no longer ignore. The "good primitive man”
wants his rights : what paradisiac prospects !
I here place by way of parallel still another
equally obvious confirmation of my view that
opera is built up on the same principles as our v
Alexandrine culture. Opera is the birth of the i
theoretical man, of the critical layman, not of the v
artist: one of the most surprising facts in the v


## p. 146 (#188) ############################################

146
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
whole history of art. It was the demand of
thoroughly unmusical hearers that the words must
above all be understood, so that according to
them a re-birth of music is only to be expected
when some mode of singing has been discovered
in which the text-word lords over the counter-
point as the master over the servant. For the
words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the
accompanying harmonic system as the soul is
nobler than the body. It was in accordance with
the laically unmusical crudeness of these views that
the combination of music, picture and expression
was effected in the beginnings of the opera : in the
spirit of this æsthetics the first experiments were
also made in the leading laic circles of Florence
by the poets and singers patronised there. The
man incapable of art creates for himself a species
of art precisely because he is the inartistic man as
such. Because he does not divine the Dionysian
depth of music, he changes his musical taste into
appreciation of the understandable word-and-tone-
rhetoric of the passions in the stilo rappresentativo,
and into the voluptuousness of the arts of song;
because he is unable to behold a vision, he forces
the machinist and the decorative artist into his
service; because he cannot apprehend the true
nature of the artist, he conjures up the "artistic
primitive man" to suit his taste, that is, the man
who sings and recites verses under the influence
of passion. He dreams himself into a time when
passion suffices to generate songs and poems : as
if emotion had ever been able to create anything
artistic. The postulate of the opera is a false





## p. 147 (#189) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 147
belief concerning the artistic process, in fact, the
idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist.
In the sense of this belief, opera is the expression
of the taste of the laity in art, who dictate their
laws with the cheerful optimism of the theorist.
Should we desire to unite in one the two con-
ceptions just set forth as influential in the origin
of opera, it would only remain for us to speak of
an idyllic tendency of the opera: in which connec-
tion we may avail ourselves exclusively of the
phraseology and illustration of Schiller. * "Nature
and the ideal," he says," are either objects of grief,
when the former is represented as lost, the latter
unattained; or both are objects of joy, in that they
are represented as real. The first case furnishes
the elegy in its narrower signification, the second
the idyll in its widest sense. " Here we must at once
call attention to the common characteristic of these
two conceptions in operatic genesis, namely, that
in them the ideal is not regarded as unattained or
nature as lost. Agreeably to this sentiment, there
was a primitive age of man when he lay close to
the heart of nature, and, owing to this naturalness,
had attained the ideal of mankind in a paradisiac
goodness and artist-organisation: from which
perfect primitive man all of us were supposed to
be descended; whose faithful copy we were in fact
still said to be: only we had to cast off some few
things in order to recognise ourselves once more
as this primitive man, on the strength of a voluntary
renunciation of superfluous learnedness, of super-
* Essay on Elegiac Poetry. —Tr.


## p. 148 (#190) ############################################

146
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
whole history of art. It was the demand of
thoroughly unmusical hearers that the words must
above all be understood, so that according to
them a re-birth of music is only to be expected
when some mode of singing has been discovered
in which the text-word lords over the counter-
point as the master over the servant. For the
words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the
accompanying harmonic system as the soul is
nobler than the body. It was in accordance with
the laically unmusical crudeness of these views that
the combination of music, picture and expression
was effected in the beginnings of the opera : in the
spirit of this æsthetics the first experiments were
also made in the leading laic circles of Florenc
by the poets and singers patronised there. T
man incapable of art creates for himself a spec
of art precisely because he is the inartistic man
such. Because he does not divine the Diony
depth of music, he changes his musical tasto
appreciation of the understandable word-and-
rhetoric of the passions in the stilo rappresent
and into the voluptuousness of the arts of
because he is unable to behold a vision, he
the machinist and the decorative artist
service; because he cannot apprehend
nature of the artist, he conjures up the
primitive man " to suit his taste, that is
who sings and recites verses under the
of passion. He dreams himself into a
passion suffices to generate songs and
if emotion had ever been able to cra
artistic. The postulate of the ope.



## p. 149 (#191) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 149
>
the phantom! Nevertheless one would err if one
thought it possible to frighten away merely by a
vigorous shout such a dawdling thing as the opera,
as if it were a spectre. He who would destroy
the opera must join issue with Alexandrine cheer-
fulness, which expresses itself so naively therein
concerning its favourite representation; of which
in fact it is the specific form of art. But what is
to be expected for art itself from the operation of
a form of art, the beginnings of which do not at
all lie in the aesthetic province; which has rather
stolen over from a half-moral sphere into the
artistic domain, and has been able only now and
then to delude us concerning this hybrid origin?
By what sap is this parasitic opera-concern
nourished, if not by that of true art? Must we
not suppose that the highest and indeed the truly
serious task of art—to free the eye from its glance
into the horrors of night and to deliver the
"subject" by the healing balm of appearance
from the spasms of volitional agitations—will
degenerate under the influence of its idyllic seduc-
tions and Alexandrine adulation to an empty
dissipating tendency, to pastime? What will
become of the eternal truths of the Dionysian
and Apollonian in such an amalgamation of styles
as I have exhibited in the character of the stilo-,
rappresentativo. i where music is regarded as the
servant, the text as the master, where music is com-
pared with the body, the text with the soul?
where at best the highest aim will be the realisa-
tion of a paraphrastic tone-painting, just as formerly
in the New Attic Dithyramb? where music is com-


## p. 149 (#192) ############################################

148
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
abundant culture. It was to such a concord of
nature and the ideal, to an idyllic reality, that the
cultured man of the Renaissance suffered himself
to be led back by his operatic imitation of Greek
tragedy; he made use of this tragedy, as Dante
made use of Vergil, in order to be led up to the
gates of paradise: while from this point he went
on without assistance and passed over from an
imitation of the highest form of Greek art to a
“ restoration of all things,” to an imitation of man's
original art-world. What delightfully naïve hope-
fulness of these daring endeavours, in the very
heart of theoretical culture ! —solely to be ex-
plained by the comforting belief, that “man-in-
himself” is the eternally virtuous hero of the opera,
the eternally fluting or singing shepherd, who must
always in the end rediscover himself as such, if he
has at any time really lost himself; solely the fruit
of the optimism, which here rises like a sweetishly
seductive column of vapour out of the depth of the
Socratic conception of the world.
The features of the opera therefore do not by any
means exhibit the elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss,
but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery,
the indolent delight in an idyllic reality which one
can at least represent to one's self each moment
as real: and in so doing one will perhaps surmise
some day that this supposed reality is nothing but
a fantastically silly dawdling, concerning which
every one, who could judge it by the terrible earnest-
ness of true nature and compare it with the actual
primitive scenes of the beginnings of mankind,
would have to call out with loathing: Away with


## p. 149 (#193) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
149
the phantom! Nevertheless one would err if one
thought it possible to frighten away merely by a
vigorous shout such a dawdling thing as the opera,
as if it were a spectre. He who would destroy
the opera must join issue with Alexandrine cheer-
fulness, which expresses itself so naïvely therein
concerning its favourite representation; of which
in fact it is the specific form of art. But what is
to be expected for art itself from the operation of
a form of art, the beginnings of which do not at
all lie in the æsthetic province; which has rather
stolen over from a half-moral sphere into the
artistic domain, and has been able only now and
then to delude us concerning this hybrid origin?
By what sap is this parasitic opera-concern
nourished, if not by that of true art? Must we
not suppose that the highest and indeed the truly
serious task of art—to free the eye from its glance
into the horrors of night and to deliver the
“subject” by the healing balm of appearance
from the spasms of volitional agitations—will
degenerate under the influence of its idyllic seduc-
tions and Alexandrine adulation to an empty
dissipating tendency, to pastime? What will
become of the eternal truths of the Dionysian
and Apollonian in such an amalgamation of styles
as I have exhibited in the character of the stilo
rappresentativo ? where music is regarded as the
servant, the text as the master, where music is com-
pared with the body, the text with the soul ?
where at best the highest aim will be the realisa-
tion of a paraphrastic tone-painting, just as formerly
in the New Attic Dithyramb? where music is com-


## p. 150 (#194) ############################################

ISO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
pltteiy alienated from its true dignity of being, the
LHonysian mirror of the world, so that the only
thing left to it is, as a slave of phenomena, to imitate
the formal character thereof, and to excite an ex-
ternal pleasure in the play of lines and proportions.
On close observation, this fatal influence of the
opera on music is seen to coincide absolutely with
the universal development of modern music; the
optimism lurking in the genesis of the opera and
in the essence of culture represented thereby, has,
with alarming rapidity, succeeded in divesting
music of its Dionyso-cosmic mission and in im-
pressing on it a playfully formal and pleasurable
character: a change with which perhaps only the
metamorphosis of the ^Eschylean man into the
cheerful Alexandrine man could be compared.
If, however, in the exemplification herewith in-
dicated we have rightly associated the evanescence
of the Dionysian spirit with a most striking, but
hitherto unexplained transformation and degener-
ation of the Hellene—what hopes must revive in
us when the most trustworthy auspices guarantee
the reverse process, the gradual awakening of the
"i Dionysian spirit in our modern world! It is im-
possible for the divine strength of Herakles to lan-
guish for ever in voluptuous bondage to Omphale.
Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit
a power has arisen which has nothing in common
with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture,
and can neither be explained nor excused thereby,
but is rather regarded by this culture as something
terribly inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile,
y . —namely, German music as we have to understand


## p. 151 (#195) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 151
it, especially in its vast solar orbit from Bach tO/K . _
Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. What
even under the most favourable circumstances can
the knowledge-craving Socratism of our days do
with this demon rising from unfathomable depths?
Neither by means of the zig-zag and arabesque
work of operatic melody, nor with the aid of the
arithmetical counting board of fugue and contra-
puntal dialectics is the formula to be found, in the
trebly powerful light * of which one could subdue
this demon and compel it to speak. What a
spectacle, when our aesthetes, with a net of
"beauty" peculiar to themselves, now pursue and
clutch at the genius of music romping about before
them with incomprehensible life, and in so doing
display activities which are not to be judged by
the standard of eternal beauty any more than by
the standard of the sublime. Let us but observe
these patrons of music as they are, at close range,
when they call out so indefatigably "beauty!
beauty! " to discover whether they have the
marks of nature's darling children who are fostered
and fondled in the lap of the beautiful, or whether
they do not rather seek a disguise for their own
rudeness, an aesthetical pretext for their own
unemotional insipidity: I am thinking here, for
instance, of Otto Jahn. But let the liar and the
hypocrite beware of our German music: for in
the midst of all our culture it is really the only
genuine, pure and purifying fire-spirit from which
and towards which, as in the teaching of the great
* See Faust, Part I. 1. 965. —Tr.


## p. 152 (#196) ############################################

152 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double
orbit: all that we now call culture, education,
civilisation, must appear some day before the
unerring judge, Dionysus.
Let us recollect furthermore how Kant and
Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of
German philosophy streaming from the same
sources to annihilate the satisfied delight in ex-
istence of scientific Socratism by the delimitation
of the boundaries thereof; how through this
delimitation an infinitely profounder and more
serious view of ethical problems and of art was
inaugurated, which we may unhesitatingly desig-
nate as Dionysian wisdom comprised in concepts.
To what then does the mystery of this oneness of
German music and philosophy point, if not to a
new form of existence, concerning the substance
of which we can only inform ourselves presen-
tiently from Hellenic analogies? For to us who
stand on the boundary line between two different
forms of existence, the Hellenic prototype retains
the immeasurable value, that therein all these
transitions and struggles are imprinted in a
classically instructive form: except that we, as it
were, experience analogically in reverse order the
chief epochs of the Hellenic genius, and seem now,
for instance, to pass backwards from the Alex-
andrine age to the period of tragedy. At the
same time we have the feeling that the birth of a
tragic age betokens only a return to itself of the
German spirit, a blessed self-rediscovering after
excessive and urgent external influences have for
a long time compelled it, living as it did in
i


## p. 153 (#197) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 153
helpless barbaric formlessness, to servitude under
their form. It may at last, after returning to the
primitive source of its being, venture to stalk
along boldly and freely before all nations without
hugging the leading-strings of a Romanic civilisa-
tion: if only it can learn implicitly of one people
—the Greeks, of whom to learn at all is itself a
high honour and a rare distinction. And when
did we require these highest of all teachers more
than at present, when we experience a re-birth of
tragedy and are in danger alike of not knowing
whence it comes, and of being unable to make
clear to ourselves whither it tends.
20.
It may be weighed some day before an
impartial judge, in what time and in what men
the German spirit has thus far striven most reso-
lutely to learn of the Greeks: and if we con-
fidently assume that this unique praise must
be accorded to the noblest intellectual efforts of
Goethe, Schiller, and Winkelmann, it will cer-
tainly have to be added that since their time, and
subsequently to the more immediate influences of
these efforts, the endeavour to attain to culture
and to the Greeks by this path has in an in-
comprehensible manner grown feebler and feebler.
In order not to despair altogether of the German
spirit, must we not infer therefrom that possibly,
in some essential matter, even these champions
could not penetrate into the core of the Hellenic
nature, and were unable to establish a permanent


## p. 154 (#198) ############################################

154 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
friendly alliance between German and Greek cul-
ture? So that perhaps an unconscious perception
of this shortcoming might raise also in more
serious minds the disheartening doubt as to
whether after such predecessors they could ad-
vance still farther on this path of culture, or could
reach the goal at all. Accordingly, we see the
opinions concerning the value of Greek contribu-
tion to culture degenerate since that time in the
most alarming manner; the expression of com-
passionate superiority may be heard in the most
heterogeneous intellectual and non - intellectual
camps, and elsewhere a totally ineffective declama-
tion dallies with "Greek harmony," "Greek beauty,"
"Greek cheerfulness. " And in the very circles
whose dignity it might be to draw indefatigably
from the Greek channel for the good of German
culture, in the circles of the teachers in the higher
educational institutions, they have learned best to
compromise with the Greeks in good time and
on easy terms, to the extent often of a sceptical
abandonment of the Hellenic ideal and a total
perversion of the true purpose of antiquarian
studies. If there be any one at all in these
circles who has not completely exhausted himself
in the endeavour to be a trustworthy corrector of
old texts or a natural-history microscopist of
language, he perhaps seeks also to appropriate
Grecian antiquity "historically" along with other
antiquities, and in any case according to the
method and with the supercilious air of our
present cultured historiography. When, therefore,
the intrinsic efficiency of the higher educational


## p. 155 (#199) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
155
institutions has never perhaps been lower or
feebler than at present, when the "journalist," the
paper slave of the day, has triumphed over the
academic teacher in all matters pertaining to
culture, and there only remains to the latter the
often previously experienced metamorphosis of
now fluttering also, as a cheerful cultured butterfly,
in the idiom of the journalist, with the "light
elegance" peculiar thereto—with what painful
confusion must the cultured persons of a period
like the present gaze at the phenomenon (which
can perhaps be comprehended analogically only
by means of the profoundest principle of the
hitherto unintelligible Hellenic genius) of the
reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the
re-birth of tragedy? Never has there been
another art-period in which so-called culture and
true art have been so estranged and opposed, as
is so obviously the case at present. We under-
stand why so feeble a culture hates true art; it
fears destruction thereby. But must not an
entire domain of culture, namely the Socratic-
Alexandrine, have exhausted its powers after
contriving to culminate in such a daintily-tapering
point as our present culture? When it was not
permitted to heroes like Goethe and Schiller to
break open the enchanted gate which leads into
the Hellenic magic mountain, when with their
most dauntless striving they did not get beyond
the longing gaze which the Goethean Iphigenia
cast from barbaric Tauris to her home across the
ocean, what could the epigones of such heroes
hope for, if the gate should not open to them
V


## p. 156 (#200) ############################################

156 THE EDtTH OS TSl*JGTDT.
saddealy o( its own accord, in 22 entirely differ-
ent position, quite oweHoc&ed in all endeavours of
culture hitherto— amidst the mystic tones of
reawakened tragic music
Let no one attempt to weaken our faith in an
impending re-birth of Hellenic antiquity; for in it
alone we find oar hope of a renovation and puri-
fication of the German spirit through the fire-
magic of music What else do we know of
amidst the present desolation and languor of
culture, which could awaken any comforting ex-
pectation for the future? We look in vain for
one single vigorously-branching root, for a speck
of fertile and healthy soil: there is dust, sand,
torpidness and languishing everywhere! Under
such circumstances a cheerless solitary wanderer
could choose for himself no better symbol than
the Knight with Death and the Devil, as Diirer
has sketched him for us, the mail-clad knight,
grim and stern of visage, who is able, unperturbed
by his gruesome companions, and yet hopelessly,
to pursue his terrible path with horse and hound
alone. Our Schopenhauer was such a Diirerian
knight: he was destitute of all hope, but he sought
the truth. There is not his equal.
But how suddenly this gloomily depicted wilder-
ness of our exhausted culture changes when the
Dionysian magic touches it! A hurricane seizes
everything decrepit, decaying, collapsed, and
stunted; wraps it whirlingly into a red cloud of
dust; and carries it like a vulture into the air.
Confused thereby, our glances seek for what has
vanished: for what they see is something risen to


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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 157
the golden light as from a depression, so full and
green, so luxuriantly alive, so ardently infinite.
Tragedy sits in the midst of this exuberance of
life, sorrow and joy, in sublime ecstasy; she listens
to a distant doleful song—it tells of the Mothers
of Being, whose names are: Wahn, Wille, Wehe*
—Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian
life and in the re-birth of tragedy. The time of
the Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with
ivy, take in your hands the thyrsus, and do not
marvel if tigers and panthers lie down fawning
at your feet. Dare now to be tragic men, for
ye are to be redeemed! Ye are to accompany
the Dionysian festive procession from India to
Greece! Equip yourselves for severe conflict, but
believe in the wonders of your god!
21.
Gliding back from these hortative tones into
the mood which befits the contemplative man, I
repeat that it can only be learnt from the Greeks
what such a sudden and miraculous awakening of
tragedy must signify for the essential basis of a
people's life. It is the people of the tragic
mysteries who fight the battles with the Persians:
and again, the people who waged such wars
required tragedy as a necessary healing potion.
Who would have imagined that there was still
such a uniformly powerful effusion of the simplest
political sentiments, the most natural domestic
* Whim, will, woe.


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158
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
instincts and the primitive manly delight in strife
in this very people after it had been shaken to its
foundations for several generations by the most
violent convulsions of the Dionysian demon? If
at every considerable spreading of the Dionysian
commotion one always perceives that the Dionys-
ian loosing from the shackles of the individual
makes itself felt first of all in an increased en-
croachment on the political instincts, to the
extent of indifference, yea even hostility, it is
certain, on the other hand, that the state-forming
Apollo is also the genius of the principium in-
dividuationis, and that the state and domestic
sentiment cannot live without an assertion of
individual personality. There is only one way
from orgasm for a people,—the way to Indian
Buddhism, which, in order to be at all endured
with its longing for nothingness, requires the rare
ecstatic states with their elevation above space,
time, and the individual; just as these in turn
demand a philosophy which teaches how to over-
come the indescribable depression of the inter-
mediate states by means of a fancy. With the
same necessity, owing to the unconditional
dominance of political impulses, a people drifts
into a path of extremest secularisation, the most
magnificent, but also the most terrible expression
of which is the Roman imperium,
Placed between India and Rome, and con-
strained to a seductive choice, the Greeks suc-
ceeded in devising in classical purity still a third
form of life, not indeed for long private use, but
just on that account for immortality. For it



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
159
holds true in all things that those whom the gods
love die young, but, on the other hand, it holds
equally true that they then live eternally with the
gods. One must not demand of what is most
noble that it should possess the durable toughness
of leather; the staunch durability, which, for
instance, was inherent in the national character
of the Romans, does not probably belong to the
indispensable predicates of perfection. But if we
ask by what physic it was possible for the Greeks,
in their best period, notwithstanding the extra-
ordinary strength of their Dionysian and political
impulses, neither to exhaust themselves by ecstatic
brooding, nor by a consuming scramble for empire
and worldly honour, but to attain the splendid
mixture which we find in a noble, inflaming, and
contemplatively disposing wine, we must remember
the enormous power of tragedy, exciting, purifying,
and disburdening the entire life of a people; the
highest value of which we shall divine only when,
as in the case of the Greeks, it appears to us as
the essence of all the prophylactic healing forces,
as the mediator arbitrating between the strongest
and most inherently fateful characteristics of a
people.
Tragedy absorbs the highest musical orgasm
into itself, so that it absolutely brings music to
perfection among the Greeks, as among ourselves;
but it then places alongside thereof tragic myth
and the tragic hero, who, like a mighty Titan,
takes the entire Dionysian world on his shoulders.
and disburdens us thereof; while, on the other
hand, it is able by means of this same tragic
I
i


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160 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
r
myth, in the person of the tragic hero, to deliver
us from the intense longing for this existence, and
reminds us with warning hand of another exist-
ence and a higher joy, for which the struggling
hero prepares himself presentiently by his de-
struction, not by his victories. Tragedy sets a
gublime symbol, namely the myth between the
universal authority of its music and the receptive
Dionysian hearer, and produces in him the illusion
that music is only the most effective means for
the animation of the plastic world of myth.
Relying upon this noble illusion, she can now
move her limbs for the dithyrambic dance, and
abandon herself unhesitatingly to an orgiastic
feeling of freedom, in which she could not venture
to indulge as music itself, without this illusion.
The myth protects us from the music, while, on
the other hand, it alone gives the highest freedom
thereto. By way of return for this service, music
imparts to tragic myth such an impressive and
convincing metaphysical significance as could
never be attained by word and image, without
this unique aid; and the tragic spectator in par-
ticular experiences thereby the sure presentiment
of supreme joy to which the path through destruc-
tion and negation leads; so that he thinks he
hears, as it were, the innermost abyss of things
speaking audibly to him.
If in these last propositions I have succeeded
in giving perhaps only a preliminary expres-
sion, intelligible to few at first, to this difficult
representation, I must not here desist from
stimulating my friends to a further attempt, or




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THE B»RTH OF TRAGEDY. l6l
cease from beseeching them to prepare themselves,
by a detached example of our common experience,
for the perception of the universal proposition.
In this example I must not appeal to those who
make use of the pictures of the scenic processes,
the words and the emotions of the performers, in
order to approximate thereby to musical perception;
for none of these speak music as their mother-
tongue, and, in spite of the aids in question, do
not get farther than the precincts of» musical
perception, without ever being allowed to touch
its innermost shrines; some of them, like
Gervinus, do not even reach the precincts by this
path. I have only to address myself to those
who, being immediately allied to music, have it
as it were for their mother's lap, and are connected
with things almost exclusively by unconscious
musical relations. I ask the question of these
genuine musicians: whether they can imagine a
man capable of hearing the third act of Tristan
und Isolde without any aid of word or scenery,
purely as a vast symphonic period, without
expiring by a spasmodic distention of all the
wings of the soul? A man who has thus, so to
speak, put his ear to the heart-chamber of the
cosmic will, who feels the furious desire for ex-
istence issuing therefrom as a thundering stream
or most gently dispersed brook, into all the veins
of the world, would he not collapse all at once?
Could he endure, in the wretched fragile tenement
of the human individual, to hear the re-echo of
countless cries of joy and sorrow from the "vast
void of cosmic night," without flying irresistibly
L


## p. 162 (#206) ############################################

162 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
towards his primitive home at the sound of this
pastoral dance-song of metaphysics? But if, never-
theless, such a work can be heard as a whole,
without a renunciation of individual existence, if
such a creation could be created without demolish-
ing its creator—where are we to get the solution
of this contradiction?
Here there interpose between our highest
musical excitement and the music in question the
tlSSiC_rQyth and the tragic hero—in reality only
as_sy. mbols of the most universal facts, of which
music_aJfiLne can j>peak directly^. If, however, we
felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as a symbol
would stand by us absolutely ineffective and
unnoticed, and would never for a moment prevent
us from giving ear to the re-echo of the universalia
ante rem. Here, however, the Apollonian power,
with a view to the restoration of the well-nigh
shattered individual, bursts forth with the healing
balm of a blissful illusion: all of a sudden we im-
agine we see only Tristan, motionless, with hushed
voice saying to himself: " the old tune, why does it
wake me? " And what formerly interested us like
a hollow sigh from the heart of being, seems now
only to tell us how " waste and void is the sea. "
And when, breathless, we thought to expire by a
convulsive distention of all our feelings, and only
a slender tie bound us to our present existence,
we now hear and see only the hero wounded to
death and still not dying, with his despairing
cry: " Longing! Longing! In dying still longing!
for longing not dying! " And if formerly, after
such a surplus and superabundance of consuming


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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
163
agonies, the jubilation of the born rent our hearts
almost like the very acme of agony, the rejoic-
ing Kurwenal now stands between us and the
"jubilation as such," with face turned toward the
ship which carries Isolde. However powerfully
fellow-suffering encroaches upon us, it nevertheless
delivers us in a manner from the primordial
suffering of the world, just as the symbol-image
of the myth delivers us from the immediate per-
ception of the highest cosmic idea, just as the
thought and word deliver us from the unchecked
effusion of the unconscious will. The glorious
Apollonian illusion makes it appear as if the very
realm of tones presented itself to us as a plastic
cosmos, as if even the fate of Tristan and Isolde
had been merely formed and moulded therein
as out of some most delicate and impressible
material.
Thus does the Apollonian wrest us from
JMonysian nniversality and fill us with rapture for
individuals; to these it rivets our sympathetic
emotion, through these it satisfies the sense of
beauty which longs for great and sublime forms;
it brings before us biographical portraits, and
incites us to a thoughtful apprehension of the
essence of life contained therein. With the
immense potency of the image, the concept, the
ethical teaching and the sympathetic emotion—
the Apollonian influence uplifts man from his
orgiastic self-annihilation, and . beguiles him con-
cerning the universality of the Dionysian process
into the belief that he is seeing a detached picture
of the world, for instance, Tristan and Isolde,

J


## p. 164 (#208) ############################################

164
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
and that, through music, he will be enabled to
see it still more clearly and intrinsically. What
can the healing magic of Apollo not accom-
plish when it can even excite in us the illusion
that the Dionysian is actually in the service
of the Apollonian, the effects of which it is
capable of enhancing; yea, that music is essen-
tially the representative art for an Apollonian
substance ?
With the pre-established harmony which obtains
between perfect drama and its music, the drama
attains the highest degree of conspicuousness, such
as is usually unattainable in mere spoken drama.
As all the animated figures of the scene in the
independently evolved lines of melody simplify
themselves before us to the distinctness of the
catenary curve, the coexistence of these lines is
also audible in the harmonic change which sym-
pathises in a most delicate manner with the evolved
process: through which change the relations of
things become immediately perceptible to us in
a sensible and not at all abstract manner, as we
likewise perceive thereby that it is only in these
relations that the essence of a character and of a
line of melody manifests itself clearly. And while
music thus compels us to see more extensively and
more intrinsically than usual, and makes us spread
out the curtain of the scene before ourselves like
some delicate texture, the world of the stage is
as infinitely expanded for our spiritualised, intro-
spective eye as it is illumined outwardly from
within. How can the word-poet furnish anything
analogous, who strives to attain this internal ex-


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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 165
^
pansion and illumination of the visible stage-world
by a much more imperfect mechanism and an
indirect path, proceeding as he does from word
and concept? Albeit musical tragedy likewise
avails itself of the word, it is at the same time able
to place alongside thereof its basis and source, and
can make the unfolding of the word, from within
outwards, obvious to us.
Of the process just set forth, however, it could
still be said as decidedly that it is only a glorious
appearance, namely the afore-mentioned Apollonian
illusion, through the influence of which we are to
be delivered from the Dionysian obtrusion and
excess. In point of fact, the relation of music
to drama is precisely the reverse; jmjsjc. Js-. the. !
adequate idea of the world, drama is but the
jreflex of this idea, a detached umbrage thereof.
The identity between the line of melody and
the living form, between the harmony and the
character-relations of this form, is true in a sense
antithetical to what one would suppose on the
contemplation of musical tragedy.