"To be just to the _Birth of Tragedy_(1872), one will have to forget some few things. It has _wrought effects,_ it even fascinated through that wherein it was amiss--through its application to _Wagnerism,_ just as if this Wagnerism were symptomatic of _a rise and going up._ And just on that account was the book an event in Wagner's life: from thence and only from thence were great hopes linked to the name of Wagner. Even to-day people remind me, sometimes right in the midst of a talk on _Parsifal,_ that _I_ and none other have it on my conscience that such a high opinion of the _cultural value_ of this movement came to the top. More than once have I found the book referred to as 'the _Re_-birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music': one only had an ear for a new formula of _Wagner's_ art, aim, task,--and failed to hear withal what was at bottom valuable therein. 'Hellenism and Pessimism' had been a more unequivocal title: namely, as a first lesson on the way in which the Greeks got the better of pessimism,--on the means whereby they _overcame_ it. Tragedy simply proves that the Greeks were _no_ pessimists: Schopenhauer was mistaken here as he was mistaken in all other things. Considered with some neutrality, the _Birth of Tragedy_ appears very unseasonable: one would not even dream that it was _begun_ amid the thunders of the battle of Wörth. I thought these problems through and through before the walls of Metz in cold September nights, in the midst of the work of nursing the sick; one might even believe the book to be fifty years older. It is politically indifferent--un-German one will say to-day,--it smells shockingly Hegelian, in but a few formulæ does it scent of Schopenhauer's funereal perfume. An 'idea'--the antithesis of 'Dionysian _versus_ Apollonian'--translated into metaphysics; history itself as the evolution of this 'idea'; the antithesis dissolved into oneness in Tragedy; through this optics things that had never yet looked into one another's face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and _comprehended_ through one another: for instance, Opera and Revolution. The two decisive _innovations_ of the book are, on the one hand, the comprehension of the _Dionysian_ phenomenon among the Greeks (it gives the first psychology thereof, it sees therein the One root of all Grecian art); on the other, the comprehension of Socratism: Socrates diagnosed for the first time as the tool of Grecian dissolution, as a typical decadent. 'Rationality' _against_ instinct! 'Rationality' at any price as a dangerous, as a life-undermining force! Throughout the whole book a deep hostile silence on Christianity: it is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian; it _negatives_ all _æsthetic_ values (the only values recognised by the _Birth of Tragedy),_ it is in the widest sense nihilistic, whereas in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit of _affirmation_ is reached. Once or twice the Christian priests are