The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism

Nietzsche · en
--But, my dear Sir, if _your_ book is not Romanticism, what in
the world is? Can the deep hatred of the present, of "reality"
and "modern ideas" be pushed farther than has been done in your
artist-metaphysics?--which would rather believe in Nothing, or in
the devil, than in the "Now"? Does not a radical bass of wrath and
annihilative pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal vocal
art and aural seduction, a mad determination to oppose all that "now"
is, a will which is not so very far removed from practical nihilism
and which seems to say: "rather let nothing be true, than that _you_
should be in the right, than that _your_ truth should prevail!"
Hear, yourself, my dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever
so unlocked ears, a single select passage of your own book, that
not ineloquent dragon-slayer passage, which may sound insidiously
rat-charming to young ears and hearts. What? is not that the true
blue romanticist-confession of 1830 under the mask of the pessimism
of 1850? After which, of course, the usual romanticist finale at once
strikes up,--rupture, collapse, return and prostration before an old
belief, before _the_ old God.... What? is not your pessimist book
itself a piece of anti-Hellenism and Romanticism, something "equally
intoxicating and befogging," a narcotic at all events, ay, a piece of
music, of _German_ music? But listen:

    Let us imagine a rising generation with this undauntedness
    of vision, with this heroic impulse towards the prodigious,
    let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-slayers,
    the proud daring 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,_ tragedy as the
    Helena belonging to him, and that he should exclaim with
    Faust:

        "Und sollt ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,
        In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?"[1]


"Would it not be _necessary_?" ... No, thrice no! ye young
romanticists: it would _not_ be necessary! But it is very probable,
that things may _end_ thus, that _ye_ may end thus, namely "comforted,"
as it is written, in spite of all self-discipline to earnestness and
terror; metaphysically comforted, in short, as Romanticists are wont to
end, as _Christians...._ No! ye should first of all learn the art of
earthly comfort, ye should learn to _laugh,_ my young friends, if ye
are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will perhaps,
as laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the
devil--and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of
that Dionysian ogre, called _Zarathustra_: