The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism
Nietzsche · en
possible as an artist: he who according to the experience of all ages
continually says "I" and sings off to us the entire chromatic scale of
his passions and desires. This very Archilochus appals us, alongside
of Homer, by his cries of hatred and scorn, by the drunken outbursts
of his desire. Is not just he then, who has been called the first
subjective artist, the non-artist proper? But whence then the reverence
which was shown to him--the poet--in very remarkable utterances by the
Delphic oracle itself, the focus of "objective" art?
_Schiller_ has enlightened us concerning his poetic procedure by a
psychological observation, inexplicable to himself, yet not apparently
open to any objection. He acknowledges that as the preparatory state
to the act of poetising he had not perhaps before him or within him a
series of pictures with co-ordinate causality of thoughts, but rather
a _musical mood_ ("The perception with me is at first without a clear
and definite object; this forms itself later. A certain musical mood
of mind precedes, and only after this does the poetical idea follow
with me.") Add to this the most important phenomenon of all ancient
lyric poetry, _the union,_ regarded everywhere as natural, _of the
lyrist with the musician,_ their very identity, indeed,--compared
with which our modern lyric poetry is like the statue of a god without
a head,--and we may now, on the basis of our metaphysics of æsthetics
set forth above, interpret the lyrist to ourselves as follows. As
Dionysian artist he is in the first place become altogether one with
the Primordial Unity, its pain and contradiction, and he produces the
copy of this Primordial Unity as music, granting that music has been
correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world; but now, under
the Apollonian dream-inspiration, this music again becomes visible
to him as in a _symbolic dream-picture._ The formless and intangible
reflection of the primordial pain in music, with its redemption in
appearance, then generates a second mirroring as a concrete symbol or
example. The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity in the
Dionysian process: the picture which now shows to him his oneness with
the heart of the world, is a dream-scene, which embodies the primordial
contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial joy, of
appearance. The "I" of the lyrist sounds therefore from the abyss of
being: its "subjectivity," in the sense of the modern æsthetes, is a
fiction. When Archilochus, the first lyrist of the Greeks, makes known
both his mad love and his contempt to the daughters of Lycambes, it is
not his passion which dances before us in orgiastic frenzy: we see
Dionysus and the Mænads, we see the drunken reveller Archilochus sunk
down to sleep--as Euripides depicts it in the Bacchæ, the sleep on the
high Alpine pasture, in the noonday sun:--and now Apollo approaches and
touches him with the laurel. The Dionyso-musical enchantment of the