The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism
Nietzsche · en
Accordingly, we observe that in the poetising of the popular song,
language is strained to its utmost _to imitate music;_ and hence a
new world of poetry begins with Archilochus, which is fundamentally
opposed to the Homeric. And in saying this we have pointed out the
only possible relation between poetry and music, between word and
tone: the word, the picture, the concept here seeks an expression
analogous to music and now experiences in itself the power of music.
In this sense we may discriminate between two main currents in the
history of the language of the Greek people, according as their
language imitated either the world of phenomena and of pictures, or the
world of music. One has only to reflect seriously on the linguistic
difference with regard to colour, syntactical structure, and vocabulary
in Homer and Pindar, in order to comprehend the significance of this
contrast; indeed, it becomes palpably clear to us that in the period
between Homer and Pindar the _orgiastic flute tones of Olympus_ must
have sounded forth, which, in an age as late as Aristotle's, when
music was infinitely more developed, transported people to drunken
enthusiasm, and which, when their influence was first felt, undoubtedly
incited all the poetic means of expression of contemporaneous man
to imitation. I here call attention to a familiar phenomenon of our
own times, against which our æsthetics raises many objections. We
again and again have occasion to observe how a symphony of Beethoven
compels the individual hearers to use figurative speech, though the
appearance presented by a collocation of the different pictorial
world generated by a piece of music may be never so fantastically
diversified and even contradictory. To practise its small wit on such
compositions, and to overlook a phenomenon which is certainly worth
explaining, is quite in keeping with this æsthetics. Indeed, even if
the tone-poet has spoken in pictures concerning a composition, when for
instance he designates a certain symphony as the "pastoral" symphony,
or a passage therein as "the scene by the brook," or another as the
"merry gathering of rustics," these are likewise only symbolical
representations born out of music--and not perhaps the imitated objects
of music--representations which can give us no information whatever
concerning the _Dionysian_ content of music, and which in fact have
no distinctive value of their own alongside of other pictorical
expressions. This process of a discharge of music in pictures we have
now to transfer to some youthful, linguistically productive people, to
get a notion as to how the strophic popular song originates, and how
the entire faculty of speech is stimulated by this new principle of
imitation of music.