It is indeed an "ideal" domain, as Schiller rightly perceived,
upon--which the Greek satyric chorus, the chorus of primitive tragedy,
was wont to walk, a domain raised far above the actual path of
mortals. The Greek framed for this chorus the suspended scaffolding of
a fictitious _natural state_ and placed thereon fictitious _natural
beings._ It is on this foundation that tragedy grew up, and so it
could of course dispense from the very first with a painful portrayal
of reality. Yet it is, not an arbitrary world placed by fancy betwixt
heaven and earth; rather is it a world possessing the same reality
and trustworthiness that Olympus with its dwellers possessed for the
believing Hellene. The satyr, as being the Dionysian chorist, lives
in a religiously acknowledged reality under the sanction of the myth
and cult. That tragedy begins with him, that the Dionysian wisdom of
tragedy speaks through him, is just as surprising a phenomenon to us
as, in general, the derivation of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps
we shall get a starting-point for our inquiry, if I put forward the
proposition that the satyr, the fictitious natural being, is to the
man of culture what Dionysian music is to civilisation. Concerning
this latter, Richard Wagner says that it is neutralised by music even
as lamplight by daylight. In like manner, I believe, the Greek man of
culture felt himself neutralised in the presence of the satyric chorus:
and this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that
the state and society, and, in general, the gaps between man and man
give way to an overwhelming feeling of oneness, which leads back to
the heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort,--with which, as I have
here intimated, every true tragedy dismisses us--that, in spite of
the perpetual change of phenomena, life at bottom is indestructibly
powerful and pleasurable, this comfort appears with corporeal lucidity
as the satyric chorus, as the chorus of natural beings, who live
ineradicable as it were behind all civilisation, and who, in spite of
the ceaseless change of generations and the history of nations, remain
for ever the same.
With this chorus the deep-minded Hellene, who is so singularly
qualified for the most delicate and severe suffering, consoles
himself:--he who has glanced with piercing eye into the very heart of
the terrible destructive processes of so-called universal history, as
also into the cruelty of nature, and is in danger of longing for a
Buddhistic negation of the will. Art saves him, and through art life
saves him--for herself.