The profoundest feature of Greek drama was the Dionysian conquest of pessimism through art. The Greeks were not the cheerful and optimistic people whom we meet with in modern rhapsodies about them; they knew the stings of life intimately, and its tragic brevity. When Midas asked Silenus what fate is best for a man, Silenus answered: “Pitiful race of a day, children of accidents and sorrow, why do you force me to say what were better left unheard? The best of all is unobtainable—not to be born, to be nothing. The second best is to die early.” Evidently these men had little to learn from Schopenhauer, or from the Hindus. But the Greeks overcame the gloom of their disillusionment with the brilliance of their art: out of their own suffering they made the spectacle of the drama, and found that “it is only as an esthetic phenomenon,” as an object of artistic contemplation or reconstruction, “that existence and the world appear justified.”11 “The sublime is the artistic subjugation of the awful.”12 Pessimism is a sign of decay, optimism is a sign of superficiality; “tragic optimism” is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience, even at the cost of woe, and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life. “Tragedy itself is the proof of the fact that the Greeks were not pessimists.” The days when this mood begot the Æschylean drama and the pre-Socratic philosophy were the “tremendous days of Greece.”13
Socrates—“the type of the theoretical man”14—was a sign of the loosened fibre of the Greek character; “the old Marathonian stalwart capacity of body and soul was more and more sacrificed to a dubious enlightenment, involving progressive degeneration of the physical and mental powers.”15 Critical philosophy replaced the philosophical poetry of the pre-Socratics; science replaced art; intellect replaced instinct; dialectic replaced the games. Under the influence of Socrates, Plato the athlete became an esthete, Plato the dramatist became a logician, an enemy of passion, a deporter of poets, a “pre-Christian Christian,” an epistemologist. On the temple of Apollo at Delphi those words of passionless wisdom were inscribed—gnothi seauton and meden agan16—which became, in Socrates and Plato, the delusion that intelligence is the only virtue, and in Aristotle the enervating doctrine of the golden mean. In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic. In its youth Greece produced Homer and Æschylus; in its decay it gave us Euripides—the logician turned dramatist, the rationalist destroying myth and symbol, the sentimentalist destroying the tragic optimism of the masculine age, the friend of Socrates who replaces the Dionysian chorus with an Apollonian galaxy of dialecticians and orators.
No wonder the Delphic oracle of Apollo had named Socrates the wisest of the Greeks, and Euripides the wisest after him; and no wonder that “the unerring instinct of Aristophanes . . . comprised Socrates and Euripides . . . in the same feeling of hatred, and saw in them the symptoms of a degenerate culture.”17 It is true that they recanted; that Euripides’ last play—The Bacchæ—is his surrender to Dionysus, and the prelude to his suicide; and that Socrates in prison took to practising the music of Dionysus to ease his conscience. “‘Perhaps’—thus he had to ask himself—‘what is not intelligible to me is not therefore unreasonable? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of and supplement to science?’”18 But it was too late; the work of the logician and the rationalist could not be undone; Greek drama and Greek character decayed. “The surprising thing had happened: when the poet” and the philosopher “recanted, their tendency had already conquered.”19 With them ended the age of heroes, and the art of Dionysus.
But perhaps the age of Dionysus may return? Did not Kant destroy once and for all the theoretical reason and the theoretical man?—and did not Schopenhauer teach us again the profundity of instinct and the tragedy of thought?—and is not Richard Wagner another Æschylus, restoring myths and symbols, and uniting music and drama again in Dionysian ecstasy? “Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture, . . .—namely, German music, . . . in its vast solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.”20 The German spirit has too long reflected passively the Apollonian art of Italy and France; let the German people realize that their own instincts are sounder than these decadent cultures; let them make a Reformation in music as in religion, pouring the wild vigor of Luther again into art and life. Who knows but that out of the war-throes of the German nation another age of heroes dawns, and that out of the spirit of music tragedy may be reborn?
In 1872 Nietzsche returned to Basle, still weak in body, but with a spirit burning with ambition, and loath to consume itself in the drudgery of lecturing. “I have before me work enough for fifty years, and I must mark time under the yoke.”21 Already he was a little disillusioned with the war: “the German Empire is extirpating the German spirit,” he wrote.22 The victory of 1871 had brought a certain coarse conceit into the soul of Germany; and nothing could be more hostile to spiritual growth. An impish quality in Nietzsche made him restless before every idol; and he determined to assail this dulling complacency by attacking its most respected exponent—David Strauss. “I enter society with a dueclass="underline" Stendhal gave that advice.”23
In the second of his well-named Thoughts out of Season—“Schopenhauer as Educator”—he turned his fire upon the chauvinistic universities. “Experience teaches us that nothing stands so much in the way of developing great philosophers as the custom of supporting bad ones in state universities . . . . No state would ever dare to patronize such men as Plato and Schopenhauer . . . . The state is always afraid of them.”24 He renewed the attack in “The Future of Our Educational Institutions”; and in “The Use and Abuse of History” he ridiculed the submergence of the German intellect in the minutiæ of antiquarian scholarship. Already in these essays two of his distinctive ideas found expression: that morality, as well as theology, must be reconstructed in terms of the evolution theory; and that the function of life is to bring about “not the betterment of the majority, who, taken as individuals, are the most worthless types,” but “the creation of genius,” the development and elevation of superior personalities.25
The most enthusiastic of these essays was called “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.” It hailed Wagner as a Siegfried “who has never learned the meaning of fear,”26 and as founder of the only real art, because the first to fuse all the arts into a great esthetic synthesis; and it called upon Germany to realize the majestic significance of the coming Wagner festival—“Bayreuth signifies for us the morning sacrament on the day of battle.”27 This was the voice of youthful worship, the voice of an almost femininely refined spirit who saw in Wagner something of that masculine decisiveness and courage which went later into the conception of the Superman. But the worshipper was a philosopher too, and recognized in Wagner a certain dictatorial egotism offensive to an aristocratic soul. He could not bear Wagner’s attack upon the French in 1871 (Paris had not been kind to Tannhäuser!); and he was astounded at Wagner’s jealousy of Brahms.28 The central theme even of this laudatory essay boded no good for Wagner: “The world has been Orientalized long enough; and men now yearn to be Hellenized.”29 But Nietzsche already knew that Wagner was half Semitic.