Dionysian art thus wishes to convince us of the eternal delight in existence: only we are to seek this delight, not in appearances, but behind them; we are to recognize how everything which comes into being must be ready for painful destruction; we are forced to gaze directly into the terror of individual existence — and nonetheless are not to become paralyzed: a metaphysical consolation tears us momentarily out of the hustle and bustle of changing forms. For a short time we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled lust for and joy in existence; the struggle, the torment, the destruction of appearances now seem to us necessary, on account of the excess of innumerable forms of existence pressing and punching themselves into life and of the exuberant fecundity of the world will; we are transfixed by the raging barbs of this torment in the very moment when we become, as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial delight in existence and when, in Dionysian rapture, we sense the indestructible and eternal nature of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are fortunate vital beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative joy we have been fused. The story of how Greek tragedy arose tells us now with clear certainty how the Greeks’ tragic work of art really was born out of the spirit of music. With this idea we think we have, for the first time, done justice to the original and astonishing meaning of the chorus. At the same time, however, we must concede that the significance of the tragic myth established previously was never conceptually and transparently clear to the Greek poets, to say nothing of the Greek philosophers. Their heroes speak to a certain extent more superficially than they act; the myth really does not find its adequate objectification in the spoken word.

The structure of the scenes and the vivid images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can grasp in words and ideas. We can make the same observation about Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for example, in a similar sense speaks more superficially than he acts, so that we derive the doctrine of Hamlet we discussed earlier, not from the words, but from the deeper view and review of the totality of the work.

With respect to Greek tragedy, which, of course, comes to us only as a drama of words, I have even suggested that the incongruity between myth and word can easily seduce us into considering it shallower and more empty of meaning than it is and thus also to assume a more superficial effect than it must have had according to the testimony of the ancients, for we easily forget that what the poet as a wordsmith could not achieve, the attainment of the highest intellectualization and idealization of myth, he could have achieved successfully at any moment as a creative musician!

Admittedly we are almost forced to recreate through scholarship the extraordinary power of the musical effects in order to experience something of that incomparable consolation necessarily characteristic of true tragedy. But we would experience this superior musical power for what it is only if we ourselves were Greeks; whereas, considering the entire development of Greek music in comparison to the music we know and are familiar with — so infinitely richer by comparison — we believe that we are hearing youthful songs of musical genius, sung with only a timid sense of their power. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal children and, even in tragic art, only children who do not know what a sublime toy has arisen under their hands and which — will be destroyed.

That struggle of the spirit of music for pictorial and mythic revelation, which becomes increasingly intense from the beginning of the lyric right up to Attic tragedy, suddenly breaks apart, right after it first attained full luxuriant bloom and, so to speak, disappears from the surface of Hellenic art, although the Dionysian world view born out of this struggle lives on in the mysteries and, in the most amazing transformations and degenerations, never stops attracting more serious natures to it. Is it not possible that one day it will rise from its mystic depths as art once more?

At this point we are concerned with the question whether the power whose opposition broke tragedy has sufficient force for all time to hinder the artistic reawakening of tragedy and the tragic world view. If the old tragedy was derailed by the dialectical drive for knowledge and for the optimism of science, we might have to infer from this fact an eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic world view, and only after the spirit of science is taken right to its limits and its claim to universal validity destroyed by the proof of those limits would it be possible to hope for a re-birth of tragedy. For a symbol of such a cultural form, we would have to set up Socrates the player of music, in the sense talked about earlier. By this confrontation I understand with respect to the spirit of science that belief, which first came to light in the person of Socrates, that nature can be rationally understood and that knowledge has a universal healing power.

Anyone who remembers the most immediate consequences of this restless, forward-driving spirit of science will immediately recall how it destroyed myth and how, through this destruction, poetry was driven out of its naturally ideal soil as something which from now on was without a home. If we have correctly ascribed to music the power to be able to bring about out of itself a rebirth of myth, then we will also have to seek out the spirit of science on the path where it has its hostile encounter with the myth-creating power of music. This occurred in the development of the new Attic dithyramb, whose music no longer expressed the inner essence, the will itself, but only gave back an inadequate
appearance in an imitation delivered through ideas. From such inwardly degenerate music those with a true musical nature turned away with the same aversion which they had shown when confronted by the art-killing attitude of Socrates.

The instinct of Aristophanes, which had such a sure grasp, was certainly right when he linked together Socrates himself, the tragedies of Euripides, and the music of the new writers of dithyrambs, hating each of them equally and smelling in all three phenomena the characteristics of a degenerate culture. Through that newer dithyramb, music was, in an outrageous manner, turned into a mimetic demonstration of appearances, for example, a battle, a storm at sea, and in the process was certainly robbed of all its power to create myths. For when music seeks to arouse our indulgence only by compelling us to look for external analogies between an event in life and nature and certain rhythmic figures and characteristic musical sounds, when our understanding is supposed to be satisfied with the recognition of these analogies, then we are dragged down into a mood in which a conception of the mythic is impossible, for myth desires to be vividly felt as a single instance of universality and truth staring into the infinite.

Truly Dionysian music confronts us as such a universal mirror of the world will: that vivid event reflected in this mirror widens out at once for our feelings into the image of an eternal truth. By contrast, in the sound painting of the newer dithyramb such a vivid event is immediately stripped of every mythic character; now the music has become a feeble copy of the phenomenon and, in the process, infinitely poorer than the phenomenon itself. Through this impoverishment the phenomenon itself is even lowered in our feelings, so that now, for example, a battle imitated in this kind of music exhausts itself in marches, trumpet calls, and so forth, and our imagination is held back by these very superficialities.

Painting with music is thus in every respect the opposite to the myth-creating power of true music: through the former a phenomenon becomes even more impoverished than it is; whereas, through Dionysian music the individual phenomenon becomes richer and widens into a world picture. It was a powerful victory of the non- Dionysian spirit when, in the development of the newer dithyramb, it alienated music from itself and forced it down to be the slave of appearances. Euripides, who, in a higher sense, must be considered a thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very reason an ardent supporter of the newer dithyrambic music and uses all its stock effects and styles with the openhandedness of a thief.

From another perspective we see the force of this un-Dionysian spirit in action directing its effects against myth, when we turn our gaze toward the way in which the presentation of character and the psychological complexities increase alarmingly in the tragedies of Sophocles. The character can no longer be allowed to broaden out into an eternal type, but, by contrast, must come across as an individual because of the artistic qualifications and shading and the most delicate clarity of every line, so that the spectator generally no longer experiences the myth but the commanding naturalism of the artist, his power of imitation.

Here, as a result, we also become aware of the victory of appearances over the universal and of the delight in the particular, like an anatomical specimen, as it were. Already we breathe the air of a theoretical world, which values the scientific insight higher than the artistic reflection of a universal principle. The movement along the line of increasingly typical characteristics quickly goes further. While Sophocles still paints whole characters and yokes their sophisticated development to myth, Euripides already paints only large individual character traits, which are capable of expressing themselves in violent passions. In the newer Attic comedy there are only masks with one expression, silly old men, deceived pimps, and mischievous slaves in an inexhaustible repetition.

Where now has the myth-building spirit of music gone? What is still left for music now is music either of excitement or of memory, that is, either a means of stimulating jaded and worn out nerves or sound painting. As far as the first is concerned, the text is largely irrelevant. Already in Euripides, when his heroes or chorus first start to sing, things get really out of hand. What must it have been like with his impertinent successors?
However, the new un-Dionysian spirit manifests itself with the utmost clarity in the conclusions of the newer plays. In the old tragedy, the metaphysical consolation was there to feel at the conclusion. Without that, the delight in tragedy generally cannot be explained. The sound of reconciliation from another world echoes most purely perhaps in Oedipus at Colonus. Now, once the genius of music flew away from tragedy, tragedy is, in the strict sense of the term, dead: for out of what are people now supposed to be able to create that metaphysical consolation? Consequently, people looked for an earthly solution to tragic dissonance. After the hero was sufficiently tortured by fate, he received a well-earned reward in an impressive marriage, in divine tributes. The hero became a gladiator, to whom people occasionally gave his freedom, after he had been well beaten and was covered with wounds. The deus ex machina moved in to take the place of metaphysical consolation.

I don’t wish to say that the tragic world view was completely destroyed everywhere by the surging spirit of the un-Dionysian: we know only that it must have fled out of art into the underworld, so to speak, degenerating into a secret cult. But over the widest surface area of Hellenic existence raged the consuming wind of that spirit which announces itself in that form of “Greek serenity” to which I have already referred earlier, as an impotent, unproductive delight in existence. This cheerfulness is the opposite of the marvellous “naivete” of the older Greeks, which we must see, in accordance with its given characteristics, as the flowering of Apollonian culture, blossoming out of a dark abyss, as the victory over suffering and the wisdom of suffering, which the Hellenic will gains through its ability to mirror beauty.

The noblest form of that other form of “Greek serenity,” the Alexandrian, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man. It manifests the same characteristic features I have just derived out of the spirit of the un- Dionysian — it fights against Dionysian wisdom and art; it strives to dissolve myth; in place of a metaphysical consolation, it sets an earthy consonance, indeed, a deus ex machina of its own, namely, the god of machines and crucibles, that is, the forces of nature spirits, recognized and used in the service of a higher egoism; it believes in correcting the world through knowledge, in a life guided by science, and thus is really in a position to confine the individual man in the narrowest circle of soluble problems, inside which he can cheerfully say to life: “I want you. You are worth knowing.”