unmoral, if you will—urged him finally the other way. He took, chose life, even at this cost.
IV
The problem of the easement of existence, however, under conditions like these becomes a pressing one. And here Nietzsche discovers a vital significance in art. Art is a kind of playing with the world; it consists in seeing it—in part or in toto—as in a play, making a picture or spectacle of it. So far as we follow this impulse, we disembarrass ourselves of ourselves and the world as immediate experience, and view everything as outside us, detached from us—we contemplate rather than experience, even the terrible we can look upon undisturbed.[1] That is, the burden of actual life is momentarily lifted, and we may even enjoy rather than suffer. We may enjoy, though what we see would undo us, were it part of actual experience. It is Schopenhauer's doctrine over again. Still earlier Goethe had stated the essential principle of it:
"Was im Leben uns verdriesst
Man im Bilde gern geniesst."
Nietzsche clings to it now. Art is not a fanciful thing to him, a luxury—it meets a vital need: by it we are helped to go on living. l Not only the thinker, the highly organized nature has this need,—all who suffer experience it, and particularly the great laborious mass, too easily tempted to insurrection or to suicide.
V
Nietzsche preoccupations are now with old Greek life, and he borrows illustrations for his view of art largely from this field. Particularly does he attend to the religious festivals and the tragic drama. His view of the undertone of life among the Greeks, it should at once be said, is novel—at least to those of us who have our ideas chiefly from Winckelmann and Goethe, and think of "the light gracefulness of the old Greek paganism" (Carlyle), or of their moral and religious life sitting
- ↑ Birth of Tragedy, sects. 22, 24, 25.
