ever pressing and pushing into life, the boundless fertility of the World-Will; at the very moment in which we are stung by the pain, we share also in the immeasurable creative pleasure; and so, despite fear and pity, we are happy and kept to life. t
The Dionysiac experience is evidently very different from that of the Apollinic dreamer and seer, and the question is, what has it to do with art at all? Nietzsche says that the Dionysiac man is an art-work, not an artist. For he is not so much looking at life as in a picture and finding relief in detaching it from himself, as entering it afresh, re-experiencing its joy and its pain, saying yes even to what is tragic in it. In short, the Apollinic type man looks on life, the Dionysiac relives it. The truth is, the Dionysiac experience is material for art, it is a subject that may be artistically treated—and this is what Nietzsche really (or logically) means, u the justification for his speaking of a second art-impulse being simply that the material has been so used. For out of the Dionysian festival grew that supreme form of Greek art, the tragic drama; this may be briefly characterized as an Apollinic treatment of the Dionysiac experience—a marriage of the two. If we fancy to ourselves a worshiper, who has wandered off from the rest in his intoxication and mystic self-oblivion, sinking to the ground for a moment, and, as he lies there, seeing himself and his rapt state and union with the God as in a dream, we have the Dionysiac experience and the rudiments of an Apollinic vision united in the same person. v It is just such a blending of diverse elements that lies, Nietzsche thinks, at the basis of Greek tragedy. w The chorus, as is commonly recognized, was the essential feature of the drama, and the chorus is really a transformed band of Dionysus worshipers. They are satyrs, even as the original worshipers dressed themselves in wild costumes to imitate the God.[1] The action on their part is entirely song and dance—the dialogue is an addition, and it is something in which they have no part. x The song is really a transformation of the original dithyramb, "the beautiful song of Dionysus," as Archilochus called it. According to what Nietzsche deems incontestable tradition, the sole subject of Greek tragedy in its very earliest form was the sufferings of
- ↑ Cf. also Erwin Rohde, Psyche, II, 15.
