at times of a peculiar intimacy in music—it touches us, takes hold of us, seems to reveal hidden depths within us, as nothing else does. Schopenhauer called it the most metaphysical of the arts, meaning that it comes nearest to expressing the inmost reality of things, which to his mind was will. The other arts are at two removes from this reality; not only is it objects which they give us, but these objects are themselves representative of objects. Music, on the contrary, stands directly related to it—when we listen to music, only this lightest, most insubstantial, most transparent of all objects, sound, stands between us and the reality.
Now there are feelings of the moment, and there is what we may call the ground-tone of our life—our feeling about life, our attitude to it, whether of affirmation or negation, in short, the set of our will as a whole. It is music of the deeper, more significant sort that interested Nietzsche, and it was this kind of music which he thought lay at the basis of the Greek tragic drama. It was of religious inspiration, reflected general moods about life, was a part of the worship of Dionysus. The full title of Nietzsche book on Greek Tragedy was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. In it he points out that the earliest form of tragedy was simply song and gesture (dance), that the dialogue came later and was a secondary matter. Even down to Sophocles the chorus was the central thing. Hence in that revival of a tragic culture, toward which Nietzsche's thoughts were turning, it was natural that music should have a central place,—it was natural too to think that music would render vital service in preparing the way for that culture, by stirring the feelings, the mood, on which it would ultimately rest. a
II
The capital point in this theory is that the musical strains are expressive of feeling directly, neither copying external objects nor produced for objective effect—the purity of music lies in its lyric quality. Just in proportion to its genuineness would, Nietzsche held, the new music avail.[1] The Dionysian mænads had no thought whether others were observing them
- ↑ Cf. Birth of Tragedy, sects. 19, 22, 24.
