e
learned persons who study Greek texts, among the roots of things, in the
very making of the universe. Art arises, he tells us, from the conflict
of the two creative spirits, symbolised by the Greeks in the two gods,
Apollo and Dionysus; and he names the one the Apollonian spirit, which
we see in plastic art, and the other the Dionysiac spirit, which we see
in music. Apollo is the god of dreams, Dionysus the god of intoxication;
the one represents for us the world of appearances, the other is, as it
were, the voice of things in themselves. The chorus, then, which arose
out of the hymns to Dionysus, is the "lyric cry," the vital ecstasy; the
drama is the projection into vision, into a picture, of the exterior,
temporary world of forms. "We now see that the stage and the action are
conceived only as vision: that the sole 'reality' is precisely the
chorus, which itself produces the vision, and expresses it by the aid of
the whole symbolism of dance, sound, and word." In the admirable phrase
of Schiller, the chorus is "a living rampart against reality," against
that false reality of daily life which is a mere drapery of
civilisation, and has nothing to do with the primitive reality of
nature. The realistic drama begins with Euripides; and Euripides, the
casuist, the friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the true
decadent, an "instrument of decomposition," the slayer of art, the
father of modern science), brings tragedy to an end, as he substitutes
pathos for action, thought for contemplation, and passionate sentiments
for the primitive ecstasy. "Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms,
an optimist dialectic drives the music out of tragedy: that is to say,
destroys the very essence of tragedy, an essence which can be
interpreted only as a manifestation and objectivation of Dionysiac
states, as a visible symbol of music, as the dream-world of a Dionysiac
intoxication." There are many pages, scattered throughout his work, in
which Pater has dealt with some of the Greek problems very much in the
spirit of Nietzsche; with that problem, for instance, of the "blitheness
and serenity" of the Greek spirit, and of the gulf of horror over which
it seems to rest, suspended as on the wings of the condor. That myth of
Dionysus Zagreus, "a Bacchus who had been in hell," which is the
foundation of the marvellous new myth of "Denys l'Auxerrois," seems
always to be in the mind of Nietzsche, though indeed he refers to it but
once,