Section 8
Original German
Der Satyr wie der idyllische Schäfer unserer neueren Zeit sind Beide Ausgeburten einer auf das Ursprüngliche und Natürliche gerichteten Sehnsucht; aber mit welchem festen unerschrocknen Griffe fasste der Grieche nach seinem Waldmenschen, wie verschämt und weichlich tändelte der moderne Mensch mit dem Schmeichelbild eines zärtlichen flötenden weichgearteten Hirten! Die Natur, an der noch keine Erkenntniss gearbeitet, in der die Riegel der Cultur noch unerbrochen sind—das sah der Grieche in seinem Satyr, der ihm deshalb noch nicht mit dem Affen zusammenfiel. Im Gegentheil: es war das Urbild des Menschen, der Ausdruck seiner höchsten und stärksten Regungen, als begeisterter Schwärmer, den die Nähe des Gottes entzückt, als mitleidender Genosse, in dem sich das Leiden des Gottes wiederholt, als Weisheitsverkünder aus der tiefsten Brust der Natur heraus, als Sinnbild der geschlechtlichen Allgewalt der Natur, die der Grieche gewöhnt ist mit ehrfürchtigem Staunen zu betrachten. Der Satyr war etwas Erhabenes und Göttliches: so musste er besonders dem schmerzlich gebrochnen Blick des dionysischen Menschen dünken. Ihn hätte der geputzte, erlogene Schäfer beleidigt: auf den unverhüllten und unverkümmert grossartigen Schriftzügen der Natur weilte sein Auge in erhabener Befriedigung; hier war die Illusion der Cultur von dem Urbilde des Menschen weggewischt, hier enthüllte sich der wahre Mensch, der bärtige Satyr, der zu seinem Gotte aufjubelt. Vor ihm schrumpfte der Culturmensch zur lügenhaften Caricatur zusammen. Auch für diese Anfänge der tragischen Kunst hat Schiller Recht: der Chor ist eine lebendige Mauer gegen die anstürmende Wirklichkeit, weil er—der Satyrchor—das Dasein wahrhaftiger, wirklicher, vollständiger abbildet als der gemeinhin sich als einzige Realität achtende Culturmensch. Die Sphäre der Poesie liegt nicht ausserhalb der Welt, als eine phantastische Unmöglichkeit eines Dichterhirns: sie will das gerade Gegentheil sein, der ungeschminkte Ausdruck der Wahrheit und muss eben deshalb den lügenhaften Aufputz jener vermeinten Wirklichkeit des Culturmenschen von sich werfen. Der Contrast dieser eigentlichen Naturwahrheit und der sich als einzige Realität gebärdenden Culturlüge ist ein ähnlicher wie zwischen dem ewigen Kern der Dinge, dem Ding an sich, und der gesammten Erscheinungswelt: und wie die Tragödie mit ihrem metaphysischen Troste auf das ewige Leben jenes Daseinskernes, bei dem fortwährenden Untergange der Erscheinungen, hinweist, so spricht bereits die Symbolik des Satyrchors in einem Gleichniss jenes Urverhältniss zwischen Ding an sich und Erscheinung aus. Jener idyllische Schäfer des modernen Menschen ist nur ein Konterfei der ihm als Natur geltenden Summe von Bildungsillusionen; der dionysische Grieche will die Wahrheit und die Natur in ihrer höchsten Kraft—er sieht sich zum Satyr verzaubert.
Unter solchen Stimmungen und Erkenntnissen jubelt die schwärmende Schaar der Dionysusdiener: deren Macht sie selbst vor ihren eignen Augen verwandelt, so dass sie sich als wiederhergestellte Naturgenien, als Satyrn, zu erblicken wähnen. Die spätere Constitution des Tragödienchors ist die künstlerische Nachahmung jenes natürlichen Phänomens; bei der nun allerdings eine Scheidung von dionysischen Zuschauern und dionysischen Verzauberten nöthig wurde. Nur muss man sich immer gegenwärtig halten, dass das Publicum der attischen Tragödie sich selbst in dem Chore der Orchestra wiederfand, dass es im Grunde keinen Gegensatz von Publicum und Chor gab: denn alles ist nur ein grosser erhabener Chor von tanzenden und singenden Satyrn oder von solchen, welche sich durch diese Satyrn repräsentiren lassen. Das Schlegel'sche Wort muss sich uns hier in einem tieferen Sinne erschliessen. Der Chor ist der „idealische Zuschauer“, insofern er der einzige Schauer ist, der Schauer der Visionswelt der Scene. Ein Publicum von Zuschauern, wie wir es kennen, war den Griechen unbekannt: in ihren Theatern war es Jedem, bei dem in concentrischen Bogen sich erhebenden Terrassenbau des Zuschauerraumes, möglich, die gesammte Culturwelt um sich herum ganz eigentlich zu übersehen und in gesättigtem Hinschauen selbst Choreut sich zu wähnen. Nach dieser Einsicht dürfen wir den Chor, auf seiner primitiven Stufe in der Urtragödie, eine Selbstspiegelung des dionysischen Menschen nennen: welches Phänomen am deutlichsten durch den Prozess des Schauspielers zu machen ist, der, bei wahrhafter Begabung, sein von ihm darzustellendes Rollenbild zum Greifen wahrnehmbar vor seinen Augen schweben sieht. Der Satyrchor ist zu allererst eine Vision der dionysischen Masse, wie wiederum die Welt der Bühne eine Vision dieses Satyrchors ist: die Kraft dieser Vision ist stark genug, um gegen den Eindruck der „Realität“, gegen die rings auf den Sitzreihen gelagerten Bildungsmenschen den Blick stumpf und unempfindlich zu machen. Die Form des griechischen Theaters erinnert an ein einsames Gebirgsthal: die Architektur der Scene erscheint wie ein leuchtendes Wolkenbild, welches die im Gebirge herumschwärmenden Bacchen von der Höhe aus erblicken, als die herrliche Umrahmung, in deren Mitte ihnen das Bild des Dionysus offenbar wird.
Jene künstlerische Urerscheinung, die wir hier zur Erklärung des Tragödienchors zur Sprache bringen, ist, bei unserer gelehrtenhaften Anschauung über die elementaren künstlerischen Prozesse, fast anstössig; während nichts ausgemachter sein kann, als dass der Dichter nur dadurch Dichter ist, dass er von Gestalten sich umringt sieht, die vor ihm leben und handeln und in deren innerstes Wesen er hineinblickt. Durch eine eigenthümliche Schwäche der modernen Begabung sind wir geneigt, uns das aesthetische Urphänomen zu complicirt und abstract vorzustellen. Die Metapher ist für den ächten Dichter nicht eine rhetorische Figur, sondern ein stellvertretendes Bild, das ihm wirklich, an Stelle eines Begriffes, vorschwebt. Der Character ist für ihn nicht etwas aus zusammengesuchten Einzelzügen componirtes Ganzes, sondern eine vor seinen Augen aufdringlich lebendige Person, die von der gleichen Vision des Malers sich nur durch das fortwährende Weiterleben und Weiterhandeln unterscheidet. Wodurch schildert Homer so viel anschaulicher als alle Dichter? Weil er um so viel mehr anschaut. Wir reden über Poesie so abstract, weil wir alle schlechte Dichter zu sein pflegen. Im Grunde ist das aesthetische Phänomen einfach; man habe nur die Fähigkeit, fortwährend ein lebendiges Spiel zu sehen und immerfort von Geisterschaaren umringt zu leben, so ist man Dichter; man fühle nur den Trieb, sich selbst zu verwandeln und aus anderen Leibern und Seelen herauszureden, so ist man Dramatiker.
Die dionysische Erregung ist im Stande, einer ganzen Masse diese künstlerische Begabung mitzutheilen, sich von einer solchen Geisterschaar umringt zu sehen, mit der sie sich innerlich eins weiss. Dieser Prozess des Tragödienchors ist das dramatische Urphänomen: sich selbst vor sich verwandelt zu sehen und jetzt zu handeln, als ob man wirklich in einen andern Leib, in einen andern Charakter eingegangen wäre. Dieser Prozess steht an dem Anfang der Entwickelung des Dramas. Hier ist etwas Anderes als der Rhapsode, der mit seinen Bildern nicht verschmilzt, sondern sie, dem Maler ähnlich, mit betrachtendem Auge ausser sich sieht; hier ist bereits ein Aufgeben des Individuums durch Einkehr in eine fremde Natur. Und zwar tritt dieses Phänomen epidemisch auf: eine ganze Schaar fühlt sich in dieser Weise verzaubert. Der Dithyramb ist deshalb wesentlich von jedem anderen Chorgesange unterschieden. Die Jungfrauen, die, mit Lorbeerzweigen in der Hand, feierlich zum Tempel des Apollo ziehn und dabei ein Prozessionslied singen, bleiben, wer sie sind, und behalten ihren bürgerlichen Namen: der dithyrambische Chor ist ein Chor von Verwandelten, bei denen ihre bürgerliche Vergangenheit, ihre sociale Stellung völlig vergessen ist: sie sind die zeitlosen, ausserhalb aller Gesellschaftssphären lebenden Diener ihres Gottes geworden. Alle andere Chorlyrik der Hellenen ist nur eine ungeheure Steigerung des apollinischen Einzelsängers; während im Dithyramb eine Gemeinde von unbewussten Schauspielern vor uns steht, die sich selbst unter einander als verwandelt ansehen.
Die Verzauberung ist die Voraussetzung aller dramatischen Kunst. In dieser Verzauberung sieht sich der dionysische Schwärmer als Satyr, und als Satyr wiederum schaut er den Gott d.h. er sieht in seiner Verwandlung eine neue Vision ausser sich, als apollinische Vollendung seines Zustandes. Mit dieser neuen Vision ist das Drama vollständig.
Nach dieser Erkenntniss haben wir die griechische Tragödie als den dionysischen Chor zu verstehen, der sich immer von neuem wieder in einer apollinischen Bilderwelt entladet. Jene Chorpartien, mit denen die Tragödie durchflochten ist, sind also gewissermaassen der Mutterschooss des ganzen sogenannten Dialogs d.h. der gesammten Bühnenwelt, des eigentlichen Dramas. In mehreren auf einander folgenden Entladungen strahlt dieser Urgrund der Tragödie jene Vision des Dramas aus: die durchaus Traumerscheinung und insofern epischer Natur ist, andrerseits aber, als Objectivation eines dionysischen Zustandes, nicht die apollinische Erlösung im Scheine, sondern im Gegentheil das Zerbrechen des Individuums und sein Einswerden mit dem Ursein darstellt. Somit ist das Drama die apollinische Versinnlichung dionysischer Erkenntnisse und Wirkungen und dadurch wie durch eine ungeheure Kluft vom Epos abgeschieden.
Der Chor der griechischen Tragödie, das Symbol der gesammten dionysisch erregten Masse, findet an dieser unserer Auffassung seine volle Erklärung. Während wir, mit der Gewöhnung an die Stellung eines Chors auf der modernen Bühne, zumal eines Opernchors, gar nicht begreifen konnten, wie jener tragische Chor der Griechen älter, ursprünglicher, ja wichtiger sein sollte, als die eigentliche „Action“,—wie dies doch so deutlich überliefert war—während wir wiederum mit jener überlieferten hohen Wichtigkeit und Ursprünglichkeit nicht reimen konnten, warum er doch nur aus niedrigen dienenden Wesen, ja zuerst nur aus bocksartigen Satyrn zusammengesetzt worden sei, während uns die Orchestra vor der Scene immer ein Räthsel blieb, sind wir jetzt zu der Einsicht gekommen, dass die Scene sammt der Action im Grunde und ursprünglich nur als Vision gedacht wurde, dass die einzige „Realität“ eben der Chor ist, der die Vision aus sich erzeugt und von ihr mit der ganzen Symbolik des Tanzes, des Tones und des Wortes redet. Dieser Chor schaut in seiner Vision seinen Herrn und Meister Dionysus und ist darum ewig der dienende Chor: er sieht, wie dieser, der Gott, leidet und sich verherrlicht, und handelt deshalb selbst nicht. Bei dieser, dem Gotte gegenüber durchaus dienenden Stellung ist er doch der höchste, nämlich dionysische Ausdruck der Natur und redet darum, wie diese, in der Begeisterung Orakel- und Weisheitssprüche: als der mitleidende ist er zugleich der weise, aus dem Herzen der Welt die Wahrheit verkündende. So entsteht denn jene phantastische und so anstössig scheinende Figur des weisen und begeisterten Satyrs, der zugleich „der tumbe Mensch“ im Gegensatz zum Gotte ist: Abbild der Natur und ihrer stärksten Triebe, ja Symbol derselben und zugleich Verkünder ihrer Weisheit und Kunst: Musiker, Dichter, Tänzer, Geisterseher in einer Person.
Dionysus, der eigentliche Bühnenheld und Mittelpunkt der Vision, ist gemäss dieser Erkenntniss und gemäss der Ueberlieferung, zuerst, in der allerältesten Periode der Tragödie, nicht wahrhaft vorhanden, sondern wird nur als vorhanden vorgestellt: d.h. ursprünglich ist die Tragödie nur „Chor“ und nicht „Drama“. Später wird nun der Versuch gemacht, den Gott als einen realen zu zeigen und die Visionsgestalt sammt der verklärenden Umrahmung als jedem Auge sichtbar darzustellen; damit beginnt das „Drama“ im engeren Sinne. Jetzt bekommt der dithyrambische Chor die Aufgabe, die Stimmung der Zuhörer bis zu dem Grade dionysisch anzuregen, dass sie, wenn der tragische Held auf der Bühne erscheint, nicht etwa den unförmlich maskirten Menschen sehen, sondern eine gleichsam aus ihrer eignen Verzückung geborene Visionsgestalt. Denken wir uns Admet mit tiefem Sinnen seiner jüngst abgeschiedenen Gattin Alcestis gedenkend und ganz im geistigen Anschauen derselben sich verzehrend—wie ihm nun plötzlich ein ähnlich gestaltetes, ähnlich schreitendes Frauenbild in Verhüllung entgegengeführt wird: denken wir uns seine plötzliche zitternde Unruhe, sein stürmisches Vergleichen, seine instinctive Ueberzeugung—so haben wir ein Analogon zu der Empfindung, mit der der dionysisch erregte Zuschauer den Gott auf der Bühne heranschreiten sah, mit dessen Leiden er bereits eins geworden ist. Unwillkürlich übertrug er das ganze magisch vor seiner Seele zitternde Bild des Gottes auf jene maskirte Gestalt und löste ihre Realität gleichsam in eine geisterhafte Unwirklichkeit auf. Dies ist der apollinische Traumeszustand, in dem die Welt des Tages sich verschleiert und eine neue Welt, deutlicher, verständlicher, ergreifender als jene und doch schattengleicher, in fortwährendem Wechsel sich unserem Auge neu gebiert. Demgemäss erkennen wir in der Tragödie einen durchgreifenden Stilgegensatz: Sprache, Farbe, Beweglichkeit, Dynamik der Rede treten in der dionysischen Lyrik des Chors und andrerseits in der apollinischen Traumwelt der Scene als völlig gesonderte Sphären des Ausdrucks aus einander. Die apollinischen Erscheinungen, in denen sich Dionysus objectivirt, sind nicht mehr „ein ewiges Meer, ein wechselnd Weben, ein glühend Leben“, wie es die Musik des Chors ist, nicht mehr jene nur empfundenen, nicht zum Bilde verdichteten Kräfte, in denen der begeisterte Dionysusdiener die Nähe des Gottes spürt: jetzt spricht, von der Scene aus, die Deutlichkeit und Festigkeit der epischen Gestaltung zu ihm, jetzt redet Dionysus nicht mehr durch Kräfte, sondern als epischer Held, fast mit der Sprache Homers.
Musean translation
Complete machine-assisted Musean translation of the 1886 issue, with the Attempt at Self-Criticism and the Preface to Richard Wagner, made directly from the German of the Fritzsch Neue Ausgabe and read against its page images; reviewed against the German before publication.
The satyr and the idyllic shepherd of our more recent age are both offspring of a longing directed toward the primal and the natural; but with what a firm, undaunted grasp the Greek reached for his forest man, and how bashfully and limply the modern human being dallied with the flattering image of a tender, fluting, soft-natured herdsman! Nature on which no knowledge has yet labored, in which the bolts of culture are still unbroken—that is what the Greek saw in his satyr, which for that reason was not yet equated with the ape. On the contrary: it was the archetype of the human being, the expression of the human being’s highest and strongest stirrings—as an inspired reveler whom the nearness of the god enraptures, as a compassionate companion in whom the god’s suffering is repeated, as a proclaimer of wisdom out of the deepest breast of nature, as an emblem of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek is accustomed to contemplate with reverent wonder. The satyr was something sublime and divine: so he had to appear, above all to the painfully shattered gaze of the Dionysian human being. The spruced-up, fabricated shepherd would have been an insult to that human being, whose eye rested in sublime satisfaction on the unveiled and undiminished grandeur of nature’s handwriting; here the illusion of culture was wiped away from the archetype of the human being, here the true human being was revealed, the bearded satyr who cries out in jubilation to his god. Before this figure the human being of culture shrank into a lying caricature. Schiller is right about these beginnings of tragic art too: the chorus is a living wall against the onrushing reality, because it—the satyr chorus—depicts existence more truthfully, more really, more completely than the human being of culture, who commonly esteems himself the only reality. The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, as a fantastic impossibility of a poet’s brain: it wants to be precisely the opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and for that very reason it must cast off the lying finery of that supposed reality of the human being of culture. The contrast between this genuine truth of nature and the lie of culture, which poses as the sole reality, is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing in itself, and the whole world of appearances: and as tragedy, with its metaphysical consolation, points to the eternal life of that core of existence amid the ceaseless perishing of appearances, so the symbolism of the satyr chorus already expresses in a simile that primal relation between the thing in itself and appearance. That idyllic shepherd of the modern human being is only a likeness of the sum of illusions of cultivation that passes for nature in his eyes; the Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature at their highest power—he sees himself enchanted into a satyr.
Under such moods and insights the reveling throng of the servants of Dionysus exults: their power transforms them before their own eyes, so that they fancy they behold themselves as restored spirits of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the artistic imitation of that natural phenomenon; in which, to be sure, a separation of Dionysian spectators from the Dionysian enchanted then became necessary. Only one must always keep in mind that the audience of Attic tragedy found itself again in the chorus of the orchestra, that at bottom there was no opposition between audience and chorus: for everything is only one great, sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs, or of those who let themselves be represented by these satyrs. Schlegel’s phrase must disclose itself to us here in a deeper sense. The chorus is the “ideal spectator” insofar as it is the only beholder, the beholder of the visionary world of the stage. An audience of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks: in their theaters, thanks to the terraced structure of the auditorium rising in concentric arcs, it was possible for everyone quite literally to look out over the entire cultural world all around and, in sated gazing, to fancy themselves a chorist. By this insight we may call the chorus, at its primitive stage in primal tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian human being: a phenomenon that can be made clearest by the process of the actor, who, when truly gifted, sees the image of the role to be portrayed hovering before their eyes, so palpable it can almost be grasped. The satyr chorus is first of all a vision of the Dionysian mass, just as, in turn, the world of the stage is a vision of this satyr chorus: the power of this vision is strong enough to make the gaze dull and insensible to the impression of “reality,” to the people of cultivation arrayed on the tiers of seats all around. The form of the Greek theater recalls a lonely mountain valley: the architecture of the stage appears like a luminous cloud-image, which the Bacchantes roving through the mountains behold from the heights, as the glorious frame in whose midst the image of Dionysus is revealed to them.
That artistic primal phenomenon, which we bring up here in explanation of the tragic chorus, is, given our bookish view of the elementary artistic processes, almost offensive; whereas nothing can be more certain than that poets are poets only because they see themselves surrounded by figures who live and act before them and into whose innermost essence they look. Through a peculiar weakness of modern talent we are inclined to imagine the aesthetic primal phenomenon as too complicated and abstract. For the genuine poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a substitute image that truly hovers before him in place of a concept. A character is for the poet not a whole composed of collected individual traits, but an insistently living person before the poet’s eyes, who differs from the corresponding vision of the painter only by continuing to live and continuing to act. By what means does Homer depict so much more vividly than all other poets? Because he beholds so much more. We talk about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be bad poets. At bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is simple; if one only has the capacity to see a living play continually and to live always surrounded by hosts of spirits, then one is a poet; if one only feels the drive to transform oneself and to speak out of other bodies and souls, then one is a dramatist.
Dionysian excitement is capable of communicating to an entire mass this artistic gift of seeing itself surrounded by such a host of spirits, with whom it knows itself inwardly to be one. This process of the tragic chorus is the dramatic primal phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before oneself and now to act as if one had really entered into another body, another character. This process stands at the beginning of the development of drama. Here is something other than the rhapsode, who does not fuse with his images but, like the painter, sees them outside himself with a contemplative eye; here there is already a giving up of the individual through entry into an alien nature. And indeed this phenomenon appears epidemically: a whole throng feels itself enchanted in this way. The dithyramb is therefore essentially different from every other choral song. The maidens who, with laurel branches in hand, process solemnly to the temple of Apollo and sing a processional song as they go remain who they are and keep their civic names: the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of the transformed, in whom their civic past, their social standing, is utterly forgotten: they have become the timeless servants of their god, living outside all spheres of society. All other choral lyric of the Hellenes is merely an immense heightening of the Apollonian solo singer; whereas in the dithyramb there stands before us a community of unconscious actors who see themselves, among one another, as transformed.
Enchantment is the presupposition of all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr in turn beholds the god, that is, in the transformation he sees a new vision outside himself, as the Apollonian consummation of his state. With this new vision the drama is complete.
According to this insight, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus, which again and again discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. Those choral parts with which tragedy is interwoven are therefore, in a certain sense, the womb of the whole so-called dialogue, that is, of the entire world of the stage, of the drama proper. In several successive discharges this primal ground of tragedy radiates forth that vision of the drama: which is thoroughly a dream appearance and in that respect epic in nature, but which, on the other hand, as the objectification of a Dionysian state, represents not the Apollonian redemption in semblance but, on the contrary, the shattering of the individual and its becoming one with primordial being. Thus the drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian insights and effects, and is thereby separated from the epic as by an immense chasm.
The chorus of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the entire mass in Dionysian excitement, finds its full explanation in this view of ours. While we, accustomed to the position of a chorus on the modern stage, above all an opera chorus, could not grasp at all how that tragic chorus of the Greeks should be older, more original, indeed more important than the “action” proper—as tradition had so clearly handed down—while we, again, could not reconcile with that handed-down high importance and originality the claim that the chorus was nevertheless composed only of lowly, serving beings, indeed at first only of goatish satyrs, while the orchestra in front of the stage always remained a riddle to us, we have now come to the insight that the stage together with the action was at bottom and originally conceived only as a vision, that the sole “reality” is precisely the chorus, which generates the vision out of itself and speaks of it with the whole symbolism of dance, tone, and word. In its vision this chorus beholds its lord and master Dionysus and is therefore eternally the serving chorus: it sees how he, the god, suffers and glorifies himself, and therefore does not itself act. In this position of utter service toward the god, it is nonetheless the highest, that is, the Dionysian, expression of nature, and therefore speaks, like nature, oracles and sayings of wisdom in its inspiration: as the compassionate one it is at the same time the wise one, proclaiming truth out of the heart of the world. Thus arises that fantastic and seemingly so offensive figure of the wise and inspired satyr, who is at the same time “the simple human being” in contrast to the god: image of nature and of its strongest drives, indeed symbol of them and at the same time herald of its wisdom and art: musician, poet, dancer, spirit-seer in one person.
Dionysus, the true hero of the stage and center of the vision, is, according to this insight and according to tradition, at first, in the very oldest period of tragedy, not truly present, but is only imagined as present: that is, originally tragedy is only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt is made to show the god as a real one and to present the visionary figure, together with its transfiguring frame, as visible to every eye; with this the “drama” in the narrower sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus is given the task of stirring the mood of the listeners to such a Dionysian pitch that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not see the clumsily masked human being but rather a visionary figure born, as it were, of their own rapture. Let us imagine Admetus, in deep brooding, remembering his recently departed wife Alcestis and wholly consuming himself in the mental contemplation of her—how now suddenly a veiled female figure, similar in form, similar in gait, is led toward him: let us imagine his sudden trembling unrest, his stormy comparing, his instinctive conviction—then we have an analogue of the feeling with which the spectator in Dionysian excitement saw the god step forward on the stage, the god with whose suffering that spectator had already become one. Involuntarily the spectator transferred the whole image of the god, magically trembling before the soul, onto that masked figure and dissolved its reality, as it were, into a ghostly unreality. This is the Apollonian dream state, in which the world of day veils itself and a new world, clearer, more comprehensible, more moving than that one and yet more shadowlike, is born anew before our eyes in constant change. Accordingly we recognize in tragedy a thoroughgoing opposition of style: language, color, mobility, dynamics of speech diverge, in the Dionysian lyric of the chorus on the one hand and in the Apollonian dream world of the stage on the other, into wholly separate spheres of expression. The Apollonian appearances in which Dionysus objectifies himself are no longer “an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life,” as the music of the chorus is, no longer those merely felt forces, not condensed into an image, in which the inspired servant of Dionysus senses the nearness of the god: now the clarity and firmness of epic form speaks to the servant from the stage, now Dionysus speaks no longer through forces but as an epic hero, almost in the language of Homer.
Plain English translation
Complete machine-assisted Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the same German text, without reference to the Musean edition or to any English translation.
The satyr and the idyllic shepherd of our more recent age are both products of a longing for the original and the natural. But with what a firm, fearless grip the Greek seized his forest man, and how bashfully and softly the modern person toyed with the flattering picture of a tender, fluting, soft-natured shepherd! In his satyr the Greek saw nature on which no knowledge had yet worked, nature in which the bolts of culture had not yet been broken open. That is why, for him, the satyr did not yet merge with the ape. On the contrary, the satyr was the original image of the human being, the expression of the human being’s highest and strongest stirrings. He was an inspired reveler, delighted by the nearness of the god. He was a suffering companion, in whom the suffering of the god is repeated. He was a proclaimer of wisdom out of the deepest breast of nature. He was a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek is used to viewing with reverent wonder. The satyr was something sublime and divine. He had to seem so especially to the painfully broken gaze of the Dionysian person. The dressed-up, lying shepherd would have offended such a person. His eye rested with sublime satisfaction on nature’s grand script, unveiled and undiminished. Here the illusion of culture was wiped away from the original image of the human being. Here the true human being revealed himself, the bearded satyr, shouting for joy up to his god. Before him the cultured person shrank into a lying caricature. For these beginnings of tragic art, too, Schiller is right: the chorus is a living wall against onrushing reality, because it—the satyr chorus—portrays existence more truthfully, more really, and more completely than the cultured person, who commonly takes himself to be the only reality. The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, as the fantastic impossibility of a poet’s brain. It wants to be exactly the opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and for that very reason it must throw off the lying finery of the supposed reality of the cultured person. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture, which poses as the only reality, is like the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing in itself, and the whole world of appearances. Tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of that core of existence, amid the continual passing away of appearances. In the same way, the symbolism of the satyr chorus already expresses in a likeness that original relationship between the thing in itself and appearance. That idyllic shepherd of the modern person is only a counterfeit of the sum of illusions of education that he takes for nature. The Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their highest force—he sees himself enchanted into a satyr.
Under such moods and insights the ecstatic crowd of Dionysus’s servants rejoices. Their power transforms them even before their own eyes, so that they imagine they see themselves as restored spirits of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the artistic imitation of that natural phenomenon. With it, however, a separation of Dionysian spectators from those under the Dionysian spell became necessary. Only we must always keep in mind that the audience of Attic tragedy found itself again in the chorus of the orchestra, and that at bottom there was no opposition between audience and chorus. For everything is only one great, sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs, or of those who let themselves be represented by these satyrs. Schlegel’s saying must open itself to us here in a deeper sense. The chorus is the “ideal spectator” insofar as it is the only beholder, the beholder of the visionary world of the stage. An audience of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theaters the seating area was built in terraces rising in concentric arcs. This made it possible for everyone to actually survey the whole cultured world around them, and in full, satisfied gazing to imagine themselves a member of the chorus. From this insight we may call the chorus, at its primitive stage in original tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian person. This phenomenon can be made clearest by the process of the actor. If truly gifted, the actor sees the image of the role he is to play hovering before his eyes so that he can almost touch it. The satyr chorus is first of all a vision of the Dionysian mass, just as the world of the stage is in turn a vision of this satyr chorus. The force of this vision is strong enough to make the gaze dull and insensitive to the impression of “reality,” to the educated people lounging in the rows of seats all around. The form of the Greek theater recalls a lonely mountain valley. The architecture of the stage looks like a shining cloud image that the Bacchae, roaming in the mountains, see from the heights. It is the glorious frame in whose middle the image of Dionysus is revealed to them.
That original artistic phenomenon, which we bring up here to explain the tragic chorus, is almost offensive given our scholarly view of the elementary artistic processes. Yet nothing can be more certain than that the poet is a poet only because he sees himself surrounded by figures who live and act before him, and into whose innermost being he looks. Because of a peculiar weakness of modern talent, we tend to imagine the original aesthetic phenomenon as too complicated and abstract. For the genuine poet, the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a substitute image that really hovers before him in place of a concept. For him a character is not a whole composed of pieced-together individual traits, but a person who is insistently alive before his eyes. This person differs from a painter’s comparable vision only in that it keeps living and acting on. What makes Homer describe things so much more vividly than all other poets? Because he looks at so much more. We talk about poetry so abstractly because we are all in the habit of being bad poets. At bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is simple. If one only has the ability to see a lively play continuously and to live always surrounded by crowds of spirits, one is a poet. If one only feels the urge to transform oneself and to speak out of other bodies and souls, one is a dramatist.
Dionysian excitement is able to pass this artistic gift on to a whole crowd: to see itself surrounded by such a host of spirits, with whom it knows itself to be inwardly one. This process of the tragic chorus is the original dramatic phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before oneself, and now to act as if one had really entered another body, another character. This process stands at the beginning of the development of drama. Here is something different from the rhapsode, who does not fuse with his images but, like the painter, sees them with a contemplative eye outside himself. Here there is already a giving up of the individual by entering into a foreign nature. And this phenomenon appears like an epidemic: a whole crowd feels enchanted in this way. The dithyramb is therefore essentially different from every other choral song. The maidens who solemnly walk to the temple of Apollo with laurel branches in their hands, singing a processional song, remain who they are and keep their civic names. The dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of transformed people, in whom their civic past and their social position are completely forgotten. They have become the timeless servants of their god, living outside all spheres of society. All other choral lyric of the Greeks is only an enormous intensification of the Apollonian individual singer. In the dithyramb, by contrast, a community of unconscious actors stands before us, who look at one another as transformed.
Enchantment is the precondition of all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr he in turn beholds the god, that is, he sees in his transformation a new vision outside himself, as the Apollonian completion of his state. With this new vision the drama is complete.
From this insight we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus that again and again discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. Those choral parts with which tragedy is interwoven are thus, in a way, the mother’s womb of the whole so-called dialogue, that is, of the entire world of the stage, of the drama proper. In several successive discharges, this original ground of tragedy radiates out that vision of the drama. The vision is thoroughly a dream appearance and in that respect epic in nature. On the other hand, as the objectification of a Dionysian state, it represents not Apollonian redemption in semblance but, on the contrary, the shattering of the individual and his becoming one with primal being. The drama is thus the Apollonian way of making Dionysian insights and effects perceptible to the senses, and by this it is separated from the epic as by an enormous gulf.
The chorus of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the whole Dionysian-excited mass, finds its full explanation in this view of ours. We were used to the position of a chorus on the modern stage, especially an opera chorus. So we could not understand at all how the tragic chorus of the Greeks could be older, more original, indeed more important than the real “action”—as the tradition so clearly reported. We also could not reconcile that reported high importance and originality with the fact that the chorus was nevertheless composed of lowly, serving beings—at first even only of goatlike satyrs. And the orchestra in front of the stage always remained a riddle to us. Now we have come to see that the stage, together with the action, was at bottom and originally conceived only as a vision. The only “reality” is the chorus, which generates the vision out of itself and speaks of it with the whole symbolism of dance, tone, and word. In its vision this chorus beholds its lord and master Dionysus, and is therefore eternally the serving chorus. It sees how he, the god, suffers and glorifies himself, and therefore does not act itself. In this position of complete service toward the god, it is nevertheless the highest, that is, the Dionysian, expression of nature. For that reason it speaks, like nature, in inspiration, in oracles and sayings of wisdom. As the one who suffers with the god, it is at the same time the wise one, proclaiming truth out of the heart of the world. So arises that fantastic and apparently offensive figure of the wise and inspired satyr, who is at the same time “the simple-minded human being” in contrast to the god. He is an image of nature and its strongest drives, indeed a symbol of them, and at the same time a proclaimer of its wisdom and art: musician, poet, dancer, seer of spirits in one person.
Dionysus, the actual hero of the stage and center of the vision, is, according to this insight and according to tradition, not truly present at first, in the very oldest period of tragedy. He is only imagined as present. That is, originally tragedy is only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt is made to show the god as a real one, and to present the visionary figure, together with its transfiguring frame, as visible to every eye. With this the “drama” in the narrower sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus is given the task of exciting the mood of the listeners to such a Dionysian degree that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not see the misshapen, masked man, but a visionary figure born, as it were, from their own rapture. Imagine Admetus, deep in thought, remembering his wife Alcestis, who has just died, and consuming himself entirely in seeing her with his mind—how suddenly a veiled female figure, similar in shape and similar in walk, is led toward him. Imagine his sudden, trembling unrest, his stormy comparing, his instinctive conviction—and we have an analogue to the feeling with which the Dionysian-excited spectator saw the god stride toward him on the stage, the god with whose suffering the spectator had already become one. Involuntarily the spectator transferred the whole image of the god, trembling magically before his soul, onto that masked figure, and dissolved its reality, as it were, into a ghostly unreality. This is the Apollonian dream state, in which the world of day is veiled, and a new world, clearer, more understandable, more gripping than the first and yet more shadowlike, is born anew before our eyes in continual change. Accordingly we recognize in tragedy a thoroughgoing contrast of style. Language, color, mobility, and dynamics of speech come apart as wholly separate spheres of expression, on one side in the Dionysian lyric of the chorus and on the other in the Apollonian dream world of the stage. The Apollonian appearances in which Dionysus objectifies himself are no longer “an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life,” as the music of the chorus is. They are no longer those merely felt forces, not condensed into an image, in which the inspired servant of Dionysus senses the nearness of the god. Now the clarity and firmness of epic shaping speaks to him from the stage. Now Dionysus no longer speaks through forces, but as an epic hero, almost in the language of Homer.
About this section
Section 8 is part of The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is section 16 of 33 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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