Section 12
Original German
Bevor wir diesen anderen Zuschauer bei Namen nennen, verharren wir hier einen Augenblick, um uns jenen früher geschilderten Eindruck des Zwiespältigen und Incommensurabeln im Wesen der aeschyleischen Tragödie selbst in's Gedächtniss zurückzurufen. Denken wir an unsere eigene Befremdung dem Chore und dem tragischen Helden jener Tragödie gegenüber, die wir beide mit unseren Gewohnheiten ebensowenig wie mit der Ueberlieferung zu reimen wussten — bis wir jene Doppelheit selbst als Ursprung und Wesen der griechischen Tragödie wiederfanden, als den Ausdruck zweier in einander gewobenen Kunsttriebe, des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen.
Jenes ursprüngliche und allmächtige dionysische Element aus der Tragödie auszuscheiden und sie rein und neu auf undionysischer Kunst, Sitte und Weltbetrachtung aufzubauen — dies ist die jetzt in heller Beleuchtung sich uns enthüllende Tendenz des Euripides.
Euripides selbst hat am Abend seines Lebens die Frage nach dem Werth und der Bedeutung dieser Tendenz in einem Mythus seinen Zeitgenossen auf das Nachdrücklichste vorgelegt. Darf überhaupt das Dionysische bestehn? Ist es nicht mit Gewalt aus dem hellenischen Boden auszurotten? Gewiss, sagt uns der Dichter, wenn es nur möglich wäre: aber der Gott Dionysus ist zu mächtig; der verständigste Gegner — wie Pentheus in den „Bacchen“ — wird unvermuthet von ihm bezaubert und läuft nachher mit dieser Verzauberung in sein Verhängniss. Das Urtheil der beiden Greise Kadmus und Tiresias scheint auch das Urtheil des greisen Dichters zu sein: das Nachdenken der klügsten Einzelnen werfe jene alten Volkstraditionen, jene sich ewig fortpflanzende Verehrung des Dionysus nicht um, ja es gezieme sich, solchen wunderbaren Kräften gegenüber, mindestens eine diplomatisch vorsichtige Theilnahme zu zeigen: wobei es aber immer noch möglich sei, dass der Gott an einer so lauen Betheiligung Anstoss nehme und den Diplomaten — wie hier den Kadmus — schliesslich in einen Drachen verwandle. Dies sagt uns ein Dichter, der mit heroischer Kraft ein langes Leben hindurch dem Dionysus widerstanden hat — um am Ende desselben mit einer Glorification seines Gegners und einem Selbstmorde seine Laufbahn zu schliessen, einem Schwindelnden gleich, der, um nur dem entsetzlichen, nicht mehr erträglichen Wirbel zu entgehn, sich vom Thurme herunterstürzt. Jene Tragödie ist ein Protest gegen die Ausführbarkeit seiner Tendenz; ach, und sie war bereits ausgeführt! Das Wunderbare war geschehn: als der Dichter widerrief, hatte bereits seine Tendenz gesiegt. Dionysus war bereits von der tragischen Bühne verscheucht und zwar durch eine aus Euripides redende dämonische Macht. Auch Euripides war in gewissem Sinne nur Maske: die Gottheit, die aus ihm redete, war nicht Dionysus, auch nicht Apollo, sondern ein ganz neugeborner Dämon, genannt Sokrates. Dies ist der neue Gegensatz: das Dionysische und das Sokratische, und das Kunstwerk der griechischen Tragödie ging an ihm zu Grunde. Mag nun auch Euripides uns durch seinen Widerruf zu trösten suchen, es gelingt ihm nicht: der herrlichste Tempel liegt in Trümmern; was nützt uns die Wehklage des Zerstörers und sein Geständniss, dass es der schönste aller Tempel gewesen sei? Und selbst dass Euripides zur Strafe von den Kunstrichtern aller Zeiten in einen Drachen verwandelt worden ist — wen möchte diese erbärmliche Compensation befriedigen?
Nähern wir uns jetzt jener sokratischen Tendenz, mit der Euripides die aeschyleische Tragödie bekämpfte und besiegte.
Welches Ziel — so müssen wir uns jetzt fragen — konnte die euripideische Absicht, das Drama allein auf das Undionysische zu gründen, in der höchsten Idealität ihrer Durchführung überhaupt haben? Welche Form des Drama's blieb noch übrig, wenn es nicht aus dem Geburtsschoosse der Musik, in jenem geheimnissvollen Zwielicht des Dionysischen geboren werden sollte? Allein das dramatisirte Epos: in welchem apollinischen Kunstgebiete nun freilich die tragische Wirkung unerreichbar ist. Es kommt hierbei nicht auf den Inhalt der dargestellten Ereignisse an; ja ich möchte behaupten, dass es Goethe in seiner projectirten „Nausikaa“ unmöglich gewesen sein würde, den Selbstmord jenes idyllischen Wesens — der den fünften Act ausfüllen sollte — tragisch ergreifend zu machen; so ungemein ist die Gewalt des Episch-Apollinischen, dass es die schreckensvollsten Dinge mit jener Lust am Scheine und der Erlösung durch den Schein vor unseren Augen verzaubert. Der Dichter des dramatisirten Epos kann eben so wenig wie der epische Rhapsode mit seinen Bildern völlig verschmelzen: er ist immer noch ruhig unbewegte, aus weiten Augen blickende Anschauung, die die Bilder vor sich sieht. Der Schauspieler in diesem dramatisirten Epos bleibt im tiefsten Grunde immer noch Rhapsode; die Weihe des inneren Träumens liegt auf allen seinen Actionen, so dass er niemals ganz Schauspieler ist.
Wie verhält sich nun diesem Ideal des apollinischen Drama's gegenüber das euripideische Stück? Wie zu dem feierlichen Rhapsoden der alten Zeit jener jüngere, der sein Wesen im platonischen „Jon“ also beschreibt: „Wenn ich etwas Trauriges sage, füllen sich meine Augen mit Thränen; ist aber das, was ich sage, schrecklich und entsetzlich, dann stehen die Haare meines Hauptes vor Schauder zu Berge, und mein Herz klopft.“ Hier merken wir nichts mehr von jenem epischen Verlorensein im Scheine, von der affectlosen Kühle des wahren Schauspielers, der gerade in seiner höchsten Thätigkeit, ganz Schein und Lust am Scheine ist. Euripides ist der Schauspieler mit dem klopfenden Herzen, mit den zu Berge stehenden Haaren; als sokratischer Denker entwirft er den Plan, als leidenschaftlicher Schauspieler führt er ihn aus. Reiner Künstler ist er weder im Entwerfen noch im Ausführen. So ist das euripideische Drama ein zugleich kühles und feuriges Ding, zum Erstarren und zum Verbrennen gleich befähigt; es ist ihm unmöglich, die apollinische Wirkung des Epos zu erreichen, während es andererseits sich von den dionysischen Elementen möglichst gelöst hat, und jetzt, um überhaupt zu wirken, neue Erregungsmittel braucht, die nun nicht mehr innerhalb der beiden einzigen Kunsttriebe, des apollinischen und des dionysischen, liegen können. Diese Erregungsmittel sind kühle paradoxe Gedanken — an Stelle der apollinischen Anschauungen — und feurige Affecte — an Stelle der dionysischen Entzückungen — und zwar höchst realistisch nachgemachte, keineswegs in den Aether der Kunst getauchte Gedanken und Affecte.
Haben wir demnach so viel erkannt, dass es Euripides überhaupt nicht gelungen ist, das Drama allein auf das Apollinische zu gründen, dass sich vielmehr seine undionysische Tendenz in eine naturalistische und unkünstlerische verirrt hat, so werden wir jetzt dem Wesen des aesthetischen Sokratismus schon näher treten dürfen; dessen oberstes Gesetz ungefähr so lautet: „alles muss verständig sein, um schön zu sein“; als Parallelsatz zu dem sokratischen „nur der Wissende ist tugendhaft.“ Mit diesem Kanon in der Hand maass Euripides alles Einzelne und rectificirte es gemäss diesem Princip: die Sprache, die Charaktere, den dramaturgischen Aufbau, die Chormusik. Was wir im Vergleich mit der sophokleischen Tragödie so häufig dem Euripides als dichterischen Mangel und Rückschritt anzurechnen pflegen, das ist zumeist das Product jenes eindringenden kritischen Prozesses, jener verwegenen Verständigkeit. Der euripideische Prolog diene uns als Beispiel für die Productivität jener rationalistischen Methode. Nichts kann unserer Bühnentechnik widerstrebender sein als der Prolog im Drama des Euripides. Dass eine einzelne auftretende Person am Eingange des Stückes erzählt, wer sie sei, was der Handlung vorangehe, was bis jetzt geschehen, ja was im Verlaufe des Stückes geschehen werde, das würde ein moderner Theaterdichter als ein muthwilliges und nicht zu verzeihendes Verzichtleisten auf den Effect der Spannung bezeichnen. Man weiss ja alles, was geschehen wird; wer wird abwarten wollen, dass dies wirklich geschieht? — da ja hier keinesfalls das aufregende Verhältniss eines wahrsagenden Traumes zu einer später eintretenden Wirklichkeit stattfindet. Ganz anders reflectirte Euripides. Die Wirkung der Tragödie beruhte niemals auf der epischen Spannung, auf der anreizenden Ungewissheit, was sich jetzt und nachher ereignen werde: vielmehr auf jenen grossen rhetorisch-lyrischen Scenen, in denen die Leidenschaft und die Dialektik des Haupthelden zu einem breiten und mächtigen Strome anschwoll. Zum Pathos, nicht zur Handlung bereitete Alles vor: und was nicht zum Pathos vorbereitete, das galt als verwerflich. Das aber, was die genussvolle Hingabe an solche Scenen am stärksten erschwert, ist ein dem Zuhörer fehlendes Glied, eine Lücke im Gewebe der Vorgeschichte; so lange der Zuhörer noch ausrechnen muss, was diese und jene Person bedeute, was dieser und jener Conflict der Neigungen und Absichten für Voraussetzungen habe, ist seine volle Versenkung in das Leiden und Thun der Hauptpersonen, ist das athemlose Mitleiden und Mitfürchten noch nicht möglich. Die aeschyleisch-sophokleische Tragödie verwandte die geistreichsten Kunstmittel, um dem Zuschauer in den ersten Scenen gewissermaassen zufällig alle jene zum Verständniss nothwendigen Fäden in die Hand zu geben: ein Zug, in dem sich jene edle Künstlerschaft bewährt, die das nothwendige Formelle gleichsam maskirt und als Zufälliges erscheinen lässt. Immerhin aber glaubte Euripides zu bemerken, dass während jener ersten Scenen der Zuschauer in eigenthümlicher Unruhe sei, um das Rechenexempel der Vorgeschichte auszurechnen, so dass die dichterischen Schönheiten und das Pathos der Exposition für ihn verloren ginge. Deshalb stellte er den Prolog noch vor die Exposition und legte ihn einer Person in den Mund, der man Vertrauen schenken durfte: eine Gottheit musste häufig den Verlauf der Tragödie dem Publicum gewissermaassen garantieren und jeden Zweifel an der Realität des Mythus nehmen: in ähnlicher Weise, wie Descartes die Realität der empirischen Welt nur durch die Appellation an die Wahrhaftigkeit Gottes und seine Unfähigkeit zur Lüge zu beweisen vermochte. Dieselbe göttliche Wahrhaftigkeit braucht Euripides noch einmal am Schlusse seines Drama's, um die Zukunft seiner Helden dem Publicum sicher zu stellen; dies ist die Aufgabe des berüchtigten deus ex machina. Zwischen der epischen Vorschau und Hinausschau liegt die dramatisch-lyrische Gegenwart, das eigentliche „Drama.“
So ist Euripides vor allem als Dichter der Wiederhall seiner bewussten Erkenntnisse; und gerade dies verleiht ihm eine so denkwürdige Stellung in der Geschichte der griechischen Kunst. Ihm muss im Hinblick auf sein kritisch-productives Schaffen oft zu Muthe gewesen sein als sollte er den Anfang der Schrift des Anaxagoras für das Drama lebendig machen, deren erste Worte lauten: „im Anfang war alles beisammen: da kam der Verstand und schuf Ordnung.“ Und wenn Anaxagoras mit seinem „Nous“ unter den Philosophen wie der erste Nüchterne unter lauter Trunkenen erschien, so mag auch Euripides sein Verhältniss zu den anderen Dichtern der Tragödie unter einem ähnlichen Bilde begriffen haben. So lange der einzige Ordner und Walter des Alls, der Nous, noch vom künstlerischen Schaffen ausgeschlossen war, war noch alles in einem chaotischen Urbrei beisammen; so musste Euripides urtheilen, so musste er die „trunkenen“ Dichter als der erste „Nüchterne“ verurtheilen. Das, was Sophokles von Aeschylus gesagt hat, er thue das Rechte, obschon unbewusst, war gewiss nicht im Sinne des Euripides gesagt: der nur so viel hätte gelten lassen, dass Aeschylus, weil er unbewusst schaffe, das Unrechte schaffe. Auch der göttliche Plato redet vom schöpferischen Vermögen des Dichters, insofern dies nicht die bewusste Einsicht ist, zu allermeist nur ironisch und stellt es der Begabung des Wahrsagers und Traumdeuters gleich; sei doch der Dichter nicht eher fähig zu dichten als bis er bewusstlos geworden sei, und kein Verstand mehr in ihm wohne. Euripides unternahm es, wie es auch Plato unternommen hat, das Gegenstück des „unverständigen“ Dichters der Welt zu zeigen; sein aesthetischer Grundsatz „alles muss bewusst sein, um schön zu sein“, ist, wie ich sagte, der Parallelsatz zu dem sokratischen „alles muss bewusst sein, um gut zu sein“. Demgemäss darf uns Euripides als der Dichter des aesthetischen Sokratismus gelten. Sokrates aber war jener zweite Zuschauer, der die ältere Tragödie nicht begriff und deshalb nicht achtete; mit ihm im Bunde wagte Euripides, der Herold eines neuen Kunstschaffens zu sein. Wenn an diesem die ältere Tragödie zu Grunde ging, so ist also der aesthetische Sokratismus das mörderische Princip: insofern aber der Kampf gegen das Dionysische der älteren Kunst gerichtet war, erkennen wir in Sokrates den Gegner des Dionysus, den neuen Orpheus, der sich gegen Dionysus erhebt und, obschon bestimmt, von den Mänaden des athenischen Gerichtshofes zerrissen zu werden, doch den übermächtigen Gott selbst zur Flucht nöthigt: welcher, wie damals, als er vor dem Edonerkönig Lykurg floh, sich in die Tiefen des Meeres rettete, nämlich in die mystischen Fluthen eines die ganze Welt allmählich überziehenden Geheimcultus.
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.
Before we name this other spectator, let us pause here a moment to call back to mind the impression, described earlier, of the divided and incommensurable in the very nature of Aeschylean tragedy. Let us think of our own bewilderment before the chorus and the tragic hero of that tragedy, neither of which we knew how to reconcile with our habits any more than with tradition—until we rediscovered that very duality as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two artistic drives woven into one another, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
To eliminate that original and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy and to rebuild it, pure and new, on un-Dionysian art, custom, and view of the world—this is the tendency of Euripides, now revealing itself to us in bright illumination.
Euripides himself, in the evening of his life, put the question of the value and significance of this tendency to his contemporaries, in the most emphatic way, in a myth. Is the Dionysian to be allowed to exist at all? Is it not to be uprooted by force from Hellenic soil? Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible: but the god Dionysus is too powerful; the most rational opponent—like Pentheus in the “Bacchae”—is unexpectedly bewitched by him and afterward runs with this enchantment into his doom. The judgment of the two old men Cadmus and Tiresias seems to be also the judgment of the aged poet: that the reflection of the cleverest individuals does not overthrow those old popular traditions, that veneration of Dionysus which propagates itself eternally, and that it is fitting, in the face of such wondrous powers, to show at least a diplomatically cautious participation: though it remains possible that the god may take offense at so lukewarm a participation and in the end turn the diplomat—as here Cadmus—into a dragon. This is what a poet tells us who with heroic strength resisted Dionysus throughout a long life—only to close his career at its end with a glorification of his adversary and a suicide, like someone seized by vertigo who, merely to escape the dreadful, no longer bearable whirl, hurls himself down from the tower. That tragedy is a protest against the feasibility of his tendency; alas, and it had already been carried out! The marvelous had happened: when the poet recanted, his tendency had already triumphed. Dionysus had already been driven from the tragic stage, and indeed by a demonic power speaking out of Euripides. Euripides too was in a certain sense only a mask: the deity that spoke out of him was not Dionysus, nor Apollo either, but an entirely newborn demon, called Socrates. This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the work of art of Greek tragedy perished of it. Even if Euripides now seeks to console us by his recantation, he does not succeed: the most magnificent temple lies in ruins; what use to us is the lament of the destroyer and his confession that it was the most beautiful of all temples? And even that Euripides has been turned into a dragon, as punishment, by the art critics of all ages—whom would this wretched compensation satisfy?
Let us now approach that Socratic tendency with which Euripides fought and conquered Aeschylean tragedy.
What goal—so we must now ask—could the Euripidean intention to found drama solely on the un-Dionysian have at all, in the highest ideality of its execution? What form of drama remained, if it was not to be born from the womb of music, in that mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only the dramatized epic: in which Apollonian domain of art, of course, the tragic effect is unattainable. What matters here is not the content of the events portrayed; indeed I would claim that it would have been impossible for Goethe, in his projected “Nausicaa,” to make the suicide of that idyllic being—which was to fill the fifth act—tragically gripping; so uncommonly great is the power of the epic-Apollonian that it enchants the most horror-filled things before our eyes with that delight in semblance and redemption through semblance. The poet of the dramatized epic can no more fuse completely with his images than the epic rhapsode can: he remains still a calm, unmoved contemplative vision, gazing out of wide eyes, that sees the images before itself. The actor in this dramatized epic remains at bottom still a rhapsode; the consecration of inner dreaming lies upon all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.
How, then, does the Euripidean play stand in relation to this ideal of Apollonian drama? How does that younger rhapsode stand in relation to the solemn rhapsode of the old days, the one who describes his nature in Plato’s “Ion” thus: “When I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears; but if what I say is terrible and dreadful, then the hair of my head stands on end with shuddering, and my heart pounds.” Here we notice nothing any more of that epic state of being lost in semblance, of the passionless coolness of the true actor, who precisely in his highest activity is entirely semblance and delight in semblance. Euripides is the actor with the pounding heart, with hair standing on end; as a Socratic thinker he draws up the plan, as a passionate actor he carries it out. A pure artist he is neither in the drafting nor in the execution. Thus the Euripidean drama is a thing at once cool and fiery, equally capable of freezing and of burning; it is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian effect of epic, while on the other hand it has detached itself as far as possible from the Dionysian elements, and now, in order to have any effect at all, needs new means of excitation, which can no longer lie within the only two artistic drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These means of excitation are cool, paradoxical thoughts—in place of the Apollonian visions—and fiery emotions—in place of the Dionysian raptures—and indeed thoughts and emotions most realistically counterfeited, by no means dipped into the ether of art.
If we have recognized thus much, that Euripides never succeeded at all in founding drama solely on the Apollonian, that rather his un-Dionysian tendency strayed into a naturalistic and unartistic one, we may now approach more closely the nature of aesthetic Socratism; whose supreme law runs roughly thus: “everything must be rational in order to be beautiful”; as a parallel to the Socratic “only the one who knows is virtuous.” With this canon in hand Euripides measured every particular and rectified it according to this principle: the language, the characters, the dramaturgical structure, the choral music. What we are so often accustomed to charge to Euripides, in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, as poetic deficiency and regression is mostly the product of that penetrating critical process, that daring rationality. Let the Euripidean prologue serve us as an example of the productivity of that rationalistic method. Nothing can be more repugnant to our stage technique than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. That a single character stepping forward at the entrance of the play tells who that person is, what precedes the action, what has happened so far, indeed what will happen in the course of the play—a modern playwright would call that a willful and unpardonable renunciation of the effect of suspense. One knows everything that will happen, after all; who will want to wait for it to really happen?—since here there is by no means the exciting relation of a prophetic dream to a reality that arrives later. Euripides reflected quite differently. The effect of tragedy never rested on epic suspense, on the tantalizing uncertainty of what would happen now and later: rather on those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the chief hero swelled into a broad and mighty stream. Everything prepared for pathos, not for action: and whatever did not prepare for pathos was deemed objectionable. But what most impedes the enjoyable surrender to such scenes is a missing link for the listener, a gap in the fabric of the backstory; as long as the listener still has to work out what this or that person means, what presuppositions this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions has, his full immersion in the suffering and action of the principal characters, his breathless suffering and fearing along with them, is not yet possible. Aeschylean-Sophoclean tragedy used the most ingenious artistic means to put into the spectator’s hand, in the first scenes and as if by chance, all those threads necessary for understanding: a trait in which that noble artistry proves itself that, as it were, masks the necessary formal element and lets it appear as something accidental. All the same, Euripides believed he noticed that during those first scenes the spectator is in a peculiar unrest, working out the arithmetic problem of the backstory, so that the poetic beauties and the pathos of the exposition would be lost to him. Therefore he placed the prologue even before the exposition and put it into the mouth of a person who could be trusted: a deity often had to guarantee the course of the tragedy to the public, in a manner of speaking, and remove every doubt about the reality of the myth: in much the same way that Descartes could prove the reality of the empirical world only by appealing to the truthfulness of God and his incapacity for lying. Euripides needs the same divine truthfulness once more at the end of his drama, to make the future of his heroes secure for the public; this is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between the epic looking forward and the epic looking beyond lies the dramatic-lyrical present, the actual “drama.”
So Euripides, above all as a poet, is the echo of his conscious insights; and precisely this gives him such a remarkable position in the history of Greek art. In regard to his critical-productive creating he must often have felt as if he were to bring to life for drama the beginning of the writing of Anaxagoras, whose first words read: “In the beginning all was together: then came intellect and created order.” And if Anaxagoras with his “Nous” appeared among the philosophers like the first sober man among nothing but drunks, Euripides too may have grasped his relation to the other tragic poets under a similar image. As long as the sole orderer and ruler of the universe, the Nous, was still excluded from artistic creation, everything was still together in a chaotic primal porridge; so Euripides had to judge, so he had to condemn the “drunken” poets as the first “sober one.” What Sophocles said of Aeschylus, that he does what is right, though unconsciously, was certainly not said in Euripides’ sense: he would have granted only so much, that Aeschylus, because he creates unconsciously, creates what is wrong. Even the divine Plato speaks of the poet’s creative faculty, insofar as it is not conscious insight, for the most part only ironically and puts it on a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter; the poet, he says, is after all not capable of composing until he has become unconscious and no intellect dwells in him any longer. Euripides undertook, as Plato also undertook, to show the world the counterpart of the “irrational” poet; his aesthetic principle “everything must be conscious in order to be beautiful” is, as I said, the parallel of the Socratic “everything must be conscious in order to be good.” Accordingly Euripides may count for us as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. Socrates, however, was that second spectator who did not comprehend the older tragedy and therefore did not respect it; allied with him, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new artistic creation. If the older tragedy perished of this, then aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle: but insofar as the struggle was directed against the Dionysian element of the older art, we recognize in Socrates the adversary of Dionysus, the new Orpheus, who rises up against Dionysus and, though destined to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court of justice, nonetheless forces the overpowering god himself to flee: who, as once when he fled from the Edonian king Lycurgus, saved himself in the depths of the sea, namely in the mystic waters of a secret cult gradually spreading over the whole world.
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.
Before we name this other spectator, let us pause a moment to recall the impression described earlier: something divided and impossible to measure in the very nature of Aeschylean tragedy. Think of our own puzzlement at the chorus and the tragic hero of that tragedy. We could reconcile neither of them with our habits or with tradition—until we rediscovered that very duality as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, the expression of two interwoven artistic drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
To remove that original, all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy, and to rebuild tragedy in a pure, new form on non-Dionysian art, morality, and a non-Dionysian view of the world: this is Euripides’ aim, now revealed to us in a clear light.
At the end of his life, Euripides himself used a myth to put the question of this aim’s value and meaning before his contemporaries in the most forceful way. Should the Dionysian be allowed to exist at all? Should it not be violently rooted out of Greek soil? Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible. But the god Dionysus is too powerful. His most rational opponent—like Pentheus in “The Bacchae”—is unexpectedly enchanted by him, and afterward runs to his doom under this spell. The judgment of the two old men, Cadmus and Tiresias, also seems to be the old poet’s judgment: the reflections of the cleverest individuals cannot overturn those ancient popular traditions, that endlessly perpetuated worship of Dionysus. Indeed, in the face of such marvelous powers, it is appropriate to show at least a diplomatically cautious participation. Even so, the god may take offense at such lukewarm involvement and finally turn the diplomat—as he does Cadmus here—into a dragon. This is what we are told by a poet who resisted Dionysus with heroic strength throughout a long life, only to end his career by glorifying his opponent and committing suicide. He is like a dizzy man who throws himself from a tower simply to escape the terrible spinning that he can no longer bear. That tragedy is a protest against the possibility of carrying out his aim. Alas, it had already been carried out! The astonishing thing had happened: by the time the poet took it back, his aim had already won. Dionysus had already been driven off the tragic stage, specifically by a demonic power speaking through Euripides. In a certain sense, Euripides too was only a mask. The god speaking through him was not Dionysus, nor Apollo, but a completely newborn demon called Socrates. This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic. It destroyed the artwork that was Greek tragedy. Euripides may try to comfort us by taking back his position, but he does not succeed. The most magnificent temple lies in ruins. What use to us are its destroyer’s laments and his admission that it was the most beautiful of all temples? And even the fact that art critics of every age have turned Euripides into a dragon as punishment—who could be satisfied with that miserable compensation?
Let us now take a closer look at that Socratic tendency with which Euripides fought and defeated Aeschylean tragedy.
We must now ask: even if carried out in its most ideal form, what goal could Euripides’ intention of basing drama solely on the non-Dionysian have had? What form of drama was left if it was not to be born from the womb of music, in that mysterious Dionysian twilight? Only dramatized epic. But in this Apollonian field of art, a tragic effect is impossible to achieve. The content of the events presented makes no difference here. Indeed, I would claim that in his planned “Nausicaa,” Goethe could not have made the suicide of that idyllic creature—which was to fill the fifth act—moving in a tragic way. The power of the epic-Apollonian is so enormous that, before our eyes, it transforms the most terrifying things through that delight in semblance and release through semblance. The poet of dramatized epic can no more merge completely with his images than the epic reciter can. He is still a calm, unmoving act of contemplation, looking with wide eyes and seeing the images before him. At the deepest level, the actor in this dramatized epic always remains a reciter. The sacred quality of inward dreaming rests on all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.
How, then, does a play by Euripides compare with this ideal of Apollonian drama? As the younger reciter compares with the solemn reciter of ancient times—the younger one who describes his own nature this way in Plato’s “Ion”: “When I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears. But if what I say is frightening and terrible, the hair on my head stands on end with horror, and my heart pounds.” Here we no longer detect that epic absorption in semblance, that emotionless coolness of the true actor, who precisely in his highest activity is entirely semblance and delight in semblance. Euripides is the actor with the pounding heart and hair standing on end. As a Socratic thinker, he draws up the plan; as a passionate actor, he carries it out. He is not a pure artist either in planning or in carrying it out. So Euripidean drama is something both cold and fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning. It cannot achieve the Apollonian effect of epic. At the same time, it has freed itself as far as possible from Dionysian elements. Now, to have any effect at all, it needs new means of stimulation, which can no longer lie within the only two artistic drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These means are cool, paradoxical thoughts in place of Apollonian visions, and fiery emotions in place of Dionysian ecstasies. And these thoughts and emotions are imitated with extreme realism, not immersed in the pure air of art at all.
We have now recognized at least this much: Euripides did not succeed at all in basing drama solely on the Apollonian. Instead, his non-Dionysian tendency went astray into a naturalistic, unartistic one. We can therefore move closer to the nature of aesthetic Socratism. Its highest law runs roughly like this: “Everything must be rational to be beautiful.” It parallels the Socratic statement, “Only the person who knows is virtuous.” With this rule in hand, Euripides measured every detail and corrected it according to the principle: language, characters, dramatic structure, and choral music. What we so often tend to count as poetic shortcomings and a step backward in Euripides, compared with Sophocles’ tragedy, is mostly the product of that penetrating critical process, that daring rationality. Euripides’ prologue can serve as an example of how productive this rationalistic method was. Nothing could run more counter to our stage technique than the prologue in a drama by Euripides. A single person appears at the beginning of the play and tells us who they are, what precedes the action, what has happened so far, and even what will happen during the play. A modern playwright would call this a deliberate and unforgivable abandonment of the effect of suspense. We already know everything that will happen. Who will want to wait for it actually to happen? For this is certainly not the exciting relationship between a prophetic dream and a reality that occurs later. Euripides reasoned quite differently. The effect of tragedy never rested on epic suspense, on the stimulating uncertainty about what would happen now and afterward. Instead, it rested on those great rhetorical and lyrical scenes in which the main hero’s passion and argument swelled into a broad, powerful river. Everything prepared the way for intense emotion, not for action. Whatever did not prepare for that emotion was considered objectionable. But what makes it hardest for listeners to surrender with pleasure to such scenes is a missing link, a gap in the fabric of the preceding story. As long as listeners still have to work out what this or that person means, or what underlies this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions, they cannot yet become fully absorbed in the suffering and actions of the main characters, or breathlessly share their suffering and fear. The tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles used the most ingenious artistic means to put all the threads needed for understanding into the spectator’s hands in the first scenes, seemingly by chance. This feature demonstrates that noble artistry which, as it were, disguises the necessary formal elements and makes them appear accidental. Still, Euripides thought he noticed a peculiar restlessness in the spectator during those first scenes, as they worked out the arithmetic problem of the preceding story. As a result, the poetic beauty and intense emotion of the opening were lost on them. He therefore placed the prologue before the opening itself and put it in the mouth of someone who could be trusted. A god often had to guarantee the course of the tragedy to the audience, so to speak, and remove every doubt about the reality of the myth. Similarly, Descartes could prove the reality of the world we experience only by appealing to God’s truthfulness and inability to lie. Euripides needs this same divine truthfulness once more at the end of his drama, to assure the audience of his heroes’ future. This is the job of the notorious god lowered onto the stage by a machine. Between the epic preview and the look beyond the end lies the dramatic, lyrical present, the actual “drama.”
So, as a poet, Euripides is above all the echo of his conscious insights. This is precisely what gives him such a memorable position in the history of Greek art. Thinking of his work as a critic and creator, he must often have felt that he was to bring the opening of Anaxagoras’ book to life for drama. Its first words are: “In the beginning everything was together; then reason came and created order.” And if Anaxagoras, with his “Nous,” appeared among philosophers like the first sober person among nothing but drunks, Euripides too may have understood his relationship to the other tragic poets through a similar image. As long as the mind, the sole organizer and ruler of the universe, was still excluded from artistic creation, everything was still together in a chaotic primal mush. This is how Euripides had to judge; this is how he, as the first “sober” poet, had to condemn the “drunken” poets. Sophocles said of Aeschylus that he did the right thing, although unconsciously. This was certainly not said in Euripides’ sense. He would have accepted only that Aeschylus did the wrong thing because he created unconsciously. Even the divine Plato generally speaks only ironically of the poet’s creative power insofar as it is not conscious insight, and puts it on a level with the gift of the prophet and interpreter of dreams. The poet, he says, cannot compose until he has become unconscious and reason no longer lives in him. Like Plato, Euripides set out to show the world the opposite of the “unreasoning” poet. His basic aesthetic principle, “Everything must be conscious to be beautiful,” is, as I said, the parallel of the Socratic principle, “Everything must be conscious to be good.” Accordingly, we can regard Euripides as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. But Socrates was that second spectator, who did not understand older tragedy and therefore did not value it. Allied with him, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new kind of artistic creation. If this brought older tragedy to its end, then aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle. But since the struggle was directed against the Dionysian element of older art, we recognize Socrates as Dionysus’ opponent: the new Orpheus who rises against Dionysus. Although destined to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court, he nevertheless forces even the overwhelmingly powerful god to flee. Just as when he fled from Lycurgus, king of the Edonians, Dionysus saved himself in the depths of the sea: that is, in the mystical waters of a secret cult gradually spreading over the whole world.
About this section
Section 12 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 20 of 33 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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