We must now seek assistance from all the artistic principles laid out above, in order to find our way correctly through the labyrinth, a descriptive term we have to use to designate the origin of Greek tragedy. I do not think I’m saying anything illogical when I claim that the problem of this origin still has not once been seriously formulated up to now, let alone solved, no matter how frequently the scattered scraps of ancient tradition have already been combined with one another and then torn apart once more. This tradition tells us very emphatically that tragedy developed out of the tragic chorus and originally consisted only of a chorus and nothing else.1 This fact requires us to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the essential original drama, without allowing ourselves to be satisfied at all with the common ways of talking about art — that the chorus is the ideal spectator or had the job of standing in for the people over against the royal area of the scene.

That last mentioned point, a conceptual explanation which sounds so lofty for many politicians — as though the invariable moral law was presented by the democratic Athenians in the people’s chorus, which was always proved right in matters dealing with the kings’ passionate acts of violence and excess — may well have been suggested by a word from Aristotle. But such an idea has no influence on the original formation of tragedy, since all the opposition between people and ruler and every politicalsocial issue in general is excluded from those purely religious origins. But looking back on the classical form of the chorus known to us in Aeschylus and Sophocles we might also consider it blasphemous to talk here of a premonition of a “constitutional popular representation.” Others have not been deterred from this blasphemous assertion. The ancient political organizations of the state had no knowledge in praxi [in practice] of a constitutional popular representation, and, in addition, they never once had a hopeful “premonition” of such things in their tragedies.

Much more famous than this political explanation of the chorus is A. W. Schlegel’s idea.1 He recommended that we consider the chorus to some extent as the quintessence and embodiment of the crowd of onlookers, as the “ideal spectator.” This view, combined with the historical tradition that originally the tragedy consisted entirely of the chorus, reveals itself for what it is, a crude and unscholarly, although dazzling, claim. But its glitter survives only in the compact form of the expression, from the truly German prejudice for everything which is called “ideal,” and from our momentary astonishment.

For we are astonished, as soon as we compare the theatre public we know well with that chorus and ask ourselves whether it would be at all possible on the basis of this public ever to derive some idealization analogous to the tragic chorus. We tacitly deny this and are now surprised by the audacity of Schlegel’s claim, as well as by the totally different nature of the Greek general public. For we had always thought that the proper spectator, whoever he might be, must always remain conscious that he has a work of art in front of him, not an empirical reality; whereas, the tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to recognize the shapes on the stage as living, existing people. The chorus of Oceanids really believes that they see the Titan Prometheus in front of them and consider themselves every bit as real as the god of the scene. And was that supposed to be the highest and purest type of spectator, a person who, like the Oceanids, considers Prometheus vitally alive and real? Would it be a mark of the ideal spectator to run up onto the stage and free the god from his torment? We had believed in an aesthetic public and considered the individual spectator all the more capable, the more he was in a position to take the work of art as art, that is, aesthetically, and now this saying of Schlegel’s indicates to us that the completely ideal spectator lets the scenic world work on him, not aesthetically at all, but vitally and empirically. “O these Greeks!” we sigh, “they are knocking over our aesthetics!” But once we get used to that idea, we repeat Schlegel’s saying every time we talk about the chorus.

But that emphatic tradition speaks here against Schlegel: the chorus in itself, without the stage, that is, the primitive form of tragedy, and that chorus of ideal spectators are not compatible. What sort of artistic style would there be which one might derive from the idea of the spectator, for which one might consider the “spectator in himself” the essential form? The spectator without a play is a contradictory idea. We suspect that the birth of tragedy cannot be explained either from the high estimation of the moral intelligence of the masses or from the idea of the spectator without a play, and we consider this problem too profound even to be touched upon by such superficial styles of commentary.

Schiller has already provided an infinitely more valuable insight into the meaning of the chorus in the famous preface to the Bride from Messina, which sees the chorus as a living wall which tragedy draws around itself in order to separate itself cleanly from the real world and to protect its ideal space and its poetical freedom for itself.2

With this as his main weapon Schiller fought against the common idea of naturalism, against the common demand for illusion in dramatic poetry. While in the theatre the day itself might be only artistic and stage architecture only symbolic, and the metrical language might have an ideal quality, on the whole, a misconception still ruled: it was not enough, Schiller claimed, that people merely tolerated as poetic freedom what, by contrast, was the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus was the decisive step with which war was declared openly and honourably against every naturalism in art.

Such a way of looking at things is the one, it strikes me, for which our age, which considers itself so superior, uses the dismissive catch phrase “pseudo-idealism.” But I rather suspect that with our present worship of naturalism and realism we are situated at the opposite pole from all idealism, namely, in the region of a wax works collection. In that, too, there is an art, as in certain popular romance novels of the present time. Only let no one pester us with the claim that with this art the “pseudo- idealism” of Schiller and Goethe has been overcome.

Of course, it is an “ideal” stage on which, according to Schiller’s correct insight, the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of the primitive tragedy, customarily strolled, a stage lifted high over the real strolling stage of mortal men. For this chorus the Greeks constructed a suspended scaffolding of an imaginary state of nature and on it placed imaginary natural beings. Tragedy grew up out of this foundation and, for that very reason, has, from its inception, been spared the embarrassing business of counterfeiting reality.

That is not to say, however, that it is a world arbitrarily fantasized somewhere between heaven and earth. It is much rather a world possessing the same reality and credibility as the world of Olympus, together with its inhabitants, had for the devout Greek. The satyr, as the Dionysian chorus member, lives in a reality granted by religion and sanctioned by myth and ritual. The fact that tragedy begins with him, that out of him the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks, is a phenomenon as foreign to us here as the development of tragedy out of the chorus generally.

Perhaps we can reach a starting point for this discussion when I offer the claim that the satyr himself, the imaginary natural being, is related to the cultural person in the same way that Dionysian music is related to civilization. On this last point Richard Wagner states that civilization is neutralized by music in the same way lamplight is by daylight. In just such a manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself neutralized by the sight of the chorus of satyrs, and the next effect of Dionysian tragedy is that the state and society, in general the gap between man and man, give way to an invincible feeling of unity, which leads back to the heart of nature. The metaphysical consolation — with which, as I am immediately indicating here, every true tragedy leaves us, that, in spite of all the transformations in phenomena, at the bottom of everything life is indestructibly powerful and delightful — this consolation appears in lively clarity as the chorus of satyrs, as the chorus of natural beings, who live, so to speak, indestructibly behind all civilization, and who, in spite of all the changes in generations and a people’s history, always remain the same.

With this chorus, the profound Greek, uniquely capable of the most delicate and the most severe suffering, consoled himself, the man who looked around with a daring gaze in the middle of the terrifying destructive instincts of so-called world history and equally into the cruelty of nature and who is in danger of longing for a Buddhist denial of the will. Art saves him, and through art life saves him.

The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its destruction of the customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is immersed. Because of this gulf of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the world of Dionysian reality separate from each other. But as soon as that daily reality comes back again into consciousness, one feels it as something disgusting. The fruit of that state is an ascetic condition, in which one denies the power of the will. In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet: both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it disgusts them to act, for their action can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that they are expected to set right again a world which is out of joint. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion — that is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, because of an excess of possibilities, so to speak. It’s not a case of reflection. No! — the true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes every driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. Now no consolation has any effect any more. His longing goes out over a world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death. Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or in an immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, the man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.
Here, at a point when the will is in the highest danger, art approaches, as a saving, healing magician. Art alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs which permit living to continue. These constructs are the Sublime as the artistic mastering of the horrible and the Comic as the artistic release from disgust at the absurd. The chorus of satyrs of the dithyramb is the saving fact of Greek art. Those emotional moods I have just described play themselves out in the middle world [Mittelwelt] of these Dionysian attendants.

Footnotes:

1The authority for this claim is Aristotle’s Poetics .

1A. W. Schlegel : August Wilhelm von Schlegel: German poet and critic, a major figure in German Romanticism. His On Dramatic Art and Literature was published in 1808.

2Schiller’s preface, Concerning the Use of the Choir in Tragedy, was published in 1803.