Chapter 18 seven

We must now resort to the various principles of art which have been discussed before, in order to discern our way through the labyrinth of the origin of Greek tragedy.It would be no exaggeration to say that the question of origin has never been seriously raised, let alone resolved.The scattered fragments of ancient legends are often stitched together, but they are torn apart again.The ancient legends tell us categorically that tragedy arose out of the tragic chorus, which at first was only a chorus and nothing but a chorus.It is our duty, therefore, to go to the heart of the tragic chorus as a truly primitive drama, and in any case not to be content with the popular artistic clichés that the chorus is the ideal audience, or that it represents the common people against the power of the princes on the stage.The latter interpretation, which rings especially loud in the ears of some statesmen, seems to have embodied the eternal moral code of the democratic Athenians in the plebeian chorus, which always stood above the violent excesses of the kings and insisted on justice. .Although this explanation can be cheered by Aristotle's words, it does not go to the margins of the problem of the origin of tragedy.The entire antagonism of commoners and princes in this question, and generally the entire political and social sphere, leaves the purely religious roots of tragedy untouched.As regards the classical forms of the chorus with which we are familiar from Aeschylus and Sophocles, we even consider it sacrilegious to say that "constitutional representation of the people" is foreseen here, but some people are not afraid of profanity.The ancient national constitutions had no practical constitutional representation of the populace, and hopefully they never "foresaw" it in their tragedies.

Far more famous than the political interpretations of the chorus are the insights of A. W. Schlegel.He suggested to us that to a certain extent, the chorus can be regarded as the model and essence of the audience, as the "ideal audience".Contrasted with the historical legend that tragedy was only a chorus from the beginning, this view shows itself as a crude, unscientific, but shining view.But it shines only by its general form of expression, by a genuinely Germanic preference for everything so-called 'ideal', by our momentary astonishment.As soon as we compare the theater public with which we are so well acquainted, with the chorus, and ask ourselves whether it is really possible for something like the tragic chorus to arise from this public, we are amazed.We dispassionately deny this, wondering both at the audacity of Schlegel's assertion and at the very different nature of the Greek public.We have always maintained that a normal spectator, of whatever kind, must always know that he is dealing with a work of art and not an empirical fact.The Greek tragic chorus, on the other hand, cannot help recognizing stage figures for real people.The chorus, who played the daughter of Poseidon, truly believed to have witnessed Prometheus, the titan, and considered herself to be the real god on stage.So, like the daughter of Poseidon, who thinks that Prometheus is there in person, is there really someone, is it the highest and purest type of audience?Is it the mark of an ideal audience to run on stage and rescue this god from torture?We believe in the aesthetic public. The more an audience treats a work of art as art, that is, as an aesthetic object, the more capable we think he is.However, Schlegel's theory now points out to us that for the perfect, ideal audience, the world of the stage does not function aesthetically but empirically.We cannot help but sigh: Ah, the Ultra-Greeks!You have overturned our aesthetics!But habitually, Schlegel's maxims were repeated whenever the chorus was mentioned.

However, the ancient legends unequivocally oppose Schlegel: the original chorus does not need the stage, and therefore the original form of tragedy is incompatible with the chorus of the ideal audience.What is this art that derives from the concept of the audience and takes the "audience in itself" as its true form?An audience without actors is a paradoxical concept.We believe that the birth of tragedy cannot be explained either from the respect of the masses for moral understanding, or from the concept of an audience without drama.It seems that this problem is too profound, and such a superficial way of investigation has not even touched its fur.

In the famous preface to The Bride of Messina, Schiller already expresses a valuable insight into the meaning of the chorus.He sees the chorus as a living wall that surrounds tragedy with which it completely isolates itself from the real world and preserves for itself an ideal world and poetic freedom. With this was Schiller's chief weapon against the banality of naturalism, against the delusions usually demanded of dramatic poetry.Although the life in the theater itself is only artificial, the scenery is only a symbol, and the rhyming language has an ideal quality, a misunderstanding is still completely dominant.It is not enough to tolerate that which is the essence of all poetry merely as a poetic freedom.The adoption of the chorus was the decisive step by which war was declared openly against naturalism of all varieties in art;—it seems to me that it is for such a mode of investigation that our pretentious age employs the " False idealism" is a slanderous term.I fear that, on the contrary, today, with our worship of nature and reality, we approach the opposite pole of all idealism, that is, into the realm of wax museums.As in some of the best-selling novels of our time, there is some kind of art in the wax museum, only let us not be tortured with the demand that this art overcome the "false idealism" of Schiller and Goethe.

According to Schiller's correct understanding, the realm of the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of primitive tragedy, is indeed an "ideal" realm, a realm high on the road of life and death.The Greeks created for this chorus a castle in the air of an imaginary state of nature, and placed imaginary natural creatures in it.Tragedy grows on this basis, and thus, of course, deprives the portrayal of suffering of reality from the very beginning.After all, however, this is not a world imagined arbitrarily between heaven and earth; rather, it is a world as real and believable as Olympus and its gods were to the pious Greeks.Satyr, the Dionysian dancer, lives in a reality sanctioned by religion, sanctioned by myth and worship.That tragedy begins with the satyr, through whom the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks, is as startling a phenomenon to us as it is that tragedy arises in the chorus in general.If I put forward an assertion that the relationship between Satyr, a fictitious natural creature, and educated people is equivalent to the relationship between Dionysus music and civilization, perhaps we have obtained a starting point for research.Richard Wagner said of civilization that music overshadows it as sunlight overshadows a candle.For the same reason, I believe, the Greeks were ashamed of themselves before the satyr chorus.The most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy is that the rift between the city-state, society, and man in general gives way to a very strong sense of unity which leads man back into the embrace of nature.Here, I have pointed out, that every true tragedy relieves us with a metaphysical consolation: that life in the foundations of things remains indestructible and joyous, despite the changes of appearance.This consolation is most clearly embodied in the chorus of the satyrs, in the chorus of the natural beings who live almost indestructibly behind all civilization, and which exist forever in spite of the passing of generations and the vicissitudes of national history.

The Greeks, thoughtful and capable only of the most delicate and grievous pains, comforted themselves with this chorus.Their bold eyes stare directly at the terrible catastrophe of the so-called world history and the cruelty of nature, and they are in danger of longing for the nirvana of Buddhism.Art saves them, and life saves itself by saving them through art. The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, its destruction of the everyday boundaries and rules of life, contains an element of trance in which all that one has experienced in the past is drowned out.In this way, a river of forgetfulness separates everyday reality from Dionysian reality.However, once everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it becomes a nuisance; a sense of renunciation sets in.In this sense the Dionysian is like Hamlet: both have seen for a time the nature of things, they have realized it, they abhor action; A world that falls apart is either ridiculous or shameful.Knowledge kills action, and action cannot be separated from the blinding of illusions—that is the lesson of Hamlet, and not of the cheap wisdom of the dreamer, who, through indecision, or so to speak, from an excess of possibilities, cannot move toward action.Not indecisive, no! —is the insight, the insight into the terrible truth, which overcomes every motive to action, in Hamlet as in the Dionysus.At this moment, when consolation is of no avail, longing has passed beyond the afterlife, beyond the gods, and existence is denied with its glorious reflection in the gods or beyond the immortal.A man conscious of the truth he once glimpsed, who sees everywhere nothing but the absurdity of existence, who at last comprehends the symbolism of Ophelia's fate, and the wisdom of Silenus, the god of the woods, is world-weary.

It is here, in this greatest danger of the will, that art arrives as a saviour.But she is able to transform the absurd and terrible world-weary thoughts of existence into the appearances that enable people to live. These appearances are the sublime and the ridiculous.The satyr chorus of Dionysus was the salvation of Greek art; in the buffered world of these Dionysian escorts, the aforementioned outbursts of passion were exhausted.