"easily upon them like their own graceful garments" (John Fiske). A recent writer even says, "The ancient Greeks seem to have been incapable of taking life seriously." m But how do views of this sort agree with the spirit of the answer which the legendary Silenus gave to King Midas's question as to what is best for man? "Pitiful race of a day, children of accident and sorrow, why do you force me to say what were best left unheard? The best of all is unobtainable—not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best is early to die." Yet the answer long lived in Greek tradition, and the substance of thought underlying it is repeated by Simonides and by Sophocles. Indeed, how do the common views harmonize with Pindar's somber tone in speaking of the soul as being here in a mortal body because of ancient guilt—or with the ascetic tendencies which we discover in the Orphic cults and in Pythagoreanism? From considerations of this nature, Nietzsche was led to conclude that there was an undertone of profound seriousness and even of pessimism among the ancient, particularly most ancient, Greeks (those before Socrates), and Burckhardt substantially agreed with this view when he characterized the Greek spirit as pessimism in world-view, optimism in temperament. n It was then against a somber background that the art of the Greeks had arisen; indeed, Nietzsche held that it was in part just because they suffered as they did, because they felt with such particular keenness the anomalous and problematical in existence, that their art grew to its extraordinary and unique proportions. o
His view of Greek art, and particularly of the tragic drama, is of such interest, and hangs together so closely with his general philosophical view, that I shall give some details.[1]
The art-impulse which has been described he designates as the Apollinic impulse. Apollo, we remember, was a God of dreams, and under this impulse we see things as in a dream, i.e., detached from real experience. According to Lucretius
- ↑ The data are in The Birth of Tragedy, to which (dispensing with special references, save in a few cases) I refer the reader. The whole of it should be read, and reread, by one who really wishes to get Nietzsche’s point of view—or, I might say, to have an initiation into his way of thinking in general; and I regret to have to say that it should be read in the original—or at least in the French translation.
