THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

FRIEDRIGH NIETZSCHE 307
"the unerring instinct of Aristophanes . . . comprised Socrates and
Euripides ... in the same feeling of hatred, and saw in them the
symptoms of a degenerate culture." 17 It is true that they recanted; that
Euripides' last play The Bacchce is his surrender to Dionysus, and
the prelude to his suicide; and that Socrates in prison took to
practicing
the music of Dionysus to ease his conscience. " 'Perhaps' thus he had to
ask himself 'what is not intelligible to me is not therefore unreasonable?
Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is banished?
Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of and supplement to science?'
"1S But it was too late; the work of the logician and the rationalist
could not be undone; Greek drama and Greek character decayed. "The
surprising thing had happened: when the poet" and the "recanted,
philosopher
their tendency had already conquered." 10 With them ended
the age of heroes, and the art of Dionysus.
But perhaps the age of Dionysus may return? Did not Kant destroy
once and for all the theoretical reason and the theoretical man? and did
not Schopenhauer teach us again the profundity of instinct and the
tragedy of thought? and is not Richard Wagner another /Eschylus,
restoring myths and symbols, and uniting music and drama again in
Dionysian ecstasy? "Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a
power has arisen which has nothing in common with the primitive conditions
of Socratic culture, . . . namely, German music, ... in its vast
solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner." 30 The
German spirit has too long reflected passively the Apollonian art of Italy
and France; let the German people realize that their own instincts are
sounder than these decadent cultures; let them make a Reformation in
music as in religion, pouring the wild vigor of Luther again into art and
life. Who knows but that out of the war-throes of the German nation
another age of heroes dawns, and that out of the spirit of music tragedy
may be reborn?
In 1872 Nietzsche returned to Basle, still weak in body, but with a spirit
burning with ambition, and loath to consume itself in the drudgery of
lecturing. "I have before me work enough for fifty years, and I must
21
mark time under the yoke." Already he was a little disillusioned with
the war: "the German Empire is extirpating the German spirit," he
wrote. 22 The victory of 1871 had brought a certain coarse conceit into
the soul of Germany; and nothing could be more hostile to spiritual
growth. An impish quality in Nietzsche made him restless before every
idol; and he determined to assail this dulling complacency by attacking
its most respected exponent David Strauss. "I enter society with a duel:
Stendhal gave that advice." 28
17
B. X,, 182.
MP. 113*
W
P* 95.
*In Hal6vyt 169. "Ibid., 15** */*'