The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music (Penguin Classics) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche [Nietzsche, Friedrich]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

11

Greek tragedy met her death in a different way from all the older sister arts: she died tragically by her own hand, after irresolvable conflicts, while the others died happy and peaceful at an advanced age. If a painless death, leaving behind beautiful progeny, is the sign of a happy natural state, then the endings of the other arts show us the example of just such a happy natural state: they sink slowly, and with their dying eyes they behold their fairer offspring, who lift up their heads in bold impatience. The death of Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left a great void whose effects were felt profoundly, far and wide; as once Greek sailors in Tiberius’ time heard the distressing cry ‘the god Pan is dead’ issuing from a lonely island, now, throughout the Hellenic world, this cry resounded like an agonized lament: ‘Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters’ crumbs!’

But when a new artistic genre did spring into life, honouring tragedy as its predecessor and its master, it was frighteningly apparent that although it bore its mother’s features they were the features she had borne during her long death-struggle. It was Euripides who fought tragedy’s death-struggle; the later genre is known as the New Attic Comedy. It was in comedy that the degenerate figure of tragedy lived on, a monument to its miserable and violent death.

This context enables us to understand the passionate affection in which the poets of the New Comedy held Euripides; so that we are no longer startled by the desire of Philemon, who wished to be hanged at once so that he might meet Euripides in the underworld, as long as he could be sure that the deceased was still in full possession of his senses. But if we wished, quite briefly and without claiming to be exhaustive, to identify the bonds that linked Euripides with Menander and Philemon, and to say what they found exciting and exemplary in him, we need say only that Euripides brought the spectator on to the stage. Once we have recognized the stuff of which the pre-Euripidean Promethean dramatists shaped their heroes, and understood how little concerned they were to bring on to the stage an accurate mask of reality, we shall also understand the quite opposite tendency in Euripides. Through him, everyday man pushed his way through the auditorium on to the stage, and the mirror in which only great and bold features had hitherto found expression now showed the painful fidelity that also reflected the blemished lines of nature, Odysseus, the typical Hellene of the older art, now sank, beneath the hands of the new poets, into the figure of the Graeculus, who from this point onwards occupied centre-stage as a good-natured, cunning slave. What Euripides, in the Frogs of Aristophanes, accounts a merit in himself – that he has, with his nostrum, rid tragic art of its pompous obesity – is particularly apparent in his tragic heroes.

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