"A sort of mystic soul," as he says of
himself, "almost the soul of a Maenad, who, troubled, capricious, and
half irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out something in a
foreign tongue."
The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the Greeks, as it
arose out of music through the medium of the chorus. We are apt to look
on the chorus in Greek plays as almost a negligible part of the
structure; as, in fact, hardly more than the comments of that "ideal
spectator" whom Schlegel called up out of the depths of the German
consciousness. We know, however, that the chorus was the original
nucleus of the play, that the action on which it seems only to comment
is no more than a development of the chorus. Here is the problem to
which Nietzsche endeavours to find an answer. He finds it, unlike the
learned persons who study Greek texts, among the roots of things, in the
very making of the universe. Art arises, he tells us, from the conflict
of the two creative spirits, symbolised by the Greeks in the two gods,
Apollo and Dionysus; and he names the one the Apollonian spirit, which
we see in plastic art, and the other the Dionysiac spirit, which we see
in music.
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