Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Dante, Tasso,
Milton, Shakespeare, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Bach, Beethoven, are all,
according to Tolstoi, "false reputations, made by the critics."
We must also class F. Nietzsche with the artists, rather than with the
philosophers. We should do him an injustice (as with J. Ruskin) were we
to express in intellectual terminology his aesthetic affirmations. The
criticism which they provoke would be too facile. Nowhere has Nietzsche
given a complete theory of art, not even in his first book, _Die Geburt
der Tragoedie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus_. What seems to be theory
there, is really the confession of the feelings and aspirations of the
writer. Nietzsche was the last, splendid representative of the romantic
period. He was, therefore, deeply preoccupied with the art problem and
with the relation of art to natural science and to philosophy, though he
never succeeded in definitely fixing those relations. From Romanticism,
rather than from Schopenhauer, he gathered those elements of thought out
of which he wove his conception of the two forms of art: the Apollonian,
all serene contemplation, as expressed in the epic and in sculpture; the
Dionysaic, all tumult and agitation, as expressed in music and the
drama. These doctrines are not rigorously proved, and their power of
resistance to criticism is therefore but slender, but they serve to
transport the mind to a more lofty spiritual level than any others of
the second half of the nineteenth century.
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