an aesthetic phenomenon, the work of a god wholly the artist; “and in this sense the object of the tragic myth is precisely to convince us that even the horrible and the monstrous are no more than an aesthetic game played with itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of its joy.”  “The Will” is Schopenhauer’s “Will,” the vital principle.  “If it were possible,” says Nietzsche, in one of his astonishing figures of speech, “to imagine a dissonance becoming a human being (and what is man but that?), in order to endure life, this dissonance would need some admirable illusion to hide from itself its true nature, under a veil of beauty.”  This is the aim of art, as it calls up pictures of the visible world and of the little temporary actions of men on its surface.  The hoofed satyr of Dionysus, as he leaps into the midst of these gracious appearances, drunk with the young wine of nature, surly with the old wisdom of Silenus, brings the real, excessive, disturbing truth of things suddenly into the illusion; and is gone again, with a shrill laugh, without forcing on us more of his presence than we can bear.

I have but touched on a few points in an argument which has itself the ecstatic quality of which it speaks.  A good deal of the book is concerned with the latest development of music, and especially with Wagner.  Nietzsche, after his change of sides, tells us not to take this part too seriously:  “what I fancied I heard in the Wagnerian music has nothing to do with Wagner.”  Few better things have been said about music than these pages; some of them might be quoted against the “programme” music which has been written since that time, and against the false theory on which musicians have attempted to harness music in the shafts of literature.  The whole book is awakening; in Nietzsche’s own words, “a prodigious hope speaks in it.”

SARAH BERNHARDT

I am not sure that the best moment to study an artist is not the moment of what is called decadence.  The first energy of inspiration is gone; what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which alone one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the principle of life itself.  What is done mechanically, after the heat of the blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased to happen, is precisely all that was consciously skilful in the performance of an art.  To see all this mechanism left bare, as the form of the skeleton is left bare when age thins the flesh upon it, is to learn more easily all that is to be learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature has hitherto concealed with its merciful covering.