an æsthetic 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 æsthetic
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."