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480 necessity of slavery in the interests of a culture, it was one of the strong thoughts of my great predecessor, which others are too feeble to lay hold of" (Werke, IX, 268, § 216).

undefined That genuine art does not spring from instincts for luxury, and that a new birth of it in the modern world is to be expected rather from a society freed from luxury, is asserted in Werke, X, 459, § 367 (here Nietzsche refers to the idea of the curse of gold which underlies Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungen "). Art undergoes degeneration when it is a means of diversion simply (Birth of Tragedy, sects. 22, 24). Nietzsche draws a satirical picture of the modern arts and of the society that calls for them, in "Richard Wagner at Bayreuth," sect. 8. All the same he admits that art is not for the time of actual struggle (ibid., sect. 4).

undefined C. W. Super, International Journal of Ethics, January, 1913, p. 178.

undefined This in lectures at Basel, as reported by Malwida von Meysenbug, Der Lebensabend einer Idealisten, p. 50.

undefined A later observation of Nietzsche's is of interest in this connection: "Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The most unhappy and melancholy animal is, as is reasonable, the cheerfullest " (Will to Power, § 91). Nietzsche thinks that the current impression of Greek cheerfulness comes largely by way of Christianity, which encountered a decadent Greece and was offended by its lightness and superficiality. This kind of "cheerfulness," however, was a poor counterpart to the high serenity of men like Æschylus, and the determining influence in it was the masses, or old-time slaves, who wished for little else than enjoyment and felt no responsibilities, being without either great memories or great hopes (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 11). The great epoch of Greece to Nietzsche's mind was from Hesiod to Æschylus (see Joël's discussion of the subject in op. cit., pp. 297-315). In English the general view of Nietzsche and Burckhardt finds expression in W. L. Courtney's The Idea of Tragedy (1900). There are echoes of Burckhardt's view in W. G. Sumner's Folkways, pp. 104-5.

undefined Nietzsche remarks on the contrast between a chorus of Apollo, in which the maidens preserve their separate identity and keep their civil names, and a dithyrambic chorus of Dionysus, in which each one's civic connection and social position are entirely forgotten (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 8).

undefined See the wonderful description, half picture and half interpretation, of the Dionysus festival (Birth of Tragedy, close of sect. 1); cf. Erwin Rohde's Psyche, II, 17 n.

undefined Cf., in this connection, Walter Pater, Greek Studies, pp. 41-3, 36; Erwin Rohde, op. cit., II, 116 n.; Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., art. "Dionysus"; J. A. Symonds, The Greek Poets, II, 145-6.

undefined Rites and ceremonies which we should regard as coming under the head of sexual excesses seem to have characterized the beginnings of the Dionysus worship in Greece, as they did the celebrations in oriental countries from which the worship originally came; but in time the Greek worship became a more chastened thing.

undefined Birth of Tragedy, beginning of sect. 17. Nietzsche thinks that this Dionysiac experience has been widespread in the world (though of course under other names), that in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds ever increasing in number were borne from place to place under the same impulse (the St. John's and St. Vitus' dancers being kindred to the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks), that the phenomena can be traced back as far as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea—and he adds, with reference to those who dismiss them as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by a consciousness of their own superior health, that they do not surmise what a cadaverous and ghostly aspect