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Rh the Gods first appeared to men in dreams, and Nietzsche regarded the Olympian family of deities as a kind of detached glorified vision of the commanding, powerful, and splendid elements in Greek life. They were hardly divine, in our sense of that term, that is, embodiments of justice, holiness, purity—any one who approaches the Homeric pantheon with Christian feelings, he remarks, is bound to be disappointed. The Greek rather saw in that immortal company himself over again and what was great, both good and evil, in his own life and experience, including the contradictions and tragic elements. Religion itself was to this extent like art—and it had the emancipating, relieving, reassuring influence of art. The Gods, Nietzsche says sententiously, justified human life by living it themselves—the "only satisfying theodicy." There were besides epic narrative and sculpture and painting, all coming from the same picture-making impulse. The things narrated or represented might have elements of terror in them, but when thus projected and separated from actual experience, the main feelings in witnessing them were of wonder and admiration. This would be the case, even if they corresponded in every single form and lineament to the realities they reproduced. Indeed, this kind of art observed the metes and bounds, the definite outlines and forms, of the actual world most scrupulously.

But there was another art-impulse, to which Nietzsche gives the name Dionysiac—it is so much "another," that we may hardly see the propriety of calling it an art-impulse at all. Nietzsche's description of it is colored by Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and is not easy to follow for those who are not versed in the latter; but I shall try to make his meaning clear. Dionysus, as is well known, was outside the Olympian circle of divinities. His worship (the rites in his honor) was of an altogether peculiar character. It was not sober, orderly, and decorous, observing metes and bounds, like the worship of Apollo and Zeus, but a more or less riotous thing. There was dancing, and the music of the flute which accompanied it was very different from the music of Apollo's lyre. Exaltation