Finely put, indeed, are the words of Nietzsche's views on ecstasy. "To the existence of art, to the existence of any aesthetic activity or perception whatsoever, a preliminary psychological condition is indispensable, namely ecstasy. Ecstasy must first have intensified the sensitiveness of the whole mechanism; until this takes place art is not realized.
"All kinds of ecstasy, however differently conditioned, possess this power; above all the ecstasy of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of ecstasy."
Plato, it will be recalled, compared the state of the poet to that of the reveller in the Bacchanalian rites. The favorable side of the worship of Dionysius or the Bacchic revels has been shown by Euripides in his play the Bacchae. He shows how King Pentheus was torn to pieces in mistake by his own mother for his hostility to the bacchic rites. Bacchus himself is the hero of the play. As the chorus says, Bacchus is innately modest and modest women will not be corrupted at the revels. Who is not moved by the song of the Chorus? "Would that I could go to Cyprus, the island of Venus, where the lovers dwell, soothing the minds of mortals, and to Paphos, which the waters of a foreign river flowing with an hundred mouths fertilize without rain—and to the land of Pieria, where is the beautiful seat of the Muses, the holy hill of Olympus. Lead me thither, O Bromius, Bromius, O master thou of Bacchanals. There are the Graces and there is Love and there is it lawful for the Bacchae to celebrate their orgies."
The ecstasy of the revellers at the rites was poetic ecstasy, for it was an unconscious or conscious erotic nature manifesting itself in the form of a religious rite. Bacchus, aside from being god of wine, was the symbol of productiveness and was accompanied by Priapus, and the phallus was carried about. He was youthful and his symbols were animals like the goat, ass, bull, tiger, lion, all of which had erotic significance. The ecstatic rites with which he was worshipped were introduced from Thrace.
Aristotle attributes the origin of tragedy to the use of the dithyramb of the revellers, and comedy to the phallic songs sung by them. The point is that love frenzy leads
to poetry, and we have an illustration of it in the connection between the Bacchic rites and poetry, between love and art. The rites degenerated under the Romans and were soon suppressed by law.
Nietzsche gives us a profound interpretation of Euripides's play in the twelfth section of The Birth of Tragedy. It is the old story of the battle between the emotions and reason, the instinct and the intellect, problems which men as different as Hearn, Bergson, Nietzsche, Pater and Freud solved by seeking liberties for the instinct. Pentheus, who represents reason, is the enemy of Bacchus, but fascinated by him, loses his life; reason leads to death when it makes no concession to the instincts. The play was a protest by Euripides against his own moralizing tendencies. The lesson of the sages Cadmus and Tiresius is, in the words of Nietzsche, that we must display a diplomatically cautious concern in the presence of the emotional forces. Don't trifle with poetry and the ecstasies that produce it.
The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his Greek Studies, that Euripides wrote the play as a repentance for his liberal views and to signify his return to the conservatism of the Greek religion, is no longer held. Gilbert Murray and others have also shown the fallacy of this view, but Nietzsche anticipated them.
The most primitive and universal ecstasy is that which is concerned with the attraction of the sexes. Poetry after all deals chiefly with love, for in the relations of the sexes we have the source of most of the pleasurable and painful emotions of humanity. Sexual love even when most hidden is at the root of all love between the sexes. It is for this reason that we can still appreciate the oldest lyric poetry of different nations.
True, two of our greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth