To make it feel both cold and heat.
Her fingers number every nerve,
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries,
And she grows young as he grows old.
Till he becomes a bleeding youth,
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles,
And binds her down for his delight.”
It is a fine pictorial expression of the formative processes of consciousness, the domination of the unconscious flux by the shaping of the knowing intellect, and the escape of that flux, the overbalancing of the intellect by the onrush of unrealised impressions. I do not think it has or can have any deeper significance in aesthetic criticism. It was, however, of considerable service to Nietzsche in the criticism of life. In life, he would be, for the moment, a worshipper of Dionysus, seeking less to control life than to live—because Dionysus, he felt, was being a little neglected. In a “Dionysian age” he would have left ecstasy below him and worshipped the placid Apollo, shaping dreams untroubled by the turmoil in the valleys. In such an age as that for which he hoped, such an age as that of Greek tragedy, he would have stormed Olympus at the head of the Dionysian revellers, and conquered the Dionysian ecstasy to bind it captive in the service of Apollo.