704
PARTISAN REVIEW
Dionysus, and I would sooner
be
a satyr than a saint."
So
far his
vocation was Socratic; he was the gadfly given by God to plague the
bourgeoisie. His mask was that of the destroyer, the misanthropist,
the tempter; and his comedy was Mephistophelian. "I am by far
the most terrible man that has ever existed; but this does not negate
the fact that I shall
be
the most beneficent. I know the joy of anni–
hilation to a degree commensurate with my power to annihilate."
If
the Nietzschean vocation was Socratic, the Nietzschean comedy
was not. Socrates the
eiron,
the dissembler, the mocker, was the
devotee of Apollo and the dialectic. Nietzsche was the votary of
Dionysus the ecstatic, the exuberant, the possessed. The Nietzschean
comedy is a neurosis: "Seeking for my highest formula for Shake–
speare, I invariably find only this: he conceived the type of Caesar
... After glancing at my
Zarathustra,
I pace to and fro in my room
for a half hour, unable to control an unbearable fit of sobbing. I
know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare: what he
must have suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown!"
Thus Nietzsche perverted his Socratic vocation into Wagnerian pathos.
His terrible comedy was inflated
to
melodrama, and so was robbed of
its proper triumph. The ironic malignity became a wail; the con–
suming laughter of the faun quavered into hysteria. The satyr was
deprived of his prey as he never was in the Socratic comedy, where
the dialectic relentlessly closed in upon its victims. Nietzsche the
faun, the satyr, was a prey to his own barbarous comedy; he perished,
masochistically, under his suffering as clown. He was defeated in
his
agon.
In the Socratic comedy the faun also underwent the discipline
of suffering, was forced to drop the satyric mask and reveal the
idiotic features of the clown. But the folly and impotence of the
clown here proved to be a devouring wisdom, an illumination so
brilliant that it daemonically ravaged the sophistications of Athens,
the hypocrisies and evasions Socrates was always inspecting. The
Socratic innocence was always arriving at intimations,
if
not at
irre–
sistible discovery. Innocence was revelation. Thus, when the Socratic
comedy came to its close, the clown reassumed in triumph the mask
of the tempter, the flickering smile of the ironist. Socrates was both
clown and faun; scapegoat, saint, and satyr. For Nietzsche, intox–
icated with Dionysiac madness, Socrates was the archetypal non-
