24
LIONEL TRILLING
to be at least a
little
superstitious is to lack generosity of mind.
Scientific though his purpose was, Frazer had the effect of vali–
dating and even of seeming to propose to modern times those old
modes of experiencing the world which, beginning with the
Romanticists, modern men have sought to revive in order to
escape from positivism and common sense.
The direction of the imagination upon great and mysterious
objects of worship is not the only means men use to liberate
themselves from the bondage of quotidian fact, and although
Frazer can scarcely be held accountable for the ever-growing
modern attraction to the extreme mental states, to rapture,
ecstasy, and transcendance, which are achieved by drugs, trance,
music and dance, orgy, and derangement of personality, yet he
did provide a bridge to the understanding and acceptance of
these states, he proposed to us the idea that the desire for them
and the use of them for heuristic purposes is a common and ac–
ceptable manifestation of human nature.
This one element of Frazer's masterpiece could scarcely fail
to suggest the next of my prolegomenal works.
It
is worth re–
marking that its author is in his own way as great a classical
scholar as Frazer himself-Nietzsche was the Professor of Classi–
cal Philology at the University of Basel when, at the age of 27,
he published
his
essay,
The Birth of Tragedy.
After the appear–
ance of this stunningly brilliant account of Greek civilization, of
which Socrates is not the hero but the villain, what can possibly
be left to us of that rational and ordered Greece, that modern,
that eighteenth-century, Athens that Arnold so entirely relied
on as the standard for judging all civilizations? Professor Kauf–
mann is right when he warns us against supposing that Nietzsche
exalts Dionysus over Apollo and tells us that Nietzsche "empha–
sizes the Dionysiac only because he feels that the Apollonian
genius of the Greeks cannot be fully understood apart from it."
But no one reading Nietzsche's essay for the first time is likely
to heed this warning. What will reach him before due caution
intervenes, before he becomes aware of the portentous dialectic
