MODERN LITERATURE
25
between Dionysus and Apollo, is the excitement of his sudden
liberation from Aristotle, the joy that he takes in his willingness
to believe the author's statement that,
"art
rather than ethics
constitutes the essential metaphysical activity of man," that trag–
edy has its source in the Dionysiac rapture, "whose closest anal–
ogy is furnished by physical intoxication," and that this rapture,
in
which "the individual forgets himself completely," was in it–
self no metaphysical state but .an orgiastic display of lust and
cruelty, "of sexual promiscuity overriding every form of tribal
law." This sadic and masochistic frenzy, Nietzsche is at pains to
insist, needs the taming hand of Apollo before it can become
tragedy, but
it
is the primal stuff of the great art, and to the
modem experience of tragedy this explanation of it seems far
more pertinent than Aristotle's, with its eagerness to forget its
origin in its achievement of a noble
apatheia.
Of supreme importance in itself, Nietzsche's essay had for
me the added pedagogic advantage of allowing me to establish
an historical line back to William Blake. Nothing is more char–
acteristic of modem literature than its discovery and canoniza–
tion of the primal, non-ethical energies, and the historical point
could be made the better by remarking the correspondence of
thought of two men of different nations and separated from
each other by a good many decades, for Nietzsche's Dionysus
and Blake's Hell are much the same thing.
Whether or not Joseph Conrad read either Blake or
Nietzsche I do not know, but his
Heart of Darkness
follows in
their line. This very great work has never lacked for the admira..
tion it deserves, and it has been given a kind of canonical place
in the legend of modem literature by Eliot's havi.ng it so clearly
in mind when he wrote
The Waste Land
and his having taken
from it the epigraph to "The Hollow Men." But no one, to my
knowledge, has ever confronted in an explicit way its strange
and terrible message of ambivalence toward the life of civiliza–
tion. Consider that its protagonist Kurtz is a progressive and a
liberal and that he is the highly respected representative of a
