only to comment is no more than a development of the chorus.  Here is the problem to which Nietzsche endeavours to find an answer.  He finds it, unlike the learned persons who study Greek texts, among the roots of things, in the very making of the universe.  Art arises, he tells us, from the conflict of the two creative spirits, symbolised by the Greeks in the two gods, Apollo and Dionysus; and he names the one the Apollonian spirit, which we see in plastic art, and the other the Dionysiac spirit, which we see in music.  Apollo is the god of dreams, Dionysus the god of intoxication; the one represents for us the world of appearances, the other is, as it were, the voice of things in themselves.  The chorus, then, which arose out of the hymns to Dionysus, is the “lyric cry,” the vital ecstasy; the drama is the projection into vision, into a picture, of the exterior, temporary world of forms.  “We now see that the stage and the action are conceived only as vision:  that the sole ‘reality’ is precisely the chorus, which itself produces the vision, and expresses it by the aid of the whole symbolism of dance, sound, and word.”  In the admirable phrase of Schiller, the chorus is “a living rampart against reality,” against that false reality of daily life which is a mere drapery of civilisation, and has nothing to do with the primitive reality of nature.  The realistic drama begins with Euripides; and Euripides, the casuist, the friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the true decadent, an “instrument of decomposition,” the slayer of art, the father of modern science), brings tragedy to an end, as he substitutes pathos for action, thought for contemplation, and passionate sentiments for the primitive ecstasy.  “Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms, an optimist dialectic drives the music out of tragedy:  that is to say, destroys the very essence of tragedy, an essence which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and objectivation of Dionysiac states, as a visible symbol of music, as the dream-world of a Dionysiac intoxication.”  There are many pages, scattered throughout his work, in which Pater has dealt with some of the Greek problems very much in the spirit of Nietzsche; with that problem, for instance, of the “blitheness and serenity” of the Greek spirit, and of the gulf of horror over which it seems to rest, suspended as on the wings of the condor.  That myth of Dionysus Zagreus, “a Bacchus who had been in hell,” which is the foundation of the marvellous new myth of “Denys l’Auxerrois,” seems always to be in the mind of Nietzsche, though indeed he refers to it but once, and passingly.  Pater has shown, as Nietzsche shows in greater detail and with a more rigorous logic, that this “serenity” was but an accepted illusion, and all Olympus itself but “intermediary,” an escape, through the aesthetics of religion, from the trouble at the heart of things; art, with its tragic illusions of life, being another form of escape.  To Nietzsche the world and existence justify themselves only as