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08 - Peoples and Countries - Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche · The Philosophy Insights Collection

• Chapter eight, Peoples and Countries two hundred forty. I heard once again for the first time Richard Wagner's overture to the Master Singer. It is a piece of magnificent, gorgeous, heavy latter day art, which has the pride to presuppose two centuries of music as still living, in order that it may be understood. It is an honor to Germans that such a pride did not miscalculate. What flavors and forces, what seasons and climes do we not find mingled in it? It impresses us at one time as ancient, at another time as foreign, bitter, and too modern. It is as arbitrary as it is pompously traditional. It is not infrequently roguish, still oftener, rough and coarse. It has fire and courage, and at the same time the loose, dun colored skin of fruits which ripen too late. It flows broad and full, and suddenly there is a moment of inexplicable hesitation, like a gap that opens between cause and effect, an oppression that makes us dream, almost a nightmare. But already it broadens and widens anew the old stream of delight, the most manifold delight of old and new happiness, including especially the joy of the artist in himself, which he refuses to conceal, his astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of the expedients here employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested expedients of art, which he apparently betrays to us. All in all, however, no beauty, no south, nothing of the delicate southern clearness of the sky, nothing of grace, no dance, hardly a will to logic, a certain clumsiness, even which is also emphasized, as though the artist wishes to say to us it is part of my intention. A cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flaring of learned, in venerable conceits and witticisms. Something German in the best and worst sense of the word, something in the German style, manifold, formless and inexhaustible, A certain German potency and super plenitude of soul which is not afraid to hide itself under the raffigements of decadence, which perhaps feels itself more at ease. There a real, genuine token of the German soul, which is at the same time young and aged to ripe, and yet still too rich in futurity. This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans. They belong to the day before yesterday, and the day after to morrow. They have, as yet know, to day two hundred forty one. We good Europeans, we also have hours when we allow ourselves of warm hearted patriotism a plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow views. I have just given an example of it, hours of national excitement, of patriotic anguish, and all other sorts of old fashioned floods of sentiment. Duller spirits may perhaps only get done with what confines its operations in us to ours, and plays itself out in hours in a considerable time, some in half a year, others in half a lifetime, according to the speed and strength with which they digest and change their material. Indeed, I could think of sluggish, hesitating races, which, even in our rapidly moving Europe would require half a century. Ere they could surmount such atavistic attacks of patriotism and soil attachment and return once more to reason, that is to say, to good Europeanism. And while digressing on this possibility, I happen to become an ear witness of a conversation between two old patriots. They were evidently both hard of hearing, and consequently spoke all the louder. He has as much and knows as much philosophy as a peasant or a coarse student, said the one. He is still innocent. But what does that matter? Nowadays? It is the age of the masses. They lie on their belly before everything that is massive, and they also in politics the statesman who rears up for them a new tower of babel, some monstrosity of empire and power they call great. What does it matter that we more prudent and conservative ones do not meanwhile give up the old belief that it is only the great thought that gives greatness to an action or affair. Supposing a statesman were to bring his people into the position of being obliged henceforth to practice high politics, for which they were by nature badly endowed and prepared, so that they would have to sacrifice their old and reliable virtues out of love, to a new and doubtful mediocrity. Supposing a statesman were to condemn his people generally to practice politics when they have hitherto had something better to do and think about, and when in the depths of their souls they have been unable to free themselves from a prudent loathing of the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy wranglings of the essentially politics practice in nations. Supposing such a statesman were to stimulate the slumbering passions and avidities of his people, were to make a stigma out of their former diffidence and delight in aloofness, an offense out of their exoticism and hidden permanency. Were to depreciate their most radical proclivities, subvert their consciences, make their minds narrow, and their tastes national. What a statesman who should do all this, which his people would have to do penance for throughout their whole future. If they had a future, such a statesman would be great, would he, undoubtedly, replied the other old patriot vehemently. Otherwise he could not have done it. It was mad, perhaps to wish such a thing. But perhaps everything great has been just as mad as its commencement misuse of war. The words, cried his interlocutor, contradictorily. Strong, strong, strong, and mad, not great. The old men had obviously become heated as they thus shouted their truths in each other's faces. But I, in my happiness and a partness, considered how soon a stronger one may become master of the strong, And also that there is a compensation for the intellectual superficializing of a nation, namely in the deepening of another two hundred forty two, whether we call it civilization or humanizing or progress, which now distinguishes the European, whether we call it simply without praise or blame by the political formula the democratic movement in Europe. Behind all the moral and political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense physiological process goes on, which is ever extending the process of the assimilation of Europeans, their increasing detachment from the conditions under which climatically and hereditarily united races originate, their increasing independence of every definite milieu that for centuries would fain inscribe itself with equal demands on soulent body. That is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially supernational and nomadic species of man who possesses physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his typical distinction this process of the evolving European, which can be retarded in its tempo by great relapses, but will perhaps just gain and grow thereby in vehemence and depths. The still raging storm and stress of national sentiment pertains to it, and also the anarchism which is appearing at present. This process will probably arrive at results on which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of modern ideas would least care to reckon the same new conditions under which, on an average a leveling and mediocrizing of man will take place. A useful, industrious, variously serviceable, and clever, gregarious man are in the highest degrees suitable to give rise to exceptional men of the most dangerous and attractive qualities. For while the capacity for adaptation, which is every day changing conditions and begins a new work with every generation, almost with every decade, makes the powerfulness of the type impossible. While the collective impression of such future Europeans will probably be that of numerous talkative, weak willed, and very handy work workmen who require a master a commander as they require their daily bread. While therefore the democratizing of Europe will tend to the production of a type prepared for slavery. In the most subtle sense of the term. This strong man will necessarily, in individual and exceptional cases, become stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been before, owing to the unprejudicedness of his schooling, owing to the immense variety of practice, art and disguise, I meant to say that the democratizing of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of tyrants, taking the word in all its meanings, even in its most spiritual sense two hundred forty three. I hear with pleasure that our son is moving rapidly towards the constellation Hercules, and I hope that the men on this earth will do like the Sun. And we foremost we good Europeans. Two hundred and forty four. There was a time when it was customary to call Germans deep by way of distinction. But now that the most successful type of New Germanism is covetous of quite other honors, and perhaps missus smartness in all that has depths, it is almost opportune and patriotic to doubt whether we did not formally deceive ourselves without commendation. In short, whether the German depths is not, at bottom something different and worse, and something from which, thank god, we are on the point of successfully ridding ourselves. Let us try, then to relearn with regard to German depths. The only thing necessary for the purpose is a little vivisection of the German soul. The German soul is above all manifold, varied in its source, aggregated and superimposed, rather than actually built. This is owing to its origin. A German who would emboden himself to assert two souls alas dwell in my breast, would make a bad guess at the truth, or, more correctly, he would come far short of the truth about the number of souls. As a people made up of the most extraordinary mixing and mingling of races, perhaps even with the preponderance of the pre aryan element, as the people of the center, in every sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other people are to themselves. They escape definition and are thereby alone the despair of the French. It is characteristic of the Germans that the question what is German? Never dies out among them. Kotzebu certainly knew his Germans well enough, we are known they cried jubilantly to him. But Zand also thought he knew them. Jean Paul knew what he was doing when he declared himself incensed at Fichtu's lying but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations. But it is probable that Gutter sought differently about Germans from Jean Paul, even though he acknowledged him to be right. With regard to Fichte. It is a question what Gute really thought about the Germans, But about many things around him he never spoke explicitly, and all his life he knew how to keep in astute silence. Probably he had good reason for it. It is certain that it was not the wars of Independence that made him look up more joyfully any more than it was the French Revolution, the event on account of which he reconstructed his faust, and indeed the whole problem of man, was the appearance of Napoleon. There are words of Gutu in which he condemns with impatient severity as from a foreign land, that which Germans take pride in. He wants to find the famous German turn of mind as indulgence towards its own and others weaknesses. Was he wrong? It is characteristic of Germans that one is seldom entirely wrong about them. The German soul has passages and galleries in it. There are caves, hiding places, and dungeons. Therein its disorder, has much of the charm of the mysterious. The German well acquainted with the bypaths to chaos. And as everything loves its symbol, so the German loves the clouds and all that is obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp and shrouded. It seems to him that everything uncertain, undeveloped, self, displacing and growing, is deep. The German himself does not exist. He is becoming. He is developing himself. Development is therefore the essentially German discovery and hit in the great domain of philosophical formulas, a ruling idea which, together with German beer and German music, is laboring to Germanize all Europe. Foreigners are astonished and attracted by the riddles which the conflicting nature at the basis of the German soul propounds to them riddles which Hegel systematized, and Richard Wagner has in the end such to music, good natured and spiteful. Such a juxtaposition preposterous in the case of every other people, is unfortunately only too often justified. In Germany. One has only to live for a while among Swabians to know this. The clumsiness of the German scholar and his social distastefulness agree alarmingly well with his physical rope dancing and nimble boldness, of which all the gods have learnt to be afraid. If any one wishes to see that German soul demonstrated ad oculos, let him only look at German taste, At German arts and manners. What boorish indifference to taste, How the noblest and the commonists stand there in juxtaposition, How dis orderly and how rich is the whole constitution of this soul. The German drags at his soul, He drags at everything he experiences. He digests his events badly, he never gets done with them, And German depths is often only a difficult hesitating digestion, and just as all chronic invalids, all the speptics like what is convenient so that German loves frankness and honesty? It is so convenient to be frank and honest. This confidingness, this complaisance, this showing the cards of German honesty, is perhaps the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays. It is his proper Mephistophilian art. With this he can still achieve much. The German lets himself go, and thereby gazes with faithful, blue, empty German eyes, and other countries immediately confound him with his dressing gown. I meant to say that let German depths be what it will. Among ourselves alone, we perhaps take the liberty to laugh at it. We shall do well to continue henceforth to honor its appearance and good name, and not barter away too cheaply our old reputation as a people for depths, for Prussian smartness and Berlin wit and sand. It is wise for a people to pose and let itself be regarded as profound, clumsy, good natured, honest and foolish. It might even be profound to do so finally we should do honor to our name. We are not called the tuschefolk deceptive people for nothing. Two hundred forty five. The good old time is past. It sung itself out in Mozart. How happy are we that his Rococo still speaks to us, that his good company, his tender enthusiasm, his childish delight in the Chinese and its flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his longing for the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, and his belief in the South can still appeal to something left in us. Ah. Some time or other it will be over with it, but who can doubt that it will be over still sooner with the intelligence and taste for Beethoven, For he was only the last echo of a break and transition in style, and not, like Mozart, the last echo of a great European taste which had existed for centuries. Beethoven is the intermediate event between an old, mellow soul that is constantly breaking down and a future over young's that is always coming. There is spread over his music the twilight of eternal loss and eternal extravagant hope, the same light in which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced round the tree of liberty of the Revolution, and finally almost fell down an adoration before Napoleon. But how rapidly does this very sentiment now pale? How difficult nowadays is even the apprehension of this sentiment. How strangely does the language of Roussau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sant to our ear, in whom, collectively the same fate of Europe was able to speak, which knew how to sing in Beethworven. Whatever German music came afterwards, belongs to Romanticism, that is to say, to a movement which historically considered was still shorter, more fleeting, and more superficial than the Great Interlude the transition of Europe from Roussort to Napoleon and to the rise of democracy Weber, But what do we care nowadays of Freischitz and Aubern, or Marchioness, Hans Heiling and Vampurre, or even Wagner's Tannheuser that is extinct, although not yet forgotten music. This whole music of Romanticism, besides, was not noble enough, was not musical enough to maintain its position anywhere but in the theater and before the masses. From the beginning it was second rate music, which was little thought of by genuine musicians. It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that Halsion master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly acquired admiration and was equally quickly forgotten as the beautiful episode of German music. But with regard to Robert Schumann, who took things seriously and has been taken seriously from the first, he was the last that founded a school, do we not now regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance that this very romanticism of Schumann's has been surmounted. Schumann fleeing into the Saxon Switzerland of his soul with a half verte like, half Jean Paul like nature, assuredly not like Beethoven, assuredly not like Byron. His manfred music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the extent of injustice. Schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally a petty taste, that is to say, a dangerous propensity, doubly dangerous among Germans. For quiet lyricism and intoxication of the feelings going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, a noble weakling reveled in nothing but anonymous joy and sorrow from the beginning, a sort of girl and newly metangerer. This Schumann was already merely a German event in music, and no longer a European event, as Beethoven had been, as in a still greater degree Mozart had been. With Schumann, German music was threatened with its greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul of Europe and sinking into a merely national affair two hundred forty six. What a torture are books written in German to a reader who has a third ear, how indignantly he stands beside the slowly turning swamp of sounds without tune and rhythms without dance, which Germans call a book. And even the German who reads books, how lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads, how many Germans know unconsiderate obligatory to know that there is art in every good sentence, art which must be divined if the sentence is to be understood. If there is a misunderstanding about its tempo. For instance, the sentence itself is misunderstood. That one must not be doubtful about the rihysm determining syllables. That one should feel the breaking of the too rigid symmetry as intentional and as a charm. That one should lend a fine and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato. That one should divine the sense in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they can be tinted and retinted in the order of their arrangement. Who among book reading Germans is complaisent enough to recognize such duties and requirements and to listen to so much art and intention in language. After all, one just has no ear for it, and so the most marked contrasts of style are not heard, and the most delicate artistry, as it were, squandered on the deaf. These were my thoughts when I noticed how clumsily and unintuitively two masters in the art of prose writing have been confounded. One whose words drop down hesitatingly and coldly, as from the roof of a damp cave. He counts on their dull sound and echo, And another who manipulates his language like a flexible sword, and from his arm down to his toes feels the dangerous bliss of the quivering over sharp blade which wishes to bite, hiss and cut two hundred forty seven. How little the German style has to do with harmony and with the ear is shown by the fact that precisely our good musicians themselves write badly. The German does not read aloud, He does not read for the ear, but only with his eyes. He has put his ears away in the drawer for the time. In antiquity when a man read, which was seldom enough, he read something to himself, and in a loud voice. They were surprised when any one read silently and sought secretly the reason of it in a loud voice, that is to say, with other swellings, inflections and variations of key, and changes of tempo in which the ancient public world took delight. The laws of the written style were then the same as those of the spoken style, and these laws depended partly on the surprising development and refined requirements of the ear and larynx, partly on the strength endurance and power of the ancient lungs. In the ancient sense, a period is above all a physiological whole, inasmuch as it is comprised in one blath. Such periods as occur and Demosthenis in Cicero, swelling twice and sinking twice, and all in one breath, were pleasures to the men of antiquity, who knew, by their own schooling how to appreciate the virtue therein the rareness and the difficulty in the deliverance of such a period. We have really no right in the big period we modern men, who are short of breath in every sense. These ancients, indeed, were all of them diletanti in speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently critics. They thus brought their orators to the highest pitch. In the same manner as in the last century, when all Italian ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of song, and with it also the art of melody, reached its elevation in Germany. However, until quite recently, when a kind of places form eloquence began shyly and awkwardly enough to flutter its young wings, there was properly speaking, only one kind of public and approximately artistical discourse that delivered from the pulpit. The preacher was the only one in Germany who knei the weight of a syllable or a word in what manner of sentence strikes, springs, rushes, flows and comes to a close. He alone had a conscience in his ears. Often enough about conscience, for reasons are not lacking by proficiency in oratory should be especially seldom attained by a German, or almost always too late. The masterpiece of German prose is, therefore, with good reason, the masterpiece of its greatest preacher. The Bible has hitherto been the best German book. Compared with Lutter's Bible. Almost everything else is merely literature, something which has not grown in jams, and therefore has not taken and does not take root in German hearts, as the Bible has done two hundred forty eight. There are two kinds of geniuses, one which above all engenders and seeks to engender, and another which willingly lets itself be fructified and brings forth. And similarly, among the gifted nations there are those on whom the woman's problem of pregnancy has devolved and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting. The Greeks, for instance, were a nation of this kind, and so are the French and others, which have to fructify and become the cause of new modes of life, like the Jews, the Romans, and in all modesty be it asked like the Germans, nations tortured and enraptured by unknown fevers and irresistibly forced out of themselves, amorous and belonging for foreign ways, such as let themselves be fructified and with all imperiors, like everything, conscious of being full of generative force, and consequently empowered by the grace of God. These two kinds of geniuses seek each other like man and woman, but they also misunderstand each other, like man and woman two hundred and forty nine. Every nation has its own tartufery, and calls that its virtue. One does not know cannot know the best. That is, in one two hundred and fifty what Europe owes to the Jews. Many things good and bad, and above all one thing of the nature, both of the best and the worst, the grand style and morality, the fearfulness and majesty of inner infinite demands, of infinite significations, the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness, and consequently just the most attractive, ensnaring and exquisite element in those iridescences and allurements to life in the after sene of which the sky of our European culture, its evening sky now glows, perhaps glows out. For this we artists, among the spectators and philosophers, are grateful to the Jews two hundred fifty one. It must be taken into the bargain if various clouds and disturbances, in short slight attacks of stupidity pass over the spirit of a people that suffers and wants to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition. For instance, among present day Germans there is alternately the anti French folly, the anti Semitic folly, the anti Polish folly, the Christian Romantic folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic folly, the Prussian folly. Just look at all those poor historians, the Zubils and Treichchus and their closely bandaged heads, and whatever else, These little obscurations of the German spirit and conscience may be called. May it be forgiven me that I, too, when on a short, daring sojourn into very infected ground, did not remain wholly exempt from the disease, but, like every one else, began to entertain thoughts about matters which did not concern me. The first symptom of political infection about the Jews, for instance, listened to the following. I have never yet met a German who was favorably inclined to the Jews, and however, decided the repudiation of actual antisemitism may be on the part of all prudence and political men. This prudence and policy is not, perhaps directed against the nature of the sentiment itself, but only against its dangerous excess, and especially against the distasteful and infamous expression of this excess of sentiment. On this point, we must not deceive ourselves that Germany has amply sufficient Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood has difficulty and will long have difficulty, in disposing only of this quantity of Jew as the Italians, the Frenchman and the Englishman have done by means of a stronger digestion. That is, the unmistakable declaration and language of a general instinct to which one must listen and according to which one must act. Let no more Jews come in and shut the doors, especially towards the East, also towards Austria. Thus commands the instinct of a people whose nature is still feeble and uncertain, so that it could be easily wiped out, easily extinguished by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race at present living in Europe. They know how to succeed even under the worst conditions, in fact, better than under favorable ones, by means of virtues of some sort, which one would like nowadays to label as vices, owing above all to a resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before modern ideas. They alter only when they do alter in the same way that the Russian Empire makes its conquest as an empire that has plenty of time and is not of yesterday, namely, according to the principle, as slowly as possible, a thinker who has the future of Europe at heart, will, in all his perspectives concerning the future, calculate upon the Jews as you will calculate upon the Russians as above all the surest and likeliest factors in the great play and battle of forces. That which is at present called a nation in Europe, and is really rather a race factor than nata, perhaps sometimes confusingly similar to a race fictor et picta is in every case something evolving, young, easily displaced, and not yet a race, much less such a race euperhenis, as the Jews are. Such nations should most carefully avoid all hot headed rivalry and hostility. It is certain that the Jews, if they desired, or if they were driven to it, as the Antisemites seemed to wish, could have the ascendancy nay literally the supremacy over Europe. That they are not working and planning for that end is equally certain. Meanwhile, they rather wish and desire, even somewhat importunely, to be absorbed and absorbed by Europe. They long to be finally settled, authorized, and respected somewhere, and wish to put an end to the nomadic life to the wandering Jew. And one should certainly take account of this impulse and tendency and make advances to it. It possibly betokens a mitigation of the Jewish instincts, for which purpose it would perhaps be useful and fair to banish the anti Semitic bawlers out of the country. One should make advances with all prudence and with selection, pretty much as the English nobility do. It stands to reason that the most powerful and strongly marked types of New Germanism could enter into relation with the Jews with the least hesitation, for instance, the nobleman officer from the Prussian border. It would be interesting in many ways to see whether the genius for money and patience, and especially some intellect and intellectuality sadly lacking in the place referred to, could not, in addition, be annexed and trained to the hereditary art of commanding and obeying, for both of which the country in question has now a classic reputation. But here it is expedient to break off my festal discourse at my sprightly Teutonomania, for I have already reached my serious topic, the European problem, as I understand it, the rearing of a new ruling caste for Europe two hundred and fifty two. They are not a philosophical race. The English bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit, generally Hobbes, Hume, and Lock, an abasement and a depreciation of the idea of a philosopher for more than a century. It was against Hume that Cunt up rose and raised himself. It was Locke, of whom Schelling rightly said jimypriez Lock. In the struggle against the English mechanical stratification of the world. Hegel and Schortenhauer, along with Gutter, were of one accord, the two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy, who pushed in different directions towards the opposite poles of German thought, and thereby wronged each other, as only brothers will do. What is lacking in England and has always been lacking. That half actor and rhetorician knew well enough the absurd muddle head Carlyle, who sought to conceal under passionate grimaces, what he knew about himself, namely, what was lacking in Carlyle, real power of intellect, real depths of intellectual perception. In short philosophy, it is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race to hold on firmly to Christianity. They need its discipline for moralizing and humanizing. The Englishman more gloomy, sensual, headstrong and brutal than the German is for that very reason, as the baser of the two also the most pious, he has all the more need of Christianity to finer nostrils. This English Christianity itself has still a characteristic English taint of spleen and alcoholic excess, for which, owing to good reasons, it is used as an antidote the finer poison to neutralize the couser. A finer form of poisoning is in fact a step in advance with coarse mannered people, a step towards spiritualization. The English coarseness and rustic de Murnus is still most satisfactorily disguised by Christian pantomime and by praying and psalm singing, or more correctly, it is thereby explained and differently expressed. And for the herd of drunkards and rakes, who formerly learned moral grunting under the influence of Methodism, and more recently as the Salvation army, a penitential fit may really be the relatively highest manifestation of humanity to which they can be elevated. So much may reasonably be admitted that, however, which offends even in the humanist Englishman is his lack of music. To speak, figuratively and also literally, he has neither rism nor dance in the movements of his soul in body, indeed, not even the desire for rihysm and dance for music. Listen to him speaking, Look at the most beautiful englishwoman walking in no country on earth are their more beautiful doves and swans? Finally, listen to them singing. But I asked too much two hundred fifty three. There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre minds because they are best adapted for them. There are truths which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre spirits. One is pushed to this probably unpleasant conclusion now that the influence of respectable but mediocre Englishman I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer begins to gain the ascendancy of the middle class region of European taste. Indeed, who could doubt that it is a useful thing for such minds to have the ascendancy for a time. It would be an error to consider the highly developed and independently soaring minds as specially qualified for determining and collecting many little common facts and deducing conclusions from them. As exceptions, they are rather from the first in no very favorable position towards those who are the rules. After all, they have more to do than merely to perceive. In effect, they have to be something new, They have to signify something new, They have to represent new values. The gulf between knowledge and capacity is perhaps greater and also more mysterious than one thinks. The capable man in the grand style the creator will possibly have to be an ignorant person, while on the other hand, for scientific discoveries like those of Darwin, a certain narrowness, aridity, and industrious carefulness short something English may not be unfavorable for arriving at them. Finally, let it not be forgotten that the English, with their profound mediocrity, brought about once before a general depression of European intelligence. What is called modern ideas or the ideas of the eighteenth century or French ideas, that consequently against which the German mind rose up with profound disgust, is of English origin. There is no doubt about it. The French were only the apes and actors of these ideas their best soldiers, and likewise alas their first and profoundest victims. For owing to the diabolical anglomania of modern ideas, the Enfrancais has in the end become so thin and emaciated that at present one recalls its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profound, passionate strength, its inventive excellency, almost with disbelief. One must, however, maintain this verdict of historical justice in a determined manner, and defend against it present prejudices and appearances. The European noblesse of sentiment, taste and manners, taking the word in every high sense, is the work and invention of France. The European ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas, is England's work and invention two hundred and fifty four. Even at present, France is still the seat of the most intellectual and refined culture of Europe. It is still the high school of taste. But one must know how to find this France of taste. He who belongs to it keeps himself well concealed. They may be a small number in whom it lives and is embodied besides perhaps being men who do not stand upon the strongest legs, in part fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids, in part persons overindulged, over refined, such as have the ambition to conceal themselves. They have all something in common. They keep their ears closed in presence of the delirious folly and noisy spouting of the democratic bourgeois. In fact, a besotted and brutalized France at present broads in the foreground. It recently celebrated a veritable orgy of bad taste and at the same time of self admiration in the funeral of Victor Igau. There is also something else common to them, a predilection to resist intellectual Germanizing, and a still greater inability to do so. In this France of intellect, which is also a France of pessimism, Schopenhauer has become more at home and more indigenous than he has ever been in Germany, not to speak of Heinrich Heine, who has long ago been reincarnated in the more refined and fastidious lyricists of Paris or of Hegel, who are present in the form of ten the first of living historians exercises an almost tyrannical influence. As regards Richadwagner. However, the more French music learns to adapt itself to the actual needs of the Ames Moudernes, the more will it, Wagner write, one can safely predict that beforehand it is already taking place sufficiently. There are, however, three things which the French can still boast of with pride, as their heritage and possession, and as indelible tokens of their ancient intellectual superiority in Europe, in spite of all voluntary or involuntary Germanizing and vulgarizing of taste. Firstly, the capacity for artistic emotion, for devotion to form, for which the expression la pour lar, along with numerous others, has been invented. Such capacity has not been lacking in France for three centuries, and owing to its reverence for the small number, it has again and again made a sort of chamber music of literature possible, which is sought for in Vain elsewhere in Europe. The second thing whereby the French can lay claim to his superiority over Europe is their ancient, many sided moralistic culture. Owing to which one finds on an average even in the petty romancier of the newspapers and chance boulevardier de Paris, a psychological sensitiveness and curiosity of which, for example, one has no conception to say nothing of the thing itself. In Germany, the Germans lack a couple of centuries of the moralistic work requisite thereto, which, as we have said, France has not grudged. Those who call the Germans naive on that account give them commendation for a defect as the opposite of the German inexperience and innocence in voloptato psychologica, which is not too remotely associated with the tediousness of German intercourse, and as the most successful expression of genuine French curiosity and inventive talent. In this domain of delicate thrills or rebel. May be noted that remarkably anticipatory and forerunning man, who with a Napoleonic tempo, traversed his Europe, in fact several centuries of the European soul as a surveyor and discoverer their a. It has required two generations to overtake him, one way or other to divine long afterwards some of the riddles that perplexed and enraptured him, this strange epicurean and man of interrogation, the last great psychologist of France. There is yet a third claim to superiority in the French character. There is a successful half way synthesis of the North and South, which makes them comprehend many things, and enjoins upon them other things which an Englishman can never comprehend. Their temperament turned alternately to and from the South, in which from time to time the poor Monsalle and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves them from the dreadful northern gray in gray, from sunless conceptual specterism, and from poverty of blood our German infirmity of taste, for the excessive prevalence of which, at the present moment blood and iron, that is to say, high politics, has with great resolution been prescribed according to a dangerous healing art which bids me wait and wait, but not yet hope. There is still in France a pre understanding and ready welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction of any kind. To fatherlandism and know how to love the South when in the North, and the north, when in the South the born Midlanders, the good Europeans for them busy has made music. This latest genius who has seen a new beauty and seduction, who has discovered a piece of the South in music two hundred fifty five. I hold that many precautions should be taken against German music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love it, as a great school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solo profusion and effulgence which overspreads a sovereign existence, believing in itself. While such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music, because in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure his health. In you, such a Southerner, a Southerner not by origin but by belief, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of a North. It must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super German music which does not fade pale and die away, as all German music does, at the sight of the blue wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky. A super European music which holds its own even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is akin to the palm tree, and can be at home and can roam with big, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey. I could imagine a music of which the rarest charm would be that it knew nothing more of good and evil, only that here and there, perhaps some sailor's homesickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses, might sweep lightly over it. An art which, from the far distance would see the colors of a sinking and almost incomprehensible moral world fleeing towards it, and would be hospitable enough and profound enough to receive such belated fugitives two hundred fifty six. Owing to the morbid estrangement which the nationality craze has induced and still induces among the nations of Europe, owing also to the short sighted and hasty handed politicians, who, with the help of this craze, are at present in power and do not suspect to what extent the disintegrating policy they pursue must necessarily be only an interlude policy owing to all this and much else that is altogether unmentionable. At present, the most unmistakable signs that Europe wishes to be one are now overlooked or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted with all the more profound and large minded men of this century. The real general tendency of the mysterious labor of their souls was to prepare the way for that new synthesis, and tentatively to anticipate the European of the future. Only in their similarations, or in their weaker moments in old age, perhaps, did they belong to the fatherlands. They only rested from themselves when they became patriots. I think of such men as Napoleon, Geta, Beethoven, Stendael, Heinrich, Heine Schortenhauer. It must not be taken amiss if I also count Richard Wagner among them, about whom one must not let oneself be deceived by his own misunderstandings. Geniuses like him have seldom the right to understand themselves, still less, of course, by the unseemly noise with which he has now resisted and opposed in France. The fact remains nevertheless that Richard Wagner and the later French Romanticism of the forties are most closely and intimately related to one another. They are a kin, fundamentally akin in all the heights and depths of their requirements. It is Europe, the one Europe whose soul presses urgently and longingly outwards and upwards in their multifarios and boisterous art, whither into a new light towards a new sun. But who would attempt to express accurately what all these masters of new modes of speech could not express distinctly? It is certain that the same storm and stress tormented them that they sought in the same manner. These last great seekers, all of them steeped in literature to their eyes and ears, the first artists of universal literary culture, for the most part, even themselves, writers, poets, intermediaries and blenders of the art and the senses. Wagner as musician is reckoned among painters, as among musicians, as artists generally among actors, all of them fanatics for expression at any cost. I especially mentioned de la Croix, the nearest related to Wagner, all of them great discoverers of the realm, of the sublime, also of the loathsome and dreadful, yet greater discovers in effect in display in the art of the show shop, all of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out virtuosi, with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets, born enemies of logic and the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the self contradictory as men, tantaluses of the will plebeian parvenu who knew themselves to be incapable of a noble tees tempo or a volento in life and action. Think of Balzac, for instance, unrestrained workers almost destroying themselves by work, antinomians and rebels in manners, ambitious and insatiable, without equilibrium and enjoyment, all of them finally shattering and sinking down at the Christian cross, And with right and reason for who of them would have been sufficiently profound and sufficiently original for an anti Christian philosophy on the whole, A boldly daring splendidly overbearing, high flying and aloft up dragging class of higher men, who had first to teach their century. And it is the century of the masses the conception higher man. Let the German friends of Rikadwagner advise together as to whether there is anything surely German in the Wagnerian art, whether its distinction does not consist precisely in coming from super German sources and impulses, in which connection it may not be underrated how indispensable Paris was in the development of his type, which the strength of his instincts made him long to visit at the most decisive time, and how the held style of his proceedings of his self apostolate could only perfect itself in sight of the French socialistic original. On a more subtle comparison, it will perhaps be found to the honor of Richadwagner's German nature that he has acted in everything with more strength, daring, severity and elevation than the nineteenth century Frenchman could have done. Owing to the circumstance that we Germans are as yet nearer to barbarism than the French. Perhaps even the most remarkable creation of Richadvagner is not only at present but forever inaccessible, incomprehensible, and inimitable to the whole latter day Latin race. The figure of Sigfrid, that very free man who was probably far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti Catholic for the taste of old and mellow civilized nations. He may even have been a sin against Romanticism, this anti Latin Syfrid. Well. Wagner had owned amply for this sin. In his old sad days, when anticipating a taste which has meanwhile passed into politics, he began with a religious vehemence peculiar to him to preach at least the way to Rome, if not walk Therein that these last words may not be misunderstood, I will call to my aid a few powerful rhymes which will even betray to less delicate ears. What I mean, What I mean counter to the last Wagner and his partiphile music, is this our mode. From German heart came this vexed ululating from German body. This self lacerating is ours. This priestly hand dullation, this incense, fuming exaltation is ours, This faltering falling shambling, this quite uncertain ding dong dangling, this sly nun ogling over our bell ringing, this holy faults enruptured heaven o'er springing? Is this our mode? Think well, ye still wait for admission? For what ye hear is Rome Rome's faith by in tuition, end of chapter eight