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When a people is suffering from nationalistic nervous fever and political ambition and wants to suffer, we have to accept the fact that various kinds of clouds and disturbances - in short, small attacks of dullness - will pass over its spirit: for example, among contemporary Germans sometimes the anti-French stupidity, sometimes the anti-Jewish, sometimes the anti-Polish, sometimes the Christian-Romantic, sometimes the Wagnerian, sometimes the Teutonic, sometimes the Prussian (take a look at these poor historians Sybel and Treitzschke and their thickly bandaged heads -), and whatever else all these small obfuscations of the German spirit and conscience may call themselves.¹¹ May I be forgiven for the fact that I, too, during a short and risky stay in a very infected region did not remain wholly free of this illness and, like all the world, began to have ideas about things which were no concern of mine, the first sign of the political infection. For example, about the Jews. Hear me out.- I have not yet met a single German who was well disposed towards the Jews. And no matter how absolute the rejection of real anti-Semitism on the part of all cautious and political types may be, nonetheless this caution and politics directs itself not against this type of feeling itself, but only against its dangerous excess, in particular against the tasteless and disgraceful expression of this excessive feeling - on that point people should not deceive themselves. That Germany has a richly sufficient number of Jews, that the German stomach and German blood have difficulty (and will still have difficulty for a long time to come) absorbing even this quantum of "Jew" - in the way the Italians, the French, and the English have absorbed them, as a result of a stronger digestive system - that is the clear message and language of a general instinct which we must listen to and according to which we must act. "Let no more Jews in! And especially bar the doors to the east (also to Austria)!" So orders the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and uncertain, so that it could be easily erased, easily dissolved away by a stronger race. But the Jews are without any doubt the strongest, most tenacious, and purest race now living in Europe. They understand how to assert themselves even under the worst conditions (better even than under favourable conditions), as a result of certain virtues which today people might like to stamp as vices - thanks, above all, to a resolute faith which has no need to feel shame when confronted by "modern ideas." They always change, if they change, only in the way the Russian empire carries out its conquests - as an empire that has time and was not born yesterday - that is, according to the basic principle "as slowly as possible!" A thinker who has the future of Europe on his conscience will, in all the designs which he draws up for himself of this future, take the Jews as well as the Russians into account as, for the time being, the surest and most probable factors in the great interplay and struggle of forces. What we nowadays call a "nation" in Europe is essentially more a res facta [something made] than a res nata [something born] (indeed sometimes it looks confusingly like a res ficta et picta [something made up and unreal]- ), in any case something developing, young, easily adjusted, not yet a race, to say nothing of aere perennius [more enduring than bronze], as is the Jewish type. But these "nations" should be very wary of every hot-headed competition and enmity! That the Jews, if they wanted to - or if people were to force them, as the anti-Semites seem to want to do - could even now become predominant, in fact, quite literally gain mastery over Europe, is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain. Meanwhile by contrast they desire and wish - even with a certain insistence - to be absorbed into and assimilated by Europe. They thirst to be finally established somewhere or other, allowed, respected, and to bring to an end their nomadic life, to the "Wandering Jew." And people should pay full attention to this tendency and impulse (which in itself perhaps even expresses a moderating of Jewish instincts) and accommodate it. And for this, it might perhaps be useful and reasonable to expel the anti-Semitic ranters out of the country. We should comply with all caution, and selectively, more or less the way the English aristocracy does it. It's clear that the stronger and already firmly established type of the new Germanism could involve itself with them with the least objection, for example, the aristocratic officers from the Mark [of Brandenburg].¹² It would be interesting in all sorts of ways to see whether the genius of gold and patience (and above all of some spirit and spirituality, which are seriously deficient in the people just referred to) could be added to and bred into the inherited art of commanding and obeying - in both of which the land mentioned above is nowadays a classic example. But at this point it's fitting that I break off my cheerful Germanomania [Deutschthümelei] and speech of celebration. For I'm already touching on something serious to me, on the "European problem," as I understand it, on the breeding of a new ruling caste for Europe.-

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These Englishmen are no race of philosophers. Bacon signifies an attack on the spirit of philosophy in general; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke have been a debasement and a devaluing of the idea of a "philosopher" for more than a century. Kant raised himself and rose up in reaction against Hume. It was Locke of whom Schelling was entitled to say, "Je méprise Locke" [I despise Locke]. In the struggle with the English mechanistic dumbing down of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer (along with Goethe) were unanimous - both of these hostile fraternal geniuses in philosophy, who moved away from each other towards opposite poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other, as only brothers can.¹³ What's lacking in England, and what has always been missing, that's something that semi-actor and rhetorician Carlyle understood well enough, the tasteless muddle-headed Carlyle, who tried to conceal under his passionate grimaces what he understood about himself, that is, what was lacking in Carlyle - a real power of spirituality, a real profundity of spiritual insight, in short, philosophy.¹⁴ It is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that it clings strongly to Christianity. They need its discipline to develop their "moralizing" and humanizing. The Englishman is more gloomy, more sensual, stronger willed, and more brutal than the German - he is also for that very reason, as the more vulgar of the two, more pious than the German. He is even more in need of Christianity. For more refined nostrils this same English Christianity has still a lingering and truly English smell of spleen and alcoholic dissipation, against which it is used for good reasons as a medicinal remedy - that is, the more delicate poison against the coarser one. Among crude people, a subtler poisoning is, in fact, already progress, a step towards spiritualization. The crudity and peasant seriousness of the English are still most tolerably disguised or, stated more precisely, interpreted and given new meaning, by the language of Christian gestures and by prayers and singing psalms. And for those drunken and dissolute cattle who in earlier times learned to make moral grunts under the influence of Methodism and more recently once again as the "Salvation Army," a twitch of repentance may really be, relatively speaking, the highest achievement of "humanity" to which they can be raised: that much we can, in all fairness, concede. But what is still offensive even in the most humane Englishman is his lack of music, speaking metaphorically (and not metaphorically -). He has in the movements of his soul and his body no rhythm and dance - in fact, not even the desire for rhythm and dance, for "music." Listen to him speak, or watch the most beautiful English woman walk - in no country of the earth are there lovelier doves and swans - and finally, listen to them sing! But I'm demanding too much . . .

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There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre heads, because they are most appropriate for them; there are truths which have charm and seductive power only for mediocre minds: - at this very point we are pushed back onto this perhaps unpleasant proposition, since the time the spirit of respectable but mediocre Englishmen - I cite Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer - has succeeded in gaining pre-eminence in the middle regions of European taste.¹⁵ In fact, who could doubt how useful it is that such spirits rule for a while? It would be a mistake to think that highly cultivated spirits who fly off to great distances would be particularly skilful at establishing many small, common facts, collecting them, and pushing to a conclusion: - they are, by contrast, as exceptional men, from the very start in no advantageous position vis-à-vis the "rules." And finally, they have more to do than merely to have knowledge - for they have to be something new, to mean something new, to present new values! The gap between know and can is perhaps greater as well as more mysterious than people think. It's possible the man who can act in the grand style, the creating man, will have to be a man who does not know; whereas, on the other hand, for scientific discoveries of the sort Darwin made a certain narrowness, aridity, and diligent carefulness, in short, something English, may not make a bad disposition. Finally we should not forget that the English with their profoundly average quality have already once brought about a collective depression of the European spirit. What people call "modern ideas" or "the ideas of the eighteenth century" or even "French ideas" - in other words, what the German spirit has risen against with a deep disgust - were English in origin. There's no doubt of that. The French have been only apes and actors of these ideas, their best soldiers, as well, and at the same time unfortunately their first and most complete victims. For with the damnable Anglomania of "modern ideas" the âme française [French soul] has finally become so thin and emaciated that nowadays we remember almost with disbelief its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profoundly passionate power, its resourceful nobility. But with our teeth we must hang on to the following principle of historical fairness and defend it against the appearance of the moment: European noblesse - in feeling, in taste, in customs, in short, the word taken in every higher sense - is the work and invention of France; European nastiness, the plebeian quality of modern ideas, the work of England.

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Even now France is still the place with the most spiritual and most refined European culture and the leading school of taste. But we have to know how to find this "France of taste." Whoever belongs to it keeps himself well concealed - the number of those in whom it is embodied and lives may be small, and in addition they may perhaps be people who are not standing on the strongest legs, partly fatalistic, dark, sick, and partly mollycoddled and artificial, such people as have the ambition to conceal themselves. All of them have something in common: confronted with the raging stupidity and the noisy chattering of the democratic bourgeois, they keep their ears plugged. In fact, rolling around these days in the foreground is a stupid and coarsened France - recently, at the funeral of Victor Hugo, it celebrated a true orgy of tastelessness and at the same time of self-admiration.¹⁶ Something else is also common to them: a good will to stand against spiritual Germanization - and an even better inability to do so! Perhaps these days Schopenhauer is already more at home and has become more indigenous in this France of the spirit, which is also a France of pessimism, than he ever was in Germany, not to mention Heinrich Heine, who has long since been transformed into the flesh and blood of the more sophisticated and discriminating Parisian lyric poets, or Hegel, who today exercises an almost tyrannical influence in the form of Taine, the pre-eminent living historian.¹⁷ And so far as Richard Wagner is concerned - the more French music learns to shape itself according to the real needs of the âme moderne [modern soul], the more it will become "Wagnerian." That's something we can predict - it's already doing enough of that now. Nonetheless, in spite of all the voluntary or involuntary Germanizing and vulgarizing of taste, there are three things which nowadays the French can still point to with pride as their inheritance and property and as the unforgotten mark of an old cultural superiority over Europe. The first is the capacity for artistic passions, for devotion to "form," for which the expression l'art pour l'art [art for art's sake] has been invented, along with a thousand others - something like that has been present in France for three centuries and, thanks to the reverence for the "small number," has made possible again and again a kind of chamber music in literature which is not to be found in the rest of Europe. - The second thing on which the French can base a superiority over Europe is their ancient multifaceted moralistic culture, because of which we find, on average, even in the small romanciers [novelists] of the newspapers and random boulevardiers of Paris, a psychological sensitivity and curiosity, of which people in Germany, for example, have no idea (to say nothing of the thing itself!). For that the Germans are lacking a couple of centuries of moralistic behaviour which, as mentioned, France did not spare itself. Anyone who calls the Germans "naive" because of this is praising them for a defect. (In contrast to the German inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychologica [psychological delight], which is not too distantly related to the boredom of associating with Germans - and as the most successful expression of a genuine French curiosity and talent for invention in this empire of tender thrills, Henry Beyle may well qualify, that remarkably prescient and pioneering man, who ran at a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as a tracker and discoverer of this soul. It took two generations to catch up with him somehow, to grasp some of the riddles which tormented and delighted him, this strange Epicurean and question mark of a man, who was France's last great psychologist). There is still a third claim to superiority: in the nature of the French is a semi-successful synthesis of north and south, which enables them to understand many things and tells them to do other things which an Englishman will never understand. In them, the temperament which periodically turns towards and away from the south and in which, from time to time, the Provencal and Ligurian blood bubbles over, protects them from the dreadful northern gray on gray and the sunless conceptual ghostliness and anaemia - our German sickness of taste, against the excesses of which at the moment we have prescribed for ourselves, with great decisiveness, blood and iron - or I should say "grand politics" (in accordance with a dangerous art of healing which teaches me to wait and wait, but up to this point has not taught me to hope).¹⁸ Even today there is still in France an advance understanding of and an accommodation with those rarer and rarely satisfied men who are too all-embracing to find their contentment in some patriotism or other and know how to love the south in the north and the north in the south - the born mid-landers, the "good Europeans."- For them Bizet created his music, this last genius who saw a new beauty and enticement and - who discovered a piece of the south in music.¹⁹

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I think all sorts of precautions are necessary against German music. Suppose that someone loves the south the way I love it, as a great school for convalescing in the spiritual and sensual sense, as an unrestrained abundance of sun and transfiguration by the sun, which spreads itself over an existence which rules itself and believes in itself. Now, such a man will learn to be quite careful as far as German music is concerned, because in ruining his taste again it ruins his health again as well. Such a man of the south, not by descent but by faith, must, if he dreams of the future of music, also dream of a redemption of music from the north and have in his ears the prelude to a more profound, more powerful, perhaps more evil and more mysterious music, a supra-German music which does not fade away, turn yellow, and grow pale at the sight of the blue voluptuous sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky, the way all German music does, a supra-European music which justifies itself even when confronted with the brown desert sunsets, whose soul is related to the palm trees and knows how to be at home and to wander among huge, beautiful, solitary predatory beasts. . . . I could imagine to myself a music whose rarest magic consisted in the fact that it no longer knew anything about good and evil, only that perhaps here and there some mariner's nostalgia or other, some golden shadow and tender weaknesses would race across it, an art which from a great distance could see speeding towards it the colours of a sinking moral world - one which has become almost unintelligible - and which would be sufficiently hospitable and deep to take in such late fugitives.-