Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche (most life changing books txt) 📕

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 humanest Englishman is his lack of music, to speak figuratively (and also literally): he has neither rhythm nor dance in the movements of his soul and body; indeed, not even the desire for rhythm and dance, for “music.” Listen to him speaking; look at the most beautiful Englishwoman walking⁠—in no country on earth are there more beautiful doves and swans; finally, listen to them singing! But I ask too much⁠ ⁠… 253

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 Englishmen⁠—I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer⁠—begins to gain the ascendancy in 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 favourable 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 (in short, something English) may not be unfavourable 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 âme Français 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 it against 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.

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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, overrefined, 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 sprawls in the foreground⁠—it recently celebrated a veritable orgy of bad taste, and at the same time of self-admiration, at the funeral of Victor Hugo. 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 perhaps 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 lyrists of Paris; or of Hegel, who at present, in the form of Taine⁠—the first of living historians⁠—exercises an almost tyrannical influence. As regards Richard Wagner, however, the more French music learns to adapt itself to the actual needs of the âme moderne, the more will it “Wagnerite”; 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, l’art pour l’art, 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 a superiority over Europe is their ancient, many-sided, moralistic culture, owing to which one finds on an average, even in the petty romanciers of the newspapers and chance boulevardiers 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,