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

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 voluptate 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, Henri Beyle may be noted; that remarkable 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 thereof:⁠—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 halfway 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 Provençal and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sunless conceptual-spectrism 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 also still in France a pre-understanding and ready welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men, who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in any kind of 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 Bizet has made music, this latest genius, who has seen a new beauty and seduction⁠—who has discovered a piece of the south in music. 255

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 solar profusion and effulgence which o’erspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself⁠—well, 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 anew. 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 the North; and 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 colours of a sinking and almost incomprehensible moral world fleeing towards it, and would be hospitable enough and profound enough to receive such belated fugitives.

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Owing to the morbid estrangement which the nationality-craze has induced and still induces among the nations of Europe, owing also to the shortsighted 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 labour of their souls was to prepare the way for that new synthesis, and tentatively to anticipate the European of the future; only in their simulations, 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, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: 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 is 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 akin, 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 multifarious 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 arts and the senses (Wagner, as musician is reckoned among painters, as poet among musicians, as artist generally among actors); all of them fanatics for