masculine sex, who advise woman to defeminize herself in
this manner, and to imitate all the stupidities from which
‘man’ in Europe, European ‘manliness,’ suffers,—who
would like to lower woman to ‘general culture,’ indeed
even to newspaper reading and meddling with politics.
Here and there they wish even to make women into free
spirits and literary workers: as though a woman without
piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious or
ludicrous to a profound and godless man;—almost
everywhere her nerves are being ruined by the most
morbid and dangerous kind of music (our latest German
music), and she is daily being made more hysterical and
more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that
of bearing robust children. They wish to ‘cultivate’ her in
general still more, and intend, as they say, to make the
‘weaker sex’ STRONG by culture: as if history did not
teach in the most emphatic manner that the ‘cultivating’ of
mankind and his weakening—that is to say, the
weakening, dissipating, and languishing of his FORCE
OF WILL—have always kept pace with one another, and
that the most powerful and influential women in the
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world (and lastly, the mother of Napoleon) had just to
thank their force of will—and not their schoolmasters—for
their power and ascendancy over men. That which
inspires respect in woman, and often enough fear also, is
her NATURE, which is more ‘natural’ than that of man,
her genuine, carnivora-like, cunning flexibility, her tiger-
claws beneath the glove, her NAIVETE in egoism, her
untrainableness and innate wildness, the
incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires
and virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one’s
sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, ‘woman,’ is
that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more
necessitous of love, and more condemned to
disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and
sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto
stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot
already in tragedy, which rends while it delights—What?
And all that is now to be at an end? And the
DISENCHANTMENT of woman is in progress? The
tediousness of woman is slowly evolving? Oh Europe!
Europe! We know the horned animal which was always
most attractive to thee, from which danger is ever again
threatening thee! Thy old fable might once more become
‘history’—an immense stupidity might once again
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overmaster thee and carry thee away! And no God
concealed beneath it—no! only an ‘idea,’ a ‘modern idea’!
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CHAPTER VIII: PEOPLES AND
COUNTRIES
240. I HEARD, once again for the first time, Richard
Wagner’s overture to the Mastersinger: 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 honour to
Germans that such a pride did not miscalculate! What
flavours 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-
coloured 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
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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 wished to say to us:
‘It is part of my intention"; a cumbersome drapery,
something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring
of learned and 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 RAFFINEMENTS of decadence—which, perhaps,
feels itself most at ease there; a real, genuine token of the
German soul, which is at the same time young and aged,
too 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
tomorrow— THEY HAVE AS YET NO TODAY.
241. We ‘good Europeans,’ we also have hours when
we allow ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism, a plunge
and relapse into old loves and narrow views—I have just
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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 hours 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
corps-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 so also in politicis. A 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
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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 practise ‘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 ‘practise 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-
practising 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 offence 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
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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 at its
commencement!’— ‘Misuse of 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 apartness, considered
how soon a stronger one may become master of the
strong, and also that there is a compensation for the
intellectual superficialising of a nation—namely, in the
deepening of another.
242. Whether we call it ‘civilization,’ or ‘humanising,’
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
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demands on soul and body,—that is to say, the slow
emergence of an essentially SUPER-NATIONAL 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 depth—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 levelling and mediocrising of man will take
place—a useful, industrious, variously serviceable, and
clever gregarious man—are in the highest degree suitable
to give rise to exceptional men of the most dangerous and
attractive qualities. For, while the capacity for adaptation,
which is every day trying 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 workmen who REQUIRE a
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master, a commander, as they require their daily bread;
while, therefore, the democratising of Europe will tend to
the production of a type prepared for SLAVERY in the
most subtle sense of the term: the 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 democratising 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.
243. I hear with pleasure that our sun 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!
244. 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 honours, and perhaps misses ‘smartness’ in all
that has depth, it is almost opportune and patriotic to
doubt whether we did not formerly deceive ourselves with
that commendation: in short, whether German depth is
not at bottom something different and worse—and
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something from which, thank God, we are on the point of
successfully ridding ourselves. Let us try, then, to relearn
with regard to German depth; 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 super- imposed, rather than
actually built: this is owing to its origin. A German who
would embolden 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 a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element as
the ‘people of the centre’ 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 peoples 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. Kotzebue certainly knew his
Germans well enough: ‘We are known,’ they cried
jubilantly to him—but Sand also thought he knew them.
Jean Paul knew what he was doing when he declared
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himself incensed at Fichte’s lying but patriotic flatteries
and exaggerations,—but it is probable that Goethe thought
differently about Germans from Jean Paul, even though he
acknowledged him to be right with regard to Fichte. It is a
question what Goethe really thought about the
Germans?—But about many things around him he never
spoke explicitly, and all his life he knew how to keep an
