Page 180 - beyond-good-and-evil

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 cer-
tain 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 TO-
DAY.

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 given
an example of it— hours of national excitement, of patriotic
anguish, and all other sorts of old-fashioned floods of senti-
ment. 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, oth-
ers in half a lifetime, according to the speed and strength
with which they digest and ‘change their material.’ Indeed,

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