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They have all something in common: they keep their ears
closed in presence of the delirious folly and noisy spout-
ing 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 predilec-
tion 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 re-incarnated 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 AME MODERNE, the more will it ‘Wagne-
rite”; 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 heri-
tage 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. FIRST-
LY, 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

00 Beyond Good and Evil