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And even if he felt no loathing for individuals, his disgust with men found a collective outlet, since he entertained, or rather worked up, a positive horror of his countrymen, so powerful that at last it breaks out in everything he writes. It reminds us dimly of Byron's dislike of Englishmen, Stendhal's of Frenchmen, and Heine's of Germans. But it is of a more violent character than Stendhal's or Heine's, and it has a pathos and contempt of its own. He shows none of it at the outset. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, he is no less partial to Germany than Heine was in his first, romantically Teutonic period. But Nietzsche's development carried him with a rush away from Germanism, and in this last book of his the word "German" has become something like his worst term of abuse.

He believes only in French culture; all other culture is a misunderstanding. It makes him angry to see those Frenchmen he values most, infected by German spirit. Thus Taine is, in his opinion, corrupted by Hegel's influence. This impression is right in so far as Hegel deprived Taine of some of the essentially French element which he originally possessed, and of which certain of his admirers before now have painfully felt the loss. But he overlooks the effect of the study of Hegel in promoting at the same time what one might call the extension of Taine's intellectual horizon. And Nietzsche is satisfied with no narrower generalisation of the case than this: Wherever Germany extends, she ruins culture.

As though to make sure of wounding German national pride, he declares that Heinrich Heine (not Goethe) gave him the highest idea of lyric poetry, and that as concerns Byron's Manfred, he has no words, only a look, for those who in the presence of this work dare to utter the name of Faust. The Germans, he maintains in connection with Manfred, are incapable of any conception of greatness. So uncritical has he become that he puts Manfred above Faust.

In his deepest instincts Nietzsche is now, as he asserts, so foreign to everything German, that the mere presence of a German "retards his digestion." German intellect is to him indigestion; it can never be finished with anything. If he has been so enthusiastic in his devotion to Wagner, if he still regards his intimate relationship with Wagner as the most profound refreshment of his life, this was because in Wagner he honoured the foreigner, because in him he saw the incarnate protest against all German virtues. In his book, The Case of Wagner, he had already hinted that Richard Wagner, the glory of German nationalism, was of Jewish descent, since his real father seems to have been the step-father, Geyer. I could not have survived my youth without Wagner, he says; I was condemned to the society of Germans and had to take a counter-poison; Wagner was the counter-poison.

Here, by way of exception, he generalises his feeling. We who were children in the 'fifties, he says, necessarily became pessimists in regard to the concept "German." We cannot be anything else than revolutionaries. And he explains this expression thus: We can assent to no state of affairs which allows the canting bigot to be at the top. (Hffding's protest against the use of the word "radicalism" applied to Nietzsche, in Moderne Filosofer, is thus beside the mark.) Wagner was a revolutionary; he fled from the Germans. And, Nietzsche adds, as an artist, a man has no other home than Paris—the city which, strangely enough, he was never, to see. He ranks Wagner among the later masters of French romanticism—Delacroix, Berlioz, Baudelaire—and wisely says nothing about the reception of Wagnerian opera in Paris under the Empire.

In everything Nietzsche now adopts the French stand-point—the old and narrow French standpoint—that, for instance, of the elderly Voltaire towards Shakespeare. He declares here, as he has done before, that his artist's taste defends Molire, Corneille and Racine, not without bitterness (nicht ohne Ingrimm) against such a wild (wstes) genius as Shakespeare. Strangely enough he repeats here his estimate of Shakespeare's Csar as his finest creation, weak as it is: "My highest formula for Shakespeare is that he conceived the type of Csar." It must be added that here again Nietzsche assents to the unhappy delusion that Shakespeare never wrote the works that bear his name. Nietzsche is "instinctively" certain that they are due to Bacon, and, ignoring repeated demonstrations of the impossibility of this fatuous notion, he supports his conjecture by the grotesque assertion that if he himself had christened his Zarathustra by a name not his own—by Wagner's, for instance—the acumen of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess who was its originator; no one would have believed it possible that the author of Human, all-too-Human had conceived the visions of Zarathustra.

He allows the Germans no honour as philosophers: Leibniz and Kant were "the two greatest clogs upon the intellectual integrity of Europe." Just when a perfectly scientific attitude of mind had been attained, they managed to find byways back to "the old ideal." And no less passionately does he deny to the Germans all honour as musicians: "A German cannot know what music is. The men who pass as German musicians are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen or Jews. I am Pole enough to give up all other music for Chopin—except Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll, some things of Liszt, and the Italians Rossini and Pietro Gasti" (by this last name he appears to mean his favourite disciple, Kselitz, who wrote under the pseudonym of Peter Gast).

He abhors the Germans as "idealists." All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity. He finds a pernicious idealism in Henrik Ibsen too, "that typical old maid," as well, as in others whose object it is to poison the clean conscience, the natural spirit, of sexual love. And he gives us a clause of his moral code, in which, under the head of Vice, he combats every kind of opposition to Nature, or if fine words are preferred, every kind of idealism. The clause runs: "Preaching of chastity is a public incitement to unnatural practices. All, depreciation of the sexual life, all sullying of it with the word 'impure,' is a crime against Life itself—is the real sin against the holy Spirit of Life."

Finally he attacks what he calls the "licentiousness" of the Germans in historical matters. German historians, he declares, have lost all eye for the values of culture; in fact, they have put this power of vision under the ban of the Empire. They claim that a man must in the first place be a German, must belong to the race. If he does, he is in a position to determine values or their absence: the Germans are thus the "moral order of the universe" in history; compared with the power of the Roman Empire they are the champions of liberty; compared with the eighteenth century they are the restorers of morality and of the Categorical Imperative. "History is actually written on Imperial German and Antisemitic lines—and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed of himself."

The Germans have on their conscience every crime against culture committed in the last four centuries. As Nietzsche in his later years was never tired of asserting, they deprived the Renaissance of its meaning, they wrecked it by the Reformation; that is, by Luther, an impossible monk who, owing to his impossibility, attacked the Church and in so doing restored it. The Catholics would have every reason to honour Luther's name.

And when, upon the bridge between two centuries of decadence, a force majeure of genius and will revealed itself, strong enough to weld Europe into political and economic unity, the Germans finally, with their "Wars of Liberation," robbed Europe of the meaning of Napoleon's existence, a prodigy of meaning. Thus they have upon their conscience all that followed, nationalism, the nvrose nationale from which Europe is suffering, and the perpetuation of the system of little states, of petty politics.