253.  There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre minds, because they are best adapted for them, there are truths which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre spirits:—­one is pushed to this probably unpleasant conclusion, now that the influence of respectable but mediocre Englishmen—­I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—­begins to gain the ascendancy in the middle-class region of European taste.  Indeed, who could doubt that it is a useful thing for such minds to have the ascendancy for a time?  It would be an error to consider the highly developed and independently soaring minds as specially qualified for determining and collecting many little common facts, and deducing conclusions from them; as exceptions, they are rather from the first in no very favourable position towards those who are “the rules.”  After all, they have more to do than merely to perceive:—­in effect, they have to be something new, they have to signify something new, they have to represent new values!  The gulf between knowledge and capacity is perhaps greater, and also more mysterious, than one thinks:  the capable man in the grand style, the creator, will possibly have to be an ignorant person;—­while on the other hand, for scientific discoveries like those of Darwin, a certain narrowness, aridity, and industrious carefulness (in short, something English) may not be unfavourable for arriving at them.—­Finally, let it not be forgotten that the English, with their profound mediocrity, brought about once before a general depression of European intelligence.

What is called “modern ideas,” or “the ideas of the eighteenth century,” or “French ideas”—­that, consequently, against which the German mind rose up with profound disgust—­is of English origin, there is no doubt about it.  The French were only the apes and actors of these ideas, their best soldiers, and likewise, alas! their first and profoundest victims; for owing to the diabolical Anglomania of “modern ideas,” the AME FRANCAIS has in the end become so thin and emaciated, that at present one recalls its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profound, passionate strength, its inventive excellency, almost with disbelief.  One must, however, maintain this verdict of historical justice in a determined manner, and defend it against present prejudices and appearances:  the European noblesse—­of sentiment, taste, and manners, taking the word in every high sense—­is the work and invention of France; the European ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas—­is ENGLAND’S work and invention.

254.  Even at present France is still the seat of the most intellectual and refined culture of Europe, it is still the high school of taste; but one must know how to find this “France of taste.”  He who belongs to it keeps himself well concealed:—­they may be a small number in whom it lives and is embodied, besides perhaps being men who do not stand upon the strongest legs, in part fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids, in part persons over-indulged, over-refined, such as have the ambition to conceal themselves.