They have all something in common:  they keep their ears closed in presence of the delirious folly and noisy spouting 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 predilection 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 “Wagnerite”; 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 heritage 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.  Firstly, 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 made a sort of chamber music of literature possible, which is sought for in vain elsewhere in Europe.—­The second thing whereby the French can lay claim to a superiority over Europe is their ancient, many-sided, moralistic culture, owing to which one finds on an average, even in the petty ROMANCIERS of the newspapers and chance BOULEVARDIERS de Paris, a psychological sensitiveness and curiosity, of which, for example, one has no conception (to say nothing of the thing itself!) in Germany.  The Germans lack a couple of centuries of the moralistic work requisite thereto, which, as we have said, France has not grudged:  those who call the Germans “naive” on that account give them commendation for a defect. (As the opposite of the German inexperience and innocence in VOLUPTATE PSYCHOLOGICA, which is not too remotely associated with the tediousness of German intercourse,—­and as the most successful expression of genuine French curiosity and inventive talent in this domain of delicate thrills, Henri Beyle may be noted; that remarkable anticipatory and forerunning man, who, with a Napoleonic tempo, traversed his Europe, in fact, several centuries of the European soul, as a surveyor and discoverer thereof:—­it has required two