256.  Owing to the morbid estrangement which the nationality-craze has induced and still induces among the nations of Europe, owing also to the short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians, who with the help of this craze, are at present in power, and do not suspect to what extent the disintegrating policy they pursue must necessarily be only an interlude policy—­owing to all this and much else that is altogether unmentionable at present, the most unmistakable signs that Europe wishes to be one, are now overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted.  With all the more profound and large-minded men of this century, the real general tendency of the mysterious labour of their souls was to prepare the way for that new synthesis, and tentatively to anticipate the European of the future; only in their simulations, or in their weaker moments, in old age perhaps, did they belong to the “fatherlands”—­they only rested from themselves when they became “patriots.”  I think of such men as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer:  it must not be taken amiss if I also count Richard Wagner among them, about whom one must not let oneself be deceived by his own misunderstandings (geniuses like him have seldom the right to understand themselves), still less, of course, by the unseemly noise with which he is now resisted and opposed in France:  the fact remains, nevertheless, that Richard Wagner and the later French romanticism of the forties, are most closely and intimately related to one another.  They are akin, fundamentally akin, in all the heights and depths of their requirements; it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul presses urgently and longingly, outwards and upwards, in their multifarious and boisterous art—­whither? into a new light? towards a new sun?  But who would attempt to express accurately what all these masters of new modes of speech could not express distinctly?  It is certain that the same storm and stress tormented them, that they sought in the same manner, these last great seekers!  All of them steeped in literature to their eyes and ears—­the first artists of universal literary culture—­for the most part even themselves writers, poets, intermediaries and blenders of the arts and the senses (Wagner, as musician is reckoned among painters, as poet among musicians, as artist generally among actors); all of them fanatics for expression “at any cost”—­I specially mention Delacroix, the nearest related to Wagner; all of them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the loathsome and dreadful, still greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art of the show-shop; all of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out virtuosi, with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and of the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory;