221.  “It sometimes happens,” said a moralistic pedant and trifle-retailer, “that I honour and respect an unselfish man:  not, however, because he is unselfish, but because I think he has a right to be useful to another man at his own expense.  In short, the question is always who he is, and who the other is.  For instance, in a person created and destined for command, self-denial and modest retirement, instead of being virtues, would be the waste of virtues:  so it seems to me.  Every system of unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals to every one, not only sins against good taste, but is also an incentive to sins of omission, an additional seduction under the mask of philanthropy—­and precisely a seduction and injury to the higher, rarer, and more privileged types of men.  Moral systems must be compelled first of all to bow before the gradations of rank; their presumption must be driven home to their conscience—­until they thoroughly understand at last that it is immoral to say that ’what is right for one is proper for another.’”—­So said my moralistic pedant and bonhomme.  Did he perhaps deserve to be laughed at when he thus exhorted systems of morals to practise morality?  But one should not be too much in the right if one wishes to have the laughers on one’s own side; a grain of wrong pertains even to good taste.

222.  Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays—­ and, if I gather rightly, no other religion is any longer preached—­let the psychologist have his ears open through all the vanity, through all the noise which is natural to these preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of self-contempt.  It belongs to the overshadowing and uglifying of Europe, which has been on the increase for a century (the first symptoms of which are already specified documentarily in a thoughtful letter of Galiani to Madame d’Epinay)—­if it is not really the cause thereof!  The man of “modern ideas,” the conceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with himself—­this is perfectly certain.  He suffers, and his vanity wants him only “to suffer with his fellows.”

223.  The hybrid European—­a tolerably ugly plebeian, taken all in all—­absolutely requires a costume:  he needs history as a storeroom of costumes.  To be sure, he notices that none of the costumes fit him properly—­he changes and changes.  Let us look at the nineteenth century with respect to these hasty preferences and changes in its masquerades of style, and also with respect to its moments of desperation on account of “nothing suiting” us.  It is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or classical, or Christian, or Florentine, or barocco, or “national,” in moribus et artibus:  it does not “clothe us”!  But the “spirit,” especially the “historical spirit,” profits even by this desperation: