stinction: does the creative power in this case arise from a
loathing of life, or from an excessive _plenitude_ of life? In Goethe, for
instance, an overflow of vitality was creative, in Flaubert--hate:
Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with this instinctive
belief at heart: "_Flaubert est toujours haissable, l'homme n'est rien,
l'oeuvre est tout_".{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} He tortured himself when he wrote, just as Pascal
tortured himself when he thought--the feelings of both were inclined to be
"non-egoistic." {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} "Disinterestedness"--principle of decadence, the will to
nonentity in art as well as in morality.

Where Wagner Is At Home.

Even at the present day, France is still the refuge of the most
intellectual and refined culture in Europe, it remains the high school of
taste: but one must know where to find this France of taste. The
_North-German Gazette_, for instance, or whoever expresses his sentiments
in that paper, thinks that the French are "barbarians,"--as for me, if I
had to find the _blackest_ spot on earth, where slaves still required to
be liberated, I should turn in the direction of Northern Germany.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} But
those who form part of _that select_ France take very good care to
_conceal themselves_; they are a small body of men, and there may be some
among them who do not stand on very firm legs--a few may be fatalists,
hypochondriacs, invalids; others may be enervated, and artificial,--such
are those who would fain be artistic,--but all the loftiness and delicacy
which still remains to this world, is in their possession. In this France
of intellect, which is also the France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is
already much more at home than he ever was in Germany, his principal work
has already been translated twice, and the second time so excellently that
now I prefer to read Schopenhauer in French (--he was an _accident_ among
Germans, just as I am--the Germans have no fingers wherewith to grasp us;
they haven't any fingers at all,--but only claws). And I do not mention
Heine--_l'adorable Heine_, as they say in Paris--who long since has passed
into the flesh and blood of the more profound and more soulful of French
lyricists. How could the horned cattle of Germany know how to deal with
the _delicatesses_ of such a nature!--And as to Richard Wagner, it is
obvious, it is even glaringly obvious, that Paris is the very _soil_ for
him, the more French musi