Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1- 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 RE-
ALLY 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.’ - 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 ac-
count 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: once and again a new sam-
ple of the past or of the foreign is tested, put on, taken off,
packed up, and above all studied—we are the first studious