"Un monstre gai vaut mieux
Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux."
If now I maintain that I am ahead, by a century or two of enlightenment, of Voltaire and Galiani—who was much more profound, how deeply must I have sunk into gloominess! This is also true, and betimes I somewhat reluctantly manifested some caution in regard to the German and Christian narrowness and inconsistency of Schopenhauerian or, worse still, Leopardian Pessimism, and sought the most characteristic form (Asia). But, in order to endure that extreme Pessimism (which here and there peeps out of my Birth of Tragedy), to live alone "without God or morality," I was compelled to invent a counter-prop for myself. Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone surfers so excruciatingly that he was compelled to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as might have been expected, the most cheerful.
92.
In regard to German culture, I have always had a feeling as of decline. The fact that I learned to know a declining form of culture has often made me unfair towards the whole phenomenon of European culture. The Germans always follow at some distance behind: they always go to the root of things, for instance:—
Dependance upon foreigners; Kant—Rousseau, the sensualists, Hume, Swedenborg.
Schopenhauer—the Indians and Romanticism, Voltaire.
Wagner—the French cult of the ugly and of grand opera, Paris, and the flight into primitive barbarism (the marriage of brother and sister).
The law of the laggard (the provinces go to Paris, Germany goes to France).
How is it that precisely Germans discovered the Greek (the more an instinct is developed, the more it is tempted to run for once into its opposite).
Music is the last breath of every culture.