_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. 93. _Renaissance and Reformation._--What does the Renaissance prove? That the reign of the "individual" can be only a short one. The output is too great; there is not even the possibility of husbanding or of capitalising forces, and exhaustion sets in step by step. These are times when everything is _squandered,_ when even the strength itself with which one collects, capitalises, and heaps riches upon riches, _is squandered._ Even the opponents of such movements are driven to preposterous extremes in the dissipation of their strength: and they too are very soon exhausted, used up, and completely sapped. In the Reformation we are face to face with a wild and plebeian counterpart of the Italian Renaissance, generated by similar impulses, except that the former, in the backward and still vulgar North, had to assume a religious form--there the concept of a higher life had not yet been divorced from that of a religious one. Even the Reformation was a movement for individual liberty; "every one his own priest" is really no more than a formula for _libertinage._ As a matter of fact, the words "Evangelical freedom" would have sufficed--and all instincts which had reasons for remaining concealed broke out like wild hounds, the most brutal needs suddenly acquired the courage to show themselves, everything seemed justified ... men refused to specify the kind of freedom they had aimed at, they preferred to shut their eyes. But the fact that their eyes were closed and that their lips were moistened with gushing orations, did not prevent their hands from being ready to snatch at whatever there was to snatch at, that the belly became the god of the "free gospel," and that all lusts of revenge and of hatred were indulged with insatiable fury. This lasted for a while: then exhaustion supervened, just as it had done in Southern Europe; and again here, it was a low form of exhaustion, a sort of general _ruere in servitium_.... Then the _disreputable_ century of Germany dawned. 94. _Chivalry_--the position won by power: its gradual break-up (and partial transference to broader and more bourgeois spheres). In the case of Larochefoucauld we find a knowledge of the actual impulses of a noble temperament--together with the gloomy Christian estimate of these impulses.