At bottom, even Wagner's music, in so far as it stands for the whole of French romanticism, is literature: the charm of exoticism (strange times, customs, passions), exercised upon sensitive cosy-corner people. The delight of entering into extremely distant and prehistoric lands to which books lead one, and by which means the whole horizon is painted with new colours and new possibilities.... Dreams of still more distant and unexploited worlds; disdain of the boulevards. ... For Nationalism, let us not deceive ourselves, is also only a form of exoticism.... Romantic musicians merely relate what exotic books have made of them: people would fain experience exotic sensations and passions according to Florentine and Venetian taste; finally they are satisfied to look for them in an image.... The essential factor is the kind of novel desire, the desire to imitate, the desire to live as people have lived once before in the past, and the disguise and dissimulation of the soul.... Romantic art is only an emergency exit from defective "reality." The attempt to perform new things: revolution, Napoleon. Napoleon represents the passion of new spiritual possibilities, of an extension of the soul's domain. The greater the debility of the will, the greater the extravagances in the desire to feel, to represent, and to dream new things.--The result of the excesses which have been indulged in: an insatiable thirst for unrestrained feelings.... Foreign literatures afford the strongest spices. 830. Winckelmann's and Goethe's Greeks, Victor Hugo's Orientals, Wagner's Edda characters, Walter Scott's Englishmen of the thirteenth century--some day the whole comedy will be exposed! All of it was disproportionately historical and false, _but_--modern. 831. Concerning the characteristics of national genius in regard to the strange and to the borrowed-- English genius vulgarises and makes realistic everything it sees; The French whittles down, simplifies, rationalises, embellishes; The German muddles, compromises, involves, and infects everything with morality; The Italian has made by far the freest and most subtle use of borrowed material, and has enriched it with a hundred times more beauty than it ever drew out of it: it is the richest genius, it had the most to bestow. 832. The Jews, with Heinrich Heine and Offenbach, approached genius in the sphere of art. The latter was the most intellectual and most high-spirited satyr, who as a musician abided by great tradition, and who, for him who has something more than ears, is a real relief after the sentimental and, at bottom, degenerate musicians of German romanticism. 833. _Offenbach;_ trench music imbued with Voltaire's intellect, free, wanton, with a slight sardonic grin, but clear and intellectual almost to the point of banality (Offenbach never titivates), and free from the _mignardise_ of morbid or blond-Viennese sensuality. 834.