thought.

First of all, of course, there stands in the way the terrible abuse
which Nietzsche has poured upon the heads of the innocent Britishers.
While France and the Latin countries, while the Orient and India, are
within the range of his sympathies, this most outspoken of all
philosophers, this prophet and poet-philosopher, cannot find words
enough to express his disgust at the illogical, plebeian, shallow,
utilitarian Englishman. It must certainly be disagreeable to be
treated like this, especially when one has a fairly good opinion of
one's self; but why do you take it so very, very seriously? Did
Nietzsche, perchance, spare the Germans? And aren't you accustomed to
criticism on the part of German philosophers? Is it not the ancient
and time-honoured privilege of the whole range of them from Leibnitz
to Hegel -- even of German poets, like Goethe and Heine -- to call you
bad names and to use unkind language towards you? Has there not always
been among the few thinking heads in Germany a silent consent and an
open contempt for you and your ways; the sort of contempt you
yourselves have for the even more Anglo-Saxon culture of the
Americans? I candidly confess that in my more German moments I have
felt and still feel as the German philosophers do; but I have also my
European turns and moods, and then I try to understand you and even
excuse you, and take your part against earnest and thinking Germany.
Then I feel like telling the German philosophers that if you, poor
fellows, had practised everything they preached, they would have had
to renounce the pleasure of abusing you long ago, for there would now
be no more Englishmen left to abuse! As it is, you have suffered
enough on account of the wild German ideals you luckily only partly
believed in: for what the German thinker wrote on patient paper in his
study, you always had to write the whole world over on tender human