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for artistic emotion, for devotion to “form,” for which the expression, l’art pour l’art , along with numerous others, has been invented:⁠—such capacity has not been lacking in France for three centuries; and owing to its reverence for the “small number,” it has again and again made a sort of chamber music of literature possible, which is sought for in vain elsewhere in Europe.⁠—The second thing whereby the French can lay claim to a superiority over Europe is their ancient, many-sided, moralistic culture, owing to which one finds on an average, even in the petty romanciers of the newspapers and chance boulevardiers de Paris , a psychological sensitiveness and curiosity, of which, for example, one has no conception (to say nothing of the thing itself!) in Germany. The Germans lack a couple of centuries of the moralistic work requisite thereto, which, as we have said, France has not grudged: those who call the Germans “naive” on that account give them commendation for a defect. (As the opposite of the German inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychologica , which is not too remotely associated with the tediousness of German intercourse⁠—and as the most successful expression of genuine French curiosity and inventive talent in this domain of delicate thrills, Henri Beyle may be noted; that remarkable anticipatory and forerunning man, who, with a Napoleonic tempo, traversed his Europe, in fact, several centuries of the European soul, as a surveyor and discoverer thereof:⁠—it has required two generations to overtake him one way or other, to divine long afterwards some of the riddles that perplexed and enraptured him⁠—this strange Epicurean and man of interrogation, the last great psychologist of France).⁠—There is yet a third claim to superiority: in the French character there is a successful halfway synthesis of the North and South, which makes them comprehend many things, and enjoins upon them other things, which an Englishman can never comprehend. Their temperament, turned alternately to and from the South, in which from time to time the Provençal and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sunless conceptual-spectrism and