Nietzsche hears Wagner's overture to The Mastersingers again and calls it magnificent, heavy, and late. It sounds to him like the German soul: of the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, with no today. Then he admits he has given in to a mood. Good Europeans, he says, also have hours of warm patriotism, old loves and narrow views. The test is how quickly a mind gets over them.
Under the political words of the age, civilisation, progress, democracy, he sees a slower physical change. Europeans are becoming more alike, more adaptable, and less tied to any soil. The usual result will be a useful, average type that needs a master. The same conditions will also breed rare and strong exceptions, so democracy prepares the ground for tyrants without meaning to. Then he turns on his own people. German "depth" may be only confusion that loves clouds. German music, he says, sang its last happy note in Mozart, and after Beethoven it grew heavier and more romantic. Germans read with their eyes and keep their ears in a drawer, so their prose has no rhythm. The ancients read aloud, and the one German masterpiece of prose, in his view, is Luther's Bible, a book made for the pulpit and the ear. Every nation, he says, has its own Tartuffery and calls it virtue.
The second half is the most charged. He lists the passing follies of German politics, the anti-French, anti-Polish, and anti-Semitic folly among them, and confesses that he caught a little of the fever himself. Then he turns against it. The Jews, he writes, are the strongest, toughest, and purest race living in Europe, and what they want is to be absorbed into Europe, not to rule it. Europe owes them the grand style in morality. The English get harsher treatment. They are not a philosophical race, he says, and the respectable but mediocre minds of Darwin, Mill, and Spencer suit a middle class that prefers comfortable truths. It was English ideas, he adds, that France later took up and returned to Europe as "modern ideas." France, by contrast, is still the school of taste in Europe, though its finest people keep themselves hidden. The French have a gift for artistic passion and for psychology, and they stand halfway between North and South. That middle position is what Nietzsche wants for himself, and it is why he warns any lover of the South to be careful with German music.
He ends with the theme that holds the chapter together. Nationalist politicians, he says, are only an interlude. The clearest sign of the age is that Europe wishes to be one, and its greatest men, Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer, were already Europeans in their deepest work. Wagner belongs on that list too. Yet the old Wagner of Parsifal turned back toward Rome, and Nietzsche closes with a mocking poem that asks whether that music is German at all.
