160
Vain, courteous and hardly wise.—Your desires surpass your reason, and your vanity even surpasses your desires,— to such people as you are a good deal of Chiristian practice and a little of Schopenhauer's theory would be an excellent prescription.
161
Beauty correspondent to the century.—If our sculptors, painters and musicians would hit off the spirit of the age, they ought to represent beauty as bloated, gigantic and nervous, just as the Greeks, under the spell of their law of moderation, saw and formed beauty in the shape of Apollo of Belvedere. We really ought to call him ugly! But the absurd classicists have deprived us of all honesty.
162
The irony of the present age.—In our days Europeans have contracted the habit of treating all matters of great interest with irony, because, through our activity in their service, we have no time for dealing seriously with them.
163
Rousseau rebutted.—It is time that there is something wretched about our civilisation; we are at liberty to infer with Rousseau “this wretched civilisation is to blame for our bad morality," or to infer in a sense opposed to
