The animal with a good conscience. – The vulgar element in everything that pleases in Southern Europe – be it Italian opera (e.g. Rossini and Bellini)8 or the Spanish adventure novel (most readily accessible to us in the French disguise of Gil Blas)9 – does not escape me; but it does not offend me, just as little as does the vulgarity that one encounters on a walk through Pompeii and basically even when reading any ancient book.10 Why is this? Is it because there is no shame and everything vulgar acts as confidently and self-assuredly as anything noble, lovely, and passionate in the same kind of music or novel? ‘The animal has its own right, just like the human being; let it run about freely – and you too, my dear fellow man, are still an animal despite everything!’ – That seems to me to be the moral of the story and the peculiarity of Southern humanity. Bad taste has its right just as good taste does – and even a prior right if it answers to a great need, provides guaranteed satisfaction and as it were a universal language, an unconditionally intelligible mask and gesture; good, refined taste, on the contrary, is always somewhat searching, deliberate, not altogether sure how it is to be understood: it is not and never was popular! What is and remains popular is the mask! So let them all continue to go their way, all those masklike elements in the melodies and cadenzas, in the leaps and gaieties of the rhythm of these operas! Ancient life, too! What can one understand about it when one does not understand the delight in the mask, the good conscience in everything mask-like! Here is the bath and the recreation of the ancient spirit – and maybe the rare and sublime natures of the old world needed this bath more than the vulgar. A vulgar turn in Northern works, for example in German music, on the other hand, offends me unspeakably. Here there is shame; the artist has lowered himself in his own eyes and could not even help blushing: we are ashamed with him and are so offended because we suspect that he believed he had to lower himself for our sakes.