Note 44 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

Although the Germans appear to have been the inventors of the passion I am denouncing, Lessing and Schlegel seem to have been the first to brandish their poets as the expression of the national soul, from a feeling of exasperation with the universalism of French literature. The men of the French Pléiade (who will certainly be brought up against me) wished to give their sensibility a national mode of expression, a national language; they never claimed to give a national character to that sensibility, to oppose it to other national sensibilities. The systematic nationalization of the mind is undoubtedly an invention of modern times. As regards the men of learning, this nationalizing has undoubtedly been favoured by the disappearance of Latin as the scientific language; and no one will ever be able to say to what an extent this disappearance was an element of arrest in civilisation.