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 half-way 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 Provencal and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sunless conceptual-spectrism and from poverty of blood—­our German infirmity of taste, for the excessive prevalence of which at the present moment, blood and iron, that is to say “high politics,” has with great resolution been prescribed (according to a dangerous healing art, which bids me wait and wait, but not yet hope).—­There is also still in France a pre-understanding and ready welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men, who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in any kind of fatherlandism, and know how to love the South when in the North and the North when in the South—­the born Midlanders, the “good Europeans.”  For them Bizet has made music, this latest genius, who has seen a new beauty and seduction,—­who has discovered a piece of the South in music.

255.  I hold that many precautions should be taken against German music.  Suppose a person loves the South as I love it—­as a great school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which o’erspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself—­well, such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music, because, in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure his health anew.  Such a Southerner, a Southerner not by origin but by belief, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-German music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky—­a super-European music, which holds its own even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is akin to the palm-tree, and can be at home and can roam with big, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey . . .  I could imagine a music of which the rarest charm would be that it knew nothing more of good and evil; only that here and there perhaps some sailor’s home-sickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses might sweep lightly over it; an art which, from the far distance, would see the colours of a sinking and almost incomprehensible moral world fleeing towards it, and would be hospitable enough and profound enough to receive such belated fugitives.