nce IN VOLUPTATE
PSYCHOLOGICA, which is not too remotely associated with the tediousness
of German intercourse,--and as the most successful expression of
genuine French curiosity and inventive talent in this domain of delicate
thrills, Henri Beyle may be noted; that remarkable anticipatory and
forerunning man, who, with a Napoleonic TEMPO, traversed HIS Europe,
in fact, several centuries of the European soul, as a surveyor and
discoverer thereof:--it has required two 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