thetics. This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and withal remains
popular,--it possesses the refinement of a race, not of an individual. It
is rich. It is definite. It builds, organises, completes, and in this
sense it stands as a contrast to the polypus in music, to "endless
melody". Have more painful, more tragic accents ever been heard on the
stage before? And how are they obtained? Without grimaces! Without
counterfeiting of any kind! Free from the _lie_ of the grand style!--In
short: this music assumes that the listener is intelligent even as a
musician,--thereby it is the opposite of Wagner, who, apart from everything
else, was in any case the most _ill-mannered_ genius on earth (Wagner
takes us as if {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} , he repeats a thing so often that we become
desperate,--that we ultimately believe it).

And once more: I become a better man when Bizet speaks to me. Also a
better musician, a better _listener_. Is it in any way possible to listen
better?--I even burrow behind this music with my ears. I hear its very
cause. I seem to assist at its birth. I tremble before the dangers which
this daring music runs, I am enraptured over those happy accidents for
which even Bizet himself may not be responsible.--And, strange to say, at
bottom I do not give it a thought, or am not aware how much thought I
really do give it. For quite other ideas are running through my head the
while.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Has any one ever observed that music _emancipates_ the spirit?
gives wings to thought? and that the more one becomes a musician the more
one is also a philosopher? The grey sky of abstraction seems thrilled by
flashes of lightning; the light is strong enough to reveal all the details
of things; to enable one to grapple with problems; and the world is
surveyed as if from a mountain top--With this I have defined philosophical
pathos--And unexpectedly _answers_ drop into my lap, a small hailstorm of
ice and wisdom, of problems _solved_. Where am I? Bizet makes me
productive. Everything that is good makes me productive. I have gratitude
for nothing else, nor have I any other touchstone for testing what is
good.

2.

Bizet's work also saves; Wagner is not the only "Saviour." With it one
bids farewell to the _damp_ north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian
ideal. Even the action in itself delivers us from these things. From
Merimee it has this logic even in passion, from him it has the direct
line, _ine