xorable_ necessity, but what it has above all else is that which
belongs to sub-tropical zones--that dryness of atmosphere, that
_limpidezza_ of the air. Here in every respect the climate is altered.
Here another kind of sensuality, another kind of sensitiveness and another
kind of cheerfulness make their appeal. This music is gay, but not in a
French or German way. Its gaiety is African; fate hangs over it, its
happiness is short, sudden, without reprieve. I envy Bizet for having had
the courage of this sensitiveness, which hitherto in the cultured music of
Europe has found no means of expression,--of this southern, tawny, sunburnt
sensitiveness.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} What a joy the golden afternoon of its happiness is to us!
When we look out, with this music in our minds, we wonder whether we have
ever seen the sea so _calm_. And how soothing is this Moorish dancing!
How, for once, even our insatiability gets sated by its lascivious
melancholy!--And finally love, love translated back into _Nature_! Not the
love of a "cultured girl!"--no Senta-sentimentality.(7) But love as fate,
as a fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel,--and precisely in this way
_Nature_! The love whose means is war, whose very essence is the _mortal
hatred_ between the sexes!--I know no case in which the tragic irony, which
constitutes the kernel of love, is expressed with such severity, or in so
terrible a formula, as in the last cry of Don Jose with which the work
ends:

"Yes, it is I who have killed her,
I--my adored Carmen!"

--Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare:
it distinguishes one work of art from among a thousand others. For, as a
rule, artists are no better than the rest of the world, they are even
worse--they _misunderstand_ love. Even Wagner misunderstood it. They
imagine that they are selfless in it because they appear to be seeking the
advantage of another creature often to their own disadvantage. But in
return they want to _possess_ the other creature.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Even God is no
exception to this rule, he is very far from thinking "What does it matter
to thee whether I love thee or not?"--He becomes terrible if he is not
loved in return "_L'amour_--and with this principle one carries one's point
against Gods and men--_est de tous les sentiments le plus egoiste, et par
consequent, lorsqu'il est blesse, le moins genereux_" (B. Constant).

3.

Perhaps you are beginning to perceiv