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.… 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 Merimée it has this logic even in passion, from him it has the direct line, _inexorable_ 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.… 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