And how well Wagner was understood!--The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner; in his school they even _write_ Hegelian.[5] But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words "infinity" and "meaning" were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner did _not_ conquer these boys with music, but with the "idea":--it is the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner's genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety--precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!--Moreover in the presence of Wagner's multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified--"saved." Tremulously they listen while the _great symbols_ in his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, on _quite intimate terms_ with bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God: but Wotan is the God of bad weather.... They are right, how could these German youths--in their present condition,--miss what we others, we _halcyonians,_ miss in Wagner? _i.e.: la gaya scienza;_ light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea--perfection.... 11. --I have mentioned the sphere to which Wagner belongs--certainly not to the history of music. What, however, does he mean historically?--_The rise of the actor in music,_ a momentous event which not only leads me to think but also to fear.