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.(11) 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.