picked up may come to the assistance of the inattentive listener; but on the whole the situation must be self-explanatory,--the _talking_ is of no account!"--so they all think, and so they have all made fun of the words. Perhaps they have only lacked courage to express fully their extreme contempt for words: a little additional insolence in Rossini, and he would have allowed la-la-la-la to be sung throughout--and it might have been the rational course! The personages of the opera are _not_ meant to be believed "in their words," but in their tones! That is the difference, that is the fine _unnaturalness_ on account of which people go to the opera! Even the _recitativo secco_ is not really intended to be heard as words and text: this kind of half-music is meant rather in the first place to give the musical ear a little repose (the repose from _melody,_ as from the sublimest, and on that account the most straining enjoyment of this art),--but very soon something different results, namely, an increasing impatience, an increasing resistance, a new longing for _entire_ music, for melody.--How is it with the art of Richard Wagner as seen from this standpoint? Is it perhaps the same? Perhaps otherwise? It would often seem to me as if one needed to have learned by heart both the words _and_ the music of his creations before the performances; for without that--so it seemed to me--me _may hear_ neither the words, nor even the music. 81. _Grecian Taste_--"What is beautiful in it?"--asked a certain geometrician, after a performance of the _Iphigenia--_"there is nothing proved in it!" Could the Greeks have been so far from this taste? In Sophocles at least "everything is proved." 82. _Esprit Un-Grecian._--The Greeks were exceedingly logical and plain in all their thinking; they did not get tired of it, at least during their long flourishing period, as is so often the case with the French; who too willingly made a little excursion into the opposite, and in fact endure the spirit of logic only when it betrays its _sociable_ courtesy, its sociable self-renunciation, by a multitude of such little excursions into its opposite. Logic appears to them as necessary as bread and water, but also like these as a kind of prison-fare, as soon as it is to be taken pure and by itself. In good society one must never want to be in the right absolutely and solely, as all pure logic requires; hence the little dose of irrationality in all French _esprit_.--The social sense of the Greeks was far less developed than that of the French in the present and the past; hence, so little _esprit_ in their cleverest men, hence, so little wit, even in their wags, hence--alas! But people will not readily believe these tenets of mine, and how much of the kind I have still on my soul!--_Est res magna tacere_--says Martial, like all garrulous people. 83.