0 Beyond Good and Evil
and enjoins upon them other things, which an Englishman
can never comprehend. Their temperament, turned alter-
nately to and from the South, in which from time to time
the Provencal and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves
them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sun-
less conceptual-spectrism and from poverty of blood—our
GERMAN infirmity of taste, for the excessive prevalence
of which at the present moment, blood and iron, that is to
say ‘high politics,’ has with great resolution been prescribed
(according to a dangerous healing art, which bids me wait
and wait, but not yet hope).—There is also still in France a
pre-understanding and ready welcome for those rarer and
rarely gratified men, who are too comprehensive to find sat-
isfaction in any kind of fatherlandism, and know how to
love the South when in the North and the North when in
the South—the born Midlanders, the ‘good Europeans.’ For
them BIZET has made music, this latest genius, who has
seen a new beauty and seduction,—who has discovered a
piece of the SOUTH IN MUSIC.
- I hold that many precautions should be taken against
German music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love
it—as a great school of recovery for the most spiritual and
the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solar profusion and
effulgence which o’erspreads a sovereign existence believ-
ing in itself—well, such a person will learn to be somewhat
on his guard against German music, because, in injuring
his taste anew, it will also injure his health anew. Such a
Southerner, a Southerner not by origin but by BELIEF, if