beauty and
seduction,--who has discovered a piece of the SOUTH IN MUSIC.

255. 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 believing 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 he should dream of the future
of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the
North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and
perhaps more perverse andmysterious music, a super-German music, which
does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at the
sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky--a
super-European music, which holds its own even in presence of the brown
sunsets of the desert, whose soul is akin to the palm-tree, and can be
at home and can roam with big, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey... I
could imagine a music of which the rarest charm would be that it knew
nothing more of good and evil; only that here and there perhaps some
sailor's home-sickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses might
sweep lightly over it; an art which, from the far distance, would see
the colours of a sinking and almost incomprehensible MORAL world fleeing
towards it, and would be hospitable enough and