it
is not infrequently roguish, still oftener rough and coarse--it has fire
and courage, and at the same time the loose, dun-coloured skin of fruits
which ripen too late. It flows broad and full: and suddenly there is a
moment of inexplicable hesitation, like a gap that opens between cause
and effect, an oppression that makes us dream, almost a nightmare; but
already it broadens and widens anew, the old stream of delight--the most
manifold delight,--of old and new happiness; including ESPECIALLY
the joy of the artist in himself, which he refuses to conceal, his
astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of the expedients here
employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested expedients of art
which he apparently betrays to us. All in all, however, no beauty, no
South, nothing of the delicate southern clearness of the sky, nothing
of grace, no dance, hardly a will to logic; a certain clumsiness even,
which is also emphasized, as though the artist wished to say to us: "It
is part of my intention"; a cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily
barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring of learned and venerable conceits
and witticisms; something German in the best and worst sense of
the word, something in the German style, manifold, formless, and
inexhaustible; a certain German potency and super-plenitude of
soul, which is not afraid to hide itself under the RAFFINEMENTS of
decadence--which, perhaps, feels itself most at ease there; a real,
genuine token of the German soul, which is at the same time young and
aged, too ripe and yet still too rich in futurity. This kind of music
expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day
before yesterday and the day after tomorrow--THEY HAVE AS YET NO TODAY.

241. We "good Europeans," we also have hours when we allow ourselves a
warm-hearted patriotism, a plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow
views--I have just given an example of it--hours of national excitement,
of patriotic anguish, and all other sorts of old-fashioned floods of
sentiment. Duller spirits may perhaps only get done with what confines
its operations in us to hours and plays itself out in hours--in a
considerable time: some in half a year, others in half a lifetime,
according to the speed and strength with which they digest and "change
their material." Indeed, I could think of sluggish, hesitating races,
which even in our rapidly moving Europe, would require half a century
ere they could surmount s