It is fairly safe to say that—with the possible exception of Liszt—there is no musician about whom people differ so strongly as about Berlioz. His case is, indeed, unique. We are pretty well agreed as to the relative positions of the other men; roughly speaking, all cultivated musicians would put Wagner and Brahms and Beethoven in the first rank of composers, and Mendelssohn, Grieg, and DvorÀk in the second or third. Even in the case of a disputed problem like Strauss, the argument among those who know his work is not, I take it, as to his being a musician of the first rank, but as to the precise position he occupies among the others of that limited regiment. Upon Berlioz, however, the world seems unable to make up its mind. The dispute here is not as to where he stands among the great ones, but whether he really belongs to the great ones at all. Though there is no absolute unanimity of opinion upon the total work of, say, Wagner or Beethoven—no complete agreement as to the amount of weakness that is bound up with their strength—there is at all events perfect unanimity of opinion that Wagner and Beethoven are of the royal line. But we have Berlioz extolled to the skies by one section of competent musicians, while another section can scarcely speak of him politely; he really seems to create a kind of physical nausea in them; and some of them even deny his temperament to have been really musical. There is surely nothing in the history of music to parallel the situation. The difference of opinion upon him, be it observed, is quite another thing from the frequent and quite excusable perplexity that men feel over a contemporary composer. Men drift widely apart over Wagner while he is alive; but the next generation, at all events, sees him practically through the same eyes. The quarrel over Berlioz is not a contemporary quarrel; the bulk of his most significant work had all appeared before 1850, and yet here we are, half a century after that time, still debating whether he is really one of the immortals. For many people Schumann's old question, "Are we to regard him as a genius, or only a musical adventurer?" still remains unanswered.

On the whole—looking for a moment only at the external aspect of the case—the current is now flowing not from but towards him. Even putting aside the exceptional spasm of 1903, the centenary of his birth, he probably gets more performances now than he ever did. Messrs. Breitkopf and HÄrtel are bringing out a magnificent complete edition of his works in score, superbly edited by Weingartner, the great conductor, and Charles Malherbe, Archivist of the Paris Opera; while in the admirable little Donajowski editions the full scores of the Symphonie fantastique, Harold en Italie, RomÉo et Juliette, and half-a-dozen of the overtures, can now be had for a total expenditure of a few shillings. Publishers do not generally take to bringing out full scores, particularly at very low prices, unless there is some demand for the works; and I think we may take it that just now there is a quickening interest in Berlioz. Yet all the while the critical war goes on, without signs of compromise on either side. The attitude of a great many people is of course to be explained partly by imperfect acquaintance with Berlioz's work, partly by their having revolted against him at the outset and never settled down to ask themselves whether their first impressions did not need revising. It is not every one who has either the candour or the capacity for hard and patient work of Weingartner, who has placed on record his own progress from the traditional view of Berlioz as "a great colourist, the founder of modern orchestration, a brilliant writer, and, in fact, almost everything else except a composer of inspiration and melody," to the view that Berlioz is one of the great masters, rich in feeling, in beauty, in inventiveness. Many worthy people no doubt took their cue from Wagner, who, besides giving a nonsensical pseudo-analysis of Berlioz in Opera and Drama, referred to him disparagingly in a well-known letter to Liszt. It is tolerably clear, however, that Wagner knew comparatively little of Berlioz at that time, and that in running down Benvenuto Cellini and La Damnation de Faust he was only indulging that unfortunate habit of his of expressing himself very positively upon subjects he knew nothing about. [1] But put aside all the criticism of him that comes from imperfect knowledge—and it must be remembered that up to quite recently it was not easy to get a perfect knowledge of him, for his scores were rather scarce, and so badly printed as to make the reading of them a trial—Wagner's and we are still left face to face with a certain amount of good critical intelligence that cannot, do what it will, take to Berlioz's music. And since criticism is, or ought to be, concerned not only with the psychological processes that go to make a work of art, but also with the psychological processes that make us judge it in this way or that—it is worth while trying to discover what it is in Berlioz that makes so many worthy people quite unsympathetic towards him.

II

Let us first of all look at him biographically and historically, as he was in himself and in his relations to his contemporaries. His is perhaps the strangest story in all the records of music. In contrast to musicians like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and a score of others, who grew up from childhood in an atmosphere saturated with music, Berlioz is born in a country town that is practically destitute of musical life. Even the piano is not cultivated there, the harp and guitar being almost the sole instruments known; in 1808—five years after the birth of Berlioz—there is still only one piano in the Department. There is no teacher of music in the place; Berlioz's father ultimately combines with other residents to bring over for this purpose a second violinist from the theatre at Lyons. Although the music in the boy cannot quite be kept down, for nearly the first twenty years of his life he is, to all intents and purposes, ignorant of the elements of technique, and never hears a bar of first-rate music. "When I arrived in Paris in 1820," [2] he says, "I had never yet set foot in a theatre; all I knew of instrumental music was the quartets of Pleyel with which the four amateurs composing the Philharmonic Society of my native town used to regale me each Sunday after mass; and I had no other idea of dramatic music than what I had been able to get in running through a collection of old operatic airs arranged with an accompaniment for the guitar." Yet, untutored as he was, and practically ignorant of even the elements of harmony, he had from his boyhood been writing music. The opening melody of the Symphonie fantastique was really written by Berlioz in his twelfth year, to some verses from Florian's Estelle; [3] and we know of other boyish compositions, fragments of which have been conserved in some of his later works. It may not be absolutely true, as M. Edmond Hippeau says, that until the age of twenty-three he was "ignorant of the most elementary principles of music"; but at all events he was just beginning to learn these principles at an age when nine other composers out of ten have left far behind them all the drudgery of the apprentice. In Paris he does indeed study after a fashion; but it is characteristic of him that he gets most of his musical experience from the performances at the Opera, and from a diligent reading of the scores of Gluck in the library of the Conservatoire.

Even in Paris, at that time, there was little to call out the best there was in such a man as Berlioz—little that could teach him the proper use of his own strange faculties, or by whose standard he could test the worth of his own inspiration. He did indeed hear a little Gluck occasionally, and a travesty of Weber; but it was not until 1828 that Beethoven made any impression on Paris. Orchestras were generally incompetent and audiences ignorant. The calibre of the average French orchestra of the time may be gauged from the fact that even the more reputable bands found Mozart's symphonies by no means easy. One shudders to think what the ordinary orchestras must have been like, and what was the quality of music to which they had grown accustomed. As for the audiences, where they were not extremely uneducated they were extremely prejudiced, clinging blindly to the remains of the pseudo-classical principles that had been bequeathed to them by their fathers. An audience that could be worked into a perfect frenzy of rage because an actor, outraging all the proprieties of the time, actually referred in Othello to something so vulgar as a handkerchief, would hardly look with favour on anything revolutionary either in idea or technique. At the opera the Italians were most in vogue. The French public knew little of instrumental music pure and simple, and were almost entirely ignorant of the huge developments of German music. Cherubini, of course, was a stately and impressive figure, a serious thinker of the same breed as the great Germans; but apart from him, there were no Parisian composers who could by any stretch of the imagination be called modern, or could do anything to teach a man like Berlioz. Lesueur, the favourite master of Berlioz, seems to have been progressive—indeed, revolutionary—in some of his theories of music and poetry; but his theory was better than his practice. From such a type as the amiable and ineffectual BoÏeldieu nothing new could possibly come. He frankly avowed his inability to understand Beethoven, and declared to Berlioz his preference for "la musique qui me berce." Yet this young musician from the country, with years of lost time to regret, with little musical education, with the very slightest of stimuli from the great music of the past, and with little encouragement in his own surroundings, produces in quick succession a number of works of the most startling originality—original in every way, in the turn of their melodies, in their harmonic facture, in their orchestration, in their rhythm, in their view of men and things. Now that the complete Berlioz is being printed, we know a good deal more of him than was possible even a few years ago. We do not now commence our study of him with the Symphonie fantastique; we can watch the workings of his brain in the two early cantatas—Herminie and ClÉopÂtre—that in the eyes of two sapient juries of the time were insufficient to win him the Prix de Rome. Here we see a freshness of outlook and of style—particularly in the matter of rhythm—that is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of music. In his earliest years, as in his latest, Berlioz was himself, a solitary figure owing practically nothing to other people's music, an artist, we may almost say, without ancestry and without posterity. Mozart builds upon Haydn and influences Beethoven; Beethoven imitates Mozart and in turn influences the practice of all later symphonists; Wagner learns from Weber and gives birth to a host of imitators. But with Berlioz—and it is a point to be insisted on—there is no one whose speech he tried to copy in his early years, and there is no one since who speaks with his voice. How many things in the early Beethoven were made in the factory of Mozart; how many times does the early Wagner speak with the voice of Weber! But who can turn over the scores of Berlioz's early works and find a single phrase that can be fathered upon any previous or contemporary writer? There was never any one, before his time or since, who thought and wrote just like him; his musical style especially is absolutely his own. Now and then in L'Enfance du Christ he suggests Gluck—not in the turn of his phrases but in the general atmosphere of an aria; but apart from this it is the rarest thing for him to remind us of any other composer. His melody, his harmony, his rhythm, are absolutely his own.

III

We are face to face, then, with a personality which, whether we like it or not, is of extraordinary strength and originality. If we are to realise what kind of force he was, and how he came to do the work he did, we must study him both from the standpoint of history and from that of physiological and psychological science. Musical criticism is apt to become too much a mere matter of wine-tasting, a bare statement of a preference of this vintage or a decided dislike for that. We need to study musicians as a whole, as complete organisms hanging together by virtue of certain peculiarities of structure. If a man does not like Liszt's music he compares it disparagingly with Wagner's—as if this placing of people on the higher or lower rungs of a ladder were the be-all and the end-all of criticism. Shakespeare is the greatest figure of the Elizabethan literary world; but what critic thinks of disposing of Ford and Massinger and Jonson and Webster and Marlowe and Tourneur with the off-hand remark that not one of them was a Shakespeare? In the same way it is not sufficient to write down Berlioz as a purveyor of extravagant ideas clothed sometimes in ugly and unpleasing forms; it is much more profitable to set ourselves to find out why he came to have such a bias in art, and what were his relations to the general intellectual movements of his time. It is only when we study him from the historical standpoint that we can understand many of his ideals; and to understand them is more important than to rail at them. The criticism that rejects the less beautiful specimens of an art because they are not perfect is like the natural history that would take account only of the typical organisms, passing over the many instructive variations from the type. In the long run human folly and human failure are just as interesting to the student of humanity as its wisdom and its triumphs; and the critic should always aim at being an impartial student of humanity, not a mere wine-taster or a magistrate.

As we have seen, whatever other qualities we may deny to Berlioz, we cannot at any rate refuse his claim to originality. Readers of ThÉophile Gautier's Histoire du Romantisme, in which the cool, objective poet and critic reviews all the leading figures of the Romantic movement—Victor Hugo, GÉrard de Nerval, Alfred de Vigny, Delacroix, and a score or so of lesser lights—will remember that Berlioz is the only musician admitted to that brilliant company. It was not due to any personal preference on Gautier's part, or to his ignorance of the other Romantic musicians; there simply were no others. So far as music was concerned, the whole Romantic movement began and ended with Berlioz. When we are tempted to feel annoyed at some of his extravagances or banalities we should remember that he had to conquer a new world unaided. He was not only without colleagues but without progenitors. When he arrived in Paris in 1821, at the age of eighteen, what was the position of music in France? Gluck's epoch-making work had terminated in 1779 with Iphigenia in Tauris; the dramatic school of which he was the leader made something like its last effort in Sacchini's Œdipe À Colone in 1789. The often charming but flimsy work of Dauvergne, Duni, Monsigny, Dalayrac and GrÉtry was without any importance for the opera of the future. Two musicians alone commanded serious respect—the great Cherubini, who, however, was neither typically French nor very revolutionary, and MÉhul, whose Joseph appeared in 1807. Lesueur and Berton do not count; while HÉrold, strong man as he was in some ways, was not strikingly original either in form or in expression. The French music produced during the years of Berlioz's early manhood was of the type of BoÏeldieu's La Dame Blanche (1828), Auber's Masaniello (1828) and Fra Diavolo (1830), or Adam's Postillon de Longjumeau (1836). Neither Spontini in the first decade of the century, nor Rossini in later years, were a necessary link in the chain of development of French music. In fact, of almost all the music heard in Paris between 1790 and 1830 we may say that whenever it was great it was not French, and whenever it was French it was not great. Above all it was scarcely ever contemporary music; it rarely showed any trace of having assimilated the life and art of its own day. Especially was it unaffected by the hot young Romantic blood that in the second and third decades of the century was transforming both French poetry and French painting. Think of the artists and poets, and then think of the musicians, and you seem to enter another and inferior world of thought.

It was Berlioz, and Berlioz alone, who brought French music into line with the activities of intelligent men in other departments. He put into it a ferocity and turbulence of imagination and an audacity of style to which it had hitherto been a stranger. Often when I listen to him now I feel that we do not even yet quite appreciate his originality. Even after the lapse of so many years the music sometimes strikes us, in spite of all the enormous development of the art between his day and ours, as startlingly new and unconventional. What then must it have sounded like in the ears of those who heard it for the first time? Imagine the bourgeois audience of those days suddenly assailed by the March to the Scaffold, or the Witches' Sabbath, in the Symphonie fantastique! There was here as violent a rupture with the staid formulas of the classic and the pseudo-classic as anything achieved by Victor Hugo or Delacroix or Gros or GÉricault.

The springs that moved Berlioz, in fact, were just the springs that moved his great contemporaries. The essence of their revolt was an insistence upon the truth that beauty is co-extensive almost with life itself. The nerves of the younger men were sharper than their fathers'; their ears were more acute, their eyes more observant. They saw and felt more of life, and tried to express in art what they had seen and felt; which could not be done without not only breaking the mould of the pseudo-classic technique, but also finding voice for a lot of sensations and ideas to which the men of the previous generation had been impervious. Recent French critics have noticed, as one evidence of the more sensitive nerves of the early Romanticists, the fineness and variety of their perceptions of colour. To the literary man of the eighteenth century an object is merely blue or red; the new writers perceive a dozen shades of blue and red, and ransack the whole vocabulary to find the right discriminating word. [4] There was a general effort to escape from the conventions that had fast-bound poetry, painting, the drama, and the opera. The dress of the actors and singers now aimed at some correspondence with that of the epoch of the play, instead of making the vain attempt to produce an historical illusion with the costume of their own time. The subjects of dramas, novels, poems, and operas, instead of being exclusively classic, were now sought in contemporary manners or in earlier European history; and with the change of matter there necessarily came a change of style. At the same time there sprang up an intellectual intimacy, previously unknown, between all classes of artists. The poet and the musician hung about the studio of the painter; the painter and the poet sang the songs of the musician, or attended the performances of his opera, to criticise it from the point of view of men who themselves were used to thinking in art. The imagination of each was stimulated and enriched by the ideas and sensations of the others. The new achievements of line or colour or language or sound prompted the devotee of each art to fresh experiments in his own medium. This in turn led to another new phenomenon, of particular importance in the history of music. There came to the front an original type—the literary musician, who made a practice, and sometimes a profession, of writing about his art, of educating the public at the same time as he clarified his own ideas and tested his own powers. This type was accompanied by yet another new product—the literary man or poet who wrote on music, not as a professor or a pedant, and not after the manner of the Rousseaus and Suards of the eighteenth century, but with dynamic force and directness, correlating music with life and thought, estimating it by its actual meaning to living men. There was nothing in the eighteenth century to correspond to the prose writings of musicians like Berlioz and Schumann, nothing to compare with the treatment of musical subjects by literary men such as Hoffmann and Baudelaire. [5] And yet, while there was in this way a greater actual expenditure of brain-power upon music and art generally, the men themselves were not such solid types as the men of the eighteenth century. Neither Hugo, nor Gautier, nor Delacroix, nor Berlioz had the intellectual weight and fixity of Diderot, or Condorcet, or David, or Gluck. The reason of the eighteenth century was transformed into sentiment, its activity into reflection, its repose into enthusiasm, its sobriety into passion.

Against this spirit the now anÆmic idealism of pseudo-classical art could not stand for long. If artists had taught the public to believe that whatever tasted of real life was vulgar or barbaric, the public must now be disabused of that notion. All life was claimed as the province of the artist; he claimed also the right to draw it as he had seen it. "There are no good subjects or bad subjects," said Victor Hugo; "there are only good poets and bad poets." Expression—vital expression, biting to the very heart of the theme—was now the ideal; beauty, in the limited sense that had been given to it by the false classics, was only a formula more or less platitudinous. "The realisation of beauty by the expression of character" was the avowed purpose of the Romanticists. M. BrunetiÈre aptly contrasts with this the classic theorem of Winckelmann, that the ideal beauty was "like pure water, having no particular savour." "We must say it and repeat it," cries Hugo in the preface of 1824 to the Odes et Ballades; "it is not the need for novelty that torments our minds; it is the need for truth—and that need is immense." Delacroix summed up the general falsity of the conventional attitude towards art when he wrote: "In order to make an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinous, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if he is, nevertheless, not beautiful, we must abstain altogether from this freak of nature, this squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the eyes.'" A journalist of 1826 (cited by M. Gustave Lanson in his admirable Histoire de la LittÉrature franÇaise) cried, "Vive la nature brute et sauvage qui revit si bien dans les vers de M. de Vigny, Jules LefÈvre, Victor Hugo!" It was not that they worshipped ugliness and violence in themselves, but that they felt there are certain occasions when truth can be reached only through the repellent and the extravagant, which, however, may be bent by a wise eclecticism to the purposes of the ideal. There is scarcely anything in the imagination of Berlioz that is not paralleled in the imaginations of the contemporary poets and painters; there is no leap of theirs towards freer verse or more expressive colour that was not also taken by the musician. Only while they had at least some roots in the past, not only in their own country but in England and Germany, and while they were many and could support and purify each other by mutual criticism, Berlioz stood by himself, without any musician, dead or living, being of any practical value to him in the course he took.

IV

Few literary and artistic movements have their social and physical roots laid as clearly open to us as the Romantic. The most astonishing thing in connection with this chain of causes and results is that there should be only the solitary figure of Berlioz to represent the musical side of it. One would have thought that the vast liberation of nervous energy effected by the Revolution and the Napoleonic period would have been too great to be confined to literature and the plastic arts—that a really French school of music would have arisen, interwoven with the past and the present of French history and social life, and as typical of contemporary French culture in its own way as the poetry, drama, and painting of the time were in theirs. That this did not happen was in all probability due to the confirmed hold which the theatre had upon music-lovers in France. To nine men out of ten there music was synonymous with opera; and opera meant a spectacle in which only the greatest pleasure of the greatest number had to be consulted. It was an art-form in which compromise was carried to its highest points; the audience was cosmopolitan and not too critical, and the composers, whether native or foreign, had to think only in the second place of art, and in the first place of speaking a musical language that would be intelligible and acceptable to all. No independent, contemporary expression of culture could be expected in opera, for no one, composer or spectator, took it quite seriously enough for that.

On the other hand, there was no purely instrumental form existing that could serve as a vehicle for such revolutionary modes of feeling as found expression in the literature and painting of the day. Finally, there was no public with sufficient musical training to demand a new revelation in music, or to comprehend it if it came. The French orchestras of the time, as we have seen, were almost uniformly inefficient, incapable of playing great music with any intelligence. It was impossible, then, for the public to be as alive, as up-to-date, in music as it was in other things; and music, more than any other art, is dependent upon collective as distinguished from individual patronage. Perhaps, also, the language of French music was as yet not sufficiently developed to fit it to answer the needs of the young generation of Romanticists. It was not real enough, not close enough to actual life to spur the energies of men either into approval or disgust. There was no mistaking the angry flare of the new spirit in other fields. The realism of Gros or of Delacroix was patent to every eye; the mere change in the choice of subjects was a challenge and a provocation. So again in poetry, one could not fail to be agitated by the incessant whipping of the language to new feats of technique, the perpetual evocation of new forms of expression, new vibrations of verbal colour. All this was on very much the same plane as the everyday life of men. It was something they could feel a fighting interest in. But no one took music so seriously. It was long before it lost the grand manner, the trick of wig and sword, of the eighteenth century; and when it did there was nothing of equal grandeur to take its place. Where it was great, and had the large stride and the flowing cloak, it breathed of the psychology of the past; where it took part in the lives of the men of its own day it attacked them only on their more sensuous, more frankly epicurean side. It was a mistress, not a wife.

In Berlioz alone, then, the Romantic movement expended its musical energies. He alone among French musicians of the time shows the same characteristics of body and mind as went to the making of the art or literature of his contemporaries. With him, as with them, the physiological structure counts for very much. No doubt a good deal of the motive-power came from the great awakening of the Napoleonic era. The nation that had been wrestling for a generation with every country in Europe necessarily touched life on more sides than it had ever done before. The old formalities no longer sufficed; indeed, the mere antiquity of any thought or any practice was no recommendation of it in the eyes of this people, to whom the strange kaleidoscopic present was a spectacle of ever-changing interest. It was this aspect of the situation to which Stendhal gave expression when he compared his own century with the eighteenth, the classic nutriment with the romantic. "The classic pieces are like religions—the time for creating them has gone by. They are like a clock that points to midday when it is four in the afternoon. This kind of poetry was all right for the people who, at Fontenoy, raised their hats and said to the English column, 'Gentlemen, be good enough to fire first.' And it is expected that this poetry should satisfy a Frenchman who took part in the retreat from Moscow!" When the Napoleonic empire had fallen, a new motive-power of great literary value was discovered in the intense melancholy which, according to Musset, seized upon the younger spirits at the sudden limitation of the nation's activities. "A feeling of inexpressible malaise commenced to ferment in every young heart. Condemned to inaction by the sovereigns of the world, given up to indolence, to ennui, the young men ... experienced, at the foundation of their souls, a misery that was insupportable."

The physiological causes, however, of this nervous irritability, this dissatisfaction with existing things, which is as strongly marked in Berlioz as in Musset or Delacroix, were probably more important than the moral ones. The majority of the artists and literary men of this epoch had a poor, neurotic physique. In almost all of them there was a tendency to nervous derangement, or some weakness of the heart or lungs that would predispose them to melancholy. Maxime du Camp bore strong testimony to the physical lassitude that characterised this epoch. "The artistic and literary generation that preceded me," he wrote, "that to which I belonged, had a youth of artistic sadness, inherent in the constitution of men or in the epoch." Again, speaking of the proclivity to suicide among the young men of the time, he says, "It was not merely a fashion, as one might believe; it was a kind of general debility that made the heart sad and the mind gloomy, and caused death to be looked upon as a deliverance."

This dÉfaillance gÉnÉrale, this tristesse sans cause comme sans objet, tristesse abstraite, must have had its roots in something deeper than the mere psychological outlook of the youth of the period. It seems probable that there was a general physical exhaustion, a widespread undermining of physique. The children born about the beginning of the century must have had for their parents, in many cases, people who had lived in an atmosphere of intense social and political excitement, and had probably undergone a considerable amount of actual physical hardship. The Napoleonic wars can hardly have failed to leave their mark upon the physiological constitution of the French race. If it be true that the fine nervous quality of the Irish comes in part from the centuries of troubled life through which the race has passed, there must certainly have been some impression left upon the physique of France by the lurid, swiftly changing episodes of the Revolution and the Empire. The mere loss of young blood must have counted for a good deal. De Musset, indeed, in his Confession d'un enfant du siÈcle, bears testimony to the melancholy of the young generation—"une gÉnÉration ardente, pÂle, nerveuse," "conceived between two battles," and born of "les mÈres inquiÈtes." [6] Maxime Du Camp too suggests this explanation of the morbidity of the time, and adds to it another. "Often I have asked myself whether this depression may not have been the outcome of physiological causes. The nation was exhausted by the wars of the empire, and the children had inherited their fathers' weakness. Besides, the system of medicine and hygiene then prevalent was disastrous. Broussais was the leader of thought, and doctors went everywhere lancet in hand. At school they bled us for a headache. When I had typhoid fever I was bled three times in one week, sixty leeches were applied, and I could only have recovered by a miracle. The doctrines preached by MoliÈre's Diafoiruses had lasted on to our day, and resulted in the anÆmic constitution so frequently met with. Poverty of blood combined with the nervous temperament makes a man melancholy and depressed."

One consequence of this flawed physique was that the young men of the time not only had extravagant conceptions, but that they took these and themselves with enormous seriousness. The majority of them posed unconscionably at times. They could not be unhappy without playing upon their own sensations for the benefit of an audience; there was something of the actor in almost all of them. Each was a Werther in his own eyes, a person towards whom the cosmos had behaved with a special and quite unpardonable malevolence. Listen, for example, to the declamation of Chateaubriand: "I have never been happy, I have never attained happiness though I have pursued it with a perseverance corresponding with the natural ardour of my soul; no one knows what the happiness was that I sought, no one has fully known the depths of my heart; the majority of my sentiments have remained immured there, or have only appeared in my works as applied to imaginary beings. To-day, when I still regret my chimÆras without however pursuing them, when, having reached the summit of life, I descend towards the tomb, I wish, before dying, to revert to those precious years, to explain my inexplicable heart, to see, in short, what I can say when my pen abandons itself unconstrainedly to all my recollections." [7] One detects a little note of insincerity in it all. The gentleman doth protest too much; he is wearing his heart too visibly on his coat-sleeve, trafficking in melancholy as a man traffics in cotton or steel, simply because there is a market for that kind of thing. We need to read Berlioz's letters with this suspicion always before us if we are to take them at their real value. A fair summary of the half-sincere, half-posing mood that was prevalent among the young men of genius of the time is to be had in GÉricault's portrait of himself, in the Louvre, with the forced melodrama of the skull on the shelf intruding itself upon the real earnestness of the picture as a whole. We get plenty of this somewhat far-fetched and too conscious diablerie in some of the early work of Berlioz; and there is no need to be more contemptuous of it there than when we meet with it in the poets or the painters who were his contemporaries. To say nothing of the grandiloquent Hugo and his youthful followers, even so strong and philosophical a type as Flaubert was decoyed now and then into the same kind of pose of exaggeration. His early letters have their full share of sentimentality, of talk about man being as a frail skiff in the tempest, and all the other formulas of the school, [8] although Flaubert expressly dissociated himself from the more lymphatic specimens of Romanticism. "Do you know," he wrote, "that the new generation of the schools is extremely stupid; formerly it had more sense; it occupied itself with women, sword-thrusts, orgies; now it apes Byron.... It is who shall have the palest face and say in the best manner 'I am blasÉ, blasÉ!' What a pity! blasÉ at eighteen!"

V

If ever the physiological structure of a man had to be taken into account in trying to explain the nature of his work, it is surely when we are dealing with Berlioz. We have only to look at his portrait to see how highly strung he was, how prone he must have been to disorders of the nervous system. There is a passage in one of his letters that seems to indicate an anxiety for his health on the part of his father, who, being a doctor, would probably understand his son's bias towards nervous troubles: "Je suis vos instructions quant au rÉgime," writes Hector; "je mange ordinairement peu et ne bois presque plus de thÉ." His early life, after he left the paternal home, was certainly one of great privation. He moreover seems to have been exceedingly careless of his health, indulging in long walks without a proper supply of food—presuming upon a nervous energy that to him no doubt seemed like a solid physical constitution. Worse even than this was his occasional deliberate resort to starvation, as one of his friends tells us, "pour connaÎtre les maux par lesquels le gÉnie pouvait passer." The wonder is not that he should always have been a prey to some trouble or other of the nerves, or that in middle age he should have been attacked by a frightful intestinal disorder, but that he should have lived as long as he did, and found strength enough for such work as he has bequeathed to us. "How unhappily I am put together," he once wrote to his friend Ferrand—"a veritable barometer, now up, now down, always susceptible to the changes of the atmosphere—bright or sombre—of my consuming thoughts." As it was, the nerves plainly underwent a gradual deterioration. There are the same general mental characteristics in his later work as in his earlier, but the music of the last fifteen years of his life will as a whole hardly bear comparison with that written between the ages of twenty-five and forty. The fine bloom seemed to have been rubbed off his spirit; even where the music still has the nervous energy of former years it is almost entirely an external thing—a mere tendency to break out into the unexpected because of the impossibility of continuing for long on the one level path; while too often there is a sheer dulness that evidently comes from the long-continued stilling of his pains with opium. But until his system wore itself out in this way through every kind of over-strain, it was clearly one of extraordinary sensitivity, susceptible to a hundred impressions that must have remained a sealed book to every other French musician of the time.

This was the keynote to his mental life and to the world which he tried to reproduce in art; and if we study his physical organisation he becomes far more typical of the Romantic movement than the most brilliant of his contemporaries. If their distinguishing mark was the extraordinary seriousness with which they took their artistic impressions, the strange convulsions produced in them by the sight of a beautiful thing or by the mere rapturous act of composition, it must be said that not one of them can compare with Berlioz in this respect. A hundred passages, in his Memoirs, his letters, and his prose works, reveal his temperament as perhaps the most extraordinarily volcanic thing in the history of music. Musicians as a whole have an unenviable notoriety for not being as other men are; they surpass even the poets in the fineness of their nerves and the tendency of these to evade the control of the higher centres. But surely, outside the history of religious mania or the ecstasy of the mystics, there is nothing to parallel the abnormal state into which Berlioz was thrown by music. "When I hear certain pieces of music, my vital forces at first seem to be doubled. I feel a delicious pleasure, in which reason has no part; the habit of analysis comes afterwards to give birth to admiration; the emotion, increasing in proportion to the energy or the grandeur of the ideas of the composer, soon produces a strange agitation in the circulation of the blood; tears, which generally indicate the end of the paroxysm, often indicate only a progressive state of it, leading to something still more intense. In this case I have spasmodic contractions of the muscles, a trembling in all my limbs, a complete torpor of the feet and the hands, a partial paralysis of the nerves of sight and hearing; I no longer see, I scarcely hear: vertigo ... a semi-swoon." Still more curious is the effect created on him by music he does not like. "One can imagine," he says, "that sensations carried to this degree of violence are rather rare, and that there is a vigorous contrast to them, namely the painful musical effect, producing the contrary of admiration and pleasure. No music acts more strongly in this respect than that whose principal fault seems to me to be platitude plus falsity of expression. Then I redden as if with shame; a veritable anger takes possession of me; to look at me, you would think I had just received an unpardonable insult; to get rid of the impression I have received, there is a general upheaval of my being, an effort of expulsion in the whole organism, analogous to the effort of vomiting, when the stomach wishes to reject a nauseous liquor. It is disgust and hatred carried to their extreme limit; this music exasperates me, and I vomit it through all my pores."

This is not a piece of merely literary exaggeration, for time after time in his letters we come across corroborative evidence that Berlioz was really affected by music in this way. He thus surpasses in nervous extravagance the most abnormal of the young poets and painters of his time. And as with them the susceptibility of their physical organisms led to a new sympathy with things, a new tenderness, a new pity, so did the weakness of Berlioz lead him to the discovery of shades of emotion that had never before found expression in music. Madame de StaËl's remark, that "la littÉrature romantique ... se sert de nos impressions personnelles pour nous Émouvoir," had a wider application than she imagined. The French Romantic was a new type in art; in most cases a nervous sufferer himself, he had glimpses of a whole world of human pain and pathos that were denied his forerunners. The great figures of the eighteenth century are for the most part objective, travelling by the way of reason rather than that of emotion, philosophers rather than artists, living in the central stream of things, and with a broad, clear outlook on the actual affairs of their own day. Their very sentiment is a different thing from the sentiment of the later generation; it is more under control, has less heart and more brain in it, is less suggestive of an overwhelming surge along the nerves. Only now and again in the literature of the eighteenth century do we catch a foreshadowing of that species of quivering emotion which found, sometimes only too easily, expression in the Romantics. We have it in a noteworthy passage of Diderot: "Le premier serment que se firent deux Êtres de chair, ce fut au pied d'un rocher qui tombait en poussiÈre; ils attestÈrent de leur constance un ciel qui n'est pas un instant le mÊme; tout passait en eux, autour d'eux, et ils croyaient leurs coeurs affranchis de vicissitudes. O enfants! toujours enfants!" This, in the literature of its time, is like a lyric of Heine appearing among the pages of Lessing, a song of Schumann in the middle of a score of Gluck. We have something of the same tone again, a similar adumbration of the romantic spirit, here and there in the RÊveries of Rousseau. But it is in the Romantics that we first find the full expression of that new tremor of feeling that comes from the sense of the weakness of our poor flesh, the sense of the mortality of our clay, our hourly nearness to corruption, our community with everything that suffers and perishes.

VI

Before coming to consider his music, let us complete the study of Berlioz as an organism by examining his prose, where we shall find many things that throw light on his structure. The assistance given to the student of musical psychology by the prose writings of musicians is so great, that one could almost wish that every composer of any note had left the world a volume or two of criticism or of autobiography. They would not necessarily have added very much to our positive knowledge of life or art; but a book is such an unconscious revelation of its writer, he shows himself in it so faithfully and so completely, no matter how much he may desire to pose or deceive, that the psychologist is able to reconstruct the man's mind from it as the scientist can reconstruct in imagination the body of an animal from a few of its bones. One does not lay much store, for example, by the actual contents of the volumes of prose which Wagner was unkind enough to bequeath to us; but after all one would not willingly let them die, for they are of the utmost help to the study of Wagner, indirectly, if not directly, throwing sidelights on him of which he was quite unconscious. The prose of Berlioz has greater intrinsic interest. Deeply as he said he loathed his journalistic work, he was after all a born journalist, a fluent writer, a cynical wit, an accomplished story-teller in certain genres, a master of polished and mordant irony. My present purpose, however, is not to attempt an appreciation of Berlioz's prose as a whole, but to call attention to certain curious elements in it that have not, so far as I am aware, been pointed out before, and that are extremely interesting to the student of so strange and complex a personality as Berlioz.

Readers of Hennequin's fine, if not quite convincing, essay on Flaubert in Quelques Écrivains FranÇais, will remember the attempt to exhibit the structure and functioning of the novelist's brain by dissection of his prose. Flaubert, he shows, tends always to write thus and thus; he has a vocabulary of such and such a kind, and he tends to build up words in such and such a way. Proceeding from this basis, Hennequin goes on to examine Flaubert's construction of his sentences, then of his paragraphs, then of his chapters, then of his novels, and thus to explain the final form of the books in terms of a fundamental intellectual structure that has been conditioned by a certain verbal faculty. Hennequin, I think, pushes his method rather too far here, making blindly for his thesis regardless of all that may be urged against it; but on the whole the essay is a novel and valuable contribution to a neglected science—the study of a man's brain through the medium of his forms of expression. Now any one who reads critically through the prose works of Berlioz must be struck by certain elements in the prose that seem to give the key to much that is almost inexplicable in his music and his character. "Extravagant," "theatrical," "bizarre"—these are the terms that have always been used of Berlioz. Sir Hubert Parry takes the easy course of attributing his theatricalism to his being a Frenchman, oblivious of the fact that the French disliked it and ridiculed it more than any other nation. The early prose of Berlioz indicates that he was a man of a cerebral structure that tended always to express itself extravagantly; a man who did not see things upon the ordinary level of earth quite so clearly as shapes in cloud and on mountain-top.

The big effects at which he aimed in music were, indeed, only one form of manifestation of a curious faculty that was always leading him to the grandiose. The ordinary orchestra, the ordinary chorus, the ordinary concert-room would never do for him; everything must be magnified, as it were, beyond life-size. Similarly in his prose, the ordinary similes, the ordinary metaphors rarely occur to him; the dilated brain can only express itself in a dilation of language. Thus one adjective is rarely enough for Berlioz; there must generally be at least three, and these of the most exaggerated kind. A thing is never beautiful or ugly for Berlioz; it is either divine or horrible. A scene in his early work, where Cleopatra reflects on the welcome to be given her by the Pharaohs entombed in the pyramids, is "terrible, frightful." His Francs Juges overture in one place is described as "monstrous, colossal, horrible." On another occasion he writes, "There is nothing so terribly frightful as my overture.... It is a hymn to despair, but the most despairing despair one can imagine—horrible and tender." Everywhere there is the same tumefaction of language. When he ponders over the memory of his first wife and her sufferings, he is overcome by "an immense, frightful, incommensurable, infinite pity." Towards the end of his life he is seized by "the furious desire for immense affections." He can hardly speak of anything that has moved him without this piling-up of the most tremendous adjectives in the language.

As might be expected, his imagery is of the same order; the very largest things in the universe are impressed into the service of his similes and metaphors. He speaks in one place of "those superhuman adagios, where the genius of Beethoven soars aloft, immense and solitary, like the colossal bird above the snowy summit of Chimborazo." He had never seen the bird above the summit of Chimborazo, but his brain reverts spontaneously to this conception in the effort to express the sensation of immensity and solitude given him by Beethoven's music. The pyramids, being conveniently large, frequently enter into his similes. "It needs a very rare order of genius to create the things that both artists and public can take to at once—things whose simplicity is in direct proportion to their mass, like the pyramids of Djizeh." "Yesterday," he writes after a certain performance of his works, "I had a pyramidal success." When the pyramids fail him he falls back on Ossian, or on Babylon and Nineveh. After having heard 6500 children's voices in St. Paul's, he writes, "It was, without comparison, the most imposing, the most Babylonian ceremony I had ever beheld." The "Tibi omnes" and the "Judex" of his Te Deum are "Babylonian, Ninivitish pieces." One night he hears the north wind "lament, moan, and howl like several generations in agony. My chimney resounds cavernously like a sixty-four feet organ-pipe. I have never been able to resist these Ossianic noises."

Occasionally the heaping of Pelion on Ossa becomes necessary in order to enable him to give the reader a faint impression of what he feels. Beethoven is "a Titan, an Archangel, a Throne, a Domination." When he is writing his hated feuilletons, "the lobes of my brain seem ready to crack asunder. I seem to have burning cinders in my veins." The scene of the benediction of the poniards in the Huguenots is a terrible piece, "written as it were in electric fluid by a gigantic Voltaic pile; it seems to be accompanied by the bursting of thunderbolts and sung by the tempests." A reminiscence of some incident in his career brings out this ejaculation—"Destruction, fire and thunder, blood and tears! my brain shrivels up in my skull as I think of these horrors!" His second love, he tells us, "appeared to me with Shakespeare, in the age of my virility, in the burning bush of a Sinai, in the midst of the clouds, the thunders, the lightnings of a poetry that was new to me."

All his youthful conceptions and desires were of this extravagant order. He writes in a letter of 1831, from Florence, "I should like to have gone into Calabria or Sicily, and enlisted in the ranks of some chief of bravi, even if I were to be no more than a mere brigand. Then at least I should have seen magnificent crimes, robberies, assassinations, rapes, conflagrations, instead of all these miserable little crimes, these mean perfidies that make one sick at heart. Yes, yes, that is the world for me: a volcano, rocks, rich spoils heaped up in caverns, a concert of cries of horror accompanied by an orchestra of pistols and carbines; blood and lacryma christi: a bed of lava rocked by earthquakes; come now, that's life!" [9] In the same year he has the idea of a colossal oratorio on the subject of "The Last Day of the World." There are to be three or four soloists, choruses, and two orchestras, one of sixty, the other of two or three hundred executants. This is the plan of the work: "Mankind having reached the ultimate degree of corruption, give themselves up to every kind of infamy; a sort of Antichrist governs them despotically. A few just men, directed by a prophet, are found amid the general depravation. The despot tortures them, steals their virgins, insults their beliefs, and commands their sacred books to be burnt in the midst of an orgy. The prophet comes to reproach him for his crimes, and announces the end of the world and the Last Judgment. The irritated despot has him thrown into prison, and, delivering himself up again to his impious pleasures, is surprised in the midst of a feast by the terrible trumpets of the Resurrection; the dead come out of their graves, the doomed living utter cries of horror, the worlds are shattered, the angels thunder in the clouds—that is the end of this musical drama."

These examples will be sufficient to show the peculiarity of mind to which I have referred. The early ideas of Berlioz seem to bear the same relation to those of ordinary men as a gas does to a solid or a liquid; the moment they are liberated they try to diffuse themselves through as much space as they can. In this connection it is interesting to note that from his earliest years he had a love for books of travel and for pondering dreamily over maps of the world; he sought the remoter conceptions that were not limited by any narrow boundary. One gets a curious sensation, after reading much of his prose, that the things of the world have lost their ordinary proportions and perspectives; the adjectives are so big and so numerous that one begins to take this inflated diction as the normal speech of men. Occasionally a truly superb effect of vastness, of distance, is produced, an effect we also get sometimes in Berlioz's music. It has always seemed to me, for example, that the opening of his song "Reviens, reviens," gave the most perfect suggestion of some one being recalled from a great distance; the whole atmosphere seems to be attenuated, rarefied almost away; the melancholy is the melancholy of a regret that sweeps the ocean to the horizon and fails to find what the eyes hunger for.

VII

It is time, however, to remind ourselves that the picture painted so far does not represent the complete Berlioz. It is all the more necessary to give ourselves this reminder because the only Berlioz known to most people is this being of wild excitement and frenzied exaggeration, with a dash in him here and there of pose. There is a "legend" of each great composer—a kind of half-true, half-false conception of him that gradually settles into people's minds and prevents them, as a rule, from thinking out the man's character and achievement for themselves. There is the Mozart legend, the Beethoven legend, the Liszt legend, the authenticity of which not one amateur in a thousand thinks of questioning. There is the Berlioz legend, too, the causes of the growth of which, in this country especially, are not far to seek. We really know very little of him over here. The Carnaval romain overture and the Faust are heard occasionally; but the average English amateur, when he thinks of Berlioz, has chiefly in mind the Symphonie fantastique and the Harold en Italie—particularly the final movements with their orgies of brigands, witches, and what not. Industrious compilers of biographies and of programme notes do their best to keep this side of Berlioz uppermost in the public mind, by always harping upon the eccentricities of his youth. One needs to remember that Berlioz died in 1869, and that from, say, 1835 to 1869 he was a very different man, both in his music and in his prose, from what he was between 1821 and 1835. His letters to the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein hardly suggest for a moment the Berlioz of the earlier letters to Humbert Ferrand and others. And as for his music, the British public that winks and leers knowingly at the mention of his name, thinking all the time of the Symphonie fantastique and the Harold en Italie, would do well to reflect that it knows nothing, or next to nothing, of the Waverley, Francs Juges, Le Roi Lear and other overtures, of LÉlio, of the Tristia, of Le Cinq Mai, of the Messe des Morts, of the operas—Benvenuto Cellini, BÉatrice et Benedict, La Prise de Troie, and Les Troyens À Carthage—of the Symphonie funÈbre et triomphale, of the RomÉo et Juliette, of L'Enfance du Christ, of the Te Deum, and of other works, to say nothing of the score or so of songs. In the whole history of music, there is probably no musician about whose merit the average man is so sublimely confident on the basis of so sublime an ignorance of his work.

VIII

Bearing in mind, then, that the Berlioz whom we have hitherto been discussing is mostly the youthful Berlioz—the writer of mad letters, the actor of extravagant parts, the composer of the Symphonie fantastique (1829-1830), and LÉlio (1831-1832)—let us look for a moment at his art as it was then, and afterwards trace it through its later and more sober manifestations.

In trying to follow him historically we meet with this difficulty, that it is impossible to say exactly when some of his conceptions first saw the light. He was in the habit of using up an early piece of material in a later work, especially if the early work was one that had been tried and had failed. We know, as I have already said, that the theme of the opening of the Symphonie fantastique is taken from a boyish composition. A phrase from another boyish work—a quintet—is used again in the Francs Juges overture. Parts of the early cantata La Mort d'OrphÉe become the Chant d'amour and La harpe Éolienne in LÉlio. The Choeur d'ombres in LÉlio is a reproduction of an aria in the scena ClÉopÂtre—one of his unsuccessful Prix de Rome essays. Part of the Messe solennelle (1824) goes into Benvenuto Cellini (1835-1837). The Marche au supplice in the Symphonie fantastique is taken from his youthful opera Les Francs Juges. The fantasia on The Tempest goes into LÉlio. I strongly suspect, indeed, that more of his work dates from the first ten years of his artistic life (1824-1834) than we have ever imagined. My theory is that he was overflowing with ideas in his younger days, and that there was a gradual failure of them in his latest years, owing to the terrible physical tortures he endured, and the large quantities of morphia he had to take to still his pangs. At first he turns out work after work with great rapidity. Taking the larger ones alone, we have in 1826 [10] La rÉvolution grecque, in 1827 or 1828 the Waverley and Francs Juges overtures, in 1828-1829 the eight Faust scenes, in 1829 the Irish Melodies, in 1829-1830 the Symphonie fantastique, in 1830 the Sardanapalus and the TempÊte, in 1831 the Corsair and Le Roi Lear overtures, in 1831-1832 the Rob Roy overture, Le Cinq Mai, LÉlio and part of the Tristia, in 1832-1833 various songs, in 1834 the Harold en Italie, and the Nuits d'ÉtÉ, in 1835-1837 Benvenuto Cellini and the Messe des Morts, in 1838 the RomÉo et Juliette. This is a good output for some twelve years of a busy and struggling man's life, during the earlier part of which he was little more than an apprentice in his art. Berlioz lived another thirty-one years, but in that time did surprisingly little. Again keeping to the larger works, we have in 1840 the Symphonie funÈbre et triomphale, in 1843 the Carnaval romain overture, in 1844 the Hymne À la France, in 1846 the completion of Faust, in 1848 the remainder of the Tristia, in 1851 La Menace des Francs, in 1850-1854 the Enfance du Christ, in 1849-1854 the Te Deum, in 1855 L'ImpÉriale, in 1860-1862 BÉatrice et Benedict, in 1856-1863 the double opera La Prise de Troie and Les Troyens À Carthage. Even allowing for the facts that in his middle and later periods he spent a good deal of time in foreign tours and in literary work, we shall still, I think, be forced to conclude that his ideas flowed more slowly in his later days, while they were certainly of an inferior quality at times. We must remember, too, that some of his works were written long before their production, and that there is sometimes reason to believe this to have been the case even where we have no positive testimony on the point. The idÉe fixe theme of the Symphonie fantastique first appeared in Herminie (1828); the "Harold" theme in the Harold en Italie had already figured on the cor anglais in the Rob Roy overture. It is probable that the RomÉo et Juliette was not all written in 1838 as a consequence of Paganini's gift, as every one was led to believe; Berlioz had the idea of the work in 1829, and perhaps conceived some of the music then. [11] The Symphonie funÈbre et triomphale, produced in 1840, was to a great extent written in 1835. The stirring phrases that are the life and soul of the Carnaval romain overture (1843) are taken from Benvenuto Cellini (1835-1837); while the theme of the love-episode in the overture had already appeared in ClÉopÂtre (1829). It is, indeed, impossible to say how much of the music of what I have called Berlioz's second epoch really dates from his first, thus still further diminishing the quantity belonging to the years after 1838. I think, if the truth were known, it would be found that one or two of the themes of BÉatrice et Benedict, ostensibly written between 1860 and 1862, belong to 1828, when Berlioz first resolved to make an opera out of Shakespeare's play. It is incontestable that the ten years from 1828 to 1838 were years of inexhaustible musical inspiration. At times, he himself has told us, he thought his head would have burst under the peremptory pressure of his ideas; so rapidly did they flow, indeed, that he had to invent a kind of musical shorthand to help his pen to keep pace with them. There was, I take it, very little of this in the last two or three decades of his life. Make what allowances we will for other demands upon his time, it seems undeniable that his brain then worked less eagerly and less easily in musical things. Had the ideas been there in full vigour they would have come out in spite of all other occupations; and that they were not there as they were in his youth can only be explained, I think, on physiological grounds. [12]

The latter aspect of the case, however, will be dealt with more fully later on. Here we may just note that Berlioz's early life was in every way calculated to produce both the inflation of the prose style that we see in his letters and the eccentricity and exaggeration that we see in some of his early music. His friend Daniel Bertrand tells us that "in his youth he sometimes amused himself by deliberately starving, in order to know what evils genius could surmount; later on his stomach had to pay for these expensive fantasies." At the time of his infatuation with Henrietta Smithson, he used to play the maddest pranks with his already over-excited brain and body; he would take long night-walks without food, and sink into the sleep of utter exhaustion in the fields. His body, like his brain, could not be kept at rest; he had a mania for tramping and climbing that invariably carried him far beyond his powers of endurance. [13] In 1830 the veteran Rouget de l'Isle, without having seen the youthful musician, diagnosed him excellently from his correspondence—"Your head," he wrote, "seems to be a volcano perpetually in eruption." We may smile at his antics all through this epoch, especially in l'affaire Smithson. But though there may have been a little conscious pose in it all, it is unquestionable that in the bulk of it he was in deadly earnest. Twice he tried to commit suicide—once at Genoa, and again in the presence of Henrietta. Nor were they merely stage performances, mere efforts at effect; it was not his fault that they did not turn out successfully.

IX

Roughly speaking, it will be found that the Berlioz I have so far depicted comes into view about 1827. It was about that date, apparently, that youthful enthusiasm, combined with starvation and folly, gave his system that lurid incandescence that people always think of when they hear the name of Berlioz. It is about that date that his letters begin to show the inflation of style to which I have referred, and his music begins to acquire force and penetration and expressiveness, together with a tincture of the abnormal. Previously to 1827 he had presumably not written very much, or if he had it has not survived. What has remained is now accessible to us in the new complete edition of his works. There we can see some songs that, whatever their precise date may be, clearly belong to his earliest period. One of the very earliest—Le DÉpit de la BergÈre—shows a quite inexperienced brain and hand. AmitiÉ, reprends ton empire is of much the same order; it looks, indeed, like a pot-boiler, an attempt to meet the contemporary demand for this kind of thing. Nor does the little cantata La rÉvolution grecque come to anything. But negative and futile as much of this early work is, it shows one thing quite clearly—that individuality of manner that accounts at once for the successes and the failures of Berlioz. As I have already pointed out, his type of melody is something peculiarly his own. The same may be said of his harmony, which moves about in a way so different from everything we are accustomed to that often we are quite unable to see the raison d'Être of it. The popular judgment is that his melody is ugly and his harmony shows a want of musical education. This, however, is rather a hasty verdict. Nothing is more certain than that our first impression of many a Berlioz melody is one of disgust—unless it be that the second impression is one of pleasure. What Schumann noticed long ago in connection with the Waverley overture is still quite true, that closer acquaintance with a Berlioz melody shows a beauty in it that was unsuspected at first. I can answer for it in my own experience, for some of the things that move me most deeply now were simply inexpressive or repellent to me at one time; and I fancy every one who will not be satisfied with the first impression of his palate, but will work patiently at Berlioz, will have the same experience. The truth seems to be that many of his conceptions were of an order quite unlike anything else we meet with in music, and hence we have some difficulty in putting ourselves at his point of view and seeing the world as he saw it. And occasionally this individuality of thought degenerates into sheer incomprehensibility. Some of his melodies, play and sing them as often as we will, never come to mean anything to us. It is not that they are ugly or commonplace, not that they are cheap or platitudinous, but simply that they convey nothing; they stand like something opaque between us and the emotion that prompted them; instead of being the medium for the revelation of the composer's thought they are a medium for the concealment of it. In cases like these the explanation seems to be that his mental processes, always rather different from ours, are here so very different that the chain of communication snaps between us; what was a difference of degree now becomes a difference of kind; he speaks another language than ours; the thought, as it were, lives in a space of other dimensions than ours. We may find a rough-and-ready analogy in a writer like MallarmÉ, where the general strangeness of thought and style becomes now and then downright unintelligibility. In the one case as in the other, we are dealing with a type of brain so far removed from the normal that the normal brain occasionally finds it simply impossible to follow it.

So again with the harmony of Berlioz. Here the peculiarity of his style has often been commented on, with its odd way of getting from one chord to another, its curious trick of conceiving the harmony in solid blocks, that succeed one another without flowing into one another—much as in certain modern Dutch pictures the colours stand away from each other as if a rigid line always lay between them and prevented their being blended by the atmosphere. The general explanation of this peculiarity of Berlioz's harmony is the easiest one—that it comes from his imperfect technical education. There may be something in this, but a little reflection will show that it is a long way from being the complete explanation. In the first place, one needs scarcely any "training" to avoid some of the progressions that Berlioz constantly uses; the mere hearing of other music would be sufficient to establish unconsciously the routine way of getting from one chord to another; and if Berlioz always takes another way, it can only be because the peculiarity of his diction has its root in a peculiarity of thought. In the second place, the harmonic oddities are really not so numerous in his earliest as in his later works. The melodies of the Waverley, Francs Juges, and King Lear overtures and of many of the earlier songs are usually harmonised more in the ordinary manner than the melodies of the works of his middle and last epochs; which seems to show again that his harmonic style was rooted in his way of thinking, and became more pronounced as he grew older and more individual. In the third place, if the peculiarities of his harmony had been due to lack of education, one would have expected him, when in more mature years he revised an early work, to correct some of the so-called faults to which a wider experience must have opened his eyes. But it is quite clear that the matter never struck him in this way. In the new edition of his works we have some instructive examples. In 1850, for example, he revised one of his songs, Adieu, Bessy, which he had written in 1830. He has altered it in many ways, and made many improvements in the melody, in the phrasing, and in the accompaniment; but the sometimes odd harmonic sequences of the original version remain unchanged in the later. It clearly never struck him that there was anything odd about them; he had really seen his picture in that particular way; it was a question not so much of mere technique as of fundamental conception. In the fourth place, we must always remember that whatever Berlioz thought he thought in terms of the orchestra. He neither played nor understood the piano, and his writing is not piano writing. Now every one knows that many effects that seem strange or ugly on the piano are perfectly pleasurable on the orchestra, where they are set not in the one plane, as it were, but in different planes and different focuses. I fancy that when Berlioz imagined a melodic line or a harmonic combination he saw it not merely as a melody or a harmony but as a piece of colour as well; and the movement of the parts was not only a shifting of lines but a weaving of colours. Many things of his that are ugly or meaningless on the piano have a beauty of their own when heard, as he conceived them, on the orchestra, set in different depths, as it were, with the toning effect of atmosphere between them; not all standing in the same line in the foreground, with the one white light of the piano making confusion among their colour-values.

There is good reason for believing, then, that much of Berlioz's peculiarity of style is far less the result of lack of education than is generally believed, and that more of it must be attributed to a peculiar constitution of brain that made him really see things just in the way he has depicted them.

Among these early songs and other works there are some that show great strength and charm and originality of expression, such as Toi qui l'aimas, verse des pleurs, La belle voyageuse, Le coucher du soleil, and Le pÊcheur (that was afterwards incorporated in LÉlio). His two youthful overtures, the Waverley and the Francs Juges, though relatively unsubtle in their working-out—for he had little feeling for the symphonic form pure and simple—are yet very individual, while parts of the Francs Juges in particular are exceedingly strong. Then the apprentice makes rapid strides on to mastery. The year 1828 may be taken as the turning-point in his career. His unsuccessful scena for the Prix de Rome—Herminie—exhibits remarkable ardour of conception. There is much that is very youthful in it; but it is decidedly individual, and above all it shows a feeling for rhythm to which there had been no parallel in French music up to that date. The next year saw another Prix de Rome scena—ClÉopÂtre—of which the same description will mostly hold good. The rhythmic scene is just as delicate, the melody is becoming purer and stronger, and we have in the aria Grands Pharaons a really fine piece of dramatic writing. About the same time he wrote the original eight scenes from Faust, containing such gems as the chorus of sylphs, the song of the rat, the song of the flea, Margaret's ballad of the King of Thule, her "Romance," and the serenade of Mephistopheles. Berlioz's musical genius was now entering upon its happiest phase; never, perhaps, did it work so easily and so joyously as in 1829 and the next seven or eight years. It was about 1829, too, that his orchestration began to be so distinctive; one can see him reaching out to new effects in the ClÉopÂtre, the chorus of the sylphs, the ballad of the King of Thule, the Ballet des Ombres and the fantasia on The Tempest.

This increasing mastery of his thoughts coincided with the epoch of his most intense nervous excitement, in which Henrietta Smithson played the part of the match to the gunpowder. So there came about the typical Romantic Berlioz of the Symphonie fantastique and LÉlio, moving about in the world with abnormally heightened senses, his brain on fire, turning waking life into a nightmare, dreaming of blood and fantastic horrors. He exploited this mad psychology to its fullest in the last two movements of the symphony; after that the volcano lost a good deal of its lurid grandeur, and in LÉlio we get rather less molten lava and rather more ashes than we want. Some of the music of LÉlio—the ballad of the fisher, the Choeur des ombres, the Chant de bonheur, the Harpe Éolienne—is among the finest Berlioz ever wrote; but the scheme as a whole, with its extraordinary prose tirades, is surely the maddest thing ever projected by a musician. Here was the young Romantic in all his imbecile, flamboyant glory, longing to be a brigand, to indulge in orgies of blood and tears, to drink his mistress' health out of the skull of his rival, and all the rest of it. But after all there is very little of this in Berlioz's music. We meet with it again in the "orgy of brigands" in the Harold en Italie; and whether that really belongs to 1834 or was written two or three years earlier, at the time when the hyperÆmic brain was working at its wildest in the Symphonie fantastique and LÉlio, [14] matters comparatively little. In any case, the madness ends in 1834 with Harold.

And then, with almost startling suddenness, a new Berlioz comes into view. We first see the change in the scena Le Cinq Mai—a song on the death of the Emperor Napoleon, to words by BÉranger—which is dated 1834 by M. Adolphe Jullien and 1832 by Herr Weingartner and M. Malherbe. The precise date is unimportant. The essential fact is that Berlioz's brain was now acquiring what it had hitherto lacked—it was beginning to be touched with a philosophic sense of the reality of things. He had, of course, in much of his earlier work, written seriously and beautifully; but Le Cinq Mai has qualities beyond these. His songs La captive (1832) and Sara la baigneuse (1833?) carry on the line from the earlier songs and overtures; what we get in addition, in Le Cinq Mai, is a gravity and ordered intensity of conception that as a whole are absent from the earlier works. He is becoming less of an egoist, more capable of voicing the thought of humanity as a whole; the Romanticist is making way for the complete human being. In the Nuits d'ÉtÉ (1834) there is a larger spirit than in any of his previous songs. Between 1835 and 1838 we have three noble works—Benvenuto Cellini, the Requiem, and RomÉo et Juliette; and to no previous work of Berlioz would the epithet "noble" be really applicable. The change is not so much a musical as an intellectual—we may almost say ethical—one. Look at him, for example, in the opening of the Requiem. All the madness, the pose, the egoism of the Symphonie fantastique and its brethren have disappeared. Berlioz now has an eye for something more in life than his own unshorn locks and his sultry amours. He no longer thinks himself the centre of the universe; he no longer believes in the Berliozcentric theory, and does not write with one eye on the mirror half the time. In place of all this we have a Berlioz who has sunk his aggressive subjectivity and learned to regard life objectively. His spirit touched to finer issues, he sings, not Berlioz, but humanity as a whole. He is now what every great artist is instinctively—a philosopher as well as a singer; by the Requiem he earns his right to stand among the serious, brooding spirits of the earth. So again in the final scene of RomÉo et Juliette, where he rises to loftier heights than he could ever have attained while he was in the throes of his egoistic Romanticism. Here again, as in the Requiem, he speaks with the authority of the seer as well as the voice of the orator; there is the thrill of profound conviction in the music, the note of inspired comprehension of men and nature as a whole. In a word, the old Berlioz has gone; a new Berlioz stands in his place, wiser than of old, purified and chastened by his experiences, artist and thinker in one.

X

In 1838, then, everything seemed of the happiest promise for his art. But that promise, alas, was not fulfilled so amply as might have been hoped for. Whatever the real cause may have been, Berlioz, as we have seen, now slackened greatly in his musical production. It could not have been wholly due to his feuilleton writing, for he was never so busy with this as in the seven years onward from 1833 (the year in which he married Henrietta Smithson, and had to earn money in some way or other). He complains to Humbert Ferrand that his journalism leaves him little time to write music, but the facts are that he was really keeping up a very good output. At the end of what I have called his first epoch he received some large sums of money—4000 francs for the Requiem (1837), 20,000 francs from Paganini for Harold en Italie (1838), and 10,000 francs for the Symphonie funÈbre et triomphale (1840)—enabling him to give up journalism and to travel. He was away frequently between 1841 and 1855, but not enough to account for the singularly small amount of music he wrote—an amount that becomes still smaller in the later years.

We cannot, I think, resist the conclusion that even between 1840 and 1855 the seeds of his illness were in him and affecting his powers of work. So far as can be ascertained from his letters, he became aware of his malady about 1855, but there is no warrant for thinking it actually began then; his father had suffered from the same complaint, and the son was evidently a doomed man. It is about 1855 that his letters begin to show what ravages his awful malady—a neuralgia of the intestines, he calls it—was making in him. The atrocious pain weakened him through and through; then the springs of energy within him were still further relaxed by the quantities of opium he had to take. He lost, at times, even his interest in art. In November 1856 he speaks to the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein of "the horrible moments of disgust with which my illness inspires me," during which "I find everything I have written" (he is working at Les Troyens) "cold, dull, stupid, tasteless; I have a great mind to burn it all." A month later he writes that he has been so ill that he could not go on with his score. Thus the melancholy record continues in letter after letter: he is ill "in soul, in body, in heart, in head;" an access of his "damned neuralgia" keeps him on his back for sixteen hours; "I cannot walk, I only drag myself along; I cannot think, I only ruminate;" "I live in an absolute isolation of soul; I do nothing but suffer eight or nine hours a day, without hope of any kind, wanting only to sleep, and appreciating the truth of the Chinese proverb—it is better to be sitting than standing, lying than sitting, asleep than awake, and dead than asleep;" "my neurosis grows and has now settled in the head; sometimes I stagger like a drunken man and dare not go out alone;" "these obstinate sufferings enervate me, brutalise me; I become more and more like an animal, indifferent to everything, or almost everything;" his doctors tell him he has "a general inflammation of the nervous system," and that he must "live like an oyster, without thought and without sensation;" some days he has "attacks of hysteria like a young girl;" "Mon Dieu, que je suis triste!"; "I suffer each day so terribly, from seven in the morning till four in the afternoon, that during such crises my thoughts are completely confused;" he takes so long over the writing of BÉatrice et Benedict because, owing to his illness, his musical ideas come to him with extreme slowness—while after he has written it he forgets it, and when he hears it it sounds quite new to him. To his other correspondents it is always the same pitiful story: "On certain days I cannot write ten consecutive lines; it takes me sometimes four days to finish an article."

It is impossible to believe that so serious a disorder began only in 1855, when Berlioz first became fully conscious of it; it must have been in him years before, and must even then have affected his powers of work. [15] But such music as he did find energy to write is eloquent of the new condition of his being. Not only bodily but mentally Berlioz was a changed man—a point that should be insisted on in view of the traditional misunderstanding of him. I have already remarked upon the Berlioz "legend" that is generally accepted, a legend founded solely on the Berlioz of twenty-five or thirty. Heine gave perhaps the finest expression to this aspect of him in the passage in which he speaks of him as "a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle, such as once existed, they say, in the primitive world. Yes, the music of Berlioz, in general, has for me something primitive, almost antediluvian; it sets me dreaming of gigantic species of extinct animals, of mammoths, of fabulous empires with fabulous sins, of all kinds of impossibilities piled one on top of the other; these magic accents recall to us Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the marvels of Nineveh, the audacious edifices of Mizraim, such as we see them in the pictures of the English painter Martin." That is not a bad description, in spite of its verbal fantasy, of the Berlioz of the last two movements of the Symphonie fantastique, the orgy of brigands in Harold en Italie, the ride to the abyss in Faust, and, let us even say, the "Tuba mirum" of the Requiem. But it is only a quarter, a tenth, of the real Berlioz. Yet the old legend still goes on; even so careful a student as Mr. W. H. Hadow has just said, in his article in the new "Grove's Dictionary," that "his imagination seems always at white heat; his eloquence pours forth in a turbid, impetuous torrent which levels all obstacles and overpowers all restraint. It is the fashion to compare him with Victor Hugo, and on one side at any rate the comparison is just. Both were artists of immense creative power, both were endowed with an exceptional gift of oratory, both ranged at will over the entire gamut of human passion. But here resemblance ends. Beside the extravagance of Berlioz, Hugo is reticent; beside the technical errors of the musician the verse of the poet is as faultless as a Greek statue."

One really gets rather tired of this perpetual harping upon the extravagance of Berlioz. The picture is pure caricature, not a portrait; one or two features in the physiognomy are selected and exaggerated, posed in the strongest light, and factitiously made to appear as the essential points of the man. Yet a baby with any knowledge of Berlioz could demonstrate the falsity of the picture. Where is the "extravagance," the want of "reticence," in the Waverley overture, the Roi Lear overture, the first three movements of the Symphonie fantastique, the twenty or thirty songs, the bulk of Faust, the bulk of Harold en Italie, the bulk of LÉlio, the three fine pieces that make up the Tristia, the Cinq Mai, the bulk of the Requiem, Benvenuto Cellini, RomÉo et Juliette, the noble Symphonie funÈbre et triomphale, the Carnaval romain overture, the Enfance du Christ, BÉatrice et Benedict, or Les Troyens? Out of all these thousands of pages, how ridiculously few of them deserve the epithet of "extravagance"; of how many of them is it true that Berlioz's "eloquence pours forth in a turbid, impetuous torrent which levels all obstacles and overpowers all restraint"?

The truth is that even in the youthful Berlioz there was considerable "reticence," considerable power to sympathise with and express not only the flamboyant but the tender, the pathetic, the delicate. We have already seen that his intellectual and moral powers came to their climax about 1838, at which time he was singing with enormous passion, but also with perfect restraint and impressive nobility. Both the music and the prose of his later years show how greatly his character was altering; it is simply ludicrous to attempt to describe this Berlioz in the language that was applicable only to the worst of the Berlioz of twenty years before. Physical and mental suffering, trials in private and perpetual disappointment in public life, chastened the man's soul, brought out the finer elements of it. He fought the powers of evil calmly and steadily with that admirable weapon of irony of his. Once he forgot himself, in the Wagner affair of 1861; but one can forgive, or at any rate understand, the momentary wave of malevolence that surged up in him then, if one thinks of the grievous illness that racked the poor frame, and the unending insults that had been his own lot as an opera composer. Apart from this episode, Berlioz always commands our respect in his later years. Always the brain, the spirit, were uppermost; where other men would have become abusive he only became more mordantly witty; where the passion of defeat would have obscured the eyes of other men he only saw the more clearly and penetratingly. Look at him in his later portraits, with that fine intellectual mouth, full of a strength that is not contradicted, but reinforced, by the ironic humour that plays over it. Yes, he met the shocks of fortune well, and they were many and rude. If we want a summary contrast of the later and the earlier Berlioz, we have only to compare the ebullient letters of his youth with the letters written to the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein between 1852 and 1867. The very style is altered; the later letters read easily and beautifully, without any of those abrupt distortions and exaggerations that pull us up with a shock in the earlier ones. When he has to castigate, he does it like a gentleman, with the rapier, not the bludgeon. And how perfectly does he maintain the essential dignity of the artist against this well-meaning but inquisitive and slightly vulgar aristocrat; with what fine breeding, what exquisite use of the iron hand within the glove, does he repel her interferences with matters that concern only himself, conveying to her that there are precincts within his soul to which neither her friendship nor her position give her the right of entry!

No, the cheap literary oleographs that do duty for the portraits of Berlioz are ludicrously in suggestive of what Berlioz really was. His fever had all died down even by 1846—supposing the ride to the abyss in Faust really to belong to that and not an earlier date; and everything after then speaks of a vastly altered being. Had he only kept his health up to this stage of his career, who knows to what sunlit heights he might not have attained? In spirit, in experience of life, in moral balance, in the technique of his art, he had now enormously improved; but set against all this was that insidious disease that so woefully hindered the free working of what had once been so eager and keen a brain. It diminished the quantity of work he could do; it spoiled some of it altogether—the cantata L'ImpÉriale, for example, where the unimpressive writing is throughout that of a mentally exhausted man. Yet a sure instinct seems often to have guided him even in this epoch of distress and frustration. He could write only a few hours each week; but as a rule he seems to have chosen happily his times for work, seizing the rare and fleeting moments when the poor brain and body were held together in a temporary harmony. The best of his later work need not fear comparison with the best of his earlier periods. And how changed in mood and outlook it all is! All his old Romanticism is gone, not only from his music but from the basis of his music. Instead of the old violent literary themes, with their clangorous rhetoric and their purple colouring, he now loves to dwell among themes of classic purity of outline, and to lavish upon them an infinite delicacy of treatment. His musical style becomes at times extraordinarily beautiful and supple; without losing any of the essential strength of his earlier manner, he confutes, by the exquisite, pearly delicacy of L'Enfance du Christ and BÉatrice et Benedict, the ignoramuses who then, as now, saw nothing in him but a master of the baroque and grotesque. His subjects are simple; he draws and colours them, as in BÉatrice and Benedict, with the rarest and brightest grace, [16] or, as in L'Enfance du Christ, with a curiously engaging simplicity of manner that suggests Puvis de Chavannes or the primitifs. And his strength, where he chooses to let it show, is now so finely controlled, so thoroughly and masterfully bent to the creation of beauty. In the great Te Deum we see his style at something like its finest; all the coarseness and clumsiness that clung to his earlier strength have gone; the muscle shows none of the raw vigour of the early days, but plays easily and flexibly under the velvet skin; while in his softer moments there is a new and extraordinary sweetness, a honeying of the voice that yet sacrifices none of its old virility. And for his last work he draws not upon any of the Romantic contemporaries of his youth, not even upon that other Romanticist—Shakespeare—to whom he was always so closely drawn, but upon his beloved Virgil; it is with a classic subject, set with classic sobriety of manner and amplitude of feeling, that he chooses to end his career. What that work meant for him only those can realise who study his letters during the seven years in which he was engaged upon it. It was his refuge, his method of escape from the world; it was for him that "tower of ivory" of which Flaubert speaks, into which the artist can mount, there to dream of the ideal that is unrealisable in life. He was a dying man all these years, and in much of the music of Les Troyens there are only too many signs of physical and mental exhaustion. But it has its extraordinarily fine moments, and the general conception is grander than anything Berlioz had attempted since the Requiem. There is something strangely moving in this reversion of the old musician, in his latest years, to the passions and the ideals of his youth. Fiction could not invent anything more touchingly beautiful than that final meeting with the Estelle he had loved as a boy of ten or twelve, and the resurgence of all the old romantic feeling for his Stella montis—that curious blinding of the fleshly eye that permitted him to see in the woman of sixty-seven only the winsome girl he had loved half-a-century before. In his art there was a similar atavism; the old fighter puts away, with a sadly ironic smile, the red flag under which he had once fought so fiercely, and seeks companionship among the great calm figures of the past. There may have been a deliberate intention of separating himself quite pointedly from Wagner, which may account for something at least of his later clinging to Gluck and the classics. But on the whole it seems more probable that the reversion to these less fevered, more spacious spirits was just the spontaneous sinking of the weary soul into the arms that were most ready to receive it. He knew he was a beaten man; he knew that during his lifetime at any rate his star was doomed to suffer eclipse; whatever chance he might have had of fighting his way through the clouds again, of overcoming the Parisian ignorance of and prejudice against him, was shattered by the disease that broke him, body and soul. So he retired into himself and waited, as calmly and philosophically as might be, for the end.

To us his situation seems even more tragic than it must have seemed to himself. Knowing what extraordinary promise he was giving in 1838, we can only regard the last thirty years of his life as a failure to redeem that promise, at all events in its entirety. In both fields—the vocal and the instrumental—he seems to halt uncertainly, not quite knowing how to carry on the work he had begun. The later music, as I have tried to show, is generally beautiful enough; the fault does not lie there. But Berlioz failed to beat out for himself the new forms that might reasonably have been expected from him by those who had followed his career from the first. All his life he longed ardently to be an opera composer. But the failure of Benvenuto Cellini in 1837, combined with the intrigues of his enemies, shuts him out of the Opera for twenty-five years; in 1846, again, the failure of Faust gives him another crushing blow. When he resumes his operatic writing, the capacity and the desire to strike out new forms seem to have gone; he is content to work within the limits of the frame that Gluck bequeathed to him. All this time he practically neglects purely instrumental music, thus failing to work out the conclusions towards which he seemed to have been feeling his way in his earlier works. Nothing in him comes to its full fruition; each branch is lopped off almost as soon as it leaves the trunk. He is a pathetic monument of incompleteness; his disease and the ignorant public between them slew his art. But the work he actually did seems on this account only the more wonderful. He was a genius of the first rank; and there is little doubt that the better his music is known the more respectful and the more sympathetic will be the tone of criticism towards him.