Chapter V: Appendix: Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and Mr. Ashton Ellis 305 (2)

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 _Chœur 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 _Chœur 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The reader who is interested in the matter may turn to letters to Liszt of 1852. Here he speaks slightingly of Berlioz's _Cellini_, and alludes to "the platitudes of his Faust _Symphony_(!)" The last phrase alone is sufficient to show that Wagner was completely ignorant of the work he had the impertinence to decry--for every one knows that Berlioz's _Faust_ is not a symphony. In a recent article in _The Speaker_ on "The Relations of Wagner and Berlioz," I have, I think, shown that Wagner could not have known a note either of the _Faust_ or the _Cellini_; the dates of performance and of publication put any such knowledge on his part out of the question. It is necessary, however, to warn the reader that in both the English translation of the Wagner-Liszt letters (by Dr. Hueffer, revised by Mr. Ashton Ellis), and the big Glasenapp-Ellis _Life of Wagner_, the real facts are kept from the English public. The incriminating phrase, "Faust Symphony," is quietly abbreviated to "Faust," so that there is nothing to rouse the reader's suspicions and make him look further into the matter. In the big _Life_, again, now in course of publication, Mr. Ellis, though he has thousands of pages at his disposal--though, indeed, he can devote a whole volume of five hundred pages to two years of Wagner's life--still cannot find room for the brief line or two from the 1852 letter that would put the real facts before the reader; discreet and silent dots take their place. The British public is apparently to be treated like a child, and told only so much of the truth about Wagner as is thought to be good for it--or at any rate good for Wagner.

[2] This is an error; he arrived in Paris in 1821.

[3] See Julien Tiersot's _Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps_ (1904)--an excellent book that is indispensable to every student of Berlioz.

[4] It is interesting to note that Alfred de Musset anticipated Arthur Rimbaud and the modern symbolists in having coloured audition. He once maintained that the note F was yellow, G red, a soprano voice blond, a contralto voice brown. See Arvède Barine's _Alfred de Musset_ (in _Les Grands Écrivains Français_), p. 115.

[5] Hoffmann was, of course, a musician as well; but he is more truly the novelist who wrote about music than the musician who wrote fiction.

[6] Buckle (note 316 to Chap. VII. of the _History of Civilisation_) remarks that "All great revolutions have a direct tendency to increase insanity, as long as they last, and probably for some time afterwards; but in this as in other respects the French Revolution stands alone in the number of its victims." See the references he gives, bearing upon "the horrible but curious subject of madness caused by the excitement of the events which occurred in France late in the eighteenth century." Buckle speaks only of the Revolution, but of course the subsequent wars must have operated in much the same way.

[7] Chateaubriand, _Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse_, p. 2.

[8] In his letter of March 18, 1839, he gives Ernest Chevalier the plan of a work that is curiously like that of Berlioz mentioned on page 38, in its preposterous fantasies and its over-emphasis of form and colour.

[9] He puts the same rhodomontade into the mouth of his Lélio.

[10] One or two of these dates can only be looked upon as approximative, but if wrong at all, they are so only to the extent of a year or two, which does not affect the question.

[11] It appears from the Sayn-Wittgenstein letters that the beautiful theme of the love-scene in _Roméo et Juliette_ was inspired by the youthful love for Estelle that also produced the opening theme of the _Symphonie fantastique_. It must, therefore, have been quite a boyish invention, though no doubt its development and general treatment really belong to 1838.

[12] M. Julien Tiersot, in his admirable _Berlioz et la société de son temps_, divides the life of Berlioz into five epochs--1803-1827 (his childhood, youth, and apprenticeship), 1827-1842 (the epoch of his greatest activity), 1843-1854 (in which he does little except _Faust_, which in reality, perhaps, dates from an earlier time), 1854-1865 (the epoch of _L'Enfance du Christ_, _Béatrice et Benedict_, and _Les Troyens_), and 1865-1869 (barren of works). The discussion in the text will make it clear why I have substituted my own classification for that of M. Tiersot, and will, I hope, be convincing. One other point deserves noting. Towards the end of his _Mémoires_ Berlioz tells us that he had dreamed a symphony one night, but deliberately refrained from writing it because of the expense of producing and printing it. Such a reason may have weighed a little with him; but no one who knows anything of artistic psychology can regard it as the total explanation. If the dream-work had really sunk into Berlioz's soul and he had felt that he had full command of it, he could not have rested until he had it down on paper, if only for his own gratification. It is far more probable that he felt himself unequal to the mental strain of thinking out his vision and forcing the stubborn material into a plastic piece of art. There was, I take it, a lassitude of tissue in him at this time that made protracted musical thinking a burden to him.

[13] On the whole question see the chapter on "Le Tempérament" in Edmond Hippeau's _Berlioz Intime_.

[14] The date of _Lélio_ is 1831-1832, but the most absurd thing in it, the _Chanson de brigands_, was written in January 1830--at the same epoch, therefore, as the _Symphonie fantastique_. It is fairly clear that 1829-1830 marked the climax of Berlioz's eccentricity, and that his passion for Henrietta Smithson had much to do with it.

[15] Jullien (p. 241) says "it was about this time that the neuralgia _to which he had always been subject_ settled in the intestines...."

[16] He himself describes it as "a caprice written with the point of a needle, and demanding excessive delicacy of execution." Yet this is the man for whom the world can find only the one epithet of "extravagant"!

_To MRS. ROSA NEWMARCH_

"FAUST" IN MUSIC