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 asToi qui l'aimas, verse des pleurs,La belle voyageuse,Le coucher du soleil, andLe pêcheur(that was afterwards incorporated inLélio). His two youthful overtures, theWaverleyand theFrancs 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 theFrancs Jugesin 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 thePrix 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 anotherPrix de Romescena—Cléopâtre—of which the same description will mostly hold good. The rhythmic scene is just as delicate, the melody is becoming purer andstronger, and we have in the ariaGrands Pharaonsa really fine piece of dramatic writing. About the same time he wrote the original eight scenes fromFaust, 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 theCléopâtre, the chorus of the sylphs, the ballad of the King of Thule, theBallet des Ombresand the fantasia onThe 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 theSymphonie fantastiqueandLélio, 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 inLéliowe get rather less molten lava and rather more ashes than we want. Some of the music ofLélio—the ballad of the fisher, theChœur des ombres, theChant de bonheur, theHarpe éolienne—isamong 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 theHarold 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 theSymphonie fantastiqueandLélio,[14]matters comparatively little. In any case, the madness ends in 1834 withHarold.
And then, with almost startling suddenness, a new Berlioz comes into view. We first see the change in the scenaLe 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 andbeautifully; butLe Cinq Maihas qualities beyond these. His songsLa captive(1832) andSara la baigneuse(1833?) carry on the line from the earlier songs and overtures; what we get in addition, inLe 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 theNuits 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, theRequiem, andRoméo 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 theRequiem. All the madness, the pose, the egoism of theSymphonie fantastiqueand 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 theRequiemhe earns his right tostand among the serious, brooding spirits of the earth. So again in the final scene ofRoméo 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 theRequiem, 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.
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 hisfeuilletonwriting, 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 francsfor theRequiem(1837), 20,000 francs from Paganini forHarold en Italie(1838), and 10,000 francs for theSymphonie 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 atLes 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 ofBéatrice et Benedictbecause, 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 disorderbegan 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 theSymphonie fantastique, the orgy of brigands inHarold en Italie, the ride to the abyss inFaust, and, let us even say, the "Tuba mirum" of theRequiem. 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 theWaverleyoverture, theRoi Learoverture, the first three movements of theSymphonie fantastique, the twenty or thirty songs, the bulk ofFaust, the bulk ofHarold en Italie, the bulk ofLélio, the three fine pieces that make up theTristia, theCinq Mai, the bulk of theRequiem,Benvenuto Cellini,Roméo et Juliette, the nobleSymphonie funèbre et triomphale, theCarnaval romainoverture, theEnfance du Christ,Béatrice et Benedict, orLes 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 describethisBerlioz 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 illnessthat 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 inFaustreally 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 cantataL'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 lovesto 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 ofL'Enfance du ChristandBéatrice et Benedict, the ignoramuses who then, as now, saw nothing in him but a master of thebaroqueand grotesque. His subjects are simple; he draws and colours them, as inBéatrice and Benedict, with the rarest and brightest grace,[16]or, as inL'Enfance du Christ, with a curiously engaging simplicity of manner that suggests Puvis de Chavannes or theprimitifs. 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 greatTe Deumwe 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 uponhis 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 ofLes Troyensthere 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 theRequiem. 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 hisStella 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 ofBenvenuto Celliniin 1837, combined with the intrigues of his enemies, shuts him out of the Opera for twenty-five years;in 1846, again, the failure ofFaustgives 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.