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.