A Prototype.
Apart from Cellini’s ruffianism there are several points of contact between the two men. Berlioz made the roaring goldsmith the hero of an opera, and it is not doubtful that he was in complete sympathy with his subject. In the Frenchman there is a full measure of the waywardness of temper, the impatience of authority, the resolute and daring humour, the passion of worship for what is great in art and of contempt for what is little and bad, which entered so largely into the composition of the
Florentine. There is not much to choose between the Berlioz of the Débats, the author of the Grotesques de la Musique and the A Travers Chants, and the Benvenuto who, as Il Lasca writes of him,
‘Senza alcun ritegno o barbazzale
Delle cose malfatte dicea male.’
Benvenuto enlarges upon the joys of drawing from the life and expatiates upon the greatness of Michelangelo in much the same spirit and with much the same fury of admiration with which Berlioz descants upon the rapture of conducting an orchestra and dilates upon the beauty of Divinités du Styx or the adagio of the so-called Moonlight Sonata. It is written of Benvenuto, in connection with Vasari’s attack upon that cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore which himself was wont to call ‘the marvel of beautiful things,’ that if he had lived to see the result,
‘Certo non capirebbe nelle pelle;
E saltando, e correndo, e fulminando,
S’ andrebbe querelando,
E per tutto gridando ad alta voce
Giorgin d’Arezzo meterebbe in croce,
Oggi universalmente
Odiato della gente
Quasi publico ladro e assassino’;
and you are reminded irresistibly of Berlioz betrampling Lachnith and the ingenious Castil-Blaze and defending Beethoven against the destructive pedantry of Fétis. And, just as the Vita is invaluable as a personal record of artist-life
in the Italy of the Renaissance, so are the Mémoires invaluable as a personal record of the works and ways of musicians in the Paris of the Romantic revival. Berlioz is revealed in them for one of the race of the giants. He is the musician of 1830, as Delacroix is the painter; and his work is as typical and as significant as the Sardanapale and the Faust lithographs.