His Theory of Autobiography.
To read the Mémoires is to feel that in writing them the great musician deliberately set himself to win the heart of posterity. He believed in himself, and he believed in his music: he divined that one day or another he would be legendary as well as immortal; and he took an infinite deal of pains to make certain that the ideal which was presently to represent him in men’s minds should be an ideal of which he could thoroughly approve. It is fair to note that in this care for the good will and the good word of the future he was not by any means alone. The romantiques, indeed, were keen—from Napoleon downwards—to make the very best of themselves. The poet of the Légende des Siècles, for example, went early to work to arrange the story of his life and character at least as carefully as he composed
the audiences of his premières; and he did it with so light a hand, and with such a sense of the importance of secrecy, that it is even now by no means so well and widely known as it should be that Victor Hugo raconté par un Témoin de sa Vie is the work of the hero’s wife, and was not only inspired but may also have been revised and prepared for publication by the hero himself. Again, the dramatist of Antony and the novelist of Bragelonne was never so happy as when he was engaged upon the creation of what he hoped would be the historical Dumas; he made volume after volume of delightful reading out of his own impressions and adventures; he turned himself into copy with a frankness, a grace, a gusto, a persistency of egoism, which are merely enchanting. Berlioz, therefore, had good warrant for his work. It is more to the point, perhaps, that he would have taken it if he had not had it. And I hold that he would have done well; for (in any case) a great man’s notion of himself is, ipso facto, better and more agreeable and convincing, especially as he presents it, than the idea of his inferiors and admirers, especially as presented by them. Berlioz, it is true, was prodigal in these Mémoires of his of wit and fun and devilry, of fine humanity and noble art, of good things said and great things dreamed and done and suffered; but he was prodigal of invention and suppression as well, and the result, while considerably less veracious, is all the more fascinating,
therefor. One feels that for one thing he was too complete an artist to be merely literal and exact; that for another he saw and felt things for himself, as Milton did before him—Milton in the mind’s eye of Milton the noblest of created things and to Mr. Saintsbury almost as unpleasing a spectacle as the gifted but abject Racine; and for a third that from his own point of view he was right, and there is an end of it.