HECTOR BERLIOZ
VI
HECTOR BERLIOZ
Not many years ago three Americans, coming, late one afternoon, in the course of a walking tour in northern France, to the little cathedral town of Beauvais, found its ordinarily quiet air filled with tumult, bustle, and confusion. The streets, gay with colored bunting and venders' booths, were thronged with crowds of merrymakers; the hum of insatiable conversation was everywhere; no rooms were to be had at the hotels, and their dining rooms were preëmpted by crowds of men in uniform, engaged in an endless round of toasts and speeches. Beauvais was, in a word, the scene of a "Grande Fête des Pompiers," or Firemen's Festival. The firemen of all the surrounding country had assembled there, had taken possession of the town, and had surrendered themselves to conviviality and joy. It was a spectacle interesting from many points of view; but the fancy of the American observers was most of all struck by certain long strips of bunting which spanned the streets at intervals, bearing in large letters the legend, "Honneur aux victimes du devoir." This, it seemed to them, was the note in this motley symphony most perfectly, inimitably, and deliciously French. These festive firemen, in the midst of their jollifications, did not forget for a moment that it was their proud privilege to stand before the world, so long as cognac allowed them to stand at all, as the honored victims of duty. One hardly knew whether to smile at their ingenuousness, or to thrill in sympathy with their emotion, which, however theatrical, was perfectly sincere; on consideration one did both.
Something of the quandary of these American observers of the very Gallic firemen of Beauvais must perhaps always be experienced by the Anglo-Saxon who tries to understand the French attitude toward life or art, so essentially different are the two types of temperament. It is hard for the stolid, matter-of-fact, insensitive, self-satisfied Anglo-Saxon, singly set upon his business, indifferent to what the world may think of him, to comprehend the subtleties and indirections of the Gaul, who conceives personal conduct as an actor conceives a rôle, spares no pains or labor to do justice to his part, and feeds on the applause or starves on the indifference of his audience. To your Englishman or American such an ideal seems trivial, artificial. His sense of humor, a faculty in which it must be confessed that the French, for all their wit, are deficient, seizes at once upon the incongruities that must always exist between an ordinary human life and a histrionically conceived rôle, and in his amusement he often fails to do justice to the intelligence, imagination, and courage that may be brought into play by such a dramatic exercise. Possibly to a higher point of view his own attitude, which he likes to call "practical," and which less friendly critics sometimes call stupid, might seem essentially no better than the playful chivalry of his fellow.
Such thoughts as these are bound to occur to the candid critic of that singular man, that quintessential Frenchman, Hector Berlioz. On first acquaintance he seems a creature of postures and pretence, grandiloquent, artificial, specious. He resorts to any means to make an impression, keeps his name before the public by journalism, by social eccentricities, by Byronic love-affairs, by all manner of ingenious indirect advertising, thrives only in the smile of the public, and writes much less to express an inner conception of beauty than to dazzle, startle, and stun. He seems to make a religion of idiosyncrasy, and to shrink from nothing but the natural. He lives, speaks, writes, composes, only in the interest of his carefully laid plot to be unprecedented. But then, as one studies him more, one begins to find admirable traits under this fantastic exterior. However artificial his ideal may be, he brings a most vivid and many-sided intelligence to its service; in spite of the opposition to the world in which his excessive individuality places him, his stock of good-nature and of half-ironical, half-kindly wit is inexhaustible; and if he does not worship at an orthodox shrine, he can suffer, and endure, and strive, like a true martyr. And so Berlioz's critic, like the Americans at Beauvais, finally decides to smile at and at the same time to admire him.