This highest simplicity of the great creative artist, who ignores the accidents and the externals of life, who "looks into his heart and writes," was just what Berlioz, with all his mobile intelligence, all his ingenuity, all his earnest aspiration, could never achieve. There was in him a perversity of temper, a disharmony between the emotional and the intellectual nature, a lack of the sense of proportion or the sense of humor, which made it impossible. The natural seemed to him jejune; the simple, vulgar; the impulsive, crude. To be elaborate, theatrical, calculated, was a necessity of his highly artificial imagination. Just as in his love affairs he was never following an unsophisticated passion, but forever masquerading as an ideal hero, and as in his essays and autobiography he never chronicled, but always dramatized, so in his compositions he could not bring himself to express spontaneous intuitions in naïve forms, but built up elaborate programs with all the ingenuity of his tireless and resourceful intelligence. All life appeared to him as a magnificent glittering spectacle in which he was playing a leading rôle; and whether he loved or hated, whether he suffered or enjoyed, whether he succeeded or failed, he hugged close to his Gallic heart the consciousness that he was acting well, and that he had an audience. Like the firemen of Beauvais, he had, too, the ineffable satisfaction of placarding the heavens, in his autobiography, with the inspiring legend, "Honneur aux victimes du devoir."
The boast in his case, nevertheless, was far from an empty one; not the least strange element in his strangely mixed character was the real heroism, the splendid faith, with which he clung to an artistic ideal which was received with contempt or indifference on every side. In his devotion to an unpopular cause, through a lifetime of difficulties, he was a true martyr. His career, after his return from Rome to Paris in 1832, was one long uphill fight, not only for recognition, but for a bare livelihood. His accounts of his hated labors as a feuilletonist, up to the time when, by a generous gift from Paganini, he was freed from such servitude, are among the sincerest and most pathetic pages in his writings. He never won the appreciation from his countrymen that his vain, sensitive, and thoroughly Parisian nature most craved. Realizing, about 1840, that a man is never a prophet in his own country, he reluctantly sought abroad the support denied him at home, and in a series of tours in Germany, Austria, Russia, and England met with a large measure of success. Yet his first care, after each foreign triumph, was to know "what they thought of it in Paris"—and alas! they never thought about it at all. Tardily, in 1856, already over fifty years old, he obtained a fauteuil in the Academy, and was appointed Librarian of the Conservatoire. But the cheering effect of this recognition was clouded by the fiasco, in 1863, of the opera on which he had been working for years, "Les Troyens à Carthage." This blow broke his heart. He wrote no more, and after six years of loneliness and ill-health, died on March 8, 1869. As so often happens, his funeral orations contained the enthusiastic praises his living ears had craved in vain, and he was shortly pronounced the greatest of French composers.
The faith in himself and his art, which kept him steadfast through all his discouragements and temptations, which enabled him to persist in a path of almost complete solitude, which armed him with the sword of conviction and the shield of a good conscience, was, as Mr. Apthorp says, "the one pure, sterling element in a character in which all else was more or less distorted." He was a man of overweening vanity and egotism, often blind to the needs of those nearest him; an uncertain friend, a spiteful enemy, an intolerable husband; he could descend to petty deceits and unworthy animosities, and was willing to sacrifice the most sacred relations on the altar of his dramatic sense. And yet he could say with truth, "The love of money has never allied itself in a single instance with my love of art; I have always been ready to make all sorts of sacrifices to go in search of the beautiful, and insure myself against contact with those paltry platitudes which are crowned by popularity." He had also many minor virtues which, if not like this precisely heroic, are nevertheless charming. He was a sprightly narrator, a witty and keen critic where his prejudices were not involved, and a taster of life in whom discrimination did not embitter good nature.
Concerning his achievement as a musician there will always be extreme oppositions of opinion, so uncompromising was his theory of art, and so relentless his execution of it. The ultimate problem of whether a realism so thoroughgoing as his is justified by the nature of music will perhaps always remain an open one. But the most recalcitrant critic must admit the greatness of his incidental services to the art which he practised with such headlong perversity. He was a good iconoclast. He helped to break the bonds of a narrow conservatism which was in danger of confining all music to the forms of the symphony and the sonata, and to the type of expression perfected by the classicists. By his daring imagination he abashed pedantry and opened up vistas of new possibilities. And he was, at least in one department, that of orchestration, a triumphant innovator. By using instruments, not in traditional, hackneyed ways, but with an intuition of their latent possibilities, he added permanently to the resources of all composers and to the sensitiveness of all listeners. Whether, therefore, the tendency of all music toward the realistic, which is so prominent to-day, and in relation to which he stands as one of the greatest of pioneers, shall continue indefinitely, or shall give place to some new movement in another direction, as certain signs seem to indicate—in any event Berlioz's place as a contributor to the unresting progress of art is secure.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] See "Selections from Berlioz's Writings," translated by W. F. Apthorp, New York, 1879, pp. 228-261.
[31] See the summary of the program of the "Symphonie Fantastique" at p. 24.
[32] Full score, Breitkopf and Härtel edition, p. 54.
[33] See Introduction, p. 43.
[34] E. Dickinson, "The Study of the History of Music," p. 264.