The truth is that even in the youthful Berlioz there was considerable "reticence," considerable power to sympathise with and express not only the flamboyant but the tender, the pathetic, the delicate. We have already seen that his intellectual and moral powers came to their climax about 1838, at which time he was singing with enormous passion, but also with perfect restraint and impressive nobility. Both the music and the prose of his later years show how greatly his character was altering; it is simply ludicrous to attempt to describe this Berlioz in the language that was applicable only to the worst of the Berlioz of twenty years before. Physical and mental suffering, trials in private and perpetual disappointment in public life, chastened the man's soul, brought out the finer elements of it. He fought the powers of evil calmly and steadily with that admirable weapon of irony of his. Once he forgot himself, in the Wagner affair of 1861; but one can forgive, or at any rate understand, the momentary wave of malevolence that surged up in him then, if one thinks of the grievous illness that racked the poor frame, and the unending insults that had been his own lot as an opera composer. Apart from this episode, Berlioz always commands our respect in his later years. Always the brain, the spirit, were uppermost; where other men would have become abusive he only became more mordantly witty; where the passion of defeat would have obscured the eyes of other men he only saw the more clearly and penetratingly. Look at him in his later portraits, with that fine intellectual mouth, full of a strength that is not contradicted, but reinforced, by the ironic humour that plays over it. Yes, he met the shocks of fortune well, and they were many and rude. If we want a summary contrast of the later and the earlier Berlioz, we have only to compare the ebullient letters of his youth with the letters written to the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein between 1852 and 1867. The very style is altered; the later letters read easily and beautifully, without any of those abrupt distortions and exaggerations that pull us up with a shock in the earlier ones. When he has to castigate, he does it like a gentleman, with the rapier, not the bludgeon. And how perfectly does he maintain the essential dignity of the artist against this well-meaning but inquisitive and slightly vulgar aristocrat; with what fine breeding, what exquisite use of the iron hand within the glove, does he repel her interferences with matters that concern only himself, conveying to her that there are precincts within his soul to which neither her friendship nor her position give her the right of entry!
No, the cheap literary oleographs that do duty for the portraits of Berlioz are ludicrously in suggestive of what Berlioz really was. His fever had all died down even by 1846—supposing the ride to the abyss in Faust really to belong to that and not an earlier date; and everything after then speaks of a vastly altered being. Had he only kept his health up to this stage of his career, who knows to what sunlit heights he might not have attained? In spirit, in experience of life, in moral balance, in the technique of his art, he had now enormously improved; but set against all this was that insidious disease that so woefully hindered the free working of what had once been so eager and keen a brain. It diminished the quantity of work he could do; it spoiled some of it altogether—the cantata L'Impériale, for example, where the unimpressive writing is throughout that of a mentally exhausted man. Yet a sure instinct seems often to have guided him even in this epoch of distress and frustration. He could write only a few hours each week; but as a rule he seems to have chosen happily his times for work, seizing the rare and fleeting moments when the poor brain and body were held together in a temporary harmony. The best of his later work need not fear comparison with the best of his earlier periods. And how changed in mood and outlook it all is! All his old Romanticism is gone, not only from his music but from the basis of his music. Instead of the old violent literary themes, with their clangorous rhetoric and their purple colouring, he now loves to dwell among themes of classic purity of outline, and to lavish upon them an infinite delicacy of treatment. His musical style becomes at times extraordinarily beautiful and supple; without losing any of the essential strength of his earlier manner, he confutes, by the exquisite, pearly delicacy of L'Enfance du Christ and Béatrice et Benedict, the ignoramuses who then, as now, saw nothing in him but a master of the baroque and grotesque. His subjects are simple; he draws and colours them, as in Béatrice and Benedict, with the rarest and brightest grace, [16] or, as in L'Enfance du Christ, with a curiously engaging simplicity of manner that suggests Puvis de Chavannes or the primitifs. And his strength, where he chooses to let it show, is now so finely controlled, so thoroughly and masterfully bent to the creation of beauty. In the great Te Deum we see his style at something like its finest; all the coarseness and clumsiness that clung to his earlier strength have gone; the muscle shows none of the raw vigour of the early days, but plays easily and flexibly under the velvet skin; while in his softer moments there is a new and extraordinary sweetness, a honeying of the voice that yet sacrifices none of its old virility. And for his last work he draws not upon any of the Romantic contemporaries of his youth, not even upon that other Romanticist—Shakespeare—to whom he was always so closely drawn, but upon his beloved Virgil; it is with a classic subject, set with classic sobriety of manner and amplitude of feeling, that he chooses to end his career. What that work meant for him only those can realise who study his letters during the seven years in which he was engaged upon it. It was his refuge, his method of escape from the world; it was for him that "tower of ivory" of which Flaubert speaks, into which the artist can mount, there to dream of the ideal that is unrealisable in life. He was a dying man all these years, and in much of the music of Les Troyens there are only too many signs of physical and mental exhaustion. But it has its extraordinarily fine moments, and the general conception is grander than anything Berlioz had attempted since the Requiem. There is something strangely moving in this reversion of the old musician, in his latest years, to the passions and the ideals of his youth. Fiction could not invent anything more touchingly beautiful than that final meeting with the Estelle he had loved as a boy of ten or twelve, and the resurgence of all the old romantic feeling for his Stella montis—that curious blinding of the fleshly eye that permitted him to see in the woman of sixty-seven only the winsome girl he had loved half-a-century before. In his art there was a similar atavism; the old fighter puts away, with a sadly ironic smile, the red flag under which he had once fought so fiercely, and seeks companionship among the great calm figures of the past. There may have been a deliberate intention of separating himself quite pointedly from Wagner, which may account for something at least of his later clinging to Gluck and the classics. But on the whole it seems more probable that the reversion to these less fevered, more spacious spirits was just the spontaneous sinking of the weary soul into the arms that were most ready to receive it. He knew he was a beaten man; he knew that during his lifetime at any rate his star was doomed to suffer eclipse; whatever chance he might have had of fighting his way through the clouds again, of overcoming the Parisian ignorance of and prejudice against him, was shattered by the disease that broke him, body and soul. So he retired into himself and waited, as calmly and philosophically as might be, for the end.
To us his situation seems even more tragic than it must have seemed to himself. Knowing what extraordinary promise he was giving in 1838, we can only regard the last thirty years of his life as a failure to redeem that promise, at all events in its entirety. In both fields—the vocal and the instrumental—he seems to halt uncertainly, not quite knowing how to carry on the work he had begun. The later music, as I have tried to show, is generally beautiful enough; the fault does not lie there. But Berlioz failed to beat out for himself the new forms that might reasonably have been expected from him by those who had followed his career from the first. All his life he longed ardently to be an opera composer. But the failure of Benvenuto Cellini in 1837, combined with the intrigues of his enemies, shuts him out of the Opera for twenty-five years; in 1846, again, the failure of Faust gives him another crushing blow. When he resumes his operatic writing, the capacity and the desire to strike out new forms seem to have gone; he is content to work within the limits of the frame that Gluck bequeathed to him. All this time he practically neglects purely instrumental music, thus failing to work out the conclusions towards which he seemed to have been feeling his way in his earlier works. Nothing in him comes to its full fruition; each branch is lopped off almost as soon as it leaves the trunk. He is a pathetic monument of incompleteness; his disease and the ignorant public between them slew his art. But the work he actually did seems on this account only the more wonderful. He was a genius of the first rank; and there is little doubt that the better his music is known the more respectful and the more sympathetic will be the tone of criticism towards him.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The reader who is interested in the matter may turn to letters to Liszt of 1852. Here he speaks slightingly of Berlioz's Cellini, and alludes to "the platitudes of his Faust Symphony(!)" The last phrase alone is sufficient to show that Wagner was completely ignorant of the work he had the impertinence to decry—for every one knows that Berlioz's Faust is not a symphony. In a recent article in The Speaker on "The Relations of Wagner and Berlioz," I have, I think, shown that Wagner could not have known a note either of the Faust or the Cellini; the dates of performance and of publication put any such knowledge on his part out of the question. It is necessary, however, to warn the reader that in both the English translation of the Wagner-Liszt letters (by Dr. Hueffer, revised by Mr. Ashton Ellis), and the big Glasenapp-Ellis Life of Wagner, the real facts are kept from the English public. The incriminating phrase, "Faust Symphony," is quietly abbreviated to "Faust," so that there is nothing to rouse the reader's suspicions and make him look further into the matter. In the big Life, again, now in course of publication, Mr. Ellis, though he has thousands of pages at his disposal—though, indeed, he can devote a whole volume of five hundred pages to two years of Wagner's life—still cannot find room for the brief line or two from the 1852 letter that would put the real facts before the reader; discreet and silent dots take their place. The British public is apparently to be treated like a child, and told only so much of the truth about Wagner as is thought to be good for it—or at any rate good for Wagner.
[2] This is an error; he arrived in Paris in 1821.
[3] See Julien Tiersot's Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps (1904)—an excellent book that is indispensable to every student of Berlioz.
[4] It is interesting to note that Alfred de Musset anticipated Arthur Rimbaud and the modern symbolists in having coloured audition. He once maintained that the note F was yellow, G red, a soprano voice blond, a contralto voice brown. See Arvède Barine's Alfred de Musset (in Les Grands Écrivains Français), p. 115.