We are face to face, then, with a personality which, whether we like
it or not, is of extraordinary strength and originality. If we are to
realise what kind of force he was, and how he came to do the work he
did, we must study him both from the standpoint of history and from
that of physiological and psychological science. Musical criticism is
apt to become too much a mere matter of wine-tasting, a bare statement
of a preference of this vintage or a decided dislike for that. We need
to study musicians as a whole, as complete organisms hanging together
by virtue of certain peculiarities of structure. If a man does not
like Liszt's music he compares it disparagingly with Wagner's--as if
this placing of people on the higher or lower rungs of a ladder were
the be-all and the end-all of criticism. Shakespeare is the greatest
figure of the Elizabethan literary world; but what critic thinks of
disposing of Ford and Massinger and Jonson and Webster and Marlowe
and Tourneur with the off-hand remark that not one of them was a
Shakespeare? In the same way it is not sufficient to write down Berlioz
as a purveyor of extravagant ideas clothed sometimes in ugly and
unpleasing forms; it is much more profitable to set ourselves to find
out why he came to have such a bias in art, and what were his relations
to the general intellectual movements of his time. It is only when we
study him from the historical standpoint that we can understand many
of his ideals; and to understand them is more important than to rail
at them. The criticism that rejects the less beautiful specimens of
an art because they are not perfect is like the natural history that
would take account only of the typical organisms, passing over the many
instructive variations from the type. In the long run human folly and
human failure are just as interesting to the student of humanity as its
wisdom and its triumphs; and the critic should always aim at being an
impartial student of humanity, not a mere wine-taster or a magistrate.
As we have seen, whatever other qualities we may deny to Berlioz,
we cannot at any rate refuse his claim to originality. Readers of
Théophile Gautier's _Histoire du Romantisme_, in which the cool,
objective poet and critic reviews all the leading figures of the
Romantic movement--Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Vigny,
Delacroix, and a score or so of lesser lights--will remember that
Berlioz is the only musician admitted to that brilliant company.
It was not due to any personal preference on Gautier's part, or to
his ignorance of the other Romantic musicians; there simply were no
others. So far as music was concerned, the whole Romantic movement
began and ended with Berlioz. When we are tempted to feel annoyed at
some of his extravagances or banalities we should remember that he had
to conquer a new world unaided. He was not only without colleagues
but without progenitors. When he arrived in Paris in 1821, at the
age of eighteen, what was the position of music in France? Gluck's
epoch-making work had terminated in 1779 with _Iphigenia in Tauris_;
the dramatic school of which he was the leader made something like its
last effort in Sacchini's _Œdipe à Colone_ in 1789. The often charming
but flimsy work of Dauvergne, Duni, Monsigny, Dalayrac and Grétry was
without any importance for the opera of the future. Two musicians
alone commanded serious respect--the great Cherubini, who, however,
was neither typically French nor very revolutionary, and Méhul, whose
_Joseph_ appeared in 1807. Lesueur and Berton do not count; while
Hérold, strong man as he was in some ways, was not strikingly original
either in form or in expression. The French music produced during the
years of Berlioz's early manhood was of the type of Boïeldieu's _La
Dame Blanche_ (1828), Auber's _Masaniello_ (1828) and _Fra Diavolo_
(1830), or Adam's _Postillon de Longjumeau_ (1836). Neither Spontini
in the first decade of the century, nor Rossini in later years, were a
necessary link in the chain of development of French music. In fact,
of almost all the music heard in Paris between 1790 and 1830 we may
say that whenever it was great it was not French, and whenever it was
French it was not great. Above all it was scarcely ever _contemporary_
music; it rarely showed any trace of having assimilated the life and
art of its own day. Especially was it unaffected by the hot young
Romantic blood that in the second and third decades of the century was
transforming both French poetry and French painting. Think of the
artists and poets, and then think of the musicians, and you seem to
enter another and inferior world of thought.
It was Berlioz, and Berlioz alone, who brought French music into line
with the activities of intelligent men in other departments. He put
into it a ferocity and turbulence of imagination and an audacity of
style to which it had hitherto been a stranger. Often when I listen
to him now I feel that we do not even yet quite appreciate his
originality. Even after the lapse of so many years the music sometimes
strikes us, in spite of all the enormous development of the art between
his day and ours, as startlingly new and unconventional. What then must
it have sounded like in the ears of those who heard it for the first
time? Imagine the bourgeois audience of those days suddenly assailed by
the March to the Scaffold, or the Witches' Sabbath, in the _Symphonie
fantastique_! There was here as violent a rupture with the staid
formulas of the classic and the pseudo-classic as anything achieved by
Victor Hugo or Delacroix or Gros or Géricault.
The springs that moved Berlioz, in fact, were just the springs that
moved his great contemporaries. The essence of their revolt was an
insistence upon the truth that beauty is co-extensive almost with
life itself. The nerves of the younger men were sharper than their
fathers'; their ears were more acute, their eyes more observant. They
saw and felt more of life, and tried to express in art what they had
seen and felt; which could not be done without not only breaking the
mould of the pseudo-classic technique, but also finding voice for a lot
of sensations and ideas to which the men of the previous generation
had been impervious. Recent French critics have noticed, as one
evidence of the more sensitive nerves of the early Romanticists, the
fineness and variety of their perceptions of colour. To the literary
man of the eighteenth century an object is merely blue or red; the
new writers perceive a dozen shades of blue and red, and ransack the
whole vocabulary to find the right discriminating word.[4] There was
a general effort to escape from the conventions that had fast-bound
poetry, painting, the drama, and the opera. The dress of the actors
and singers now aimed at some correspondence with that of the epoch of
the play, instead of making the vain attempt to produce an historical
illusion with the costume of their own time. The subjects of dramas,
novels, poems, and operas, instead of being exclusively classic, were
now sought in contemporary manners or in earlier European history; and
with the change of matter there necessarily came a change of style. At
the same time there sprang up an intellectual intimacy, previously
unknown, between all classes of artists. The poet and the musician hung
about the studio of the painter; the painter and the poet sang the
songs of the musician, or attended the performances of his opera, to
criticise it from the point of view of men who themselves were used to
thinking in art. The imagination of each was stimulated and enriched
by the ideas and sensations of the others. The new achievements of
line or colour or language or sound prompted the devotee of each art
to fresh experiments in his own medium. This in turn led to another
new phenomenon, of particular importance in the history of music.
There came to the front an original type--the literary musician, who
made a practice, and sometimes a profession, of writing about his
art, of educating the public at the same time as he clarified his own
ideas and tested his own powers. This type was accompanied by yet
another new product--the literary man or poet who wrote on music, not
as a professor or a pedant, and not after the manner of the Rousseaus
and Suards of the eighteenth century, but with dynamic force and
directness, correlating music with life and thought, estimating it by
its actual meaning to living men. There was nothing in the eighteenth
century to correspond to the prose writings of musicians like Berlioz
and Schumann, nothing to compare with the treatment of musical subjects
by literary men such as Hoffmann and Baudelaire.[5] And yet, while
there was in this way a greater actual expenditure of brain-power
upon music and art generally, the men themselves were not such solid
types as the men of the eighteenth century. Neither Hugo, nor Gautier,
nor Delacroix, nor Berlioz had the intellectual weight and fixity of
Diderot, or Condorcet, or David, or Gluck. The reason of the eighteenth
century was transformed into sentiment, its activity into reflection,
its repose into enthusiasm, its sobriety into passion.
Against this spirit the now anæmic idealism of pseudo-classical art
could not stand for long. If artists had taught the public to believe
that whatever tasted of real life was vulgar or barbaric, the public
must now be disabused of that notion. All life was claimed as the
province of the artist; he claimed also the right to draw it as he had
seen it. "There are no good subjects or bad subjects," said Victor
Hugo; "there are only good poets and bad poets." Expression--vital
expression, biting to the very heart of the theme--was now the
ideal; beauty, in the limited sense that had been given to it by the
false classics, was only a formula more or less platitudinous. "The
realisation of beauty by the expression of character" was the avowed
purpose of the Romanticists. M. Brunetière aptly contrasts with this
the classic theorem of Winckelmann, that the ideal beauty was "like
pure water, having no particular savour." "We must say it and repeat
it," cries Hugo in the preface of 1824 to the _Odes et Ballades_; "it
is not the need for novelty that torments our minds; it is the need
for truth--and that need is immense." Delacroix summed up the general
falsity of the conventional attitude towards art when he wrote: "In
order to make an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble
as far as possible the profile of Antinous, and then say, 'We have done
our utmost; if he is, nevertheless, not beautiful, we must abstain
altogether from this freak of nature, this squat nose and thick lips,
which are so unendurable to the eyes.'" A journalist of 1826 (cited
by M. Gustave Lanson in his admirable _Histoire de la Littérature
française_) cried, "Vive la nature _brute et sauvage_ qui revit si
bien dans les vers de M. de Vigny, Jules Lefèvre, Victor Hugo!" It was
not that they worshipped ugliness and violence in themselves, but that
they felt there are certain occasions when truth can be reached only
through the repellent and the extravagant, which, however, may be bent
by a wise eclecticism to the purposes of the ideal. There is scarcely
anything in the imagination of Berlioz that is not paralleled in the
imaginations of the contemporary poets and painters; there is no leap
of theirs towards freer verse or more expressive colour that was not
also taken by the musician. Only while they had at least some roots in
the past, not only in their own country but in England and Germany, and
while they were many and could support and purify each other by mutual
criticism, Berlioz stood by himself, without any musician, dead or
living, being of any practical value to him in the course he took.