Few literary and artistic movements have their social and physical
roots laid as clearly open to us as the Romantic. The most astonishing
thing in connection with this chain of causes and results is that there
should be only the solitary figure of Berlioz to represent the musical
side of it. One would have thought that the vast liberation of nervous
energy effected by the Revolution and the Napoleonic period would have
been too great to be confined to literature and the plastic arts--that
a really French school of music would have arisen, interwoven with the
past and the present of French history and social life, and as typical
of contemporary French culture in its own way as the poetry, drama,
and painting of the time were in theirs. That this did not happen was
in all probability due to the confirmed hold which the theatre had
upon music-lovers in France. To nine men out of ten there music was
synonymous with opera; and opera meant a spectacle in which only the
greatest pleasure of the greatest number had to be consulted. It was
an art-form in which compromise was carried to its highest points; the
audience was cosmopolitan and not too critical, and the composers,
whether native or foreign, had to think only in the second place of
art, and in the first place of speaking a musical language that would
be intelligible and acceptable to all. No independent, contemporary
expression of culture could be expected in opera, for no one, composer
or spectator, took it quite seriously enough for that.
On the other hand, there was no purely instrumental form existing that
could serve as a vehicle for such revolutionary modes of feeling as
found expression in the literature and painting of the day. Finally,
there was no public with sufficient musical training to demand a
new revelation in music, or to comprehend it if it came. The French
orchestras of the time, as we have seen, were almost uniformly
inefficient, incapable of playing great music with any intelligence. It
was impossible, then, for the public to be as alive, as up-to-date, in
music as it was in other things; and music, more than any other art, is
dependent upon collective as distinguished from individual patronage.
Perhaps, also, the language of French music was as yet not sufficiently
developed to fit it to answer the needs of the young generation of
Romanticists. It was not real enough, not close enough to actual life
to spur the energies of men either into approval or disgust. There
was no mistaking the angry flare of the new spirit in other fields.
The realism of Gros or of Delacroix was patent to every eye; the mere
change in the choice of subjects was a challenge and a provocation. So
again in poetry, one could not fail to be agitated by the incessant
whipping of the language to new feats of technique, the perpetual
evocation of new forms of expression, new vibrations of verbal colour.
All this was on very much the same plane as the everyday life of men.
It was something they could feel a fighting interest in. But no one
took music so seriously. It was long before it lost the grand manner,
the trick of wig and sword, of the eighteenth century; and when it did
there was nothing of equal grandeur to take its place. Where it was
great, and had the large stride and the flowing cloak, it breathed of
the psychology of the past; where it took part in the lives of the
men of its own day it attacked them only on their more sensuous, more
frankly epicurean side. It was a mistress, not a wife.
In Berlioz alone, then, the Romantic movement expended its musical
energies. He alone among French musicians of the time shows the same
characteristics of body and mind as went to the making of the art
or literature of his contemporaries. With him, as with them, the
physiological structure counts for very much. No doubt a good deal of
the motive-power came from the great awakening of the Napoleonic era.
The nation that had been wrestling for a generation with every country
in Europe necessarily touched life on more sides than it had ever
done before. The old formalities no longer sufficed; indeed, the mere
antiquity of any thought or any practice was no recommendation of it
in the eyes of this people, to whom the strange kaleidoscopic present
was a spectacle of ever-changing interest. It was this aspect of the
situation to which Stendhal gave expression when he compared his own
century with the eighteenth, the classic nutriment with the romantic.
"The classic pieces are like religions--the time for creating them has
gone by. They are like a clock that points to midday when it is four
in the afternoon. This kind of poetry was all right for the people
who, at Fontenoy, raised their hats and said to the English column,
'Gentlemen, be good enough to fire first.' And it is expected that this
poetry should satisfy a Frenchman who took part in the retreat from
Moscow!" When the Napoleonic empire had fallen, a new motive-power of
great literary value was discovered in the intense melancholy which,
according to Musset, seized upon the younger spirits at the sudden
limitation of the nation's activities. "A feeling of inexpressible
_malaise_ commenced to ferment in every young heart. Condemned to
inaction by the sovereigns of the world, given up to indolence, to
_ennui_, the young men ... experienced, at the foundation of their
souls, a misery that was insupportable."
The physiological causes, however, of this nervous irritability, this
dissatisfaction with existing things, which is as strongly marked in
Berlioz as in Musset or Delacroix, were probably more important than
the moral ones. The majority of the artists and literary men of this
epoch had a poor, neurotic physique. In almost all of them there was a
tendency to nervous derangement, or some weakness of the heart or lungs
that would predispose them to melancholy. Maxime du Camp bore strong
testimony to the physical lassitude that characterised this epoch. "The
artistic and literary generation that preceded me," he wrote, "that
to which I belonged, had a youth of artistic sadness, inherent in the
constitution of men or in the epoch." Again, speaking of the proclivity
to suicide among the young men of the time, he says, "It was not
merely a fashion, as one might believe; it was a kind of general
debility that made the heart sad and the mind gloomy, and caused death
to be looked upon as a deliverance."
This _défaillance générale_, this _tristesse sans cause comme sans
objet_, _tristesse abstraite_, must have had its roots in something
deeper than the mere psychological outlook of the youth of the period.
It seems probable that there was a general physical exhaustion, a
widespread undermining of physique. The children born about the
beginning of the century must have had for their parents, in many
cases, people who had lived in an atmosphere of intense social and
political excitement, and had probably undergone a considerable amount
of actual physical hardship. The Napoleonic wars can hardly have
failed to leave their mark upon the physiological constitution of the
French race. If it be true that the fine nervous quality of the Irish
comes in part from the centuries of troubled life through which the
race has passed, there must certainly have been some impression left
upon the physique of France by the lurid, swiftly changing episodes
of the Revolution and the Empire. The mere loss of young blood must
have counted for a good deal. De Musset, indeed, in his _Confession
d'un enfant du siècle_, bears testimony to the melancholy of the young
generation--"une génération ardente, pâle, nerveuse," "conceived
between two battles," and born of "les mères inquiètes."[6] Maxime Du
Camp too suggests this explanation of the morbidity of the time, and
adds to it another. "Often I have asked myself whether this depression
may not have been the outcome of physiological causes. The nation was
exhausted by the wars of the empire, and the children had inherited
their fathers' weakness. Besides, the system of medicine and hygiene
then prevalent was disastrous. Broussais was the leader of thought,
and doctors went everywhere lancet in hand. At school they bled us for
a headache. When I had typhoid fever I was bled three times in one
week, sixty leeches were applied, and I could only have recovered by a
miracle. The doctrines preached by Molière's Diafoiruses had lasted on
to our day, and resulted in the anæmic constitution so frequently met
with. Poverty of blood combined with the nervous temperament makes a
man melancholy and depressed."
One consequence of this flawed physique was that the young men of the
time not only had extravagant conceptions, but that they took these
and themselves with enormous seriousness. The majority of them posed
unconscionably at times. They could not be unhappy without playing
upon their own sensations for the benefit of an audience; there was
something of the actor in almost all of them. Each was a Werther in
his own eyes, a person towards whom the cosmos had behaved with a
special and quite unpardonable malevolence. Listen, for example, to
the declamation of Chateaubriand: "I have never been happy, I have
never attained happiness though I have pursued it with a perseverance
corresponding with the natural ardour of my soul; no one knows what
the happiness was that I sought, no one has fully known the depths of
my heart; the majority of my sentiments have remained immured there,
or have only appeared in my works as applied to imaginary beings.
To-day, when I still regret my chimæras without however pursuing
them, when, having reached the summit of life, I descend towards the
tomb, I wish, before dying, to revert to those precious years, _to
explain my inexplicable heart_, to see, in short, what I can say when
my pen abandons itself unconstrainedly to all my recollections."[7]
One detects a little note of insincerity in it all. The gentleman
doth protest too much; he is wearing his heart too visibly on his
coat-sleeve, trafficking in melancholy as a man traffics in cotton
or steel, simply because there is a market for that kind of thing.
We need to read Berlioz's letters with this suspicion always before
us if we are to take them at their real value. A fair summary of the
half-sincere, half-posing mood that was prevalent among the young
men of genius of the time is to be had in Géricault's portrait of
himself, in the Louvre, with the forced melodrama of the skull on the
shelf intruding itself upon the real earnestness of the picture as a
whole. We get plenty of this somewhat far-fetched and too conscious
_diablerie_ in some of the early work of Berlioz; and there is no need
to be more contemptuous of it there than when we meet with it in the
poets or the painters who were his contemporaries. To say nothing of
the grandiloquent Hugo and his youthful followers, even so strong and
philosophical a type as Flaubert was decoyed now and then into the same
kind of pose of exaggeration. His early letters have their full share
of sentimentality, of talk about man being as a frail skiff in the
tempest, and all the other formulas of the school,[8] although Flaubert
expressly dissociated himself from the more lymphatic specimens of
Romanticism. "Do you know," he wrote, "that the new generation of the
schools is extremely stupid; formerly it had more sense; it occupied
itself with women, sword-thrusts, orgies; now it apes Byron.... It is
who shall have the palest face and say in the best manner 'I am _blasé,
blasé_!' What a pity! _blasé_ at eighteen!"
V
If ever the physiological structure of a man had to be taken into
account in trying to explain the nature of his work, it is surely when
we are dealing with Berlioz. We have only to look at his portrait to
see how highly strung he was, how prone he must have been to disorders
of the nervous system. There is a passage in one of his letters that
seems to indicate an anxiety for his health on the part of his father,
who, being a doctor, would probably understand his son's bias towards
nervous troubles: "Je suis vos instructions quant au régime," writes
Hector; "je mange ordinairement peu et ne bois presque plus de thé."
His early life, after he left the paternal home, was certainly one of
great privation. He moreover seems to have been exceedingly careless
of his health, indulging in long walks without a proper supply of
food--presuming upon a nervous energy that to him no doubt seemed like
a solid physical constitution. Worse even than this was his occasional
deliberate resort to starvation, as one of his friends tells us, "pour
connaître les maux par lesquels le génie pouvait passer." The wonder
is not that he should always have been a prey to some trouble or other
of the nerves, or that in middle age he should have been attacked by
a frightful intestinal disorder, but that he should have lived as
long as he did, and found strength enough for such work as he has
bequeathed to us. "How unhappily I am put together," he once wrote to
his friend Ferrand--"a veritable barometer, now up, now down, always
susceptible to the changes of the atmosphere--bright or sombre--of my
consuming thoughts." As it was, the nerves plainly underwent a gradual
deterioration. There are the same general mental characteristics in his
later work as in his earlier, but the music of the last fifteen years
of his life will as a whole hardly bear comparison with that written
between the ages of twenty-five and forty. The fine bloom seemed to
have been rubbed off his spirit; even where the music still has the
nervous energy of former years it is almost entirely an external
thing--a mere tendency to break out into the unexpected because of
the impossibility of continuing for long on the one level path; while
too often there is a sheer dulness that evidently comes from the
long-continued stilling of his pains with opium. But until his system
wore itself out in this way through every kind of over-strain, it was
clearly one of extraordinary sensitivity, susceptible to a hundred
impressions that must have remained a sealed book to every other French
musician of the time.
This was the keynote to his mental life and to the world which he
tried to reproduce in art; and if we study his physical organisation
he becomes far more typical of the Romantic movement than the most
brilliant of his contemporaries. If their distinguishing mark was
the extraordinary seriousness with which they took their artistic
impressions, the strange convulsions produced in them by the sight of a
beautiful thing or by the mere rapturous act of composition, it must be
said that not one of them can compare with Berlioz in this respect. A
hundred passages, in his _Memoirs_, his letters, and his prose works,
reveal his temperament as perhaps the most extraordinarily volcanic
thing in the history of music. Musicians as a whole have an unenviable
notoriety for not being as other men are; they surpass even the poets
in the fineness of their nerves and the tendency of these to evade
the control of the higher centres. But surely, outside the history of
religious mania or the ecstasy of the mystics, there is nothing to
parallel the abnormal state into which Berlioz was thrown by music.
"When I hear certain pieces of music, my vital forces at first seem to
be doubled. I feel a delicious pleasure, in which reason has no part;
the habit of analysis comes afterwards to give birth to admiration;
the emotion, increasing in proportion to the energy or the grandeur
of the ideas of the composer, soon produces a strange agitation in
the circulation of the blood; tears, which generally indicate the
end of the paroxysm, often indicate only a progressive state of it,
leading to something still more intense. In this case I have spasmodic
contractions of the muscles, a trembling in all my limbs, a complete
torpor of the feet and the hands, a partial paralysis of the nerves
of sight and hearing; I no longer see, I scarcely hear: vertigo ...
a semi-swoon." Still more curious is the effect created on him by
music he does not like. "One can imagine," he says, "that sensations
carried to this degree of violence are rather rare, and that there
is a vigorous contrast to them, namely _the painful musical effect_,
producing the contrary of admiration and pleasure. No music acts
more strongly in this respect than that whose principal fault seems
to me to be platitude plus falsity of expression. Then I redden as if
with shame; a veritable anger takes possession of me; to look at me,
you would think I had just received an unpardonable insult; to get
rid of the impression I have received, there is a general upheaval of
my being, an effort of expulsion in the whole organism, analogous to
the effort of vomiting, when the stomach wishes to reject a nauseous
liquor. It is disgust and hatred carried to their extreme limit; this
music exasperates me, and I vomit it through all my pores."
This is not a piece of merely literary exaggeration, for time after
time in his letters we come across corroborative evidence that Berlioz
was really affected by music in this way. He thus surpasses in nervous
extravagance the most abnormal of the young poets and painters of his
time. And as with them the susceptibility of their physical organisms
led to a new sympathy with things, a new tenderness, a new pity, so did
the weakness of Berlioz lead him to the discovery of shades of emotion
that had never before found expression in music. Madame de Staël's
remark, that "la littérature romantique ... se sert de nos impressions
personnelles pour nous émouvoir," had a wider application than she
imagined. The French Romantic was a new type in art; in most cases a
nervous sufferer himself, he had glimpses of a whole world of human
pain and pathos that were denied his forerunners. The great figures of
the eighteenth century are for the most part objective, travelling
by the way of reason rather than that of emotion, philosophers rather
than artists, living in the central stream of things, and with a
broad, clear outlook on the actual affairs of their own day. Their
very sentiment is a different thing from the sentiment of the later
generation; it is more under control, has less heart and more brain
in it, is less suggestive of an overwhelming surge along the nerves.
Only now and again in the literature of the eighteenth century do we
catch a foreshadowing of that species of quivering emotion which found,
sometimes only too easily, expression in the Romantics. We have it in a
noteworthy passage of Diderot: "Le premier serment que se firent deux
êtres de chair, ce fut au pied d'un rocher qui tombait en poussière;
ils attestèrent de leur constance un ciel qui n'est pas un instant
le même; tout passait en eux, autour d'eux, et ils croyaient leurs
cœurs affranchis de vicissitudes. O enfants! toujours enfants!"
This, in the literature of its time, is like a lyric of Heine appearing
among the pages of Lessing, a song of Schumann in the middle of a
score of Gluck. We have something of the same tone again, a similar
adumbration of the romantic spirit, here and there in the _Rêveries_
of Rousseau. But it is in the Romantics that we first find the full
expression of that new tremor of feeling that comes from the sense of
the weakness of our poor flesh, the sense of the mortality of our clay,
our hourly nearness to corruption, our community with everything that
suffers and perishes.