Before coming to consider his music, let us complete the study of
Berlioz as an organism by examining his prose, where we shall find many
things that throw light on his structure. The assistance given to the
student of musical psychology by the prose writings of musicians is so
great, that one could almost wish that every composer of any note had
left the world a volume or two of criticism or of autobiography. They
would not necessarily have added very much to our positive knowledge
of life or art; but a book is such an unconscious revelation of its
writer, he shows himself in it so faithfully and so completely, no
matter how much he may desire to pose or deceive, that the psychologist
is able to reconstruct the man's mind from it as the scientist can
reconstruct in imagination the body of an animal from a few of its
bones. One does not lay much store, for example, by the actual contents
of the volumes of prose which Wagner was unkind enough to bequeath to
us; but after all one would not willingly let them die, for they are of
the utmost help to the study of Wagner, indirectly, if not directly,
throwing sidelights on him of which he was quite unconscious. The
prose of Berlioz has greater intrinsic interest. Deeply as he said he
loathed his journalistic work, he was after all a born journalist, a
fluent writer, a cynical wit, an accomplished story-teller in certain
_genres_, a master of polished and mordant irony. My present purpose,
however, is not to attempt an appreciation of Berlioz's prose as a
whole, but to call attention to certain curious elements in it that
have not, so far as I am aware, been pointed out before, and that
are extremely interesting to the student of so strange and complex a
personality as Berlioz.
Readers of Hennequin's fine, if not quite convincing, essay on
Flaubert in _Quelques Écrivains Français_, will remember the attempt
to exhibit the structure and functioning of the novelist's brain by
dissection of his prose. Flaubert, he shows, tends always to write
thus and thus; he has a vocabulary of such and such a kind, and he
tends to build up words in such and such a way. Proceeding from this
basis, Hennequin goes on to examine Flaubert's construction of his
sentences, then of his paragraphs, then of his chapters, then of his
novels, and thus to explain the final form of the books in terms of
a fundamental intellectual structure that has been conditioned by a
certain verbal faculty. Hennequin, I think, pushes his method rather
too far here, making blindly for his thesis regardless of all that
may be urged against it; but on the whole the essay is a novel and
valuable contribution to a neglected science--the study of a man's
brain through the medium of his forms of expression. Now any one who
reads critically through the prose works of Berlioz must be struck by
certain elements in the prose that seem to give the key to much that
is almost inexplicable in his music and his character. "Extravagant,"
"theatrical," "bizarre"--these are the terms that have always been
used of Berlioz. Sir Hubert Parry takes the easy course of attributing
his theatricalism to his being a Frenchman, oblivious of the fact that
the French disliked it and ridiculed it more than any other nation.
The early prose of Berlioz indicates that he was a man of a cerebral
structure that tended always to express itself extravagantly; a man who
did not see things upon the ordinary level of earth quite so clearly as
shapes in cloud and on mountain-top.
The big effects at which he aimed in music were, indeed, only one
form of manifestation of a curious faculty that was always leading
him to the grandiose. The ordinary orchestra, the ordinary chorus,
the ordinary concert-room would never do for him; everything must be
magnified, as it were, beyond life-size. Similarly in his prose, the
ordinary similes, the ordinary metaphors rarely occur to him; the
dilated brain can only express itself in a dilation of language. Thus
one adjective is rarely enough for Berlioz; there must generally be at
least three, and these of the most exaggerated kind. A thing is never
beautiful or ugly for Berlioz; it is either divine or horrible. A scene
in his early work, where Cleopatra reflects on the welcome to be given
her by the Pharaohs entombed in the pyramids, is "terrible, frightful."
His _Francs Juges_ overture in one place is described as "monstrous,
colossal, horrible." On another occasion he writes, "There is nothing
so terribly frightful as my overture.... It is a hymn to despair, but
the most despairing despair one can imagine--horrible and tender."
Everywhere there is the same tumefaction of language. When he ponders
over the memory of his first wife and her sufferings, he is overcome
by "an immense, frightful, incommensurable, infinite pity." Towards
the end of his life he is seized by "the furious desire for immense
affections." He can hardly speak of anything that has moved him without
this piling-up of the most tremendous adjectives in the language.
As might be expected, his imagery is of the same order; the very
largest things in the universe are impressed into the service of his
similes and metaphors. He speaks in one place of "those superhuman
adagios, where the genius of Beethoven soars aloft, immense and
solitary, like the colossal bird above the snowy summit of Chimborazo."
He had never seen the bird above the summit of Chimborazo, but his
brain reverts spontaneously to this conception in the effort to express
the sensation of immensity and solitude given him by Beethoven's
music. The pyramids, being conveniently large, frequently enter into
his similes. "It needs a very rare order of genius to create the
things that both artists and public can take to at once--things whose
simplicity is in direct proportion to their mass, like the pyramids
of Djizeh." "Yesterday," he writes after a certain performance of his
works, "I had a pyramidal success." When the pyramids fail him he
falls back on Ossian, or on Babylon and Nineveh. After having heard
6500 children's voices in St. Paul's, he writes, "It was, without
comparison, the most imposing, the most Babylonian ceremony I had
ever beheld." The "Tibi omnes" and the "Judex" of his _Te Deum_ are
"Babylonian, Ninivitish pieces." One night he hears the north wind
"lament, moan, and howl like several generations in agony. My chimney
resounds cavernously like a sixty-four feet organ-pipe. I have never
been able to resist these Ossianic noises."
Occasionally the heaping of Pelion on Ossa becomes necessary in order
to enable him to give the reader a faint impression of what he feels.
Beethoven is "a Titan, an Archangel, a Throne, a Domination." When he
is writing his hated feuilletons, "the lobes of my brain seem ready to
crack asunder. I seem to have burning cinders in my veins." The scene
of the benediction of the poniards in the _Huguenots_ is a terrible
piece, "written as it were in electric fluid by a gigantic Voltaic
pile; it seems to be accompanied by the bursting of thunderbolts and
sung by the tempests." A reminiscence of some incident in his career
brings out this ejaculation--"Destruction, fire and thunder, blood and
tears! my brain shrivels up in my skull as I think of these horrors!"
His second love, he tells us, "appeared to me with Shakespeare, in the
age of my virility, in the burning bush of a Sinai, in the midst of the
clouds, the thunders, the lightnings of a poetry that was new to me."
All his youthful conceptions and desires were of this extravagant
order. He writes in a letter of 1831, from Florence, "I should like to
have gone into Calabria or Sicily, and enlisted in the ranks of some
chief of _bravi_, even if I were to be no more than a mere brigand.
Then at least I should have seen magnificent crimes, robberies,
assassinations, rapes, conflagrations, instead of all these miserable
little crimes, these mean perfidies that make one sick at heart. Yes,
yes, that is the world for me: a volcano, rocks, rich spoils heaped up
in caverns, a concert of cries of horror accompanied by an orchestra
of pistols and carbines; blood and lacryma christi: a bed of lava
rocked by earthquakes; come now, that's life!"[9] In the same year
he has the idea of a colossal oratorio on the subject of "The Last
Day of the World." There are to be three or four soloists, choruses,
and two orchestras, one of sixty, the other of two or three hundred
executants. This is the plan of the work: "Mankind having reached the
ultimate degree of corruption, give themselves up to every kind of
infamy; a sort of Antichrist governs them despotically. A few just men,
directed by a prophet, are found amid the general depravation. The
despot tortures them, steals their virgins, insults their beliefs, and
commands their sacred books to be burnt in the midst of an orgy. The
prophet comes to reproach him for his crimes, and announces the end of
the world and the Last Judgment. The irritated despot has him thrown
into prison, and, delivering himself up again to his impious pleasures,
is surprised in the midst of a feast by the terrible trumpets of the
Resurrection; the dead come out of their graves, the doomed living
utter cries of horror, the worlds are shattered, the angels thunder in
the clouds--that is the end of this musical drama."
These examples will be sufficient to show the peculiarity of mind to
which I have referred. The early ideas of Berlioz seem to bear the same
relation to those of ordinary men as a gas does to a solid or a liquid;
the moment they are liberated they try to diffuse themselves through as
much space as they can. In this connection it is interesting to note
that from his earliest years he had a love for books of travel and
for pondering dreamily over maps of the world; he sought the remoter
conceptions that were not limited by any narrow boundary. One gets a
curious sensation, after reading much of his prose, that the things
of the world have lost their ordinary proportions and perspectives;
the adjectives are so big and so numerous that one begins to take this
inflated diction as the normal speech of men. Occasionally a truly
superb effect of vastness, of distance, is produced, an effect we also
get sometimes in Berlioz's music. It has always seemed to me, for
example, that the opening of his song "Reviens, reviens," gave the most
perfect suggestion of some one being recalled from a great distance;
the whole atmosphere seems to be attenuated, rarefied almost away; the
melancholy is the melancholy of a regret that sweeps the ocean to the
horizon and fails to find what the eyes hunger for.