It is time, however, to remind ourselves that the picture painted
so far does not represent the complete Berlioz. It is all the more
necessary to give ourselves this reminder because the only Berlioz
known to most people is this being of wild excitement and frenzied
exaggeration, with a dash in him here and there of pose. There is
a "legend" of each great composer--a kind of half-true, half-false
conception of him that gradually settles into people's minds and
prevents them, as a rule, from thinking out the man's character and
achievement for themselves. There is the Mozart legend, the Beethoven
legend, the Liszt legend, the authenticity of which not one amateur in
a thousand thinks of questioning. There is the Berlioz legend, too, the
causes of the growth of which, in this country especially, are not far
to seek. We really know very little of him over here. The _Carnaval
romain_ overture and the _Faust_ are heard occasionally; but the
average English amateur, when he thinks of Berlioz, has chiefly in mind
the _Symphonie fantastique_ and the _Harold en Italie_--particularly
the final movements with their orgies of brigands, witches, and what
not. Industrious compilers of biographies and of programme notes do
their best to keep this side of Berlioz uppermost in the public mind,
by always harping upon the eccentricities of his youth. One needs
to remember that Berlioz died in 1869, and that from, say, 1835 to
1869 he was a very different man, both in his music and in his prose,
from what he was between 1821 and 1835. His letters to the Princess
Sayn-Wittgenstein hardly suggest for a moment the Berlioz of the
earlier letters to Humbert Ferrand and others. And as for his music,
the British public that winks and leers knowingly at the mention of
his name, thinking all the time of the _Symphonie fantastique_ and the
_Harold en Italie_, would do well to reflect that it knows nothing, or
next to nothing, of the _Waverley_, _Francs Juges_, _Le Roi Lear_ and
other overtures, of _Lélio_, of the _Tristia_, of _Le Cinq Mai_, of
the _Messe des Morts_, of the operas--_Benvenuto Cellini_, _Béatrice
et Benedict_, _La Prise de Troie_, and _Les Troyens à Carthage_--of
the _Symphonie funèbre et triomphale_, of the _Roméo et Juliette_, of
_L'Enfance du Christ_, of the _Te Deum_, and of other works, to say
nothing of the score or so of songs. In the whole history of music,
there is probably no musician about whose merit the average man is so
sublimely confident on the basis of so sublime an ignorance of his work.