Roughly speaking, it will be found that the Berlioz I have so
far depicted comes into view about 1827. It was about that date,
apparently, that youthful enthusiasm, combined with starvation and
folly, gave his system that lurid incandescence that people always
think of when they hear the name of Berlioz. It is about that date
that his letters begin to show the inflation of style to which I have
referred, and his music begins to acquire force and penetration and
expressiveness, together with a tincture of the abnormal. Previously
to 1827 he had presumably not written very much, or if he had it has
not survived. What has remained is now accessible to us in the new
complete edition of his works. There we can see some songs that,
whatever their precise date may be, clearly belong to his earliest
period. One of the very earliest--_Le Dépit de la Bergère_--shows a
quite inexperienced brain and hand. _Amitié, reprends ton empire_
is of much the same order; it looks, indeed, like a pot-boiler, an
attempt to meet the contemporary demand for this kind of thing. Nor
does the little cantata _La révolution grecque_ come to anything. But
negative and futile as much of this early work is, it shows one thing
quite clearly--that individuality of manner that accounts at once for
the successes and the failures of Berlioz. As I have already pointed
out, his type of melody is something peculiarly his own. The same may
be said of his harmony, which moves about in a way so different from
everything we are accustomed to that often we are quite unable to see
the _raison d'être_ of it. The popular judgment is that his melody is
ugly and his harmony shows a want of musical education. This, however,
is rather a hasty verdict. Nothing is more certain than that our first
impression of many a Berlioz melody is one of disgust--unless it be
that the second impression is one of pleasure. What Schumann noticed
long ago in connection with the _Waverley_ overture is still quite
true, that closer acquaintance with a Berlioz melody shows a beauty
in it that was unsuspected at first. I can answer for it in my own
experience, for some of the things that move me most deeply now were
simply inexpressive or repellent to me at one time; and I fancy every
one who will not be satisfied with the first impression of his palate,
but will work patiently at Berlioz, will have the same experience.
The truth seems to be that many of his conceptions were of an order
quite unlike anything else we meet with in music, and hence we have
some difficulty in putting ourselves at his point of view and seeing
the world as he saw it. And occasionally this individuality of thought
degenerates into sheer incomprehensibility. Some of his melodies,
play and sing them as often as we will, never come to mean anything
to us. It is not that they are ugly or commonplace, not that they are
cheap or platitudinous, but simply that they convey nothing; they
stand like something opaque between us and the emotion that prompted
them; instead of being the medium for the revelation of the composer's
thought they are a medium for the concealment of it. In cases like
these the explanation seems to be that his mental processes, always
rather different from ours, are here so very different that the chain
of communication snaps between us; what was a difference of degree now
becomes a difference of kind; he speaks another language than ours; the
thought, as it were, lives in a space of other dimensions than ours. We
may find a rough-and-ready analogy in a writer like Mallarmé, where the
general strangeness of thought and style becomes now and then downright
unintelligibility. In the one case as in the other, we are dealing with
a type of brain so far removed from the normal that the normal brain
occasionally finds it simply impossible to follow it.
So again with the harmony of Berlioz. Here the peculiarity of his style
has often been commented on, with its odd way of getting from one
chord to another, its curious trick of conceiving the harmony in solid
blocks, that succeed one another without flowing into one another--much
as in certain modern Dutch pictures the colours stand away from each
other as if a rigid line always lay between them and prevented their
being blended by the atmosphere. The general explanation of this
peculiarity of Berlioz's harmony is the easiest one--that it comes from
his imperfect technical education. There may be something in this,
but a little reflection will show that it is a long way from being
the complete explanation. In the first place, one needs scarcely any
"training" to avoid some of the progressions that Berlioz constantly
uses; the mere hearing of other music would be sufficient to establish
unconsciously the routine way of getting from one chord to another;
and if Berlioz always takes another way, it can only be because the
peculiarity of his diction has its root in a peculiarity of thought.
In the second place, the harmonic oddities are really not so numerous
in his earliest as in his later works. The melodies of the _Waverley_,
_Francs Juges_, and _King Lear_ overtures and of many of the earlier
songs are usually harmonised more in the ordinary manner than the
melodies of the works of his middle and last epochs; which seems to
show again that his harmonic style was rooted in his way of thinking,
and became more pronounced as he grew older and more individual. In the
third place, if the peculiarities of his harmony had been due to lack
of education, one would have expected him, when in more mature years
he revised an early work, to correct some of the so-called faults to
which a wider experience must have opened his eyes. But it is quite
clear that the matter never struck him in this way. In the new edition
of his works we have some instructive examples. In 1850, for example,
he revised one of his songs, _Adieu, Bessy_, which he had written in
1830. He has altered it in many ways, and made many improvements in the
melody, in the phrasing, and in the accompaniment; but the sometimes
odd harmonic sequences of the original version remain unchanged in the
later. It clearly never struck him that there was anything odd about
them; he had really seen his picture in that particular way; it was a
question not so much of mere technique as of fundamental conception. In
the fourth place, we must always remember that whatever Berlioz thought
he thought in terms of the orchestra. He neither played nor understood
the piano, and his writing is not piano writing. Now every one knows
that many effects that seem strange or ugly on the piano are perfectly
pleasurable on the orchestra, where they are set not in the one plane,
as it were, but in different planes and different focuses. I fancy
that when Berlioz imagined a melodic line or a harmonic combination he
saw it not merely as a melody or a harmony but as a piece of colour
as well; and the movement of the parts was not only a shifting of
lines but a weaving of colours. Many things of his that are ugly or
meaningless on the piano have a beauty of their own when heard, as he
conceived them, on the orchestra, set in different depths, as it were,
with the toning effect of atmosphere between them; not all standing in
the same line in the foreground, with the one white light of the piano
making confusion among their colour-values.
There is good reason for believing, then, that much of Berlioz's
peculiarity of style is far less the result of lack of education than
is generally believed, and that more of it must be attributed to a
peculiar constitution of brain that made him really see things just in
the way he has depicted them.
Among these early songs and other works there are some that show
great strength and charm and originality of expression, such as _Toi
qui l'aimas, verse des pleurs_, _La belle voyageuse_, _Le coucher
du soleil_, and _Le pêcheur_ (that was afterwards incorporated in
_Lélio_). His two youthful overtures, the _Waverley_ and the _Francs
Juges_, though relatively unsubtle in their working-out--for he had
little feeling for the symphonic form pure and simple--are yet very
individual, while parts of the _Francs Juges_ in particular are
exceedingly strong. Then the apprentice makes rapid strides on to
mastery. The year 1828 may be taken as the turning-point in his career.
His unsuccessful scena for the _Prix de Rome_--_Herminie_--exhibits
remarkable ardour of conception. There is much that is very youthful
in it; but it is decidedly individual, and above all it shows a
feeling for rhythm to which there had been no parallel in French
music up to that date. The next year saw another _Prix de Rome_
scena--_Cléopâtre_--of which the same description will mostly hold
good. The rhythmic scene is just as delicate, the melody is becoming
purer and stronger, and we have in the aria _Grands Pharaons_ a
really fine piece of dramatic writing. About the same time he wrote
the original eight scenes from _Faust_, containing such gems as the
chorus of sylphs, the song of the rat, the song of the flea, Margaret's
ballad of the King of Thule, her "Romance," and the serenade of
Mephistopheles. Berlioz's musical genius was now entering upon its
happiest phase; never, perhaps, did it work so easily and so joyously
as in 1829 and the next seven or eight years. It was about 1829, too,
that his orchestration began to be so distinctive; one can see him
reaching out to new effects in the _Cléopâtre_, the chorus of the
sylphs, the ballad of the King of Thule, the _Ballet des Ombres_ and
the fantasia on _The Tempest_.
This increasing mastery of his thoughts coincided with the epoch of
his most intense nervous excitement, in which Henrietta Smithson
played the part of the match to the gunpowder. So there came about the
typical Romantic Berlioz of the _Symphonie fantastique_ and _Lélio_,
moving about in the world with abnormally heightened senses, his brain
on fire, turning waking life into a nightmare, dreaming of blood and
fantastic horrors. He exploited this mad psychology to its fullest in
the last two movements of the symphony; after that the volcano lost
a good deal of its lurid grandeur, and in _Lélio_ we get rather less
molten lava and rather more ashes than we want. Some of the music of
_Lélio_--the ballad of the fisher, the _Chœur des ombres_, the _Chant
de bonheur_, the _Harpe éolienne_--is among the finest Berlioz ever
wrote; but the scheme as a whole, with its extraordinary prose tirades,
is surely the maddest thing ever projected by a musician. Here was
the young Romantic in all his imbecile, flamboyant glory, longing to
be a brigand, to indulge in orgies of blood and tears, to drink his
mistress' health out of the skull of his rival, and all the rest of
it. But after all there is very little of this in Berlioz's music. We
meet with it again in the "orgy of brigands" in the _Harold en Italie_;
and whether that really belongs to 1834 or was written two or three
years earlier, at the time when the hyperæmic brain was working at
its wildest in the _Symphonie fantastique_ and _Lélio_,[14] matters
comparatively little. In any case, the madness ends in 1834 with
_Harold_.
And then, with almost startling suddenness, a new Berlioz comes into
view. We first see the change in the scena _Le Cinq Mai_--a song on
the death of the Emperor Napoleon, to words by Béranger--which is
dated 1834 by M. Adolphe Jullien and 1832 by Herr Weingartner and M.
Malherbe. The precise date is unimportant. The essential fact is that
Berlioz's brain was now acquiring what it had hitherto lacked--it
was beginning to be touched with a philosophic sense of the reality
of things. He had, of course, in much of his earlier work, written
seriously and beautifully; but _Le Cinq Mai_ has qualities beyond
these. His songs _La captive_ (1832) and _Sara la baigneuse_ (1833?)
carry on the line from the earlier songs and overtures; what we get
in addition, in _Le Cinq Mai_, is a gravity and ordered intensity of
conception that as a whole are absent from the earlier works. He is
becoming less of an egoist, more capable of voicing the thought of
humanity as a whole; the Romanticist is making way for the complete
human being. In the _Nuits d'Été_ (1834) there is a larger spirit than
in any of his previous songs. Between 1835 and 1838 we have three noble
works--_Benvenuto Cellini_, the _Requiem_, and _Roméo et Juliette_;
and to no previous work of Berlioz would the epithet "noble" be really
applicable. The change is not so much a musical as an intellectual--we
may almost say ethical--one. Look at him, for example, in the opening
of the _Requiem_. All the madness, the pose, the egoism of the
_Symphonie fantastique_ and its brethren have disappeared. Berlioz
now has an eye for something more in life than his own unshorn locks
and his sultry amours. He no longer thinks himself the centre of the
universe; he no longer believes in the Berliozcentric theory, and does
not write with one eye on the mirror half the time. In place of all
this we have a Berlioz who has sunk his aggressive subjectivity and
learned to regard life objectively. His spirit touched to finer issues,
he sings, not Berlioz, but humanity as a whole. He is now what every
great artist is instinctively--a philosopher as well as a singer;
by the _Requiem_ he earns his right to stand among the serious,
brooding spirits of the earth. So again in the final scene of _Roméo et
Juliette_, where he rises to loftier heights than he could ever have
attained while he was in the throes of his egoistic Romanticism. Here
again, as in the _Requiem_, he speaks with the authority of the seer
as well as the voice of the orator; there is the thrill of profound
conviction in the music, the note of inspired comprehension of men and
nature as a whole. In a word, the old Berlioz has gone; a new Berlioz
stands in his place, wiser than of old, purified and chastened by his
experiences, artist and thinker in one.
X
In 1838, then, everything seemed of the happiest promise for his art.
But that promise, alas, was not fulfilled so amply as might have been
hoped for. Whatever the real cause may have been, Berlioz, as we have
seen, now slackened greatly in his musical production. It could not
have been wholly due to his _feuilleton_ writing, for he was never so
busy with this as in the seven years onward from 1833 (the year in
which he married Henrietta Smithson, and had to earn money in some way
or other). He complains to Humbert Ferrand that his journalism leaves
him little time to write music, but the facts are that he was really
keeping up a very good output. At the end of what I have called his
first epoch he received some large sums of money--4000 francs for the
_Requiem_ (1837), 20,000 francs from Paganini for _Harold en Italie_
(1838), and 10,000 francs for the _Symphonie funèbre et triomphale_
(1840)--enabling him to give up journalism and to travel. He was away
frequently between 1841 and 1855, but not enough to account for the
singularly small amount of music he wrote--an amount that becomes still
smaller in the later years.
We cannot, I think, resist the conclusion that even between 1840 and
1855 the seeds of his illness were in him and affecting his powers of
work. So far as can be ascertained from his letters, he became aware of
his malady about 1855, but there is no warrant for thinking it actually
began then; his father had suffered from the same complaint, and the
son was evidently a doomed man. It is about 1855 that his letters begin
to show what ravages his awful malady--a neuralgia of the intestines,
he calls it--was making in him. The atrocious pain weakened him through
and through; then the springs of energy within him were still further
relaxed by the quantities of opium he had to take. He lost, at times,
even his interest in art. In November 1856 he speaks to the Princess
Sayn-Wittgenstein of "the horrible moments of disgust with which my
illness inspires me," during which "I find everything I have written"
(he is working at _Les Troyens_) "cold, dull, stupid, tasteless; I have
a great mind to burn it all." A month later he writes that he has been
so ill that he could not go on with his score. Thus the melancholy
record continues in letter after letter: he is ill "in soul, in body,
in heart, in head;" an access of his "damned neuralgia" keeps him on
his back for sixteen hours; "I cannot walk, I only drag myself along;
I cannot think, I only ruminate;" "I live in an absolute isolation of
soul; I do nothing but suffer eight or nine hours a day, without hope
of any kind, wanting only to sleep, and appreciating the truth of the
Chinese proverb--it is better to be sitting than standing, lying than
sitting, asleep than awake, and dead than asleep;" "my neurosis grows
and has now settled in the head; sometimes I stagger like a drunken
man and dare not go out alone;" "these obstinate sufferings enervate
me, brutalise me; I become more and more like an animal, indifferent
to everything, or almost everything;" his doctors tell him he has "a
general inflammation of the nervous system," and that he must "live
like an oyster, without thought and without sensation;" some days he
has "attacks of hysteria like a young girl;" "Mon Dieu, que je suis
triste!"; "I suffer each day so terribly, from seven in the morning
till four in the afternoon, that during such crises my thoughts are
completely confused;" he takes so long over the writing of _Béatrice
et Benedict_ because, owing to his illness, his musical ideas come to
him with extreme slowness--while after he has written it he forgets
it, and when he hears it it sounds quite new to him. To his other
correspondents it is always the same pitiful story: "On certain days I
cannot write ten consecutive lines; it takes me sometimes four days to
finish an article."
It is impossible to believe that so serious a disorder began only
in 1855, when Berlioz first became fully conscious of it; it must
have been in him years before, and must even then have affected his
powers of work.[15] But such music as he did find energy to write
is eloquent of the new condition of his being. Not only bodily but
mentally Berlioz was a changed man--a point that should be insisted
on in view of the traditional misunderstanding of him. I have already
remarked upon the Berlioz "legend" that is generally accepted, a legend
founded solely on the Berlioz of twenty-five or thirty. Heine gave
perhaps the finest expression to this aspect of him in the passage in
which he speaks of him as "a colossal nightingale, a lark the size
of an eagle, such as once existed, they say, in the primitive world.
Yes, the music of Berlioz, in general, has for me something primitive,
almost antediluvian; it sets me dreaming of gigantic species of extinct
animals, of mammoths, of fabulous empires with fabulous sins, of all
kinds of impossibilities piled one on top of the other; these magic
accents recall to us Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the
marvels of Nineveh, the audacious edifices of Mizraim, such as we see
them in the pictures of the English painter Martin." That is not a bad
description, in spite of its verbal fantasy, of the Berlioz of the last
two movements of the _Symphonie fantastique_, the orgy of brigands in
_Harold en Italie_, the ride to the abyss in _Faust_, and, let us even
say, the "Tuba mirum" of the _Requiem_. But it is only a quarter, a
tenth, of the real Berlioz. Yet the old legend still goes on; even so
careful a student as Mr. W. H. Hadow has just said, in his article in
the new "Grove's Dictionary," that "his imagination seems always at
white heat; his eloquence pours forth in a turbid, impetuous torrent
which levels all obstacles and overpowers all restraint. It is the
fashion to compare him with Victor Hugo, and on one side at any rate
the comparison is just. Both were artists of immense creative power,
both were endowed with an exceptional gift of oratory, both ranged
at will over the entire gamut of human passion. But here resemblance
ends. Beside the extravagance of Berlioz, Hugo is reticent; beside the
technical errors of the musician the verse of the poet is as faultless
as a Greek statue."
One really gets rather tired of this perpetual harping upon the
extravagance of Berlioz. The picture is pure caricature, not a
portrait; one or two features in the physiognomy are selected and
exaggerated, posed in the strongest light, and factitiously made
to appear as the essential points of the man. Yet a baby with any
knowledge of Berlioz could demonstrate the falsity of the picture.
Where is the "extravagance," the want of "reticence," in the _Waverley_
overture, the _Roi Lear_ overture, the first three movements of the
_Symphonie fantastique_, the twenty or thirty songs, the bulk of
_Faust_, the bulk of _Harold en Italie_, the bulk of _Lélio_, the three
fine pieces that make up the _Tristia_, the _Cinq Mai_, the bulk of
the _Requiem_, _Benvenuto Cellini_, _Roméo et Juliette_, the noble
_Symphonie funèbre et triomphale_, the _Carnaval romain_ overture, the
_Enfance du Christ_, _Béatrice et Benedict_, or _Les Troyens_? Out of
all these thousands of pages, how ridiculously few of them deserve
the epithet of "extravagance"; of how many of them is it true that
Berlioz's "eloquence pours forth in a turbid, impetuous torrent which
levels all obstacles and overpowers all restraint"?
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.