by the public, disparaged by a Scudo and an Adolphus Adam, and the theatre only opened its doors to him with difficulty. It was really splendid!
But a careful examination of facts, such as that made by M. Julien Tiersot, shows the stifling mediocrity and hardship of his life. There were, first of all, his material cares. When thirty-six years old "Beethoven's successor" had a fixed salary of fifteen hundred francs as assistant keeper of the Conservatoire Library, and not quite as much for his contributions to the Debits-contributions which exasperated and humiliated him, and were one of the crosses of his life, as they obliged him to speak anything but the truth.[22]
That made a total of three thousand francs, hardly gained on which he had to keep a wife and child—"même deux," as M. Tiersot says. He attempted a festival at the Opera; the result was three hundred and sixty francs loss. He organised a festival at the 1844 Exhibition; the receipts were thirty-two thousand francs, out of which he got eight hundred francs. He had the Damnation de Faust performed; no one came to it, and he was ruined. Things went better in Russia; but the manager who brought him to England became bankrupt. He was haunted by thoughts of rents and doctors' bills. Towards the end of his life his financial affairs mended a little, and a year before his death he uttered these sad words: "I suffer a great deal, but I do not want to die now—I have enough to live upon."
One of the most tragic episodes of his life is that of the symphony which he did not write because of his poverty. One wonders why the page that finishes his Mémoires is not better known, for it touches the depths of human suffering.
At the time when his wife's health was causing him most anxiety, there came to him one night an inspiration for a symphony. The first part of it—an allegro in two-four time in A minor—was ringing in his head. He got up and began to write, and then he thought,
"If I begin this bit, I shall have to write the whole symphony. It will be a big thing, and I shall have to spend three or four months over it. That means I shall write no more articles and earn no money. And when the symphony is finishedI shall not be able to resist the temptation of having it copied (which will mean an expense of a thousand or twelve hundred francs), and then of having it played. I shall give a concert, and the receipts will barely cover half the cost. I shall lose what I have not got; the poor invalid will lack necessities; and I shall be able to pay neither my personal expenses nor my son's fees when he goes on board ship. … These thoughts made me shudder, and I threw down my pen, saying, 'Bah! to-morrow I shall have forgotten the symphony.' The next night I heard the allegro clearly, and seemed to see it written down. I was filled with feverish agitation; I sang the theme; I was going to get up … but the reflections of the day before restrained me; I steeled myself against the temptation, and clung to the thought of forgetting it. At last I went to sleep; and the next day, on waking, all remembrance of it had, indeed, gone for ever."[23]
That page makes one shudder. Suicide is less distressing. Neither Beethoven nor Wagner suffered such tortures. What would Wagner have done on a like occasion? He would have written the symphony without doubt—and he would have been right. But poor Berlioz, who was weak enough to sacrifice his duty to love, was, alas! also heroic enough to sacrifice his genius to duty.[24]
And in spite of all this material misery and the sorrow of being misunderstood, people speak of the glory he enjoyed. What did his compeers think of him—at least, those who called themselves such? He knew that Mendelssohn, whom he loved and esteemed, and who styled himself his "good friend," despised him and did not recognise his genius.[25] The large-hearted Schumann, who was, with the exception of Liszt,[26] the only person who intuitively felt his greatness, admitted that he used sometimes to wonder if he ought to be looked upon as "a genius or a musical adventurer."[27]
Wagner, who treated his symphonies with scorn before he had even read them,[28] who certainly understood his genius, and who deliberately ignored him, threw himself into Berlioz's arms when he met him in London in 1855. "He embraced him with fervour, and wept; and hardly had he left him when The Musical World published passages from his book, Oper und Drama, where he pulls Berlioz to pieces mercilessly."[29] In France, the young Gounod, doli fabricator Epeus, as Berlioz called him, lavished flattering words upon him, but spent his time in finding fault with his compositions,[30] or in trying to supplant him at the theatre. At the Opera he was passed over in favour of a Prince Poniatowski.
He presented himself three times at the Academy, and was beaten the first time by Onslow, the second time by Clapisson, and the third time he conquered by a majority of one vote against Panseron, Vogel, Leborne, and others, including, as always, Gounod. He died before the Damnation de Faust was appreciated in France, although it was the most remarkable musical composition France had produced. They hissed its performance? Not at all; "they were merely indifferent"—it is Berlioz who tells us this. It passed unnoticed. He died before he had seen Les Troyens played in its entirety, though it was one of the noblest works of the French lyric theatre that had been composed since the death of Gluck.[31] But there is no need to be astonished. To hear these works to-day one must go to Germany. And although the dramatic work of Berlioz has found its Bayreuth—thanks to Mottl, to Karlsruhe and Munich—and the marvellous Benvenuto Cellini has been played in twenty German towns,[32] and regarded as a masterpiece by Weingartner and Richard Strauss, what manager of a French theatre would think of producing such works?
But this is not all. What was the bitterness of failure compared with the great anguish of death? Berlioz saw all those he loved die one after the other: his father, his mother, Henrietta Smithson, Marie Recio. Then only his son Louis remained.
He was the captain of a merchant vessel; a clever, good-hearted boy, but restless and nervous, irresolute and unhappy, like his father. "He has the misfortune to resemble me in everything," said Berlioz; "and we love each other like a couple of twins."[33] "Ah, my poor Louis," he wrote to him, "what should I do without you?" A few months afterwards he learnt that Louis had died in far-away seas.
He was now alone.[34] There were no more friendly voices; all that he heard was a hideous duet between loneliness and weariness, sung in his ear during the bustle of the day and in the silence of the night.[35] He was wasted with disease. In 1856, at Weimar, following great fatigue, he was seized with an internal malady. It began with great mental distress; he used to sleep in the streets. He suffered constantly; he was like "a tree without leaves, streaming with rain." At the end of 1861, the disease was in an acute stage. He had attacks of pain sometimes lasting thirty hours, during which he would writhe in agony in his bed. "I live in the midst of my physical pain, overwhelmed with weariness. Death is very slow."[36]
Worst of all, in the heart of his misery, there was nothing that comforted him. He believed in nothing—neither in God nor immortality.
"I have no faith. … I hate all philosophy and everything that resembles it, whether religious or otherwise. … I am as incapable of making a medicine of faith as of having faith in medicine."[37]
"God is stupid and cruel in his complete indifference."[38]
He did not believe in beauty or honour, in mankind or himself.
"Everything passes. Space and time consume beauty, youth, love, glory, genius. Human life is nothing; death is no better. Worlds are born and die like ourselves. All is nothing. Yes, yes, yes! All is nothing. … To love or hate, enjoy or suffer, admire or sneer, live or die—what does it matter? There is nothing in greatness or littleness, beauty or ugliness. Eternity is indifferent; indifference is eternal."[39]
"I am weary of life; and I am forced to see that belief in absurdities is necessary to human minds, and that it is born in them as insects are born in swamps."[40]
"You make me laugh with your old words about a mission to fulfil. What a missionary! But there is in me an inexplicable mechanism which works in
