Chapter 2

Who does not know his passion for Henrietta Smithson? It was a sad story. He fell in love with an English actress who played Juliet (Was it she or Juliet whom he loved?). He caught but a glance of her, and it was all over with him. He cried out, "Ah, I am lost!" He desired her; she repulsed him. He lived in a delirium of suffering and passion; he wandered about for days and nights like a madman, up and down Paris and its neighbourhood, without purpose or rest or relief, until sleep overcame him wherever it found him--among the sheaves in a field near Villejuif, in a meadow near Sceaux, on the bank of the frozen Seine near Neuilly, in the snow, and once on a table in the Café Cardinal, where he slept for five hours, to the great alarm of the waiters, who thought he was dead.[17] Meanwhile, he was told slanderous gossip about Henrietta, which he readily believed. Then he despised her, and dishonoured her publicly in his _Symphonie fantastique_, paying homage in his bitter resentment to Camille Moke, a pianist, to whom he lost his heart without delay.

[Footnote 17: _Mémoires_, I, 98.]

After a time Henrietta reappeared. She had now lost her youth and her power; her beauty was waning, and she was in debt. Berlioz's passion was at once rekindled. This time Henrietta accepted his advances. He made alterations in his symphony, and offered it to her in homage of his love. He won her, and married her, with fourteen thousand francs debt. He had captured his dream--Juliet! Ophelia! What was she really? A charming Englishwoman, cold, loyal, and sober-minded, who understood nothing of his passion; and who, from the time she became his wife, loved him jealously and sincerely, and thought to confine him within the narrow world of domestic life. But his affections became restive, and he lost his heart to a Spanish actress (it was always an actress, a virtuoso, or a part) and left poor Ophelia, and went off with Marie Recio, the Inès of _Favorite_, the page of _Comte Ory_--a practical, hardheaded woman, an indifferent singer with a mania for singing. The haughty Berlioz was forced to fawn upon the directors of the theatre in order to get her parts, to write flattering notices in praise of her talents, and even to let her make his own melodies discordant at the concerts he arranged.[18] It would all be dreadfully ridiculous if this weakness of character had not brought tragedy in its train.

So the one he really loved, and who always loved him, remained alone, without friends, in Paris, where she was a stranger. She drooped in silence and pined slowly away, bedridden, paralysed, and unable to speak during eight years of suffering. Berlioz suffered too, for he loved her still and was torn with pity--"pity, the most painful of all emotions."[19] But of what use was this pity? He left Henrietta to suffer alone and to die just the same. And, what was worse, as we learn from Legouvé, he let his mistress, the odious Recio, make a scene before poor Henrietta.[20] Recio told him of it and boasted about what she had done.

[Footnote 18: "Isn't it really devilish," he said to Legouvé, "tragic and silly at the same time? I should deserve to go to hell if I wasn't there already."]

[Footnote 19: _Mémoires_, II, 335. See the touching passages he wrote on Henrietta Smithson's death.]

[Footnote 20: "One day, Henrietta, who was living alone at Montmartre, heard someone ring the bell, and went to open the door.

"'Is Mme. Berlioz at home?'

"'I am Mme. Berlioz.'

"'You are mistaken; I asked for Mme. Berlioz.'

"'And I tell you, I am Mme. Berlioz.'

"'No, you are not. You are speaking of the old Mme. Berlioz, the one who was abandoned; I am speaking of the young and pretty and loved one. Well, that is myself!'

"And Recio went out and banged the door after her.

"Legouvé said to Berlioz, 'Who told you this abominable thing? I suppose she who did it; and then she boasted about it into the bargain. Why didn't you turn her out of the house?' 'How could I?' said Berlioz in broken tones, 'I love her'" _(Soixante ans de souvenirs_).]

And Berlioz did nothing--"How could I? I love her."

One would be hard upon such a man if one was not disarmed by his own sufferings. But let us go on. I should have liked to pass over these traits, but I have no right to; I must show you the extraordinary feebleness of the man's character. "Man's character," did I say? No, it was the character of a woman without a will, the victim of her nerves.[21]

[Footnote 21: From this woman's nature came his love of revenge, "a thing needless, and yet necessary," he said to his friend Hiller, who, after having made him write the _Symphonie fantastique_ to spite Henrietta Smithson, next made him write the wretched fantasia _Euphonia_ to spite Camille Moke, now Mme. Pleyel. One would feel obliged to draw more attention to the way he often adorned or perverted the truth if one did not feel it arose from his irrepressible and glowing imagination far more than from any intention to mislead; for I believe his real nature to have been a-very straightforward one. I will quote the story of his friend Crispino, a young countryman from Tivoli, as a characteristic example. Berlioz says in his _Mémoires_ (I, 229): "One day when Crispino was lacking in respect I made-him a present of two shirts, a pair of trousers, and three good kicks behind." In a note he added, "This is a lie, and is the result of an artist's tendency to aim at effect. I never kicked Crispino." But Berlioz took care afterwards to omit this note. One attaches as little importance to his other small boasts as to this one. The errors in the _Mémoires_ have been greatly exaggerated; and besides, Berlioz is the first to warn his readers that he only wrote what pleased him, and in his preface says that he is not writing his Confessions. Can one blame him for that?]

* * * * *

Such people are destined to unhappiness; and if they make other people suffer, one may be sure that it is only half of what they suffer themselves. They have a peculiar gift for attracting and gathering up trouble; they savour sorrow like wine, and do not lose a drop of it. Life seemed desirous that Berlioz should be steeped in suffering; and his misfortunes were so real that it would be unnecessary to add to them any exaggerations that history has handed down to us.

People find fault with Berlioz's continual complaints; and I, too, find in them a lack of virility and almost a lack of dignity. To all appearances, he had far fewer material reasons for unhappiness than--I won't say Beethoven--Wagner and other great men, past, present, and future. When thirty-five years old he had achieved glory; and Paganini proclaimed him Beethoven's successor. What more could he want? He was discussed 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]

[Footnote 22: _Mémoires_, II, 158. The heartaches expressed in this chapter will be felt by every artist.]

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 finished I 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]

[Footnote 23: _Mémoires_, II, 349.]

[Footnote 24: Berlioz has already touchingly replied to any reproaches that might be made in the words that follow the story I have quoted. "'Coward!' some young enthusiast will say, 'you ought to have written it; you should have been bold.' Ah, young man, you who call me coward did not have to look upon what I did; had you done so you, too, would have had no choice. My wife was there, half dead, only able to moan; she had to have three nurses, and a doctor every day to visit her; and I was sure of the disastrous result of any musical adventure. No, I was not a coward; I know I was only human. I like to believe that I honoured art in proving that she had left me enough reason to distinguish between courage and cruelty" (_Mémoires_, II, 350).]

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]

[Footnote 25: In a note in the _Mémoires_, Berlioz publishes a letter of Mendelssohn's which protests his "good friendship," and he writes these bitter words: "I have just seen in a volume of Mendelssohn's Letters what his friendship for me consisted of. He says to his mother, in what is plainly a description of myself, '---- is a perfect caricature, without a spark of talent ... there are times when I should like to swallow him up'" (_Mémoires_, II, 48). Berlioz did not add that Mendelssohn also said: "They pretend that Berlioz seeks lofty ideals in art. I don't think so at all. What he wants is to get himself married." The injustice of these insulting words will disgust all those who remember that when Berlioz married Henrietta Smithson she brought as dowry nothing but debts; and that he had only three hundred francs himself, which a friend had lent him.]

[Footnote 26: Liszt repudiated him later.]

[Footnote 27: Written in an article on the _Ouverture de Waverley_ (_Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_).]

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.

[Footnote 28: Wagner, who had criticised Berlioz since 1840, and who published a detailed study of his works in his _Oper und Drama_ in 1851, wrote to Liszt in 1855: "I own that it would interest me very much to make the acquaintance of Berlioz's symphonies, and I should like to see the scores. If you have them, will you lend them to me?"]

[Footnote 29: See Berlioz's letter, cited by J. Tiersot, _Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps_, p. 275.]

[Footnote 30: _Roméo, Faust, La Nonne sanglante_.]

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.

[Footnote 31: I shall content myself here with noting a fact, which I shall deal with more fully in another essay at the end of this book: it is the decline of musical taste in France--and, I rather think, in all Europe--since 1835 or 1840. Berlioz says in his _Mémoires_: "Since the first performance of _Roméo et Juliette_ the indifference of the French public for all that concerns art and literature has grown incredibly" (_Mémoires_, II, 263). Compare the shouts of excitement and the tears that were drawn from the dilettanti of 1830 (_Mémoires_, I, 81), at the performances of Italian operas or Gluck's works, with the coldness of the public between 1840 and 1870. A mantle of ice covered art then. How much Berlioz must have suffered. In Germany the great romantic age was dead. Only Wagner remained to give life to music; and he drained all that was left in Europe of love and enthusiasm for music. Berlioz died truly of asphyxia.]

[Footnote 32: Here is an official list of the towns where _Benvenuto_ has been played since 1879 (I am indebted for this information to M. Victor Chapót, Berlioz's grandnephew). They are, in alphabetical order: Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Dresden, Frankfort-On-Main, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Hamburg, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Mannheim, Metz, Munich, Prague, Schwerin, Stettin, Strasburg, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Weimar.]

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]

[Footnote 33: _Mémoires_, II, 420.]

[Footnote 34: "I do not know how Berlioz has managed to be cut off like this. He has neither friends nor followers; neither the warm sun of popularity nor the pleasant shade of friendship" (Liszt to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 16 May, 1861).]

[Footnote 35: In a letter to Bennet he says, "I am weary, I am weary...." How often does this piteous cry sound in his letters towards the end of his life. "I feel I am going to die.... I am weary unto death" (21 August, 1868--six months before his death).]

[Footnote 36: Letter to Asger Hammerick, 1865.]

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]

[Footnote 37: Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 21 September, 1862; and August, 1864.]

[Footnote 38: _Mémoires_, II, 335. He shocked Mendelssohn, and even Wagner, by his irreligion. (See Berlioz's letter to Wagner, 10 September, 1855.)]

[Footnote 39: _Les Grotesques de la Musique_, pp. 295-6.]

[Footnote 40: Letter to the Abbé Girod. See Hippeau, _Berlioz intime_, p. 434.]

"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 spite of all arguments; and I let it work because I cannot stop it. What disgusts me most is the certainty that beauty does not exist for the majority of these human monkeys."[41]

"The unsolvable enigma of the world, the existence of evil and pain, the fierce madness of mankind, and the stupid cruelty that it inflicts hourly and everywhere on the most inoffensive beings and on itself--all this has reduced me to the state of unhappy and forlorn resignation of a scorpion surrounded by live coals. The most I can do is not to wound myself with my own dart."[42]

"I am in my sixty-first year; and I have no more hopes or illusions or aspirations. I am alone; and my contempt for the stupidity and dishonesty of men, and my hatred for their wicked cruelty, are at their height. Every hour I say to Death, 'When you like!' What is he waiting for?"[43]

[Footnote 41: Letter to Bennet. He did not believe in patriotism. "Patriotism? Fetichism! Cretinism!" (_Mémoires_, II, 261).]

[Footnote 42: Letter to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 1862.]

[Footnote 43: _Mémoires_, II, 391.]

And yet he fears the death he invites. It is the strongest, the bitterest, the truest feeling he has. No musician since old Roland de Lassus has feared it with that intensity. Do you remember Herod's sleepless nights in _L'Enfance du Christ_, or Faust's soliloquy, or the anguish of Cassandra, or the burial of Juliette?--through all this you will find the whispered fear of annihilation. The wretched man was haunted by this fear, as a letter published by M. Julien Tiersot shows:--

"My favourite walk, especially when it is raining, really raining in torrents, is the cemetery of Montmartre, which is near my house. I often go there; there is much that draws me to it. The day before yesterday I passed two hours in the cemetery; I found a comfortable seat on a costly tomb, and I went to sleep.... Paris is to me a cemetery and her pavements are tomb-stones. Everywhere are memories of friends or enemies that are dead.... I do nothing but suffer unceasing pain and unspeakable weariness. I wonder night and day if I shall die in great pain or with little of it--I am not foolish enough to hope to die without any pain at all. Why are we not dead?"[44]

His music is like these mournful words; it is perhaps even more terrible, more gloomy, for it breathes death.[45] What a contrast: a soul greedy of life and preyed upon by death. It is this that makes his life such an awful tragedy. When Wagner met Berlioz he heaved a sigh of relief--he had at last found a man more unhappy than himself.[46]

[Footnote 44: Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 January, 1859; 30 August, 1864; 13 July, 1866; and to A. Morel, 21 August, 1864.]

[Footnote 45: " ... Qui viderit illas De lacrymis factas sentiet esse meis," wrote Berlioz, as an inscription for his _Tristes_ in 1854.]

[Footnote 46: "One instantly recognises a companion in misfortune; and I found I was a happier man than Berlioz" (Wagner to Liszt, 5 July, 1855).]

On the threshold of death he turned in despair to the one ray of light left him--_Stella montis_, the inspiration of his childish love; Estelle, now old, a grandmother, withered by age and grief. He made a pilgrimage to Meylan, near Grenoble, to see her. He was then sixty-one years old and she was nearly seventy. "The past! the past! O Time! Nevermore! Nevermore!"[47]