It was between the two periods of his Conservatory life that he endured his chief sentimental misfortune,—­his falling in love with and finally marrying Henrietta Smithson.  Miss Smithson was a young English actress playing Shakespearean roles in France with a passing success.  She was exquisitely lovely—­Delaroche has painted her spirituelle beauty in his ‘Ophelia.’  The marriage was the typically unfortunate artist-match; and she became a paralytic invalid for years.  After her death, tours in Germany and elsewhere, new works, new troubles, enthusiasms, and disappointments filled up the remainder of the composer’s days.  He returned to his beloved Dauphine, war-worn and almost as one who has outlived life.  In his provincial retreat he composed the huge operatic duology ‘The Trojans at Carthage,’ and ‘The Taking of Troy,’ turning once more to Virgil, his early literary love.  Neither of them is often heard now, any more than his amazing ‘Benvenuto Cellini.’  Their author died in Dauphine in 1869, weary, disenchanted, but conscious that he would be greater in the eyes of a coming generation than ever he had been during his harassed life.

Berlioz’s literary remains are valuable as criticisms, and their personal matter is of brisk and varied charm.  His intense feeling for Shakespeare influenced his whole aesthetic life.  He was extremely well read.  His most unchecked tendency to romanticism was balanced by a fine feeling for the classics.  He loved the greater Greek and Latin writers.  His Autobiography is a perfect picture of himself emotionally, and exhibits his wide aesthetic nature.  His Letters are equally faithful as portraiture.  He possessed a distinctively literary style.  He tells us how he fell in love—­twice, thrice; records the disgraceful cabals and intrigues against his professional success, and explains how a landscape affected his nerves.  He is excellent reading, apparently without taking much pains to be so.  Vivacity, wit, sincerity, are salient traits.  In his volume of musical essays entitled ‘A Travers Chants’ (an untranslatable title which may be paraphrased ’Memoirs of Music and Musicians’) are superior appreciations of musicians and interpreters and performances in opera-house and concert-hall, expressed with grace and taste in the feuilletonist’s best manner.  In the Journal des Debats, year by year, he wrote himself down indisputably among the great French critics; and he never misused his critical post to make it a lever for his own advantage.  His great treatise on Orchestration is a standard work not displaced by Gevaert or more recent authorities.  He was not only a musical intelligence of enormous capacity:  he offers perhaps as typical an embodiment of the French artistic temperament as can be pointed out.

THE ITALIAN RACE AS MUSICIANS AND AUDITORS

From Berlioz’s Autobiography