’Weber passes by us amid a romantic landscape, conducting the ballads of the dead amidst weeping willows and oaks with twisted branches.  Schumann follows him, beneath the pale moonlight, along the shores of silvery lakes.  And behold, here comes Rossini, incarnation of the musical gift, so gay, so natural, without the least concern for expression, caring nothing for the public, and who isn’t my man by a long way—­ah! certainly not—­but then, all the same, he astonishes one by his wealth of production, and the huge effects he derives from an accumulation of voices and an ever-swelling repetition of the same strain.  These three led to Meyerbeer, a cunning fellow who profited by everything, introducing symphony into opera after Weber, and giving dramatic expression to the unconscious formulas of Rossini.  Oh! the superb bursts of sound, the feudal pomp, the martial mysticism, the quivering of fantastic legends, the cry of passion ringing out through history!  And such finds!—­each instrument endowed with a personality, the dramatic recitatives accompanied symphoniously by the orchestra —­the typical musical phrase on which an entire work is built!  Ah! he was a great fellow—­a very great fellow indeed!’

‘I am going to shut up, sir,’ said the waiter, drawing near.

And, seeing that Gagniere did not as much as look round, he went to awaken the petty retired tradesman, who was still dozing in front of his saucer.

‘I am going to shut up, sir.’

The belated customer rose up, shivering, fumbled in the dark corner where he was seated for his walking-stick, and when the waiter had picked it up for him from under the seats he went away.

And Gagniere rambled on: 

’Berlioz has mingled literature with his work.  He is the musical illustrator of Shakespeare, Virgil, and Goethe.  But what a painter! —­the Delacroix of music, who makes sound blaze forth amidst effulgent contrasts of colour.  And withal he has romanticism in his brain, a religious mysticism that carries him away, an ecstasy that soars higher than mountain summits.  A bad builder of operas, but marvellous in detached pieces, asking too much at times of the orchestra which he tortures, having pushed the personality of instruments to its furthest limits; for each instrument represents a character to him.  Ah! that remark of his about clarionets:  “They typify beloved women.”  Ah! it has always made a shiver run down my back.  And Chopin, so dandified in his Byronism; the dreamy poet of those who suffer from neurosis!  And Mendelssohn, that faultless chiseller! a Shakespeare in dancing pumps, whose “songs without words” are gems for women of intellect!  And after that—­after that—­a man should go down on his knees.’

There was now only one gas-lamp alight just above his head, and the waiter standing behind him stood waiting amid the gloomy, chilly void of the room.  Gagniere’s voice had come to a reverential tremolo.  He was reaching devotional fervour as he approached the inner tabernacle, the holy of holies.