[Footnote 105:  Berlioz never ceased to inveigh against the Revolution of 1848—­which should have had his sympathies.  Instead of finding material, like Wagner, in the excitement of that time for impassioned compositions, he worked at L’Enfance du Christ.  He affected absolute indifference—­he who was so little made for indifference.  He approved the State’s action, and despised its visionary hopes.] What ingratitude!  He owed to these revolutions, to these democratic storms, to these human tempests, the best of all his genius—­and he disowned it all.  This musician of a new era took refuge in the past.

* * * * *

Well, what did it matter?  Whether he wished it or not, he opened out some magnificent roads for Art.  He has shown the music of France the way in which her genius should tread; he has shown her possibilities she had never before dreamed of.  He has given us a musical utterance at once truthful and expressive, free from foreign traditions, coming from the depths of our being, and reflecting our spirit; an utterance which responded to his imagination, to his instinct for what was picturesque, to his fleeting impressions, and his delicate shades of feeling.  He has laid the strong foundation of a national and popular music for the greatest republic in Europe.

These are shining qualities.  If Berlioz had had Wagner’s reasoning power and had made the utmost use of his intuitions, if he had had Wagner’s will and had shaped the inspirations of his genius and welded them into a solid whole, I venture to say that he would have made a revolution in music greater than Wagner’s own; for Wagner, though stronger and more master of himself, was less original and, at bottom, but the close of a glorious past.

Will that revolution still be accomplished?  Perhaps; but it has suffered half a century’s delay.  Berlioz bitterly calculated that people would begin to understand him about the year 1940.[106]

After all, why be astonished that his mighty mission was too much for him?  He was so alone.[107] As people forsook him, his loneliness stood out in greater relief.  He was alone in the age of Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, and Franck; alone, yet containing a whole world in himself, of which his enemies, his friends, his admirers, and he himself, were not quite conscious; alone, and tortured by his loneliness.  Alone—­the word is repeated by the music of his youth and his old age, by the Symphonie fantastique and Les Troyens.  It is the word I read in the portrait before me as I write these lines—­the beautiful portrait of the Memoires, where his face looks out in sad and stern reproach on the age that so misunderstood him.

[Footnote 106:  “My musical career would finish very pleasingly if only I could live for a hundred and forty years” (Memoires, II, 390).]