Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/508

498[April 24, 1869] passed by him on the music of a kindred spirit, Herr Wagner: yet he could write that amazing opera, Les Troyens.

The creative, the critical, and the presiding artist were alike incomplete. When Berlioz was in London as a professed conductor, he had no scruple in more than once standing before an orchestra to superintend the performance of music which he had never rehearsed, nor even perused, such as Mendelssohn's violin concertos. Yet who could write more glibly and sonorously about sincerity and conscience in art than he could? Who be more intensely sarcastic on the slovenly proceedings of those who protested nothing, as compared with himself? In brief, as an example of arrogance in censure, and carelessness in preparation, Berlioz, as a critic, cannot be too plainly characterised for the guidance and warning of those who take on them the responsibility of dealing out praise and blame, and of lecturing a younger generation on the truths, beauties, and purposes of Art.

When, however, Berlioz was in one of his quieter and less antagonistic moods, and confined himself to the very few subjects he had mastered, he could be brilliant, original, and instructive. His criticisms on Gluck's music, whether written or spoken, were deep, truthful, and ingenious. Next in his favour stood the compositions of Beethoven's decay time. After these came the music of Weber. It will be remembered that, to qualify Der Freischütz to appear on the stage of grand French Opera, where spoken dialogue is not allowed, he composed musical recitatives. The confusion of these, and their utter absence of charm or dramatic expression, can hardly be overrated.

When M. Berlioz cared to be so, he was admirable as an orchestral conductor—fiery, delicate, precise, and animating; gesticulating, it may be, a little too much, but obviously so thoroughly in earnest, that his directions and gestures had not the offence which always attaches itself to feigned enthusiasm. The only instrument with which he was practically conversant was the guitar. Of the organ, as has been said, he knew nothing. He praised the harp to the skies, and his use of that picturesque, but restricted instrument, was original and effective. Unless memory has strangely exaggerated the facts, at the execution of some numbers of the Romeo and Juliet symphony in London, a squadron of ten harps was called in, to be used only in the movement, "The Fête of the Capulets." He had ideas of monstrous combinations: of four distant orchestras or more, brought under simultaneous control by the agency of the electric telegraph. Yet what was the most gigantic and ambitious of his devices compared with the orchestra of cannons, by the platoon-firing of which Sarti timed his Te Deum, composed on the occasion of the taking of Ocsakow by the Russians?

To sum up, the artistic career of Berlioz, cannot be called either a healthy or a happy one. He was devoured by aspirations. One so shrewd as himself, however, must have felt, in the secrecy of self-examination, that there was no chance of his ever realising them permanently. Sterile in melody, incomplete in science, with a vague, yet passionate sense that something was yet to be done in music, especially in the combination of sounds, as distinguished from the arrangements and expression of thoughts, he bent himself to tasks of a difficulty altogether impossible to overcome. Taking the works of Beethoven's last unhappy years as his point of departure, he tried to improve on his model—forgetting, in the violence of his resolution, that Beethoven's crudest and least well-cemented works, flung out during a period of misery and defiance, still contain a treasure of original ideas which no uncouth treatment or maltreatment could conceal, still less annihilate. It is perfectly true, that he was indulged with occasional outbursts of patronage, as in Russia, Vienna, Baden-Baden, and Weimar. But these, it may be fairly asserted, failed to place him in the solid position of European fame which he coveted. His greatest admirers, as was once pithily remarked, were those who the least understood music. It may be doubted, without any undue scepticism, whether works, so slender in idea, so elaborately and awkwardly overwrought as his, will be long thought worth the trouble of reproduction, now that the personality of their author as a superintendent, the sarcasms of his tongue, and the severities of his pen, are no more.

surprised none of the keen-eyed Golden Islanders that Mrs. Magniac shortly exchanged her name for that of Fonnereau—and reigned at Mon Désir.

To do the lady justice, she betrayed no atom of triumph. Mistress, of course, she was—and mistress she evidently intended to be—but Geraldine had abdicated with a grace and promptitude that left nothing to desire; and Melusina repaid her with a gushing tenderness nothing short of maternal finding—herself, in turn, amply recompensed by the increasing gratitude and confidence of her husband.

Her influence over the latter augmented, almost daily. Poor Geraldine, while unable to point to any one act or word, on the part of her stepmother, to justify her suspicion, became sensible that she was gradually undermining the attachment that had hitherto subsisted between her father and herself. If this conviction—always bitterly present to her mind—occasionally tinged her speech, Melusina would meet it with a patient smile—or, what was more intolerable, a glance of intelligent appeal, to her husband—which, if it produced no present result, satisfied