d he never sugar-coated his opinion, however
unpalatable to others. He was already in a state of fierce revolt
against the conventional forms of the music of his day, and no
trumpet-tones of protest were too loud for him. He had now begun to
write for the journals, though oftentimes his articles were refused on
account of their fierce assaults. "Your hands are too full of stones,
and there are too many glass windows about," was the excuse of one
editor, softening the return of a manuscript. But Berlioz did not fully
know himself or appreciate the tendencies fermenting within him until
in 1830 he became the victim of a grand Shakespearean passion. The great
English dramatist wrought most powerfully on Victor Hugo and Hector
Berlioz, and had much to do with their artistic development. Berlioz
gives a very interesting account of his Shakespearean enthusiasm, which
also involved one of the catastrophes of his own personal life. "An
English company gave some plays of Shakespeare, at that time wholly
unknown to the French public. I went to the first performance of
'Hamlet' at the Odeon. I saw, in the part of _Ophelia_, Harriet
Smithson, who became my wife five years afterward. The effect of her
prodigious talent, or rather of her dramatic genius, upon my heart and
imagination, is only comparable to the complete overturning which the
poet, whose worthy interpreter she was, caused in me. Shakespeare, thus
coming on me suddenly, struck me as with a thunderbolt. His lightning
opened the heaven of art to me with a sublime crash, and lighted up its
farthest depths. I recognized true dramatic grandeur, beauty, and truth.
I measured at the same time the boundless inanity of the notions of
Shakespeare in France, spread abroad by Voltaire,

'... ce singe de genie,
Chez l'homme en mission par le diable envoye--'

(that ape of genius, an emissary from the devil to man),' and the
pitiful poverty of our old poetry of pedagogues and ragged-school
teachers. I saw, I understood, I felt that I was alive and must arise
and walk." Of the influence of "Romeo and Juliet" on him, he says:
"Exposing myself to the burning sun and balmy nights of Italy, seeing
this love as quick and sudden as thought, burning like lava, imperious,
irresistible, boundless, and pure and beautiful as the smile of angels,
those furious scenes of vengeance, those distracted embraces, those
struggles between love and death, was too much. After the melancholy,
th