e understands why it encountered, and still encounters, so much secret
hostility. How many accomplished musicians of distinction and learning,
who pay honour to artistic tradition, are incapable of understanding
Berlioz because they cannot bear the air of liberty breathed by his
music. They are so used to thinking in German, that Berlioz's speech
upsets and shocks them. I can well believe it. It is the first time a
French musician has dared to think in French; and that is the reason why
I warned you of the danger of accepting too meekly German ideas about
Berlioz. Men like Weingartner, Richard Strauss, and Mottl--thoroughbred
musicians--are, without doubt, able to appreciate Berlioz's genius
better and more quickly than we French musicians. But I rather mistrust
the kind of appreciation they feel for a spirit so opposed to their own.
It is for France and French people to learn to read his thoughts; they
are intimately theirs, and one day will give them their salvation.

* * * * *

Berlioz's other great originality lay in his talent for music that was
suited to the spirit of the common people, recently raised to
sovereignty, and the young democracy. In spite of his aristocratic
disdain, his soul was with the masses. M. Hippeau applies to him Taine's
definition of a romantic artist: "the plebeian of a new race, richly
gifted, and filled with aspirations, who, having attained for the first
time the world's heights, noisily displays the ferment of his mind and
heart." Berlioz grew up in the midst of revolutions and stories of
Imperial achievement. He wrote his cantata for the _Prix de Rome_ in
July, 1830, "to the hard, dull noise of stray bullets, which whizzed
above the roofs, and came to flatten themselves against the wall near
his window."[93] When he had finished this cantata, he went, "pistol in
hand, to play the blackguard in Paris with the _sainte canaille_." He
sang the _Marseillaise_, and made "all who had a voice and heart and
blood in their veins"[94] sing it too. On his journey to Italy he
travelled from Marseilles to Livourne with Mazzinian conspirators, who
were going to take part in the insurrection of Modena and Bologna.
Whether he was conscious of it or not, he was the musician of
revolutions; his sympathies were with the people.

[Footnote 93: _Memoires_, I, 155.]

[Footnote 94: These words are taken from Berlioz's directions on the
score of his arrangement of the _Marseil