rlioz was disheartened. Life had conquered him. It was not that he had
lost any of his artistic mastery; on the contrary, his compositions
became more and more finished; and nothing in his earlier work attained
the pure beauty of some of the pages of _L'Enfance du Christ_ (1850-4),
or of _Les Troyens_ (1855-63). But he was losing his power; and his
intense feeling, his revolutionary ideas, and his inspiration (which in
his youth had taken the place of the confidence he lacked) were failing
him. He now lived on the past--the _Huit scenes de Faust_ (1828) held
the germs of _La Damnation de Faust_ (1846); since 1833, he had been
thinking of _Beatrice et Benedict_ (1862); the ideas in _Les Troyens_
were inspired by his childish worship of Virgil, and had been with him
all his life. But with what difficulty he now finished his task! He had
only taken seven months to write _Romeo_, and "on account of not being
able to write the _Requiem_ fast enough, he had adopted a kind of
musical shorthand";[63] but he took seven or eight years to write _Les
Troyens_, alternating between moods of enthusiasm and disgust, and
feeling indifference and doubt about his work. He groped his way
hesitatingly and unsteadily; he hardly understood what he was doing. He
admired the more mediocre pages of his work: the scene of the Laocoon,
the finale of the last act of the _Les Troyens a Troie_, the last scene
with Aeneas in _Les Troyens a Carthage_.[64] The empty pomposities of
Spontini mingle with the loftiest conceptions. One might say that his
genius became a stranger to him: it was the mechanical work of an
unconscious force, like "stalactites in a dripping grotto." He had no
impetus. It was only a matter of time before the roof of the grotto
would give way. One is struck with the mournful despair with which he
works; it is his last will and testament that he is making. And when he
has finished it, he will have finished everything. His work is ended; if
he lived another hundred years he would not have the heart to add
anything more to it. The only thing that remains--and it is what he is
about to do--is to wrap himself in silence and die.

[Footnote 63: _Memoires_, I, 307.]

[Footnote 64: About this time he wrote to Liszt regarding _L'Enfance du
Christ_: "I think I have hit upon something good in Herod's scena and
air with the soothsayers; it is full of character, and will, I hope,
please you. There are, perhaps, more graceful and pleasing things