ens a Troie_. In
_Les Troyens a Carthage_, the fragrance of the Aeneid is shed over the
night of love, and we see the luminous sky and hear the murmur of the
sea. Some of his melodies are like statues, or the pure lines of
Athenian friezes, or the noble gesture of beautiful Italian girls, or
the undulating profile of the Albanian hills filled with divine
laughter. He has done more than felt and translated into music the
beauty of the Mediterranean--he has created beings worthy of a Greek
tragedy. His Cassandre alone would suffice to rank him among the
greatest tragic poets that music has ever known. And Cassandre is a
worthy sister of Wagner's Bruennhilde; but she has the advantage of
coming of a nobler race, and of having a lofty restraint of spirit and
action that Sophocles himself would have loved.

Not enough attention has been drawn to the classical nobility from which
Berlioz's art so spontaneously springs. It is not fully acknowledged
that he was, of all nineteenth-century musicians, the one who had in the
highest degree the sense of plastic beauty. Nor do people always
recognise that he was a writer of sweet and flowing melodies.
Weingartner expressed the surprise he felt when, imbued with current
prejudice against Berlioz's lack of melodic invention, he opened, by
chance, the score of the overture of _Benvenuto_ and found in that short
composition, which barely takes ten minutes to play, not one or two, but
four or five melodies of admirable richness and originality:--

"I began to laugh, both with pleasure at having discovered such a
treasure, and with annoyance at finding how narrow human judgment is.
Here I counted five themes, all of them plastic and expressive of
personality; of admirable workmanship, varied in form, working up by
degrees to a climax, and then finishing with strong effect. And this
from a composer who was said by critics and the public to be devoid of
creative power! From that day on there has been for me another great
citizen in the republic of art."[74]

[Footnote 74: _Musikfuehrer_, 29 November, 1903.]

Before this, Berlioz had written in 1864:--

"It is quite easy for others to convince themselves that, without
even limiting me to take a very short melody as the theme of a
composition--as the greatest musicians have often done--I have
always endeavoured to put a wealth of melody into my compositions.
One may, of course, dispute the worth of these melodies,