[Footnote 205:  Written in a letter to his sister, Nanci, on 3 April, 1850.]

“Well,” said Gautier, “what you tell me pleases me very much.  I am like you; I prefer silence to music.  I have only just succeeded, after having lived part of my life with a singer, in being able to tell good music from bad; but it is all the same to me."[206]

And he added: 

“But it is a very curious thing that all other writers of our time are like this.  Balzac hated music.  Hugo could not stand it.  Even Lamartine, who himself is like a piano to be hired or sold, holds it in horror!”

It needed a complete upheaval of the nation—­a political and moral upheaval—­to change that frame of mind.  Some indication of the change was making itself felt in the last years of the second Empire.  Wagner, who suffered from the hostility or indifference of the public in 1860, at the time when Tannhaeuser was performed at the Opera, had already found, however, a few understanding people in Paris who discerned his genius and sincerely admired him.  The most interesting of the writers who first began to understand musical emotion is Charles Baudelaire.  In 1861, Pasdeloup gave the first Concerts populaires de musique classique at the Cirque d’Hiver.  The Berlioz Festival, organised by M. Reyer, on March 23rd, 1870, a year after Berlioz’s death, revealed to France the grandeur of its greatest musical genius, and was the beginning of a campaign of public reparation to his memory.

[Footnote 206:  We remark, nevertheless, that that did not prevent Gautier from being a musical critic.]

The disasters of the war in 1870 regenerated the nation’s artistic spirit.  Music felt its effect immediately.[207] On February 24th, 1871, the Societe nationale de Musique was instituted to propagate the works of French composers; and in 1873 the Concerts de l’Association artistique were started under M. Colonne’s direction; and these concerts, besides making people acquainted with the classic composers of symphonies and the masters of the young French school, were especially devoted to the honouring of Berlioz, whose triumph reached its summit about 1880.[208]

[Footnote 207:  I wish to make known from the beginning that I am only noticing here the greater musical doings of the nation, and making no mention of works which have not had an important influence on this movement.]

[Footnote 208:  In the meanwhile France saw the brilliant rise and extinction of a great artist—­the most spontaneous of all her musicians—­Georges Bizet, who died in 1875, aged thirty-seven.  “Bizet was the last genius to discover a new beauty,” said Nietzsche; “Bizet discovered new lands—­the Southern lands of music,” Carmen (1875) and L’Arlesienne (1872) are masterpieces of the lyrical Latin drama.  Their style is luminous, concise, and well-defined; the figures are outlined with incisive precision.  The music is full of light and movement, and is a great contrast to Wagner’s philosophical symphonies, and its popular subject only serves to strengthen its aristocratic distinction.  By its nature and its clear perception of the spirit of the race it was well in advance of its time.  What a place Bizet might have taken in our art if he had only lived twenty years longer!]