[Footnote 72:  “The chief characteristics of my music are passionate expression, inward warmth, rhythmic in pulses, and unforeseen effects.  When I speak of passionate expression, I mean an expression that desperately strives to reproduce the inward feeling of its subject, even when the theme is contrary to passion, and deals with gentle emotions or the deepest calm.  It is this kind of expression that may be found in L’Enfance du Christ, and, above all, in the scene of Le Ciel in the Damnation de Faust and in the Sanctus of the Requiem” (Memoires, II, 361).]

Whatever one may think of this volcanic force, of this torrential stream of youth and passion, it is impossible to deny them; one might as well deny the sun.

And I shall not dwell on Berlioz’s love of Nature, which, as M. Prudhomme shows us, is the soul of a composition like the Damnation and, one might say, of all great compositions.  No musician, with the exception of Beethoven, has loved Nature so profoundly.  Wagner himself did not realise the intensity of emotion which she roused in Berlioz,[73] and how this feeling impregnated the music of the Damnation, of Romeo, and of Les Troyens.

[Footnote 73:  “So you are in the midst of melting glaciers in your Niebelungen!  To be writing in the presence of Nature herself must be splendid.  It is an enjoyment which I am denied.  Beautiful landscapes, lofty peaks, or great stretches of sea, absorb me instead of evoking ideas in me.  I feel, but I cannot express what I feel.  I can only paint the moon when I see its reflection in the bottom of a well” (Berlioz to Wagner, 10 September, 1855).]

But this genius had other characteristics which are less well known, though they are not less unusual.  The first is his sense of pure beauty.  Berlioz’s exterior romanticism must not make us blind to this.  He had a Virgilian soul; and if his colouring recalls that of Weber, his design has often an Italian suavity.  Wagner never had this love of beauty in the Latin sense of the word.  Who has understood the Southern nature, beautiful form, and harmonious movement like Berlioz?  Who, since Gluck, has recognised so well the secret of classical beauty?  Since Orfeo was composed, no one has carved in music a bas-relief so perfect as the entrance of Andromache in the second act of Les Troyens 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.