He was fitted in every way for the part, even by his deficiencies and his ignorance.  His classical education in music was incomplete.  M. Saint-Saens tells us that “the past did not exist for him; he did not understand the old composers, as his knowledge of them was limited to what he had read about them.”  He did not know Bach.  Happy ignorance!  He was able to write oratorios like L’Enfance du Christ without being worried by memories and traditions of the German masters of oratorio.  There are men like Brahms who have been, nearly all their life, but reflections of the past.  Berlioz never sought to be anything but himself.  It was thus that he created that masterpiece, La Fuite en Egypte, which sprang from his keen sympathy with the people.

He had one of the most untrammelled spirits that ever breathed.  Liberty was for him a desperate necessity.  “Liberty of heart, of mind, of soul—­of everything....  Real liberty, absolute and immense!"[80] And this passionate love of liberty, which was his misfortune in life, since it deprived him of the comfort of any faith, refused him any refuge for his thoughts, robbed him of peace, and even of the soft pillow of scepticism—­this “real liberty” formed the unique originality and grandeur of his musical conceptions.

[Footnote 80:  Memoires, I, 221.]

“Music,” wrote Berlioz to C. Lobe, in 1852, “is the most poetic, the most powerful, the most living of all arts.  She ought to be the freest, but she is not yet....  Modern music is like the classic Andromeda, naked and divinely beautiful.  She is chained to a rock on the shores of a vast sea, and awaits the victorious Perseus who shall loose her bonds and break in pieces the chimera called Routine.”

The business was to free music from its limited rhythms and from the traditional forms and rules that enclosed it;[81] and, above all, it needed to be free from the domination of speech, and to be released from its humiliating bondage to poetry.  Berlioz wrote to the Princess of Wittgenstein, in 1856:—­

[Footnote 81:  “Music to-day, in the vigour of her youth, is emancipated and free and can do what she pleases.  Many old rules have no longer any vogue; they were made by unreflecting minds, or by lovers of routine for other lovers of routine.  New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the breaking of ancient laws.  Many forms have become too hackneyed to be still adopted.  The same thing may be entirely good or entirely bad, according to the use one makes of it, or the reasons one has for making use of it.  Sound and sonority are secondary to thought, and thought is secondary to feeling and passion.” (These opinions were given with reference to Wagner’s concerts in Paris, in 1860, and are taken from A travers chants, p. 312.)

Compare Beethoven’s words:  “There is no rule that one may not break for the advancement of beauty.”]