[Footnote 1:  “And you, Russia, who have saved me....” (Berlioz, Memoires, II, 353, Calmann-Levy’s edition, 1897).]

That is the worst of it; people imagine that they understand Berlioz with so very little trouble.  Obscurity of meaning may harm an artist less than a seeming transparency; to be shrouded in mist may mean remaining long misunderstood, but those who wish to understand will at least be thorough in their search for the truth.  It is not always realised how depth and complexity may exist in a work of clear design and strong contrasts—­in the obvious genius of some great Italian of the Renaissance as much as in the troubled heart of a Rembrandt and the twilight of the North.

That is the first pitfall; but there are many more that will beset us in the attempt to understand Berlioz.  To get at the man himself one must break down a wall of prejudice and pedantry, of convention and intellectual snobbery.  In short, one must shake off nearly all current ideas about his work if one wishes to extricate it from the dust that has drifted about it for half a century.

Above all, one must not make the mistake of contrasting Berlioz with Wagner, either by sacrificing Berlioz to that Germanic Odin, or by forcibly trying to reconcile one to the other.  For there are some who condemn Berlioz in the name of Wagner’s theories; and others who, not liking the sacrifice, seek to make him a forerunner of Wagner, or kind of elder brother, whose mission was to clear a way and prepare a road for a genius greater than his own.  Nothing is falser.  To understand Berlioz one must shake off the hypnotic influence of Bayreuth.  Though Wagner may have learnt something from Berlioz, the two composers have nothing in common; their genius and their art are absolutely opposed; each one has ploughed his furrow in a different field.

The Classical misunderstanding is quite as dangerous.  By that I mean the clinging to superstitions of the past, and the pedantic desire to enclose art within narrow limits, which still flourish among critics.  Who has not met these censors of music?  They will tell you with solid complacence how far music may go, and where it must stop, and what it may express and what it must not.  They are not always musicians themselves.  But what of that?  Do they not lean on the example of the past?  The past! a handful of works that they themselves hardly understand.  Meanwhile, music, by its unceasing growth, gives the lie to their theories, and breaks down these weak barriers.  But they do not see it, do not wish to see it; since they cannot advance themselves, they deny progress.  Critics of this kind do not think favourably of Berlioz’s dramatic and descriptive symphonies.  How should they appreciate the boldest musical achievement of the nineteenth century?  These dreadful pedants and zealous defenders of an art that they only understand after it has ceased to live are the worst enemies of unfettered genius,