Berlioz is thus the true inheritor of Beethoven’s thought.  The difference between a work like Romeo and one of Beethoven’s symphonies is that the former, it would seem, endeavours to express objective emotions and subjects in music.  I do not see why music should not follow poetry in getting away from introspection and trying to paint the drama of the universe.  Shakespeare is as good as Dante.  Besides, one may add, it is always Berlioz himself that is discovered in his music:  it is his soul starving for love and mocked at by shadows which is revealed through all the scenes of Romeo.

I will not prolong a discussion where so many things must be left unsaid.  But I would suggest that, once and for all, we get rid of these absurd endeavours to fence in art.  Do not let us say:  Music can....  Music cannot express such-and-such a thing.  Let us say rather, If genius pleases, everything is possible; and if music so wishes, she may be painting and poetry to-morrow.  Berlioz has proved it well in his Romeo.

This Romeo is an extraordinary work:  “a wonderful isle, where a temple of pure art is set up.”  For my part, not only do I consider it equal to the most powerful of Wagner’s creations, but I believe it to be richer in its teaching and in its resources for art—­resources and teaching which contemporary French art has not yet fully turned to account.  One knows that for several years the young French school has been making efforts to deliver our music from German models, to create a language of recitative that shall belong to France and that the leitmotif will not overwhelm; a more exact and less heavy language, which in expressing the freedom of modern thought will not have to seek the help of the classical or Wagnerian forms.  Not long ago, the Schola Cantorum published a manifesto that proclaimed “the liberty of musical declamation ... free speech in free music ... the triumph of natural music with the free movement of speech and the plastic rhythm of the ancient dance”—­thus declaring war on the metrical art of the last three centuries.[84]

[Footnote 84:  Tribune de Saint Gervais, November, 1903.]

Well, here is that music; you will nowhere find a more perfect model.  It is true that many who profess the principles of this music repudiate the model, and do not hide their disdain for Berlioz.  That makes me doubt a little, I admit, the results of their efforts.  If they do not feel the wonderful freedom of Berlioz’s music, and do not see that it was the delicate veil of a very living spirit, then I think there will be more of archaism than real life in their pretensions to “free music.”  Study, not only the most celebrated pages of his work, such as the Scene d’amour (the one of all his compositions that Berlioz himself liked best),[85] La Tristesse de Romeo, or La Fete des Capulet (where a spirit like Wagner’s own unlooses and