in which the dramatist might have shared honours with the musician, and to such a forcible tragedy as 'La Juive'-perhaps the best serious opera book in being-preferred the 'Guillaume Tell' of M. Jouy, in which the inspiriting Swiss legend was only rescued from utter nullity and dulness by the ingenious counsels and suggestions of a refined and poetical opera-singer, Adolphe Nourrit. His habit of mistaken selection is only an expression in another form of the insolence of Catalani's husband, who demanded for the formation of an opera merely 'my wife and five or six puppets.' The music was to supersede the story-to make the acting a matter of secondary interest. In his generation Bellini was-and later, Signor Verdi has been-far wiser and more careful in the selection of their themes for the stage.

6

During his residence in Paris, though Rossini entirely withdrew from the theatre-whether from pique or self-knowledge it matters little-he amused himself diligently by composition. One or two of the works thus produced, such as the 'Stabat' and the 'Soirées Napolitaines,' may be included in the list of his best writings. Not so his attempts at pianoforte music; these are flavourless and ineffective, betraying timidity and inexperience. The latest public offering presented during his lifetime was a Chant des Titans,' written for the Great Exhibition of Paris and not heard of since. The Solemn' or 'Little' Mass, with the strange cynical dedication originally prefixed to it by him-though it was touched and retouched by him during many later years-is somewhat flat and laboured as compared with most of his music. But a like character may be applied to most of the later efforts of men who were originally the most facile and fertile in the production of their ideas. When they have ceased to be spontaneous-when they pause to weigh, to measure, to reconsider they have too often lost power, without arriving at any solid excellence sufficient to compensate for the weakness of a languid inspiration.

Such are a few among the many characteristics, whether he be considered as an artist or as a man, which distinguished the greatest composer for the musical stage whom Italy has ever produced. The justice of the future will not be wanting to Rossini and to his works, the influence of which has been far wider and deeper than pedants have admitted or superficial admirers have dreamed. Their vogue, for the moment, has largely gone by, because they contain too much of what is sensuous and perishable, and because the conditions of musical execution have changed; but that the Master's fame will last so long as

Music lasts, must be admitted by every one who studies the chronicle of art and its achievements with honesty and genial sympathy for everything that is good after its kind.

We have now to turn to as painfully interesting a book as the library of Autobiography contains; and to consider the story of a man's life, told by himself with such an agony of selfexaltation that it is impossible to withhold pity, akin though that be to contempt. There is no want of vivacity in the narrative-but a prevailing want of veracity, such as must always distinguish works professedly written for effect. Like other egotists who have accused themselves of vices in which they indulged at the utmost sparingly, Berlioz had no disinclination to parade the prejudices and the extravagances which marked his feverish career, to blow the trumpet of exaggeration before his own small talents-being, in his own fancy, another Lara, another Childe Harold; one of those chartered beings whose mystical supremacy and power are to strike astonishment into the hearts of men-a musician deriding such old pedants having paunches (the coarse phrase is his, not ours) as Bach and Handel-the superior to Mozart, the equal of Weber, the continuer of Beethoven; a man playing an artist's part who led a stormy, defiant, and not very honourable life, chequered by some flashes of success, corroded by unjustified ambitions and jealousies and violent passions-to be closed in misery pitiable to contemplate-in a death which no one lamented—in a grave which no pilgrim will visit as a shrine.

The key to the unlovely peculiarities and characteristics of Berlioz may be found in the portrait which faces the title-page of these public confessions. In this, as in the well-known likeness of Cowper, may be read, by anyone versed in physiognomy, the signs of mental distemperature, the story of a sword wearing out its scabbard. Were not some such interpretation of the kind to be accepted, the impression produced by this book in respect to its writer would be simply odious.

Hector Berlioz was born in the year 1803 at la Côte-SaintAndré, a small town in the department of the Isère. His father was a physician; like many of his profession, a liberal-not to say a free-thinker; a good and just man, somewhat addicted to opium-eating. His mother was a devotee, who did her utmost to train up the boy in the Roman Catholic faith. During the first seven years of his life her prayers appeared to be answered. Her son received impressions of mystic solemnity, not without their sensuous beauty, which never utterly wore out. But a spirit of rebellion soon began to manifest itself. He flung off the

yoke of Superstition-he learned what he pleased and how he pleased. Although he was moved to hysterical enthusiasm by certain passages in the classic poets, such as the tragedy of Dido's fate told in the Eneid,' his principal delight was in books of travel and wild adventure among savage people, and in shadowing out discoveries and hair-breadth 'scapes, of which he was to be the hero. But these violent desires and delights were soon to be replaced by others. Before Hector had reached the ripe age of thirteen, the boy imagined himself to be furiously in love with a Mademoiselle Estelle Gautier; and the throes and fevers of this fancy are recorded in paragraphs which have a suspiciously false air of similar confessions by Rousseau and Byron. By this time, however, the stirrings of a more real passion had made themselves felt within him. His father, who determined that he should be a physician, bribed him to study osteology and anatomy by the somewhat illogical presents of a flageolet, a flute, and later a guitar. But the boy sate up at night secretly to study, without a master, Rameau's treatise on harmony, and to put down notes, as other boys have done before and since, fondly imagining them compositions. No matter; he was to be forced into medicine. His sentimental disgust to all the needful studies and physically revolting experiences which must be mastered ere medical skill is reached, is dwelt on by Berlioz in his most spasmodic manner. We have a right to question its sincerity; observing as we do in later pages of the book, how he may be said to have gloated over details which could have been recorded by no man having within him one touch of human delicacy-one spark of that real reverence with which the anguish of Life and the repose of Death should be regarded. Nothing (to cite one instance) can be imagined more coarsely revolting than the passage describing the exhumation and burial in the same grave of his two wives.Among other of his collected writings is an attempt at an art-novel, Euphonia,' the catastrophe of which is needlessly brutal, and ghastly in no common degree; such as could only have suggested itself to an imagination thoroughly depraved. And yet throughout his autobiography Berlioz parades himself as endowed with the most exquisite impulsiveness of feeling and perception-too nobly sensitive to be happy, or to succeed as the callous herd are content to do.

Berlioz was sent up to Paris to study Physic on a scanty allowance. It was perhaps hoped that the scantiness of the home subsidies on which he was to live and study might prevent the aberrations so sincerely dreaded by his father, so superstitiously by his mother. But the reckoning was as vain

as are most reckonings of the kind. Berlioz neglected the dissecting-room for the Danaïdes' of Salieri (with Spontini's Bacchanal introduced), and the Stratonice' of Méhul, at the Grand Opéra ;-where Madame Branchu was singing and Bigottini exhibiting her admirable pantomimic powers. He got access to the library of the Conservatoire, and there devoured the scores of Gluck, for which he had an instinctive 'passion.' The question was presently brought to an issue. The young man would be a musician, not a provincial doctor; and, in spite of the aversion of his relations, succeeded in carrying his point. A fellow-student at the Conservatoire introduced him to Lesueur, with a grand cantata written by him as credentials. The French master pointed out the total absence of logical construction and grammatical training in this ambitious essay, and recommended him, with as much patience as kindness, to enter upon a severe and systematic course of study. Berlioz expresses his gratitude, as in duty bound to do, for the gracious intentions of his adviser; but in the very next breath breaks out into a sneering lament over the time wasted by him in learning and unlearning antediluvian theories,' and in forcing himself to admire the service-music furnished by the French Court composer to the chapel of the Tuileries. Far easier than to master the precepts of art, and on these to form and found a style of his own, was it for Berlioz to spoil paper by violent pretences at composition. The first of these which came to a hearing was a Mass produced at the Church of Saint-Roch, the worst portions of which (he says) were those the most admired by Lesueur, being imitations of his own weak writing. The Mass failed, says our autobiographer, largely owing to the shameful badness of its performance. He re-wrote and corrected it; resolute to bring it to a second hearing. The news of the failure, however, reached his parents, who taunted him as one having mistaken his vocation, and threatened to stop the supplies. It was necessary to prove them in the wrong by bringing forward the corrected work successfully. But the means were not forthcoming. Acting on a friend's advice, he wrote a petition for assistance to Chateaubriand; who in courtly phrase, regretted inability to lend either money or countenance. Chance befriended him better in the person of an amateur of noble family, M. Augustin de Pons, who was at that time rich, and who having been present when the Mass was butchered at the Church of Saint-Roch, volunteered to lend its composer the money required to obtain a better result at a second performance. The Mass was repeated and went magnificentlythanks to this timely succour. On looking back, Berlioz candidly

confesses in his Memoirs that the music was not worthy of a hearing. The sequel to the misplaced generosity of De Pons was sad. He lost his fortune; and after some years of struggle for an existence by giving music lessons, committed suicide in the utmost misery. Berlioz endeavoured to serve him, by naming him from time to time in the Journal des Débats,' unable, he avers, to do more for his early benefactor. But this was the misfortune of the unhappy being throughout his life. Never was man more munificently assisted by others, never did artist do less in repayment, by holding out the hand of assistance and sympathy to those of a younger generation.

Another feather in the cap of this turbulent youngster-here set forth with great complacency by himself was his quarrel with Cherubini, who had just entered on his duties as Director of the Conservatoire, and had there established a system of order eminently necessary to the well-being of that school, which conduced in great measure to its value and excellence as a great European establishment. The Italian was not the most amiable of men; but an enthusiastic neophyte might have endured the strictness in authority of a musician who could write Les Deux Journées,' and that grandest of modern classical operas Médée.' The anecdote here told only makes the scholar's insolence-not the master's punctiliousness -ridiculous. Berlioz rejoices in detailing the revenges with which, in after-life, he was able to commemorate this petty quarrel. But from first to last, he was more willing to provoke than to disarm opposition. His father, who bore his absurdities and violences with wonderful patience, was, in the end, disappointed and wearied into leaving him to his own resources. To eke out his scanty means, he took service as a chorussinger at the Opéra Comique, like many of the chorus there, without a voice.

Passing over many adventures, we may come to the year 1830, when Berlioz made a step forward, by arranging for the July Festival La Marseillaise with a double chorus and huge orchestra. The colossal success of this led to his acquaintance with that strange man Rouget de Lisle. There was a project that the two should lay violent hands on Othello,' as the subject of an opera. Having, after four years of competition, at last succeeded in gaining the first prize at the Institut, for a Cantata on the subject of Sardanapalus,' Berlioz was condemned to the privilege of two years' residence at Rome. Nothing is more characteristic than his outburst of ignorant sarcasm at the reward for which he had competed, unless it be his account of the first execution of his Cantata, the final scene