Berlioz, bitter and unsympathetic as it here pleases him to appear, was wholly unconventional; he was the athlete constantly stripped for the combat, and armed for the fight. How different from the Berlioz seen in his profession and in society! As much as those, who knowing him but slightly, judged him hard and unsociable, so much did those to whom his affections went out, laud his extreme kindness and his tenderness of feeling. He was not prepossessing in appearance or manner. His esteem and friendship had to be won little by little, in order to open by some means or other, the way to his heart. He no sooner found himself among friends, than his spirits rose and often urged him into countless pleasantries. Nevertheless, even toward these he showed the most variable disposition: he would arrive sullen and morose, and then without warning, would break into wild and infectious gaiety, to fall just as suddenly into icy reserve. A troublesome thought would suffice for this, and it only needed an inopportune word to make him intractable. If he chanced to be in the mood for brilliant paradoxes or merry persiflage, it was necessary to refrain from interrupting or opposing him. In the heat of conversation, no matter how serious, he loved to utter wretched puns, and absurd verbal extravagances. These irrepressible sallies, at which he was generally the only one to laugh, were something very serious in his eyes. “Genius is akin to madness.” “Berlioz, one of the most eminent musicians of all time, perhaps the most extraordinary artist in every way who ever lived.” Thus he was characterized by M. Reyer in speaking at the foot of Berlioz’s statue. He was, truly, an extraordinary artist in every sense; apostle and sectarian at one and the same time; one who conceived great things and sometimes partly realized them; who was in turn sarcastic and sentimental, emotional and passionate almost to weeping; who nourished an intolerant worship of his art and never knew moderation in his judgments; who was gifted with admirable creative faculties and opened new paths to the art of instrumentation; who was in perpetual strife with the pretenders of true melody, to whom he never yielded; who aimed to be at once as noble and as majestic as Spontini, as imaginative and as impassioned as Weber, as sweet and as tender as Virgil, as sublime and as trivial as Shakespeare, as grand and pathetic as Goethe and Beethoven, yet who knew how to be himself by force of will and loftiness of genius. Berlioz had a rare grasp of mind, and was keenly sensitive to the beauties of certain great literary works, hence the “romantic movement” in France deeply influenced him. With enormous will power and bordering on insanity, he aspired in his youthful dreams to be considered, some day, the Victor Hugo, the Delacroix of musical art, and, in some respects, his aspiration was more than realized—after he was dead! [Illustration: Ad. Julien] [Illustration: AMBROISE THOMAS