But to go back to music. At the last sacred concerts, after Kreutzer had experimentalised by making cuts in one Beethoven symphony, did not Habeneck follow suit by dropping out several instruments in another, and M. Costa, in London, try all sorts of weird conclusions with big drums, ophicleides, and trombones in _Don Giovanni_ and _Figaro_? Well! if conductors lead the way, who can blame the small fry for following after? But is not this the ruin of Art? Ought not we, who love and honour her, who are jealous for the prescriptive rights of human intellect, to hound down and annihilate the transgressor; to cry aloud: “Thy crime is ridiculous. Thy stupidity beneath contempt. Despair and die! Be thou contemned, be thou derided, be thou accursed! Despair and die!!!” * * * * * My devotion to Gluck and Spontini at first somewhat blinded me to the glories of Mozart. Not only had I a prejudice against Italian, both language and singers, but in _Don Giovanni_ the composer has written a passage that I call simply criminal. Doña Anna bewails her fate in a passage of heart-rending beauty and sorrow, then, right in the middle, after _Forse un giorno_ comes an impossible piece of buffoonery that I would give my blood to wipe out. This and other similar passages that I found in his compositions sent my admiration for Mozart down below zero. I felt I could not trust his dramatic instinct, and it was not until years later, when I found the original score of the _Magic Flute_ instead of its travesty, the _Mysteries of Isis_, and made acquaintance with the marvellous beauty of his quartettes and quintettes, and some of his sonatas, that this Angelic Doctor took his due place in my mind. XI HENRIETTE I cannot go minutely into all the sorrowful details of the great drama of my life, upon which the curtain rose about this time (1827). An English company had come over to Paris to play Shakespeare, and at their first performance--_Hamlet_--I saw in Ophelia the Henriette Smithson who, five years later, became my wife. The impression made upon my heart and mind by her marvellous genius was only equalled by the agitation into which I was plunged by the poetry she so nobly interpreted. Shakespeare, coming upon me unawares, struck me down as with a thunderbolt. His lightning spirit, descending upon me with transcendent power from the starry heights, opened to me the highest heaven of Art, lit up its deepest depths, and revealed the best and grandest and truest that earth can shew. I realised the paltry meanness of our French view of that mighty brain. The scales fell from my eyes, I saw, felt, understood, lived; I arose and walked! But the shock was overwhelming, and it was long ere I recovered. Intense, profound melancholy, combined with extreme nerve-exhaustion, reduced me to a pitiable state of mind and body that only a great physiologist could diagnose.