ent day
composers. It is true that all music is the expression in tones of the
imagination of the composer; true, also, that music must fulfil
certain conditions of its own being. But imaginations differ. That of
Berlioz, for example, was quite a new phenomenon; and as for the
working principles of musical composition, they are as much subject to
modification as any other form of human experimentation. Berlioz,
himself, says that he never intended to subvert the laws of music,
only to make a new and individual use of them. As he was no abstract
maker of music, his autobiography--one of the most fascinating in the
history of art, only to be compared with that of Benvenuto
Cellini--should be familiar to all who would penetrate the secrets of
his style. Berlioz's compositions, in fact, are more specifically
autobiographic than those of any other notable musician. Both in his
music and his literary works are the same notes of passionate
insistence on his own point of view, of radical dislike for accepting
conditions as they were (he says of himself that he loved to make the
barriers crack) and of fondness for brilliant outward effect. In
considering Berlioz, one is always reminded of Matthew Arnold's lines
on Byron, who resembles Berlioz so closely.

"He taught us little; but our soul
Had felt him, like the thunder's roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of passion with eternal law;
And yet with reverential awe
We watch'd the fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife."

Only realize that Berlioz's _Fantastic Symphony_ was composed but
twenty-one years after Haydn's death, and compare the simple,
self-centered Haydn with the restless, wide-visioned Berlioz, of a
mentality positively omnivorous; who, in addition to his musical
achievements, was a brilliant critic and _litterateur_, a man of
travel and wide acquaintance with the world. Then indeed you will
appreciate what an enormous change had come over music. A mere mention
of the authors from whom Berlioz drew his subjects: Shakespeare,
Goethe, Byron, Scott, Virgil, Hugo, shows the wide range of his
reading and the difference in output which would inevitably result.
The previous impersonal attitude towards music is shown by the very
names of compositions which, broadly speaking (till the beginning of
the 19th century) were seldom more than Symphony, Sonata, or Quartet,
No. so and so; while the movements, in an equally m