ing the last ten years great progress in
music has been made in France.]

Remark also Berlioz's freedom of melody. His musical phrases pulse and
flow like life itself. "Some phrases taken separately," says Schumann,
"have such an intensity that they will not bear harmonising--_as in many
ancient folk-songs_--and often even an accompaniment spoils their
fulness."[89] These melodies so correspond with the emotions, that they
reproduce the least thrills of body and mind by their vigorous
workings-up and delicate reliefs, by splendid barbarities of modulation
and strong and glowing colour, by gentle gradations of light and shade
or imperceptible ripples of thought, which flow over the body like a
steady tide. It is an art of peculiar sensitiveness, more delicately
expressive than that of Wagner; not satisfying itself with the modern
tonality, but going back to old modes--a rebel, as M. Saint-Saens
remarks, to the polyphony which had governed music since Bach's day, and
which is perhaps, after all, "a heresy destined to disappear."[90]

[Footnote 89: _Ibid_. "A rare peculiarity," adds Schumann, "which
distinguishes nearly all his melodies." Schumann understands why Berlioz
often gives as an accompaniment to his melodies a simple bass, or chords
of the augmented and diminished fifth--ignoring the intermediate parts.]

[Footnote 90: "What will then remain of actual art? Perhaps Berlioz will
be its sole representative. Not having studied the pianoforte, he had an
instinctive aversion to counterpoint. He is in this respect the opposite
of Wagner, who was the embodiment of counterpoint, and drew the utmost
he could from its laws" (Saint-Saens).]

How much finer, to my idea, are Berlioz's recitatives, with their long
and winding rhythms,[91] than Wagner's declamations, which--apart from
the climax of a subject, where the air breaks into bold and vigorous
phrases, whose influence elsewhere is often weak--limit themselves to
the quasi-notation of spoken inflections, and jar noisily against the
fine harmonies of the orchestra. Berlioz's orchestration, too, is of a
more delicate temper, and has a freer life than Wagner's, flowing in an
impetuous stream, and sweeping away everything in its course; it is also
less united and solid, but more flexible; its nature is undulating and
varied, and the thousand imperceptible impulses of the spirit and of
action are reflected there. It is a marvel of spontaneity and caprice.

[Footnote 91: J