rance, from 1840 to 1870, is nowhere better shown than in its romantic
and realistic writers, for whom music was an hermetically sealed door.
All these artists were "_visuels_," for whom music was only a noise.
Hugo is supposed to have said that Germany's inferiority was measured by
its superiority in music.[204] "The elder Dumas detested," Berlioz says,
"even bad music."[205] The journal of the Goncourts calmly reflects the
almost universal scorn of literary men for music. In a conversation
which took place in 1862 between Goncourt and Theophile Gautier,
Goncourt said:

"We confessed to him our complete infirmity, our musical deafness--we
who, at the most, only liked military music."

[Footnote 204: One must at least do Hugo the justice of saying that he
always spoke of Beethoven with admiration, although he did not know him.
But he rather exalts him in order to take away from the importance of a
poet--the only one in the nineteenth century--whose fame was shading his
own; and when he wrote in his _William Shakespeare_ that "the great man
of Germany is Beethoven" it was understood by all to mean "the great man
of Germany is not Goethe."]

[Footnote 205: Written in a letter to his sister, Nanci, on 3 April,
1850.]

"Well," said Gautier, "what you tell me pleases me very much. I am
like you; I prefer silence to music. I have only just succeeded,
after having lived part of my life with a singer, in being able to
tell good music from bad; but it is all the same to me."[206]

And he added:

"But it is a very curious thing that all other writers of our time
are like this. Balzac hated music. Hugo could not stand it. Even
Lamartine, who himself is like a piano to be hired or sold, holds
it in horror!"

It needed a complete upheaval of the nation--a political and moral
upheaval--to change that frame of mind. Some indication of the change
was making itself felt in the last years of the second Empire. Wagner,
who suffered from the hostility or indifference of the public in 1860,
at the time when _Tannhaeuser_ was performed at the Opera, had already
found, however, a few understanding people in Paris who discerned his
genius and sincerely admired him. The most interesting of the writers
who first began to understand musical emotion is Charles Baudelaire. In
1861, Pasdeloup gave the first _Concerts populaires de musique
classique_ at the Cirque d'Hiver. The Berlioz Festival, organise