y his deficiencies and
his ignorance. His classical education in music was incomplete. M.
Saint-Saens tells us that "the past did not exist for him; he did not
understand the old composers, as his knowledge of them was limited to
what he had read about them." He did not know Bach. Happy ignorance! He
was able to write oratorios like _L'Enfance du Christ_ without being
worried by memories and traditions of the German masters of oratorio.
There are men like Brahms who have been, nearly all their life, but
reflections of the past. Berlioz never sought to be anything but
himself. It was thus that he created that masterpiece, _La Fuite en
Egypte_, which sprang from his keen sympathy with the people.

He had one of the most untrammelled spirits that ever breathed. Liberty
was for him a desperate necessity. "Liberty of heart, of mind, of
soul--of everything.... Real liberty, absolute and immense!"[80] And
this passionate love of liberty, which was his misfortune in life, since
it deprived him of the comfort of any faith, refused him any refuge for
his thoughts, robbed him of peace, and even of the soft pillow of
scepticism--this "real liberty" formed the unique originality and
grandeur of his musical conceptions.

[Footnote 80: _Memoires_, I, 221.]

"Music," wrote Berlioz to C. Lobe, in 1852, "is the most poetic,
the most powerful, the most living of all arts. She ought to be the
freest, but she is not yet.... Modern music is like the classic
Andromeda, naked and divinely beautiful. She is chained to a rock
on the shores of a vast sea, and awaits the victorious Perseus who
shall loose her bonds and break in pieces the chimera called
Routine."

The business was to free music from its limited rhythms and from the
traditional forms and rules that enclosed it;[81] and, above all, it
needed to be free from the domination of speech, and to be released from
its humiliating bondage to poetry. Berlioz wrote to the Princess of
Wittgenstein, in 1856:--

[Footnote 81: "Music to-day, in the vigour of her youth, is emancipated
and free and can do what she pleases. Many old rules have no longer any
vogue; they were made by unreflecting minds, or by lovers of routine for
other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the
sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the
breaking of ancient laws. Many forms have become too hackneyed to be
still adopted. The sa