o. Berlioz, I
suspect, was a magnified virtuoso. His orchestral technique is supreme,
but his music fails to force its way into my soul. It pricks the
nerves, it pleases the sense of the gigantic, the strange, the
formless, but there is something uncanny about it all, like some huge,
prehistoric bird, an awful Pterodactyl with goggle eyes, horrid snout
and scream. Berlioz, like Baudelaire, has the power of evoking the
shudder. But as John Addington Symonds wrote: "The shams of the
classicists, the spasms of the romanticists have alike to be abandoned.
Neither on a mock Parnassus nor on a paste-board Blocksberg can the
poet of the age now worship. The artist walks the world at large
beneath the light of natural day." All this was before the Polish
charmer distilled his sugared wormwood, his sweet, exasperated poison,
for thirsty souls in morbid Paris.

Think of the men and women with whom the new comer associated--for his
genius was quickly divined: Hugo, Lamartine, Pere Lamenais,--ah! what
balm for those troubled days was in his "Paroles d'un
Croyant,"--Chateaubriand, Saint-Simon, Merimee, Gautier, Liszt, Victor
Cousin, Baudelaire, Ary Scheffer, Berlioz, Heine,--who asked the Pole
news of his muse the "laughing nymph,"--"If she still continued to
drape her silvery veil around the flowing locks of her green hair, with
a coquetry so enticing; if the old sea god with the long white beard
still pursued this mischievous maid with his ridiculous love?"--De
Musset, De Vigny, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Auber, Sainte-Beuve, Adolphe
Nourrit, Ferdinand Hiller, Balzac, Dumas, Heller, Delacroix,--the Hugo
of painters,--Michelet, Guizot, Thiers, Niemcevicz and Mickiewicz the
Polish bards, and George Sand: the quintessence of the Paris of art and
literature.

The most eloquent page in Liszt's "Chopin" is the narrative of an
evening in the Chaussee d'Antin, for it demonstrates the Hungarian's
literary gifts and feeling for the right phrase. This description of
Chopin's apartment "invaded by surprise" has a hypnotizing effect on
me. The very furnishings of the chamber seem vocal under Liszt's
fanciful pen. In more doubtful taste is his statement that "the glace
which covers the grace of the elite, as it does the fruit of their
desserts,...could not have been satisfactory to Chopin"! Liszt, despite
his tendency to idealize Chopin after his death, is our most
trustworthy witness at this period. Chopin was an ideal to Liszt though
he has not l