Those who conceive of him thus have never understood him, never penetrated his mind, which was exalted by transports of enthusiasm, pride, fury and joy; which was, at times, almost hallucinated. But music, for him, was a serene region which he would not allow the disorders of his life to enter; when he surrendered to it wholly he was, despite himself, carried away by the delirium of a visionary, as when the God of Moses and the Prophets appeared to him in his Psalms and his oratorios—or betrayed by his heart, in moments of pity and compassion, that were yet without a trace of sentimentality.[1]
He was, in his art, one of those men who, like Goethe, regard their lives from a great distance, a great height. Our modern sentimentality, which displays itself with complacent indiscretion, is disconcerted by this haughty reserve. In this kingdom of art, inaccesible to the capricious chances of life, it seems to us that the prevailing light is sometimes too uniform. Here are the Elysian Fields; hither one retreats from the life of the world; here, often enough, one regrets it. But is there not something affecting in the spectacle of this master, serene amidst all his afflictions, his brow unlined and his heart without a care?
***
Such a man, who lived entirely for his art, was not calculated to please women; and he troubled his head very little about them. None the less, they were his warmest partisans and his most venemous adversaries. The English pamphleteers made merry over one of his worshippers, who, under the pseudonym
- ↑ In the Funeral Anthem, the Foundling Anthem, and in certain pages of his later works, Theodora and Jephthah.
