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
inmorbid 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.
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