Читать книгу The Life of Hector Berlioz as Written by Himself in His Letters and Memoirs - Hector Berlioz - Страница 5

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Decidedly ours is a prosaic century. On no other grounds can my wounded vanity account for the humiliating fact that no auspicious omens, no mighty portents—such as heralded the birth of the great men of the golden age of poetry—gave notice of my coming. It is strange, but true, that I was born, quite unobtrusively, at La Côte Saint-André, between Vienne and Grenoble, on the 11th December 1803.

As its name implies, La Côte Saint-André lies on a hillside overlooking a plain—wide, green, and golden—of which the dreamy majesty is accentuated by the mountain belt that bounds it on the southeast, being in turn crowned by the mystic glory of distant Alpine glaciers and snowy peaks.

Needless to say, I was brought up in the Catholic faith. This—of all religions the most charming, since it gave up burning people—was for seven years the joy of my life, and although we have since fallen out, I still retain my tender memories of it.

Indeed, so greatly am I in sympathy with its creed that, had I had the misfortune to be born in the clutches of one of the dreary schisms hatched by Luther and Calvin, I should certainly, at the first awakening of my poetic instinct, have thrown off its benumbing grasp and have flung myself into the arms of the fair Roman.

My sweet remembrance of my first communion is probably due to my having made it with my elder sister at the Ursuline convent, where she was a boarder.

At early morn, accompanied by the almoner, I made my way to that holy house. The soft spring sunlight, the murmuring poplars swaying in the whispering breeze, the dainty fragrance of the morning air, all worked upon my sensitive mind, until, as I knelt among those fair white maidens, and heard their fresh young voices raised in the eucharistic hymn, my whole soul was filled with mystic passion. Heaven opened before me—a heaven of love and pure delight, a thousand times more glorious than tongue has told—and thus I gave myself to God.

Such is the marvellous power of genuine melody, of heart-felt expression! Ten years later I recognised that air—so innocently adapted to a religious ceremony—as “When my beloved shall return,” from d’Aleyrac’s opera Nina.

Dear, dead d’Aleyrac! Even your name is forgotten now!

This was my musical awakening.

Thus abruptly I became a saint, and such a desperate saint! Every day I went to mass, every Sunday I took the communion, every week I went to confession in order to say to my director:

“Father, I have done nothing.”

“Well, my son,” would the worthy man reply, “continue.”

I followed his advice strictly for many years.

Louis Berlioz, my father, was a doctor. It is not my place to sing his praises. I need, therefore, only say that he was looked upon as an honoured friend, not only in our little town, but throughout the whole country side. Feeling acutely his responsibility as the steward of a difficult and dangerous profession, every minute he could spare from his sick people was given to arduous study, and never did the thought of gain turn him aside from his disinterested service to the poor and needy.

In 1810, the medical society of Montpellier offered a prize for the best treatise on a new and important point in medicine, which was gained by my father’s monograph on Chronic Diseases. It was printed in Paris, and many of its theories adopted by physicians, who had not the common honesty to acknowledge their source. This somewhat surprised my dear, unsophisticated father, but he only said, “If truth prevails, nothing else matters.”

Now (I write in 1848) he has long since ceased to practise, and spends his time in reading and peaceful thought.

Of the highest type of liberal mind, he is entirely without social, political, or religious prejudices; for instance, having promised my mother to leave my faith undisturbed, I have known him carry his tolerance so far as to hear me my catechism. This is considerably more, I must own, than I could do were my own son in question.

For many years my father has suffered from an incurable disease of the stomach. He scarcely eats at all, and nothing but constant and increasing doses of opium keep him alive. He has told me that, years ago, worn out by the prolonged agony, he took thirty-two grains at once.

“It was not as a cure that I took it,” he said, significantly.

But, strange to say, this terrific dose of poison, instead of killing him, gave him for some time a respite from his sufferings.

When I was ten years old he sent me to a priest’s school in the town to learn Latin, but the result not proving satisfactory he resolved to teach me himself.

And with the most untiring patience, the most intense care, my father became my instructor in history, literature, languages, geography—even in music.

Yet I must own that I do not think a solitary education like mine half as good for a boy as ordinary school life. Children brought up among relations, servants, and specially chosen friends only, do not get accustomed to the rough-and-tumble that best fits them to face the world. Real life is to them a dosed book, their angles are not rubbed off, and I know that, in my own case, at twenty-five I was still nothing but an awkward, ignorant child.

Indulgent as my father was over my work, yet, for a long while, he was unable to make me love the classics. It seemed impossible to me to concentrate my thoughts long enough to learn by heart a few lines of Horace and Virgil; impatient of the beaten track my wayward mind flew off to the entrancing unknown world of the atlas, roving gaily through the labyrinth of islands, capes, and straits of the Pacific and the Indian Archipelago. This was the origin of my love for travel and adventure.

My father truly said of me:

“He knows every isle of the South Seas, but cannot tell me how many departments there are in France!”

Every book of travel in the library was pressed into my service, and I should most certainly have run away to sea if we had lived in a seaport. My son inherits my taste. He chose the navy for his profession long ere he saw the sea. May he do honour to his choice!

However, in the end the love of poetry and appreciation of its beauty awoke in me. The first spark of passion that fired my heart and imagination was kindled by Virgil’s magnificent epic, and I well remember how my voice broke as I tried to construe aloud the fourth book of the Æneid. One day, stumbling along, I came to the passage where Dido—the presents of Æneas heaped around her—gives up her life upon the funeral pyre; the agony of the dying queen, the cries of her sister, her nurse, her women; the horror of that scene that struck pity even to the hearts of the Immortals, all rose so vividly before me that my lips trembled, my words came more and more indistinctly, and at the line—