SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
laugh with your old words
«You make me laugh with your old words about a mission to fulfil. What a missionary! But there is in me an inexplicable mechanism which works in spite of all arguments; and I let it work because I cannot stop it. What disgusts me most is the certainty that beauty does not exist for the majority of these human monkeys.»[41]
«The unsolvable enigma of the world, the existence of evil and pain, the fierce madness of mankind, and the stupid cruelty that it inflicts hourly and everywhere on the most inoffensive beings and on itself–all this has reduced me to the state of unhappy and forlorn resignation of a scorpion surrounded by live coals. The most I can do is not to wound myself with my own dart.»[42]
«I am in my sixty-first year; and I have no more hopes or illusions or aspirations. I am alone; and my contempt for the stupidity and dishonesty of men, and my hatred for their wicked cruelty, are at their height. Every hour I say to Death, ‘When you like!’ What is he waiting for?»[43]
[Footnote 41: Letter to Bennet. He did not believe in patriotism. «Patriotism? Fetichism! Cretinism!» (Mémoires, II, 261).]
[Footnote 42: Letter to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 1862.]
[Footnote 43: Mémoires, II, 391.]
And yet he fears the death he invites. It is the strongest, the bitterest, the truest feeling he has. No musician since old Roland de Lassus has feared it with that intensity. Do you remember Herod’s sleepless nights in L’Enfance du Christ, or Faust’s soliloquy, or the anguish of Cassandra, or the burial of Juliette?–through all this you will find the whispered fear of annihilation. The wretched man was haunted by this fear, as a letter published by M. Julien Tiersot shows:–
«My favourite walk, especially when it is raining, really raining in torrents, is the cemetery of Montmartre, which is near my house. I often go there; there is much that draws me to it. The day before yesterday I passed two hours in the cemetery; I found a comfortable seat on a costly tomb, and I went to sleep…. Paris is to me a cemetery and her pavements are tomb-stones. Everywhere are memories of friends or enemies that are dead…. I do nothing but suffer unceasing pain and unspeakable weariness. I wonder night and day if I shall die in great pain or with little of it–I am not foolish enough to hope to die without any pain at all. Why are we not dead?»[44]
His music is like these mournful words; it is perhaps even more terrible, more gloomy, for it breathes death.[45] What a contrast: a soul greedy of life and preyed upon by death. It is this that makes his life such an awful tragedy. When Wagner met Berlioz he heaved a sigh of relief–he had at last found a man more unhappy than himself.[46]
[Footnote 44: Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 January, 1859; 30 August, 1864; 13 July, 1866; and to A. Morel, 21 August, 1864.]
[Footnote 45: » … Qui viderit illas De lacrymis factas sentiet esse meis,» wrote Berlioz, as an inscription for his Tristes in 1854.]
[Footnote 46: «One instantly recognises a companion in misfortune; and I found I was a happier man than Berlioz» (Wagner to Liszt, 5 July, 1855).]
this was: Laugh With Your Old Words
go to next chapter: Threshold Of Death
