though they are not less unusual. The first is his sense of pure beauty.
Berlioz's exterior romanticism must not make us blind to this. He had a
Virgilian soul; and if his colouring recalls that of Weber, his design
has often an Italian suavity. Wagner never had this love of beauty in
the Latin sense of the word. Who has understood the Southern nature,
beautiful form, and harmonious movement like Berlioz? Who, since Gluck,
has recognised so well the secret of classical beauty? Since _Orfeo_ was
composed, no one has carved in music a bas-relief so perfect as the
entrance of Andromache in the second act of _Les Troyens à Troie_. In
_Les Troyens à Carthage_, the fragrance of the Aeneid is shed over the
night of love, and we see the luminous sky and hear the murmur of the
sea. Some of his melodies are like statues, or the pure lines of
Athenian friezes, or the noble gesture of beautiful Italian girls, or
the undulating profile of the Albanian hills filled with divine
laughter. He has done more than felt and translated into music the
beauty of the Mediterranean--he has created beings worthy of a Greek
tragedy. His Cassandre alone would suffice to rank him among the
greatest tragic poets that music has ever known. And Cassandre is a
worthy sister of Wagner's Brünnhilde; but she has the advantage of
coming of a nobler race, and of having a lofty restraint of spirit and
action that Sophocles himself would have loved.

Not enough attention has been drawn to the classical nobility from which
Berlioz's art so spontaneously springs. It is not fully acknowledged
that he was, of all nineteenth-century musicians, the one who had in the
highest degree the sense of plastic beauty. Nor do people always
recognise that he was a writer of sweet and flowing melodies.
Weingartner expressed the surprise he felt when, imbued with current
prejudice against Berlioz's lack of melodic invention, he opened, by
chance, the score of the overture of _Benvenuto_ and found in that short