Among the human race there are certain beings endowed with peculiar sensibility, upon whom nothing acts in the same manner or in the same degree as upon other people, and for whom the exception becomes the rule. With them, their natural peculiarities explain those pertaining to their lives, which in turn explain the peculiarity of their destiny. These, too, are the exceptions which lead the world, and this must inevitably be the case, because they are the persons who, by their struggles and sufferings, pay for the enlightenment and onward movement of the human race. When these leaders of intelligence lie dead upon the road they have opened up, the flock of Panurge rushes in, quite proud of bursting through the open gates; each individual sheep, with all the dignity of the fly on the coachwheel, boasts aloud of the honour of having brought about the triumph of revolution.

J'ai tant fait que nos gens sont enfin dans la plaine!

Berlioz, like Beethoven, was an illustrious victim of the mournful privilege of being an exception, and dearly did he pay for the heavy responsibility! The exceptions are doomed by fate to suffer, and to make others suffer also. How can the crowd (that profanum vulgus which Horace so cordially detested) be expected to recognise and confess itself incompetent before the diminutive audacity, purely personal, which has the hardihood to give the lie direct to inveterate habits and prevailing routine?