The glass contained the wine of love and youth mingled with a grosser potion. In the drama La Coupe et les Lèvres he exhibited libertine passion seeking alliance with innocence and purity, and incapable of attaining self-recovery; in Namouna, hastily written to fit the volume for publication, he presented the pursuit of ideal love as conducting its victim through all the lures of sensual desire; the comedy À quoi rêvent les jeunes Filles, with its charm of fantasy, tells of a father's device to prepare his daughters for the good prose of wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset had emancipated himself from the Cénacle, and would neither appeal to the eye with an overcharge of local colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curious rhymes. Next year (1833) in the Revue des Deux Mondes appeared Rolla, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's early manner, and of Byron's influence on his genius; the prodigal, beggared of faith, debased by self-indulgence, is not quite a disbeliever in love; through passion he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge of death.
At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in Italy. The hours of illusion were followed by months of despair. He knew suffering, not through the imagination, but in his own experience. After a time calm gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue of the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivolously despairing and elegantly corrupt. In Les Nuits—two of these (Mai, Octobre) inspired by the Italian joy and pain—he speaks simply and directly from the heart in accents of penetrating power. Solitude, his constant friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love, shall be his consolers—
| "Après avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore; Il faut aimer sans cesse, après avoir aimé." |
Musset's powers had matured through suffering; the Lettre à Lamartine, the Espoir en Dieu, the Souvenir, the elegy À la Malibran, the later stanzas Après une Lecture (1842), are masterpieces of the true Musset—the Musset who will live.
At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind; but the years were years of lassitude. His patriotic song, Le Rhin Allemand, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received him. "Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academician; the ungracious reply, "Il s'absinthe trop," told the truth, and it was a piteous decline. In 1857, attended by the pious Sister Marceline, Musset died.
Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty, intelligence, esprit, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse—these were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructive imagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of an artist's passion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, has borne the lapse of time ill. "J'y ai vomi la vérité," he said. It is not the happiest way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis-Quinze boudoir. Pierre et Camille, with its deaf-and-dumb lovers, and their baby, who babbles in the presence of the relenting grandfather "Bonjour, papa," has a pretty innocence. Le Fils de Titien returns to the theme of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence. Frédéric et Bernerette and Mimi Pinson may be said to have created the poetic literature of the grisette—gay and good, or erring and despairful—making a flower of what had blossomed in the stories of Paul de Kock as a weed.
Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac poems, Musset's best Comédies and Proverbes (proverbial sayings exemplified in dramatic action), deserve a place. Written in prose for readers of the Revue des Deux Mondes, their scenic qualities were discovered only in 1847, when the actress Madame Allan presented Un Caprice and Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermée at St. Petersburg. The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political conspiracy, Lorenzaccio, was an effort beyond the province and the powers of Musset. His André del Sarto, a tragic representation of the great painter betrayed by his wife and his favourite pupil, needed the relief of his happier fantasy. It is in such delicate creations of a world of romance, a world of sunshine and of perpetual spring, as On ne badine pas avec l'Amour, Les Caprices de Marianne, Le Chandelier, Il ne faut jurer de rien, that Musset showed how romantic art could become in a high sense classic by the balance of sensibility and intelligence, of fantasy and passion. The graces of the age of Madame de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freer graces of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance of Shakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the artificial elegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love, and still repeated love; sentiment is relieved by the play of gaiety; the grotesque approaches the beautiful; we sail in these light-timbered barques to a land that lies not very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest of our own great enchanter.
VI
Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry of Musset. Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the law of Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a hand that moulds and colours—that is all. A child of the South, born at Tarbes in 1811, THÉOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult's studio till the day when, his friend the poet Gérard de Nerval having summoned him to take part in the battle of Hernani, he swore by the skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter. His first volume, Poésies, appeared in 1830, and was followed in two years by Albertus, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness and horror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The Comédie de la Mort evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust, Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art and love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The Orientales was his poetic gospel; but the Orientales is precisely the volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these early poems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured and picturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far as they can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured with vivid pigments.
It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he believed, for poetry, he was forced to toil day after day, year after year, as a critic of the stage and of the art-exhibitions. He performed his task in workman-like fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressions than to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of literary criticism are his exhumations of the earlier seventeenth-century poets—Théophile, Cyrano, Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others—published in 1844, together with a study of Villon, under the title Les Grotesques, and the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on Les Progrès de la Poésie Française depuis 1830. A reader of that memoir to-day will feel, with Swift, that literary reputations are dislimned and shifted as quickly and softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays aloft.