Yet another circumstance aided the process of disintegration. The Revolution of July transferred a number of the youthful standard-bearers and champions of the literary camp to the political. It is significant that in 1830 the Globe ceased to be a literary organ and passed into the hands of the Saint-Simonists. Its founders and most important contributors, men like Guizot, Thiers, Villemain, and Vitet, became members of Parliament, public officials, or ministers of state. And since in our days the pursuit of politics leads much more quickly to fame than that of literature, even poets were tempted to mount the political platforms. Men like Hugo and Lamartine engaged actively in politics during the reign of Louis Philippe. The authors who continued to confine their attention to literature felt themselves distanced by those who combined politics with it, and could not help being at times irritated by the more noisy fame attained by these latter, and by seeing literature, their own all in all, regarded as an alternative good enough to have recourse to in time of need.
It was a severe blow to the Romantic School when Sainte-Beuve, its valiant, enthusiastic herald, withdrew from his post as one of Hugo's staff. He seems, with that curious mixture of humility and independence which distinguished his character, to have been long annoyed with himself for the attitude of submission to Hugo which he had assumed in his poetry, and to have nevertheless gone on unwillingly swinging his censer before the head of the school. The habit Hugo had got into of expecting or demanding huge doses of incense was obnoxious to him, and yet he was too weak to withhold his tribute. It was, however, undoubtedly less admiration for Hugo than for Hugo's young wife which kept Sainte-Beuve within the magic circle. The private rupture between him and Hugo in 1836 was the signal for a complete change in his literary attitude towards the poet of the Orientales. Sainte-Beuve's temperament led him to regard schools, systems, associations, parties, merely in the light of hotels in which he lodged for a time, never completely unpacking his trunk; he was always inclined to depreciate and satirise the one he had just left; hence he now began to write severe and for the most part depreciatory criticism of Hugo's works.
Alfred de Musset had at a still earlier date entertained himself by publishing abroad his defection. A man of such masterly and refined intellect could not be blind to the narrowness and imperfections of the doctrines of the school, still less to the childishness with which they were pushed to extremes by certain Hotspurs among its adherents. When he read aloud his poems for the first time in Hugo's house to an assembly of young Romanticists, only two passages were applauded. The one was the sentence in Don Paez: "Frères, cria de loin un dragon jaune et bleu qui dormait dans du foin." The "yellow and blue" enraptured them; it was what they called colour in style. The other passage was in the description of the huntsmen in "Le lever": a Et sur leur manches vertes les pieds noirs des faucons."
This elementary colour seemed of more value to the youthful audience than all the emotion, passion, and wit of the poems. For it was delineation such as this which distinguished them from the men of the old school, to whom it was only of importance that their readers should learn what happened, not what things were like. To these young men the all-important matter was that for De Musset the visible world existed; but it could not be the most important matter to De Musset himself, whose forte lay in a perfectly different direction, and who felt no desire to compete with Hugo or Théophile Gautier.
De Musset was, moreover, above everything else a young aristocrat, the fashionable man of the world who amused himself with literature in his leisure moments. He had no inclination for the companionship of long-haired poets in Calabrian headgear.
His earliest relations with the public had been of a somewhat uncertain description. He had tried to astonish and provoke it. Now it met him in the most cordial manner, ready, if he would only adopt another attitude towards it, to forgive him everything, even the ballad to the moon. And De Musset, eager to prove his independence, indifferent to parties, averse to dogma, in reality (as his spiritual kinship with Mathurin Régnier and Marivaux shows) classically inclined, yielded to a certain extent to the vague pressure. He captivated the reading world by the air of whimsical superciliousness with which he now wrote of his own and his late comrades' warlike deeds. In his poem, "Les secrètes Pensées de Rafaël, Gentilhomme français," he declares himself weary of the strife; he has, he says, fought on both sides; hundreds of scars have given him a venerable appearance, and he now—at the age of twenty-one—sits like a worn veteran upon his torn drum. Racine and Shakespeare meet upon his table and fall asleep there beside Boileau, who has forgiven them both. In another poem he writes:
"Aujourd'hui l'art n'est plus—personne n'y veut croire.
Notre littérature a cent mille raisons
Pour parler de noyés, de morts, et de guenilles.
Elle-même est un mort que nous galvanisons.
Elle entend son affaire en nous peignant des filles,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Elle-même en est une et la plus délabrée
Qui de fard et d'onguents se soit jamais plâtrée."
This attack upon the fantastic immorality of the ultra-Romantic literary productions was so youthfully, recklessly sweeping that it seemed to be made upon the whole of contemporary literature. And it was possibly not purely an accident that it was written the same year in which Marion Delorme was published, that drama which with all its faults is most chaste and spiritual in conception, but which undeniably has a courtesan for its heroine. De Musset at the same time showed plainly that he was becoming ever more and more indifferent to youthful ideals. Almost all the poets of the young school, headed by Hugo, sided with struggling Greece; Alfred de Musset wrote admiringly of his Mardoche that "he had a greater regard for the Porte and Sultan Mahmoud than for the worthy Hellenic nation now staining the white marble of Paros with its blood."
What was the cause of this indifference and supercilious world-weariness?
Blood that was much too hot; a too passionate heart too early disappointed. In his first youth De Musset's faith in his fellow-men had been irreparably shaken, and distrust engendered bitterness and scorn. It is useless to seek the origin of his dark view of life in any single event, though he himself believed that it was to be accounted for by the fact, to which he constantly alludes, that he was betrayed in his early youth by a mistress and a friend. It was no doubt a severe blow to a youth of his honourable, truthful character to find himself thus deceived; but it is also certain that, whilst the wound was still fresh, he examined it through the poetic magnifying glass and made literary capital of it. It was the fashion to have love woes and to succeed in consoling one's self. But De Musset suffered more than many who read his wanton youthful effusions are apt to imagine. To conceal his sensitiveness, to evade the satire of cynics, he for a time affected extreme coldness and hardness. Such affected cynicism makes as unpleasant an impression as any other affectation. Taine wrote a famous essay on De Musset, the admiration in which is as blind as it is touching; it culminates in the exclamation: This man at least never lied! Unless we consider assumed superciliousness and cold-heartedness truthful, we can scarcely endorse the assertion.