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ALFRED DE MUSSET
Alfred de Musset lived to be forty-seven, but all his works, except three charming little plays and a few poems, were written before he was thirty.
The whole series of remarkable and admirable productions was given to the world during the six years following on his rupture with George Sand. Although she had deceived him, his inclination to dwell upon deceit and treachery becomes ever slighter; and along with it he loses his affectation of world-weariness. In his works, even in his choice of subjects, we can trace the author's personal struggle to throw off his mask of vice and to free himself from the attraction vice has for him.
The first important work De Musset produced after his return from Italy was the drama Lorenzaccio, the idea of which he had conceived in Florence. Lorenzo de Medici is cousin to Alexander de Medici, the bestially cruel and sensual Duke of Florence. By nature Lorenzo is a pure, high-strung, energetic character. He early determines, taking Brutus as his model, to rid the world of a tyrant. To attain his aim he plays the part of a heartless libertine, becomes Alexander's follower, tool, counsellor, and pander. As Hamlet assumed madness, Lorenzo assumes the mask of a weak, cowardly sensualism, in order to allay suspicion and secure his victim. But the disguise under which he conceals his real nature adheres to him like a Nessus garment; he gradually becomes nearly everything that he only desired to appear; against his will he inhales and absorbs the corruption with which he himself has assisted to impregnate the atmosphere of the court and capital; when he reflects on his life he loathes himself. And yet he is misunderstood; for through all the wickedness and the feigned, sickly cowardice, he is pursuing his plan of murdering Alexander at the right moment and re-establishing the Republic.
He is consumed by misanthropical scorn. He despises the Duke as a satyr and a bloodhound; the people, because they allow such a man to reign over them, and because they permit him, Lorenzaccio, to walk unassailed, unpunished along the streets of Florence; the Republicans, because they have no energy and no comprehension of the political situation. His dream is to purge himself of all the impurity of his life by a single, great, decisive deed, the assassination of the Duke; and the poet allows him thus to purify himself. Lorenzo throws off his assumed character and judges and punishes like an avenging angel. De Musset's political pessimism shows itself in what follows. Lorenzaccio falls by the hands of an assassin, who is tempted by the price set upon his head, and the Florentine republican leaders are too indifferent and unpractical, the mass of the citizens too degenerate, to profit by the death of the Duke; they sit still and allow themselves to be surprised and overpowered by another tyrant. The imperfectly concealed contempt of the author for the Republicans is undoubtedly due to impressions received in 1830. De Musset had himself seen a revolution which promised a Republic end in a Monarchy. In his play, however, the Republicans are represented in a more unfavourable light than they deserve. The evening before the assassination Lorenzaccio undoubtedly informs them at what hour he will kill the Duke, yet we can hardly blame them for not making their preparations. Is not the man who shouts this startling intelligence into their houses from the street, the Duke's inseparable comrade, his companion in guilt, his court-fool? What wonder that they shrug their shoulders and do nothing! In De Musset's injustice to them we are conscious of a personal feeling which has no connection with his literary subject. Of chief importance to him, however, has been the representation of Lorenzo's character, with its nobility under a repulsive mask. In Lorenzo's soul there is an ideal element, of which he is not ashamed; he aspires; he believes in the expiating power of deeds. What purifies him in the hour of his death is not an accident, like Rolla's pure kiss, but an action of which he has dreamed ever since he grew up.
In Le Chandelier we are still in very depraved company; but the principal character, the young clerk, Fortunio, stands out against the dark background, a figure of light, with his intense, boundless devotion to Jacqueline. He is badly used by her and her lover, who employ him as a screen, a blind, in their low intrigue. He finds them out, but goes on loving as before, and is ready to encounter certain death to hide the disgraceful amour of the woman he loves. This young page has the determination and courage of a hero, and the power of his pure devotion is so great that it moves and overcomes Jacqueline and wins her from Clavaroche. He is an ideal youthful lover.
Octave in Les Caprices de Marianne is a frivolous and in many ways depraved young man, who neither will nor can love any woman seriously. He declares that he disdains to spend more time on the conquest of a woman than it takes him to break the seal on his bottle of Grecian wine. But in one relation, that of friendship, he is as simple-hearted and trusting as a boy. He loves his friend, young Cœlio, with such ardour that he is ready to die for him or to revenge his death, with such fidelity that he scornfully rejects the favour of the lady whom Cœlio vainly worships. He is an ideal friend. A striking contrast to him is Cœlio, a character in whom De Musset, who in this drama divided his own personality, represented the other half of his nature. Cœlio is the youthful lover, whose love is a longing adoration, a passion so melancholy in its ardour that it will kill him if it remain unsatisfied. A halo of Shakespearean romance surrounds his head, his words are music, his hopes poetry. He describes himself in the words: "Il me manque le repos, la douce insouciance qui fait de la vie un miroir où tous les objets se peignent un instant et sur lequel tout glisse. Une dette pour moi est un remords. L'amour, dont vous autres vous faites un passe-temps, trouble ma vie entière."
We feel in these male characters how De Musset is maturing as an author. His desire is no longer only to delineate the seething instincts of youth, or the wild play of the passions with its accompaniment of deceit, treachery, and violence; he dwells long and with predilection on the innocent and deep feeling which is only made guilty by outward circumstances, on the love which in reality is pure, and which appears criminal only because it is an infraction of social laws, on the friendship which in its essence is heroic devotion, even when it assumes the degrading form of eloquent panderage—in short upon friendship and love in their purity, on those forces in human life which we are wont to call ideal.
Nor is it only De Musset's male characters who become purer and purer; his women undergo the same gradual transformation. In his early works they are either Delilahs or Eves. But his ever-increasing inclination to represent the spiritually beautiful and morally pure, leads him to idealise them also more and more. It is noteworthy that the first female character which he creates after his final breach with George Sand in 1835, namely, Madame Pierson in La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, is to a great extent a highly idealised portrait of that lady. His prose tales, of which at least three, Emmeline, Frédéric et Bernerette, and Le Fils du Titien, are among the best love-stories our century has produced, bear witness to their author's increasing tendency to ennoble and glorify love and, consequently, his female characters. He takes, for example, the outward semblance of some little grisette or other he has known, some sweet-tempered, frivolous, loose-living, gay young creature, and this figure he invests with a virginal charm which it has long lost, and makes of it a Mimi Pinson; or he paints for us a young girl as soulful, as naïve in all her mistakes and false steps, as beautiful and delicate in her manner of expressing herself, and as touchingly simple in the hour of her death as that Bernerette, whose last letter few have read without tears. To him, the love-poet, love is so autocratic a power that he subordinates even art to it. To be the lover and the beloved seems to him at last such a much greater thing than to be the artist, that his final conception of ideal art is: art consecrated and exclusively devoted to one person, the only beloved. In Le Fils du Titien the hero, a gifted young artist, is arrested in a dissolute career by a noble woman's love. He shows his gratitude by determining to paint one single picture, the portrait of his mistress. On it he concentrates all his powers, and by it alone he is to be known to posterity. In its honour he writes a sonnet, in which he praises the beauty and the pure soul of his beloved, tells why it is he has determined that his brush shall never be used in the service of another, and declares that, beautiful as the picture may be, it is as nothing compared with a kiss from its model.