The answer must undoubtedly be: In the land of the ideal; nowhere else. It is upon its coast that the wanton, cynical De Musset, in his capacity of author, lands at last. De Musset, the man, suffered shipwreck on other shores. He fell a victim to the abuse of narcotics. His undisciplined, ill-regulated character was his bane. In his writings he became ever more spiritual, ever more moral; in his life he sank ever deeper into mechanical sensual indulgence. He early lost control over himself; for a time he rose by the aid of his art above the ruin of his life; but in the end even the wings of art became powerless.
He had hoped much from the Constitutional Monarchy. He had expected from it, or under it, an art-loving court, a liberal policy, a revival of national glory, and a blossoming time in literature. We can imagine his disappointment. It is not impossible that a court with a keen appreciation of literature and art might have exercised a saving influence upon Alfred de Musset, have drawn him into its circle, compelled him to preserve his self-respect, and made his pleasures, and even his excesses, more refined. But Louis Philippe, that polished and well-educated peace-lover, had no real love of literature and no literary taste. He was even less capable of attaching Alfred de Musset than Victor Hugo to himself. De Musset wrote a sonnet on the occasion of Meunier's attempt to assassinate the King, in 1836. It was not printed, but the Duke of Orleans, who had been a school-fellow of De Musset's, saw it, thought it excellent, and read it to His Majesty. The King never knew who had written it; as soon as he heard that the author presumed to address him in the second person singular, he became so indignant that he would hear no more. To make amends for this slight, the Duke procured De Musset an invitation to the court balls. When the poet was presented to Louis Philippe, he was astonished by the reception he met with. The King came up to him with a smile of pleasant surprise and said: "You have just come from Joinville; I am very glad to see you." De Musset had too much savoir-vivre to betray any surprise. He made a low bow and tried to think what the King's words could mean. At last he remembered that a distant relation of his was inspector of forests on the crown property of Joinville. The King, who did not burden his memory with the names of authors, had a perfect acquaintance with all the names of the officials in charge of the crown lands. Every winter for eleven years in succession he saw the face of his supposed forest-inspector with the same pleasure, and favoured him with such gracious nods and smiles that many a courtier turned pale with envy. The honour was supposed to be shown to literature; but this much is certain, that Louis Philippe never knew that there lived in France during his reign a great poet who bore the same name as his inspector of forests.
Such a lack-lustre rule as Louis Philippe's could not but be abhorrent to De Musset. His haughty, wildly defiant answer to Becker's Rheinlied, points to lyric possibilities in him which might have developed under other political conditions. As things were, he felt himself restricted to being the poet of youth and love; and when youth was past he was incapable of reviving his powers. His virtues were as fatal to him as his vices. Proud and distinguished, he had not a trace of the ambition which leads a man to husband his intellectual resources, not an atom of the desire of gain which compels to industry, or of the egotism which makes the writer attribute supreme importance to his own work. He lived his life with such greedy haste that at forty he was as exhausted as a man of seventy, without having attained to either composure or wisdom. His premature physical exhaustion brought intellectual exhaustion in its train. He was destitute of that higher instinct which compels the author to live altogether for his art, and he had not a trace of the social or political instinct which bends the productive mind to the yoke of duty to others. He was so incapable of self-control that the slightest temptation proved irresistible. His life became as absolutely aimless as his art was; there was no cause he desired to advance, nothing that he was determined at any cost to say; and his character was too uncontrollable, too little reflective, for self-development, as Goethe understood it, to be the aim which rendered all others superfluous. When Alfred de Musset died in 1857, his creative capacity had been extinct for several years.
[1] His tour in Italy with George Sand lasted from December 1833 to April 1834. In 1834 he wrote On ne badine pas avec l'Amour and Lorenzaccio; in 1835 Barberine (his most insignificant play), Le Chandelier, Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, and La Nuit de Mai; in 1836 Emmeline and Il ne faut jurer de rien; in 1837 Un Caprice, Les deux Maîtresses, and Frédéric et Bernerette; in 1838 Le Fils du Titien. Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermée was written in 1845, Bettine in 1851, Carmosine in 1852.
[XI]
GEORGE SAND
"I believe," writes George Sand in the introduction to La Mare au Diable, "that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love, and that the novel of our day ought to supply the place of the parable and fable of the childish days of old. The aim of the artist should be to awaken love for the objects he represents; and I, for my part, should not reproach him if he beautified them a little. Art is not an examination of the given reality, but a pursuit of the ideal truth." What the mature woman here proclaims as her aesthetic creed is what she had felt all her life. She had never regarded the calling of the author in any other light than that of an aspiration after the highest of which humanity is capable; or, to put it more correctly, she had considered it to be the author's calling to elevate the mind above the imperfection of the existing conditions of society, with the aim of giving it a wide horizon, and thereby imparting to it the power, when it descended to earth again, to combat in its own fashion the prejudices, the conventions, the coarseness of mind and hardness of heart to which that imperfection was due.
In the introduction to Le Compagnon du Tour de France she says: "Since when has it been obligatory for the novel to be a transcription of what is, of the hard and cold reality of contemporary men and things? It may be this, I know; and Balzac, a master to whose talent I have always done homage, has written the Comédie humaine. But, although I was united by the ties of friendship to that illustrious man, I saw human affairs under quite a different aspect. I remember saying to him: 'You are writing the Human Comedy, The title is a modest one. You might quite as well call it the Human Drama, the Human Tragedy.' 'Yes,' said he, 'and you, you are writing the Human Epic.' 'The title in this case,' I replied, 'would be too imposing. What I should like to write is the human pastoral, the human ballad, the human romance. To put it plainly, you have the desire and the ability to paint the human being as you see him. Good! I, on the other hand, feel impelled to paint him as I wish him to be, as I believe he ought to be.' And, as we were not competing with each other, we each recognised that the other was right."