The third letter, telling us about the nobility and the women of Venice, completes the impression. Just as the Pyrenees had moved George Sand, so Italy now moved her. This was a fresh acquisition for her palette. More than once from henceforth Venice was to serve her for the wonderful scenery of her stories. This is by no means a fresh note, though, in George Sand's work. There is no essential difference, then, in her inspiration. She had always been impressionable, but her taste was now getting purer. Musset, the most romantic of French poets, had an eminently classical taste. In the Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, he defined romanticism as an abuse of adjectives. He was of Madame de Lafayette's opinion, that a word taken out was worth twenty pennies, and a phrase taken out twenty shillings. In a copy of Indiana he crossed out all the useless epithets. This must have made a considerable difference to the length of the book. George Sand was too broad-minded to be hurt by such criticism, and she was intelligent enough to learn a lesson from it.
Musset's transformation was singularly deeper. When he started for Venice, he was the youngest and most charming of poets, fanciful and full of fun. "Monsieur mon gamin d'Alfred," George Sand called him at that time. When he returned from there, he was the saddest of poets. For some time he was, as it were, stunned. His very soul seemed to be bowed down with his grief. He was astonished at the change he felt in himself, and he did not by any means court any fresh inspiration.
J'ai vu, le temps ou ma jeunesse Sur mes levres etait sans cesse Prete a chanter comme un oiseau; Mais j'ai souffert un dur martyre Et le moins que j'en pourrais dire,
Si je lessayais sur a lyre,
La briserait comme un roseau,
he writes.
In the Nuit de Mai, the earliest of these songs of despair, we have the poet's symbol of the pelican giving its entrails as food to its starving young. The only symbols that we get in this poetry are symbols of sadness, and these are at times given in magnificent fulness of detail. We have solitude in the Nuit de decembre, and the labourer whose house has been burnt in the Lettre a Lamartine. The Nuit d'aout gives proof of a wild effort to give life another trial, but in the Auit d'octobre anger gets the better of him once more.
Honte a toi, qui la premiere
M'as appris la trahison . . . !
The question has often been asked whether the poet refers here to the woman he loved in Venice but it matters little whether he did or not. He only saw her through the personage who from henceforth symbolized "woman" to him and the suffering which she may cause a man. And yet, as this suffering became less intense, softened as it was by time, he began to discover the benefit of it. His soul had expanded, so that he was now in communion with all that is great in Nature and in Art. The harmony of the sky, the silence of night, the murmur of flowing water, Petrarch, Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, all appealed to him. The day came when he could write:
Un souvenir heureux est peut-etre sur terre
Plus vrai que le bonheur.
This is the only philosophy for a conception of life which treats love as everything for man. He not only pardons now, but he is grateful:
Je ne veux rien savoir, ni si les champs fleurissent,
Nice quil adviendra di., simulacre humain,
Ni si ces vastes cieux eclaireront demain
Ce qu' ils ensevelissent heure, en ce lieu,
Je me dis seulement: a cette
Un jour, je fus aime, j'aimais, elle etait belle,
Jenfouis ce tresor dans mon ame immortelle
Et je l'em porte a Dieu.