Alfred de Musset was one of these latter, a beautiful and charming youth, gifted with all the graces of life and with the magic fire of genius. He has told his own sad story in a book, “The Confessions of a Child of His Age.” Most of the strong and healthy men of France had been killed off in the Napoleonic wars, and the new generation were the children of weaklings. They drifted aimlessly, having luxury but no duties, and no vision or ideal to inspire them.
Musset was born in 1810, of a well-to-do and cultured family. He was impressionable, sensitive, and in the beginning plunged with ardor into the poetical movement headed by Hugo. But soon he lost interest, and gave himself to amorous adventures and to mournful self-pity, an elegant young Byron of the boulevards. It was a time when a poet could make a national reputation by comparing the moon above a church-steeple to a dot on the letter i. Musset, from the beginning to the end of his short life, had no experience of any sort except sexuality, alcohol, and the poetry of men who likewise had no other experience.
At the age of twenty-three he met George Sand, a woman of thirty who had run away from her family and was supporting herself as a free-lance novelist. She carried the young poet off to Italy, but their dream of love broke up in a quarrel, and poor Musset had brain fever, and came home, and sat all day in his room for four months, so his brother tells us, doing nothing but crying, except when he played chess. But at the end of the four months he went out and found another love, and then another and another. Any woman would do, according to his philosophy, poetically set forth in an exquisite verse: “What matters the flagon, provided one is drunk?”
The young poet was welcomed to the French Academy, but was not very faithful to his duties. Said one of the members: “Musset absents himself too much.” To which the answer was: “Musset absinthes himself too much.” He was an old roué at the age of thirty, and there was nothing left but to die. Long afterwards George Sand published a novel in which she told the intimate details of their love affair; and that, of course, was fine copy, and a tremendous thrill. The title of the novel was “She and He,” and Musset’s brother came back with a book entitled “He and She.” It appears that George Sand had been unfaithful to Musset in the midst of their amour; but we cannot get up much sympathy for the unhappy “child of his age.” His brother delicately tells us how, in the days of his beautiful youth, lying in bed at night, the young poet would impart shy confidences about his amorous triumphs. He was seducing other men’s wives and daughters and sisters, and was apparently not concerning himself with any brain fevers these men might have, or with any tears of grief they might shed in between their games of chess.
Two of the most beautiful and eloquent of Musset’s poems are entitled, respectively, “A Night of May” and “A Night of December.” Each of them portrays the poet as falling sorrowfully out of love. The world had naturally assumed that the two poems related to the same mistress; but the poet’s brother revealed that the two poems had a different “motive,” and also that there was another “motive” in between the May “motive” and the December “motive.” And there were many other “motives”—since numbers of elegant ladies in Paris aspired to become the theme of one of the “Nights” of this delicate if drunken genius. We shall see a long string of poets of this sort for a hundred years in France—and some, alas! in England and America. The lesson of their lives is always the same—that poetry without social vision and moral backbone is merely a snare for the human spirit.
CHAPTER LXIV
PRAYER IN ADULTERY
The problem of the relationship of art to morality is most interestingly illustrated by the case of George Sand. This woman-writer was promiscuous, and she was predatory, in the sense that she turned her adventures into copy and sold them in the market. But she had a mind, and she used it to investigate all the new ideas of her time. She was moved, not merely by her own desire for pleasure, but by the sufferings and strivings of her fellow human beings. She poured all these things into her books, and made herself one of the civilizing forces of her time.
She was born in 1804 and raised in a convent. Married at the age of eighteen, and being unhappy, she kicked over the traces and became a Bohemian adventurer, wearing trousers, proclaiming the rights of passion, taking to herself one conspicuous lover after another, and then putting them into books for the support of herself and her two children. She was the founder of what we might call emotional feminism. She was religious in a sentimental way, though a vigorous anti-clerical; she became converted to Socialism, worked ardently for social reform, and published many long novels in its support.
George Sand had a romantic ancestry, of which she did not fail to make literary use. On her father’s side she was descended from a royal bastard. Her mother had been a camp follower in the army of Napoleon, “a child of the old pavements of Paris.” Thus the novelist united in one person the aristocratic and the proletarian impulses. A large percentage of her collected ancestors were illegitimate, so she came honestly by her free love ideas. On the other hand, she was a very respectable, hard-working bourgeois woman, who preached interminably on virtue, and paid all her debts, and got good prices for her manuscripts—things which were regarded as extremely bad taste by the art-world of her time.
France had had innumerable aristocratic ladies who had loved promiscuously, proceeding from a king to a duke, and from a duke to an abbé or a monseigneur. There had been women who had risen from the lower classes by becoming the mistresses of noblemen. But here was a brand-new phenomenon, a woman who went out and faced the world “on her own,” and instead of taking the money of the men she loved, proceeded to earn the money by writing about the men! It was an enormous scandal, and at the same time an enormous literary success, for these were pot-boilers of genius, full of eloquence and fire. Also they were full of ideas on a hundred subjects, elementary instruction such as ladies on the women’s pages of our Sunday supplements give to correspondents. But American readers find it a little hard to understand the fusion of piety and sexuality which George Sand pours into her romantic novels. “Oh, my dear Octave,” writes an adulterous wife to her lover, “never shall we pass a night together without kneeling and praying for Jacques!” It is just a little shocking to us to learn that this Jacques is the husband whom the pair are deceiving!