French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

5. Musset.

Alfred de Musset makes a melancholy figure in literary history. Few men ever had a more brilliant morning than he; few men ever had an evening more somber. And Musset’s evening fell at mid-day. Heine, with that bitterness which was his, could say of the still youthful poet, “A young man with a very fine future—behind him!”

What this writer accomplished, he accomplished by the pure felicity of genius—genius, flushed and quickened with the warm blood of youth. He did nothing in the way of self-tasking, but all in the way of self-indulging. He obeyed whim, and not will. When the whim failed, he failed. Will indeed he seemed not to have, but only willfulness. He died at forty-seven, but he had already ceased living at forty.

It is generally agreed that in what makes genius for the poet, namely, capacity of poetic feeling, propensity to poetic rhythm, command of poetic phrase, and power to see with the imagination, Musset belongs among the foremost singers of France. What he lacked was moral equipment to match. We mean not moral goodness, though this, too, he missed, but moral strength. He might have soared like the eagle, for he had eagle’s pinions; but he had not the eagle’s heart, and after a few daring upward flights he fluttered ignobly downward, and thereafter, except at intervals too rare, kept the ground. Some charge this lamentable failure on Musset’s part to the ill influence over him of George Sand, with whom in the fresh splendor of his young fame he entered into an unhappy “relation”—a “relation” sought by the woman in the case, who of the two was the older. She, as some think, sucked Musset’s heart out of him like a vampire. But what a confession to make on the man’s behalf of flaccid moral fiber in him! Such a man, one would say, was certain to fall in due time prey to some one; in default of other hunter, then prey to himself. It is one of the things least consistent with a favorable view of George Sand’s fundamental character that, two years after Musset’s death, and some twenty years after the time of her “relation” with him, she should publish, thinly veiled under the form of fiction, a story of that relation, in which she herself appeared vindicated, and the unhappy dead was held up to the laughter and contempt of Europe. Paul de Musset, Alfred’s brother, replied in a book which claimed to set the facts in their true light before the world. Wretched wrangle! A little more of dull conformity on her part to things as she found them, and a little less of passionate protest against them in literature and in life, would have helped George Sand shun scandals that happily limit her influence as they deservedly darken her fame. There is too much reason to fear that this woman, in whom genius was certainly greater than was conscience, made, after the manner of Goethe, a deliberate study of Musset in quest of material to be worked up in literary product.

Musset was greatest as poet, but he wrote admirable prose in novels and in comedies. He singularly combined capacity of hard and brilliant wit in prose dialogue with capacity of the softest, most dewy sentiment in musical verse. Some of his comedies are established classics of the French stage.

We confine ourselves here to brief exhibition by specimen of what Musset accomplished in that species of literary work in which he was greatest, namely, poetry. A quaternion of pieces called “The Nights” will supply us perhaps with our best single extract, at once practicable and characteristic. These pieces are entitled respectively “Night of May,” “Night of August,” “Night of October,” “Night of December.” They are couched in the form of dialogue between the poet and his muse. Of course they are highly charged with autobiographic quality. The poet poses in them very pensively before the public. The Byronic melancholy, without the Byronic passion, pervades them. Our extract we take, condensing it, from the “Night of December.” In it, the poet’s muse talks to the poet in what might easily pass for an almost pious vein. We could make extracts in which the piety would be far, very far, less edifying, would in fact take on the characteristic dissolute French type of moral sentiment. His muse’s talk to the poet is somewhat such as might be imagined to be a confidential consolatory strain of condescension from the goddess-mother Venus to her son, the Virgilian “pious” Æneas. We make our translation closely line for line, almost word for word. The rhyme we sacrifice for the sake of what we trust may seem to wise judges a fairly good approximation, otherwise impossible in a literal rendering, to the spirit and rhythm of the original:

Is it aimlessly, then, that Providence works, And absent, then, deem’st thou the God that thee smote? The stroke thou complainest of saved thee perchance, My poor child, for ’twas then that was opened thy heart. An apprentice is man, and his master is pain, And none knows himself until he has grieved. It is a stern law, but a law that’s supreme, As old as the world and as ancient as doom, That the baptism we of misfortune must take, And that all at this sorrowful price must be bought. The harvest to ripen has need of the dew, To live and to feel man has need of his tears, Joy has for its symbol a plant that is bruised Yet is wet with the rain and covered with flowers. Wast not saying that thou of thy folly wast cured? Art not young, art not happy, and everywhere hailed? And those airy-light pleasures which make life beloved, If thou never hadst wept, what worth to thee they? ******* Wouldst thou feel the ineffable peace of the skies, The hush of the nights, the moan of the waves, If somewhere down here fret and failure of sleep Had not brought to thy dream the eternal repose? ******* Of what then complainest? The unquenchable hope Is rekindled in thee ’neath the hand of mischance. Why choose to abhor thy vanished young years, And an evil detest that thee better has made?

Imagine the foregoing in its own original music, and invested with that hovering, wavering atmosphere of pathos which Musset knew so well how to throw over his verse, and you will partly understand what the charm is of this French poet to his countrymen.

Musset exhibits something of the wit that he was, in the following bit of rhymed epigram, which, breaking up two stanzas for the purpose, we take from his poem entitled “Namouna.” The rhymes were necessary here to convey the effect of smartness belonging to the original, and we accordingly preserve them: