THE CHILD OF HIS AGE
The middle of the nineteenth century was a hard time for generous-minded
and idealistic poets in France. The great revolution had failed, it
failed again in 1830 and in 1848, and cruelty and greed and corruption
seemed to be the final destiny of civilization. A few strong spirits
kept the faith, but the weaker ones drifted away and drowned their
sorrows in debauchery and drink.
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.