by Hugo and his friends was victorious. This assertion may be made
with truth, though the victory was as yet only a spiritual one. A very
small minority of the most cultivated men and most intelligent women
of France recognised that the battle was decided, that classic tragedy
was dead, that the Aristotelian rules were mistakes, that the men of
the transition period had had their day, that Casimir Delavigne's vein
was exhausted, and that the only literary aspirants who knew their own
minds were the generation of 1830. The fact that a movement of exactly
the same kind had begun in painting, sculpture, and music showed more
plainly than anything else how deep-seated and irresistible the change
was.
But those who apprehended this were, as already observed, a small
minority. The stiff, formal literature of the days of the Empire had on
its side custom, the fear of novelty, stupidity, envy; it was supported
by the whole official class, the press (with the solitary exception of
one daily newspaper, the _Journal des Débats_), and the government;
all government appointments and pensions were bestowed exclusively on
men of the old school, a fact which acted as a powerful temptation to
the rising generation. And there was, moreover, a certain amount of
weariness and discouragement in the new camp after the first great
intellectual effort. The combatants were young; they had fancied that
one mighty onslaught would be sufficient to capture the defences of
prejudice; and it was with a feeling of disappointment that they found
themselves after the attack still only at the foot of the redoubt,
with their numbers greatly reduced. They lost patience and ardour for
the fight. They had been quite prepared for an obstinate struggle,
entailing losses, wounds, and scars, but upon the condition of its
leading to a comparatively speedy victory, to a conspicuous triumph,
with applause and flourish of trumpets. But this seemingly endless
strife, the constant ridicule poured on them, the enemy's undisturbed
occupation of all influential positions in the domains of literature
and art, the continued indifference of the public to the new, and its
enthusiasm for the superannuated school--all this aroused misgivings
in the minds of the youthful forces. Some among them asked themselves
if they had not gone too far in their youthful ardour, if His Majesty
the public were not perhaps right, or at least partly right, after all;
and they began to make excuses for their talent, and to try to win the
forgiveness of the public for it by concessions and apostasy. Some
deserted their friends, in order to gain admission to this, that, or
the other distinguished circle of society. Others, with the Academy in
view, began to regulate their behaviour so as not to spoil their chance
of becoming members of it while still comparatively young men.
A nobler feeling too, the individual author's feeling of independence,
contributed to break up the group. The ties by which it was at first
attempted to hold it together were of too cramping a nature. The
leaders had not been contented with indicating a general direction,
announcing a guiding artistic principle; they had evolved a regular
code of doctrines. And these inventors of artistic dogmas were not
far-sighted, unbiassed thinkers, but poets, as one-sided as they were
gifted. Sociable as men of the Latin race undoubtedly are in comparison
with others, a literary association of this kind was nevertheless
an impossibility in France. Men of science may agree upon a common
line of action, but one of the requirements of art is the complete,
absolute independence of the individual; only when the creative artist
is completely himself, not when he gives up any part whatsoever of his
valuable individuality for the sake of combination, does he produce the
best which he is capable of giving to the world. Absolute individualism
is, of course, impossible in art; consciously or unconsciously,
voluntarily or involuntarily, groups are formed; and, certain as it is
that the individual must be permitted to express himself freely, it is
just as certain that only in artistic continuity, only with the support
and inspiration of artistic tradition, or of kindred spirits--great
predecessors or contemporaries, can he attain to the highest. Isolated,
overstrained geniuses droop and decay. But where a school has a single
acknowledged leader, that leader must have the capacity of imparting
freedom. He must make allowance for everything except want of character
and style. A man of Hugo's stamp could not impart freedom, and the more
fanatical among his adherents interpreted the doctrines of the school
in a much narrower fashion than he did. In the course of a few years
the characteristics of the most distinguished young members of the
school developed in a more marked manner than could have been foreseen
while they were still in the germ, and the revolt of these notable
personages was of advantage to the old Classic party.
Yet another circumstance aided the process of disintegration.
The Revolution of July transferred a number of the youthful
standard-bearers and champions of the literary camp to the political.
It is significant that in 1830 the _Globe_ ceased to be a literary
organ and passed into the hands of the Saint-Simonists. Its founders
and most important contributors, men like Guizot, Thiers, Villemain,
and Vitet, became members of Parliament, public officials, or ministers
of state. And since in our days the pursuit of politics leads much
more quickly to fame than that of literature, even poets were tempted
to mount the political platforms. Men like Hugo and Lamartine engaged
actively in politics during the reign of Louis Philippe. The authors
who continued to confine their attention to literature felt themselves
distanced by those who combined politics with it, and could not help
being at times irritated by the more noisy fame attained by these
latter, and by seeing literature, their own all in all, regarded as an
alternative good enough to have recourse to in time of need.
It was a severe blow to the Romantic School when Sainte-Beuve, its
valiant, enthusiastic herald, withdrew from his post as one of Hugo's
staff. He seems, with that curious mixture of humility and independence
which distinguished his character, to have been long annoyed with
himself for the attitude of submission to Hugo which he had assumed
in his poetry, and to have nevertheless gone on unwillingly swinging
his censer before the head of the school. The habit Hugo had got into
of expecting or demanding huge doses of incense was obnoxious to him,
and yet he was too weak to withhold his tribute. It was, however,
undoubtedly less admiration for Hugo than for Hugo's young wife which
kept Sainte-Beuve within the magic circle. The private rupture between
him and Hugo in 1836 was the signal for a complete change in his
literary attitude towards the poet of the _Orientales_. Sainte-Beuve's
temperament led him to regard schools, systems, associations, parties,
merely in the light of hotels in which he lodged for a time, never
completely unpacking his trunk; he was always inclined to depreciate
and satirise the one he had just left; hence he now began to write
severe and for the most part depreciatory criticism of Hugo's works.
Alfred de Musset had at a still earlier date entertained himself by
publishing abroad his defection. A man of such masterly and refined
intellect could not be blind to the narrowness and imperfections of
the doctrines of the school, still less to the childishness with which
they were pushed to extremes by certain Hotspurs among its adherents.
When he read aloud his poems for the first time in Hugo's house to
an assembly of young Romanticists, only two passages were applauded.
The one was the sentence in _Don Paez_: "Frères, cria de loin un
dragon jaune et bleu qui dormait dans du foin." The "yellow and blue"
enraptured them; it was what they called colour in style. The other
passage was in the description of the huntsmen in "Le lever": a Et sur
leur manches vertes les pieds noirs des faucons."
This elementary colour seemed of more value to the youthful audience
than all the emotion, passion, and wit of the poems. For it was
delineation such as this which distinguished them from the men of the
old school, to whom it was only of importance that their readers should
learn what happened, not what things were like. To these young men the
all-important matter was that for De Musset the visible world existed;
but it could not be the most important matter to De Musset himself,
whose forte lay in a perfectly different direction, and who felt no
desire to compete with Hugo or Théophile Gautier.
De Musset was, moreover, above everything else a young aristocrat, the
fashionable man of the world who amused himself with literature in
his leisure moments. He had no inclination for the companionship of
long-haired poets in Calabrian headgear.
His earliest relations with the public had been of a somewhat uncertain
description. He had tried to astonish and provoke it. Now it met him
in the most cordial manner, ready, if he would only adopt another
attitude towards it, to forgive him everything, even the ballad to the
moon. And De Musset, eager to prove his independence, indifferent to
parties, averse to dogma, in reality (as his spiritual kinship with
Mathurin Régnier and Marivaux shows) classically inclined, yielded
to a certain extent to the vague pressure. He captivated the reading
world by the air of whimsical superciliousness with which he now wrote
of his own and his late comrades' warlike deeds. In his poem, "Les
secrètes Pensées de Rafaël, Gentilhomme français," he declares himself
weary of the strife; he has, he says, fought on both sides; hundreds
of scars have given him a venerable appearance, and he now--at the age
of twenty-one--sits like a worn veteran upon his torn drum. Racine and
Shakespeare meet upon his table and fall asleep there beside Boileau,
who has forgiven them both. In another poem he writes:
"Aujourd'hui l'art n'est plus--personne n'y veut croire.
Notre littérature a cent mille raisons
Pour parler de noyés, de morts, et de guenilles.
Elle-même est un mort que nous galvanisons.
Elle entend son affaire en nous peignant des filles,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Elle-même en est une et la plus délabrée
Qui de fard et d'onguents se soit jamais plâtrée."
This attack upon the fantastic immorality of the ultra-Romantic
literary productions was so youthfully, recklessly sweeping that it
seemed to be made upon the whole of contemporary literature. And it
was possibly not purely an accident that it was written the same year
in which _Marion Delorme_ was published, that drama which with all its
faults is most chaste and spiritual in conception, but which undeniably
has a courtesan for its heroine. De Musset at the same time showed
plainly that he was becoming ever more and more indifferent to youthful
ideals. Almost all the poets of the young school, headed by Hugo,
sided with struggling Greece; Alfred de Musset wrote admiringly of his
Mardoche that "he had a greater regard for the Porte and Sultan Mahmoud
than for the worthy Hellenic nation now staining the white marble of
Paros with its blood."
What was the cause of this indifference and supercilious
world-weariness?
Blood that was much too hot; a too passionate heart too early
disappointed. In his first youth De Musset's faith in his fellow-men
had been irreparably shaken, and distrust engendered bitterness and
scorn. It is useless to seek the origin of his dark view of life in any
single event, though he himself believed that it was to be accounted
for by the fact, to which he constantly alludes, that he was betrayed
in his early youth by a mistress and a friend. It was no doubt a
severe blow to a youth of his honourable, truthful character to find
himself thus deceived; but it is also certain that, whilst the wound
was still fresh, he examined it through the poetic magnifying glass
and made literary capital of it. It was the fashion to have love woes
and to succeed in consoling one's self. But De Musset suffered more
than many who read his wanton youthful effusions are apt to imagine.
To conceal his sensitiveness, to evade the satire of cynics, he for a
time affected extreme coldness and hardness. Such affected cynicism
makes as unpleasant an impression as any other affectation. Taine wrote
a famous essay on De Musset, the admiration in which is as blind as it
is touching; it culminates in the exclamation: This man at least never
lied! Unless we consider assumed superciliousness and cold-heartedness
truthful, we can scarcely endorse the assertion.
But a turning-point in the spoilt, arrogant young man's life was at
hand.
On the 15th of August 1833 _Rolla_ appeared in what was then a new
periodical, the _Revue des deux Mondes_. A few days afterwards its
editor, Buloz, a Swiss, invited his collaborators to a dinner at the
famous Palais-Royal restaurant, _Les trois frères provençaux_. The
guests were numerous; among them was one lady. The host, introducing
Alfred de Musset to Madame George Sand, requested him to take her in to
dinner.
They were a handsome couple. He was slender and refined-looking, fair,
with dark eyes, and a sharp, horse-like profile; she was dark, with
luxuriant, wavy, black hair, a beautifully smooth, olive skin, faintly
tinged with red in the cheeks, large, striking dark eyes, and perfectly
shaped arms and hands. One felt that there was a whole world behind
that forehead, and yet the lady was young and charming and as silent as
if she had no pretensions to intellect. Her dress was simple, though
somewhat fantastic; she wore a gold-embroidered Turkish jacket over her
bodice and a dagger at her waist.
In Paris in 1870 I heard one of the few surviving guests at this dinner
say that it was a piece of peasant cunning, a regular speculation on
the part of Buloz, this bringing together of De Musset and George Sand.
Buloz had said beforehand to one of his acquaintances: "He shall take
her in to dinner. All women fall in love with him; all men consider it
their duty to fall in love with her; they will certainly fall in love
with each other--what manuscripts I shall get then!" And he rubbed his
hands at the thought.
They were two extremely dissimilar beings who sat side by side at this
table. Probably the only point of resemblance between them was that
they were both authors.
Hers was a fertile, a maternal nature. Her mind was healthy, healthy
even in its revolutionary outbursts, richly endowed and well-balanced.
Her body was healthy too; she could stand the most fatiguing kind of
life, could work most of the night, and content herself with a long
morning sleep, which she commanded at will, and from which she awoke
refreshed. Every great passion, every revolutionary idea which had
moved the nineteenth century, had been housed by this woman in her
soul, and yet she had retained her freshness, her tranquillity of
mind, and her self-control. She could write calmly and carefully for
six hours at a stretch. She had a gift of mental concentration which
enabled her to take her pen and transfer her dreams to paper amidst
the talking and laughing of a large company as if she were sitting in
perfect solitude. And after doing it she would take part in what was
going on, smiling, rather taciturn, hearing everything, understanding
everything, absorbing everything that was said as a sponge absorbs
water.
And he! His was in a far higher degree the artistic temperament. His
work was a fever, his sleep was restless, his impulses and passions
were uncontrollable. When he conceived an idea he did not sit brooding
over it silent and sphinx-like as she did; he was overpowered and
trembled, "plus étourdi qu'un page amoureux d'une fée," to quote an
expression of his own. And when he seated himself at his desk to
work out his idea he was constantly tempted to throw away his pen in
despair. The process was so slow; the thoughts came crowding, demanding
instant expression; violent palpitation of the heart was the result;
and if the smallest temptation presented itself--an invitation to sup
with friends and beautiful women, or a proposal to make a country
excursion--he fled from his work as men flee from an enemy.
She "knitted" her novels; he wrote his works in a brief, burning,
blissful ecstasy which gave place on the following day to disgust
with what he had written. He thought it bad, and yet was incapable
of re-writing it, for he hated his pen as the galley-slave hates his
oar. In spite of all his youthful arrogance he writhed and moaned as
if in constant anguish, and the reason was that within his slender,
pliant frame dwelt a giant of an artist, who felt more deeply and
strongly and lived harder and faster than the man in whom he was
incorporate could bear, and who conceived greater ideas than the
brain which was his organ could bring into the world without the most
distressful birth-throes. When the poet flung himself into every kind
of dissipation, it was chiefly from the need of deadening the suffering
that his genius caused him.
He, the youth of two-and-twenty, the spoiled son of aristocratic
parents, living at home, protected by a brother's vigilant affection,
and with no real experience except of a few love affairs, had the
knowledge of life, the suspiciousness, the bitterness, the misanthropy
of a man of forty; and where his knowledge was insufficient, he eked it
out with assumed indifference and cynicism.
She, the woman of twenty-eight, with Bohemian and royal blood in her
veins (she was a great-granddaughter of Maurice of Saxony), with the
gravest experiences of life behind her, now without family, fortune,
home, or the support of any male relative, separated from her little
children, reduced to elective affinities, leading the life of the
literary Bohemian, bearing a man's name, wearing male attire, and
living like a man among men, was, nevertheless, in the depths of her
soul, naïve, passionless, enthusiastic, tender-hearted, and as eagerly
receptive of everything new as if she had had no experiences to speak
of, and had never been disillusioned.
He, so original in his art, so irregular in his life, was,
nevertheless, in many ways narrow-minded. We men easily become so,
especially those of us who, like De Musset, are born in a good position
and learn early to reverence custom and to dread ridicule.
She, in whose technique there is nothing revolutionary, who follows
the beaten track as far as the literary presentment of her theme is
concerned, was in her mental attitude almost a prodigy. There was not a
trace of narrow-mindedness in her. She had no prejudices. Women whose
fate has brought them into direct contact with the cancerous sores of
society, and who have faced the verdict of society without flinching,
sometimes become more open-minded than men, for the reason that they
have paid more for their openmindedness. George Sand examined things
for herself, weighed them well, and in most cases estimated them at
their proper value.
He was her superior in culture. With the artist's genius he combined
an incorruptible masculine critical faculty; keen and flexible as a
Damascene blade, it clove every hollow phrase it lighted on, transfixed
and burst every bubble of thought or language.
She often yielded to the inclination of her sex to let the heart speak
first and loudest. Any noble enthusiasm, any beautiful Utopian theory
carried her away; she had the woman's instinctive desire to serve; in
her youth she was always on the look-out for a banner borne by men with
great and valiant hearts, that she might fight under it. It was not her
ambition to charm the fashionable world as the famous concert-player;
her desire was to beat the drum as the daughter of the regiment. Her
want of cultivated reasoning power, however, led her to follow and
worship vague dreamers as the men of the future, chief amongst them
the foolish though sincere Pierre Leroux, a philosopher and socialist
to whom for many years she looked up as a daughter to a father. De
Musset's aristocratic intellect rejected the claims of these prophets
who could not write twenty readable pages of prose; George Sand allowed
herself to be infected with their tendency to emphatic and unctuous
diction.
To conclude, then, she was his inferior as an artist, though as a human
being she was greater and far stronger. She had not the masculine
direct artistic intuition, the faculty by virtue of which a man says,
giving no reason: "Thus it must be." When they looked at a painting
together, he, who made no pretension to be a connoisseur, at once
perceived the merits of the picture and the characteristic qualities
of the artist, and described them in a few words. She arrived in some
peculiar, slow, roundabout way at an understanding of the picture, and
the expression of her feeling on the subject was often either vague
or paradoxical. His intelligence was acute and nervous, hers diffuse,
universally sympathetic. When they listened to an opera together, what
affected him were the outbursts of heartfelt personal passion--the
individual element. She, on the contrary, was affected by the choruses,
the expression of the emotions of common humanity. It seemed as if a
concourse of minds were required to set hers in motion.
Her writings lacked conciseness. Whilst every sentence that came from
his pen was like a gold coin stamped on both sides and chiselled on
the edge, hers were wordy to prolixity. The first thing De Musset
involuntarily did when a copy of _Indiana_ came into his hands, was to
score out some twenty or thirty superfluous adjectives in the first few
pages. George Sand saw the book afterwards, and she was, it is said,
more annoyed than grateful.
Six months before they met, she had felt some uneasiness at the idea
of making De Musset's acquaintance. She first requested Sainte-Beuve
to bring him to see her, and then wrote in the postscript of a letter,
dated March 1833: "On further reflection I have decided that I do
not wish you to bring Alfred de Musset here; he is too much of the
dandy; we should not suit one another. It was more curiosity than
real interest which made me wish to see him. But it is not prudent to
satisfy every feeling of curiosity." One perceives a touch of anxiety
or foreboding in these words.
Alfred de Musset for his part had, like all authors, a certain dread
of authoresses. It was undoubtedly a male member of the profession who
nicknamed these ladies bluestockings. Nevertheless, there is no denying
the great attraction which a remarkable feminine mind possesses for
the masculine mind. The ecstatic feeling which accompanies a perfect
intellectual understanding was in this case intensified a hundredfold
by a suddenly conceived, violent mutual passion.