historic point of view, we are struck by the strong impress it bears
of the spirit of the age, of that artistic intoxication recalling
the carnival mood of the Renaissance, which took possession of men's
minds while Romanticism prevailed in France. The born artist, whose
first duty it always is to break with traditional convention within
the domain of his art, feels himself in every age tempted to defy
the conventions of society also; but the generation of 1830 was more
youthfully naïve in its rebellion against conventionality than any
preceding generation had been in France for centuries, or than any
of its successors has been. In all artists there is something of the
Bohemian or of the child; the artists of that day allowed the Bohemian
and the child in them free play. It is characteristic that the first
fancy which seizes these two chosen spirits after they have found each
other, and the first breathless, burning ecstasy of bliss is past, is
to dress themselves up and play tricks upon their acquaintances. The
first time Paul de Musset is invited to spend an evening with the young
couple, he finds Alfred in the garb of an eighteenth-century marquis,
and George Sand in hoops and panniers. When George Sand gives her first
dinner-party after she and De Musset become friends, he waits at table,
unrecognised by the guests, in the dress of a young Norman servant
girl; and as a suitable _vis-à-vis_ for the guest of the evening,
Monsieur Lerminier, a well-known professor of philosophy, she has
invited Debureau, the famous Pierrot of the Funambules Theatre, whom no
one present has seen except on the stage, and whom she introduces as
an eminent member of the English House of Commons charged with secret
despatches to the Austrian government. To give both him and Lerminier
an opportunity to display their accomplishments, the conversation is
turned upon politics. But Sir Robert Peel, Lord Stanley, and other
such personages are mentioned in vain; the foreign diplomat either
maintains an obstinate silence or answers in monosyllables. At last
some one employs the expression, "the European balance of power." Then
the Englishman speaks. "Would you like to know," he says, "what my
idea of the European balance of power at this serious conjuncture in
English and continental politics is?--This!" And the diplomat throws
up his plate so that it spins round in the air, then cleverly catches
it on the point of his knife and balances it as it whirls there. The
astonishment of the other guests may be imagined. Does not a little
anecdote like this show us the connection between De Musset and George
Sand in a curious light of youthfulness and childishness? It is like a
reflected gleam from the days of the Renaissance; we know at once that
we are in the romantic France of the Thirties.
The connection has its commonplace, sordid side, of which enough
has been made, and on which I shall not dwell. Every one knows that
De Musset and George Sand travelled in Italy together, and that he
tormented her with his jealousy, she him with a surveillance of his
actions and habits to which he was totally unaccustomed; that their
life together was not happy; that he was very ill in Venice (with
_delirium tremens_, we are led to understand); and that during his
illness she had a love affair with the Italian doctor, Pagello by name,
who attended him, the consequence of which was that De Musset left her
and went home in a state of extreme depression.
But there is yet another and more attractive aspect of the
connection--namely, the psychological or aesthetic. The history of
literature tells of many such intimacies between remarkable men and
women; but in this one there is something unusual and new. A masculine
genius of the highest rank, one stage of whose artistic career is
already run, but who is still quite young--a feminine genius, great and
complete in herself, in appraising whom it may safely be affirmed that
no woman before her ever displayed such exuberant creative power--these
two influence each other during the exaltation of a passionate
attachment.
The science of psychology is still in such a backward condition that
the difference between a man's imagination and a woman's has scarcely
been determined; still less has it been clearly ascertained how they
act upon each other. Here for the first time in modern civilisation
the masculine literary creative mind and the feminine come into
contact--the highest, finest development of each. The experiment (which
was ere long to be repeated in England, on approximative lines, in the
case of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) had never been made on
so grand a scale. These are the Adam and Eve of Art. They meet and
share the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The curse, that is to say the
quarrel, follows; he goes his way, she hers. But they are no longer the
same. The works they now produce are of a different stamp from those
which they produced before they met.
He leaves her, his feelings lacerated, disappointed, despairing, with a
new and heavy complaint against her sex, convinced that: Treachery! thy
name is woman!
She leaves him, her soul torn with conflicting emotions, first
half-consoled, then distracted with grief, but soon feeling the relief
of being past a crisis which was pain to her calm, productive nature;
she has a new feeling of woman's superiority to man, and is more
strongly convinced than before that: Weakness! thy name is man!
He leaves her with his aversion for all enthusiasms, Utopias, and
philanthropic projects strengthened, feeling more than ever convinced
that for the artist art is everything. Nevertheless, the contact
with the great feminine intellect has not been fruitless. The very
suffering makes him truthful. He throws off his affected egotism; we
no longer see him making a display of assumed hardness and coldness.
The influence of her open-mindedness and charitableness and of her
enthusiasm for ideals is plainly perceptible in the works which he now
writes--in Lorenzaccio's enthusiastic republicanism, in Andrea del
Sarto's whole character--possibly even in the vehement personal protest
against Thiers' press laws.
She leaves him, more convinced than ever that the male sex is by nature
narrow-minded and egotistical, more prone than ever to yield to the
fascination of general ideas. In _Horace_ she devotes her talent to the
service of Saint-Simonism; she writes _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_
in the interests of socialism; in 1848 she composes the bulletins
for the Provisional Government. Nevertheless, it was contact with De
Musset's virile, classic genius which finally moulded her pure and
classic style. She learned to love form, to seek the beautiful for its
own sake. Dumas, the younger, has said of a sentence of hers that "it
is drawn by Leonardo and sung by Mozart"; he should have added that her
hand was guided and her ear trained by Alfred de Musset.
After the separation, both artists are fully matured. Henceforward he
is the poet with the burning heart, she the sybil with the eloquently
prophetic tongue.
Into the gulf which opened between them she cast her immaturity, her
tirades, her faults of taste, her man's clothes, and thenceforward was
altogether feminine, altogether natural.
Into the same gulf he cast his Don Juan costume, his bravado, his
admiration for Rolla, his boyish insolence, and thenceforward was the
man, the emancipated intellectual force.
X
ALFRED DE MUSSET
Alfred de Musset lived to be forty-seven, but all his works, except
three charming little plays and a few poems, were written before he was
thirty.
The whole series of remarkable and admirable productions was given to
the world during the six years following on his rupture with George
Sand. Although she had deceived him, his inclination to dwell upon
deceit and treachery becomes ever slighter; and along with it he loses
his affectation of world-weariness. In his works, even in his choice of
subjects, we can trace the author's personal struggle to throw off his
mask of vice and to free himself from the attraction vice has for him.
The first important work De Musset produced after his return from
Italy was the drama _Lorenzaccio_, the idea of which he had conceived
in Florence. Lorenzo de Medici is cousin to Alexander de Medici, the
bestially cruel and sensual Duke of Florence. By nature Lorenzo is a
pure, high-strung, energetic character. He early determines, taking
Brutus as his model, to rid the world of a tyrant. To attain his
aim he plays the part of a heartless libertine, becomes Alexander's
follower, tool, counsellor, and pander. As Hamlet assumed madness,
Lorenzo assumes the mask of a weak, cowardly sensualism, in order to
allay suspicion and secure his victim. But the disguise under which
he conceals his real nature adheres to him like a Nessus garment; he
gradually becomes nearly everything that he only desired to appear;
against his will he inhales and absorbs the corruption with which he
himself has assisted to impregnate the atmosphere of the court and
capital; when he reflects on his life he loathes himself. And yet he is
misunderstood; for through all the wickedness and the feigned, sickly
cowardice, he is pursuing his plan of murdering Alexander at the right
moment and re-establishing the Republic.
He is consumed by misanthropical scorn. He despises the Duke as a
satyr and a bloodhound; the people, because they allow such a man to
reign over them, and because they permit him, Lorenzaccio, to walk
unassailed, unpunished along the streets of Florence; the Republicans,
because they have no energy and no comprehension of the political
situation. His dream is to purge himself of all the impurity of his
life by a single, great, decisive deed, the assassination of the
Duke; and the poet allows him thus to purify himself. Lorenzo throws
off his assumed character and judges and punishes like an avenging
angel. De Musset's political pessimism shows itself in what follows.
Lorenzaccio falls by the hands of an assassin, who is tempted by the
price set upon his head, and the Florentine republican leaders are too
indifferent and unpractical, the mass of the citizens too degenerate,
to profit by the death of the Duke; they sit still and allow themselves
to be surprised and overpowered by another tyrant. The imperfectly
concealed contempt of the author for the Republicans is undoubtedly
due to impressions received in 1830. De Musset had himself seen a
revolution which promised a Republic end in a Monarchy. In his play,
however, the Republicans are represented in a more unfavourable light
than they deserve. The evening before the assassination Lorenzaccio
undoubtedly informs them at what hour he will kill the Duke, yet we
can hardly blame them for not making their preparations. Is not the
man who shouts this startling intelligence into their houses from the
street, the Duke's inseparable comrade, his companion in guilt, his
court-fool? What wonder that they shrug their shoulders and do nothing!
In De Musset's injustice to them we are conscious of a personal feeling
which has no connection with his literary subject. Of chief importance
to him, however, has been the representation of Lorenzo's character,
with its nobility under a repulsive mask. In Lorenzo's soul there is
an ideal element, of which he is not ashamed; he aspires; he believes
in the expiating power of deeds. What purifies him in the hour of his
death is not an accident, like Rolla's pure kiss, but an action of
which he has dreamed ever since he grew up.
In _Le Chandelier_ we are still in very depraved company; but the
principal character, the young clerk, Fortunio, stands out against
the dark background, a figure of light, with his intense, boundless
devotion to Jacqueline. He is badly used by her and her lover, who
employ him as a screen, a blind, in their low intrigue. He finds them
out, but goes on loving as before, and is ready to encounter certain
death to hide the disgraceful amour of the woman he loves. This young
page has the determination and courage of a hero, and the power of his
pure devotion is so great that it moves and overcomes Jacqueline and
wins her from Clavaroche. He is an ideal youthful lover.
Octave in _Les Caprices de Marianne_ is a frivolous and in many ways
depraved young man, who neither will nor can love any woman seriously.
He declares that he disdains to spend more time on the conquest of a
woman than it takes him to break the seal on his bottle of Grecian
wine. But in one relation, that of friendship, he is as simple-hearted
and trusting as a boy. He loves his friend, young Cœlio, with such
ardour that he is ready to die for him or to revenge his death, with
such fidelity that he scornfully rejects the favour of the lady whom
Cœlio vainly worships. He is an ideal friend. A striking contrast
to him is Cœlio, a character in whom De Musset, who in this drama
divided his own personality, represented the other half of his nature.
Cœlio is the youthful lover, whose love is a longing adoration, a
passion so melancholy in its ardour that it will kill him if it remain
unsatisfied. A halo of Shakespearean romance surrounds his head, his
words are music, his hopes poetry. He describes himself in the words:
"Il me manque le repos, la douce insouciance qui fait de la vie un
miroir où tous les objets se peignent un instant et sur lequel tout
glisse. Une dette pour moi est un remords. L'amour, dont vous autres
vous faites un passe-temps, trouble ma vie entière."
We feel in these male characters how De Musset is maturing as an
author. His desire is no longer only to delineate the seething
instincts of youth, or the wild play of the passions with its
accompaniment of deceit, treachery, and violence; he dwells long and
with predilection on the innocent and deep feeling which is only made
guilty by outward circumstances, on the love which in reality is pure,
and which appears criminal only because it is an infraction of social
laws, on the friendship which in its essence is heroic devotion, even
when it assumes the degrading form of eloquent panderage--in short upon
friendship and love in their purity, on those forces in human life
which we are wont to call ideal.
Nor is it only De Musset's male characters who become purer and purer;
his women undergo the same gradual transformation. In his early works
they are either Delilahs or Eves. But his ever-increasing inclination
to represent the spiritually beautiful and morally pure, leads him
to idealise them also more and more. It is noteworthy that the first
female character which he creates after his final breach with George
Sand in 1835, namely, Madame Pierson in _La Confession d'un Enfant
du Siècle_, is to a great extent a highly idealised portrait of that
lady. His prose tales, of which at least three, _Emmeline, Frédéric et
Bernerette_, and _Le Fils du Titien_, are among the best love-stories
our century has produced, bear witness to their author's increasing
tendency to ennoble and glorify love and, consequently, his female
characters. He takes, for example, the outward semblance of some
little grisette or other he has known, some sweet-tempered, frivolous,
loose-living, gay young creature, and this figure he invests with a
virginal charm which it has long lost, and makes of it a Mimi Pinson;
or he paints for us a young girl as soulful, as naïve in all her
mistakes and false steps, as beautiful and delicate in her manner of
expressing herself, and as touchingly simple in the hour of her death
as that Bernerette, whose last letter few have read without tears. To
him, the love-poet, love is so autocratic a power that he subordinates
even art to it. To be the lover and the beloved seems to him at last
such a much greater thing than to be the artist, that his final
conception of ideal art is: art consecrated and exclusively devoted
to one person, the only beloved. In _Le Fils du Titien_ the hero, a
gifted young artist, is arrested in a dissolute career by a noble
woman's love. He shows his gratitude by determining to paint one single
picture, the portrait of his mistress. On it he concentrates all his
powers, and by it alone he is to be known to posterity. In its honour
he writes a sonnet, in which he praises the beauty and the pure soul
of his beloved, tells why it is he has determined that his brush shall
never be used in the service of another, and declares that, beautiful
as the picture may be, it is as nothing compared with a kiss from its
model.
But of all De Musset's stories, _Emmeline_ is certainly the most
charming. It was inspired by the author's own first worthy attachment
after his quarrel with George Sand--a short but happy one, which in its
main features resembled that of the story. A young man falls violently
in love with a young married lady, whose charms are painted in the most
delicate colours, but colours chosen with an accurately observing eye.
There is nothing in recent literature which can be compared with this
art except Turgenev's most delicate delineations of female character;
but Turgenev's women are more spiritual, less real, are beheld with the
lover's less critical eye and represented with less artistic boldness.
After long admiring the lady without any hope of awakening her interest
in him, the young man wins her love and she gives herself to him. Then
they abruptly part for ever, because she is too truthful to deceive her
husband, and her lover has too much delicacy of feeling to remain in
her neighbourhood under such circumstances.
A poem in this story, which the young lover asks his lady to read,
seems to me to be the most beautiful of the love poems of De Musset's
second period. It speaks the language of ideal feeling. It is the
well-known "Si je vous disais pourtant que je vous aime." One verse
runs:
"J'aime, et je sais répondre avec indifférence;
J'aime, et rien ne le dit; j'aime et seul je le sais;
Et mon secret est cher, et chère ma souffrance;
Et j'ai fait le serment d'aimer sans espérance,
Mais non pas sans bonheur;--je vous vois, c'est assez."
Whilst he was bringing out these charming stories, which are as
delicate as if they had been written upon flower petals, De Musset also
wrote a few short plays, in which love appears as the terrible force
with which man cannot trifle, as the fire with which he cannot play,
as the electric flash which kills; and one or two others in which the
wit of the aristocratic man of the world sparkles in the tissue of the
soulful, highly emotional style.[1] Of these little plays, _Un Caprice_
is the most finished and has the most sparkling dialogue. Not without
reason is it included among the works the names of which are carved
upon De Musset's tombstone in Père-Lachaise. In this play the erotic
caprice, the momentary infatuation, is made to yield to the discipline
of marriage. The man in this case is frivolous and untrustworthy; the
women, who join forces, have their hearts in the right place, and one
of them has, besides, all the charm of high-bred cleverness. Madame de
Léry is a _Parisienne_. And no one drew the _Parisienne_ of that day
with such genius as De Musset. He stood on the same plane with her. She
is the genuine fine lady, but also the genuine woman. The beautiful
thing about this character is that in it we see unadulterated, genuine,
fresh nature piercing through the extremest refinement of fashionable
life--nature, in spite of all the sparkling and tinselly cleverness
and all the premature experience and the ennui resulting therefrom;
nature even in dissimulation, nature even in the little comedy which
Madame de Léry is woman and actress enough to play. "Oh! how true it
is," exclaims Goethe in one of his letters, "that nothing is wonderful
except the natural, nothing great except the natural, nothing beautiful
except the natural, nothing &c., &c.!" In the gay, supercilious,
society art of this creation of De Musset's, nature is preserved. The
idea underlying _Un Caprice_ is a moral idea. But whereas many writers
represent and conceive of love as something so firm and solid that it
can be taken hold of and deposited here or there as if it were a piece
of granite rock, to De Musset, even when he is most moral, it is always
only the most delicately powerful, and consequently most volatile
essence of life. At its full strength it can kill, but it can also
evaporate.
In his last plays De Musset exalted the feminine fidelity and purity in
which he believed, though it had not fallen to his lot to find them.
In _Barberine_ the idea of which he took from an old legend, he had
already depicted an ideally faithful wife of the type of Shakespeare's
_Imogen_. But the play was an uninteresting one. The heroines of
the last two he writes are wonderfully beautiful creations. In the
little masterpiece, _Bettine_, he has, apparently with the greatest
ease, accomplished one of the most difficult tasks for a delineator
of character. Bettine enters, and she has not spoken three or four
times before we feel that we are in the presence of a strong, brave,
tender-hearted, noble-minded woman; and we are conscious of more than
this, for we feel certain that she is a woman of parts, an artist,
accustomed to triumph, accustomed to feel herself intellectually
superior to her surroundings; and to pay little heed to petty
conventionalities. It is her wedding morning. She comes singing on to
the stage, where the notary is waiting, goes straight up to him, and
to his astonishment addresses him as _thou_: "Ah! te voilà, notaire, ô
cher notaire, mon cher ami! As-tu tes paperasses?" His official dignity
has so little existence for her that she has no hesitation in letting
him see her delight because it is her wedding-day. The kindly happiness
of her nature overflows on every occasion. She is not brilliant
like the aristocratic woman of the world, but frank, large-minded,
confident, like the true artist; and her healthy human nature affects
us the more pleasantly from being seen against the background of
that moral corruption which is represented by her cold and exacting
bridegroom.
The beautiful little drama, _Carmosine_ the idea of which is taken
from a tale of Boccaccio, is intended to show how a strong, ardent,
worshipful love, which outward circumstances separate from its object,
can be cured by magnanimous kindness and tenderness. Carmosine, a young
girl of the middle class, loves King Pedro of Arragon with a hopeless,
consuming passion; this feeling makes it impossible for her to give
her hand to her faithful and sorrowing adorer, Perillo. She determines
to suffer silently and die. But the playfellow of her childhood,
Minuccio the singer, is led by his compassion for her to tell the King
and Queen of her love. Far from being indignant, the Queen goes to
her in disguise and gradually alleviates her suffering with sisterly
and queenly words. She tells her that a love so deep and great is too
beautiful a thing to be torn out of the heart, and that the Queen
herself wishes her to be made one of her ladies-in-waiting, so that she
may see the King every day--because such a love, born of the soul's
aspiration after the highest, ennobles:
"C'est moi, Carmosine, qui veut vous apprendre que l'on peut
aimer sans souffrir, lorsque l'on aime sans rougir, qu'il n'y a
que la honte ou le remords qui doivent donner de la tristesse,
car elle est faite pour le coupable, et, à coup sûr, votre
pensée ne l'est pas."
And the King comes, under pretext of wishing to see her father, and in
the Queen's presence says to her:
"C'est donc vous, gentille demoiselle, qui êtes souffrante et
en danger, dit-on? Vous n'avez pas le visage à cela.... Vous
tremblez, je crois. Vous défiez-vous de moi?"
"Non, Sire."
"Eh bien, donc, donnez-moi la main. Que veut dire ceci, la
belle fille? Vous qui êtes jeune et qui êtes faite pour réjouir
le cœur des autres, vous vous laissez avoir du chagrin? Nous
vous prions, pour l'amour de nous, qu'il vous plaise de prendre
courage, et que vous soyez bientôt guérie."
"Sire, c'est mon trop peu de force à supporter une trop grande
peine qui est la cause de ma souffrance. Puisque vous avez pu
m'en plaindre, j'espère que Dieu m'en délivrera."
"Belle Carmosine, je parlerai en roi et en ami. Le grand amour
que vous nous avez porté vous a, près de nous, mise en grand
honneur; et celui qu'en retour nous voulons vous rendre, c'est
de vous donner de notre main, en vous priant de l'accepter,
l'époux que nous vous avons choisi. Après quoi nous voulons
toujours nous appeler votre chevalier, et porter dans nos
passes d'armes votre devise et vos couleurs, sans demander
autre chose de vous, pour cette promesse, qu'un seul baiser."
The Queen, to Carmosine: "Donne-le mon enfant, je ne suis pas
jalouse."
"Sire, la reine a répondu pour moi."
In what world does this happen? In what world do we breathe so pure an
air? Where does such equity flourish? where is love at one and the same
time so humble, so ardent, and so noble? and where are such chivalry,
such fidelity, such freedom from jealousy, and such benignity to be
found? Where such a king? Where such a queen?