igny, Hugo,
Lamartine had opened the avenues for the imagination; Byron was dead,
but Harold and Manfred and Don Juan survived. Musset, born a poet,
was ready for imaginative ventures; he had been introduced, while
still a boy, to the Cenacle. Spain and Italy were the regions of
romance; at nineteen he published his first collection of poems,
_Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_, and--an adolescent Cherubin-Don Juan
of song--found himself famous.

He gave his adhesion to the romantic school, rather with the light
effrontery of youth than with depth of conviction; he was impertinent,
ironical, incredulous, blasphemous, despairing, as became an elegant
Byron minor of the boulevards, aged nineteen. But some of the pieces
were well composed; all had the "form and feature of blown youth";
the echoes of southern lands had the fidelity and strangeness of
echoes tossed from Paris backwards; certain passages and lines had
a classic grace; it might even be questioned whether the _Ballade
a la Lune_ was a challenge to the school of tradition, or a jest at
the expense of his own associates.

A season of hesitation and of transition followed. Musset was not
disposed to play the part of the small drummer-boy inciting the
romantic battalion to the double-quick. He began to be aware of his
own independence. He was romantic, but he had wit and a certain
intellectual good-sense; he honoured Racine together with Hugo; he
could not merge his individuality in a school. Yet, with an infirmity
characteristic of him, Musset was discouraged. It was not in him to
write great poetry of an impersonal kind; his _Nuit Venitienne_ had
been hissed at the Odeon; and what had he to sing out of his own heart?
He resolved to make the experiment. Three years after his first volume
a second appeared, which announced by its title that, while still
a dramatic poet, he had abandoned the stage; the _Spectacle dans un
Fauteuil_ declared that, though his glass was small, it was from his
own glass that he would drink.

The glass contained the wine of love and youth mingled with a grosser
potion. In the drama _La Coupe et les Levres_ he exhibited libertine
passion seeking alliance with innocence and purity, and incapable
of attaining self-recovery; in _Namouna_, hastily written to fit the
volume for publication, he presented the pursuit of ideal love as
conducting its victim through all the lures of sensual desire; the
comedy _A quoi revent les jeunes Filles_, with i