ts charm of fantasy,
tells of a father's device to prepare his daughters for the good prose
of wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset had emancipated
himself from the Cenacle, and would neither appeal to the eye with
an overcharge of local colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curious
rhymes. Next year (1833) in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ appeared
_Rolla_, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's early manner,
and of Byron's influence on his genius; the prodigal, beggared of
faith, debased by self-indulgence, is not quite a disbeliever in love;
through passion he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge of
death.

At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in Italy. The hours
of illusion were followed by months of despair. He knew suffering,
not through the imagination, but in his own experience. After a time
calm gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue of
the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivolously despairing
and elegantly corrupt. In _Les Nuits_--two of these (_Mai_,
_Octobre_) inspired by the Italian joy and pain--he speaks simply
and directly from the heart in accents of penetrating power. Solitude,
his constant friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love,
shall be his consolers--

"_Apres avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore;
Il faut aimer sans cesse, apres avoir aime._"

Musset's powers had matured through suffering; the _Lettre a
Lamartine_, the _Espoir en Dieu_, the _Souvenir_, the elegy _A la
Malibran_, the later stanzas _Apres une Lecture_ (1842), are
masterpieces of the true Musset--the Musset who will live.

At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came the flash and outbreak
of a fiery mind; but the years were years of lassitude. His patriotic
song, _Le Rhin Allemand_, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received
him. "Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academician; the
ungracious reply, "Il s'absinthe trop," told the truth, and it was
a piteous decline. In 1857, attended by the pious Sister Marceline,
Musset died.

Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty,
intelligence, _esprit_, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse--these
were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructive
imagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of
an artist's passion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose,
the _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, has borne the lapse of time