picturesqueness that
he had fancied proved itself to have none of the force of a motive.
This is the fact in Musset's life which the writer of these lines finds
most regrettable--the fact of his contented smallness of horizon--the
fact that on his own line he should not have cared to go further. There
is something really exasperating in the sight of a picturesque poet
wantonly slighting an opportunity to go to Spain--the Spain of forty
years ago. It does violence even to that minimum of intellectual
eagerness which is the portion of a contemplative mind. It is annoying
to think that Alfred de Musset should have been meagrely contemplative.
This is the weakness that tells against him, more than the weakness of
what would be called his excesses. From the point of view of his own
peculiar genius, it was a good fortune for him to be susceptible and
tender, sensitive and passionate. The trouble was not that he was all
this, but that he was lax and soft; that he had too little energy and
curiosity. Shelley was at least equally tremulous and sensitive--equally
a victim of his impressions, and an echo, as it were, of his temperament.
But even Musset's fondest readers must feel that Shelley had within him
a firm, divinely-tempered spring against which his spirit might rebound
indefinitely. As regards intense sensibility--that fineness of feeling
which is the pleasure and pain of the poetic nature--M. Paul de Musset
tells two or three stories of his brother which remind one of the
anecdotes recorded of the author of the "Ode to the West Wind." "One of
the things which he loved best in the world was a certain exclamation
of Racine's 'Phaedra,' which expresses by its _bizarrerie_ the trouble
of her sickened heart:
Ariane, ma soeur, de quel amour blessee,
Vous mourutes aux bords ou vous futes laissee!
When Rachel used to murmur forth this strange, unexpected plaint,
Alfred always took his head in his two hands and turned pale with
emotion."
The author describes the poet's early years, and gives several very
pretty anecdotes of his childhood. Alfred de Musset was born in 1810,
in the middle of old Paris, on a spot familiar to those many American
visitors who wander across the Seine, better and better pleased as they
go, to the museum of the Hotel de Cluny. The house in which Musset's
parents lived was close to this beautiful monument--a happy birthplace
for a poet; but both the house and the street have now disappeared
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