the eye, the would-be
childlike smile, tinged with leer, of eighteenth century gallantry. He
is an impertinent, effeminate, fondled, cynical little jackanapes; the
youngest, childish, monkeyish example, at present merely comic and
contemptible, of the miserable type of young lovers given to France by
the eighteenth century; the _enfant du siecle_, externally a splendid,
brilliant, triumphant success, internally a miserable, broken, unmanned
failure; the child initiated into life by cynicism, the youth educated
to love by adultery; corrupt unripeness; the most miserable type of
demoralisation ever brought into literature, the type of Fortunio
and Perdican, and of their author Alfred de Musset; a type which
the Elizabethans, with their Claudios and Giovannis, could not have
conceived; which the Spaniards, with their Don Juans and Ludovic Enios,
would have despised, they who had brought on to the stage profligacy
which bearded death and hell, turning with contempt from profligacy
which could be chastised only with the birch. Cherubino is this: his
love is no poetic and silly passion for a woman much older than
himself, before whom he sinks on his knees as before a goddess; it
is the instinct of the lady-killer, the instinct of adventures, the
consciousness in this boy of thirteen that all womankind is his destined
prey, his game, his quarry. And womankind instinctively understands and
makes the Lovelace of thirteen its darling, its toy, its kitten, its pet
monkey, all whose grimacings and coaxings and impertinences may be
endured, enjoyed, encouraged. He is the graceful, brilliant, apish Ariel
or Puck of the society whose Mirandas and Titanias are Julie and Manon
Lescaut; he is the page of the French eighteenth century.

Such is, when we analyse him, the page Cherubino; looking at him
carelessly, with the carelessness of familiarity, these various
peculiarities escape our notice; they merge into each other and into the
whole figure. But although we do not perceive them consciously and in
detail, we take in, vaguely and unconsciously, their total effect: we do
not analyse Cherubino and classify his qualities, we merely take him in
as a general type. And it is this confused and familiar entity which we
call the page, and which we expect to have brought home to us as soon as
we hear the first notes, as we see the title of "Voi che sapete." It is
this entity, this character thus vaguely conceived, which forms for us
an essent