tumn of 1833 that George Sand, having obtained from Alfred de Musset's mother permission (we have the brother's authority for this) to take him with her to Italy, left Paris in his company. There is no need of going into the story of their quarrel. Many years after it was all over, George Sand wrote her version of the affair in a novel called "Elle et Lui." In this she called attention especially to Musset's irritability and inconstancy; but, unfortunately for her already maculate reputation, there had been left in Paul de Musset's hands such letters of her own and such memoranda of his brother's as served to tell in irrefutable language the story of her treachery to him; this is all contained in Paul de Musset's "Lui et Elle." It by no means follows that, because she was heartless toward him, he was himself without flaw. The real trouble lay in their radical dissimilarity of character: he was ardent, impetuous, without settled principles, although naturally high-toned and a gentleman; while she, whatever her vagaries might be, kept cool and unmoved. He would only work as the impulse seized him; she, on the other hand, could sit down to her table, as another woman would to her sewing, and write a definite number of pages every day with perfect equanimity. The story of their quarrels goes much deeper than this, but it is painful reading. We see his nervous irritability and sensitiveness fully exposed, and her cold curiosity and vanity, so that the romance is soon huddled out of sight, and all that is left is a scene of domestic infelicity, in which the woman by her insatiable vanity and rapidly-growing indifference breaks the heart of a youth who, whatever his faults, really loved her. It was a mere episode in her life. She threw him over for a good-looking, stupid young Italian physician, but for Musset the blow was one from which he never recovered. When he came home, in the next spring, sick in mind and body, an old, hopeless man at twenty-three, there began a new chapter in his life. One of his most marked traits had always been an eager love of truth and intense hatred of deception, so that this woman's heartless treatment of him poisoned his whole nature. The period of literary production after his return was but brief; yet in it he wrote some of his finest things. The best of the lyrical compositions are four, called the "Nuits," in which it is easy to detect traces of his sufferings. The "Nuit de Mai" and the "Nuit d'Octobre " are the finest ;

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and, while it would be invidious to make an absolute statement of their superiority to all French lyrical poetry, it may yet be said that they utter a cry of real feeling such as is but seldom heard in any language. The first-named opens with a lovely description of the spring; but its close is still finer with its comparison of the pelican feeding its young with its blood to the poet delighting the world by singing his sufferings. The passage ends thus:

"Pour toute nourriture il apporte son cœur.
Sombre et silencieux, étendu sur la pierre,
Partageant à ses fils ses entrailles de père,
Dans un amour sublime il berce sa douleur,
Et, regardant couler sa sanglante mainelle,
Sur son festin de mort il s'affaisse et chancelle,
Ivre de volupté, de tendresse et d'horreur.
Mais parfois, au milieu du divin sacrifice,
Fatigué de mourir dans un trop long supplice,
Il craint que ses enfants ne le laissent vivant;
Alors il se soulève, ouvre son aile au vent,
Et, se frappant le cœur avec un cri sauvage,
Il pousse dans la nuit un si funèbre adieu
Que les oiseaux des mers désertent le rivage,
Et que le voyageur attardé sur la plage,
Sentant passer la mort, se recommande à Dieu.
Poëte, c'est ainsi que font les grand poëtes:
Ils laissent s'égayer ceux qui vivent un temps,
Mais les festins humains qu'ils servent à leurs fêtes
Ressemblent la plupart à ceux des pélicans," etc., etc.

Certainly the charge of coldness, of ungenuineness, cannot be brought against verses like these; and it is in just such expression of his feelings, of such poetical statement, that Musset is at his best. It is an interesting question just what incidents of his life are referred to in the "Nuits." In the "Nuit d'Octobre " occurs the apostrophe

"Honte à toi qui la première

M'as appris la trahison,

Et d'horreur et de colère

M'as fait perdre la raison,” etc.,

by which George Sand is of course meant. The brother's biography contains the' opening lines of another of these poems, the "Nuit de Juin;" these run as follows:

"LE POËTE.

"Muse, quand le blé pousse il faut être joyeux.
Regarde ces coteaux et leur blonde parure.
Quelle douce clarté dans l'immense nature!
Tout ce qui vit ce soir doit se sentir heureux."

No more was ever written. Just when Musset had reached this point he was interrupted by a friend who dragged him off to dinner, and the inspiration never returned, and we have but this fragment left to tantalize us. Another poem, most beautiful, of his is that "À la Malibran," which we have no space to give in full. The reader cannot do better than to turn to it, and, after reading it, let him say how much justice there is in Mr. Swinburne's remarks about Musset, that he is "the female page or attendant dwarf of Chamfort;" and that his poems are "decoctions of watered Byronism," although he gives him credit for "fitful and febrile beauty." It is to be remembered, however, that Mr. Swinburne was engaged at that time in lauding Victor Hugo, and that for the better performance of that task it perhaps seemed to him good to decry more genuine poets.

It was not as a writer of lyric verse alone that Musset acquired fame. In the year 1830 he had tried his luck with a little comedy, "La Nuit Venitienne," which was hissed from the stage without a hearing. It was treated as a scapegoat for the sins of the Romanticists, and condemned on general principles. This failure discouraged him very much, and, although he subsequently wrote many plays, he intended that they should be read rather than acted; but when one slight piece, "Un Caprice," had been successful at St. Petersburg, it was brought out in Paris, and from that time Musset's plays have held a high place on the stage. They may be crudely divided into two classes, one concerning itself with a charming representation of little scenes in society, while others are of a more poetical sort, with the scene at times in an impossible land on a sort of historical basis, and again, as "Lorenzaccio," on a firm ground of fact. The early ones, "La Nuit Venitienne," "Fantaisie," and "Les Caprices de Marianne," have for heroes, or for important characters, young men tired of the dissipation into which they have fallen through listlessness. Such is Octave in the play last named, while on the other hand there is Colio, the ardent lover.

Lindau-who occasionally makes an unexpected slip-says of Cœlio that he is all love, all poetry, all inactivity (Thatlosigkeit), and wholly uninteresting, which last epithet is singularly out of place. Those who have seen this comedy with tragic end upon the stage, will be unwilling to agree with the critic in this matter. It is hard to recall a modern play of the same length that appeals to more varied feelings than this, or one so full of poetical imagination, so free from the rigid chains of realism. Even in those slighter pieces which most nearly approach realism, he avoids that dangerous temptation which leads to substituting violent incidents for the more delicate appeal to the sympathy of the spectator or reader with their natural, unforced feelings. The artful simplicity of "Un Caprice" shows this.

After his return from Italy he wrote "On ne badine pas avec l'Amour," a very beautiful play, and "Lorenzaccio," which has in it the elements of a fine tragedy. As it stands, however, it is incomplete and unsatisfactory, containing passages that might profitably be stricken out before acting, and with frequent need of additions to make the action clear. The hero, whose name gives the title to the play, sinks himself into all sorts of vice in order that he may the better bring vengeance upon the tyrant who, in spite of warnings, never dreams of suspecting him. Almost everywhere Musset gives the feeling that he did less than he might have done, that his power of work was lamentably less than his ability, and nowhere is this more evident than in this play. In the others he, to be sure, brought himself forward under various disguises, but the complexity of his character relieves this charge of the odiousness it has when brought against smaller men. He was always at war with himself; the life he led was unworthy; what he saw about him charmed and misled him, so that we see one of the finest geniuses of his time corroded by the society which had a fatal fascination for him as a man of the world.

It will be noticed that the title of one of his poems is "Les secrètes Pensées de Rafaël, Gentilhomme français" and Musset differed from a good many workers with the pen by the fact that he was not so much a professional writer as first of all, in his own eyes and in those of the society in which he lived, gentilhomme français. He never wrote from any stronger outside influ

ence than the request of some one whom he was anxious to please. Editors pursued him in vain for manuscript; he would write only to please himself, and he was always unwilling to make any settled plans of work. This position that he took, and which was his too by right, distinguishes him clearly from his many fellow-workers, who were writers first and always. Some of them-the novelists, for instance-built up a fantastic theory of society out of their own heads, introducing all manner of imaginary inventions of their own, and giving a conventional and in some respects unreal report of the life they undertook to describe. Thus Balzac wrote with one foot firmly planted on fact, while the other was upheld by a civilization that existed in his own fancy. In this way arose the familiar French novel, which portrays an invented, ungenuine society, the prey of certain vices, with impossible scenes assumed to be normal, but all resting on nearly as unsolid a foundation as did tales of chivalry. The securest reserve is that which hides behind apparent frankness; and France, which is overrun with foreign visitors, where the people of the lower classes cannot quarrel without going out into the street to do it, is less intimately known to outsiders than almost any country in Europe. Real French society of the best class is as unknown to strangers as is the inside of an Egyptian harem to the hasty traveler who journeys up the Nile in a steamboat. But while Musset is at home in the fairy-land where is laid the scene of such plays as " À quoi rêvent les jeunes Filles," and even some that have been put upon the stage, like "On ne badine pas avec l'Amour," etc., when he touches firm French soil, he is perfectly honest, and far removed from treating conventionally what he saw about him.

His prose writings show this candor. In the "Confession. d'un Enfant du Siècle" he draws a picture of a man degraded by corrupt society, in which vice is rather the employment of idle men than an alluring temptation. In construction the book is faulty, and bears traces of the long gap between the composition of the different parts. It is painful reading from what was doubtless an accurate description of the bad side of its author's character. Certainly the life it depicts was one destructive of poetical feeling, and the little that he wrote after the age of thirty shows that he did not escape the consequence of his own follies. Lin