The Galaxy, June 1877 Part 15

He has remained the poet of youth. No one has sung so truthfully and touchingly its aspirations and its sensibilities, its doubts and its hopes. No one has comprehended and justified its follies and its amiable idiosyncrasies with a more poetic irony, with a deeper conviction. His joy was young, his sorrow was young, and young was his song. To youth he owes all happiness, and in youth he sang his brightest chants. But the weakness of youth was his fatal enemy, and with youth faded away his joy in existence and in creation.

This is exactly true. Half the beauty of Musset's writing is its simple suggestion of youthfulness--of something fresh and fair, slim and tremulous, with a tender epidermis. This quality, with some readers, may seem to deprive him of a certain proper dignity; and it is very true that he was not a Stoic. You may even call him unmanly. He cries out when he is hurt; he resorts frequently to tears, and he talks much about his tears. (We have seen that after his return from Venice they formed, for four months, his princ.i.p.al occupation.) But his defence is that if he does not bear things like a man, he at least, according to Shakespeare's distinction, feels them like a man. What makes him valuable is just this gift for the expression of that sort of emotion which the conventions and proprieties of life, the dryness of ordinary utterance, the stiffness of most imaginations, leave quite in the vague, and yet which forms a part of human nature important enough to have its exponent. If the presumption is against the dignity of deeply poetic utterance, poor Musset is, in the vulgar phrase, nowhere--he is a mere grotesque sound of lamentation. But if in judging him you don't stint your sympathy, you will presently perceive him to have an extraordinarily precious quality--a quality equally rare in literature and in life. He has pa.s.sion. There is in most poetry a great deal of reflection, of wisdom, of grace, of art, of genius; but (especially in English poetry) there is little of this peculiar property of Musset's.

When it occurs we feel it to be extremely valuable; it touches us beyond anything else. It was the great gift of Byron, the quality by which he will live in spite of those weaknesses and imperfections which may be pointed out by the dozen. Alfred de Musset in this respect resembled the poet whom he appears most to have admired--living at a time when it had not begun to be the fashion to be ashamed to take Byron seriously. Mr. Swinburne in one of his prose essays speaks of him with violent scorn as Byron's "attendant dwarf," or something of that sort. But this is to miss the case altogether. There is nothing diminutive in generous admiration, and nothing dwarfish in being a younger brother; Mr. Swinburne's charge is too coa.r.s.e a way of stating the position. Musset resembles Byron in the fact that the beauty of his verse is somehow identical with the feeling of the writer--with his immediate, sensible warmth--and not dependent upon that reflective stage into which, to produce its great effects, most English poetic expression instantly pa.s.ses, and which seems to chill even while it n.o.bly beautifies. Musset is talked of nowadays in France very much as Byron is talked of among ourselves; it is noticed that he often made bad verse, and he is accused of having but half known his trade. This sort of criticism is eminently just, and there is a weak side of the author of "Rolla" which it is easy to attack.

Alfred de Musset, like Mr. Murray's fastidious correspondent, wrote poetry as an amateur--wrote it, as they say in France, _en gentilhomme_. It is the fashion, I believe, in some circles, to be on one's guard against speaking foreign tongues too well (the precaution is perhaps superfluous) lest a marked proficiency should expose one to be taken for a teacher of languages. It was a feeling of this kind, perhaps, that led Alfred de Musset to a certain affectation of negligence and laxity; though he wrote for the magazines, he could boast a long pedigree, and he had nothing in common with the natives of Grub street. Since his death a new school of poets has sprung up--of which, indeed, his contemporary, Theophile Gautier, may be regarded as the founder. These gentlemen have taught French poetry a mult.i.tude of paces of which so sober-footed a damsel was scarcely to have been supposed capable; they have discovered a great many secrets which Musset appears never to have suspected, or (if he did suspect them) to have thought not worth finding out. They have sounded the depths of versification, and beside their refined, consummate _facture_ Musset's simple devices and good-natured prosody seem to belong to a primitive stage of art. It is the difference between a clever performer on the tight rope and a gentleman strolling along on soft turf with his hands in his pockets. If people care supremely for form, Musset will always but half satisfy them. It is very pretty, they will say; but it is confoundedly unbusinesslike. His verse is not chiselled and pondered, and in spite of an ineffable natural grace, it lacks the positive qualities of cunning workmanship--those qualities which are found in such high perfection in Theophile Gautier. To our own sense Musset's exquisite feeling more than makes up for one-half the absence of "chiselling," and the ineffable grace we spoke of just now makes up for the other half. His sweetness of pa.s.sion, of which the poets who have succeeded him have so little, is a more precious property than their superior science. His grace is often something divine; it is in his grace that we must look for his style. Herr Lindau says that Heine speaks of "truth, harmony, and grace" being his salient qualities. (By the first, we take it, he meant what we have called Musset's pa.s.sion.) His harmony, from the first, was often admirable; the rhythm of even some of his earliest verses makes them haunt the ear after one has murmured them aloud.

Ulric, des mers nul oeil n'a mesure l'abime, Ni les herons plongeurs, ni les vieux matelots; Le soleil vient briser ses rayons sur leur cime, Comme un soldat vaincu brise ses javelots.

Musset's grace, in its suavity, freedom, and unaffectedness, is altogether peculiar; though it must be said that it is only in the poems of his middle period that it is at its best. His latest things are, according to Sainte-Beuve, _califichets_--baubles; they are too much in the rococo, the Dresden china style. But as we have said before, with his youth Musset's inspiration failed him. It failed him in his prose as well as in his verse. "Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermee," one of the last of his dramatic proverbs, is very charming, very perfect in its way; but compared with the tones of the "Caprices de Marianne," the "Chandelier," "Fantasio," the sentiment is thin and the style has rather a simper. It is what the French call _marivaudage_. There can, however, be no better example of the absoluteness of the poetic sentiment, of its justifying itself as it goes, of lyrical expression being as it were not only a means, but an end, than the irresistible beauty of such effusions as the "Lettre a Lamartine" and the "Nuit d'Aout."

Poete, je t'ecris pour te dire que j'aime!

--that is all, literally, that Musset has to say to the "amant d'Elvire"; and it would be easy to make merry at the expense of so simply candid a piece of "gush." But the confidence is made with a transparent ardor, a sublime good faith, an audible, touching tremor of voice, which, added to the enchanting harmony of the verse, make the thing one of the most splendid poems of our day.

Ce ne sont pas des chants, ce ne sont que des larmes, Et je ne te dirai que ce que Dieu m'a dit!

Musset has never risen higher. He has, in strictness, only one idea--the idea that the pa.s.sion of love and the act of loving are the divinest things in a miserable world; that love has a thousand disappointments, deceptions, and pangs, but that for its sake they are all worth enduring, and that, as Tennyson has said, more curtly and reservedly,

'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Sometimes he expresses this idea in the simple epicurean fashion, with gayety and with a more or less cynical indifference to the moral side of the divine pa.s.sion. Then he is often pretty, picturesque, fanciful, but he remains essentially light. At other times he feels its relation to the other things that make up man's destiny, and the sense of aspiration meets with the sense of enjoyment or of regret. Then he is at his best; then he seems an image of universally sentient youth.

Je ne puis; malgre moi, l'infini me tourmente.

Je n'y saurais songer sans crainte et sans espoir; Et quoiqu'on en ait dit, ma raison s'epouvante De ne pas le comprendre, et pourtant de le voir.

While we may suspect that there is something a little over-colored in M. Paul de Musset's account of the degree to which his brother was haunted by the religious sentiment--by the impulse to grope for some philosophy of life--we may also feel that with the poet's sense of the "divineness" of love there went a conviction that ideal love implies a divine object. This is the feeling expressed in the finest lines of the "Lettre a Lamartine"--in lines at least which, if they are not the finest, are fine enough to quote:

Eh bien, bon ou mauvais, inflexible ou fragile, Humble ou gai, triste ou fier, mais toujours gemissant, Cet homme, tel qu'il est, cet etre fait d'argile, Tu l'a vu, Lamartine, et son sang est ton sang.

Son bouheur est le tien; sa douleur est la tienne; Et des maux qu'ici bas il lui faut endurer, Pas un qui ne te touche et qui ne t'appartienne; Puisque tu sais chanter, ami, tu sais pleurer.

Dis-moi, qu'en penses-tu dans tes jours de tristesse?

Que t'a dit le malheur quand tu l'as consulte?

Trompe par tes amis, trahi par ta maitresse, Du ciel et de toi-meme as-tu jamais doute?

Non, Alphonse, jamais. La triste experience Nous apporte la cendre et n'eteint pas le feu.

Tu respectes le mal fait par la Providence; Tu le laisses pa.s.ser et tu crois a ton Dieu.

Quelqu'il soit c'est le mien; il n'est pas deux croyances.

Jene sais pas son nom: j'ai regarde les cieux; Je sais qu'ils sont a lui, je sais qu'ils sont immenses, Et que l'immensite ne peut pas etre a deux.

J'ai connu, jeune encor, de severes souffrances; J'ai vu verdir les bois et j'ai tente d'aimer.

Je sais ce que la terre englout.i.t d'esperances, Et pour y recueillir ce qu'il y faut semer.

Mais ce que j'ai senti, ce que je veux t'ecrire, C'est ce que m'ont appris les anges de douleur; Je le sais mieux encor et puis mieux te le dire, Car leur glaive, en entrant, l'a grave dans mon coeur.

And the rest of the poem is a lyrical declaration of belief in immortality.

We have called the "Lettre a Lamartine" Musset's highest flight, but the "Nuit de Mai" is almost as fine a poem--full of imaginative splendor and melancholy ecstasy. The series of the "Nuits" is altogether superb; with an exception made, perhaps, for the "Nuit de Decembre," which has a great deal of sombre beauty, but which is not, like the others, in the form of a dialogue between the Muse and the poet--the Muse striving to console the world-wounded bard for his troubles, and urging him to take refuge in hope and production:

Poete, prends ton luth et me donne un baiser; La fleur de l'eglantier sent ses bourgeons eclore.

Le printemps nait ce soir; les vents vout s'embraser; Et la bergeronette, en attendant l'aurore, Au premier buissons vertes commence a se poser.

Poete, prends ton luth et me donne un baiser.

That is impregnated with the breath of a vernal night. The same poem (the "Nuit de Mai") contains the famous pa.s.sage about the pelican--the pa.s.sage beginning

Les plus' desesperes sont les chants les plus beaux, Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots----

in which the legend of the pelican opening his breast to feed his starving young is made an image of what the poet does to entertain his readers:

Poete, c'est ainsi que font les grands poetes.

Ils laissent s'egayer ceux qui vivent un temps; Mais les festins humains qu'ils servent a leurs fetes Ressemblent la plupart a ceux des pelicans.

This pa.s.sage is perhaps--unless we except the opening verses of "Rolla"--Musset's n.o.blest piece of poetic writing. We must place next to it--next to the three "Nuits"--the admirably pa.s.sionate and genuine "Stanzas to Malibran"--a beautiful characterization of the artistic disinterestedness of the singer who suffered her genius to consume her--who sang herself to death. The closing verses of the poem have a wonderful purity; to rise so high, and yet in form, in accent, to remain so still and temperate, belongs only to great poetry; as it would be well to remind the critic who thinks the author of the "Stanzas to Malibran" dwarfish. There is another sort of verse in which violence of movement is more sensible than upwardness of direction.

So far in relation to Musset's lyric genius--though we have given but a brief and inadequate account of it. He had besides a dramatic genius of the highest beauty, to which we have left ourself s.p.a.ce to devote only a few words. It is true that the drama with Musset has a decidedly lyrical element, and that though his persons always talk prose, they are constantly saying things which would need very little help to fall into the mould of a stanza or a sonnet. In his dramas as in his verses, his weakness is that he is amateurish; they lack construction; their merit is not in their plots, but in what, for want of a better term, one may call their sentimental perfume. The earliest of them failed upon the stage, and for many years it was supposed they could not be played. Musset supposed so himself, and took no trouble to encourage the experiment. He made no concessions to contemporary "realism." But at last they were taken up--almost by accident--and it was found that, in the hands of actors whose education enabled them to appreciate their delicacy, this delicacy might become wonderfully effective. If feeling is the great quality in his verses, the case is the same in his strange, fantastic, exquisite little _comedies_; comedies in the literal English sense of the word we can hardly call them, for they have almost always a melancholy or a tragical termination. They are thoroughly sentimental; he puts before us people who convince us that they really _feel_; the drama is simply the history of their feeling.

In the emotions of Valentin and Perdican, of Fantasio and Fortunio, of Celio and Octave, of Carmosine and Bettine, there is something contagious, irresistibly touching. But the great charm is Musset's dramatic world itself, the atmosphere in which his figures move, the element they breathe.

It seems at first like a reckless thing to say, but we will risk it: in the _quality_ of his fancy Musset always reminds us of Shakespeare. His little dramas go on in the country of "As you Like It" and the "Winter's Tale"; the author is at home there, like Shakespeare himself, and he moves with something of the Shakespearian lightness and freedom.

His fancy loves to play with human life, and in the tiny mirror which it holds up we find something of the depth and mystery of the object.

Musset's dialogue, in its mingled gayety and melancholy, its sweetness and irony, its allusions to real things and its kinship with a romantic world, has an altogether indefinable magic. To speak it on the stage is almost to make it coa.r.s.e. Once Musset attempted a larger theme than usual; in "Lorenzaccio" he wrote an historical drama on the scale of Shakespeare's histories; that is, with mult.i.tudes of figures, scenes, incidents, and ill.u.s.trations. He laid his hand on an admirable subject--the story of a certain Lorenzino de' Medici, who played at being a debauchee and a poltroon in order better to put the tyrant of Florence (his own cousin) off his guard, and serve his country by ridding her of him. The play shows an extraordinary abundance and vivacity of imagination, and really, out of those same "histories" of Shakespeare, it is hard to see where one should find an equal spontaneity in dealing with the whole human furniture of a period.

Alfred de Musset, in "Lorenzaccio," has the air of being as ready to handle a hundred figures as a dozen--of having imagination enough for them all. The thing has the real creative _souffle_, and if it is not the most perfect of his productions, it is probably the most vigorous.

We have not spoken of his tales; their merit is the same as of the _comedies_--that of spontaneous feeling, and of putting people before us in whose feelings we believe. Besides this, they have Musset's grace and delicacy in a perhaps excessive degree; they are the most mannered of his productions. Two or three of them, however--"Emmeline," "Les Deux Maitresses," "Frederic et Bernerette"--are masterpieces; this last epithet is especially to be bestowed upon the letter written by the heroine of the last-mentioned tale (an incorrigibly _volage_ grisette) to her former lover on the occasion of his marrying and settling. The incoherency, the garrulity, the mingled resignation and regret of an amiable flirt of the lower orders, divided between the vivacity of her emotion and the levity of her nature, are caught in the act; and yet it is not fair to say of anything represented by Musset that it is caught in the act. Just the beauty and charm of it is that it is not the exact reality, but a something seen by the imagination--a tinge of the ideal, a touch of poetry. We must try to see Musset himself in the same way; his own figure needs to a certain extent the help of our imagination.

And yet, even with such help taken, we cannot but feel that he is an example of the wasteful way in which nature and history sometimes work--of their cruel indifference to our personal standards of economy--of the vast amount of material they take to produce a little result.

Alfred de Musset's exquisite organization, his exaltations and weaknesses, his pangs and tears, his pa.s.sions and debaucheries, his intemperance and idleness, his years of unproductiveness, his innumerable mistresses (with whatever pangs and miseries it may seem proper to attribute to _them_), his quarrel with a woman of genius, and the scandals, exposures, and recriminations that are so ungracefully bound up with it--all this was necessary in order that we should have the two or three little volumes into which his _best_ could be compressed. It takes certainly a great deal of life to make a little art! In this case, however, we must remember, that little is exquisite.

HENRY JAMES, JR.

REFLECTED LIGHT.

Your eyes say, "Sweet, I love--I love you, sweet."

Where is the blame If, when their mute significance I meet, Mine say the same?

Nay, thank me not, nor deem your triumph near.

The message bright My glance conveys--'tis but--believe, me, dear-- Reflected light!

MARY AINGE DE VERE.

LIFE INSURANCE.--II.

The companies organized under the general law of the State of New York are the mere creatures of that statute. Their organization, management, powers for good or evil, opportunities for mismanagement and corruption, are all to be traced directly to the law to which they owe their being. It will be necessary, therefore, for an intelligent understanding of the condition to which the business has come, to examine the act particularly. It is chapter 463 of the laws of 1853. It provides that any number of persons not less than thirteen may form a corporation for the purpose of making insurance on the lives of individuals, or against accidents, or on the health of persons, or on live stock. Such corporators are allowed to draw their own charter, and upon its approval by the Attorney General, that doc.u.ment has all the force of positive law. It is of course subject to the provisions of the act itself, but those provisions are so few and meagre that it is practically left to the promoters of the scheme to draw their own charter of incorporation. The capital stock is to be not less than $100,000, and no provision is made for the incorporating of any company without a capital. The rate of dividends to the stockholders, the proportion of profits to be paid the policy-holders, and the time of payment, are not provided for in the law, and are left to be settled by the a.s.sociates. The consequence is that no two companies are alike in this respect. In some of them the stockholder receives an interest of seven per cent. upon his stock, and is ent.i.tled to no more under any circ.u.mstances, the whole surplus or profits being divided among the policy-holders. In others, in addition to interest, the stock is ent.i.tled to partic.i.p.ate with the policies in the surplus. The extent of this partic.i.p.ation varies; in some it is fixed at ten per cent. of the whole profits, to the stock-holders, in others twenty, and in others thirty per cent. In all of them, however, with one exception, partic.i.p.ation by the policy-holders in the profits of the business is a rule. To a greater or lesser extent, in some to the whole profits, it is the recognized rule that the holders of policies are to receive dividends or bonuses from the companies out of the profits. In effect, therefore, so far as partic.i.p.ation in the profits of the business goes, all our companies, with the one exception before mentioned, are mutual companies.

The act makes no provision for the government of the corporations it allows to be created. It leaves it to the promoters to state the mode and manner in which the corporate powers shall be exercised, and the manner of electing trustees, or directors, and officers. The natural consequence of this provision is, that the manner of electing trustees and directors varies in different companies. In some of them the stock-holders alone have any voice or vote, in others the policy-holders are allowed, under certain restrictions, to vote, but it is safe to say that in all of them the power is kept in the hands of the stock-holders as far as it possibly can be; and the policy-holders are allowed as little voice in the management of the company as the stock-holders can permit.

The result of this vice in the formation of the company is shown in corporations which have ama.s.sed a large reserve. There it will be seen that the owners of one hundred thousand dollars of stock absolutely control the entire management and disposition of twenty, thirty, or forty millions of acc.u.mulations, as the case may be; and the real owners of this fund--the policy-holders--have no voice in its management and no vote for the body or board which exercises the powers of the corporation.