easy and convenient means of observation. Such affinities either proclaim or betray themselves. Genius is a king who creates his people. Tell me who loves, who admires you, and I will tell you who you are. The disciples who imitate the manner and taste of their model in writing are very curious to follow, and best suited in their turn to cast light on him. The disciple usually exaggerates or parodies his master without suspecting it. In rhetorical schools he enfeebles, in picturesque and naturalistic schools he forces, heightens to excess, exaggerates. He is an enlarging mirror. When the master is negligent, and the disciple careful and dressed in Sunday clothes, they resemble one another. On days when Châteaubriand writes badly and Marchangy does his best, they have a deceptive resemblance. From a little further off, from behind, and by moonlight, you might mistake them for one another.

If it is just to judge a talent by his friends and natural followers, it is not less legitimate to judge him and counter-judge him (for it is in fact a sort of counter-proof) by the enemies whom he rouses and unwittingly attracts; by his contraries, his antipathies; by those who instinctively cannot bear him. Nothing serves better to mark the limits of a talent, to circumscribe its sphere and domain, than to know the exact points where revolt against it begins. In its detail this even becomes piquant to watch. In literature people detest one another sometimes all their lives, and yet have never met. So the antagonism between mental genera grows clear. What would you have? It's in the blood, in the temperament, in first prejudices which often do not depend on ourselves. When it is not low envy, it is racial hatred. How will you make Boileau enjoy Quinault, and Fontenelle think highly of Boileau, and Joseph de Maistre or Montalembert love Voltaire? But I have said enough to-day about the

natural method in literature.

I

ALFRED DE MUSSET

From 'Causeries du Lundi,' May 11th, 1857. (Abridged.)

T Is the duty of each generation, as it is of an army, to bury

its dead and to do them the last honors.

It would not be

just that the charming poet who has just been taken away should disappear without receiving-amid all that has been said

and what will be said, true and heart-felt, of his talent -- some special words of farewell from an old friend, from a witness of his first steps. The melodious strain of Alfred de Musset was so familiar to us, so dear from the very first; it had so penetrated our hearts in its freshness and buoyant novelty; it was, though more youthful, so part of our own generation,-a generation then all poetry and all devoted to feeling and expression. It is nineteen years ago; and I see him still making his entry in the literary world,—first in the intimate circle of Victor Hugo, then in that of Alfred de Vigny and the Deschamps brothers. What a début! What easy graciousness! and at the very first verses that he recited, his 'Andalouse,' his Don Paez,' and his 'Juana,' — what surprise, what rapture he aroused among us! It was spring itself; a whole springtime of poetry that budded before our eyes. He was not eighteen. His forehead was strong and proud. His downy cheek still preserved the roses of childhood, his nostrils swelled with the breath of desire. He advanced with firm tread and eye upcast, as though sure of conquest and full of the pride of life. No one at the first sight gave a better idea of adolescent genius. All those brilliant couplets, those outpourings of verse that their very success has since caused to be outworn, but which were then so new in French poetry; all those passages marked as if with a Shakespearean accent, those furious rushes mingled with petulant audacities and smiles, those flashes of heat and precocious storm,-seemed to promise a Byron to France.

The graceful delicate songs that flitted each morning from his lips, and presently were running over the lips of all, were indeed of his age. But passion was to him a divination. He breathed it in with might, he sought to outrun it. He asked its secret of friends richer in experience, still dripping from their shipwreck. At the dance, at receptions and gay festivals, when he met pleasure he did not restrain himself; he sought by reflection to distill its sadness, its bitterness. to himself, even as he gave himself up with an appearance of self-surrendering transport, and even as it were to increase its savor, that this was only a fleeting instant, soon to be irreparable, that would never recur in this same light. And in all he sought a stronger, keener sensation, in accord with the key to which he had tuned his soul. He found that the roses of a day did not fade fast enough. He would gladly uproot them all that

he might the better breathe them in and press from them their

I only touch the subject; but if we take up and glance over again, now that he is no more, many of the pieces and personages of Alfred de Musset, we shall now perceive in this child of genius just the opposite of Goethe: of that Goethe who detached himself in time from his creations, even from those most intimate in their origin; who worked out his characters only to a certain point; who cut the bond in time, abandoned them to the world, being already himself altogether elsewhere; and for whom "poetry was a deliverance." Goethe, even from his youth, from the time of Werther, was preparing to live till past eighty. For Alfred de Musset, poetry was the opposite of that. His poetry was himself. He was riveted wholly to it. He cast himself into it recklessly. It was his youthful soul, it was his flesh and blood. that flowed; and when he had cast to others these shreds, these glorious limbs of the poet, that seemed at times like limbs of Phaethon and of a young god (recall, for instance, the magnificent apostrophes and invocations of 'Rolla '), he kept still his own shred, his bleeding heart, his burning weary heart. Why was he not patient? All would have come in due time. But he hasted to condense and to devour the years.

Musset was poet only. He wished to feel. He was of a generation whose password, the first wish inscribed at the bottom of their hearts, had been, Poetry for its own sake, Poetry above all. "In all the period of my fair youth," one of the poets of that same epoch has said, "there was nothing that I desired or summoned so with prayers or adored as I did holy Passion,”— passion; that is to say, the living substance of poetry. So Musset was superlatively prodigal above all. Like a reckless soldier, he would not provide in advance for the second half of the journey. He would have disdained to accept what men call wisdom, and what seemed to him the gradual ebbing of life. It was not for him to transform himself. When he attained the summit, and even while he was still climbing the hillside, it seemed to him that he had reached and passed the goal of all desires. Satiety had laid hold on him.

.

and

Recall his first songs of page or knightly lover, put opposite to this that admirable and pitiful final sonnet: the whole poetic career of Alfred de Musset is embraced between these two,- Glory and Pardon. What a brilliant track, boldly

traced; what light, what eclipse, and what shadow! Poet who was but a dazzling type of many obscurer souls of his age, who has symbolized their flights and their falls, their grandeurs and their miseries,- his name will not die. Let us guard it engraven with peculiar care; us to whom he left the burdens of age, and who could say that day, with truth, as we returned from his funeral, "For years our youth was dead, but we have just buried it with him." Let us admire, let us continue to love and honor in its better part, the spirit, deep or fleeting, that he breathed into his songs. But let us draw from it also this witness to the infirmity that clings to our being, and never let us presume in pride on the gifts that human nature has received.

IT

GOETHE: AND BETTINA BRENTANO

From Portraits of Men'

T MAY be remembered that we have already seen Jean Jacques Rousseau in correspondence with one of his admirers, whose partiality towards him ultimately developed into a warmer sentiment. After reading 'La Nouvelle Heloïse,' Madame de la Tour-Franqueville became extremely enthusiastic, believing herself to be a Julie d'Etange; and thereupon indited somewhat ardent love-letters to the great author, who in his misanthropical way treated her far from well. It is curious to note, in a similar case, how differently Goethe, the great poet of Germany, behaved to one of his admirers who declared her love with such wild bursts of enthusiasm. But not more in this case than in the other must we expect to find a true, natural, and mutual affection, the love of two beings who exchange and mingle their most cherished feelings. The adoration in question is not real love: it is merely a kind of worship, which requires the god and the priestess. Only, Rousseau was an invalid,—a fretful god, suffering from hypochondria, who had fewer good than bad days; Goethe, on the other hand, was a superior god, calm and equable, in good health and benevolent,-in fact, the Olympian Jupiter, who looks on smiling.

In the spring of 1807 there lived at Frankfort a charming young girl nineteen years of age,* though of such small stature

*She was in fact twenty-two, having been born April 4, 1785. — Ed.

that she only appeared to be twelve or thirteen.

Bettina Brentano, the child of an Italian father, who had settled and married at Frankfort, came of a family noted for its originality, each member having some singular or fantastic characteristic. It was said in the town that "madness only began in the Brentano family where it ended in other people." Little Bettina considered this saying as a compliment. "What others call eccentricity is quite comprehensible to me," she would remark, “and is part of some esoteric quality that I cannot define." She had in her much of the devil and the imp; in fact, all that is the reverse of the bourgeois and conventional mind, against which she waged eternal war. A true Italian as regards her highly colored, picturesque, and vivid imagination, she was quite German in her dreamy enthusiasm, which at times verged on hallucination. She would sometimes exclaim, "There is a demon in me, opposed to all practical reality." Poetry was her natural world. She felt art and nature as they are only felt in Italy; but her essentially Italian conceptions, after having assumed all the colors of the rainbow, usually ended in mere vagaries. In short, in spite of the rare qualities with which little Bettina was endowed, she lacked what might be called sound common-sense,- a quality hardly in keeping with all her other gifts. It seemed as if Bettina's family, in leaving Italy for Germany, had instead of passing through France come by the way of Tyrol, with some band of gay Bohemians. The faults to which I have just alluded grow sometimes graver the older one becomes; but at nineteen they merely lend an additional charm and piquancy. It is almost necessary to apologize in speaking so freely in relation to Bettina; for Signorina Brentano-having become Frau d'Arnim, and subsequently widow of Achim d'Arnim, one of the most distinguished poets of Germany-is now living in Berlin, surrounded by some of the most remarkable men of the day. She receives a homage and consideration not merely due to the noble qualities of her mind, but to the excellency of her character. This woman, who was once such a frolicsome imp, is now known as one of the most unselfish and true-hearted of her sex.

However, it was she herself who in 1835, two years after Goethe's death, published the correspondence that enables us to glean an accurate knowledge of her character; allowing us-in fact, compelling us to speak so unconstrainedly in relation to her. This book translated into French by a woman of merit,