habit of life? And so on. In short, What was his vice or his foible? Everbody has one. None of these responses is indifferent to the judgment of the author of a book, and of the book itself, unless the book be a treatise on pure geometry; not if it is at all a literary work, that is to say, a book into which he enters at all. . . .

...

Up to a certain point one can study talents in their moral posterity, in their disciples and natural admirers. That is a last 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 Chateaubriand 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.

ALFRED DE MUSSET.

(From "Causeries du Lundi,” May 11th, 1857. — Abridged).

-

It 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 distil its sadness, its bitterness. He said

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

essence. ...

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. . .

Recall his first songs of page or knightly lover, . . . and 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. 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.

JOSEPH XAVIER BONIFACE SAINTINE.

SAINTINE, JOSEPH XAVIER BONIFACE, a French novelist, dramatist, and poet; born at Paris, July 10, 1798; died there, January 21, 1865. His début in literature was made at the age of one-andtwenty, when he carried off the prize of the French Academy for some verses, entitled "Bonheur de l'Étude." Two years later he took a second prize for an essay on teaching, and published soon after his "Picciola," which received the Montyon prize of 3,000 francs, and won for its author the cross of the Legion of Honor. Under the pseudonym of Xavier he produced some theatrical compositions, among others, "L'Ours et le Pacha," in collaboration with Scribe, and "Les Cabinets Particuliers," with Duvert and Lausanne. In all, he wrote about two hundred vaudevilles, comedies, or dramas. "Une Maîtresse sous Louis XIII." is a study of the time of Richelieu and the customs of those days. Among the best of his theatrical pieces are "L'Homme du Monde," "Le Bouffon de Prince," "Un Monsieur et Une Dame," "Deux Pigeons," ""Duc d'Olonne, "Babiole et Joblot," "Riche d'Amour," "Henriette et Charlot," and "Erreurs du Bel Âge.” "Jonathan le Visionnaire," two volumes, appeared in 1825; "Le Mutilé" in 1834; "Les Récits dans la Tourelle," two volumes, in 1844; "Les Trois Reines," two vol umes, in 1853; "Seul" in 1857; "Mythologie du Rhin," 1861; "Chemins des Écoliers," 1862; "La Seconde Vie," a revery, in 1864. Saintine also wrote for the "Revue de Paris," "Musée des Familles," "Siècle," "Constitutionnel," "Journal Pour Tous," and "La Revue Contemporaine."

THE PRISON FLOWER.

(From "Picciola.")

ONE day, at the prescribed hour, Charney was walking in the court-yard, his head bowed, his arms crossed behind his back, pacing slowly, as if he could so make the narrow space which he was permitted to perambulate scem larger.

Spring announced its coming; a softer air dilated his lungs, and to live free, and be master of the soil and of space, seemed to him the goal of his desires.