fuge from an exhausted
vocabulary in _biting_ each other, are an odd sort of thing for an
ingenuous lad, domiciled in the manner M. Paul de Musset describes, and
hardly old enough to have a latch-key, to lay on the family breakfast
table. But this was very characteristic all round. Musset was not a
didactic poet, and it was not for him to lose time by taking his first
steps as one. His business was to talk about love in unmistakable
terms, to proclaim its pleasures and pains with all possible eloquence;
and he would have been quite at a loss to understand why he should have
blushed or stammered in preluding to so beautiful a theme. Herr Lindau
thinks that even in the germ Musset's inspiration is already
vicious--that "his wonderful talent was almost simultaneously ripe and
corrupted." But Herr Lindau speaks from the modest Saxon point of view;
a point of view, however, from which, in such a matter, there is a
great deal to be said.

The great event in Alfred de Musset's life, most people would say, was
his journey to Italy with George Sand. This event has been
abundantly--superabundantly--described, and Herr Lindau, in the volume
before us, devotes a long chapter to it and lingers over it with
peculiar complacency. Our own sentiment would be that there is
something extremely displeasing in the publicity which has attached
itself to the episode; that there is indeed a sort of colossal
indecency in the way it has passed into the common fund of literary
gossip. It illustrates the base, the weak, the trivial side of all the
great things that were concerned in it--fame, genius, and love. Either
the Italian journey was in its results a very serious affair for the
remarkable couple who undertook it--in which case it should be left in
that quiet place in the history of the development of the individual
into which public intrusion can bring no light, but only darkness--or
else it was a piece of levity and conscious self-display; in which case
the attention of the public has been invited to it on false grounds. If
there ever was an affair it should be becoming to be silent about, it
was certainly this one; but neither the actors nor the spectators have
been of this way of thinking; one may almost say that there exists a
whole literature on the subject. To this literature Herr Lindau's
contribution is perhaps the most ingenious. He has extracted those
pages from Paul de Musset's novel of "Lui et Elle" which treat of the
climax of