ets_--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 passion 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 passion. 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