Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/50

38 PROLEGOMENA. freely and fully. And it is just for this that one loves this lamented poet so much : in his work — poetry, drama, story, —it was himself, his heart, his life, that he gave with a kind of wild fever. This is no doubt in some sort a weakness. The truest, the greatest artists hold aloof from their own work, and at the right moment set it free to run its course in the world. Into his work Alfred de Musset plunged madly. It is his own flesh and blood. It is himself that we seize in his books.’ This is a fine and just criticism. It was Musset’s weakness, as his charm, to be all in all in whatever he wrote ; it was not his to watch from the bank the flood, as greater poets have done : he was himself the swimmer who breasted and strove with or went down upon the torrent. It is with the poet himself that we have to deal in the part of Fantasio — wild as a hawk, full of youth and of the weariness and sorrow that sometimes belong to youth, shattered with debts, careless, reckless, inventive, waiting ever for what the next hour may bring forth ; profane sometimes on the surface, but in his heart incapable of thinking that the mad whirl (as it seems to him in his mad moments) of the universe came out of itself and will return to itself. The move- ments and the passions of the world are his ; he lives in the sunrise and in the sunset ; he is a poet and an ad- venturer; and out of a mere whim he saves a great and goodly lady from the most terrible fate that could overtake her. The character is as full of beauty as it is of wildness, and it is its very beauty which has led one unworthy detrac- tor of Musset’s to ridicule it as an ill-drawn picture of the youth which, according to him, Musset always longed to have, but never actually had. Fantasio is the central figure, but the others are worthy pendants to him. The Prince of Mantua with his pedantic affectations, which it is easy to believe that M. Coquelin rendered to perfection, is a very living character, as in his own way is the servile and insolent Marinoni — as indeed are all the personages of this admirable mimicry of the world. The scene between Spark and Marinoni may be curiously compared with the similar scene of interchange of Shake-