and accepted financial favors from the tyrant. What he considered his master work was published at the age of forty-five, a volume of verse whose title explains its character, "Enamels and Cameos." The art of poetry has become identical with that of the goldsmith; words are tiny jewels, fitted together with precise and meticulous care. Words have beauty, quite apart from their meaning, and the proper study for mankind is the dictionary. Poetry should have neither feeling nor ideas; while as for the subject, the more unlikely and unsuitable it is, the greater the triumph of the poet. This is not an effort to caricature Gautier's doctrine, it is his own statement, the theme of one of his poems. But on no account are you to take this poem for propaganda!

You see how the proposition demonstrates its own absurdity. Théophile Gautier was during his entire lifetime a fanatical preacher, a propagandist of sensuality and materialism, a glorified barber and tailor, a publicity man for the Association of Merchants of Tapestries, Furniture and Jewelry. When he writes a poem on the subject of a rose-colored dress, he asks you to believe that he is really interested in the rose-colored dress, but you may be sure that he is no such fool; he writes about the rose-colored dress as an act of social defiance. He says: There are imbeciles in the world who believe in religion, in moral sense, in virtue, self-restraint and idealism, subjects which bore me to extinction; in order to show my contempt for such imbeciles, I proceed to prove that the greatest poem in the world can be written on a rose-colored dress or on a roof, or on my watch, or on smoke, or on whatever unlikely subject crosses my mind; I consecrate myself to this task, I become a moral antimoralist, a propagandist of no-propaganda

What are the products of nature bearing most resemblance to enamels and cameos? They are certain kinds of insects, beautiful, hard, shiny, brilliantly colored, repulsive, cruel, and poisonous Such is the art of Théophile Gautier and his successors, who have made French literature a curse for a hundred years. This literature possesses prestige because of its perfection of form; therefore it is important to get clear in our minds the fact that the ability to fit words together in intricate patterns is a thing ranking very low in the scale of human faculties.

The feats of the art-for-art-sakers are precisely as important as those of the man on the stage who balances three billiard-balls on the end of his nose. The pianogymnast who leaped to world fame by his ability to wiggle his fingers more rapidly than any other living man has been definitely put out of date by the mechanical piano-player; and some day mankind will adopt a universal language, and forget all the enamels and cameos in the old useless tongues.

Get it clear in your mind that external beauty is entirely compatible with deadly cruelty of intellect and spirit. A tiger is a marvelous product, from the esthetic point of view, and offers a superb theme to poets, as William Blake has shown us. "Tyger, tyger, burning bright"-but who wants this gold-striped glory in his garden? In exactly the same way, there is a mass of what is called literature, possessing the graces of form— music and glamor, elegance, passion, energy-and using all these virtues, precisely as the tiger uses his teeth and claws, to rend and destroy human life. Literary criticism which fails to take account of such vicious qualities in art works is just exactly as sensible and trustworthy as the merchant who would sell you a cobra de capello, with a gorgeous black and white striped hood, for a boudoir ornament and pet.

CHAPTER LXIII

THE CHILD OF HIS AGE

The middle of the nineteenth century was a hard time for generous-minded and idealistic poets in France. The great revolution had failed, it failed again in 1830 and in 1848, and cruelty and greed and corruption seemed to be the final destiny of civilization. A few strong spirits kept the faith, but the weaker ones drifted away and drowned their sorrows in debauchery and drink.

Alfred de Musset was one of these latter, a beautiful and charming youth, gifted with all the graces of life and with the magic fire of genius. He has told his own sad story in a book, "The Confessions of a Child of His Age." Most of the strong and healthy men of France had been killed off in the Napoleonic wars, and the new

generation were the children of weaklings. They drifted aimlessly, having luxury but no duties, and no vision or ideal to inspire them.

Musset was born in 1810, of a well-to-do and cultured family. He was impressionable, sensitive, and in the beginning plunged with ardor into the poetical movement headed by Hugo. But soon he lost interest, and gave himself to amorous adventures and to mournful self-pity, an elegant young Byron of the boulevards. It was a time when a poet could make a national reputation by comparing the moon above a church-steeple to a dot on the letter i. Musset, from the beginning to the end of his short life, had no experience of any sort except sexuality, alcohol, and the poetry of men who likewise had no other experience.

She

At the age of twenty-three he met George Sand, a woman of thirty who had run away from her family and was supporting herself as a free-lance novelist. carried the young poet off to Italy, but their dream of love broke up in a quarrel, and poor Musset had brain fever, and came home, and sat all day in his room for four months, so his brother tells us, doing nothing but crying, except when he played chess. But at the end of the four months he went out and found another love, and then another and another. Any woman would do, according to his philosophy, poetically set forth in an exquisite verse: "What matters the flagon, provided one is drunk?"

The young poet was welcomed to the French Academy, but was not very faithful to his duties. Said one of the members: "Musset absents himself too much.” To which the answer was: "Musset absinthes himself too much." He was an old roué at the age of thirty, and there was nothing left but to die. Long afterwards George Sand published a novel in which she told the intimate details of their love affair; and that, of course, was fine copy, and a tremendous thrill. The title of the novel was "She and He," and Musset's brother came back with a book entitled "He and She." It appears that George Sand had been unfaithful to Musset in the midst of their amour; but we cannot get up much sympathy for the unhappy "child of his age." His brother delicately tells us how, in the days of his beautiful youth,

lying in bed at night, the young poet would impart shy confidences about his amorous triumphs. He was seducing other men's wives and daughters and sisters, and was apparently not concerning himself with any brain fevers these men might have, or with any tears of grief they might shed in between their games of chess.

Two of the most beautiful and eloquent of Musset's poems are entitled, respectively, "A Night of May" and "A Night of December." Each of them portrays the poet as falling sorrowfully out of love. The world had naturally assumed that the two poems related to the same mistress; but the poet's brother revealed that the two poems had a different "motive," and also that there was another "motive" in between the May "motive" and the December "motive." And there were many other "motives"—since numbers of elegant ladies in Paris aspired to become the theme of one of the "Nights" of this delicate if drunken genius. We shall see a long string of poets of this sort for a hundred years in France-and some, alas! in England and America. The lesson of their lives is always the same-that poetry without social vision and moral backbone is merely a snare for the human spirit.

CHAPTER LXIV

PRAYER IN ADULTERY

The problem of the relationship of art to morality is most interestingly illustrated by the case of George Sand. This woman-writer was promiscuous, and she was predatory, in the sense that she turned her adventures into copy and sold them in the market. But she had a mind, and she used it to investigate all the new ideas of her time. She was moved, not merely by her own desire for pleasure, but by the sufferings and strivings of her fellow human beings. She poured all these things into her books, and made herself one of the civilizing forces of her time.

She was born in 1804 and raised in a convent. Married at the age of eighteen, and being unhappy, she kicked over the traces and became a Bohemian adventurer, wearing trousers, proclaiming the rights of passion, taking to herself one conspicuous lover after another, and then

putting them into books for the support of herself and her two children. She was the founder of what we might call emotional feminism. She was religious in a sentimental way, though a vigorous anti-clerical; she became converted to Socialism, worked ardently for social reform, and published many long novels in its support.

George Sand had a romantic ancestry, of which she did not fail to make literary use. On her father's side she was descended from a royal bastard. Her mother

had been a camp follower in the army of Napoleon, "a child of the old pavements of Paris." Thus the novelist united in one person the aristocratic and the proletarian impulses. A large percentage of her collected ancestors were illegitimate, so she came honestly by her free love ideas. On the other hand, she was a very respectable, hard-working bourgeois woman, who preached interminably on virtue, and paid all her debts, and got good prices for her manuscripts-things which were regarded as extremely bad taste by the art-world of her time.

France had had innumerable aristocratic ladies who had loved promiscuously, proceeding from a king to a duke, and from a duke to an abbé or a monseigneur. There had been women who had risen from the lower classes by becoming the mistresses of noblemen. But here was a brand-new phenomenon, a woman who went out and faced the world "on her own," and instead of taking the money of the men she loved, proceeded to earn the money by writing about the men! It was an enormous scandal, and at the same time an enormous literary success, for these were pot-boilers of genius, full of eloquence and fire. Also they were full of ideas on a hundred subjects, elementary instruction such as ladies on the women's pages of our Sunday supplements give to correspondents. But American readers find it a little hard to understand the fusion of piety and sexuality which George Sand pours into her romantic novels. "Oh, my dear Octave," writes an adulterous wife to her lover, "never shall we pass a night together without kneeling and praying for Jacques!" It is just a little shocking to us to learn that this Jacques is the husband whom the pair are deceiving!

George Sand lived like a healthy bourgeoise to the age of seventy-two; in her later years she retired to the