XIV

ALFRED DE MUSSET IN THE THEATRE

Alfred de Musset once wrote a little poem in which he expressed a wish that, in due time, he might be buried beneath a weeping willow tree. I have forgotten the text of this poem; but I remember that it is inscribed upon the rather ugly monument that marks his grave in Père-Lachaise. Over this unpretentious tomb-stone there hangs or used to hang - a lonely branch of willow,- the languid offshoot of a sapling planted by some pious hand. I remember being struck by the incongruity between the verses, carved in rock, and the sickly little tree that drooped forlornly over them.

This impression dates from twenty years ago; for, at the age of seventeen, I renounced the youthful habit of visiting the graves of the great. [It must have been about that time that I read R. L. S. on Old Mortality.] But now the thought occurs to me that the sculptured verses may be taken as a symbol of the permanent fame of de Musset as a poet, and the struggling willow branch may be regarded as a symbol of his slender but still-growing reputation as a dramatist. Perhaps some later traveler can tell me if the simile may be developed even further. That nearly leafless sapling which made me smile, a score of years ago, may now

for aught I know - be grown into a healthy and promising young tree. In that event, the fanciful comparison would be perfected; for the fame of de Musset as a playwright has steadily increased in recent years.

In the history of all the arts except the drama, the posthumous achievement of a noble reputation is not at all unusual. Many painters, many sculptors, neglected in their life-time and derided by their own contemporaries, have subsequently come to be regarded as men whose only failing was that they were doomed to work on earth before their time. So recent a painter as Jean François Millet lived in penury while he was making canvases that now are sold at auction for a hundred thousand dollars. The painter and the sculptor manufacture objects that are durable, and may appeal to the leisurely consideration of posterity. Their merit is finally evaluated by that small but perpetual minority composed of "those who know," minority that may summon but a few votes in any single generation but that triumphs ultimately by an undisrupted repetition of its verdict throughout the tireless succession of the centuries.

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The history of literature has been enriched by many similar instances of men who, scorned by their contemporaries, have been accepted as apostles by posterity. A notable example is afforded by the case of Keats. This man was absolutely honest; and when, upon his death-bed, he requested Joseph Severn to inscribe upon his tombstone the pathetic legend, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," he believed exactly what he said. His poems had been appreciated

only by the inner circle of his friends; even by this inner circle he had been regarded mainly as a promising disciple of Leigh Hunt; and to the general public he had merely been made known as a butt for the sarcastic and heavy-handed ridicule of Lockhart and Wilson. His short life seemed a failure, and he died a disappointed man. Yet now one hundred years after the publication of his faulty and faltering first volumeKeats is commonly regarded as one of the very greatest of all poets in the English language and one of the very few important apostles to the modern world.

It is only in the domain of the drama that these drastic reversals of an adverse contemporary verdict are so rare as to seem almost absolutely negligible. As a general rule [but rules, of course, are always open to exceptions] it may safely be asserted that a playwright who has failed to please his own contemporaries can scarcely hope to attract the patronage of posterity. The reason is, of course, that the drama is a democratic art. It succeeds or fails by a plebiscite of the immediate, untutored public, instead of by a vote delivered by the small but self-perpetuant minority composed of "those who know." A book may keep itself alive, if only a single printed copy chances to avoid the iniquity of sheer oblivion and happens, in some future century, to fall into the hands of an appreciative critic; but it is very difficult, at any time, to persuade a theatre-manager to reproduce a play that failed to interest the theatre-going public in the very year when it was first produced. The exercise of art any as R. L. S. has told us is nothing but

the playing of a game; and the game of the dramatist is to interest the public of his time, assembled in the theatre of his time, in the predetermined antics of the actors of his time. The playwright because of the

conditions of his craft is required to appeal to the immediate many, instead of the ultimate few; and his efforts to interest a helter-skelter audience must stand or fall by the democratic verdict of the public toward which he has directed his immediate appeal.

Such representative great dramatists as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen succeeded amply in attracting the applause of their immediate contemporaries and thereby laid the basis for the favor that has been bestowed upon them by succeeding generations. Their plays are still produced by commercial-minded managers, because the fact has been established that there is a public willing to patronize them. On the other hand, there is nothing—in the general domain of art more difficult to resurrect than a play that once has died in the presence of a gathered audience. Volumes and volumes of testimony might easily be drawn upon to support the thesis that dramatic art cannot appeal to the verdict of posterity; but one exception to this reasonable rule of criticism is obtruded by the plays of Alfred de Musset. This author was regarded justly in his life-time as one of the supreme triumvirate that led the renascence of French poetry in the first half of the nineteenth century; but he received no recognition whatsoever as a writer for the stage. It is only since his death that de Musset has been at all respected as a dramatist.

His career, in relation to the theatre, is so exceptional that it calls for recapitulation. Alfred de Musset was born in Paris in 1810. His first play, La Nuit Vénitienne, was offered at the Odéon in 1830, the very year of Victor Hugo's epoch-making Hernani. It will be noted that de Musset was, at that time, less than twenty-one years old. This fledgeling effort was a failure; and the author, disgusted with the theatre, refused thereafter to write pieces for the stage. This petulant renunciation reminds us now of Dante's famous phrase, "the great refusal"; for there is no longer any doubt that de Musset, if he had chosen to take the theatre seriously, might easily have rivaled the popularity of Hugo with the contemporary public. He continued to compose in the dramatic form, because of a necessity of his nature; but, instead of offering his pieces for production, he printed them successively in the Revue des Deux Mondes. While Hugo was writing clap-trap melodramas, disguised as literature by the flowing garment of his gorgeous verse, de Musset was writing, in neat and nimble prose, fantastic comedies conceived in an unprecedented mood of witty and romantic playfulness. These pieces, as they appeared in print, were regarded by contemporary readers merely as vacationary exercises by a writer whose more serious medium was verse. The reading public tolerated these relaxations of a noble mind; but it never occurred to any critic that de Musset's printed comedies might possibly be actable. The author did not care. He hated Hernani, and despised the Antony of old Dumas; and he had a happy time composing little