a poet, since they coincide, in the few particulars we have of them, with the corresponding period of a poet’s life as described by a master hand in fiction,-the childhood and boyhood of Contarini Fleming as told by Lord Beaconsfield. The parallel is curiously accurate, down to the details of childish fits of love, rage and remorse ; and Contarini Fleming was, of course, written long before the world cared or knew anything about Alfred de Musset’s temperament. It may be added that Contarini Fleming turned out a much stronger man in Lord Beaconsfield’s beautiful story than Musset did in actual life. But all through there is likeness between the real and the imagined poet - and not least in the fact that neither was more poetical in thought than where he clothed his ideas in prose. Only let it be marked, with reference to a certain amount of nonsense which has sometimes been talkes about ’prose-poets,’ that Contarini in fiction and Musset in fact were absolute masters of the varying forms of verse.
Musset’s first serious literary attempt was made in 1828, when chance threw him into the society of literary men, among them Scribe and Brazier ; and it took the form of an elegy, beginning with this lines :-
- ’Il vint sous les figuiers une vierge d’Athènes,
- Douce et blanche, puiser l’eau pure des fontaines,
- De marbre pour les bras, d’ébènes pour les yeux.’
It had a simple story, it ran to a hundred lines, and it was written in two days. The second attempt, which followed hard upon it, had more of a history. It came after Musset had been takes to Victor Hugo’s house, and at a time when Romanticism was beginning a steadfast war against the pedantries of the Classical tradition. Dumas’s Henri III et sa Cour had been played at the Théâtre Français, Hugo’s Marion Delorme was on the stocks, and his Cromwell had been published. Musset set to work naturally, it was drama on the Romantic method, and, equally naturally, it was ultra-romantic. There was a good deal of the unexpected, a good deal of killing, and at the end of the piece the heroine went into a convent. One line of the few preserved from the flames, to which the piece as a whole was consigned, is worth
