Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/123

M U S M U S 111 along the south shore of the Firth of Forth, is intersected by the river Esk and embraces the village of Fisherrow. In the town is Pinkie House, an ancient baronial resi dence, formerly a seat of the abbot of Dunfermline, whose monastery held the lands and regality before the Reforma tion. About a mile to the south-east the battle of Pinkie, so disastrous to the Scottish arms, was fought in 1547. Musselburgh is a place of great antiquity ; one of the two stone bridges over the Esk is said to represent an ancient Roman structure, and remains of Roman work have been found at Inveresk in the immediate vicinity. The town has an important factory for fishing-nets, a paper mill, breweries, and other manufactories, and there is a harbour, chiefly for fishermen, at Fisherrow. Loretto School here has its name from the old chapel of Loretto, founded in 1534 by Thomas Duthy, a hermit from Mount Sinai. The Musselburgh Links, east of the river, are much fre- cjuented by golfers, and upon the Links there is a good racecourse. The population of the burgh in 1881 was 7866. MUSSET, ALFRED DE (1810-1857), poet, play-writer, and novelist, was born on the llth December 1810 in a house in the middle of old Paris, near the Hotel Cluny. His father, Victor de Musset, who in the course of his life held several ministerial posts of importance, traced his descent back as far as 1140. In Alfred s childhood there were various things which fostered his imaginative power. He and his brother Paul, who afterwards wrote a biography of Alfred, delighted in reading old romances together, and in assuming the characters of the heroes of these romances. But it was not until about 1826 that Musset gave any definite sign of the mental force which afterwards distin guished him. In the summer of 1827 he all but won a prix d honneur by an essay on " The origin of our feelings," and in 1828, when Scribe, Melesville, and the elder Brazier were in the habit of coming to Madame de Musset s house at Auteuil, where drawing-room plays and charades were constantly given, Musset, excited by this companionship, wrote his first poem, which, to judge from the extracts pre served, was neither better nor worse than much other work of clever boys who may or may not afterwards turn out to be possessed of genius. Shortly after his first attempt in verse he was taken by Paul Foucher to Victor Hugo s house, where he met such men as Alfred de Vigny, Merimee, and Sainte-Beuve. It was under Hugo s influence, no doubt, that he composed a play. The scene was laid in Spain, and some lines, showing a marked advance upon his first effort, are preserved. In 1828, when the war between the classical and the romantic school of literature was grow ing daily more serious and exciting, Musset, who had pub lished some verses in a country newspaper, boldly recited some of his work to Sainte-Beuve, who wrote of it to a friend, " There is amongst us a boy full of genius." At eighteen years old Musset produced a translation, with a few insertions of his own, of De Quincey s Opium-Eater. This was published by Mame, attracted no attention, and has been long out of print. His first original volume was published in 1829 under the name of Conies dEspayne et dltalie, had an immediate and striking success, provoked bitter opposition, and produced many unworthy imitations. In December 1830 he was just twenty years old, and was already conscious of that curious double existence within him so frequently symbolized in his plays, in Octave and Celio for instance (in Les Caprices de Mari anne), who also stand for the two camps, the men of matter and the men of feeling, which he has elsewhere described as characteristic of his generation. At this date his piece the Nuit Venitienne was produced by Harel, manager of the Odeon. The exact causes of its failure might now be far to seek ; unlucky stage accidents had something to do with it, but there seems reason to believe that there was a strongly-organized opposition. However this may be, the result was disastrous to the French stage ; for it put a complete damper on the one poet who, as he afterwards showed both in theoretical and in practical writings, had the fine insight which took in at a glance the merits and defects both of the classical and the romantic schools. Thus he was strong and keen to weld together the merits of both schools in a new method which, but for the fact that there has been no successor to grasp the wand which its originator wielded, might well be called the school of Musset. The serious effect produced upon Musset by the failure of his Nuit Venitienne is curiously illustrative of his character. A man of greater strength and with equal belief in his own genius might have gone on appealing to the public until he compelled them to hear him. Musset gave up the attempt in disgust, and waited until the public were eager to hear him without any invitation on his part. In the case of his finest plays this did not happen until after his death ; but long before that he was fully recog nized as a poet of the first rank, and as an extraordinary master of character and language in prose-writing. In his complete disgust with the stage after the failure above referred to there was no doubt something of a not ignoble pride, but there was something also of weakness of a kind of weakness out of which it must be said sprang some of his most exquisite work, some of the poems which could only have been written by a man who was face to face with difficulties which were old enough in the experience of mankind, though for the moment new and strange to him, and by which he felt himself to be overwhelmed. In 1833 Musset published the volume called Un Spec tacle dans un Fauteuil. One of the most striking pieces in this Namouna was written at the publisher s request to fill up some empty space ; and this fact is noteworthy when taken in conjunction with the horror which Musset afterwards so often expressed of doing anything like writ ing " to order," of writing, indeed, in any way or at any moment except when the inspiration or the fancy happened to seize him. The success of the volume seemed to be small in comparison with that of his Contes d fispagne, but it led indirectly to Musset s being engaged as a contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes. In this he published, in April 1833, Andre del Sarto, and he followed this six weeks later with Les Caprices de Marianne. This play, which now ranks as one of the classical pieces in the repertory of the Theatre Francais, is a fine illustration of the method above referred to, a method of which Musset gave something like a definite explication five years later. This explication was also published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and it set forth that the war between the classical and the romantic schools could never end in a definite victory for either school, nor was it desirable that it should so end. "It was time," Musset said, " for a third school which should unite the merits of each." And in Les Caprices de Marianne these merits are most curiously and happily combined. It so happens that, as the piece is generally given on the stage, with the omission of one change of scene, the classical unities are almost exactly preserved, while the whole play is impregnated with romanticism in the best sense of the word. It has perhaps more of the Shakespearean quality the quality of artfully mingling the terrible, the grotesque, and the high comedy tones which exists more or less in all Musset s longer and more serious plays than is found in any other of these. In Claudio, the husband, the terrible and the grotesque are strangely and powerfully allied; Tibia, his serving-man, is grotesque with a touch of grimness caught from his master ; Octave and Celio represent the two elements which were always Avarrino- in Musset s own heart one is the careless half-