SOURCE: Bishop, Lloyd. “After 1830: A Poet of Many Styles and Genres.” In The Poetry of Alfred de Musset: Styles and Genres, pp. 17-52. New York: Peter Lang, 1987.

[In the following excerpt, Bishop presents a survey of Musset's poetic genres and styles, including his short lyric poetry, narrative and dramatic verse, and Les nuits cycle.]

SHORTER POEMS

Musset's shorter pieces are written in many different genres: elegy, sonnet, rondeau, madrigal, chanson, romance, ballad, epigram, epistle, billet, impromptu. Some, like “Un Rêve,” his first published poem, and “Une Vision,” another early work, deal with the fantastic; others (e.g., “Charles-Quint,” “Jeanne d'Arc,” “Napoléon”) with the historical. They offer a wide variety of moods, from the very grave (“Sur la Naissance du Conte de Paris”) to the light and humorous (“Le Songe du Reviewer”). The theological seriousness of the long poem “L'Espoir en Dieu” was immediately followed by the brief and frivolous “A la mi-Carême,” showing, as his brother Paul tells us, the “mobility” of a young and impressionable mind. Stylistically, the shorter pieces are characterized on the whole by a simplicity that contrasts sharply with the flamboyant manner of the Contes. The vocabulary is ordinary, there are few learned allusions and few bold images. A sustained repetition here and there is the only rhetorical device consistently used. Many poems are little more than rhymed prose. Many others are quite charming or witty: Musset was the only major French romantic poet with a sustained sense of humor.

From the point of view of versification, these shorter pieces reveal that Musset has given up his romantic taste for experimentation. The most notable feature is the frequent use of vers mêlés. In “Adieu” the octosyllable is used with the decasyllable; in “Rappelle-toi” the decasyllable is used with the alexandrine as well as with lines of 6 and 4 syllables. In some pieces the length of a line is just half that of the preceding one: 8+4 in “Mimi Pinson” and “Adieux à Suzon,” 10+5 in “Conseils à une Parisienne.” The uneven line is occasionally used: seven syllables in “Le Rideau de ma voisine,” for instance, and five syllables in “La Nuit.”

A good number of the shorter pieces, as one would expect, are merely occasional poetry—tokens of thanks, fits of pique, etc. Most of the épîtres are addressed to friends, mistresses, ex-mistresses and would-be mistresses. The most noteworthy of these deal with the various forms and stages of love and friendship. Several pieces (“A Pépa,” “A Juana,” “A Ninon,” “A Aimée d'Alton”) express a charming, superficial infatuation, usually in an unaffected tone and unmannered idiom.

Quand le sommeil sur ta famille
Autour de toi s'est répandu,
O Pépita, charmante fille,
Mon amour, à quoi penses-tu?
Qui sait? Peut-être à l'héroïne
De quelque infortuné roman:
A tout ce que l'espoir devine
Et la réalité dément;
Peut-être à ces grandes montagnes
Qui n'accouchent que de souris;
A des amoureux en Espagne,
A des bonbons, à des maris;
Peut-être aux tendres confidences
D'un coeur naïf comme le tien;
A ta robe, aux airs que tu danses;
Peut-être à moi,—peut-être à rien.

(“A Pépa”)

The tone changes with the George Sand cycle, seven short pieces written between August 1833 and January 1835, published posthumously, and which belong to the mainstream of the serious love lyric. The first poem celebrates the triumphant return of love to a heart that for three years had thought itself cured and hardened. In another the poet contrasts true love and the true happiness it brings with the vain “comédie humaine.” But the last three pieces record the end of the stormy love affair.

Il faudra bien t'y faire à cette solitude,
Pauvre coeur insensé, tout prêt à se rouvrir,
Qui sait si mal aimer et sait si bien souffrir.

(“A George Sand” V)

Et cet amour si doux, qui faisait sur la vie
Glisser dans un baiser nos deux coeurs confondus,
Toi qui me l'as appris, tu ne t'en souviens plus.

(“A George Sand” VI)

To the woman who thus not only rejected the poet's love but erased the happy times from her memory the final piece sends a desperate plea for remembrance.

Fais riche un autre amour et souviens-toi du mien.
Laisse mon souvenir te suivre loin de France;
Qu'il parte sur ton coeur, pauvre bouquet fané,
Lorsque tu l'as cueilli, j'ai connu l'Espérance,
Je croyais au bonheur, et toute ma souffrance
Est de l'avoir perdu sans te l'avoir donné.

(“A George Sand” VII)

The cycle is noteworthy for its sober tonality which prevents the frequent rhetorical devices (apostrophe, hyperbole, personification, anaphora and the ornamental epithet) from weakening the convincing expression of genuine love and genuine sorrow.

Vladimir Nabokov has said that French romanticism has given us the poetry of love and German romanticism the poetry of friendship. But Musset is a poet for whom friendship too was important both personally and poetically: A good proportion of his opus is addressed to close friends and near-friends. In “A Ulric G.” and “A mon ami Edouard B”, for example, he commiserates with two friends who have suffered disappointments in love. He envies the former for his “blessure” and his “maux;” to the latter he expresses a romantic aesthetics:

          Ah! frappe-toi le coeur, c'est là qu'est le génie.
C'est là qu'est la pitié, la souffrance et l'amour.

In “A mon ami Alfred T.” Musset praises Alfred Tatet for not being a fair weather friend, for staying with him through adversity; the theme then develops into that of pain, just as it was for love, being the true measure of friendship.

Mais du moins j'aurais pu, frère, quoi qu'il m'arrive,
De mon cachet de deuil sceller notre amitié,
Et, que demain je meure ou que demain je vive,
Pendant que mon coeur bat, t'en donner la moitié.

In another poem addressed to Tatet, Musset celebrates the sybaritic pleasures of youth and the more lasting joys of friendship.

—Oui, la vie est un bien, la joie est une ivresse;
Il est doux d'en user sans crainte et sans soucis;
Il est doux de fêter les dieux de la jeunesse,
De couronner de fleurs son verre et sa maîtresse,
D'avoir trente ans comme Dieu l'a permis.
Et, si jeunes encore, d'être de vieux amis.

For Victor Hugo Musset entones a ringing tribute to friendship winning out over a literary quarrel. To Charles Nodier he expresses, years later, his nostalgia for the friendship of the Cénacle days. To his brother Paul returning from Italy he expresses with touching sincerity his deep affection.

Ami, ne t'en va plus si loin.
D'un peu d'aide j'ai grand besoin.
          Quoi qu'il m'advienne,
Je ne sais où va mon chemin,
Mais je marche mieux quand ma main
          Serre la tienne.

Of the other short pieces the most successful are the chansons and the sonnets, the former for their often Verlaine-like musicality, … the later for their formal perfection. … Partly because of the flexibility of his rhyme schemes and partly because of his natural talent, there is never any feeling of strain in the sonnets. Their moods range from extreme joy (“Qu'il est doux d'être au monde …”) to extreme sorrow, that for example, of the well known “Tristesse.”

J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie,
Et mes amis et ma gaieté;
J'ai perdu jusqu'à la fierté
Qui faisait croire à mon génie.
.....Le seul bien qui me reste au monde
Est d'avoir quelquefois pleuré.

.....

NARRATIVE POETRY

During the still formative years that followed the publication of the Contes, Musset was groping for a style of narrative poetry that would be truly his own, in the sense of being in accord with his temperament and in the sense of finding his unique voice. “Suzon” and “Octave,” both written in 1831, continue the flippant Byronic manner and the Italo-Hispanic atmosphere of the Contes. They are minor works and hastily written, as evidenced by the somewhat confused plots and the sloppy versification (some lines do not even have a rhyme). “Suzon” is a licentious and sacrilegious tale of two debauched and atheistic priests who stop at nothing, including murder, to seduce an unwilling woman. “Octave,” as a drama of jealousy and vengeance, does not represent an advance in the quality of Musset's writing, it is in fact inferior to “Portia” and to “Don Paez.”

It was also during this early period that Musset wrote most of the long “fragment,” “Le Saule,” which marks a new poetic manner in its great length, its sustained seriousness and its oratorical style. The piece abounds in apostrophes, ornamental periphrases, rhetorical questions, personification of abstractions and classical clichés like “le manteau de la nuit.” The tale is basically a melodrama in which Georgette, the idealized heroine, is sent off to a convent by her father to protect her chastity from the advances of the young Tiburce. (Tiburce is a composite of several types of romantic hero: He has the blond hair and delicate, “effeminate” features of the author himself; his eyes however have the hardness and severity of the Byronic hero; like many another romantic hero, he was born in poverty and is an orphan; like Coelio of Les Caprices de Marianne, his voice is sad, and like Coelio again, Tiburce is the bookish, studious type; like Manfred and Faust he is a solitary seeker of Life's mystery but soon discovers that human knowledge is vanity.) Georgette languishes in the absence of her lover, who finally arrives, disguised as a monk. But too late: she dies of grief and he in turn will die by his own hand.

The two most famous passages are the invocation to the Evening Star and the Hymn to the Sun, which are not directly related to the narrative. Some critics have exclaimed over these “morceaux choisis;” others have complained of “passages passe-partout.” One critic (Maurice Grammont) has shown that they are “suggestively” related to the plot and theme. In any event we are at the farthest remove from the casual style of “Mardoche.”

Pâle étoile du soir, messagère lointaine,
Dont le front sort brillant des voiles du couchant,
De ton palais d'azur, au sein du firmament,
          Que regardes-tu dans la plaine?
Etoile, où t'en vas-tu, dans cette nuit immense?
Cherches-tu sur la rive un lit dans les roseaux?
Ou t'en vas-tu, si belle, à l'heure du silence,
Tomber comme une perle au sein profond des eaux?
Ah! si tu dois mourir, bel astre, et si ta tête
Va dans la vaste mer plonger ses blonds cheveux,
Avant de nous quitter, un seul instant arrête;—
Etoile de l'amour, ne descends pas des cieux!

“Namouna” was originally intended as a filler to add volume to the first “livraison” of Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil. The poem is an ironic treatment of the Don Juan myth. There are in fact two Don Juans here: the idealized hero of the second canto and Hassan, the cynical hero of the first and final cantos. The latter is a cheerful débauché with a repressed Weltschmerz, a creature of paradox and ambivalence. The two Don Juan types are an expression of Musset's contradictory personality and of his contradictory attitudes toward love. Despite the basically comic presentation, the poem treats obliquely of the poet's disarray: One senses tears at times behind the laughter, “signals of a heart of pain,” as Pushkin said of the “motley” chapters of his half-sad, half-mirthful Eugene Onegin. And the poem's romantic irony makes it denser than a cursory reading would suggest. …

Musset's most important narrative poem is “Rolla.” The story is well known. The hero is a young nobleman whom an improvident father has left with a modest inheritance which must last Rolla a lifetime since he has too much aristocratic pride to consider assuming a profession or learning a trade. He abhors the habits and routine of everyday life and looks with misanthropic scorn upon kings and paupers alike. A romantic hero, he walks “naked and alone in this masquerade called Life.” Since the future holds no promise of happiness or meaningfulness, he sets out systematically to squander his small fortune on three years of debauchery; when he is down to his last few pennies, he will spend them on a prostitute and kill himself.

On the surface Rolla is a Don Juan of the Mardoche-Hassan mould. But he possesses neither their flippancy nor their caddishness, and the poet insists on his good qualities rather than his failings. He is, for instance, “loyal, intrépide et superbe” and “naïf … comme l'enfance.” And despite his wayward ways, his heart remains pure. Pur is the most important and, with its synonym, chaste, the most frequently used epithet in the poem; it points up the pathos of Rolla's situation. It is his nostalgia for the purity of childhood and the very vestiges of that purity that make his situation tragic. He is not a wicked young man but rather an enfant du siècle, that is, a victim of the philosophical disarray of his times.

The poem does not end on a note of total despair. The prostitute with whom Rolla spends his last night on earth, Marie, is even younger than he—she is 15, he 20—and her heart, like his, is still virginally pure. In Musset's casuistry the “heart” is not contaminated by the vile actions of the body: everything seems to depend on “the direction of intention.” Through the long night the two young people experience, not love but “the specter of love.” At the very end they do experience—if only a brief moment—the ecstasy of real love. The poem leaves the reader with the suggestion that if a new, viable Faith arose it would find ready adherents even among the cynical and degenerate youth of modern times. The suggestion is prepared by an earlier passage:

Penses-tu cependant que si quelque croyance,
Si le plus léger fil le retenait encor,
Il viendrait sur ce lit prostituer sa mort?

Generically, “Rolla” is as much an ode as a narrative poem. The slender plot serves as pretext for a series of lyrical fragments, more or less directly related to it, that express in sustained oratory the philosophical implications of the story.

Rolla does not appear at all in the first canto. The narrator, who is both a persona of the poet and a kindred spirit of the hero, represents especially the youth of Musset's time. The tone is one of high seriousness; there is not a trace of irony or nonchalance here or in any of the cantos. The first movement begins with no fewer than twelve successive rhetorical questions. The first one introduces the general theme—“Do you miss the days when the gods were alive and life was young?.” The eleven others serve as anaphorical (i.e., musical) amplifications. The canto ends with seven more rhetorical questions developing musically the theme “Where is there a Savior, a saint for us? Where is hope?”

A noteworthy feature of the poem's overall structure is the rapid juxtaposition of fragments, which are not linked by explicit transitional material but which do contribute to the whole. The poet passes from one fragment to another at a breathless pace, which is at times disconcerting. This aspect of Musset's style has been observed by Philippe Van Tieghem: “Musset … procède par raccourcis … Les images sont comme des hallucinations rapides, des ‘illuminations’ instantanées, que le poète n'a pas le temps d'expliquer, mais qui suppose toute une scène symbolique” (Musset, p. 61) and by Emile Montégut: “Rapide, primesautière, l'inspiration de Musset procède par bonds qui, aussi rapprochés qu'ils soient, laissent toujours entre eux un certain intervalle” (Nos Morts, p. 260).

The second canto finally introduces Rolla, describing him as the greatest débauché of the world's most libertine city. But an extended metaphor immediately qualifies the hyperbole.

          … son corps était l'hôtellerie
Où s'étaient attablés ces pâles voyageurs;
Tantôt pour y briser les lits et les murailles,
Pour s'y chercher dans l'ombre, et s'ouvrir les entrailles,
Comme des cerfs en rut et des gladiateurs;
Tantôt pour y chanter, en s'enivrant ensemble,
Comme de gais oiseaux qu'un coup de vent rassemble,
Et qui, pour vingt amours, n'ont qu'un arbuste en fleurs.

Rolla is pictured here not as a man of sinful intentions but simply as a passive creature indolently watching his passions perform (cf. the simile that precedes the long metaphor: “il les [ses passions] laissait aller / Comme un pâtre assoupi regarde l'eau couler.”) The image of the hôtellerie supports the body/heart antimony that allows Musset's hero to retain his essential purity while his body is the mere locus of unseemly actions. The passage offers an excellent example of Musset's animating imagery—passions presented as drunken, raucous travelers in a tavern—his pictorial gifts, and the appropriateness of imagery to theme, qualities that characterize most of the poet's work. The metaphor is unusual because of its length and because it is fed by two similes the latter of which is itself extended.

The rest of the second canto switches back and forth from Rolla to a series of digressions only tangentially related to the plot but which do bear on Rolla's moral and metaphysical situation. By way of contrast we move from Rolla's lack of worldly, professional and moral ambition to Hercules choosing, in a happier time, “Vertu” over “Volupté”; then we move from a one-line restatement of Rolla's dissipated life—

Rolla fit à vingt ans ce qu'avaient fait ses pères.

—to an eleven-line digression on the sinfulness of large modern cities; then from Rolla's haughty pride and noble heart to the famous digression on la cavale sauvage.

Lorsque dans le désert la cavale sauvage,
Après trois jours de marche, attend un jour d'orage
Pour boire l'eau du ciel sur les palmiers poudreux. …
Elle cherche son puits dans le désert immense.
Alors elle se couche, et ses grands yeux s'éteignent,
Et le pâle désert roule sur son enfant
Les flots silencieux de son linceul mouvant.
Elle ne savait pas, lorsque les caravanes
Avec leurs chameliers passaient sous les platanes,
Qu'elle n'avait qu'à suivre et qu'à baisser le front
Pour trouver à Bagdad de fraîches écuries.

While there is no explicit link made between the cavale and Rolla, implicit analogies abound: the noble race, the proud thoroughbred; the “savage,” untamed nature of both horse and hero; the tragic death after three days of anguished wandering in the desert, an objective correlative of Rolla's three years of aimless and anguished wandering in the vaste désert d'hommes called Paris; and finally the refusal to join the herd to trade freedom for safety and comfort.

Si Dieu nous a tirés tous de la même fange,
Certe, il a dû pétrir dans une argile étrange
Et sécher aux rayons d'un soleil irrité
Cet être, quel qu'il soit, ou l'aigle, ou l'hirondelle,
Qui ne saurait plier ni son cou ni son aile,
Et qui n'a pour tout bien qu'un mot: la liberté.

Canto III is an ode to purity, that of childhood and early adolescence, as exemplified paradoxically by Marie, the young prostitute. It is especially while she sleeps that she retains her virginal purity: For Musset the dreams of youth are not fulfillments of repressed erotic wishes but, rather, a healthy regression back to the primordial innocence of man before the first sin. A short digression on Eve obliquely reinforces the theme.

This romantic narrative is expressed in a predominantly neo-classic style: The entire poem is studded with rhetorical questions and apostrophes; regular alexandrines predominate; and in the main the imagery is unobtrusive and traditional (snow is paler, marble less sparkling white than the milky skin of this sleeping child, etc.)

Also interesting stylistically is the way the numerous digressions are woven musically into the narrative; they come not as simple restatements but as variations on a theme. In Canto IV for example Musset interweaves contrapuntally the passionate love-making of Rolla and Marie with equally passionate invective against Voltaire, who is used as a synecdoche for all the “démolisseurs stupides” of the Enlightenment. The counterpoint itself expresses, without the need of explicit statement, the cause and effect relationship the poet is trying to establish:

Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire
Voltige-t-il encor sur tes os décharnés?
Il est tombé sur nous, cet édifice immense
Que de tes larges mains tu sapais nuit et jour.
Entends-tu soupirer ces enfants qui s'embrassent?
Des sanglots inouis, des plaintes oppressées,
Ouvrent en frissonnant leurs lèvres insensées.
En les baisant au front le Plaisir s'est pâmé.
Regarde!—ils n'aiment pas, ils n'ont jamais aimé.

The interweaving of narrative and apostrophe is effective here, it produces density thanks to the philosophical overtones: The demise of Christianity means not only that the thirst for the ideal and the absolute will never be satisfied, but also that men have lost their faith in each other; human love is now an empty simulacrum of true love. In desperation, modern man, for whom Rolla is a symbol, replaces the ancient hope for life and joy eternal with a grudging acceptance of the ephemeral, an anguished hedonism.

.....

DRAMATIC POETRY

It was also during his early period that Musset made his theatrical debut, which was traumatically unsuccessful. La Nuit vénitienne (December 1, 1831) was greeted with hoots and whistles and had to be withdrawn after just two performances, partly because of a staging accident, partly because the romantics were disappointed to find that the play was a throwback to Marivaux rather than an experimental drama constructed along Hugolian lines, and partly too because the classicists had not forgiven the irreverent author of the Contes. Humiliated, Musset renounced the legitimate theater until as late as 1847. But he did devote his considerable dramatic gifts to the creation of an Armchair Theater, Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil, poetic dramas designed not for the live stage and a live audience but for readers of dramatic poetry and prose.

His first contribution to the Armchair Theater, La Coupe et les Lèvres (1832) is a “dramatic poem,” a genre that Musset was the first to introduce into French literature and modeled on Goethe's Faust and Byron's Manfred. It is also a “tragedy” because it presents us with a tragic hero in the same sense that Goethe and Byron's heroes are tragic. The protagonist, Charles Frank, is a young man of twenty filled with both a deep appetite for and an even deeper hatred of life. He rejects the society of his fellow Tyrolian hunters, and in a rage burns down his father's house, thus severing symbolically all ties with humanity. His bitter nihilism is explained in the soliloquy that ends act 4. Frank, like Rolla, describes himself as the child of an impious age that believes in nothing. Musset alludes to the pernicious legacy of the materialist philosophy of the previous century.

Je renierai l'amour, la fortune et la gloire;
Mais je crois au néant, comme je crois en moi.
Le soleil le sait bien, qu'il n'est sous la lumière
Qu'une immortalité, celle de la matière.

He also curses the nefarious “analyseurs” of the Enlightenment. The result of this intellectual legacy is disaster.

L'amour n'existe plus; la vie est devastée.
Et l'homme, resté seul, ne croit plus qu'à la mort.

This statement anticipates one of Malraux's: The death of God will bring on the death of man since the latter will be able to define himself “vertically” only in terms of the one remaining absolute: Death.

After knowing fame, wealth and sensual love, Frank soon learns to despise them, concluding like Pushkin's Boris Gudonov that

Glory, luxury and the devilish love
Of women seem beautiful from a distance.

He returns at the end of the play to his native village and to the childhood sweetheart, Déidamia, he had left behind. Déidamia is a symbol not only of hope for the future but of the lost purity and innocence of Frank's youth. Just moments before the nuptials are to be performed, just before the cup touches the lips, Déidamia is murdered by Frank's former mistress, Belcolore, symbol of the dangers of debauchery but, on another level, of Frank's—and modern man's—incurable doubt.

The overall thematic structure of La Coupe, like that of Rolla, is loosely integrated. Musset seems to switch emphasis mid-way through the poem. As Jean d'Aquitaine explains: “On croirait que le poète a voulu d'abord faire la tragédie de l'orgueil et de la puissance qu'il peut développer dans une âme, mais soudain il tourne court sur une autre donnée et fait le procès de l'inconduite, qui s'arme d'un poignard et termine le drame, malgré l'idylle du cinquième acte, par un assassinat” (Musset le poète, p. 65). Perhaps a determined reader could find a central unifying theme (the impossibility of happiness in a hypersensitive soul, or the impossibility of transcendence), but it is true that the author has not clearly focussed his major point.

The plot of La Coupe is arranged by Chance, not because of a technical flaw but for the desired philosophical implications. Frank calls himself “fils du hasard,” and it is indeed Chance that throws him into the path of the beautiful and treacherous courtesan, Belcolore; it is Chance that makes him wealthy through luck at the gambling table; and it is Chance that brings him military glory rather than almost certain death in battle. The point is that since the age of Voltaire and the philosophes of the Enlightenment, divine providence no longer rules the universe.

La poussière est à Dieu;—le reste est au hasard.

(Rolla)

The style of La Coupe is declamatory, marked by long and loud monologues, rhetorical flourishes, artificial eloquence. The sentences are often periodic in structure, epic in tonality. Musset pulls out all the stops: magnification and the marvelous (if a universe ruled by Chance can be said to partake of the supernatural), repetitions, enumerations, apostrophes, extended laudations and imprecations. Let one example, a Faustian imprecation, suffice:

          Malheur aux nouveau-nés!
Maudit soit le travail! maudite l'espérance!
Malheur au coin de terre où germe la semence,
Où tombe la sueur de deux bras décharnés!
Maudits soient les liens du sang et de la vie!
Maudite la famille et la société!
Malheur à la maison, malheur à la cité,
Et malédiction sur la mère patrie!

The declamatory style is appropriate to the genre: Musset is not striving for psychological realism but philosophical lyricism, something new in French poetry, and refreshing when compared to Vigny's prosaic philosophical poems.

The second contribution to the Armchair Theater is a comedy, and like many comedies it has no real hero since the idealistic, shy and self-effacing Silvio, as M. P. Van Tieghem puts it, is “nullement un caractère mais une manière d'aimer” (Musset, p. 44) that is, almost an abstraction. While lacking a real hero, the play is the first study of the jeune fille in French dramatic literature. It is a delightful comedy of fanciful plot and poetic atmosphere in the Shakespearean manner. There is no attention paid to the historical or geographical setting (“La scène est où l'on voudra”), or to authentic costumes, there is no satire on contemporary mores, no complicated imbroglio, no clever marivaudage, no bravura passages or even any mots d'auteur (see Van Tieghem, p. 43-44). Musset insists not on the ridiculous (although the ridiculous Irus serves as foil to Sylvio) but on the charming world of two naive adolescent girls, the twin sisters, Ninon and Ninette, who at fifteen are in love with love. With A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles? Musset introduces another genre new to French literature, the comédie de fantaisie.

The basic style of the play can be characterized as poeticized conversation. The dialogues in several scenes are contrapuntally arranged. In the following passage for instance the sisters are “on stage” together but are in two different parts of the garden; unaware of each other's presence, they are engaged not in dialogue but in a lyrical duet.

NINON
Toi dont la voix est douce, et douce la parole,
Chanteur mystérieux, reviendras-tu me voir?
Ou, comme en soupirant, l'hirondelle s'envole,
Mon bonheur fuira-t-il, n'ayant duré qu'un soir?
NINETTE
Audacieux fantôme à la forme voilée,
Les ombrages ce soir seront-ils sans danger?
Te reverrai-je encor dans cette sombre allée,
Ou disparâtras-tu comme un chamois léger?
NINON
L'eau, la terre et les vents, tout s'emplit d'harmonies.
Un jeune rossignol chante au fond de mon coeur.
J'entends sous les roseaux murmurer des génies …
Ai-je de nouveaux sens inconnus à ma soeur?
NINETTE
Pourquoi ne puis-je voir sans plaisir et sans peine
Les baisers du zéphyr trembler sur la fontaine,
Et l'ombre des tilleuls passer sur mes bras nus?
Ma soeur est une enfant,—et je ne le suis plus.
NINON
O fleurs des nuits d'été, magnifique nature!
O plantes! ô rameaux! l'un dans l'autre enlacés!
NINETTE
O feuilles des palmiers, reines de la verdure,
Qui versez vos amours dans les vents embrasés!

The theme of the passage is of course the awakening of the senses: Nature is seen for the first time in its sexual aspect (“baisers du zéphyr;” “rameaux enlacés;” “vents embrasés”). Seldom have Musset's charm and delicacy of touch been as effective as here.

Silvio, although more a flat than a round character, is nearly as charming in his youthful naiveté as the sisters. Like Perdican he has just recently graduated from the university; unlike Perdican he is tongue-tied when first meeting the girl he is supposed to marry. (The girl's romantic father, Laërte, an interesting character in his own right, gives Silvio his choice of fiancée and even trains his shy son-in-law in the art of seduction!) But when alone his tongue is loosened and offers experimental (for him) images ranging from clichés

Frêles comme un roseau, blondes comme les blés …

to preciosity

On dirait que l'ainée est l'étui de sa soeur.

And at the end of the play he indulges in a veritable flood of similes when addressing his fiancée (Ninon).

Vos yeux sont de cristal,—vos lèvres sont vermeilles
Comme ce ciel de pourpre autour de l'occident.
Votre taille flexible est comme un palmier vert;
Vos cheveux sont légers comme la cendre fine
Qui voltige au soleil autour d'un feu d'hiver.
Ils frémissent au vent comme la balsamine;
Sur votre front d'ivoire ils courent en glissant,
Comme une huile craintive au bord d'un lac d'argent.
Vos yeux sont transparents comme l'ambre fluide
Au bord du Niemen;—leur regard est limpide
Comme une goutte d'eau sur la grenade en fleurs.
Le son de votre voix est comme un bon génie
Qui porte dans ses mains un vase plein de miel.
Toute votre nature est comme une harmonie. …

Frank of La Coupe and Silvio of A quoi rêvent present the two basic and contrasting types of hero found in Musset's fiction and drama as well as his narrative and dramatic poetry. The first is cynical and corrupt, disillusioned with life, with his fellow man, with love, and finally with himself. The second is inexperienced, pure in body and in mind, tender, trusting, and expecting much, in fact everything, from love. It is a commonplace of Musset criticism that the two types are reflections (stylized refractions, rather) of Musset's dual personality.

.....

EXTENDED LYRICS

Musset's famous Night Cycle, which includes in addition to the four Nuits the “Lettre à Lamartine,” “L'Espoir en Dieu” and “Souvenir,” presents extended lyrics written between 1835 and 1841. Until this cycle Musset's longer poems had been narrative and dramatic, that is, impersonal. The cycle presents the poet's thoughts and feelings on poetry, love, religion, memory and life in general, but the theme that gives the cycle its profoundest unity is that of the role of suffering in the life of a poet.

The Nuits are usually considered elegiac cris de coeur (hostile critics speak of gush and mush) but in the main they explore ideas thanks especially to the Poet/Muse dialectic. The principal theme is not the poet's suffering per se but the relationship between suffering and poetic creativity and the relationship between suffering and love. The cycle forms an organic, if loosely knit, unit, but critics have paid scant attention to the contribution of each poem to the whole and their relationship with each other. The “Nuit de Mai” is an unresolved debate between the Poet and his Muse. The latter, who represents Musset's more energetic and positive side, insists that suffering is inspiration, the very stuff of great poetry.

Rien ne nous rend si grands qu'une grande douleur.
Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux.
Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots.

Her final argument takes the form of the famous parable of the Pelican, who lets its young feed on his heart, just as the lyric poet sacrifices his privacy and bears his soul for the spiritual and aesthetic nourishment of the public. The Poet (Musset's passive, pessimistic side—but the capital letter enlarges the debate beyond the scope of a mere personal problem), insists on the contrary that intense suffering stifles the poet's voice.

La bouche garde le silence
Pour écouter le coeur.
L'homme n'écrit rien sur le sable
A l'heure où passe l'aquilon.

Although it is the poet who has the last word in “La Nuit de Mai” and who speaks alone in “La Nuit de Décembre,” it is the Muse's theory that is put into practice in the latter: The Poet enumerates—and in verse!—his many sorrows, thus effecting a catharsis that will eventually liberate him from sterile passivity and melancholy. At the time he wrote “La Nuit de Mai” Musset's state of mind was no doubt closer to that of the Muse than that of his persona. The Muse invites the Poet to imitate the springtime—

Poète, prends ton luth et me donne un baiser;
La fleur de l'églantier sent ses bourgeons éclore,
Le printemps naît ce soir; les vents vont s'embraser.

Similarly, just before writing the “Nuit de Mai” Musset himself felt as if a new poetic phase was about to blossom forth. His brother Paul tells us that having written nothing during the Winter months of 1835 his friend Alfred Tatet asked him what would be “the fruit of his silence.” Musset allegedly replied: “Aujourd'hui j'ai cloué de mes propres mains, dans la bière, ma première jeunesse, ma paresse et ma vanité. Je crois sentir enfin que ma pensée, comme une plante qui a été longtemps arosée, a puisé dans la terre des sucs pour croître au soleil. Il me semble que je vais bientôt parler et que j'ai quelque chose dans l'âme qui demande à sortir.”¹ (Note in passing that Musset refers to his poetry as pensée, a point brought up a moment ago and one that I shall bring up again shortly. … Musset then wrote the “Nuit de Mai” in a state of exaltation, setting candles at his writing table for the Muse, and upon completing it he felt that his mental anguish had been cured.

For the cure thus effected to be a lasting one Musset needed to confront directly the anguish only hinted at in “La Nuit de Mai.” The next stage was that recommended by the Muse: épanchement, that is, the cathartic role of “La Nuit de Décembre.” In this second poem of the cycle most of the poet's traumatic experiences and blocages are made explicit: the cruel disappointments in love (three especially: his first one Mme Beaulieu, his greatest one, George Sand, and his most recent one, Mme Jaubert), the death of his father, the hantise du double, and the central theme, solitude.

The self-portrait presented in “La Nuit de Décembre” is that of an authentic romantic hero: We see not just the solitude, but the thirst for the absolute and the unknown (“la soif d'un monde ignoré”), the misanthropy and cynicism (“La face humaine et ses mensonges”), the eternal boredom (“le boiteux Ennui”), the death wish (“Partout où j'ai voulu mourir”). Musset's double, who haunts him at every grievous moment in his life, is described as “Un orphelin vêtu de noir”—two topoi constantly attached to the romantic beau ténébreux.²

The “Nuit de Décembre” is an elegy—the only one, incidentally, of the four Nuits that is a true elegy—but his grief, having come out into the open, can now be put behind him or at least faced up to. In the rest of the cycle the poet is not going to indulge in sorrow for sorrow's sake, as is often claimed or implied; he is going to try to come to grips with it. The third Nuit (“d'Août”), thanks to the second one, will be written in a serene mood, “son coeur guéri,” according to his brother. “Ouvre tes bras,” the poet joyously cries to the Muse, “je viens chanter.”

In the “Nuit d'Août” the Poet is ready to deal with his greatest emotional crisis, the George Sand affair, and to work his way toward psychological liberation: He will seek love elsewhere. The poem captures the poet's frame of mind at this point in his emotional career as expressed to Sand herself (now only “a friend”) in his correspondence.

J'aurai cependant d'autres maîtresses; maintenant les arbres se couvrent de verdure et l'odeur des lilas entre ici par bouffées: tout renaît et le coeur me bondit malgré moi. Je suis encore jeune, la première femme que j'aurai sera jeune aussi.

(Correspondance, p. 59.)

Plus je vois de choses crouler sous mes pieds, plus je sens une force cachée qui s'élève, et se tend comme la corde d'un arc …

C'est le printems … ce sont les fleurs et toute cette verdure qui m'appellent à la vie.

(Ibid., p. 68)

Peut-être les élégies dont mon coeur est plein vont se changer en hymne. Il me semble que la nature entière l'entonnerait avec moi … Je ne sais si c'est de peur ou de plaisir que je frissonne. Je vais aimer.

(Ibid., p. 72)

As in these letters it is “immortal Nature” that teaches the poet that life and love must go on after tragedy.

Puisque l'oiseau des bois voltige et chante encore
Sur la branche où ses oeufs sont brisés dans le nid;
Puisque, jusqu'aux rochers, tout se charge en poussière;
Puisque tout meurt ce soir pour revivre demain;
Après avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore;
Il faut aimer sans cesse, après avoir aimé.

The fourth and final Nuit (“d' Octobre”) expresses this same feeling of expectation and renewed confidence in life and in himself, but only after the poet has vented his spleen. The Muse must convince him that grief is instructive

L'homme est un apprenti, la douleur est son maître.

and that hatred is beneath his dignity

Tu dis vrai: la haine est impie.

He will forgive and forget the betrayals of former mistresses and think only of his new one (Aimée d'Alton).

From the polyvalent figure of the first Nuit the Muse becomes progressively more maternal in the “Nuit d'Août” and the “Nuit d'Octobre,” “signe évident”, says Bernard Masson, “d'une remise en ordre de la psyché perturbée (“Relire les Nuits,” p. 197). The Nights, collectively, tell the story of a debilitating crisis followed by an intermittent but finally successful convalescence, indeed a rebirth, the resurrection of a poet who had thought himself dead. The last verb of the last Night is renaître.

The year before he wrote “La Nuit d'Octobre” Musset began but never completed a fifth poem, “La Nuit de Juin.” Only four lines are known to us, but they are enough to indicate clearly the central theme and tone:

Muse, quand le blé pousse, il faut être joyeux.
Regarde ces coteaux et leur blonde parure.
Quelle douce clarté dans l'immense nature!
Tout ce qui vit ce soir doit se sentir heureux.

One has only to compare the bright joyous imagery of these lines with the darker hues of the first two Nuits to see how far Musset has evolved during the course of the cycle.

Comme il fait noir dans la vallée!

(“Nuit de Mai”)

Un malheureux vêtu de noir
Qui me ressemblait comme un frère.

(“Nuit de Décembre”)

The basic style of the night cycle can be called oratorical lyricism. Repetitions, apostrophes, long enumerations and anaphoras, rhetorical questions and exclamations abound. The poet is not even averse to using what he has often decried: the ornamental periphrasis. The month of June for instance, is presented thus:

Depuis que le soleil, dans l'horizon immense,
A franchi le Cancer sur son axe enflammé …

and the moon becomes “l'astre cher au voyageur.” The oratory, which at times borders on the declamatory, does not derive from any lack of spontaneity and sincerity. On the contrary, declamation and intense emotion, as the Muse knows well, often go hand in hand.

Leurs déclamations sont comme des épées.
Elles tracent dans l'air un cercle éblouissant,
Mais il y pend toujours quelques gouttes de sang.

(“Nuit de Mai”)

Spontaneous, not studied, eloquence is indeed one of the marks of Musset's style.

There are two reasons why the Nuits do not degenerate into maudlin sentimentality. The first is the dramatic form they are given. The dark brooding of the Dionysian poet is countered, writes Russell King, by the restraint of the Apollonian Muse; or, as Bernard Masson puts it, the darker side of the poet's Jungian Selbst is confronted by his Anima. The long, well constructed and harmonious sentences of the Muse give a sense of controlled emotion, of clarity and logic. She speaks in stately alexandrines while the tense, impulsive Poet often speaks in shorter lines and shorter sentences punctuated by anguished questions and exclamations and uneven or staccato rhythms created by an enjambement, a displaced caesura, a seven-syllable line (“Honte à toi qui la première”) or a six-syllable line followed by an octosyllable. Upon rereading the Nuits Alphonse Bouvet was struck by “leur apparent décousu et leurs contradictions.” However the Muse/Poet debate, which inhibits perfect unity of theme and tone, and the sudden changes of mood within the Poet himself are but other aspects of the dramatic nature of these highly original lyrics.

The second reason is the surprising emphasis on general ideas rather than on the unique situation of Alfred de Musset. When the Poet alludes to his sorrow in “La Nuit de Mai”

Mais j'ai souffert un dur martyre

the specific nature of the martyre is not explained. And in the other Nuits the culpable women remain anonymous and tend to be presented on an abstract level: la femme rather than cette femme. The Poet too is depersonalized by the capital P and by the abstract tenor of most of his argument.

L'homme n'écrit rien sur le sable
A l'heure où passe l'aquilon.
La bouche garde le silence
Pour écouter le coeur.
Leurs déclamations sont comme des épées
Rien ne nous rend si grands qu'une grande douleur.
Il faut aimer sans cesse …
Muse, quand le blé pousse, il faut être joyeux.

This generalized, intellectualized and depersonalized lyric stance escaped the notice of nineteenth-century critics. To René Doumic goes the honor of having first discovered or at least elaborated on the flou voulu of the Nuits. Writing in 1897 he establishes an important fact:

Le plus frappant, dans les Nuits, c'est de voir comment le poète y dépouille son émotion de tous les éléments particuliers, de tous les détails qui l'auraient faite étroite et précise … Les personnes, les noms, le décor extérieur, le lieu, la date, autant de détails que nous sommes libres d'imaginer à notre gré … Telle est pour la poésie lyrique elle-même, la condition de vie et de la durée: il faut qu'elle dépasse les émotions d'un homme et l'expression des sentiments d'un jour, pour arriver jusqu'à ce fond immuable et commun où, par delà les individus et les temps, toutes les souffrances humaines se reconnaissent et se répondent.

(Quoted by P. Gastinel, Romantisme de Musset, p. 493)

Thus Doumic sees Musset striving for universality. Joachim Merlant thinks rather that it is a sense of delicacy that impels poets like Musset to speak in general rather than specific terms: “l'expression verbale jette toujours une lumière trop nette, trop crue sur les sentiments. Aussi les poètes de la vie intérieure, Musset, Vigny, Lamartine, Verlaine, se sont-ils de plus en plus préoccupés de trouver une forme indécise, flottante, qui parle aux seuls initiés; c'est à la fois un scrupule de délicatesse morale et de probité artistique. A vouloir dire complètement certaines choses on les trahit” (Musset: Morceaux choisis, p. 101). Margaret Rees (Musset, p. viii) is impressed with how much “food for thought” there is to be found in Musset's work and submits (p. 65) that the important role of ideas in the Poésies nouvelles has been soft-pedaled by the critics. Philippe Van Tieghem (Musset: p. 21) is convinced that the most striking characteristic of the Nuits is the primacy of the intellectual, and Patricia Siegel (“Structure et thématique,” chapter 2) calls them the apogee of Musset's thought.

The style of the other three poems in the cycle is similar to that of the four Nuits. The “Lettre à M. de Lamartine” (1836) is addressed, with considerable rhetorical flourish, to the Christian poet and especially the poet of sorrow with whom Musset now identifies thanks to his new feeling that great pain is providential (“Nuit d'Octobre”). As with nearly all the poems in the cycle the movement is from autobiographical allusions (here the second and final rupture with Mme Jaubert, mingled as usual with his first disappointment in love) to more general considerations, from the particular to the universal. Musset affirms his belief in a vaguely perceived God and in the immortality of the soul, which will eventually triumph over its transient grief and preserve for eternity the memory of true love. This final theme is expressed in oratory that has been both praised for its “incomparable” forcefulness and damned for its grandiloquence.

Tu te sens le coeur pris d'un caprice de femme,
Et tu dis qu'il se brise à force de souffrir.
Tu demandes à Dieu de soulager ton âme:
Ton âme est immortelle, et ton coeur va guérir.
Le regret d'un instant te trouble et te dévore;
Tu dis que le passé te voile l'avenir.
Ne te plains pas d'hier; laisse venir l'aurore:
Ton âme est immortelle, et le temps va s'enfuir.
Ton corps est abattu du mal de ta pensée;
Tu sens ton front peser et tes genoux fléchir.
Tombe, agenouille-toi, créature insensée:
Ton âme est immortelle, et la mort va venir.
Tes os dans le cercueil vont tomber en poussière;
Ta mémoire, ton nom, ta gloire vont périr,
Mais non pas ton amour, si ton amour t'est chère:
Ton âme est immortelle, et va s'en souvenir.

“L'Espoir en Dieu,” despite the title and apparent theme, expresses an anguish more than a faith. The deliberative monologue and the fluctuating feelings that develop as the poem progresses are dramatic, not dogmatic. The poem registers the musings of a doubter who “wants” to believe. There are Pascalian echoes: the anguish before the infinite—

          Malgré moi l'infini me tourmente..
Je n'y saurais songer sans crainte et sans espoir.

and a theological wager of sorts—

Pour que Dieu nous réponde, adressons-nous à lui.
Si le ciel est désert, nous n'offensons personne:
Si quelqu'un nous entend, qu'il nous prenne en pitié!

The final section, however, presents almost accusatory questions

Pourquoi fais-tu douter de toi?
Quel triste plaisir peux-tu prendre
A tenter notre bonne foi?
Pourquoi donc, ô Maître suprême,
As-tu créé le mal si grand?

and a challenge

Soulève les voiles du monde
Et montre-toi, Dieu juste et bon!

“Souvenir” offers the cycle's final statement on the problem of ephemeral love. It is a development of the optimism expressed in the “Lettre à Lamartine.” Life's rare privileged moments do endure: in the memory, in poetry, and in the soul's immortal consciousness. The poem belongs to a genre that Meyer Abrams has called the greater Romantic lyric. …

Two other extended lyrics of note are “A la Malibran” (1838) and “Souvenir des Alpes” (1852). The first holds little interest for the reader of the late twentieth century for two reasons: the subject and the style. Musset himself explains in the elegy that while great painters and poets live eternally through the works that survive them, the art of a great singer is lost to posterity. The magnificent voice of La Malibran could not be recorded then as now, and so her fame gradually died out with the passing generations. Another thematic problem is the idealization of an undoubtedly dedicated artist who died prematurely; she died, in fact, not so much the victim of her dedication to her art and her public, and not the victim of her fiery genius, as the poem claims, but from a fall off a horse. And the 25 rhetorical questions (more than 46٪ of the poem's sentences and more the 64٪ of the sentences in the middle section—stanzas 8 to 24-) become tiresome to the modern reader. “Souvenir des Alpes,” like the more famous “Souvenir,” is another good example of the greater Romantic lyric. …

The originality of Musset's lyricism should be stressed. Despite the poetics of the “Nuit de Mai” (which will be put in its proper perspective in the next chapter), Musset's extended lyrics are not simple cris de coeur, mere developments of an exclamation. They move consistently from the personal to the general and belong as much to the poetry of ideas as to traditional lyricism. One critic, Yves Le Hir, has noticed the high frequency of maxims and aphorisms in Musset's love lyrics. Even in the many exclamatory and interrogative sentences it is usually an idea, not a complaint, that is being developed lyrically.

Notes

1. Valentine Brunet (Le Lyrisme d'Alfred de Musset) finds evidence that Musset's sorceress, Belisa (in Don Paez), may have been influenced by La Celestina of Fernando de Rojas. See Brunet for a more detailed account of Musset's Spanish sources.

2. Alfred de Musset, Poésies complètes, ed. Maurice Allem (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 36. All subsequent quotations from Musset's poetry are taken from this edition. References to line numbers are given only for the detailed stylistic analyses in Part Two. Purely documentary information following quotations from secondary sources are placed in the text rather than in notes. The information includes only the name of the author, a short or shortened title and page number. For full bibliographical information, including name of publisher, date and place of publication, consult the Bibliography.

Bibliography

Abrams, Myer W. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, eds. Frederick W. Hillis and Harold Bloom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 527-560.

Aquitaine, Jean d.’ Alfred de Musset: l'oeuvre, le poète. Paris: Gaillard, 1907.

Doumic, René. “Le classicisme de Musset.” Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 June 1907, 923-24.

Gastinel, Pierre. Le Romantisme d'Alfred de Musset. Paris: Hachette, 1933.

Grammont, Maurice. Le Vers français: ses moyens d'expression, son harmonie. Paris: Delagrave, 1967.

King, Russell S. “Musset: the Poet of Dionysus.” Studies in Romanticism, 13 (1974), 323-32.

Le Hir, Yves. “L'Expression du sentiment amoureux dans l'oeuvre poétique d'Alfred de Musset.” Le Français Moderne, 23 (1955), 176-190 and 275-279; 24 (1956), 15-34.

Masson, Bernard. “Relire les Nuits de Musset sous la lumière de Jung.” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 76, 192-210.

Merlant, Joachim, ed. Musset: Morceaux choisis. Paris: Didier, 1924.

Montégut, Emile. Nos Morts contemporains. Paris: Hachette, 1893.

Musset, Alfred de. Poésies complètes. Ed. Maurice Allem. Paris: Gallimard, 1957.

Rees, Margaret. Alfred de Musset. New York: Twayne, 1971.

Siegel, Patricia J. “Structure et thématique dans la poésie d'Alfred de Musset.” Diss. Yale, 1970.

Van Tieghem, Philippe. Musset. Paris: Hatier, 1969.