SOURCE: Bishop, Lloyd. “Musset's ‘Souvenir’ and the Greater Romantic Lyric.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 12, no. 4 (summer 1984): 119-30.

[In the following essay, Bishop maintains that Musset's poem “Souvenir” fits the structural, thematic, and narrative mode of the “greater Romantic lyric” as defined by Meyer Abrams and exemplified in poetic works by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Victor Hugo, and others.]

The earliest formal invention produced by Romantic poets is a genre that Meyer Abrams has called the “greater Romantic lyric,” a genre that evolved out of eighteenth-century loco-descriptive poetry and that includes such well known poems as Coleridge's “The Eolian Harp” and “Fears in Solitude,” Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” Shelley's “Stanzas Written in Dejection,” Keat's “Ode to a Nightingale” and Schiller's “Der Spaziergang.”¹ It is only recently that the genre has been shown to include French poems as well, specifically “Tristesse d'Olympio” and “Le Lac.”² That “Souvenir” is very similar thematically to “Le Lac” and to “Tristesse d'Olympio” is a cliché of literary history; that it is an important exemplar of the greater Romantic lyric is a fact that needs to be demonstrated. The purpose of this essay is to provide such a demonstration by placing Musset's poem in this larger context.

The greater Romantic lyric, as described by Abrams, is an extended poem involving a description of a natural setting, an interaction or interinvolvement between the setting and the observing subject modulating into a sustained meditation that interweaves perceptual, personal and philosophical elements and that produces thus a paysage moralisé. It presents a determinate speaker in a particularized setting, whom we overhear as he carries on a sustained colloquy either with himself, with the outer scene or with a silent human auditor, present or absent. It exhibits in particular two basic patterns of experience and formal thematic development with a third pattern often present:

The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely interinvolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves the emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding, which is the result of intervening meditation.³

As Abrams asserts, this controlled and shapely lyric is of great interest not only because it was the first Romantic formal invention, but also because it was so very prevalent during the Romantic period and because it engendered so many successors. Variations on the mode were performed by Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats and more recently by Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden.⁴ Since the concept of the greater Romantic lyric is relatively new, the list of exemplars and of variants will undoubtedly be lengthened considerably by literary scholars during the next decade or two, especially, we hope, in French literature. This essay is presented as one effort in that direction.

Let us look closely at “Souvenir” to see how well it fits into the mould of the greater Romantic lyric.

1. An extended poem involving a description of a natural setting, an interaction or interinvolvement between the setting and the observing subject modulating into a sustained meditation that interweaves perceptual, personal and philosophical elements.

“Souvenir” is an extended lyric consisting of 45 quatrains, nearly three times the number in “Le Lac,” and begins with the narrator's reaction to a revisited natural setting.

J'espérais bien pleurer, mais je croyais souffrir,
En osant te revoir, place à jamais sacrée …(5)

(1-2)

As in “Tintern Abbey,” “Le Lac” and “Tristesse d'Olympio” the scene is associated with a beloved female companion, and the secluded scene (“cette solitude”)—just as in “Tintern Abbey”—impresses “thoughts of more deep seclusion.” The narrator's friends fear that the revisitation will prove too wrenching an experience for him.

Que redoutiez-vous donc de cette solitude,
Et pourquoi, mes amis, me preniez-vois la main?

(5-6)

Perceptual and personal elements are immediately interwoven: Nature becomes a “shrine” [tombe] where sleeps a memory.” The setting immediately evokes the image of a former mistress.

Les voilà, ces coteaux, ces bruyères fleuries,
Et ces pas argentins sur le sable muet,
Ces sentiers amoureux remplis de causeries,
          Où son bras m'enlaçait.

(9-12)

The rest of the poem is a philosophical meditation, compelled by the natural scene, on the evanescence of human happiness and, as we shall see, on the essence of human life.

2. A determinate speaker in a particularized outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on a sustained colloquy either with himself, with the outer scene or with a silent human auditor, present or absent.

“Souvenir” is anchored to a specific time and place as Patricia Ward has said of “Tintern Abbey” and “Tristesse d'Olympio.” Musset's brother Paul has related to us the particular circumstances under which the poem was written: the revisitation at Fontainebleau of a natural scene that Musset had shared seven years earlier, in 1833, with George Sand shortly before their fateful trip to Italy; the unexpected meeting with her, several months after the revisitation, at the Théâtre Italien; the feverish writing of “Souvenir” that very night.

The narrator's colloquy is carried on in the first stanza with the outer scene—

En osant te revoir, place à jamais sacrée

in the second stanza with silent human auditors (“mes amis”) and in the third and fourth stanzas with himself. At the end of the fifth stanza the poet apostrophizes Nature once again:

Lieux charmants, beau désert qu'aimait tant ma maîtresse,
          Ne m'attendiez-vous pas?

(19-20)

The imperative of the sixth stanza seems addressed simultaneously to Nature and to the poet's worried friends addressed earlier.

Ah! Laissez-les couler, elles me sont bien chères,
Ces larmes que soulève un coeur encor blessé!
Ne les essuyez pas, laissez sur mes paupières
          Ce voile du passé!

(21-24)

3. The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene.

In “Souvenir” the sight of the heather and hillocks, the “silvery” sound of footsteps in the sand, activate the involuntary memory and produce a varied reaction. First, sweet nostalgia: the poet recalls the “fair days” of his youth; then his mistress's intense love of this particular setting; but the recollection of her subsequent betrayal brings tears to his eyes. However, a stoic pride, worthy of Vigny, prevents the poet from indulging in self-pity and recrimination.

Je ne viens point jeter un regret inutile

(25)

Que celui-là se livre à des plaintes amères,
Qui s'agenouille et prie au tombeau d'un ami.

(29-30)

Loin de moi les vains mots, les frivoles pensées,
Des vulgaires douleurs linceul accoutumé,
Que viennent étaler sur leurs amours passées
          Ceux qui n'ont point aimé!

(53-56)

All these varied feelings remain closely intervolved with the outer scene. In fact, the intervolvement is so close that the pathetic fallacy comes into play. The very sentiers which witnessed the lovers' embrace become, through a transferred epithet, amoureux themselves (11); and the poet's stoic pride is reinforced by the fact that Nature herself sets the example:

Fière est cette forêt dans sa beauté tranquille,
          Et fier aussi mon coeur.

(27-28)

4. In the course of the meditation the lyric speaker either achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision or resolves the emotional problem.

All these thematic elements are present in “Souvenir.” The first insight gained is that Time is not only the great destroyer, as Hugo and Lamartine had complained, but also and more importantly, the greater healer.

O puissance du temps! ô légères années!
Vous emportez nos pleurs, nos cris et nos regrets;

(45-46)

This thought leads the poet to pick a philosophical quarrel with Dante—

Dante, pourquoi dis-tu qu'il n'est pire misère
Qu'un souvenir heureux dans les jours de douleur?
Quel chagrin t'a dicté cette parole amère,
          Cette offense au malheur?

(57-60)

and to achieve another insight. For him the memory of a happy experience is more real than the original experience itself:

Un souvenir heureux est peut-être sur terre
          Plus vrai que le bonheur.

(67-68)

It is more durable; it is purer in an almost chemical sense of being unalloyed with baser instincts and motives or bitter feelings like jealousy and revenge.

Ainsi de cette terre, humide encor de pluie,
Sortent, sous tes rayons, tous les parfums du jour;
Aussi calme, aussi pur, de mon âme attendrie
          Sort mon ancien amour.

(37-40; italics added)

Here the purity of love experiences, transformed into what Robert Denommé calls “crystallized recollections,”⁶ is associated with the vibrant purity of the earth after a gentle rain, just as the “souvenir heureux” of stanza 17 is associated with the pur flambeau of the moon. Indeed it is Nature's “natural purity” that impels thoughts of moral purity (cf. the vallon pur observed by Olympio). In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth tells us that he finds “In nature and the language of the senses”

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

(italics added)

The original experience, then, is maintained through memory in its pristine, “natural” purity and also escapes the ravages of Time. Another pre-Proustian insight is that man is not the sum of all his experiences, as Malraux and the existentialists have told us, but of the privileged moments.

Ce fugitif instant fut toute votre vie.

(99)

This is a position diametrically opposed to the one taken by Hugo's persona at one point in “Tristesse d'Olympio”:

N'existons-nous donc plus? Avons-nous eu notre heure?
.....L'air joue avec la branche au moment où je pleure;
Ma maison me regarde et ne me connaît plus.

(77-80)

At this point a bitter Olympio sees human existence as an insignificant speck in Space and Time, but he too will ultimately resolve the problem by invoking the sacré souvenir.

Musset arrives at this insight at the very beginning of his poem. At first he fears that the memory educed by the revisited scene will not be “pure” but bitter-sweet; this is the meaning of the pleurer/souffrir nuance of “J'espérais bien pleurer, mais je croyais souffrir / En osant te revoir. …” But he notes with relief that no bitterness has surfaced: he can face up now to the greatest loss in his life with equanimity. The emotional problem, already under control at the beginning of the poem, is definitively resolved, and the poet will affirm a moral decision: he will forgive his unfaithful mistress and will remember the good days without bitterness.

5. Often the poem rounds upon itself, to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.

After stanza 10 and for the length of 31 successive stanzas the outer scene in “Souvenir” is totally forgotten and yields to the abstract meditation. In stanza 42 the poet finally addresses Nature once again, then becomes aware once again, in the penultimate stanza, of the scene before him (“ces vastes cieux”) and in the concluding stanza interweaves the setting (“ce lieu”) with the treasured memory. The poem ends where it began: at the outer, “sacred” scene.

Je me dis seulement: “A cette heure, en ce lieu,
Un jour, je fus aimé, j'aimais, elle était belle.
J'enfouis ce trésor dans mon âme immortelle,
                    Et je l'emporte à Dieu!

(177-180; italics added)

The fact that the poem rounds upon itself is confirmed also by the sudden change in rhyme schemes at the end. Nearly all (41 out of 45) of the poem's quatrains have rimes croisées, but the final two stanzas return to the rimes embrassées used in the initial stanza. Nearly all (43 out of 45) of the quatrains begin with a feminine rhyme, but the final stanza returns to the initial masculine rhyme of the first stanza.

Musset's insistent use of the demonstrative adjective when describing or alluding to the natural scene, both at the beginning of the poem and at the end—

ces vastes lieux
ce lieu
ces coteaux
ces buissons
cette solitude
cette terre
ces pas argentins

recalls that of Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey.”

these waters
these steep and lofty cliffs
these orchard-tufts
this dark sycamore
these hedge-rows
these pastoral farms
these beateous forms
this fair river
this delightful stream

These demonstratives establish the dependence of the objects perceived upon the subjective experience of the perceiver. As Richard Haven explains:

But of course in “Tintern Abbey” we can separate setting from speaker only by a conscious effort that violates the poem. Gray's verbs [In “Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard”] relate noun to noun; Wordsworth's relate noun to first person pronoun: “I hear,” “I behold,” “I view,” “I see.” Even when the subject of the verb is not “I,” the construction still conveys a subjective relation: “cliffs, / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts” and “connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky” (5-8; italics added). The pattern is described as one which cannot exist independently of the perceiver, and it is this which constitutes the particularity of both speaker and setting. … The emphasis is on the demonstrative pronouns [sic.] (these waters, these cliffs, this dark sycamore) which relate the nouns to the pronoun (“these where I am, which I see”) rather than on the nouns themselves.⁷

The demonstratives in “Souvenir” act as shifters as well as pointers: they shift the emphasis to subjective experience. The natural objects, inventoried more than described, denote not so much the outer scene in itself as events in consciousness. (The thing itself is a sign, says Derrida, and the sign itself is an absence, says Blanchot). To the Romantic nature poet the ontological status of natural objects is dual, and the two components of the duality are not usually equal. Things stand there initially, but only initially, in (a) their noumenal presence, their independent and transcendent being, as things-in-themselves to be admired in themselves, disinterestedly, [but this admiration already contaminates the transcendence with the presence of the admiring observer]; however their true being resides foremost in (b) their function as pointers to human feelings and to human relationships. Here for instance is the end of “Tintern Abbey”:

                                                  these steep and lofty cliffs
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both (a) for themselves, and (b) for thy sake.

The spatial contours in “Souvenir” are vague, not because Musset, any more than Lamartine, is an inadequate Nature poet, but because this is not a true descriptive poem but one of revery and meditation—a greater Romantic lyric. Georges Poulet has noted (Les Métamorphoses du Cercle) that Lamartinian space is only initially and imperfectly the locus of material and concrete things. Ultimately, inevitably, in poem after poem, things retreat. This is also true of “Souvenir” in which after stanza 10 the numerous objects focussed on earlier effect a strategic withdrawal in order to allow the ideas, for which the things are mainly signs, to occupy stage center. And this is why Musset, like Wordsworth and Lamartine, attaches vague, general epithets to his nouns even when, at the beginning and at the end of his poem, he does focus on the natural objects. The demonstrative adjectives are as operative as the vague descriptive ones, and properly so.

“TINTERN ABBEY”

THESE pastoral farms
THIS dark sycamore
THESE beauteous forms
THESE steep and lofty cliffs
THIS delightful stream

“LE LAC”

rocs sauvages
noirs sapins
beau lac
CES roches profondes
riants coteaux
CETTE pierre où tu
la vis s'asseoir

“SOUVENIR”

CES bruyères fleuries
CES sapins à la sombre verdure
CETTE forêt dans sa beauté
tranquille
CETTE gorge profonde
CES sentiers amoureux
CETTE vallée amie

If Wordsworth, Lamartine and Musset had filled their poems with sharp detail, with the perfervid precision of an amateur botanist, this would have detracted, in my view, from the meditative mood. Nature, again, is not being admired, it is being examined philosophically. The demonstrative adjectives, for instance, point not to the beauty of the natural objects perceived by an admiring subject but to an essential and mysterious coalescence of subject-object.

.....

One can also speak of an altered mood or deepened understanding at the very end of “Souvenir” because of the sudden and somewhat surprising religious note. If one discounts the figurative (i.e., seemingly secularized) epithet “sacré” of the first stanza and the angry expletive “juste Dieu” of stanza 21 it is not only the sole religious one but also the very last one sounded in the poem, occupying thus a singularly privileged position. A man's treasured memories remain with him, Musset tells us, not just for the length of his mortal days but throughout a God-governed eternity. Memories of privileged moments form, then, not only the very center of worldly existence but of the other-worldly paradise, the soul's immortal consciousness.

Ton âme est immortelle, et va s'en souvenir.

(“Lettre à M. de Lamartine”)

This is quite different from the treatment that God receives in “Tristesse d'Olympio” from Hugo, who a bit later in his career will conceive of himself as the poet vates and who will write “sous la dictée d'en haut” (Sartre). In Hugo's poem God is not depicted as the guardian of sacred memory but as the very instrument of oblivion.

Dieu nous prête un moment les prés et les fontaines
Les grands bois frissonnants, le rocs profonds et sourds,
Et les cieux azurés et les lacs et les plaines,
Pour y mettre nos coeurs, nos rêves, nos amours;
Puis il nous les retire. Il souffle notre flamme.
Il plonge dans la nuit l'antre où nous rayonnons;
Et dit à la vallée, où s'imprime notre âme,
D'effacer notre trace et d'oublier nos noms.

(italics added)

Why in “Souvenir” this sudden reference to God from a writer who in poetry, fiction and drama expresses a metaphysical anguish arising from his age's loss of faith—and his own—and who at bottom is much less a religious soul than Hugo? Surely it is not a facile device designed to elicit from the reader a stock response of the only-God-can-make-a-tree type. This is simply not Musset's style. I think the best answer may be found in Georges Poulet's discussion of the romantic consciousness. If the first impulse of the man of sensibility is to be receptive to new sensations from the outside (despite the centrality of the self in Romantic literature, consciousness of objects precedes self-consciousness, especially and necessarily when the emotion experienced is Romantic love), his second impulse is to communicate these feelings to the external world: the movement now is from the center, the self, to the periphery.

L'âme humaine est conçue comme un foyer d'impressions qui rayonnent au-dehors … Tout sentiment cherche à s'épandre et à se communiquer. Comment sentir, sans éprouver le besoin de faire partager à toutes les sensibilitiés périphériques les émotions ressenties d'abord au centre.⁸

Chaque heure de l'existence, chaque lieu, si ténu qu'il soit, occupé par la moindre présence, devient un centre d'énergie irradiante, qui, comme dit Saint-Martin, “croît à la fois et dans tous les sens; occupe et remplit toutes les parties de sa circonférence.”

Chaque point de la création, chaque moment particulier de la durée, révèle [for Romantics like William Blake just as for the poets of the Renaissance] une capacité d'expansion véritablement infinie.⁹

For Musset, not every but any hour of existence, any privileged moment or “sacred” place, can become an irradiating center capable of infinite expansion:

Ce fugitif instant fut toute votre vie.
.....          To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour,

This is basically a religious idea, which links Musset (despite certain critical clichés to the contrary) to the mainstream of European romanticism.

Presque simultanément, en France, en Allemagne, en Angleterre, les romantiques découvraient ou retrouvaient le caractère essentiellement religieux de la centralité humaine: “Je suis le point central, la source sainte” chante Astralis dans le roman de Novalis. L'homme est source, et source sacrée. Dans la profondeur de sa centralité se mêlent de façon indescriptible le mystère de son être propre et celui du Dieu qui s'y veut associé.¹⁰

What Poulet calls “the explosion of the center” suggests not only the sacredness of the Self, but an ever-widening periphery, the Romantic quest for the Absolute. But there is also in “Souvenir,” I think, an idea of implosion, a bursting inward to the center's center, to its mysterious, essential and sacred core. This is why Olympio too will cry out that his memory is “sacred.” One must read Musset's place à jamais sacrée as presenting not simply a conventional epithet used as a trite compliment to a former mistress, but as expressive of a genuine if unorthodox religious feeling. The God of many a Romantic is not the transcendent God but the one within—

… non pas un Dieu extérieur, objectif, travaillant au bon fonctionnement de sa Providence externe, mais le Dieu plus intérieur à nous-mêmes que nous-mêmes et plus central que nous ne le pourrions jamais devenir.¹¹

.....

Our conclusion is brief and obvious. We have not forced Musset's “Souvenir” into the mould of the greater Romantic lyric: we are dealing here, just as much as with “Tintern Abbey,” “Tristesse d'Olympio” and “Le Lac,” with a perfect fit.

Notes

1. For Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, see M. W. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, eds. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 527. Reprinted in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970). References are to the original edition. For Schiller, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 453-57.

2. For “Tristesse d'Olympio,” see Patricia A. Ward, “Tristesse d'Olympio and the Romantic Nature Experience,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 7 (1978-79), 4-16. For “Le Lac,” see Lloyd Bishop, “Le Lac and the Greater Romantic Lyric,”; in circulation, copies sent upon request.

3. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” 527-28.

4. For Yeats, see George Bornstein, “Yeats and the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in Romantic and Modern: Revaluations of Literary Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), pp. 91-110. For the others, see Abrams, p. 529.

5. Alfred de Musset, Poésies complètes, ed. Maurice Allem (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 404. All subsequent quotations and references to line numbers are based on this edition.

6. Robert T. Denommé, Nineteenth-Century French Romantic Poets (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 134 and 149.

7. Richard Haven, “Some Perspectives in Three Poems by Gray, Wordsworth, and Duncan,” in Romantic and Modern, pp. 176-77.

8. Georges Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle (Paris: Plon, 1961), p. 133.

9. Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle, p. 139.

10. Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle, p. 138.

11. Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle, p. 138. Musset, like so many Romantics espoused—at least at times—a vague pantheism and his belief was—at times—as strong as his unbelief. (Cf. his letter to the duchesse de Castries: “Vous me dites que ce qui me manque c'est la foi. Non, Madame. J'ai eu ou cru avoir cette vilaine maladie du doute, qui n'est, au fond, qu'un enfantillage, quand ce n'est pas un parti pris, ou une parade … La croyance en Dieu est innée en moi; le dogme et la pratique me sont impossibles. …”) Quoted by Gilbert Ganne, Alfred de Musset: Sa Jeunesse et la nôtre (Paris: Librarie Académique Perrin, 1970), p. 135. The religious note at the end of “Souvenir” is also announced by the lengthy poem, “L'Espoir en Dieu” (1838). For a good recent study of Souvenir that discusses some of the issues treated in this essay, see P. J. Siegel, “Musset's Souvenir: Hugo or Dante?,” Les Bonnes Feuilles, 8, 1, 3-16.