[In the following essay, Fontanella discusses the form and function of Casal's poetry series “Mi museo ideal,” which can be interpreted as an ode to French painter Gustave Moreau. The middle ten sonnets each focus on a separate painting of Moreau, while the first and last pieces act as framing elements that situate the collection as a type of museum or “temple for art.”]

Very few of those critics who have paid due attention to the Cuban poet Julián del Casal (1863-1893) have elaborated on their observations of the media in and from which the poet worked in creating “Mi museo ideal.”¹ The question is significant, for the French poets of the later nineteenth century, especially the Parnassians whom Casal so admired, determined in great part his use of particular poetic modes and forms.² Thus the main body of “Mi museo ideal” is a group of ten sonnets, each depicting a work by the French painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898). That these ten sonnets are preceded by another sonnet, whose subject is a portrait of the painter, and that they are followed by a final poem, of 130 lines, which is not fashioned after a specific painting,³ is also significant. In the discussion which follows, the framework provided by the first and last poems functions in conjunction with the subjects of these poems to underscore the structural and formal aspects of both the composite collection and the ten sonnets individually.

We must not forget, as we discuss Casal's “Museo,” his awareness of having “transposed” his subject from one medium, painting, to another, poetry. Nor may we merely consider the beginning and final poems apart from the ten sonnets, which are, almost invariably, the only poems of “Mi museo ideal” to capture the critics' attention.⁴ The arrangement in twelve parts—first “Vestíbulo: Retrato de Gustavo Moreau,” then the ten sonnets on the paintings, and finally “Sueño de gloria: Apoteosis de Gustavo Moreau”—is equivalent to the structuring of a “museum,” which houses the ten sonnets by means of the first and twelfth poems of the collection. Furthermore, the idea of opening in the “vestibule” connotes from the start a spatial relationship from one poem to another, by which we are to see that Casal is poetizing painted art as if it were on exhibit.⁵

Pertinent here is E. H. Gombrich's discussion of representation in plastic art forms. For him, the factor of substitution may precede the factor of portrayal; further, that the artist's representation of objects of the external world may be initially a substitution for them implies the idea of function:

It needed two conditions, then, to turn a stick into our hobby horse: first, that its form made it just possible to ride on it; secondly—and perhaps decisively—that riding mattered. … If we keep in mind that representation is originally the creation of substitutes out of given material we may reach safer ground. The greater the wish to ride, the fewer may be the features that will do for a horse. But at a certain stage it must have eyes—for how else could it see? At the most primitive level, then, the conceptual image might be identified with what we have called the minimum image—that minimum, that is, which will make it fit into a psychological lock.⁶

Gombrich's approach, applied to “Mi museo ideal,” raises the central question with which we deal in this essay. How did Casal's poems, and the way he presented them, function to satisfy both the demands of his literary tradition and his own needs as a poet? Since the meaning of the new form cannot carry the total meaning of the original from which it is derived, what, in brief, has Casal brought to the Moreau paintings? No matter how accurately the poems may re-present the formal and structural elements of the paintings (this is basic to the aims of Parnassian poetic ekphrasis and, therefore, of no little pertinence in this essay), they cannot mean, solely, the paintings. The approximation of the function of “Mi museo ideal” to that of the original set of paintings is one of the best means of determining the equivalence of the sonnets and the paintings. Obviously, what Casal brings to the paintings not only indicates what his new medium may afford him; it also makes the paintings his own. Casal's title insists that it is his own (“Mi”) museum, which he creates, at least in part, for himself.

In general, whereas the symbolists persisted in making the poem a step-by-step, visible development of thought, the Parnassians usually considered themselves capable of perceiving form prior to idea.⁷ For the Parnassians—as for Casal, who was describing pictorial art—the form existed prior to the poem, as an aspect of the transposable object being viewed. When Théophile Gautier was in vogue, “transposition d'art” was a commonplace, and “poets set about writing ‘pastels’ and artists painting ‘sonnets.’”⁸ Gautier himself considered traditional forms “containers” into which thoughts might be methodically and concentratedly worked, and he regarded the “sonnet orthodoxe” in this way:

Il a une forme géométriquement arrêtée: de même que, dans les plafonds, les compartiments polygones ou bizarrement contournés servent plus les peintres qu'ils ne les gênent en déterminant l'espace où il faut encadrer et faire tenir leurs figures. Il n'est pas rare d'arriver, par le raccourci et l'ingénieux agencement des lignes, à loger un géant dans un de ces caissons étroits, et l'œuvre y gagne par sa concentration même. Ainsi une grande pensée peut se mouvoir à l'aise dans ces quatorze vers méthodiquement distribués.⁹

(Italics mine.)

He went on, of course, to say that if one does not intend to submit to the laws of the sonnet (“Il faut donc se soumettre absolument à les lois”), then one ought not to compose sonnets at all. In this regard, Gautier's insistence derived, as Jean Ducros has observed in a treatment of Leconte de Lisle, from the Parnassian preference for impersonal art:

Cette théorie [of imitation, to which the theory of impersonal art is intimately (“étroitement”) linked] suppose que la qualité d'un poème ne vient pas seulement de l'originalité et de la profondeur de l'émotion, ou de l'idée qu'il exprime, mais aussi de l'observation de règles idéales que devine le génie poetique. Ces règles ont, comme les idées platoniciennes, une existence propre et indépendante. Elles s'opposent à la réalité, changeante et confuse. Elles excluent l'émotion personnelle comme l'intention morale, car l'une et l'autre sont inséparables de l'intelligence et de la sensibilité individuelles. C'est dire qu'elles ne s'appliquent pas à la matière de l'œuvre d'art, monde intime ou monde extérieur, mais seulement à sa forme. Il y a des règles formelles en sculpture, qui commandent à la ligne. La poésie doit aussi soumettre ses images et ses rythmes à des lois idéales, et ces lois ont une valeur éternelle: les rapports de longueurs et les principes de proportions sont indépendants des personnes et des temps.¹⁰

Today it is easy for us to agree with the basis, at least, of the principle that “only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition—from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition—from one language into another, or finally intersemiotic transposition—from one system of signs into another, e.g., from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting” (italics mine).¹¹ But deformation on the part of the Parnassians was, theoretically, an unpurposed consequence of art that re-presented objects of the external world. On the other hand, the aesthetic, moral, and linguistic deformation on the part of the symbolists was a systematic, therefore intentional, effort (stemming largely from Schopenhauer's world view) at personal representation.¹² Nevertheless, the very impracticability of the aesthetic of “transposition,” as we shall see, in part accounts for an approximation of the Parnassian to the symbolist: both in effect create a world of “personal representation.” Casal's completed “Museo” is, indeed, a personalized re-formation, answering only in theory to the phrase “transposition d'art.”

Furthermore, the Parnassian group was not always consistent in giving form priority over thought, or in making form independent of idea. The periodical L'Artiste, which stood for “l'art pour l'art” and in which Gautier collaborated in 1856, affirmed that “nous n'avons jamais pu comprendre la séparation de l'idée et de la forme. … Une belle forme est une belle idée.”¹³ Nor were the Parnassians unaware of a dichotomy in their aesthetics. Anatole France caused a stir at a meeting of the Parnassians when he read a paper in which he defined the poet as the perceiver of objects in the external world—objects which are transformed by the perceiver's “prisme cérébral,” then decomposed and given new substance in another medium. It is, he said, in the redirection of the ideal outward from the poet's mind that the split between form and idea occurs; they meet again in the total poem. The association was immediately made with Hérédia's creative process, as Leconte de Lisle kept hush and as one unknown rose to object: “Oui, si vraiment, ainsi que France vient de nous le faire entendre, la poésie n'est qu'une vibration de l'œil du poète, réfléchie sur le papier; si, pour en tirer les plus beaux effets, il suffit d'avoir dans la cervelle quelques plaques sensibles, alors Hérédia, le plus étonnant réflecteur d'images, serait aussi le plus grand de nos poètes.”¹⁴

What probably upset the gathering was that Anatole France's paper made the act of perception so mechanical that it deprived the poet of the subjective powers which would set him apart from the unimaginative perceiver. But France's way of thinking also implied a refashioning of the ideal image by the poet, and not merely the Parnassian concept of the form's containment of the image. Leconte de Lisle's silence at the meeting may, perhaps, be explained by his agreement with France, for in 1864 Leconte wrote: “La pensée surabonde nécessairement dans l'œuvre d'un vrai poète, maître de sa langue et de son instrument. Il voit du premier coup d'œil plus loin, plus haut, plus profondément que tous, parce qu'il contemple l'idéal à travers la beauté visible, et qu'il le concentre et l'enchâsse dans l'expression propre, précise, unique” (italics mine).¹⁵

Despite differences of opinion like these, Parnassians generally agreed upon art's double purpose: to perpetuate and reveal beauty. Only through art was beauty made available to all—although art had no utilitarian aim, even so. As Leconte de Lisle warned, “L'art n'a pas mission de changer en or fin le plomb vil des âmes inférieures. … L'art est donc l'unique révélateur du beau, et il le révèle uniquement.”¹⁶ The concept of “transposition” thus implied a repositioning to a double end, the re-presentation and perpetuation of the image of beauty—and through a single poetic form of inherently perpetuating qualities.

This form, above all others, was the sonnet. What could the sonnet afford the poet of ekphrasis, such as Hérédia or Casal? Hérédia said of the “exquise tapisserie,” the sonnet, that “on la termine, tout le cavenas [sic] tient dans la main, et rien ne favorise mieux la constance. De là, vint qu'on n'a jamais fabriqué tant de sonnets qu'aujourd'hui.”¹⁷ The sonnet's extraordinary favor among the Parnassian poets gave rise to its polemical nature at the time, an example of which we have already seen in Gautier's insistence on the poet's obedience to the laws of the sonnet.¹⁸ It was by virtue of submission to the “règles idéales” (which alone could give art its changelessness and which applied only to forms, not to moral intention) that the poet could prevent his art from falling into oblivion. By universalizing his poetic structure in this way—which is what Casal did also when he chose his subject matter from myth and the classics—the poet could remove the destructive temporal factor from his art object.

Hérédia, fighting the use of the lengthy poem, called the sonnet an eternal form: “Une forme a persisté, qui ne pouvait pas périr, car elle est admirablement assortie à la secrète horreur des compositions étendues, c'est le sonnet.”¹⁹ The sonnet, like Ducros' “règles idéales” and Gautier's “lois,” was not subject to vicissitude. Baudelaire may have been extreme when he said that “le meilleur compte rendu d'un tableau pourra être un sonnet ou une élégie,”²⁰ but there is something very worth noting in his comment: traditional poetic forms could, it was thought, be put to use for the expression of certain poetic modes; to perpetuate a painting, one could “transpose” it to the sonnet. The sonnet was the place where the image of the ideal would be safe from the harsh realities of the world of non-art. It was not by chance, then, that Pierre Martino employed a metaphorical temple to discuss Hérédia (“un vrai desservant du temple … officiant dans la plus sainte des chapelles, celle du sonnet”); here, the sonnet became, figuratively, a composite part of a sanctified place where art is preserved.²¹

The preservation of art, the perpetuation of the image, became an extended analogy that was almost a commonplace in the latter half of the nineteenth century in France. The precept of “l'art pour l'art” was expanded from what was an attitude toward art to what became the artist's active practice of constructing measures of defense for his own work. This implied a whole life-style for the artist himself, as we shall see. Catulle Mendès, a Parnassian and Judith Gautier's husband, told how the publisher of the first issue of Parnasse intended “Le Parnasse sera à la poésie ce que le Salon est à la peinture.”²² Book is to poem as museum is to painting. Gustave Moreau himself conceived of the museum as an elaborate exhibition of the artist's ideal, and it is curious how much the arrangement of his paintings in his own home reminds one of the makeup of a book, each of whose pages is an object of visual study:

Moreau requested that the state “keep as long as possible [his] collection, conserving its character as an ensemble which shows the sum of work and the effort of the artist during his life.” The idea of making an ensemble of the emblems of his working imagination occurred to Moreau early in his career. It appears that he personally installed the hundreds of oil paintings and thousands of watercolors and drawings in elaborate cabinets opening out like Chinese puzzles; in the walls throughout his house which fold upon themselves like accordions; in the revolving meuble occupying the largest of his two studios on the top floor.²³

The physical suspension of a painting corresponded, we may say, to the suspension of poetic subject, the arresting of image in time and space. One of the most illuminating statements of this analogy is from Gautier's “Le Musée ancien”:

Les tableaux, autrefois, étaient accrochés çà et là à peu près au hasard, ou plutôt d'après les dimensions et les angles de leurs cadres, sans souci de la chronologie; l'œuvre du même maître, éparpillée à de grandes distances, perdait la moitié de son effet. Aucune idée, aucune doctrine n'avait présidé à l'arrangement de ces trésors du génie lentement amassés par les siècles. C'était un magasin rempli de merveilles, non un musée.

Cette idée si simple de réunir les œuvres de chaque école, les manières de chaque maître, de les faire se suivre chronologiquement de façon que l'on pût lire comme dans un livre ouvert les origines, les progrès et la décadence de l'art de tel pays ou de tel siècle, n'était venue, la routine l'avait repoussée. Aucun conservateur du Musée ne s'était aperçu qu'il avait sous la main tous les matériaux pour écrire la plus magnifique histoire de la peinture sans faire les moindres frais de critique ou de style. Les pages toutes prêtes attendaient, ne demandant qu'à être numérotées.

Maintenant, une promenade au Musée est un cours d'art complet, fait par des professeurs qui, pour être muets, n'en sont pas moins éloquents. La longue muraille vous enseigne, et chaque pas vous donne une connaissance: l'on voit naître, se développer et mourir les grandes écoles d'Italie, de Flandre et de Hollande, auxquelles se substitue, peu à peu, l'école de France, la seule qui vive aujourd'hui. Aucune histoire, aucun traité de peinture, ni Vasari, ni l'abbé Lanzi, ni Decamps, ni Sery d'Agencourt, ne sauraient vous en apprendre autant. Voilà les Byzantins. …²⁴

All Gautier's curator had to do was to number each painting that lay helter-skelter in the museum and he would effect a metamorphosis of picture into page and museum into book. Moreover, the museum would be an open book; it would serve an aesthetic function, which is to reveal the beautiful. It would not perform the utilitarian task, would not alter beauty, as Leconte de Lisle warned it must not, but, rather, would perpetuate its pictorial images.

Let us look at Gautier's statement even more closely. The museum wall was not merely able to replace the professor of art; it could be more eloquent than he. The museum, not just the painting, would speak out. The arrangement (museum) of paintings, like the paintings themselves, would have an “éloquence”—an eloquence which, paradoxically, would not be verbally interpretable. It would hold just as much of a radiant truth as the total meaning of the individual painting. Now since, like a painting, a completed poem could have, theoretically, a nonverbal significance, and since Casal's language is often used to daze and charm, not to further conceptual discernment, we may see that it was through language that imitated the iconic quality of the visual image that Casal had his poetry “speak out” (made it an ekphrasis). But since no poem can speak only a nonverbal language, Casal's poems can merely attempt, through words, an imitation of visual significance, and it is in this sense that “Mi museo ideal” can be thought of as a collection of “transpositions.”²⁵ In the case of “Mi museo ideal,” the “transposition” itself and the most significant aspect of the process are, respectively, ekphrasis by ekstasis. That is, the description in poetic form of pictorial art, the “speaking out” of the pictorial art, is achieved primarily through the poet's exhibiting, his holding forth, the emblematical image. Casal's contemplation of the work of art leads to an exposition of the object that for him has most descriptive and archetypal meaning.

How then did Casal's “museum” of poetic paintings become an eloquent defense for his art and himself? To reiterate briefly, Casal chose the sonnet form so admired by the Parnassians for the first eleven poems of his poetic “museum”; only for the last poem did he lay aside the sonnet and adopt a poetic form whose rhyme scheme is varied and whose length is 130 lines. His sonnets on the paintings we may define as within the category of “the poem of imaginative confrontation, where a close connection between the poet's mood and the imagery is expressed by the personifying of the imagery [This] is the genre of the Keats ode, the Grecian Urn being the nearest to the emblem poem.”²⁶ Casal, like Keats, tried to represent in words original objects d'art, or, more accurately, objets d'art that he had never really seen. His individual sonnets may be considered emblematical, and so too may be the composite “Museo,” which progressively acquires functionalism in the course of the composition, but Casal's sonnets, like Keat's poem, are certainly not “pura descripción pictórica,” as R. Blanco-Fombona would have them be.²⁷ Rather, “Mi museo ideal” is, in part, a willful projection of Casal's imaginings, a reflection of his private life, and a defense for his art and himself, whereby the poet translated his various moods into the images that he depicted.

Now where the lyric is purposefully focused on visual imagery, we may think of it as overseen as well as overheard: as Frye says, “there are thousands of lyrics so intently focussed on visual imagery that they are, as we may say, set to pictures. In the emblem an actual picture appears.”²⁸ In this respect, the poems of “Mi museo ideal” were probably not so purposeful an experiment as Appollinaire's “calligrammes,” but they do show a sense of the relation of literary form to the subject treated, that is, to the paintings. Casal may simply have been following tradition—that of Hérédia, let us say—or he may have been consciously aware of what the sonnet afforded him as a medium for ekphrasis. But since when dealing with actual works by Moreau, Casal chose the sonnet form in order to represent the objet d'art, we may venture to say that the framing of the subject of each individual painting is partly achieved by the visual shape of the corresponding poems.

In fact, “frame” constitutes a primary aesthetic idea in the poems, especially when a “frame” quality, inherent in several of the pictures, comes into play; in these instances, Casal has reproduced such an effect in the poems. In the painting Salomé, the femme fatale dances beneath pillared arches which form a cupola above her; nearly the same effect is used in L'Apparition, where Moreau depicts the same figures in the same locale but from a different point of view; in Prometée the Titan is bound beneath an overhanging rock; in Galatée (the painting perhaps most suggestive of the effect of inherent frame), Moreau looks out from within a grotto, through its entrance, past Galatea, and to the face of the Cyclops, even more emphatically, into his eye; the moment of Hercule et l'Hydre de Lerne occurs within a labyrinth. Four of the sonnets which correspond to these paintings open with prepositions whose function is to suggest frameworks for the central image. These frameworks are immediately foretold in the statements of preposition, then named by their representational nouns: “En el palacio hebreo” (“Salomé”); “Bajo el dosel de gigantesca roca” (“Prometeo”); “En el seno radioso de su gruta” (“Galatea”); “En el umbral de lóbrega caverna” (“Hércules ante la Hidra”). “La aparición” is the exception (“Nube fragante y cálida”) among these five sonnets. Nevertheless, we should remember that its context is historically and locally an immediate continuation of “Salomé.” The palace mentioned in the first quatrain of “La aparición” has already acquired representational value in the anteceding sonnet, where the palace was three times emphasized in the first quatrain. The poet, rather than renaming, engages the tactile sense in “La aparición,” and he builds up the palace by the naming of its elements (“granito, / ónix, pórfido y nácar”).

In “Galatea” (as in “Retrato de Gustavo Moreau”) Casal has invented representative detail to “transpose” the quality of “frame” to his sonnet.²⁹ The means for achieving this are not reduced to the simplicity of “Bajo el dosel,” the opening of the “Prometeo” sonnet, where we have nothing to further this end except the localizing preposition and the noun itself, the mere printed sign for an architectural structure which projects and suspends overhead; “en” and “gruta” alone would perform an analogous function in “Galatea.” In this sonnet, where the concavity of “gruta,” for example, receives double emphasis with metaphorical “seno,” the descriptive components are indicative of the pervasiveness of enclosure. The carpeted (“alfombrada”) grotto becomes a sacrosanct place where beauty and order, personified in the figure of Galatea, can enjoy sleep, static life; and we might venture to say that the grotto is visually suggested by the literary form, the sonnet, especially if we bear in mind that the Parnassians thought of the sonnet itself as a sacrosanct place. As subject of the sonnet, Galatea requires of it that it be her symbolically powerful refuge. As the eternal, changeless image of art itself, she contributes to the “Museo”'s substitutional function (as do many of the artistic subjects with which we are concerned) and merits the framing that stresses her emblematic value.

The representative elements which make up the second quatrain of “Galatea” sprang from the imagination of Casal; these elements do not show up in Moreau's painting. Their validity, of course, is to be found in the way they interrelate with other elements of the poem, not the painting. When the poet asks himself what occurs outside the limited space of the grotto from which he views the subject of the painting, he imagines it to be in contrast to what occurs within the grotto and in opposition, also, to the whole mood of the “withinness” of beauty's temple. Sound and haphazard movement outside contrast with silence and static motion within:

Desde la orilla de dorada ruta
donde baten las ondas cristalinas,
salpicando de espumas diamantinas
el pico negro de la roca bruta,
Polifemo. …

This contrast—of the elements within and those outside—extends the visual framework. The words “baten,” “ondas,” “salpicando de espumas,” suggest the elements outside of the grotto, and the verbal units of the final line of this second quatrain accomplish the contrast: “pico” is the physical opposite of “gruta” (on a sexual as well as conceptually spatial level), “negro” connotes something ominous, contrary to the neutral quietude of Galatea with her “piel color de rosa.” The physical attributes of the grotto outlined in the first quatrain are not those of “roca bruta.” The poet thus lends spatiality to his poem by projecting through the rectilinear plane of the visual image, thus persuading the reader to orient himself and better apprehend the “central” image by referring to other imaginary planes, too.

As the reader of a poem begins his perception of the work's significance with the first word, so the viewer of a picture begins his understanding of the meaning of the work with the initial perception of any graphic sign.³⁰ But it would be proper to keep in mind that a logical syntax is often operative in a poem, especially in lineally descriptive poetry, to a greater degree than it is in a painting. The poet's syntax might arrange sense data in a more direct way than might that of the painter; and the poet better controls the reader's orientation, the more explicit his descriptive language. Granted the particular nature of Casal's and Moreau's works, we may correctly speak in terms of relatively oriented vision when we compare these, for in the case of the latter, the beholder's attention is more random, at least initially. The first word of the poem is, therefore, of particular importance to Casal as poet of ekphrasis. In the poems mentioned above, Casal situates the particular subject matter and thus impels the reader to a specific reference point for the emblematic meaning. For example, Casal shocks us immediately upon exit from the grotto with the mention of the Cyclops' name: the ninth line of “Galatea” begins “Polifemo”; the two tercets are dedicated to him. The written name “Polifemo” is an economical sign for his visage, which is precisely the subject content of the space framed by the opening of the grotto in the painting. Thus, the written word, syntactically located, could approximate the painted visage.

We can see at work in Casal's act of poetic painting, as Susanne Langer would have it, that the poem becomes not merely “a shape in space, but a shaping of space—of all the space that [the beholder] is given.”³¹ Quantitatively considered, his sonnet gives less importance to Galatea, although she is the titular subject, than it does to Polyphemus, who exists for the dramatic encounter between reader and subject. Casal has emphasized psychological condition (“lujuria”) and deemphasized the portrayal of beauty (Galatea) in this “transposition.” The quantitative deemphasis of the latter, in fact, allows for the emphasis of the former, and it is tempting to think of Polyphemus and his ambience as occupying more of the poem's visual space.

The poet does not run helter-skelter over the surface of the painting, accumulating visual detail for his poem. No more would Casal portray sky, to take an obvious example, at the “base” of a sonnet than would Gombrich admit the likelihood of the child's placing the eyes on the haunches of the hobby horse. Although both are possible, of course, these artistic applications would diminish the representation's initial substitutional value. (Compare the order of poetic subject in “Sueño de gloria,” which more concerns the narration of an apotheosis than the hypostatization of a preexistent image.) Nearly all the sonnets either begin with a portrayal of sky or, at least, go from the diaphanous to the concrete. Further, Casal impels the reader to shape his own painting as he takes him to and through the planes that lend a dimensional aspect to the sonnet. It is by leading to that the poet marks the particular images which best define the total meaning of the poem; it is by leading through that he creates the illusion of virtual space within the sonnet medium. As with “extasiado” in the ninth line of “Galatea,” for example, Casal suggests a halting point (Polyphemus' visage) for the reader of the poem, who, Frye would say, is also supposed to be seeing a picture appear in the emblematic poem; so it is the Cyclops' eye that is held in ekstasis. A similar technique is used to discover Jupiter waiting in ambush for Europa.

It is significant that Casal ended his sonnet with the mention of the Cyclops' eye (“incendia la lujuria su ojo verde”). Polyphemus' dramatic function is to look back into the grotto, on the sleeping Galatea (after the mention of the name “Polifemo” we are again told of a sleeping goddess); his function, in other words, is to look out toward the reader. Galatea is doubly perceived, once by the reader and then by Polyphemus. The repetition of this detail in a poetic form so condensed as the sonnet lends a spatial value to the poetic image, as the reader associates the two allusions to Galatea and simultaneously relates these to her two beholders, himself and the Cyclops. What this achieves for Casal is an impression of momentaneousness. It is a process that contradicts the temporal aspect implicit in the written poem, and it is essential to the concepts of ekstasis and exhibit. Placement of “ojo” at the end of the poem urges the reader from a witnessing of representational detail and brings him to a recognition of the meaning of the poem: the state of beauty (Galatea at rest in her grotto) threatened by elements in opposition (Polyphemus and the unruly world outside the grotto). As “transposer,” Casal has underscored the dramatic aspect of the painting, and his rendering of the traditional image in new perspectives has made possible the perpetuation of the image. The linear progression of the poem has achieved what the painting could not automatically achieve. The poet has acted as a guide through the syntactical format within which he worked. Like Gautier in his Guide de l'amateur au musée du Louvre, Casal could lead in a particular sequence into, through, and out of his “museum,” and he could dictate the sequence in which each of its units was to be viewed, too.

In “Hélène sur les remparts de Troie” Moreau shows Helen in a graceful stance upon the ruined walls, holding a lily in her hand and overlooking with nonchalance the dead soldiers and rubble of the recently ended battle. In Casal's sonnet “Elena,” the apparently random naming of the effects of the war at Troy is the poet's means of representing the chaos of recent historical past. “What?” is answered before “Where?” As soon as we are informed of the locale, a mysterious figure is presented as apart (“envuelta”) from the surroundings, but is not identified for us until the thirteenth line of the sonnet. The emblematical subject thus undergoes a process of ekstasis through circumscription before it is held up toward the reader at the end of the poem: “mira Elena hacia el lívido horizonte / irguiendo un lirio en la rosada mano.” By the device of circumscription, Casal has lent to his sonnet the quality of riddle, which is broken, finally, by the terminal identification of the poem's principal subject, Helen.³² That is, Casal has made both circumscription and description operative in this poem especially, and in this way he seems to lean toward the symbolist's (Mallarmé's) propensity for suggesting rather than naming.

The lily, the central symbol of the final line and the main focal point of Moreau's painting, is merely an extension of Helen: a depersonalized Helen takes form in the lily. In terms of meaning, then, they are one and the same image. Both stand erect. Both are incongruous with their surroundings: they have survived what nothing else has survived. They are cold, fresh beauty grown up out of the burning ugliness of death (“homicidas mechas”). They are isolated by their physical position (“desde el monte / de ruinas hacinadas en el llano”) and by their position in the sequence in which things are mentioned in the sonnet. In one sense, the spatial identification of the lily with Helen emphasizes Helen's lack of empathy with her surroundings. But as the person becomes the flower by virtue of the verbal succession of the inanimate object after the human figure of Helen, the impersonality of art's image is stressed, and the titular subject acquires its completeness in the final line when its association with the nonhuman lily is established.

The Helen-lily image may be thought of as symbolically representative of Casal's poetic work: the art object is worth all of wasted civilization; it is the object for which civilization has sacrificed itself, and yet, ironically, it denies this sphere of action. There is also a methodological significance to be observed here. A flower may possess a symbolic value similar to that which it has in “Salomé”; yet the particularity of its presentation in each poem indicates how the contexts lend it special meaning. The common symbol, in turn, helps to define the meaning of both of these sonnets at once and that of the composite collection as well.

The meeting of methodology and aesthetic in Casal's “transpositions” is clarified by his “Elena.” In Moreau's paintings, the artistic ideal is symbolized, time and again, by the human figure. His Helen is one example; Galatea and Hercules are others. Prometheus' lofty position is associable with Helen's, and in Casal's sonnet, Prometheus' moan—only a potentially audible moan, there by virtue of Casal's projection of meaning—is correlative with his solitary indifference. Whereas condition (indifference and solitude) is stressed in the figures of Prometheus and Helen, Hercules and Salomé are the human embodiments of physical harmony. Galatea, isolated, sleeping, and protected, encompasses all these qualities. Moreau's paintings and Casal's use of them reflect the “two beliefs—in the Image as a radiant truth out of space and time, and in the necessary isolation or estrangement of men who can perceive it—[beliefs which] are inextricably associated.”³³ “Radiant” seems to be a strategic word for both Moreau and Casal; it was not enough in their attempts to represent the image as truth merely to leave it compromisingly positioned within the picture or the poem. It must be set apart descriptively (sheathed Helen), or it must be held forth to occupy the foremost plane of imaginary space (as in “Salomé”). Also, the image must be timeless, without definable past or future, for conscious relation to any other thing implies contemporaneity, thereby breaking the illusion of the image's perfect isolation. The image must be devoid of its own mental process. In Casal's sonnet, Helen of Troy is “indiferente,” she reflects non-thought; she actively shows non-concern, choosing to look toward nothingness rather than at the human question so immediately present—indeed, attributable to her. The emphasis on Helen, indifferent and emphatically apart from anything else, is what the word “envuelta” and the structure of her appearance within the spatial and temporal limits of the sonnet achieve for the reader.

“Hércules ante la Hidra” is another complex example of the problem of ekstasis. Again, both structure and descriptive usage serve to effect this desired end. An indication that it is, in fact, a process of ekstasis at work is to be found in the very title of the sonnet. His alteration of Moreau's title, Hercule et l'Hydre de Lerne, shows Casal's more explicit concern for the psychological drama represented in the painting. The poet could rely only partially on the visual effect of his poem to determine the physical relationship of his two primary subjects, so Casal's title set the mood for the theme of dramatic confrontation by clearly positioning Hercules before (“ante”) the Hydra.³⁴ In “Galatea” the poet achieved psychological drama by ultimately directing the reader's vision toward the eye of the Cyclops. To somewhat the same effect, the Hydra here moves outward from within, threateningly, and is identified by name at the end of the first quatrain: “surge, acechando del viajero el paso, / invencible y mortal, la Hidra de Lerna.”

In the description of the Hydra, motive is emphasized; in the description of Hercules, the opposing force to the Hydra, physical attributes are emphasized. Casal has posed Hercules in this manner, plasticized him in agreement with Moreau's having plasticized him in his painting. The tercets show Hercules charged with potential energy, at the moment of confrontation:

Hércules, coronado de laureles,
repleto el carcaj en el áureo cinto,
firme en la diestra la potente maza,
ante las sierpes de viscosas pieles
detiénese en mitad del laberinto,
fulminando en sus ojos la amenaza.

This potentiality is a favorite theme for Moreau, and it is the one Casal correspondingly underscores in his literary “transposition.” In order to achieve the sense of potentiality, stasis is put to function, and the final line emphasizes Hercules' stare. (The contrary of functional stasis was true of Keats's urn, where a kinetic sense was more apt for the ekphrasis.) In “Hércules ante la Hidra,” the phrases “umbral de lóbrega caverna” and “mitad del laberinto” describe the frames from which the two opposing images project themselves outward and freeze before the reader. Once Hercules and the Hydra are thus held forth, detained in opposition to each other, the sonnet acquires formal meaning. That “deliberate pause in practical activity”³⁵ practiced by so many artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century is an idea immediately associable with the subject of the poem. In “Hércules ante la Hidra,” where the emphasis is on a potential activity, where a psychological drama is created at the expense of a physical one, the artist's own “overcoming of action in cosmic contemplation” is suggested.

Casal opened his “museum” with a sonnet on Salomé, whose function, according to story, was to charm. This function is imitated in the language of the first quatrain of “Salomé,” where Casal creates an illusion of pervasive fragrance:

                                                                                                                        el suave
humo fragante por el sol deshecho,
sube a perderse en el calado techo
o se dilata en la anchurosa nave. …

What he achieves by this is the most immediate synesthesia and the most efficacious means for sensorial recall of the whole iconology of poems after the reader has passed through it.³⁶ This phenomenon of total perception of a series of images as one simultaneous whole is treated by Georges Poulet and elaborated upon by Wylie Sypher: it implies a vision of eternity, traceable in all the “imaginative” romantics, a blending of feeling and thought that shows up as a natural achievement in De Quincey and Baudelaire.³⁷

“Salomé” and “La aparición” are presented as a diptych; the story of the first poem directly precedes that of the second, as the paintings themselves indicate by the repositioning of their subject matter, the omission and transformation of certain subjects, and the introduction and holding forth of new ones. And, especially since the two poems begin the succession of ten, their historical successiveness is an impetus for the “promenade.” Given these temporal and spatial considerations, and since in “La aparición” there is a breakdown in the harmony of the Salomé figure, as a result of the appearance of the head of John the Baptist before her, we can see the alternation between the images of plasticized harmony and the pathological, traced by Praz in the course of his The Romantic Agony. Huysmans, from whose prose descriptions Casal derived the bases for these two sonnets, “correlated the pathological and aesthetic aspects of the Dancer motif.”³⁸ Salomé's paralysis in “La aparición” is particularly remarkable in light of the importance of her image as dancer in the sonnet just preceding, where, as the traditional Salomé figure, she appeared as an image of harmonious organic movement, which was hypostatized, at the end of the poem, in the lotus.

As in “Elena,” the femme fatale was depersonalized into a flower to emphasize her organic perfection as image and her implicit lack of human concern, since between the moments of “Salomé” and “La aparición,” Salomé's function as charmer was complete with the decapitation of John the Baptist. Her foremost position in the temporal progression of “Salomé” implies the formal completion of this function, while it also gives primacy to the dancer-flower motif.³⁹ In order to give primacy to this motif, Casal has moved from the vaguest to the least vague, from the most scopic to the most minute visual object, the pistils of the lotus. Within the perceptual vagueness of the quatrains he has located Herod, the orientation point for other symbols; before Herod (“delante de él”) is Salomé, who holds up the lotus in her right hand. Casal has chosen the progression from vagueness, to center, forward, then upward, to create a sensation of space in his poem by suggesting the physical planes which, in fact, correspond to the pictorial illusion of Moreau's painting. By the nature of the medium, however, the sequence of planes remains more or less arbitrary for the beholder of the painting; there is no sequential equivocation in the poem, and for the reader, perceptual progression is fixed. The depersonalization of Salomé, or of Helen, into flower does more than reflect the attitude of the traditional figure. The flower is metaphorically the work of art as unconscious organic life and, as such, merits its structural location in the two sonnets as the final detail in ekstasis. Moreover, the flower, although requiring continual refashioning and perpetuation, resists literal “transposition,” because it is “utterly original” (Kermode) and inimitable.

“Una peri” demonstrates, perhaps most clearly of all the poems, a full process of ekstasis. The peri balances herself atop a high promontory (line 1). She moves off into space, where she is portrayed in resplendence (“retratada en la fúlgida marea,” line 8). As she descends, in a noiseless spin (“en silencioso giro, / como visión lumínica de plata”), a feeble sigh idles upon her lips (“vaga en sus labios lánguido suspiro”), and finally, weariness is outlined in her violet-colored eyes. Just before her spin begins (line 9), she is held momentarily in space, clasping her lyre (like the flower, a symbol of perfection). She descends so near to us that we can perceive the weariness and the color of her eyes. As in the case of Prometheus' moan, although the peri sighs, she cannot be heard. She is so close that we see her sigh; it idles upon her lips. The peri, then, is caught in temporal arrest twice: once in midair, at the end of the quatrains, and again before the beholder of her fall, at the end of the tercets. Moreau's painting(s) La Péri shows her as Casal saw her, caught in midair, clasped to her lyre. But her departure from the balancing point on the high promontory and her spin toward the beholder are inventions by Casal. One important critic recently remarked with surprise that Moreau's La Péri “n'offre aucune ressemblance avec le sonnet de Casal—à la différence de ce qui se passe pour les neuf autres sonnets, tous reproductions fidèles des tableaux du peintre. Nous avouons ignorer quelle œuvre de Moreau servit de modèle au poète pour composer son sonnet.”⁴⁰ But herein lies a mistreatment of the poem: Faurie shows no way to account for a willfully “imperfect” ekphrasis and thus neglects to distinguish between stated Parnassian aesthetic and actual practice.

The intention of the poet to make the image stand out for the reader, to “speak” her condition, could scarcely be clearer. Not only is Casal mindful of framing the peri in space, as Moreau did so elaborately, in an “encadrement floral,” but he makes her “step forth” a second time, this time stopping closer to the poet. What a closer viewing allows is a sure perception of the peri's condition (“suspiro,” “cansancio”). So the peri has gone beyond the simply revelatory nature of herself as visual image. Through the double ekstasis Casal chose to bring about, he has better perceived the image by writing into it a mood, and in this sense, he has incorporated himself in Moreau's art.

Casal, like so many of his contemporaries, was so absorbing himself into his own art forms that he was becoming them.⁴¹ The ten sonnets of the “Museo,” taken as a series of distinct members, may be said to represent a structuring of the inner life of the poet. The ten sonnets may also be taken as a single mode of art set forth within a poetic structure that symbolizes the poet's mind and private life, and which literally stands for them, emblematically. As a whole, the “Museo” becomes correlative with the poet's life, and it is the life in its projected state, the printed poems.

Casal saw himself as the creator in confrontation with adverse destiny, and his empathy with Moreau's self-portrait is definable primarily in these terms. His “Vestíbulo” sonnet begins: “Rostro que desafía los crueles / rigores del destino.” It is the same image we saw Moreau project into Hercule et l'Hydre de Lerne and Prometée, and which Casal projected into his corresponding sonnets. It is, in Kermode's words, the “necessary isolation and estrangement of men who can perceive [the Image].” As Casal put it in a letter written to a friend, Esteban Borrero Echevarría, and dated 19 March 1891, that is, shortly before the first publication of the collection “Mi museo ideal” in 1892:

Mi ideal consiste hoy en vivir obscurecido, solo, arrinconado e invisible para todos, excepto para usted y dos o tres personas. …

Ahora quiero buscar una habitación alta, aislada en una azotea, abierta a los cuatro vientos, porque preciso aprender a pintar y porque creo que mi neurosis, o como se llame mi enfermedad, depende en gran parte de vivir en la ciudad, es decir, rodeado de paredes altas, de calles adoquinadas, oyendo incesantemente estrépito de coches, ómnibus y carretones. Procuraré irme a vivir en un barrio lejano, cerca del mar, para aguardar allí la muerte, que no tardará mucho en venir. Mientras llegue, viviré entre libros y cuadros, trabajando todo lo que pueda literariamente, sin pretender alcanzar nada con mis trabajos, como no sea matar el tiempo. …

Múdeme o no, pienso terminar un tomo de versos que tengo ya a más de la mitad y otro de cuentos que está en el mismo estado. Cuando descanse, me entregaré a la pintura. Después quiero escribir algunas impresiones literarias y dos novelas que ya se están convirtiendo para mí en una verdadera obsesión.⁴²

Was knowing how to paint going to serve a need (“porque preciso”)? Was painting going to be just another way to “kill time,” as he had determined that literature would become for himself? Or were paintings simply the things to “live among,” as the vogue of the day dictated? Casal's letter continues with a description of what the hero of the novel he plans to write will be like; there are striking similarities between this hero's life, that of Des Esseintes, and that which Casal dreamed for himself, as we are led to believe by autobiographical fragments. Huysmans' hero Des Esseintes, like Casal, built up his own “maison d'un artiste.” It is significant that so much of A rebours is a lapidary, a “florilegium,” bibliothetical description; that Des Esseintes is an olfactologist, a bibliotaph, and so on. Huysmans wrote partly in the tradition of those catalogers like Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, and Edmond de Goncourt; but Ralph Freedman points out an important difference, one which shows the kinship between Casal and his admired Huysmans, as they stand in contrast to the pure catalogers: “The romantic pilgrimage through a world of images is replaced by the inner wanderings of an essentially sedentary self.”⁴³

While Casal was more than just a guide or a cataloger, he did not relinquish totally his capacity to describe objective reality. He performed as descriptive guide in several curious ways, however, as we have observed already. There is yet another way in which Casal is a special kind of guide. He put into effect the two guiding principles professed by Moreau for the creation of art: “la belle inertie” and “la richesse nécessaire.”⁴⁴ The former principle has already been discussed; the latter is demonstrated by Casal's dependence on representational detail. For Moreau and for Casal, representational detail was one more means of negating the interpretative process. That is, the more nominal the information, the less possibility there is for projection into the art work and thus the more changeless the work remains. Captivate the senses by dazzling, stupefying, them, would be another way of putting it.⁴⁵

There is, indeed, a functional parallel between “el sacro poder de sus pinceles” and the consecrating powers of the pen of Casal. Both the paintbrush and the pen, the means by which the image is fashioned and refashioned, are the instruments for effectuating the respective artistic media of Moreau and Casal. For the self-sustainment of its fashioner, the image is vital (Casal's “porque preciso”), because it is that which the fashioner opposes to death as a possible escape from the antiaesthetic world. Moreau would time and again treat the same subject. La Péri, Salomé, and Galatée, for example, are the titles for several of his pieces; all three happen to be titles that Casal used also, and sometimes, in “Galatea,” let us say, it is difficult to choose precisely which painting Casal had in mind. What is so significant about this, however, is that Moreau was practicing reexposition after reexposition of his own subjects. His continual refashioning of his own work seems directly related to that practiced by the Parnassian poets with their most cultivated images. Moreau was not merely defending the Parnassian image; he was bit-by-bit building a projection of himself in which he could exist in life and through which he could live on after death: “On the eve of his death he is said to have gone over hundreds of his drawings signing and lightly correcting them. He saw his life as the works it engendered.”⁴⁶

Casal's choice to alternatively internalize and artistically externalize this image was a means to attain his own spiritual existence. This was a real-life process poetically displaced in the imagery of “Sueño de gloria,” where the poet, by analogy with Moreau, could lead himself out of the sepulcher and raise himself all the way to godhood. Casal, as an example of those “artists and contemplatives in a world built for action,” whose possibilities for escape are two, death and the refashioning of the image, made Moreau and his work the means to victorious escape from the rigorous destiny of the artist in an antiaesthetic world.⁴⁷ The wish for this escape is implicit early in the collection with a “vestibular” departure from the external world into the “Museo.” We have in the second quatrain of “Vestíbulo”:

Creador luminoso como Apeles,
si en la Grecia inmortal nacido hubiera,
cual dios entre los dioses estuviera
por el sacro poder de sus pinceles.

The subjunctive verbal mood here is unique in the collection of sonnets, and it expresses Casal's desire for the equation of the artist with the image. This is precisely what Casal does for the artist in the final poem. But first, the poet passes from “Vestíbulo” into the world of the paintings through the eyes of the artist in the portrait. This figurative filtering of perception of the world of the paintings through Moreau's own vision gives substance to the final poem, “Sueño de gloria,” where Casal makes a poetized Moreau, as aesthete-creator, the encompassing symbol for the ten images of “Mi museo ideal” and for the ideal itself.

“Sueno de gloria” is Casal's own vision. With it, the poet passes from the “poem of imaginative confrontation” to one of “expanded consciousness.”⁴⁸ The poem is a dream (as we know by its title) that occurs on the day of universal judgment, in a terrestrial atmosphere where acrid-smelling sepulchers open to free the dead. Casal alters Helen's condition from what we have seen in the sonnet by having her fall blushingly and stammeringly in love with Moreau, her Creator, and rise to godhood with him in holy union sanctioned by God. This disruption of the harmonic perfection of the traditional image makes way for Moreau's becoming the encompassing image, whereby he will stand for all the rest. Both Helen and Moreau are positioned apart from their surroundings. Their ascension is described as follows:

y, cual fragantes lirios enlazados,
por la región magnífica del viento
ascienden los eternos desposados. …

Moreau, as well as Helen (“lirios enlazados”), is absorbed into one of the traditional forms the image takes, into the autonomous art object symbolized by the flower. He becomes indistinguishable from his own artistic creation by virtue of his symbolic marriage to, and absorption into, its primary images, Helen and the lily.

“Sueño de gloria” should, properly, be taken as a re-presentation of elements from the “museum” preceding, as a refashioning not only of its symbolical units but also of its lexical and syntactical units. Compare, for example, the poetic line that introduces Helen (“Bajo el dosel de verdinegro olivo”) to the opening line of the “Prometeo” sonnet (“Bajo el dosel de gigantesca roca”). Thus, Casal's own dream vision becomes a refashioning of the image, that is, of the “museum” as a totality of ideal forms. But the post-reading experience must deny a mode of perception that yields a vision of a succession of parts, in the same way that the individual sonnet must lend itself to perfect perception only at the moment of its final words or image. The sensation of totality achieved upon completion of the twelve poems is due to a number of factors, two of which are the poems' basic structural unit (museum) and the deific vision (the figurative representation of Poulet's romantic timelessness) of “Sueño de gloria.”

The antithetical elements of intellectual effort and form, which by literary custom denied intellectual effort, are reconciled figuratively in the “Sueño,” where Casal is symbolizing Moreau's conquest over death by so incorporating the painter into his own subject matter that the painter, too, is concretized as image. In “Sueño de gloria,” Casal merges figures from the pagan classical world (Helen) and the present (Moreau) with biblical theme in a denial of temporal and spatial limitation. Casal achieves, without using the Parnassians' “perpetuating” sonnet form, an illusion of changelessness, through the thematic representation of a totality of time and space. And the “expanded consciousness” of the poet is represented by the expanded poetic form. In contrast to the restrictively directive (through the single point of view of the painter, figuratively speaking) entrance in “Vestíbulo” into the realms of Moreau's subjects from the Bible and classical myth, we have a symbolical exit in the form of ascent from death up to godhood. The direction is outward, rather than inward. The beginning and final poems of “Mi museo ideal” create a “minimum image” (Gombrich) by which Casal substitutes his collection of poems for Moreau's own museum. The idea of a temple for art, Gombrich might have said, is substitutionally operative once the “Museo” acquires an architectural aspect.

Notes

1. One notable exception is the recent study by Marie Josèphe Faurie, Le Modernisme hispano-américain et ses sources françaises (Paris, 1966), pp. 171-199. José Lezama Lima (Analecta del reloj [Havana, 1953], pp. 62-97) is primarily concerned with critical approach in his comparative treatment of Casal and Baudelaire. On the other hand, studies of “Mi museo ideal” are usually carried no further than a gleaning of the poems' subject matter. Bernardo Gicovate (Conceptos fundamentales de literatura comparada: Iniciación de la poesía modernista [San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1962], p. 112) says of the collection: “no nos queda más remedio que aceptar el juicio de la posterioridad y admitir un mero valor de documento histórico para esta parte de la obra de Casal.” Esperanza Figueroa (“Julián del Casal y Rubén Darío,” Revista bimestre cubana, L, No. 2 [1942], 191-208; “Julián del Casal y el modernismo,” Revista iberoamericana, XXXI, No. 59 [1965], 47-69) and José María Monner Sans (Julián del Casal y el modernismo hispanoamericano [Mexico D. F., 1952]) have treated the poet's place in the Latin American “Modernista” movement. Gustavo Duplessis (“Julián del Casal,” Revista bimestre cubana, LIV, Nos. 1, 2, 3 [1944] 31-75, 140-170, 241-286) published a thesis on the poet, valuable mostly for its documentary material. See also Rita Geada de Prulletti, “Bibliografía de y sobre Julián del Casal (1863-1893),” Revista iberoamericana, XXXIII, No. 63 [1967], 133-139.

2. Figueroa (“Casal y Darío,” p. 206) mentions among Casal's readings Musset, Baudelaire, Gautier, Mendès, Maupassant, Verlaine, and Huysmans. Faurie (Modernisme, p. 195) states that “de tous les auteurs français Baudelaire est celui qui eut sur Casal la plus grande influence.” We know, too, that Casal was highly regarded by certain of France's important literary figures and that, among these, Verlaine, Huysmans, and Moreau wrote in praise of Casal, and that Judith Gautier corresponded with him (see Duplessis, “Casal,” p. 69; Faurie, Modernisme, p. 198). Gicovate states that “desde sus deudas para con Gautier y Huysmans hasta sus lecturas de Banville, Leconte de Lisle y sus traducciones e imitaciones de Hérédia y aun de Louis Bouilhet, todas las imitaciones directas de los parnasianos y los ecos que salpican aquí y allá una obra titubeante han sido señalados ya” (Conceptes, p. 110), and he goes on to say that “no queda por hacer sino el inventario de esta influencia parnasiana, preguntarse si algo quedó, si aprendió algo el poeta en esta larga esclavitud.” As for the frequent mention of the Cuban-born José Maria de Hérédia in discussions of Casal, this is due mostly to points of similarity between the sonnet collection Les Trophées and a part of the work of Casal. The collected Trophées were published with a dedication to Leconte in 1893, one year after “Mi museo ideal” although some of the sonnets of the collection had appeared much earlier (in 1866, Parnasse contemporain, for example), and Casal had known them by way of various reviews (see Faurie, Modernisme, p. 181; also, Manuel de la Cruz's three-part article “José María Heredia,” in the periodical to which Casal made frequent contributions of poems, El fígaro, VIII, Nos. 38, 39, 40 [6, 13, 20 November 1892], 2-3, 3, 6-7).

3. Still, Casal may very well have had paintings by Moreau in mind when he wrote the first and twelfth poems of “Mi museo ideal” e.g., the 1850 Autoportrait and the Fleur mystique.

4. Some of the poems were originally published separately. This is true, for example, of the final poem, “Sueño de gloria” (published in La Habana literaria, 30 December 1891), and Duplessis (“Casal,” p. 156) cites the publication of “Gustavo Moreau” in El fígaro, 15 January 1892. Figueroa (“Casal y modernismo,” p. 57) claims 1890 as the date for “Salomé.” The subtitle for “Mi museo ideal” is “Diez cuadros de Gustavo Moreau.” The published collection in Nieve (Havana: “La moderna” de Aurelio Miranda, 1892) and in subsequent editions includes the first and twelfth poems, whose full titles, placement within the collection, and various points of coincidence with the ten “cuadros” indicate that they were intended as integral parts of the “Museo.” (See one of the earliest announcements of the first publication of Nieve in the Havana literary periodical, El fígaro, VIII, No. 14 [24 April 1892], 9.) Throughout the present study, quotations from the Casal poems are from Poesías, Edición del Centenario (Havana, 1963).

5. The structural similarity of “Mi museo ideal” to Modest Moussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition is worth noting. Pictures was inspired by ten pictures and designs by Hartmann, a friend of the composer and an architect and painter by profession, and the suite was written after the 1874 exhibition of Hartmann's work in Saint Petersburg. The composition has as a principal motif a “Promenade,” which evokes Moussorgsky entering and walking from piece to piece on exhibit, all the while recalling his artist-friend (see M. D. Calvocoressi, Modest Mussorgsky: His Life and Works [London, 1956], p. 182). No immediate connection with Casal is insisted upon here, but the suite is mentioned in conjunction with the collection of poems for its striking structural resemblance to the latter. We might consider, too, the contemporaneity of the two works.

6. E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, 2d ed. (London, 1965), pp. 7-8. “Surrounded as we are by posters and newspapers carrying illustrations of commodities or events, we find it difficult to rid ourselves of the prejudice that all images should be ‘read’ as referring to some imaginary or actual reality. Only the historian knows how hard it is to look at Pygmalion's work without comparing it with nature. But recently we have been made aware how thoroughly we misunderstand primitive or Egyptian art whenever we make the assumption that the artist ‘distorts’ his motif or that he even wants us to see in his work the record of any specific experience” (p. 3).

7. Gustave Kahn, symbolist promoter of vers libre, wrote: “Qu'est-ce qu'un vers?—C'est un arrêt simultané de la pensée et de la forme de la pensée.—Qu'est-ce qu'une strophe? C'est le développement par une phrase en vers d'un point complet de l'idée.—Qu'est-ce qu'un poème? C'est la mise en situation par ses facettes prismatiques, qui sont les strophes, de l'idée tout entière qu'on a voulu évoquer” (cited by Jules Huret, Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire [Paris, 1891], p. 395. For Kahn, then, idea and form were inseparable in space and time; they were elaborations upon each other, and the total poem was equivalent to the whole idea or total form of that idea. Mallarmé said derisively that “les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose entièrement et la montrent.” His complaint was against the a priori perception of form and the necessary submission of the poet to it, thus depriving the poem of its self-generating nature and consequent “mystère.” The Parnassians, for him, “manquent de mystère; ils retirent aux esprits cette joie délicieuse de croire qu'ils créent. Nommer un objet, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu le suggérer, voilà le rêve” (cited by Huret, Enquête, p. 60).

8. Aaron Schaffer, Parnassus in France: Currents and Cross-Currents in Nineteenth-Century French Lyric Poetry (Austin, Texas, 1929), p. 32.

9. Théophile Gautier, Portraits et souvenirs littéraires (Paris, 1885), pp. 234-235.

10. Jean Ducros, Le Retour de la poésie française à l'antiquité grecque au milieu de XIX^e siècle (Paris, 1918), pp. 96, 98.

11. Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 238.

12. Karl D. Uitti, The Concept of Self in the Symbolist Novel (The Hague, 1961), p. 55. Uitti also points out, significantly: “It can be argued that all poets and novelists ‘deform’ language, that every work of literature conforms in one way or another to the distortion of vision of its author. Yet this truth, as we understand it today, was just making its impact felt on the literary consciousness of Lorrain's [Jean Lorrain, pseud. of Paul Duval, a symbolist] generation. These writers tried systematically to discover and impose a highly personal way of seeing things.”

13. Schaffer, Parnassus, p. 36. This corresponds to a claim by Leconte de Lisle (Revue européenne, December 1861): “Nous ignorons, il est vrai, que les idées, en étymologie exacte et en strict bon sens, ne peuvent être que des formes et que les formes sont l'unique manifestation de la pensée” (Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle, Oeuvres de … [Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, n.d.], p. 282).

14. Fernand Calmettes, Leconte de Lisle et ses amis (Paris, n.d.), pp. 215-216.

15. Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle, the Avant-propos to “Les Poètes contemporains,” Oeuvres, p. 241. Leconte de Lisle himself, “withdrawing into the study of the history and mythology of the peoples of the East, … espoused the stoical, pantheistic philosophy of the Buddhists” (Schaffer, Parnassus, p. 91).

16. Leconte de Lisle, Oeuvres, pp. 279-280.

17. José Maria Hérédia, cited by Gustave Kahn, Symbolistes et décadents (Paris, 1902), p. 370.

18. Charles Asselineau (Histoire du sonnet, 2d ed. [Alençon, 1856], p. 35) continued the Colletet tradition with his brief Histoire; he found the sonnet form symptomatic of “époques de forte poésie où l'imagination des poètes s'inquiète également du sentiment et de la forme, de l'art et de la pensée.” Théophile Gautier, who referred his readers far back in time to Colletet's treatise on the sonnet (see Les Grotesques [Paris, 1882], pp. 235-236), struck a polemical reaction from Sainte-Beuve: “Je suis de ceux qui ont toujours reculé devant cette poésie Louis XIII, et je n'ai jamais pu m'en inoculer le goût. … C'est en somme une très-mauvaise compagnie” (Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Théophile Gautier,” Portraits contemporains, V [Paris, 1871], 121-122). See also the explication of Banville's Petit Traité de poésie française (1872) by Max Fuchs (Théodore de Banville [Paris, 1912], pp. 421-442).

19. Hérédia, cited by Kahn, Symbolistes, p. 369. Because of the tradition in which we find Casal the length of a poem merits more discussion than we might offhand suspect. Jules Lemaître's reference to Hérédia's “sonnets si pleins qu'ils ‘valent vraiment de longs poèmes’” (in his Les Contemporains, 2d ser. [Paris, 1891], p. 55) was accessible to Casal's literary circle, at least shortly after the publication of Nieve, that is, at least by 6 November 1892, the date of the first issue of Cruz's three-part article in El fígaro. It is recognized by most critics of Casal that one of the earliest of his French “teachers” was Baudelaire, a transmitter of the aesthetics of Poe. Turning to Poe's “Philosophy of Composition,” we find, in effect, that length was his very first consideration in the composition of “The Raven,” the poem he used to demonstrate what Baudelaire called “le choix des moyens” (Pierre Charles Baudelaire, Critique littéraire et musicale, ed. Claude Pichois [Paris, 1961], p. 206). It is not unlikely that Casal had introduced himself, through Baudelaire, to the principles stated by Poe. Northrup Frye (Anatomy of Criticism [New York, 1966], p. 278) calls Poe's essay an anticipation of the critical techniques of a new mode; for Frye, Poe's very conscious application of the medium restricted to some degree his lyrical initiative. Frye sees, also, “how far removed the lyrical initiative really is from whatever a cri de coeur is supposed to be,” a fact indicated by the elaborateness of conventional forms like the sonnet. We might replace once and for all the ugly terminology (“sterile contemplation”) used in so many discussions of the Parnassian sonnet tradition, and think instead in terms of a relative absence of lyrical initiative for this form. In this way, Casal's poetic form is a functional artistic choice, rather than an unhappy accident.

20. Pierre Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” Curiosités esthétiques, L'Art romantique et autres oeuvres critiques, ed. Henri Lemaître (Paris, 1962), p. 101.

21. Pierre Martino, Parnasse et symbolisme: 1850-1900 (Paris, 1947), p. 85. “In all of its aspects form affirms its abhorrence of destruction. In W. R. D. Fairbairn's phrase, form seeks to safeguard ‘the integrity of the object,’ presenting everything in a way which emphasizes its wholeness and intactness … it seeks to protect from death itself both the material and the object it commemorates” (Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious [New York, 1962], p. 130).

22. Catulle Mendès, cited by Huret, Enquête, p. 289.

23. Dore Ashton, “Gustave Moreau,” in Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin (New York, 1961), p. 114. And Proust used a metaphor like Martino's when he wrote: “Sans doute cet homme [Moreau] en reste dans une certaine mesure sanctifié. Il est une espèce de prêtre dont la vie est vouée à servir cette divinité, à nourrir les animaux sacrés qui lui plaisent et à répandre les parfums qui facilitent ses apparitions. Sa maison est à moitié église, à moitié maison du prêtre. Maintenant l'homme est mort, il ne reste plus que ce qui a pu se dégager du divin qui était en lui. Par une brusque métamorphose, la maison est devenue un musée avant même d'être ainsi aménagée (Marcel Proust, “Gustave Moreau,” Nouveaux Mélanges, ed. Bernard de Fallois [Paris, 1954], p. 392). My thanks to J. Theodore Johnson, Jr., for the Proust reference.

24. Théophile Gautier, “Le Musée ancien,” Tableaux à la plume (Paris, 1880), pp. 3-5; appeared in La Presse (10 February 1849). It is curious to recall that Gautier considered art historians and treatisers deficient teachers compared with the museum, while he himself wrote endless pages on painters and paintings. See, for example, his Guide de l'amateur au musée du Louvre, a prose “promenade” through the Louvre, divided into different sections on individual painters and schools of painting.

25. See Leo Spitzer's criticism of Karl Shapiro's “A Farewell to Criticism,” in the essay “Three Poems on Ecstasy,” in Essays on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton, N.J., 1962). Also, Frances A. Yates, in the interesting critical work “The Emblematic Conceit in Giordano Bruno's De gli eroici furori and in the Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VI [1943], 101-121), has pointed out how a whole tradition of poetry and poetic forms may be explicated by a discussion of “the sonnet language itself as an artistic phenomenon.” Yates notes that most of the poems of Eroici furori—a work comprised of prose descriptions of emblems or devices that would be plates in an illustrated emblem book; poems in which visual forms appearing in the emblems occur as poetic conceits; and expositions of philosophical meanings latent in the imagery of both the emblems and the poems—are in sonnet form.

26. Frye, Anatomy, p. 301. See also Spitzer's essay “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ or Content vs. Metagrammar,” in Essays. Spitzer comments on the “circularity” of the poem, in inward and outward form, which reproduces symbolically the form of the art object, whether real or imaginary.

27. R. Blanco-Fombona (El modernismo y los poetas modernistas [Madrid, 1929], p. 89) says: “También son de pura descripción pictórica los sonetos inspirados en los cuadros de Gustavo Moreau, aunque jamás pudo [Casal] apreciarlos sino por grabados y descripciones.” The consensus is that Casal had never seen an actual painting by Moreau. Roberto Meza Fuentes (De Díaz Mirón a Rubén Darío [Santiago, Chile, 1940], p. 99) remarks: “Entonces el poeta … sueña … en los personajes de Huysmans y en los cuadros de Moreau, que no llega a conocer nunca sino a través de fotografías. Y, sobre motivos de esos cuadros, teje en sonetos la filigrana de su “Museo Ideal.” ¡Pobre poeta! ¡Ha edificado todo un castillo de ensueño sobre un mundo de fotografía!” Faurie (Modernisme) pays special attention to Casal's poetic translation of Huysmans' prose description of Moreau's works. Meza Fuentes and Blanco-Fombona, in implying the lack of validity of the photograph or the prose description as a source for a workable ekphrasis, have disregarded Casal's subjectivization of Moreau's works.

28. Frye, Anatomy, p. 274. An obvious example of the exploitation of the pictorial in the lyric is Appollinaire's “Il pleut,” where the meaning of the subject is suggested by the shape of the poem.

29. In “Retrato de Gustavo Moreau,” the opening “Vestíbulo” sonnet, Casal chose to depict Moreau with “frente austera / aureolada de larga cabellera, / donde al mirto se enlazan los laureles.” Although self-portraits of Moreau do not depict him with this “encadrement,” Casal has chosen to imitate the fashion of intricate frame—reminiscent of the way in which Moreau designed his own museum-house—in order to emblematize his subject. With respect to Moreau's own elaborate framing of his pictures, Faurie (Modernisme, p. 177) comments that “La Péri, avec son large encadrement floral, semble l'œuvre d'un calligraphe pour la decoration d'un manuscrit.”

30. “The primary illusion of virtual space comes at the first stroke of brush or pencil that concentrates the mind entirely on the picture plane and neutralizes the actual limits of vision. That explains why Redon felt driven, at the sight of a blank paper on his easel, to scrawl on it as quickly as possible with anything that would make a mark. Just establish one line in virtual space, and at once we are in the realm of symbolic forms. The mental shift is as definite as that which we make from hearing a sound of tapping, squeaking, or buzzing to hearing speech, when suddenly in the midst of the little noises surrounding us we make out a single word. The whole character of our hearing is transformed. The medley of physical sound disappears, the ear receives language, perhaps indistinct by reason of interfering noises, but struggling through them like a living thing. Exactly the same sort of reorientation is effected for sight by the creation of any purely visual space. The image, be it a representation or a mere design, stands before us in its expressiveness: significant form” (Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art [New York, 1953], p. 84). The point is important for our understanding of how Casal uses the sonnet's structure for the purpose of ekstasis.

31. “The purpose of all plastic art is to articulate visual form, and to present that form … as the sole, or at least paramount, object of perception” (Langer, Feeling, p. 71). Leo Spitzer (“Lope de Vega's ‘Al triunfo de Judit,’” Modern Language Notes, LXIX, No. 1 [1954], 1-11) discusses spatial arrangement within the sonnet and its relationship to the pictorial form.

32. “The poem of the quiet mind, if it has a subject beyond recommending itself, attempts to communicate to the reader a private and secret possession, which brings us to the next cardinal point, the riddle. The idea of the riddle is descriptive containment: the subject is not described but circumscribed, a circle of words drawn around it. In simple riddles, the central subject is an image, and the reader feels impelled to guess, that is, to equate the poem to the name or sign-symbol of its image” (Frye, Anatomy, pp. 299-300).

33. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York, 1964), p. 2.

34. Static drama is often represented in the works of Moreau: “The two mythical figures gaze at each other transfixed. This is characteristic of Moreau who again and again suggests an ambiguous mirror-image, two aspects, two abstract entities that confront each other and recognize each other all too well” (Ashton, “Moreau,” p. 115, commenting on Moreau's representation of Oedipus and the Sphinx).

35. Benedetto Croce, cited by Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2d ed. (Cleveland, 1967), p. xv.

36. It will not do merely to name a mood; critical understanding can be achieved here only by a discussion of sensorial perception, for “La aparición” itself explicitly names that mood “deleite.” “The most integral and involving time sense imaginable is that expressed in the Chinese and Japanese cultures. Until the coming of the missionaries in the seventeenth century, and the introduction of the mechanical clocks, the Chinese and Japanese had for thousands of years measured time by graduations of incense. Not only the hours and days, but the seasons and zodiacal signs were simultaneously indicated by a succession of carefully ordered scents. The sense of smell, long considered the root of memory and the unifying basis of individuality, has come to the fore again in the experiments of Wilder Penfield. During brain surgery electric probing of brain tissue revived many memories of the patients. These evocations were dominated and unified by unique scents and odors that structured these past experiences. The sense of smell is not only the most subtle and delicate of the human senses; it is, also, the most iconic in that it involves the entire human sensorium more fully than any other sense” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [New York, 1964], p. 136). See, for example, Baudelaire's “Correspondances,” “Parfum Exotique,” or “La Chevelure,” where sense of smell is the means to immediate transport.

37. Georges Poulet, “Timelessness and Romanticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XV, No. 1 (1954), 3-22; Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York, 1960), p. 98.

38. Kermode, Image, p. 70. See also n. 27 above. Joris Karl Huysmans, in the fifth chapter of his novel of 1884, A rebours, has his protagonist, Des Esseintes, acquire Moreau's Salomé and L'Apparition. Casal knew A rebours and also wrote an article on Huysmans for La Habana literaria (15 March 1892), most recently published in Casal's Prosas, I, Edición del Centenario (Havana, 1963), 173-178. Moreau, too, repeatedly correlated the harmonious with the pathological: “The favorite theme of Moreau, which he never tires of treating in his pictures, is that of Fatality, of Evil and Death incarnate in female beauty” (Praz, Agony, p. 295).

39. Let us establish once and for all that the dancer-into-flower progression that Casal used had great significance in the nineteenth century's artistic tradition: “The Tree is in a sense necessary to the Dancer, since it so powerfully reinforces the idea of integrity—‘root, shoot, blossom’—in the Image, and provides a traditional analogy in support of the Image's independent life” (Kermode, Image, p. 102). See also Oscar Wilde's “The Decay of Lying” (Selections from the Works of …, ed. Graham Hough [New York, 1960], p. 267), where the first doctrine of “the new aesthetics” is stated: “Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.” Kermode (Image, pp. 43-44) points out that for the tradition behind Casal's work, “fundamentally the unanimity of the witnesses is impressive. The work of art itself is symbol, ‘aesthetic monad’; utterly original and not in the old sense ‘imitated’; ‘concrete,’ yet fluid and suggestive; a means to truth, a truth unrelated to, and more exalted than, that of positivist science, or any observation depending upon the discursive reason; out of the flux of life, and therefore, under one aspect, dead; yet uniquely alive because of its participation in a higher order of existence, and because it is analogous not to a machine but to an organism; coextensive in matter and form; resistant to explication; largely independent of intention, and of any form of ethical utility; and itself emblematised in certain images, of which … the Dancer is the most perfect.” Today, “it must be remembered, of course, that a work of art is not an actual organism, but presents only the appearance of life, growth, and functional unity” (Langer, Feeling, p. 373).

40. Faurie, Modernisme, p. 177.

41. Moreau knew that as he was arranging his paintings in his home, he was “sculpting his own tomb,” as Mallarmé would have phrased it (“le cas d'un poète, en cette société qui ne lui permet pas de vivre, c'est le cas d'un homme qui s'isole pour sculpter son propre tombeau”; cited by Huret, Enquête, p. 61). And Edmond de Goncourt takes us on a promenade through La Maison d'un artiste, endlessly cataloging the art in each room there. After mentioning in his Préambule “l'éducation de l'œil des gens du XIX^e siècle, et encore un sentiment tout nouveau, la tendresse presque humaine pour les choses,” he confesses himself to be “le plus passionné de tous les collectionneurs” (I [Paris, 1898], 3). The degree to which the poet is artist, then, is in part determined by the quantity of beauty contained in the external world that he has occasion and capacity to perceive and tirelessly remake. Casal hung his Moreau reproductions on his walls (see Duplessis, “Casal,” p. 59), as did Des Esseintes, who had become the model “Décadent” for so many of Casal's generation (see Monner Sans, Casal, p. 97).

42. Cited by Duplessis, “Casal,” pp. 66-67; more recently published in Casal's Prosas, III, 84-87. See Francisco Chacón (“Casal,” in El fígaro, VIII, No. 14 [24 April 1892], 2) for confirmation of this attitude and Casal's use of the “Museo ideal” poems as a means of evading worldly preoccupation. Wen Gálvez, in his unsympathetic review of Nieve (in El fígaro, VIII, No. 20 [12 June 1892], 6) could correctly describe the life-style in question, but he could not admit the ethic it represented.

43. Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton, N.J., 1966), p. 36. The maligning criticism of Wen Gálvez stresses the image of the young Casal as a retiring “visionista”; according to Gálvez, Casal accepted this description (the review of Nieve in El fígaro, VIII, No. 20, 6).

44. “Moreau's two guiding principles, according to Renan, who claimed he heard Moreau discourse on them frequently, were the principles of la belle inertie and la richesse nécessaire” (Ashton, “Moreau” [n. 23 above], p. 118). “Moreau advocated [these] two principles, in opposition to the emotional qualities which he held to be an infiltration of literature into painting” (Praz, Agony [n. 35 above], p. 289). An ekphrasis by ekstasis, then, minimizing the empathetic response of the reader, is precisely what Moreau would have advocated for a “transposition” of his paintings into Casal's medium.

45. Irving Putter (“Leconte de Lisle and His Contemporaries,” University of California Publications in Modern Philology, XXXV, No. 2 [1951], 69) tells how Leconte de Lisle “disoriented readers and met with a chorus of disapproval or condemnation” when he tried out a new system of orthography on both proper and, even, common nouns, attempting to approximate Greek pronunciation. Doubtless Leconte produced a visual effect with this device equivalent to the effect of Moreau's “richesse nécessaire.” Those who opposed Leconte de Lisle's poetic method and endlessly compared his work “to the Great Pyramid, which is composed of innumerable small, dirty stones, all alike, whose mass effect is overwhelming” (italics mine; Putter, p. 86) did show a partial—though scarcely sympathetic!—comprehension of the aesthetics in question.

46. Ashton, “Moreau,” p. 114.

47. Kermode, Image, p. 30. Casal's withdrawal from an antiaesthetic world is further indicated by the dedication of “Mi museo ideal” to Eduardo Rosell y Malpica, who fought for Cuban independence and recorded his impressions during the military movement (see Diario del Teniente Coronel Eduardo Rosell y Malpica: 1895-1897, II, ed. Benigno Souza [Havana, 1950]). Casal's choice of subject for his dedication, in other words, points to the poet's subjective, aesthetic withdrawal into isolation, away from “a world built for action.”

48. Frye, Anatomy, p. 301.