[In the following essay, Pearsall explains Casal's concept of modernity, tracing the influence of other poets, such as Baudelaire, on his work.]

Of all of the Modernist writers, none was more concerned with the problem of literary modernity than Julián del Casal. He wrote one of Modernism's most thoughtful definitions of modern art when he examined, in his review of Aurelia Castillo de González's long poem Pompeya, the European authors of his time whom he admired, and defined them as modern because

en sus obras se reflejan, como en bruñido espejo, el malestar permanente, el escepticismo profundo, la amargura intensa, las aspiraciones indefinidas y el pesimismo sombrío, frutos amargos y ponzoñosos extraídos del fondo de sus almas, a fuerza de sufrimientos, de estudio, de análisis y de investigaciones que envenenan la atmósfera y les inoculan el asco de la vida, haciendo volver el pensamiento a esos seres morfinizados de ideal hacia los espacios siderales del ensueño o hacia los campos remotos de las edades grandiosas, lejanas y desaparecidas.¹

These poets, among whom he includes Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Verlaine, are modern because their works reflect interior psychological values—a fin de siglo sensibility which in turn causes them to seek evasion through time and space. Casal, in his emphasis upon the centrality of hastío to contemporary literature, accepts Théophile Gautier's affirmation that the decadent spirit represents the essence of modernity because it reflects the crisis of contemporary culture.² In his review article, furthermore, Casal specifically mentions the French author's famous essay on decadence, i.e., Gautier's introduction to Les Fleurs du mal,³ when Casal writes of the Italian poet Stecchetti: “Olindo Guerrini, conocido por el pseudónimo de Lorenzo Stécchetti [sic], … siguiendo el consejo de Gauthier [sic] para ser original en este tiempo, sólo escucha las confidencias de la neurosis, las revelaciones de la pasión apagada que se deprava y las alucinaciones extrañas de las ideas fijas que arrastran a la locura.”⁴

It is quite possible that Casal also based his concept of modernity upon Baudelaire's discussions of modern art in the essays on the Salon of 1846, for Baudelaire served as a model of the modern for Casal as well as for Gautier. In an article published in El País in October, 1890, four and one-half months after the publication of his review of Pompeya, Casal specifically linked modernity as a reflection of the affective with Baudelaire when he identified Baudelaire and Mallarmé as “los poetas contemporáneos que reflejan en sus composiciones los matices más imperceptibles del alma moderna” (Prosas, III, 17). There are numerous similarities between Casal's Castillo de González review and Baudelaire's essays on the Salon of 1846. Casal and Baudelaire both link modernity with classical antiquity, and they compare the modern and classical conceptions of certain themes.⁵ Especially striking are the two poet's discussions of others' misunderstanding of modernity as the “official” topoi of contemporary society, for in “De l'Héroïsme de la vie moderne,” his concluding essay on the Salon of 1846, Baudelaire had written, “la plupart des artistes qui ont abordé les sujets modernes se sont contentés des sujets publics et oficiels, de nos victoires et de notre héroïsme politique … Cependant il y a des sujets privés qui sont bien autrement héroïques.”⁶ Casal's opening to his review of Castillo de González's Pompeya parallels the passage from “De l'Héroïsme de la vie moderne,” for he writes that many people believe that the poet should treat only the large, historical topics of his time: “las luchas, las glorias, y los ideales de su tiempo” (Prosas, II, 143). He attacks Núñez de Arce for having given wide circulation to this attitude.⁷ Casal, like Baudelaire, believed that this concept of poetry revealed a lack of comprehension that the greatness of modern art lies not in its treatment of exterior, public themes, but in its reflection of the artist's psychology.

In “Qu'est-ce que le Romantisme?” from the Salon de 1846, Baudelaire defined modern art as a manière de sentir, derived from Romanticism's interiorization; his definition also included Romanticism's search for transcendence:

Le romantisme n'est précisément ni dans le choix des sujets ni dans la vérité exacte, mais dans la manière de sentir.

Ils l'ont cherché en dehors, et c'est en dedans qu'il était seulement possible de le trouver.

Pour moi, le romantisme est l'expression la plus récente, la plus actuelle du beau.

Qui dit romantisme dit art moderne,—c'est-à-dire intimité, spiritualité, couleur, aspiration vers l'infini, exprimées par tout les moyens que contiennent les arts.⁸

Baudelaire's esthetic of modernity is profoundly ambivalent, for there is a deep, unresolved conflict in defining the modern as on the one hand interiorization (a manière de sentir) and, on the other, search for transcendence (aspiration vers l'infini). There is also a serious ambivalence in equating modern art, with its emphasis upon immediacy of feeling (l'expression la plus récente, la plus actuelle du beau), with Romanticism, a temporal concept rooted in the past.⁹

The strength of Casal's definition of modernity, which from all indications he based on Baudelaire's concept, and Gautier's study of Baudelaire, lies in the Cuban's overcoming the ambivalence present in Baudelaire. By emphasizing the emotional and cultural crises essential to modern art, Casal shatters the Romantic myth of temporal and spatial transcendence through art by placing it upon a purely psychological basis (“haciendo volver el pensamiento a esos seres morfinizados de ideal hacia los espacios siderales del ensueño o hacia los campos remotos de las edades grandiosas, lejanas y desaparecidas”) (Prosas, II, 145); i.e., by considering it to be a fiction of the mind.

In Casal's writings, everything would be consumed by the interiorizing, narcissistic aim of his art, by his obsession with making poetry into a mirror of the self. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in his transformation of the art objects of the urban interior into metaphors which reveal interior emotional states. In his definition, modern art exists on two levels: first, on an esthetic plane, as a bruñido espejo; and then at a psychological level, as a reflection of a modern manière de sentir. In order to create his glittering esthetic mirror, Casal used the turn-of-the century urban interior filled with art objects. An article, “Album de la ciudad. El Fénix,” written for the March 13, 1890, issue of La Discusión, described one of the elegant stores of Havana, which sold art objects and jewels destined to fill the homes of the city:

Hay tibores japoneses, alrededor de los cuales vuelan monstruos, pájaros y flores; lámparas de metal, con su pantalla de seda, guarnecida de encajes; relojes de mesa, encerrados en urnas de cristal; vasos de Sèvres, de distintos tamaños; búcaros de barro húngaro y barro italiano, traídos de la exposición de París. También se encuentran, tanto en las vidrieras como en el interior, abanicos de carey, con países de plumas; álbumes elegantes, con broches caprichosos; figuras en relieve, encuadradas en marcos elegantes; devocionarios de marfil, esmaltados de cifras de metal; rosarios de nácar, engarzados en oro; y un número infinito de bibelots, minúsculos fragmentos de obras de arte que, como observa Bourget,¹⁰ han transformado la decoración de todos los interiores y les han dado una fisonomía arcaica tan continuamente curiosa y tan dócilmente sometida que nuestro siglo, a fuerza de recopilar y comprobar todos los estilos, se ha olvidado de hacerse el suyo.

(Prosas, II, 76-77)

The chaotic profusion of art objects in Casal's writings reflects the break-down in literary and artistic values at the end of Romanticism. He would take advantage of this cultural vacuum to transform the surfeit of objets d'art of the urban interior from a relatively anarchic style into a hard, glittering reflection of his own icy despair.

The urban interior and the art objects which fill it are explicitly a refuge from the streets of Havana, and the vitality and movement of the city. Although it has been a commonplace in Spanish American Modernist criticism to study Casal as a writer isolated from middle-class Havana, his art is, in fact, deeply conditioned by the life of the urban haute bourgeoisie. With the rise of industrialism and mercantilism in the nineteenth century, the newly-affluent upper middle class retreated into the interiors of their homes, which they filled with art objects from all over the globe, making their drawing rooms into a kind of international theater. This realm dominated by objects provided an escape from the deteriorating quality of modern city life, with its combination of pressures and dullness.¹¹ Casal wrote during the period immediately preceding the development of art nouveau, before a unified vision of the urban interior had developed.¹² He notes the lack of style in the late nineteenth-century dwelling when he writes that the art objects, eclectically gathered, “han transformado la decoración de todos los interiores y les han dado una fisonomía arcaica tan continuamente curiosa y tan dócilmente sometida que nuestro siglo, a fuerza de recopilar y comprobar todos los estilos, se ha olvidado de hacerse el suyo” (Prosas, II, 77). From the cultural void which tended to suck in everything at the end of Romanticism, there emerges an obsession with form, for it provided the possibility of stability in a shifting, uncertain world.

Many of Casal's writings on art which appeared during the spring and summer of 1890, just before he began to publish the poetry of Nieve, reveal that he sought the principles governing the transformation of exterior reality into the artist's deeply personalized vision. Although he rejected Zola's novelistic style, in his parody of the latter's La Bête humaine,¹³ because of the French novelist's preoccupation with the objects of his environment, no other passion informs Casal's esthetic so much as the frenzied pursuit of form. He wrote, in an article on the Cuban poet Armando Menocal, that poets and artists should not just observe objects, but “escuchar esa voz ideal que canta alrededor de las cosas, esparciendo sobre ellas, como benéfico rocío, sus gracias y sus encantos” (Prosas, II, 63).

The search for an understanding of the uses of plasticity led to the Cuban's interest in Baudelaire, the greatest poet of the urban interior, who fantasized a world of form to displace the decay he saw all around him in Paris. Casal very early translated Baudelaire repeatedly, above all, the latter's prose poems dealing with plasticity. Casal especially chose to translate Baudelaire's writings in which objects were a means to a vision beyond themselves; the French author's works deeply influenced the development of his imagery.

On October 16, 1887, Casal had published “La moral del juguete,”¹⁴ a translation of Baudelaire's “La Moral du joujou,” which has as its theme one of Baudelaire's now best-known theories, that the roots of artistic sensitivity lie in childhood. In returning to infancy to find the earliest contact with art, Baudelaire observed that the child wants to find the “soul” of the toy. Because of the child's failure, it becomes the work of the artist to continue to search for the essence of form. In April and May of 1890, Casal published translations of several of Baudelaire's prose poems. In “El loco y la Venus,” a translation of “Le Fou et la Vénus,” Casal returned to the theme of “La moral del juguete,” that objects exist with great intensity, that they have a silent, ecstatic being. Baudelaire—and Casal in his translation—heightens the sensuous intensity of the three-dimensional scene he portrays: “Parece que una luz siempre creciente hace brillar cada vez más los objetos; que las flores excitadas arden en deseos de rivalizar con el azul del cielo por la energía de los colores y que el calor, haciendo visibles los perfumes, los hace subir hacia el astro como si fueran humo” (Prosas, III, 120).

Casal had translated an excerpt from Maupassant's La Vie errante which dealt with the Neoplatonic belief that sensuous perception was a means to a vision beyond itself. John Locke had written in the seventeenth century that nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses; the nineteenth century further denigrated rational intelligence. Maupassant now finds this exaltation of sensual awareness essential to modern art at the end of Romanticism: “La inteligencia tiene cinco barreras entreabiertas y encadenadas que se llaman los cinco sentidos y los hombres enamorados del arte nuevo sacuden hoy, con todas sus fuerzas, esas cinco barreras” (Prosas, III, 113).

On April 27, 1890, Casal published “Un hemisferio en una cabellera,”¹⁵ his translation of Baudelaire's “Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure.” The woman's hair contains a reverie; it holds entire seas whose winds carry the poet to faraway lands, where the sky is bluer and deeper, where the air is perfumed by fruits, by leaves, and by human flesh. The previous day, on April 28, 1890, Casal had published his translation of Baudelaire's “Le Confiteor de l'artiste,” in which the artist becomes one with the objects which surround him; he can no longer distinguish his own thought from theirs: “todas esas cosas piensan por mí o pienso por ellas (porque en la grandeza del ensueño, el yo se pierde pronto) …” (Prosas, III, 117). Casal's awareness that objects, in their appeal to the senses, can be used to evoke a new reality, and his sensation of fusion with the material world surrounding him, combined dramatically in an “imitation” of Baudelaire's prose poem “La double Chambre,” which he published shortly before the poetry of Nieve. The physical existence of the room in which the poet dwells is transformed, through the intensification of sensation, into “una cámara semejante a una fantasía” (Prosas, II, 155). The artist is in touch with the mysterious life of the objects around him: “Las cortinas hablan una lengua muda, como las flores, como los cielos, como los soles ponientes. … Los muebles tienen formas prolongadas, dolientes, abatidas. Parece que sueñan …” (Prosas, II, 155). The transformation of a material world into pure impression is essential to the vision he seeks. In his flight from city life into the highly sculptural poetic reality of the urban interior, Casal, like Baudelaire, would return to the original idea of art, for he would enter a place identified as a sanctuary to seek the mystery held within the forms depicted.

In his interest in the artist's complex relationship with the physical realm surrounding him, Casal turned to Baudelaire's discussion, in the essays on the Salon of 1859, of the distinction among various levels of reality,¹⁶ which Marcel Ruff considers one of the French author's most original contributions to modern art.¹⁷ Baudelaire distinguished between photographic and historical reality, and the psychological truth of the novel. Casal, like Baudelaire, rejects photographic realism; the truth of any work—even the realist novel—is beyond the photographic for it reaches a level more profound and more universal than photographic exactitude. Casal also rejects historical accuracy as Baudelaire never had, for Baudelaire felt that the paintings of Ingres and David were excellent examples of historical vision in painting. What emerges is Casal's insistence, beyond that of Baudelaire, upon the detachment of the image from exterior reality, and its association with an interior psychological realm.

One of Casal's earliest works dealing with the interiorization of the image was “Amor en el claustro,” published on August 1, 1887. The anecdotal substance of the poem is simple; a young nun prays in the chapel of her convent late at night. As she looks at the crucifix it dissolves before her eyes, and in its place she sees the face of her dead lover. Already, for Casal, the decisive image is the interiorized one. The deeply assimilated vision of the amado is more powerful than the form of the crucifix which has not been appropriated by the self, and which, therefore, does not ultimately reveal the self.

Casal would reveal six years later, as he was writing his last book of poetry, that the image of the person portrayed had become as interiorized and obsessive for him as the face of her lover was for the young nun. In one of his portraits in the series Seres enigmáticos, entitled “El hombre de las muletas de níquel,” Casal confesses that the vision of the once elegant, crippled man haunts him and that its expression has become a pathological necessity.¹⁸

Among the nineteenth-century writers whom Casal admired most was Flaubert, for in Flaubert's works, as in much of nineteenth-century fiction, art is considered to be a mirror of reality. Casal, as we have seen, sought to make his own poetry into a reflection of the artist's psychology. He noted, however, a narcissistic quality in Flaubert when he wrote that, although the French novelist is considered the most impersonal of authors, Bouvard et Pécuchet is in many ways a portrait of Flaubert himself.¹⁹ The metaphor used by Flaubert, of art as a mirror of reality, is in fact ambiguous. What we discover in much nineteenth-century writing is indeed a mirror, but it is displaced: instead of the artist's work having become a reflection of the world, it is the world which the artist has transformed into a mirror.²⁰ This transformation of exterior reality into a portrait of the artist is nowhere more evident than in Casal's art of the urban interior.

The woman was one of the major art objects of the Cuban writer's urban interiors. During the spring of 1890, the same period immediately preceding publication of the poems of Nieve, in which he was publishing the translations of Baudelaire and his writings on esthetics, Casal published, on June 3, a word portrait of a Parisian demi-mondaine, entitled “La derrochadora.”²¹ The figure of the courtesan, a woman of the turn-of-the-century salons, intrigued Casal, and he wrote numerous articles about her. She became for him a symbol of his esthetic world, for her artificial beauty and elegance were as compelling yet transitory as those of his own artistic vision. In “La derrochadora” the demi-mondaine lives surrounded by objects; she reminds one of Manet's Olympia as she is portrayed at her morning ritual of bathing and being perfumed by her maid among glitteringly polished mirrors, jewels, and jasper. The hard surfaces of these objects are accentuated by the contrast with the soft texture of the courtesan's robe and skin. Her maid transforms her into an esthetic object and a sex object, and in this world of cosas, in which she herself is another one, the woman spends her days buying art objects: “En cada tienda, halla algo nuevo que comprar. Ya es un brazalete de oro, cuajado de pedrería digno de una Leonor de Este; ya un abanico ínfimo, con paisaje grotesco, todo hecho con tintas de relumbrón; ya una estatua de mármol, obra maestra de un artista desconocido, pero que firmaría un Falguière; ya un cromo americano …” (Prosas, I, 238). Her search for art objects is frenzied and compulsive; what she buys one day is discarded almost immediately to make room for the next day's purchases—as the prostitute herself is interchangeable with many others, objects bought and used for a short time. The one emotional quality which Casal emphasizes in the woman is her lack of attachment to any other person; the demi-mondaine by definition has an ambivalent relationship to the bourgeois society which exploits her and off which she lives. Like many of Casal's writings on women, the portrait of the elegant prostitute is characterized by a conflictual attitude toward love; he writes that when anyone mentions love to her, the woman's response is a cynical “¡Desdichados! ¿Todavía creéis en eso?” (Prosas, I, 238).

The portrait of the elegant prostitute was published only three days before Casal's definition of modern art as a reflection of the artist's ennui and pathology: “el malestar permanente, el escepticismo profundo, la amargura intensa, las aspiraciones indefinidas y el pesimismo sombrío. …” There is no better reflection of Casal's own glacial tristeza, his depression expressed in icily sculptural form, than the Parisian demi-mondaine as she is seen dwelling in a nightmarish vision of life experienced entirely in terms of objects by a psyche devoid of emotion. Casal's portraits of women, however, ultimately fail as portraits, for they are a deeply narcissistic—highly polished mirror of the artist—proof of his own existence.

That the art object was becoming increasingly interiorized in Casal's writings is apparent in another portrait of a woman, entitled simply “Croquis femenino,” published the same day as “La derrochadora.” The subject of this sketch, like the prostitute, remains unnamed, but she represents another type of woman Casal admired. She is one of the wealthy, cultivated Cuban women who lived apart from the haute bourgeoisie of Havana, and whose houses were meeting places for writers and artists. Like the French courtesan, she lives in an environment dominated by objects. Casal presents an exhaustive inventory of her salon: “Espejos venecianos, con marcos de bronce, ornados con ligeros amorcillos; pieles de tigres arrojados al pie de olorosos divanes; tibores japoneses, guarnecidos de dragones y quimeras; mesas de laca incrustadas de nácar, cubiertas de un pueblo de estatuitas; óleos admirables, firmados por reputados pintores, todo se encuentra en aquel salón” (Prosas, II, 141). When Casal describes the woman's psychology, he turns to the plasticity of the fairy tale to create an interior vision. He writes that she is one of the people of his time who “viven siempre inclinados sobre sí mismos, mirándose por dentro, como si llevaran allí, a semejanza de la heroína de los cuentos de hadas, una gruta formada de piedras preciosas, donde ven una ninfa encantadora que se adormece entre los cantos de pájaros maravillosos y los aromas de flores desconocidas” (Prosas, II, 140). Even the woman's introversion is expressed in terms of glittering, gem-like preciosity, for the grotto, where she dwells within this fantastically sculptured psychological world, is formed of jewels.

Casal emphasizes that she, like the prostitute of “La derrochadora,” is detached from reality and incapable of feeling emotion for the people around her. He notes ironically that she is so pathologically linked with the objects in her environment that she has fallen in love with one of them, a portrait of Murat which hangs in the corner of her living room. The art object is now so interiorized that it is becoming the imagery of the woman's mind. Casal writes that, as she drives through the streets of Havana, she resembles a legendary queen in exile “que ha venido a olvidar entre los esplendores naturales del nuevo mundo, la imagen torturadora de su Asiria perdida” (Prosas, II, 140). The woman is, herself, an image tormented by an image in this Through-the-Looking-Glass delirium of highly-fantasized plasticity.

The imagery of Casal's “Museo ideal” reveals the same interiorized, often narcissistic function that one observes in the writings published immediately before Nieve. Our examination of the “Museo ideal” will concentrate on two of Casal's best-known works, the Salome poems entitled “Salomé” and “La aparición,” which are based on two of Gustave Moreau's masterpieces, the oil painting Salomé (in the Mante Collection) and the watercolor L'Apparition (now in the Luxembourg Museum). No other group of works by Casal has received more attention from critics than the “Museo ideal.” More than a quarter of a century ago Arturo Torres Ríoseco contended that the poems of the collection were transpositions into poetry of Huysmans' prose descriptions of Moreau's paintings in À rebours.²² The recent scholarship of Robert Jay Glickman, however, shows that Casal was in contact with Moreau himself through correspondence between August 11, 1891, and January 1, 1893.²³ In a letter of August 15, 1891, Casal wrote to Moreau that he had been introduced to the French artist's paintings by Joris-Karl Huysmans.²⁴ Glickman notes, “We may assume that Casal meant that he had discovered Moreau by reading Huysmans' novel À rebours, which was published in 1884,”²⁵ for the paintings by Moreau which appear in Casal's “Museo ideal” are those which Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Huysmans' novel, chooses to decorate the interior of the house in Paris into which he retreats from the life of the city. It seems natural that Casal's art of the urban interior would lead him to À rebours, the novel which was fast becoming a kind of decadent manifesto.

After Casal had written all of the poems of the “Museo ideal,” he published, in La Habana Literaria, on March 15, 1892, an article on Huysmans, in which he stated that in À rebours Huysmans had established “el proceso artístico de nuestro tiempo” (Prosas, I, 178). Casal's evaluation of the French novelist's place within the literary currents of the time is noteworthy: “Hasta hace pocos años, Huysmans ha militado en la escuela naturalista, de la que se alejó más tarde …” (Prosas, I, 177), for Huysmans remained much closer to Zola than Casal liked to believe. If there is one problem in Casal's understanding of Huysmans, it is his failure to comprehend the ironic nature of Des Esseintes' retreat into his house filled with art objects. Huysmans, through his protagonist, attempted to show the impossibility of withdrawing entirely from one's environment, i.e., of breaking completely with Naturalism. The writers like Casal, and they were legion, who saw in À rebours the essence of decadent art, did not understand that Huysmans never entirely escaped the early influence of Zola; nor did they perceive that Zola was a much greater visionary than Huysmans, who was not an exceptionally original writer.

It remains unclear whether or not Casal had seen a photograph of Moreau's Salomé before he published his sonnet of the same title, although Casal wrote to Moreau on August 11, 1891, that the poems “Salomé,” “Elena” and “Galatea” were based on photocopies of Moreau's paintings.²⁶ Four days later, in another letter to the French painter on August 15, he stated that these three sonnets were “escritos por mí ante copias de vuestras divinas y sugestivas figuras de Elena, Salomé y Galatea.”²⁷ In spite of Casal's repeated assertion of Moreau's painting as his source, other evidence suggests that Huysmans' prose description may have in fact been Casal's model, for “Salomé” was published on September 21, 1890, almost one year before “Elena” and “Galatea” appeared on August 2 and August 9, 1891, respectively. Casal's earliest references to Huysmans, futhermore, antedate all references to Moreau.²⁸

Casal's correspondence suggests that “La aparición,” the second of the poems of the “Museo ideal,” was based at least partially upon a photocopy of Moreau's L'Apparition, and not entirely upon Huysmans' prose description. A reproduction of Moreau's painting reached Havana on or about August 13, 1891.²⁹ Casal's poem was published somewhat later, on August 30, 1891, in La Habana Elegante, when Casal first published as a group the works which would form the body or gallery of his “Museo ideal,” i.e., the entire collection minus “Vestíbulo: Retrato de Gustavo Moreau” and “Sueño de gloria: Apoteosis de Gustavo Moreau.” The group bore the title “Mi museo ideal” (Cuadros de Gustavo Moreau).

The versions of the two Salome poems which appeared in La Habana Elegante on August 30, 1891, were very close to the versions which would appear in Nieve. Since holograph copies of only four of Casal's poems are extant, it is impossible to trace the evolution of his poetry from its inception. In the case of “Salomé” and “La aparición” one cannot determine with absolute certainty the dates when the poems were actually written, and then compare them with the dates on or by which Casal had in his possession copies of Moreau's paintings.

Casal and Moreau faced many of the same problems in their work, because they both sought an art which would be simultaneously sculptural and evocative. Just as Casal had begun to write under the influence of the Parnassian poets, Moreau had started his career as an academic painter. Moreau, however, had too eccentric a vision of life to be a very successful academic painter. He had prepared for the Salon of 1869, but had failed to win a prize; one of the paintings which had taken an award was a Salomé. With his lack of success, Moreau, in the decade before he showed most of the works which Casal would include in his “Museo ideal,” had withdrawn from exhibiting in order to develop a style more suited to his temperament.³⁰ During this time he reinforced both the sculptural and evocative qualities of his painting. For the first time, he began to work in sculpture; the resulting plasticity is apparent in both Salomé and L'Apparition. It should also be noted that Moreau's maquettes indicate that he drew his sketches of Salome from living models.³¹ Ironically, Moreau and Casal, both of whom exalted the artificial and denigrated everything natural, portrayed nature very sensitively.³² For the first time, too, Moreau experimented with the use of large spaces to evoke psychological depth in his paintings. The lamp hanging in the darkened chamber in Salomé appears to have been copied from a Rembrandt which he owned.³³ He evidently admired and was influenced by the Dutch painter's evocation of emotional profundity through the use of light and shadow.

Conflict and ambiguity are the psychological qualities which dominate Moreau's Salome paintings. Throughout his other works also, this ambivalence focuses on the woman, who is perceived to be both compelling and destructive; Moreau believed that the great femme fatale, Salome, like Helen of Troy, conveyed the threateningly powerful nature of the woman. In his word portrait of another femme fatale, Emma Crouch, the celebrated courtesan of the court of Napoleon III, Casal wrote that she was a “female don Juan.”³⁴ The Romantic myth had become inverted in these figures admired by the fin de siglo, for the woman was now the vortex which drew men to her, only to destroy them. Mario Praz has noted the sexually ambivalent quality of Moreau's paintings;³⁵ his Venuses have, for example, the faces of men, and Hercules has the face of a young woman. The lotus which Salome holds is conflictual in its symbolism, for it evokes both spirituality and sexuality.³⁶ The ambiguity and destruction present in the images of the “Museo ideal” would find their culmination in the mysteriously violent, sexual symbolism of “Dolorosa.”

As an artist, Casal was much closer in temperament and interests to Moreau than he was to Huysmans. The latter tended to distort reality by projecting upon it a vision of physical pathology; his frequent references to syphilis are an example.³⁷ Casal was much more interested in certain psychological and esthetic properties of Moreau's paintings. It is useless, however, to talk about true ekfrasis—transposition from painting into poetry—in Casal's works, even in the cases like “La aparición” in which it is known that he had seen a photocopy of the Moreau painting before the publication of his poem.³⁸ It is apparent that Casal's understanding of Moreau was not exceptionally thorough or deep, for Glickman has shown that Casal did not identify some of Moreau's works properly. “Una peri” was likely written describing Moreau's Sapho se précipitant dans la men,³⁹ and “Venus Anadeomena” describes La Naissance de Vénus and another unidentified painting.⁴⁰ Moreau, one of the great teachers of his time, with whom both Matisse and Rouault studied, researched his paintings in a thorough and painstaking manner. In order to understand Moreau's works, they must be approached in the same scholarly manner in which the artist undertook them, for he combined fantasy with a great deal of historical accuracy. These historical details, however, were much less important to Casal than to Moreau, for it should be remembered that in discussing Baudelaire's study of the levels of artistic reality, Casal had rejected historical reality as an important criterion of art.

During the same period (September, 1890, until April, 1892), in which he was publishing the poem-paintings of the “Museo ideal,” Casal was also writing the confessional poetry which would be included in the section of Nieve entitled “Marfiles viejos.” The “Museo ideal” has not been studied sufficiently in light of its being more or less contemporary with the “Marfiles viejos,” for many of the psychological properties present in the latter collection are mirrored in the “Museo ideal.” The extreme anxiety which surrounded erotic fantasy for Casal, expressed in the violence and destruction seen in the Salome poems, is also present in the sonnet “A la castidad” from “Marfiles viejos”:

          Yo no amo la mujer, porque en su seno
dura el amor lo que en la rama el fruto,
y mi alma vistió de eterno luto
y en mi cuerpo infiltró mortal veneno.
          Ni con voz de ángel o lenguaje obsceno
logra en mí enardecer al torpe bruto
que si le rinde varonil tributo
agoniza al instante de odio lleno.
          ¡Oh blanca castidad! Sé el ígneo faro
que guíe el paso de mi planta inquieta
a través del erial de jas pasiones
          y otórgame, en mi horrendo desamparo,
con los dulces ensueños del poeta
la calma de los puros corazones.(41)

The icy pathology of the portraits of Salome reflects the poet's emptiness and self-alienation, two of the most powerful motifs of the “Marfiles viejos.” “Tristissima nox,” the opening work of the collection, and the first poem to be written, introduces the theme, “el vacío profundo de mi alma.” This stoic disillusion is echoed repeatedly in the poetry; in his tribute to Leopardi, for example, which follows “Tristissima nox,” Casal, in characterizing the Italian poet as “águila que vivió preso en el lodo,” refers to the modern poet for whom all the old illusions have died, leaving nothing to replace them. Casal's disenchantment with the art to which he had been deeply committed is explicit in “Paisaje espiritual”: “no endulcen mi infernal tormento / ni la Pasión, ni el Arte, ni la Ciencia …” (Poetry, I, 143). The self-alienation of “Pax animae” parallels his earlier discussion of modern art, for he had written that their suffering led modern writers to escape “hacia los espacios siderales del ensueño.” The emotional mechanism underlying Casal's mysticism is apparent:

          No me habléis más de dichas terrenales
que no ansío gustar. Está ya muerto
mi corazón y en su recinto abierto
sólo entrarán los cuervos sepulcrales.
          Del pasado no llevo las señales
y a veces de que existo no estoy cierto,
porque es la vida para mí un desierto
poblado de figuras espectrales.
          No veo más que un astro obscurecido
por brumas de crepúsculo lluvioso,
y, entre el silencio de sopor profundo,
          tan sólo llega a percibir mi oído
algo extraño y confuso y misterioso
que me arrastra muy lejos de este mundo.

(Poetry, I, 140)

The desire for flight into a world of illusion expressed here is echoed in the final lines of “A un crítico”: “tranquilo iré a dormir con los pequeños / si veo fulgurar ante mis ojos, / hasta el instante mismo de la muerte, / las visiones doradas de mis sueños” (Poetry, I, 145). The repeated insistence upon fantasy and transcendent vision is convincing only as a wish for evasion; his mysticism compensates for and is severely undermined by his nihilism.

The experience of emotional disintegration voiced in the confessional poetry of the “Marfiles viejos” is captured in the glittering images of the “Museo ideal.” When we compare Casal's “La aparición” with Moreau's painting of the same name, which he had seen before he published his poem, it is evident that the poet's plasticity is more luminous and fluid than Moreau's relatively static composition. As Salome screams at the vision of the decapitated John the Baptist, esthetic break-down reflects the psychological disintegration as the image dissolves into a shower of crimson drops of blood on the marble pavement:

          Nube fragante y cálida tamiza
el fulgor del palacio de granito,
ónix, pórfido y nácar. Infinito
deleite invade a Herodes. La rojiza
          espada fulgurante inmoviliza
hierático el verdugo, y hondo grito
arroja Salomé frente al maldito
espectro que sus miembros paraliza.
          Despójase del traje de brocado
y, quedando vestida en un momento,
de oro y perlas, zafiros y rubíes,
          huye del Precursor decapitado
que esparce en el marmóreo pavimento
lluvia de sangre en gotas carmesíes.

(Poetry, I, 115)

Casal's art has become so profoundly a mirror of his affective world, that it is engulfed and finally shattered by the very emotional properties it was designed to reflect. The psychological and esthetic disintegration in his works, however, was ultimately so overwhelmingly threatening to Casal that he attempted, in the “Museo ideal,” to transform his fluid, unstructured poetic world into a highly-structured series of rigidly framed images juxtaposed between a fixed beginning and ending.

A study of the changes in sequence of the poems of the “Museo ideal” in the course of their various dates of publication reveals that the poems were not always written for the places ultimately assigned to them in Nieve. When Casal first published the poems of his “Museo ideal” as a group on August 30, 1891, several of the poems did not appear in the order in which they were written and originally published, for “Salomé,” “Elena,” and “Galatea” had been previously published separately.⁴² The final arrangement of the collection seems to have been reached as a result of trial and error over a period of time, with no overall scheme; a possible exception is the use of “Salomé” and “La aparición” as the first poem-paintings within the gallery, for this opening sequence of the August 30, 1891, publication of his “Museum” in La Habana Elegante was repeated in Nieve.

Nor did Casal settle immediately upon a beginning for his collection. He first used as epigraph for the “Museo ideal” the second stanza of Joséphin Soulary's 1880 “Prologue” to Les Jeux divins espousing myth and the marvellous in art: “Pour nous, fils de l'art, rien ne vaut / Le mythe et sa légende rose; / Nous mourons de la vie en prose / Où le merveilleux fait défaut.”⁴³ These lines were followed by a dedication to his friend Eduardo Rosell, which was maintained in Nieve. The epigraph from Soulary's “Prologue” was later suppressed in favor of Casal's own poem, “Vestíbulo. Retrato de Gustavo Moreau,” which served to give a physical sense of an entry hall into his museum.

Because the holograph copy of “Vestíbulo. Retrato de Gustavo Moreau” which Casal sent to Moreau is extant, we know that Casal conceived of the poem almost from the beginning as the entrance to his “Museo ideal,” for the term vestíbulo was very early incorporated into the title. The holograph copy is dated December 12, 1891; Casal first mentioned the poem in a letter to Moreau on December 15, 1891, when he indicated that “Vestíbulo” was going to have an important role in his book because it would function as the gateway to the series he planned to entitle “Mi museo ideal.”⁴⁴ The poem appeared in Nieve with the same title that it had borne in the holograph version, i.e., “Vestíbulo. Retrato de Gustavo Moreau,” although it had twice been published under the title “Gustavo Moreau.”

Casal did not conceive so quickly of “Sueño de gloria. Apoteosis de Gustavo Moreau” as the conclusion to his “Museo ideal.” In the holograph version the apotheosis of Moreau is placed before “Vestíbulo.” This copy of the poems suggests that “Sueño de gloria,” dated December 8, 1891, was written earlier than the vestibule-portrait poem, which is dated December 12, 1891. Casal's correspondence with Moreau, too, suggests that the apotheosis poem was conceived earlier than the portrait poem, for Casal included what Glickman characterizes as a “detailed outline” of “Sueño de gloria” in a letter to Moreau dated November 1, 1891.⁴⁵ He did not mention “Vestíbulo” until his December 15, 1891, letter. Publication dates are further evidence that “Sueño de gloria” is the earlier work, for it was published in La Habana Literaria on December 30, 1891. “Vestíbulo” first appeared, under the title “Gustavo Moreau,” in El Fígaro, more than two weeks later on January 15, 1892.

As late as after the typesetting of Nieve had begun, Casal appears to have still planned to place “Sueño de gloria” at the beginning of the “Museo ideal,” either before or immediately after “Vestíbulo.” In the 1892 edition of Nieve a centered rule was printed beneath the title “Sueño de gloria. Retrato de Gustavo Moreau.” The only other poems which have this mark beneath the title are the first seven poems of Nieve, i.e., the “Introducción,” the five works which form the “Bocetos antiguos” (the collection which precedes the “Museo ideal”), and “Vestíbulo. Retrato de Gustavo Moreau.” “Sueño de gloria” was evidently to have been included in this sequence since the printer included it in the group whose titles were underlined with the centered rule. Casal evidently decided to move the poem—decisions made concerning poem sequence are generally the author's—after the typesetting of Nieve had already begun.⁴⁶

The fact that Casal placed his images within rigidly juxtaposed frames and between a beginning (“Vestíbulo. Retrato de Gustavo Moreau”) and an ending (“Sueño de gloria. Apoteosis de Gustavo Moreau”) cannot obscure entirely the lack of underlying structure, or the emotional disintegration, of the “Museo ideal.” This unstructured, tenuous art world, moreover, both explains the need for and is severely weakened by the imposition of a rigid form upon it. In “Sueño de gloria. Apoteosis de Gustavo Moreau,” the final poem of the collection, Casal further undermines his own unstructured, disintegrating poetic vision by returning to the outmoded Romantic myth of transcendence through art, already discredited in his own Modernist esthetic. His allegorical depiction of art in this poem as the union of Genius—the “divine” Moreau—with Beauty—a decadent Helen of Troy—is so trite that it weakens the radical sense of modernity of the “Museo ideal,” the moments in which the poem-paintings fulfill Casal's definition of modern art as a reflection of the poet's psychology.

The poem “Dolorosa” from Rimas represents the culmination of Casal's poetry of the urban interior. In the rich effects of the artificial lighting upon the luxuriant surfaces (“Tendía la lamparilla / en el verde cortinaje, / franjas de seda amarilla / con transparencias de encaje,” Poetry, I, 234), the play of light and shadow dissolves the concrete objects into an abstract psychological world, from which emerges the image of the dagger which dominates each of the three sections of the poem. As the imagery shimmers evanescently it seems to have acquired the quality of the bruñido espejo which Casal believed essential to modern poetry:

          Brilló el puñal en la sombra
como una lengua de plata,
y bañó al que nadie nombra
onda de sangre escarlata.

(Poetry, I, 234)

The metaphors are tinged with violence and mysterious sexuality, as the most powerful of Casal's imagery often is. They evoke the poet's self-alienation, his psyche turned against itself. Casal portrays, in frenetic plasticity, the self-destructive force within:

          ¡Cómo en la sombra glacial
tus ojos fosforecían,
y de palidez mortal
tus mejillas se cubrían!
          ¡Cómo tus manos heladas
asíanse de mi cuello,
o esparcían levantadas
las ondas de tu cabello!
          Arrojándote a mis pies,
con la voz de los que gimen,
me confesaste después
todo el horror de tu crimen.

(Poetry, I, 235-36)

In “Dolorosa,” as in the “Museo ideal,” Casal's definition of modern art is fulfilled in the poetry of the urban interior; we see both the highly polished mirror of his esthetic world and the dark reverse side of the self which it reveals. The icy materialism of Casal's interiors, moreover, formed one of his closest links with the values of turn-of-the-century middle-class Havana. As the art objects were transformed into a deeper psychological reality, furthermore, this sanctuary increasingly dissolved into a reflection of the poet's frozen solitude and psychic disintegration. The exaltation of the urban interior in Casal's works is, as a result, its destruction, for it failed to provide the artist with a refuge either from himself or the bourgeois society which surrounded him.

As his poetic world, with its frenetic emphasis upon form and sensation, developed, it ultimately ended in the denial of form and sensation. One of the least understood aspects of synesthesia is that, although it represents a heightening of awareness of the things of this world, its end result is the negation of objects and the senses. Impressionism is based on the idea that impressions of objects are important, not the cosas themselves. In the literary generation which follows Casal's, the increasingly complex function of the perception of exterior reality can be observed in the works of authors like Proust and Azorín. Proust, by means of impressions, transformed visual and other sensory elements taken from Combray, Balbec, and Paris, into metaphors which became mirrors of interior emotional states. The first stages of this process are apparent in Casal's transformation of the art objects of the urban interior into the bruñido espejo of a psychological world—the ultimate destruction of the sensuous art object.

Casal's desire to impose a rigid form upon the “Museo ideal” is paralleled in his attempt to structure the equally unstructured Rimas, his final volume of poetry. Although the manuscript of the work is no longer extant, it is unlikely that the author would have left the poems in the order in which they now appear, which is the sequence in which they were left at his death. When he originally published the poems separately he assigned to a number of them subheadings similar to those used in Nieve; these would probably have been used as subtitles for groups of poems.⁴⁷

The epigraph which appears in the posthumous, and subsequent, editions of Rimas are the lines from Baudelaire's “Bénédiction” dealing with suffering as the preparation for the transcendent paradis révélé: “Soyez béni, mon Dieu, qui donnez la souffrance / Comme un divin remède à nos impuretés / Et comme la meilleure et la plus pure essence / Qui prépare les forts aux saintes voluptés!”⁴⁸ Casal returns to the long-discredited (in his own works) Romantic myth of epiphany through art when he quotes one of Baudelaire's most uninteresting and least original poems.

It is uncertain that Casal actually intended to use the lines from “Bénédiction” as the epigraph to Rimas. In “Mi museo ideal,” as we have seen, although he had originally included the “Prologue” to the French poet Joséphin Soulary's Les Jeux divins as an epigraph, he replaced it with a poem of his own, “Vestíbulo. Retrato de Gustavo Moreau,” in the final version for inclusion in Nieve. It seems especially likely that he would have done the same in Rimas since he had used his own poems as the introductory statements for his previous two books of poetry. However, even if the epigraph which the work has always borne had been replaced, the obsessive insistence upon the discredited metaphysical theme would have remained. The book's cover, which Casal designed and which it seems unlikely that he would have changed,⁴⁹ shows the seated figure of Poetry and bears the inscription “Ars Religio Nostra.” “A la Belleza,” the first poem of Rimas to be written, and the poem which, up to his death, Casal left as the introductory work of the volume, also echoes the Baudelairean desire for apocalyptic vision.

Because the lines from “Bénédiction” have remained as the epigraph to Rimas, Casal's Neoplatonism is more easily traced than that of many other Modernist writers. Casal wrote in “A la Belleza” that he had glimpsed a vision of absolute beauty in the poetry of only one poet. In all likelihood, this poet is Baudelaire,⁵⁰ since “A la Belleza” is placed immediately after the Baudelairean stanza dealing with the preparation for the paradis révélé. The roots of Casal's quest for metaphysical experience in art lie, through the French author, deep in a nineteenth-century Neo-platonic tradition. In commenting on Edgar Allan Poe's Poetic Principle, Baudelaire presented his theory of correspondences, in which the material objects of earth are like parts of a puzzle which give us an intuition of a spiritual realm beyond: “C'est cet admirable, cet immortel instinct du beau qui nous fait considérer la terre et ses spectacles comme un aperçu, comme une correspondance du ciel.”⁵¹ This theory of art was deeply influenced by Poe. For example, in a reference to the “wild effort” that poets expend to reach Beauty, Poe stated that, “Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.”⁵² Indeed, it was Poe's struggle toward an all but undefinable ideal that most strongly attracted Baudelaire to him.⁵³

The theories of Poe upon which Baudelaire relied so heavily in the development of his own writings on art were in turn highly derivative. Poe and Baudelaire had read the essays of Emerson, and were familiar with Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondence, both of which were influenced by Plato. There was a basic ambiguity in Emerson's thought that was never resolved. He states the underlying assumption of transcendental symbolism when he writes in his essay “Nature”: “It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.”⁵⁴ Emerson, however, never confronted the question of where this world beyond the components of nature lay. He continues, in “Nature,” saying that this spiritual realm “is less a transcendent divinity revealed through nature from beyond than a transcendent state of mind projected onto nature from within.”⁵⁵ And in his essay “The Poet,” Emerson wrote that the universe was “the externalization of the soul.”⁵⁶

From the time of Emerson, then, transcendence was a contradiction in terms; it held a tragic ambiguity, for it never really affirmed that there is any ultimate reality beyond the individual. Although, as we have seen, Casal had earlier avoided Baudelaire's esthetic ambiguity, he later incorporated, in his poetic vision of Rimas, the basic ambivalence in Baudelaire's thought without resolving it. The resulting conflict sprung from the failure of either poet to relinquish an idealistic sense of art in the face of his belief that modern poetry could only be the expression of a psychological world.

The uncertainty of Casal's transcendent concept of art, by the time he wrote Rimas, is evident in “A la Belleza.” Although he describes his quest for metaphysical beauty, the poem is strangely confused. He severely weakens the artistic mysticism he seeks to perpetuate when he concedes that the epiphany sought through art perhaps belongs only to an interior psychological realm: “Quizás como te sueña mi deseo / estés en mí reinando, / mientras voy persiguiendo por el mundo / las huellas de tu paso” (Poetry, I, 198).

“Cuerpo y alma,” the final poem of Rimas, is dominated by two major themes of the work: pathology⁵⁷ and the desire for cosmic vision. The last poem of the collection to be written,⁵⁸ and the only one published posthumously (October 29, 1893, eight days after Casal's death on October 21), its function appears to have been to give a sense of an ending to Rimas. The initial sections of “Cuerpo y alma,” a chain of downward-spiralling images evoking illness, and a corresponding series of ethereal images evoking transcendence, symbolize the irreconcilable struggle between the poet's sick body and the purity of his soul. The conflict between the two is resolved in the closing envío's promise of fulfillment, through death, of the long-frustrated desire for the infinite. The synthesis of major themes of Rimas found in this final poem, and the attitude of acceptance of death, gave finality, and the suggestion of unity and form, to a collection left unfinished and unstructured by the poet's own premature death.

The similarity of theme between the envío of “Cuerpo y alma” and the ending of Les Fleurs du mal merits consideration, for Casal appears to have found the model for his conclusion to Rimas in the ending of the French work. After referring to Baudelaire as “el más grande poeta de nuestros tiempos” in his posthumous busto “El doctor Francisco Zayas,” published in La Habana Elegante on October 22, 1893, Casal quoted the final lines from “Le Voyage,” the closing poem of Les Fleurs du mal:

O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! Levons l'ancre!
Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillons!
Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre,
Nos cœurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!
Verse-nous ton poison pour qu'il nous réconforte!
Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?
Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!(59)

Although Baudelaire insisted that his book “n'est pas un pur album, et qu'il a un commencement et une fin,”⁶⁰ Marcel Ruff, in his study of the structure of Les Fleurs du mal, contends that the individual poems were not always written for the places ultimately assigned to them.⁶¹ This is especially true of the use of “Le Voyage” as a general conclusion to the collection, for at the time he wrote the poem, Baudelaire planned to conclude his work with an epilogue addressed to the city of Paris, which would have shifted the perspective of the book away from the introspection and destiny of the artist onto a spiritual drama played across the entire city. Although it was an afterthought, the position of “Le Voyage” at the end of Les Fleurs du mal is justifiable, for like “Cuerpo y alma,” it unifies major themes of the work it concludes.⁶² The ending of Baudelaire's poem especially, quoted during the final days of Casal's life when he was writing “Cuerpo y alma,” must have provided the young Cuban with a model, for Baudelaire had used the closing theme of acceptance of death, as Casal would in his envío, to give a sense of finality and unity to a profoundly unstructured and psychically disrupted work.

Notes

1. Julián del Casal, Prosas, Edición del Centenario, II (Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963), 145. References to the Centennial Edition of Casal's prose will be cited in the notes and within the text of this study as Prosas, followed by volume and page number.

2. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 75. For a detailed discussion of decadence as a crisis of consciousness see Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1977), pp. 149-221.

3. Théophile Gautier, Introd., Les Fleurs du mal, by Charles Baudelaire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Lévy Frères, 1869), p. 17. Calinescu observes that the first “entirely approbative and widely influential view of decadence as a style occurs in the preface that Théophile Gautier wrote in 1868” for Les Fleurs du mal. See Calinescu, p. 164.

4. Casal, Prosas, II, 144. Casal quotes almost verbatim Gautier's phrase “écoutant pour les traduire les confidences subtiles de la névrose, les aveux de la passion vieillissante qui se déprave et les hallucinations bizarres de l'idée fixe tournant à la folie.” See Gautier, p. 17.

5. Baudelaire contrasts modern and classical treatment of various themes in “De l'Héroïsme de la vie moderne,” the concluding essay on the Salon of 1846. See Baudelaire, “De l'Héroïsme de la vie moderne,” in Salon de 1846, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), II, 493-96.

6. Baudelaire, “De l'Héroïsme de la vie moderne,” p. 495.

7. Casal, Prosas, II, 144.

8. Baudelaire, pp. 420-21.

9. For Paul de Man, Baudelaire's writings reveal the ambivalence inherent in modernity. In his famous essay on the French artist Constantin Guys, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” Baudelaire's conception of modernity is very close to that of Nietzsche in his second Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung. In Baudelaire's essay we find an acute sense of the present as essential to all esthetic experience: “Le plaisir que nous retirons de la représentation du présent tient non seulement à la beauté dont il peut être revêtu, mais aussi à sa qualité essentielle de présent.” De Man observes, “The paradox of the problem is potentially contained in the formula ‘représentation du présent’ which combines a repetitive with an instantaneous pattern without apparent awareness of the incompatibility. Yet this latent tension governs the development of the entire essay.” Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in In Search of Literary Theory, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 256.

10. In his theory of decadence found in his article on Baudelaire, published in the Nouvelle revue of November 15, 1881, and reprinted in Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), Paul Bourget had defined decadent societies as those in which cultural elements were no longer subordinated to an “organic” whole.

11. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), pp. 167-68.

12. I tend to disagree with Esperanza Figueroa, who relates Casal's style to art nouveau. Casal does not subordinate all artistic elements to a central design, as art nouveau demands. See Esperanza Figueroa, “El cisne modernista,” in Estudios criticos sobre el modernismo, ed. Homero Castillo (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1968), pp. 311-14.

13. Casal, “Verdad y poesía”, in Prosas, II, 115-17.

14. Casal, “La moral del juguete,” in Prosas, III, 96-100.

15. Casal, “Un hemisferio en una cabellera,” in Prosas, III, 119.

16. Casal, “En el cafetal,” in Prosas, I, 222. Malpica, the writer whose novel Casal reviews, had translated Baudelaire into Spanish.

17. Marcel Ruff, Baudelaire, L'Homme et l'æuvre (Paris: Hatier-Boivin, 1955), p. 58.

18. Casal, “El hombre de las muletas de níquel,” in Prosas, I, 233.

19. Casal, “Esteban Borrero Echeverría,” in Prosas, I, 263.

20. Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 110.

21. Casal, “Croquis femenino: Derrochadora,” in Prosas, II, 147-48.

22. See Arturo Torres Ríoseco, “À Rebours and Two Sonnets of Julián del Casal,” Hispanic Review, 23 (1955), 295-97.

23. See Robert Jay Glickman, “Julián del Casal: Letters to Gustave Moreau,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, 37 (1972-1973), 101-35; and Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, A Critical Edition, II (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 180-87.

24. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 180.

25. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 187.

26. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 192.

27. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 192.

28. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 206.

29. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 207.

30. Julius Kaplan, Gustave Moreau (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York Graphic Society, 1974), p. 34.

31. Kaplan, p. 95.

32. In his poem “En el campo,” for example, at the same time that he rejects the natural, Casal portrays it with sensitivity.

33. Kaplan, p. 34.

34. Casal, Prosas, Edición del Centenario, III, 189.

35. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 304.

36. In À rebours Des Esseintes broods upon the multiple symbolism of the lotus as a phallic symbol, an allegory of fertility, a symbol of “la danseuse, la femme mortelle, le Vase souillé, cause de tous les péchés et de tous les crimes.” He also relates it to the embalming custom of ancient Egypt, in which lotus petals were inserted in the sexual organs of the corpses for the purpose of purification. Gladys Zaldívar accepts Juan Eduardo Cirlot's identification of the lotus as a “centro místico,” which has the same evocations as the rose in Western culture, in the sense that Mary is called the Mystic Rose, an archetype of innocence and chastity. See Gladys Zaldívar, “Dos temas de la búsqueda metafísica,” in Julián del Casal: Estudios críticos sobre su obra (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1974), p. 144; and Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Diccionario de símbolos tradicionales (Barcelona: Miracles, 1958), p. 270.

37. Zaldívar, p. 144.

38. Lee Fontanella has studied the absence of Parnassian ekfrasis in Casal's deeply personal interpretations of Moreau's paintings; see Lee Fontanella, “Parnassian Precept and a New Way of Seeing Casal's Museo ideal,” Comparative Literature Studies, 7 (1970), 450-79.

39. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 212-13.

40. Ibid., pp. 211-12.

41. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal: A Critical Edition, I (Gainesville: The University Presses of Florida, 1976), 146. References to this volume of Glickman's three-volume critical edition will be cited as Poetry, I, within the body of this study. In “A la Belleza,” in order to demobilize the threatening fantasies of the woman, Casal insists upon the non-sexual nature of Beauty: “Yo sé que eres más blanca que los cisnes, / más pura que los astros, / fría como las vírgenes y amarga / cual corrosivos ácidos.”

42. “Salomé” was first published on September 21, 1890, in La Habana Elegante. “Elena” and “Galatea” were published in La Habana Elegante on August 2 and 9, 1891, respectively.

43. Reproduced in Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 182.

44. Ibid., pp. 190-91.

45. Ibid., p. 190.

46. Ibid., p. 215.

47. Ibid., p. 288.

48. “Bénédiction” is the first poem in the collection Spleen et idéal at the beginning of Les Fleurs du mal.

49. Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, II, 288.

50. Cintio Vitier presumes that this poet is Baudelaire, “de cuyo ideario y sensibilidad … estaba tan penetrado Casal.” See Cintio Vitier, “Casal como antítesis de Martí. Hastío, forma, belleza, asimilación y originalidad. Nuevos rasgos de lo cubano. ‘El frío’ y ‘lo otro,’” in Prosas, Edición del Centenario, I, by Casal, p. 94.

51. Charles Baudelaire, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” in Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires par Edgar Poe, ed. M. Jacques Crépet (Paris: Louis Conard, 1933), p. xx.

52. Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. E. H. Davidson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 470.

53. Robert Mitchell Torrance, “Ideal and Spleen: The Failure of Transcendent Vision in Romantic, Symbolist and Modern Poetry,” Diss. Harvard 1969, p. 112.

54. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 32.

55. Emerson, “Nature,” p. 32.

56. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 227.

57. The poems of Rimas were written while Casal was dying from the illness which would kill him before publication of the work could be completed. Not surprisingly, therefore, his personal suffering is reflected in the themes of illness, pain, and death which are repeated throughout the poetry. Esperanza Figueroa identifies Casal's illness as tuberculosis. See Esperanza Figueroa, “Comentario bibliográfico y rectificaciones,” in Julián del Casal: Estudios críticos sobre su obra, pp. 18-21.

58. See Esperanza Figueroa, “Bibliografía cronológica de la obra de Julián del Casal,” Revista Iberoamericana, 35 (1969), 398.

59. Casal, Prosas, I, 254. Corrections to the text have been based on the Antoine Adam edition of Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1961), pp. 68-9.

60. Letter to Alfred De Vigny, in Correspondance générale de Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques Crépet, IV (Paris: Louis Conard, 1948), 9.

61. Ruff, p. 108. For additional discussions of the structure of Les Fleurs du mal see L. F. Benedetto, “L'Architecture des ‘Fleurs de mal’,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 39 (1912), 18-70; and Albert Feuillerat, “L'Architecture des Fleurs du mal,” in Studies by Members of the French Department of Yale University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), pp. 221-330.

62. Ruff, p. 121.