The big good poets of French Romanticism - finally I make use of my French - for all of the good it does me

I have in front of me The Oxford Book of French Verse, first published in 1907, “Chosen by St. John Lucas,” a 500 page collection of French poems in French, with only the introduction and notes in English.  Just about half of the book covers the 19th century, and half of that is just four poets: Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset.  Those are the poets I want to linger over here.  You may note that I have skipped the Revolution and the “little bad poets of the Empire,” as the saint calls them (p. xxx).  I was going to say something dismissive, but not that cruel.  For whatever reason, Bonaparte was not good for French literature.

It roared back to life in the 1820s, first with the poets, then the theatre, and then the novel and its variants, but that will be more in the 1830s.  It began with The Poetic Meditations (1820) of Lamartine, and for him that is almost where it ended, since he used his fame to go into politics.  Inventing French Romanticism was only one of his accomplishments.

I am not entirely sure what French Romanticism is.  It is in large part an argument with French Classicism, and I am not so sure what that is.  I am reading an old school edition of Hugo’s Les feuillles d’automnes (Autumn Leaves, 1831) which includes notes about Hugo’s many violation of Classical rules, such as when he uses feminine rhymes inappropriately or puts the caesura in the wrong place.  If you say so, I think.  An advanced topic in French prosody.  Anyway, these poets are doing it wrong, however subtly, which was once pretty exciting.

My memory of the relevant English translations:

There’s a pretty good translation of Lamartine’s Meditations.

There is a functional but dull translation of Musset’s complete poems.

Given his stature, there is not much Hugo in English.

There is close to no Vigny in English.  No idea why.

A short selected Musset and selected Vigny would be valuable additions to English literature, hint hint, poetic translators.  Vigny and Musset have plays available in good English.  See Vigny’s Chatterton (1835) for some intense French Romanticism as reflected in an imaginary version of an actual misunderstood, doomed teenage poet.

I read that one in French while reading Vigny’s complete poems, now that I could.  I have also been filling in some Hugo, a tiny fraction of his thousands of pages of poems.  That would be a feat, reading Hugo’s complete poems.

Vigny wrote narrative poems, mostly in rhyming couplets.  Stories about Roland, Jesus, “The Anger of Samson,” (the death of) “Moses,” “The Death of the Wolf” – how the French love stories about wolves.  I could not believe how many children’s books there are about wolves, both funny and scary.  The hunter in the poem kills the wolf, but learns that wolves are better than people, or no worse.

Early Hugo has been a surprise and just what I expected.  He was immediately Hugolian, from the poems written when he was 18, hugely skilled, confident or a blowhard depending on one’s taste.  His first few little books, collected in Odes and Ballads (1828), are all political, legitimist, about the great fallen heroes who fought the Revolution.  I certainly learned the word for “executioner,” since it appears in every poem.  This is not the Hugo who is the champion of the powerless.  The primary victim of capital punishment he has in mind is Louis XVI.

Hugo changed quickly.  Maybe the poor are the subjects of the last half of Odes et Ballades.  I only read the first half.  Hugo exhausted me.

I have one complaint, which I can at this point make about Vigny and Hugo: they were not great rhymers.  They use lots of conventional rhymes, and there is clearly no penalty for repeating them in poem after poem – ombre / sombre (shadow / dark) , orage / nuage or orage / ombrage (storm / snow, shady), essor / trésor (flight / treasure) – that last one is the worst, since it is so phony.  The poets of a couple of a generation later wouldn’t allow this.  Paul Verlaine put an end to it.

When the painter is a writer in disguise

When an author writes a story about another artist – a painter, a composer, a choreographer* – what is she really writing about? Recently, I wrote that I always assume that the artist character is really a disguised writer. A little glib, I know, but this is my starting point until convinced otherwise.

A novelist who wants to write about the source or character or limits of her own creativity may want to avoid directly writing about another writer. One reason is to appear a bit less narcissistic, another is to create some distance between the author and her subject.

Some examples, 19th century and modern. I know two Balzac stories about painters, The Unknown Masterpiece (1832) and Pierre Grassou (1840) , both of which seem to me like blatant statements about Balzac’s own purpose. In The Unknown Masterpiece, a great master labors over a single painting for a decade, and to what end?** The contrast to Balzac’s own massive productivity is obvious. Pierre Grassou goes in the other direction. The painter is a prolific hack who becomes successful because of the ignorance of his audience. This one has a great twist ending, perfectly obvious but no less entertaining. Both stories might as well have called the central character “Not Balzac.”

A modern, modernist, example: in The Lost Steps (1953) Alejo Carpentier takes a composer from New York City up the Orinoco into the Venezuelan jungle. The composer is struggling with an oratorio based on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. The novel is a critique or investigation of Romantic notions of the Primitive. Some people hate being told what a novel is about in such stark terms, and a rich book like The Lost Steps is “about” more than one thing, sure. But, no kidding, Romantic notions of the Primitive – ignore that and you ignore most of the book. If the narrator were a painter or writer or photographer some details would change, possibly in interesting ways, but not the central question.

To be clear: I don’t think that Balzac or Carpentier or Gogol are writing about writing as such when they tell these stories (Lost Illusions is Balzac writing about writing as such). They’re writing about creativity. That’s the subject they can displace onto another art form.

Tomorrow, the deep end of the pool (and I'm not such a strong swimmer): when the form makes all the difference.

Thanks to the Incurable Logophile for the suggestion. Got me thinking.

* Half kidding about the choreographer. What are the great novels or stories about choreographers? No idea. Suggestions welcome.

** The Unknown Masterpiece has taken on a life of its own, interpreted by later readers in ways that might shock Balzac. More on that some other time.

Cruel Spain, Romantic Spain

Dr. Johnson advised a young James Boswell to visit Spain and write a book about it. Johnson thought it would make his reputation – there were no books in England about Spain. This was in 1763. Boswell followed the core of Johnson’s advice, very successfully, but went to Corsica rather than Spain. So England maintained its ignorance.

An educated Englishman in the 17th or 18th century might have had a lot to say about Spain, actually. The Spanish were cruel, backwards, superstitious, enchained by a sort of primitive degeneration of Catholicism, ruled by sinister monks and Jesuits, who used murder and kidnapping to pursue power and wealth. And that’s just in Spain – in America, the Spanish were even worse, more brutal, more destructive. The Spanish were monsters, basically.

Later writers called this “The Black Legend”. It’s a complicated mix of genuine information and concern about what we now call human rights abuses in America and bizarre concoctions, often lurid, always anti-Catholic, about monasteries and Jesuits. See Matthew Lewis’s Gothic hackwork The Monk (1795) or Charles Maturin’s brilliant, insane, anti-Catholic nightmare Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1590 or so) is an early example. I happened to hear Beethoven’s Fidelio (1814?) last night, which is another one – a real story about a terrible French prison is in the opera transferred to Seville.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, it was actually Italy rather than Spain that played the same role – see John Webster, or Thomas Otway, or almost any poison and murder-fueled revenge tragedy, aside from Kyd. I don’t know when the shift away from Italy occurred. I assume it is related to the rise of The Grand Tour. As English people visited Italy in significant numbers, the portrayal of Italians as power-mad lunatics began to ring false. Englishmen didn’t go to Spain until 1808, as soldiers in a bloody, protracted war.

Did the exposure change the perception of Spain? I don’t know. But Romanticism, that did the trick. Romantics were attracted to the exoticism of Spain – the not-so-distant Moorish heritage and architecture, the bullfights, Spanish notions of honor. Byron, in Lara and the first book of Don Juan, for example, or Merimeé’s Carmen, or Washington Irving’s genial Tales from the Alhambra. For the Romantics, the bandits and gypsies and primitivism were wonderful, signs of an authentic culture, an alternative to all the modern problems of more advanced civilizations.

The Romantics may have been full of nonsense in their own way, although their attitude is a lot more pleasant. And at least these writers had been to Spain – Irving, at least, truly fell in love with it. They were the first writers of note that I know of to be interested in Spain as it actually existed.

Balzac - it was so beautiful, and at the same time so full of horror

"What Love May Cost an Old Man" - that's the title of the second part of A Harlot High and Low, published in 1843, four years after the first part.* The old man is Baron de Nucingen, a banker, who longtime Balzac readers know from several earlier stories.

Nucingen catches a single glimpse (in the dark, somehow) of the retired harlot Esther, and begins to pine away from love. Esther has been living in a sort of love nest for five years, perfectly happy, renouncing everything but her beautiful Lucien. Lucien, by contrast, under the control of a sinister Spanish priest, spends his time in society, spending money, keeping mistresses, and trying to marry the wealthy daughter of a duchess.

The only obstacle to the marriage is money. Lucien and the priest need a million francs to buy an estate, so Lucien will look legitimately respectable. The Baron de Nucingen gives them the opportunity they need - they just need to sell Esther to the Baron for a million francs.

"Lucien cast upon Esther a begging look, the look of a weak, greedy man, his heart full of tenderness, his character that of a coward. Esther answered with a sign of the head which meant: 'I must listen to the executioner and learn how to place my head beneath the axe, and I shall die bravely.' It was so beautiful, and at the same time so full of horror, that the poet wept; Esther ran to him, folded him in her arms, drank the tear and said to him: 'Don't worry!' a thing said with the eyes and with a gesture, and with the voice of madness." (161)

Drank the tear, did she. Anyway, this is where part 1 ends. Part 2 mostly involves the negotiations among various parties over Esther's price. It's one of the crassest things I've ever read. There must be a monetary figure mentioned every other page.

"So the goldsmith will have to be paid thirty thousand francs and the pawnbroker another ten thousand before the plate can be got at. Total: forty-three thousand francs with expenses." (179)

On and on like this. The Baron is cheated and squeezed at every turn, although between the irritating accent Balzac forces on him, and the fact that he's essentially buying a slave, I would guess he does not find many readers who feel too sorry for him.

Fortunately, or tragically, or predictably, Esther has a final act of renunciation in reserve.**

That's the way the novel works, the collision between the purest Romantic love, and the most vulgar commercial and criminal life. Some of this is pretty ordinary irony - who's the true harlot? Sometimes the gulf seems too wide to comprehend. This is all in the same book? That friction, the clash between the high and low, is brought to life in A Harlot. However absurd the results, that's why we still read this book.

* A Harlot High and Low has a strange publication history. It is clearly one novel, but the four parts were published as separate volumes in 1839, 1843, 1845, and 1847.

** Boy, that's a lot of story. Maybe too much. And this just gets us through Part 2, ignoring subplots. There's still half of the book left, with at least as much activity.

Cooper the realist, Cooper the Romantic*

Every writer creates his own world. The relationship between the writer's world and the real one can be tricky. Cooper set The Deerslayer on Lake Otsego, a real place, at the beginning of a real war between England and France in 1745. He spends a lot of time telling us exactly how various canoes are situated on the lake, how people are dressed, the direction of the currents. This is a realistic novel, right?

Well, sometimes. But when pious, "feeble-minded" Hetty falls asleep in the woods, and is awakened by a pair of bear cubs, who, with their mother, accompany her as she walks along the shore, the novel has moved somewhere else - to Tasso's Arcadia, or The Faerie Queen.

Or how about when the Lady in the Lake gives Deerslayer his famous magic rifle Killdeer? Yes, the (or a) Lady in the Lake. Yes, the rifle has a name, just like Roland's sword Durandal, or Excalibur. We're a lot closer to Morte d'Arthur and Orlando Furioso than to Lewis and Clark's Journals. The Deerslayer is Natty Bumppo's "origin" story, written last but telling readers who already know his adventures how he got the name Hawkeye, how he got his reputation, and his rifle. It's all suitably heroic.

Perhaps this sounds dismissive. I don't mean that. I think it helps to know what a person is reading. Twain's complaints about violations of realism are funny but irrelevant. Cooper's world is fundamentally unreal. His American frontier is closer to the real world than that of, for example, Chateaubriand's Atala, with its hermit priests and Kentucky crocodiles. But as in Atala, the semi-real setting is used to emphasize other concerns. I'll try to pin those down tomorrow.

There's been a revival of scholarly interest in Cooper lately. This article from an the NEH Humanities journal is a good place to learn about that. Cooper more or less invented the spy novel, the sailing novel, and the Western. So Cooper gives scholars interested in genre and reception a lot to work with. He's also been picked up by people interested in early environmentalism, interested in, for example, the scene in The Pioneers where a flock of passenger pigeons are slaughtered. I think this is all pretty interesting, but the there are limits to how far the non-scholarly Amateur Reader can go with this sort of thing.

* Careful, son. "Romantic" is a tangled term. The Deerslayer is Romantic in that it has the qualities of the old Romance genre (Boiardo, Malory, Ariosto). It's also Romantic in that it explores or advocates post-Enlightenment ideas associated with Romanticisim. But these two definitions are only barely related. I seem to only mean the first one here.

Why so little love for the Germans?

Should I spend more time explaining why the German Romantics – the German 19th century, really – has had such bad luck in the English-speaking literary world? Or wondering why, not explaining, since I don’t know the answer.

There’s something strange about the tone of a lot of Romantic German fiction, something I do not know how to describe well. Sometimes it’s a sort of gentleness or serenity, even amidst the strangest events. I’m thinking of Adalbert Stifter here, or Goethe’s Elective Affinities, or some of Hoffmann’s fantasias. They all take place in a version of the real world that has been shifted, so that everything is just a little off. We are used to this in fantasy and horror stories, but in realistic stories many readers don’t know what to do. That’s a guess.

A few German Romantics are really difficult to understand. The poets Novalis and Hölderlin, for example, or part 2 of Faust. Strangely, these really hard works are often as easy to find in English as more straightforward books by Storm or Keller or many others.

None of this explains the case of Fontane, who writes in a similar style to Flaubert and Turgenev. Effi Briest ought to be as well-known as Madame Bovary. Or how about Heinrich von Kleist, hard to take, but very much a modern writer.

I may be wrong. Penguin Classics keeps a number of these writers in print, which means that someone, somewhere is teaching them. Fontane, Hoffmann, Mörike, just recently a selection of Heine’s prose. Keeping up the good fight.

Compare the status (in America) of 19th century German literature with that of Russian literature. With some trepidation, I’m joining an internet reading challenge for Russian literature. Everyone want to use it as a goad to start or finish War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, that sort of thing. In a German challenge, the focus would be very different – some Goethe, sure, but more Mann, Musil, and Grass, not so much Green Henry or Wilhelm Meister.

Schumann and the Romantic Age

Marcel Brion’s Schumann and the Romantic Age (1956) is mostly about Robert Schumann, his life and work. The book is well written, and Schumann’s life makes for a first-rate story – his fight to marry Clara, the madness that destroyed him, his continual creative struggle.

But then there’s the Romantic Age, meaning the world of Liszt and Chopin, but also Romantic literature – German literature. This book about music is also an essay on a body of work that is unfortunately obscure and difficult to access. The first chapter is basically about Schumann’s early reading – Hoffmann, Tieck, Goethe, and huge quantities of Jean Paul. A later chapter gives us a quick history of lieder, where the ties to German poetry are obvious.

For some reason, this group of writers has never quite found favor in England or America. As a result, translations are rare or non-existent, even of some major works. Brion, discussing Schumann’s one opera (Genoveva, never performed anymore), says that he had to choose between two different treatments of the saint’s life, one by Ludwig Tieck and the other by Friedrich Hebbel, one gentle, the other tragic. Both sound very interesting. Good luck to the reader without German.

What is frustrating is that the stories and poems I have been able to track down are inevitably interesting, and often brilliant. Tieck’s story Blonde Eckbert is a dream-like masterpiece. Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, about a man who sells his shadow, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine, about the perils of marrying a water spirit, are almost as good. Then there’s Schumann’s favorite, Jean Paul, Laurence Sterne’s great disciple.

There are exceptions – Goethe, Kleist, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, even as difficult a writer as Hölderlin are fairly easily available. But why is it so hard to find a translation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”, an enormously famous story thanks to Tchaikovsky? Why has his great novel The Devil’s Elixir been out of print since the 1960s?

These writers have had their champions – Carlyle, Poe, Ford Madox Ford. They translated, they advocated, they became frustrated, in the last regard much like me.