Indecision in Mussets “Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie”

Abstract

In the early and middle years of French Romanticism, few writers and fewer critics succeeded in defining the movement clearly and positively. Hugo's Preface de Cromwell, published in 1827, the most prominent of Romantic manifestos, is seen to be inadequate when one examines its validity in so far as even Hugo himself was concerned. What relevance does the Preface have in such disparate works as Les Orientales (1829), Le Dernier Jour d'1tn Condamne (1829), Hernani (1830), and Les Feuilles d'Automne (1831)? Earlier, Stendhal, in his Racine et Shakespeare, had argued on much safer grounds, by declaring that being Romantic meant being being of one's age, but this says little. Despite the manifestos, despite Hernani, despite the Cenacle, Sainte-Beuve, Le Globe, despite Chateaubriand and Lamartine, Romanticism meant different things for different writers. In England, the role and significance of imagination binds together the principal exponents of Romanticism, with the glaring exception of Byron. In France no one quality or characteristic unifies the writers of the 1820S and 1830s. There were many strands and many short-lived fashions. Apart from experimentation and innovation in form, versification and vocabulary, Romanticism was manifested in a predilection for the Orient, Spain, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; for England, Shakespeare, Ossian, Byron; for Werther and Rene's mal du siecle; for the glorification and even sanctification of nature and love; for liberalism, political opposition, Republicanism, monarchy, socio-political awareness .... For a nineteen-year-old writer, in 1829, striving to be both original and modern, such a picture was indeed bewildering. Musset's Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie can be seen as a product of this bewilderment. The Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, published by Lemerre in December 1829, were intended to give substance to Musset's claim to be allowed to become a writer. His father was engaged in securing a post at the Ministry of War for his son; he had to be dissuaded from such a course. The poems were first read before a large audience of the Cenacle on Christmas Eve, 1829, an occasion which Dumas describes in his Memoires. The reception must have been pleasing to a young debut ant who had just celebrated his nineteenth birthday. Although all did not rush to acclaim the new poet, he was attentively heard, the young ladies blushed, the orthodox Romantics were scandalized by some of the liberties in his versification. Once the Contes! were published, critics felt impelled to review the work at length; an aunt, the Chanoinesse de Vendome, disinherited him, and Harel, the Director of the