Class 2: Mystic Twilight

Class 2: Mystic Twilight A. What’s in a Title? 1. Title Slide 1 (closing slide from last week) 2. Title transformation video 3. Title Slide 2 (Redon: Reflection) Using my file of slides for last week as a template for this one, I found an amusing thing. The last slide I showed before, a painting of Nôtre Dame at Sunset by Albert Lebourg (1849–1928), could serve equally well for this one, although I chose a different painting to go on the website. 4. Comparison of Lebourg and Redon An amusing coincidence—but it also provides a “teachable moment.” Let’s compare the Lebourg with the picture I actually chose: Reflection (1910) by Odilon Redon (1840–1916). Both are twilight pictures, both have a similar color palette and mood, both have roughly the same composition—but Lebourg is recording a real view, while Redon is depicting ideas in the mind. Lebourg, a relatively minor painter from Rouen, was not an Impressionist, but he certainly follows their example in painting an actual view in summary form, concerned not with detail but with the effect of light at a particular time of day. Redon, who was one of the major painters of the Symbolist movement, my main theme today, is also unconcerned with spelling out particulars. Is this a real place? Probably not. What is causing those sparks in the water? We don’t know. Who is the woman? We don’t know that either. What is she thinking? Ah, that’s the point: we don’t know; the picture invites us to guess, but it is not going to give us an answer. All the elements in the picture—sky, mountains, water, sparling highlights, and pensive woman—are there because of their emotive associations. The picture is not complete without the viewer’s mind to bring it all together. I came upon the comparison quite by accident, but I could not think of a better way to explain the difference between the two main aesthetics in France at the end of the century, Impressionism and Symbolism. 5. Redon quotation As Redon said: “My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” This aesthetic, Symbolism, is the subject of today’s class. I shall devote the first hour mainly to its poets, whose field of action was basically secular. The second hour will look at how often that “ambiguous realm of the undetermined” would expand into the spiritual. 6. Frédéric Bazille: Paul Verlaine at 23 (1867) Another coincidence. Almost as soon as I started preparing this class, and weeks after I had decided its title, “Mystic Twilight,” I came upon a poem by this man Paul Verlaine (1844–96) called “Twilight of a Mystical Evening.” It was included in the collection Poèmes Saturniens (Poems under Saturn), that made — 1 — him famous when he published it at the age of 22. Sometime in the year after that, Verlaine would meet the equally young painter Frédéric Bazille (1841–70), who was so excited by his friendship that he picked up on of his own still-lifes and dashed off this painting in tribute. Here is the poem, read by Nathalie Mussard shown with a translation by A. S. Kline. 7. Verlaine: Crépuscule du soir mystique, read by Nathalie Mussard 8. — still from the above Let’s look more closely. First, the linking of twilight with memory, the external moment triggering internal thoughts. Second, the shape of a poem, which looks like a sonnet, but it not sectionalized like one; indeed there is no heavy punctuation to impede its flow from beginning to end. Third, the fact that although each group of two or three lines makes its own sense, it is very difficult to resolve the whole into a coherent sentence; Velaine piles image upon image—and if they connect, it is not as a chain of meaning, but as a cloud. 9. Odilon Redon: Woman with Flowers (1910) And what about those flowers—dahlias, lilies, tulips, and (in the French) buttercups? They don’t fit into context either time they appear; they don’t grow on trellises, and they do not have a strong perfume. But they do have intense color; if appealing to one or two senses is good, appealing to three or four is even better. Symbolist painters such as Redon often used flowers in a similar way, as an intensification of sensation. And Verlaine is intense; look at the three words I have highlighted here: maladive means sickly, or even morbid; poison is exactly that, not merely a heady scent, but an actual poison; and pâmoison means fainting, something strong enough to make you lose consciousness. 10. Poldowski portrait Normally, I use the visual arts as the main element in my presentations, because they are right there in front of you, there is no language barrier, and they take no time to show. But I can’t talk about Symbolism without talking about poetry, since that is where the movement started. And I can’t rely solely on translations, partly because no one translator can capture all the nuances of the Symbolists’ verbal imagery, and also because you at least need to sample the sound of the French, whether spoken or, as here, sung. But I am including this setting too because its composer was hitherto unknown to me—most probably ignored as a woman, but now sought out to right the balance. Régine Wieniawski (1879–1932) was the daughter of the celebrated Polish violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski. It is not entirely clear where she trained, but when her father died she moved with her mother to London, where she met and in 1901 married Sir Aubrey Dean Paul, becoming Lady Dean Paul herself—which would make her a distant cousin by marriage of Winston Churchill! She continued to study and compose, however, and had great success with her Verlaine songs, composed around 1910, under the pseudoym she was using at the time, Poldowski. She is later, but she catches the spirit, I think. 11. Poldowski: Crépuscule du soir mystique (Ensemble 1904) — 2 — B. Accursed Poets 12. Four Symbolist Poets In 1884, Verlaine published an anthology of six contemporary French poets that he called Poètes maudits, or “Accursed Poets.” Wikipedia explains it: “A poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit.” Three of the six are shown here: Verlaine himself (under the anagrammatic pseudonym “Pauvre Lelian”), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98). The man at the top right, Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), belongs to an older generation and is not included, but he was one of the first of whom the term was used, and can be considered the godfather of the Symbolist Movement. For the rest of this hour, I am going to concentrate only on these poets; I shall range more widely after the break. 13. Paul Verlaine: Ars Poetica And what was Symbolist poetry? Verlaine wrote a youthful poem about it, Art poetique; here are four of its verses, translated by Norman Shapiro. You see he values spontaneity, free association, and irregularity unconstrained by rigid rules. He also says—and this is important—that a poem should be like music. Again and again we shall find, as we venture into Modernism, that the arts in other media— poetry, prose, painting, and even sculpture—aspire to the condition of music. 14. Baudelaire: Harmonie du soir (1866) In a previous course, I showed this poem from Baudelaire’s 1857 collection, Harmonie du soir or Evening Harmony. Just look at it for a moment, whether you read French or not. I will give you a translation in a moment. Note its intricate structure, lines from one stanza carried through to the next in mesmeric incantation. This is an exception to Verlaine’s distaste for structure, but it is music! Just listen to the effect of the sonorous repetitions when read aloud by the excellent Denis Lavant. There is so much sonority in the words that the music in the background is spurious; it is a violin arrangement of a song from The Merry Widow. 15. Baudelaire: Harmonie du soir, read by Denis Lavant 16. Baudelaire: Evening Harmony, translated by Roy Campbell There is a site on the web that gives five different translations of each of several Baudelaire poems. All have different qualities; none is perfect. Looking at this one by Roy Campbell, I want you to notice the Catholic imagery of “censer,” “altar,” and “monstrance.” And especially the synesthesia, the combination of sights, sounds, scents, and colors. It is a poem entirely devoted to the senses—all the senses—which suffuse the reader as with the smoke of opium. 17. Baudelaire and Les fleurs du mal I would not want you to think that Baudelaire spent his days swooning in the scent of incense. He was very much a poet of the here and now, and could be quite direct in his sexual frankness. When he — 3 — published Fleurs du mal (Fowers of Evil) in 1857, he was prosecuted for indecency, and several of his poems were excised—those dealing with lesbianism or sado-masochism, for instance. But, as he said in his introduction to the collection, the poet must be open to everything. When with some friends discussing the greatest pleasure love can give, he maintained that the true pleasure of love was “the certainly of doing evil.

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