Richard et Cosima Wagner: Lettres à Judith GautierReview by: Alison FairlieThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Jul., 1966), pp. 523-524Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3721526 .

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Reviews 523

d'Histoire littiraire (1952). He can be excused for crediting Antoine Adam (Verlaine, 1'homme et 1'aeuvre) with the discovery that Verlaine borrowed the title of Birds in the Night from Sir Arthur Sullivan, since Adam did not make it clear that he obtained this fact from my thesis. M. Cuenot also refers the reader to Adam's account of Verlaine's library and reading-matter, without noticing my complete publication of Verlaine's own book-lists (Revue des Sciences humaines, i955).

Less excusable is his uncritical use of a faulty text (the first edition of the Pleiade CEuvres Poetiques Completes, 1938) which the editor, Le Dantec, improved upon later. M. Cuenot has evidently not noticed the textual corrections in my editions, since he quotes lafange des trottoirs p. 76) rhyming with l'air noir: I pointed out in my edition of La Bonne Chanson that as Verlaine would not have rhymed plurals with singulars at such a period of sagesse as when he was composing La Bonne Chanson, this must be a printing error, and Le Dantec agreed by adopting my reading, lafange du trottoir, in later editions. In any case the rhyme trottoirs: noir, if authentic, would have called for special comment which M. Cuenot does not make. He does make the strange statement: 'Verlaine s'interesse peu aux rapports de l'homme et de la nature' (p. 30). Surely few writers have registered such intense interaction of mood with nature, in the Rousseau manner (Ariettes oubliees, Les faux beaux jours ...) or, going further, merging with Nature, so to speak (II pleure dans mon coeur . ..). And how can it be said that the toper who obviously enjoyed fairs (Chevaux de bois) and London crowds (Kaleidoscope, 0 civilises que civilise ...) 'n'est pas un homme des foules' ?

It is a serious lack in such a copiously useful book that there is no index. The awkward format and roneotype do not make for ease of reading either, but they are not M. Cuenot's fault: it is a mystery why French cultural authorities did not give this important piece of work the presentation it deserved. UN

LONDON

Richard et Cosima Wagner: Lettres a Judith Gautier. Presentees et annotees par LEON GUICHARD. Paris: Gallimard. I964. 384 pp.+12 plates. 22.90 N.F.

The text of this pleasantly produced book comprises thirty-five letters or parts of letters by Wagner, sixty-seven by Cosima Wagner, and two (numbered 66 and 69 in the section of letters from Cosima) by Judith Gautier. Those of Wagner had for the major part already been published, though dating, order, and textual readings were highly unsatisfactory, as shown by M. Guichard in his Avertissement (pp. 32-4) and in the very detailed notes. Those of Cosima are mainly inddites. A section of Addenda, pp. 359-82, is based on 'les souvenirs inedits de celle qui vecut pendant quinze ans dans l'intimite de Judith Gautier, Suzanne Meyer-Zundel'.

The letters are of interest rather as documents on the everyday life and back- ground of their writers than for any revelation of artistic principles or general views. There are brief remarks by Wagner on certain of his works, and one significant early letter (12/8/70) discussing the difference between 'l'esprit fransais' and that of Germany, but the rest are scraps concerned with the details of satins and scents which Judith is to buy in Paris for his household, or momentary evocations of a mutual attraction now confined to the melancholy of the might-have-been and never allowed to disrupt family life with Cosima.

Cosima herself writes with intelligence, sensitivity, and wit; her letters give a live and totally unsentimental picture of a family unit where ambition and frustra- tion are met with patience, humour, wide intellectual and artistic interests, and a joy in children and the countryside. Points of detail can be gleaned concerning the intentions behind Wagner's works, reactions to them, and, occasionally, those of

Reviews 523

d'Histoire littiraire (1952). He can be excused for crediting Antoine Adam (Verlaine, 1'homme et 1'aeuvre) with the discovery that Verlaine borrowed the title of Birds in the Night from Sir Arthur Sullivan, since Adam did not make it clear that he obtained this fact from my thesis. M. Cuenot also refers the reader to Adam's account of Verlaine's library and reading-matter, without noticing my complete publication of Verlaine's own book-lists (Revue des Sciences humaines, i955).

Less excusable is his uncritical use of a faulty text (the first edition of the Pleiade CEuvres Poetiques Completes, 1938) which the editor, Le Dantec, improved upon later. M. Cuenot has evidently not noticed the textual corrections in my editions, since he quotes lafange des trottoirs p. 76) rhyming with l'air noir: I pointed out in my edition of La Bonne Chanson that as Verlaine would not have rhymed plurals with singulars at such a period of sagesse as when he was composing La Bonne Chanson, this must be a printing error, and Le Dantec agreed by adopting my reading, lafange du trottoir, in later editions. In any case the rhyme trottoirs: noir, if authentic, would have called for special comment which M. Cuenot does not make. He does make the strange statement: 'Verlaine s'interesse peu aux rapports de l'homme et de la nature' (p. 30). Surely few writers have registered such intense interaction of mood with nature, in the Rousseau manner (Ariettes oubliees, Les faux beaux jours ...) or, going further, merging with Nature, so to speak (II pleure dans mon coeur . ..). And how can it be said that the toper who obviously enjoyed fairs (Chevaux de bois) and London crowds (Kaleidoscope, 0 civilises que civilise ...) 'n'est pas un homme des foules' ?

It is a serious lack in such a copiously useful book that there is no index. The awkward format and roneotype do not make for ease of reading either, but they are not M. Cuenot's fault: it is a mystery why French cultural authorities did not give this important piece of work the presentation it deserved. UN

LONDON

Richard et Cosima Wagner: Lettres a Judith Gautier. Presentees et annotees par LEON GUICHARD. Paris: Gallimard. I964. 384 pp.+12 plates. 22.90 N.F.

The text of this pleasantly produced book comprises thirty-five letters or parts of letters by Wagner, sixty-seven by Cosima Wagner, and two (numbered 66 and 69 in the section of letters from Cosima) by Judith Gautier. Those of Wagner had for the major part already been published, though dating, order, and textual readings were highly unsatisfactory, as shown by M. Guichard in his Avertissement (pp. 32-4) and in the very detailed notes. Those of Cosima are mainly inddites. A section of Addenda, pp. 359-82, is based on 'les souvenirs inedits de celle qui vecut pendant quinze ans dans l'intimite de Judith Gautier, Suzanne Meyer-Zundel'.

The letters are of interest rather as documents on the everyday life and back- ground of their writers than for any revelation of artistic principles or general views. There are brief remarks by Wagner on certain of his works, and one significant early letter (12/8/70) discussing the difference between 'l'esprit fransais' and that of Germany, but the rest are scraps concerned with the details of satins and scents which Judith is to buy in Paris for his household, or momentary evocations of a mutual attraction now confined to the melancholy of the might-have-been and never allowed to disrupt family life with Cosima.

Cosima herself writes with intelligence, sensitivity, and wit; her letters give a live and totally unsentimental picture of a family unit where ambition and frustra- tion are met with patience, humour, wide intellectual and artistic interests, and a joy in children and the countryside. Points of detail can be gleaned concerning the intentions behind Wagner's works, reactions to them, and, occasionally, those of

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.103 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 16:58:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Cosima's father, Liszt. She reads and briefly comments on the works of Leconte de Lisle and Flaubert, and orders the recently published translations of Indian epics for Wagner. It is she who makes translations of the words of Wagner's operas into French for Judith Gautier to work up with the help of the faithful friend Benedictus: it seems that at one stage Leconte de Lisle was envisaged (pp. 68 and I86) to provide the final version for Parsifal, though Cosima had reservations about his ability to convey the full spirit of the original. What emerges particularly clearly, thanks to M. Guichard's notes, is the extent to which Judith Gautier made use of Cosima's letters when writing her own memoirs, at times attributing to herself some of Cosima's live and firm ideas and expressions.

The editor's very thorough notes (occupying pp. 241-356) contain much helpful material on personalities of the period, in particular Gautier, Catulle Mendes, Augusta Holmes, and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Brief letters from Wagner to Gautier and Gautier to Wagner are given in pp. 264-5, and, in the Addenda, letters from Hugo and Gautier (pp. 365, 367-9). An index of proper names would have been useful.

The plates, with portraits of Wagner, Cosima, and Judith, give facsimiles of five letters (one by Judith not being included in the text) and of one ofJudith's sonnets of passionate homage to Wagner. If one compares the facsimile of the letter of

I or I2 December 1877 with the reading given in the text (pp. 75-7) a number of minor errors may be noted. M. Guichard stated in his Avertissement that 'de ces lettres .. . j'ai respecte la ponctuation et l'orthographe': in this letter five punctua- tion marks or accents have been altered and Wagner's 'signalisees' has been corrected to 'signalees'. These are, of course, very small points in an edition which in general appears meticulous in its examination of detail. Both text and notes throw interesting sidelights on the background and daily life of certain personalities in nineteenth-century literature and music.N ALISON FAIRLIE CAMBRIDGE

Realite et Imagination dans 'Le Grand Meaulnes' et 'Le Voyeur', Essai de critique formelle. By MAURICE LECUYER. (Rice University Studies, Vol. 5I, no. 2, Spring 1965) 51 PP.

M. Lecuyer's approach is based on the assumption that, in all works of fiction, there are three levels of reality: the first is that of history or (auto)biography, the second, that of events related which, although fictitious, might well have occurred in real life, and the third, 'le plan d'une fiction imaginee elle-meme par un personnage fictif, mais douee pour lui d'une existence tout aussi valable que celle de la realite'. In both novels under discussion there occurs, he claims, a frequent, subtle and often puzzling transition between the second and third levels, and he subjects the texts to a detailed formal analysis in order to discover how this is achieved. The devices of transition revealed are both typographical (use of points of suspension, blank spaces etc.) and stylistic, notably the use of indirect free style, the employment of the present tense to heighten the psychological reality of the characters, subtle changes of tense sometimes involving morphological ambiguity (e.g. 'finit' taken either as present or past historic), use of neutral or quasi-scientific vocabulary to give a false impression of reality, and the practice of a-chronology.

The 'fiction imagin6e' in both novels appears, however, to be the result of the narrators' 'imagination desordonnee', and as a result, M. Lecuyer totally mis- represents the tone and hence the purpose of Le Grand Meaulnes. The mental state of the narrator, FranCois Seurel, is referred to variously as 'schizophrenie benigne', 'catatonie', 'autisme' and 'hallucinoses', and compared to that of Mathias after a strong dose of absinthe (p. I I). M. Lecuyer also argues, rhetori-

Cosima's father, Liszt. She reads and briefly comments on the works of Leconte de Lisle and Flaubert, and orders the recently published translations of Indian epics for Wagner. It is she who makes translations of the words of Wagner's operas into French for Judith Gautier to work up with the help of the faithful friend Benedictus: it seems that at one stage Leconte de Lisle was envisaged (pp. 68 and I86) to provide the final version for Parsifal, though Cosima had reservations about his ability to convey the full spirit of the original. What emerges particularly clearly, thanks to M. Guichard's notes, is the extent to which Judith Gautier made use of Cosima's letters when writing her own memoirs, at times attributing to herself some of Cosima's live and firm ideas and expressions.

The editor's very thorough notes (occupying pp. 241-356) contain much helpful material on personalities of the period, in particular Gautier, Catulle Mendes, Augusta Holmes, and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Brief letters from Wagner to Gautier and Gautier to Wagner are given in pp. 264-5, and, in the Addenda, letters from Hugo and Gautier (pp. 365, 367-9). An index of proper names would have been useful.

The plates, with portraits of Wagner, Cosima, and Judith, give facsimiles of five letters (one by Judith not being included in the text) and of one ofJudith's sonnets of passionate homage to Wagner. If one compares the facsimile of the letter of

I or I2 December 1877 with the reading given in the text (pp. 75-7) a number of minor errors may be noted. M. Guichard stated in his Avertissement that 'de ces lettres .. . j'ai respecte la ponctuation et l'orthographe': in this letter five punctua- tion marks or accents have been altered and Wagner's 'signalisees' has been corrected to 'signalees'. These are, of course, very small points in an edition which in general appears meticulous in its examination of detail. Both text and notes throw interesting sidelights on the background and daily life of certain personalities in nineteenth-century literature and music.N ALISON FAIRLIE CAMBRIDGE

Realite et Imagination dans 'Le Grand Meaulnes' et 'Le Voyeur', Essai de critique formelle. By MAURICE LECUYER. (Rice University Studies, Vol. 5I, no. 2, Spring 1965) 51 PP.

M. Lecuyer's approach is based on the assumption that, in all works of fiction, there are three levels of reality: the first is that of history or (auto)biography, the second, that of events related which, although fictitious, might well have occurred in real life, and the third, 'le plan d'une fiction imaginee elle-meme par un personnage fictif, mais douee pour lui d'une existence tout aussi valable que celle de la realite'. In both novels under discussion there occurs, he claims, a frequent, subtle and often puzzling transition between the second and third levels, and he subjects the texts to a detailed formal analysis in order to discover how this is achieved. The devices of transition revealed are both typographical (use of points of suspension, blank spaces etc.) and stylistic, notably the use of indirect free style, the employment of the present tense to heighten the psychological reality of the characters, subtle changes of tense sometimes involving morphological ambiguity (e.g. 'finit' taken either as present or past historic), use of neutral or quasi-scientific vocabulary to give a false impression of reality, and the practice of a-chronology.

The 'fiction imagin6e' in both novels appears, however, to be the result of the narrators' 'imagination desordonnee', and as a result, M. Lecuyer totally mis- represents the tone and hence the purpose of Le Grand Meaulnes. The mental state of the narrator, FranCois Seurel, is referred to variously as 'schizophrenie benigne', 'catatonie', 'autisme' and 'hallucinoses', and compared to that of Mathias after a strong dose of absinthe (p. I I). M. Lecuyer also argues, rhetori-

Reviews Reviews 524 524

This content downloaded from 91.213.220.103 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 16:58:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions