Wistful sighing at the loss of prelapsarian innocence

                                                 Laisse-moi faire, o grand vieillard,
                                                 Changeant mon luth pour ta palette,
                                                       Une transposition d'art !

       Thus Gautier, in his lines addressed to the painter Titian--a transposition under the Parnassian dictum of objective representation of life and nature. Or Gautier again : Chaque piece devait etre...quelque chose qui rappelat ces empreintes des medailles antiques qu'on voit chez les peintres et les sculptures. At first sight it would appear that Verlaine is indulging the Parnassian ethic in his Fetes galantes--a straight impassive transposition of Watteau's paintings of the Regency period, just as Leconte de Lisle and Gautier sought poetical sources in the historical and Biblical past. But Verlaine has chosen carefully. In Watteau he sees and identifies with a fellow Romantic, with his ennui, with the iconoclast who discards the Classical severity of le grand siecle, just as the packers in Watteau's L'Enseigne de Gersaint bundle Louis XIV out of sight into a crate. Verlaine is in the process of discarding Parnassian impassibility.
       In his Civilisation (231-6), Kenneth Clark describes the Rococo in art and architecture as the visible form of the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love. He goes on : Rococo was to some extent a Parisian invention, and provocatively secular...Instead of the static orders of antiquity, it drew inspiration from natural objects in which the line wandered freely--shells, flowers, seaweed. Rococo was a reaction against the academic style ; but it was not negative. It represented a real gain in sensibility. It achieved a new freedom of association and captured new and more delicate shades of feeling. All this is expressed through the work of one exquisite artist, Watteau...Next to love Watteau cared most about music for which, his friends tell us, he had a most delicate ear. Nearly all his scenes are enacted to the sound of music. In this he shows himself as part of a tradition going back to the Venetians, of whom Pater said that they painted the musical intervals of our existence when life itself is conceived as a kind of listening. Watteau achieves this effect of music by translating experience into a different sensuous medium : colour. Watteau's colour has a shimmering, irridescent quality which makes one think immediately of musical analogies. In Clair de lune, Verlaine effects a transposition of certain elements--a paysage choisi--of Watteau's art, but moves on and away from the Parnassian ideal of objective description towards a refined description of a musical interval of our existence, where the portrayal contains the bare essence of detail in order to convey a mood. The Clair de lune scene is the objective correlative of that mood.
     Watteau's world of Fetes galantes is a stylised one, depicting an 18th century France that is like the garden of the Hesperides, where cultivated men and women make love and music in an apparently eternal trance, unbroken by any premonitions of coming Terror or by ominous mutterings of Sansculottes. In considering Watteau, one feels that he has taken certain aspects of that aristocratic world as his point of departure, as stock definitions of that world, and then he expands, refines, develops, returns persistently to those 'stock definitions', rather like Variations on a Theme. In this, Watteau appears not simply as a painter. He is also a social commentator. The broad mass of Fetes galantes is the world of effete gallantry and politesse, almost a projection into a fantasy world of prelapsarian innocence. Of course, these 'galants' must have been aware of the rumblings of social change--this perhaps explains their self-immersion in galanteries--but Watteau intrudes ordinary people into some of these scenes : porters, packers, musicians,the painter himself, and his beloved Commedia dell'Arte. The porter in L'Enseigne de Gersaint, with his wistful bemused smile, is a pungent comment on those facile aristocratic 'lovers of art'. In his self-portrait in Fetes Venitiennes, he indicates both that he is aware of his mal du siecle malaise, and that, as the ordinary humble musician, he has a deep awareness of the utter dearth of morality and social empathy in these aristocrats.
      That self-portrait as humble anguished musician is an extension of the social role he gives to the Commedia dell'Arte, for these strolling players have an equal importance in his 'stock definitions' of this society, by dint of their regular recurrence. Watteau reveals his affinity for, his empathy with, this group, for he individualises them--one might say humanises them when one thinks of the lack of emotion displayed by the 'galants'--particularly in the cases of Le Mezzetin and Gilles. 
     The Commedia dell'Arte's stock-in-trade was the Italian farce, performed with a raucous, vivid, vulgar ebullience. Theirs was a strong, natural, uninhibited force, but their format began to change in character and to approximate to French Comedy after they were installed at the Hotel de Bourgogne, and Harlequin became the central figure of extravagant fantasy which came to be known later as pantomime. So, here, we have two worlds of fantasy in equipoise : the garden of Hesperides and the buffoonery of the Comedie Italienne. But these latter were expelled from France in 1697, only to be replaced, in the public eye, by French artistes in the forains, who assimilated features of the Commedia to their format. In 1714 the Opera sold to the forains the right to sing plays in dialogue. So then Harlequin, the absurd valet of Italian farce, became the hero of adventures in the fantastic world of pantomime, vaudeville and comic opera. The extent of Watteau's feeling about this decline of the original format of the Commedia, the extent of his partisanship is seen in his pair of pictures--L'Amour au Theatre italien and L'Amour au Theatre Francais--contrasting the styles of the Italian and French players, to the latters' disadvantage.
     It is this feeling that, in the dispersal of their original format, there has been a dispersal of their natural vitality and exuberance--this feeling Watteau makes a particular point of portraying, almost as if they had lost prelapsarian innocence in this world of aristocratic 'galants'. This feature, then, is the link between Watteau's paysage choisi and that of Verlaine in Clair de lune. These more diversified but less natural players are one element in Verlaine's serie de dechiffrements in order to convey his etat d'ame : a wistful sighing in the realisation of the loss of an earlier innocence.
    The Symbolist concept that reality is no more than a facade, concealing either a world of ideas and emotions, or an ideal world aspired towards, is associated in the case of Baudelaire with the doctrine outlined in his sonnet Correspondances. For Baudelaire, objects are not simply objects but are the symbols of ideal forms lying concealed behind them :
                                      La nature est un temple ou de vivant piliers
                                      Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.
                                      L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles...
'L'homme' and la nature', we have them both in Clair de lune. They form the facade that is the objective correlative of Verlaine's emotions.
    In meaning, Verlaine's paysage choisi has a triple function in the poem :
             (1) it acknowledges the fact that Watteau's 'paysage' is a subjective,
                  stylised representation ;
             (2) it acknowledges that Verlaine's own choice is selective and subjective ;
             (3) it defines and stresses the artificial, highly stylised Baroque layout of
                  this chateau setting.
Verlaine's paysage is that of Watteau's L'Amour auTheatre Italien , but Verlaine fills out the obscurity around the group with other 'dechiffrements' : trees, birds, statues, fountains. These are the Comedie Italienne after 1714, but whose former anarchical buffoonery has become somewhat stylised.
      As was said earlier, Verlaine deletes the non-essential frippery. So here Scaramouche, Isabella, Pierrot, Harlequin, Mezzetin, Pantalone, and the Doctor lose their identity in masques. They are quasi tristes sous leurs deguisements fantasques , for here they are in a stylised chateau garden of the aristocracy, entertaining some lack-lustre 'galants' with a difffused form of entertainment that is a far cry from their original naturalness, their raucous anarchism. They might well be sad, but they are here to entertain. The quasi suggests that their joviality is affected, but, as an archaism, the word links their present artifice with their former naturalness. The faintly archaic form of ll.1-2 suggests 'period' ; the luth , although used at this time, is also a link with the strolling players of the Middle Ages ; the allusion to bergamasques is a link with the rustic Italian revels of their homeland. In short, the first quatrain makes several allusions to the naturalness that they have lost, and the consequence is that they are quasi tristes. The structural layout of this quatrain has the word tristes as its focal point : the succession of charmant...jouant...dansant , particularly emphasised by the et...et and the 'contre-rejet' of quasi...all lead up to tristes , in place of the expected other item in the list of their actions in the performance.
     In this first quatrain, Verlaine uses the Impressionist technique : focussing on one item, one action after another, for the essence of Impressionism is that only the point of focus can be highlighted at any given moment, while the rest has a diffuse appearance. The quatrain concentrates essentially on what is seen by the audience : the actions of the troupe, including the jouant du luth. This Impressionist technique continues in the next quatrain, in that the focus is on the faces of the troupe, on their expressions, but essentially on the song they sing.  The song seems to pervade the atmosphere--this is stressed by the double reference : chantant...chanson--and merges with the moonlight playing on the scene, just as the double reference in the first quatrain--bergamasque...dansant--stresses that this activity is there the visual feature of emphasis. So the visual focus moves from the elements of the dance--feet, arms,swerve, motion, which are, of course, unstated--to a more restricted focus on face and expression, and then up and over them to the moonlight .
     They sing sur le mode mineur--a deliberate curtailment of their inherent exuberance in deference to the convenances factices of their aristocratic audience. Their song about la vie opportune would be an admirable and universal theme were it not allied to l'amour vainqueur--with its implicit phonic pun : vainqueur X 'vain coeur'--which is a pursuit of the dilettantes of Fetes galantes. The whole phrase is like a quotation from a notation of Romantic idees recues. So their song-theme and manner of singing are both in deference to the tastes of their audience. Line 7 might well be a statement from one of the audience who envies the troupe their freedom and their fantasy world--those apparently liberated happy souls who are outwith the restrictive politesse of his world. But the inclusion of this line between the double reference to singing gives further point to the probability that the speaker envies the closeness, the contact the players still have with their natural selves : dancing, playing music, and now singing--their singing can still relay an individuality of cadence, tone and harmony, despite the mode mineur.
    The final quatrain details the apotheosis of this naturalness of l'homme merging with la Nature. The structure of the first two quatrains has laid emphasis on the consequences of restricting natural impulses--quasi tristes...Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire a leur bonheur--but that merging of Man and Nature through the song has invoked that prelapsarian state of harmony that existed between them. One recalls here how Baudelaire in his Harmonie du soir made use of 'Le ciel est triste et beau' as one facet of the facade he used in order to recreate the emotion he experienced at the memory of a past love affair. In line 9 of Clair de lune, Verlaine makes use of part of Baudelaire's phrase for similar purposes : as part of the facade he is using to convey an emotion. The whole quatrain takes on the graceful stylisation of a Japanese painting : the birds are dreaming in the moonlit trees, the fitful complaint of the fountains is reminiscent of lovers' ecstasies. This is a harmony between the terrestrial and the cosmic. Even the contrived harmony of the Baroque garden is superceded, as the fountains flow, almost in a surge of joyful effulgence, parmi les marbres.
      The visual focus has risen up and away from that troupe with their limited, stylised performance, to the moonlight, and back down through the trees to that final image of the God-made and the Man-made in ecstatic harmony. This world which the poem evokes by suggestion and vague reference is the world of a lost prelapsarian innocence--Eden. The concentration of repetition in these last lines, with the phrases clair de lune and jets  d'eau broken and taken up again with embellishment and change of accent, this melodic effect is a rendition of prelapsarian harmony and extase in song. The world Verlaine feels he has lost is something similar to that depicted in Giorgione's Fete champetre, and is summed up in Book IV, ll.763-774 of Milton's Paradise Lost :
                            Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights
                            His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings,
                            Reigns here and revels ; not in the bought smile
                            Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared,
                            Casual fruition, nor in court amours
                            Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
                            Or serenade, which the starved lover sings
                            To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
                            These lulled by nightingales embracing slept,
                            And on their naked limbs the flowery roof
                            Showered roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on
                            Blest pair ;
Yet the sadness, the wistfulness Verlaine feels seeps through, with the use of broad doleful vowel sounds, the weak rhymes, the simplicity of the words that do not detract, by any over-richness, from that vague melancholic effect he wishes to convey. Verlaine has moved a good deal away from that delight Gautier displayed in summoning up  a detached, objectified transposition d'art. In La vigne et la maison, Lamartine takes his soul back to the state of childhood innocence. The Soul's rebuke on the futility of such a journey is acid : 'C'est rouvrir des cercueils pour revoir des trepas !' The votre ame of Clair de lune at first glance appears to be that of Watteau, but it is, in fact, Verlaine's soul, which the poet takes through present artifice into a harmony with nature which is out of time, but is also past and irrevocable. Verlaine has reopened 'des cercueils pour revoir des trepas'. His is the pain of lost innocence.