SOURCE: King, Russell S. “Indecision in Musset's Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie.” Nottingham French Studies 8, no. 3 (October 1969): 57-68.

In the following essay, King surveys Musset's Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, examining this work as a product of the writer's early literary apprenticeship.

In the early and middle years of French Romanticism, few writers and fewer critics succeeded in defining the movement clearly and positively. Hugo's Préface 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 Préface have in such disparate works as Les Orientales (1829), Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné (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 “modern,” being of one's age, but this says little.

Despite...