From the composition of the verses let us pass to the style. Baudelaire
intertwines his silken and golden threads with strong, rude hemp, as
in a cloth worked by Orientals, at the same time gorgeous and coarse,
where the most delicate ornamentations run in charming caprice on the
fine camel's-hair, or on a cloth coarse to the touch like the sail of
a boat. The most delicate, the most precious even, is hurled in with
savage brutalities; and, from the scented boudoir and voluptuously
languorous conversations, one falls into ignoble inns where drunkards,
mixing blood with wine, dispute at the point of their knives for some
Hélène from the streets.
"The Flowers of Evil" are the brightest gem in Baudelaire's crown. In
them he has given play to his originality, and shown that one is able,
after incalculable volumes of verse where every variety of subject
seems to be exhausted, to bring to light something new and unexpected,
without hauling down the sun and the stars, or making universal history
file past as in a German fresco.
But what has especially made his name famous is his translation of
Edgar Poe; for in France little is read of the poet except his prose,
and it is the feuilletons that make the poems known. Baudelaire has
almost naturalised for us this singular and rare individuality, so
pregnant, so exceptional, who at first rather scandalised than charmed
America. Not that his work is in any way morally shocking--he is,
on the contrary, of virginal and seraphic chastity; but because he
disturbed accepted principles and practical common sense, and, also,
because there was no criterion by which to judge him.
Edgar Poe had none of the American ideas on progress, perfectibility,
democratic institutions, and other subjects of declamation dear to
the Philistines of the two worlds. He was not a worshipper of the
god of gold; he loved poetry for itself and preferred beauty to
utility--enormous heresy! Still, he had the good fortune to write well
things that made the hair of fools in all countries stand on end. A
grave director of a review or journal--a friend of Poe, moreover, and
well-intentioned--avowed that it was difficult to employ him, and that
one was obliged to pay him less than others, because he wrote above the
heads of the vulgar--admirable reason!
The biographer of the author of the "Raven" and "Eureka," said that
Edgar Poe, if he had regulated his genius and applied his creative
powers in a way more appropriate to America, would have become a
money-making author; but he was undisciplined, worked only when he
liked, and on what subjects he pleased. His roving disposition made him
roll like a comet out of its orbit from Baltimore to New York, from New
York to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to Boston or Richmond, without
being able to settle anywhere. In his moments of ennui, distress, or
breakdown, when to excessive excitement, caused by some feverish work,
succeeded that despondency known to authors, he drank brandy, a fault
for which he has been bitterly reproached by Americans, who, as every
one knows, are models of temperance.
He was not under any delusion as to the effects of this disastrous
vice, he who has written in the "Black Cat" this prophetic phrase:
"What illness is comparable to alcohol!" He drank without drunkenness,
just to forget, to find himself in a happy mood in regard to his
work, or even to end an intolerable life in evading the scandal of a
direct suicide. Briefly, one day, seized in the street by an attack
of delirium tremens, he was carried to the hospital where he died,
still young and with no signs of decaying power. The deplorable habit
had had no influence on his intellect or his manners, which remained
always those of an accomplished gentleman; nor on his beauty, which was
remarkable to the end.
We indicate but rapidly some traits of Edgar Poe, as we are not writing
his life. The American author held so high a place in the intellectual
esteem of Baudelaire that we must speak of him in a more or less
developed way, and give, if not an account of his life, at least of
his doctrines. Edgar Poe has certainly influenced Baudelaire, his
translator, especially during the latter part of his life, which was,
alas! so short.
"The Extraordinary Histories," "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,"
"The Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," "Eureka," have been
translated by Baudelaire with so exact a correspondence in style and
thought, a freedom so faithful yet so supple, that the translations
produce the effect of original work, and are almost perfect. "The
Extraordinary Histories" are preceded by a piece of high criticism,
in which the translator analyses the eccentric and novel talent of
Poe, which France, with her utter heedlessness of the originalities
of foreigners, ignored profoundly till Baudelaire revealed them. He
brought to bear upon this work, necessary to explain a nature so beyond
the vulgar idea, a metaphysical sagacity of the rarest delicacy. The
pages may be counted the most remarkable he has ever written.
Great excitement was created by these histories, so mathematically
fantastic, deduced in algebraical formulæ, and in which the expositions
resemble some judiciary led by the most subtle and perspicacious
magistrates.
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The
Gold-Bug," enigmas more difficult to divine than those of the Sphinx,
and in which the interest, sustained to the very end, excites to
delirium the public, surfeited with romances and adventures. One feels
deeply for Auguste Dupin, with his strange, divinatory lucidity, who
seems to hold between his hands the threads, drawing one to the other,
of thoughts most opposed, and who arrives at his conclusions by
deductions of a marvellous correctness. One admires Legrand, cleverer
still at deciphering cryptograms than Claude Jacquet, employed by the
Ministry, who read to Desmarets, in the history of the "13," the letter
deciphered by Ferrango; and the result of this reading is the discovery
of the treasures of Captain Kidd! Every one will confess that he would
have had to be very clear-sighted to trace in the glimmer of the flame,
in the red characters on yellow parchment, the death's-head, the kid,
the lines and points, the cross, the tree and its branches, and to
guess where the corsair had buried the coffer full of diamonds, jewels,
watches, golden chains, ounces, doubloons, dollars, piastres, and money
from all countries, the discovery of which recompensed the sagacity
of Legrand. The "Pit and the Pendulum" caused terror equal to the
blackest inventions of Anne Radcliffe, of Lewis, and of the Rev. Father
Mathurin, while one gets giddy watching the tearing whirlpool of the
Maelstrom, colossal, funnel-like walls upon which ships run like pieces
of straw in a tempest.
"The Truth of the Case of M. Waldemar," shakes the nerves even of the
most robust, and the "Fall of the House of Usher" inspires profound
melancholy.
Imaginative natures were deeply touched by the faces of women, so
vaporous, transparent, romantically pale, and of almost spiritual
beauty, that the poet named Morelia, Ligeia, Lady Rowena, Trevanion,
de Tremaine, Lenore; but who are in reality only the incarnations under
different forms of a unique love surviving the death of the adored one.
Henceforth, in France, the name of Baudelaire is inseparable from that
of Edgar Poe, and the memory of the one immediately awakes thoughts
of the other. It seems sometimes that the ideas of the American were
really of French origin.
Baudelaire, like the greater number of the poets of his time, when
the Arts, less separated than they were formerly, mingled more one
with another and allowed of frequent transposition, had the taste for,
sentiment and knowledge of, painting. He wrote noteworthy articles
in the "Salon," and, amongst others, pamphlets on Delacroix, which
analysed with clear penetration and subtlety the nature of a great
romantic painter. He thought deeply, and we find, in some reflections
on Edgar Poe, this significant phrase: "Like our Delacroix, who has
raised his art to the height of great poetry, Edgar Poe likes to
place his subjects on violet and green backgrounds which reveal the
phosphorescence and the fragrance of the storm." How just is this
sentiment, so simply phrased, incidental to the passionate and feverish
colour of the painter! Delacroix, in effect, charmed Baudelaire by
the "maladie" even of his talent, so troubled, restless, nervous,
excitable, and so tormented with uneasiness, melancholy, febrile
ardour, convulsive efforts, and the vague dreams of modern times.
At one time, the realistic school believed it could monopolise
Baudelaire. Certain outrageously crude and truthful pictures in the
"Flowers of Evil," pictures in which the poet had not hesitated before
any ugliness, might have made some superficial minds think he leaned
towards that doctrine. They did not note that these pictures, so-called
real, were always ennobled by character, effect, or colour, and also
served as a contrast to the smooth and idealistic work. Baudelaire,
allowing himself to be drawn by these realists, visited their studios
and was to have written an article on Courbet, the painting-master
of Ornans, which, however, never appeared. Nevertheless, to one of
the later Salons, Fantin, in the odd frame where he united round
the medallion of Eugène Delacroix, like the supernumeraries of an
apotheosis, the painters, and writers known as realists, placed
Baudelaire in a corner of it with his serious look and ironical smile.
Certainly Baudelaire, as an admirer of Delacroix, had a right to be
there. But did he intellectually and sympathetically make a part of
this company, whose tendencies were not in accord with his aristocratic
tastes and aspirations towards the beautiful? In him, as we have
already said, the employment of trivial and natural ugliness was only a
sort of manifestation and protestation of horror; and we doubt if the
Venus de Courbet had ever much charm for him, the amateur of exquisite
elegance, refined mannerisms, and mannered evasions. Not that he was
incapable of admiring grandiose beauty; he who has written "La Géante"
ought to love "The Night" and the "Dawn," those magnificent colossal
females that Michelangelo has placed on the voluta of the tombs of the
Medici. Baudelaire had, moreover, metaphysical and philosophical tenets
which could not but alienate him from this school, to which he had no
pretext for attaching himself.
Far from being satisfied with reality, he sought diligently for
the bizarre, and, if he met with some singular, original type, he
followed it, studied it, and learnt how to find the end of the thread
on the bobbin and so to unravel it. Thus he was familiar with Guys,
a mysterious individual, who occupied his time in going to all the
odd corners of the universe where anything was taking place to obtain
sketches for English illustrated journals.
This Guys, whom we knew, was at one time a great traveller, a profound
and quick observer, and a perfect humorist. In the flash of an eye he
seized upon the characteristic side of men and things; in a few strokes
of the pencil he silhouetted them in his album, tracing the cursive
lines with the pen like a stenographer, and washing them over with a
flat tint to indicate the colour.
Guys was not what is properly called an artist, but he had the
particular gift of sketching the chief points of things rapidly. In a
flash of the eye, with an unequalled clear-sightedness, he disentangled
from all the traits--just the one. He placed it in prominence,
instinctively or designedly, rejecting the merely complementary parts.
No one was more reproachful than he of a pose, a "cassure," to use a
vulgar word which exactly expresses our thought, whether in a dandy
or in a _voyou_, in a great lady or in a daughter of the people. He
possessed in a rare degree the sense of modern corruptions, in high as
in low society, and he also culled, under the form of sketches, his
flowers of evil. No one could render like Guys the elegant slenderness
and sleekness of the race-horse, the dainty border on the skirt of a
little lady drawn by her ponies, the pose of the powdered and befurred
coachman on the box of a great chariot, with panels emblazoned with
the coat of arms, going to a "drawing-room" accompanied by three
footmen. He seems, in this style of drawing, fashionable and cursive,
consecrated to the scenes of high life, to have been the precursor
of the intelligent artists of "La Vie Parisienne," Marcelin, Hadol,
Morin, Crafty. But, if Guys expressed, according to the principles of
Brummel, dandyism and the allurements of the _duckery_, he excelled no
less in portraying the venal nymphs of Piccadilly and the Argyle Rooms
with their flash toilets and bold eyes. He was not afraid to occupy
himself with the deserted lanes, and to sketch there, under the light
of the moon or in the flickering glimmer of a gas-jet, a silhouette
of one of the spectres of pleasure who haunt the streets of London.
If he found himself in Paris, he followed the extreme fashions of
the wicked place and what is known as the "coqueterie du ruisseau."
You can imagine that Guys sought there only "character." It was his
passion, and he separated with astonishing certainty the picturesque
and singular side of the types from the allurements and costume of
the time. Talent of this kind could not but charm Baudelaire, who,
in effect, greatly esteemed Guys. We possessed about sixty drawings,
sketches, aquarelles of this humorist, and we gave some of them to the
poet. The present gave him great pleasure, and he carried it joyfully
away.
Certainly he realised all that was lacking in these rough sketches, to
which Guys himself attached not the slightest importance once they had
been traced on wood by the clever engravers of the "Illustrated London
News." But Baudelaire was struck by the spirit, the clear-sightedness,
and powerful observation they displayed, literary qualities graphically
translated in the language of line. He loved in these drawings
the complete absence of antiquity--that is to say, of classical
tradition--and the deep sentiment of what we call "decadence," for lack
of a word more expressive of our meaning. But we know what Baudelaire
understood by "decadence." Did he not say somewhere, à propos of these
literary distinctions:--"It seems to me that two women are presented
to me; the one a rustic matron, rude in health and virtue, without
allurement or worth; briefly, _owing nothing except to simple nature_;
the other, one of those beauties who dominate and fascinate the mind,
uniting, with her powerful and original charm, all the eloquence of the
toilet, mistress of her bearing, conscious and queen of herself, with a
voice of harmonious melody, and dreamy gaze allowed to travel whither
it will. My choice cannot be doubted, however many pedagogues reproach
me with lack of classical honour?"
This so original comprehension of modern beauty turns the question,
for it regards antique beauty as primitive, coarse, barbarous; a
paradoxical opinion undoubtedly, but one which can be upheld. Balzac
much preferred, to the Venus of Milo, a Parisienne _élégante_,
delicate, coquettish, draped in cashmere, going furtively on foot to
some rendezvous, her chantilly violet held to her nose, her head bent
in such a way as to display, between the brim of her hat and the last
fold of her shawl, the nape of a neck like a column of ivory, over
which some stray curl glistens in the sunlight. This has its charms;
but, for our part, we prefer the Venus of Milo.
With such ideas as these one can imagine that for some time Baudelaire
was inclined towards the realistic school of which Courbet is the god
and Manet the high-priest. But if certain sides of his nature were such
as could be satisfied by direct, and not traditional, representation
of ugliness, or at least of contemporary triviality, his aspirations
for Art, elegance, luxury, and beauty led him towards a superior
sphere. And Delacroix, with his febrile passion, his stormy colours,
his poetical melancholy, his palette of the setting sun, and his clever
expression of the decadence, was, and remained, his master by election.
We come now to a singular work of Baudelaire's, half translation, half
original, entitled, "The artificial Paradises, Opium and Hashish," and
at which we must pause; for it has contributed not a little to the
idea among the public, who are always happy in spreading unfavourable
reports of authors, that the writer of the "Flowers of Evil" was in the
habit of seeking inspiration in these stimulants. His death, following
upon a stroke of paralysis which made him powerless to express the
thoughts in his brain, only confirmed this belief. This paralysis, so
it was said, came undoubtedly from excess in hashish or opium, to which
the poet first gave himself up out of love of peculiarity, and then
from that fatal craving these drugs produce.
His illness was caused by nothing but the fatigue, ennui, sorrow, and
embarrassments inherent in literary people whose talent does not admit
of regular work, easy to sell, like journalism, and whose works, by
their originality, frighten the timid directors of reviews. Baudelaire
was as sober as all other workers, and, while admitting a taste for
the creation of an "artificial paradise," by means of some stimulant,
opium, hashish, wine, alcohol, or tobacco, seems to follow the nature
of man--since one finds it in all periods, in all conditions, in all
countries, barbarous or civilised--he saw in it the proof of original
perversity, a means of escaping _necessary_ sorrow, a satanical
suggestion for usurping, even in the present, the happiness reserved as
a recompense for resignation, virtue, and the persistent effort towards
the good and the beautiful. He thought that the devil said to the
eaters of hashish, the smokers of opium, as in the olden times to our
first parents, "If you taste of the fruit you will be as the gods," and
that he no more kept his word than he did to Adam and Eve; for, the
next day, the god, tempted, weakened, enervated, descended lower than
the beast and remained isolated in an immense space, having no other
resource to escape himself than by recourse to his poison, the doses of
which he gradually increases. That he once or twice tried hashish, as
a psychological experience, is possible and even probable; but he did
not make continuous use of it. This happiness, bought at the chemist's
and carried in the pocket, was repugnant to him, and he compared the
ecstasy that it produced to that of a maniac, for whom painted cloth
and coarse decorations replaced real furniture and the garden enriched
with living flowers. He came but rarely, and then only as a spectator,
to the séances at the Hôtel Pimodan, where our circle met to take the
"dawamesk"; séances that we have already described in the "Review of
the Two Worlds," under this title: "The Club of the Hashishins." After
some ten experiments we renounced once and for all this intoxicating
drug, not only because it made us ill physically, but also because the
true littérateur has need only of natural dreams, and he does not wish
his thoughts to be influenced by any outside agency.
Balzac came to one of these soirées, and Baudelaire related his visit
thus: "Balzac undoubtedly thought that there is no greater shame or
keener suffering than the abdication of the will. I saw him once at a
reunion when he was contemplating the prodigious effects of hashish.
He listened and questioned with attention and amusing vivacity. People
who knew him would guess that he was bound to be interested. The idea
shocked him in spite of himself. Some one presented him with the
dawamesk. He examined it, smelt it, and gave it back without touching
it. The struggle between his almost infantile curiosity and his
repugnance for the abdication, betrayed itself in his expressive face;
love of dignity prevailed. In effect, it is difficult to imagine the
theorist of 'will' the spiritual twin of Louis Lambert, consenting to
lose even a particle of this precious _substance_."
We were at the Hôtel Pimodan that evening, and therefore can relate
this little anecdote with perfect accuracy. Only, we would add this
characteristic detail: in giving back the spoonful of hashish that was
offered him, Balzac only said that the attempt would be useless, and
that hashish, he was sure, would have no action on his brain. That was
possible. This powerful brain, in which _will power_ was enthroned and
fortified by study, saturated with the subtle aroma of moka, and never
obscured by even a few bottles of the lightest of wine of Vouvray,
would perhaps have been capable of resisting the passing intoxication
of Indian hemp. For hashish, or dawamesk, we have forgotten to say,
is only a concoction of _cannabis indica_, mixed to a fleshy substance
with honey and pistachio-nuts, to give it the consistence of a paste or
preserve.
The analysis of hashish is medically very well done in the "Artificial
Paradises," and science is able to cull from them certain information;
for Baudelaire prided himself on his accuracy, and on no consideration
whatever would he slur over the least technical ornamentation of this
habit in which he had himself indulged. He specifies perfectly the real
character of the hallucinations produced by hashish, which of itself
creates nothing, simply developing the particular disposition of the
individual, exaggerating it to the very last degree. What one sees is
oneself, aggrandised, made sensitive, excited, immoderately outside
time and space, at one time real but soon deformed, accentuated,
enlarged, and in which each detail, with extreme intensity, becomes of
supernatural importance. Yet all this is easily understandable to the
hashish-eater, who divines the mysterious correspondence between the
often incongruous images. If you hear a piece of music which seems as
though performed by some celestial orchestra and a choir of seraphim,
compared to which the symphonies of Haydn, of Mozart, and of Beethoven
are no more than aggravating clatter, you may believe that it is
only that a hand has skimmed over the keys of a piano in some vague
prelude, or that a distant organ murmurs through the uproar of the
streets--a well-known piece from the opera. If your eyes are dazzled
by blinding lights, scintillations, and flames, assuredly it is only a
certain number of candles that burn in the torches and flambeaux.
As to the walls, ceasing to be opaque, sinking away into vaporous
perspective, deep, blue, like a window opening on the infinite, it
is but a glass mirror opposite the dreamer with its mingled and
transparently fantastic shadows. The nymphs, the goddesses, the
gracious apparitions, burlesque or terrible, come out of the pictures,
the tapestries, from the statues displaying their mythological nudity
in the niches, or from the grimacing china figures on the shelves.
It is the same with the olfactory ecstasies which transport one to the
paradises of perfumes, of marvellous flowers, balancing their calices
like censors which send out aromatic scents of penetrating subtlety,
recalling the memory of former lives, of balsamic and distant shores
and primitive loves in some Tahiti of a dream. One does not have to
seek far in the room for a pot of heliotrope or tuberose, a sachet
of Spanish leather or a cashmere shawl impregnated with patchouli,
negligently thrown over the arm of a chair.
It is understood, then, if one wishes to enjoy to the full the magic
of hashish, it is necessary to prepare in advance and furnish in some
way the _motif_ to its extravagant variations and disorderly fantasies.
It is important to be in a tranquil frame of mind and body, to have on
this day neither anxiety, duty, nor fixed time, and to find oneself in
such an apartment as Baudelaire and Edgar Poe loved, a room furnished
with poetical comfort, bizarre luxury, and mysterious elegance; a
private and hidden retreat which seems to await the beloved, the ideal
feminine face that Chateaubriand, in his noble language, calls the
"sylphide." In such circumstances, it is probable, and even almost
certain, that the naturally agreeable sensations turn into ravishing
blessings, ecstasies, ineffable pleasure, much superior to the coarse
joys promised to the faithful in the paradise of Mahomet, too easily
comparable to a seraglio. The green, red, and white houris coming out
from the hollow pearl that they inhabit and offering themselves to the
faithful, would appear as vulgar women compared to the nymphs, angels,
sylphides, perfumed vapours, ideal transparencies, forms of blue and
rose let loose on the disc of the sun and coming from the depths of
infinity with stellary transports, like the silver globules on gaseous
liquor, from the bottom of the crystal chalice, that the hashish-eater
sees in innumerable legions in the dreams he dreams while wide-awake.
Without these precautions the ecstasy is likely to turn
into-nightmare. Pleasure changes to suffering, joy to terror; a
terrible anguish seizes one by the heart and breaks one with its
fantastically enormous weight, as though the sphinx of the pyramids,
or the elephant of the king of Siam, had amused itself by flattening
one out. At other times an icy cold is felt making the victim seem like
marble up to the hips, like the king in the "Thousand and One Nights,"
half changed to a statue, whose wicked wife came every morning to beat
the still supple shoulders.
Baudelaire relates two or three hallucinations of men of different
temperaments, and one experienced by a woman in a small room hidden by
a gilt trellis and festooned with flowers, which is easily recognised
as the boudoir of the Hôtel Pimodan. He accompanies each vision with
an analytical and moral commentary, through which his unconquerable
repugnance for happiness obtained by such means is easily discernible.
He counts as nothing the consideration of the help that genius can draw
from the ideas suggested by intoxication of hashish. Firstly, these
ideas are not so beautiful as one imagines, their charm comes chiefly
from the extreme excitement in which the subject is. Then hashish,
which produces these ideas, destroys at the same time the power of
using them, for it reduces to nothing the will and plunges its victims
in an ennui in which the mind becomes incapable of any effort or
work, and from which it cannot escape except through the medium of
another dose. "Lastly," he adds, "admitting the minute hypothesis of
a temperament well enough balanced, strong enough to resist the evil
effects of this perfidious drug, it is necessary to consider another
fatal, terrible danger, which is that of habit. Those who have recourse
to a poison to make them think, will soon find that they cannot think
without poison. Picture to yourself the terrible fate of a man whose
paralysed imagination no longer fulfils its functions without the aid
of hashish or opium."
And, a little later, he makes his profession of faith in these noble
terms: "But man is not so lacking in honest means of inspiration that
he is obliged to invite the aid of the pharmacy or of sorcery; he has
no need to sell his soul to pay for the intoxicating caresses and
friendliness of the houris. What is the paradise that one buys at the
price of eternal salvation?"
There follows the painting of a sort of Olympus placed on the arduous
mount of spirituality where the muses of Raphael or of Mantegna,
under the guidance of Apollo, surround with their rhythmical choirs
the artist vowed to the cult of beauty and recompense him for his
continuous efforts. "Beneath him," continues the author, "at the foot
of the mountain, in the brambles and mud, the troop of men, the band of
helots, simulate the grimaces of enjoyment, and yell out if the bite
of poison is taken away from them; and the saddened poet says: 'These
unfortunate beings who have neither fasted nor prayed, and who have
refused to work out their own redemption, demand from black magic the
means of elevation, with a sudden stroke, to a supernatural existence.
Magic dupes them and kindles in them false happiness and light; whilst
we, poets and philosophers, who have given new life to our souls by
continued work and thought, by the assiduous exercise of the will and
permanent nobility of intention, we have created for our pleasure a
garden of real beauty. Confiding in the word which says faith can
remove mountains, we have accomplished the only miracle which God has
allowed.'"
After such an expression of faith it is difficult to believe that the
author of the "Flowers of Evil," in spite of his satanical leanings,
has often visited artificial paradises.
Succeeding the study on hashish is one on the subject of opium. But
here Baudelaire had for his guidance a book, singularly celebrated
in England, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," by De Quincey,
a distinguished Hellenist, a leading writer, and a man of great
respectability, who has dared, with tragical candour, in a country the
most hardened by cant in the world, to avow his passion for opium, to
describe this passion, representing the phases, the intermittences,
the relapses, the combats, the enthusiasms, the prostrations, the
ecstasies and the phantasmagoria followed by inexpressible anguish. De
Quincey, incredible as it may seem, had, augmenting little by little
each dose, come to taking eight thousand drops a day. This, however,
did not prevent him from living till the age of seventy-five, for he
only died in the month of December 1859, making the doctors, to whom,
in a fit of _humour_, he had mockingly left his corpse as a subject for
scientific experiment, wait a long time. This habit did not prevent
him from publishing a crowd of literary and learned works in which
nothing announced the fatal influence which he himself described as
"the black idol." The _dénouement_ of the book leaves it understood
that only with superhuman efforts was the author brought to the state
of self-correction; but that could only have been a sacrifice to morals
and conventions, like the recompense of virtue and the punishment
of crime at the end of a melodrama, final impenitence being a bad
example. And De Quincey pretends that, after seventeen years of use
and eight years of abuse of opium, he has been able to renounce this
dangerous substance! It is unnecessary to discourage the _theriakis_
of good-will. But what of the love, however expressed, in the lyrical
invocation to the brown liqueur?
"O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium! thou who, to the hearts of
rich and poor alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for the
pangs of grief that 'tempt the spirit to rebel' bringest an assuaging
balm;--eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the
purposes of wrath, pleadest effectually for relenting pity, and through
one night's heavenly sleep callest back to the guilty man the visions
of his infancy, and hands washed pure from blood;--O just and righteous
opium! that to the chancery of dreams summonest, for the triumphs of
despairing innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury; and
dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges;--thou buildest upon
the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain,
cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles--beyond
the splendours of Babylon and Hekatompylos; and, 'from the anarchy of
dreaming sleep,' callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried
beauties, and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the
'dishonours of the grave.' Thou only givest these gifts to man; and
thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!"
Baudelaire does not translate De Quincey's book entirely. He takes
from it the most salient parts, of which he writes in an analysis
intermingled with digressions and philosophical reflections, in such a
way that he presents the entire work in an abridgment. Nothing is more
curious than the biographical details which open these confessions.
They show the flight of the scholar to escape from the tyrannies of his
tutors, his miserable and starving life in the great desert of London,
his sojourn in the lodgings turned into a garret by the negligence
of the proprietor. We read of his liaison with a little half-idiot
servant, Ann, a poor child, sad violet of the highways, innocent and
virginal so far; his return in grace to his family and his becoming
possessed of a fortune, considerable enough to allow him to give
himself up entirely to his favourite studies in a charming cottage,
in company with a noble woman, whom this Orestes of opium called
his Electra. For, after his neuralgic pains, he had got into that
ineradicable habit of taking the poison of which he absorbed, without
disastrous results, the enormous quantity of forty grains a day.
To the most striking visions which shone with the blue and silver of
Paradise or Elysium succeeded others more sombre than Erebus, to which
one can apply the frightful lines of the poet:
"As when some great painter dips
His pen in gloom of earthquake and eclipse."
De Quincey, who was a precocious and distinguished humanist--he
knew both Greek and Latin at the age of ten--had always taken great
pleasure in reading Livy, and the words "Consul Romanus" resounded
in his ears like a magical and peremptorily irresistible formula.
These five syllables struck upon his ear like the blasts of trumpets,
sounding triumphal fanfares, and when, in his dreams, multitudes of
enemies struggled on a field of battle lighted with livid glimmerings,
with the rattling of guns and heavy tramping, like the surge of distant
waters, suddenly a mysterious voice would cry out these dominating
words: "Consul Romanus." A great silence would fall, oppressed by
anxious waiting, and the consul would appear mounted on a white horse,
in the midst of a great crowd, like the Marius of the "Batailles des
Cimbres" of Decamps, and, with a fatidical gesture, decide the victory.
At other times, people seen in reality would be mixed up in his dreams,
and would haunt them like obstinate spectres not to be chased away by
any formula of exorcism.
One day, in the year 1813, a Malay, of a yellow and bilious colour,
with sad, home-sick eyes, coming from London and seeking some haven,
knowing not one word of any European language, knocked to see if he
could rest a while, at the door of the cottage. Not wishing to fall
short in the eyes of his domestics and neighbours, De Quincey spoke
to him in Greek; the Asiatic replied in Malay, and his honour as a
linguist was saved. After having given him some money, the master of
the cottage, moved by the charity which causes a smoker to offer a
cigar to a poor devil whom he supposes has long been without tobacco,
gave the Malay a large piece of opium, which the man swallowed in a
mouthful. There was enough to kill seven or eight unaccustomed people,
but the yellow-skinned man was in the habit of taking it, for he went
away with signs of great satisfaction and gratitude. He was not seen
again, at least in the flesh, but he became one of the most assiduous
frequenters of De Quincey's visions. The Malay of the saffron face and
the strangely black eyes was a kind of genus of the extreme Orient who
had the keys of India, Japan, China, and other countries of repute in a
chimerical and impossible distance. As one obeys a guide whom one has
not called, but whom one must follow by one of those fatalities that a
dream admits of, De Quincey, in the steps of the Malay, plunged into
regions of fabulous antiquity and inexpressible strangeness that caused
him the profoundest terror. "I know not," says he in his "Confessions,"
"if others share my feelings on this point; but I have often thought
that, if I were compelled to forgo England, and to live in China, among
Chinese manners and methods and scenery, I should go mad.... A young
Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. ... In China, over
and above what it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am
terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, by the barrier of utter
abhorrence placed between myself and _them_, by counter-sympathies
deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics, with
vermin, with crocodiles or snakes."
With malicious irony, the Malay, who seemed to understand the
repugnance of the opium-eater, took care to lead him to the centre
of great towns, to the ivory towers, to rivers full of junks crossed
by bridges in the form of dragons, to streets encumbered with an
innumerable population of baboons, lifting their heads with obliquely
set eyes, and moving their tails like rats, murmuring, with forced
reverence, complimentary mono-syllables.
The third and last part of the dreams of an opium-eater has a
lamentable title, which, however, is well justified, "Suspiria de
profundis." In one of these visions appeared three unforgettable
figures, mysteriously terrible like the Grecian "Moires" and the
"Mothers" of the second "Faust." These are the followers of Levana,
the austere goddess who takes up the new-born babe and perfects it by
sorrow. As there were three Graces, three Fates, three Furies, three
Muses in the primitive ages, so there were three goddesses of sorrow;
they are our Notre-Dame des Tristesses. The eldest of the three
sisters is called Mater lacrymarum, or Our Lady of Tears; the second
Mater suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs; the third and youngest, Mater
tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness, the most redoubtable of all, and of
whom the strongest cannot dream without a secret terror. These mournful
spectres do not speak the language of mortals; they weep, they sigh,
and make terrible gestures in the shadows. Thus they express their
unknown sorrows, their nameless anguish, the suggestions of solitary
despair, all that there is of suffering, bitterness, and sorrow in
the depths of the human soul. Man ought to take warning from these
initiators: "Thus will he see things that ought not to be seen, sights
which are abominable, and unspeakable secrets; thus will he read the
ancient truths, the sad, great, and terrible truths."
One can imagine that Baudelaire did not spare De Quincey the reproaches
he addressed to all those who sought to attain the supernatural by
material means; but, in regard to the beauty of the pictures painted by
the illustrious and poetical dreamer, he showed him great good will and
admiration.
About this time Baudelaire left Paris and pitched his tent in Brussels.
One must not presume that this journey was taken with any political
idea, but merely from the desire of a more tranquil and reposeful life,
far away from the distractions and excitements of Paris. This change
does not appear to have been a particularly profitable one for him. He
worked little at Brussels, and his papers contain only sketchy notes,
summaries almost hieroglyphical, which he alone could resolve. His
health, instead of improving, was impaired, more deeply than he himself
was aware, as the climate did not agree with him. The first symptoms
manifested themselves in a certain slowness of speech, and a more and
more marked hesitation in the choice of his words; but, as Baudelaire
often expressed himself in a solemn and sententious way, one did not
take much notice of this embarrassment in speech, which was the preface
to the terrible malady that carried him off.
The rumour of Baudelaire's death spread in Paris with the winged
rapidity of bad news, faster than an electric current along its wire.
Baudelaire was still living, but the news, though false, was only
premature; he could not recover from the attack. Brought back from
Brussels by his family and friends, he lived some months, unable to
speak, unable to write, as paralysis had broken the connecting thread
between thought and speech. _Thought_ lived in him always--one could
see that from the expression of his eyes; but it was a prisoner, and
dumb, without any means of communication, in the dungeon of clay which
would only open in the tomb. What good is it to go into the details of
this sad end? It is not a happy way to die; it is sorrowful, for the
survivors, to see so fine and fruitful an intelligence pass away, to
lose in a more and more deserted path of life a companion of youth.
Besides the "Flowers of Evil," translations of Edgar Poe, the
"Artificial Paradises," and art criticisms, Baudelaire left a little
book of "poems in prose" inserted at various periods in journals and
reviews, which soon became without interest for vulgar readers and
forced the poet, in his noble obstinacy, which would allow of no
concession, to take the series to a more enterprising or literary
paper. This is the first time that these pieces, scattered and
difficult to find, are bound in one volume, nor will they be the least
of the poet's titles to the regard of posterity.
In the short Preface addressed to Arsène Houssaye, which precedes the
"Petits poèmes en prose," Baudelaire relates how the idea of employing
this hybrid form, floating between verse and prose, came to him.
"I have a little confession to make to you. It was in turning over,
for the twentieth time, the famous 'Gaspard de la nuit' of Aloysius
Bertrand (a book known to me, to you, and several of our friends--has
it not the right to be called famous?) that the idea came to me to
attempt something analogous and to apply to the description of modern
life, or rather to a modern and more abstract life, the process that
he has applied to the painting of an ancient time, so strangely
picturesque.
"Who among us, in these days of ambition, has not dreamt of the miracle
of poetical, musical prose, without rhythm, without rhyme, supple
enough and apt enough to adapt itself to the movements of the soul, to
the swaying of a dream, to the sudden throbs of conscience?"
It is unnecessary to say that nothing resembles "Gaspard de la nuit"
less than the "Poems in Prose." Baudelaire himself saw this after he
commenced work, and he spoke of an _accident_, of which any other than
he would have been proud, but which only humiliated a mind which looked
upon the accomplishment of _exactly_ what it had intended as an honour.
We have seen that Baudelaire always claimed to direct his inspiration
according to his own will, and to introduce infallible mathematics into
his art. He blamed himself for producing anything but that upon which
he had resolved, even though it is, as in the present case, an original
and powerful work.
Our poetical language, it must be acknowledged, in spite of the
valiant effort of the new school to render it flexible and malleable,
hardly lends itself to rare and subtle detail, especially when
the subject is _la vie moderne_, familiar or luxurious. Without
having, as at one time, a horror for the calculated word and a love
of circumlocution, French verse, by its very construction, refuses
particularly significant expressions and if forced into direct
statement, immediately becomes hard, rugged, and laborious. "The Poems
in Prose" came very opportunely to supply this deficiency, and in this
form, which demands perfect art and where each word must be thrown,
before being employed, into scales more easy to weigh down than those
of the "Peseurs d'or" of Quintin Metsys--for it is necessary to have
the standard, the weights, and the balance--Baudelaire has shown a
precious side of his delicate and bizarre talent. He has been able to
approach the almost inexpressible and to render the fugitive nuances
which float between sound and colour, and those thoughts which resemble
arabesque _motifs_ or themes of musical phrases. It is not only to the
physical nature, but to the secret movements of the soul, to capricious
melancholy, to nervous hallucinations that this form is aptly applied.
The author of the "Flowers of Evil" has drawn from it marvellous
effects, and one is sometimes surprised that the language carries one
through the transparencies of a dream, in the blue distances, marks
out a ruined tower, a clump of trees, the summit of a mountain, and
shows one things impossible to describe, which, until now, have never
been expressed in words. This should be one of the glories, if not the
greatest, of Baudelaire, to bring within the range of style a series of
things, sensations, and effects unnamed by Adam, the great nomenclator.
A writer can be ambitious of no more beautiful title, and this the
author of the "Poems in prose" undoubtedly merits.
It is very difficult, without writing at great length--and, even then,
it is better to direct the reader straight to the poems themselves--to
give a just idea of these compositions; pictures, medallions,
bas-reliefs, statuettes, enamels, pastels, cameos which follow each
other rather like the vertebrae in the spine of a serpent. One is able
to pick out some of the rings, and the pieces join themselves together,
always living, having each its own soul writhing convulsively towards
an inaccessible ideal.
Before closing this Introduction, which, although already too long--for
we have simply chased through the work of the author and friend whose
talent we endeavour to explain--it is necessary to quote the titles
of the "Poems in Prose"--very superior in intensity, concentration,
profoundness, and elegance to the delicate fantasies of "Gaspard de
la nuit," which Baudelaire proposed to take as models. Among the
fifty pieces which comprise the collection, each different in tone
and composition, we will number "Le Gâteau, "La Chambre double," "Le
Foules," "Les Veuves," "Le vieux saltimbanque," "Une Hémisphère dans
une chevelure," "L'Invitation au voyage," "La Belle Dorothée," "Une
Mort héroïque," "Le Thyrse," Portraits de maîtresses," "Le Désir de
peindre," "Un Cheval de race" and especially "Les Bienfaits de la
lune," an adorable poem in which the poet expresses, with magical
illumination, what the English painter Millais has missed so completely
in his "Eve of St. Agnes"--the descent of the nocturnal star with its
phosphoric blue light, its grey of iridescent mother-of-pearl, its mist
traversed by rays in which atoms of silver beat like moths. From the
top of her stairway of clouds, the Moon leans down over the cradle of
a sleeping child, bathing it in her baneful and splendid light; she
dowers the sweet pale head like a fairy god-mother, and murmurs in its
ear: "Thou shalt submit eternally to the influence of my kiss, thou
shalt be beautiful after my fashion. Thou shalt love what I love and
those that love me: the waters, the clouds, the silence, the night, the
great green sea, the shapeless and multiform waters, the place where
thou art not, the lover whom thou knowest not, the prodigious flowers,
the perfumes that trouble the mind, the cats which swoon and groan like
women in hoarse or gentle voices."
We know of no other analogy to this perfect piece than the poetry of
Li-tai-pe, so well translated by Judith Walter, in which the Empress of
China draws, among the rays, on the stairway of jade made brilliant by
the moon, the folds of her white satin robe. A _lunatique_ only is able
to understand the moon and her mysterious charm.
When we listen to the music of Weber we experience at first a sensation
of magnetic sleep, a sort of appeasement which separates us without
any shock from real life. Then in the distance sounds a strange note
which makes us listen attentively. This note is like a sigh from the
supernatural world, like the voice of the invisible spirits which call
us. Oberon just puts his hunting-horn to his mouth and the magic forest
opens, stretching out into blue vistas peopled with all the fantastic
folk described by Shakespeare in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Titania
herself appears in the transparent robe of silver gauze.
The reading of the "Poems in Prose" has often produced in us these
impressions; a phrase, a word--one only--bizarrely chosen and placed,
evoke for us an unknown world of forgotten and yet friendly faces.
They revive the memories of early life, and present a mysterious choir
of vanished ideas, murmuring in undertones among the phantoms of
things apart from the realities of life. Other phrases, of a morbid
tenderness, seem like music whispering consolation for unavowed sorrows
and irremediable despair. But it is necessary to beware, for such
things as these make us homesick, like the "Ranz des vaches" of the
poor Swiss lansquenet in the German ballad, in garrison at Strasbourg,
who swam across the Rhine, was retaken and shot "for having listened
too much to the sound of the horn of the Alps."