"Vous êtes un beau ciel d'automne, clair et rose!
Mais la tristesse en moi monte comme la mer,
Et laisse, en refluant, sur ma lèvre morose
Le souvenir cuisant de son limon amer.
"--Ta main se glisse en vain sur mon sein qui se pâme;
Ce qu'elle cherche, amie, est un lieu saccagé
Par la griffe et la dent féroce de la femme.
Ne cherchez plus mon cœur; les bêtes l'ont mangé.
"Mon cœur est un palais flétri par la cohue;
On s'y soûle, on s'y tue, on s'y prend aux cheveux!
--Un parfum nage autour de votre gorge nue!...
"O Beauté, dur fléau des âmes, tu le veux!
Avec tes yeux de feu, brillants comme des fêtes,
Calcine ces lambeaux qu'ont épargnés les bêtes!"
I have not included the poem in my own translations. But for those
who find that French verse still presents some difficulty, I give an
English version of "Causerie." It is fairly literal, it is more or
less melodious in English. That it quite achieves the _atmosphere_ of
Baudelaire's poem I can hardly think. I have taken it from the little
volume issued by the "Walter Scott" Publishing Company, in which, for
some reason, it is called "The Eyes of Beauty."
"You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and, ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
"In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
By woman's tooth and talon! ah; no more
Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.
"It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay--
A perfume swims about your naked breast!
"Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
Bum up these tatters that the beasts have spared!"
Now let us come to Swinburne. If the following verses of "Laus Veneris"
in "Ballads and Poems" are not directly derived from Baudelaire, I
ask who indeed influenced the young Oxford poet in 1886?
"Me, most forsaken of all souls that fell;
Me, satiated with things insatiable;
Me, for whose sake the extreme hell makes mirth,
Yea, laughter kindles at the heart of hell.
"Alas thy beauty! for thy mouth's sweet sake
My soul is bitter to me, my limbs quake
As water, as the flesh of men that weep,
As their heart's vein whose heart goes nigh to break.
"Ah God, that sleep with flower-sweet finger-tips
Would crush the fruit of death upon my lips;
Ah God, that death would tread the grapes of sleep
And wring their juice upon me as it drips.
"There is no change of cheer for many days,
But change of chimes high up in the air, that sways
Rung by the running fingers of the wind;
And singing sorrows heard on hidden ways."
"I dare not always touch her, lest the kiss
Leave my lips charred. Yea, Lord, a little bliss,
Brief, bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin;
Natheless thou knowest how sweet a thing it is."
The verse of Swinburne is more musical, and has a wider range of
imagery. But the passion is the same, the method is the same, and,
for those who understand French as a Frenchman understands it, the
"atmosphere" fails in the magic intensity that Baudelaire achieves.
This is one single instance. Those who are interested can pursue these
comparisons between the two poets for themselves. They will be richly
rewarded.
I have mentioned Walter Pater, that great artist in English who may
be said to have succeeded Ruskin as the exponent of the most critical
and refined thought of our time. When I say that he succeeded Ruskin I
do not mean to imply that he has the slightest æsthetic affinity with
the author of "Modern Painters." I only speak of him as having had as
strong an influence upon later thought as Ruskin had upon his.
Pater was curious of everything in life and Art that offered a new
sensation--that should enable men to realise themselves in the
completest and most varied way. Baudelaire was certainly not Walter
Pater's master in the same degree that he was the master of Swinburne
and of Wilde. Yet, none the less certainly, the Frenchman's work made
expression possible to the recluse of Oxford.
Hellenic thought, with its dangerous conclusions, was restated by
Pater because "Les fleurs du Mal" had paved the way.
Here again, within the compass of a brief essay it is impossible
to set forth these contentions in detail. But those who have read
Baudelaire, and what Gautier says about him--those who have studied
contemporary thought and contemporary literature when Pater began to
weave his magical prose--will confirm what is no discovery of mine,
but a fact of literature. They will recognise that, in the "Conclusion"
of Walter Pater's "Renaissance" the following words could hardly have
been written had it not been for the daring expression of the poet whom
Frenchmen admit to be second to. Hugo alone.
"The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human
spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager
observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some
tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of
passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and
attractive for us--for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience,
but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is
given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all
that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most
swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where
the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
"To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this
ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that
our failure is to form habits; for, after all, habit is relative to a
stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye
that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all
melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or
any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set
the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange
dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's
hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment
some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of
their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this
short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense
of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering
all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly
have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What
we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and
courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of
Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas,
as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather
up what otherwise might pass unregarded by us. 'Philosophy is the
microscope of thought' The theory or idea or system which requires of
us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of
some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we
have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has
no real claim upon us." What is this most perfect piece of prose but an
expansion of Baudelaire's poem "Correspondances"?
"La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
"Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent,
"Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
--Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
"Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens."
In the temple of night rise vast living pillars, and there those who
worship murmur words that man has never yet been able to understand.
The worshippers in this temple of night wander through a huge
and tangled wood of symbols, while on every side they feel that
inexplicable yet friendly eyes regard them.
Far-off and dim long-drawn echoes are heard. They shiver through the
forest, coming together in one deep mingled sound like that of a gong.
The sound reverberates and dies away.
Vast as the night and more brilliant than the day, colour, sound, sweet
odours speak to the worshippers in this temple. They are all infinitely
varied. There are sounds as fragrant as childhood itself. There are
others as beautiful as the sound of hautbois, and the sound itself is a
colour which is like green corn.
The forest is full of magic odours. The odour of amber and incense,
the scent of benzoin and musk, the perfumes form themselves into one
harmonic chord in which the enraptured senses and that throbbing
exaltation which is of the soul, fuse into a triumphant hinting of
sense and sound.
If this is not gathering the conflicting claims, bewildering
experiences, the entangled interests of modern life into one receptive
cistern of the brain where consciousness stands tasting all that comes,
then the poem of Baudelaire means nothing, and the beautiful prose of
Pater has drawn nothing from it.
"We shall see him no more"; "This is the end of the man and his
work"--remarks like these only faintly indicate what was said of Oscar
Wilde when he was sent to prison. When Wilde was in prison in 1896
"Salomé" was produced by Lugne Poë at the Théâtre de Louvre in Paris.
England was affronted and offended. When the play of "Salomé" was
produced in England for the first time it was at a private performance
at the New Stage Club. The critics did their best to howl it down.
It was as though a ghost, a revenant, had appeared. Meanwhile the
play had been produced in Berlin, and from that moment it held the
European stage. It ran for a longer consecutive period in Germany than
any play by any Englishman--not excepting Shakespeare. Its popularity
extended to all countries where it was not prohibited. It was performed
throughout Europe, Asia, and America. It was even played in Yiddish
... that was the beginning. At the present moment the works of Oscar
Wilde are being sold in enormous quantities and in many editions. You
can buy "Intentions" or "Dorian Gray" for one shilling. The influence
that Oscar Wilde is having upon a generation of readers which has risen
since he died is incalculable. Hardly an article in the daily press
would be written as it is written if it were not for the posthumous
prosperity of the poet whose work has risen like the Phœnix from the
ashes of his personal reputation.
It was Baudelaire who provided that attitude towards life which Wilde
made his own. Baudelaire gave Wilde--or rather Wilde took from
Baudelaire--some of the jewels which the latter had snatched from the
classic diadem of Poe.
"And if we grow tired of an antique time, and desire to realise our own
age in all its weariness and sin, are there not books that can make
us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score
of shameful years? Close to your hand lies a little volume, bound in
some Nile-green skin that has been powdered with gilded nenuphars and
smoothed with hard ivory. It is the book that Gautier loved; it is
Baudelaire's masterpiece. Open it at that sad madrigal that begins
"'Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
Sois belle! et sois triste!'
and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never
worshipped joy. Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures himself;
let its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts,
and you will become for a moment what he was who wrote it; nay, not for
a moment only, but for many barren, moonlit nights and sunless, sterile
days will a despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you,
and the misery of another gnaw your heart away. Read the whole book,
suffer it to tell even one of its secrets to your soul, and your soul
will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and
seek to repent of strange crimes of which it is guiltless, and to make
atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never known."
Thus Wilde in "Intentions." It is not an acknowledgment of what he
himself owed to Baudelaire, but it is a perfectly phrased, if veiled,
recognition of his debt.
The cadences of the "Madrigal Triste" are heard over and over again in
the poems of Oscar Wilde. We find them in "True Knowledge," in the "New
Remorse," and in "Désespoir."
In the stanzas of the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" there is much that could
never have been written had it not been that Wilde was saturated with
the sombre melodies of such poems as "Le Vin de l'Assassin," and "Le
Vin des Chiffonniers." It was Baudelaire who suggested a literary form
in which such things as were said in "Reading Gaol" could be said.
Wilde, in his earlier days, when he was writing that extraordinary poem
"The Sphinx," always used to express himself as a great admirer of "Une
Charogne." Mr. Sherard, Wilde's biographer, says that in his opinion
the poet's admiration for that frightful and distorted work of genius
was merely assumed. But Mr. Sherard tells us also that the "Flowers of
Evil" exercised a great influence over Wilde's mind during the earlier
period of his artistic life. And in the "Sphinx" it is most marked.
Allowing for the difference of metre and the divergence of language,
the two verses from Baudelaire's poem "Le Chat," which I am about to
quote, are identical in thought and feeling with the opening stanzas
of "The Sphinx." It is impossible not to believe--not to feel certain
indeed--that when Wilde wrote--
"In a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting
gloom,"
he had not, consciously or unconsciously, in mind--
"Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon cœur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate."