Charles Baudelaire was born at Paris, April 21st, 1821, in an old
turreted house in the Rue Hautefeuille. His father, a distinguished
gentleman of the eighteenth-century school, seems to have passed his
old-world manners on to his son, for we learn from Baudelaire's friend
and biographer, Théophile Gautier, that the poet "always preserved the
forms of an extreme urbanity."
At school, during his childhood, he gained many distinctions, and
passed for a kind of infant prodigy; but later on, when he sat for his
examination as _bachelier ès lettres_, his extreme nervousness made him
appear almost an idiot. Failing miserably, he made no second attempt.
Then his father died, and his mother married General Aupick, afterwards
ambassador to Constantinople, an excellent man in every respect, but
quite incapable of sympathising with or even of understanding the love
for literature that now began to manifest itself in the mind of his
stepson. All possible means were tried to turn him from literature to
some more lucrative and more respectable profession. Family quarrels
arose over this all-important question, and young Baudelaire, who seems
to have given some real cause for offence to the step-father whose
aspirations and profession he despised, was at length sent away upon a
long voyage, in the hopes that the sight of strange lands and new faces
would perhaps cause him to forget the ambitions his relatives could but
consider as foolish and idealistic. He sailed the Indian Seas; visited
the islands of Mauritius, Bourbon, Madagascar, and Ceylon; saw the
yellow waters of the sacred Ganges; stored up the memory of tropical
sounds and colours and odours for use later on; and returned to Paris
shortly after his twenty-first birthday, more than ever determined to
be a man of letters.
His parents were in despair; no doubt quite rightly so from their
point of view. Théophile Gautier, perhaps remembering the many
disappointments and martyrdoms of his own sad life, defends the
attitude of General Aupick in a passage where he poignantly describes
the hopelessness of the profession of letters. The future author
of _The Flowers of Evil_, however, was now his own master and in a
position, so far as monetary matters were concerned, to follow out
his own whim. He took apartments in the Hôtel Pimodan, a kind of
literary lodging-house where all Bohemia met; and where Gautier and
Boissard were also at that period installed. Then began that life of
uninterrupted labour and meditation that has given to France her most
characteristic literature, for these poems of Baudelaire's are not
only original in themselves but have been the cause of originality
in others; they are the root of modern French literature and much of
the best English literature; they were the origin of that new method
in poetry that gave Mallarmé and Verlaine to France; Yeats and some
others to England. It was in the Hôtel Pimodan that Baudelaire and
Gautier first met and formed one of those unfading friendships not so
rare among men of letters as among men of the world; there also the
"Hashish-Eaters" held the _séances_ that have since become famous in
the history of literature. Hashish and opium, indeed, contribute not a
little to the odour of the strange _Flowers of Evil_; as also, perhaps,
they contributed to Baudelaire's death from the terrible malady known
as general paralysis, for he was a man who could not resist a so easy
path into the world of _macabre_ visions. I shall return to this
question again; there is internal evidence in his writings that shows
he made good literary use of these opiate-born dreams which in the end
dragged him into their own abyss.
It was in 1849, when Baudelaire was twenty-eight years of age, that he
made the acquaintance of the already famous Théophile Gautier, from
whose admirable essay I shall presently translate a passage giving us
an excellent pen-sketch of the famous poet and cynic--for Baudelaire
was a cynic: he had not in the least degree the rapt expression and
vague personality usually supposed to be characteristic of the poetic
mood. "He recalls," wrote M. Dulamon, who knew him well, "one of
those beautiful Abbés of the eighteenth century, so correct in their
doctrine, so indulgent in their commerce with life--the Abbé de Bernis,
for example. At the same time, he writes better verse, and would not
have demanded at Rome the destruction of the Order of Jesuits."
That was Baudelaire exactly, suave and polished, filled with sceptical
faith, cynical with the terrible cynicism of the scholar who is acutely
conscious of all the morbid and gloomy secrets hidden beneath the
fair exteriors of the world. Gautier, in the passage I have already
mentioned, emphasises both his reserve and his cynicism: "Contrary to
the somewhat loose manners of artists generally, Baudelaire prided
himself upon observing the most rigid _convenances_; his courtesy,
indeed, was excessive to the point of seeming affected. He measured his
sentences, using only the most carefully chosen terms, and pronounced
certain words in a particular manner, as though he wished to underline
them and give them a mysterious importance. He had italics and capital
letters in his voice. Exaggeration, much in honour at Pimodan's, he
disdained as being theatrical and gross; though he himself affected
paradox and excess. With a very simple, very natural, and perfectly
detached air, as though retailing, _à la Prudhomme_, a newspaper
paragraph about the mildness or rigour of the weather, he would advance
some satanically monstrous axiom, or uphold with the coolness of ice
some theory of a mathematical extravagance; for he always followed
a rigorous plan in the development of his follies. His spirit was
neither in words nor traits; he saw things from a particular point
of view, so that their outlines were changed, as objects when one
gets a bird's-eye view of them; he perceived analogies inappreciable
to others, and you were struck by their fantastic logic. His rare
gestures were slow and sober; he never threw his arms about, for he
held southern gesticulation in horror; British coolness seemed to him
to be good taste. One might describe him as a dandy who had strayed
into Bohemia; though still preserving his rank, and that cult of self
which characterises a man imbued with the principles of Brummel." At
this time Baudelaire was practically unknown outside his own circle of
friends, writers themselves; and it was not until eight years later, in
1857, when he published his _Flowers of Evil_, that he became famous.
Infamous would perhaps be a better word to describe the kind of fame
he at first obtained, for every Philistine in France joined in the cry
against a poet who dared to remind his readers that the grave awaits
even the rich; who dared to choose the materials of his art from among
the objects of death and decay; who exposed the mouldering secrecies of
the grave, and painted, in the phosphorescent colours of corruption,
frescoes of death and horror; who desecrated love in the sonnet
entitled "Causerie":
"You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose!
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lip 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
Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!"
We can recall nothing like it in the literary history of our own
country; the sensation caused by the appearance of the first series
of Mr. Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads_ was mild in comparison; just
as Mr. Swinburne's poems were but wan derivatives from Baudelaire--at
least as far as ideas are concerned; I say nothing about their beauty
of expression or almost absolute mastery of technique--for it is quite
obvious that the English poet was indebted to Baudelaire for all the
bizarre and Satanic elements in his work; as Baudelaire was indebted
to Poe. Mr. Swinburne, however, is wild where Baudelaire is grave;
and where Baudelaire compresses some perverse and morbid image into a
single unforgettable line, Mr. Swinburne beats it into a froth of many
musical lovely words, until we forget the deep sea in the shining foam.
If we call to mind the reception at first given to the black-and-white
work of Aubrey Beardsley, it will give some idea of the consternation
caused in France by the appearance of the _Flowers of Evil_. Beardsley,
indeed, resembles Baudelaire in many ways, for he achieved in art what
the other achieved in literature: the apotheosis of the horrible and
grotesque, the perfecting of symbols to shadow forth intellectual sin,
the tearing away of the decent veil of forgetfulness that hides our own
corruption from our eyes, and his one prose romance, _Under the Hill_,
unhappily incomplete at his death at the age of twenty-four, beats
Baudelaire on his own ground. The four or five chapters which alone
remain of this incomplete romance stand alone in literature. They are
the absolute attainment of what Baudelaire more or less successfully
attempted--a testament of sin. Not the sin of the flesh, the gross
faults of the body that are vulgarly known as sin; but sin which is a
metaphysical corruption, a depravity of pure intellect, the sin of the
fallen angels in hell who cover their anguish with the sound of harps
and sweet odours; who are incapable of bodily impurity, and for whom
spiritual purity is the only terror. And since mortality, which is the
shadow of the immortal, can comprehend spiritual and abstract things
only by the analogies and correspondences which exist between them and
the far reflections of them that we call reality, both Baudelaire and
Beardsley, as indeed all artists who speak with tongues of spiritual
truth, choose more or less actual human beings to be the shadows of the
divine or satanic beings they would invoke, and make them sin delicate
sins of the refined bodily sense that we may get a far-off glimpse of
the Evil that is not mortal but immortal, the Spiritual Evil that has
set up its black throne beside the throne of Spiritual Good, and has
equal share in the shaping of the world and man.
I am not sure that Baudelaire, when he wrote this sinister poetry,
had any clear idea that it was his vocation to be a prophet either
of good or evil. Certainly he had no thought of founding a school of
poetry, and if he made any conscious effort to bring a new method into
literature, it was merely because he desired to be one of the famous
writers of his country. An inspired thinker, however, whether his
inspiration be mighty or small, receives his thought from a profounder
source than his own physical reason, and writes to the dictation of
beings outside of and greater than himself. The famous Eliphas Levi,
like all the mystics who came before and after him, from Basilides
the Gnostic to Blake the English visionary, taught that the poet and
dreamer are the mediums of the Divine Word, and sole instruments
through which the gods energise in the world of material things. The
writing of a great book is the casting of a pebble into the pool of
human thought; it gives rise to ever-widening circles that will reach
we know not whither, and begins a chain of circumstances that may end
in the destruction of kingdoms and religions and the awakening of new
gods. The change wrought, directly or indirectly, by _The Flowers of
Evil_ alone is almost too great to be properly understood. There is
perhaps not a man in Europe to-day whose outlook on life would not have
been different had _The Flowers of Evil_ never been written. The first
thing that happens after the publication of such a book is the theft
of its ideas and the imitation of its style by the lesser writers who
labour for the multitude, and so its teaching goes from book to book,
from the greater to the lesser, as the divine hierarchies emanate from
Divinity, until ideas that were once paradoxical, or even blasphemous
and unholy, have become mere newspaper commonplaces adopted by the
numberless thousands who do not think for themselves, and the world's
thought is changed completely, though by infinite slow degrees. The
immediate result of Baudelaire's work was the Decadent School in
French literature. Then the influence spread across the Channel, and
the English Æsthetes arose to preach the gospel of imagination to
the unimaginative. Both Decadence and Æstheticism, as intellectual
movements, have fallen into the nadir of oblivion, and the dust lies
heavy upon them, but they left a little leaven to lighten the heavy
inertness of correct and academic literature; and now Symbolism, a
greater movement than either, is in the ascendant, giving another
turn to the wheel, and to all who think deeply about such matters
it seems as though Symbolist literature is to be the literature of
the future. The Decadents and Æsthetes were weak because they had
no banner to fight beneath, no authority to appeal to in defence of
their views, no definite gospel to preach. They were by turns morbid,
hysterical, foolishly blasphemous, or weakly disgusting, but never
anything for long, their one desire being to produce a thrill at any
cost. If the hospital failed they went to the brothel, and when even
obscenity failed to stimulate the jaded palates of their generation
there was still the graveyard left. A more or less successful imitation
of Baudelaire's awful verses entitled "The Corpse" has been the
beginning of more than one French poet's corrupt flight across the sky
of literature. That Baudelaire himself was one of their company is
not an accusation, for he had genius, which his imitators, English or
French, have not; and his book, even apart from the fact that it made
straight the way for better things, must be admitted to be a great and
subtly-wrought work of art by whosoever reads it with understanding.
And, moreover, his morbidness is not at all an affectation; his
poems inevitably prove the writer to have been quite sincere in his
perversion and in his decadence.
The Symbolist writers of to-day, though they are sprung from him, are
greater than he because they are the prophets of a faith who believe
in what they preach. They find their defence in the writings of the
mystics, and their doctrines are at the root of every religion. They
were held by the Gnostics and are in the books of the Kabbalists and
the Magi. Blake preached them and Eliphas Levi taught them to his
disciples in France, who in turn have misunderstood and perverted them,
and formed strange religions and sects of Devil-worshippers. These
doctrines hold that the visible world is the world of illusion, not of
reality. Colour and sound and perfume and all material and sensible
things are but the symbols and far-off reflections of the things that
are alone real. Reality is hidden away from us by the five senses and
the gates of death; and Reason, the blind and laborious servant of the
physical brain, deludes us into believing that we can know anything of
truth through the medium of the senses. It is through the imagination
alone that man can obtain spiritual revelation, for imagination is the
one window in the prison-house of the flesh through which the soul
can see the proud images of eternity. And Blake, who is the authority
of all English Symbolist writers, long since formulated their creed
in words that have been quoted again and again, and must still be
quoted by all who write in defence of modern art:--_"The world of
imagination is the world of Eternity. It is the divine bosom into which
we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of
imagination is infinite and eternal, whereat the world of generation,
or vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal
world the permanent realities of everything which we see reflected in
this vegetable glass of nature!"_
In spite of the cry against _Flowers of Evil_, Baudelaire did not lack
defenders among literary men themselves; and many enthusiastic articles
were written in praise of his book. Thierry not unjustly compared him
to Dante, to which Barbey d'Aurevilly replied, "Baudelaire comes from
hell, Dante only went there"; adding at the finish of his article:
"After the _Flowers of Evil_ there are only two possible ways for the
poet who made them blossom: either to blow out his brains or become
a Christian." Baudelaire did neither. And Victor Hugo, after reading
the two poems, "The Seven Old Men" and "The Little Old Women," wrote
to Baudelaire. "You have dowered the heaven of art with one knows not
what deathly gleam," he said in his letter; "you have created a new
shudder." The phrase became famous, and for many years after this the
creation of a new shudder was the ambition of every young French writer
worth his salt.
When the first great wave of public astonishment had broken and ebbed,
Baudelaire's work began to be appreciated by others than merely
literary men, by all in fact who cared for careful art and subtle
thinking, and before long he was admitted to be the greatest after
Hugo who had written French verse. He was famous and he was unhappy.
Neither glory, nor love, nor friendship--and he knew them all--could
minister to the disease of that fierce mind, seeking it knew not what
and never finding it; seeking it, unhappily, in the strangest excesses.
He took opium to quieten his nerves when they trembled, for something
to do when they did not, and made immoderate use of hashish to produce
visions and heighten his phantasy. His life was a haunted weariness.
Thomas de Quincey's _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ seems to
have fascinated him to a great extent, for besides imitating the vices
of the author, he wrote, in imitation of his book, _The Artificial
Paradises_, a monograph on the effects of opium and hashish, partly
original, partly a mere translation from the _Confessions_.
He remembered his visions and sensations as an eater of drugs and
made literary use of them. At the end of this book, among the "Poems
in Prose," will be found one entitled "The Double Chamber," almost
certainly written under the influence of opium, and the last verse of
"The Temptation"--
"O mystic metamorphosis!
My senses into one sense flow--
Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
Her breath is music faint and low!"
as well as the last six lines of that profound sonnet
"Correspondences"--
"Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
Have all the expansion of things infinite:
As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight,"
are certainly memories of a sensation he experienced under the
influence of hashish, as recorded in _The Artificial Paradises_, where
he has this curious passage:--"The senses become extraordinarily
acute and fine. The eyes pierce Infinity. The ear seizes the most
unseizable sounds in the midst of the shrillest noises. Hallucinations
commence.... External objects take on monstrous appearances and
show themselves under forms hitherto unknown.... The most singular
equivocations, the most inexplicable transposition of ideas, take
place. _Sounds are perceived to have a colour, and colour becomes
musical._" Baudelaire need not have gone to hashish to discover this.
The mystics of all times have taught that sounds in gross matter
produce colour in subtle matter; and all who are subject to any
visionary condition know that when in trance colours will produce
words of a language whose meaning is forgotten as soon as one awakes
to normal life; but I do not think Baudelaire was a visionary. His
work shows too precise a method, and a too ordered appreciation of the
artificial in beauty. There again he is comparable to Aubrey Beardsley,
for I have read somewhere that when Beardsley was asked if ever he saw
visions, he replied, "I do not permit myself to see them, except upon
paper." The whole question of the colour of sound is one of supreme
interest to the poet, but it is too difficult and abstract a question
to be written of here. A famous sonnet by Rimbaud on the colour of the
vowels has founded a school of symbolists in France. I will content
myself with quoting that--in the original, since it loses too much, by
translation:
"A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes,
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bourdonnent autour des puanteurs cruelles,
Golfes d'ombres; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombrelles;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;
U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides
Que l'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux.
O, suprême clairon, plein de strideurs étranges,
Silences traversés des mondes et des anges.
--O l'Oméga, rayon violet de ses yeux."
It is to be hoped that opium and hashish rendered Baudelaire somewhat
less unhappy during his life, for they certainly contributed to hasten
his death. Always of an extremely neurotic temperament, he began to
break down beneath his excesses, and shortly after the publication of
_The Artificial Paradises_, which shows a considerable deterioration in
his style, he removed from Paris to Brussels in the hope of building
up his health by the change. At Brussels he grew worse. His speech
began to fail; he was unable to pronounce certain words and stumbled
over others. Hallucinations commenced, no longer the hallucinations of
hashish; and his disease, rapidly establishing itself, was recognised
as "general paralysis of the insane." Gautier tells how the news of
his death came to Paris while he yet lived. It was false news, but
prematurely true. Baudelaire lingered on for another three months;
motionless and inert, his eyes the only part of him alive; unable to
speak or even to write, and so died.
He left, besides _The Flowers of Evil_ and _Little Poems in Prose_
(his masterpieces), several volumes of critical essays, published
under the titles of _Æsthetic Curiosities_ and _Romantic Art; The
Artificial Paradises_, and his translations of the works of Edgar Allan
Poe--admirable pieces of work by which Poe actually gains.