Baudelaire's love of the artificial has been insisted upon by all who
have studied his work, but to my mind never sufficiently insisted
upon, for it was the foundation of his method. He wrote many arguments
in favour of the artificial, and elaborated them into a kind of
paradoxical philosophy of art. His hatred of nature and purely natural
things was but a perverted form of the religious ecstasy that made the
old monk pull his cowl about his eyes when he left his cell in the
month of May, lest he should see the blossoming trees, and his mind be
turned towards the beautiful delusions of the world. The Egyptians and
the earliest of the Christians looked upon nature not as the work of
the good and benevolent spirit who is the father of our souls, but as
the work of the rebellious "gods of generation," who fashion beautiful
things to capture the heart of man and bind his Soul to earth. Blake,
whom I have already quoted, hated nature in the same fashion, and held
death to be the one way of escape from "the delusions of goddess Nature
and her laws." Baudelaire's revolt against external things was more
a revolt of the intellect than of the imagination; and he expresses
it, not by desiring that the things of nature should be swept away to
make room for the things of the spirit, but that they should be so
changed by art that they cease to be natural. As he was of all poets
the most intensely modern, holding that "modernity is one-half of art,"
the other half being something "eternal and immutable," he preferred,
unlike Blake and his modern followers, to express himself in quite
modern terms, and so wrote his famous and much misunderstood Éloge du
Maquillage to defend his views. As was usual with him, he pushed his
ideas to their extreme logical sequence, and the casual reader who
picks up that extraordinary essay is in consequence quite misled as to
the writer's intention.
It seems scarcely necessary at this time of day to assert that the
_Éloge du Maquillage_ is something more than a mere _Praise of
Cosmetics_, written by a man who wished to shock his readers. It is
the part expression of a theory of art, and if it is paradoxical and
far-fetched it is because Baudelaire wrote at a time when French
literature, in the words of M. Asselineau, "was dying of correctness,"
and needed very vigorous treatment indeed. If the _Éloge du Maquillage_
had been more restrained in manner, if it had not been something so
entirely contrary to all accepted ideas of the well-regulated citizen
who never thinks a thought that somebody else has not put into his
head, it might have been passed over without notice. It was written to
initiate the profane; to make them think, at least; and not to raise a
smile among the initiated. And moreover, it was in a manner a defence
of his own work that had met with so much hatred and opposition.
He begins by attempting to prove that Nature is innately and
fundamentally wrong and wicked. "The greater number of errors relative
to the beautiful date from the eighteenth century's false conceptions
of morality. Nature was regarded in those times as the base, source,
and type of all possible good and beauty.... If, however, we consent
to refer simply to the visible facts,... we see that Nature teaches
nothing, or almost nothing. That is to say, she _forces_ man to sleep,
to drink, to eat, and to protect himself, well or ill, against the
hostilities of the atmosphere. It is she also who moves him to kill
and eat or imprison and torture his kind; for, as soon as we leave
the region of necessities and needs to enter into that of luxuries
and pleasures, we see that Nature is no better than a counsellor to
crime.... Religion commands us to nourish our poor and infirm parents;
Nature (the voice of our own interest) commands us to do away with
them. Pass in review, analyse all that is natural, all the actions
and desires of the natural man, and you will find nothing but what is
horrible. All beautiful and noble things are the result of calculation.
Crime, the taste for which the human animal absorbs before birth,
is originally natural. Virtue, on the contrary, is _artificial_,
supernatural, since there has been a necessity in all ages and among
all nations for gods and prophets to preach virtue to humanity; since
man alone would have been unable to discover it. Evil is done without
effort, _naturally_ and by fatality; good is always the product of an
art."
So far the argument is straightforward and expresses what many
must have thought, but Baudelaire, remembering that exaggeration
is the best way of impressing one's ideas upon the unimaginative,
immediately carries his argument from the moral order to the order of
the beautiful, and applies it there. The result is strange enough. "I
am thus led to regard personal adornment as one of the signs of the
primitive nobility of the human soul. The races that our confused and
perverted civilisation, with a fatuity and pride entirely laughable,
treats as savages, understand as does the child the high spirituality
of the toilet. The savage and the child, by their naïve love of all
brilliant things, of glittering plumage and shining stuffs, and the
superlative majesty of artificial forms, bear witness to their distaste
for reality, and so prove, unknown to themselves, the immateriality of
their souls."
Thus, with some appearance of logic, he carries his argument a step
farther, and this immediately brings him to the bizarre conclusion that
the more beautiful a woman naturally is, the more she should hide her
natural beauty beneath the artificial charm of rouge and powder. "She
performs a duty in attempting to appear magical and supernatural. She
is an idol who must adorn herself to be adored." Powder and rouge and
kohl, all the little artifices that shock respectability, have for
their end "the creation of an abstract unity in the grain and colour of
the skin." This unity brings the human being nearer to the condition
of a statue--that is to say, "a divine and superior being." Red and
black are the symbols of "an excessive and supernatural life." A touch
of kohl "lends to the eye a more decided appearance of a window opened
upon infinity"; and rouge augments the brilliance of the eye, "and adds
to a beautiful feminine face the mysterious passion of the priestess."
But artifice cannot make ugliness any the less ugly, nor help age to
rival youth. "Who dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating
nature?" Deception, if it is to have any charm, must be obvious and
unashamed; it must be displayed "if not with affectation, at least with
a kind of candour."
Such theories as these, if they are sincerely held, necessarily lead
the theorist into the strangest bypaths of literature. Baudelaire, like
many another writer whose business is with verse, pondered so long upon
the musical and rhythmical value of words that at times words became
meaningless to him. He thought his own language too simple to express
the complexities of poetic reverie, and dreamed of writing his poems
in Latin. Not, however, in the Latin of classical times; that was
too robust, too natural, too "brutal and purely epidermic," to use
an expression of his own; but in the corrupt Latin of the Byzantine
decadence, which he considered as "the supreme sigh of a strong being
already transformed and prepared for the spiritual life."
One of these Latin poems has appeared in all editions of _The Flowers
of Evil_. Though dozens as good are to be found in the Breviary of
the Roman Church, "Franciscæ Meæ Laudes" has been included in this
selection for the benefit of those curious in such matters. It is one
of Baudelaire's many successful steps in the wrong direction.