In almost every line of _The Flowers of Evil_ one can trace the
influence of Edgar Poe, and in the many places where Baudelaire has
attained a pure imaginative beauty as in "The Sadness of the Moon"
or "Music" or "The Death of Lovers," it is a beauty that would have
pleased the author of _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_. Another
kind of beauty, the beauty of death--for in Baudelaire's crucible
everything is melted into loveliness--is even more directly traceable
to Poe. In spite of the sonnet "Correspondences," and in spite of his
Symbolist followers of the present day, Baudelaire himself made but
an imperfect use of such symbols as he had; and these he found ready
to his hand in the works of the American poet. The Tomb, the symbol
of death or of an intellectual darkness inhabited by the Worm, who is
remorse; the Abyss, which is the despair into which the mortal part of
man's mind plunges when brought into contact with dead and perishing
substances; all these are borrowed from Poe. The Worm, who "devours
with a kiss," occasionally becomes Time devouring life, or the Demon,
"the obscure Enemy who gnaws the heart"; and when it is none of these
it is the Serpent, as in that sombre poem "To a Madonna"--the Serpent
beneath the feet of conquering purity. Baudelaire's imagination,
however, which continually ran upon _macabre_ images, loved remorse
more than peace, and loved the Serpent more than the purity that would
slay it, so he destroys purity with "Seven Knives" which are "the Seven
Deadly Sins," that the Serpent may live to prey upon a heart that finds
no beauty in peace. Even Love is evil, for his "ancient arrows" are
"crime, horror, folly," and the god Eros becomes a demon lying in wait:
"Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat
Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
And I too well his ancient arrows know:
Crime, Horror, Folly...."
Gautier pretends that the poet preserved his ideal under the form of
"the adorable phantom of La Beatrix, the ideal ever desired, never
attained, the divine and superior beauty incarnated in an ethereal
woman, spiritualised, made of light and flame and perfume, a vapour, a
dream, a reflection of the seraphical world"; but when Baudelaire has
a vision of this same Beatrice he sees her as one of a crowd of "cruel
and curious demons" who mock at his sorrow, and she, too, mocks him,
and caresses the demons who are his spiritual foes.
Baudelaire was too deeply in love with the artificial to care overmuch
for the symbols he could have found among natural objects. Only once
in _The Flowers of Evil_ does he look upon the Moon with the eyes of a
mystic; and that is when he remembers that all people of imagination
are under the Moon's influence, and makes his poet hide her iridescent
tear in his heart, "far from the eyes of the Sun," for the Sun is lord
of material labours and therefore hostile to the dreams and reveries
that are the activity of the poet. He sought more for bizarre analogies
and striking metaphors than for true symbols or correspondences. He is
happiest when comparing the vault of the heaven to "the lighted ceiling
of a music hall," or "the black lid of the mighty pot where the human
generations boil"; and when he thinks of the unfortunate and unhappy
folk of the world, he does not see any hope for them in any future
state; he sees, simply, "God's awful claw" stretched out to tear them.
He offers pity, but no comfort.
Sometimes he has a vision of a beauty unmingled with any malevolence;
but it is always evoked by sensuous and material things; perfume or
music; and always it is a sorrowful loveliness he mourns or praises.
Perhaps of all his poems "The Balcony" is most full of that tender and
reverential melancholy we look for in a poem of love; but even it tells
of a passion that has faded out of heart and mind and become beautiful
only with its passing away, and not of an existing love. The other love
poems--if indeed such a name can be given to "A Madrigal of Sorrow,"
"The Eyes of Beauty," "The Remorse of the Dead," and the like--are
nothing but terrible confessions of satiety, or cruelty, or terror. I
have translated "The Corpse," his most famous and most infamous poem,
partly because it shows him at his worst as the others in the volume at
his best, partly because it is something of the nature of a literary
curiosity. A poem like "The Corpse," which is simply an example of
what may happen if any writer pushes his theories to the extreme, does
not at all detract, be it said, from Baudelaire's delicate genius; for
though he may not be quite worthy of a place by Dante, he has written
poems that Dante might have been proud to write, and he is worthy to
be set among the very greatest of the moderns, alongside Hugo and
Verlaine. Read the sonnet entitled "Beauty" and you will see how
he has invoked in fourteen lines the image of a goddess, mysterious
and immortal; as fair as that Aphrodite who cast the shadow of her
loveliness upon the Golden Age; as terrible as Pallas, "the warrior
maid invincible." And as Minerva loved mortality in the person of
Ulysses, so Baudelaire's personification of Beauty loves the poets who
pray before her and gaze into her eternal eyes, watching the rising and
setting of their visionary Star in those placid mirrors.
The explanation of most of Baudelaire's morbid imaginings is this, that
he was a man haunted by terrible dream-like memories; chief among them
the memory that the loveliness he had adored in woman--the curve of a
perfect cheek, the lifting of a perfect arm in some gesture of imperial
indolence, the fall of a curl across, a pale brow, all the minute
and unforgettable things that give immortality to some movement of
existence--all these, and the woman and her lover, must pass away from
Time and Space; and he, unhappily, knew nothing of the philosophy that
teaches us how all objects and events, even the most trivial--a woman's
gesture, a rose, a sigh, a fading flame, the sound that trembles
on a lute-string--find a place in Eternity when they pass from the
recognition of our senses. If he believed in the deathlessness of man's
personality he gained no comfort from his belief. He mourned the body's
decay; he was not concerned with the soul; and no heaven less palpable
than Mohammed's could have had any reality in his imagination.
His prose is as distinguished in its manner as his verse. I think it
was Professor Saintsbury who first brought _The Little Poems in Prose_,
a selection from which is included in this volume, before the notice
of English readers in an essay written many years ago. I am writing
this in France, far from the possibility of consulting any English
books, but if my memory serves me rightly he considered the prose of
these prose poems to be as perfect as literature can be. I think he
said, "they go as far as prose can go." They need no other introduction
than themselves, for they are perfect of their kind, and not different
in thought from the more elaborately wrought poems of _The Flowers of
Evil_. Some of them, as for instance "Every Man His Chimæra," are as
classical and as universally true as the myths and symbolisms of the
Old Testament; and all of them, I think, are worthy of a place in that
book the Archangel of the Presence will consult when all is weighed
in the balance--the book written by man himself, the record of his
deep and shallow imaginings. Baudelaire wrote them, he said, because
he had dreamed, "in his days of ambition," "of a miracle of poetical
prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme." His attitude of mind
was always so natural to him that he never thought it necessary to
make any excuse for the spirit of his art or the drear philosophy he
preached; unless a short notice printed in the first edition of his
poems, but withdrawn from the second edition, explaining that "faithful
to his dolorous programme, the author of _The Flowers of Evil_, as a
perfect comedian, has had to mould his spirit to all sophisms as to all
corruptions," can be considered as an excuse. From whatever point of
view we regard him: whether we praise his art and blame his philosophy,
or blame his art and praise his philosophy, he is as difficult to
analyse as he is difficult to give a place to, for we have none with
whom to compare him, or very few, too few to be of service to the
critic. His art is like the pearl, a beautiful product of disease, and
to blame it is like blaming the pearl.
He looked upon life very much as Poe, whom he so admired, looked upon
it: with the eye of a sensitive spectator in some gloomy vault of the
Spanish Inquisition, where beauty was upon the rack; he was horrified,
but unable to turn from a sight that fascinated him by its very terror.
His moments of inspiration are haunted by the consciousness that evil
beings, clothed with horror as with a shroud, are ever lingering about
the temple of life and awaiting an opportunity to enter. He was like
a man who awakens trembling from a nightmare, afraid of the darkness,
and unable to believe the dawn may be less hopeless than the midnight.
Perhaps he was haunted, as many artists and all mystics, by a fear of
madness and of the unseen world of evil shapes that sanity hides from
us and madness reveals. Is there a man, is there a writer, especially,
who has not at times been conscious of a vague and terrible fear that
the whole world of visible nature is but a comfortable illusion that
may fade away in a moment and leave him face to face with the horror
that has visited him in dreams? The old occult writers held that
the evil thoughts of others beget phantoms in the air that can make
themselves, bodies out of our fear, and haunt even our waking moments.
These were the shapes of terror that haunted Baudelaire. Shelley, too,
writes of them with as profound a knowledge as the magical writer of
the Middle Ages. They come to haunt his Prometheus.
"Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
And hollow underneath, like death."
They are the elemental beings who dwell beside the soul of the dreamer
and the poet, "like a vain loud multitude"; turning life into death and
all beautiful thoughts into poems like _The Flowers of Evil_, or into
tales like the satanic reveries of Edgar Poe.
"We are the ministers of pain, and fear,
And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,
And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn,
We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
When the great King betrays them to our will."
And every man gives them of the substance of his imagination to clothe
them in prophetic shapes that are the images of his destiny:
"From our victim's destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round,
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night."
The greatest of all poets conquer their dreams; others, who are
great, but not of the greatest, are conquered by them, and Baudelaire
was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Poe that
Baudelaire may well have pondered as he laboured at his translation,
for it reveals the secret of his life: "There are moments when, even
to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume
the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man is no Carathis
to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of
sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful; but,
like the demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the
Oxus, they must sleep or they will devour us--they must be suffered to
slumber or we perish."