Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821; he died there in 1867.
Between these dates lies the evolution of one of the most striking
personalities in French literature, and the development of an influence
which affected not only the literature of the poet's own country, but
that of all Europe and America. The genuineness of both personality and
influence was one of the first critical issues raised after Baudelaire's
advent into literature; it is still one of the main issues in all
critical consideration of him. A question which involves by implication
the whole relation of poetry, and of art as such, to life, is obviously
one that furnishes more than literary issues, and engages other than
literary interests. And thus, by easy and natural corollaries,
Baudelaire has been made a subject of appeal not only to judgment, but
even to conscience. At first sight, therefore, he appears surrounded
either by an intricate moral maze, or by a no less troublesome confusion
of contradictory theories from opposing camps rather than schools of
criticism. But no author--no dead author--is more accessible, or more
communicable in his way; his poems, his theories, and a goodly portion
of his life, lie at the disposition of any reader who cares to know him.
[Illustration: CHARLES BAUDELAIRE]
The Baudelaire legend, as it is called by French critics, is one of the
blooms of that romantic period of French literature which is presided
over by the genius of Théophile Gautier. Indeed; it is against the
golden background of Gautier's imagination that the picture of the
youthful poet is best preserved for us, appearing in all the delicate
and illusive radiance of the youth and beauty of legendary saints on the
gilded canvases of mediaeval art. The radiant youth and beauty may be no
more truthful to nature than the gilded background, but the fact of the
impression sought to be conveyed is not on that account to be
disbelieved.
Baudelaire, Gautier writes, was born in the Rue Hautefeuille, in one of
those old houses with a pepper-pot turret at the corner which have
disappeared from the city under the advancing improvement of straight
lines and clear openings. His father, a gentleman of learning, retained
all the eighteenth-century courtesy and distinction of manner, which,
like the pepper-pot turret, has also disappeared under the advance of
Republican enlightenment. An absent-minded, reserved child, Baudelaire
attracted no especial attention during his school days. When they were
over, his predilection for a literary vocation became known. From this
his parents sought to divert him by sending him to travel. He voyaged
through the Indian Ocean, visiting the great islands: Madagascar,
Ceylon, Mauritius, Bourbon. Had there been a chance for irresolution in
the mind of the youth, this voyage destroyed it forever. His
imagination, essentially exotic, succumbed to the passionate charm of a
new, strange, and splendidly glowing form of nature; the stars, the
skies, the gigantic vegetation, the color, the perfumes, the
dark-skinned figures in white draperies, formed for him at that time a
heaven, for which his senses unceasingly yearned afterwards amid the
charms and enchantments of civilization, in the world's capital of
pleasure and luxury. Returning to Paris, of age and master of his
fortune, he established himself in his independence, openly adopting his
chosen career.
He and Théophile Gautier met for the first time in 1849, in the Hotel
Pimodau, where were held the meetings of the Hashish Club. Here in the
great Louis XIV. saloon, with its wood-work relieved with dull gold; its
corbeled ceiling, painted after the manner of Lesueur and Poussin, with
satyrs pursuing nymphs through reeds and foliage; its great red and
white spotted marble mantel, with gilded elephant harnessed like the
elephant of Porus in Lebrun's picture, bearing an enameled clock with
blue ciphers; its antique chairs and sofas, covered with faded tapestry
representing hunting scenes, holding the reclining figures of the
members of the club; women celebrated in the world of beauty, men in the
world of letters, meeting not only for the enjoyment of the artificial
ecstasies of the drug, but to talk of art, literature, and love, as in
the days of the Decameron--here Baudelaire made what might be called his
historic impression upon literature. He was at that time twenty-eight
years of age; and even in that assemblage, in those surroundings, his
personality was striking. His black hair, worn close to the head, grew
in regular scallops over a forehead of dazzling whiteness; his eyes, the
color of Spanish tobacco, were spiritual, deep, penetrating, perhaps too
insistently so, in expression; the mobile sinuous mouth had the ironical
voluptuous lips that Leonardo da Vinci loved to paint; the nose was
delicate and sensitive, with quivering nostrils; a deep dimple
accentuated the chin; the bluish-black tint of the shaven skin, softened
with rice-powder, contrasted with the clear rose and white of the upper
part of his cheeks. Always dressed with meticulous neatness and
simplicity, following English rather than French taste; in manner
punctiliously observant of the strictest conventionality, scrupulously,
even excessively polite; in talk measuring his phrases, using only the
most select terms, and pronouncing certain words as if the sound itself
possessed a certain subtle, mystical value,--throwing his voice into
capitals and italics;--in contrast with the dress and manners about him,
he, according to Gautier, looked like a dandy who had strayed
into Bohemia.
The contrast was no less violent between Baudelaire's form and the
substance of his conversation. With a simple, natural, and perfectly
impartial manner, as if he were conveying commonplace information about
every-day life, he would advance some axiom monstrously Satanic, or
sustain, with the utmost grace and coolness, some mathematical
extravagance in the way of a theory. And no one could so inflexibly push
a paradox to the uttermost limits, regardless of consequences to
received notions of morality or religion; always employing the most
rigorous methods of logic and reason. His wit was found to lie neither
in words nor thoughts, but in the peculiar standpoint from which he
regarded things, a standpoint which altered their outlines,--like those
of objects looked down upon from a bird's flight, or looked up to on a
ceiling. In this way, to continue the exposition of Gautier, Baudelaire
saw relations inappreciable to others, whose logical bizarrerie was
startling.
His first productions were critical articles for the Parisian journals;
articles that at the time passed unperceived, but which to-day furnish
perhaps the best evidences of that keen artistic insight and foresight
of the poet, which was at once his greatest good and evil genius. In
1856 appeared his translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe; a
translation which may be said to have naturalized Poe in French
literature, where he has played a role curiously like that of Baudelaire
in Poe's native literature. The natural predisposition of Baudelaire,
which fitted him to be the French interpreter of Poe, rendered him also
peculiarly sensitive to Poe's mysteriously subtle yet rankly vigorous
charms; and he showed himself as sensitively responsive to these as he
had been to the exotic charms of the East. The influence upon his
intellectual development was decisive and final. His indebtedness to
Poe, or it might better be said, his identification with Poe, is visible
not only in his paradoxical manias, but in his poetry, and in his
theories of art and poetry set forth in his various essays and fugitive
prose expressions, and notably in his introduction to his translations
of the American author's works.
In 1857 appeared the "Fleurs du Mal" (Flowers of Evil), the volume of
poems upon which Baudelaire's fame as a poet is founded. It was the
result of his thirty years' devotion to the study of his art and
meditation upon it. Six of the poems were suppressed by the censor of
the Second Empire. This action called out, in form of protest, that fine
appreciation and defense of Baudelaire's genius and best defense of his
methods, by four of the foremost critics and keenest artists in poetry
of Paris, which form, with the letters from Sainte-Beuve, de Custine,
and Deschamps, a precious appendix to the third edition of the poems.
The name 'Flowers of Evil' is a sufficient indication of the intentions
and aim of the author. Their companions in the volume are: 'Spleen and
Ideal,' 'Parisian Pictures,' 'Wine,' 'Revolt,' 'Death.' The simplest
description of them is that they are indescribable. They must not only
be read, they must be studied repeatedly to be understood as they
deserve. The paradox of their most exquisite art, and their at times
most revolting revelations of the degradations and perversities of
humanity, can be accepted with full appreciation of the author's meaning
only by granting the same paradox to his genuine nature; by crediting
him with being not only an ardent idealist of art for art's sake, but an
idealist of humanity for humanity's sake; one to whom humanity, even in
its lowest degradations and vilest perversions, is sublimely
sacred;--one to whom life offered but one tragedy, that of human souls
flying like Cain from a guilt-stricken paradise, but pursued by the
remorse of innocence, and scourged by the consciousness of their own
infinitude.
But the poet's own words are the best explanation of his aim and
intention:--
"Poetry, though one delve ever so little into his own self,
interrogate his own soul, recall his memories of enthusiasms,
has no other end than itself; it cannot have any other aim,
and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of
the name of poem, as that which shall have been written
solely for the pleasure of writing a poem. I do not wish to
say that poetry should not ennoble manners--that its final
result should not be to raise man above vulgar interests.
That would be an evident absurdity. I say that if the poet
has pursued a moral end, he has diminished his poetic force,
and it would not be imprudent to wager that his work would be
bad. Poetry cannot, under penalty of death or forfeiture,
assimilate itself to science or morality. It has not Truth
for object, it has only itself. Truth's modes of
demonstration are different and elsewhere. Truth has nothing
to do with ballads; all that constitutes the charm, the
irresistible grace of a ballad, would strip Truth of its
authority and power. Cold, calm, impassive, the demonstrative
temperament rejects the diamonds and flowers of the muse; it
is, therefore, the absolute inverse of the poetic
temperament. Pure Intellect aims at Truth, Taste shows us
Beauty, and the Moral Sense teaches us Duty. It is true that
the middle term has intimate connection with the two
extremes, and only separates itself from Moral Sense by a
difference so slight that Aristotle did not hesitate to
class some of its delicate operations amongst the virtues.
And accordingly what, above all, exasperates the man of taste
is the spectacle of vice, is its deformity, its
disproportions. Vice threatens the just and true, and revolts
intellect and conscience; but as an outrage upon harmony, as
dissonance, it would particularly wound certain poetic minds,
and I do not think it would be scandal to consider all
infractions of moral beauty as a species of sin against
rhythm and universal prosody.
"It is this admirable, this immortal instinct of the
Beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacle
as a sketch, as a correspondent of Heaven. The insatiable
thirst for all that is beyond that which life veils is the
most living proof of our immortality. It is at once by poetry
and across it, across and through music, that the soul gets a
glimpse of the splendors that lie beyond the tomb. And when
an exquisite poem causes tears to rise in the eye, these
tears are not the proof of excessive enjoyment, but rather
the testimony of a moved melancholy, of a postulation of the
nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect, which wishes to
take immediate possession, even on earth, of a
revealed paradise.
"Thus the principle of poetry is strictly and simply human
aspiration toward superior beauty; and the manifestation of
this principle is enthusiasm and uplifting of the
soul,--enthusiasm entirely independent of passion,--which is
the intoxication of heart, and of truth which is the food of
reason. For passion is a natural thing, even too natural not
to introduce a wounding, discordant tone into the domain of
pure beauty; too familiar, too violent, not to shock the pure
Desires, the gracious Melancholies, and the noble Despairs
which inhabit the supernatural regions of poetry."
Baudelaire saw himself as the poet of a decadent epoch, an epoch in
which art had arrived at the over-ripened maturity of an aging
civilization; a glowing, savorous, fragrant over-ripeness, that is
already softening into decomposition. And to be the fitting poet of such
an epoch, he modeled his style on that of the poets of the Latin
decadence; for, as he expressed it for himself and for the modern school
of "decadents" in French poetry founded upon his name:--
"Does it not seem to the reader, as to me, that the language
of the last Latin decadence--that supreme sigh of a robust
person already transformed and prepared for spiritual
life--is singularly fitted to express passion as it is
understood and felt by the modern world? Mysticism is the
other end of the magnet of which Catullus and his band,
brutal and purely epidermic poets, knew only the sensual
pole. In this wonderful language, solecisms and barbarisms
seem to express the forced carelessness of a passion which
forgets itself, and mocks at rules. The words, used in a
novel sense, reveal the charming awkwardness of a barbarian
from the North, kneeling before Roman Beauty."
Nature, the nature of Wordsworth and Tennyson, did not exist for
Baudelaire; inspiration he denied; simplicity he scouted as an
anachronism in a decadent period of perfected art, whose last word in
poetry should be the apotheosis of the Artificial. "A little
charlatanism is permitted even to genius," he wrote: "it is like fard on
the cheeks of a naturally beautiful woman; an appetizer for the mind."
Again he expresses himself:
"It seems to me, two women are presented to me, one a rustic
matron, repulsive in health and virtue, without manners,
without expression; in short, owing nothing except to simple
nature;--the other, one of those beauties that dominate and
oppress memory, uniting to her original and unfathomable
charms all the eloquence of dress; who is mistress of her
part, conscious of and queen of herself, speaking like an
instrument well tuned; with looks freighted with thought, yet
letting flow only what she would. My choice would not be
doubtful; and yet there are pedagogic sphinxes who would
reproach me as recreant to classical honor."
In music it was the same choice. He saw the consummate art and
artificiality of Wagner, and preferred it to all other music, at a time
when the German master was ignored and despised by a classicized musical
world. In perfumes it was not the simple fragrance of the rose or violet
that he loved, but musk and amber; and he said, "my soul hovers over
perfumes as the souls of other men hover over music."
Besides his essays and sketches, Baudelaire published in prose a
novelette; 'Fanfarlo,' 'Artificial Paradises,' opium and hashish,
imitations of De Quincey's 'Confessions of an Opium Eater'; and 'Little
Prose Poems,' also inspired by a book, the 'Gaspard de la Nuit' of
Aloysius Bertrand, and which Baudelaire thus describes:--
"The idea came to me to attempt something analogous, and to
apply to the description of modern life, or rather a modern
and more abstract life, the methods he had applied to the
painting of ancient life, so strangely picturesque. Which one
of us in his ambitious days has not dreamed of a miracle of
poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme,
supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the
lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie,
and to the assaults of conscience?"
Failing health induced Baudelaire to quit Paris and establish himself in
Brussels; but he received no benefit from the change of climate, and the
first symptoms of his terrible malady manifested themselves--a slowness
of speech, and hesitation over words. As a slow and sententious
enunciation was characteristic of him, the symptoms attracted no
attention, until he fell under a sudden and violent attack. He was
brought back to Paris and conveyed to a "maison de santé," where he
died, after lingering several months in a paralyzed condition,
motionless, speechless; nothing alive in him but thought, seeking to
express itself through his eyes.
The nature of Baudelaire's malady and death was, by the public at large,
accepted as confirmation of the suspicion that he was in the habit of
seeking his inspiration in the excitation of hashish and opium. His
friends, however, recall the fact of his incessant work, and intense
striving after his ideal in art; his fatigue of body and mind, and his
increasing weariness of spirit under the accumulating worries and griefs
of a life for which his very genius unfitted him. He was also known to
be sober in his tastes, as all great workers are. That he had lent
himself more than once to the physiological and psychological experiment
of hashish was admitted; but he was a rare visitor at the séances in the
saloon of the Hotel Pimodau, and came as a simple observer of others.
His masterly description of the hallucinations produced by hashish is
accompanied by analytical and moral commentaries which unmistakably
express repugnance to and condemnation of the drug:--
"Admitting for the moment," he writes, "the hypothesis of a
constitution tempered enough and strong enough to resist the
evil effects of the perfidious drug, another, a fatal and
terrible danger, must be thought of,--that of habit. He who
has recourse to a poison to enable him to think, will soon
not be able to think without the poison. Imagine the horrible
fate of a man whose paralyzed imagination is unable to work
without the aid of hashish or opium.... But man is not so
deprived of honest means of gaining heaven, that he is
obliged to invoke the aid of pharmacy or witchcraft; he need
not sell his soul in order to pay for the intoxicating
caresses and the love of houris. What is a paradise that one
purchases at the expense of one's own soul?... Unfortunate
wretches who have neither fasted nor prayed, and who have
refused the redemption of labor, ask from black magic the
means to elevate themselves at a single stroke to a
supernatural existence. Magic dupes them, and lights for them
a false happiness and a false light; while we, poets and
philosophers, who have regenerated our souls by incessant
work and contemplation, by the assiduous exercise of the will
and permanent nobility of intention, we have created for our
use a garden of true beauty. Confiding in the words that
'faith will remove mountains,' we have accomplished the one
miracle for which God has given us license."
The perfect art-form of Baudelaire's poems makes translation of them
indeed a literal impossibility. The 'Little Old Women,' 'The Voyage,'
'The Voyage to Cytherea,' 'A Red-haired Beggar-girl,' 'The Seven Old
Men,' and sonnet after sonnet in 'Spleen and Ideal,' seem to rise only
more and more ineffable from every attempt to filter them through
another language, or through another mind than that of their original,
and, it would seem, one possible creator.
[Illustration: Manuscript signature here: Grace King]