I
For the sentimental no greater foe exists than the iconoclast who
dissipates literary legends. And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden
times when they gossiped of De Quincey's enormous opium consumption, of
the gin absorbed by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways,
Byron's escapades, and Shelley's atheism--alas! into what faded limbo
have they vanished. Poe, too, whom we saw in fancy reeling from Richmond
to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New York. Those
familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the way of all such jerry-built
spooks. We now know Poe to have been a man suffering at the time of his
death from cerebral lesion, a man who drank at intervals and little. Dr.
Guerrier of Paris has exploded a darling superstition about De Quincey's
opium-eating. He has demonstrated that no man could have lived so
long--De Quincey was nearly seventy-five at his death--and worked so
hard, if he had consumed twelve thousand drops of laudanum as often as
he said he did. Furthermore, the English essayist's description of the
drug's effects is inexact. He was seldom sleepy--a sure sign, asserts
Dr. Guerrier, that he was not altogether enslaved by the drug habit.
Sprightly in old age, his powers of labour were prolonged until past
three-score and ten. His imagination needed little opium to produce the
famous Confessions. Even Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at
the première of Hernani was, according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And
Rousseau has been whitewashed. So they are disappearing, those literary
legends, until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear,
old-fashioned, disreputable men of genius!
But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This
French poet has suffered more from the friendly malignant biographer and
chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the curs out of the cemetery?
asked Baudelaire after he had read Griswold on Poe. A few years later
his own cemetery was invaded and the world was put into possession of
the Baudelaire legend; that legend of the atrabilious, irritable poet,
dandy, maniac, his hair dyed green, spouting blasphemies; that grim,
despairing image of a diabolic, a libertine, saint, and drunkard. Maxime
du Camp was much to blame for the promulgation of these tales--witness
his Souvenirs littéraires. However, it may be confessed that part of the
Baudelaire legend was created by Charles Baudelaire. In the history of
literature it is difficult to parallel such a deliberate piece of
self-stultification. Not Villon, who preceded him, not Verlaine, who
imitated him, drew for the astonishment or disedification of the world a
like unflattering portrait. Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered
at times from acute cortical irritation. And, notwithstanding his
desperate effort to realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, who
had said that no man can bare his heart quite naked; there always will
be something held back, something false ostentatiously thrust forward.
The grimace, the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers
between the soul of man and the sharp reality of published confessions.
Baudelaire was no more exception to this rule than St. Augustine,
Bunyan, Rousseau, or Huysmans; though he was as frank as any of them, as
we may see in the printed diary, Mon cœur mis à nu (Posthumous Works,
Société du Mercure de France); and in the Journal, Fusées, Letters, and
other fragments exhumed by devoted Baudelarians.
To smash legends, Eugène Crépet's biographical study, first printed in
1887, has been republished with new notes by his son, Jacques Crépet.
This is an exceedingly valuable contribution to Baudelaire lore; a
dispassionate life, however, has yet to be written, a noble task for
some young poet who will disentangle the conflicting lies originated by
Baudelaire--that tragic comedian--from the truth and thus save him from
himself. The Crépet volume is really but a series of notes; there are
some letters addressed to the poet by the distinguished men of his day,
supplementing the rather disappointing volume of Letters, 1841-1866,
published in 1908. There are also documents in the legal prosecution of
Baudelaire, with memories of him by Charles Asselineau, Léon Cladel,
Camille Lemonnier, and others.
In November, 1850, Maxime du Camp and Gustave Flaubert found themselves
at the French Ambassador's, Constantinople. The two friends had taken a
trip in the Orient which later bore fruit in Salammbô. General Aupick,
the representative of the French Government, cordially the young men
received; they were presented to his wife, Madame Aupick. She was the
mother of Charles Baudelaire, and inquired rather anxiously of Du Camp:
"My son has talent, has he not?" Unhappy because her second marriage, a
brilliant one, had set her son against her, the poor woman welcomed from
such a source confirmation of her eccentric boy's gifts. Du Camp tells
the much-discussed story of a quarrel between the youthful Charles and
his stepfather, a quarrel that began at table. There were guests
present. After some words Charles bounded at the General's throat and
sought to strangle him. He was promptly boxed on the ears and succumbed
to a nervous spasm. A delightful anecdote, one that fills with joy
psychiatrists in search of a theory of genius and degeneration. Charles
was given some money and put on board a ship sailing to East India. He
became a cattle-dealer in the British army, and returned to France
years afterward with a Vénus noire, to whom he addressed extravagant
poems! All this according to Du Camp. Here is another tale, a comical
one. Baudelaire visited Du Camp in Paris, and his hair was violently
green. Du Camp said nothing. Angered by this indifference, Baudelaire
asked: "You find nothing abnormal about me?" "No," was the answer. "But
my hair--it is green!" "That is not singular, mon cher Baudelaire; every
one has hair more or less green in Paris." Disappointed in not creating
a sensation, Baudelaire went to a café, gulped down two large bottles of
Burgundy, and asked the waiter to remove the water, as water was a
disagreeable sight; then he went away in a rage. It is a pity to doubt
this green hair legend; presently a man of genius will not be able to
enjoy an epileptic fit in peace--as does a banker or a beggar. We are
told that St. Paul, Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, Dostoiëvsky
were epileptoids; yet we do not encounter men of this rare kind among
the inmates of asylums. Even Baudelaire had his sane moments.
The joke of the green hair has been disposed of by Crépet. Baudelaire's
hair thinning after an illness, he had his head shaved and painted with
salve of a green hue, hoping thereby to escape baldness. At the time
when he had embarked for Calcutta (May, 1841), he was not seventeen, but
twenty years of age. Du Camp said he was seventeen when he attacked
General Aupick. The dinner could not have taken place at Lyons because
the Aupick family had left that city six years before the date given by
Du Camp. Charles was provided with five thousand francs for his
expenses, instead of twenty--Du Camp's version--and he never was a
beef-drover in the British army, for a good reason--he never reached
India. Instead, he disembarked at the Isle of Bourbon, and after a short
stay suffered from homesickness and returned to France, after being
absent about ten months. But, like Flaubert, on his return home
Baudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the East; over there he had
yearned for Paris. Jules Claretie recalls Baudelaire saying to him with
a grimace: "I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung
up by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of
glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find
at the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious." Is it
necessary to add that Baudelaire, notorious in Paris for his love of
cats, dedicating poems to cats, would never have perpetrated such
revolting cruelty?
Another misconception, a critical one, is the case of Poe and
Baudelaire. The young Frenchman first became infatuated with Poe's
writings in 1846 or 1847--he gave these two dates, though several
stories of Poe had been translated into French as early as 1841 or 1842;
L'Orang-Outang was the first, which we know as The Murders in the Rue
Morgue; Madame Meunier also adapted several Poe stories for the reviews.
Baudelaire's labours as a translator lasted over ten years. That he
assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe, is a commonplace of literary
gossip. But that Poe had overwhelming influence in the formation of his
poetic genius is not the truth. Yet we find such an acute critic as the
late Edmund Clarence Stedman writing, "Poe's chief influence upon
Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry." It is precisely the
reverse. Poe's influence affected Baudelaire's prose, notably in the
disjointed confessions, Mon cœur mis à nu, which vaguely recall the
American writer's Marginalia. The bulk in the poetry in Les Fleurs du
Mal was written before Baudelaire had read Poe, though not published in
book form until 1857. But in 1855 some of the poems saw the light in the
Revue des deux Mondes, while many of them had been put forth a decade or
fifteen years before as fugitive verse in various magazines. Stedman was
not the first to make this mistake. In Bayard Taylor's The Echo Club we
find on page 24 this criticism: "There was a congenital twist about Poe
... Baudelaire and Swinburne after him have been trying to surpass him
by increasing the dose; but his muse is the natural Pythia inheriting
her convulsions, while they eat all sorts of insane roots to produce
theirs." This must have been written about 1872, and after reading it
one would fancy that Poe and Baudelaire were rhapsodic wrigglers on the
poetic tripod, whereas their poetry is often reserved, even glacial.
Baudelaire, like Poe, sometimes "built his nests with the birds of
Night," and that was enough to condemn the work of both men by critics
of the didactic school.
Once, when Baudelaire heard that an American man of letters(?) was in
Paris, he secured an introduction and called on him. Eagerly inquiring
after Poe, he learned that he was not considered a genteel person in
America, Baudelaire withdrew, muttering maledictions. Enthusiastic poet!
Charming literary person! Yet the American, whoever he was, represented
public opinion at the time. To-day criticisms of Poe are vitiated by the
desire to make him an angel. It is to be doubted whether without his
barren environment and hard fortunes we should have had Poe at all. He
had to dig down deep into the pit of his personality to reach the
central core of his music. But every ardent young soul entering
"literature" begins by a vindication of Poe's character. Poe was a man,
and he is now a classic. He was a half-charlatan as was Baudelaire. In
both the sublime and the sickly were never far asunder. The pair loved
to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries. Both were implacable
pessimists. Both were educated in affluence, and both had to face
unprepared the hardships of life. The hastiest comparison of their
poetic work will show that their only common ideal was the worship of an
exotic beauty. Their artistic methods of expression were totally
dissimilar. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like temperament which
vibrated in the presence of strange subjects. Above all, he was obsessed
by sex. Women, as angel of destruction, is the keynote of his poems. Poe
was almost sexless. His aerial creatures never footed the dusty highways
of the world. His lovely lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me," could
never have been written by Baudelaire; while Poe would never have
pardoned the "fulgurant" grandeur, the Beethoven-like harmonies, the
Dantesque horrors of that "deep wide music of lost souls" in "Femmes
Damnées":
"Descendes, descendes, lamentable victimes."
Or this, which might serve as a text for one of John Martin's vast
sinister mezzotints:
J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal
Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore,
Une fée allumer dans un ciel infernal
Une miraculeuse aurore;
J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal
Un être, qui n'était que lumière, or et gaze,
Terrasser rénorme Satan;
Mais mon cœur que jamais ne visite l'extase,
Est un théâtre où l'on attend
Toujours, toujours en vain l'Etre aux ailes de gaze.
George Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and
Baudelaire: "Both authors--Poe and De Quincey--fell short of Baudelaire
himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have a
superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperameut and affection
for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror." Poe is without
passion, except a passion for the macabre; what Huysmans calls "The
October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a gulf of despair and
terror and humanity in Baudelaire, which shakes your nerves, yet
stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a poet, he was no
match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual prestidigitation. The
mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious detective tales, tales
extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the
Poe the prophet and mystic--in these the American was more versatile
than his French translator. That Baudelaire said, "Evil be thou my
good," is doubtless true. He proved all things and found them vanity. He
is the poet of original sin, a worshipper of Satan for the sake of
paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish to us--in his heart he was
a believer. His was "an infinite reverse aspiration," and mixed up with
his pose was a disgust for vice, for life itself. He was the last of the
Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called him the Kamchatka of Romanticism; its
remotest hyperborean peak. Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as
Naturalism; but Baudelaire is alive, and read. His glistening
phosphorescent trail is over French poetry and he is the begetter of a
school:--Verlaine, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud,
Jules Laforgue, Gabriel D'Annunzio, Aubrey Beardsley, Verhaeren, and
many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who
was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be
the obverse of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong
with the world."
When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanticists that they came
from Chateaubriand, he should have substituted the name of
Rousseau--"Romanticism, it is Rousseau," exclaims Pierre Lasserre. But
there is more of Byron and Petrus Borel--a forgotten half-mad poet--in
Baudelaire; though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau
reactionary, sported the workingman's blouse, cut his hair, shouldered a
musket, went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling
the proletarian "Brother!" (oh, Baudelaire!) and, as the Goncourts
recorded in their diary, had the head of a maniac. How seriously we may
take this swing of the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of the poet's
at the time of the Revolution: "Come," he said, "let us go shoot General
Aupick!" It was his stepfather that he thought of, not the eternal
principles of Liberty. This may be a false anecdote; many such were
foisted upon Baudelaire. For example, his exclamations at cafés or in
public places, such as: "Have you ever eaten a baby? I find it pleasing
to the palate!" or, "The night I killed my father!" Naturally, people
stared and Baudelaire was happy--he had startled a bourgeois. The
cannibalistic idea he may have borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet,
for this French poet knew English literature.
Gautier compares the poems to a certain tale of Hawthorne's in which
there is a garden of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his
laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; he never descended into the
mud and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged his
soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France says, "a divine poet." How
childish, yet how touching is his resolution--he wrote in his diary of
prayer's dynamic force--when he was penniless, in debt, threatened with
imprisonment, sick, nauseated with sin: "To make every morning my prayer
to God, the reservoir of all force, and all justice; to my father, to
Mariette, and to Poe as intercessors." (Evidently, Maurice Barrès
encountered here his theory of Intercessors.) Baudelaire loved the
memory of his father as much as Stendhal hated his own. He became
reconciled with his mother after the death of General Aupick, in 1857.
He felt in 1862 that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for
he wrote: "I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror. To-day
imbecility's wing fanned me as it passed." The sense of the vertiginous
gulf was abiding with him; read his poem, "Pascal avait son gouffre."
In preferring the Baudelaire translations of Poe to the original--and
they give the impression of being original works--Stedman agreed with
Asselineau that the French is more concise than the English. The prose
of Poe and Baudelaire is clear, sober, rhythmic; Baudelaire's is more
lapidary, finer in contour, richer coloured, more supple, though without
the "honey and tiger's blood" of Barbey d'Aurevilly. Baudelaire's soul
was patiently built up as a fabulous bird might build its nest--bits of
straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades of black stars, rags,
leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray of roses, a sparkle of
pebble, a gleam of blue sky, arabesques of incense and verdigris,
despairing hearts and music and the abomination of desolation, for its
ground-tones. But this soul-nest is also a cemetery of the seven
sorrows. He loves the clouds ... les nuages ... là bas.... It was là bas
with him even in the tortures of his wretched love-life. Corruption and
death were ever floating in his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who
saw everywhere the hidden skeleton. Félicien Hops has best interpreted
Baudelaire; the etcher and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too,
is a Baudelarian. If there could be such an anomaly as a native
wood-note wildly evil, it would be the lyric and astringent voice of
this poet. His sensibility was both catholic and morbid, though he could
be frigid in the face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a
man for whom the invisible word existed; if Gautier was pagan,
Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from mediæval days. The spirit rules,
and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw God." A Manichean in his worship of
evil, he nevertheless abased his soul: "Oh! Lord God! Give me the force
and courage to contemplate my heart and my body without disgust," he
prays: but as some one remarked to Rochefoucauld, "Where you end,
Christianity begins."
Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders of a poetic Maremma,
which every miasma of the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and
glow-worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire painted in his sultry music
the profundities of abysms, the vastness of space. He painted, too, the
great nocturnal silences of the soul.
Pacem summum tenent! He never reached peace on the heights. Let us
admit that souls of his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel is
too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the enigma for us is none the less
unfathomable. Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled delirium.
To affiliate him with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffman, James Thomson,
Coleridge, and the rest of the sombre choir does not explain him; he is,
perhaps, nearer Donne and Villon than any of the others--strains of the
metaphysical and sinister and supersubtle are to be discovered in him.
The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bilocation, are only too
easy to diagnose; but the remedy? Hypocrite lecteur--mon semblable--mon
frère! When the subtlety, force, grandeur, of his poetic production be
considered, together with its disquieting, nervous, vibrating qualities,
it is not surprising that Victor Hugo wrote to the poet: "You invest the
heaven of art with we know not what deadly rays; you create a new
shudder." Hugo might have said that he turned Art into an Inferno.
Baudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry. In his heaven of fire, glass
and ebony he is the blazing Lucifer. "A glorious devil, large in heart
and brain, that did love beauty only..." once sang Tennyson, though not
of the Frenchman.