As long ago as 1869, and in our "barbarous gas-lit country," as
Baudelaire named the land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which
this poet was described as "unique and as interesting as Hamlet. He is
that rare and unknown being, a genuine poet--a poet in the midst of
things that have disordered his spirit--a poet excessively developed in
his taste for and by beauty ... very responsive to the ideal, very
greedy of sensation." A better description of Baudelaire does not exist
The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that sounded throughout the
disordered symphony of the poet's life.
He was, later, revealed--also reviled--to American readers by Henry
James, who completely missed his significance. This was in 1878, when
appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists. Previous to
that there had been some desultory discussion, a few essays in the
magazines, and in 1875 a sympathetic paper by Professor James Albert
Harrison of the University of Virginia. He denounced the Frenchman for
his reprehensible taste, though he did not mention his beautiful verse
nor his originality in the matter of criticism. Baudelaire, in his eyes,
was not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of Sainte-Beuve,
introduced Poe as a great man to the French nation. (See Baudelaire's
letter to Sainte-Beuve in the newly published Letters, 1841-1866.)
Perhaps "Mr. Dick Minim" and his projected Academy of Criticism might
make clear these devious problems.
The Etudes Critiques of Edmond Schérer were collected in 1863. In them
we find this unhappy, uncritical judgment: "Baudelaire, lui, n'a rien,
ni le cœur, ni l'esprit, ni l'idée, ni le mot, ni la raison, ni la
fantaisie, ni la verve, ni même la facture ... son unique titre c'est
d'avoir contribué à créer l'esthétique de la débauche." It is not our
intention to dilate upon the injustice of this criticism. It is
Baudelaire the critic of æsthetics in whom we are interested. Yet I
cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of Schérer had been
transformed into affirmations, only justice would have been accorded
Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet, the most original of his century,
but also a critic of the first rank, one who welcomed Richard Wagner
when Paris hooted him and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, played
the rôle of the envious; one who fought for Edouard Manet, Leconte de
Lisle, Gustave Flaubert, Eugène Delacroix; fought with pen for the
modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, Daumier, Félicien Rops, Gavarni,
and Constantin Guys. He literally identified himself with De Quincey and
Poe, translating them so wonderfully well that some unpatriotic persons
like the French better than the originals. So much was Baudelaire
absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted that the translator
would meet the same fate as the American poet. A singular, vigorous
spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry with its "icy ecstasy" is profound
and harmonious, whose criticism is penetrated by a catholic quality, who
anticipated modern critics in his abhorrence of schools and
environments, preferring to isolate the man and uniquely study him. He
would have subscribed to Swinburne's generous pronouncement: "I have
never been able to see what should attract man to the profession of
criticism but the noble pleasure of praising." The Frenchman has said
that it would be impossible for a critic to become a poet; and it is
impossible for a poet not to contain a critic.
Théophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition of Les
Fleurs du Mal is not only the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire
as man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark of Gautier's gifts
as a critical essayist. We learn therein how the young Charles, an
incorrigible dandy, came to visit Hôtel Pimodan about 1844. In this
Hôtel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His
fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by the painters,
poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day--that is, carefully selected
ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Mérimée, and others whose verve or
genius gave them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this cave of
forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de Chagrin pictured the same sort
of scenes which were supposed to occur weekly at the Pimodan. Gautier
eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred artistic souls, where
the beautiful Jewess, Maryx, who had posed for Ary Scheffer's Mignon
and for Paul Delaroche's La Gloire, met the superb Madame Sabatier, the
only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original of that extraordinary
group of Clésinger's--the sculptor and son-in-law of George Sand--la
Femme au Serpent, a Salammbô à la mode in marble. Hasheesh was eaten, so
Gautier writes, by Boissard and Baudelaire. As for the creator of
Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust for such nonsense. He had to work
for his living at journalism, and he died in harness, an irreproachable
father, while the unhappy Baudelaire, the inheritor of an intense,
unstable temperament, soon devoured his patrimony of 75,000 francs, and
for the remaining years of his life was between the devil of his dusky
Jenny Duval and the deep sea of hopeless debt.
It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were no doubt much less wicked
than the participants would have us believe, that Baudelaire encountered
Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his portrait, and encouraged
the fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We have seen
an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray talent of about
the same order as Thackeray's, with a superadded note of the
"horrific"--that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics. Baudelaire
admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman praised the illustrations of
Guys, he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the commonplaces of a
painter's technique; also how to compose a palette--a rather meaningless
phrase nowadays. At least, he did not write of the arts without some
technical experience. Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and
when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 1846, 1855, and 1859,
the praise and blame they evoked were testimonies to the training and
knowledge of their author. A new spirit had been born.
The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor
spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are
the production of a humanist. Some would put them above Diderot's. Mr.
Saintsbury, after Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire among the
English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism observed
too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds, "to read a
criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by no means a
sure method of recognizing the picture afterward." Now, word-painting
was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier,
with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh impossible feat of
competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of canvas and
marble. And, if he with his verbal imagination did not entirely succeed,
how could a less adept manipulator of the vocabulary? We do not agree
with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine too much when the imagination is
that of a poet. Baudelaire divined the work of the artist and set it
down scrupulously in a prose of exceeding rectitude. He did not paint
pictures in prose. He did not divagate. He did not overburden his pages
with technical terms. But the spirit of his subject he did disengage in
a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical schools were a cross for
him to bear, and he wore his prejudices lightly. Like a true critic, he
judged more by form than theme. There are no types; there is only life,
he asserted, and long before Jules Laforgue. He was ever art-for-art,
yet, having breadth of comprehension and a Heine-like capacity for
seeing both sides of his own nature with its idiosyncrasies, he could
write: "The puerile utopia of the school of art-for-art, in excluding
morality, and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. All
literature which refuses to advance fraternally between science and
philosophy is a homicidal and a suicidal literature."
Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than of
music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of
democracy, of the democratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental
fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation
the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those
things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the Dresden
uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary étude. Brave
lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the region of the
ideal. Baudelaire's little attack of the equality-measles soon vanished.
He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly and injustice of
abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of paradox, he dedicated
a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but he would not have
contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that "in art the democrat
is always reactionary. In 1830 the democrats were against Victor Hugo
and Delacrois." And Les Fleurs du Mal, that book of opals, blood, and
evil swamp-flowers, will never be savoured by the mob.
In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in
the Louvre he enjoyed the company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of
the poet's preferences. He was also attracted by El Greco--not an
unnatural admiration, considering the sombre extravagance of his own
genius. Of Goya he has written in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his
touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his Derves ruined by abuse of
drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination were more beautiful
than Nature herself. The country itself, he declared, was odious. Like
Whistler, whom he often met--see the Hommage à Delacrois by
Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler, Baudelaire, Manet,
Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacrois, Cordier, Duranty the critic,
and De Balleroy--he could not help showing his aversion to "foolish
sunsets." In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain had entered too much
moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of poetry, criticism and
fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, is the literary progenitor
of Jean, Duc d'Esseintes, in Huysmans's _A Rebours_. Huysmans at first
modelled himself upon Baudelaire. His Le Drageoir aux Epices is a
continuation of Petits Poèmes en Prose. And to Baudelaire's account must
be laid much artificial morbid writing. Despite his pursuit of
perfection in form, his influence has been too often baneful to
impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of Gallic Byronism, and
high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no extravagance, absurd or
terrible, that he did not commit, from etching a four-part fugue on ice
to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer. In his criticism alone was he the
sane logical Frenchman. And while he did not live to see the success of
the Impressionist group, he surely would have acclaimed their theory and
practice. Was he not an impressionist himself?
As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so Delacroix quite overflowed
his æsthetic consciousness. Read Volume II of his collected works,
_Curiosités Esthétiques_, which contains his Salons; also his essay, _De
l'Essence du Rire_ (worthy to be placed side by side with George
Meredith's essay on Comedy). Caricaturists, French and foreign, are
considered in two chapters at the close of the volume. Baudelaire was as
conscientious as Gautier. He trotted around miles of mediocre canvas,
saying an encouraging word to the less talented, boiling over with holy
indignation or indulging in glacial irony, before the rash usurpers
occupying the seats of the mighty, and pouncing on new genius with
promptitude. Upon Delacroix he lavished the largesse of his admiration.
He smiled at the platitudes of Horace Vernet, and only shook his head
over the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed William
Hausollier, now so little known. He praised Devéria, Chasseriau--who
waited years before he came into his own; his preferred landscapists
were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke of Ary Scheffer and
the "apes of sentiment"; while his discussions of Hogarth, Cruikshank,
Pinelli and Breughel proclaims his versatility of vision. In his essay
Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne he was the first among critics to recognize
the peculiar quality called "modernity," that naked vibration which
informs the novels of Goncourt, Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale,
and the pictures of Manet, Monet, Degas and Raffaelli with their
evocations of a new, nervous Paris. It is in his Volume III, entitled
L'Art Romantique, that so many things dear to the new century were then
subjects of furious quarrels. This book contains much just and brilliant
writing. It was easy for Nietzsche to praise Wagner in Germany in 1876,
but dangerous at Paris in 1861 to declare war on Wagner's adverse
critics. This Baudelaire did.
The relations of Baudelaire and Edouard Manet were exceedingly cordial.
In a letter to Théophile Thoré, the art critic (Letters, p. 361), we
find Baudelaire defending his friend from the accusation that his
pictures were pastiches of Goya. He wrote: "Manet has never seen Goya,
never El Greco; he was never in the Pourtalés Gallery." Which may have
been true at the time, 1864, nevertheless Manet had visited Madrid and
spent much time studying Velasquez and abusing Spanish cookery.
(Consider, too, Goya's Balcony with Girls and Manet's famous Balcony.)
Raging at the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this same epistle:
"They accuse even me of imitating Edgar Poe.... Do you know why I so
patiently translated Poe? Because he resembled me." The poet italicized
these words. With stupefaction, therefore, he admired the mysterious
coincidences of Manet's work with that of Goya and El Greco.
He took Manet seriously. He wrote to him in a paternal and severe tone.
Recall his reproof when urging the painter to exhibit his work. "You
complain about attacks, but are you the first to endure them? Have you
more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by
derision. And in order not to make you too proud I must tell you that
they are models, each in his way, and in a very rich world, while you
are only the first in the decrepitude of your art." (Letters, p. 436.)
Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words if he were able to revisit
the glimpses of the Champs Elysées at the Autumn Salons? What would he
think of Cézanne? Odilon Redon he would understand, for he is the
transposer of Baudelairianism to terms of design and colour. And perhaps
the poet whose verse is saturated with tropical hues--he, when young,
sailed in southern seas--might appreciate the monstrous debauch of form
and colour in the Tahitian canvases of Paul Gauguin.
Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his
verse. He is par excellence the poet of æsthetics. To Daumier he
inscribed a poem; and to the sculptor Ernest Christophe, to Delacroix
(Sur Tasse en Prison), to Manet, to Guys (Rêve Parisien), to an unknown
master (Une Martyre); and Watteau, a Watteau à rebours, is seen in Un
Voyage à Cythère; while in Les Phares this poet of the ideal, spleen
music, and perfume, shows his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Puget, Goya, Delacroix--"Delacroix, lac de sang
hanté des mauvais anges." And what is more exquisite than his quatrain
to Lola de Valence, a poetic inscription for the picture of Edouard
Manet, with its last line as vaporous, as subtle as Verlaine: "Le charme
inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir!" Heine called himself the last of the
Romantics. The first of the "Moderns" and the last of the Romantics was
the many-sided Charles Baudelaire.