I
When Baudelaire is great, when his genius is at its highest point
of imaginative creation, of imaginative criticism, it is never when
he works by implication--as the great men who are pure artists (for
instance, Shakespeare) work by implication only--but always from his
personal point of view being simply infallible and impeccable. The pure
artist, it has been said, never asserts: and the instances are far
from being numerous; Balzac asserts, and Balzac is always absolutely
just in all his assertions: he whose analysis of modern Society--_La
Comédie Humaine_--verges almost always on creation; and despite certain
deficiencies in technique and in style, he remains the greatest of all
novelists. As for Baudelaire, he rarely asserts; he more often suggests
or divines--with that exquisite desire of perfect and just work that
is always in him. With his keen vision he rarely misses the essential;
with his subtle and sifted prose he rarely fails in characterizing
the right man in the right way and the wrong man--the man who is not
an artist--in forms of ironical condemnation. Shelley in his time and
Blake in his time gave grave enough offence and perplexity; so did
Baudelaire, so did Poe, so did Swinburne, so did Rossetti, so did
Beardsley. All had their intervals of revolt--spiritual or unspiritual,
according to the particular trend of their genius; some destroy
mendacious idols, some change images into symbols; some are supposed
to be obscurely original. All had to apprehend, as Browning declared
in regard to his readers and critics in one of his Prefaces, "charges
of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely
harsh." And all these might have said as he said: "I blame nobody,
least of all myself, who did my best then and since."
In our approach to the poetry, or to the prose, of any famous
writer, with whom we are concerned, we must necessarily approach his
personality; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we
cannot love it without loving him. As for Baudelaire, I must confess
that, in spite of the fact that one might hate or love the man
according to the judgment of the wise or of the unwise, I find him more
lovable than hateful. That he failed in trying to love one woman is as
certain as his disillusion after he had possessed her; that, in regard
to Jeanne Duval, she was to him simply a silent instrument that, by
touching all the living strings of it, he awakened to a music that is
all his own; that whether this "masterpiece of flesh" meant more to him
than certain other women who inspired him in different ways; whether
he thirsted to drain her "empty kiss" or the "empty kiss" of Rachel,
of Marguerite, of Gabrielle, of Judith, is a matter of but little
significance. A man's life such as his is a man's own property and the
property of no one else. And Baudelaire's conclusion as to any of these
might be, perhaps, summed up in this stanza:
"Your sweet, scarce lost estate
Of innocence, the candour of your eyes,
Your child-like, pleased surprise,
Your patience: these afflict me with a weight
As of some heavy wrong that I must share
With God who made, with man who found you, fair."
"In more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels,"
says Saint Augustine; and Beardsley's sacrifice, along with that of
all great decadent art, the art of Rops or of Baudelaire, is really a
sacrifice to the eternal beauty, and only seemingly to the powers of
evil. And here let me say that I have no concern with what neither he
nor I could have had absolute knowledge of, his own intention in his
work. A man's intention, it must be remembered--and equally in the case
of much of the work of Poe and of Baudelaire, much less so in the case
of Balzac and Verlaine--from the very fact that it is conscious, is
much less intimately himself than the sentiment which his work conveys
to me.
Baudelaire's figures, exactly like those designed by Beardsley and
by Rodin, have the sensitiveness of the spirit and that bodily
sensitiveness which wastes their veins and imprisons them in the
attitude of their luxurious meditation. They have nothing that is
merely "animal" in their downright course towards repentance; no
overwhelming passion hurries them beyond themselves; they do not
capitulate to an open assault of the enemy of souls. It is the soul in
them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. Their
bodies are eager and faint with wantonness; they desire fiercer and
more exquisite pains, a more intolerable suspense than there is in the
world.
Beardsley is the satirist of an age without convictions, and he can
but paint hell as Baudelaire did, without pointing for contrast to any
actual paradise. He employs the same rhetoric as Baudelaire--a method
of emphasis which it is uncritical to think insincere. In the terrible
annunciation of evil which he called _The Mysterious Rose-Garden,_ the
lantern-bearing angel with winged sandals whispers, from among the
falling roses, tidings of more than "pleasant sins." And in Baudelaire,
as in Beardsley, the peculiar efficacy of their satire is that it
is so much the satire of desire returning on itself, the mockery of
desire enjoyed, the mockery of desire denied. It is because these love
beauty that beauty's degradation obsesses them; it is because they
are supremely conscious of virtue that vice has power to lay hold on
them. And with these--unlike other satirists of our day--it is always
the soul, and not the body's discontent only, which cries out of these
insatiable eyes, that have looked on all their lusts; and out of these
bitter mouths, that have eaten the dust of all their sweetnesses; and
out of these hands, that have laboured delicately for nothing; and out
of their feet, that have run after vanities.
The body, in the arms of death, the soul, in the arms of the naked
body: these are the strangest symbolical images of Life and of Death.
So, as Flaubert's devotion to art seemed to have had about it something
of the "seriousness and passion that are like a consecration," I give
this one sentence on the death of Emma Bovary: "Ensuite il recita le
_Misereatur_ et l'_Indulgentiam_, trempa son pouce droit dans l'huile
et commença les onctions: d'abord sur les yeux, qui avaient tant
convoité toutes les somptuosités terrestres; puis sur les narines,
friandes de brises tièdes et de senteurs amoureuses; puis sur la
bouche, qui s'était ouverte pour le mensonge, qui avait gémi d'orgueil
et crié dans la luxure; puis sur les mains, qui se delectaient au
contacts suaves, et enfin sur la plante des pieds, si rapides autrefois
quand elle courait à l'assouvissance de ses désirs et qui maintenant ne
marcheraient plus."
Charles Baudelaire was born April 9th, 1821, in la rue Saint Augustin,
8; he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice. His father, François, who had
married Mile Janin in 1803, married, after her death, Caroline
Archimbaut-Dufays, born in London, September 27th, 1793. François
Baudelaire's father, named Claude, married Marie-Charlotte Dieu,
February 10th, 1738, at Neuville-au-Port, in the Department of Marne.
From 1838 to 1842 (when Baudelaire attains his majority) there is a
family crisis in a certainly impossible family circle. These years he
spends in vagabonding at his own will: living a deliciously depraved
life; diving, perhaps, into depths of impurity; haunting the night
resorts that one finds in the most curious quarters of Paris--the
cafés, the theatres, la Rue de Bréda. He amuses himself enormously:
even in "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame;" he lives then, as
always, by his sensitive nerves, by his inexhaustible curiosity. He is
devoured then, as always, by the inner fires of his genius and of his
sensuality; and is, certainly, a quite naturally immoral man in his
relations with women.
He lives, as I have said; he feeds himself on his nerves:
"The modern malady of love is nerves."
It is an incurable, a world-old malady; and, from Catullus, one of the
greatest of all poets, century after century, from the Latin poets of
the Middle Ages, from the poets of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan
Age, down to the modern Romantic Movement, no poet who was a passionate
lover of Woman has ever failed to sing for her and against her:
"I hate and I love: you ask me how I can do it?
I know not: I know that it hurts: I am going through it."
_Odi et amo; quari id faciam, fortasse requiris._
_Nescio; sed fiere sentio, et excrucior._
"Caelius, Lesbia mine, that Lesbia, that
Lesbia whom Catullus for love did rate
Higher than all himself and than all things, stands
Now at the cross-roads and the alleys to wait
For the lords of Rome, with public lips and hands."
_Cœli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia,_
_Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam_
_Plus, quàm se, atque suos amavit omnes._
Need I quote more than these three fines? These fines, and those
quoted above, are enough to show, for all time, that Catullus was
as passionate a lover and as passionate a hater of flesh as Villon.
Yet, if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even
_le grosse Margot_ from her place in his life; who, to a certainty,
had not for one instant the place in his life that Lesbia had in the
life of Catullus. Villon was no dabbler in infamy, but one who liked
infamous things for their own sake.
Nor must I forget John Donne, whose quality of passion is unique in
English poetry--a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of
actual violence: his senses speak with unparalleled directness: he can
exemplify every motion with an unluxurious explicitness which leaves
no doubt of his intentions. He suffers from all the fevers and colds
of love; and, in his finest poem--a hate poem--he gives expression
to a whole region of profound human sentiment which has never been
expressed, out of Catullus, with such intolerable truth:
"When, by thy scorn, O murdress, I am dead,
And that thou thinkest thee free
From all solicitations of me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see:
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call'st for more,
And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold, quick-silver sweat will lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent."
As for Baudelaire's adventures when he is sent, perhaps against his
will, in May, 1841, on a long voyage from Bordeaux to Calcutta, to
return to Paris in February, 1843, after six months' travel, it
is conjecturable that he might return a changed man. Certainly his
imagination found in the East a curious fascination, with an actual
reawakening of new instincts; and with that oppressive sense of extreme
heat, as intense, I suppose, as in Africa, which makes one suffer,
bodily and spiritually, and in ways more extraordinary than those who
have never endured those tropical heats can possibly conceive of. There
he may have abandoned himself to certain obscure rites that to him
might have been an initiation into the cults of the Black Venus. And,
with these hot suns, these burning midnoons, these animal passions, the
very seductiveness of the nakedness of bronze skin, what can I imagine
but this: that they lighted in his veins an intolerable flame, that
burned there ardently to the end?
For in his _Wagner_ (1861) he writes: "The radiant ancient Venus,
Aphrodite, born of white foam, has not imprudently traversed the
horrible darkness of the Middle Ages. She has retired to the depths of
a cavern, magnificently lighted by the fires that are not those of the
Sun. In her descent under earth, Venus has come near to hell's mouth,
and she goes, certainly, to many abominable solemnities, to render
homage to the Arch-demon, Prince of the Flesh and Lord of Sin." He
finds her in the music where Wagner has created a furious song of the
flesh, with an absolute knowledge of what in men is diabolical. "For
from the first measures, the nerves vibrate in unison with the melody;
one's flesh remembers itself and begins to tremble. _Tannhäuser_
represents the eternal combat between the two principles that have
chosen the human heart as battle-field, that is to say, of the flesh
with the spirit, of hell with heaven, of Satan with God."
In January, 1843, Baudelaire finds himself in possession of a fortune
of seventy-five thousand francs. With his incurable restlessness,
his incurable desire of change, he is always moving from one place
to another. He takes rooms at Quai de Bethune, 10, Isle-Saint-Louis;
rue Vanneau, faubourg Saint-Germain; rue Varenne, quai d'Anjou; Hôtel
Pimodan, 17; Hôtel Corneille; Hôtel Folkestone, rue Lafitte; Avenue
de la République, 95; rue des Marais-du-Temple, 25; rue Mazarine;
rue de Babylone; rue de Seine, 57; rue Pigalle, 60; Hôtel Voltaire,
19 quai Voltaire; rue Beautrellis, 22; Cité d'Orléans, 15; rue
d'Angoulême-du-Temple, 18; Hôtel Dieppe, rue d'Amsterdam, 22; rue des
Ecuries-d'Artois, 6; rue de Seine, l'Hôtel du Maroc, 35.
With a certain instinct for drawing Baudelaire haunts many painter's
studios: Delacroix's, whose genius he discovers, giving him much of
his fame, becoming his intimate friend; Manet's, whose genius he also
divines and discovers; Daumier's, to whom he attributes "the strange
and astonishing qualities of a great genius, sick of genius." So also,
from the beginning, Baudelaire's judgments are infallibly right; so
also his first book, _Le Salon de_ 1845, has all the insolence of youth
and all the certitude of a youth of genius. But his fame is made,
that is to say, as an imaginative critic, with _Le Salon de_ 1846;
for, after the prelude, the entire book is fascinating, paradoxical,
and essentially æsthetical; a wonderful book in which he reveals the
mysteries of colour, of form, of design, of technique, and of the
enigmas of creative works. Here he elaborates certain of his mature
theories, such as his exultant praise--in which he is one with Lamb
and with Swinburne; his just disdain, and his grave irony, in which
he is one with Swinburne; and, above all, that passionate love of all
forms of beauty, at once spiritual and absolute, which is part of the
quintessence of his genius.
So, as Swinburne, in the fire of his youthful genius, was the first
to praise Baudelaire in English, I quote these sentences of his from
an essay on Tennyson and Musset: "I do not mean that the _Comédie de
la Mort_ must be ranked with the _Imitation of Christ,_ or that _Les
Fleurs du Mal_ should be bound up with _The Christian Year._ But I do
say that no principle of art which does not exclude from its tolerance
the masterpieces of Titian can logically or consistently reject the
masterpieces of a poet who has paid to one of them the most costly
tribute of carven verse, in lines of chiselled ivory with rhymes of
ringing gold, that ever was laid by the high priest of one muse on the
high altar of another. And I must also maintain my opinion that the
pervading note of spiritual tragedy in the brooding verse of Baudelaire
dignifies and justifies at all points his treatment of his darkest and
strangest subjects. The atmosphere of his work is to the atmosphere
of Gautier's as the air of a gas-lit alcove is to the air of the
far-flowering meadows that make in April a natural Field of the Cloth
of Gold all round the happier poet's native town of Tarbes, radiant
as the open scroll of his writings with immeasurable wealth of youth
and sunlight and imperishable spring. The sombre starlight under which
Baudelaire nursed and cherished the strange melancholy of his tropical
home-sickness, with its lurid pageant of gorgeous or of ghastly dreams,
was perhaps equidistant from either of these, but assuredly had less in
common with the lamplight than the sunshine."
To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, as Villon and his infamous
friends did on their wonderful winter nights, "where the wolves live
on wind," and where the gallows stands at street corners, ominously,
and one sees swing in the wind dead chained men; to haunt the strange
streets of cities, to know all the useless and improper and amusing,
the moral and the immoral people, who are alone worth knowing; to live,
as well as to observe; to be drawn out of the rapid current of life
into an exasperating inaction: it is such things as these that make
for poetry and for prose. Some make verse out of personal sensations,
verse which is half pathological, which is half physiological; some out
of colours and scents and crowds and ballets; some out of music, out
of the sea's passions; some simply out of rhythms that insist on being
used; a few out of the appreciation of the human comedy. The outcome of
many experiments, these must pass beyond that stage into the stage of
existence.
So, in much of Baudelaire's verse I find not only the exotic
(rarely the erotic) but, in the peculiar technique of the lines,
certain andante movements, lingering subtleties of sound, colour,
and suggestion, with--at times, but never in the excessive sense
of Flaubert's--the almost medical curiosity of certain researches
into the stuff of dreams, the very fibre of life itself, which,
combined, certainly tend to produce a new thing in poetry. A new
order of phenomena absorbs his attention, which becomes more and more
externalized, more exclusively concerned with the phenomena of the
soul, with morbid sensation, with the curiosities of the mind and the
senses. Humanity is now apprehended in a more than ever generalized and
yet specialized way in its essence, when it becomes, if you will, an
abstraction; or, if you will, for the first time purely individual.
In certain poets these have been foiled endeavours; in Baudelaire
never: for one must never go beyond the unrealizable, never lose
one's intensity of expression, never let go of the central threads of
one's spider's web. Still, in regard to certain direct pathological
qualities, there is a good deal of this to be found in much of the
best poetry--in Poe, in Rossetti, in Swinburne's earlier work, and
much in Baudelaire; only all these are moved by a fascination: in Poe
for the fantastically inhuman; in Rossetti for the inner life of the
imagination, for to him, as Pater said, "life is a crisis at every
moment;" in Swinburne for the arduous fulness of intricate harmony,
and for the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled
abundance.
There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own
highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the
end of art, but the artist--whether he be Baudelaire or Verlaine--
should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is
not written by a man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but
rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing on impulse,
hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he
does not remember, in some "close corner of his brain," and exerts
the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the
medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some
obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what
it was, and, aiming at much more minor things in the world than pure
beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to
remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end must
be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the
purpose which it sought to serve, but by the success or failure in
one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise
consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a
precise consciousness of what he is doing.
To Baudelaire as to Pater there were certain severe tests of the
effects made on us by works of genius. In both writers there is a
finality of creative criticism. For, to these, all works of art, all
forms of human life, were as powers and forces producing pleasurable
sensations. One can find them in a gem, a wine, a spoken word, a sudden
gesture, in anything, indeed, that strikes vividly or fundamentally the
senses, that acts instantaneously on one's perceptive passions. "What,"
says Pater in his essay on Wordsworth, "are the peculiarities in things
and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can
convey to others, in an extraordinary way?"
"The ultimate aim of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to
establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass
judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had
an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning,
almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who
allowed himself to be a critic. Certainly, Baudelaire shared certain
of those qualities; indeed, almost all; even, in a sense, logic. His
genius was so great, and in its greatness so manysided, that for some
studious disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from
any possible point of view, have always some of his magic and of his
magnetism. The ardour, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute
desire to get at the root of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be,
will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper;
that is to say, those that are most morbid, most fond of imaginative
perversities.
Prose, I have said, listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats
their speech almost in their own terms. But poetry (it is Baudelaire
who says it) "is akin to music through a prosody whose roots plunge
deeper in the human soul than any classical theory has defined." Poetry
begins where prose ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins
sooner. The one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I
can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse, out of
mere honour towards my material. The farther I can extend my prose, the
farther back do I set the limits of verse. The region of poetry will
thus be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible
chance of any confusion of territory.
Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in
prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare,
not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the
whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare
and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his
mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of
any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take
_King Lear_ and take _Père Goriot._ Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he
suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear
grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument
of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there,
wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that
he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his
crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well
enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In
that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and
material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose.
So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem
of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of
the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of
every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets
become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are
guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual
life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out
their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have
produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine
purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious
for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to
contain a critic."
[Illustration: dessin de C.B.]