I
Baudelaire's genius is satanical; he has in a sense the vision of
Satan. He sees in the past the lusts of the Borgias the sins and vices
of the Renaissance; the rare virtues that flourish like flowers and
weeds, in brothels and in garrets. He sees the vanity of the world with
finer modern tastes than Solomon; for his imagination is abnormal, and
divinely normal. In this age of infamous shames he has no shame. His
flesh endures, his intellect is flawless. He chooses his own pleasures
delicately, sensitively, as he gathers his exotic _Fleurs du Mal,_ in
itself a world, neither a _Divina Commedia_ nor _Une Comédie Humaine,_
but a world of his own fashioning.
His vividly imaginative passion, with his instincts of inspiration, are
aided by a determined will, a selfreserve, an intensity of conception,
an implacable insolence, an accurate sense of the exact value of every
word. In the Biblical sense he might have said of his own verse: "It
is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh." The work, as the man, is
subtle, strange, complex, morbid, enigmatical, refined, paradoxical,
spiritual, animal. To him a scent means more than a sunset, a perfume
more than a flower, the tempting demons more than the unseductive
angels. He loves luxury as he loves wine; a picture of Manet's as a
woman's fan.
[Illustration: BAUDELAIRE, DESIGNED BY HIMSELF, 1848]
Fascinated by sin, he is never the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as
the Original Sin; he studies sin as he studies evil, with a stem logic;
he finds in horror a kind of attractiveness, as Poe had found it;
rarely in hideous things, save when his sense of what I call a moralist
makes him moralize, as in his terrible poem, _Une Charogne._ He has
pity for misery, hate for progress. He is analytic, he is a learned
casuist, whom I can compare with the formidable Spanish Jesuit, Thomas
Sanchez, who wrote the Latin _Aphorismi Matrimonio_ (1629).
His soul swims on music played on no human instrument, but on strings
that the Devil pulls, to which certain living puppets dance in
grotesque fashion, to unheard-of rhythms, to the sound of violins
strummed on by evil spirits in Witches' Sabbats. Some swing in the
air, as hanged dead people on gallows, and, as their bones rattle in
the wind, one sees Judas Iscariot, risen out of Hell for an instant's
gratification, as he grimaces on these grimacing visages.
_Les fleurs du mal_ is the most curious, subtle, fascinating, and
extraordinary creation of an entire world ever fashioned in modern
ages. Baudelaire paints vice and degradation of the utmost depth, with
cynicism and with pity, as in the poem I have referred to, where the
cult of the corpse is the sensuality of ascetism, or the ascetism of
sensuality: the mania of fakirs; material by passion, Christian by
perversity.
And, in a sense, he is our modern Catullus; in his furies, his
negations, his outcries, his Paganism, his inconceivable passion for
woman's flesh; yet Lesbia is for ever Lesbia. Still, Baudelaire in
his _Franciscae meae_ _Laudes,_ and with less sting but with as much
sensual sense of the splendour of sex, gives a magnificent Latin eulogy
of a learned and pious modiste, that ends:
"Patera gemmis corusca,
Panis salsus, mollis esca,
Divinum vinum, Francisca."
And he praises the Decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette
merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre
les négligences forcés d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des
règles."
_Don Juan aux enfers_ is a perfect Delacroix. In _Danse macabre_
there is the universal swing of the dancers who dance the Dance of
Death. Death herself, in her extreme horror, ghastly, perfumed with
myrrh, mixes her irony with men's insanity as she dances the Sabbat
of Pleasure. He shows us the infamous menagerie of the vices in the
guise of reptiles; our chief enemy Ennui is _ce monstre délicat._
There are Vampires, agonies of the damned alive; _Le possédé_ with
his excruciating cry out of all his fibres: _O mon cher Belzébuth! je
t'adore!_ And there are some, subtler and silent, that seem to move,
softly, as the feet of Night, to the sound of faint music, or under the
shroud of a sunset.
_Les fleurs du mal_ are grown in Parisian soil, exotics that have
the strange, secretive, haunting touch and taint of the earth's or
of the body's corruption. In his sense of beauty there is a certain
revolt, a spiritual malady, which may bring with it the heated air
of an alcove or the intoxicating atmosphere of the East. Never
since Villon has the flesh of woman been more adored and abhorred.
Both aware of the original sin of _l'unique animál_--the seed of our
moral degradation--Villon creates his _Grosse Margot_ and Baudelaire
_Delphine et Hippolyte._ Villon's is a scullion-wench, and in the
Ballad a Brothel as infamous, as foul, as abominable as a Roman Lupanar
surges before one's astonished vision. And this comes after his
supreme, his consummate praise of ruinous old age on a harlot's body:
_Les regrets de la Belle Heaulmière._ It is one of the immortal things
that exist in the world, that I can compare only with Rodin's statue in
bronze: both equal incarnations of the symbolical conception that sin
brought shame into the first woman's flesh.
"Que m'en reste-il? Honte et Péché:"
cries each mouth, cries to the end of earth's eternity.
In Baudelaire's _Femmes damnées_ there is the aching soul of the
spirit's fatal malady: that sexual malady for which there is no remedy:
the Lesbian sterile perilous divinisation of flesh for flesh, virginal
or unvirginal flesh _with_ flesh. In vain desire, of that one desire
that exists beyond all possible satisfaction, the desire of an utter
annihilation of body with body in that ecstasy which can never be
absolutely achieved without man's flesh, they strive, unconsumed with
even the pangs of their fruitless desires. They live only with a life
of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome
bounds of nature into the violence of a perversity which is at times
almost insane. And all this sorrowful and tortured flesh is consumed
with that feverish desire that leaves them only a short space for their
desire's fruitions.