Certain of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the
hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a serpentine girl's skin;
some the odour of woman's flesh. Certain spirits are intoxicated by
these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of
their vices, from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a
cruel imagination has fashioned these naked images of the Seven Deadly
Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall; that smile not even in
Hell, in whose flames they writhe. One conceives them there and between
the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their
infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages;
they are incapable of imagining God's justice.
Baudelaire dramatizes these living images of his spirit and of his
imagination, these fabulous creatures of his inspiration, these
macabre ghosts, in a fashion utterly different from that of other
tragedians--Shakespeare, and Aristophanes in his satirical Tragedies,
his lyrical Comedies; yet in the same sense of being the writer where
beauty marries unvirginally the sons of ancient Chaos.
In these pages swarm (in his words) all the corruptions and all the
scepticisms; ignoble criminals without convictions, detestable hags
that gamble, the cats that are like men's mistresses; Harpagon; the
exquisite, barbarous, divine, implacable, mysterious Madonna of the
Spanish style; the old men; the drunkards, the assassins, the lovers
(their deaths and lives); the owls; the vampires whose kisses raise
from the grave the corpse of its own self; the Irremediable that
assails its origin: Conscience in Evil! There is an almost Christ-like
poem on his Passion, _Le reniement de Saint-Pierre,_ an almost Satanic
denunciation of God in _Abel and Cain,_ and with them the Evil Monk,
an enigmatical symbol of Baudelaire's soul, of his work, of all that
his eyes love and hate. Certain of these creatures play in travesties,
dance in ballets. For all the Arts are transformed, transfigured,
transplanted out of their natural forms to pass in magnificent state
across the stage: the stage with the abyss of Hell in front of it.
"Sensualist" (I quote a critic), "but the most profound of sensualists,
and, furious of being no more than that, he goes, in his sensation, to
the extreme limit, to the mysterious gate of infinity against which he
knocks, yet knows not how to open, with rage he contracts his tongue
in the vain effort." Yet centuries before him Dante entered Hell,
traversed it in imagination from its endless beginning to its endless
end; returned to earth to write, for the spirit of Beatrice and for the
world, that _Divina Commedia,_ of which in Verona certain women said:
"Lo, he that strolls to Hell and back
At will I Behold him, how Hell's reek
Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek."
It is Baudelaire who, in Hell as in earth, finds a certain Satan in
such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essentially
demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily,
as if the Devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets. Here
in such satanic and romantic atmosphere one hears dissonances, the
discords of the instruments in the Sabbats, the howlings of irony, the
vengeance of the vanquished.
I give one sentence of Gautier's on Baudelaire. "This poet of _Les
fleurs du mal_ loved what one wrongly calls the style of decadence,
which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point
of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilizations
that aged: a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and
of rarities, turning for ever backward the limits of the language,
using technical vocabularies, taking colours from all the palettes,
notes from all the keyboards, striving to render one's thought in what
is most ineffable, and form in its most vague and evasive contours,
listening so as to translate them, the subtle confidences of neurosis,
the passionate confessions of ancient passions in their depravity and
the bizarre hallucinations of the fixed idea." He adds: "In regard to
his verse there is the language already veined in the greenness of
decomposition, the tainted language of the later Roman Empire, and the
complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek
art fallen in delinquencies." See how perfectly the phrase _la langue
de faisandée_ suits the exotic style of Baudelaire!
Yet, tainted as the style is from time to time, never was the man
himself tainted: he who in modern verse gave first of all an unknown
taste to sensations; he who painted vice in all its shame; whose most
savorous verses are perfumed as with subtle aromas; whose women are
bestial, rouged, sterile, bodies without souls; whose _Litanies de
Satan_ have that cold irony which he alone possessed in its extremity,
in these so-called impious lines which reveal, under whatever disguise,
his belief in a mathematical superiority established by God from
all eternity, and whose least infraction is punished by certain
chastisements, in this world as in the next.
I can imagine Baudelaire in his hours of nocturnal terrors, sleepless
in a hired woman's bed, saying to himself these words of Marlowe's
_Satan:_
"Why, this is Hell, nor can I out of it!"
in accents of eternal despair wrenched from the lips of the Arch Fiend.
And the genius of Baudelaire, I can but think, was as much haunted as
Marlowe's with, in Lamb's words, "a wandering in fields where curiosity
is forbidden to go, approaching the dark gulf near enough to look in."