Has Baudelaire _l'amour du mal pour le mal?_ In a certain sense, yes;
in a certain sense, no. He believes in evil as in Satan and God--the
primitive forces that govern worlds: the eternal enemies. He sees the
germs of evil everywhere, few of the seeds of virtue. He sees pass
before him the world's drama: he is one of the actors, he plays his
parts cynically, ironically. He speaks in rhythmic cadences.
But, above all, he watches the dancers; these also are elemental;
and the tragic fact is that the dancers dance for their living. For
their living, for their pleasure, for the pleasure of pleasing others.
So passes the fantastic part of their existence, from the savage who
dances silent dances--for, indeed, all dancers are silent--but without
music, to the dancer who dances for us on the stage, who turns always
to the sound of music. There is an equal magic in the dance and in
song; both have their varied rhythms; both, to use an image, the
rhythmic beating of our hearts. It is imagined that dancing and music
were the oldest of the arts. Rhythm has rightly been called the soul of
dancing; both are instinctive.
The greatest French poet after Villon, the most disreputable and
the most creative poet in French literature, the greatest artist in
French verse, and, after Verlaine, the most passionate, perverse,
lyrical, visionary, and intoxicating of modern poets, comes Baudelaire,
infinitely more perverse, morbid, exotic than these other poets. In
his verse there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity, which
has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with horror,
in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every
complication of taste, the exasperation of perfumes, the irritant of
cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption to the creation and
adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served
before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a
prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine,
however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length
sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady of
love.
The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that
of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the
Goncourts, Zola, and Leconte de Lisle. Even Baudelaire, in whom the
spirit is always an uneasy guest at the orgy of life, had a certain
theory of Realism which tortures many of his poems into strange,
metallic shapes and fills them with irritative odours, and disturbs
them with a too deliberate rhetoric of the flesh. Flaubert, the
greatest novelist after Balzac, the only impeccable novelist who ever
lived, was resolute to be the creator of a world in which art--formal
art--was the only escape from the burden of reality. It was he who
wrote to Baudelaire, who had sent him _Les fleurs du mal_: "I devoured
your volume from one end to another, read it over and over again, verse
by verse, word by word, and all I can say is it pleases and enchants
me. You overwhelm me with your colours. What I admire most in your book
is its perfect art. You praise flesh without loving it."
There is something Oriental in Baudelaire's genius; a nostalgia that
never left him after he had seen the East: there where one finds
hot-midnights, feverish days, strange sensations; for only the East,
when one has lived in it, can excite one's vision to a point of ardent
ecstasy. He is the first modern poet who gave to a calculated scheme of
versification a kind of secret and sacred joy. He is before all things
the artist, always sure of his form. And his rarefied imagination aided
him enormously not only in the perfecting of his verse and prose, but
in making him create the criticism of modern art.
Next after Villon, Baudelaire is the poet of Paris. Like a damned soul
(to use one of his imaginary images) he wanders at nights, an actual
_noctambule,_ alone or with Villiers, Gautier, in remote quarters, sits
in cafés, goes to casinos, the _Rat Mort._ "The Wind of Prostitution"
(I quote his words) torments him, the sight of hospitals, of gambling
houses, the miserable creatures one comes on in certain quarters,
even the fantastic glitter of lamplights. All this he needs: a kind
of intense curiosity, of excitement, in his fréquentation of these
streets, comes over him, like one who has taken opium. And this is only
one part of his life, he who lived and died solitary, a confessor of
sins who has never told the whole truth, _le mauvais moins_ of his own
sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel.
He is the first who ever related things in the modulated tone of the
confessional and never assumed an inspired air. The first also who
brings into modern literature the chagrin that bites at our existence
like serpents. He admits to his diabolical taste, not quite exceptional
in him; one finds it in Petronius, Rabelais, Balzac. In spite of his
magnificent _Litanies de Satan,_ he is no more of the satanical school
than Byron. Yet both have the same sardonic irony, the delight of
mystification, of deliberately irritating solemn people's convictions.
Both, who died tragically young, had their hours of sadness, when
one doubts and denies everything; passionately regretting youth,
turning away, in sinister moods, in solitude, from that too intense
self-knowledge that, like a mirror, shows the wrinkles on our cheeks.