I
In their later work all great poets use foreshortening. They get
greater subtlety by what they omit and suggest to the imagination.
Browning, in his later period, suggests to the intellect, and to that
only. Hence his difficulty, which is not a poetic difficulty; not a
cunning simplification of method like Shakespeare's, who gives us no
long speeches of undiluted undramatic poetry, but poetry everywhere
like life-blood.
Browning's whole life was divided equally between two things: love and
art. He subtracted nothing from the one by which to increase the other;
between them they occupied his whole nature; in each he was equally
supreme. _Men and Women_ and the love-letters are the double swing of
the same pendulum; at the centre sits the soul, impelled and impelling.
Outside these two forms of his greatness Browning had none, and one he
concealed from the world. It satisfied him to exist as he did, knowing
what he was, and showing no more of himself to those about him than the
outside of a courteous gentleman. Nothing in him blazed through, in the
uncontrollable manner of those who are most easily recognized as great
men. His secret was his own, and still, to many, remains so.
[Illustration: MANET, 1862]
I have said above, of Browning: "His secret was his own, and still, to
many, remains so." Exactly the same thing must be said of Baudelaire.
He lived, and died, secret; and the man remains baffling, and will
probably never be discovered. But, in most of his printed letters, he
shows only what he cares to reveal of himself at a given moment. In
the letters, printed in book form, that I have before me, there is
much more of the nature of confessions. Several of his letters to his
mother are heart-breaking; as in his agonized effort to be intelligible
to her; his horror of her _curé_; his shame in pawning her Indian
shawl; his obscure certainty that the work he is doing is of value,
and that he ought not to feel shame. Then comes his suggestion that
society should adjust these difficult balances. Again, in his ghastly
confession that he has only sent Jeanne seven francs in three months;
that he is as tired of her as of his own life: there is shown a tragic
gift for self-observation and humble truthfulness. It would have taken
a very profound experience of life to have been a good mother to
Baudelaire: or she should have had a wiser _cure._ Think of the _curé_
burning the only copy of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ that Baudelaire had left
in "papier d'Hollande," and the mother acquiescing.
I give two quotations, which certainly explain themselves if they do
not explain Baudelaire:
"I must leave home and not return there, except in a more natural state
of mind. I have just been rewriting an article. The affair kept me so
long that when I went out I had not even the courage to return, and so
the day was lost. Last week I had to go out and sleep for two days and
nights in a hideous little hotel because I was spied on. I went out
without any money for the simple reason that I had none.
"Imagine my perpetual laziness, which I hate profoundly, and the
impossibility of going out on account of my perpetual want of money.
After I had been seeking money for three days, on Monday night,
exhausted with fatigue, with weariness and with hunger, I went into
the first hotel I came on, and since then I have had to remain there,
and for certain reasons. I am nearly devoured, eaten by this enforced
idleness."
In a letter written in Brussels, March 9, 1868, he says: "I have
announced the publication of three fragments: _Chateaubriand et le
Dandysme littéraire, La Peinture didactique,_ and _Les fleurs du mal
jugées par l'auteur lui-même._ I shall add to these a refutation of
an article of Janin, one on _Henri Heine et la jeunesse des poètes,_
and the refutation of _La Préface de la vie de Jules César par
Napoléon III._" Besides these, on the cover of his _Salon de_ 1848
are announced: "_De la poésie moderne; David, Guérin et Gerodet;
Les Limbes, poésies; Catéchisme de la femme aimée._" On the paper
cover of my copy of his _Théophile Gautier_ (1861), under the title
of "_Sous Presse,_" are announced: _Opium et Haschisch, ou l'Idéal
Artificiel_ (which was printed in 1860 as _Les paradis artificiels:
opium et haschisch), Curiosités esthétiques_ (which were printed in
1868); _Notices littéraires;_ and _Machiavel et Condorcet, dialogue
philosophique._ Of these, _Les Limbes_ appeared as _Les fleurs du
mal_ (1857); _Les Notices littéraires_ at the end of _L'Art Romantique_
(1868); none of the others were printed, nor do I suppose he had even
the time to begin them.
He might have written on Machiavelli a prose dialogue as original, from
the French point of view, as one of Landor's Imaginary Conversations,
such as those between Plato and Diogenes, the two Ciceros, Leonora
d'Este with Father Panigarole. Both had that satirical touch which can
embody the spirit of an age or of two men in conversation. Both had a
creative power and insight equal to that of the very greatest masters;
both had the power of using prose with a perfection which no stress of
emotion is allowed to discompose. Only it seems to me that Baudelaire
might have made the sinister genius, the calculating, cold observation
of Machiavelli, who wrote so splendidly on Cesare Borgia, give vent to
a tremendous satire on priests and Kings and Popes after the manner
of Rabelais or of Aristophanes; certainly not in the base and ignoble
manner of Aretino.
It is lamentable to think how many things Baudelaire never did or never
finished. One reason might have been his laziness, his sense of luxury,
and, above all, his dissatisfaction with certain things he had hoped
to do, and which likely enough a combination of poverty and of nerves
prevented him from achieving. And as he looks back on the general folly
incident to all mankind--his _bête noire_--on his lost opportunities,
on his failures, a sack of cobwebs, a pack of gossamers, wave in the
air before his vision; and he wonders why he himself has not carved his
life as those fanciful things have their own peculiar way of doing.
Baudelaire was inspired to begin _Mon cœur mis à nu_ in 1863 by this
paragraph he had read in Poe's _Marginalia,_ printed in New York in
1856: "If an ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one
effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human
sentiment, the opportunity is his own--the road to immortal renown lies
straight open and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to
write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple--a few
plain words--_My Heart Laid Bare_."
With all his genius, Poe was never able to write a book of Confessions,
nor was Baudelaire ever able to finish his. Poe, who also died
tragically young, throws out a sinister hint in these last words: "No
man _could_ write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and
blaze at every touch of the fiery pen."
Baudelaire's Confessions are meant to express his inmost convictions,
his most sacred memories, his hates and rages, the manner in which his
sensations and emotions have fashioned themselves in his waking self;
to express that he is a stranger to the world and to the world's cults;
to express, also, as he says, that _ce livre tout rêvé sera un livre
de rancunes._ It cannot in any sense be compared with the Confessions
of Saint Augustine, of Rousseau, of Cellini, of Casanova. Still,
Baudelaire had none of Rousseau's cowardice, none of Cellini's violent
exultations over himself and the things he created: none of Casanova's
looking back over his past life and his adventures: those of a man who
did not live to write, but wrote because he had lived and when he could
live no longer.
In Baudelaire's notes there is something that reminds me of Browning's
lines:
"Men's thoughts and loves and hates!
Earth is my vineyard, these grew there;
From grapes of the ground, I made or marred
My vintage."
For so much in these studies in sensations are the product of a man
who has both made and marred his prose and poetical vintage. He
analyses some of his hideous pains; and I cannot but believe--I quote
these words from a letter I have received from a man of sensitive
nerves--that he may have felt: "It _is_ so beautifül to emerge after
the bad days that one is almost glad to have been through them, and
I can quite truthfully say I am glad to have pain--it makes one a
connoisseur in sensations, and we only call it pain because it is
something that we don't understand." Without having suffered intensely
no poet can be a real poet; and without passion no poet is supreme. And
these lines of Shelley are not only meant for himself, but for most of
us who are artists:
"One who was as a nerve over which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth."
There is also something Browning says of Shelley which might be applied
to Baudelaire's later years: "The body, enduring tortures, refusing to
give repose to the bewildered soul, and the laudanum bottle making but
a perilous and pitiful truce between these two." He was also subject
to that state of mind in which ideas may be supposed to assume the
force of sensations, through the confusion of thought with the objects
of thought, and excess of passion animating the creations of the
imagination.