Here are certain chosen confessions of Baudelaire. "For my misery I am
not made like other men. I am in a state of spiritual revolt; I feel as
if a wheel turns in my head. To write a letter costs me more time than
in writing a volume. My desire of travelling returns on me furiously.
When I listen to the tingling in my ears that causes me such trouble,
I can't help admiring with what diabolical care imaginative men amuse
themselves in multiplying their embarrassments. One of my chief
preoccupations is to get the Manager of the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin
to take back an actress execrated by his own wife--despite another
actress who is employed in the theatre." It is amusing to note that the
same desire takes hold of Gautier, who writes to Arsène Houssaye, the
Director of the Comédie-Française, imploring him to take back a certain
Louise if there is a place vacant for her.
"I can't sleep much now," writes Baudelaire, "as I am always thinking.
_Quand je dis que je dormirai demain matin, vous devinerez de quel
sommeil je veux parler_." This certainly makes me wonder what sort of
sodden sleep he means. Probably the kind of sleep he refers to in his
Epilogue to the _Poèmes en Prose,_ addressed to Paris:
"Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full,
Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand."
The question comes here: How much does Baudelaire give of himself
in his letters? Some of his inner, some of his outer life; but, for
the most part, "in tragic hints." Yet in the whole of his letters he
never gives one what Meredith does in _Modern Love,_ which, published
in 1862, remains his masterpiece, and it will always remain, beside
certain things of Donne and of Browning, an astonishing feat in the
vivisection of the heart in verse. It is packed with imagination,
but with imagination of so nakedly human a kind that there is hardly
an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse: it is like scraps of
broken--of heart-broken--talk, overheard and jotted down at random.
These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no illusions, and their
tragic hints "are like a fine, pained mockery of love itself as they
struggle open-eyed against the blindness of passion. The poem laughs
while it cries, with a double-mindedness more constant than that of
Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation carried to the point
of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:
"O thou Weed
Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou had'st ne'er been
born."
Another question arises: How can a man who wrote his letters in a
_café,_ anywhere, do more than jot down whatever came into his head?
Has he ever given an account of one day in his life--eventful or
uneventful? You might as well try to count the seconds of your watch as
try to write for yourself your sensations during one day. What seems
terrible is the rapidity of our thoughts: yet, fortunately, one is not
always thinking. "Books think for me; I don't think," says Lamb in one
of his paradoxes. There is not much thought in his prose: imagination,
humour, salt and sting, tragical emotions, and, on the whole, not
quite normal. How can any man of genius be entirely normal?
The most wonderful letters ever written are Lamb's. Yet, as in
Balzac's, in Baudelaire's, in Browning's, so few of Lamb's letters,
those works of nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are
to be taken on oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them
into patterns of sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were
of the nature of a preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed
fiction of the essays. What began in mischief ends in art.
The life of Baudelaire, like the lives of Balzac and of Villiers and of
Verlaine, was one long labour, in which time, money, and circumstances
were all against him. "Sometimes," Balzac cries, "it seems to me that
my brain is on fire. I shall die in the trenches of the intellect."
It is his genius, his imagination, that are on fire, not so much as
his sleepless brain. This certainly Baudelaire never felt. Yet, in one
sentence written in 1861, I find an agony not unlike Balzac's, but
more material, more morbid: "La plupart des temps je me dis: si je
vis, je vivrai toujours de même, en damné, et quand la mort naturelle
viendra, je serai vieux, usé, passé de mode, criblé de dettes; ajoute
à cela que je trouve souvent qu'on ne me rend pas justice, et que
je vois que tout réussit à souhait pour les sots." This, with his
perpetual nervous terrors, his hallucinations, his drugs, his miseries,
his women, his wine, his good and bad nights, his sense of poisonous
people, his disorders, his excitability, his imagination that rarely
leaves him, his inspiration that often varies, his phrase, after a
certain despair: "Je me suis précipité dans le travail: alors j'ai
reconnu que je n'avais perdu aucune faculté;" his discouragements, his
sudden rages, not only against fame, but when he just refrains from
hitting a man's face with his stick; after all this, and after much
more than this, I have to take his word, when he says--not thinking of
these impediments in his way--"What poets ought to do is to know how to
escape from themselves." In 1861 he writes: "As my literary situation
is more than good, I can do all I want, I can get all my books printed;
yet, as I have the misfortune in possessing a kind of unpopular spirit,
I shall not make much money, but I shall leave a great fame behind
me--provided I have the courage to live." "Provided "That word sounds a
note of nervous distress. He continues: "I have made a certain amount
of money; if I had not had so many debts, _and if I had had more
fortune, I might have been rich"_ The last five words he writes in
small capitals. And this lamentable refrain is part of his obsession;
wondering, as we all do, why we have never been rich. Then comes this
curious statement: "What exasperates me is when I think of what I have
received this year; it is enormous; certainly I have lived on this
money like a ferocious beast; and yet how often I spend much less than
that in sheer waste!"