I
For the sentimental no greater foe exists than the iconoclast who
dissipates literary legends. And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden
times when they gossipped of De Quincey's enormous opium consumption,
of the gin absorbed by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways,
Byron's escapades, and Shelley's atheism--alas! into what faded limbo
have they vanished. Poe, too, Poe whom we saw in fancy reeling from
Richmond to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New
York. Those familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the way of all
such jerry-built spooks. We now know Poe to have been a man suffering
at the time of his death from cerebral lesion, a man who drank at
intervals and but little. Dr. Guerrier of Paris has exploded a darling
superstition about De Quincey's opium-eating. He has demonstrated that
no man could have lived so long--De Quincey was nearly seventy-five
at his death--and worked so hard, if he had consumed twelve thousand
drops of laudanum as often as he said he did. Furthermore, the
English essayist's description of the drug's effects is inexact. He
was seldom sleepy--a sure sign, asserts Dr. Guerrier, that he was
not altogether enslaved by the drug habit. Sprightly in old age, his
powers of labour were prolonged until past three-score and ten. His
imagination needed little opium to produce the famous Confessions.
Even Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at the _première_ of
Hernani was, according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And Rousseau has
been white-washed. So they are disappearing, those literary legends,
until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear, old-fashioned,
disreputable men of genius!
But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This
French poet himself has suffered more from the friendly malignant
biographer and Parisian chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the
curs out of the cemetery? asked Baudelaire after he had read Griswold
on Poe. A few years later his own cemetery was invaded and the world
was put in possession of the Baudelaire legend; that legend of the
atrabilious, irritable poet, dandy, maniac, his hair dyed green,
spouting blasphemies; that grim, despairing image of a Diabolic, a
libertine, saint, and drunkard. Maxime du Camp was much to blame for
the promulgation of these tales--witness his Souvenirs Littéraires.
However, it may be confessed that part of the Baudelaire legend was
created by Charles Baudelaire. In the history of literature it is
difficult to parallel such a deliberate piece of self-stultification.
Not Villon, who preceded him, not Verlaine, who imitated him, drew
for the astonishment or disedification of the world like unflattering
portraits. Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered at times from
acute cortical irritation. And, notwithstanding his desperate effort to
realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, who had said that no
man can bare his heart quite naked; there will be always something held
back, something false too ostentatiously thrust forward. The grimace,
the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul
of man and the sharp reality of published confessions. Baudelaire was
no more exception to this rule than St. Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, or
Huysmans; though he was as frank as any of them, as we may see in the
recently printed diary, Mon cœur mis à nu (Posthumous Works, Société
du Mercure de France); and in the Journal, Fusées, Letters, and other
fragments exhumed by devoted Baudelarians.
To smash legends, Eugène Crépet's biographical study, first printed in
1887, has been republished with new notes by his son, Jacques Crépet.
This is an exceedingly valuable contribution to Baudelaire lore; a
dispassionate life, however, has yet to be written, a noble task for
some young poet who will disentangle the conflicting lies originated
by Baudelaire--that tragic comedian--from the truth and thus save him
from himself. The new Crépet volume is really but a series of notes;
there are some letters addressed to the poet by the distinguished men
of his day, supplementing the rather disappointing volume of Letters,
1841-1866, published in 1908. There are also documents in the legal
prosecution of Baudelaire, with memories of him by Charles Asselineau,
Léon Cladel, Camille Lemonnier, and others.
In November, 1850, Maxime du Camp and Gustave Flaubert found themselves
at the French Ambassador's, Constantinople. The two friends had taken
a trip in the Orient which later bore fruit in Salammbô. General
Aupick, the representative of the French Government, received the
young men cordially; they were presented to his wife, Madame Aupick.
She was the mother of Charles Baudelaire, and inquired of Du Camp,
rather anxiously: "My son has talent, has he not?" Unhappy because her
second marriage, a brilliant one, had set her son against her, the poor
woman welcomed from such a source confirmation of her eccentric boy's
gifts. Du Camp tells the much-discussed story of a quarrel between the
youthful Charles and his stepfather, a quarrel that began at table.
There were guests present. After some words Charles bounded at the
General's throat and sought to strangle him. He was promptly boxed on
the ears and succumbed to a nervous spasm. A delightful anecdote, one
that fills with joy psychiatrists in search of a theory of genius and
degeneration. Charles was given some money and put on board a ship
sailing to East India. He became a cattle-dealer in the British army,
and returned to France years afterward with a _Vénus noire_, to whom
he addressed extravagant poems! All this according to Du Camp. Here
is another tale, a comical one. Baudelaire visited Du Camp in Paris,
and his hair was violently green. Du Camp said nothing. Angered by
this indifference, Baudelaire asked: "You find nothing abnormal about
me?" "No," was the answer. "But my hair--it is green!" "That is not
singular, _mon cher_ Baudelaire; every one has hair more or less green
in Paris." Disappointed in not creating a sensation, Baudelaire went to
a café, gulped down two large bottles of Burgundy, and asked the waiter
to remove the water, as water was a disagreeable sight for him; then
he went away in a rage. It is a pity to doubt this green hair legend;
presently a man of genius will not be able to enjoy an epileptic fit
in peace--as does a banker or a beggar. We are told that St. Paul,
Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, Dostoïevsky were epileptoids; yet
we do not encounter men of this rare kind among the inmates of asylums.
Even Baudelaire had his sane moments.
The joke of the green hair has been disposed of by Crépet. Baudelaire's
hair thinning after an illness, he had his head shaved and painted
with salve of a green hue, hoping thereby to escape baldness. At
the time when he had embarked for Calcutta (May, 1841), he was not
seventeen, but twenty, years of age. Du Camp said he was seventeen when
he attacked General Aupick. The dinner could not have taken place at
Lyons because the Aupick family had left that city six years before the
date given by Du Camp. Charles was provided with five thousand francs
for his expenses, instead of twenty--Du Camp's version--and he never
was a beef-drover in the British army, for a good reason--he never
reached India. Instead, he disembarked at the Isle of Bourbon, and
after a short stay was seized by homesickness and returned to France,
being absent about ten months. But, like Flaubert, on his return home
Baudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the East; out there he had
yearned for Paris. Jules Claretie recalls Baudelaire saying to him with
a grimace: "I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung
up by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of
glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find
at the same time: strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious." Is
it necessary to add that Baudelaire, notorious in Paris for his love
of cats, dedicating poems to cats, would never have perpetrated such
revolting cruelty?
Another misconception, a critical one, is the case of Poe and
Baudelaire. The young Frenchman first became infatuated with Poe's
writings in 1846 or 1847--he gives these two dates, though several
stories of Poe had been translated into French as early as 1841 or
1842; L'Orang-Outang was the first, which we know as The Murders in
the Rue Morgue; Madame Meunier also adapted several Poe stories for
the reviews. Baudelaire's labours as a translator lasted over ten
years. That he assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe, is a commonplace
of literary gossip. But that Poe had overwhelming influence in the
formation of his poetic genius is not the truth. Yet we find such an
acute critic as the late Edmund Clarence Stedman writing, "Poe's chief
influence upon Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry." It is
precisely the reverse. Poe's influence affected Baudelaire's prose,
notably in the disjointed confessions, Mon cœur mis à nu, which
recall the American writer's Marginalia. The bulk of the poetry in Les
Fleurs de Mal was written before Baudelaire had read Poe, though not
published in book form until 1857. But in 1855 some of the poems saw
the light in the _Revue des deux Mondes_, while many of them had been
put forth a decade or fifteen years before as fugitive verse in various
magazines. Stedman was not the first to make this mistake. In Bayard
Taylor's The Echo Club we find on page 24 this criticism: "There was a
congenital twist about Poe.. .. Baudelaire and Swinburne after him have
been trying to surpass him by increasing the dose; but his muse is the
natural Pythia, inheriting her convulsions, while they eat all sorts
of insane roots to produce theirs." This must have been written about
1872, and after reading it one would fancy Poe and Baudelaire were
rhapsodic wrigglers on the poetic tripod, whereas their poetry is often
reserved, even glacial. Baudelaire, like Poe, sometimes "built his
nests with the birds of Night," and that was enough to condemn the work
of both men with critics of the didactic school.
Once, when Baudelaire heard that an American man-of-letters (?) was in
Paris, he secured an introduction and called. Eagerly inquiring after
Poe, he learned that he was not considered a genteel person in America.
Baudelaire withdrew, muttering maledictions. Enthusiastic poet!
Charming literary person! But the American, whoever he was, represented
public opinion at the time. To-day criticisms of Poe are vitiated by
the desire to make him an angel. It is to be doubted whether without
his barren environment and hard fortunes we should have had Poe at all.
He had to dig down deeper into the pit of his personality to reach
the central core of his music. But every ardent young soul entering
"literature" begins by a vindication of Poe's character. Poe was a man,
and he is now a classic. He was a half-charlatan as was Baudelaire.
In both the sublime and the sickly were never far asunder. The pair
loved to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries. Both were
implacable pessimists. Both were educated in affluence, and both had to
face unprepared the hardships of life. The hastiest comparison of their
poetic work will show that their only common ideal was the worship of
an exotic beauty. Their artistic methods of expression were totally
dissimilar. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like temperament which
vibrated in the presence of strange subjects. Above all he was obsessed
by sex. Woman, as angel of destruction, is the keynote of his poems.
Poe was almost sexless. His aerial creatures never footed the dusty
highways of the world. His lovely lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me,"
could never have been written by Baudelaire; while Poe would never have
pardoned the "fulgurant" grandeur, the Beethoven-like harmonies, the
Dantesque horrors of that "deep wide music of lost souls" in "Femmes
Damnées":
Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes.
Or this, which might serve as a text for one of John Martin's vast
sinister mezzotints:
J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal
Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore,
Une fée allumer dans un ciel infernal
Une miraculeuse aurore;
J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal
Un être, qui n'était que lumière, or et gaze,
Terrasser l'énorme Satan;
Mais mon cœur que jamais ne visite l'extase,
Est un théâtre où l'on attend
Toujours, toujours en vain l'Etre aux ailes de gaze.
Professor Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and
Baudelaire: "Both authors--Poe and De Quincey--fell short of Baudelaire
himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have
a superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperament and
affection for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror."
Poe is without passion, except a passion for the _macabre_; for what
Huysmans calls "The October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a
gulf of despair and terror and humanity in Baudelaire which shakes
your nerves yet stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a
poet, he was no match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual
prestidigitation. The mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious
detective tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights
into the cosmical blue, the Poe the prophet and mystic--in these the
American was more versatile than his French translator. That Baudelaire
said, "Evil, be thou my good," is doubtless true. He proved all things
and found them vanity. He is the poet of original sin, a worshipper
of Satan for the sake of paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish
to us--in his heart he was a believer. His was "an infinite reverse
aspiration," and mixed up with his pose was a disgust for vice, for
life itself. He was the last of the Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called
him the Kamtschatka of Romanticism; its remotest hyperborean peak.
Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as Naturalism; but Baudelaire is
alive, and is read. His glistening phosphorescent trail is over French
poetry and he is the begetter of a school:--Verlaine, Villiers de
l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Verhaeren, and
many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who
was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be
the opposite of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong
with the world."
When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanticists that they all came
from Chateaubriand, he should have substituted the name of Rousseau
--"Romanticism, it is Rousseau," exclaims Pierre Lasserre. But there is
more of Byron and Petrus Borel--a forgotten mad poet--in Baudelaire;
though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau reactionary,
sported the workingman's blouse, shaved his head, shouldered a musket,
went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling the
proletarian "Brother!" (oh, Baudelaire!) and, as the Goncourts recorded
in their diary, had the head of a maniac. How seriously we may take
this swing of the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of the poet's at
the time of the Revolution: "Come," he said, "let us go shoot General
Aupick!" It was his stepfather that he thought of, not the eternal
principles of Liberty. This may be a false anecdote; many were foisted
upon Baudelaire. For example, his exclamations at cafés or in public
places, such as: "Have you ever eaten a baby? I find it pleasing to
the palate!" or, "The night I killed my father!" Naturally people
stared and Baudelaire was happy--he had startled the bourgeois. The
cannibalistic idea he may have borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet,
for this French poet knew English literature.
Gautier compares the poems to a certain tale of Hawthorne's in which
there is a garden of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his
laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; he never descended into the
mud and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged his
soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France says, "a divine poet." How
childish, yet how touching is his resolution--he wrote in his diary
of prayer's dynamic force--when he was penniless, in debt, threatened
with imprisonment, sick, nauseated with sin: "To make every morning
my prayer to God, the reservoir of all force, and all justice; to my
father, to Mariette, and to Poe as intercessors." (Evidently, Maurice
Barrès encountered here his theory of Intercessors.) Baudelaire loved
the memory of his father as much as Stendhal hated his. His mother he
became reconciled with after the death of General Aupick, in 1857. He
felt in 1862 that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for
he wrote: "I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror. To-day
imbecility's wing fanned me as it passed." The sense of the vertiginous
gulf was abiding with him; read his poem, "Pascal avait son gouffre."
In preferring the Baudelaire translations of Poe to the original--and
they give the impression of being original works--Stedman agreed with
Asselineau that the French is more concise than the English. The
prose of Poe and Baudelaire is clear, sober, rhythmic; Baudelaire's
is more lapidary, finer in contour, richer coloured, more supple,
though without the "honey and tiger's blood" of Barbey d'Aurevilly's.
Baudelaire's soul was patiently built up as a fabulous bird might
build its nest--bits of straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades
of black stars, rags, leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray
of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a gleam of blue sky, arabesques of
incense and verdigris, despairing hearts and music and the abomination
of desolation for ground-tones. But this soul-nest is also a cemetery
of the seven sorrows. He loved the clouds .... _les nuages ...
là bas_ ... It was _là bas_ with him even in the tortures of his
wretched love-life. Corruption and death were ever floating in his
consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who saw everywhere the hidden
skeleton. Félicien Rops has best interpreted Baudelaire: the etcher
and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too, is a Baudelarian. If
there could be such an anomaly as a native wood-note evil, it would
be the lyric and astringent voice of this poet. His sensibility was
both catholic and morbid, though he could be frigid in the face of the
most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a man for whom the visible word
existed; if Gautier was pagan, Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from
mediæval days. The spirit ruled, and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw
God." A Manichean in his worship of evil, he nevertheless abased his
soul: "Oh! Lord God! Give me the force and courage to contemplate my
heart and my body without disgust," he prays: But as some one remarked
to Rochefoucauld, "Where you end, Christianity begins."
Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders of a poetic Maremma,
which every miasma of the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and
glow-worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire painted in his sultry
music the profundities of abysms, the vastness of space. He painted,
too, the great nocturnal silences of the soul.
_Pacem summam tenent!_ He never reached peace on the heights. Let us
admit that souls of his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel
is too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the enigma for us is none the less
unfathomable. Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled delirium.
To affiliate him with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffmann, James Thomson,
Coleridge, and the rest of the sombre choir does not explain him; he
is, perhaps, nearer Donne and Villon than any of the others--strains
of the metaphysical and sinister and supersubtle are to be discovered
in him. The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bi-location,
are only too easy to diagnose; but the remedy? _Hypocrite lecteur--mon
semblable--mon frère!_ When the subtlety, force, grandeur, of his
poetic production be considered, together with its disquieting,
nervous, vibrating qualities, it is not surprising that Victor Hugo
wrote to the poet: "You invest the heaven of art with we know not what
deadly rays; you create a new shudder." Hugo could have said that he
turned Art into an Inferno. Baudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry.
In his heaven of fire, glass, and ebony he is the blazing Lucifer.
"A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, that did love beauty
only...." sang Tennyson.