As long ago as 1869 and in our "barbarous gas-lit country," as
Baudelaire named the land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which
this poet was described as "unique and as interesting as Hamlet. He is
that rare and unknown being, a genuine poet--a poet in the midst of
things that have disordered his spirit--a poet excessively developed
in his taste for and by beauty ... very responsive to the ideal, very
greedy of sensation." A better description of Baudelaire does not
exist. The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that sounded throughout
the disordered symphony of the poet's life.
He was, later, revealed to American readers by Henry James. This was in
1878, when appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists.
Previous to that there had been some desultory discussion, a few
essays in the magazines, and in 1875 a sympathetic paper by Professor
James Albert Harrison of the University of Virginia. But Mr. James
had the ear of a cultured public. He denounced the Frenchman for his
reprehensible taste, though he did not mention his beautiful verse or
his originality in the matter of criticism. Baudelaire, in his eyes,
was not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of Sainte-Beuve,
introduced Poe as a great man to the French nation. (See Baudelaire's
letter to Sainte-Beuve in the newly published Letters, 1841-1866.)
Perhaps Mr. Dick Minim and his projected Academy of Criticism might
make clear these devious problems.
The Etudes Critiques of Edmond Schérer were collected in 1863. In
them we find this unhappy, uncritical judgment: "Baudelaire, lui, n'a
rien, ni le cœur, ni l'esprit, ni l'idée, ni le mot, ni la raison,
ni la fantaisie, ni la verve, ni même la facture ... son unique titre
c'est d'avoir contribué à créer l'esthétique de la débauche." It is
not our intention to dilate upon the injustice of this criticism. It
is Baudelaire the critic of æsthetics in whom we are interested. Yet
I cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of Schérer had been
transformed into affirmations, only justice would have been accorded
Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet, the most original of his century,
but also a critic of the first rank, one who welcomed Richard Wagner
when Paris hooted him and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, played
the rôle of the envious; one who fought for Edouard Manet, Leconte
de Lisle, Gustave Flaubert, Eugène Delacroix; fought with pen for
the modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, Daumier, Félicien Rops,
Gavarni, and Constantin Guys. He literally identified himself with
De Quincey and Poe, translating them so wonderfully well that some
unpatriotic critics like the French better than the originals. So much
was Baudelaire absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted the
translator would meet the same fate as the American poet. A singular,
vigorous spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry with its "icy ecstasy"
is profound and harmonic, whose criticism is penetrated by a catholic
quality, who anticipated modern critics in his abhorrence of schools
and environments, preferring to isolate the man and study him uniquely.
He would have subscribed to Swinburne's generous pronouncement: "I have
never been able to see what should attract man to the profession of
criticism but the noble pleasure of praising." The Frenchman has said
that it would be impossible for a critic to become a poet; and it is
impossible for a poet not to contain a critic.
Théophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition of Les
Fleurs du Mal is not only the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire
as man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark of Gautier's
gifts as an essayist. We learn therein how the young Charles, an
incorrigible dandy, came to visit Hôtel Pimodan about 1844. In this
Hôtel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His
fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by the painters,
poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day--that is, carefully selected
ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Mérimée, and others whose verve
or genius gave them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this
cave of forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de Chagrin pictured
the same sort of scenes that were supposed to occur weekly at the
Pimodan. Gautier eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred
artistic souls, where the beautiful Jewess Maryx, who had posed for Ary
Scheffer's Mignon and for Paul Delaroche's La Gloire, met the superb
Mme. Sabatier, the only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original
of that extraordinary group of Clésinger's--the sculptor and son-in-law
of George Sand--la Femme au Serpent, a Salammbô _à la mode_ in marble.
Hasheesh was eaten, so Gautier writes, by Boissard and by Baudelaire.
As for the creator of Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust for such
nonsense. He had to work for his living at journalism, and he died
in harness an irreproachable father, while the unhappy Baudelaire,
the inheritor of an intense, unstable temperament, soon devoured his
patrimony of 75,000 francs and for the remaining years of his life was
between the devil of his dusky Jenny Duval and the deep sea of debt.
It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were no doubt much less
wicked than the participants would have us believe, that Baudelaire
encountered Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his portrait, and
encouraged the fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We
have seen an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray talent
of about the same order as Thackeray's, with a superadded note of the
horrific--that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics. Baudelaire
admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman praised the illustrations
of Guys, he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the commonplaces
of a painter's technique; also how to compose a palette--a rather
meaningless phrase nowadays. At least he did not write of the arts
without some technical experience. Delacroix took up his enthusiastic
disciple, and when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 1846,
1855, and 1859, the praise and blame they evoked were testimonies to
the training and knowledge of their author. A new spirit had been born.
The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor
spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are
the production of a humanist. Some would put them above Diderot's. Mr.
Saintsbury, after Mr. Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire
among the English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism
observed too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds,
"to read a criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by
no means a sure method of recognizing the picture afterward." Now,
word-painting was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his
friend Gautier, with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh
impossible feat of competing in his verbal descriptions with the
certitudes of canvas and marble. And if he with his verbal imagination
did not entirely succeed, how could a less adept manipulator of the
vocabulary? We do not agree with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine
too much when the imagination is that of a poet. Baudelaire divined
the work of the artist and set it down scrupulously in prose of
rectitude. He did not paint pictures in prose. He did not divagate.
He did not overburden his pages with technical terms. But the spirit
he did disengage in a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical
schools were a cross for him to bear, and he bore all his learning
lightly. Like a true critic, he judged more by form than theme. There
are no types; there is only life, he had cried before Jules Laforgue.
He was ever for art-for-art, yet, having breadth of comprehension
and a Heine-like capacity for seeing both sides of his own nature
and its idiosyncrasies, he could write: "The puerile utopia of the
school of art for art, in excluding morality, and often even passion,
was necessarily sterile. All literature which refuses to advance
fraternally between science and philosophy is a homicidal and a
suicidal literature."
Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than
of music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of
democracy, of the démocratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental
fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation
the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades.
These things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the
Dresden uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary
étude. Brave lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the
region of the ideal. Baudelaire's little attack of the equality-measles
soon vanished. He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly
and injustice of abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of
paradoxes, he dedicated a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but
he would not have contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that "in
art the democrat is always reactionary. In 1830 the democrats were
against Victor Hugo and Delacroix." And Les Fleurs du Mal, that book of
opals, blood, and evil swamp-flowers, can never be savoured by the mob.
In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in
the Louvre he enjoyed in company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of
the latter's preferences. He was also attracted to El Greco--not an
unnatural admiration, considering the sombre extravagance of his own
genius. Goya he has written of in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his
touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his nerves ruined by abuse of
drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination or those by his
friend Rousseau were more beautiful than Nature herself. The country,
he declared, was odious. Like Whistler, whom he often met--see the
Hommage à Delacroix by Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler,
Baudelaire, Manet, Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacroix, Cordier,
Duranty the critic, and De Balleroy--he could not help showing his
aversion to "foolish sunsets." In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain
had entered too much moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of
poetry, criticism and fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo,
is the literary progenitor of Jean, Due d'Esseintes, of Huysmans's
A Rebours. Huysmans modelled at first himself on Baudelaire. His Le
Drageoir aux Epices is a continuation of Petits Poèmes en Prose. And
to Baudelaire's account must be laid much artificial morbid writing.
Despite his pursuit of perfection in form, his influence has been
too often baneful to impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of
Gallic Byronism, and high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no
extravagance, absurd or terrible, that he did not commit, from etching
a four-part fugue on ice to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer. In
his criticism alone was he the sane, logical Frenchman. And while he
did not live to see the success of the Impressionist group, he would
have surely acclaimed their theories and practice. Was he not an
impressionist himself?
As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so Delacroix quite overflowed
his æsthetic consciousness. Read Volume II. of his collected works,
Curiosités Esthétiques, which contains his Salons; also his essay,
De l'Essence du Rire (worthy to be placed side by side with George
Meredith's essay on Comedy). Caricaturists, French and foreign, are
considered in two chapters at the close of the volume. Baudelaire
was as conscientious as Gautier. He toiled around miles of mediocre
canvas, saying an encouraging word to the less talented, boiling
over with holy indignation, glacial irony, before the rash usurpers
occupying the seats of the mighty, and pouncing on new genius with
promptitude. Upon Delacroix he lavished the largesse of his admiration.
He smiled at the platitudes of Horace Vernef, and only shook his head
over the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed William
Hausoullier, now so little known. He praised Devéria, Chasseriau--who
waited years before he came into his own; his preferred landscapists
were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke of Ary Scheffer
and the "apes of sentiment"; while his discussions of Hogarth,
Cruikshank, Pinelli and Breughel proclaim his versatility of vision. In
his essay Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne he was the first among critics
to recognize the peculiar quality named "modernity," that nervous,
naked vibration which informs the novels of Goncourt, Flaubert's
L'Education Sentimentale, and the pictures of Manet, Monet, Degas and
Raffaelli with their evocations of a new, nervous Paris. It is in his
Volume III., entitled, L'Art Romantique, that so many things dear to
the new century were then subjects of furious quarrels. This book
contains much just and brilliant writing. It was easy for Nietzsche to
praise Wagner in Germany in 1876, but dangerous at Paris in 1861 to
declare war on Wagner's critics. This Baudelaire did.
The relations of Baudelaire and Edouard Manet were exceedingly cordial.
In a letter to Théophile Thoré, the art critic (Letters, p. 361), we
find Baudelaire defending his friend from the accusation that his
pictures were _pastiches_ of Goya. He wrote: "Manet has never seen
Goya, never El Greco; he was never in the Pourtalés Gallery." Which may
have been true at the time, 1864, but Manet visited Madrid and spent
much time studying Velasquez and abusing Spanish cookery. (Consider,
too, Goya's Balcony with Girls and Manet's famous Balcony.) Raging
at the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this same epistle:
"They accuse even me of imitating Edgar Poe.... Do you know why I
so patiently translated Poe? _Because he resembled me._" The poet
italicised these words. With stupefaction, therefore, he admired the
mysterious coincidences of Manet's work with that of Goya and El Greco.
He took Manet seriously. He wrote to him in a paternal and severe tone.
Recall his reproof when urging the painter to exhibit his work. "You
complain about attacks, but are you the first to endure them? Have you
more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by
derision. And in order not to make you too proud I must tell you that
they are models, each in his way, and in a very rich world, while _you
are only the first in the decrepitude of your art._" (Letters, p. 436.)
Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words if he were able to
revisit the glimpses of the Champs Elysées at the autumn Salons? What
would he think of Cézanne? Odilon Redon he would understand, for he is
the transposer of Baudelairianism to terms of design and colour. And
perhaps the poet whose verse is saturated with tropical hues--he, when
young, sailed in southern seas--might appreciate the monstrous debauch
of form and colour in the Tahitian canvases of Paul Gauguin.
Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his
verse. He is _par excellence_ the poet of æsthetics. To Daumier he
inscribed a poem; and to the sculptor Ernest Christophe, to Delacroix
(Sur Le Tasse en Prison), to Manet, to Guys (Rêve Parisien), to an
unknown master (Une Martyre); and Watteau, a Watteau à rebours, is
seen in Un Voyage à Cy there; while in Les Phares this poet of ideal,
spleen, music, and perfume shows his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da
Vinci, Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Puget, Goya, Delacroix--"Delacroix,
lac de sang hanté des mauvais anges." And what could be more exquisite
than his quatrain to Lola de Valence, a poetic inscription for the
picture of Edouard Manet, with its last line as vaporous, as subtle as
Verlaine: Le charme inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir! Heine called
himself the last of the Romantics. The first of the "Moderns" and the
last of the Romantics was the many-sided Charles Baudelaire.