He was born at Paris April 9, 1821 (Flaubert's birth year), and not
April 21st as Gautier has it. His father was Joseph Francis Baudelaire,
or Beaudelaire, who occupied a government position. A cultivated art
lover, his taste was apparent in the home he made for his second wife,
Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, an orphan and the daughter of a military
officer. There was a considerable difference in the years of this pair;
the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, at the birth of
their only child. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one
son, Claude, who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paralysis,
though a steady man of business. That great neurosis, called Commerce,
has its mental wrecks, too, but no one pays attention; only when the
poet falls by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and other
soul-hunters seeking for victims. After the death of Baudelaire's
father, the widow, within a year, married the handsome, ambitious
Aupick, then _chef de bataillon_, lieutenant-colonel, decorated with
the Legion of Honour, and later general and ambassador to Madrid,
Constantinople, and London. Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but
unlike most children of genius, he was a scholar and won brilliant
honours at school. His step-father was proud of him. From the Royal
College of Lyons, Charles went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris,
but was expelled in 1839. Troubles soon began at home for him. He
was irascible, vain, very precocious, and given to dissipation. He
quarrelled with General Aupick, and disdained his mother. But she was
to blame, she has confessed; she had quite forgotten the boy in the
flush of her second love. He could not forget, or forgive what he
called her infidelity to the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was
inconsolable. The good bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said
that Charles was a little crazy--second marriages usually bring woe in
their train. "When a mother has such a son, she doesn't remarry," said
the young poet. Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes,
Dufais. He wrote in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or maniacs ...
all victims of terrible passions"; which was one of his exaggerations.
His grand-father on the paternal side was a Champenois peasant, his
mother's family presumably Norman, but not much is known of her
forbears. Charles believed himself lost from the time his half-brother
was stricken. He also believed that his instability of temperament--and
he studied his "case" as would a surgeon--was the result of his
parents' disparity in years.
After his return from the East, where he did not learn English, as has
been said--his mother taught him as a boy to converse in and write
the language--he came into his little inheritance, about fifteen
thousand dollars. Two years later he was so heavily in debt that his
family asked for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had
been swindled, being young and green. How had he squandered his money?
Not exactly on opera-glasses, like Gérard de Nerval, but on clothes,
pictures, furniture, books. The remnant was set aside to pay his debts.
Charles would be both poet and dandy. He dressed expensively but
soberly, in the English fashion; his linen dazzling, the prevailing
hue of his habiliments black. In height he was medium, his eyes brown,
searching, luminous, the eye of a nyctalops, "eyes like ravens'";
nostrils palpitating, cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual, the jaw
strong and square. His hair was black, curly, and glossy, his forehead
high, square, white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is
there, what Catulle Mendès nicknamed him: His Excellence, Monseigneur
Brummel! Later he was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de
N. S. le Diable; or the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the clean-shaven
face of the mock priest, the slow cold eyes and the sharp cunning
sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better
know the worthlessness of temptation." In the heyday of his blood he
was perverse and deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting the
Byronic notion that _ennui_ could be best cured by dissipation; in sin
Baudelaire found the saddest of all tasks. Mendès laughs at the legend
of Baudelaire's violence, of his being given to explosive phrases.
Despite Gautier's stories about the Hôtel Pimodan and its club of
hasheesh-eaters, M. Mendès denies that Baudelaire was a victim of the
hemp. What the majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits
of literary workers is this prime fact: men who work hard, writing
verse--and there is no mental toil comparable to it--cannot drink, or
indulge in opium, without the inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned
ideas of "inspiration," spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden
bolt from heaven, are delusions still hugged by the world. To be told
that Chopin filed at his music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy
forged his thunderbolts, that Manet toiled like a labourer on the
dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to poetic work,
that Gautier was a hard-working journalist, is a disillusion for the
sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged from Jupiter's skull to the
desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but Balzac and Flaubert did not
encourage this fancy. Work literally killed Poe, as it killed Jules
de Goncourt, Flaubert, and Daudet. Maupassant went insane because
he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked and
worried. His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was
flawed--Sainte-Beuve told him that he had worn out his nerves--from the
start, he was _détraqué_; but that his entire life was one huge debauch
is a nightmare of the moral police in some white cotton night-cap
country.
His period of mental production was not brief or barren. He was a
student. Du Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved by
the variety and quality of his published work. His range of sympathies
was large. His mistake, in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write
so well about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its real
name--which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was one of the elect, an
aristocrat, who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate air of
a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated voice, aroused unusual
interest and admiration. He was a humanist of distinction; he has left
a hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Baudelaire, like
Chopin, made more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity the
expressiveness of art.
Women played a commanding rôle in his life. They always do with any
poet worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging
this as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with Woman than the
individual. The legend of the beautiful creature he brought from the
East resolves itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne Duval. He met
her in Paris, after he had been in the East. She sang at a café-concert
in Paris. She was more brown than black. She was not handsome, not
intelligent, not good; yet he idealized her, for she was the source of
half his inspiration. To her were addressed those marvellous evocations
of the Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious mornings on strange
far-away seas and "superb Byzant" domes that devils built. Baudelaire
is the poet of perfumes; he is also the patron saint of _ennui_. No one
has so chanted the praise of odours. His soul swims on perfume as do
other souls on music, he has sung. As he grew older he seemed to hunt
for more acrid odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase
the carving of which transports us, but from which the head is quickly
averted. Jeanne, whom he never loved, no matter what may be said, was
a sorceress. But she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; he left
her a dozen times only to return. He was a capital draughtsman with a
strong nervous line and made many pen-and-ink drawings of her. They are
not prepossessing. In her rapid decline, she was not allowed to want;
Madame Aupick paying her expenses in the hospital. A sordid history.
She was a veritable flower of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like
music, would be colourless, scentless, if it sounded no dissonances.
Fancy art reduced to the beatific and banal chord of C major!
He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier, a reigning beauty,
at whose salon artistic Paris assembled. She had been christened by
Gautier _Madame la Présidente_, and her sumptuous beauty was portrayed
by Ricard in his La Femme au Chien. She returned Baudelaire's love.
They soon parted. Again a riddle that the published letters hardly
solve. One letter, however, does show that Baudelaire had tried to be
faithful, and failed. He could not extort from his exhausted soul the
sentiment; but he put its music on paper. His most seductive lyrics
were addressed to Madame Sabatier: "A la très chère, à la très-belle,"
a hymn saturated with love. Music, spleen, perfumes--"colour, sound,
perfumes call to each other as deep to deep; perfumes like the flesh
of children, soft as hautboys, green like the meadows"--criminals,
outcasts, the charm of childhood, the horrors of love, pride, and
rebellion, Eastern landscapes, cats, soothing and false; cats, the
true companions of lonely poets; haunted clocks, shivering dusks, and
gloomier dawns--Paris in a hundred phases--these and many other themes
this strange-souled poet, this "Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris
has celebrated in finely wrought verse and profound phrases. In a
single line he contrives atmosphere; the very shape of his sentence,
the ring of the syllables, arouses the deepest emotion. A master of
harmonic undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in
making their music more fluid, more singing, more vapourous--all young
French poets pass through their Baudelarian green-sickness--but he
alone knows the secrets of moulding those metallic, free sonnets, which
have the resistance of bronze; and of the despairing music that flames
from the mouths of lost souls trembling on the wharves of hell. He is
the supreme master of irony and troubled voluptuousness.
Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved rather than sang; the plastic
arts spoke to his soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, his
emotions transformed themselves into ideas. Bourget classified him as
mystic, libertine, and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul,
to use the phrase of Père Lacordaire. (Curiously enough, he actually
contemplated, in 1861, becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant
seat in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve dissuaded him from this
folly.) Recall Baudelaire's prayer: "Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me
the grace to produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that
I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those I contemn."
Individualist, egoist, anarchist, his only thought was of letters.
Jules Laforgue thus described Baudelaire: "Cat, Hindoo, Yankee,
Episcopal, alchemist." Yes, an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes
he created. He was of Gothic imagination, and could have said with
Rolla: _Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux._ He had an
unassuaged thirst for the absolute. The human soul was his stage, he
its interpreting orchestra.
In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by the devoted
Poulet-Malassis, who afterward went into bankruptcy--a warning to
publishers with a taste for fine literature. The titles contemplated
were Limbes, or Lesbiennes. Hippolyte Babou suggested the one we know.
These poems were suppressed on account of six, and poet and publisher
summoned. As the municipal government had made a particular ass of
itself in the prosecution of Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovary,
the Baudelaire matter was disposed of in haste. He was condemned to
a fine of three hundred francs, a fine which was never paid, as the
objectionable poems were removed. They were printed in the Belgian
edition, and may be read in the new volume of Œuvres Posthumes.
Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, for he knew that his book
was dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge
from the trial with flying colours; to be classed as one who wrote
objectionable literature was a shock. "Flaubert had the Empress back
of him," he complained; which was true; the Empress Eugénie, also the
Princess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put forth those polished
intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of which he had taken a
hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this form with
a new content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be found in these
miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject and
lowly, a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who had
discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one of his poems
he described a landscape of metal, of marble and water; a babel of
staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by the silence
of eternity. This depressing yet magical dream was utilised by Huysmans
in his A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the Prose Poems there
is nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude
of artificiality is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep fundamental
note of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the eternal diapason
is there even when least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than
Poe. His range of sympathy is wider. In this he transcends him as a
poet, though his subject-matter often issues from the very dregs of
life. Brother to pitiable wanderers, there is, nevertheless, no trace
of cant, no "Russian pity" _à la_ Dostoïevsky, no humanitarian or
socialistic rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist. He hated
the sentimental sapping of altruism. His prose-poem, Crowds, with its
"bath of multitude," may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles
Lamb we find the idea: "Are there no solitudes out of caves and the
desert? or, cannot the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully
alone?"
His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser, a more
significant essay than Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth;
Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in Wagner's
career. Wagner sent a brief, hearty letter of thanks to the critic
and made his acquaintance. To Wagner Baudelaire introduced a young
Wagnerian, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. This Wagner letter is included
in the volume of Crépet; but there are no letters published from
Baudelaire to Franz Liszt, though they were friends. In Weimar I saw
at the Liszt house several from Baudelaire which should have been
included in the Letters. The poet understood Liszt and his reforms as
he understood Wagner's. The German composer admired the French poet,
and his Kundry, of the sultry second act, Parsifal, has a Baudelairian
hue, especially in the temptation scene.
The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been steadily, rather, unsteadily,
going downhill; a desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He went
out only after dark, he haunted the exterior boulevards, associated
with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst, ate without
hunger, as he has said. A woeful decadence for this aristocrat of
life and letters. Most sorrowful of sinners, his morose delectation
scourged his nerves and extorted the darkest music from his lyre. He
fled to Brussels, there to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. He
gave a few lectures, and met Rops, Lemonnier, drank to forget, and
forgot to work. He abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A country
where the trees are black, the flowers without odour, and where there
is no conversation. He, the brilliant _causeur_, the chief _blaguer_
of a circle in which young James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the
rôle of a listener--this most _spirituel_ among artists found himself
a failure in the Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind
ourselves that Baudelaire was the creator of most of the paradoxes
attributed, not only to Whistler, but to an entire school--if one may
employ such a phrase. The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his
cutting enunciation, his power of blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his
love of the artificial, have been copied by the æsthetic blades of
our day. He it was who first taunted Nature with being an imitator of
art, with being always the same. Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the
quotidian eating and drinking! And as pessimist, too, he led the mode.
Baudelaire, like Flaubert, grasped the murky torch of pessimism once
held by Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, and Sénancour. Doubtless all
this stemmed from Byronism. To-day it is all as stale as Byronism.
His health failed rapidly, and he didn't have money enough to pay for
doctor's prescriptions; he owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur,
where he was visiting the father-in-law of Félicien Rops (March, 1866),
he suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels.
His mother, who lived at Honfleur, in mourning for her husband, came
to his aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia
set in. He could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight
of himself in the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger.
His friends rallied, and they were among the most distinguished
people in Paris, the _élite_ of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two
playing Wagner on the piano--which must have added a fresh _nuance_ to
death--and they brought him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers
and music to the last. He could not bear the sight of his mother; she
revived in him some painful memories, but that passed, and he clamoured
for her when she was absent. If anyone mentioned the names of Wagner or
Manet, he smiled. Madame Sabatier came; so did the Manets. And with a
fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon
eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.
Barbey d'Aurevilly, himself a Satanist and dandy (oh, those comical old
attitudes of literature!), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du
Mal would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot
of the cross. (Later he said the same of Huysmans.) Baudelaire had the
latter course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted spiritual
suicide for how many years? (He once tried actual suicide, but the
slight cut in his throat looked so ugly that he went no farther.) His
soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and evil. That at
the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his God is not a
subject of comment. He was an extraordinary poet with a bad conscience,
who lived miserably and was buried with honours. Then it was that his
worth was discovered (funeral orations over a genius are a species of
public staircase wit). His reputation waxes with the years. He is an
exotic gem in the crown of French poetry. Of him Swinburne has chanted
Ave Atque Vale:
Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?