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Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d49fc62 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #50488 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50488) diff --git a/old/50488-0.txt b/old/50488-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 066b42e..0000000 --- a/old/50488-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3448 +0,0 @@ -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 50488 *** - -CHARLES BAUDELAIRE - -A STUDY - -BY - -ARTHUR SYMONS - -LONDON - -ELKIN MATHEWS - -CORK STREET - -MCMXX - - -TO - -JOHN QUINN - - -[Illustration: ÉMILE DE ROY, 1844] - - - CONTENTS - - CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY. - BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES. - NOTES. - - -LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS - - Émile de Roy, 1844. _Frontispiece_ - - I. Jeanne Duval: Drawing by Baudelaire, 1860. - II. Baudelaire, designed by himself, 1848. - III. Les fleurs du mal, 1857. - IV. Les paradis artificiels, 1861. - V. Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859. - VI. Gustave Courbet, 1848. - VII. Edouard Manet, 1862. - VIII. Edouard Manet, 1865. - IX. Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Charles Asselineau, 1865. - - - - -BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY - - - -I - - -When Baudelaire is great, when his genius is at its highest point -of imaginative creation, of imaginative criticism, it is never when -he works by implication--as the great men who are pure artists (for -instance, Shakespeare) work by implication only--but always from his -personal point of view being simply infallible and impeccable. The pure -artist, it has been said, never asserts: and the instances are far -from being numerous; Balzac asserts, and Balzac is always absolutely -just in all his assertions: he whose analysis of modern Society--_La -Comédie Humaine_--verges almost always on creation; and despite certain -deficiencies in technique and in style, he remains the greatest of all -novelists. As for Baudelaire, he rarely asserts; he more often suggests -or divines--with that exquisite desire of perfect and just work that -is always in him. With his keen vision he rarely misses the essential; -with his subtle and sifted prose he rarely fails in characterizing -the right man in the right way and the wrong man--the man who is not -an artist--in forms of ironical condemnation. Shelley in his time and -Blake in his time gave grave enough offence and perplexity; so did -Baudelaire, so did Poe, so did Swinburne, so did Rossetti, so did -Beardsley. All had their intervals of revolt--spiritual or unspiritual, -according to the particular trend of their genius; some destroy -mendacious idols, some change images into symbols; some are supposed -to be obscurely original. All had to apprehend, as Browning declared -in regard to his readers and critics in one of his Prefaces, "charges -of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely -harsh." And all these might have said as he said: "I blame nobody, -least of all myself, who did my best then and since." - -In our approach to the poetry, or to the prose, of any famous -writer, with whom we are concerned, we must necessarily approach his -personality; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we -cannot love it without loving him. As for Baudelaire, I must confess -that, in spite of the fact that one might hate or love the man -according to the judgment of the wise or of the unwise, I find him more -lovable than hateful. That he failed in trying to love one woman is as -certain as his disillusion after he had possessed her; that, in regard -to Jeanne Duval, she was to him simply a silent instrument that, by -touching all the living strings of it, he awakened to a music that is -all his own; that whether this "masterpiece of flesh" meant more to him -than certain other women who inspired him in different ways; whether -he thirsted to drain her "empty kiss" or the "empty kiss" of Rachel, -of Marguerite, of Gabrielle, of Judith, is a matter of but little -significance. A man's life such as his is a man's own property and the -property of no one else. And Baudelaire's conclusion as to any of these -might be, perhaps, summed up in this stanza: - - "Your sweet, scarce lost estate - Of innocence, the candour of your eyes, - Your child-like, pleased surprise, - Your patience: these afflict me with a weight - As of some heavy wrong that I must share - With God who made, with man who found you, fair." - -"In more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels," -says Saint Augustine; and Beardsley's sacrifice, along with that of -all great decadent art, the art of Rops or of Baudelaire, is really a -sacrifice to the eternal beauty, and only seemingly to the powers of -evil. And here let me say that I have no concern with what neither he -nor I could have had absolute knowledge of, his own intention in his -work. A man's intention, it must be remembered--and equally in the case -of much of the work of Poe and of Baudelaire, much less so in the case -of Balzac and Verlaine--from the very fact that it is conscious, is -much less intimately himself than the sentiment which his work conveys -to me. - -Baudelaire's figures, exactly like those designed by Beardsley and -by Rodin, have the sensitiveness of the spirit and that bodily -sensitiveness which wastes their veins and imprisons them in the -attitude of their luxurious meditation. They have nothing that is -merely "animal" in their downright course towards repentance; no -overwhelming passion hurries them beyond themselves; they do not -capitulate to an open assault of the enemy of souls. It is the soul in -them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. Their -bodies are eager and faint with wantonness; they desire fiercer and -more exquisite pains, a more intolerable suspense than there is in the -world. - -Beardsley is the satirist of an age without convictions, and he can -but paint hell as Baudelaire did, without pointing for contrast to any -actual paradise. He employs the same rhetoric as Baudelaire--a method -of emphasis which it is uncritical to think insincere. In the terrible -annunciation of evil which he called _The Mysterious Rose-Garden,_ the -lantern-bearing angel with winged sandals whispers, from among the -falling roses, tidings of more than "pleasant sins." And in Baudelaire, -as in Beardsley, the peculiar efficacy of their satire is that it -is so much the satire of desire returning on itself, the mockery of -desire enjoyed, the mockery of desire denied. It is because these love -beauty that beauty's degradation obsesses them; it is because they -are supremely conscious of virtue that vice has power to lay hold on -them. And with these--unlike other satirists of our day--it is always -the soul, and not the body's discontent only, which cries out of these -insatiable eyes, that have looked on all their lusts; and out of these -bitter mouths, that have eaten the dust of all their sweetnesses; and -out of these hands, that have laboured delicately for nothing; and out -of their feet, that have run after vanities. - -The body, in the arms of death, the soul, in the arms of the naked -body: these are the strangest symbolical images of Life and of Death. -So, as Flaubert's devotion to art seemed to have had about it something -of the "seriousness and passion that are like a consecration," I give -this one sentence on the death of Emma Bovary: "Ensuite il recita le -_Misereatur_ et l'_Indulgentiam_, trempa son pouce droit dans l'huile -et commença les onctions: d'abord sur les yeux, qui avaient tant -convoité toutes les somptuosités terrestres; puis sur les narines, -friandes de brises tièdes et de senteurs amoureuses; puis sur la -bouche, qui s'était ouverte pour le mensonge, qui avait gémi d'orgueil -et crié dans la luxure; puis sur les mains, qui se delectaient au -contacts suaves, et enfin sur la plante des pieds, si rapides autrefois -quand elle courait à l'assouvissance de ses désirs et qui maintenant ne -marcheraient plus." - -Charles Baudelaire was born April 9th, 1821, in la rue Saint Augustin, -8; he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice. His father, François, who had -married Mile Janin in 1803, married, after her death, Caroline -Archimbaut-Dufays, born in London, September 27th, 1793. François -Baudelaire's father, named Claude, married Marie-Charlotte Dieu, -February 10th, 1738, at Neuville-au-Port, in the Department of Marne. - -From 1838 to 1842 (when Baudelaire attains his majority) there is a -family crisis in a certainly impossible family circle. These years he -spends in vagabonding at his own will: living a deliciously depraved -life; diving, perhaps, into depths of impurity; haunting the night -resorts that one finds in the most curious quarters of Paris--the -cafés, the theatres, la Rue de Bréda. He amuses himself enormously: -even in "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame;" he lives then, as -always, by his sensitive nerves, by his inexhaustible curiosity. He is -devoured then, as always, by the inner fires of his genius and of his -sensuality; and is, certainly, a quite naturally immoral man in his -relations with women. - -He lives, as I have said; he feeds himself on his nerves: - - "The modern malady of love is nerves." - -It is an incurable, a world-old malady; and, from Catullus, one of the -greatest of all poets, century after century, from the Latin poets of -the Middle Ages, from the poets of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan -Age, down to the modern Romantic Movement, no poet who was a passionate -lover of Woman has ever failed to sing for her and against her: - - "I hate and I love: you ask me how I can do it? - I know not: I know that it hurts: I am going through it." - - _Odi et amo; quari id faciam, fortasse requiris._ - _Nescio; sed fiere sentio, et excrucior._ - - "Caelius, Lesbia mine, that Lesbia, that - Lesbia whom Catullus for love did rate - Higher than all himself and than all things, stands - Now at the cross-roads and the alleys to wait - For the lords of Rome, with public lips and hands." - - _Cœli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia,_ - _Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam_ - _Plus, quàm se, atque suos amavit omnes._ - -Need I quote more than these three fines? These fines, and those -quoted above, are enough to show, for all time, that Catullus was -as passionate a lover and as passionate a hater of flesh as Villon. -Yet, if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even -_le grosse Margot_ from her place in his life; who, to a certainty, -had not for one instant the place in his life that Lesbia had in the -life of Catullus. Villon was no dabbler in infamy, but one who liked -infamous things for their own sake. - -Nor must I forget John Donne, whose quality of passion is unique in -English poetry--a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of -actual violence: his senses speak with unparalleled directness: he can -exemplify every motion with an unluxurious explicitness which leaves -no doubt of his intentions. He suffers from all the fevers and colds -of love; and, in his finest poem--a hate poem--he gives expression -to a whole region of profound human sentiment which has never been -expressed, out of Catullus, with such intolerable truth: - - "When, by thy scorn, O murdress, I am dead, - And that thou thinkest thee free - From all solicitations of me, - Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, - And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see: - Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, - And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, - Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think - Thou call'st for more, - And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink; - And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou - Bathed in a cold, quick-silver sweat will lie - A verier ghost than I. - What I will say, I will not tell thee now, - Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, - I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent, - Than by my threatenings rest still innocent." - -As for Baudelaire's adventures when he is sent, perhaps against his -will, in May, 1841, on a long voyage from Bordeaux to Calcutta, to -return to Paris in February, 1843, after six months' travel, it -is conjecturable that he might return a changed man. Certainly his -imagination found in the East a curious fascination, with an actual -reawakening of new instincts; and with that oppressive sense of extreme -heat, as intense, I suppose, as in Africa, which makes one suffer, -bodily and spiritually, and in ways more extraordinary than those who -have never endured those tropical heats can possibly conceive of. There -he may have abandoned himself to certain obscure rites that to him -might have been an initiation into the cults of the Black Venus. And, -with these hot suns, these burning midnoons, these animal passions, the -very seductiveness of the nakedness of bronze skin, what can I imagine -but this: that they lighted in his veins an intolerable flame, that -burned there ardently to the end? - -For in his _Wagner_ (1861) he writes: "The radiant ancient Venus, -Aphrodite, born of white foam, has not imprudently traversed the -horrible darkness of the Middle Ages. She has retired to the depths of -a cavern, magnificently lighted by the fires that are not those of the -Sun. In her descent under earth, Venus has come near to hell's mouth, -and she goes, certainly, to many abominable solemnities, to render -homage to the Arch-demon, Prince of the Flesh and Lord of Sin." He -finds her in the music where Wagner has created a furious song of the -flesh, with an absolute knowledge of what in men is diabolical. "For -from the first measures, the nerves vibrate in unison with the melody; -one's flesh remembers itself and begins to tremble. _Tannhäuser_ -represents the eternal combat between the two principles that have -chosen the human heart as battle-field, that is to say, of the flesh -with the spirit, of hell with heaven, of Satan with God." - -In January, 1843, Baudelaire finds himself in possession of a fortune -of seventy-five thousand francs. With his incurable restlessness, -his incurable desire of change, he is always moving from one place -to another. He takes rooms at Quai de Bethune, 10, Isle-Saint-Louis; -rue Vanneau, faubourg Saint-Germain; rue Varenne, quai d'Anjou; Hôtel -Pimodan, 17; Hôtel Corneille; Hôtel Folkestone, rue Lafitte; Avenue -de la République, 95; rue des Marais-du-Temple, 25; rue Mazarine; -rue de Babylone; rue de Seine, 57; rue Pigalle, 60; Hôtel Voltaire, -19 quai Voltaire; rue Beautrellis, 22; Cité d'Orléans, 15; rue -d'Angoulême-du-Temple, 18; Hôtel Dieppe, rue d'Amsterdam, 22; rue des -Ecuries-d'Artois, 6; rue de Seine, l'Hôtel du Maroc, 35. - -With a certain instinct for drawing Baudelaire haunts many painter's -studios: Delacroix's, whose genius he discovers, giving him much of -his fame, becoming his intimate friend; Manet's, whose genius he also -divines and discovers; Daumier's, to whom he attributes "the strange -and astonishing qualities of a great genius, sick of genius." So also, -from the beginning, Baudelaire's judgments are infallibly right; so -also his first book, _Le Salon de_ 1845, has all the insolence of youth -and all the certitude of a youth of genius. But his fame is made, -that is to say, as an imaginative critic, with _Le Salon de_ 1846; -for, after the prelude, the entire book is fascinating, paradoxical, -and essentially æsthetical; a wonderful book in which he reveals the -mysteries of colour, of form, of design, of technique, and of the -enigmas of creative works. Here he elaborates certain of his mature -theories, such as his exultant praise--in which he is one with Lamb -and with Swinburne; his just disdain, and his grave irony, in which -he is one with Swinburne; and, above all, that passionate love of all -forms of beauty, at once spiritual and absolute, which is part of the -quintessence of his genius. - -So, as Swinburne, in the fire of his youthful genius, was the first -to praise Baudelaire in English, I quote these sentences of his from -an essay on Tennyson and Musset: "I do not mean that the _Comédie de -la Mort_ must be ranked with the _Imitation of Christ,_ or that _Les -Fleurs du Mal_ should be bound up with _The Christian Year._ But I do -say that no principle of art which does not exclude from its tolerance -the masterpieces of Titian can logically or consistently reject the -masterpieces of a poet who has paid to one of them the most costly -tribute of carven verse, in lines of chiselled ivory with rhymes of -ringing gold, that ever was laid by the high priest of one muse on the -high altar of another. And I must also maintain my opinion that the -pervading note of spiritual tragedy in the brooding verse of Baudelaire -dignifies and justifies at all points his treatment of his darkest and -strangest subjects. The atmosphere of his work is to the atmosphere -of Gautier's as the air of a gas-lit alcove is to the air of the -far-flowering meadows that make in April a natural Field of the Cloth -of Gold all round the happier poet's native town of Tarbes, radiant -as the open scroll of his writings with immeasurable wealth of youth -and sunlight and imperishable spring. The sombre starlight under which -Baudelaire nursed and cherished the strange melancholy of his tropical -home-sickness, with its lurid pageant of gorgeous or of ghastly dreams, -was perhaps equidistant from either of these, but assuredly had less in -common with the lamplight than the sunshine." - -To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, as Villon and his infamous -friends did on their wonderful winter nights, "where the wolves live -on wind," and where the gallows stands at street corners, ominously, -and one sees swing in the wind dead chained men; to haunt the strange -streets of cities, to know all the useless and improper and amusing, -the moral and the immoral people, who are alone worth knowing; to live, -as well as to observe; to be drawn out of the rapid current of life -into an exasperating inaction: it is such things as these that make -for poetry and for prose. Some make verse out of personal sensations, -verse which is half pathological, which is half physiological; some out -of colours and scents and crowds and ballets; some out of music, out -of the sea's passions; some simply out of rhythms that insist on being -used; a few out of the appreciation of the human comedy. The outcome of -many experiments, these must pass beyond that stage into the stage of -existence. - -So, in much of Baudelaire's verse I find not only the exotic -(rarely the erotic) but, in the peculiar technique of the lines, -certain andante movements, lingering subtleties of sound, colour, -and suggestion, with--at times, but never in the excessive sense -of Flaubert's--the almost medical curiosity of certain researches -into the stuff of dreams, the very fibre of life itself, which, -combined, certainly tend to produce a new thing in poetry. A new -order of phenomena absorbs his attention, which becomes more and more -externalized, more exclusively concerned with the phenomena of the -soul, with morbid sensation, with the curiosities of the mind and the -senses. Humanity is now apprehended in a more than ever generalized and -yet specialized way in its essence, when it becomes, if you will, an -abstraction; or, if you will, for the first time purely individual. - -In certain poets these have been foiled endeavours; in Baudelaire -never: for one must never go beyond the unrealizable, never lose -one's intensity of expression, never let go of the central threads of -one's spider's web. Still, in regard to certain direct pathological -qualities, there is a good deal of this to be found in much of the -best poetry--in Poe, in Rossetti, in Swinburne's earlier work, and -much in Baudelaire; only all these are moved by a fascination: in Poe -for the fantastically inhuman; in Rossetti for the inner life of the -imagination, for to him, as Pater said, "life is a crisis at every -moment;" in Swinburne for the arduous fulness of intricate harmony, -and for the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled -abundance. - -There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own -highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the -end of art, but the artist--whether he be Baudelaire or Verlaine-- -should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is -not written by a man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but -rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing on impulse, -hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he -does not remember, in some "close corner of his brain," and exerts -the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the -medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some -obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what -it was, and, aiming at much more minor things in the world than pure -beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to -remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end must -be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the -purpose which it sought to serve, but by the success or failure in -one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise -consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a -precise consciousness of what he is doing. - -To Baudelaire as to Pater there were certain severe tests of the -effects made on us by works of genius. In both writers there is a -finality of creative criticism. For, to these, all works of art, all -forms of human life, were as powers and forces producing pleasurable -sensations. One can find them in a gem, a wine, a spoken word, a sudden -gesture, in anything, indeed, that strikes vividly or fundamentally the -senses, that acts instantaneously on one's perceptive passions. "What," -says Pater in his essay on Wordsworth, "are the peculiarities in things -and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can -convey to others, in an extraordinary way?" - -"The ultimate aim of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to -establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass -judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had -an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, -almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who -allowed himself to be a critic. Certainly, Baudelaire shared certain -of those qualities; indeed, almost all; even, in a sense, logic. His -genius was so great, and in its greatness so manysided, that for some -studious disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from -any possible point of view, have always some of his magic and of his -magnetism. The ardour, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute -desire to get at the root of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be, -will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper; -that is to say, those that are most morbid, most fond of imaginative -perversities. - -Prose, I have said, listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats -their speech almost in their own terms. But poetry (it is Baudelaire -who says it) "is akin to music through a prosody whose roots plunge -deeper in the human soul than any classical theory has defined." Poetry -begins where prose ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins -sooner. The one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I -can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse, out of -mere honour towards my material. The farther I can extend my prose, the -farther back do I set the limits of verse. The region of poetry will -thus be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible -chance of any confusion of territory. - -Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in -prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, -not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the -whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare -and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his -mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of -any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take -_King Lear_ and take _Père Goriot._ Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he -suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear -grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument -of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, -wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that -he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his -crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well -enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In -that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and -material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose. - -So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem -of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of -the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of -every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets -become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are -guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual -life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out -their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have -produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine -purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious -for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to -contain a critic." - - -[Illustration: dessin de C.B.] - - - -II - - -Has any writer ever explained the exact meaning of the word Style? -To me nothing is more difficult. Technique, that is quite a -different affair. The essence of good style might be, as Pater says, -"expressiveness," as, for instance, in Pascal's style, which--apart -from that--is the purest style of any French writer. It is no paradox -to state this fact: without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is -worth considering in any art; the violinist, the pianist, the painter, -the poet, the novelist, the rope-dancer, the acrobat--all, without -exception, if they lapse from technique lapse from perfection. I -have often taken Ysaye as the type of the artist, not because he is -faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the -point where faultless technique leaves off. - -Art, said Aristotle, should always have "a continual slight novelty," -and his meaning is that art should never astonish. Take, for instance, -Balzac, Villiers, Poe, and Baudelaire; only one part of their genius, -but a most sinister one, is the desire to astonish. There is, to -me, nothing more astonishing in prose fiction than _The Pit and the -Pendulum_ and _The Cask of Amontillado_ of Poe; they are more than -analysis, though this is pushed to the highest point of analysis; they -have in them a slow, poisonous and cruel logic; equalled only, and at -times surpassed in their imagination, by certain of Villiers' _Contes -Cruels,_ such as his _Demoiselles de Bien Filâtre, L'Intersigne_ and -_Les amants de Tolède._ And--what is more astonishing in his prose than -in any of the writers I have mentioned--is his satire; a satire which -is the revenge of beauty on ugliness; and therefore the only laughter -of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Rabelais -and of Swift. - -Baudelaire, when he astonishes, is never satirical: sardonical, -ironical, coldly cruel, irritating, and persistent. This form of -astonishment is an inveterate part of the man's sensitive and -susceptible nature. It is concentrated, inimical, a kind of juggling or -fencing; a form of contradiction, of mystification; and a deliberate -desire of causing bewilderment. The Philistine can never pardon a -mystification, and a fantastic genius--such as that of Baudelaire and -of Poe--can never resist it when opportunity offers. - -Had he but been one of those "elect souls, vessels of election, _épris -des hauteurs,_ as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if led -on by a kind of thirst for God!" (I quote Pater's words on Pascal) his -sombre soul might have attained an ultimate peace; a peace beyond all -understanding. This was cruelly denied him. He, I imagine, believed -in God; thirsted for God: neither was his belief confirmed nor his -thirst assuaged. He might, for all I know, have thought himself a -reprobate--and so cast out of God's sight. - - "For, till the thunder in the trumpet be, - Soul may divide from body, but not we - One from another; I hold thee with my hand, - I let mine eyes have all their will of thee, - I seal myself upon thee with my might, - Abiding alway out of all men's sight - Until God loosen over sea and land - The thunder of the trumpets of the night." - -I am certain Baudelaire must have read the poems of John Keats; for -there are certain characteristics in the versification, and in the -using of images of both poets. Keats had something feminine and twisted -in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves--which are utterly lacking -in Baudelaire--but which it is now the fashion to call decadent; Keats -being more than a decadent, but certainly decadent in such a line as-- - - "One faint eternal eventide of gems," - -which might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. I -give one of his sonnets, a perverse and perverted one, made by a fine -technical feat out of two recurrent rhymes: - - "Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx, - L'angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadaphore, - Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix - Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore - - Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx - Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore, - (Car le maître est allé puiser des fleurs au Styx - Avec ce seul objet dont le néant s'honore.) - - Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or - Agonise selon peut-être le décor - Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe, - - Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor - Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe - De scintillations sitôt le septuor." - -Keats luxuriates; like Baudelaire, in the details of physical -discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as when, in -sleeplessness--how often these two overstrung and over-nervous poets -must have had sleepless nights!-- - - "We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft, - And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil." - -He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the -physical sensations of his lovers, the bodily translations of emotion. -In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes: - - "When her lips and eyes -Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs -Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small." - -And, in another line, he writes: - - "By the moist languor of thy breathing face." - -Lycius, in _Lamia:_ - - "Sick to lose - The amorous promise of her lone complain, - Swooned murmuring of love, and pale with pain;" - -and all that trembling and swooning of his lovers, which English -critics have found unmanly, would at all events be very much at home -in modern French poetry, where love is again, as it was to Catullus -and Propertius, a sickness, an entrancing madness, a poisoning. To -find anything like it, like this utter subtlety of expression, we -must go back to the Elizabethan Age, and then look forward, and find, -beyond Keats, traces of it in Rossetti and in Morris's _The Defence of -Guinevere;_ as, for instance, in some of the Queen's lines: - - "Listen, suppose your turn were come to die, - And you were quite alone and very weak; - Yea, laid a dying while very mightily - - The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak - Of river through your broad lands running well; - Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak: - - 'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell, - Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be, - I shall not tell you, you must somehow tell - - Of your own strengths and mightiness; here, see!' - Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes, - At foot of your familiar bed to see - - A great God's angel standing, with such dyes, - Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands, - Hold out two ways, light from the inner skies - - Showing him well, and making his commands - Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too, - Holding within his hands the cloths on wands; - - And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue, - Wavy and long, and one cut short and red: - No man could tell the better of the two. - - After a shivering half-hour you said: - 'God help! Heaven's colour, the blue'; and he said, 'Hell!' - Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed, - - And cry to all good men that loved you well, - 'Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known;' - Launcelot went away, then I could tell, - - Like wisest men, how all things would be, moan, - And roll and hurt myself, and long to die, - And yet fear much to die for what was sown. - - Nevertheless you, O Sir Gawaine, lie, - Whatever may have happened through these years, - God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie." - -All these rough, harsh _terza-rime_ lines are wonderful enough in their -nakedness of sensations--sensations of heat, of hell, of heaven, of -colours, of death, of life, of moans, and of lies. It is, in a sense, -as far as such experiments go, a return to the Middle Ages; to what was -exotic in them and strange and narcotic. Only here, as in _Les Litanies -de Satan_ of Baudelaire--to which they have some remote likeness--there -are no interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, on these -hot, impassioned scenes. - -Rossetti says somewhere that no modern poet, and that few poets of any -century, ever compressed into so small a space so much imaginative -material as he himself always did; and this, I conceive, partly, -also, from that almost child-like imagination of his, for all its -intellectual subtlety, that dominated him to such an extent that to -tell him anything of a specially tragic or pathetic nature was cruel, -so vividly did he realize every situation; and also because of his -wonderful saying in regard to his own way of weaving an abominable line -at the end of one of his finest sonnets into a sublime one: - - "Life touching lips with Immortality:" - -that the line he had used before belonged to the class of phrase -absolutely forbidden in poetry. "It is intellectually incestuous poetry -seeking to beget its emotional offspring on its own identity; whereas -the present line gives only the momentary contact with the immortal -which results from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-conscious -element of it." - -Now, to me, both Keats before him and Baudelaire in his own -generation, had the same excessive sense of, concentration. "To load -every rift with ore:" that, to Keats, was the essential thing; and it -meant to pack the verse with poetry so that every line should be heavy -with the stuff of the imagination: the phrase I have given being a -rebuke to Shelley, significant of the art of both poets. Fox as Keats, -almost in the same degree as Baudelaire, worked on every inch of his -surface, so perhaps no poets ever put so much poetic detail into so -small a space, with, as I have said, the exception of Rossetti. And, as -a matter of fact, when we examine the question with scrupulous care, -it must be said that both Baudelaire and Keats are often metrically -slipshod. - -One of Wagner's ideas, in regard to the artistic faculty was, -receptivity; the impulse to impart only what comes when these -impressions fill the mind "to an ecstatic excess;" and the two forms -of the artist: the feminine, who recoils from life, and the masculine, -who absorbs life. From this follows, in the case of creative artists -such as Baudelaire, the necessity to convey to others as vividly -and intelligibly, as far as possible, what his own mind's eye had -seen. Then one has to seize everything from which one can wring its -secret--its secret for us and for no one else. And all this, and in -fact the whole of our existence, is partly the conflict within us of -the man with the woman, the male and the female energies that strive -always: - - "Here nature is, alive and untamed, - Unafraid and unashamed; - Here man knows woman with the greed - Of Adam's wonder, the primal need." - -And, in these fundamental lines of Blake: - - "What is it men in women do require? - The lineaments of gratified Desire. - What is it women do in men require? - The lineaments of gratified Desire." - -And, again, in these more primeval and more essentially animal lines of -Rossetti: - - "O my love, O Love--snake of Eden! - (_And O the bower and the hour!_) - O to-day and the day to come after! - Loose me, love--give way to my laughter! - - Lo! two babes for Eve and for Adam! - (_And O the bower and the hour!_) - Lo, sweet snake, the travail and treasure-- - Two men-children born for their pleasure! - - The first is Cain and the second Abel: - (_Eden bower's in flower_) - The soul of one shall be made thy brother, - And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other. - (_And O the bower and the hour!_)." - -Baudelaire, in _De l'essence de rire,_ wrote: "The Romantic School, -or, one might say in preference, the Satanical School, has certainly -understood the primordial law of laughter. All the melodramatic -villains, all those who are cursed, damned, fatally marked with a -rictus of the lips that extends to the ears, are in the pure orthodoxy -of laughter. For the rest, they are for the most part illegitimate -sons of the famous Melmoth the Wanderer, the great Satanic creation -of Maturin. What can one conceive of as greater, as more powerful, in -regard to our humanity than this pale and bored Melmoth? He is a living -contradiction; that is why his frozen laughter freezes and wrenches -the entrails." - -Distinctly the most remarkable of the British triumvirate which in the -early part of the century won a momentary fame as the school of horror, -Maturin is much less known to the readers of to-day than either Monk -Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe. Thanks to Balzac, who did _Melmoth_ the honour -of a loan in _Melmoth réconcilié,_ Maturin has attained a certain -fame in France--which, indeed, he still retains. _Melmoth_ has to-day -in France something of that reputation which has kept alive another -English book, _Vathek._ Did not Balzac, in a moment of indiscriminating -enthusiasm, couple the _Melmoth_ of Maturin with the _Don Juan_ of -Molière, the _Faust_ of Goethe, the _Manfred_ of Byron--_grandes images -tracées par les plus grands génies de l'Europe?_ In other words, -Maturin had his day of fame, in which even men like Scott and Byron -were led into a sympathetic exaggeration. There's one exception. That -Coleridge was hostile, possibly unjust, is likely enough. It should be -mentioned that in 1816 the Drury Lane Committee, who had, reasonably -enough, rejected a play by Coleridge, accepted a monstrous production -of Maturin's named _Bertram._ The _gros bon mélodrame,_ as Balzac -calls it, was a great success. "It is all sound and fury, signifying -nothing," said Kean, who acted in it; and Kean, who knew his public, -realized that that was why it succeeded. The play was printed, and -ran through seven editions, sinking finally to the condition of a -chap-book, in which its horrors were to be had for sixpence. On this -pretentious work Coleridge--for what reasons we need not inquire--took -the trouble to write an article, or, as it was phrased, to make an -attack. To this Maturin wrote a violent reply, which the good advice -of Scott prevented him from publishing. It is curious at the present -day to read the letter in which Scott urges upon Maturin the wisdom of -silence--not because he is likely to get the worst of the battle, but, -among other reasons, because "Coleridge's work has been little read -or heard of, and has made no general impression whatever--certainly -no impression unfavourable to you or your play. In the opinion of -many, therefore, you will be resenting an injury of which they are -unacquainted with the existence." - -The episode is both comic and instructive. Coleridge and Maturin! Scott -urging on Maturin the charity of mercy to Coleridge, as--"Coleridge -has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust, -to continue to be a favourite with the public!" Poor Maturin, far -from continuing to be a favourite with the public, outlived his -reputation in the course of a somewhat short life. He died at the age -of forty-three. Like the hero of Baudelaire's whimsical and delicious -little tale _La Fanfarlo,_ he preferred artifice to nature, especially -when it was unnecessary. Such is the significant gossip which we have -about the personality of Maturin--gossip which brings out clearly the -deliberate eccentricity which marks his work, which one sees also in -the foppish affected and lackadaisical creature who looks at the reader -as if he were admiring himself before his mirror. - -The word "genius," indeed, is too lofty an epithet to use regarding -a man of great talent certainly, but of nothing more than erratic -and melodramatic talent. _Melmoth the Wanderer_ is in parts very -thrilling; its Elizabethan feast of horrors has a savour as of a lesser -Tourneur. But it is interesting only in parts, and at its best it -never comes near the effect which the great masters of the grotesque -and terrible--Hoffmann, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam--have known how -to produce. A freak of construction, which no artist could have been -guilty of, sends us wandering from story to story in a very maze of -underplots and episodes and interpolations. Six separate stories are -told--all in parenthesis--and the greater part of the book is contained -.within inverted commas. What is fine in it is the vivid, feverish -way in which, from time to time, some story of horror or mystery is -forced home to one's sensations. It is the art of the nightmare, and -it has none of the supremacy in that line of the _Contes Drolatiques_ -of Balzac. But certain scenes in the monastery and in the prisons -of the Inquisition--an attempted escape, a scene where an immured -wretch fights the reptiles in the darkness--are full of a certain -kind of power. That escape, for instance, with its consequences, is -decidedly gruesome, decidedly exciting; but compare it with Dumas, -with the escape of Monte Cristo; compare it with the yet finer -narrative of Casanova--the unsurpassed model of all such narratives -in fiction. Where Casanova and Dumas produce their effect by a simple -statement--a record of external events from which one realizes, as -one could realize in no other way, all the emotions and sensations of -the persons who were undergoing such experiences--Maturin seeks his -effect, and produces it, but in a much lesser degree, by a sort of -excited psychology, an exclamatory insistence on sensation and emotion. -_Melmoth the Wanderer_ is only the object of our historical curiosity. -We have, indeed, and shall always have, "lovers of dark romance." - - - -III - - -I - - -Baudelaire's genius is satanical; he has in a sense the vision of -Satan. He sees in the past the lusts of the Borgias the sins and vices -of the Renaissance; the rare virtues that flourish like flowers and -weeds, in brothels and in garrets. He sees the vanity of the world with -finer modern tastes than Solomon; for his imagination is abnormal, and -divinely normal. In this age of infamous shames he has no shame. His -flesh endures, his intellect is flawless. He chooses his own pleasures -delicately, sensitively, as he gathers his exotic _Fleurs du Mal,_ in -itself a world, neither a _Divina Commedia_ nor _Une Comédie Humaine,_ -but a world of his own fashioning. - -His vividly imaginative passion, with his instincts of inspiration, are -aided by a determined will, a selfreserve, an intensity of conception, -an implacable insolence, an accurate sense of the exact value of every -word. In the Biblical sense he might have said of his own verse: "It -is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh." The work, as the man, is -subtle, strange, complex, morbid, enigmatical, refined, paradoxical, -spiritual, animal. To him a scent means more than a sunset, a perfume -more than a flower, the tempting demons more than the unseductive -angels. He loves luxury as he loves wine; a picture of Manet's as a -woman's fan. - -[Illustration: BAUDELAIRE, DESIGNED BY HIMSELF, 1848] - - -Fascinated by sin, he is never the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as -the Original Sin; he studies sin as he studies evil, with a stem logic; -he finds in horror a kind of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; -rarely in hideous things, save when his sense of what I call a moralist -makes him moralize, as in his terrible poem, _Une Charogne._ He has -pity for misery, hate for progress. He is analytic, he is a learned -casuist, whom I can compare with the formidable Spanish Jesuit, Thomas -Sanchez, who wrote the Latin _Aphorismi Matrimonio_ (1629). - -His soul swims on music played on no human instrument, but on strings -that the Devil pulls, to which certain living puppets dance in -grotesque fashion, to unheard-of rhythms, to the sound of violins -strummed on by evil spirits in Witches' Sabbats. Some swing in the -air, as hanged dead people on gallows, and, as their bones rattle in -the wind, one sees Judas Iscariot, risen out of Hell for an instant's -gratification, as he grimaces on these grimacing visages. - -_Les fleurs du mal_ is the most curious, subtle, fascinating, and -extraordinary creation of an entire world ever fashioned in modern -ages. Baudelaire paints vice and degradation of the utmost depth, with -cynicism and with pity, as in the poem I have referred to, where the -cult of the corpse is the sensuality of ascetism, or the ascetism of -sensuality: the mania of fakirs; material by passion, Christian by -perversity. - -And, in a sense, he is our modern Catullus; in his furies, his -negations, his outcries, his Paganism, his inconceivable passion for -woman's flesh; yet Lesbia is for ever Lesbia. Still, Baudelaire in -his _Franciscae meae_ _Laudes,_ and with less sting but with as much -sensual sense of the splendour of sex, gives a magnificent Latin eulogy -of a learned and pious modiste, that ends: - - "Patera gemmis corusca, - Panis salsus, mollis esca, - Divinum vinum, Francisca." - -And he praises the Decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette -merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre -les négligences forcés d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des -règles." - -_Don Juan aux enfers_ is a perfect Delacroix. In _Danse macabre_ -there is the universal swing of the dancers who dance the Dance of -Death. Death herself, in her extreme horror, ghastly, perfumed with -myrrh, mixes her irony with men's insanity as she dances the Sabbat -of Pleasure. He shows us the infamous menagerie of the vices in the -guise of reptiles; our chief enemy Ennui is _ce monstre délicat._ -There are Vampires, agonies of the damned alive; _Le possédé_ with -his excruciating cry out of all his fibres: _O mon cher Belzébuth! je -t'adore!_ And there are some, subtler and silent, that seem to move, -softly, as the feet of Night, to the sound of faint music, or under the -shroud of a sunset. - -_Les fleurs du mal_ are grown in Parisian soil, exotics that have -the strange, secretive, haunting touch and taint of the earth's or -of the body's corruption. In his sense of beauty there is a certain -revolt, a spiritual malady, which may bring with it the heated air -of an alcove or the intoxicating atmosphere of the East. Never -since Villon has the flesh of woman been more adored and abhorred. -Both aware of the original sin of _l'unique animál_--the seed of our -moral degradation--Villon creates his _Grosse Margot_ and Baudelaire -_Delphine et Hippolyte._ Villon's is a scullion-wench, and in the -Ballad a Brothel as infamous, as foul, as abominable as a Roman Lupanar -surges before one's astonished vision. And this comes after his -supreme, his consummate praise of ruinous old age on a harlot's body: -_Les regrets de la Belle Heaulmière._ It is one of the immortal things -that exist in the world, that I can compare only with Rodin's statue in -bronze: both equal incarnations of the symbolical conception that sin -brought shame into the first woman's flesh. - -"Que m'en reste-il? Honte et Péché:" - -cries each mouth, cries to the end of earth's eternity. - -In Baudelaire's _Femmes damnées_ there is the aching soul of the -spirit's fatal malady: that sexual malady for which there is no remedy: -the Lesbian sterile perilous divinisation of flesh for flesh, virginal -or unvirginal flesh _with_ flesh. In vain desire, of that one desire -that exists beyond all possible satisfaction, the desire of an utter -annihilation of body with body in that ecstasy which can never be -absolutely achieved without man's flesh, they strive, unconsumed with -even the pangs of their fruitless desires. They live only with a life -of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome -bounds of nature into the violence of a perversity which is at times -almost insane. And all this sorrowful and tortured flesh is consumed -with that feverish desire that leaves them only a short space for their -desire's fruitions. - - -II - -Certain of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the -hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a serpentine girl's skin; -some the odour of woman's flesh. Certain spirits are intoxicated by -these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of -their vices, from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a -cruel imagination has fashioned these naked images of the Seven Deadly -Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall; that smile not even in -Hell, in whose flames they writhe. One conceives them there and between -the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their -infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages; -they are incapable of imagining God's justice. - -Baudelaire dramatizes these living images of his spirit and of his -imagination, these fabulous creatures of his inspiration, these -macabre ghosts, in a fashion utterly different from that of other -tragedians--Shakespeare, and Aristophanes in his satirical Tragedies, -his lyrical Comedies; yet in the same sense of being the writer where -beauty marries unvirginally the sons of ancient Chaos. - -In these pages swarm (in his words) all the corruptions and all the -scepticisms; ignoble criminals without convictions, detestable hags -that gamble, the cats that are like men's mistresses; Harpagon; the -exquisite, barbarous, divine, implacable, mysterious Madonna of the -Spanish style; the old men; the drunkards, the assassins, the lovers -(their deaths and lives); the owls; the vampires whose kisses raise -from the grave the corpse of its own self; the Irremediable that -assails its origin: Conscience in Evil! There is an almost Christ-like -poem on his Passion, _Le reniement de Saint-Pierre,_ an almost Satanic -denunciation of God in _Abel and Cain,_ and with them the Evil Monk, -an enigmatical symbol of Baudelaire's soul, of his work, of all that -his eyes love and hate. Certain of these creatures play in travesties, -dance in ballets. For all the Arts are transformed, transfigured, -transplanted out of their natural forms to pass in magnificent state -across the stage: the stage with the abyss of Hell in front of it. - -"Sensualist" (I quote a critic), "but the most profound of sensualists, -and, furious of being no more than that, he goes, in his sensation, to -the extreme limit, to the mysterious gate of infinity against which he -knocks, yet knows not how to open, with rage he contracts his tongue -in the vain effort." Yet centuries before him Dante entered Hell, -traversed it in imagination from its endless beginning to its endless -end; returned to earth to write, for the spirit of Beatrice and for the -world, that _Divina Commedia,_ of which in Verona certain women said: - - "Lo, he that strolls to Hell and back - At will I Behold him, how Hell's reek - Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek." - -It is Baudelaire who, in Hell as in earth, finds a certain Satan in -such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essentially -demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily, -as if the Devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets. Here -in such satanic and romantic atmosphere one hears dissonances, the -discords of the instruments in the Sabbats, the howlings of irony, the -vengeance of the vanquished. - -I give one sentence of Gautier's on Baudelaire. "This poet of _Les -fleurs du mal_ loved what one wrongly calls the style of decadence, -which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point -of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilizations -that aged: a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and -of rarities, turning for ever backward the limits of the language, -using technical vocabularies, taking colours from all the palettes, -notes from all the keyboards, striving to render one's thought in what -is most ineffable, and form in its most vague and evasive contours, -listening so as to translate them, the subtle confidences of neurosis, -the passionate confessions of ancient passions in their depravity and -the bizarre hallucinations of the fixed idea." He adds: "In regard to -his verse there is the language already veined in the greenness of -decomposition, the tainted language of the later Roman Empire, and the -complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek -art fallen in delinquencies." See how perfectly the phrase _la langue -de faisandée_ suits the exotic style of Baudelaire! - -Yet, tainted as the style is from time to time, never was the man -himself tainted: he who in modern verse gave first of all an unknown -taste to sensations; he who painted vice in all its shame; whose most -savorous verses are perfumed as with subtle aromas; whose women are -bestial, rouged, sterile, bodies without souls; whose _Litanies de -Satan_ have that cold irony which he alone possessed in its extremity, -in these so-called impious lines which reveal, under whatever disguise, -his belief in a mathematical superiority established by God from -all eternity, and whose least infraction is punished by certain -chastisements, in this world as in the next. - -I can imagine Baudelaire in his hours of nocturnal terrors, sleepless -in a hired woman's bed, saying to himself these words of Marlowe's -_Satan:_ - - "Why, this is Hell, nor can I out of it!" - -in accents of eternal despair wrenched from the lips of the Arch Fiend. -And the genius of Baudelaire, I can but think, was as much haunted as -Marlowe's with, in Lamb's words, "a wandering in fields where curiosity -is forbidden to go, approaching the dark gulf near enough to look in." - - -III - -Has Baudelaire _l'amour du mal pour le mal?_ In a certain sense, yes; -in a certain sense, no. He believes in evil as in Satan and God--the -primitive forces that govern worlds: the eternal enemies. He sees the -germs of evil everywhere, few of the seeds of virtue. He sees pass -before him the world's drama: he is one of the actors, he plays his -parts cynically, ironically. He speaks in rhythmic cadences. - -But, above all, he watches the dancers; these also are elemental; -and the tragic fact is that the dancers dance for their living. For -their living, for their pleasure, for the pleasure of pleasing others. -So passes the fantastic part of their existence, from the savage who -dances silent dances--for, indeed, all dancers are silent--but without -music, to the dancer who dances for us on the stage, who turns always -to the sound of music. There is an equal magic in the dance and in -song; both have their varied rhythms; both, to use an image, the -rhythmic beating of our hearts. It is imagined that dancing and music -were the oldest of the arts. Rhythm has rightly been called the soul of -dancing; both are instinctive. - -The greatest French poet after Villon, the most disreputable and -the most creative poet in French literature, the greatest artist in -French verse, and, after Verlaine, the most passionate, perverse, -lyrical, visionary, and intoxicating of modern poets, comes Baudelaire, -infinitely more perverse, morbid, exotic than these other poets. In -his verse there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity, which -has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with horror, -in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every -complication of taste, the exasperation of perfumes, the irritant of -cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption to the creation and -adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served -before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a -prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine, -however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length -sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady of -love. - -The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that -of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the -Goncourts, Zola, and Leconte de Lisle. Even Baudelaire, in whom the -spirit is always an uneasy guest at the orgy of life, had a certain -theory of Realism which tortures many of his poems into strange, -metallic shapes and fills them with irritative odours, and disturbs -them with a too deliberate rhetoric of the flesh. Flaubert, the -greatest novelist after Balzac, the only impeccable novelist who ever -lived, was resolute to be the creator of a world in which art--formal -art--was the only escape from the burden of reality. It was he who -wrote to Baudelaire, who had sent him _Les fleurs du mal_: "I devoured -your volume from one end to another, read it over and over again, verse -by verse, word by word, and all I can say is it pleases and enchants -me. You overwhelm me with your colours. What I admire most in your book -is its perfect art. You praise flesh without loving it." - -There is something Oriental in Baudelaire's genius; a nostalgia that -never left him after he had seen the East: there where one finds -hot-midnights, feverish days, strange sensations; for only the East, -when one has lived in it, can excite one's vision to a point of ardent -ecstasy. He is the first modern poet who gave to a calculated scheme of -versification a kind of secret and sacred joy. He is before all things -the artist, always sure of his form. And his rarefied imagination aided -him enormously not only in the perfecting of his verse and prose, but -in making him create the criticism of modern art. - -Next after Villon, Baudelaire is the poet of Paris. Like a damned soul -(to use one of his imaginary images) he wanders at nights, an actual -_noctambule,_ alone or with Villiers, Gautier, in remote quarters, sits -in cafés, goes to casinos, the _Rat Mort._ "The Wind of Prostitution" -(I quote his words) torments him, the sight of hospitals, of gambling -houses, the miserable creatures one comes on in certain quarters, -even the fantastic glitter of lamplights. All this he needs: a kind -of intense curiosity, of excitement, in his fréquentation of these -streets, comes over him, like one who has taken opium. And this is only -one part of his life, he who lived and died solitary, a confessor of -sins who has never told the whole truth, _le mauvais moins_ of his own -sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel. - -He is the first who ever related things in the modulated tone of the -confessional and never assumed an inspired air. The first also who -brings into modern literature the chagrin that bites at our existence -like serpents. He admits to his diabolical taste, not quite exceptional -in him; one finds it in Petronius, Rabelais, Balzac. In spite of his -magnificent _Litanies de Satan,_ he is no more of the satanical school -than Byron. Yet both have the same sardonic irony, the delight of -mystification, of deliberately irritating solemn people's convictions. -Both, who died tragically young, had their hours of sadness, when -one doubts and denies everything; passionately regretting youth, -turning away, in sinister moods, in solitude, from that too intense -self-knowledge that, like a mirror, shows the wrinkles on our cheeks. - - - -IV - - -Baudelaire, whose acquaintance with English was perfect, was thrilled -in 1846 when he read certain pages of Poe; he seemed to see in his -prose a certain similarity in words and thoughts, even in ideas, as -if he himself had written some of them; these pages of a prose-writer -whom he named "the master of the horrible, the prince of mystery." -For four years he set himself to the arduous task of translating the -prose of a man of genius, whom he certainly discovered for France and -for French readers. And his translation is so wonderful that it is far -and away finer than a marvellous original. His first translation was -printed in _Le Liberté de Pensée_ in July, 1848, and he only finished -his translations at the end of sixteen years. In 1852 the _Revue de -Paris_ printed his _Edgar Allan Poe; sa vie et ses ouvrages._ His -translations came in this order: _Histoires extraordinaires_ (1856, -which I have before me); _Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires_ (1857, -which I also possess); _Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym_ (1858); _Euréka_ -(1864); _Histoires grotesques et sérieuses_ (1865). - -One knows the fury with which (in 1855) he set himself the prodigious -task of translating one of Poe's stories every day; which, to one's -amazement, he actually did. Always he rages over his proofs, over -those printers' devils, an accursed race; every proof is sent back to -the printing press, revised; underlined, covered in the margins with -imperative objurgations, written with an angry hand and accentuated -with notes of exclamation. Swinburne shared the same fate. He writes -to Chatto a violent letter on the incompetence of printers: "their -scandalous negligence," "ruinous and really disgraceful blunders," -"numberless wilful errors," written in a state of perfect frenzy. -"These damned printers," he cries at them, as Baudelaire did; "who have -done their utmost to disfigure my book. The appearance of the pages is -disgraceful--a chaos." And he actually writes one letter to complain of -a dropped comma! - -The _Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe_ of 1857 are infinitely finer than -those of 1856. He begins with: _Littérature de décadence!_ and with -a paradox, of his invention, of the Sphynx without an enigma. _Genus -irritabile vatum!_ a Latin phrase for the irritable race of artists, is -irrefutable, and certainly irrefutable are all Baudelaire's arguments, -divinations, revelations of Poe's genius and of Poe's defects. - -Poe's genius has been generally misunderstood. He gave himself to -many forms of misconception: by his eccentricities, his caprices, his -fantastic follies, his natural insolence, his passionate excitations -(mostly imaginary), his delinquencies in regard to morals, his -over-acute sensibility, his exasperating way of exasperating the -general public he hated, his analysing problems that had defied any -living writer's ingenuity to have compassed (as in his detective -stories); above all, his almost utter alienation from that world he -lived in, dreamed in, never worshipped, died in. - -And he remains still a kind of enigma; in spite of the fact that the -most minute details of his life are known, and that he never outlived -his reputation. Yes, enigmatical in various points: as to his not -giving even the breath of life to the few ghosts of women who cross -his pages; of never diving very deeply into any heart but his own. Are -not most of his men malign, perverse, atrocious, abnormal, never quite -normal, evocations of himself? From Dupin to Fortunato, from the Man in -the Crowd to the Man in the Pit, from Prince Prospero to Usher, are not -these _revenants,_ in the French sense? - -There is something demoniacal in his imagination; for Poe never, I -might say, almost never, lets his readers have an instant's rest; any -more than the Devil lets his subjects have any actual surcease of -torment. Yet, as there is a gulf between Good and Evil, no one, by any -chance, falls into the abyss. - -Poe, of course, writes with his nerves, and therefore only nervous -writers have ever understood him. It is Baudelaire, the most nervous of -modern writers, who says of Poe that no one, before him, had affirmed -imperturbably the natural wickedness of man. Yet this statement is a -paradox; a lesser paradox is that man is originally perverse; for all -are not _nés marques pour le mal?_ - -Poe is not a great critic; he says certain unforgettable things, with -even an anticipation of the work of later writers. "_I know,_" he -says, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of -the tme musical expression. Give it any undue decision--imbue it with -any very determinate tone--and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, -its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character" Where he is great -is where he writes: "I have a pure contempt for mere prejudice and -conventionality;" and mostly where he defines himself. "Nor is there an -instance to be discovered, among all I have published, of my having set -forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical -topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by -something that wore the semblance of a reason." - -His fault is that he is too lenient to woman poets who never merited -that name and to men of mere talent; yet he annihilates many undeserved -reputations; perhaps, after all, "thrice slain." No one pointed out -the errors in Mrs. Browning's verses as he did; her affectations such -as "God's possibles;" her often inefficient rhythm; her incredibly bad -rhymes. Yet, for all this, he, whose ear as a poet was almost perfect, -made the vile rhyme of "vista" with "sister," that raised the righteous -wrath of Rossetti. - -In his essay on Hawthorne, he warns one from a certain heresy. "The -deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as an -allegory, is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's -ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his -not having attempted to overcome." But it is on pages 196-198 of his -_Marginalia_ that he gives his final statement in regard to Verse, -the Novel, and the Short Story; so far as these questions have any -finality. As, for instance, how the highest genius uses his powers in -"the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might -be perused in an hour." As for the Story, it has this immense advantage -over a novel that its brevity adds to the intensity of the effect; -that "Beauty can be better treated in the poem, but that one can use -terror and passion and horror as artistic means." Poe was a master of -the grotesque, of the extraordinary, never of the passionate. - -There is an unholy magic in some of his verse and prose; in his -hallucinations, so real and so unreal; his hysterics, his sense of the -contradiction between the nerves and the spirit; in his scientific -analyses of terrible, foreseen effects, where generally the man of whom -he writes is driven into evil ways. For did he not state this axiom: -"A good writer has always his last line in view when he has written -his first line?" This certainly was part of his _métier,_ made of -combinations and of calculations. - -I read somewhere, "There is nothing wonderful in 'The Raven.'" It -is really a _tour de force;_ even if the metre is not invented, he -invented the inner double rhymes, and the technique is flawless. It -has Black Magic in it; the unreality of an intoxication; a juggler's -skill; it will be always his most famous poem. In his analysis of these -verses, does not Poe undervalue the inspiration that created them? Yes, -by an amusing vanity. And, as Baudelaire says: "A little charlatanism -is always permitted to a man of genius, and it doesn't suit him badly. -It is like the rouge on the cheeks of a woman actually fair, a new form -of seasoning for the spirit." - -There was too much of the woman in the making of Poe, manly as he was -in every sense. He had no strength of will, was drawn from seduction -to seduction; had not enough grip on his constitution to live wisely, -to live well. He drifted, let himself be drifted. He had no intention -of ruining himself, yet ruined he was, and there was nothing that -could have saved him. Call it his fate or his evil star, he was -doomed inevitably to an early death. _Pas de chance!_ Yes--let one -suppose--had he himself chosen the form of his death, he might have -desired to die like the sick women in his pages--_mourant de maux -bizarres._ - -Baudelaire, the most scrupulous of the men of letters of our age, spent -his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French -poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose -becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and -surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better -than a marvellous original. Often an enigma to himself, much of his -life and of his adventures and of his experiences remain enigmatical. -I shall choose one instance out of many; that is to say, what was the -original of his dedication of _L'Heautimoromenos_ in _Les Fleurs du -Mal_, and of his dedication of _Les paradis artificiels_ to a woman -whose initials are J. G. F.? - -The poem was first printed in _L 'Artiste_, May 10, 1857, together with -two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical: -_Franciscae Meae Laudes,_ and _L'Irrémédiable._ The Latin verses, -composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs -to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent -as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the -Dedication: _Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote._ The -verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who -absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has -spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his -hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine -wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its -name, on the comedy of Terence, _The Self-Tormentor,_ where, in fact, -the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic -earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare's _Timon of -Athens._ Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest -confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women. -He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a -discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in -his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror. -He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his -own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal -laughter. - -The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall -into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with -reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases -on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable -fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he -intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the -Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes -with satanical glances and is: _La conscience dans le mal!_ - -In _Les fleurs du mal_ (1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's -handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find -that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages -123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems -to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" with -_Piscina plena virtutis;_ "Dans un Styx bourbeux" with _Sicat beneficum -Lethe;_ "Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" with _Labris vocem redde -mutis!_ "Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le -vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu -son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une -modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication of _Les paradis,_ -"une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason -for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough: -a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry. -One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il -traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce -sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words, -taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming -uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman -Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes -that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which -seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution: - - _In nocte mea taberna._ - _Flambeau des grâces sataniques._ - -I return to my copy of _Les paradis artificiels_ (1860). The dedication -to J. G. F. begins: "_Ma chère amie,_ Common-sense tells us that -terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality -is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives -with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the -imaginations that she haunts. - -[Illustration: Frontpage Les paradis artificiels] - -"Besides, it seems to me there is little enough reason why this -dedication should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the -writer's satisfaction, that any kind of book ought to be understood, -except by him or by her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed, -indispensable that it has been written for _any one?_ I have, for my -part, so little taste for the living world that, like certain sensible -and stay-at-home women who send, I am told, their letters to imaginary -friends by the post, I would willingly write only for the dead. - -"But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it is -to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who now -turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many -transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a -living being enjoys the privilege of being able to draw new and subtle -pleasures even from sorrow, from catastrophe, and from fatality. - -"You will see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and -solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending -his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped -his sweating forehead and _refreshed his lips parched by fever;_ and -you will divine the gratitude of another Orestes, whose nightmares -you have so often watched over, and whose unendurable slumbers you -dissipated, with a light and tender hand." - -I have to say that in the last sentences I have translated Baudelaire -uses "tu" instead of "vous," and that he does the same in his Latin -verses and in the verses next after it. The question still remains: who -was the woman of the initials? - -What is certainly not a solution of the unfathomable mystery of -this enigmatical woman, but which is, in a certain sense, a clue, -I find on pages 55-67 of the book I have referred to, a narrative -that seems more than likely to have been hers. He says this to make -one understand better the mixture of dreams and hallucinations in -haschisch, as having been sent him by a woman: "It is a woman, rather -a mature woman, curious, of an excitable spirit, who, having yielded -to the temptation of using the drug, describes her visions." These are -superb and fantastic visions, written by an imaginative, sensitive, -and suggestive woman. She begins: "However bizarre and astonishing are -these sensations that intoxicated my folly for twelve hours (twelve or -twenty? I don't know which) I shall never return to them. The spiritual -excitement is too vivid, the fatigue too much to endure, and, to say -all, in this childish enchantment I find something criminal." She adds: -"I have heard that the enthusiasm of poets and of creators is not -unlike what I have experienced, in spite of the fact that I have always -imagined that such men whose delight is to move us ought to be of a -really calm temperament; but if poetical delirium has any resemblance -with what a little teaspoon full of drugged jam has given me, I think -that all such pleasures cost dear to poets, and it is not without a -certain prosaic satisfaction that I return to real life." - -In these sentences Baudelaire gives one a certain clue as to the -identity of this woman. "But, above all, observe that in this woman's -story the hallucination is of a bastard kind, and whose reason of being -is to be an exterior spectacle; the mind is no more than a mirror -where the surrounding environment is transformed in an extraordinary -fashion. Besides, we see intervene what I must call the moral -hallucination: the subject believes he is subjected to an expiation, -but the feminine temperament, which is little accustomed to analysis, -does not permit itself to note the singularly optimistic character of -this hallucination. The benevolent regard of the Olympian Divinities -is poetized by a kind of varnish essentially _haschischin._ I cannot -say that this woman has escaped from the sense of remorse; but that -her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and of -regret, have returned to their former sensibility." - -I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical -casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but -not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra, -to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by -the same woman to whom _Le paradis_ is dedicated. Like Orestes, he -might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered -father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words: -"And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now, -how I keep the watches of the night--how often I bewail my hapless -sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given -of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of -lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J. -G. F.'s? - -In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed: _Théophile Gautier, par Charles -Baudelaire;_ a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as -only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was -capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier -asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant: -"Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French -language, even l'_Argot._ - -Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he -ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave -it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac. - -"Not for the first," he says, in his _Study of Shakespeare,_ "and -probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well -as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, -to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented -fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the -more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of -Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition -and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing -could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in -my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. - -"'I have been many a time astonished that to pass for an observer -should be Balzac's great title to fame. To me it had always seemed that -it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. -All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated -himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the -highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in -his _Human Comedy_ are keener after living, more active and cunning in -their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous -in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real -world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the -very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle -with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all beings of the -outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in a strong relief -and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his -figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their fights. -Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate -ambition to see everything, to bring everything to fight, to guess -everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down -more forcibly the principal fines so as to preserve the perspective of -the whole. He reminds me of some fines of those etchers who are never -satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into -very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing -natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But -this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More -properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But -who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a -method which may permit him to invest--and that with a sure hand--what -is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? -Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.'" - - - -V - - -"T am far from sure," said Paul Verlaine to me in Paris, "that the -philosophy of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam will not one day become the -formula of our century." Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the -belief common to all Eastern mystics. And there is in everything he -wrote a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and deliberate, which -seems to me to be the natural consequences of his intellectual pride. -It is part of his curiosity in souls--as in the equally sinister -curiosity of Baudelaire--to prefer the complex to the simple, the -perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. His heroes -are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies are the shock -of spirit against matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. -They are on the margins of a wisdom too great for their capacity; they -are haunted by dark powers, instincts of ambiguous passions. And in the -women his genius created there is the immortal weariness of beauty; -they are enigmas to themselves; they desire, and know not why they -refrain; they do good and evil with the lifting of an eyelid, and are -guilty and innocent of all the sins of the earth. - -[Illustration: manuscript] - -Villiers wrote these significant sentences in the preface to _La -Révolte_ (1870): "One ought to write for the entire world. Besides, -what does justice matter to us? He who from his very birth does -not contain in himself his proper glory shall never know the -real significance of this word." In the literature of the fantastic -there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de -l'Isle-Adam--a writer whose singular personality and work render him -perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of -letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his -life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived, -as he says somewhere, "par politesse," ceaselessly experimenting -upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an -extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic -contrasts. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race, -a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more -especially, of the _bourgeois_ multitude of letters and of life: it -is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look -for the source of that violent and _voulu_ eccentricity which mars so -much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is -unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take -notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has -placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question -if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious, -impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers "les -gens de sens commun" are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of -his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface, -_Genus irritabile vatum._ - -In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a -writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it -be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer -who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and -a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin -de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from -exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite -sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere -there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in -so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, -contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions. - -Villiers has written much. The volume of _Contes cruels_ (published -in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains -specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind -the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, -and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no -other collection of tales in any language on which so various and -finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut -of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The -_Tales_ of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the _Twice-Told -Tales_ of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; -both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are -but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the -other volumes. _La révolte,_ a drama in one act in prose, represented -at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of -certain _Contes cruels_; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place -near them. _L'Ève future_ (1886), that most immense and ferocious -of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the -_Contes_ swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of -plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale -_L'Amour suprême,_ attempts to be a second set of _Contes Cruels;_ it -has nothing of their distinction, except in _Akëdysséril. Tribulat -Bonhomet,_ which appeared in 1887--"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, -couleur du siècle," as the author has called it--is largely made up of -an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes, -_Histoires insolites_ (1888) and _Nouveaux contes cruels_ (1889), there -are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating -horror of _La torture par l'espérance,_ and the delicate cynicism -of _Les amies de pension._ As for the prose drama in five acts, _Le -Nouveau Monde_ (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize--"une -médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres -seductions encore"--there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play -with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air; -but what would you have of a "prize poem"? It was acted at one of -the theatres at Paris in 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante -Comte d'Orsay, and it had a very gratifying "literary" success. Such, -omitting the early works, of which I have every first edition, and the -numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published, -are the works we have before us from which to study "peut-être le -seul des hommes de notre génération qui ait eu en lui l'étincelle du -génie"--as Catulle Mendès, ever generous in his literary appreciation -of friend and foe, has said in that charming book, _La légende du -Parnasse contemporaine._ I shall speak chiefly of the _Contes cruels,_ -and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach -one after another the various sides of this multiform and manysided -genius. - -First and before all, Villiers is a humorist, and he is a humorist -who has no limitations, who has command of every style, who has -essayed every branch of the literature of the fantastic. There are -some halfdozen of tales--all contained in the _Contes cruels_--which, -for certain of the rarest qualities of writing--subtleties, delicate -perversities, exquisite complexities of irony essentially modern--can -be compared, so far as I know, with nothing outside the _Petits poèmes -en prose_ of Baudelaire. _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, Maryelle, -Sentimentalisme, Le convive des dernières fêtes, La Reine Ysabeau_--one -might add the solitary poem inserted, jewel amid jewels, amongst the -prose--these pieces, with which one or two others have affinities of -style though not of temper, constitute a distinct division of Villiers' -work. They are all, more or less, studies in modern love, supersubtie -and yet perfectly finished little studies, so light in touch, -manipulated with so delicate a finesse, so exquisite and unerring -in tact, that the most monstrous paradoxes, the most incredible -assumptions of cynicism, become possible, become acceptable. Of them -all I think the masterpiece is _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre;_ and -it is one of the most perfect little works of art in the world. The -mockery of the thing is elemental; cynicism touches its zenith. It -becomes tender, it becomes sublime. A perversion simply monstrous -appears, in the infantine simplicity of its presentment, touching, -credible, heroic. The edge of laughter is skirted by the finest -of inches; and, as a last charm, one perceives, through the irony -itself--the celestial, the elementary irony--a faint and sweet perfume -as of a perverted odour of sanctity. The style has the delicacy of the -etcher's needle. From beginning to end every word has been calculated, -and every word is an inspiration. No other tale quite equals this -supreme achievement; but in _Maryelle,_ in _Sentimentalisme,_ and -the others there is the same note, and a perfection often only less -absolute. _Maryelle_ and _Sentimentalisme_ are both studies in a -special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of -fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest -precision. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The -experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and -tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate -lightness of the style--the gentle, well-bred, _disengaged_ tone of -a _raconteur_ without reserve or after-thought, or with all that -scrupulously hid--there is a sort of double irony, a criss-cross and -intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in -spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other -side of cynicism. _La Reine Ysabeau_ and _Le Convive des Dernières -Fêtes_ sound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost -by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of -the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance, -and fatality is unrolled before our eyes--the something enigmatical -in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness. -Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this -incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis -of the first sentence to the "Priez pour eux," every touch tells, and -every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points -akin to it, is the strange tale of _Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes,_ -perhaps, after the more epic chronicle of _La Reine Ysabeau,_ the -finest of Villiers' tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale -is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying -episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It -is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive -shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the -same _frisson_ in the latter part of _Tribulat Bonhomet,_ and in the -marvellous little study in the supernatural _L'Intersigne,_ one of the -most impressive of Villiers' works. But here the sensation is not due -to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror--distinct -and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind--is but one -among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a -whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the -same _bizarrerie_--the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendrée, Antoine -Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C., -and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged -with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the -touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric -light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves--scenes which -have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with -average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed -their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one -is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of -exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony -is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard -who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a -sarcastic smile. - -What is Villiers' view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on -the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer; -I have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the -fantastic edifice of his work. - -The group of tales I have been considering reveals the humorist in -his capacity of ironical observer: their wit is a purely impersonal -mockery, they deal with life from the point of view of the artist, -and they are pre-eminently artistic, free from any direct purpose or -preoccupation. In the pseudo-scientific burlesques, and the kindred -satires on ignorant and blatant mediocrity, the smile of the Comic -Muse has given place to "Laughter holding both his sides;" absurdity -caps absurdity, order and measure seem to be flung to the winds, and -in this new Masque of Anarchy sharp blows are given, the jests are -barbed, and they fly not quite at random. "L'Esprit du siècle," says -Villiers, "ne l'oublions pas, est aux machines." And it is in the -mechanical miracles of modern science that he has found a new and -unworked and inexhaustible field of satire. Jules Verne has used -these new discoveries with admirable skill in his tales of extravagant -wonder; Villiers seizes them as a weapon, and in his hands it becomes -deadly, and turns back upon the very age which forged it; as a means -of comedy, and the comedy becomes soberly Rabelaisian, boisterous and -bitter at once, sparing nothing, so that he can develop the deliberate -plan of "an apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last sigh," -make a sober proposal for the utilization of the sky as a means of -advertisement (_Affichage Céleste_), and describe in all its detail -and through all its branches the excellent invention of Bathybius -Bottom, _La machine à gloire,_ a mechanical contrivance for obtaining -dramatic success with the expense and inconvenience of that important -institution, the Claque. In these wild and whirling satires, which are -at bottom as cold and biting as Swift, we have a quite new variety -of style, a style of patchwork and grimaces. Familiar words take new -meanings, and flash through all the transformations of the pantomime -before our eyes; strange words start up from forgotten corners; words -and thoughts, never brought together since Babel, clash and stumble -into a protesting combination; and in the very aspect of the page there -is something startling. The absurdity of these things is so extreme, -an absurdity so supremely serious, that we are carried almost beyond -laughter, and on what is by virtue of its length the most important of -the scientific burlesques, _L'Ève future,_ it is almost impossible to -tell whether the author is really in sober earnest or whether the whole -thing is a colossal joke. Its 375 pages are devoted to a painfully -elaborate description of the manufacture, under the direction of the -"très-illustre inventeur américain, M. Edison," of an _artificial -woman!_ No such fundamental satire, such ghastly exposure of "poor -humanity," has been conceived since Swift. The sweep of it covers human -nature, and its essential laughter breaks over the very elements of -man. Unfortunately the book is much too long; its own weight sinks it; -the details become wearisome, the seriousness of the absurdity palls. - -So far we have had the humorist, a humorist who appears to be cynic -to the backbone, cynic equally in the Parisian perversities of _Les -demoiselles de Bienfilâtre_ and the scientific hilarity of _La machine -à gloire._ But we have now to take account of one of those "exceptions" -of which I spoke--work which has nothing of the humorist in it, work -in which there is not a trace of cynicism, work full of spirituality -and all the virtues. _Virginie et Paul_ is a-story of young love -comparable only with that yet lovelier story, the magical chapter, in -_Richard Feverel._ This Romeo and Juliet are both fifteen, and their -little moment of lovers' chat, full of the poetry of the most homely -and natural things, is brought before us in a manner so exquisitely -true, so perfectly felt, that it is not even sentimental. Every -word is a note of music, a song of nightingales among the roses--; -_per amica silentia lunæ_--and there is not a wrong note in it, no -exaggeration, nothing but absolute truth and beauty. The strange and -charming little romance of _L'Inconnue_ is another of these tales of -ingenuous love, full of poetry fresh from lovers' hearts, and with -a delicate rhythmical effect in its carefully modulated, style. -_L'Amour Suprême,_ a less perfect work of art, exhales the same aroma -of tender and etherealized affection--an adoring and almost mystic -love of the ideal incarnated in woman. In the bizarre narrative of -_Véra,_ which recalls the supernatural romances of Poe, there is again -this strange spirituality of tone; and in the dazzling prose poem -of _Akëdysséril_--transfigured prose glowing with Eastern colour, a -tale of old-world passion full of barbaric splendour, and touched, -for all its remoteness, with the human note--in this epic fragment, -considered in France, I believe, to be, in style at least, Villiers' -masterpiece, it is humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal that -we contemplate. Humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal!--think -for a moment of _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre,_ of _L'Analyse -chimique du dernier soupir!_ What, then, are we to believe? Has -Villiers two natures, and can he reconcile irréconciliable opposites? -Or if one is the real man, which one? And what of the other? What, in -a word, is the true Villiers? "For, as he thinketh in his heart, so is -he." - -The question is not a difficult one to answer; it depends upon an -elementary knowledge of the nature of that perfectly intelligible -being, the cynic. The typical cynic is essentially a tender-hearted, -sensitive idealist; his cynicism is in the first instance a recoil, -then, very often, a disguise. Most of us come into the world without -any very great expectations, not looking for especial loftiness in -our neighbours, not very much shocked if every one's devotion to the -ideal is not on a level with, perhaps, ours. We go on our way, if not -exactly "rejoicing," at least without positive discomfort. Here and -there, however, a soul nurtured on dreams and nourished in the scorn -of compromise finds its way among men and demands of them perfection. -There is no response to the demand. Entranced by an inaccessible ideal, -the poor soul finds that its devotion poisons for it all the wells -of earth. And this is the birth of what we call a cynic. The cynic's -progress is various, and seldom in a straight fine. It is significant -to find that in _Révolte,_ one of Villiers' comparatively early -works, the irony has a perfectly serious point, and aims directly at -social abuses. The tableau is a scene, an episode, taken straight -from life, a piece of the closest actuality; there is no display, no -exaggeration, all is simple and straightforward as truth. The laughter -in it is the broken-hearted laughter, sadder than tears, of the poet, -the dreamer, before the spectacle of the world. It is obviously -the work of one who is a mocker through his very passion for right -and good, his sense of the infinite disproportion of things. Less -obviously, but indeed quite really, is the enormous and almost aimless -mockery of some of these tales of his the reverse of a love of men -and a devotion to the good and the beautiful. Cynicism is a quality -that develops, and when we find it planted in the brain of a humorist -there is simply no accounting for the transformations through which -it may run. Thus the gulf which seems to separate _Les demoiselles de -Bienfilâtre_ from _L'inconnue_ is, after all, nothing but a series of -steps. Nor is it possible for one who judges art as art to regret this -series of steps; for it is precisely his cynicism that has become the -"note," the rarest quality, of this man of passionate and lofty genius; -it is as a cynic that he will live--a cynic who can be pitiless and -tender, Rabelaisian and Heinesque, but imaginative, but fantastically -poetical, always. - - -[Illustration: GUSTAVE COURBET, 1848] - - -_Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch_ (1860), which I have -before me, is the most wonderful book that Baudelaire ever wrote. -It has that astonishing logic which he possessed supremely, which -unravels, with infinite precautions, every spider's web of this -seductive drug, which enslaves the imagination, which changes the will, -which turns sounds into colours, colours into sounds; which annihilates -space and time; and, often at its crises, even one's own individuality. -To Baudelaire, as to me, it has, and had, the divinity of a sorcerous, -a dangerous, an insidious mistress. It produces morbid effects on one's -senses; wakens mysterious visions in our half-closed eyes. And this, -like every form of intoxication, is mysterious, malign, satanical, -diabolical. And, subjugated by it, part of oneself is dominated, so -that, in Baudelaire's words: _Il a vouloir faire l'ange, il est devenu -une bête._ - -With some this poison carries them to the verge of the abyss, over -which one looks fascinated by the abrupt horror of the void. In some -their ideas congeal: even to the point of imagining oneself "a fragment -of thinking ice." One sits, as in a theatre, seeing a drama acted on -the stage, where one's senses perceive subtle impressions, but vague, -unreal, ghost-like; where at moments one's eyes envisage the infinite. -"Then," says Baudelaire, "the grammar, the arid grammar itself, -becomes something like an evoked sorcery, the words are alive again in -flesh and in blood, the substantive, in its substantial majesty, the -adjective, a transparent vestment that clothes it and colours it like -a glacis, and the verb, angel of movement, that gives the swing to the -phrase." - -With the hallucinations all exterior forms take on singular aspects; -are deformed and transformed. Then come the transpositions of ideas, -with unaccountable analogies that penetrate the spirit. Even music, -heard or unheard, can seem voluptuous and sensual. It is Baudelaire who -speaks now, evokes an enchantment: "The idea of an evaporation, slow, -successive, eternal, takes hold of your spirit, and you soon apply this -idea to' your proper thoughts, to your way of thinking. By a singular -equivocation, by a kind of transportation, or of an intellectual _quid -pro quo,_ you find yourself evaporating, and you attribute to your pipe -(in which you feel yourself crouching and heaped together like tobacco) -the strange faculty of _smoking yourself_." The instant becomes -eternity; one is lucid at intervals; the hallucination is sudden, -perfect, and fatal. One feels an excessive thirst; one subsides into -that strange state that the Orientals call _Kief._ - -Certainly haschisch has a more vehement effect on one than opium; it -is more troubling, more ecstatic, more malign, malignant, insinuating, -more evocative, more visionary, more unseizable; it lifts one across -infinite horizons, it carries us passionately over the passionate -waves of seas in storms--of unknown storms on unseen seas--into not -even eternities, nor into chaos, nor into Heaven nor into Hell -(though these may whirl before one's vision), but into incredible -existences, over which no magician rules, over which no witch presides. -It can separate ourselves from ourselves; change our very shapes into -shapeless images; drown us in the deep depths of annihilation, out of -which we slowly emerge; bury us under the oldest roots of the earth; -give us death in life and life in death; give us sleep that is not -sleep, and waking dreams that are not waking dreams. There is nothing, -human or inhuman, moral or immoral, that this drug cannot give us. - -Yet, all the time, we know not what it takes from us; nor what deadly -exchange we may have to give; nor what intoxication can be produced -beyond its intoxication; nor if, as with Coleridge, who took opium, it -might not become "almost a habit of the Soul." - -Imagine a universe in disorder, peopled by strange beings, that have -no relation with each other, whose speech one supposes is jargon; -where such houses as there are are built in different ways--none with -straight lines, many in triangles; where the animals are unlike ours, -some smaller than ants; where there are no churches, no apparent -streets; but innumerable brothels. When one sees fires the smoke goes -downward; flames leap out of the soil and turn into living serpents. -Now one sees a serpent return into his proper flame. There seem to be -no gods, nor idols nor priests nor shrines. - -The seas storm the skies and swallow up Hell; and all that lives and -all that dies seems indistinguishable. Suppose that--in an opium -dream--Satan turns God. The soil might wither at his touch; Lesbians -lament the loss of Lesbianism; and the word of God be abolished. - -I have used the word vehement in regard to Haschisch. It violates the -imagination, ravishes the senses; can disturb one physically; but -never, if taken in measure, prove destructive. This green drug can -create unheard-of excitations, exasperations; can create contagious -laughter, evoke comical images, supernatural and fantastic. - -Now take a world created by Opium. The soil wavers, moves always, -in void space; a soil in which no seed nor weed grows. The men and -women are veiled--none see their faces. There is light, but neither -sun nor stars nor night. The houses have no windows; inside are no -mirrors; but everywhere opium dens; everywhere the smoke--incessant--of -pipes; everywhere a stench produced by opium and by their moral -degradation. The streets are thick with grass; such animals as -there are are stupefied. In fact, this inexorably moving world that -has no foundations exhales--worse than pestilence--an inexplicable -stupefaction. - -And, symbolical as it must be, these excitable poisons are to a -certainty one of the most terrible means employed by the Prince of -the Powers of the Air to enslave deplorable humanity; but by no means -to give him, what the drug can give him, the monstrous sense of the -suddenness of space and time, as if one were hurled between them by two -opposing whirlwinds. - -Now appears suddenly the Women--furious, formidable--one calls -Mephistophila, who having gazed on the Medusa becomes Medusa; who, -rouged and pale as the dead, gives one the idea of that eternal minute -which must be hell. Her very name trails like a coffin-lid. Abnormal, -she is sinister. She is one of my hallucinations. Can she ever count -the countless sins she has committed? Occult, she adores the Arcana. -Her kisses on women's lips are cruel. Perhaps she is the modern -Messalina. _Elle est l'impératrice blême d'un macabre Lesbos._ - -She admits--I give here simply her confessions--to no abominations, nor -does she specialize her vices. As certain of her damnation as of her -existence--real, imaginary--she lives and loves and lies and forgives. -She knows she has abandoned herself to all the impossible desires -endured by such souls as hers, who expect annihilation. _Elle est la -reine, pas présente, mais acceptée, de la cour des miracles femelles du -Mal._ - -She is not of those the Furies hate eternally, nor has she knowledge -of man's mingled fates; yet certain Circes have shown her how to weave -webs of spiritual spiders; she knows not where those are that turn the -Wheels of Destiny. Whirlwinds have shaken her in her perfumed room as -she lies in perfumed garments, considering her nakedness as sacred: -she the impure, never the pure! She is so tired of having ravished -souls from bodies and bodies from souls, that all she desires is sleep, -sleep without dreams. Did sleep ever come to those who most desired it? -Messalina, Helen of Troy, Faustina knew this; dust has closed their -lips, the very dust they have trodden under foot, the dust that knows -not whither it is drifting: none thinking of the inevitable end. - -Has not this poisonous drug shown to me, as to her, shadows hot from -hell? Not the shadows the sun casts on our figures as we walk on -the grass; not the moon's shadows that make mockery of us; but the -veritable heat and fire and flame and fumes of uttermost hell. - -In her eyes persists an ardent and violent life, hateful and bestial. -Depraved by insensible sensations, she imagines Caligula before her -and maledictions not her own. I know her now in vision--she is more -insatiable than Death--more ravenous after ravishment than Life. No -vampire, no Lamia, she knows not that her body has been drenched with -so many poisons that her breath might poison a man with one kiss. And -now, now, her eyes are so weary, her eyeballs ache with such tortured -nerves, that she desires nothing--nothing at all. - -In the very essence of Haschisch I find a disordered Demon whose -insanities make one's very flesh ache. Under his power symbols -speak--you can become yourself a living symbol. Under its magic you can -imagine black magic, and music can speak your passion: for is not music -as passionate as man's love for woman, as a woman's love for a man? -It can turn your rhythm into its rhythm, can change every word into a -sound, a word into a note of music: it cannot change the substance of -your soul. - -Finally, the drugged man admires himself inordinately; he condemns -himself, he glorifies himself; he realizes his condemnation; he becomes -the centre of the universe, certain of his virtue as of his genius. -Then, in a stupendous irony, he cries: _Je suis devenu Dieu!_ One -instant after he projects himself out of himself, as if the will of an -intoxicated man had an efficacious virtue, and cries, with a cry that -might strike down the scattered angels from the ways of the sky: _Je -suis un Dieu!_ - -One of Baudelaire's profoundest sayings is: "Every perfect debauch -has need of a perfect leisure: _Toute débauche parfaite a besoin d'un -parfait loisir"_ He gives his definition of the magic that imposes -on haschisch its infernal stigmata; of the soul that sells itself in -detail; of the frantic taste for this adorable poison of the man whose -soul he had chosen for these experiments, his own soul; of how finally -this hazardous spirit, driven, without being aware of it, to the edge -of hell, testifies of its original grandeur. - - - -VIII - - -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. - - -II - -How very commonly we hear it remarked that such and such thoughts -are beyond the compass of words. I do not believe that any thought, -properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather, -that where difficulty in expression is experienced, there is, in the -intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or of -method. For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not -set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which -I conceived it: for thought is logicalized by the effort at written -composition. There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite -delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it -absolutely impossible to adapt language. Yet, so entire is my faith in -the power of words, that at times I have believed it possible to embody -even the evanescences of fancies such as I have described. Could one -actually do so, which would be to have done an original thing, such -words might have compelled the heaven into the earth. - -Some of these qualities Baudelaire finds in Gautier; to my mind there -are many more of these strange and occult qualities to be found in -Baudelaire. I have said somewhere that there is no such thing, properly -speaking, as a "natural" style; and it is merely ignorance of the -mental process of writing which sometimes leads one to say that the -style of Swift is more natural than that of Ruskin. Pater said to me -at Oxford that his own _Imaginary Portraits_ seemed to him the best -written of his books, which he qualified by adding: "It seems to be the -most _natural_." I think then he was beginning to forget that it was -not natural to him to be natural. - -Gautier had a way of using the world's dictionary, whose leaves, blown -by an unknown wind, always opened so as to let the exact word leap -out of the pages, adding the appropriate shades. Both writers had an -innate sense of "correspondences," and of a universal symbolism, where -the "sacredness" of every word defends one from using it in a profane -sense. To realize the central secret of the mystics, from Protagoras -onwards, the secret which the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes betrays in -its "As things are below, so are they above;" which Boehme has classed -in his teaching of "signatures;" and which Swedenborg has systematized -in his doctrine of "correspondences," one arrives at Gérard de Nerval, -whose cosmical visions are at times so magnificent that he seems to be -creating myths, as, after his descent into hell, he plays the part he -imagines assigned to him in his astral influences. - -Among these comes Hoffmann. In his _Kreislerione,_ that Baudelaire read -in the French translation I have before me, printed in 1834, he says: -"The musician whose sense of music is conscious swims everywhere across -floods of harmony and melody. This is no vain image, nor an allegory -devoid of sense, such as composers use when they speak of colours, of -perfumes, of the rays of the sun that appear like concords." "Colour -speaks," says Baudelaire, "in a voice evocatory of sorcery; animals and -plants grimace; perfumes provoke correspondent thoughts and memories. -And when I think of Gautier's rapidity in solving all the problems of -style and of composition, I cannot help remembering a severe maxim that -he let fall before me in one of his conversations: 'Every writer who -fails to seize any idea, however subtle and unexpected he supposes it -to be, is not a writer. _L'Inexprimable n'existe pas._'" - -It is either Delacroix or Baudelaire who wrote: "The writer who is -incapable of saying everything, who takes unawares and without having -enough material to give body to an idea, however subtle or strange or -unexpected he may suppose it to be, is not a writer." And one has to -beware of the sin of allegory, which spoils even Bunyan's prose. For -the deepest emotion raised in us by allegory is a very imperfectly -satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we -should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome. - -Then there is the heresy of instruction--_l'hérésie de -l'enseignement_--which Poe and Baudelaire and Swinburne consider -ruinous to art. Art for art's sake first of all; that a poem must be -written for the poem's sake simply, from whatever instinct we have -derived it; it matters nothing whether this be inspired by a prescient -ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, or by some of that loveliness -whose very elements appertain solely to eternity. Above all, Verlaine's -_Pas de couleur, rien que la nuance!_ - -The old war--not (as some would foolishly have it defined) a war -between facts and fancies, reason and romance, poetry and good sense, -but simply between imagination which apprehends the spirit of a thing -and the understanding which dissects the body of a fact--the strife -which can never be decided--was for Blake the most important question -possible. Poetry or art based on loyalty to science is exactly as -absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or poetry. Though, -indeed, Blake wrought his _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ into a form -of absolute magnificence, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine -thought and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which hells and -heavens change names and alternate through mutual annihilations, which -emit an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame, he never -actually attained the incomparable power of condensing vapour into -tangible and malleable form, of helping us to handle air and measure -mist, which is so instantly perceptible in Balzac's genius, he who was -not "a prose Shakespeare" merely, but rather perhaps a Shakespeare in -all but the lyrical faculty. - -Even when Baudelaire expresses his horror of life, of how abject the -world has become, how he himself is supposed to be "une anomalie," his -sense of his own superiority never leaves him. "Accursed," as I have -said, such abnormally gifted artists are, he declares his thirst of -glory, a diabolical thirst of fame and of all kinds of enjoyments--in -spite of his "awful temperament, all ruse and violence"--and can say: -"I desire to live and to have self-content. Something terrible says -to me _never,_ and some other thing says to me _try. Moi-même, le -boulevard m'effraye_." - -Baudelaire's tragic sense of his isolation, of his intense misery, -of his series of failures, of his unendurable existence--it was and -was not life--in Brussels finds expression in this sentence, dated -September, 1865: - -"Les gens qui ne sont pas exilés ne savent pas ce que sont les nerfs de -ceux sont cloués à l'étranger, sans communications et sans nouvelles." -What he says is the inevitable that has no explanation: simply the -inevitable that no man can escape. To be exiled from Paris proves to -be, practically, his death-stroke. And, in the last letter he ever -wrote, March 5, 1866, there is a sense of irony, of vexation, of -wounded pride, and in the last "sting in the tail of the honey" he -hisses: -"There is enough talent in these young writers; but what absurdities, -what exaggerations, and what youthful infatuations! Curiously, only a -few years ago I perceived these imitators whose tendencies alarmed me. -I know nothing of a more compromising nature than these: as for me, I -love nothing more than being alone. But this is not possible for me, -_et il paraît que l'école Baudelaire existe_." - -And, to all appearances, it did; and what really annoyed Baudelaire was -the publication of Verlaine's _Poèmes saturniens_ and their praise by -Leconte de l'Isle, Banville, and Hugo; Hugo, whom he had come to hate. -It is with irony that he says of Hugo: "Je n'accepterais ni son génie, -ni sa fortune, s'il me fallait au même temps posséder ses énormes -ridicules." - - -III - -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!" - - - -VIII - - -In 1861 Poulet-Malassis showed Baudelaire the manuscript of _Les -Martyrs ridicules_ of Léon Cladel, who was so excited as he read it, so -intrigued by his antithetical constructions and by the mere singularity -of the title, and so amazed by this writer's audacity, that he made his -acquaintance, went over his proofs, and helped to teach him the craft -of letters. So, in his sombre and tragic and passionate and feverish -novels, we see the inevitable growth out of the hard soil of Quercy, -and out of the fertilizing contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of this -whole literature, so filled with excitement, so nervous, so voluminous -and vehement, in whose pages speech is always out of breath. And one -finds splendid variations in his stories of peasants and wrestlers and -thieves and prostitutes: something at once epic and morbid. - -Baudelaire, in his preface, points out the solemn sadness and the -grim irony with which Cladel relates deplorably comic facts; the -fury with which he insists on painting his strange characters; the -fantastic fashion in which he handles sin with the intense curiosity -of a casuist, analysing evil and its inevitable consequences. He notes -"la puissance sinistrement caricatural de Cladel." But it is in these -two sentences that he sums up, supremely, the beginning and the end of -realistic and imaginative art. "The Poet, under his mask, still lets -himself be seen. But the supremacy of art had consisted in remaining -glacial and hermetically sealed, and in leaving to the reader all the -merit of indignation. (_Le poète, sous son masque, se laisse encore -voir. Le supreme de l'art eût consisté à rester glacial et fermé, et à -laisser au lecteur tout le mérite de l'indignation._)" - -[Illustration] - -Certain of these pages are ironical and sinister and cynical; as, for -instance, in this sentence: "Quant aux insectes amoureux, je ne crois -pas que les figures de rhétorique dont ils se servent pour gémir leurs -passions soient mesquines; toutes les mansardes entendant tous les -soirs des tirades tragiques dont la Comédie Française ne pourra jamais -bénéficier." And it is in regard to this that I give certain details of -an anecdote related by Cladel of Baudelaire, which refers to the fatal -year when he left Paris for Brussels. - -Both often went to the Café de la Belle-Poule; and, one night, when -Cladel was waiting for Baudelaire, a very beautiful woman seated -opposite him asked him to present her to Baudelaire. He laughed and -they waited, and Baudelaire was presented, who, after giving them the -usual drinks, at the end of an hour went away. This went on for a -whole month; when Baudelaire, after her incessant assiduities to him, -brought her home with him, Cladel also. They talk. The woman becomes -lascivious. Baudelaire answers that he has a passion for beautiful -forms and does not wish to expose himself to a deception. She undresses -slowly. She is magnificent, and her tresses are so long that, with -leaning over a little, she could put her naked feet on the ends of -them. She assumes, being probably aware of it, the exact pose of -Mademoiselle de Maupin when she stands naked before d'Albert. Cladel -goes out. He has not quite closed the door when he hears Baudelaire, -prematurely old and worn out, say: "Rhabille-toi." Still vital, he -has no more the abstract heat of rapture of the passionate lover in -Gautier's famous self-confessions; for, in that wonderful book, there -is nothing besides a delicately depraved imagination and an extreme -ecstasy over the flesh and the senses. And he also realized, as -Baudelaire did not always, that the beauty of life was what he wanted, -and not the body, that frail and perishable thing, that has to be -pitied, that so many desire to perpetuate. - -Yet never in Baudelaire, as in Gautier, did the five senses become -articulate, as if they were made specially for him; for he speaks -for them with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are--never -Baudelaire's--in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have -no recollection. Yet neither were absolutely content with the beauty of -a woman's body: for the body must finally dwindle and expand to some -ignoble physical condition, and on certain women's necks wrinkles will -crawl, and the fire in one's blood sometimes loses some of its heat; -only, one wants to perpetuate the beauty of life itself, imperishable -at least in its recurrence. - -In his preface Baudelaire compares Murger with Musset, both Bohemian -classics, only one spoke of Bohemia with a bitter bantering, and the -poet, when he was not in his noble moods, had crises of fatuity. "All -this evil society, with its vile habits, its adventurous morals, was -painted by the vivid pencil-strokes of Murger; only he jested in his -relations of miserable things." Yes, Murger is a veracious historian; -believe him, if you do not know or have forgotten, that such are the -annals of Bohemia. There, people laugh just so lightly and sincerely, -weep and laugh just as freely, are really hungry, really have their -ambitions, and at times die of all these maladies. It is the gayest and -most melancholy country in the world. To have lived there too long, is -to find all the rest of the world in exile. But if you have been there -or not, read Murger's pages; there, perhaps, you will see more of the -country than anything less than a lifetime spent in it will show you. - - - -IX - - -In April, 1864, Baudelaire left Paris for Brussels, where he stayed in -the Hôtel du Grand-Miroir, rue de la Montagne. Before then his nerves -had begun to torment him; they played tricks with his very system; he -wrote very little prose and no verse. It was with a kind of desperate -obstination--a more than desperate obstinacy--that he strove to prevent -himself from giving way to his pessimistic conceptions of life, to his -morbid over-sensibility that ached as his flesh ached. Unsatiated, -unsatisfied, for once in his existence irresolute in regard to what he -wanted to do, watching himself with an almost casuistical casuistry, -alone and yet not alone in the streets of Paris, he wandered, a -_noctambule,_ night after night, sombre and sinister. So a ghost -self-obsessed might wander in desolate cities seeing ever before him -the Angel of Destruction. - -Did he then know that he was becoming more and more abnormal? This I -ignore. This, I suppose, he alone knew; and hated too much knowledge of -his precarious condition. He was veritably more alone than ever, before -he plunged--as one who might see shipwreck before him--into that gulf -that is no gulf, that extends not between hell and heaven, but that one -names Brussels. - -[Illustration: manuscript] - -Still he frequented his favourite haunts, the Moulin-Rouge, the Casino -de la rue Cadet, and other cabarets. He saw then, as I saw many -years afterwards, pass some of his Flowers of Evil--some who knew him -and had read his verses, most of whom he ignored--macabre, with hectic -cheeks and tortured eyes and painted faces; these strange nocturnal -birds of passage that flit to and fro, the dancers and the hired -women; always--so Latin an attitude of their traditional trade!--with -enquiring and sidelong glances at men and at women. - -I can see him now, as I write, sit in certain corners of the -Moulin-Rouge--as I did--drinking strange drinks and smoking cigarettes; -hearing with all his old sensuality that adorable and cynical and -perverse and fascinating _Valse des Roses_ of Olivier Métra: a -maddening music to the soundless sound of the mad dances of the -_Chahut_--danced by dancers of both sexes, ambiguous and exotic and -neurotic--that, as the avid circle forms hastily around them, set their -fevers into our fevers, their nerves into our nerves. - -It was in May, 1892, that, having crossed the streets of Paris from -the hotel where I was staying, the Hôtel Corneille, in the Latin -Quarter (made famous by Balzac in his superb story, _Z. Marcas_,) I -found myself in Le Jardin de Paris, where I saw for the first time -La Mélinite. She danced in a quadrille: young and girlish, the more -provocative because she played as a prude, with an assumed modesty; -_décolletée_ nearly to the waist, in the Oriental fashion. She had -long, black curls around her face; and had about her a depraved -virginity. - -And she caused in me, even then, a curious sense of depravity that -perhaps comes into the verses I wrote on her. There, certainly, on -the night of May 22nd, danced in her feverish, her perverse, her -enigmatical beauty, La Mélinite, to her own image in the mirror: - - "A shadow smiling - Back to a shadow in the night," - -as she cadenced Olivier Métra's _Valse des Roses._ - -It is a fact of curious interest that in 1864 Poulet-Malassis was -obliged to leave Paris--on account of his misfortunes as a publisher, -in regard to money, and for various other reasons--and to exile himself -in Brussels: still more curious that Baudelaire--drawn, perhaps, by -some kind of affinity in their natures--followed him sooner than he -had intended to go. Malassis lived in rue de Mercedes, 35 _bis,_ -Faubourg d'Ixilles. In those years both saw a great deal of the famous, -perverse, macabre Félicien Rops. - -Malassis, naturally, was obliged, in his expedients for living as he -used to live, to publish privately printed obscene books; some no more -than erotic. As Baudelaire hated, with his Parisian refinement, that -kind of certainly objectionable literature, on May 4th, 1865, he writes -to Sainte-Beuve: "As for Malassis, his terrible affair arrives on the -12th. He believes he will be condemned for five years. What there -is grave in this is that that closes France for him for five years. -But that cuts him for a time from his ways of living. I see in it no -great evil. As for me, who am no fool, I have never possessed one of -these idiotic books, even printed in fine characters and with fine -engravings." As a matter of fact, Malassis was condemned in May, 1866, -to one year's imprisonment for having privately printed _Les Amies_ of -Paul Verlaine--a book of sonnets, attributed to an imaginary Pablo de -Herlaguez. - -Baudelaire, as I have said, had many reasons for going to Brussels. -Among these was his urgent desire of finding a publisher to print his -collected works--having failed to find any publisher for them. Another -was that of giving lectures--a thing he was not made for--and for two -other reasons: one of making immediate money, one of adding to his fame -as a writer. Then, to write a book on Belgium. - -He writes to Manet (who has written to him: "Do return to Paris! No -happiness can come to you while you live in that damned country!"): -"As for finishing here _Pauvre Belgique,_ I am incapable of it: I am -near on dead. I have quite a lot of _Poèmes en Prose_ to get printed in -magazines. I can do no more than that. _Je souffre d'un mal qui je n'ai -pas, comme j'étais gamin, et que je vivais au bout du monde."_ - -His book was to have been humorous, mocking, and serious--his final -separation from modern stupidity. "People may understand me, perhaps, -then." "Nothing," he confesses, "can console me in my detestable -misery, in my humiliating situation, nor especially in my vices." - -In February, 1865, he writes: "As for my present state, it is an -absolute abdication of the will. (_C'est une parfaite abdication de la -volonté._)" What reason, I wonder, was there for him to "abdicate" the -one element in our natures by which we live at our greatest, the very -root of our passions (as Balzac said), "nervous fluids and that unknown -substance which, in default of another term, we must call the will?" -Man has a given quality of energy; each man a different quality: how -will he spend it? That is Balzac's invariable question. All these -qualities were always in Baudelaire. - -Had he finally, after so many years in which his energy was supreme, -lost some of his energy, struggling, as he seems to do, against -insuperable difficulties that beset him on either side, like thieves -that follow men in the dark with the intention of stabbing you in the -back? Does he then try to conjecture what next year might bring him -of good or of evil? He has lived his life after his own will: what -shall the end be? He dares neither look backward nor forward. It might -be that he feels the earth crumbling under his feet; for how many -artists have had that fear--the fear that the earth under their feet -may no longer be solid? There is another step for him to take, a step -that frightens him; might it not be into another more painful kind of -oblivion? Has something of the man gone out of him: that is to say, the -power to live for himself? - -In the summer of 1865 Baudelaire spent several days in Paris, seeing -Banville and other friends of his. They found him unchanged; his eyes -clear; his voice musical; he talked as wonderfully as ever. They used -all their logic to persuade him to remain in Paris. He refused, even -after Gautier had said to him: "You are astonishing: can one conceive -your mania of eternalizing yourself in a land where one is only bored -to extinction?" He laughed; promised to return: he never did; it was -the last day when his friends possessed him entirely. - -In his years of exile he printed Poe's _Histoires grotesques et -sérieuses_ (1864); _Les nouvelles fleurs du mal_ in _La Parnasse -contemporaine_ (1866). In 1865 Poulet-Malassis printed _Les épaves de -Charles Baudelaire._ Avec une eau-forte de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam. A -l'enseigne du Coq. 1865. 165 pages. - -"Avertissement de l'Éditeur. - -"Ce recueil est composé de morceaux poétiques, pour la plupart -condamnés ou inédits, auxquels M. Charles Baudelaire n'a pas cru devoir -faire place dans l'édition définitive des _Fleurs du mal._ - -"Cela explique son titre. - -"M. Charles Baudelaire a fait don, sans réserve, de ces poëmes, à un -ami qui juge à propos de les publier, parce qu'il se flatte de les -goûter, et qu'il est à un âge où l'on aime encore à faire partager ses -sentiments à des amis auxquels on prête ses vertus. - -"L'auteur sera avisé de cette publication en même temps que les deux -cents soixantes lectures probables qui figurent--à peu près--pour son -éditeur bénévole, le public littéraire en France, depuis que les bêtes -y ont décidément usurpé la parole sur les hommes." - -I have before me two copies of this rare edition, printed on yellow -Holland paper; one numbered 100, the other 194. The second has -inscribed in ink: _A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de -l'auteur avec les civilités de l'éditeur A. P. Malassis._ This was sent -on the part of Baudelaire to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is superbly -bound in a kind of red-purple thick leather binding, with pale gold -squares, in the form of the frame of a picture; done, certainly, with -great taste. - -On January 3, 1865, Baudelaire writes a letter to his mother; a letter -that pains one as one reads it: so resigned he seems to be, yet never -in his life less resigned to his fate. He fears that God might deprive -him of even happiness; that it is more difficult to think than to write -a book; that if only he were certain of having five or six years before -him he might execute all that remained for him to do; that he has the -fixed idea of death; that he has suffered so much already that he -believes many things may be forgiven him (sins of concupiscence, sins -of conscience, sins one never forgets) as he has been punished so much. - -I pass from this to the beginning of March, 1866. He stays with Rops -at Namur, where (certainly by bad luck) he enters again l'Église -Saint-Loup, which he had spoken of as "this sinister marvel in the -interior of a catafalque--terrible and delicious--broidered with gold, -red, and silver." As he admires these richly sculptured confessionals, -as he speaks with Rops and Malassis, he stumbles, taken by a kind of -dizziness in the head, and sits down on a step in the church. They -lift him up; he feigns not to be frightened, says that his foot had -slipped accidentally. Next day he shows signs of a nervous trouble, not -a mental one; asking them in the train to Brussels to have the window -opened; it is open. That is the first sign of his loss of speech, and -the last letter that he ever wrote (dated March 30th, 1866), ends: _Je -ne puis pas bouger._ It is strange to set beside this Balzac's last -words, that end a letter written June 20th, 1856: _Je ne puis ni lire -ni écrire._ It is written to Théophile Gautier. - -Swinburne, having heard the fatal news in regard to Baudelaire, added -to his book on Blake these magnificent words: as pure, as fervent a -tribute to the memory of a fellow-artist as Baudelaire might have -wished to have been written on himself, as Swinburne might have desired -to have been written on himself: "I heard that a mortal illness had -indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the -fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more -of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of -Charles Baudelaire. We may see again as various a power as was his, -may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as tragic a manner -of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of -emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison -of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair -and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at -once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He -could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible -and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances -of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at -least in part expressed, brought him near to me by way of written or -transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, -and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal -words which too often return upon our lips: - - _Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!"_ - -And I, who have transcribed these words, have before me a book that -Swinburne showed me, that he had richly bound in Paris, and that I -bought at the sale of his library on June 19th: _Richard Wagner et -Tannhäuser à Paris._ Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, 1861; with, -written in pencil, on the page before the title-page, these words: - -"_A Mr. Algernon C. Swinburne. Bon Souvenir et mille Remerciements. C. -B._" - -From April 9, 1866, to August 31, 1867, Baudelaire endures the slow -tortures of a body and a soul condemned to go on living; living, what -else can it be called, than a kind of living death? To remain, in most -senses, himself; to be, as always, Charles Baudelaire; to have in his -mind one desire, the desire, the vain desire, of recovery; to be unable -to utter one word; to think, to sleep, to conceive imaginary projects, -for his near future, for his verse, for his prose: to walk, to eat, -to drink; to be terribly conscious of his dolorous situation; to be, -as ever, anxious for a new edition of _Les fleurs du mal;_ to mark a -date in an almanac, counting three months, when he imagined he would -be in a state to superintend the impression of his final edition; to -have finally given up all hope, all illusion; to have gazed out of his -wonderful eyes, at his friend's faces, eyes shadowed by an expression -of infinite sadness, eyes that endured his last tragedy: that is how -Baudelaire survived himself to the end. - -He died on Saturday, August 31, 1867, at eleven o'clock in the morning, -at the age of forty-six and four months. So died, simply and without -any trace of suffering, this man of genius. Had he been thoroughly -understood by the age in which he lived? Blake, who said the final -truth on this question: "The ages are all equal; but genius is always -above the ages:" was not understood in his age. - - - - -BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES - - -1. _Salon de_ 1845. Pax Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Jules Labitte, 1845. -72 pp. - -2. _Salon de_ 1846. Par Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1846. -132 pp. - -3. _Histoires extraordinaires._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de Charles -Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1856. - - 1. Edgar Poe, La vie et ses œuvres, pp. vii-xxxi. 2. - Translations, 323 pp. - -4. _Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. Michel Lévy, 1857. - - 1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, pp. v-xxiv. 2. Translations, - 288 pp. - -5. _Les fleurs du mal._ Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis -et de Broise, 4 rue de Buci, 1857. 252 pp. - - 1. Dédicace. 2. Au Lecteur. - - - SPLEEN ET IDÉAL.--1. Bénédiction. 2. Le Soleil. 3. Élévation. 4. - Correspondances. 5. _J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues._ 6. - Les Phares. 7. La Muse malade. 8. La Muse vénale. 9. Le Mauvais - Moine. 10. L'Ennemi. 11. Le Guignon. 12. La Vie intérieure. 13. - Bohémiens en voyage. 14. L'Homme et la mer. 15. Don Juan aux - enfers. 16. Châtiment de l'orgueil. 17. La Beauté. 18. L'Idéal. - 19. La Géante. 20. Les Bijoux. 21. Parfum exotique. 22. _Je - t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne._ 23. _Tu mettre l'univers - entier dans ta ruelle._ 24. _Sed non satiata._ 25. _Avec ses - vêtements ondoyants et nacrés._ 26. Le Serpent qui danse. 27. - La Charogne. 28. _De profundis clamavi._ 29. Le Vampire. 30. - Le Léthé. 31. _Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive._ - 32. Remords posthume. 33. Le Chat. 34. Le Balcon. 35. _Je te - donne ces vers afin que si mon nom._ 36. Tout entière. 37. _Que - diras-tu ce soir, pauvre âme solitaire._ 38. Le Flambeau vivant. - 39. A Celle qui est trop gaie. 40. Réversibilité. 41. Confession. - 42. L'Aube spirituelle. 43. Harmonie du soir. 44. Le Flacon. 45. - Le Poison. 46. Ciel brouillé. 47. Le Chat. 48. Le beau navire. - 49. L'Invitation au voyage. 50. L'Irréparable. 51. Causerie. 52. - L'Héautontimouroménos. 53. Franciscae meae laudes. 54. A une - Dame Créole. 55. Moesta et Errabunda. 56. Les Chats. 57. Les - Hiboux. 58. La cloche fêlée. 59. Spleen. 60. Spleen. 61. Spleen. - 62. Spleen. 63. Brumes et pluies. 64. L'Irrémédiable. 65. A une - mendiante rousse. 66. Le Jeu. 67. Le Crépuscule du soir. 68. Le - Crépuscule du matin. 69. _Le servante au grand cœur dont vous - étiez jaloux._ 70. _Je n'ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville._ 71. - Le Tonneau de la haine. 72. Le Revenant. 73. Le Mort joyeux. 74. - Sépulture. 75. Tristesses de la lune. 76. La Musique. 77. La Pipe. - - FLEURS DU MAL.--78. La Destruction. 79. Une Martyr. 80. Lesbos. - 81. Femmes damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte). 82. Femmes damnées. - 83. Les deux bonnes sœurs. 84. La fontaine de sang. 85. - Allégorie. 86. La Beatrice. 87. Les métamorphoses du vampire. 88. - Un voyage à Cythère. 89. L'Amour et le crâne. - - RÉVOLTE.--90. Le reniement de Saint Pierre. 91. Abel et Caïn. 92. - Les Litanies de Satan. - - LE VIN.--93. L'âme du vin. 94. Le vin des chiffonniers. 95. Le - vin de l'assassin. 96. Le vin du solitaire. 97. Le vin des amants. - - LA MORT.--98. La mort des amants. 99. La mort des pauvres. 100. - La mort des artistes. - -6. _Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1858. 200 pp. - -7. _Théophile Gautier._ Par Charles Baudelaire. Notice littéraire -précédée d'une lettre de Victor Hugo. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de -Broise, 9 rue des Beaux-Arts, 1859. - - 1. A M. Charles Baudelaire de Victor Hugo, pp. i, iii. 2. - Théophile Gautier, 68 pp. - -8. _Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch._ Par Charles -Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 9 rue des Beaux-Arts, -1860. - - 1. Dédicace à J. G. F., pp. i-iv. 2. Le poème du haschisch, pp. - 1-108. 3. Un mangeur d'opium, pp. 109-304. - -On the back of the cover is this announcement: - -"Sous Presse, du même auteur: _Réflexions sur quelques-uns, de mes -Contemporains;_ un volume contenant: Edgar Poe, Théophile Gautier, -Pierre Dupont, Richard Wagner, Auguste Barbier, Leconte de Lisle, -Hégésippe Moreau, Pétrus Borel, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gustave -le Vavasseur, Gustave Flaubert, Philibert Rouvière; la famille des -_Dandies,_ ou Chateaubriand, de Custine, Paul de Molinès, and Barbey -d'Aurévilly." - -This volume appeared in part in _L'Art Romantique_ (1868); several of -these essays were never written, such as the one on Barbey d'Aurévilly. -Seconde Édition, 1861. - -9. _Les Fleurs du Mal_ de Charles Baudelaire. - -Seconde Édition augmentée de trente-cinq poëmes nouveaux et orné -d'un Portrait de l'Auteur dessiné et gravé par Bracquemond. Paris, -Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, Éditeurs, 97 rue de Richelieu et Passage -Mirés, 1861. 319 pp. - - 1. L'Albatros. 2. Le Masque. Statue Allégorique dans le goût - de la Renaissance. 3. Hymne à la Beauté. 4. La Chevelure. 5. - Duellum. 6. Le Possédé. 7. Un Fantôme: (1) Les Ténèbres. (2) Le - Parfum. (3) Le Cadre. (4) Le Portrait. 8. Sempre eadem. 9. Chant - d'Automne. 10. A une Madone. Ex-Voto dans le goût Espagnol. 11. - Chanson d'Après-Midi. 12. Sisina. 13. Sonnet d'automne. 14. Une - Gravure fantastique. 15. Obsession. 16. Le Goût du néant. 17. - Alchimie de la Douleur. 18. Horreur Sympathique. 19. L'Horloge. - 20. Un Paysage. 21. Le Cynge. 22. Les Sept Vieillards. 23. Les - Petites Vieilles. 24. Les Aveugles. 25. A une passante. 26. Le - Squelette laboureur. 27. Danse macabre. 28. L'Amour du mensonge. - 29. Rêve Parisien. 30. La Fin de la journée. 31. Le Rêve d'un - curieux. 32. Le Voyage. - -10. _Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser_ à Paris. Par Charles Baudelaire. -Paris, E. Dentu, Palais-Royale, 13 et 17, Galerie d'Orléans, 1861. 70 -pp. - -11. _Euréka._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, -Michel Lévy, 1864. 252 pp. - -12. _Histoires Grotesques et Sérieuses._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction par -Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1865. 372 pp. - -13. Les épaves de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte. Frontispiece -de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. - - 1. Avertissement de l'Éditeur, pp. i-iii. 2. Les épaves, 163 pp. - -14. _Les épaves_ de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte de Félicien -Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. Numéro 194. - -15. _Les épaves_ de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte de Félicien -Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. Numéro 100. - - _A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de l'auteur, - avec les civilités de l'Editeur. A. P. Malassis._ - - - -II - - -_Edition Définitive des œuvres de Charles Baudelaire._ Paris, Michel -Lévy et Frères, Libraires Éditeurs, rue Vivienne, 2 _bis,_ et Boulevard -des Italiens, 15. A la Librairie Nouvelle, 1868-1869. - -Volume I. LES FLEURS DU MAL. 414 pp. - -Volume II. CURIOSITÉS ESTHÉTIQUES. 440 pp. - - 1. Salon de 1845. 2. Salon de 1846. 3. Le Musée Classique - du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle (1846). 4. Exposition Universale de - 1855. Beaux Arts (1855). 5. Salon de 1850? 6. De l'Essence du - Rire, et généralement du Comique dans les Arts Plastiques. 7. - Quelques Caricaturistes Français: Carle Vernet. Pigal. Charlet. - Daumier. Henri Monnier. Grandville. Gavami. Trimolet. Traviès. - Jacque (1857). 8. Quelques Caricaturistes Étrangers: Hogarth. - Cruikshank. Goya. Pinelli. Breughel (1857). - -Volume III. L'ART ROMANTIQUE. - - 1. L'œuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix (1862). 2. Peintures - murales d'Eugène Delacroix à Saint-Sulpice (1861). 3. Le - Peintre de la Vie Moderne. Constantin Guys (1862). 4. Peintres - et Aqua-fortistes (1862). 5. Vente de le Collection de M. E. - Piot (1864). 6. L'Art Philosophique. 7. Morale des Joujou - (1854). 8. Théophile Gautier (1859-1861-1862). 9. Pierre Dupont - (1852-1861-1862). 10. Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris. - Encore quelques Mots (1861). u. Philibert Rouvière (1855). - 12. Conseils aux jeunes Littérateurs (1846). 13. Les Drames - et les Romans honnêtes (1850). 14. L'École Païenne (1851). - 15. _Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes Contemporaines:_ (1) - Victor Hugo (1861). (2) Auguste Barbier (1861). (3) Marceline - Desbordes-Valmore (1861). (4) Théophile Gautier (1861). (5) - Pétrus Borel (1861). (6) Hégéssipe Moreau (1861). (7) Théodore de - Banville (1861). (8) Pierre Dupont (1852). (9) Leconte de Lisle - (1861). (10) Gustave Levavasseur (1861). - - CRITIQUES LITTÉRAIRES.--1. Les Misérables, par Victor Hugo - (1862). 2. Madame Bovary, par Gustave Flaubert. (1857). 3. - La double vie, par Charles Asselineau (1859). 4. Les martyrs - ridicules, par Léon Cladel (1861). - -Volume IV. 1. PETITS POEMES EN PROSE. - - A ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE.--1. L'Étranger (1862). 2. Le Désespoir de - la vieille (1862). 3. Le _Confiteor_ de l'artiste (1862). 4. - Un Plaisant (1862). 5. Le Chambre double (1862). 6. Chacun sa - chimère (1862). 7. Le fou et la Vénus (1862). 8. Le Chien et le - Flacon (1862). 9. Le Mauvais Vitrier (1862). 10. A une heure du - matin (1862). 11. Le Femme sauvage et le Petite Maîtresse (1862). - 12. Les Foules (1861). 13. Les Veuves (1861). 14. Le Vieux - Saltimbanque (1861). 15. Le Gâteau (1862). 16. L'Horloge (1857). - 17. Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure (1857). 18. L'Invitation au - voyage (1857). 19. Le Joujou du pauvre (1862). 20. Les Dons des - fées (1862). 21. Les Tentations, ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire - (1863). 22. Le Crépuscule du Soir (1855). 23. La Solitude (1855). - 24. Les Projets (1857). 25. La Belle Dorothée (1863). 26. Les - Yeux des Pauvres (1864). 27. Une Mort Héroïque (1863). 28. La - Fausse Monnaie (1864). 29. Le Joueur généreux (1864). 30. La - Corde, à Edouard Manet (1864). 31. Les Vocations (1864). 32. Le - Thyrse. A Franz Liszt (1863). 33. Enivrez-vous (1864). 34. Déjà! - (1863). 35. Les Fenêtres (1863). 36. Le Désir de peindre (1863). - 37. Les Bienfaits de la lune (1863). 38. Laquelle est la vraie? - (1863). 39. Un Cheval de race (1864). 40. Le Miroir (1864). 41. - Le Port (1864). 42. Portraits de maîtresses (1867). 43. Le galant - Tireur (1867). 44. La Soupe et les Nuages (1864). 45. Le Tir et - la Cimetière (1867). 46. Porte d'Auréole (1867). 47. Mademoiselle - Bistouri (1867). 48. (Anywhere out of the world): N'importe où - hors du monde (1867). 49. Assommons les pauvres (1867). 50. Les - Bon Chiens à M. Joseph Stevens (1865). _Epilogue_ (1860). - -2. LES PARADIS ARTIFICIELS. - -A. J. G. F. LE POÈME DU HASCHISCH. - - 1. Le Goût de l'Infini. 2. Qu'est-ce que le Haschisch? 3. Le - Théâtre du Séraphin. 4. L'Homme-Dieu. 5. Morale. - - UN MANGEUR D'OPIUM.--1. Précautions oratoires. 2. Confessions - préliminaires. 3. Voluptés d'opium. 4. Tortures d'opium. 5. Un - Faux Dénouement. 6. Le Génie enfant. 7. Chagrins d'enfance. - 8. Visions d'Oxford: (1) Le Palimpseste. (2) Levana et nos - Notre-Dame des Tristesses. (3) Le Spectre du Brocken. (4) - Savannah-la-Mer. 9. Conclusion. - -Du VIN ET DU HASCHISCH, COMPARÉS COMME MOYENS DE MULTIPLICATION DE -L'INDIVIDUALITÉ, 1851, 1858. - - 1, 2, 3. Le Vin. 5, 6, 7. Le Haschisch. - -LA FANFARLO, 1847. - -LE JEUNE ENCHANTEUR. HISTOIRE TIRÉE D'UN PALIMPSESTE DE POMPÉIA, 1846. - -Volume V. HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES. Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. - - 1. Edgar Poe: sa vie et ses œuvres. 2. Double assassinat dans la - rue Morgue. 3. La lettre volée. 4. Le scarabée d'or. 5. Le canard - au ballon. 6. Aventure sans pareille d'un certain Hans Pfaall. - 7. Manuscrit trouvé dans une bouteille. 8. Une descente dans le - Maelstrom. 9. Le vérité sur le cas de M. Valdemar. 10. Révélation - magnétique, 11. Les souvenirs de M. Auguste Bedloe. 12. Morella. - 13. Ligeia. 14. Metzengerstein. 15. Le Mystère de Marie Roget. - -Volume VI. NOUVELLES HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES. Par Edgar Poe. -Traduction de Charles Baudelaire. - - 1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe. 2. Le Démon de la Perversité. - 3. Le Chat noir. 4. William Wilson. 5. L'homme des foules. - 6. Le cœur révélateur. 7. Bérénice. 8. La chute de la maison - Usher. 9. Le puits et la pendule. 10. Hop-Frog. 11. La Barrique - d'Amontillado. 12. Le Masque de la Mort rouge. 13. Le Roi Peste. - 14. Le Diable dans le beffroi. 15. Lionnerie. 16. Quatre bêtes en - une. 17. Petite discussion avec une momie. 18. Puissance de la - Parole. 19. Colloque entre Monos et Una. 20. Conversation d'Eiros - avec Charmion. 21. Ombre. 22. Silence. 23. L'île de la Fée. 24. - Le Portrait Ovale. - -Volume VII. AVENTURES D'ARTHUR GORDON PYM. EURÉKA. Par Edgar Poe. -Traduction de Charles Baudelaire. - - - -III - -1. ESSAIS DE BIBLIOGRAPHIE CONTEMPORAINE: CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. Par A. de -Fizelière et Georges Decaux. Paris, Académie des Bibliophiles, rue de -la Bourse, 10, 1868. Numéro 178. - -2. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SA VIE ET SON ŒUVRE. Par Charles Asselineau. -Paris, Alphonse Lemerre, Éditeur, Passage Choiseul, 47, 1869. - -3. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SOUVENIRS. CORRESPONDANCES-- -BIBLIOGRAPHIE_--suivie de pièces inédités._ Par Charles Cousin. La -Bibliographie par le Vicomte Spoelberck de Lovenjoul. Paris, Chez René -Pincebourde, 14 rue de Beaume (quai Voltaire), 1872. - -4. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: ŒUVRES POSTHUMES ET CORRESPONDANCE -INÉDITS_--précédée d'une Étude Biographique._ Par Eugène Crépet. Paris, -Maison Quantin, Compagnie-Générale d'impression et d'Édition, 7 rue -Benoît, 1887. - -5. LE TOMBEAU DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE--_précédée d'une Étude sur les -Textes de les Fleurs du Mal, Commentaire et Variantes._ Par le Prince -Ourousof. Paris, Bibliothèque Artistique et Littéraire (_La Plume,_) -1896. - -6. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867). Par Féli Gautier. Orné de 26 -Portraits différents du Poète et de 28 Gravures et Reproductions. -Bruxelles, E. Deman, 1904. Tirage à 150 Exemplaires numérotés. -Exemplaire No. 74. - -7. VERSIFICATION ET MÉTRIQUE DE BAUDELAIRE. Par Albert Cassagne. Paris, -Hachette, 1906. - -8. LETTRES (1841-1866) DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. Paris, Mercure de France, -1908. - -9. ŒUVRES POSTHUMES DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. Paris, Mercure de France, -1908. - -10. LE CARNET DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 1911. - -Publié avec une Introduction et des Notes par Féli Gautier et orné -d'un dessin inédité de Baudelaire. Paris, J. Chevrel, Libraire 29 rue -de Seine. Cette plaquette non mise dans le commerce à été tirée à cent -exemplaires sur papier velin d'arches. Numéro 27. - -This _petit carnot vert,_ which contains seven quires of twenty-four -pages--the last two have been torn out--was used by Baudelaire for -noting down certain private details, details of almost every kind, -which he began in 1861 and ended in 1864. There are lists of his debts, -of his friends, of his enemies, of his projects, of his proofs, of his -books, of his articles, of the people he has to see and to write to, of -the etchings and drawings he buys or intends to buy, of the money he -owes and of the money he is in the utmost need of. On one page is the -original text of his dedication of the "Poems on Prose." On one page he -reckons forty days in which to execute some of his translations, his -prose, and his poems. On another page he gives a list of his hatreds, -underlining _Vilainies, Canailles_; then his plans for short stories -and dramas. These notes are of importance. "Faire en un an 2 vols, _de -Nouvelles_ et _Mon cœur mis à nu._" "_Tous les jours cinq poèmes et -autre chose._" Then this sinister note: "Pour faire du neuf, quitter -Paris, ou je me meurs." After this come long lists of the women he -frequents and of their addresses, such as 29 rue Neuve Bréda, 36 rue -Cigalle. After this comes Swinburne's verses, with the list of the few -friends he possesses: Villiers, Noriac, Manet, Malassis, his mother; -together with Louise, Gabrielle, and Judith. - -11. LETTRES INÉDITÉS A SA MÈRE (1833-1866). Par Charles Baudelaire. -Louis Conard, Libraire Éditeur, 6 Place de la Madeleine, Paris, 1918. -Numéro 182. - -12. JOURNEAUX INTIMES DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: TEXTE INTEGRAL. Paris, -Georges Crès, 21 rue Hautefeuille, 1919. - -This edition is founded on the original manuscripts of Baudelaire, now -in the possession of Gabriel Thomas. - -FUSÉES. A manuscript of fifteen pages, containing twenty-two sections -numbered in red ink; the pagination is also in red ink. The notes have, -often enough, the aspect of mere fragments, scrawled angrily. One of -them, numbered 53, and two paragraphs of another (the note 17: _Tantôt -il lui demandait; Minette_) are written in pencil; note 12 is written -in blue ink. Certain phrases in the text are used twice over. - -MON CŒUR MIS À NU. A manuscript of 91 pages, containing 197 articles -numbered in red ink; the pagination used in the same way as in the -other. Every note is preceded with the autograph mention: _Mon Cœur mis -à nu._ The text is written rapidly; the notes numbered 26, 31, 44, 48, -51, 54, 60, 68, 69, 72, 75 (the last three in italics), 80 are written -with a black pencil, the note 62 with a black pencil on blue paper, and -the note 83 written with a red pencil. - - - - -NOTES - - -Fascinated by sin, Baudelaire, as I have said in these pages, is never -the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as the original sin; he studies -sin as he studies evil, with a stern logic; he finds in horror a kind -of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; rarely in hideous things, save -when his sense of what I call a moralist makes him moralise, as in his -terrible poem, _Une Charogne._ - -Baudelaire's original manuscript, that is to say, the copy he makes for -his final text, I have recently bought. It covers two and a half folio -pages, folded four times across, as if he had carried it about with -him; it is written on thin, half-yellow paper, yellowed with age, and -on both sides; it is copied at tremendous speed with a quill pen that -blots the dashes he puts under every stanza. The title is underlined; -the only revision is where he obliterates "comme une vague" (which he -had used in the first line) and changes it to "d'un souffle, vague." He -uses a tremendous amount of capital letters; as in the first stanza: -"L'Objet, Mon Cœur, Matin, Doux, Détour, d'un Sentier, Une Charogne, -Cailloux." In the next: "Femme Lubrique, Les Poisons, D'une Façon -Nonchalant et Cynique, Ventre, Exhalations." At the end of the last -stanza but one he writes: - -"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses -Vivre parmi les monuments;" - -which he changes in the text of his _Fleurs du mal_ into: - -"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses -Moisir parmi les ossements." - -The change makes an enormous improvement to the stanza. - -To possess this manuscript written by Baudelaire is to possess one of -the most magnificent poems he ever wrote: the whole thing is copied in -a kind of unholy rapture, in a kind of evil perversion. - - - - -I. AN ADVENTURE IN FIRST EDITIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS - - -I am, fortunately, the possessor of a copy of the first edition of _Les -Fleurs du Mal._ The title-page is as follows: LES FLEURS DU MAL || -par Charles Baudelaire. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de Broise: || -Libraire-Éditeurs. || 4 rue de Buci. || 1857. - -This copy is signed, in brown Parisian ink: _"à mon ami Champfleury, -Ch. Baudelaire_" His signature is fantastic: the B. curled backward -like a snake's tail in an Egyptian hieroglyphic, the straight line -like an enchanter's wand. It is "grand-12; 252 pages." It contains one -hundred poems, the perfect number. It is printed on _papier vergé._ It -is one of the twenty copies, thus specially printed, that Baudelaire -ordered for himself and for certain of his friends. The rest of the -edition was printed on common white paper. Taken as a whole, this is -certainly one of the most perfectly printed books done in France, or -anywhere, in the past century. - -Poulet-Malassis came from Alençon to Paris, and began by printing the -_Odes Funambulesques_ of Théodore de Banville early in 1857, before he -completed the publication of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ in July of that year. -Baudelaire wrote to him, saying that he did not want popularity, "_mais -un bel éreintage général qui attirera la curiosité."_ He asked him to -be sparing in blank spaces on the pages; and to use certain archaisms -and touches of red. These touches of red are given on the title-page; -they have a decorative effect. He said that he had a natural horror -of the over-use of inverted commas, which have a way of spoiling the -text. He must have a unique system of his own. "I must have," he -insists, "in this kind of production, the one admissible thing, that -is, perfection." There one sees his unerring instinct; his sense of the -exact value of words. Yet he writes to his publisher, underlining the -phrase: "You know certain things better than I do, but whenever there -is, on my part, no radical repulsion, follow your taste." He rages -against de Broise's perpetual reproaches with regard to _les surcharges -de M. Baudelaire--_the "author's corrections." He points out certain -printer's mistakes, page 44 for page 45, and _guères_ rhyming with -_vulgaire._ There was no time to correct these errors; they remain so -in the printed pages of my copy. - -It is interesting, in regard to this question, to find in the first -text of _Le Vin de l'Assassin_ these lines: - - "Ma femme est morte, je suis libre! - Je puis donc boire tout mon saoul" - -In the second edition one reads "soûl." I find in Brachet's -_Dictionnaire Étymologique_ this definition of the word "_soûl,_ ancien -français, _saoul._ Latin _satallus,_ d'où l'ancien français _saoul._" -Therefore Baudelaire was right, traditionally, in using the original -form of the word. - -His worst trouble is in getting the famous dedication to Gautier -printed and spaced as it had to be. It must be composed in a certain -solemn style. Then he writes: "The magician has made me abbreviate the -dedication; it must not be a profession of faith, which might have the -fault of attracting people's eyes '_sur le côté scabreux du volume._'" -As it is, strangely enough for him, Baudelaire made a mistake in -syntax, using "_au magicien ès-langue française"_ instead of "_au -parfait magicien ès-lettres françaises_," which he corrected in the -edition of 1861. - -On July 11, 1857, he writes to Malassis: "Quick, hide the edition, -the whole edition. I have saved fifty here. The mistake was in having -sent a copy to _Le Figaro_! As the edition was sold out in three weeks -we may have the glory of a trial, from which we can easily escape." -The trial came; he was obliged to suppress six poems (supposed to -contain "obscene and immoral passages"). Baudelaire never ceased to -protest against the infamy of this trial. A copy of the second edition -(not nearly so well printed as the first) is before me: LES FLEURS -DU MAL. || Par Charles Baudelaire. || Seconde Edition. || Augmentée -de trente-cinq poèmes nouveaux || et ornée d'un portrait de l'auteur -dessiné et gravé par Bracquemont. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de -Broise. || Editeurs. || 97. Rue de Richelieu, et Beaux-Arts, 56. || -1861. || Tout droits réservés. || Paris: Imp. Simon Raçon et Comp. || -Rue d'Erfurth. - -In comparing the text of 1857 with that of 1861 I find several -revisions of certain verses, not always, I think, for the best. For -instance, in the _Préface,_ the first edition is as follows: - -"Dans nos cervaux malsains, comme un million d'helminthes, -Grouille, chante et ripaille un peuple de Démons." - -He changes this into "verre fourmillant;" "dans nos cervaux ribote." On -page 22, he writes: - - "Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme - A l'aspect du tableau plein d'épouvantement - Des monstruosités, que voile un vêtement; - Des visages masqués et plus laids que des masques." - -In the later text he puts a full stop after "épouvantement," and -continues: - - "O monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement! - O ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques." - -This reading seems to me infinitely inferior to the reading of the -first version. - -Again, there are certain other changes, even less happy, such as -"_quadrature_" into "_nature_," "_divin élixir_" into "_comme un -élixir,_" "_Mon âme se balançait comme un ange joyeux,_" into "_Mon -cœur, comme un oiseau, voltigeant tout joyeux."_ Baudelaire, in sending -a copy of _Les fleurs du mal_ (1861) to Alfred de Vigny, wrote that he -had marked the new poems in pencil in the list at the end of the book. -In my copy--1857--he has marked, with infinite delicacy, in pencil, -only three poems: "Lesbos," "Femmes Damnées," "Les Métamorphoses du -Vampire." He underlines, in "Une Charogne," these words in the text: -"_charogne lubrique, cynique, ventre, d'exhalaisons."_ At one side of -the prose note on "Franciscae meae laudes" he has made, on the margin, -a number of arrows. - -In _Le Corsaire-Satan,_ January, 1848, Baudelaire reviewed three books -of short stories by Champfleury. On the first, _Chien-Caillou,_ he -writes: "One day a quite small, quite simple volume, _Chien Caillou,_ -was printed; the history simply, clearly, crudely related, of a poor -engraver, certainly original, but whose poverty was so extreme that -he lived on carrots, between a rabbit and a girl of the town; and -he made masterpieces," I have before me this book: "_Chien-Caillou, -fantaisies d'hiver._ Par Champfleury. Paris, A la Libraire Pittoresque -de Martinon, Rue du Coq-Saint-Martin, 1847," It is dedicated to Victor -Hugo. "I dedicate to you this work, in spite of the fact that I have -an absolute horror of dedications--because of the expression _young -man_ that it leaves in readers' minds. But you have been the first to -signalize _Chien-Caillou_ to your friends, and your luminous genius has -suddenly recognized the reality of the second title: _This is not a -Story."_ - -In the same year came out _Le Gâteau des rois._ Par M. Jules Janin. -Ouvrage entièrement inédit. Paris. Libraire d'Amyot, 6 rue de la Paix, -1847. I have my own copy of this edition, bound in pale yellow-paper -covers. - -On January 26th, 1917, there came to me from Paris an original -manuscript, written by Charles Baudelaire on three pages of note-paper, -concerning these two books of Champfleury and Jules Janin. Being -unfinished, it may have been the beginning of an essay which he never -completed. Certainly I find no trace of this prose in any of his -printed books. From the brown colour of the ink that he used I think it -was written in 1857, as the ink and the handwriting are absolutely the -same as in his signed _Fleurs du mal_ sent to Champfleury. There are -several revisions and corrections in the text of the MS. that I possess. - -At the top of the first page are nearly obliterated the words: -_remplacez les blancs._ It begins: "Pour donner immédiatement au -lecteur non initié dans les dessous de la littérature, non instruit -dans les préliminaires des réputations, une idée première de -l'importance littéraire réille de ces petits livres, gros d'esprit, -de poésie et d'observations, qu'il sache que le premier d'entre nous, -_Chien-Caillou,_ Fantaisies d'hiver, fut publié en même temps qu'un -petit livre d'un homme très célèbre, qui avait, en même temps que -Champfleury, l'idée de ces publications en trimestrielles." It ends: -"Où est le cœur? Où est l'âme, où est la raison?" - -Here is my translation: - -"To convey to the reader who has not penetrated into the back-parlours -of literature, who has not been instructed in the preliminaries of -reputations, an immediate idea of the real literary importance of -these little books, fat in wit, poetry, and observations, it should be -stated that the first among them, _Chien-Caillou._ Fantaisies d'hiver, -was published at the same time as another small book by a famous man -who had, simultaneously with Champfleury, started these quarterly -publications. - -"Now, for these people whose intelligence, daily applied to the -elaboration of books, is hardest to please, Champfleury's work absorbed -that of the famous man. All those of whom I speak have known _Le -Gâteau des rois._ Their profession is to know everything. _Le Gâteau -des rois,_ a kind of Christmas book, or 'Livre de Noël,' showed above -all a clearly asserted pretention to draw from "the language, by -playing infinite variations on the dictionary, all the effects which -a transcendental instrumentalist draws from his chords. Shifting of -forces, error of an unballasted mind! The ideas in this strange book -follow each other in haste, dart with the swiftness of sound, leaning -at random on infinitely tenuous connections. Their association with one -another hangs by a thread according to a method of thought similar to -that of people in Bedlam. - -"Vast current of involuntary ideas, wild-goose chase, abnegation of -will! This singular feat of dexterity was accomplished by the man you -know, whose sole and special faculty consists in not being master of -himself, the man of encounters and good fortunes. - -"Assuredly there was talent. But what abuse! What debauchery! And, -besides, what fatigue and what pain! - -"No doubt some respect is due or, at least, some grateful compassion, -for the tireless writhing of an old dancing girl. But, alas! worn-out -attitudes, weak methods, boresome seductivities! - -"The ideas of our man are but old women driven crazy with too much -dancing, too much kicking off the ground. _Sustalerunt sæpius pedes._ - -"Where is the heart? Where the soul? Where reason?" - -Here the manuscript comes to an abrupt end, and one is left to wonder -how much more Baudelaire had written; perhaps only one more page, as -he had a peculiar fashion of writing fragments on bits of note-paper. -Certainly this prose has the refinement, the satire, the exquisite use -of words, the inimitable charm and unerring instinct of a faultless -writer. Not only is there his passion for _les danseuses_ and for the -exotic, but a sinister touch in _l'abdication de la volonté_ which -recurs finally in a letter written February 8, 1865; for, when one -imagines himself capable of an absolute abdication of the will, it -means that something of the man has gone out of him. - - - - -III. AN ADVENTURE IN IMAGES - - -It is often said, not without a certain kind of truth, that the -likeness is precisely what matters least in a portrait. That is one of -the interesting heresies which Whistler did not learn from Velasquez. -Because a portrait which is a likeness, and nothing more than a -likeness, can often be done by a second-rate artist, by a kind of -sympathetic trick, it need not follow that likeness is in itself an -unimportant quality in a masterly portrait, nor will it be found that -likeness was ever disregarded by the greatest painters. But there are -many kinds of likenesses, among which we have to choose, as we have to -choose in all art which follows nature, between a realism of outward -circumstance and a realism of inner significance. Every individual face -has as many different expressions as the soul behind it has moods. -When we talk, currently, of a "good likeness," we mean, for the most -part, that a single, habitual expression, with which we are familiar, -as we are familiar with a frequently worn suit of clothes, has been -rendered; that we see a man as we imagine ourselves ordinarily to see -him. But, in the first place, most people see nothing with any sort of -precision; they cannot tell you the position and shape of the ears, or -the shape of the cheek-bones, of their most intimate friends. Their -mental vision is so feeble that they can call up only a blurred image, -a vague compromise between expressions, without any definite form at -all. Others have a mental vision so sharp, retentive, yet without -selection, that to think of a person is to call up a whole series -of precise images, each the image of a particular expression at a -particular moment; the whole series failing to coalesce into one really -typical likeness, the likeness of soul or body. Now it is the artist's -business to choose among these mental pictures; better still, to create -on paper, or on his canvas, the image which was none of these, but -which these helped to make in his own soul. - -The Manet portrait of Charles Baudelaire, dated 1862, is exquisite, -ironical, subtle, enigmatical, astonishing; He has arrested the head -and shoulders of the poet in an instant's vision; the outlines are -definite, clear, severe, and simple. One sees the eager head thrust -forward, as if the man were actually walking; the fine and delicate -nose, voluptuously dilated in the nostrils, seems to breathe in vague -perfumes; the mouth, half-seen, has a touch of his malicious irony; the -right eye shines vividly in a fixed glance, those eyes that had the -colour of Spanish tobacco. Over the long, waving hair, that seems to -be swept backward by the wind, is placed, with unerring skill, at the -exact angle, that top-hat that Baudelaire had to have expressly made to -fit the size of his head. Around his long neck is just seen the white -soft collar of his shirt, with a twisted tie in front. In this picture -one sees the inspired poet, with distinct touches of this strong piece -of thinking flesh and blood. And Manet indicates, I think, that glimpse -of the soul which one needs in a perfect likeness. - -In the one done in 1865, the pride of youth, the dandy, the vivid -profile, have disappeared. Here, as if in an eternal aspect, Baudelaire -is shown. There is his tragic mask; the glory of the eyes, that seem to -defy life, to defy death, seems enormous, almost monstrous. The lips -are closed tightly together, in their long, sinuous line, almost as if -Leonardo da Vinci had stamped them with his immortality. The genius -of Manet has shown the genius of Baudelaire in a gigantic shadow; the -whole face surging out of that dark shadow; and the soul is there! - -In the portrait by Carjat, his face and his eyes are contorted as if -in a terrible rage; the whole face seems drawn upward and downward in -a kind of convulsion; and the aspect, one confesses, shows a degraded -type, as if all the vices he had never committed looked out of his eyes -in a wild revolt. - -It is in the mask of Baudelaire done by Zachari Astruc that I find -almost the ethereal beauty, the sensitive nerves, the drawn lines, of -the death-mask of Keats; only, more tragic. It looks out on one as a -carved image, perfect in outline, implacable, restless, sensual; and, -in that agonized face, what imagination, what enormous vitality, what -strange subtlety, what devouring energy! It might be the face of a -Roman Emperor, refined, century by century, from the ghastly face of -Nero, the dissolute face of Caligula, to this most modern of poets. - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Charles Baudelaire, by Arthur Symons - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 50488 *** diff --git a/old/50488-h/50488-h.htm b/old/50488-h/50488-h.htm deleted file mode 100644 index 11623b3..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/50488-h.htm +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3724 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" - "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> -<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> - <head> - <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" /> - <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" /> - <title> - The Project Gutenberg eBook of Charles Baudelaire, A Study, by Arthur Symons. - </title> - <style type="text/css"> - -body { - margin-left: 10%; - margin-right: 10%; -} - - h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { - text-align: center; 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- text-align: center; -} - -.figleft { - float: left; - clear: left; - margin-left: 0; - margin-bottom: 1em; - margin-top: 1em; - margin-right: 1em; - padding: 0; - text-align: center; -} - -.figright { - float: right; - clear: right; - margin-left: 1em; - margin-bottom: - 1em; - margin-top: 1em; - margin-right: 0; - padding: 0; - text-align: center; -} - -/* Footnotes */ -.footnotes {border: dashed 1px;} - -.footnote {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;} - -.footnote .label {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;} - -.fnanchor { - vertical-align: super; - font-size: .8em; - text-decoration: - none; -} - - - </style> - </head> -<body> - - -<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 50488 ***</div> - - - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="500" alt="" /> -</div> - -<h1>CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</h1> - -<h3>A STUDY</h3> - -<h3>BY</h3> - -<h2>ARTHUR SYMONS</h2> - -<h5>LONDON</h5> - -<h5>ELKIN MATHEWS</h5> - -<h5>CORK STREET</h5> - -<h5>MCMXX</h5> - -<hr class="full" /> - - -<h5>TO</h5> - -<h4>JOHN QUINN</h4> -<hr class="tb" /> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_front.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Émile De Roy, 1844</p> -</div> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-left: 15%;"> -<span style="font-weight: bold;">CONTENTS</span><br /> -<br /> -<a href="#BAUDELAIRE_A_STUDY">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY.</a><br /> -<a href="#BIBLIOGRAPHY_AND_NOTES">BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES.</a><br /> -<a href="#NOTES">NOTES.</a><br /> -</p> - - -<p class="p2" style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-left: 15%; font-weight: bold;">LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 15%;"> -Émile de Roy, 1844. <i>Frontispiece</i> -</p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary=""> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">I.</td><td align="left">Jeanne Duval: Drawing by Baudelaire, 1860.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">II.</td><td align="left">Baudelaire, designed by himself, 1848.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left">Les fleurs du mal, 1857.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left">Les paradis artificiels, 1861.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left">Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VI.</td><td align="left">Gustave Courbet, 1848.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VII.</td><td align="left">Édouard Manet, 1862.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VIII.</td><td align="left">Édouard Manet, 1865.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IX.</td><td align="left">Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Charles Asselineau, 1865.</td></tr> -</table> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h3><a id="BAUDELAIRE_A_STUDY"></a>BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY</h3> - - - -<h4>I</h4> - - -<p>When Baudelaire is great, when his genius is at its highest point -of imaginative creation, of imaginative criticism, it is never when -he works by implication—as the great men who are pure artists (for -instance, Shakespeare) work by implication only—but always from his -personal point of view being simply infallible and impeccable. The pure -artist, it has been said, never asserts: and the instances are far -from being numerous; Balzac asserts, and Balzac is always absolutely -just in all his assertions: he whose analysis of modern Society—<i>La -Comédie Humaine</i>—verges almost always on creation; and despite certain -deficiencies in technique and in style, he remains the greatest of all -novelists. As for Baudelaire, he rarely asserts; he more often suggests -or divines—with that exquisite desire of perfect and just work that -is always in him. With his keen vision he rarely misses the essential; -with his subtle and sifted prose he rarely fails in characterizing -the right man in the right way and the wrong man—the man who is not -an artist—in forms of ironical condemnation. Shelley in his time and -Blake in his time gave grave enough offence and perplexity; so did -Baudelaire, so did Poe, so did Swinburne, so did Rossetti, so did -Beardsley. All had their intervals of revolt—spiritual or unspiritual, -according to the particular trend of their genius; some destroy -mendacious idols, some change images into symbols; some are supposed -to be obscurely original. All had to apprehend, as Browning declared -in regard to his readers and critics in one of his Prefaces, "charges -of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely -harsh." And all these might have said as he said: "I blame nobody, -least of all myself, who did my best then and since."</p> - -<p>In our approach to the poetry, or to the prose, of any famous -writer, with whom we are concerned, we must necessarily approach his -personality; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we -cannot love it without loving him. As for Baudelaire, I must confess -that, in spite of the fact that one might hate or love the man -according to the judgment of the wise or of the unwise, I find him more -lovable than hateful. That he failed in trying to love one woman is as -certain as his disillusion after he had possessed her; that, in regard -to Jeanne Duval, she was to him simply a silent instrument that, by -touching all the living strings of it, he awakened to a music that is -all his own; that whether this "masterpiece of flesh" meant more to him -than certain other women who inspired him in different ways; whether -he thirsted to drain her "empty kiss" or the "empty kiss" of Rachel, -of Marguerite, of Gabrielle, of Judith, is a matter of but little -significance. A man's life such as his is a man's own property and the -property of no one else. And Baudelaire's conclusion as to any of these -might be, perhaps, summed up in this stanza:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Your sweet, scarce lost estate<br /> -Of innocence, the candour of your eyes,<br /> -Your child-like, pleased surprise,<br /> -Your patience: these afflict me with a weight<br /> -As of some heavy wrong that I must share<br /> -With God who made, with man who found you, fair."<br /> -</p> - -<p>"In more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels," -says Saint Augustine; and Beardsley's sacrifice, along with that of -all great decadent art, the art of Rops or of Baudelaire, is really a -sacrifice to the eternal beauty, and only seemingly to the powers of -evil. And here let me say that I have no concern with what neither he -nor I could have had absolute knowledge of, his own intention in his -work. A man's intention, it must be remembered—and equally in the case -of much of the work of Poe and of Baudelaire, much less so in the case -of Balzac and Verlaine—from the very fact that it is conscious, is -much less intimately himself than the sentiment which his work conveys -to me.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire's figures, exactly like those designed by Beardsley and -by Rodin, have the sensitiveness of the spirit and that bodily -sensitiveness which wastes their veins and imprisons them in the -attitude of their luxurious meditation. They have nothing that is -merely "animal" in their downright course towards repentance; no -overwhelming passion hurries them beyond themselves; they do not -capitulate to an open assault of the enemy of souls. It is the soul in -them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. Their -bodies are eager and faint with wantonness; they desire fiercer and -more exquisite pains, a more intolerable suspense than there is in the -world.</p> - -<p>Beardsley is the satirist of an age without convictions, and he can -but paint hell as Baudelaire did, without pointing for contrast to any -actual paradise. He employs the same rhetoric as Baudelaire—a method -of emphasis which it is uncritical to think insincere. In the terrible -annunciation of evil which he called <i>The Mysterious Rose-Garden,</i> the -lantern-bearing angel with winged sandals whispers, from among the -falling roses, tidings of more than "pleasant sins." And in Baudelaire, -as in Beardsley, the peculiar efficacy of their satire is that it -is so much the satire of desire returning on itself, the mockery of -desire enjoyed, the mockery of desire denied. It is because these love -beauty that beauty's degradation obsesses them; it is because they -are supremely conscious of virtue that vice has power to lay hold on -them. And with these—unlike other satirists of our day—it is always -the soul, and not the body's discontent only, which cries out of these -insatiable eyes, that have looked on all their lusts; and out of these -bitter mouths, that have eaten the dust of all their sweetnesses; and -out of these hands, that have laboured delicately for nothing; and out -of their feet, that have run after vanities.</p> - -<p>The body, in the arms of death, the soul, in the arms of the naked -body: these are the strangest symbolical images of Life and of Death. -So, as Flaubert's devotion to art seemed to have had about it something -of the "seriousness and passion that are like a consecration," I give -this one sentence on the death of Emma Bovary: "Ensuite il recita le -<i>Misereatur</i> et l'<i>Indulgentiam</i>, trempa son pouce droit dans l'huile -et commença les onctions: d'abord sur les yeux, qui avaient tant -convoité toutes les somptuosités terrestres; puis sur les narines, -friandes de brises tièdes et de senteurs amoureuses; puis sur la -bouche, qui s'était ouverte pour le mensonge, qui avait gémi d'orgueil -et crié dans la luxure; puis sur les mains, qui se delectaient au -contacts suaves, et enfin sur la plante des pieds, si rapides autrefois -quand elle courait à l'assouvissance de ses désirs et qui maintenant ne -marcheraient plus."</p> - -<p>Charles Baudelaire was born April 9th, 1821, in la rue Saint Augustin, -8; he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice. His father, François, who had -married Mile Janin in 1803, married, after her death, Caroline -Archimbaut-Dufays, born in London, September 27th, 1793. François -Baudelaire's father, named Claude, married Marie-Charlotte Dieu, -February 10th, 1738, at Neuville-au-Port, in the Department of Marne.</p> - -<p>From 1838 to 1842 (when Baudelaire attains his majority) there is a -family crisis in a certainly impossible family circle. These years he -spends in vagabonding at his own will: living a deliciously depraved -life; diving, perhaps, into depths of impurity; haunting the night -resorts that one finds in the most curious quarters of Paris—the -cafés, the theatres, la Rue de Bréda. He amuses himself enormously: -even in "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame;" he lives then, as -always, by his sensitive nerves, by his inexhaustible curiosity. He is -devoured then, as always, by the inner fires of his genius and of his -sensuality; and is, certainly, a quite naturally immoral man in his -relations with women.</p> - -<p>He lives, as I have said; he feeds himself on his nerves:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"The modern malady of love is nerves." -</p> - -<p>It is an incurable, a world-old malady; and, from Catullus, one of the -greatest of all poets, century after century, from the Latin poets of -the Middle Ages, from the poets of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan -Age, down to the modern Romantic Movement, no poet who was a passionate -lover of Woman has ever failed to sing for her and against her:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"I hate and I love: you ask me how I can do it?<br /> -I know not: I know that it hurts: I am going through it."<br /> -<br /> -<i>Odi et amo; quari id faciam, fortasse requiris.</i><br /> -<i>Nescio; sed fiere sentio, et excrucior.</i><br /> -<br /> -"Caelius, Lesbia mine, that Lesbia, that<br /> -Lesbia whom Catullus for love did rate<br /> -Higher than all himself and than all things, stands<br /> -Now at the cross-roads and the alleys to wait<br /> -For the lords of Rome, with public lips and hands."<br /> -<br /> -<i>Cœli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia,</i><br /> -<i>Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam</i><br /> -<i>Plus, quàm se, atque suos amavit omnes.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>Need I quote more than these three fines? These fines, and those -quoted above, are enough to show, for all time, that Catullus was -as passionate a lover and as passionate a hater of flesh as Villon. -Yet, if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even -<i>le grosse Margot</i> from her place in his life; who, to a certainty, -had not for one instant the place in his life that Lesbia had in the -life of Catullus. Villon was no dabbler in infamy, but one who liked -infamous things for their own sake.</p> - -<p>Nor must I forget John Donne, whose quality of passion is unique in -English poetry—a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of -actual violence: his senses speak with unparalleled directness: he can -exemplify every motion with an unluxurious explicitness which leaves -no doubt of his intentions. He suffers from all the fevers and colds -of love; and, in his finest poem—a hate poem—he gives expression -to a whole region of profound human sentiment which has never been -expressed, out of Catullus, with such intolerable truth:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"When, by thy scorn, O murdress, I am dead,<br /> -And that thou thinkest thee free<br /> -From all solicitations of me,<br /> -Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,<br /> -And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see:<br /> -Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,<br /> -And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,<br /> -Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think<br /> -Thou call'st for more,<br /> -And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;<br /> -And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou<br /> -Bathed in a cold, quick-silver sweat will lie<br /> -A verier ghost than I.<br /> -What I will say, I will not tell thee now,<br /> -Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,<br /> -I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent,<br /> -Than by my threatenings rest still innocent."<br /> -</p> - -<p>As for Baudelaire's adventures when he is sent, perhaps against his -will, in May, 1841, on a long voyage from Bordeaux to Calcutta, to -return to Paris in February, 1843, after six months' travel, it -is conjecturable that he might return a changed man. Certainly his -imagination found in the East a curious fascination, with an actual -reawakening of new instincts; and with that oppressive sense of extreme -heat, as intense, I suppose, as in Africa, which makes one suffer, -bodily and spiritually, and in ways more extraordinary than those who -have never endured those tropical heats can possibly conceive of. There -he may have abandoned himself to certain obscure rites that to him -might have been an initiation into the cults of the Black Venus. And, -with these hot suns, these burning midnoons, these animal passions, the -very seductiveness of the nakedness of bronze skin, what can I imagine -but this: that they lighted in his veins an intolerable flame, that -burned there ardently to the end?</p> - -<p>For in his <i>Wagner</i> (1861) he writes: "The radiant ancient Venus, -Aphrodite, born of white foam, has not imprudently traversed the -horrible darkness of the Middle Ages. She has retired to the depths of -a cavern, magnificently lighted by the fires that are not those of the -Sun. In her descent under earth, Venus has come near to hell's mouth, -and she goes, certainly, to many abominable solemnities, to render -homage to the Arch-demon, Prince of the Flesh and Lord of Sin." He -finds her in the music where Wagner has created a furious song of the -flesh, with an absolute knowledge of what in men is diabolical. "For -from the first measures, the nerves vibrate in unison with the melody; -one's flesh remembers itself and begins to tremble. <i>Tannhäuser</i> -represents the eternal combat between the two principles that have -chosen the human heart as battle-field, that is to say, of the flesh -with the spirit, of hell with heaven, of Satan with God."</p> - -<p>In January, 1843, Baudelaire finds himself in possession of a fortune -of seventy-five thousand francs. With his incurable restlessness, -his incurable desire of change, he is always moving from one place -to another. He takes rooms at Quai de Bethune, 10, Isle-Saint-Louis; -rue Vanneau, faubourg Saint-Germain; rue Varenne, quai d'Anjou; Hôtel -Pimodan, 17; Hôtel Corneille; Hôtel Folkestone, rue Lafitte; Avenue -de la République, 95; rue des Marais-du-Temple, 25; rue Mazarine; -rue de Babylone; rue de Seine, 57; rue Pigalle, 60; Hôtel Voltaire, -19 quai Voltaire; rue Beautrellis, 22; Cité d'Orléans, 15; rue -d'Angoulême-du-Temple, 18; Hôtel Dieppe, rue d'Amsterdam, 22; rue des -Ecuries-d'Artois, 6; rue de Seine, l'Hôtel du Maroc, 35.</p> - -<p>With a certain instinct for drawing Baudelaire haunts many painter's -studios: Delacroix's, whose genius he discovers, giving him much of -his fame, becoming his intimate friend; Manet's, whose genius he also -divines and discovers; Daumier's, to whom he attributes "the strange -and astonishing qualities of a great genius, sick of genius." So also, -from the beginning, Baudelaire's judgments are infallibly right; so -also his first book, <i>Le Salon de</i> 1845, has all the insolence of youth -and all the certitude of a youth of genius. But his fame is made, -that is to say, as an imaginative critic, with <i>Le Salon de</i> 1846; -for, after the prelude, the entire book is fascinating, paradoxical, -and essentially æsthetical; a wonderful book in which he reveals the -mysteries of colour, of form, of design, of technique, and of the -enigmas of creative works. Here he elaborates certain of his mature -theories, such as his exultant praise—in which he is one with Lamb -and with Swinburne; his just disdain, and his grave irony, in which -he is one with Swinburne; and, above all, that passionate love of all -forms of beauty, at once spiritual and absolute, which is part of the -quintessence of his genius.</p> - -<p>So, as Swinburne, in the fire of his youthful genius, was the first -to praise Baudelaire in English, I quote these sentences of his from -an essay on Tennyson and Musset: "I do not mean that the <i>Comédie de -la Mort</i> must be ranked with the <i>Imitation of Christ,</i> or that <i>Les -Fleurs du Mal</i> should be bound up with <i>The Christian Year.</i> But I do -say that no principle of art which does not exclude from its tolerance -the masterpieces of Titian can logically or consistently reject the -masterpieces of a poet who has paid to one of them the most costly -tribute of carven verse, in lines of chiselled ivory with rhymes of -ringing gold, that ever was laid by the high priest of one muse on the -high altar of another. And I must also maintain my opinion that the -pervading note of spiritual tragedy in the brooding verse of Baudelaire -dignifies and justifies at all points his treatment of his darkest and -strangest subjects. The atmosphere of his work is to the atmosphere -of Gautier's as the air of a gas-lit alcove is to the air of the -far-flowering meadows that make in April a natural Field of the Cloth -of Gold all round the happier poet's native town of Tarbes, radiant -as the open scroll of his writings with immeasurable wealth of youth -and sunlight and imperishable spring. The sombre starlight under which -Baudelaire nursed and cherished the strange melancholy of his tropical -home-sickness, with its lurid pageant of gorgeous or of ghastly dreams, -was perhaps equidistant from either of these, but assuredly had less in -common with the lamplight than the sunshine."</p> - -<p>To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, as Villon and his infamous -friends did on their wonderful winter nights, "where the wolves live -on wind," and where the gallows stands at street corners, ominously, -and one sees swing in the wind dead chained men; to haunt the strange -streets of cities, to know all the useless and improper and amusing, -the moral and the immoral people, who are alone worth knowing; to live, -as well as to observe; to be drawn out of the rapid current of life -into an exasperating inaction: it is such things as these that make -for poetry and for prose. Some make verse out of personal sensations, -verse which is half pathological, which is half physiological; some out -of colours and scents and crowds and ballets; some out of music, out -of the sea's passions; some simply out of rhythms that insist on being -used; a few out of the appreciation of the human comedy. The outcome of -many experiments, these must pass beyond that stage into the stage of -existence.</p> - -<p>So, in much of Baudelaire's verse I find not only the exotic -(rarely the erotic) but, in the peculiar technique of the lines, -certain andante movements, lingering subtleties of sound, colour, -and suggestion, with—at times, but never in the excessive sense -of Flaubert's—the almost medical curiosity of certain researches -into the stuff of dreams, the very fibre of life itself, which, -combined, certainly tend to produce a new thing in poetry. A new -order of phenomena absorbs his attention, which becomes more and more -externalized, more exclusively concerned with the phenomena of the -soul, with morbid sensation, with the curiosities of the mind and the -senses. Humanity is now apprehended in a more than ever generalized and -yet specialized way in its essence, when it becomes, if you will, an -abstraction; or, if you will, for the first time purely individual.</p> - -<p>In certain poets these have been foiled endeavours; in Baudelaire -never: for one must never go beyond the unrealizable, never lose -one's intensity of expression, never let go of the central threads of -one's spider's web. Still, in regard to certain direct pathological -qualities, there is a good deal of this to be found in much of the -best poetry—in Poe, in Rossetti, in Swinburne's earlier work, and -much in Baudelaire; only all these are moved by a fascination: in Poe -for the fantastically inhuman; in Rossetti for the inner life of the -imagination, for to him, as Pater said, "life is a crisis at every -moment;" in Swinburne for the arduous fulness of intricate harmony, -and for the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled -abundance.</p> - -<p>There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own -highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the -end of art, but the artist—whether he be Baudelaire or Verlaine— -should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is -not written by a man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but -rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing on impulse, -hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he -does not remember, in some "close corner of his brain," and exerts -the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the -medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some -obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what -it was, and, aiming at much more minor things in the world than pure -beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to -remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end must -be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the -purpose which it sought to serve, but by the success or failure in -one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise -consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a -precise consciousness of what he is doing.</p> - -<p>To Baudelaire as to Pater there were certain severe tests of the -effects made on us by works of genius. In both writers there is a -finality of creative criticism. For, to these, all works of art, all -forms of human life, were as powers and forces producing pleasurable -sensations. One can find them in a gem, a wine, a spoken word, a sudden -gesture, in anything, indeed, that strikes vividly or fundamentally the -senses, that acts instantaneously on one's perceptive passions. "What," -says Pater in his essay on Wordsworth, "are the peculiarities in things -and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can -convey to others, in an extraordinary way?"</p> - -<p>"The ultimate aim of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to -establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass -judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had -an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, -almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who -allowed himself to be a critic. Certainly, Baudelaire shared certain -of those qualities; indeed, almost all; even, in a sense, logic. His -genius was so great, and in its greatness so manysided, that for some -studious disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from -any possible point of view, have always some of his magic and of his -magnetism. The ardour, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute -desire to get at the root of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be, -will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper; -that is to say, those that are most morbid, most fond of imaginative -perversities.</p> - -<p>Prose, I have said, listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats -their speech almost in their own terms. But poetry (it is Baudelaire -who says it) "is akin to music through a prosody whose roots plunge -deeper in the human soul than any classical theory has defined." Poetry -begins where prose ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins -sooner. The one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I -can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse, out of -mere honour towards my material. The farther I can extend my prose, the -farther back do I set the limits of verse. The region of poetry will -thus be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible -chance of any confusion of territory.</p> - -<p>Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in -prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, -not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the -whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare -and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his -mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of -any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take -<i>King Lear</i> and take <i>Père Goriot.</i> Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he -suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear -grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument -of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, -wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that -he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his -crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well -enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In -that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and -material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose.</p> - -<p>So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem -of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of -the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of -every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets -become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are -guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual -life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out -their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have -produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine -purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious -for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to -contain a critic."</p> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"> -<img src="images/baud_duval.jpg" width="500" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Jeanne Duval by C. Baudelaire</p> -</div> - - - -<h4>II</h4> - - -<p>Has any writer ever explained the exact meaning of the word Style? -To me nothing is more difficult. Technique, that is quite a -different affair. The essence of good style might be, as Pater says, -"expressiveness," as, for instance, in Pascal's style, which—apart -from that—is the purest style of any French writer. It is no paradox -to state this fact: without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is -worth considering in any art; the violinist, the pianist, the painter, -the poet, the novelist, the rope-dancer, the acrobat—all, without -exception, if they lapse from technique lapse from perfection. I -have often taken Ysaye as the type of the artist, not because he is -faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the -point where faultless technique leaves off.</p> - -<p>Art, said Aristotle, should always have "a continual slight novelty," -and his meaning is that art should never astonish. Take, for instance, -Balzac, Villiers, Poe, and Baudelaire; only one part of their genius, -but a most sinister one, is the desire to astonish. There is, to -me, nothing more astonishing in prose fiction than <i>The Pit and the -Pendulum</i> and <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> of Poe; they are more than -analysis, though this is pushed to the highest point of analysis; they -have in them a slow, poisonous and cruel logic; equalled only, and at -times surpassed in their imagination, by certain of Villiers' <i>Contes -Cruels,</i> such as his <i>Demoiselles de Bien Filâtre, L'Intersigne</i> and -<i>Les amants de Tolède.</i> And—what is more astonishing in his prose than -in any of the writers I have mentioned—is his satire; a satire which -is the revenge of beauty on ugliness; and therefore the only laughter -of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Rabelais -and of Swift.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire, when he astonishes, is never satirical: sardonical, -ironical, coldly cruel, irritating, and persistent. This form of -astonishment is an inveterate part of the man's sensitive and -susceptible nature. It is concentrated, inimical, a kind of juggling or -fencing; a form of contradiction, of mystification; and a deliberate -desire of causing bewilderment. The Philistine can never pardon a -mystification, and a fantastic genius—such as that of Baudelaire and -of Poe—can never resist it when opportunity offers.</p> - -<p>Had he but been one of those "elect souls, vessels of election, <i>épris -des hauteurs,</i> as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if led -on by a kind of thirst for God!" (I quote Pater's words on Pascal) his -sombre soul might have attained an ultimate peace; a peace beyond all -understanding. This was cruelly denied him. He, I imagine, believed -in God; thirsted for God: neither was his belief confirmed nor his -thirst assuaged. He might, for all I know, have thought himself a -reprobate—and so cast out of God's sight.</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"For, till the thunder in the trumpet be,<br /> -Soul may divide from body, but not we<br /> -One from another; I hold thee with my hand,<br /> -I let mine eyes have all their will of thee,<br /> -I seal myself upon thee with my might,<br /> -Abiding alway out of all men's sight<br /> -Until God loosen over sea and land<br /> -The thunder of the trumpets of the night."<br /> -</p> - -<p>I am certain Baudelaire must have read the poems of John Keats; for -there are certain characteristics in the versification, and in the -using of images of both poets. Keats had something feminine and twisted -in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves—which are utterly lacking -in Baudelaire—but which it is now the fashion to call decadent; Keats -being more than a decadent, but certainly decadent in such a line as—</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"One faint eternal eventide of gems,"<br /> -</p> - -<p>which might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. I -give one of his sonnets, a perverse and perverted one, made by a fine -technical feat out of two recurrent rhymes:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx,<br /> -L'angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadaphore,<br /> -Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix<br /> -Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore<br /> -<br /> -Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx<br /> -Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore,<br /> -(Car le maître est allé puiser des fleurs au Styx<br /> -Avec ce seul objet dont le néant s'honore.)<br /> -<br /> -Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or<br /> -Agonise selon peut-être le décor<br /> -Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,<br /> -<br /> -Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor<br /> -Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe<br /> -De scintillations sitôt le septuor."<br /> -</p> - -<p>Keats luxuriates; like Baudelaire, in the details of physical -discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as when, in -sleeplessness—how often these two overstrung and over-nervous poets -must have had sleepless nights!—</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,<br /> -And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil."<br /> -</p> - -<p>He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the -physical sensations of his lovers, the bodily translations of emotion. -In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes:</p> - -<p> -<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"When her lips and eyes</span><br /> -Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs<br /> -Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small."<br /> -</p> - -<p>And, in another line, he writes:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"By the moist languor of thy breathing face."<br /> -</p> - -<p>Lycius, in <i>Lamia:</i></p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"Sick to lose</span><br /> -The amorous promise of her lone complain,<br /> -Swooned murmuring of love, and pale with pain;"<br /> -</p> - -<p>and all that trembling and swooning of his lovers, which English -critics have found unmanly, would at all events be very much at home -in modern French poetry, where love is again, as it was to Catullus -and Propertius, a sickness, an entrancing madness, a poisoning. To -find anything like it, like this utter subtlety of expression, we -must go back to the Elizabethan Age, and then look forward, and find, -beyond Keats, traces of it in Rossetti and in Morris's <i>The Defence of -Guinevere;</i> as, for instance, in some of the Queen's lines:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Listen, suppose your turn were come to die,<br /> -And you were quite alone and very weak;<br /> -Yea, laid a dying while very mightily<br /> -<br /> -The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak<br /> -Of river through your broad lands running well;<br /> -Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:<br /> -<br /> -'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,<br /> -Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,<br /> -I shall not tell you, you must somehow tell<br /> -<br /> -Of your own strengths and mightiness; here, see!'<br /> -Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,<br /> -At foot of your familiar bed to see<br /> -<br /> -A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,<br /> -Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,<br /> -Hold out two ways, light from the inner skies<br /> -<br /> -Showing him well, and making his commands<br /> -Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,<br /> -Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;<br /> -<br /> -And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,<br /> -Wavy and long, and one cut short and red:<br /> -No man could tell the better of the two.<br /> -<br /> -After a shivering half-hour you said:<br /> -'God help! Heaven's colour, the blue'; and he said, 'Hell!'<br /> -Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,<br /> -<br /> -And cry to all good men that loved you well,<br /> -'Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known;'<br /> -Launcelot went away, then I could tell,<br /> -<br /> -Like wisest men, how all things would be, moan,<br /> -And roll and hurt myself, and long to die,<br /> -And yet fear much to die for what was sown.<br /> -<br /> -Nevertheless you, O Sir Gawaine, lie,<br /> -Whatever may have happened through these years,<br /> -God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie."<br /> -</p> - -<p>All these rough, harsh <i>terza-rime</i> lines are wonderful enough in their -nakedness of sensations—sensations of heat, of hell, of heaven, of -colours, of death, of life, of moans, and of lies. It is, in a sense, -as far as such experiments go, a return to the Middle Ages; to what was -exotic in them and strange and narcotic. Only here, as in <i>Les Litanies -de Satan</i> of Baudelaire—to which they have some remote likeness—there -are no interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, on these -hot, impassioned scenes.</p> - -<p>Rossetti says somewhere that no modern poet, and that few poets of any -century, ever compressed into so small a space so much imaginative -material as he himself always did; and this, I conceive, partly, -also, from that almost child-like imagination of his, for all its -intellectual subtlety, that dominated him to such an extent that to -tell him anything of a specially tragic or pathetic nature was cruel, -so vividly did he realize every situation; and also because of his -wonderful saying in regard to his own way of weaving an abominable line -at the end of one of his finest sonnets into a sublime one:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Life touching lips with Immortality:"<br /> -</p> - -<p>that the line he had used before belonged to the class of phrase -absolutely forbidden in poetry. "It is intellectually incestuous poetry -seeking to beget its emotional offspring on its own identity; whereas -the present line gives only the momentary contact with the immortal -which results from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-conscious -element of it."</p> - -<p>Now, to me, both Keats before him and Baudelaire in his own -generation, had the same excessive sense of, concentration. "To load -every rift with ore:" that, to Keats, was the essential thing; and it -meant to pack the verse with poetry so that every line should be heavy -with the stuff of the imagination: the phrase I have given being a -rebuke to Shelley, significant of the art of both poets. Fox as Keats, -almost in the same degree as Baudelaire, worked on every inch of his -surface, so perhaps no poets ever put so much poetic detail into so -small a space, with, as I have said, the exception of Rossetti. And, as -a matter of fact, when we examine the question with scrupulous care, -it must be said that both Baudelaire and Keats are often metrically -slipshod.</p> - -<p>One of Wagner's ideas, in regard to the artistic faculty was, -receptivity; the impulse to impart only what comes when these -impressions fill the mind "to an ecstatic excess;" and the two forms -of the artist: the feminine, who recoils from life, and the masculine, -who absorbs life. From this follows, in the case of creative artists -such as Baudelaire, the necessity to convey to others as vividly -and intelligibly, as far as possible, what his own mind's eye had -seen. Then one has to seize everything from which one can wring its -secret—its secret for us and for no one else. And all this, and in -fact the whole of our existence, is partly the conflict within us of -the man with the woman, the male and the female energies that strive -always:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Here nature is, alive and untamed,<br /> -Unafraid and unashamed;<br /> -Here man knows woman with the greed<br /> -Of Adam's wonder, the primal need."<br /> -</p> - -<p>And, in these fundamental lines of Blake:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"What is it men in women do require?<br /> -The lineaments of gratified Desire.<br /> -What is it women do in men require?<br /> -The lineaments of gratified Desire."<br /> -</p> - -<p>And, again, in these more primeval and more essentially animal lines of -Rossetti:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"O my love, O Love—snake of Eden!<br /> -(<i>And O the bower and the hour!</i>)<br /> -O to-day and the day to come after!<br /> -Loose me, love—give way to my laughter!<br /> -<br /> -Lo! two babes for Eve and for Adam!<br /> -(<i>And O the bower and the hour!</i>)<br /> -Lo, sweet snake, the travail and treasure—<br /> -Two men-children born for their pleasure!<br /> -<br /> -The first is Cain and the second Abel:<br /> -(<i>Eden bower's in flower</i>)<br /> -The soul of one shall be made thy brother,<br /> -And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other.<br /> -(<i>And O the bower and the hour!</i>)."<br /> -</p> - -<p>Baudelaire, in <i>De l'essence de rire,</i> wrote: "The Romantic School, -or, one might say in preference, the Satanical School, has certainly -understood the primordial law of laughter. All the melodramatic -villains, all those who are cursed, damned, fatally marked with a -rictus of the lips that extends to the ears, are in the pure orthodoxy -of laughter. For the rest, they are for the most part illegitimate -sons of the famous Melmoth the Wanderer, the great Satanic creation -of Maturin. What can one conceive of as greater, as more powerful, in -regard to our humanity than this pale and bored Melmoth? He is a living -contradiction; that is why his frozen laughter freezes and wrenches -the entrails."</p> - -<p>Distinctly the most remarkable of the British triumvirate which in the -early part of the century won a momentary fame as the school of horror, -Maturin is much less known to the readers of to-day than either Monk -Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe. Thanks to Balzac, who did <i>Melmoth</i> the honour -of a loan in <i>Melmoth réconcilié,</i> Maturin has attained a certain -fame in France—which, indeed, he still retains. <i>Melmoth</i> has to-day -in France something of that reputation which has kept alive another -English book, <i>Vathek.</i> Did not Balzac, in a moment of indiscriminating -enthusiasm, couple the <i>Melmoth</i> of Maturin with the <i>Don Juan</i> of -Molière, the <i>Faust</i> of Goethe, the <i>Manfred</i> of Byron—<i>grandes images -tracées par les plus grands génies de l'Europe?</i> In other words, -Maturin had his day of fame, in which even men like Scott and Byron -were led into a sympathetic exaggeration. There's one exception. That -Coleridge was hostile, possibly unjust, is likely enough. It should be -mentioned that in 1816 the Drury Lane Committee, who had, reasonably -enough, rejected a play by Coleridge, accepted a monstrous production -of Maturin's named <i>Bertram.</i> The <i>gros bon mélodrame,</i> as Balzac -calls it, was a great success. "It is all sound and fury, signifying -nothing," said Kean, who acted in it; and Kean, who knew his public, -realized that that was why it succeeded. The play was printed, and -ran through seven editions, sinking finally to the condition of a -chap-book, in which its horrors were to be had for sixpence. On this -pretentious work Coleridge—for what reasons we need not inquire—took -the trouble to write an article, or, as it was phrased, to make an -attack. To this Maturin wrote a violent reply, which the good advice -of Scott prevented him from publishing. It is curious at the present -day to read the letter in which Scott urges upon Maturin the wisdom of -silence—not because he is likely to get the worst of the battle, but, -among other reasons, because "Coleridge's work has been little read -or heard of, and has made no general impression whatever—certainly -no impression unfavourable to you or your play. In the opinion of -many, therefore, you will be resenting an injury of which they are -unacquainted with the existence."</p> - -<p>The episode is both comic and instructive. Coleridge and Maturin! Scott -urging on Maturin the charity of mercy to Coleridge, as—"Coleridge -has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust, -to continue to be a favourite with the public!" Poor Maturin, far -from continuing to be a favourite with the public, outlived his -reputation in the course of a somewhat short life. He died at the age -of forty-three. Like the hero of Baudelaire's whimsical and delicious -little tale <i>La Fanfarlo,</i> he preferred artifice to nature, especially -when it was unnecessary. Such is the significant gossip which we have -about the personality of Maturin—gossip which brings out clearly the -deliberate eccentricity which marks his work, which one sees also in -the foppish affected and lackadaisical creature who looks at the reader -as if he were admiring himself before his mirror.</p> - -<p>The word "genius," indeed, is too lofty an epithet to use regarding -a man of great talent certainly, but of nothing more than erratic -and melodramatic talent. <i>Melmoth the Wanderer</i> is in parts very -thrilling; its Elizabethan feast of horrors has a savour as of a lesser -Tourneur. But it is interesting only in parts, and at its best it -never comes near the effect which the great masters of the grotesque -and terrible—Hoffmann, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam—have known how -to produce. A freak of construction, which no artist could have been -guilty of, sends us wandering from story to story in a very maze of -underplots and episodes and interpolations. Six separate stories are -told—all in parenthesis—and the greater part of the book is contained -.within inverted commas. What is fine in it is the vivid, feverish -way in which, from time to time, some story of horror or mystery is -forced home to one's sensations. It is the art of the nightmare, and -it has none of the supremacy in that line of the <i>Contes Drolatiques</i> -of Balzac. But certain scenes in the monastery and in the prisons -of the Inquisition—an attempted escape, a scene where an immured -wretch fights the reptiles in the darkness—are full of a certain -kind of power. That escape, for instance, with its consequences, is -decidedly gruesome, decidedly exciting; but compare it with Dumas, -with the escape of Monte Cristo; compare it with the yet finer -narrative of Casanova—the unsurpassed model of all such narratives -in fiction. Where Casanova and Dumas produce their effect by a simple -statement—a record of external events from which one realizes, as -one could realize in no other way, all the emotions and sensations of -the persons who were undergoing such experiences—Maturin seeks his -effect, and produces it, but in a much lesser degree, by a sort of -excited psychology, an exclamatory insistence on sensation and emotion. -<i>Melmoth the Wanderer</i> is only the object of our historical curiosity. -We have, indeed, and shall always have, "lovers of dark romance."</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_self.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Baudelaire, designed by himself.</p> -</div> - -<h4>III</h4> - - -<h5>I</h5> - - -<p>Baudelaire's genius is satanical; he has in a sense the vision of -Satan. He sees in the past the lusts of the Borgias the sins and vices -of the Renaissance; the rare virtues that flourish like flowers and -weeds, in brothels and in garrets. He sees the vanity of the world with -finer modern tastes than Solomon; for his imagination is abnormal, and -divinely normal. In this age of infamous shames he has no shame. His -flesh endures, his intellect is flawless. He chooses his own pleasures -delicately, sensitively, as he gathers his exotic <i>Fleurs du Mal,</i> in -itself a world, neither a <i>Divina Commedia</i> nor <i>Une Comédie Humaine,</i> -but a world of his own fashioning.</p> - -<p>His vividly imaginative passion, with his instincts of inspiration, are -aided by a determined will, a selfreserve, an intensity of conception, -an implacable insolence, an accurate sense of the exact value of every -word. In the Biblical sense he might have said of his own verse: "It -is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh." The work, as the man, is -subtle, strange, complex, morbid, enigmatical, refined, paradoxical, -spiritual, animal. To him a scent means more than a sunset, a perfume -more than a flower, the tempting demons more than the unseductive -angels. He loves luxury as he loves wine; a picture of Manet's as a -woman's fan.</p> - -<p>Fascinated by sin, he is never the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as -the Original Sin; he studies sin as he studies evil, with a stem logic; -he finds in horror a kind of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; -rarely in hideous things, save when his sense of what I call a moralist -makes him moralize, as in his terrible poem, <i>Une Charogne.</i> He has -pity for misery, hate for progress. He is analytic, he is a learned -casuist, whom I can compare with the formidable Spanish Jesuit, Thomas -Sanchez, who wrote the Latin <i>Aphorismi Matrimonio</i> (1629).</p> - -<p>His soul swims on music played on no human instrument, but on strings -that the Devil pulls, to which certain living puppets dance in -grotesque fashion, to unheard-of rhythms, to the sound of violins -strummed on by evil spirits in Witches' Sabbats. Some swing in the -air, as hanged dead people on gallows, and, as their bones rattle in -the wind, one sees Judas Iscariot, risen out of Hell for an instant's -gratification, as he grimaces on these grimacing visages.</p> - -<p><i>Les fleurs du mal</i> is the most curious, subtle, fascinating, and -extraordinary creation of an entire world ever fashioned in modern -ages. Baudelaire paints vice and degradation of the utmost depth, with -cynicism and with pity, as in the poem I have referred to, where the -cult of the corpse is the sensuality of ascetism, or the ascetism of -sensuality: the mania of fakirs; material by passion, Christian by -perversity.</p> - -<p>And, in a sense, he is our modern Catullus; in his furies, his -negations, his outcries, his Paganism, his inconceivable passion for -woman's flesh; yet Lesbia is for ever Lesbia. Still, Baudelaire in -his <i>Franciscae meae</i> <i>Laudes,</i> and with less sting but with as much -sensual sense of the splendour of sex, gives a magnificent Latin eulogy -of a learned and pious modiste, that ends:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Patera gemmis corusca,<br /> -Panis salsus, mollis esca,<br /> -Divinum vinum, Francisca."<br /> -</p> - -<p>And he praises the Decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette -merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre -les négligences forcés d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des -règles."</p> - -<p><i>Don Juan aux enfers</i> is a perfect Delacroix. In <i>Danse macabre</i> -there is the universal swing of the dancers who dance the Dance of -Death. Death herself, in her extreme horror, ghastly, perfumed with -myrrh, mixes her irony with men's insanity as she dances the Sabbat -of Pleasure. He shows us the infamous menagerie of the vices in the -guise of reptiles; our chief enemy Ennui is <i>ce monstre délicat.</i> -There are Vampires, agonies of the damned alive; <i>Le possédé</i> with -his excruciating cry out of all his fibres: <i>O mon cher Belzébuth! je -t'adore!</i> And there are some, subtler and silent, that seem to move, -softly, as the feet of Night, to the sound of faint music, or under the -shroud of a sunset.</p> - -<p><i>Les fleurs du mal</i> are grown in Parisian soil, exotics that have -the strange, secretive, haunting touch and taint of the earth's or -of the body's corruption. In his sense of beauty there is a certain -revolt, a spiritual malady, which may bring with it the heated air -of an alcove or the intoxicating atmosphere of the East. Never -since Villon has the flesh of woman been more adored and abhorred. -Both aware of the original sin of <i>l'unique animál</i>—the seed of our -moral degradation—Villon creates his <i>Grosse Margot</i> and Baudelaire -<i>Delphine et Hippolyte.</i> Villon's is a scullion-wench, and in the -Ballad a Brothel as infamous, as foul, as abominable as a Roman Lupanar -surges before one's astonished vision. And this comes after his -supreme, his consummate praise of ruinous old age on a harlot's body: -<i>Les regrets de la Belle Heaulmière.</i> It is one of the immortal things -that exist in the world, that I can compare only with Rodin's statue in -bronze: both equal incarnations of the symbolical conception that sin -brought shame into the first woman's flesh.</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Que m'en reste-il? Honte et Péché:"<br /> -</p> - -<p>cries each mouth, cries to the end of earth's eternity.</p> - -<p>In Baudelaire's <i>Femmes damnées</i> there is the aching soul of the -spirit's fatal malady: that sexual malady for which there is no remedy: -the Lesbian sterile perilous divinisation of flesh for flesh, virginal -or unvirginal flesh <i>with</i> flesh. In vain desire, of that one desire -that exists beyond all possible satisfaction, the desire of an utter -annihilation of body with body in that ecstasy which can never be -absolutely achieved without man's flesh, they strive, unconsumed with -even the pangs of their fruitless desires. They live only with a life -of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome -bounds of nature into the violence of a perversity which is at times -almost insane. And all this sorrowful and tortured flesh is consumed -with that feverish desire that leaves them only a short space for their -desire's fruitions.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_cover_fleur.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Les fleurs du mal, 1857.</p> -</div> - -<h5>II</h5> - -<p>Certain of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the -hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a serpentine girl's skin; -some the odour of woman's flesh. Certain spirits are intoxicated by -these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of -their vices, from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a -cruel imagination has fashioned these naked images of the Seven Deadly -Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall; that smile not even in -Hell, in whose flames they writhe. One conceives them there and between -the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their -infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages; -they are incapable of imagining God's justice.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire dramatizes these living images of his spirit and of his -imagination, these fabulous creatures of his inspiration, these -macabre ghosts, in a fashion utterly different from that of other -tragedians—Shakespeare, and Aristophanes in his satirical Tragedies, -his lyrical Comedies; yet in the same sense of being the writer where -beauty marries unvirginally the sons of ancient Chaos.</p> - -<p>In these pages swarm (in his words) all the corruptions and all the -scepticisms; ignoble criminals without convictions, detestable hags -that gamble, the cats that are like men's mistresses; Harpagon; the -exquisite, barbarous, divine, implacable, mysterious Madonna of the -Spanish style; the old men; the drunkards, the assassins, the lovers -(their deaths and lives); the owls; the vampires whose kisses raise -from the grave the corpse of its own self; the Irremediable that -assails its origin: Conscience in Evil! There is an almost Christ-like -poem on his Passion, <i>Le reniement de Saint-Pierre,</i> an almost Satanic -denunciation of God in <i>Abel and Cain,</i> and with them the Evil Monk, -an enigmatical symbol of Baudelaire's soul, of his work, of all that -his eyes love and hate. Certain of these creatures play in travesties, -dance in ballets. For all the Arts are transformed, transfigured, -transplanted out of their natural forms to pass in magnificent state -across the stage: the stage with the abyss of Hell in front of it.</p> - -<p>"Sensualist" (I quote a critic), "but the most profound of sensualists, -and, furious of being no more than that, he goes, in his sensation, to -the extreme limit, to the mysterious gate of infinity against which he -knocks, yet knows not how to open, with rage he contracts his tongue -in the vain effort." Yet centuries before him Dante entered Hell, -traversed it in imagination from its endless beginning to its endless -end; returned to earth to write, for the spirit of Beatrice and for the -world, that <i>Divina Commedia,</i> of which in Verona certain women said:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Lo, he that strolls to Hell and back<br /> -At will I Behold him, how Hell's reek<br /> -Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek."<br /> -</p> - -<p>It is Baudelaire who, in Hell as in earth, finds a certain Satan in -such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essentially -demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily, -as if the Devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets. Here -in such satanic and romantic atmosphere one hears dissonances, the -discords of the instruments in the Sabbats, the howlings of irony, the -vengeance of the vanquished.</p> - -<p>I give one sentence of Gautier's on Baudelaire. "This poet of <i>Les -fleurs du mal</i> loved what one wrongly calls the style of decadence, -which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point -of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilizations -that aged: a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and -of rarities, turning for ever backward the limits of the language, -using technical vocabularies, taking colours from all the palettes, -notes from all the keyboards, striving to render one's thought in what -is most ineffable, and form in its most vague and evasive contours, -listening so as to translate them, the subtle confidences of neurosis, -the passionate confessions of ancient passions in their depravity and -the bizarre hallucinations of the fixed idea." He adds: "In regard to -his verse there is the language already veined in the greenness of -decomposition, the tainted language of the later Roman Empire, and the -complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek -art fallen in delinquencies." See how perfectly the phrase <i>la langue -de faisandée</i> suits the exotic style of Baudelaire!</p> - -<p>Yet, tainted as the style is from time to time, never was the man -himself tainted: he who in modern verse gave first of all an unknown -taste to sensations; he who painted vice in all its shame; whose most -savorous verses are perfumed as with subtle aromas; whose women are -bestial, rouged, sterile, bodies without souls; whose <i>Litanies de -Satan</i> have that cold irony which he alone possessed in its extremity, -in these so-called impious lines which reveal, under whatever disguise, -his belief in a mathematical superiority established by God from -all eternity, and whose least infraction is punished by certain -chastisements, in this world as in the next.</p> - -<p>I can imagine Baudelaire in his hours of nocturnal terrors, sleepless -in a hired woman's bed, saying to himself these words of Marlowe's -<i>Satan:</i></p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Why, this is Hell, nor can I out of it!"<br /> -</p> - -<p>in accents of eternal despair wrenched from the lips of the Arch Fiend. -And the genius of Baudelaire, I can but think, was as much haunted as -Marlowe's with, in Lamb's words, "a wandering in fields where curiosity -is forbidden to go, approaching the dark gulf near enough to look in."</p> - - -<h5>III</h5> - -<p>Has Baudelaire <i>l'amour du mal pour le mal?</i> In a certain sense, yes; -in a certain sense, no. He believes in evil as in Satan and God—the -primitive forces that govern worlds: the eternal enemies. He sees the -germs of evil everywhere, few of the seeds of virtue. He sees pass -before him the world's drama: he is one of the actors, he plays his -parts cynically, ironically. He speaks in rhythmic cadences.</p> - -<p>But, above all, he watches the dancers; these also are elemental; -and the tragic fact is that the dancers dance for their living. For -their living, for their pleasure, for the pleasure of pleasing others. -So passes the fantastic part of their existence, from the savage who -dances silent dances—for, indeed, all dancers are silent—but without -music, to the dancer who dances for us on the stage, who turns always -to the sound of music. There is an equal magic in the dance and in -song; both have their varied rhythms; both, to use an image, the -rhythmic beating of our hearts. It is imagined that dancing and music -were the oldest of the arts. Rhythm has rightly been called the soul of -dancing; both are instinctive.</p> - -<p>The greatest French poet after Villon, the most disreputable and -the most creative poet in French literature, the greatest artist in -French verse, and, after Verlaine, the most passionate, perverse, -lyrical, visionary, and intoxicating of modern poets, comes Baudelaire, -infinitely more perverse, morbid, exotic than these other poets. In -his verse there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity, which -has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with horror, -in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every -complication of taste, the exasperation of perfumes, the irritant of -cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption to the creation and -adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served -before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a -prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine, -however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length -sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady of -love.</p> - -<p>The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that -of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the -Goncourts, Zola, and Leconte de Lisle. Even Baudelaire, in whom the -spirit is always an uneasy guest at the orgy of life, had a certain -theory of Realism which tortures many of his poems into strange, -metallic shapes and fills them with irritative odours, and disturbs -them with a too deliberate rhetoric of the flesh. Flaubert, the -greatest novelist after Balzac, the only impeccable novelist who ever -lived, was resolute to be the creator of a world in which art—formal -art—was the only escape from the burden of reality. It was he who -wrote to Baudelaire, who had sent him <i>Les fleurs du mal</i>: "I devoured -your volume from one end to another, read it over and over again, verse -by verse, word by word, and all I can say is it pleases and enchants -me. You overwhelm me with your colours. What I admire most in your book -is its perfect art. You praise flesh without loving it."</p> - -<p>There is something Oriental in Baudelaire's genius; a nostalgia that -never left him after he had seen the East: there where one finds -hot-midnights, feverish days, strange sensations; for only the East, -when one has lived in it, can excite one's vision to a point of ardent -ecstasy. He is the first modern poet who gave to a calculated scheme of -versification a kind of secret and sacred joy. He is before all things -the artist, always sure of his form. And his rarefied imagination aided -him enormously not only in the perfecting of his verse and prose, but -in making him create the criticism of modern art.</p> - -<p>Next after Villon, Baudelaire is the poet of Paris. Like a damned soul -(to use one of his imaginary images) he wanders at nights, an actual -<i>noctambule,</i> alone or with Villiers, Gautier, in remote quarters, sits -in cafés, goes to casinos, the <i>Rat Mort.</i> "The Wind of Prostitution" -(I quote his words) torments him, the sight of hospitals, of gambling -houses, the miserable creatures one comes on in certain quarters, -even the fantastic glitter of lamplights. All this he needs: a kind -of intense curiosity, of excitement, in his fréquentation of these -streets, comes over him, like one who has taken opium. And this is only -one part of his life, he who lived and died solitary, a confessor of -sins who has never told the whole truth, <i>le mauvais moins</i> of his own -sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel.</p> - -<p>He is the first who ever related things in the modulated tone of the -confessional and never assumed an inspired air. The first also who -brings into modern literature the chagrin that bites at our existence -like serpents. He admits to his diabolical taste, not quite exceptional -in him; one finds it in Petronius, Rabelais, Balzac. In spite of his -magnificent <i>Litanies de Satan,</i> he is no more of the satanical school -than Byron. Yet both have the same sardonic irony, the delight of -mystification, of deliberately irritating solemn people's convictions. -Both, who died tragically young, had their hours of sadness, when -one doubts and denies everything; passionately regretting youth, -turning away, in sinister moods, in solitude, from that too intense -self-knowledge that, like a mirror, shows the wrinkles on our cheeks.</p> - - - -<h4>IV</h4> - - -<p>Baudelaire, whose acquaintance with English was perfect, was thrilled -in 1846 when he read certain pages of Poe; he seemed to see in his -prose a certain similarity in words and thoughts, even in ideas, as -if he himself had written some of them; these pages of a prose-writer -whom he named "the master of the horrible, the prince of mystery." -For four years he set himself to the arduous task of translating the -prose of a man of genius, whom he certainly discovered for France and -for French readers. And his translation is so wonderful that it is far -and away finer than a marvellous original. His first translation was -printed in <i>Le Liberté de Pensée</i> in July, 1848, and he only finished -his translations at the end of sixteen years. In 1852 the <i>Revue de -Paris</i> printed his <i>Edgar Allan Poe; sa vie et ses ouvrages.</i> His -translations came in this order: <i>Histoires extraordinaires</i> (1856, -which I have before me); <i>Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires</i> (1857, -which I also possess); <i>Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym</i> (1858); <i>Euréka</i> -(1864); <i>Histoires grotesques et sérieuses</i> (1865).</p> - -<p>One knows the fury with which (in 1855) he set himself the prodigious -task of translating one of Poe's stories every day; which, to one's -amazement, he actually did. Always he rages over his proofs, over -those printers' devils, an accursed race; every proof is sent back to -the printing press, revised; underlined, covered in the margins with -imperative objurgations, written with an angry hand and accentuated -with notes of exclamation. Swinburne shared the same fate. He writes -to Chatto a violent letter on the incompetence of printers: "their -scandalous negligence," "ruinous and really disgraceful blunders," -"numberless wilful errors," written in a state of perfect frenzy. -"These damned printers," he cries at them, as Baudelaire did; "who have -done their utmost to disfigure my book. The appearance of the pages is -disgraceful—a chaos." And he actually writes one letter to complain of -a dropped comma!</p> - -<p>The <i>Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe</i> of 1857 are infinitely finer than -those of 1856. He begins with: <i>Littérature de décadence!</i> and with -a paradox, of his invention, of the Sphynx without an enigma. <i>Genus -irritabile vatum!</i> a Latin phrase for the irritable race of artists, is -irrefutable, and certainly irrefutable are all Baudelaire's arguments, -divinations, revelations of Poe's genius and of Poe's defects.</p> - -<p>Poe's genius has been generally misunderstood. He gave himself to -many forms of misconception: by his eccentricities, his caprices, his -fantastic follies, his natural insolence, his passionate excitations -(mostly imaginary), his delinquencies in regard to morals, his -over-acute sensibility, his exasperating way of exasperating the -general public he hated, his analysing problems that had defied any -living writer's ingenuity to have compassed (as in his detective -stories); above all, his almost utter alienation from that world he -lived in, dreamed in, never worshipped, died in.</p> - -<p>And he remains still a kind of enigma; in spite of the fact that the -most minute details of his life are known, and that he never outlived -his reputation. Yes, enigmatical in various points: as to his not -giving even the breath of life to the few ghosts of women who cross -his pages; of never diving very deeply into any heart but his own. Are -not most of his men malign, perverse, atrocious, abnormal, never quite -normal, evocations of himself? From Dupin to Fortunato, from the Man in -the Crowd to the Man in the Pit, from Prince Prospero to Usher, are not -these <i>revenants,</i> in the French sense?</p> - -<p>There is something demoniacal in his imagination; for Poe never, I -might say, almost never, lets his readers have an instant's rest; any -more than the Devil lets his subjects have any actual surcease of -torment. Yet, as there is a gulf between Good and Evil, no one, by any -chance, falls into the abyss.</p> - -<p>Poe, of course, writes with his nerves, and therefore only nervous -writers have ever understood him. It is Baudelaire, the most nervous of -modern writers, who says of Poe that no one, before him, had affirmed -imperturbably the natural wickedness of man. Yet this statement is a -paradox; a lesser paradox is that man is originally perverse; for all -are not <i>nés marques pour le mal?</i></p> - -<p>Poe is not a great critic; he says certain unforgettable things, with -even an anticipation of the work of later writers. "<i>I know,</i>" he -says, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music—I mean of -the tme musical expression. Give it any undue decision—imbue it with -any very determinate tone—and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, -its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character" Where he is great -is where he writes: "I have a pure contempt for mere prejudice and -conventionality;" and mostly where he defines himself. "Nor is there an -instance to be discovered, among all I have published, of my having set -forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical -topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by -something that wore the semblance of a reason."</p> - -<p>His fault is that he is too lenient to woman poets who never merited -that name and to men of mere talent; yet he annihilates many undeserved -reputations; perhaps, after all, "thrice slain." No one pointed out -the errors in Mrs. Browning's verses as he did; her affectations such -as "God's possibles;" her often inefficient rhythm; her incredibly bad -rhymes. Yet, for all this, he, whose ear as a poet was almost perfect, -made the vile rhyme of "vista" with "sister," that raised the righteous -wrath of Rossetti.</p> - -<p>In his essay on Hawthorne, he warns one from a certain heresy. "The -deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as an -allegory, is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's -ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his -not having attempted to overcome." But it is on pages 196-198 of his -<i>Marginalia</i> that he gives his final statement in regard to Verse, -the Novel, and the Short Story; so far as these questions have any -finality. As, for instance, how the highest genius uses his powers in -"the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might -be perused in an hour." As for the Story, it has this immense advantage -over a novel that its brevity adds to the intensity of the effect; -that "Beauty can be better treated in the poem, but that one can use -terror and passion and horror as artistic means." Poe was a master of -the grotesque, of the extraordinary, never of the passionate.</p> - -<p>There is an unholy magic in some of his verse and prose; in his -hallucinations, so real and so unreal; his hysterics, his sense of the -contradiction between the nerves and the spirit; in his scientific -analyses of terrible, foreseen effects, where generally the man of whom -he writes is driven into evil ways. For did he not state this axiom: -"A good writer has always his last line in view when he has written -his first line?" This certainly was part of his <i>métier,</i> made of -combinations and of calculations.</p> - -<p>I read somewhere, "There is nothing wonderful in 'The Raven.'" It -is really a <i>tour de force;</i> even if the metre is not invented, he -invented the inner double rhymes, and the technique is flawless. It -has Black Magic in it; the unreality of an intoxication; a juggler's -skill; it will be always his most famous poem. In his analysis of these -verses, does not Poe undervalue the inspiration that created them? Yes, -by an amusing vanity. And, as Baudelaire says: "A little charlatanism -is always permitted to a man of genius, and it doesn't suit him badly. -It is like the rouge on the cheeks of a woman actually fair, a new form -of seasoning for the spirit."</p> - -<p>There was too much of the woman in the making of Poe, manly as he was -in every sense. He had no strength of will, was drawn from seduction -to seduction; had not enough grip on his constitution to live wisely, -to live well. He drifted, let himself be drifted. He had no intention -of ruining himself, yet ruined he was, and there was nothing that -could have saved him. Call it his fate or his evil star, he was -doomed inevitably to an early death. <i>Pas de chance!</i> Yes—let one -suppose—had he himself chosen the form of his death, he might have -desired to die like the sick women in his pages—<i>mourant de maux -bizarres.</i></p> - -<p>Baudelaire, the most scrupulous of the men of letters of our age, spent -his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French -poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose -becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and -surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better -than a marvellous original. Often an enigma to himself, much of his -life and of his adventures and of his experiences remain enigmatical. -I shall choose one instance out of many; that is to say, what was the -original of his dedication of <i>L'Heautimoromenos</i> in <i>Les Fleurs du -Mal</i>, and of his dedication of <i>Les paradis artificiels</i> to a woman -whose initials are J. G. F.?</p> - -<p>The poem was first printed in <i>L 'Artiste</i>, May 10, 1857, together with -two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical: -<i>Franciscae Meae Laudes,</i> and <i>L'Irrémédiable.</i> The Latin verses, -composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs -to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent -as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the -Dedication: <i>Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote.</i> The -verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who -absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has -spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his -hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine -wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its -name, on the comedy of Terence, <i>The Self-Tormentor,</i> where, in fact, -the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic -earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare's <i>Timon of -Athens.</i> Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest -confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women. -He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a -discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in -his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror. -He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his -own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal -laughter.</p> - -<p>The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall -into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with -reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases -on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable -fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he -intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the -Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes -with satanical glances and is: <i>La conscience dans le mal!</i></p> - -<p>In <i>Les fleurs du mal</i> (1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's -handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find -that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages -123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems -to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" with -<i>Piscina plena virtutis;</i> "Dans un Styx bourbeux" with <i>Sicat beneficum -Lethe;</i> "Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" with <i>Labris vocem redde -mutis!</i> "Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le -vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu -son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une -modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication of <i>Les paradis,</i> -"une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason -for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough: -a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry. -One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il -traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce -sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words, -taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming -uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman -Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes -that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which -seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -<i>In nocte mea taberna.</i><br /> -<i>Flambeau des grâces sataniques.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>I return to my copy of <i>Les paradis artificiels</i> (1860). The dedication -to J. G. F. begins: "<i>Ma chère amie,</i> Common-sense tells us that -terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality -is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives -with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the -imaginations that she haunts.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_front_paradis.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Les paradis artificiels, 1861.</p> -</div> - -<p>"Besides, it seems to me there is little enough reason why this -dedication should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the -writer's satisfaction, that any kind of book ought to be understood, -except by him or by her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed, -indispensable that it has been written for <i>any one?</i> I have, for my -part, so little taste for the living world that, like certain sensible -and stay-at-home women who send, I am told, their letters to imaginary -friends by the post, I would willingly write only for the dead.</p> - -<p>"But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it is -to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who now -turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many -transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a -living being enjoys the privilege of being able to draw new and subtle -pleasures even from sorrow, from catastrophe, and from fatality.</p> - -<p>"You will see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and -solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending -his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped -his sweating forehead and <i>refreshed his lips parched by fever;</i> and -you will divine the gratitude of another Orestes, whose nightmares -you have so often watched over, and whose unendurable slumbers you -dissipated, with a light and tender hand."</p> - -<p>I have to say that in the last sentences I have translated Baudelaire -uses "tu" instead of "vous," and that he does the same in his Latin -verses and in the verses next after it. The question still remains: who -was the woman of the initials?</p> - -<p>What is certainly not a solution of the unfathomable mystery of -this enigmatical woman, but which is, in a certain sense, a clue, -I find on pages 55-67 of the book I have referred to, a narrative -that seems more than likely to have been hers. He says this to make -one understand better the mixture of dreams and hallucinations in -haschisch, as having been sent him by a woman: "It is a woman, rather -a mature woman, curious, of an excitable spirit, who, having yielded -to the temptation of using the drug, describes her visions." These are -superb and fantastic visions, written by an imaginative, sensitive, -and suggestive woman. She begins: "However bizarre and astonishing are -these sensations that intoxicated my folly for twelve hours (twelve or -twenty? I don't know which) I shall never return to them. The spiritual -excitement is too vivid, the fatigue too much to endure, and, to say -all, in this childish enchantment I find something criminal." She adds: -"I have heard that the enthusiasm of poets and of creators is not -unlike what I have experienced, in spite of the fact that I have always -imagined that such men whose delight is to move us ought to be of a -really calm temperament; but if poetical delirium has any resemblance -with what a little teaspoon full of drugged jam has given me, I think -that all such pleasures cost dear to poets, and it is not without a -certain prosaic satisfaction that I return to real life."</p> - -<p>In these sentences Baudelaire gives one a certain clue as to the -identity of this woman. "But, above all, observe that in this woman's -story the hallucination is of a bastard kind, and whose reason of being -is to be an exterior spectacle; the mind is no more than a mirror -where the surrounding environment is transformed in an extraordinary -fashion. Besides, we see intervene what I must call the moral -hallucination: the subject believes he is subjected to an expiation, -but the feminine temperament, which is little accustomed to analysis, -does not permit itself to note the singularly optimistic character of -this hallucination. The benevolent regard of the Olympian Divinities -is poetized by a kind of varnish essentially <i>haschischin.</i> I cannot -say that this woman has escaped from the sense of remorse; but that -her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and of -regret, have returned to their former sensibility."</p> - -<p>I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical -casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but -not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra, -to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by -the same woman to whom <i>Le paradis</i> is dedicated. Like Orestes, he -might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered -father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words: -"And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now, -how I keep the watches of the night—how often I bewail my hapless -sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given -of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of -lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J. -G. F.'s?</p> - -<p>In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed: <i>Théophile Gautier, par Charles -Baudelaire;</i> a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as -only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was -capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier -asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant: -"Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French -language, even l'<i>Argot.</i></p> - -<p>Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he -ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave -it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac.</p> - -<p>"Not for the first," he says, in his <i>Study of Shakespeare,</i> "and -probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well -as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, -to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented -fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the -more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of -Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition -and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing -could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in -my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.</p> - -<p>"'I have been many a time astonished that to pass for an observer -should be Balzac's great title to fame. To me it had always seemed that -it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. -All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated -himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the -highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in -his <i>Human Comedy</i> are keener after living, more active and cunning in -their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous -in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real -world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the -very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle -with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all beings of the -outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in a strong relief -and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his -figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their fights. -Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate -ambition to see everything, to bring everything to fight, to guess -everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down -more forcibly the principal fines so as to preserve the perspective of -the whole. He reminds me of some fines of those etchers who are never -satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into -very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing -natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But -this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More -properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But -who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a -method which may permit him to invest—and that with a sure hand—what -is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? -Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.'"</p> - - - -<h4>V</h4> - - -<p>"T am far from sure," said Paul Verlaine to me in Paris, "that the -philosophy of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam will not one day become the -formula of our century." Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the -belief common to all Eastern mystics. And there is in everything he -wrote a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and deliberate, which -seems to me to be the natural consequences of his intellectual pride. -It is part of his curiosity in souls—as in the equally sinister -curiosity of Baudelaire—to prefer the complex to the simple, the -perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. His heroes -are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies are the shock -of spirit against matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. -They are on the margins of a wisdom too great for their capacity; they -are haunted by dark powers, instincts of ambiguous passions. And in the -women his genius created there is the immortal weariness of beauty; -they are enigmas to themselves; they desire, and know not why they -refrain; they do good and evil with the lifting of an eyelid, and are -guilty and innocent of all the sins of the earth.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_lettre_auto.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Autograph letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859.</p> -</div> - -<p>Villiers wrote these significant sentences in the preface to <i>La -Révolte</i> (1870): "One ought to write for the entire world. Besides, -what does justice matter to us? He who from his very birth does -not contain in himself his proper glory shall never know the -real significance of this word." In the literature of the fantastic -there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de -l'Isle-Adam—a writer whose singular personality and work render him -perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of -letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his -life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived, -as he says somewhere, "par politesse," ceaselessly experimenting -upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an -extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic -contrasts. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race, -a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more -especially, of the <i>bourgeois</i> multitude of letters and of life: it -is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look -for the source of that violent and <i>voulu</i> eccentricity which mars so -much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is -unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take -notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has -placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question -if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious, -impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers "les -gens de sens commun" are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of -his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface, -<i>Genus irritabile vatum.</i></p> - -<p>In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a -writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it -be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer -who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and -a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin -de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from -exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite -sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere -there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in -so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, -contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions.</p> - -<p>Villiers has written much. The volume of <i>Contes cruels</i> (published -in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains -specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind -the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, -and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no -other collection of tales in any language on which so various and -finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut -of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The -<i>Tales</i> of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the <i>Twice-Told -Tales</i> of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; -both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are -but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the -other volumes. <i>La révolte,</i> a drama in one act in prose, represented -at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of -certain <i>Contes cruels</i>; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place -near them. <i>L'Ève future</i> (1886), that most immense and ferocious -of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the -<i>Contes</i> swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of -plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale -<i>L'Amour suprême,</i> attempts to be a second set of <i>Contes Cruels;</i> it -has nothing of their distinction, except in <i>Akëdysséril. Tribulat -Bonhomet,</i> which appeared in 1887—"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, -couleur du siècle," as the author has called it—is largely made up of -an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes, -<i>Histoires insolites</i> (1888) and <i>Nouveaux contes cruels</i> (1889), there -are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating -horror of <i>La torture par l'espérance,</i> and the delicate cynicism -of <i>Les amies de pension.</i> As for the prose drama in five acts, <i>Le -Nouveau Monde</i> (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize—"une -médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres -seductions encore"—there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play -with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air; -but what would you have of a "prize poem"? It was acted at one of -the theatres at Paris in 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante -Comte d'Orsay, and it had a very gratifying "literary" success. Such, -omitting the early works, of which I have every first edition, and the -numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published, -are the works we have before us from which to study "peut-être le -seul des hommes de notre génération qui ait eu en lui l'étincelle du -génie"—as Catulle Mendès, ever generous in his literary appreciation -of friend and foe, has said in that charming book, <i>La légende du -Parnasse contemporaine.</i> I shall speak chiefly of the <i>Contes cruels,</i> -and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach -one after another the various sides of this multiform and manysided -genius.</p> - -<p>First and before all, Villiers is a humorist, and he is a humorist -who has no limitations, who has command of every style, who has -essayed every branch of the literature of the fantastic. There are -some halfdozen of tales—all contained in the <i>Contes cruels</i>—which, -for certain of the rarest qualities of writing—subtleties, delicate -perversities, exquisite complexities of irony essentially modern—can -be compared, so far as I know, with nothing outside the <i>Petits poèmes -en prose</i> of Baudelaire. <i>Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, Maryelle, -Sentimentalisme, Le convive des dernières fêtes, La Reine Ysabeau</i>—one -might add the solitary poem inserted, jewel amid jewels, amongst the -prose—these pieces, with which one or two others have affinities of -style though not of temper, constitute a distinct division of Villiers' -work. They are all, more or less, studies in modern love, supersubtie -and yet perfectly finished little studies, so light in touch, -manipulated with so delicate a finesse, so exquisite and unerring -in tact, that the most monstrous paradoxes, the most incredible -assumptions of cynicism, become possible, become acceptable. Of them -all I think the masterpiece is <i>Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre;</i> and -it is one of the most perfect little works of art in the world. The -mockery of the thing is elemental; cynicism touches its zenith. It -becomes tender, it becomes sublime. A perversion simply monstrous -appears, in the infantine simplicity of its presentment, touching, -credible, heroic. The edge of laughter is skirted by the finest -of inches; and, as a last charm, one perceives, through the irony -itself—the celestial, the elementary irony—a faint and sweet perfume -as of a perverted odour of sanctity. The style has the delicacy of the -etcher's needle. From beginning to end every word has been calculated, -and every word is an inspiration. No other tale quite equals this -supreme achievement; but in <i>Maryelle,</i> in <i>Sentimentalisme,</i> and -the others there is the same note, and a perfection often only less -absolute. <i>Maryelle</i> and <i>Sentimentalisme</i> are both studies in a -special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of -fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest -precision. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The -experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and -tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate -lightness of the style—the gentle, well-bred, <i>disengaged</i> tone of -a <i>raconteur</i> without reserve or after-thought, or with all that -scrupulously hid—there is a sort of double irony, a criss-cross and -intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in -spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other -side of cynicism. <i>La Reine Ysabeau</i> and <i>Le Convive des Dernières -Fêtes</i> sound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost -by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of -the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance, -and fatality is unrolled before our eyes—the something enigmatical -in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness. -Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this -incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis -of the first sentence to the "Priez pour eux," every touch tells, and -every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points -akin to it, is the strange tale of <i>Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes,</i> -perhaps, after the more epic chronicle of <i>La Reine Ysabeau,</i> the -finest of Villiers' tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale -is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying -episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It -is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive -shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the -same <i>frisson</i> in the latter part of <i>Tribulat Bonhomet,</i> and in the -marvellous little study in the supernatural <i>L'Intersigne,</i> one of the -most impressive of Villiers' works. But here the sensation is not due -to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror—distinct -and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind—is but one -among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a -whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the -same <i>bizarrerie</i>—the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendrée, Antoine -Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C., -and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged -with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the -touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric -light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves—scenes which -have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with -average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed -their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one -is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of -exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony -is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard -who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a -sarcastic smile.</p> - -<p>What is Villiers' view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on -the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer; -I have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the -fantastic edifice of his work.</p> - -<p>The group of tales I have been considering reveals the humorist in -his capacity of ironical observer: their wit is a purely impersonal -mockery, they deal with life from the point of view of the artist, -and they are pre-eminently artistic, free from any direct purpose or -preoccupation. In the pseudo-scientific burlesques, and the kindred -satires on ignorant and blatant mediocrity, the smile of the Comic -Muse has given place to "Laughter holding both his sides;" absurdity -caps absurdity, order and measure seem to be flung to the winds, and -in this new Masque of Anarchy sharp blows are given, the jests are -barbed, and they fly not quite at random. "L'Esprit du siècle," says -Villiers, "ne l'oublions pas, est aux machines." And it is in the -mechanical miracles of modern science that he has found a new and -unworked and inexhaustible field of satire. Jules Verne has used -these new discoveries with admirable skill in his tales of extravagant -wonder; Villiers seizes them as a weapon, and in his hands it becomes -deadly, and turns back upon the very age which forged it; as a means -of comedy, and the comedy becomes soberly Rabelaisian, boisterous and -bitter at once, sparing nothing, so that he can develop the deliberate -plan of "an apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last sigh," -make a sober proposal for the utilization of the sky as a means of -advertisement (<i>Affichage Céleste</i>), and describe in all its detail -and through all its branches the excellent invention of Bathybius -Bottom, <i>La machine à gloire,</i> a mechanical contrivance for obtaining -dramatic success with the expense and inconvenience of that important -institution, the Claque. In these wild and whirling satires, which are -at bottom as cold and biting as Swift, we have a quite new variety -of style, a style of patchwork and grimaces. Familiar words take new -meanings, and flash through all the transformations of the pantomime -before our eyes; strange words start up from forgotten corners; words -and thoughts, never brought together since Babel, clash and stumble -into a protesting combination; and in the very aspect of the page there -is something startling. The absurdity of these things is so extreme, -an absurdity so supremely serious, that we are carried almost beyond -laughter, and on what is by virtue of its length the most important of -the scientific burlesques, <i>L'Ève future,</i> it is almost impossible to -tell whether the author is really in sober earnest or whether the whole -thing is a colossal joke. Its 375 pages are devoted to a painfully -elaborate description of the manufacture, under the direction of the -"très-illustre inventeur américain, M. Edison," of an <i>artificial -woman!</i> No such fundamental satire, such ghastly exposure of "poor -humanity," has been conceived since Swift. The sweep of it covers human -nature, and its essential laughter breaks over the very elements of -man. Unfortunately the book is much too long; its own weight sinks it; -the details become wearisome, the seriousness of the absurdity palls.</p> - -<p>So far we have had the humorist, a humorist who appears to be cynic -to the backbone, cynic equally in the Parisian perversities of <i>Les -demoiselles de Bienfilâtre</i> and the scientific hilarity of <i>La machine -à gloire.</i> But we have now to take account of one of those "exceptions" -of which I spoke—work which has nothing of the humorist in it, work -in which there is not a trace of cynicism, work full of spirituality -and all the virtues. <i>Virginie et Paul</i> is a-story of young love -comparable only with that yet lovelier story, the magical chapter, in -<i>Richard Feverel.</i> This Romeo and Juliet are both fifteen, and their -little moment of lovers' chat, full of the poetry of the most homely -and natural things, is brought before us in a manner so exquisitely -true, so perfectly felt, that it is not even sentimental. Every -word is a note of music, a song of nightingales among the roses—; -<i>per amica silentia lunæ</i>—and there is not a wrong note in it, no -exaggeration, nothing but absolute truth and beauty. The strange and -charming little romance of <i>L'Inconnue</i> is another of these tales of -ingenuous love, full of poetry fresh from lovers' hearts, and with -a delicate rhythmical effect in its carefully modulated, style. -<i>L'Amour Suprême,</i> a less perfect work of art, exhales the same aroma -of tender and etherealized affection—an adoring and almost mystic -love of the ideal incarnated in woman. In the bizarre narrative of -<i>Véra,</i> which recalls the supernatural romances of Poe, there is again -this strange spirituality of tone; and in the dazzling prose poem -of <i>Akëdysséril</i>—transfigured prose glowing with Eastern colour, a -tale of old-world passion full of barbaric splendour, and touched, -for all its remoteness, with the human note—in this epic fragment, -considered in France, I believe, to be, in style at least, Villiers' -masterpiece, it is humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal that -we contemplate. Humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal!—think -for a moment of <i>Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre,</i> of <i>L'Analyse -chimique du dernier soupir!</i> What, then, are we to believe? Has -Villiers two natures, and can he reconcile irréconciliable opposites? -Or if one is the real man, which one? And what of the other? What, in -a word, is the true Villiers? "For, as he thinketh in his heart, so is -he."</p> - -<p>The question is not a difficult one to answer; it depends upon an -elementary knowledge of the nature of that perfectly intelligible -being, the cynic. The typical cynic is essentially a tender-hearted, -sensitive idealist; his cynicism is in the first instance a recoil, -then, very often, a disguise. Most of us come into the world without -any very great expectations, not looking for especial loftiness in -our neighbours, not very much shocked if every one's devotion to the -ideal is not on a level with, perhaps, ours. We go on our way, if not -exactly "rejoicing," at least without positive discomfort. Here and -there, however, a soul nurtured on dreams and nourished in the scorn -of compromise finds its way among men and demands of them perfection. -There is no response to the demand. Entranced by an inaccessible ideal, -the poor soul finds that its devotion poisons for it all the wells -of earth. And this is the birth of what we call a cynic. The cynic's -progress is various, and seldom in a straight fine. It is significant -to find that in <i>Révolte,</i> one of Villiers' comparatively early -works, the irony has a perfectly serious point, and aims directly at -social abuses. The tableau is a scene, an episode, taken straight -from life, a piece of the closest actuality; there is no display, no -exaggeration, all is simple and straightforward as truth. The laughter -in it is the broken-hearted laughter, sadder than tears, of the poet, -the dreamer, before the spectacle of the world. It is obviously -the work of one who is a mocker through his very passion for right -and good, his sense of the infinite disproportion of things. Less -obviously, but indeed quite really, is the enormous and almost aimless -mockery of some of these tales of his the reverse of a love of men -and a devotion to the good and the beautiful. Cynicism is a quality -that develops, and when we find it planted in the brain of a humorist -there is simply no accounting for the transformations through which -it may run. Thus the gulf which seems to separate <i>Les demoiselles de -Bienfilâtre</i> from <i>L'inconnue</i> is, after all, nothing but a series of -steps. Nor is it possible for one who judges art as art to regret this -series of steps; for it is precisely his cynicism that has become the -"note," the rarest quality, of this man of passionate and lofty genius; -it is as a cynic that he will live—a cynic who can be pitiless and -tender, Rabelaisian and Heinesque, but imaginative, but fantastically -poetical, always.</p> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"> -<img src="images/baud_courbet.jpg" width="500" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Gustave Courbet, 1848</p> -</div> - - -<p><i>Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch</i> (1860), which I have -before me, is the most wonderful book that Baudelaire ever wrote. -It has that astonishing logic which he possessed supremely, which -unravels, with infinite precautions, every spider's web of this -seductive drug, which enslaves the imagination, which changes the will, -which turns sounds into colours, colours into sounds; which annihilates -space and time; and, often at its crises, even one's own individuality. -To Baudelaire, as to me, it has, and had, the divinity of a sorcerous, -a dangerous, an insidious mistress. It produces morbid effects on one's -senses; wakens mysterious visions in our half-closed eyes. And this, -like every form of intoxication, is mysterious, malign, satanical, -diabolical. And, subjugated by it, part of oneself is dominated, so -that, in Baudelaire's words: <i>Il a vouloir faire l'ange, il est devenu -une bête.</i></p> - -<p>With some this poison carries them to the verge of the abyss, over -which one looks fascinated by the abrupt horror of the void. In some -their ideas congeal: even to the point of imagining oneself "a fragment -of thinking ice." One sits, as in a theatre, seeing a drama acted on -the stage, where one's senses perceive subtle impressions, but vague, -unreal, ghost-like; where at moments one's eyes envisage the infinite. -"Then," says Baudelaire, "the grammar, the arid grammar itself, -becomes something like an evoked sorcery, the words are alive again in -flesh and in blood, the substantive, in its substantial majesty, the -adjective, a transparent vestment that clothes it and colours it like -a glacis, and the verb, angel of movement, that gives the swing to the -phrase."</p> - -<p>With the hallucinations all exterior forms take on singular aspects; -are deformed and transformed. Then come the transpositions of ideas, -with unaccountable analogies that penetrate the spirit. Even music, -heard or unheard, can seem voluptuous and sensual. It is Baudelaire who -speaks now, evokes an enchantment: "The idea of an evaporation, slow, -successive, eternal, takes hold of your spirit, and you soon apply this -idea to' your proper thoughts, to your way of thinking. By a singular -equivocation, by a kind of transportation, or of an intellectual <i>quid -pro quo,</i> you find yourself evaporating, and you attribute to your pipe -(in which you feel yourself crouching and heaped together like tobacco) -the strange faculty of <i>smoking yourself</i>." The instant becomes -eternity; one is lucid at intervals; the hallucination is sudden, -perfect, and fatal. One feels an excessive thirst; one subsides into -that strange state that the Orientals call <i>Kief.</i></p> - -<p>Certainly haschisch has a more vehement effect on one than opium; it -is more troubling, more ecstatic, more malign, malignant, insinuating, -more evocative, more visionary, more unseizable; it lifts one across -infinite horizons, it carries us passionately over the passionate -waves of seas in storms—of unknown storms on unseen seas—into not -even eternities, nor into chaos, nor into Heaven nor into Hell -(though these may whirl before one's vision), but into incredible -existences, over which no magician rules, over which no witch presides. -It can separate ourselves from ourselves; change our very shapes into -shapeless images; drown us in the deep depths of annihilation, out of -which we slowly emerge; bury us under the oldest roots of the earth; -give us death in life and life in death; give us sleep that is not -sleep, and waking dreams that are not waking dreams. There is nothing, -human or inhuman, moral or immoral, that this drug cannot give us.</p> - -<p>Yet, all the time, we know not what it takes from us; nor what deadly -exchange we may have to give; nor what intoxication can be produced -beyond its intoxication; nor if, as with Coleridge, who took opium, it -might not become "almost a habit of the Soul."</p> - -<p>Imagine a universe in disorder, peopled by strange beings, that have -no relation with each other, whose speech one supposes is jargon; -where such houses as there are are built in different ways—none with -straight lines, many in triangles; where the animals are unlike ours, -some smaller than ants; where there are no churches, no apparent -streets; but innumerable brothels. When one sees fires the smoke goes -downward; flames leap out of the soil and turn into living serpents. -Now one sees a serpent return into his proper flame. There seem to be -no gods, nor idols nor priests nor shrines.</p> - -<p>The seas storm the skies and swallow up Hell; and all that lives and -all that dies seems indistinguishable. Suppose that—in an opium -dream—Satan turns God. The soil might wither at his touch; Lesbians -lament the loss of Lesbianism; and the word of God be abolished.</p> - -<p>I have used the word vehement in regard to Haschisch. It violates the -imagination, ravishes the senses; can disturb one physically; but -never, if taken in measure, prove destructive. This green drug can -create unheard-of excitations, exasperations; can create contagious -laughter, evoke comical images, supernatural and fantastic.</p> - -<p>Now take a world created by Opium. The soil wavers, moves always, -in void space; a soil in which no seed nor weed grows. The men and -women are veiled—none see their faces. There is light, but neither -sun nor stars nor night. The houses have no windows; inside are no -mirrors; but everywhere opium dens; everywhere the smoke—incessant—of -pipes; everywhere a stench produced by opium and by their moral -degradation. The streets are thick with grass; such animals as -there are are stupefied. In fact, this inexorably moving world that -has no foundations exhales—worse than pestilence—an inexplicable -stupefaction.</p> - -<p>And, symbolical as it must be, these excitable poisons are to a -certainty one of the most terrible means employed by the Prince of -the Powers of the Air to enslave deplorable humanity; but by no means -to give him, what the drug can give him, the monstrous sense of the -suddenness of space and time, as if one were hurled between them by two -opposing whirlwinds.</p> - -<p>Now appears suddenly the Women—furious, formidable—one calls -Mephistophila, who having gazed on the Medusa becomes Medusa; who, -rouged and pale as the dead, gives one the idea of that eternal minute -which must be hell. Her very name trails like a coffin-lid. Abnormal, -she is sinister. She is one of my hallucinations. Can she ever count -the countless sins she has committed? Occult, she adores the Arcana. -Her kisses on women's lips are cruel. Perhaps she is the modern -Messalina. <i>Elle est l'impératrice blême d'un macabre Lesbos.</i></p> - -<p>She admits—I give here simply her confessions—to no abominations, nor -does she specialize her vices. As certain of her damnation as of her -existence—real, imaginary—she lives and loves and lies and forgives. -She knows she has abandoned herself to all the impossible desires -endured by such souls as hers, who expect annihilation. <i>Elle est la -reine, pas présente, mais acceptée, de la cour des miracles femelles du -Mal.</i></p> - -<p>She is not of those the Furies hate eternally, nor has she knowledge -of man's mingled fates; yet certain Circes have shown her how to weave -webs of spiritual spiders; she knows not where those are that turn the -Wheels of Destiny. Whirlwinds have shaken her in her perfumed room as -she lies in perfumed garments, considering her nakedness as sacred: -she the impure, never the pure! She is so tired of having ravished -souls from bodies and bodies from souls, that all she desires is sleep, -sleep without dreams. Did sleep ever come to those who most desired it? -Messalina, Helen of Troy, Faustina knew this; dust has closed their -lips, the very dust they have trodden under foot, the dust that knows -not whither it is drifting: none thinking of the inevitable end.</p> - -<p>Has not this poisonous drug shown to me, as to her, shadows hot from -hell? Not the shadows the sun casts on our figures as we walk on -the grass; not the moon's shadows that make mockery of us; but the -veritable heat and fire and flame and fumes of uttermost hell.</p> - -<p>In her eyes persists an ardent and violent life, hateful and bestial. -Depraved by insensible sensations, she imagines Caligula before her -and maledictions not her own. I know her now in vision—she is more -insatiable than Death—more ravenous after ravishment than Life. No -vampire, no Lamia, she knows not that her body has been drenched with -so many poisons that her breath might poison a man with one kiss. And -now, now, her eyes are so weary, her eyeballs ache with such tortured -nerves, that she desires nothing—nothing at all.</p> - -<p>In the very essence of Haschisch I find a disordered Demon whose -insanities make one's very flesh ache. Under his power symbols -speak—you can become yourself a living symbol. Under its magic you can -imagine black magic, and music can speak your passion: for is not music -as passionate as man's love for woman, as a woman's love for a man? -It can turn your rhythm into its rhythm, can change every word into a -sound, a word into a note of music: it cannot change the substance of -your soul.</p> - -<p>Finally, the drugged man admires himself inordinately; he condemns -himself, he glorifies himself; he realizes his condemnation; he becomes -the centre of the universe, certain of his virtue as of his genius. -Then, in a stupendous irony, he cries: <i>Je suis devenu Dieu!</i> One -instant after he projects himself out of himself, as if the will of an -intoxicated man had an efficacious virtue, and cries, with a cry that -might strike down the scattered angels from the ways of the sky: <i>Je -suis un Dieu!</i></p> - -<p>One of Baudelaire's profoundest sayings is: "Every perfect debauch -has need of a perfect leisure: <i>Toute débauche parfaite a besoin d'un -parfait loisir"</i> He gives his definition of the magic that imposes -on haschisch its infernal stigmata; of the soul that sells itself in -detail; of the frantic taste for this adorable poison of the man whose -soul he had chosen for these experiments, his own soul; of how finally -this hazardous spirit, driven, without being aware of it, to the edge -of hell, testifies of its original grandeur.</p> - - - -<h4>VIII</h4> - - -<h5>I</h5> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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. <i>Men and Women</i> 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.</p> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_manet01.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Édouard Manet, 1862</p> -</div> - - -<p>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 <i>curé</i>; 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 <i>cure.</i> Think of the <i>curé</i> -burning the only copy of <i>Les Fleurs du Mal</i> that Baudelaire had left -in "papier d'Hollande," and the mother acquiescing.</p> - -<p>I give two quotations, which certainly explain themselves if they do -not explain Baudelaire:</p> - -<p>"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.</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>In a letter written in Brussels, March 9, 1868, he says: "I have -announced the publication of three fragments: <i>Chateaubriand et le -Dandysme littéraire, La Peinture didactique,</i> and <i>Les fleurs du mal -jugées par l'auteur lui-même.</i> I shall add to these a refutation of -an article of Janin, one on <i>Henri Heine et la jeunesse des poètes,</i> -and the refutation of <i>La Préface de la vie de Jules César par -Napoléon III.</i>" Besides these, on the cover of his <i>Salon de</i> 1848 -are announced: "<i>De la poésie moderne; David, Guérin et Gerodet; -Les Limbes, poésies; Catéchisme de la femme aimée.</i>" On the paper -cover of my copy of his <i>Théophile Gautier</i> (1861), under the title -of "<i>Sous Presse,</i>" are announced: <i>Opium et Haschisch, ou l'Idéal -Artificiel</i> (which was printed in 1860 as <i>Les paradis artificiels: -opium et haschisch), Curiosités esthétiques</i> (which were printed in -1868); <i>Notices littéraires;</i> and <i>Machiavel et Condorcet, dialogue -philosophique.</i> Of these, <i>Les Limbes</i> appeared as <i>Les fleurs du -mal</i> (1857); <i>Les Notices littéraires</i> at the end of <i>L'Art Romantique</i> -(1868); none of the others were printed, nor do I suppose he had even -the time to begin them.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>bête noire</i>—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.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire was inspired to begin <i>Mon cœur mis à nu</i> in 1863 by this -paragraph he had read in Poe's <i>Marginalia,</i> 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—<i>My Heart Laid Bare</i>."</p> - -<p>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 <i>could</i> write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and -blaze at every touch of the fiery pen."</p> - -<p>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 <i>ce livre tout rêvé sera un livre -de rancunes.</i> 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.</p> - -<p>In Baudelaire's notes there is something that reminds me of Browning's -lines:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Men's thoughts and loves and hates!<br /> -Earth is my vineyard, these grew there;<br /> -From grapes of the ground, I made or marred<br /> -My vintage."<br /> -</p> - -<p>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 <i>is</i> 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:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"One who was as a nerve over which do creep<br /> -The else unfelt oppressions of this earth."<br /> -</p> - -<p>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.</p> - - -<h5>II</h5> - -<p>How very commonly we hear it remarked that such and such thoughts -are beyond the compass of words. I do not believe that any thought, -properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather, -that where difficulty in expression is experienced, there is, in the -intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or of -method. For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not -set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which -I conceived it: for thought is logicalized by the effort at written -composition. There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite -delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it -absolutely impossible to adapt language. Yet, so entire is my faith in -the power of words, that at times I have believed it possible to embody -even the evanescences of fancies such as I have described. Could one -actually do so, which would be to have done an original thing, such -words might have compelled the heaven into the earth.</p> - -<p>Some of these qualities Baudelaire finds in Gautier; to my mind there -are many more of these strange and occult qualities to be found in -Baudelaire. I have said somewhere that there is no such thing, properly -speaking, as a "natural" style; and it is merely ignorance of the -mental process of writing which sometimes leads one to say that the -style of Swift is more natural than that of Ruskin. Pater said to me -at Oxford that his own <i>Imaginary Portraits</i> seemed to him the best -written of his books, which he qualified by adding: "It seems to be the -most <i>natural</i>." I think then he was beginning to forget that it was -not natural to him to be natural.</p> - -<p>Gautier had a way of using the world's dictionary, whose leaves, blown -by an unknown wind, always opened so as to let the exact word leap -out of the pages, adding the appropriate shades. Both writers had an -innate sense of "correspondences," and of a universal symbolism, where -the "sacredness" of every word defends one from using it in a profane -sense. To realize the central secret of the mystics, from Protagoras -onwards, the secret which the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes betrays in -its "As things are below, so are they above;" which Boehme has classed -in his teaching of "signatures;" and which Swedenborg has systematized -in his doctrine of "correspondences," one arrives at Gérard de Nerval, -whose cosmical visions are at times so magnificent that he seems to be -creating myths, as, after his descent into hell, he plays the part he -imagines assigned to him in his astral influences.</p> - -<p>Among these comes Hoffmann. In his <i>Kreislerione,</i> that Baudelaire read -in the French translation I have before me, printed in 1834, he says: -"The musician whose sense of music is conscious swims everywhere across -floods of harmony and melody. This is no vain image, nor an allegory -devoid of sense, such as composers use when they speak of colours, of -perfumes, of the rays of the sun that appear like concords." "Colour -speaks," says Baudelaire, "in a voice evocatory of sorcery; animals and -plants grimace; perfumes provoke correspondent thoughts and memories. -And when I think of Gautier's rapidity in solving all the problems of -style and of composition, I cannot help remembering a severe maxim that -he let fall before me in one of his conversations: 'Every writer who -fails to seize any idea, however subtle and unexpected he supposes it -to be, is not a writer. <i>L'Inexprimable n'existe pas.</i>'"</p> - -<p>It is either Delacroix or Baudelaire who wrote: "The writer who is -incapable of saying everything, who takes unawares and without having -enough material to give body to an idea, however subtle or strange or -unexpected he may suppose it to be, is not a writer." And one has to -beware of the sin of allegory, which spoils even Bunyan's prose. For -the deepest emotion raised in us by allegory is a very imperfectly -satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we -should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome.</p> - -<p>Then there is the heresy of instruction—<i>l'hérésie de -l'enseignement</i>—which Poe and Baudelaire and Swinburne consider -ruinous to art. Art for art's sake first of all; that a poem must be -written for the poem's sake simply, from whatever instinct we have -derived it; it matters nothing whether this be inspired by a prescient -ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, or by some of that loveliness -whose very elements appertain solely to eternity. Above all, Verlaine's -<i>Pas de couleur, rien que la nuance!</i></p> - -<p>The old war—not (as some would foolishly have it defined) a war -between facts and fancies, reason and romance, poetry and good sense, -but simply between imagination which apprehends the spirit of a thing -and the understanding which dissects the body of a fact—the strife -which can never be decided—was for Blake the most important question -possible. Poetry or art based on loyalty to science is exactly as -absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or poetry. Though, -indeed, Blake wrought his <i>Marriage of Heaven and Hell</i> into a form -of absolute magnificence, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine -thought and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which hells and -heavens change names and alternate through mutual annihilations, which -emit an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame, he never -actually attained the incomparable power of condensing vapour into -tangible and malleable form, of helping us to handle air and measure -mist, which is so instantly perceptible in Balzac's genius, he who was -not "a prose Shakespeare" merely, but rather perhaps a Shakespeare in -all but the lyrical faculty.</p> - -<p>Even when Baudelaire expresses his horror of life, of how abject the -world has become, how he himself is supposed to be "une anomalie," his -sense of his own superiority never leaves him. "Accursed," as I have -said, such abnormally gifted artists are, he declares his thirst of -glory, a diabolical thirst of fame and of all kinds of enjoyments—in -spite of his "awful temperament, all ruse and violence"—and can say: -"I desire to live and to have self-content. Something terrible says -to me <i>never,</i> and some other thing says to me <i>try. Moi-même, le -boulevard m'effraye</i>."</p> - -<p>Baudelaire's tragic sense of his isolation, of his intense misery, -of his series of failures, of his unendurable existence—it was and -was not life—in Brussels finds expression in this sentence, dated -September, 1865:</p> - -<p>"Les gens qui ne sont pas exilés ne savent pas ce que sont les nerfs de -ceux sont cloués à l'étranger, sans communications et sans nouvelles." -What he says is the inevitable that has no explanation: simply the -inevitable that no man can escape. To be exiled from Paris proves to -be, practically, his death-stroke. And, in the last letter he ever -wrote, March 5, 1866, there is a sense of irony, of vexation, of -wounded pride, and in the last "sting in the tail of the honey" he -hisses: -"There is enough talent in these young writers; but what absurdities, -what exaggerations, and what youthful infatuations! Curiously, only a -few years ago I perceived these imitators whose tendencies alarmed me. -I know nothing of a more compromising nature than these: as for me, I -love nothing more than being alone. But this is not possible for me, -<i>et il paraît que l'école Baudelaire existe</i>."</p> - -<p>And, to all appearances, it did; and what really annoyed Baudelaire was -the publication of Verlaine's <i>Poèmes saturniens</i> and their praise by -Leconte de l'Isle, Banville, and Hugo; Hugo, whom he had come to hate. -It is with irony that he says of Hugo: "Je n'accepterais ni son génie, -ni sa fortune, s'il me fallait au même temps posséder ses énormes -ridicules."</p> - - -<h5>III</h5> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>"I can't sleep much now," writes Baudelaire, "as I am always thinking. -<i>Quand je dis que je dormirai demain matin, vous devinerez de quel -sommeil je veux parler</i>." 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 <i>Poèmes en Prose,</i> addressed to Paris:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full,<br /> -Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand<br /> -In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,<br /> -<br /> -I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and<br /> -Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,<br /> -The vulgar herd can never understand."<br /> -</p> - -<p>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 <i>Modern Love,</i> 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:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"O thou Weed</span><br /> -Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet<br /> -That the sense aches at thee, would thou had'st ne'er been<br /> -born."<br /> -</p> - -<p>Another question arises: How can a man who wrote his letters in a -<i>café,</i> 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?</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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, <i>and if I had had more -fortune, I might have been rich"</i> 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!"</p> - - - -<h4>VIII</h4> - - -<p>In 1861 Poulet-Malassis showed Baudelaire the manuscript of <i>Les -Martyrs ridicules</i> of Léon Cladel, who was so excited as he read it, so -intrigued by his antithetical constructions and by the mere singularity -of the title, and so amazed by this writer's audacity, that he made his -acquaintance, went over his proofs, and helped to teach him the craft -of letters. So, in his sombre and tragic and passionate and feverish -novels, we see the inevitable growth out of the hard soil of Quercy, -and out of the fertilizing contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of this -whole literature, so filled with excitement, so nervous, so voluminous -and vehement, in whose pages speech is always out of breath. And one -finds splendid variations in his stories of peasants and wrestlers and -thieves and prostitutes: something at once epic and morbid.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire, in his preface, points out the solemn sadness and the -grim irony with which Cladel relates deplorably comic facts; the -fury with which he insists on painting his strange characters; the -fantastic fashion in which he handles sin with the intense curiosity -of a casuist, analysing evil and its inevitable consequences. He notes -"la puissance sinistrement caricatural de Cladel." But it is in these -two sentences that he sums up, supremely, the beginning and the end of -realistic and imaginative art. "The Poet, under his mask, still lets -himself be seen. But the supremacy of art had consisted in remaining -glacial and hermetically sealed, and in leaving to the reader all the -merit of indignation. (<i>Le poète, sous son masque, se laisse encore -voir. Le supreme de l'art eût consisté à rester glacial et fermé, et à -laisser au lecteur tout le mérite de l'indignation.</i>)"</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_manet_02.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Édouard Manet, 1865.</p> -</div> - -<p>Certain of these pages are ironical and sinister and cynical; as, for -instance, in this sentence: "Quant aux insectes amoureux, je ne crois -pas que les figures de rhétorique dont ils se servent pour gémir leurs -passions soient mesquines; toutes les mansardes entendant tous les -soirs des tirades tragiques dont la Comédie Française ne pourra jamais -bénéficier." And it is in regard to this that I give certain details of -an anecdote related by Cladel of Baudelaire, which refers to the fatal -year when he left Paris for Brussels.</p> - -<p>Both often went to the Café de la Belle-Poule; and, one night, when -Cladel was waiting for Baudelaire, a very beautiful woman seated -opposite him asked him to present her to Baudelaire. He laughed and -they waited, and Baudelaire was presented, who, after giving them the -usual drinks, at the end of an hour went away. This went on for a -whole month; when Baudelaire, after her incessant assiduities to him, -brought her home with him, Cladel also. They talk. The woman becomes -lascivious. Baudelaire answers that he has a passion for beautiful -forms and does not wish to expose himself to a deception. She undresses -slowly. She is magnificent, and her tresses are so long that, with -leaning over a little, she could put her naked feet on the ends of -them. She assumes, being probably aware of it, the exact pose of -Mademoiselle de Maupin when she stands naked before d'Albert. Cladel -goes out. He has not quite closed the door when he hears Baudelaire, -prematurely old and worn out, say: "Rhabille-toi." Still vital, he -has no more the abstract heat of rapture of the passionate lover in -Gautier's famous self-confessions; for, in that wonderful book, there -is nothing besides a delicately depraved imagination and an extreme -ecstasy over the flesh and the senses. And he also realized, as -Baudelaire did not always, that the beauty of life was what he wanted, -and not the body, that frail and perishable thing, that has to be -pitied, that so many desire to perpetuate.</p> - -<p>Yet never in Baudelaire, as in Gautier, did the five senses become -articulate, as if they were made specially for him; for he speaks -for them with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are—never -Baudelaire's—in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have -no recollection. Yet neither were absolutely content with the beauty of -a woman's body: for the body must finally dwindle and expand to some -ignoble physical condition, and on certain women's necks wrinkles will -crawl, and the fire in one's blood sometimes loses some of its heat; -only, one wants to perpetuate the beauty of life itself, imperishable -at least in its recurrence.</p> - -<p>In his preface Baudelaire compares Murger with Musset, both Bohemian -classics, only one spoke of Bohemia with a bitter bantering, and the -poet, when he was not in his noble moods, had crises of fatuity. "All -this evil society, with its vile habits, its adventurous morals, was -painted by the vivid pencil-strokes of Murger; only he jested in his -relations of miserable things." Yes, Murger is a veracious historian; -believe him, if you do not know or have forgotten, that such are the -annals of Bohemia. There, people laugh just so lightly and sincerely, -weep and laugh just as freely, are really hungry, really have their -ambitions, and at times die of all these maladies. It is the gayest and -most melancholy country in the world. To have lived there too long, is -to find all the rest of the world in exile. But if you have been there -or not, read Murger's pages; there, perhaps, you will see more of the -country than anything less than a lifetime spent in it will show you.</p> - - - -<h4>IX</h4> - - -<p>In April, 1864, Baudelaire left Paris for Brussels, where he stayed in -the Hôtel du Grand-Miroir, rue de la Montagne. Before then his nerves -had begun to torment him; they played tricks with his very system; he -wrote very little prose and no verse. It was with a kind of desperate -obstination—a more than desperate obstinacy—that he strove to prevent -himself from giving way to his pessimistic conceptions of life, to his -morbid over-sensibility that ached as his flesh ached. Unsatiated, -unsatisfied, for once in his existence irresolute in regard to what he -wanted to do, watching himself with an almost casuistical casuistry, -alone and yet not alone in the streets of Paris, he wandered, a -<i>noctambule,</i> night after night, sombre and sinister. So a ghost -self-obsessed might wander in desolate cities seeing ever before him -the Angel of Destruction.</p> - -<p>Did he then know that he was becoming more and more abnormal? This I -ignore. This, I suppose, he alone knew; and hated too much knowledge of -his precarious condition. He was veritably more alone than ever, before -he plunged—as one who might see shipwreck before him—into that gulf -that is no gulf, that extends not between hell and heaven, but that one -names Brussels.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<img src="images/baud_lettre_auto_02.jpg" width="600" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Charles Asselineau, 1865.</p> -</div> - -<p>Still he frequented his favourite haunts, the Moulin-Rouge, the Casino -de la rue Cadet, and other cabarets. He saw then, as I saw many -years afterwards, pass some of his Flowers of Evil—some who knew him -and had read his verses, most of whom he ignored—macabre, with hectic -cheeks and tortured eyes and painted faces; these strange nocturnal -birds of passage that flit to and fro, the dancers and the hired -women; always—so Latin an attitude of their traditional trade!—with -enquiring and sidelong glances at men and at women.</p> - -<p>I can see him now, as I write, sit in certain corners of the -Moulin-Rouge—as I did—drinking strange drinks and smoking cigarettes; -hearing with all his old sensuality that adorable and cynical and -perverse and fascinating <i>Valse des Roses</i> of Olivier Métra: a -maddening music to the soundless sound of the mad dances of the -<i>Chahut</i>—danced by dancers of both sexes, ambiguous and exotic and -neurotic—that, as the avid circle forms hastily around them, set their -fevers into our fevers, their nerves into our nerves.</p> - -<p>It was in May, 1892, that, having crossed the streets of Paris from -the hotel where I was staying, the Hôtel Corneille, in the Latin -Quarter (made famous by Balzac in his superb story, <i>Z. Marcas</i>,) I -found myself in Le Jardin de Paris, where I saw for the first time -La Mélinite. She danced in a quadrille: young and girlish, the more -provocative because she played as a prude, with an assumed modesty; -<i>décolletée</i> nearly to the waist, in the Oriental fashion. She had -long, black curls around her face; and had about her a depraved -virginity.</p> - -<p>And she caused in me, even then, a curious sense of depravity that -perhaps comes into the verses I wrote on her. There, certainly, on -the night of May 22nd, danced in her feverish, her perverse, her -enigmatical beauty, La Mélinite, to her own image in the mirror:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"A shadow smiling<br /> -Back to a shadow in the night,"<br /> -</p> - -<p>as she cadenced Olivier Métra's <i>Valse des Roses.</i></p> - -<p>It is a fact of curious interest that in 1864 Poulet-Malassis was -obliged to leave Paris—on account of his misfortunes as a publisher, -in regard to money, and for various other reasons—and to exile himself -in Brussels: still more curious that Baudelaire—drawn, perhaps, by -some kind of affinity in their natures—followed him sooner than he -had intended to go. Malassis lived in rue de Mercedes, 35 <i>bis,</i> -Faubourg d'Ixilles. In those years both saw a great deal of the famous, -perverse, macabre Félicien Rops.</p> - -<p>Malassis, naturally, was obliged, in his expedients for living as he -used to live, to publish privately printed obscene books; some no more -than erotic. As Baudelaire hated, with his Parisian refinement, that -kind of certainly objectionable literature, on May 4th, 1865, he writes -to Sainte-Beuve: "As for Malassis, his terrible affair arrives on the -12th. He believes he will be condemned for five years. What there -is grave in this is that that closes France for him for five years. -But that cuts him for a time from his ways of living. I see in it no -great evil. As for me, who am no fool, I have never possessed one of -these idiotic books, even printed in fine characters and with fine -engravings." As a matter of fact, Malassis was condemned in May, 1866, -to one year's imprisonment for having privately printed <i>Les Amies</i> of -Paul Verlaine—a book of sonnets, attributed to an imaginary Pablo de -Herlaguez.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire, as I have said, had many reasons for going to Brussels. -Among these was his urgent desire of finding a publisher to print his -collected works—having failed to find any publisher for them. Another -was that of giving lectures—a thing he was not made for—and for two -other reasons: one of making immediate money, one of adding to his fame -as a writer. Then, to write a book on Belgium.</p> - -<p>He writes to Manet (who has written to him: "Do return to Paris! No -happiness can come to you while you live in that damned country!"): -"As for finishing here <i>Pauvre Belgique,</i> I am incapable of it: I am -near on dead. I have quite a lot of <i>Poèmes en Prose</i> to get printed in -magazines. I can do no more than that. <i>Je souffre d'un mal qui je n'ai -pas, comme j'étais gamin, et que je vivais au bout du monde."</i></p> - -<p>His book was to have been humorous, mocking, and serious—his final -separation from modern stupidity. "People may understand me, perhaps, -then." "Nothing," he confesses, "can console me in my detestable -misery, in my humiliating situation, nor especially in my vices."</p> - -<p>In February, 1865, he writes: "As for my present state, it is an -absolute abdication of the will. (<i>C'est une parfaite abdication de la -volonté.</i>)" What reason, I wonder, was there for him to "abdicate" the -one element in our natures by which we live at our greatest, the very -root of our passions (as Balzac said), "nervous fluids and that unknown -substance which, in default of another term, we must call the will?" -Man has a given quality of energy; each man a different quality: how -will he spend it? That is Balzac's invariable question. All these -qualities were always in Baudelaire.</p> - -<p>Had he finally, after so many years in which his energy was supreme, -lost some of his energy, struggling, as he seems to do, against -insuperable difficulties that beset him on either side, like thieves -that follow men in the dark with the intention of stabbing you in the -back? Does he then try to conjecture what next year might bring him -of good or of evil? He has lived his life after his own will: what -shall the end be? He dares neither look backward nor forward. It might -be that he feels the earth crumbling under his feet; for how many -artists have had that fear—the fear that the earth under their feet -may no longer be solid? There is another step for him to take, a step -that frightens him; might it not be into another more painful kind of -oblivion? Has something of the man gone out of him: that is to say, the -power to live for himself?</p> - -<p>In the summer of 1865 Baudelaire spent several days in Paris, seeing -Banville and other friends of his. They found him unchanged; his eyes -clear; his voice musical; he talked as wonderfully as ever. They used -all their logic to persuade him to remain in Paris. He refused, even -after Gautier had said to him: "You are astonishing: can one conceive -your mania of eternalizing yourself in a land where one is only bored -to extinction?" He laughed; promised to return: he never did; it was -the last day when his friends possessed him entirely.</p> - -<p>In his years of exile he printed Poe's <i>Histoires grotesques et -sérieuses</i> (1864); <i>Les nouvelles fleurs du mal</i> in <i>La Parnasse -contemporaine</i> (1866). In 1865 Poulet-Malassis printed <i>Les épaves de -Charles Baudelaire.</i> Avec une eau-forte de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam. A -l'enseigne du Coq. 1865. 165 pages.</p> - -<p>"Avertissement de l'Éditeur.</p> - -<p>"Ce recueil est composé de morceaux poétiques, pour la plupart -condamnés ou inédits, auxquels M. Charles Baudelaire n'a pas cru devoir -faire place dans l'édition définitive des <i>Fleurs du mal.</i></p> - -<p>"Cela explique son titre.</p> - -<p>"M. Charles Baudelaire a fait don, sans réserve, de ces poëmes, à un -ami qui juge à propos de les publier, parce qu'il se flatte de les -goûter, et qu'il est à un âge où l'on aime encore à faire partager ses -sentiments à des amis auxquels on prête ses vertus.</p> - -<p>"L'auteur sera avisé de cette publication en même temps que les deux -cents soixantes lectures probables qui figurent—à peu près—pour son -éditeur bénévole, le public littéraire en France, depuis que les bêtes -y ont décidément usurpé la parole sur les hommes."</p> - -<p>I have before me two copies of this rare edition, printed on yellow -Holland paper; one numbered 100, the other 194. The second has -inscribed in ink: <i>A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de -l'auteur avec les civilités de l'éditeur A. P. Malassis.</i> This was sent -on the part of Baudelaire to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is superbly -bound in a kind of red-purple thick leather binding, with pale gold -squares, in the form of the frame of a picture; done, certainly, with -great taste.</p> - -<p>On January 3, 1865, Baudelaire writes a letter to his mother; a letter -that pains one as one reads it: so resigned he seems to be, yet never -in his life less resigned to his fate. He fears that God might deprive -him of even happiness; that it is more difficult to think than to write -a book; that if only he were certain of having five or six years before -him he might execute all that remained for him to do; that he has the -fixed idea of death; that he has suffered so much already that he -believes many things may be forgiven him (sins of concupiscence, sins -of conscience, sins one never forgets) as he has been punished so much.</p> - -<p>I pass from this to the beginning of March, 1866. He stays with Rops -at Namur, where (certainly by bad luck) he enters again l'Église -Saint-Loup, which he had spoken of as "this sinister marvel in the -interior of a catafalque—terrible and delicious—broidered with gold, -red, and silver." As he admires these richly sculptured confessionals, -as he speaks with Rops and Malassis, he stumbles, taken by a kind of -dizziness in the head, and sits down on a step in the church. They -lift him up; he feigns not to be frightened, says that his foot had -slipped accidentally. Next day he shows signs of a nervous trouble, not -a mental one; asking them in the train to Brussels to have the window -opened; it is open. That is the first sign of his loss of speech, and -the last letter that he ever wrote (dated March 30th, 1866), ends: <i>Je -ne puis pas bouger.</i> It is strange to set beside this Balzac's last -words, that end a letter written June 20th, 1856: <i>Je ne puis ni lire -ni écrire.</i> It is written to Théophile Gautier.</p> - -<p>Swinburne, having heard the fatal news in regard to Baudelaire, added -to his book on Blake these magnificent words: as pure, as fervent a -tribute to the memory of a fellow-artist as Baudelaire might have -wished to have been written on himself, as Swinburne might have desired -to have been written on himself: "I heard that a mortal illness had -indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the -fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more -of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of -Charles Baudelaire. We may see again as various a power as was his, -may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as tragic a manner -of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of -emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison -of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair -and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at -once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He -could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible -and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances -of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at -least in part expressed, brought him near to me by way of written or -transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, -and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal -words which too often return upon our lips:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -<i>Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!"</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>And I, who have transcribed these words, have before me a book that -Swinburne showed me, that he had richly bound in Paris, and that I -bought at the sale of his library on June 19th: <i>Richard Wagner et -Tannhäuser à Paris.</i> Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, 1861; with, -written in pencil, on the page before the title-page, these words:</p> - -<blockquote> -<p>"<i>A Mr. Algernon C. Swinburne. Bon Souvenir et mille Remerciements. C. -B.</i>"</p> -</blockquote> - -<p>From April 9, 1866, to August 31, 1867, Baudelaire endures the slow -tortures of a body and a soul condemned to go on living; living, what -else can it be called, than a kind of living death? To remain, in most -senses, himself; to be, as always, Charles Baudelaire; to have in his -mind one desire, the desire, the vain desire, of recovery; to be unable -to utter one word; to think, to sleep, to conceive imaginary projects, -for his near future, for his verse, for his prose: to walk, to eat, -to drink; to be terribly conscious of his dolorous situation; to be, -as ever, anxious for a new edition of <i>Les fleurs du mal;</i> to mark a -date in an almanac, counting three months, when he imagined he would -be in a state to superintend the impression of his final edition; to -have finally given up all hope, all illusion; to have gazed out of his -wonderful eyes, at his friend's faces, eyes shadowed by an expression -of infinite sadness, eyes that endured his last tragedy: that is how -Baudelaire survived himself to the end.</p> - -<p>He died on Saturday, August 31, 1867, at eleven o'clock in the morning, -at the age of forty-six and four months. So died, simply and without -any trace of suffering, this man of genius. Had he been thoroughly -understood by the age in which he lived? Blake, who said the final -truth on this question: "The ages are all equal; but genius is always -above the ages:" was not understood in his age.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h4><a name="BIBLIOGRAPHY_AND_NOTES" id="BIBLIOGRAPHY_AND_NOTES">BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES</a></h4> - - -<p>1. <i>Salon de</i> 1845. Pax Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Jules Labitte, 1845. -72 pp.</p> - -<p>2. <i>Salon de</i> 1846. Par Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1846. -132 pp.</p> - -<p>3. <i>Histoires extraordinaires.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de Charles -Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1856.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Edgar Poe, La vie et ses œuvres, pp. vii-xxxi. 2. -Translations, 323 pp.</p></blockquote> - -<p>4. <i>Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. Michel Lévy, 1857.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, pp. v-xxiv. 2. Translations, -288 pp.</p></blockquote> - -<p>5. <i>Les fleurs du mal.</i> Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis -et de Broise, 4 rue de Buci, 1857. 252 pp.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Dédicace. 2. Au Lecteur.</p> - - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">SPLEEN ET IDÉAL.</span>—1. Bénédiction. 2. Le Soleil. 3. Élévation. 4. -Correspondances. 5. <i>J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues.</i> 6. -Les Phares. 7. La Muse malade. 8. La Muse vénale. 9. Le Mauvais -Moine. 10. L'Ennemi. 11. Le Guignon. 12. La Vie intérieure. 13. -Bohémiens en voyage. 14. L'Homme et la mer. 15. Don Juan aux -enfers. 16. Châtiment de l'orgueil. 17. La Beauté. 18. L'Idéal. -19. La Géante. 20. Les Bijoux. 21. Parfum exotique. 22. <i>Je -t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne.</i> 23. <i>Tu mettre l'univers -entier dans ta ruelle.</i> 24. <i>Sed non satiata.</i> 25. <i>Avec ses -vêtements ondoyants et nacrés.</i> 26. Le Serpent qui danse. 27. -La Charogne. 28. <i>De profundis clamavi.</i> 29. Le Vampire. 30. -Le Léthé. 31. <i>Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive.</i> -32. Remords posthume. 33. Le Chat. 34. Le Balcon. 35. <i>Je te -donne ces vers afin que si mon nom.</i> 36. Tout entière. 37. <i>Que -diras-tu ce soir, pauvre âme solitaire.</i> 38. Le Flambeau vivant. -39. A Celle qui est trop gaie. 40. Réversibilité. 41. Confession. -42. L'Aube spirituelle. 43. Harmonie du soir. 44. Le Flacon. 45. -Le Poison. 46. Ciel brouillé. 47. Le Chat. 48. Le beau navire. -49. L'Invitation au voyage. 50. L'Irréparable. 51. Causerie. 52. -L'Héautontimouroménos. 53. Franciscae meae laudes. 54. A une -Dame Créole. 55. Moesta et Errabunda. 56. Les Chats. 57. Les -Hiboux. 58. La cloche fêlée. 59. Spleen. 60. Spleen. 61. Spleen. -62. Spleen. 63. Brumes et pluies. 64. L'Irrémédiable. 65. A une -mendiante rousse. 66. Le Jeu. 67. Le Crépuscule du soir. 68. Le -Crépuscule du matin. 69. <i>Le servante au grand cœur dont vous -étiez jaloux.</i> 70. <i>Je n'ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville.</i> 71. -Le Tonneau de la haine. 72. Le Revenant. 73. Le Mort joyeux. 74. -Sépulture. 75. Tristesses de la lune. 76. La Musique. 77. La Pipe.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">FLEURS DU MAL.</span>—78. La Destruction. 79. Une Martyr. 80. Lesbos. -81. Femmes damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte). 82. Femmes damnées. -83. Les deux bonnes sœurs. 84. La fontaine de sang. 85. -Allégorie. 86. La Beatrice. 87. Les métamorphoses du vampire. 88. -Un voyage à Cythère. 89. L'Amour et le crâne.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">RÉVOLTE.</span>—90. Le reniement de Saint Pierre. 91. Abel et Caïn. 92. -Les Litanies de Satan.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LE VIN.</span>—93. L'âme du vin. 94. Le vin des chiffonniers. 95. Le -vin de l'assassin. 96. Le vin du solitaire. 97. Le vin des amants.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LA MORT.</span>—98. La mort des amants. 99. La mort des pauvres. 100. -La mort des artistes.</p></blockquote> - -<p>6. <i>Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1858. 200 pp.</p> - -<p>7. <i>Théophile Gautier.</i> Par Charles Baudelaire. Notice littéraire -précédée d'une lettre de Victor Hugo. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de -Broise, 9 rue des Beaux-Arts, 1859.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. A M. Charles Baudelaire de Victor Hugo, pp. i, iii. 2. -Théophile Gautier, 68 pp.</p></blockquote> - -<p>8. <i>Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch.</i> Par Charles -Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 9 rue des Beaux-Arts, -1860.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Dédicace à J. G. F., pp. i-iv. 2. Le poème du haschisch, pp. -1-108. 3. Un mangeur d'opium, pp. 109-304.</p></blockquote> - -<p>On the back of the cover is this announcement:</p> - -<p>"Sous Presse, du même auteur: <i>Réflexions sur quelques-uns, de mes -Contemporains;</i> un volume contenant: Edgar Poe, Théophile Gautier, -Pierre Dupont, Richard Wagner, Auguste Barbier, Leconte de Lisle, -Hégésippe Moreau, Pétrus Borel, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gustave -le Vavasseur, Gustave Flaubert, Philibert Rouvière; la famille des -<i>Dandies,</i> ou Chateaubriand, de Custine, Paul de Molinès, and Barbey -d'Aurévilly."</p> - -<p>This volume appeared in part in <i>L'Art Romantique</i> (1868); several of -these essays were never written, such as the one on Barbey d'Aurévilly. -Seconde Édition, 1861.</p> - -<p>9. <i>Les Fleurs du Mal</i> de Charles Baudelaire.</p> - -<p>Seconde Édition augmentée de trente-cinq poëmes nouveaux et orné -d'un Portrait de l'Auteur dessiné et gravé par Bracquemond. Paris, -Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, Éditeurs, 97 rue de Richelieu et Passage -Mirés, 1861. 319 pp.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. L'Albatros. 2. Le Masque. Statue Allégorique dans le goût -de la Renaissance. 3. Hymne à la Beauté. 4. La Chevelure. 5. -Duellum. 6. Le Possédé. 7. Un Fantôme: (1) Les Ténèbres. (2) Le -Parfum. (3) Le Cadre. (4) Le Portrait. 8. Sempre eadem. 9. Chant -d'Automne. 10. A une Madone. Ex-Voto dans le goût Espagnol. 11. -Chanson d'Après-Midi. 12. Sisina. 13. Sonnet d'automne. 14. Une -Gravure fantastique. 15. Obsession. 16. Le Goût du néant. 17. -Alchimie de la Douleur. 18. Horreur Sympathique. 19. L'Horloge. -20. Un Paysage. 21. Le Cynge. 22. Les Sept Vieillards. 23. Les -Petites Vieilles. 24. Les Aveugles. 25. A une passante. 26. Le -Squelette laboureur. 27. Danse macabre. 28. L'Amour du mensonge. -29. Rêve Parisien. 30. La Fin de la journée. 31. Le Rêve d'un -curieux. 32. Le Voyage.</p></blockquote> - -<p>10. <i>Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser</i> à Paris. Par Charles Baudelaire. -Paris, E. Dentu, Palais-Royale, 13 et 17, Galerie d'Orléans, 1861. 70 -pp.</p> - -<p>11. <i>Euréka.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, -Michel Lévy, 1864. 252 pp.</p> - -<p>12. <i>Histoires Grotesques et Sérieuses.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction par -Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1865. 372 pp.</p> - -<p>13. Les épaves de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte. Frontispiece -de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Avertissement de l'Éditeur, pp. i-iii. 2. Les épaves, 163 pp.</p></blockquote> - -<p>14. <i>Les épaves</i> de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte de Félicien -Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. Numéro 194.</p> - -<p>15. <i>Les épaves</i> de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte de Félicien -Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. Numéro 100.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p><i>A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de l'auteur, -avec les civilités de l'Editeur. A. P. Malassis.</i></p></blockquote> - - - -<p>II</p> - - -<p><i>Édition Définitive des œuvres de Charles Baudelaire.</i> Paris, Michel -Lévy et Frères, Libraires Éditeurs, rue Vivienne, 2 <i>bis,</i> et Boulevard -des Italiens, 15. A la Librairie Nouvelle, 1868-1869.</p> - -<p>Volume <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">I. LES FLEURS DU MAL.</span> 414 pp.</p> - -<p>Volume <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">II. CURIOSITÉS ESTHÉTIQUES.</span> 440 pp.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Salon de 1845. 2. Salon de 1846. 3. Le Musée Classique -du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle (1846). 4. Exposition Universale de -1855. Beaux Arts (1855). 5. Salon de 1850? 6. De l'Essence du -Rire, et généralement du Comique dans les Arts Plastiques. 7. -Quelques Caricaturistes Français: Carle Vernet. Pigal. Charlet. -Daumier. Henri Monnier. Grandville. Gavami. Trimolet. Traviès. -Jacque (1857). 8. Quelques Caricaturistes Étrangers: Hogarth. -Cruikshank. Goya. Pinelli. Breughel (1857).</p></blockquote> - -<p>Volume <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">III. L'ART ROMANTIQUE.</span></p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. L'œuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix (1862). 2. Peintures -murales d'Eugène Delacroix à Saint-Sulpice (1861). 3. Le -Peintre de la Vie Moderne. Constantin Guys (1862). 4. Peintres -et Aqua-fortistes (1862). 5. Vente de le Collection de M. E. -Piot (1864). 6. L'Art Philosophique. 7. Morale des Joujou -(1854). 8. Théophile Gautier (1859-1861-1862). 9. Pierre Dupont -(1852-1861-1862). 10. Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris. -Encore quelques Mots (1861). u. Philibert Rouvière (1855). -12. Conseils aux jeunes Littérateurs (1846). 13. Les Drames -et les Romans honnêtes (1850). 14. L'École Païenne (1851). -15. <i>Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes Contemporaines:</i> (1) -Victor Hugo (1861). (2) Auguste Barbier (1861). (3) Marceline -Desbordes-Valmore (1861). (4) Théophile Gautier (1861). (5) -Pétrus Borel (1861). (6) Hégéssipe Moreau (1861). (7) Théodore de -Banville (1861). (8) Pierre Dupont (1852). (9) Leconte de Lisle -(1861). (10) Gustave Levavasseur (1861).</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">CRITIQUES LITTÉRAIRES.</span>—1. Les Misérables, par Victor Hugo -(1862). 2. Madame Bovary, par Gustave Flaubert. (1857). 3. -La double vie, par Charles Asselineau (1859). 4. Les martyrs -ridicules, par Léon Cladel (1861).</p></blockquote> - -<p>Volume <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">IV. 1. PETITS POEMES EN PROSE.</span></p> - -<blockquote> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">A ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE.</span>—1. L'Étranger (1862). 2. Le Désespoir de -la vieille (1862). 3. Le <i>Confiteor</i> de l'artiste (1862). 4. -Un Plaisant (1862). 5. Le Chambre double (1862). 6. Chacun sa -chimère (1862). 7. Le fou et la Vénus (1862). 8. Le Chien et le -Flacon (1862). 9. Le Mauvais Vitrier (1862). 10. A une heure du -matin (1862). 11. Le Femme sauvage et le Petite Maîtresse (1862). -12. Les Foules (1861). 13. Les Veuves (1861). 14. Le Vieux -Saltimbanque (1861). 15. Le Gâteau (1862). 16. L'Horloge (1857). -17. Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure (1857). 18. L'Invitation au -voyage (1857). 19. Le Joujou du pauvre (1862). 20. Les Dons des -fées (1862). 21. Les Tentations, ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire -(1863). 22. Le Crépuscule du Soir (1855). 23. La Solitude (1855). -24. Les Projets (1857). 25. La Belle Dorothée (1863). 26. Les -Yeux des Pauvres (1864). 27. Une Mort Héroïque (1863). 28. La -Fausse Monnaie (1864). 29. Le Joueur généreux (1864). 30. La -Corde, à Edouard Manet (1864). 31. Les Vocations (1864). 32. Le -Thyrse. A Franz Liszt (1863). 33. Enivrez-vous (1864). 34. Déjà! -(1863). 35. Les Fenêtres (1863). 36. Le Désir de peindre (1863). -37. Les Bienfaits de la lune (1863). 38. Laquelle est la vraie? -(1863). 39. Un Cheval de race (1864). 40. Le Miroir (1864). 41. -Le Port (1864). 42. Portraits de maîtresses (1867). 43. Le galant -Tireur (1867). 44. La Soupe et les Nuages (1864). 45. Le Tir et -la Cimetière (1867). 46. Porte d'Auréole (1867). 47. Mademoiselle -Bistouri (1867). 48. (Anywhere out of the world): N'importe où -hors du monde (1867). 49. Assommons les pauvres (1867). 50. Les -Bon Chiens à M. Joseph Stevens (1865). <i>Epilogue</i> (1860).</p></blockquote> - -<p>2. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LES PARADIS ARTIFICIELS.</span></p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">A. J. G. F. LE POÈME DU HASCHISCH.</span></p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Le Goût de l'Infini. 2. Qu'est-ce que le Haschisch? 3. Le -Théâtre du Séraphin. 4. L'Homme-Dieu. 5. Morale.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">UN MANGEUR D'OPIUM.</span>—1. Précautions oratoires. 2. Confessions -préliminaires. 3. Voluptés d'opium. 4. Tortures d'opium. 5. Un -Faux Dénouement. 6. Le Génie enfant. 7. Chagrins d'enfance. -8. Visions d'Oxford: (1) Le Palimpseste. (2) Levana et nos -Notre-Dame des Tristesses. (3) Le Spectre du Brocken. (4) -Savannah-la-Mer. 9. Conclusion.</p></blockquote> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">DU VIN ET DU HASCHISCH, COMPARÉS COMME MOYENS DE MULTIPLICATION DE -L'INDIVIDUALITÉ</span>, 1851, 1858.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1, 2, 3. Le Vin. 5, 6, 7. Le Haschisch.</p></blockquote> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LA FANFARLO</span>, 1847.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LE JEUNE ENCHANTEUR. HISTOIRE TIRÉE D'UN PALIMPSESTE DE POMPÉIA</span>, 1846.</p> - -<p>Volume V. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES</span>. Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Edgar Poe: sa vie et ses œuvres. 2. Double assassinat dans la -rue Morgue. 3. La lettre volée. 4. Le scarabée d'or. 5. Le canard -au ballon. 6. Aventure sans pareille d'un certain Hans Pfaall. -7. Manuscrit trouvé dans une bouteille. 8. Une descente dans le -Maelstrom. 9. Le vérité sur le cas de M. Valdemar. 10. Révélation -magnétique, 11. Les souvenirs de M. Auguste Bedloe. 12. Morella. -13. Ligeia. 14. Metzengerstein. 15. Le Mystère de Marie Roget.</p></blockquote> - -<p>Volume VI. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">NOUVELLES HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES.</span> Par Edgar Poe. -Traduction de Charles Baudelaire.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe. 2. Le Démon de la Perversité. -3. Le Chat noir. 4. William Wilson. 5. L'homme des foules. -6. Le cœur révélateur. 7. Bérénice. 8. La chute de la maison -Usher. 9. Le puits et la pendule. 10. Hop-Frog. 11. La Barrique -d'Amontillado. 12. Le Masque de la Mort rouge. 13. Le Roi Peste. -14. Le Diable dans le beffroi. 15. Lionnerie. 16. Quatre bêtes en -une. 17. Petite discussion avec une momie. 18. Puissance de la -Parole. 19. Colloque entre Monos et Una. 20. Conversation d'Eiros -avec Charmion. 21. Ombre. 22. Silence. 23. L'île de la Fée. 24. -Le Portrait Ovale.</p></blockquote> - -<p>Volume VII. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">AVENTURES D'ARTHUR GORDON PYM. EURÉKA.</span> Par Edgar Poe. -Traduction de Charles Baudelaire.</p> - - - -<p>III</p> - -<p>1. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">ESSAIS DE BIBLIOGRAPHIE CONTEMPORAINE: CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>. Par A. de -Fizelière et Georges Decaux. Paris, Académie des Bibliophiles, rue de -la Bourse, 10, 1868. Numéro 178.</p> - -<p>2. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SA VIE ET SON ŒUVRE</span>. Par Charles Asselineau. -Paris, Alphonse Lemerre, Editeur, Passage Choiseul, 47, 1869.</p> - -<p>3. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SOUVENIRS. CORRESPONDANCES</span>— -<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">BIBLIOGRAPHIE</span><i>—suivie de pièces inédités.</i> Par Charles Cousin. La -Bibliographie par le Vicomte Spoelberck de Lovenjoul. Paris, Chez René -Pincebourde, 14 rue de Beaume (quai Voltaire), 1872.</p> - -<p>4.<span style="font-size: 0.8em;"> CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: ŒUVRES POSTHUMES ET CORRESPONDANCE -INÉDITS</span><i>—précédée d'une Étude Biographique.</i> Par Eugène Crépet. Paris, -Maison Quantin, Compagnie-Générale d'impression et d'Édition, 7 rue -Benoît, 1887.</p> - -<p>5. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LE TOMBEAU DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>—<i>précédée d'une Étude sur les -Textes de les Fleurs du Mal, Commentaire et Variantes.</i> Par le Prince -Ourousof. Paris, Bibliothèque Artistique et Littéraire (<i>La Plume,</i>) -1896.</p> - -<p>6. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span> (1821-1867). Par Féli Gautier. Orné de 26 -Portraits différents du Poète et de 28 Gravures et Reproductions. -Bruxelles, E. Deman, 1904. Tirage à 150 Exemplaires numérotés. -Exemplaire No. 74.</p> - -<p>7. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">VERSIFICATION ET MÉTRIQUE DE BAUDELAIRE</span>. Par Albert Cassagne. Paris, -Hachette, 1906.</p> - -<p>8. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LETTRES</span> (1841-1866) <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>. Paris, Mercure de France, -1908.</p> - -<p>9. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">ŒUVRES POSTHUMES DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>. Paris, Mercure de France, -1908.</p> - -<p>10. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LE CARNET DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>. 1911.</p> - -<p>Publié avec une Introduction et des Notes par Féli Gautier et orné -d'un dessin inédité de Baudelaire. Paris, J. Chevrel, Libraire 29 rue -de Seine. Cette plaquette non mise dans le commerce à été tirée à cent -exemplaires sur papier velin d'arches. Numéro 27.</p> - -<p>This <i>petit carnot vert,</i> which contains seven quires of twenty-four -pages—the last two have been torn out—was used by Baudelaire for -noting down certain private details, details of almost every kind, -which he began in 1861 and ended in 1864. There are lists of his debts, -of his friends, of his enemies, of his projects, of his proofs, of his -books, of his articles, of the people he has to see and to write to, of -the etchings and drawings he buys or intends to buy, of the money he -owes and of the money he is in the utmost need of. On one page is the -original text of his dedication of the "Poems on Prose." On one page he -reckons forty days in which to execute some of his translations, his -prose, and his poems. On another page he gives a list of his hatreds, -underlining <i>Vilainies, Canailles</i>; then his plans for short stories -and dramas. These notes are of importance. "Faire en un an 2 vols, <i>de -Nouvelles</i> et <i>Mon cœur mis à nu.</i>" "<i>Tous les jours cinq poèmes et -autre chose.</i>" Then this sinister note: "Pour faire du neuf, quitter -Paris, ou je me meurs." After this come long lists of the women he -frequents and of their addresses, such as 29 rue Neuve Bréda, 36 rue -Cigalle. After this comes Swinburne's verses, with the list of the few -friends he possesses: Villiers, Noriac, Manet, Malassis, his mother; -together with Louise, Gabrielle, and Judith.</p> - -<p>11. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LETTRES INÉDITÉS A SA MÈRE</span> (1833-1866). Par Charles Baudelaire. -Louis Conard, Libraire Editeur, 6 Place de la Madeleine, Paris, 1918. -Numéro 182.</p> - -<p>12. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">JOURNEAUX INTIMES DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: TEXTE INTEGRAL</span>. Paris, -Georges Crès, 21 rue Hautefeuille, 1919.</p> - -<p>This edition is founded on the original manuscripts of Baudelaire, now -in the possession of Gabriel Thomas.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">FUSÉES</span>. A manuscript of fifteen pages, containing twenty-two sections -numbered in red ink; the pagination is also in red ink. The notes have, -often enough, the aspect of mere fragments, scrawled angrily. One of -them, numbered 53, and two paragraphs of another (the note 17: <i>Tantôt -il lui demandait; Minette</i>) are written in pencil; note 12 is written -in blue ink. Certain phrases in the text are used twice over.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">MON CŒUR MIS À NU</span>. A manuscript of 91 pages, containing 197 articles -numbered in red ink; the pagination used in the same way as in the -other. Every note is preceded with the autograph mention: <i>Mon Cœur mis -à nu.</i> The text is written rapidly; the notes numbered 26, 31, 44, 48, -51, 54, 60, 68, 69, 72, 75 (the last three in italics), 80 are written -with a black pencil, the note 62 with a black pencil on blue paper, and -the note 83 written with a red pencil.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h4><a name="NOTES" id="NOTES">NOTES</a></h4> - - -<p>Fascinated by sin, Baudelaire, as I have said in these pages, is never -the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as the original sin; he studies -sin as he studies evil, with a stern logic; he finds in horror a kind -of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; rarely in hideous things, save -when his sense of what I call a moralist makes him moralise, as in his -terrible poem, <i>Une Charogne.</i></p> - -<p>Baudelaire's original manuscript, that is to say, the copy he makes for -his final text, I have recently bought. It covers two and a half folio -pages, folded four times across, as if he had carried it about with -him; it is written on thin, half-yellow paper, yellowed with age, and -on both sides; it is copied at tremendous speed with a quill pen that -blots the dashes he puts under every stanza. The title is underlined; -the only revision is where he obliterates "comme une vague" (which he -had used in the first line) and changes it to "d'un souffle, vague." He -uses a tremendous amount of capital letters; as in the first stanza: -"L'Objet, Mon Cœur, Matin, Doux, Détour, d'un Sentier, Une Charogne, -Cailloux." In the next: "Femme Lubrique, Les Poisons, D'une Façon -Nonchalant et Cynique, Ventre, Exhalations." At the end of the last -stanza but one he writes:</p> - -<p> -"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses<br /> -Vivre parmi les monuments;"<br /> -</p> - -<p>which he changes in the text of his <i>Fleurs du mal</i> into:</p> - -<p> -"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses<br /> -Moisir parmi les ossements."<br /> -</p> - -<p>The change makes an enormous improvement to the stanza.</p> - -<p>To possess this manuscript written by Baudelaire is to possess one of -the most magnificent poems he ever wrote: the whole thing is copied in -a kind of unholy rapture, in a kind of evil perversion.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h5>I. AN ADVENTURE IN FIRST EDITIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS</h5> - - -<p>I am, fortunately, the possessor of a copy of the first edition of <i>Les -Fleurs du Mal.</i> The title-page is as follows: <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LES FLEURS DU MAL</span> || -par Charles Baudelaire. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de Broise: || -Libraire-Éditeurs. || 4 rue de Buci. || 1857.</p> - -<p>This copy is signed, in brown Parisian ink: <i>"à mon ami Champfleury, -Ch. Baudelaire</i>" His signature is fantastic: the B. curled backward -like a snake's tail in an Egyptian hieroglyphic, the straight line -like an enchanter's wand. It is "grand-12; 252 pages." It contains one -hundred poems, the perfect number. It is printed on <i>papier vergé.</i> It -is one of the twenty copies, thus specially printed, that Baudelaire -ordered for himself and for certain of his friends. The rest of the -edition was printed on common white paper. Taken as a whole, this is -certainly one of the most perfectly printed books done in France, or -anywhere, in the past century.</p> - -<p>Poulet-Malassis came from Alençon to Paris, and began by printing the -<i>Odes Funambulesques</i> of Théodore de Banville early in 1857, before he -completed the publication of <i>Les Fleurs du Mal</i> in July of that year. -Baudelaire wrote to him, saying that he did not want popularity, "<i>mais -un bel éreintage général qui attirera la curiosité."</i> He asked him to -be sparing in blank spaces on the pages; and to use certain archaisms -and touches of red. These touches of red are given on the title-page; -they have a decorative effect. He said that he had a natural horror -of the over-use of inverted commas, which have a way of spoiling the -text. He must have a unique system of his own. "I must have," he -insists, "in this kind of production, the one admissible thing, that -is, perfection." There one sees his unerring instinct; his sense of the -exact value of words. Yet he writes to his publisher, underlining the -phrase: "You know certain things better than I do, but whenever there -is, on my part, no radical repulsion, follow your taste." He rages -against de Broise's perpetual reproaches with regard to <i>les surcharges -de M. Baudelaire—</i>the "author's corrections." He points out certain -printer's mistakes, page 44 for page 45, and <i>guères</i> rhyming with -<i>vulgaire.</i> There was no time to correct these errors; they remain so -in the printed pages of my copy.</p> - -<p>It is interesting, in regard to this question, to find in the first -text of <i>Le Vin de l'Assassin</i> these lines:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Ma femme est morte, je suis libre!<br /> -Je puis donc boire tout mon saoul"<br /> -</p> - -<p>In the second edition one reads "soûl." I find in Brachet's -<i>Dictionnaire Étymologique</i> this definition of the word "<i>soûl,</i> ancien -français, <i>saoul.</i> Latin <i>satallus,</i> d'où l'ancien français <i>saoul.</i>" -Therefore Baudelaire was right, traditionally, in using the original -form of the word.</p> - -<p>His worst trouble is in getting the famous dedication to Gautier -printed and spaced as it had to be. It must be composed in a certain -solemn style. Then he writes: "The magician has made me abbreviate the -dedication; it must not be a profession of faith, which might have the -fault of attracting people's eyes '<i>sur le côté scabreux du volume.</i>'" -As it is, strangely enough for him, Baudelaire made a mistake in -syntax, using "<i>au magicien ès-langue française"</i> instead of "<i>au -parfait magicien ès-lettres françaises</i>," which he corrected in the -edition of 1861.</p> - -<p>On July 11, 1857, he writes to Malassis: "Quick, hide the edition, -the whole edition. I have saved fifty here. The mistake was in having -sent a copy to <i>Le Figaro</i>! As the edition was sold out in three weeks -we may have the glory of a trial, from which we can easily escape." -The trial came; he was obliged to suppress six poems (supposed to -contain "obscene and immoral passages"). Baudelaire never ceased to -protest against the infamy of this trial. A copy of the second edition -(not nearly so well printed as the first) is before me: <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LES FLEURS -DU MAL</span>. || Par Charles Baudelaire. || Seconde Edition. || Augmentée -de trente-cinq poèmes nouveaux || et ornée d'un portrait de l'auteur -dessiné et gravé par Bracquemont. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de -Broise. || Editeurs. || 97. Rue de Richelieu, et Beaux-Arts, 56. || -1861. || Tout droits réservés. || Paris: Imp. Simon Raçon et Comp. || -Rue d'Erfurth.</p> - -<p>In comparing the text of 1857 with that of 1861 I find several -revisions of certain verses, not always, I think, for the best. For -instance, in the <i>Préface,</i> the first edition is as follows:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Dans nos cervaux malsains, comme un million d'helminthes,<br /> -Grouille, chante et ripaille un peuple de Démons."<br /> -</p> - -<p>He changes this into "verre fourmillant;" "dans nos cervaux ribote." On -page 22, he writes:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme<br /> -A l'aspect du tableau plein d'épouvantement<br /> -Des monstruosités, que voile un vêtement;<br /> -Des visages masqués et plus laids que des masques."<br /> -</p> - -<p>In the later text he puts a full stop after "épouvantement," and -continues:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"O monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement!<br /> -O ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques."<br /> -</p> - -<p>This reading seems to me infinitely inferior to the reading of the -first version.</p> - -<p>Again, there are certain other changes, even less happy, such as -"<i>quadrature</i>" into "<i>nature</i>," "<i>divin élixir</i>" into "<i>comme un -élixir,</i>" "<i>Mon âme se balançait comme un ange joyeux,</i>" into "<i>Mon -cœur, comme un oiseau, voltigeant tout joyeux."</i> Baudelaire, in sending -a copy of <i>Les fleurs du mal</i> (1861) to Alfred de Vigny, wrote that he -had marked the new poems in pencil in the list at the end of the book. -In my copy—1857—he has marked, with infinite delicacy, in pencil, -only three poems: "Lesbos," "Femmes Damnées," "Les Métamorphoses du -Vampire." He underlines, in "Une Charogne," these words in the text: -"<i>charogne lubrique, cynique, ventre, d'exhalaisons."</i> At one side of -the prose note on "Franciscae meae laudes" he has made, on the margin, -a number of arrows.</p> - -<p>In <i>Le Corsaire-Satan,</i> January, 1848, Baudelaire reviewed three books -of short stories by Champfleury. On the first, <i>Chien-Caillou,</i> he -writes: "One day a quite small, quite simple volume, <i>Chien Caillou,</i> -was printed; the history simply, clearly, crudely related, of a poor -engraver, certainly original, but whose poverty was so extreme that -he lived on carrots, between a rabbit and a girl of the town; and -he made masterpieces," I have before me this book: "<i>Chien-Caillou, -fantaisies d'hiver.</i> Par Champfleury. Paris, A la Libraire Pittoresque -de Martinon, Rue du Coq-Saint-Martin, 1847," It is dedicated to Victor -Hugo. "I dedicate to you this work, in spite of the fact that I have -an absolute horror of dedications—because of the expression <i>young -man</i> that it leaves in readers' minds. But you have been the first to -signalize <i>Chien-Caillou</i> to your friends, and your luminous genius has -suddenly recognized the reality of the second title: <i>This is not a -Story."</i></p> - -<p>In the same year came out <i>Le Gâteau des rois.</i> Par M. Jules Janin. -Ouvrage entièrement inédit. Paris. Libraire d'Amyot, 6 rue de la Paix, -1847. I have my own copy of this edition, bound in pale yellow-paper -covers.</p> - -<p>On January 26th, 1917, there came to me from Paris an original -manuscript, written by Charles Baudelaire on three pages of note-paper, -concerning these two books of Champfleury and Jules Janin. Being -unfinished, it may have been the beginning of an essay which he never -completed. Certainly I find no trace of this prose in any of his -printed books. From the brown colour of the ink that he used I think it -was written in 1857, as the ink and the handwriting are absolutely the -same as in his signed <i>Fleurs du mal</i> sent to Champfleury. There are -several revisions and corrections in the text of the MS. that I possess.</p> - -<p>At the top of the first page are nearly obliterated the words: -<i>remplacez les blancs.</i> It begins: "Pour donner immédiatement au -lecteur non initié dans les dessous de la littérature, non instruit -dans les préliminaires des réputations, une idée première de -l'importance littéraire réille de ces petits livres, gros d'esprit, -de poésie et d'observations, qu'il sache que le premier d'entre nous, -<i>Chien-Caillou,</i> Fantaisies d'hiver, fut publié en même temps qu'un -petit livre d'un homme très célèbre, qui avait, en même temps que -Champfleury, l'idée de ces publications en trimestrielles." It ends: -"Où est le cœur? Où est l'âme, où est la raison?"</p> - -<p>Here is my translation:</p> - -<p>"To convey to the reader who has not penetrated into the back-parlours -of literature, who has not been instructed in the preliminaries of -reputations, an immediate idea of the real literary importance of -these little books, fat in wit, poetry, and observations, it should be -stated that the first among them, <i>Chien-Caillou.</i> Fantaisies d'hiver, -was published at the same time as another small book by a famous man -who had, simultaneously with Champfleury, started these quarterly -publications.</p> - -<p>"Now, for these people whose intelligence, daily applied to the -elaboration of books, is hardest to please, Champfleury's work absorbed -that of the famous man. All those of whom I speak have known <i>Le -Gâteau des rois.</i> Their profession is to know everything. <i>Le Gâteau -des rois,</i> a kind of Christmas book, or 'Livre de Noël,' showed above -all a clearly asserted pretention to draw from "the language, by -playing infinite variations on the dictionary, all the effects which -a transcendental instrumentalist draws from his chords. Shifting of -forces, error of an unballasted mind! The ideas in this strange book -follow each other in haste, dart with the swiftness of sound, leaning -at random on infinitely tenuous connections. Their association with one -another hangs by a thread according to a method of thought similar to -that of people in Bedlam.</p> - -<p>"Vast current of involuntary ideas, wild-goose chase, abnegation of -will! This singular feat of dexterity was accomplished by the man you -know, whose sole and special faculty consists in not being master of -himself, the man of encounters and good fortunes.</p> - -<p>"Assuredly there was talent. But what abuse! What debauchery! And, -besides, what fatigue and what pain!</p> - -<p>"No doubt some respect is due or, at least, some grateful compassion, -for the tireless writhing of an old dancing girl. But, alas! worn-out -attitudes, weak methods, boresome seductivities!</p> - -<p>"The ideas of our man are but old women driven crazy with too much -dancing, too much kicking off the ground. <i>Sustalerunt sæpius pedes.</i></p> - -<p>"Where is the heart? Where the soul? Where reason?"</p> - -<p>Here the manuscript comes to an abrupt end, and one is left to wonder -how much more Baudelaire had written; perhaps only one more page, as -he had a peculiar fashion of writing fragments on bits of note-paper. -Certainly this prose has the refinement, the satire, the exquisite use -of words, the inimitable charm and unerring instinct of a faultless -writer. Not only is there his passion for <i>les danseuses</i> and for the -exotic, but a sinister touch in <i>l'abdication de la volonté</i> which -recurs finally in a letter written February 8, 1865; for, when one -imagines himself capable of an absolute abdication of the will, it -means that something of the man has gone out of him.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h5>II. AN ADVENTURE IN IMAGES</h5> - - -<p>It is often said, not without a certain kind of truth, that the -likeness is precisely what matters least in a portrait. That is one of -the interesting heresies which Whistler did not learn from Velasquez. -Because a portrait which is a likeness, and nothing more than a -likeness, can often be done by a second-rate artist, by a kind of -sympathetic trick, it need not follow that likeness is in itself an -unimportant quality in a masterly portrait, nor will it be found that -likeness was ever disregarded by the greatest painters. But there are -many kinds of likenesses, among which we have to choose, as we have to -choose in all art which follows nature, between a realism of outward -circumstance and a realism of inner significance. Every individual face -has as many different expressions as the soul behind it has moods. -When we talk, currently, of a "good likeness," we mean, for the most -part, that a single, habitual expression, with which we are familiar, -as we are familiar with a frequently worn suit of clothes, has been -rendered; that we see a man as we imagine ourselves ordinarily to see -him. But, in the first place, most people see nothing with any sort of -precision; they cannot tell you the position and shape of the ears, or -the shape of the cheek-bones, of their most intimate friends. Their -mental vision is so feeble that they can call up only a blurred image, -a vague compromise between expressions, without any definite form at -all. Others have a mental vision so sharp, retentive, yet without -selection, that to think of a person is to call up a whole series -of precise images, each the image of a particular expression at a -particular moment; the whole series failing to coalesce into one really -typical likeness, the likeness of soul or body. Now it is the artist's -business to choose among these mental pictures; better still, to create -on paper, or on his canvas, the image which was none of these, but -which these helped to make in his own soul.</p> - -<p>The Manet portrait of Charles Baudelaire, dated 1862, is exquisite, -ironical, subtle, enigmatical, astonishing; He has arrested the head -and shoulders of the poet in an instant's vision; the outlines are -definite, clear, severe, and simple. One sees the eager head thrust -forward, as if the man were actually walking; the fine and delicate -nose, voluptuously dilated in the nostrils, seems to breathe in vague -perfumes; the mouth, half-seen, has a touch of his malicious irony; the -right eye shines vividly in a fixed glance, those eyes that had the -colour of Spanish tobacco. Over the long, waving hair, that seems to -be swept backward by the wind, is placed, with unerring skill, at the -exact angle, that top-hat that Baudelaire had to have expressly made to -fit the size of his head. Around his long neck is just seen the white -soft collar of his shirt, with a twisted tie in front. In this picture -one sees the inspired poet, with distinct touches of this strong piece -of thinking flesh and blood. And Manet indicates, I think, that glimpse -of the soul which one needs in a perfect likeness.</p> - -<p>In the one done in 1865, the pride of youth, the dandy, the vivid -profile, have disappeared. Here, as if in an eternal aspect, Baudelaire -is shown. There is his tragic mask; the glory of the eyes, that seem to -defy life, to defy death, seems enormous, almost monstrous. The lips -are closed tightly together, in their long, sinuous line, almost as if -Leonardo da Vinci had stamped them with his immortality. The genius -of Manet has shown the genius of Baudelaire in a gigantic shadow; the -whole face surging out of that dark shadow; and the soul is there!</p> - -<p>In the portrait by Carjat, his face and his eyes are contorted as if -in a terrible rage; the whole face seems drawn upward and downward in -a kind of convulsion; and the aspect, one confesses, shows a degraded -type, as if all the vices he had never committed looked out of his eyes -in a wild revolt.</p> - -<p>It is in the mask of Baudelaire done by Zachari Astruc that I find -almost the ethereal beauty, the sensitive nerves, the drawn lines, of -the death-mask of Keats; only, more tragic. It looks out on one as a -carved image, perfect in outline, implacable, restless, sensual; and, -in that agonized face, what imagination, what enormous vitality, what -strange subtlety, what devouring energy! It might be the face of a -Roman Emperor, refined, century by century, from the ghastly face of -Nero, the dissolute face of Caligula, to this most modern of poets.</p> - - - - - - - - -<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 50488 ***</div> - - - -</body> -</html> -</div> - -</div> diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_courbet.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_courbet.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 763da66..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_courbet.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_cover_fleur.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_cover_fleur.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index a657abb..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_cover_fleur.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_duval.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_duval.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index f29e617..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_duval.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_front.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_front.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 4ecfac7..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_front.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_front_paradis.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_front_paradis.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 94f6595..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_front_paradis.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_lettre_auto.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_lettre_auto.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 206f443..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_lettre_auto.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_lettre_auto_02.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_lettre_auto_02.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 0eb71e2..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_lettre_auto_02.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_manet01.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_manet01.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 8cde7ed..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_manet01.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_manet_02.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_manet_02.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 53d33a3..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_manet_02.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/baud_self.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/baud_self.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index a7b8028..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/baud_self.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50488-h/images/cover.jpg b/old/50488-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 9d5571c..0000000 --- a/old/50488-h/images/cover.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/old/50488-0.txt b/old/old/50488-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a18e2d9..0000000 --- a/old/old/50488-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3838 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Charles Baudelaire, by Arthur Symons - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: Charles Baudelaire - A Study - -Author: Arthur Symons - -Release Date: November 19, 2015 [EBook #50488] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARLES BAUDELAIRE *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generpously made available by the Internet Archive.) - - - - - -CHARLES BAUDELAIRE - -A STUDY - -BY - -ARTHUR SYMONS - -LONDON - -ELKIN MATHEWS - -CORK STREET - -MCMXX - - -TO - -JOHN QUINN - - -[Illustration: ÉMILE DE ROY, 1844] - - - CONTENTS - - CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY. - BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES. - NOTES. - - -LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS - - Émile de Roy, 1844. _Frontispiece_ - - I. Jeanne Duval: Drawing by Baudelaire, 1860. - II. Baudelaire, designed by himself, 1848. - III. Les fleurs du mal, 1857. - IV. Les paradis artificiels, 1861. - V. Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859. - VI. Gustave Courbet, 1848. - VII. Edouard Manet, 1862. - VIII. Edouard Manet, 1865. - IX. Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Charles Asselineau, 1865. - - - - -BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY - - - -I - - -When Baudelaire is great, when his genius is at its highest point -of imaginative creation, of imaginative criticism, it is never when -he works by implication--as the great men who are pure artists (for -instance, Shakespeare) work by implication only--but always from his -personal point of view being simply infallible and impeccable. The pure -artist, it has been said, never asserts: and the instances are far -from being numerous; Balzac asserts, and Balzac is always absolutely -just in all his assertions: he whose analysis of modern Society--_La -Comédie Humaine_--verges almost always on creation; and despite certain -deficiencies in technique and in style, he remains the greatest of all -novelists. As for Baudelaire, he rarely asserts; he more often suggests -or divines--with that exquisite desire of perfect and just work that -is always in him. With his keen vision he rarely misses the essential; -with his subtle and sifted prose he rarely fails in characterizing -the right man in the right way and the wrong man--the man who is not -an artist--in forms of ironical condemnation. Shelley in his time and -Blake in his time gave grave enough offence and perplexity; so did -Baudelaire, so did Poe, so did Swinburne, so did Rossetti, so did -Beardsley. All had their intervals of revolt--spiritual or unspiritual, -according to the particular trend of their genius; some destroy -mendacious idols, some change images into symbols; some are supposed -to be obscurely original. All had to apprehend, as Browning declared -in regard to his readers and critics in one of his Prefaces, "charges -of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely -harsh." And all these might have said as he said: "I blame nobody, -least of all myself, who did my best then and since." - -In our approach to the poetry, or to the prose, of any famous -writer, with whom we are concerned, we must necessarily approach his -personality; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we -cannot love it without loving him. As for Baudelaire, I must confess -that, in spite of the fact that one might hate or love the man -according to the judgment of the wise or of the unwise, I find him more -lovable than hateful. That he failed in trying to love one woman is as -certain as his disillusion after he had possessed her; that, in regard -to Jeanne Duval, she was to him simply a silent instrument that, by -touching all the living strings of it, he awakened to a music that is -all his own; that whether this "masterpiece of flesh" meant more to him -than certain other women who inspired him in different ways; whether -he thirsted to drain her "empty kiss" or the "empty kiss" of Rachel, -of Marguerite, of Gabrielle, of Judith, is a matter of but little -significance. A man's life such as his is a man's own property and the -property of no one else. And Baudelaire's conclusion as to any of these -might be, perhaps, summed up in this stanza: - - "Your sweet, scarce lost estate - Of innocence, the candour of your eyes, - Your child-like, pleased surprise, - Your patience: these afflict me with a weight - As of some heavy wrong that I must share - With God who made, with man who found you, fair." - -"In more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels," -says Saint Augustine; and Beardsley's sacrifice, along with that of -all great decadent art, the art of Rops or of Baudelaire, is really a -sacrifice to the eternal beauty, and only seemingly to the powers of -evil. And here let me say that I have no concern with what neither he -nor I could have had absolute knowledge of, his own intention in his -work. A man's intention, it must be remembered--and equally in the case -of much of the work of Poe and of Baudelaire, much less so in the case -of Balzac and Verlaine--from the very fact that it is conscious, is -much less intimately himself than the sentiment which his work conveys -to me. - -Baudelaire's figures, exactly like those designed by Beardsley and -by Rodin, have the sensitiveness of the spirit and that bodily -sensitiveness which wastes their veins and imprisons them in the -attitude of their luxurious meditation. They have nothing that is -merely "animal" in their downright course towards repentance; no -overwhelming passion hurries them beyond themselves; they do not -capitulate to an open assault of the enemy of souls. It is the soul in -them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. Their -bodies are eager and faint with wantonness; they desire fiercer and -more exquisite pains, a more intolerable suspense than there is in the -world. - -Beardsley is the satirist of an age without convictions, and he can -but paint hell as Baudelaire did, without pointing for contrast to any -actual paradise. He employs the same rhetoric as Baudelaire--a method -of emphasis which it is uncritical to think insincere. In the terrible -annunciation of evil which he called _The Mysterious Rose-Garden,_ the -lantern-bearing angel with winged sandals whispers, from among the -falling roses, tidings of more than "pleasant sins." And in Baudelaire, -as in Beardsley, the peculiar efficacy of their satire is that it -is so much the satire of desire returning on itself, the mockery of -desire enjoyed, the mockery of desire denied. It is because these love -beauty that beauty's degradation obsesses them; it is because they -are supremely conscious of virtue that vice has power to lay hold on -them. And with these--unlike other satirists of our day--it is always -the soul, and not the body's discontent only, which cries out of these -insatiable eyes, that have looked on all their lusts; and out of these -bitter mouths, that have eaten the dust of all their sweetnesses; and -out of these hands, that have laboured delicately for nothing; and out -of their feet, that have run after vanities. - -The body, in the arms of death, the soul, in the arms of the naked -body: these are the strangest symbolical images of Life and of Death. -So, as Flaubert's devotion to art seemed to have had about it something -of the "seriousness and passion that are like a consecration," I give -this one sentence on the death of Emma Bovary: "Ensuite il recita le -_Misereatur_ et l'_Indulgentiam_, trempa son pouce droit dans l'huile -et commença les onctions: d'abord sur les yeux, qui avaient tant -convoité toutes les somptuosités terrestres; puis sur les narines, -friandes de brises tièdes et de senteurs amoureuses; puis sur la -bouche, qui s'était ouverte pour le mensonge, qui avait gémi d'orgueil -et crié dans la luxure; puis sur les mains, qui se delectaient au -contacts suaves, et enfin sur la plante des pieds, si rapides autrefois -quand elle courait à l'assouvissance de ses désirs et qui maintenant ne -marcheraient plus." - -Charles Baudelaire was born April 9th, 1821, in la rue Saint Augustin, -8; he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice. His father, François, who had -married Mile Janin in 1803, married, after her death, Caroline -Archimbaut-Dufays, born in London, September 27th, 1793. François -Baudelaire's father, named Claude, married Marie-Charlotte Dieu, -February 10th, 1738, at Neuville-au-Port, in the Department of Marne. - -From 1838 to 1842 (when Baudelaire attains his majority) there is a -family crisis in a certainly impossible family circle. These years he -spends in vagabonding at his own will: living a deliciously depraved -life; diving, perhaps, into depths of impurity; haunting the night -resorts that one finds in the most curious quarters of Paris--the -cafés, the theatres, la Rue de Bréda. He amuses himself enormously: -even in "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame;" he lives then, as -always, by his sensitive nerves, by his inexhaustible curiosity. He is -devoured then, as always, by the inner fires of his genius and of his -sensuality; and is, certainly, a quite naturally immoral man in his -relations with women. - -He lives, as I have said; he feeds himself on his nerves: - - "The modern malady of love is nerves." - -It is an incurable, a world-old malady; and, from Catullus, one of the -greatest of all poets, century after century, from the Latin poets of -the Middle Ages, from the poets of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan -Age, down to the modern Romantic Movement, no poet who was a passionate -lover of Woman has ever failed to sing for her and against her: - - "I hate and I love: you ask me how I can do it? - I know not: I know that it hurts: I am going through it." - - _Odi et amo; quari id faciam, fortasse requiris._ - _Nescio; sed fiere sentio, et excrucior._ - - "Caelius, Lesbia mine, that Lesbia, that - Lesbia whom Catullus for love did rate - Higher than all himself and than all things, stands - Now at the cross-roads and the alleys to wait - For the lords of Rome, with public lips and hands." - - _Cœli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia,_ - _Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam_ - _Plus, quàm se, atque suos amavit omnes._ - -Need I quote more than these three fines? These fines, and those -quoted above, are enough to show, for all time, that Catullus was -as passionate a lover and as passionate a hater of flesh as Villon. -Yet, if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even -_le grosse Margot_ from her place in his life; who, to a certainty, -had not for one instant the place in his life that Lesbia had in the -life of Catullus. Villon was no dabbler in infamy, but one who liked -infamous things for their own sake. - -Nor must I forget John Donne, whose quality of passion is unique in -English poetry--a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of -actual violence: his senses speak with unparalleled directness: he can -exemplify every motion with an unluxurious explicitness which leaves -no doubt of his intentions. He suffers from all the fevers and colds -of love; and, in his finest poem--a hate poem--he gives expression -to a whole region of profound human sentiment which has never been -expressed, out of Catullus, with such intolerable truth: - - "When, by thy scorn, O murdress, I am dead, - And that thou thinkest thee free - From all solicitations of me, - Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, - And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see: - Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, - And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, - Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think - Thou call'st for more, - And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink; - And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou - Bathed in a cold, quick-silver sweat will lie - A verier ghost than I. - What I will say, I will not tell thee now, - Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, - I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent, - Than by my threatenings rest still innocent." - -As for Baudelaire's adventures when he is sent, perhaps against his -will, in May, 1841, on a long voyage from Bordeaux to Calcutta, to -return to Paris in February, 1843, after six months' travel, it -is conjecturable that he might return a changed man. Certainly his -imagination found in the East a curious fascination, with an actual -reawakening of new instincts; and with that oppressive sense of extreme -heat, as intense, I suppose, as in Africa, which makes one suffer, -bodily and spiritually, and in ways more extraordinary than those who -have never endured those tropical heats can possibly conceive of. There -he may have abandoned himself to certain obscure rites that to him -might have been an initiation into the cults of the Black Venus. And, -with these hot suns, these burning midnoons, these animal passions, the -very seductiveness of the nakedness of bronze skin, what can I imagine -but this: that they lighted in his veins an intolerable flame, that -burned there ardently to the end? - -For in his _Wagner_ (1861) he writes: "The radiant ancient Venus, -Aphrodite, born of white foam, has not imprudently traversed the -horrible darkness of the Middle Ages. She has retired to the depths of -a cavern, magnificently lighted by the fires that are not those of the -Sun. In her descent under earth, Venus has come near to hell's mouth, -and she goes, certainly, to many abominable solemnities, to render -homage to the Arch-demon, Prince of the Flesh and Lord of Sin." He -finds her in the music where Wagner has created a furious song of the -flesh, with an absolute knowledge of what in men is diabolical. "For -from the first measures, the nerves vibrate in unison with the melody; -one's flesh remembers itself and begins to tremble. _Tannhäuser_ -represents the eternal combat between the two principles that have -chosen the human heart as battle-field, that is to say, of the flesh -with the spirit, of hell with heaven, of Satan with God." - -In January, 1843, Baudelaire finds himself in possession of a fortune -of seventy-five thousand francs. With his incurable restlessness, -his incurable desire of change, he is always moving from one place -to another. He takes rooms at Quai de Bethune, 10, Isle-Saint-Louis; -rue Vanneau, faubourg Saint-Germain; rue Varenne, quai d'Anjou; Hôtel -Pimodan, 17; Hôtel Corneille; Hôtel Folkestone, rue Lafitte; Avenue -de la République, 95; rue des Marais-du-Temple, 25; rue Mazarine; -rue de Babylone; rue de Seine, 57; rue Pigalle, 60; Hôtel Voltaire, -19 quai Voltaire; rue Beautrellis, 22; Cité d'Orléans, 15; rue -d'Angoulême-du-Temple, 18; Hôtel Dieppe, rue d'Amsterdam, 22; rue des -Ecuries-d'Artois, 6; rue de Seine, l'Hôtel du Maroc, 35. - -With a certain instinct for drawing Baudelaire haunts many painter's -studios: Delacroix's, whose genius he discovers, giving him much of -his fame, becoming his intimate friend; Manet's, whose genius he also -divines and discovers; Daumier's, to whom he attributes "the strange -and astonishing qualities of a great genius, sick of genius." So also, -from the beginning, Baudelaire's judgments are infallibly right; so -also his first book, _Le Salon de_ 1845, has all the insolence of youth -and all the certitude of a youth of genius. But his fame is made, -that is to say, as an imaginative critic, with _Le Salon de_ 1846; -for, after the prelude, the entire book is fascinating, paradoxical, -and essentially æsthetical; a wonderful book in which he reveals the -mysteries of colour, of form, of design, of technique, and of the -enigmas of creative works. Here he elaborates certain of his mature -theories, such as his exultant praise--in which he is one with Lamb -and with Swinburne; his just disdain, and his grave irony, in which -he is one with Swinburne; and, above all, that passionate love of all -forms of beauty, at once spiritual and absolute, which is part of the -quintessence of his genius. - -So, as Swinburne, in the fire of his youthful genius, was the first -to praise Baudelaire in English, I quote these sentences of his from -an essay on Tennyson and Musset: "I do not mean that the _Comédie de -la Mort_ must be ranked with the _Imitation of Christ,_ or that _Les -Fleurs du Mal_ should be bound up with _The Christian Year._ But I do -say that no principle of art which does not exclude from its tolerance -the masterpieces of Titian can logically or consistently reject the -masterpieces of a poet who has paid to one of them the most costly -tribute of carven verse, in lines of chiselled ivory with rhymes of -ringing gold, that ever was laid by the high priest of one muse on the -high altar of another. And I must also maintain my opinion that the -pervading note of spiritual tragedy in the brooding verse of Baudelaire -dignifies and justifies at all points his treatment of his darkest and -strangest subjects. The atmosphere of his work is to the atmosphere -of Gautier's as the air of a gas-lit alcove is to the air of the -far-flowering meadows that make in April a natural Field of the Cloth -of Gold all round the happier poet's native town of Tarbes, radiant -as the open scroll of his writings with immeasurable wealth of youth -and sunlight and imperishable spring. The sombre starlight under which -Baudelaire nursed and cherished the strange melancholy of his tropical -home-sickness, with its lurid pageant of gorgeous or of ghastly dreams, -was perhaps equidistant from either of these, but assuredly had less in -common with the lamplight than the sunshine." - -To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, as Villon and his infamous -friends did on their wonderful winter nights, "where the wolves live -on wind," and where the gallows stands at street corners, ominously, -and one sees swing in the wind dead chained men; to haunt the strange -streets of cities, to know all the useless and improper and amusing, -the moral and the immoral people, who are alone worth knowing; to live, -as well as to observe; to be drawn out of the rapid current of life -into an exasperating inaction: it is such things as these that make -for poetry and for prose. Some make verse out of personal sensations, -verse which is half pathological, which is half physiological; some out -of colours and scents and crowds and ballets; some out of music, out -of the sea's passions; some simply out of rhythms that insist on being -used; a few out of the appreciation of the human comedy. The outcome of -many experiments, these must pass beyond that stage into the stage of -existence. - -So, in much of Baudelaire's verse I find not only the exotic -(rarely the erotic) but, in the peculiar technique of the lines, -certain andante movements, lingering subtleties of sound, colour, -and suggestion, with--at times, but never in the excessive sense -of Flaubert's--the almost medical curiosity of certain researches -into the stuff of dreams, the very fibre of life itself, which, -combined, certainly tend to produce a new thing in poetry. A new -order of phenomena absorbs his attention, which becomes more and more -externalized, more exclusively concerned with the phenomena of the -soul, with morbid sensation, with the curiosities of the mind and the -senses. Humanity is now apprehended in a more than ever generalized and -yet specialized way in its essence, when it becomes, if you will, an -abstraction; or, if you will, for the first time purely individual. - -In certain poets these have been foiled endeavours; in Baudelaire -never: for one must never go beyond the unrealizable, never lose -one's intensity of expression, never let go of the central threads of -one's spider's web. Still, in regard to certain direct pathological -qualities, there is a good deal of this to be found in much of the -best poetry--in Poe, in Rossetti, in Swinburne's earlier work, and -much in Baudelaire; only all these are moved by a fascination: in Poe -for the fantastically inhuman; in Rossetti for the inner life of the -imagination, for to him, as Pater said, "life is a crisis at every -moment;" in Swinburne for the arduous fulness of intricate harmony, -and for the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled -abundance. - -There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own -highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the -end of art, but the artist--whether he be Baudelaire or Verlaine-- -should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is -not written by a man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but -rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing on impulse, -hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he -does not remember, in some "close corner of his brain," and exerts -the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the -medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some -obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what -it was, and, aiming at much more minor things in the world than pure -beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to -remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end must -be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the -purpose which it sought to serve, but by the success or failure in -one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise -consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a -precise consciousness of what he is doing. - -To Baudelaire as to Pater there were certain severe tests of the -effects made on us by works of genius. In both writers there is a -finality of creative criticism. For, to these, all works of art, all -forms of human life, were as powers and forces producing pleasurable -sensations. One can find them in a gem, a wine, a spoken word, a sudden -gesture, in anything, indeed, that strikes vividly or fundamentally the -senses, that acts instantaneously on one's perceptive passions. "What," -says Pater in his essay on Wordsworth, "are the peculiarities in things -and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can -convey to others, in an extraordinary way?" - -"The ultimate aim of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to -establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass -judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had -an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, -almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who -allowed himself to be a critic. Certainly, Baudelaire shared certain -of those qualities; indeed, almost all; even, in a sense, logic. His -genius was so great, and in its greatness so manysided, that for some -studious disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from -any possible point of view, have always some of his magic and of his -magnetism. The ardour, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute -desire to get at the root of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be, -will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper; -that is to say, those that are most morbid, most fond of imaginative -perversities. - -Prose, I have said, listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats -their speech almost in their own terms. But poetry (it is Baudelaire -who says it) "is akin to music through a prosody whose roots plunge -deeper in the human soul than any classical theory has defined." Poetry -begins where prose ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins -sooner. The one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I -can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse, out of -mere honour towards my material. The farther I can extend my prose, the -farther back do I set the limits of verse. The region of poetry will -thus be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible -chance of any confusion of territory. - -Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in -prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, -not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the -whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare -and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his -mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of -any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take -_King Lear_ and take _Père Goriot._ Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he -suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear -grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument -of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, -wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that -he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his -crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well -enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In -that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and -material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose. - -So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem -of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of -the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of -every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets -become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are -guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual -life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out -their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have -produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine -purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious -for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to -contain a critic." - - -[Illustration: dessin de C.B.] - - - -II - - -Has any writer ever explained the exact meaning of the word Style? -To me nothing is more difficult. Technique, that is quite a -different affair. The essence of good style might be, as Pater says, -"expressiveness," as, for instance, in Pascal's style, which--apart -from that--is the purest style of any French writer. It is no paradox -to state this fact: without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is -worth considering in any art; the violinist, the pianist, the painter, -the poet, the novelist, the rope-dancer, the acrobat--all, without -exception, if they lapse from technique lapse from perfection. I -have often taken Ysaye as the type of the artist, not because he is -faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the -point where faultless technique leaves off. - -Art, said Aristotle, should always have "a continual slight novelty," -and his meaning is that art should never astonish. Take, for instance, -Balzac, Villiers, Poe, and Baudelaire; only one part of their genius, -but a most sinister one, is the desire to astonish. There is, to -me, nothing more astonishing in prose fiction than _The Pit and the -Pendulum_ and _The Cask of Amontillado_ of Poe; they are more than -analysis, though this is pushed to the highest point of analysis; they -have in them a slow, poisonous and cruel logic; equalled only, and at -times surpassed in their imagination, by certain of Villiers' _Contes -Cruels,_ such as his _Demoiselles de Bien Filâtre, L'Intersigne_ and -_Les amants de Tolède._ And--what is more astonishing in his prose than -in any of the writers I have mentioned--is his satire; a satire which -is the revenge of beauty on ugliness; and therefore the only laughter -of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Rabelais -and of Swift. - -Baudelaire, when he astonishes, is never satirical: sardonical, -ironical, coldly cruel, irritating, and persistent. This form of -astonishment is an inveterate part of the man's sensitive and -susceptible nature. It is concentrated, inimical, a kind of juggling or -fencing; a form of contradiction, of mystification; and a deliberate -desire of causing bewilderment. The Philistine can never pardon a -mystification, and a fantastic genius--such as that of Baudelaire and -of Poe--can never resist it when opportunity offers. - -Had he but been one of those "elect souls, vessels of election, _épris -des hauteurs,_ as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if led -on by a kind of thirst for God!" (I quote Pater's words on Pascal) his -sombre soul might have attained an ultimate peace; a peace beyond all -understanding. This was cruelly denied him. He, I imagine, believed -in God; thirsted for God: neither was his belief confirmed nor his -thirst assuaged. He might, for all I know, have thought himself a -reprobate--and so cast out of God's sight. - - "For, till the thunder in the trumpet be, - Soul may divide from body, but not we - One from another; I hold thee with my hand, - I let mine eyes have all their will of thee, - I seal myself upon thee with my might, - Abiding alway out of all men's sight - Until God loosen over sea and land - The thunder of the trumpets of the night." - -I am certain Baudelaire must have read the poems of John Keats; for -there are certain characteristics in the versification, and in the -using of images of both poets. Keats had something feminine and twisted -in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves--which are utterly lacking -in Baudelaire--but which it is now the fashion to call decadent; Keats -being more than a decadent, but certainly decadent in such a line as-- - - "One faint eternal eventide of gems," - -which might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. I -give one of his sonnets, a perverse and perverted one, made by a fine -technical feat out of two recurrent rhymes: - - "Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx, - L'angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadaphore, - Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix - Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore - - Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx - Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore, - (Car le maître est allé puiser des fleurs au Styx - Avec ce seul objet dont le néant s'honore.) - - Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or - Agonise selon peut-être le décor - Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe, - - Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor - Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe - De scintillations sitôt le septuor." - -Keats luxuriates; like Baudelaire, in the details of physical -discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as when, in -sleeplessness--how often these two overstrung and over-nervous poets -must have had sleepless nights!-- - - "We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft, - And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil." - -He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the -physical sensations of his lovers, the bodily translations of emotion. -In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes: - - "When her lips and eyes -Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs -Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small." - -And, in another line, he writes: - - "By the moist languor of thy breathing face." - -Lycius, in _Lamia:_ - - "Sick to lose - The amorous promise of her lone complain, - Swooned murmuring of love, and pale with pain;" - -and all that trembling and swooning of his lovers, which English -critics have found unmanly, would at all events be very much at home -in modern French poetry, where love is again, as it was to Catullus -and Propertius, a sickness, an entrancing madness, a poisoning. To -find anything like it, like this utter subtlety of expression, we -must go back to the Elizabethan Age, and then look forward, and find, -beyond Keats, traces of it in Rossetti and in Morris's _The Defence of -Guinevere;_ as, for instance, in some of the Queen's lines: - - "Listen, suppose your turn were come to die, - And you were quite alone and very weak; - Yea, laid a dying while very mightily - - The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak - Of river through your broad lands running well; - Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak: - - 'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell, - Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be, - I shall not tell you, you must somehow tell - - Of your own strengths and mightiness; here, see!' - Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes, - At foot of your familiar bed to see - - A great God's angel standing, with such dyes, - Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands, - Hold out two ways, light from the inner skies - - Showing him well, and making his commands - Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too, - Holding within his hands the cloths on wands; - - And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue, - Wavy and long, and one cut short and red: - No man could tell the better of the two. - - After a shivering half-hour you said: - 'God help! Heaven's colour, the blue'; and he said, 'Hell!' - Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed, - - And cry to all good men that loved you well, - 'Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known;' - Launcelot went away, then I could tell, - - Like wisest men, how all things would be, moan, - And roll and hurt myself, and long to die, - And yet fear much to die for what was sown. - - Nevertheless you, O Sir Gawaine, lie, - Whatever may have happened through these years, - God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie." - -All these rough, harsh _terza-rime_ lines are wonderful enough in their -nakedness of sensations--sensations of heat, of hell, of heaven, of -colours, of death, of life, of moans, and of lies. It is, in a sense, -as far as such experiments go, a return to the Middle Ages; to what was -exotic in them and strange and narcotic. Only here, as in _Les Litanies -de Satan_ of Baudelaire--to which they have some remote likeness--there -are no interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, on these -hot, impassioned scenes. - -Rossetti says somewhere that no modern poet, and that few poets of any -century, ever compressed into so small a space so much imaginative -material as he himself always did; and this, I conceive, partly, -also, from that almost child-like imagination of his, for all its -intellectual subtlety, that dominated him to such an extent that to -tell him anything of a specially tragic or pathetic nature was cruel, -so vividly did he realize every situation; and also because of his -wonderful saying in regard to his own way of weaving an abominable line -at the end of one of his finest sonnets into a sublime one: - - "Life touching lips with Immortality:" - -that the line he had used before belonged to the class of phrase -absolutely forbidden in poetry. "It is intellectually incestuous poetry -seeking to beget its emotional offspring on its own identity; whereas -the present line gives only the momentary contact with the immortal -which results from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-conscious -element of it." - -Now, to me, both Keats before him and Baudelaire in his own -generation, had the same excessive sense of, concentration. "To load -every rift with ore:" that, to Keats, was the essential thing; and it -meant to pack the verse with poetry so that every line should be heavy -with the stuff of the imagination: the phrase I have given being a -rebuke to Shelley, significant of the art of both poets. Fox as Keats, -almost in the same degree as Baudelaire, worked on every inch of his -surface, so perhaps no poets ever put so much poetic detail into so -small a space, with, as I have said, the exception of Rossetti. And, as -a matter of fact, when we examine the question with scrupulous care, -it must be said that both Baudelaire and Keats are often metrically -slipshod. - -One of Wagner's ideas, in regard to the artistic faculty was, -receptivity; the impulse to impart only what comes when these -impressions fill the mind "to an ecstatic excess;" and the two forms -of the artist: the feminine, who recoils from life, and the masculine, -who absorbs life. From this follows, in the case of creative artists -such as Baudelaire, the necessity to convey to others as vividly -and intelligibly, as far as possible, what his own mind's eye had -seen. Then one has to seize everything from which one can wring its -secret--its secret for us and for no one else. And all this, and in -fact the whole of our existence, is partly the conflict within us of -the man with the woman, the male and the female energies that strive -always: - - "Here nature is, alive and untamed, - Unafraid and unashamed; - Here man knows woman with the greed - Of Adam's wonder, the primal need." - -And, in these fundamental lines of Blake: - - "What is it men in women do require? - The lineaments of gratified Desire. - What is it women do in men require? - The lineaments of gratified Desire." - -And, again, in these more primeval and more essentially animal lines of -Rossetti: - - "O my love, O Love--snake of Eden! - (_And O the bower and the hour!_) - O to-day and the day to come after! - Loose me, love--give way to my laughter! - - Lo! two babes for Eve and for Adam! - (_And O the bower and the hour!_) - Lo, sweet snake, the travail and treasure-- - Two men-children born for their pleasure! - - The first is Cain and the second Abel: - (_Eden bower's in flower_) - The soul of one shall be made thy brother, - And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other. - (_And O the bower and the hour!_)." - -Baudelaire, in _De l'essence de rire,_ wrote: "The Romantic School, -or, one might say in preference, the Satanical School, has certainly -understood the primordial law of laughter. All the melodramatic -villains, all those who are cursed, damned, fatally marked with a -rictus of the lips that extends to the ears, are in the pure orthodoxy -of laughter. For the rest, they are for the most part illegitimate -sons of the famous Melmoth the Wanderer, the great Satanic creation -of Maturin. What can one conceive of as greater, as more powerful, in -regard to our humanity than this pale and bored Melmoth? He is a living -contradiction; that is why his frozen laughter freezes and wrenches -the entrails." - -Distinctly the most remarkable of the British triumvirate which in the -early part of the century won a momentary fame as the school of horror, -Maturin is much less known to the readers of to-day than either Monk -Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe. Thanks to Balzac, who did _Melmoth_ the honour -of a loan in _Melmoth réconcilié,_ Maturin has attained a certain -fame in France--which, indeed, he still retains. _Melmoth_ has to-day -in France something of that reputation which has kept alive another -English book, _Vathek._ Did not Balzac, in a moment of indiscriminating -enthusiasm, couple the _Melmoth_ of Maturin with the _Don Juan_ of -Molière, the _Faust_ of Goethe, the _Manfred_ of Byron--_grandes images -tracées par les plus grands génies de l'Europe?_ In other words, -Maturin had his day of fame, in which even men like Scott and Byron -were led into a sympathetic exaggeration. There's one exception. That -Coleridge was hostile, possibly unjust, is likely enough. It should be -mentioned that in 1816 the Drury Lane Committee, who had, reasonably -enough, rejected a play by Coleridge, accepted a monstrous production -of Maturin's named _Bertram._ The _gros bon mélodrame,_ as Balzac -calls it, was a great success. "It is all sound and fury, signifying -nothing," said Kean, who acted in it; and Kean, who knew his public, -realized that that was why it succeeded. The play was printed, and -ran through seven editions, sinking finally to the condition of a -chap-book, in which its horrors were to be had for sixpence. On this -pretentious work Coleridge--for what reasons we need not inquire--took -the trouble to write an article, or, as it was phrased, to make an -attack. To this Maturin wrote a violent reply, which the good advice -of Scott prevented him from publishing. It is curious at the present -day to read the letter in which Scott urges upon Maturin the wisdom of -silence--not because he is likely to get the worst of the battle, but, -among other reasons, because "Coleridge's work has been little read -or heard of, and has made no general impression whatever--certainly -no impression unfavourable to you or your play. In the opinion of -many, therefore, you will be resenting an injury of which they are -unacquainted with the existence." - -The episode is both comic and instructive. Coleridge and Maturin! Scott -urging on Maturin the charity of mercy to Coleridge, as--"Coleridge -has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust, -to continue to be a favourite with the public!" Poor Maturin, far -from continuing to be a favourite with the public, outlived his -reputation in the course of a somewhat short life. He died at the age -of forty-three. Like the hero of Baudelaire's whimsical and delicious -little tale _La Fanfarlo,_ he preferred artifice to nature, especially -when it was unnecessary. Such is the significant gossip which we have -about the personality of Maturin--gossip which brings out clearly the -deliberate eccentricity which marks his work, which one sees also in -the foppish affected and lackadaisical creature who looks at the reader -as if he were admiring himself before his mirror. - -The word "genius," indeed, is too lofty an epithet to use regarding -a man of great talent certainly, but of nothing more than erratic -and melodramatic talent. _Melmoth the Wanderer_ is in parts very -thrilling; its Elizabethan feast of horrors has a savour as of a lesser -Tourneur. But it is interesting only in parts, and at its best it -never comes near the effect which the great masters of the grotesque -and terrible--Hoffmann, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam--have known how -to produce. A freak of construction, which no artist could have been -guilty of, sends us wandering from story to story in a very maze of -underplots and episodes and interpolations. Six separate stories are -told--all in parenthesis--and the greater part of the book is contained -.within inverted commas. What is fine in it is the vivid, feverish -way in which, from time to time, some story of horror or mystery is -forced home to one's sensations. It is the art of the nightmare, and -it has none of the supremacy in that line of the _Contes Drolatiques_ -of Balzac. But certain scenes in the monastery and in the prisons -of the Inquisition--an attempted escape, a scene where an immured -wretch fights the reptiles in the darkness--are full of a certain -kind of power. That escape, for instance, with its consequences, is -decidedly gruesome, decidedly exciting; but compare it with Dumas, -with the escape of Monte Cristo; compare it with the yet finer -narrative of Casanova--the unsurpassed model of all such narratives -in fiction. Where Casanova and Dumas produce their effect by a simple -statement--a record of external events from which one realizes, as -one could realize in no other way, all the emotions and sensations of -the persons who were undergoing such experiences--Maturin seeks his -effect, and produces it, but in a much lesser degree, by a sort of -excited psychology, an exclamatory insistence on sensation and emotion. -_Melmoth the Wanderer_ is only the object of our historical curiosity. -We have, indeed, and shall always have, "lovers of dark romance." - - - -III - - -I - - -Baudelaire's genius is satanical; he has in a sense the vision of -Satan. He sees in the past the lusts of the Borgias the sins and vices -of the Renaissance; the rare virtues that flourish like flowers and -weeds, in brothels and in garrets. He sees the vanity of the world with -finer modern tastes than Solomon; for his imagination is abnormal, and -divinely normal. In this age of infamous shames he has no shame. His -flesh endures, his intellect is flawless. He chooses his own pleasures -delicately, sensitively, as he gathers his exotic _Fleurs du Mal,_ in -itself a world, neither a _Divina Commedia_ nor _Une Comédie Humaine,_ -but a world of his own fashioning. - -His vividly imaginative passion, with his instincts of inspiration, are -aided by a determined will, a selfreserve, an intensity of conception, -an implacable insolence, an accurate sense of the exact value of every -word. In the Biblical sense he might have said of his own verse: "It -is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh." The work, as the man, is -subtle, strange, complex, morbid, enigmatical, refined, paradoxical, -spiritual, animal. To him a scent means more than a sunset, a perfume -more than a flower, the tempting demons more than the unseductive -angels. He loves luxury as he loves wine; a picture of Manet's as a -woman's fan. - -[Illustration: BAUDELAIRE, DESIGNED BY HIMSELF, 1848] - - -Fascinated by sin, he is never the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as -the Original Sin; he studies sin as he studies evil, with a stem logic; -he finds in horror a kind of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; -rarely in hideous things, save when his sense of what I call a moralist -makes him moralize, as in his terrible poem, _Une Charogne._ He has -pity for misery, hate for progress. He is analytic, he is a learned -casuist, whom I can compare with the formidable Spanish Jesuit, Thomas -Sanchez, who wrote the Latin _Aphorismi Matrimonio_ (1629). - -His soul swims on music played on no human instrument, but on strings -that the Devil pulls, to which certain living puppets dance in -grotesque fashion, to unheard-of rhythms, to the sound of violins -strummed on by evil spirits in Witches' Sabbats. Some swing in the -air, as hanged dead people on gallows, and, as their bones rattle in -the wind, one sees Judas Iscariot, risen out of Hell for an instant's -gratification, as he grimaces on these grimacing visages. - -_Les fleurs du mal_ is the most curious, subtle, fascinating, and -extraordinary creation of an entire world ever fashioned in modern -ages. Baudelaire paints vice and degradation of the utmost depth, with -cynicism and with pity, as in the poem I have referred to, where the -cult of the corpse is the sensuality of ascetism, or the ascetism of -sensuality: the mania of fakirs; material by passion, Christian by -perversity. - -And, in a sense, he is our modern Catullus; in his furies, his -negations, his outcries, his Paganism, his inconceivable passion for -woman's flesh; yet Lesbia is for ever Lesbia. Still, Baudelaire in -his _Franciscae meae_ _Laudes,_ and with less sting but with as much -sensual sense of the splendour of sex, gives a magnificent Latin eulogy -of a learned and pious modiste, that ends: - - "Patera gemmis corusca, - Panis salsus, mollis esca, - Divinum vinum, Francisca." - -And he praises the Decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette -merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre -les négligences forcés d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des -règles." - -_Don Juan aux enfers_ is a perfect Delacroix. In _Danse macabre_ -there is the universal swing of the dancers who dance the Dance of -Death. Death herself, in her extreme horror, ghastly, perfumed with -myrrh, mixes her irony with men's insanity as she dances the Sabbat -of Pleasure. He shows us the infamous menagerie of the vices in the -guise of reptiles; our chief enemy Ennui is _ce monstre délicat._ -There are Vampires, agonies of the damned alive; _Le possédé_ with -his excruciating cry out of all his fibres: _O mon cher Belzébuth! je -t'adore!_ And there are some, subtler and silent, that seem to move, -softly, as the feet of Night, to the sound of faint music, or under the -shroud of a sunset. - -_Les fleurs du mal_ are grown in Parisian soil, exotics that have -the strange, secretive, haunting touch and taint of the earth's or -of the body's corruption. In his sense of beauty there is a certain -revolt, a spiritual malady, which may bring with it the heated air -of an alcove or the intoxicating atmosphere of the East. Never -since Villon has the flesh of woman been more adored and abhorred. -Both aware of the original sin of _l'unique animál_--the seed of our -moral degradation--Villon creates his _Grosse Margot_ and Baudelaire -_Delphine et Hippolyte._ Villon's is a scullion-wench, and in the -Ballad a Brothel as infamous, as foul, as abominable as a Roman Lupanar -surges before one's astonished vision. And this comes after his -supreme, his consummate praise of ruinous old age on a harlot's body: -_Les regrets de la Belle Heaulmière._ It is one of the immortal things -that exist in the world, that I can compare only with Rodin's statue in -bronze: both equal incarnations of the symbolical conception that sin -brought shame into the first woman's flesh. - -"Que m'en reste-il? Honte et Péché:" - -cries each mouth, cries to the end of earth's eternity. - -In Baudelaire's _Femmes damnées_ there is the aching soul of the -spirit's fatal malady: that sexual malady for which there is no remedy: -the Lesbian sterile perilous divinisation of flesh for flesh, virginal -or unvirginal flesh _with_ flesh. In vain desire, of that one desire -that exists beyond all possible satisfaction, the desire of an utter -annihilation of body with body in that ecstasy which can never be -absolutely achieved without man's flesh, they strive, unconsumed with -even the pangs of their fruitless desires. They live only with a life -of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome -bounds of nature into the violence of a perversity which is at times -almost insane. And all this sorrowful and tortured flesh is consumed -with that feverish desire that leaves them only a short space for their -desire's fruitions. - - -II - -Certain of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the -hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a serpentine girl's skin; -some the odour of woman's flesh. Certain spirits are intoxicated by -these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of -their vices, from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a -cruel imagination has fashioned these naked images of the Seven Deadly -Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall; that smile not even in -Hell, in whose flames they writhe. One conceives them there and between -the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their -infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages; -they are incapable of imagining God's justice. - -Baudelaire dramatizes these living images of his spirit and of his -imagination, these fabulous creatures of his inspiration, these -macabre ghosts, in a fashion utterly different from that of other -tragedians--Shakespeare, and Aristophanes in his satirical Tragedies, -his lyrical Comedies; yet in the same sense of being the writer where -beauty marries unvirginally the sons of ancient Chaos. - -In these pages swarm (in his words) all the corruptions and all the -scepticisms; ignoble criminals without convictions, detestable hags -that gamble, the cats that are like men's mistresses; Harpagon; the -exquisite, barbarous, divine, implacable, mysterious Madonna of the -Spanish style; the old men; the drunkards, the assassins, the lovers -(their deaths and lives); the owls; the vampires whose kisses raise -from the grave the corpse of its own self; the Irremediable that -assails its origin: Conscience in Evil! There is an almost Christ-like -poem on his Passion, _Le reniement de Saint-Pierre,_ an almost Satanic -denunciation of God in _Abel and Cain,_ and with them the Evil Monk, -an enigmatical symbol of Baudelaire's soul, of his work, of all that -his eyes love and hate. Certain of these creatures play in travesties, -dance in ballets. For all the Arts are transformed, transfigured, -transplanted out of their natural forms to pass in magnificent state -across the stage: the stage with the abyss of Hell in front of it. - -"Sensualist" (I quote a critic), "but the most profound of sensualists, -and, furious of being no more than that, he goes, in his sensation, to -the extreme limit, to the mysterious gate of infinity against which he -knocks, yet knows not how to open, with rage he contracts his tongue -in the vain effort." Yet centuries before him Dante entered Hell, -traversed it in imagination from its endless beginning to its endless -end; returned to earth to write, for the spirit of Beatrice and for the -world, that _Divina Commedia,_ of which in Verona certain women said: - - "Lo, he that strolls to Hell and back - At will I Behold him, how Hell's reek - Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek." - -It is Baudelaire who, in Hell as in earth, finds a certain Satan in -such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essentially -demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily, -as if the Devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets. Here -in such satanic and romantic atmosphere one hears dissonances, the -discords of the instruments in the Sabbats, the howlings of irony, the -vengeance of the vanquished. - -I give one sentence of Gautier's on Baudelaire. "This poet of _Les -fleurs du mal_ loved what one wrongly calls the style of decadence, -which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point -of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilizations -that aged: a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and -of rarities, turning for ever backward the limits of the language, -using technical vocabularies, taking colours from all the palettes, -notes from all the keyboards, striving to render one's thought in what -is most ineffable, and form in its most vague and evasive contours, -listening so as to translate them, the subtle confidences of neurosis, -the passionate confessions of ancient passions in their depravity and -the bizarre hallucinations of the fixed idea." He adds: "In regard to -his verse there is the language already veined in the greenness of -decomposition, the tainted language of the later Roman Empire, and the -complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek -art fallen in delinquencies." See how perfectly the phrase _la langue -de faisandée_ suits the exotic style of Baudelaire! - -Yet, tainted as the style is from time to time, never was the man -himself tainted: he who in modern verse gave first of all an unknown -taste to sensations; he who painted vice in all its shame; whose most -savorous verses are perfumed as with subtle aromas; whose women are -bestial, rouged, sterile, bodies without souls; whose _Litanies de -Satan_ have that cold irony which he alone possessed in its extremity, -in these so-called impious lines which reveal, under whatever disguise, -his belief in a mathematical superiority established by God from -all eternity, and whose least infraction is punished by certain -chastisements, in this world as in the next. - -I can imagine Baudelaire in his hours of nocturnal terrors, sleepless -in a hired woman's bed, saying to himself these words of Marlowe's -_Satan:_ - - "Why, this is Hell, nor can I out of it!" - -in accents of eternal despair wrenched from the lips of the Arch Fiend. -And the genius of Baudelaire, I can but think, was as much haunted as -Marlowe's with, in Lamb's words, "a wandering in fields where curiosity -is forbidden to go, approaching the dark gulf near enough to look in." - - -III - -Has Baudelaire _l'amour du mal pour le mal?_ In a certain sense, yes; -in a certain sense, no. He believes in evil as in Satan and God--the -primitive forces that govern worlds: the eternal enemies. He sees the -germs of evil everywhere, few of the seeds of virtue. He sees pass -before him the world's drama: he is one of the actors, he plays his -parts cynically, ironically. He speaks in rhythmic cadences. - -But, above all, he watches the dancers; these also are elemental; -and the tragic fact is that the dancers dance for their living. For -their living, for their pleasure, for the pleasure of pleasing others. -So passes the fantastic part of their existence, from the savage who -dances silent dances--for, indeed, all dancers are silent--but without -music, to the dancer who dances for us on the stage, who turns always -to the sound of music. There is an equal magic in the dance and in -song; both have their varied rhythms; both, to use an image, the -rhythmic beating of our hearts. It is imagined that dancing and music -were the oldest of the arts. Rhythm has rightly been called the soul of -dancing; both are instinctive. - -The greatest French poet after Villon, the most disreputable and -the most creative poet in French literature, the greatest artist in -French verse, and, after Verlaine, the most passionate, perverse, -lyrical, visionary, and intoxicating of modern poets, comes Baudelaire, -infinitely more perverse, morbid, exotic than these other poets. In -his verse there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity, which -has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with horror, -in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every -complication of taste, the exasperation of perfumes, the irritant of -cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption to the creation and -adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served -before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a -prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine, -however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length -sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady of -love. - -The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that -of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the -Goncourts, Zola, and Leconte de Lisle. Even Baudelaire, in whom the -spirit is always an uneasy guest at the orgy of life, had a certain -theory of Realism which tortures many of his poems into strange, -metallic shapes and fills them with irritative odours, and disturbs -them with a too deliberate rhetoric of the flesh. Flaubert, the -greatest novelist after Balzac, the only impeccable novelist who ever -lived, was resolute to be the creator of a world in which art--formal -art--was the only escape from the burden of reality. It was he who -wrote to Baudelaire, who had sent him _Les fleurs du mal_: "I devoured -your volume from one end to another, read it over and over again, verse -by verse, word by word, and all I can say is it pleases and enchants -me. You overwhelm me with your colours. What I admire most in your book -is its perfect art. You praise flesh without loving it." - -There is something Oriental in Baudelaire's genius; a nostalgia that -never left him after he had seen the East: there where one finds -hot-midnights, feverish days, strange sensations; for only the East, -when one has lived in it, can excite one's vision to a point of ardent -ecstasy. He is the first modern poet who gave to a calculated scheme of -versification a kind of secret and sacred joy. He is before all things -the artist, always sure of his form. And his rarefied imagination aided -him enormously not only in the perfecting of his verse and prose, but -in making him create the criticism of modern art. - -Next after Villon, Baudelaire is the poet of Paris. Like a damned soul -(to use one of his imaginary images) he wanders at nights, an actual -_noctambule,_ alone or with Villiers, Gautier, in remote quarters, sits -in cafés, goes to casinos, the _Rat Mort._ "The Wind of Prostitution" -(I quote his words) torments him, the sight of hospitals, of gambling -houses, the miserable creatures one comes on in certain quarters, -even the fantastic glitter of lamplights. All this he needs: a kind -of intense curiosity, of excitement, in his fréquentation of these -streets, comes over him, like one who has taken opium. And this is only -one part of his life, he who lived and died solitary, a confessor of -sins who has never told the whole truth, _le mauvais moins_ of his own -sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel. - -He is the first who ever related things in the modulated tone of the -confessional and never assumed an inspired air. The first also who -brings into modern literature the chagrin that bites at our existence -like serpents. He admits to his diabolical taste, not quite exceptional -in him; one finds it in Petronius, Rabelais, Balzac. In spite of his -magnificent _Litanies de Satan,_ he is no more of the satanical school -than Byron. Yet both have the same sardonic irony, the delight of -mystification, of deliberately irritating solemn people's convictions. -Both, who died tragically young, had their hours of sadness, when -one doubts and denies everything; passionately regretting youth, -turning away, in sinister moods, in solitude, from that too intense -self-knowledge that, like a mirror, shows the wrinkles on our cheeks. - - - -IV - - -Baudelaire, whose acquaintance with English was perfect, was thrilled -in 1846 when he read certain pages of Poe; he seemed to see in his -prose a certain similarity in words and thoughts, even in ideas, as -if he himself had written some of them; these pages of a prose-writer -whom he named "the master of the horrible, the prince of mystery." -For four years he set himself to the arduous task of translating the -prose of a man of genius, whom he certainly discovered for France and -for French readers. And his translation is so wonderful that it is far -and away finer than a marvellous original. His first translation was -printed in _Le Liberté de Pensée_ in July, 1848, and he only finished -his translations at the end of sixteen years. In 1852 the _Revue de -Paris_ printed his _Edgar Allan Poe; sa vie et ses ouvrages._ His -translations came in this order: _Histoires extraordinaires_ (1856, -which I have before me); _Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires_ (1857, -which I also possess); _Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym_ (1858); _Euréka_ -(1864); _Histoires grotesques et sérieuses_ (1865). - -One knows the fury with which (in 1855) he set himself the prodigious -task of translating one of Poe's stories every day; which, to one's -amazement, he actually did. Always he rages over his proofs, over -those printers' devils, an accursed race; every proof is sent back to -the printing press, revised; underlined, covered in the margins with -imperative objurgations, written with an angry hand and accentuated -with notes of exclamation. Swinburne shared the same fate. He writes -to Chatto a violent letter on the incompetence of printers: "their -scandalous negligence," "ruinous and really disgraceful blunders," -"numberless wilful errors," written in a state of perfect frenzy. -"These damned printers," he cries at them, as Baudelaire did; "who have -done their utmost to disfigure my book. The appearance of the pages is -disgraceful--a chaos." And he actually writes one letter to complain of -a dropped comma! - -The _Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe_ of 1857 are infinitely finer than -those of 1856. He begins with: _Littérature de décadence!_ and with -a paradox, of his invention, of the Sphynx without an enigma. _Genus -irritabile vatum!_ a Latin phrase for the irritable race of artists, is -irrefutable, and certainly irrefutable are all Baudelaire's arguments, -divinations, revelations of Poe's genius and of Poe's defects. - -Poe's genius has been generally misunderstood. He gave himself to -many forms of misconception: by his eccentricities, his caprices, his -fantastic follies, his natural insolence, his passionate excitations -(mostly imaginary), his delinquencies in regard to morals, his -over-acute sensibility, his exasperating way of exasperating the -general public he hated, his analysing problems that had defied any -living writer's ingenuity to have compassed (as in his detective -stories); above all, his almost utter alienation from that world he -lived in, dreamed in, never worshipped, died in. - -And he remains still a kind of enigma; in spite of the fact that the -most minute details of his life are known, and that he never outlived -his reputation. Yes, enigmatical in various points: as to his not -giving even the breath of life to the few ghosts of women who cross -his pages; of never diving very deeply into any heart but his own. Are -not most of his men malign, perverse, atrocious, abnormal, never quite -normal, evocations of himself? From Dupin to Fortunato, from the Man in -the Crowd to the Man in the Pit, from Prince Prospero to Usher, are not -these _revenants,_ in the French sense? - -There is something demoniacal in his imagination; for Poe never, I -might say, almost never, lets his readers have an instant's rest; any -more than the Devil lets his subjects have any actual surcease of -torment. Yet, as there is a gulf between Good and Evil, no one, by any -chance, falls into the abyss. - -Poe, of course, writes with his nerves, and therefore only nervous -writers have ever understood him. It is Baudelaire, the most nervous of -modern writers, who says of Poe that no one, before him, had affirmed -imperturbably the natural wickedness of man. Yet this statement is a -paradox; a lesser paradox is that man is originally perverse; for all -are not _nés marques pour le mal?_ - -Poe is not a great critic; he says certain unforgettable things, with -even an anticipation of the work of later writers. "_I know,_" he -says, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of -the tme musical expression. Give it any undue decision--imbue it with -any very determinate tone--and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, -its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character" Where he is great -is where he writes: "I have a pure contempt for mere prejudice and -conventionality;" and mostly where he defines himself. "Nor is there an -instance to be discovered, among all I have published, of my having set -forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical -topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by -something that wore the semblance of a reason." - -His fault is that he is too lenient to woman poets who never merited -that name and to men of mere talent; yet he annihilates many undeserved -reputations; perhaps, after all, "thrice slain." No one pointed out -the errors in Mrs. Browning's verses as he did; her affectations such -as "God's possibles;" her often inefficient rhythm; her incredibly bad -rhymes. Yet, for all this, he, whose ear as a poet was almost perfect, -made the vile rhyme of "vista" with "sister," that raised the righteous -wrath of Rossetti. - -In his essay on Hawthorne, he warns one from a certain heresy. "The -deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as an -allegory, is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's -ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his -not having attempted to overcome." But it is on pages 196-198 of his -_Marginalia_ that he gives his final statement in regard to Verse, -the Novel, and the Short Story; so far as these questions have any -finality. As, for instance, how the highest genius uses his powers in -"the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might -be perused in an hour." As for the Story, it has this immense advantage -over a novel that its brevity adds to the intensity of the effect; -that "Beauty can be better treated in the poem, but that one can use -terror and passion and horror as artistic means." Poe was a master of -the grotesque, of the extraordinary, never of the passionate. - -There is an unholy magic in some of his verse and prose; in his -hallucinations, so real and so unreal; his hysterics, his sense of the -contradiction between the nerves and the spirit; in his scientific -analyses of terrible, foreseen effects, where generally the man of whom -he writes is driven into evil ways. For did he not state this axiom: -"A good writer has always his last line in view when he has written -his first line?" This certainly was part of his _métier,_ made of -combinations and of calculations. - -I read somewhere, "There is nothing wonderful in 'The Raven.'" It -is really a _tour de force;_ even if the metre is not invented, he -invented the inner double rhymes, and the technique is flawless. It -has Black Magic in it; the unreality of an intoxication; a juggler's -skill; it will be always his most famous poem. In his analysis of these -verses, does not Poe undervalue the inspiration that created them? Yes, -by an amusing vanity. And, as Baudelaire says: "A little charlatanism -is always permitted to a man of genius, and it doesn't suit him badly. -It is like the rouge on the cheeks of a woman actually fair, a new form -of seasoning for the spirit." - -There was too much of the woman in the making of Poe, manly as he was -in every sense. He had no strength of will, was drawn from seduction -to seduction; had not enough grip on his constitution to live wisely, -to live well. He drifted, let himself be drifted. He had no intention -of ruining himself, yet ruined he was, and there was nothing that -could have saved him. Call it his fate or his evil star, he was -doomed inevitably to an early death. _Pas de chance!_ Yes--let one -suppose--had he himself chosen the form of his death, he might have -desired to die like the sick women in his pages--_mourant de maux -bizarres._ - -Baudelaire, the most scrupulous of the men of letters of our age, spent -his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French -poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose -becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and -surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better -than a marvellous original. Often an enigma to himself, much of his -life and of his adventures and of his experiences remain enigmatical. -I shall choose one instance out of many; that is to say, what was the -original of his dedication of _L'Heautimoromenos_ in _Les Fleurs du -Mal_, and of his dedication of _Les paradis artificiels_ to a woman -whose initials are J. G. F.? - -The poem was first printed in _L 'Artiste_, May 10, 1857, together with -two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical: -_Franciscae Meae Laudes,_ and _L'Irrémédiable._ The Latin verses, -composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs -to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent -as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the -Dedication: _Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote._ The -verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who -absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has -spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his -hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine -wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its -name, on the comedy of Terence, _The Self-Tormentor,_ where, in fact, -the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic -earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare's _Timon of -Athens._ Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest -confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women. -He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a -discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in -his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror. -He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his -own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal -laughter. - -The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall -into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with -reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases -on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable -fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he -intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the -Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes -with satanical glances and is: _La conscience dans le mal!_ - -In _Les fleurs du mal_ (1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's -handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find -that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages -123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems -to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" with -_Piscina plena virtutis;_ "Dans un Styx bourbeux" with _Sicat beneficum -Lethe;_ "Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" with _Labris vocem redde -mutis!_ "Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le -vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu -son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une -modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication of _Les paradis,_ -"une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason -for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough: -a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry. -One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il -traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce -sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words, -taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming -uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman -Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes -that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which -seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution: - - _In nocte mea taberna._ - _Flambeau des grâces sataniques._ - -I return to my copy of _Les paradis artificiels_ (1860). The dedication -to J. G. F. begins: "_Ma chère amie,_ Common-sense tells us that -terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality -is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives -with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the -imaginations that she haunts. - -[Illustration: Frontpage Les paradis artificiels] - -"Besides, it seems to me there is little enough reason why this -dedication should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the -writer's satisfaction, that any kind of book ought to be understood, -except by him or by her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed, -indispensable that it has been written for _any one?_ I have, for my -part, so little taste for the living world that, like certain sensible -and stay-at-home women who send, I am told, their letters to imaginary -friends by the post, I would willingly write only for the dead. - -"But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it is -to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who now -turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many -transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a -living being enjoys the privilege of being able to draw new and subtle -pleasures even from sorrow, from catastrophe, and from fatality. - -"You will see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and -solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending -his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped -his sweating forehead and _refreshed his lips parched by fever;_ and -you will divine the gratitude of another Orestes, whose nightmares -you have so often watched over, and whose unendurable slumbers you -dissipated, with a light and tender hand." - -I have to say that in the last sentences I have translated Baudelaire -uses "tu" instead of "vous," and that he does the same in his Latin -verses and in the verses next after it. The question still remains: who -was the woman of the initials? - -What is certainly not a solution of the unfathomable mystery of -this enigmatical woman, but which is, in a certain sense, a clue, -I find on pages 55-67 of the book I have referred to, a narrative -that seems more than likely to have been hers. He says this to make -one understand better the mixture of dreams and hallucinations in -haschisch, as having been sent him by a woman: "It is a woman, rather -a mature woman, curious, of an excitable spirit, who, having yielded -to the temptation of using the drug, describes her visions." These are -superb and fantastic visions, written by an imaginative, sensitive, -and suggestive woman. She begins: "However bizarre and astonishing are -these sensations that intoxicated my folly for twelve hours (twelve or -twenty? I don't know which) I shall never return to them. The spiritual -excitement is too vivid, the fatigue too much to endure, and, to say -all, in this childish enchantment I find something criminal." She adds: -"I have heard that the enthusiasm of poets and of creators is not -unlike what I have experienced, in spite of the fact that I have always -imagined that such men whose delight is to move us ought to be of a -really calm temperament; but if poetical delirium has any resemblance -with what a little teaspoon full of drugged jam has given me, I think -that all such pleasures cost dear to poets, and it is not without a -certain prosaic satisfaction that I return to real life." - -In these sentences Baudelaire gives one a certain clue as to the -identity of this woman. "But, above all, observe that in this woman's -story the hallucination is of a bastard kind, and whose reason of being -is to be an exterior spectacle; the mind is no more than a mirror -where the surrounding environment is transformed in an extraordinary -fashion. Besides, we see intervene what I must call the moral -hallucination: the subject believes he is subjected to an expiation, -but the feminine temperament, which is little accustomed to analysis, -does not permit itself to note the singularly optimistic character of -this hallucination. The benevolent regard of the Olympian Divinities -is poetized by a kind of varnish essentially _haschischin._ I cannot -say that this woman has escaped from the sense of remorse; but that -her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and of -regret, have returned to their former sensibility." - -I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical -casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but -not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra, -to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by -the same woman to whom _Le paradis_ is dedicated. Like Orestes, he -might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered -father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words: -"And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now, -how I keep the watches of the night--how often I bewail my hapless -sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given -of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of -lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J. -G. F.'s? - -In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed: _Théophile Gautier, par Charles -Baudelaire;_ a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as -only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was -capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier -asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant: -"Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French -language, even l'_Argot._ - -Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he -ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave -it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac. - -"Not for the first," he says, in his _Study of Shakespeare,_ "and -probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well -as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, -to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented -fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the -more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of -Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition -and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing -could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in -my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. - -"'I have been many a time astonished that to pass for an observer -should be Balzac's great title to fame. To me it had always seemed that -it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. -All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated -himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the -highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in -his _Human Comedy_ are keener after living, more active and cunning in -their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous -in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real -world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the -very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle -with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all beings of the -outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in a strong relief -and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his -figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their fights. -Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate -ambition to see everything, to bring everything to fight, to guess -everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down -more forcibly the principal fines so as to preserve the perspective of -the whole. He reminds me of some fines of those etchers who are never -satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into -very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing -natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But -this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More -properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But -who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a -method which may permit him to invest--and that with a sure hand--what -is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? -Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.'" - - - -V - - -"T am far from sure," said Paul Verlaine to me in Paris, "that the -philosophy of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam will not one day become the -formula of our century." Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the -belief common to all Eastern mystics. And there is in everything he -wrote a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and deliberate, which -seems to me to be the natural consequences of his intellectual pride. -It is part of his curiosity in souls--as in the equally sinister -curiosity of Baudelaire--to prefer the complex to the simple, the -perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. His heroes -are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies are the shock -of spirit against matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. -They are on the margins of a wisdom too great for their capacity; they -are haunted by dark powers, instincts of ambiguous passions. And in the -women his genius created there is the immortal weariness of beauty; -they are enigmas to themselves; they desire, and know not why they -refrain; they do good and evil with the lifting of an eyelid, and are -guilty and innocent of all the sins of the earth. - -[Illustration: manuscript] - -Villiers wrote these significant sentences in the preface to _La -Révolte_ (1870): "One ought to write for the entire world. Besides, -what does justice matter to us? He who from his very birth does -not contain in himself his proper glory shall never know the -real significance of this word." In the literature of the fantastic -there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de -l'Isle-Adam--a writer whose singular personality and work render him -perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of -letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his -life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived, -as he says somewhere, "par politesse," ceaselessly experimenting -upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an -extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic -contrasts. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race, -a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more -especially, of the _bourgeois_ multitude of letters and of life: it -is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look -for the source of that violent and _voulu_ eccentricity which mars so -much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is -unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take -notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has -placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question -if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious, -impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers "les -gens de sens commun" are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of -his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface, -_Genus irritabile vatum._ - -In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a -writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it -be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer -who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and -a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin -de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from -exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite -sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere -there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in -so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, -contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions. - -Villiers has written much. The volume of _Contes cruels_ (published -in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains -specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind -the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, -and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no -other collection of tales in any language on which so various and -finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut -of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The -_Tales_ of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the _Twice-Told -Tales_ of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; -both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are -but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the -other volumes. _La révolte,_ a drama in one act in prose, represented -at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of -certain _Contes cruels_; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place -near them. _L'Ève future_ (1886), that most immense and ferocious -of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the -_Contes_ swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of -plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale -_L'Amour suprême,_ attempts to be a second set of _Contes Cruels;_ it -has nothing of their distinction, except in _Akëdysséril. Tribulat -Bonhomet,_ which appeared in 1887--"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, -couleur du siècle," as the author has called it--is largely made up of -an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes, -_Histoires insolites_ (1888) and _Nouveaux contes cruels_ (1889), there -are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating -horror of _La torture par l'espérance,_ and the delicate cynicism -of _Les amies de pension._ As for the prose drama in five acts, _Le -Nouveau Monde_ (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize--"une -médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres -seductions encore"--there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play -with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air; -but what would you have of a "prize poem"? It was acted at one of -the theatres at Paris in 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante -Comte d'Orsay, and it had a very gratifying "literary" success. Such, -omitting the early works, of which I have every first edition, and the -numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published, -are the works we have before us from which to study "peut-être le -seul des hommes de notre génération qui ait eu en lui l'étincelle du -génie"--as Catulle Mendès, ever generous in his literary appreciation -of friend and foe, has said in that charming book, _La légende du -Parnasse contemporaine._ I shall speak chiefly of the _Contes cruels,_ -and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach -one after another the various sides of this multiform and manysided -genius. - -First and before all, Villiers is a humorist, and he is a humorist -who has no limitations, who has command of every style, who has -essayed every branch of the literature of the fantastic. There are -some halfdozen of tales--all contained in the _Contes cruels_--which, -for certain of the rarest qualities of writing--subtleties, delicate -perversities, exquisite complexities of irony essentially modern--can -be compared, so far as I know, with nothing outside the _Petits poèmes -en prose_ of Baudelaire. _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, Maryelle, -Sentimentalisme, Le convive des dernières fêtes, La Reine Ysabeau_--one -might add the solitary poem inserted, jewel amid jewels, amongst the -prose--these pieces, with which one or two others have affinities of -style though not of temper, constitute a distinct division of Villiers' -work. They are all, more or less, studies in modern love, supersubtie -and yet perfectly finished little studies, so light in touch, -manipulated with so delicate a finesse, so exquisite and unerring -in tact, that the most monstrous paradoxes, the most incredible -assumptions of cynicism, become possible, become acceptable. Of them -all I think the masterpiece is _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre;_ and -it is one of the most perfect little works of art in the world. The -mockery of the thing is elemental; cynicism touches its zenith. It -becomes tender, it becomes sublime. A perversion simply monstrous -appears, in the infantine simplicity of its presentment, touching, -credible, heroic. The edge of laughter is skirted by the finest -of inches; and, as a last charm, one perceives, through the irony -itself--the celestial, the elementary irony--a faint and sweet perfume -as of a perverted odour of sanctity. The style has the delicacy of the -etcher's needle. From beginning to end every word has been calculated, -and every word is an inspiration. No other tale quite equals this -supreme achievement; but in _Maryelle,_ in _Sentimentalisme,_ and -the others there is the same note, and a perfection often only less -absolute. _Maryelle_ and _Sentimentalisme_ are both studies in a -special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of -fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest -precision. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The -experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and -tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate -lightness of the style--the gentle, well-bred, _disengaged_ tone of -a _raconteur_ without reserve or after-thought, or with all that -scrupulously hid--there is a sort of double irony, a criss-cross and -intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in -spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other -side of cynicism. _La Reine Ysabeau_ and _Le Convive des Dernières -Fêtes_ sound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost -by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of -the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance, -and fatality is unrolled before our eyes--the something enigmatical -in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness. -Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this -incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis -of the first sentence to the "Priez pour eux," every touch tells, and -every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points -akin to it, is the strange tale of _Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes,_ -perhaps, after the more epic chronicle of _La Reine Ysabeau,_ the -finest of Villiers' tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale -is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying -episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It -is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive -shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the -same _frisson_ in the latter part of _Tribulat Bonhomet,_ and in the -marvellous little study in the supernatural _L'Intersigne,_ one of the -most impressive of Villiers' works. But here the sensation is not due -to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror--distinct -and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind--is but one -among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a -whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the -same _bizarrerie_--the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendrée, Antoine -Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C., -and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged -with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the -touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric -light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves--scenes which -have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with -average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed -their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one -is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of -exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony -is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard -who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a -sarcastic smile. - -What is Villiers' view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on -the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer; -I have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the -fantastic edifice of his work. - -The group of tales I have been considering reveals the humorist in -his capacity of ironical observer: their wit is a purely impersonal -mockery, they deal with life from the point of view of the artist, -and they are pre-eminently artistic, free from any direct purpose or -preoccupation. In the pseudo-scientific burlesques, and the kindred -satires on ignorant and blatant mediocrity, the smile of the Comic -Muse has given place to "Laughter holding both his sides;" absurdity -caps absurdity, order and measure seem to be flung to the winds, and -in this new Masque of Anarchy sharp blows are given, the jests are -barbed, and they fly not quite at random. "L'Esprit du siècle," says -Villiers, "ne l'oublions pas, est aux machines." And it is in the -mechanical miracles of modern science that he has found a new and -unworked and inexhaustible field of satire. Jules Verne has used -these new discoveries with admirable skill in his tales of extravagant -wonder; Villiers seizes them as a weapon, and in his hands it becomes -deadly, and turns back upon the very age which forged it; as a means -of comedy, and the comedy becomes soberly Rabelaisian, boisterous and -bitter at once, sparing nothing, so that he can develop the deliberate -plan of "an apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last sigh," -make a sober proposal for the utilization of the sky as a means of -advertisement (_Affichage Céleste_), and describe in all its detail -and through all its branches the excellent invention of Bathybius -Bottom, _La machine à gloire,_ a mechanical contrivance for obtaining -dramatic success with the expense and inconvenience of that important -institution, the Claque. In these wild and whirling satires, which are -at bottom as cold and biting as Swift, we have a quite new variety -of style, a style of patchwork and grimaces. Familiar words take new -meanings, and flash through all the transformations of the pantomime -before our eyes; strange words start up from forgotten corners; words -and thoughts, never brought together since Babel, clash and stumble -into a protesting combination; and in the very aspect of the page there -is something startling. The absurdity of these things is so extreme, -an absurdity so supremely serious, that we are carried almost beyond -laughter, and on what is by virtue of its length the most important of -the scientific burlesques, _L'Ève future,_ it is almost impossible to -tell whether the author is really in sober earnest or whether the whole -thing is a colossal joke. Its 375 pages are devoted to a painfully -elaborate description of the manufacture, under the direction of the -"très-illustre inventeur américain, M. Edison," of an _artificial -woman!_ No such fundamental satire, such ghastly exposure of "poor -humanity," has been conceived since Swift. The sweep of it covers human -nature, and its essential laughter breaks over the very elements of -man. Unfortunately the book is much too long; its own weight sinks it; -the details become wearisome, the seriousness of the absurdity palls. - -So far we have had the humorist, a humorist who appears to be cynic -to the backbone, cynic equally in the Parisian perversities of _Les -demoiselles de Bienfilâtre_ and the scientific hilarity of _La machine -à gloire._ But we have now to take account of one of those "exceptions" -of which I spoke--work which has nothing of the humorist in it, work -in which there is not a trace of cynicism, work full of spirituality -and all the virtues. _Virginie et Paul_ is a-story of young love -comparable only with that yet lovelier story, the magical chapter, in -_Richard Feverel._ This Romeo and Juliet are both fifteen, and their -little moment of lovers' chat, full of the poetry of the most homely -and natural things, is brought before us in a manner so exquisitely -true, so perfectly felt, that it is not even sentimental. Every -word is a note of music, a song of nightingales among the roses--; -_per amica silentia lunæ_--and there is not a wrong note in it, no -exaggeration, nothing but absolute truth and beauty. The strange and -charming little romance of _L'Inconnue_ is another of these tales of -ingenuous love, full of poetry fresh from lovers' hearts, and with -a delicate rhythmical effect in its carefully modulated, style. -_L'Amour Suprême,_ a less perfect work of art, exhales the same aroma -of tender and etherealized affection--an adoring and almost mystic -love of the ideal incarnated in woman. In the bizarre narrative of -_Véra,_ which recalls the supernatural romances of Poe, there is again -this strange spirituality of tone; and in the dazzling prose poem -of _Akëdysséril_--transfigured prose glowing with Eastern colour, a -tale of old-world passion full of barbaric splendour, and touched, -for all its remoteness, with the human note--in this epic fragment, -considered in France, I believe, to be, in style at least, Villiers' -masterpiece, it is humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal that -we contemplate. Humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal!--think -for a moment of _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre,_ of _L'Analyse -chimique du dernier soupir!_ What, then, are we to believe? Has -Villiers two natures, and can he reconcile irréconciliable opposites? -Or if one is the real man, which one? And what of the other? What, in -a word, is the true Villiers? "For, as he thinketh in his heart, so is -he." - -The question is not a difficult one to answer; it depends upon an -elementary knowledge of the nature of that perfectly intelligible -being, the cynic. The typical cynic is essentially a tender-hearted, -sensitive idealist; his cynicism is in the first instance a recoil, -then, very often, a disguise. Most of us come into the world without -any very great expectations, not looking for especial loftiness in -our neighbours, not very much shocked if every one's devotion to the -ideal is not on a level with, perhaps, ours. We go on our way, if not -exactly "rejoicing," at least without positive discomfort. Here and -there, however, a soul nurtured on dreams and nourished in the scorn -of compromise finds its way among men and demands of them perfection. -There is no response to the demand. Entranced by an inaccessible ideal, -the poor soul finds that its devotion poisons for it all the wells -of earth. And this is the birth of what we call a cynic. The cynic's -progress is various, and seldom in a straight fine. It is significant -to find that in _Révolte,_ one of Villiers' comparatively early -works, the irony has a perfectly serious point, and aims directly at -social abuses. The tableau is a scene, an episode, taken straight -from life, a piece of the closest actuality; there is no display, no -exaggeration, all is simple and straightforward as truth. The laughter -in it is the broken-hearted laughter, sadder than tears, of the poet, -the dreamer, before the spectacle of the world. It is obviously -the work of one who is a mocker through his very passion for right -and good, his sense of the infinite disproportion of things. Less -obviously, but indeed quite really, is the enormous and almost aimless -mockery of some of these tales of his the reverse of a love of men -and a devotion to the good and the beautiful. Cynicism is a quality -that develops, and when we find it planted in the brain of a humorist -there is simply no accounting for the transformations through which -it may run. Thus the gulf which seems to separate _Les demoiselles de -Bienfilâtre_ from _L'inconnue_ is, after all, nothing but a series of -steps. Nor is it possible for one who judges art as art to regret this -series of steps; for it is precisely his cynicism that has become the -"note," the rarest quality, of this man of passionate and lofty genius; -it is as a cynic that he will live--a cynic who can be pitiless and -tender, Rabelaisian and Heinesque, but imaginative, but fantastically -poetical, always. - - -[Illustration: GUSTAVE COURBET, 1848] - - -_Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch_ (1860), which I have -before me, is the most wonderful book that Baudelaire ever wrote. -It has that astonishing logic which he possessed supremely, which -unravels, with infinite precautions, every spider's web of this -seductive drug, which enslaves the imagination, which changes the will, -which turns sounds into colours, colours into sounds; which annihilates -space and time; and, often at its crises, even one's own individuality. -To Baudelaire, as to me, it has, and had, the divinity of a sorcerous, -a dangerous, an insidious mistress. It produces morbid effects on one's -senses; wakens mysterious visions in our half-closed eyes. And this, -like every form of intoxication, is mysterious, malign, satanical, -diabolical. And, subjugated by it, part of oneself is dominated, so -that, in Baudelaire's words: _Il a vouloir faire l'ange, il est devenu -une bête._ - -With some this poison carries them to the verge of the abyss, over -which one looks fascinated by the abrupt horror of the void. In some -their ideas congeal: even to the point of imagining oneself "a fragment -of thinking ice." One sits, as in a theatre, seeing a drama acted on -the stage, where one's senses perceive subtle impressions, but vague, -unreal, ghost-like; where at moments one's eyes envisage the infinite. -"Then," says Baudelaire, "the grammar, the arid grammar itself, -becomes something like an evoked sorcery, the words are alive again in -flesh and in blood, the substantive, in its substantial majesty, the -adjective, a transparent vestment that clothes it and colours it like -a glacis, and the verb, angel of movement, that gives the swing to the -phrase." - -With the hallucinations all exterior forms take on singular aspects; -are deformed and transformed. Then come the transpositions of ideas, -with unaccountable analogies that penetrate the spirit. Even music, -heard or unheard, can seem voluptuous and sensual. It is Baudelaire who -speaks now, evokes an enchantment: "The idea of an evaporation, slow, -successive, eternal, takes hold of your spirit, and you soon apply this -idea to' your proper thoughts, to your way of thinking. By a singular -equivocation, by a kind of transportation, or of an intellectual _quid -pro quo,_ you find yourself evaporating, and you attribute to your pipe -(in which you feel yourself crouching and heaped together like tobacco) -the strange faculty of _smoking yourself_." The instant becomes -eternity; one is lucid at intervals; the hallucination is sudden, -perfect, and fatal. One feels an excessive thirst; one subsides into -that strange state that the Orientals call _Kief._ - -Certainly haschisch has a more vehement effect on one than opium; it -is more troubling, more ecstatic, more malign, malignant, insinuating, -more evocative, more visionary, more unseizable; it lifts one across -infinite horizons, it carries us passionately over the passionate -waves of seas in storms--of unknown storms on unseen seas--into not -even eternities, nor into chaos, nor into Heaven nor into Hell -(though these may whirl before one's vision), but into incredible -existences, over which no magician rules, over which no witch presides. -It can separate ourselves from ourselves; change our very shapes into -shapeless images; drown us in the deep depths of annihilation, out of -which we slowly emerge; bury us under the oldest roots of the earth; -give us death in life and life in death; give us sleep that is not -sleep, and waking dreams that are not waking dreams. There is nothing, -human or inhuman, moral or immoral, that this drug cannot give us. - -Yet, all the time, we know not what it takes from us; nor what deadly -exchange we may have to give; nor what intoxication can be produced -beyond its intoxication; nor if, as with Coleridge, who took opium, it -might not become "almost a habit of the Soul." - -Imagine a universe in disorder, peopled by strange beings, that have -no relation with each other, whose speech one supposes is jargon; -where such houses as there are are built in different ways--none with -straight lines, many in triangles; where the animals are unlike ours, -some smaller than ants; where there are no churches, no apparent -streets; but innumerable brothels. When one sees fires the smoke goes -downward; flames leap out of the soil and turn into living serpents. -Now one sees a serpent return into his proper flame. There seem to be -no gods, nor idols nor priests nor shrines. - -The seas storm the skies and swallow up Hell; and all that lives and -all that dies seems indistinguishable. Suppose that--in an opium -dream--Satan turns God. The soil might wither at his touch; Lesbians -lament the loss of Lesbianism; and the word of God be abolished. - -I have used the word vehement in regard to Haschisch. It violates the -imagination, ravishes the senses; can disturb one physically; but -never, if taken in measure, prove destructive. This green drug can -create unheard-of excitations, exasperations; can create contagious -laughter, evoke comical images, supernatural and fantastic. - -Now take a world created by Opium. The soil wavers, moves always, -in void space; a soil in which no seed nor weed grows. The men and -women are veiled--none see their faces. There is light, but neither -sun nor stars nor night. The houses have no windows; inside are no -mirrors; but everywhere opium dens; everywhere the smoke--incessant--of -pipes; everywhere a stench produced by opium and by their moral -degradation. The streets are thick with grass; such animals as -there are are stupefied. In fact, this inexorably moving world that -has no foundations exhales--worse than pestilence--an inexplicable -stupefaction. - -And, symbolical as it must be, these excitable poisons are to a -certainty one of the most terrible means employed by the Prince of -the Powers of the Air to enslave deplorable humanity; but by no means -to give him, what the drug can give him, the monstrous sense of the -suddenness of space and time, as if one were hurled between them by two -opposing whirlwinds. - -Now appears suddenly the Women--furious, formidable--one calls -Mephistophila, who having gazed on the Medusa becomes Medusa; who, -rouged and pale as the dead, gives one the idea of that eternal minute -which must be hell. Her very name trails like a coffin-lid. Abnormal, -she is sinister. She is one of my hallucinations. Can she ever count -the countless sins she has committed? Occult, she adores the Arcana. -Her kisses on women's lips are cruel. Perhaps she is the modern -Messalina. _Elle est l'impératrice blême d'un macabre Lesbos._ - -She admits--I give here simply her confessions--to no abominations, nor -does she specialize her vices. As certain of her damnation as of her -existence--real, imaginary--she lives and loves and lies and forgives. -She knows she has abandoned herself to all the impossible desires -endured by such souls as hers, who expect annihilation. _Elle est la -reine, pas présente, mais acceptée, de la cour des miracles femelles du -Mal._ - -She is not of those the Furies hate eternally, nor has she knowledge -of man's mingled fates; yet certain Circes have shown her how to weave -webs of spiritual spiders; she knows not where those are that turn the -Wheels of Destiny. Whirlwinds have shaken her in her perfumed room as -she lies in perfumed garments, considering her nakedness as sacred: -she the impure, never the pure! She is so tired of having ravished -souls from bodies and bodies from souls, that all she desires is sleep, -sleep without dreams. Did sleep ever come to those who most desired it? -Messalina, Helen of Troy, Faustina knew this; dust has closed their -lips, the very dust they have trodden under foot, the dust that knows -not whither it is drifting: none thinking of the inevitable end. - -Has not this poisonous drug shown to me, as to her, shadows hot from -hell? Not the shadows the sun casts on our figures as we walk on -the grass; not the moon's shadows that make mockery of us; but the -veritable heat and fire and flame and fumes of uttermost hell. - -In her eyes persists an ardent and violent life, hateful and bestial. -Depraved by insensible sensations, she imagines Caligula before her -and maledictions not her own. I know her now in vision--she is more -insatiable than Death--more ravenous after ravishment than Life. No -vampire, no Lamia, she knows not that her body has been drenched with -so many poisons that her breath might poison a man with one kiss. And -now, now, her eyes are so weary, her eyeballs ache with such tortured -nerves, that she desires nothing--nothing at all. - -In the very essence of Haschisch I find a disordered Demon whose -insanities make one's very flesh ache. Under his power symbols -speak--you can become yourself a living symbol. Under its magic you can -imagine black magic, and music can speak your passion: for is not music -as passionate as man's love for woman, as a woman's love for a man? -It can turn your rhythm into its rhythm, can change every word into a -sound, a word into a note of music: it cannot change the substance of -your soul. - -Finally, the drugged man admires himself inordinately; he condemns -himself, he glorifies himself; he realizes his condemnation; he becomes -the centre of the universe, certain of his virtue as of his genius. -Then, in a stupendous irony, he cries: _Je suis devenu Dieu!_ One -instant after he projects himself out of himself, as if the will of an -intoxicated man had an efficacious virtue, and cries, with a cry that -might strike down the scattered angels from the ways of the sky: _Je -suis un Dieu!_ - -One of Baudelaire's profoundest sayings is: "Every perfect debauch -has need of a perfect leisure: _Toute débauche parfaite a besoin d'un -parfait loisir"_ He gives his definition of the magic that imposes -on haschisch its infernal stigmata; of the soul that sells itself in -detail; of the frantic taste for this adorable poison of the man whose -soul he had chosen for these experiments, his own soul; of how finally -this hazardous spirit, driven, without being aware of it, to the edge -of hell, testifies of its original grandeur. - - - -VIII - - -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. - - -II - -How very commonly we hear it remarked that such and such thoughts -are beyond the compass of words. I do not believe that any thought, -properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather, -that where difficulty in expression is experienced, there is, in the -intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or of -method. For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not -set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which -I conceived it: for thought is logicalized by the effort at written -composition. There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite -delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it -absolutely impossible to adapt language. Yet, so entire is my faith in -the power of words, that at times I have believed it possible to embody -even the evanescences of fancies such as I have described. Could one -actually do so, which would be to have done an original thing, such -words might have compelled the heaven into the earth. - -Some of these qualities Baudelaire finds in Gautier; to my mind there -are many more of these strange and occult qualities to be found in -Baudelaire. I have said somewhere that there is no such thing, properly -speaking, as a "natural" style; and it is merely ignorance of the -mental process of writing which sometimes leads one to say that the -style of Swift is more natural than that of Ruskin. Pater said to me -at Oxford that his own _Imaginary Portraits_ seemed to him the best -written of his books, which he qualified by adding: "It seems to be the -most _natural_." I think then he was beginning to forget that it was -not natural to him to be natural. - -Gautier had a way of using the world's dictionary, whose leaves, blown -by an unknown wind, always opened so as to let the exact word leap -out of the pages, adding the appropriate shades. Both writers had an -innate sense of "correspondences," and of a universal symbolism, where -the "sacredness" of every word defends one from using it in a profane -sense. To realize the central secret of the mystics, from Protagoras -onwards, the secret which the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes betrays in -its "As things are below, so are they above;" which Boehme has classed -in his teaching of "signatures;" and which Swedenborg has systematized -in his doctrine of "correspondences," one arrives at Gérard de Nerval, -whose cosmical visions are at times so magnificent that he seems to be -creating myths, as, after his descent into hell, he plays the part he -imagines assigned to him in his astral influences. - -Among these comes Hoffmann. In his _Kreislerione,_ that Baudelaire read -in the French translation I have before me, printed in 1834, he says: -"The musician whose sense of music is conscious swims everywhere across -floods of harmony and melody. This is no vain image, nor an allegory -devoid of sense, such as composers use when they speak of colours, of -perfumes, of the rays of the sun that appear like concords." "Colour -speaks," says Baudelaire, "in a voice evocatory of sorcery; animals and -plants grimace; perfumes provoke correspondent thoughts and memories. -And when I think of Gautier's rapidity in solving all the problems of -style and of composition, I cannot help remembering a severe maxim that -he let fall before me in one of his conversations: 'Every writer who -fails to seize any idea, however subtle and unexpected he supposes it -to be, is not a writer. _L'Inexprimable n'existe pas._'" - -It is either Delacroix or Baudelaire who wrote: "The writer who is -incapable of saying everything, who takes unawares and without having -enough material to give body to an idea, however subtle or strange or -unexpected he may suppose it to be, is not a writer." And one has to -beware of the sin of allegory, which spoils even Bunyan's prose. For -the deepest emotion raised in us by allegory is a very imperfectly -satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we -should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome. - -Then there is the heresy of instruction--_l'hérésie de -l'enseignement_--which Poe and Baudelaire and Swinburne consider -ruinous to art. Art for art's sake first of all; that a poem must be -written for the poem's sake simply, from whatever instinct we have -derived it; it matters nothing whether this be inspired by a prescient -ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, or by some of that loveliness -whose very elements appertain solely to eternity. Above all, Verlaine's -_Pas de couleur, rien que la nuance!_ - -The old war--not (as some would foolishly have it defined) a war -between facts and fancies, reason and romance, poetry and good sense, -but simply between imagination which apprehends the spirit of a thing -and the understanding which dissects the body of a fact--the strife -which can never be decided--was for Blake the most important question -possible. Poetry or art based on loyalty to science is exactly as -absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or poetry. Though, -indeed, Blake wrought his _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ into a form -of absolute magnificence, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine -thought and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which hells and -heavens change names and alternate through mutual annihilations, which -emit an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame, he never -actually attained the incomparable power of condensing vapour into -tangible and malleable form, of helping us to handle air and measure -mist, which is so instantly perceptible in Balzac's genius, he who was -not "a prose Shakespeare" merely, but rather perhaps a Shakespeare in -all but the lyrical faculty. - -Even when Baudelaire expresses his horror of life, of how abject the -world has become, how he himself is supposed to be "une anomalie," his -sense of his own superiority never leaves him. "Accursed," as I have -said, such abnormally gifted artists are, he declares his thirst of -glory, a diabolical thirst of fame and of all kinds of enjoyments--in -spite of his "awful temperament, all ruse and violence"--and can say: -"I desire to live and to have self-content. Something terrible says -to me _never,_ and some other thing says to me _try. Moi-même, le -boulevard m'effraye_." - -Baudelaire's tragic sense of his isolation, of his intense misery, -of his series of failures, of his unendurable existence--it was and -was not life--in Brussels finds expression in this sentence, dated -September, 1865: - -"Les gens qui ne sont pas exilés ne savent pas ce que sont les nerfs de -ceux sont cloués à l'étranger, sans communications et sans nouvelles." -What he says is the inevitable that has no explanation: simply the -inevitable that no man can escape. To be exiled from Paris proves to -be, practically, his death-stroke. And, in the last letter he ever -wrote, March 5, 1866, there is a sense of irony, of vexation, of -wounded pride, and in the last "sting in the tail of the honey" he -hisses: -"There is enough talent in these young writers; but what absurdities, -what exaggerations, and what youthful infatuations! Curiously, only a -few years ago I perceived these imitators whose tendencies alarmed me. -I know nothing of a more compromising nature than these: as for me, I -love nothing more than being alone. But this is not possible for me, -_et il paraît que l'école Baudelaire existe_." - -And, to all appearances, it did; and what really annoyed Baudelaire was -the publication of Verlaine's _Poèmes saturniens_ and their praise by -Leconte de l'Isle, Banville, and Hugo; Hugo, whom he had come to hate. -It is with irony that he says of Hugo: "Je n'accepterais ni son génie, -ni sa fortune, s'il me fallait au même temps posséder ses énormes -ridicules." - - -III - -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!" - - - -VIII - - -In 1861 Poulet-Malassis showed Baudelaire the manuscript of _Les -Martyrs ridicules_ of Léon Cladel, who was so excited as he read it, so -intrigued by his antithetical constructions and by the mere singularity -of the title, and so amazed by this writer's audacity, that he made his -acquaintance, went over his proofs, and helped to teach him the craft -of letters. So, in his sombre and tragic and passionate and feverish -novels, we see the inevitable growth out of the hard soil of Quercy, -and out of the fertilizing contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of this -whole literature, so filled with excitement, so nervous, so voluminous -and vehement, in whose pages speech is always out of breath. And one -finds splendid variations in his stories of peasants and wrestlers and -thieves and prostitutes: something at once epic and morbid. - -Baudelaire, in his preface, points out the solemn sadness and the -grim irony with which Cladel relates deplorably comic facts; the -fury with which he insists on painting his strange characters; the -fantastic fashion in which he handles sin with the intense curiosity -of a casuist, analysing evil and its inevitable consequences. He notes -"la puissance sinistrement caricatural de Cladel." But it is in these -two sentences that he sums up, supremely, the beginning and the end of -realistic and imaginative art. "The Poet, under his mask, still lets -himself be seen. But the supremacy of art had consisted in remaining -glacial and hermetically sealed, and in leaving to the reader all the -merit of indignation. (_Le poète, sous son masque, se laisse encore -voir. Le supreme de l'art eût consisté à rester glacial et fermé, et à -laisser au lecteur tout le mérite de l'indignation._)" - -[Illustration] - -Certain of these pages are ironical and sinister and cynical; as, for -instance, in this sentence: "Quant aux insectes amoureux, je ne crois -pas que les figures de rhétorique dont ils se servent pour gémir leurs -passions soient mesquines; toutes les mansardes entendant tous les -soirs des tirades tragiques dont la Comédie Française ne pourra jamais -bénéficier." And it is in regard to this that I give certain details of -an anecdote related by Cladel of Baudelaire, which refers to the fatal -year when he left Paris for Brussels. - -Both often went to the Café de la Belle-Poule; and, one night, when -Cladel was waiting for Baudelaire, a very beautiful woman seated -opposite him asked him to present her to Baudelaire. He laughed and -they waited, and Baudelaire was presented, who, after giving them the -usual drinks, at the end of an hour went away. This went on for a -whole month; when Baudelaire, after her incessant assiduities to him, -brought her home with him, Cladel also. They talk. The woman becomes -lascivious. Baudelaire answers that he has a passion for beautiful -forms and does not wish to expose himself to a deception. She undresses -slowly. She is magnificent, and her tresses are so long that, with -leaning over a little, she could put her naked feet on the ends of -them. She assumes, being probably aware of it, the exact pose of -Mademoiselle de Maupin when she stands naked before d'Albert. Cladel -goes out. He has not quite closed the door when he hears Baudelaire, -prematurely old and worn out, say: "Rhabille-toi." Still vital, he -has no more the abstract heat of rapture of the passionate lover in -Gautier's famous self-confessions; for, in that wonderful book, there -is nothing besides a delicately depraved imagination and an extreme -ecstasy over the flesh and the senses. And he also realized, as -Baudelaire did not always, that the beauty of life was what he wanted, -and not the body, that frail and perishable thing, that has to be -pitied, that so many desire to perpetuate. - -Yet never in Baudelaire, as in Gautier, did the five senses become -articulate, as if they were made specially for him; for he speaks -for them with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are--never -Baudelaire's--in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have -no recollection. Yet neither were absolutely content with the beauty of -a woman's body: for the body must finally dwindle and expand to some -ignoble physical condition, and on certain women's necks wrinkles will -crawl, and the fire in one's blood sometimes loses some of its heat; -only, one wants to perpetuate the beauty of life itself, imperishable -at least in its recurrence. - -In his preface Baudelaire compares Murger with Musset, both Bohemian -classics, only one spoke of Bohemia with a bitter bantering, and the -poet, when he was not in his noble moods, had crises of fatuity. "All -this evil society, with its vile habits, its adventurous morals, was -painted by the vivid pencil-strokes of Murger; only he jested in his -relations of miserable things." Yes, Murger is a veracious historian; -believe him, if you do not know or have forgotten, that such are the -annals of Bohemia. There, people laugh just so lightly and sincerely, -weep and laugh just as freely, are really hungry, really have their -ambitions, and at times die of all these maladies. It is the gayest and -most melancholy country in the world. To have lived there too long, is -to find all the rest of the world in exile. But if you have been there -or not, read Murger's pages; there, perhaps, you will see more of the -country than anything less than a lifetime spent in it will show you. - - - -IX - - -In April, 1864, Baudelaire left Paris for Brussels, where he stayed in -the Hôtel du Grand-Miroir, rue de la Montagne. Before then his nerves -had begun to torment him; they played tricks with his very system; he -wrote very little prose and no verse. It was with a kind of desperate -obstination--a more than desperate obstinacy--that he strove to prevent -himself from giving way to his pessimistic conceptions of life, to his -morbid over-sensibility that ached as his flesh ached. Unsatiated, -unsatisfied, for once in his existence irresolute in regard to what he -wanted to do, watching himself with an almost casuistical casuistry, -alone and yet not alone in the streets of Paris, he wandered, a -_noctambule,_ night after night, sombre and sinister. So a ghost -self-obsessed might wander in desolate cities seeing ever before him -the Angel of Destruction. - -Did he then know that he was becoming more and more abnormal? This I -ignore. This, I suppose, he alone knew; and hated too much knowledge of -his precarious condition. He was veritably more alone than ever, before -he plunged--as one who might see shipwreck before him--into that gulf -that is no gulf, that extends not between hell and heaven, but that one -names Brussels. - -[Illustration: manuscript] - -Still he frequented his favourite haunts, the Moulin-Rouge, the Casino -de la rue Cadet, and other cabarets. He saw then, as I saw many -years afterwards, pass some of his Flowers of Evil--some who knew him -and had read his verses, most of whom he ignored--macabre, with hectic -cheeks and tortured eyes and painted faces; these strange nocturnal -birds of passage that flit to and fro, the dancers and the hired -women; always--so Latin an attitude of their traditional trade!--with -enquiring and sidelong glances at men and at women. - -I can see him now, as I write, sit in certain corners of the -Moulin-Rouge--as I did--drinking strange drinks and smoking cigarettes; -hearing with all his old sensuality that adorable and cynical and -perverse and fascinating _Valse des Roses_ of Olivier Métra: a -maddening music to the soundless sound of the mad dances of the -_Chahut_--danced by dancers of both sexes, ambiguous and exotic and -neurotic--that, as the avid circle forms hastily around them, set their -fevers into our fevers, their nerves into our nerves. - -It was in May, 1892, that, having crossed the streets of Paris from -the hotel where I was staying, the Hôtel Corneille, in the Latin -Quarter (made famous by Balzac in his superb story, _Z. Marcas_,) I -found myself in Le Jardin de Paris, where I saw for the first time -La Mélinite. She danced in a quadrille: young and girlish, the more -provocative because she played as a prude, with an assumed modesty; -_décolletée_ nearly to the waist, in the Oriental fashion. She had -long, black curls around her face; and had about her a depraved -virginity. - -And she caused in me, even then, a curious sense of depravity that -perhaps comes into the verses I wrote on her. There, certainly, on -the night of May 22nd, danced in her feverish, her perverse, her -enigmatical beauty, La Mélinite, to her own image in the mirror: - - "A shadow smiling - Back to a shadow in the night," - -as she cadenced Olivier Métra's _Valse des Roses._ - -It is a fact of curious interest that in 1864 Poulet-Malassis was -obliged to leave Paris--on account of his misfortunes as a publisher, -in regard to money, and for various other reasons--and to exile himself -in Brussels: still more curious that Baudelaire--drawn, perhaps, by -some kind of affinity in their natures--followed him sooner than he -had intended to go. Malassis lived in rue de Mercedes, 35 _bis,_ -Faubourg d'Ixilles. In those years both saw a great deal of the famous, -perverse, macabre Félicien Rops. - -Malassis, naturally, was obliged, in his expedients for living as he -used to live, to publish privately printed obscene books; some no more -than erotic. As Baudelaire hated, with his Parisian refinement, that -kind of certainly objectionable literature, on May 4th, 1865, he writes -to Sainte-Beuve: "As for Malassis, his terrible affair arrives on the -12th. He believes he will be condemned for five years. What there -is grave in this is that that closes France for him for five years. -But that cuts him for a time from his ways of living. I see in it no -great evil. As for me, who am no fool, I have never possessed one of -these idiotic books, even printed in fine characters and with fine -engravings." As a matter of fact, Malassis was condemned in May, 1866, -to one year's imprisonment for having privately printed _Les Amies_ of -Paul Verlaine--a book of sonnets, attributed to an imaginary Pablo de -Herlaguez. - -Baudelaire, as I have said, had many reasons for going to Brussels. -Among these was his urgent desire of finding a publisher to print his -collected works--having failed to find any publisher for them. Another -was that of giving lectures--a thing he was not made for--and for two -other reasons: one of making immediate money, one of adding to his fame -as a writer. Then, to write a book on Belgium. - -He writes to Manet (who has written to him: "Do return to Paris! No -happiness can come to you while you live in that damned country!"): -"As for finishing here _Pauvre Belgique,_ I am incapable of it: I am -near on dead. I have quite a lot of _Poèmes en Prose_ to get printed in -magazines. I can do no more than that. _Je souffre d'un mal qui je n'ai -pas, comme j'étais gamin, et que je vivais au bout du monde."_ - -His book was to have been humorous, mocking, and serious--his final -separation from modern stupidity. "People may understand me, perhaps, -then." "Nothing," he confesses, "can console me in my detestable -misery, in my humiliating situation, nor especially in my vices." - -In February, 1865, he writes: "As for my present state, it is an -absolute abdication of the will. (_C'est une parfaite abdication de la -volonté._)" What reason, I wonder, was there for him to "abdicate" the -one element in our natures by which we live at our greatest, the very -root of our passions (as Balzac said), "nervous fluids and that unknown -substance which, in default of another term, we must call the will?" -Man has a given quality of energy; each man a different quality: how -will he spend it? That is Balzac's invariable question. All these -qualities were always in Baudelaire. - -Had he finally, after so many years in which his energy was supreme, -lost some of his energy, struggling, as he seems to do, against -insuperable difficulties that beset him on either side, like thieves -that follow men in the dark with the intention of stabbing you in the -back? Does he then try to conjecture what next year might bring him -of good or of evil? He has lived his life after his own will: what -shall the end be? He dares neither look backward nor forward. It might -be that he feels the earth crumbling under his feet; for how many -artists have had that fear--the fear that the earth under their feet -may no longer be solid? There is another step for him to take, a step -that frightens him; might it not be into another more painful kind of -oblivion? Has something of the man gone out of him: that is to say, the -power to live for himself? - -In the summer of 1865 Baudelaire spent several days in Paris, seeing -Banville and other friends of his. They found him unchanged; his eyes -clear; his voice musical; he talked as wonderfully as ever. They used -all their logic to persuade him to remain in Paris. He refused, even -after Gautier had said to him: "You are astonishing: can one conceive -your mania of eternalizing yourself in a land where one is only bored -to extinction?" He laughed; promised to return: he never did; it was -the last day when his friends possessed him entirely. - -In his years of exile he printed Poe's _Histoires grotesques et -sérieuses_ (1864); _Les nouvelles fleurs du mal_ in _La Parnasse -contemporaine_ (1866). In 1865 Poulet-Malassis printed _Les épaves de -Charles Baudelaire._ Avec une eau-forte de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam. A -l'enseigne du Coq. 1865. 165 pages. - -"Avertissement de l'Éditeur. - -"Ce recueil est composé de morceaux poétiques, pour la plupart -condamnés ou inédits, auxquels M. Charles Baudelaire n'a pas cru devoir -faire place dans l'édition définitive des _Fleurs du mal._ - -"Cela explique son titre. - -"M. Charles Baudelaire a fait don, sans réserve, de ces poëmes, à un -ami qui juge à propos de les publier, parce qu'il se flatte de les -goûter, et qu'il est à un âge où l'on aime encore à faire partager ses -sentiments à des amis auxquels on prête ses vertus. - -"L'auteur sera avisé de cette publication en même temps que les deux -cents soixantes lectures probables qui figurent--à peu près--pour son -éditeur bénévole, le public littéraire en France, depuis que les bêtes -y ont décidément usurpé la parole sur les hommes." - -I have before me two copies of this rare edition, printed on yellow -Holland paper; one numbered 100, the other 194. The second has -inscribed in ink: _A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de -l'auteur avec les civilités de l'éditeur A. P. Malassis._ This was sent -on the part of Baudelaire to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is superbly -bound in a kind of red-purple thick leather binding, with pale gold -squares, in the form of the frame of a picture; done, certainly, with -great taste. - -On January 3, 1865, Baudelaire writes a letter to his mother; a letter -that pains one as one reads it: so resigned he seems to be, yet never -in his life less resigned to his fate. He fears that God might deprive -him of even happiness; that it is more difficult to think than to write -a book; that if only he were certain of having five or six years before -him he might execute all that remained for him to do; that he has the -fixed idea of death; that he has suffered so much already that he -believes many things may be forgiven him (sins of concupiscence, sins -of conscience, sins one never forgets) as he has been punished so much. - -I pass from this to the beginning of March, 1866. He stays with Rops -at Namur, where (certainly by bad luck) he enters again l'Église -Saint-Loup, which he had spoken of as "this sinister marvel in the -interior of a catafalque--terrible and delicious--broidered with gold, -red, and silver." As he admires these richly sculptured confessionals, -as he speaks with Rops and Malassis, he stumbles, taken by a kind of -dizziness in the head, and sits down on a step in the church. They -lift him up; he feigns not to be frightened, says that his foot had -slipped accidentally. Next day he shows signs of a nervous trouble, not -a mental one; asking them in the train to Brussels to have the window -opened; it is open. That is the first sign of his loss of speech, and -the last letter that he ever wrote (dated March 30th, 1866), ends: _Je -ne puis pas bouger._ It is strange to set beside this Balzac's last -words, that end a letter written June 20th, 1856: _Je ne puis ni lire -ni écrire._ It is written to Théophile Gautier. - -Swinburne, having heard the fatal news in regard to Baudelaire, added -to his book on Blake these magnificent words: as pure, as fervent a -tribute to the memory of a fellow-artist as Baudelaire might have -wished to have been written on himself, as Swinburne might have desired -to have been written on himself: "I heard that a mortal illness had -indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the -fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more -of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of -Charles Baudelaire. We may see again as various a power as was his, -may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as tragic a manner -of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of -emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison -of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair -and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at -once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He -could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible -and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances -of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at -least in part expressed, brought him near to me by way of written or -transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, -and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal -words which too often return upon our lips: - - _Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!"_ - -And I, who have transcribed these words, have before me a book that -Swinburne showed me, that he had richly bound in Paris, and that I -bought at the sale of his library on June 19th: _Richard Wagner et -Tannhäuser à Paris._ Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, 1861; with, -written in pencil, on the page before the title-page, these words: - -"_A Mr. Algernon C. Swinburne. Bon Souvenir et mille Remerciements. C. -B._" - -From April 9, 1866, to August 31, 1867, Baudelaire endures the slow -tortures of a body and a soul condemned to go on living; living, what -else can it be called, than a kind of living death? To remain, in most -senses, himself; to be, as always, Charles Baudelaire; to have in his -mind one desire, the desire, the vain desire, of recovery; to be unable -to utter one word; to think, to sleep, to conceive imaginary projects, -for his near future, for his verse, for his prose: to walk, to eat, -to drink; to be terribly conscious of his dolorous situation; to be, -as ever, anxious for a new edition of _Les fleurs du mal;_ to mark a -date in an almanac, counting three months, when he imagined he would -be in a state to superintend the impression of his final edition; to -have finally given up all hope, all illusion; to have gazed out of his -wonderful eyes, at his friend's faces, eyes shadowed by an expression -of infinite sadness, eyes that endured his last tragedy: that is how -Baudelaire survived himself to the end. - -He died on Saturday, August 31, 1867, at eleven o'clock in the morning, -at the age of forty-six and four months. So died, simply and without -any trace of suffering, this man of genius. Had he been thoroughly -understood by the age in which he lived? Blake, who said the final -truth on this question: "The ages are all equal; but genius is always -above the ages:" was not understood in his age. - - - - -BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES - - -1. _Salon de_ 1845. Pax Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Jules Labitte, 1845. -72 pp. - -2. _Salon de_ 1846. Par Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1846. -132 pp. - -3. _Histoires extraordinaires._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de Charles -Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1856. - - 1. Edgar Poe, La vie et ses œuvres, pp. vii-xxxi. 2. - Translations, 323 pp. - -4. _Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. Michel Lévy, 1857. - - 1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, pp. v-xxiv. 2. Translations, - 288 pp. - -5. _Les fleurs du mal._ Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis -et de Broise, 4 rue de Buci, 1857. 252 pp. - - 1. Dédicace. 2. Au Lecteur. - - - SPLEEN ET IDÉAL.--1. Bénédiction. 2. Le Soleil. 3. Élévation. 4. - Correspondances. 5. _J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues._ 6. - Les Phares. 7. La Muse malade. 8. La Muse vénale. 9. Le Mauvais - Moine. 10. L'Ennemi. 11. Le Guignon. 12. La Vie intérieure. 13. - Bohémiens en voyage. 14. L'Homme et la mer. 15. Don Juan aux - enfers. 16. Châtiment de l'orgueil. 17. La Beauté. 18. L'Idéal. - 19. La Géante. 20. Les Bijoux. 21. Parfum exotique. 22. _Je - t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne._ 23. _Tu mettre l'univers - entier dans ta ruelle._ 24. _Sed non satiata._ 25. _Avec ses - vêtements ondoyants et nacrés._ 26. Le Serpent qui danse. 27. - La Charogne. 28. _De profundis clamavi._ 29. Le Vampire. 30. - Le Léthé. 31. _Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive._ - 32. Remords posthume. 33. Le Chat. 34. Le Balcon. 35. _Je te - donne ces vers afin que si mon nom._ 36. Tout entière. 37. _Que - diras-tu ce soir, pauvre âme solitaire._ 38. Le Flambeau vivant. - 39. A Celle qui est trop gaie. 40. Réversibilité. 41. Confession. - 42. L'Aube spirituelle. 43. Harmonie du soir. 44. Le Flacon. 45. - Le Poison. 46. Ciel brouillé. 47. Le Chat. 48. Le beau navire. - 49. L'Invitation au voyage. 50. L'Irréparable. 51. Causerie. 52. - L'Héautontimouroménos. 53. Franciscae meae laudes. 54. A une - Dame Créole. 55. Moesta et Errabunda. 56. Les Chats. 57. Les - Hiboux. 58. La cloche fêlée. 59. Spleen. 60. Spleen. 61. Spleen. - 62. Spleen. 63. Brumes et pluies. 64. L'Irrémédiable. 65. A une - mendiante rousse. 66. Le Jeu. 67. Le Crépuscule du soir. 68. Le - Crépuscule du matin. 69. _Le servante au grand cœur dont vous - étiez jaloux._ 70. _Je n'ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville._ 71. - Le Tonneau de la haine. 72. Le Revenant. 73. Le Mort joyeux. 74. - Sépulture. 75. Tristesses de la lune. 76. La Musique. 77. La Pipe. - - FLEURS DU MAL.--78. La Destruction. 79. Une Martyr. 80. Lesbos. - 81. Femmes damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte). 82. Femmes damnées. - 83. Les deux bonnes sœurs. 84. La fontaine de sang. 85. - Allégorie. 86. La Beatrice. 87. Les métamorphoses du vampire. 88. - Un voyage à Cythère. 89. L'Amour et le crâne. - - RÉVOLTE.--90. Le reniement de Saint Pierre. 91. Abel et Caïn. 92. - Les Litanies de Satan. - - LE VIN.--93. L'âme du vin. 94. Le vin des chiffonniers. 95. Le - vin de l'assassin. 96. Le vin du solitaire. 97. Le vin des amants. - - LA MORT.--98. La mort des amants. 99. La mort des pauvres. 100. - La mort des artistes. - -6. _Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1858. 200 pp. - -7. _Théophile Gautier._ Par Charles Baudelaire. Notice littéraire -précédée d'une lettre de Victor Hugo. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de -Broise, 9 rue des Beaux-Arts, 1859. - - 1. A M. Charles Baudelaire de Victor Hugo, pp. i, iii. 2. - Théophile Gautier, 68 pp. - -8. _Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch._ Par Charles -Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 9 rue des Beaux-Arts, -1860. - - 1. Dédicace à J. G. F., pp. i-iv. 2. Le poème du haschisch, pp. - 1-108. 3. Un mangeur d'opium, pp. 109-304. - -On the back of the cover is this announcement: - -"Sous Presse, du même auteur: _Réflexions sur quelques-uns, de mes -Contemporains;_ un volume contenant: Edgar Poe, Théophile Gautier, -Pierre Dupont, Richard Wagner, Auguste Barbier, Leconte de Lisle, -Hégésippe Moreau, Pétrus Borel, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gustave -le Vavasseur, Gustave Flaubert, Philibert Rouvière; la famille des -_Dandies,_ ou Chateaubriand, de Custine, Paul de Molinès, and Barbey -d'Aurévilly." - -This volume appeared in part in _L'Art Romantique_ (1868); several of -these essays were never written, such as the one on Barbey d'Aurévilly. -Seconde Édition, 1861. - -9. _Les Fleurs du Mal_ de Charles Baudelaire. - -Seconde Édition augmentée de trente-cinq poëmes nouveaux et orné -d'un Portrait de l'Auteur dessiné et gravé par Bracquemond. Paris, -Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, Éditeurs, 97 rue de Richelieu et Passage -Mirés, 1861. 319 pp. - - 1. L'Albatros. 2. Le Masque. Statue Allégorique dans le goût - de la Renaissance. 3. Hymne à la Beauté. 4. La Chevelure. 5. - Duellum. 6. Le Possédé. 7. Un Fantôme: (1) Les Ténèbres. (2) Le - Parfum. (3) Le Cadre. (4) Le Portrait. 8. Sempre eadem. 9. Chant - d'Automne. 10. A une Madone. Ex-Voto dans le goût Espagnol. 11. - Chanson d'Après-Midi. 12. Sisina. 13. Sonnet d'automne. 14. Une - Gravure fantastique. 15. Obsession. 16. Le Goût du néant. 17. - Alchimie de la Douleur. 18. Horreur Sympathique. 19. L'Horloge. - 20. Un Paysage. 21. Le Cynge. 22. Les Sept Vieillards. 23. Les - Petites Vieilles. 24. Les Aveugles. 25. A une passante. 26. Le - Squelette laboureur. 27. Danse macabre. 28. L'Amour du mensonge. - 29. Rêve Parisien. 30. La Fin de la journée. 31. Le Rêve d'un - curieux. 32. Le Voyage. - -10. _Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser_ à Paris. Par Charles Baudelaire. -Paris, E. Dentu, Palais-Royale, 13 et 17, Galerie d'Orléans, 1861. 70 -pp. - -11. _Euréka._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, -Michel Lévy, 1864. 252 pp. - -12. _Histoires Grotesques et Sérieuses._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction par -Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1865. 372 pp. - -13. Les épaves de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte. Frontispiece -de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. - - 1. Avertissement de l'Éditeur, pp. i-iii. 2. Les épaves, 163 pp. - -14. _Les épaves_ de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte de Félicien -Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. Numéro 194. - -15. _Les épaves_ de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte de Félicien -Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. Numéro 100. - - _A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de l'auteur, - avec les civilités de l'Editeur. A. P. Malassis._ - - - -II - - -_Edition Définitive des œuvres de Charles Baudelaire._ Paris, Michel -Lévy et Frères, Libraires Éditeurs, rue Vivienne, 2 _bis,_ et Boulevard -des Italiens, 15. A la Librairie Nouvelle, 1868-1869. - -Volume I. LES FLEURS DU MAL. 414 pp. - -Volume II. CURIOSITÉS ESTHÉTIQUES. 440 pp. - - 1. Salon de 1845. 2. Salon de 1846. 3. Le Musée Classique - du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle (1846). 4. Exposition Universale de - 1855. Beaux Arts (1855). 5. Salon de 1850? 6. De l'Essence du - Rire, et généralement du Comique dans les Arts Plastiques. 7. - Quelques Caricaturistes Français: Carle Vernet. Pigal. Charlet. - Daumier. Henri Monnier. Grandville. Gavami. Trimolet. Traviès. - Jacque (1857). 8. Quelques Caricaturistes Étrangers: Hogarth. - Cruikshank. Goya. Pinelli. Breughel (1857). - -Volume III. L'ART ROMANTIQUE. - - 1. L'œuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix (1862). 2. Peintures - murales d'Eugène Delacroix à Saint-Sulpice (1861). 3. Le - Peintre de la Vie Moderne. Constantin Guys (1862). 4. Peintres - et Aqua-fortistes (1862). 5. Vente de le Collection de M. E. - Piot (1864). 6. L'Art Philosophique. 7. Morale des Joujou - (1854). 8. Théophile Gautier (1859-1861-1862). 9. Pierre Dupont - (1852-1861-1862). 10. Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris. - Encore quelques Mots (1861). u. Philibert Rouvière (1855). - 12. Conseils aux jeunes Littérateurs (1846). 13. Les Drames - et les Romans honnêtes (1850). 14. L'École Païenne (1851). - 15. _Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes Contemporaines:_ (1) - Victor Hugo (1861). (2) Auguste Barbier (1861). (3) Marceline - Desbordes-Valmore (1861). (4) Théophile Gautier (1861). (5) - Pétrus Borel (1861). (6) Hégéssipe Moreau (1861). (7) Théodore de - Banville (1861). (8) Pierre Dupont (1852). (9) Leconte de Lisle - (1861). (10) Gustave Levavasseur (1861). - - CRITIQUES LITTÉRAIRES.--1. Les Misérables, par Victor Hugo - (1862). 2. Madame Bovary, par Gustave Flaubert. (1857). 3. - La double vie, par Charles Asselineau (1859). 4. Les martyrs - ridicules, par Léon Cladel (1861). - -Volume IV. 1. PETITS POEMES EN PROSE. - - A ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE.--1. L'Étranger (1862). 2. Le Désespoir de - la vieille (1862). 3. Le _Confiteor_ de l'artiste (1862). 4. - Un Plaisant (1862). 5. Le Chambre double (1862). 6. Chacun sa - chimère (1862). 7. Le fou et la Vénus (1862). 8. Le Chien et le - Flacon (1862). 9. Le Mauvais Vitrier (1862). 10. A une heure du - matin (1862). 11. Le Femme sauvage et le Petite Maîtresse (1862). - 12. Les Foules (1861). 13. Les Veuves (1861). 14. Le Vieux - Saltimbanque (1861). 15. Le Gâteau (1862). 16. L'Horloge (1857). - 17. Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure (1857). 18. L'Invitation au - voyage (1857). 19. Le Joujou du pauvre (1862). 20. Les Dons des - fées (1862). 21. Les Tentations, ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire - (1863). 22. Le Crépuscule du Soir (1855). 23. La Solitude (1855). - 24. Les Projets (1857). 25. La Belle Dorothée (1863). 26. Les - Yeux des Pauvres (1864). 27. Une Mort Héroïque (1863). 28. La - Fausse Monnaie (1864). 29. Le Joueur généreux (1864). 30. La - Corde, à Edouard Manet (1864). 31. Les Vocations (1864). 32. Le - Thyrse. A Franz Liszt (1863). 33. Enivrez-vous (1864). 34. Déjà! - (1863). 35. Les Fenêtres (1863). 36. Le Désir de peindre (1863). - 37. Les Bienfaits de la lune (1863). 38. Laquelle est la vraie? - (1863). 39. Un Cheval de race (1864). 40. Le Miroir (1864). 41. - Le Port (1864). 42. Portraits de maîtresses (1867). 43. Le galant - Tireur (1867). 44. La Soupe et les Nuages (1864). 45. Le Tir et - la Cimetière (1867). 46. Porte d'Auréole (1867). 47. Mademoiselle - Bistouri (1867). 48. (Anywhere out of the world): N'importe où - hors du monde (1867). 49. Assommons les pauvres (1867). 50. Les - Bon Chiens à M. Joseph Stevens (1865). _Epilogue_ (1860). - -2. LES PARADIS ARTIFICIELS. - -A. J. G. F. LE POÈME DU HASCHISCH. - - 1. Le Goût de l'Infini. 2. Qu'est-ce que le Haschisch? 3. Le - Théâtre du Séraphin. 4. L'Homme-Dieu. 5. Morale. - - UN MANGEUR D'OPIUM.--1. Précautions oratoires. 2. Confessions - préliminaires. 3. Voluptés d'opium. 4. Tortures d'opium. 5. Un - Faux Dénouement. 6. Le Génie enfant. 7. Chagrins d'enfance. - 8. Visions d'Oxford: (1) Le Palimpseste. (2) Levana et nos - Notre-Dame des Tristesses. (3) Le Spectre du Brocken. (4) - Savannah-la-Mer. 9. Conclusion. - -Du VIN ET DU HASCHISCH, COMPARÉS COMME MOYENS DE MULTIPLICATION DE -L'INDIVIDUALITÉ, 1851, 1858. - - 1, 2, 3. Le Vin. 5, 6, 7. Le Haschisch. - -LA FANFARLO, 1847. - -LE JEUNE ENCHANTEUR. HISTOIRE TIRÉE D'UN PALIMPSESTE DE POMPÉIA, 1846. - -Volume V. HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES. Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. - - 1. Edgar Poe: sa vie et ses œuvres. 2. Double assassinat dans la - rue Morgue. 3. La lettre volée. 4. Le scarabée d'or. 5. Le canard - au ballon. 6. Aventure sans pareille d'un certain Hans Pfaall. - 7. Manuscrit trouvé dans une bouteille. 8. Une descente dans le - Maelstrom. 9. Le vérité sur le cas de M. Valdemar. 10. Révélation - magnétique, 11. Les souvenirs de M. Auguste Bedloe. 12. Morella. - 13. Ligeia. 14. Metzengerstein. 15. Le Mystère de Marie Roget. - -Volume VI. NOUVELLES HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES. Par Edgar Poe. -Traduction de Charles Baudelaire. - - 1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe. 2. Le Démon de la Perversité. - 3. Le Chat noir. 4. William Wilson. 5. L'homme des foules. - 6. Le cœur révélateur. 7. Bérénice. 8. La chute de la maison - Usher. 9. Le puits et la pendule. 10. Hop-Frog. 11. La Barrique - d'Amontillado. 12. Le Masque de la Mort rouge. 13. Le Roi Peste. - 14. Le Diable dans le beffroi. 15. Lionnerie. 16. Quatre bêtes en - une. 17. Petite discussion avec une momie. 18. Puissance de la - Parole. 19. Colloque entre Monos et Una. 20. Conversation d'Eiros - avec Charmion. 21. Ombre. 22. Silence. 23. L'île de la Fée. 24. - Le Portrait Ovale. - -Volume VII. AVENTURES D'ARTHUR GORDON PYM. EURÉKA. Par Edgar Poe. -Traduction de Charles Baudelaire. - - - -III - -1. ESSAIS DE BIBLIOGRAPHIE CONTEMPORAINE: CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. Par A. de -Fizelière et Georges Decaux. Paris, Académie des Bibliophiles, rue de -la Bourse, 10, 1868. Numéro 178. - -2. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SA VIE ET SON ŒUVRE. Par Charles Asselineau. -Paris, Alphonse Lemerre, Éditeur, Passage Choiseul, 47, 1869. - -3. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SOUVENIRS. CORRESPONDANCES-- -BIBLIOGRAPHIE_--suivie de pièces inédités._ Par Charles Cousin. La -Bibliographie par le Vicomte Spoelberck de Lovenjoul. Paris, Chez René -Pincebourde, 14 rue de Beaume (quai Voltaire), 1872. - -4. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: ŒUVRES POSTHUMES ET CORRESPONDANCE -INÉDITS_--précédée d'une Étude Biographique._ Par Eugène Crépet. Paris, -Maison Quantin, Compagnie-Générale d'impression et d'Édition, 7 rue -Benoît, 1887. - -5. LE TOMBEAU DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE--_précédée d'une Étude sur les -Textes de les Fleurs du Mal, Commentaire et Variantes._ Par le Prince -Ourousof. Paris, Bibliothèque Artistique et Littéraire (_La Plume,_) -1896. - -6. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867). Par Féli Gautier. Orné de 26 -Portraits différents du Poète et de 28 Gravures et Reproductions. -Bruxelles, E. Deman, 1904. Tirage à 150 Exemplaires numérotés. -Exemplaire No. 74. - -7. VERSIFICATION ET MÉTRIQUE DE BAUDELAIRE. Par Albert Cassagne. Paris, -Hachette, 1906. - -8. LETTRES (1841-1866) DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. Paris, Mercure de France, -1908. - -9. ŒUVRES POSTHUMES DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. Paris, Mercure de France, -1908. - -10. LE CARNET DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 1911. - -Publié avec une Introduction et des Notes par Féli Gautier et orné -d'un dessin inédité de Baudelaire. Paris, J. Chevrel, Libraire 29 rue -de Seine. Cette plaquette non mise dans le commerce à été tirée à cent -exemplaires sur papier velin d'arches. Numéro 27. - -This _petit carnot vert,_ which contains seven quires of twenty-four -pages--the last two have been torn out--was used by Baudelaire for -noting down certain private details, details of almost every kind, -which he began in 1861 and ended in 1864. There are lists of his debts, -of his friends, of his enemies, of his projects, of his proofs, of his -books, of his articles, of the people he has to see and to write to, of -the etchings and drawings he buys or intends to buy, of the money he -owes and of the money he is in the utmost need of. On one page is the -original text of his dedication of the "Poems on Prose." On one page he -reckons forty days in which to execute some of his translations, his -prose, and his poems. On another page he gives a list of his hatreds, -underlining _Vilainies, Canailles_; then his plans for short stories -and dramas. These notes are of importance. "Faire en un an 2 vols, _de -Nouvelles_ et _Mon cœur mis à nu._" "_Tous les jours cinq poèmes et -autre chose._" Then this sinister note: "Pour faire du neuf, quitter -Paris, ou je me meurs." After this come long lists of the women he -frequents and of their addresses, such as 29 rue Neuve Bréda, 36 rue -Cigalle. After this comes Swinburne's verses, with the list of the few -friends he possesses: Villiers, Noriac, Manet, Malassis, his mother; -together with Louise, Gabrielle, and Judith. - -11. LETTRES INÉDITÉS A SA MÈRE (1833-1866). Par Charles Baudelaire. -Louis Conard, Libraire Éditeur, 6 Place de la Madeleine, Paris, 1918. -Numéro 182. - -12. JOURNEAUX INTIMES DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: TEXTE INTEGRAL. Paris, -Georges Crès, 21 rue Hautefeuille, 1919. - -This edition is founded on the original manuscripts of Baudelaire, now -in the possession of Gabriel Thomas. - -FUSÉES. A manuscript of fifteen pages, containing twenty-two sections -numbered in red ink; the pagination is also in red ink. The notes have, -often enough, the aspect of mere fragments, scrawled angrily. One of -them, numbered 53, and two paragraphs of another (the note 17: _Tantôt -il lui demandait; Minette_) are written in pencil; note 12 is written -in blue ink. Certain phrases in the text are used twice over. - -MON CŒUR MIS À NU. A manuscript of 91 pages, containing 197 articles -numbered in red ink; the pagination used in the same way as in the -other. Every note is preceded with the autograph mention: _Mon Cœur mis -à nu._ The text is written rapidly; the notes numbered 26, 31, 44, 48, -51, 54, 60, 68, 69, 72, 75 (the last three in italics), 80 are written -with a black pencil, the note 62 with a black pencil on blue paper, and -the note 83 written with a red pencil. - - - - -NOTES - - -Fascinated by sin, Baudelaire, as I have said in these pages, is never -the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as the original sin; he studies -sin as he studies evil, with a stern logic; he finds in horror a kind -of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; rarely in hideous things, save -when his sense of what I call a moralist makes him moralise, as in his -terrible poem, _Une Charogne._ - -Baudelaire's original manuscript, that is to say, the copy he makes for -his final text, I have recently bought. It covers two and a half folio -pages, folded four times across, as if he had carried it about with -him; it is written on thin, half-yellow paper, yellowed with age, and -on both sides; it is copied at tremendous speed with a quill pen that -blots the dashes he puts under every stanza. The title is underlined; -the only revision is where he obliterates "comme une vague" (which he -had used in the first line) and changes it to "d'un souffle, vague." He -uses a tremendous amount of capital letters; as in the first stanza: -"L'Objet, Mon Cœur, Matin, Doux, Détour, d'un Sentier, Une Charogne, -Cailloux." In the next: "Femme Lubrique, Les Poisons, D'une Façon -Nonchalant et Cynique, Ventre, Exhalations." At the end of the last -stanza but one he writes: - -"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses -Vivre parmi les monuments;" - -which he changes in the text of his _Fleurs du mal_ into: - -"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses -Moisir parmi les ossements." - -The change makes an enormous improvement to the stanza. - -To possess this manuscript written by Baudelaire is to possess one of -the most magnificent poems he ever wrote: the whole thing is copied in -a kind of unholy rapture, in a kind of evil perversion. - - - - -I. AN ADVENTURE IN FIRST EDITIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS - - -I am, fortunately, the possessor of a copy of the first edition of _Les -Fleurs du Mal._ The title-page is as follows: LES FLEURS DU MAL || -par Charles Baudelaire. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de Broise: || -Libraire-Éditeurs. || 4 rue de Buci. || 1857. - -This copy is signed, in brown Parisian ink: _"à mon ami Champfleury, -Ch. Baudelaire_" His signature is fantastic: the B. curled backward -like a snake's tail in an Egyptian hieroglyphic, the straight line -like an enchanter's wand. It is "grand-12; 252 pages." It contains one -hundred poems, the perfect number. It is printed on _papier vergé._ It -is one of the twenty copies, thus specially printed, that Baudelaire -ordered for himself and for certain of his friends. The rest of the -edition was printed on common white paper. Taken as a whole, this is -certainly one of the most perfectly printed books done in France, or -anywhere, in the past century. - -Poulet-Malassis came from Alençon to Paris, and began by printing the -_Odes Funambulesques_ of Théodore de Banville early in 1857, before he -completed the publication of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ in July of that year. -Baudelaire wrote to him, saying that he did not want popularity, "_mais -un bel éreintage général qui attirera la curiosité."_ He asked him to -be sparing in blank spaces on the pages; and to use certain archaisms -and touches of red. These touches of red are given on the title-page; -they have a decorative effect. He said that he had a natural horror -of the over-use of inverted commas, which have a way of spoiling the -text. He must have a unique system of his own. "I must have," he -insists, "in this kind of production, the one admissible thing, that -is, perfection." There one sees his unerring instinct; his sense of the -exact value of words. Yet he writes to his publisher, underlining the -phrase: "You know certain things better than I do, but whenever there -is, on my part, no radical repulsion, follow your taste." He rages -against de Broise's perpetual reproaches with regard to _les surcharges -de M. Baudelaire--_the "author's corrections." He points out certain -printer's mistakes, page 44 for page 45, and _guères_ rhyming with -_vulgaire._ There was no time to correct these errors; they remain so -in the printed pages of my copy. - -It is interesting, in regard to this question, to find in the first -text of _Le Vin de l'Assassin_ these lines: - - "Ma femme est morte, je suis libre! - Je puis donc boire tout mon saoul" - -In the second edition one reads "soûl." I find in Brachet's -_Dictionnaire Étymologique_ this definition of the word "_soûl,_ ancien -français, _saoul._ Latin _satallus,_ d'où l'ancien français _saoul._" -Therefore Baudelaire was right, traditionally, in using the original -form of the word. - -His worst trouble is in getting the famous dedication to Gautier -printed and spaced as it had to be. It must be composed in a certain -solemn style. Then he writes: "The magician has made me abbreviate the -dedication; it must not be a profession of faith, which might have the -fault of attracting people's eyes '_sur le côté scabreux du volume._'" -As it is, strangely enough for him, Baudelaire made a mistake in -syntax, using "_au magicien ès-langue française"_ instead of "_au -parfait magicien ès-lettres françaises_," which he corrected in the -edition of 1861. - -On July 11, 1857, he writes to Malassis: "Quick, hide the edition, -the whole edition. I have saved fifty here. The mistake was in having -sent a copy to _Le Figaro_! As the edition was sold out in three weeks -we may have the glory of a trial, from which we can easily escape." -The trial came; he was obliged to suppress six poems (supposed to -contain "obscene and immoral passages"). Baudelaire never ceased to -protest against the infamy of this trial. A copy of the second edition -(not nearly so well printed as the first) is before me: LES FLEURS -DU MAL. || Par Charles Baudelaire. || Seconde Edition. || Augmentée -de trente-cinq poèmes nouveaux || et ornée d'un portrait de l'auteur -dessiné et gravé par Bracquemont. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de -Broise. || Editeurs. || 97. Rue de Richelieu, et Beaux-Arts, 56. || -1861. || Tout droits réservés. || Paris: Imp. Simon Raçon et Comp. || -Rue d'Erfurth. - -In comparing the text of 1857 with that of 1861 I find several -revisions of certain verses, not always, I think, for the best. For -instance, in the _Préface,_ the first edition is as follows: - -"Dans nos cervaux malsains, comme un million d'helminthes, -Grouille, chante et ripaille un peuple de Démons." - -He changes this into "verre fourmillant;" "dans nos cervaux ribote." On -page 22, he writes: - - "Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme - A l'aspect du tableau plein d'épouvantement - Des monstruosités, que voile un vêtement; - Des visages masqués et plus laids que des masques." - -In the later text he puts a full stop after "épouvantement," and -continues: - - "O monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement! - O ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques." - -This reading seems to me infinitely inferior to the reading of the -first version. - -Again, there are certain other changes, even less happy, such as -"_quadrature_" into "_nature_," "_divin élixir_" into "_comme un -élixir,_" "_Mon âme se balançait comme un ange joyeux,_" into "_Mon -cœur, comme un oiseau, voltigeant tout joyeux."_ Baudelaire, in sending -a copy of _Les fleurs du mal_ (1861) to Alfred de Vigny, wrote that he -had marked the new poems in pencil in the list at the end of the book. -In my copy--1857--he has marked, with infinite delicacy, in pencil, -only three poems: "Lesbos," "Femmes Damnées," "Les Métamorphoses du -Vampire." He underlines, in "Une Charogne," these words in the text: -"_charogne lubrique, cynique, ventre, d'exhalaisons."_ At one side of -the prose note on "Franciscae meae laudes" he has made, on the margin, -a number of arrows. - -In _Le Corsaire-Satan,_ January, 1848, Baudelaire reviewed three books -of short stories by Champfleury. On the first, _Chien-Caillou,_ he -writes: "One day a quite small, quite simple volume, _Chien Caillou,_ -was printed; the history simply, clearly, crudely related, of a poor -engraver, certainly original, but whose poverty was so extreme that -he lived on carrots, between a rabbit and a girl of the town; and -he made masterpieces," I have before me this book: "_Chien-Caillou, -fantaisies d'hiver._ Par Champfleury. Paris, A la Libraire Pittoresque -de Martinon, Rue du Coq-Saint-Martin, 1847," It is dedicated to Victor -Hugo. "I dedicate to you this work, in spite of the fact that I have -an absolute horror of dedications--because of the expression _young -man_ that it leaves in readers' minds. But you have been the first to -signalize _Chien-Caillou_ to your friends, and your luminous genius has -suddenly recognized the reality of the second title: _This is not a -Story."_ - -In the same year came out _Le Gâteau des rois._ Par M. Jules Janin. -Ouvrage entièrement inédit. Paris. Libraire d'Amyot, 6 rue de la Paix, -1847. I have my own copy of this edition, bound in pale yellow-paper -covers. - -On January 26th, 1917, there came to me from Paris an original -manuscript, written by Charles Baudelaire on three pages of note-paper, -concerning these two books of Champfleury and Jules Janin. Being -unfinished, it may have been the beginning of an essay which he never -completed. Certainly I find no trace of this prose in any of his -printed books. From the brown colour of the ink that he used I think it -was written in 1857, as the ink and the handwriting are absolutely the -same as in his signed _Fleurs du mal_ sent to Champfleury. There are -several revisions and corrections in the text of the MS. that I possess. - -At the top of the first page are nearly obliterated the words: -_remplacez les blancs._ It begins: "Pour donner immédiatement au -lecteur non initié dans les dessous de la littérature, non instruit -dans les préliminaires des réputations, une idée première de -l'importance littéraire réille de ces petits livres, gros d'esprit, -de poésie et d'observations, qu'il sache que le premier d'entre nous, -_Chien-Caillou,_ Fantaisies d'hiver, fut publié en même temps qu'un -petit livre d'un homme très célèbre, qui avait, en même temps que -Champfleury, l'idée de ces publications en trimestrielles." It ends: -"Où est le cœur? Où est l'âme, où est la raison?" - -Here is my translation: - -"To convey to the reader who has not penetrated into the back-parlours -of literature, who has not been instructed in the preliminaries of -reputations, an immediate idea of the real literary importance of -these little books, fat in wit, poetry, and observations, it should be -stated that the first among them, _Chien-Caillou._ Fantaisies d'hiver, -was published at the same time as another small book by a famous man -who had, simultaneously with Champfleury, started these quarterly -publications. - -"Now, for these people whose intelligence, daily applied to the -elaboration of books, is hardest to please, Champfleury's work absorbed -that of the famous man. All those of whom I speak have known _Le -Gâteau des rois._ Their profession is to know everything. _Le Gâteau -des rois,_ a kind of Christmas book, or 'Livre de Noël,' showed above -all a clearly asserted pretention to draw from "the language, by -playing infinite variations on the dictionary, all the effects which -a transcendental instrumentalist draws from his chords. Shifting of -forces, error of an unballasted mind! The ideas in this strange book -follow each other in haste, dart with the swiftness of sound, leaning -at random on infinitely tenuous connections. Their association with one -another hangs by a thread according to a method of thought similar to -that of people in Bedlam. - -"Vast current of involuntary ideas, wild-goose chase, abnegation of -will! This singular feat of dexterity was accomplished by the man you -know, whose sole and special faculty consists in not being master of -himself, the man of encounters and good fortunes. - -"Assuredly there was talent. But what abuse! What debauchery! And, -besides, what fatigue and what pain! - -"No doubt some respect is due or, at least, some grateful compassion, -for the tireless writhing of an old dancing girl. But, alas! worn-out -attitudes, weak methods, boresome seductivities! - -"The ideas of our man are but old women driven crazy with too much -dancing, too much kicking off the ground. _Sustalerunt sæpius pedes._ - -"Where is the heart? Where the soul? Where reason?" - -Here the manuscript comes to an abrupt end, and one is left to wonder -how much more Baudelaire had written; perhaps only one more page, as -he had a peculiar fashion of writing fragments on bits of note-paper. -Certainly this prose has the refinement, the satire, the exquisite use -of words, the inimitable charm and unerring instinct of a faultless -writer. Not only is there his passion for _les danseuses_ and for the -exotic, but a sinister touch in _l'abdication de la volonté_ which -recurs finally in a letter written February 8, 1865; for, when one -imagines himself capable of an absolute abdication of the will, it -means that something of the man has gone out of him. - - - - -III. AN ADVENTURE IN IMAGES - - -It is often said, not without a certain kind of truth, that the -likeness is precisely what matters least in a portrait. That is one of -the interesting heresies which Whistler did not learn from Velasquez. -Because a portrait which is a likeness, and nothing more than a -likeness, can often be done by a second-rate artist, by a kind of -sympathetic trick, it need not follow that likeness is in itself an -unimportant quality in a masterly portrait, nor will it be found that -likeness was ever disregarded by the greatest painters. But there are -many kinds of likenesses, among which we have to choose, as we have to -choose in all art which follows nature, between a realism of outward -circumstance and a realism of inner significance. Every individual face -has as many different expressions as the soul behind it has moods. -When we talk, currently, of a "good likeness," we mean, for the most -part, that a single, habitual expression, with which we are familiar, -as we are familiar with a frequently worn suit of clothes, has been -rendered; that we see a man as we imagine ourselves ordinarily to see -him. But, in the first place, most people see nothing with any sort of -precision; they cannot tell you the position and shape of the ears, or -the shape of the cheek-bones, of their most intimate friends. Their -mental vision is so feeble that they can call up only a blurred image, -a vague compromise between expressions, without any definite form at -all. Others have a mental vision so sharp, retentive, yet without -selection, that to think of a person is to call up a whole series -of precise images, each the image of a particular expression at a -particular moment; the whole series failing to coalesce into one really -typical likeness, the likeness of soul or body. Now it is the artist's -business to choose among these mental pictures; better still, to create -on paper, or on his canvas, the image which was none of these, but -which these helped to make in his own soul. - -The Manet portrait of Charles Baudelaire, dated 1862, is exquisite, -ironical, subtle, enigmatical, astonishing; He has arrested the head -and shoulders of the poet in an instant's vision; the outlines are -definite, clear, severe, and simple. One sees the eager head thrust -forward, as if the man were actually walking; the fine and delicate -nose, voluptuously dilated in the nostrils, seems to breathe in vague -perfumes; the mouth, half-seen, has a touch of his malicious irony; the -right eye shines vividly in a fixed glance, those eyes that had the -colour of Spanish tobacco. Over the long, waving hair, that seems to -be swept backward by the wind, is placed, with unerring skill, at the -exact angle, that top-hat that Baudelaire had to have expressly made to -fit the size of his head. Around his long neck is just seen the white -soft collar of his shirt, with a twisted tie in front. In this picture -one sees the inspired poet, with distinct touches of this strong piece -of thinking flesh and blood. And Manet indicates, I think, that glimpse -of the soul which one needs in a perfect likeness. - -In the one done in 1865, the pride of youth, the dandy, the vivid -profile, have disappeared. Here, as if in an eternal aspect, Baudelaire -is shown. There is his tragic mask; the glory of the eyes, that seem to -defy life, to defy death, seems enormous, almost monstrous. The lips -are closed tightly together, in their long, sinuous line, almost as if -Leonardo da Vinci had stamped them with his immortality. The genius -of Manet has shown the genius of Baudelaire in a gigantic shadow; the -whole face surging out of that dark shadow; and the soul is there! - -In the portrait by Carjat, his face and his eyes are contorted as if -in a terrible rage; the whole face seems drawn upward and downward in -a kind of convulsion; and the aspect, one confesses, shows a degraded -type, as if all the vices he had never committed looked out of his eyes -in a wild revolt. - -It is in the mask of Baudelaire done by Zachari Astruc that I find -almost the ethereal beauty, the sensitive nerves, the drawn lines, of -the death-mask of Keats; only, more tragic. It looks out on one as a -carved image, perfect in outline, implacable, restless, sensual; and, -in that agonized face, what imagination, what enormous vitality, what -strange subtlety, what devouring energy! It might be the face of a -Roman Emperor, refined, century by century, from the ghastly face of -Nero, the dissolute face of Caligula, to this most modern of poets. - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Charles Baudelaire, by Arthur Symons - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARLES BAUDELAIRE *** - -***** This file should be named 50488-0.txt or 50488-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/4/8/50488/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generpously made available by the Internet Archive.) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: Charles Baudelaire - A Study - -Author: Arthur Symons - -Release Date: November 19, 2015 [EBook #50488] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARLES BAUDELAIRE *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generpously made available by the Internet Archive.) - - - - - - -</pre> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="500" alt="" /> -</div> - -<h1>CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</h1> - -<h3>A STUDY</h3> - -<h3>BY</h3> - -<h2>ARTHUR SYMONS</h2> - -<h5>LONDON</h5> - -<h5>ELKIN MATHEWS</h5> - -<h5>CORK STREET</h5> - -<h5>MCMXX</h5> - -<hr class="full" /> - - -<h5>TO</h5> - -<h4>JOHN QUINN</h4> -<hr class="tb" /> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_front.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Émile De Roy, 1844</p> -</div> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-left: 15%;"> -<span style="font-weight: bold;">CONTENTS</span><br /> -<br /> -<a href="#BAUDELAIRE_A_STUDY">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY.</a><br /> -<a href="#BIBLIOGRAPHY_AND_NOTES">BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES.</a><br /> -<a href="#NOTES">NOTES.</a><br /> -</p> - - -<p class="p2" style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-left: 15%; font-weight: bold;">LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 15%;"> -Émile de Roy, 1844. <i>Frontispiece</i> -</p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary=""> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">I.</td><td align="left">Jeanne Duval: Drawing by Baudelaire, 1860.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">II.</td><td align="left">Baudelaire, designed by himself, 1848.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left">Les fleurs du mal, 1857.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left">Les paradis artificiels, 1861.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left">Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VI.</td><td align="left">Gustave Courbet, 1848.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VII.</td><td align="left">Édouard Manet, 1862.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VIII.</td><td align="left">Édouard Manet, 1865.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IX.</td><td align="left">Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Charles Asselineau, 1865.</td></tr> -</table> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h3><a id="BAUDELAIRE_A_STUDY"></a>BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY</h3> - - - -<h4>I</h4> - - -<p>When Baudelaire is great, when his genius is at its highest point -of imaginative creation, of imaginative criticism, it is never when -he works by implication—as the great men who are pure artists (for -instance, Shakespeare) work by implication only—but always from his -personal point of view being simply infallible and impeccable. The pure -artist, it has been said, never asserts: and the instances are far -from being numerous; Balzac asserts, and Balzac is always absolutely -just in all his assertions: he whose analysis of modern Society—<i>La -Comédie Humaine</i>—verges almost always on creation; and despite certain -deficiencies in technique and in style, he remains the greatest of all -novelists. As for Baudelaire, he rarely asserts; he more often suggests -or divines—with that exquisite desire of perfect and just work that -is always in him. With his keen vision he rarely misses the essential; -with his subtle and sifted prose he rarely fails in characterizing -the right man in the right way and the wrong man—the man who is not -an artist—in forms of ironical condemnation. Shelley in his time and -Blake in his time gave grave enough offence and perplexity; so did -Baudelaire, so did Poe, so did Swinburne, so did Rossetti, so did -Beardsley. All had their intervals of revolt—spiritual or unspiritual, -according to the particular trend of their genius; some destroy -mendacious idols, some change images into symbols; some are supposed -to be obscurely original. All had to apprehend, as Browning declared -in regard to his readers and critics in one of his Prefaces, "charges -of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely -harsh." And all these might have said as he said: "I blame nobody, -least of all myself, who did my best then and since."</p> - -<p>In our approach to the poetry, or to the prose, of any famous -writer, with whom we are concerned, we must necessarily approach his -personality; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we -cannot love it without loving him. As for Baudelaire, I must confess -that, in spite of the fact that one might hate or love the man -according to the judgment of the wise or of the unwise, I find him more -lovable than hateful. That he failed in trying to love one woman is as -certain as his disillusion after he had possessed her; that, in regard -to Jeanne Duval, she was to him simply a silent instrument that, by -touching all the living strings of it, he awakened to a music that is -all his own; that whether this "masterpiece of flesh" meant more to him -than certain other women who inspired him in different ways; whether -he thirsted to drain her "empty kiss" or the "empty kiss" of Rachel, -of Marguerite, of Gabrielle, of Judith, is a matter of but little -significance. A man's life such as his is a man's own property and the -property of no one else. And Baudelaire's conclusion as to any of these -might be, perhaps, summed up in this stanza:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Your sweet, scarce lost estate<br /> -Of innocence, the candour of your eyes,<br /> -Your child-like, pleased surprise,<br /> -Your patience: these afflict me with a weight<br /> -As of some heavy wrong that I must share<br /> -With God who made, with man who found you, fair."<br /> -</p> - -<p>"In more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels," -says Saint Augustine; and Beardsley's sacrifice, along with that of -all great decadent art, the art of Rops or of Baudelaire, is really a -sacrifice to the eternal beauty, and only seemingly to the powers of -evil. And here let me say that I have no concern with what neither he -nor I could have had absolute knowledge of, his own intention in his -work. A man's intention, it must be remembered—and equally in the case -of much of the work of Poe and of Baudelaire, much less so in the case -of Balzac and Verlaine—from the very fact that it is conscious, is -much less intimately himself than the sentiment which his work conveys -to me.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire's figures, exactly like those designed by Beardsley and -by Rodin, have the sensitiveness of the spirit and that bodily -sensitiveness which wastes their veins and imprisons them in the -attitude of their luxurious meditation. They have nothing that is -merely "animal" in their downright course towards repentance; no -overwhelming passion hurries them beyond themselves; they do not -capitulate to an open assault of the enemy of souls. It is the soul in -them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. Their -bodies are eager and faint with wantonness; they desire fiercer and -more exquisite pains, a more intolerable suspense than there is in the -world.</p> - -<p>Beardsley is the satirist of an age without convictions, and he can -but paint hell as Baudelaire did, without pointing for contrast to any -actual paradise. He employs the same rhetoric as Baudelaire—a method -of emphasis which it is uncritical to think insincere. In the terrible -annunciation of evil which he called <i>The Mysterious Rose-Garden,</i> the -lantern-bearing angel with winged sandals whispers, from among the -falling roses, tidings of more than "pleasant sins." And in Baudelaire, -as in Beardsley, the peculiar efficacy of their satire is that it -is so much the satire of desire returning on itself, the mockery of -desire enjoyed, the mockery of desire denied. It is because these love -beauty that beauty's degradation obsesses them; it is because they -are supremely conscious of virtue that vice has power to lay hold on -them. And with these—unlike other satirists of our day—it is always -the soul, and not the body's discontent only, which cries out of these -insatiable eyes, that have looked on all their lusts; and out of these -bitter mouths, that have eaten the dust of all their sweetnesses; and -out of these hands, that have laboured delicately for nothing; and out -of their feet, that have run after vanities.</p> - -<p>The body, in the arms of death, the soul, in the arms of the naked -body: these are the strangest symbolical images of Life and of Death. -So, as Flaubert's devotion to art seemed to have had about it something -of the "seriousness and passion that are like a consecration," I give -this one sentence on the death of Emma Bovary: "Ensuite il recita le -<i>Misereatur</i> et l'<i>Indulgentiam</i>, trempa son pouce droit dans l'huile -et commença les onctions: d'abord sur les yeux, qui avaient tant -convoité toutes les somptuosités terrestres; puis sur les narines, -friandes de brises tièdes et de senteurs amoureuses; puis sur la -bouche, qui s'était ouverte pour le mensonge, qui avait gémi d'orgueil -et crié dans la luxure; puis sur les mains, qui se delectaient au -contacts suaves, et enfin sur la plante des pieds, si rapides autrefois -quand elle courait à l'assouvissance de ses désirs et qui maintenant ne -marcheraient plus."</p> - -<p>Charles Baudelaire was born April 9th, 1821, in la rue Saint Augustin, -8; he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice. His father, François, who had -married Mile Janin in 1803, married, after her death, Caroline -Archimbaut-Dufays, born in London, September 27th, 1793. François -Baudelaire's father, named Claude, married Marie-Charlotte Dieu, -February 10th, 1738, at Neuville-au-Port, in the Department of Marne.</p> - -<p>From 1838 to 1842 (when Baudelaire attains his majority) there is a -family crisis in a certainly impossible family circle. These years he -spends in vagabonding at his own will: living a deliciously depraved -life; diving, perhaps, into depths of impurity; haunting the night -resorts that one finds in the most curious quarters of Paris—the -cafés, the theatres, la Rue de Bréda. He amuses himself enormously: -even in "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame;" he lives then, as -always, by his sensitive nerves, by his inexhaustible curiosity. He is -devoured then, as always, by the inner fires of his genius and of his -sensuality; and is, certainly, a quite naturally immoral man in his -relations with women.</p> - -<p>He lives, as I have said; he feeds himself on his nerves:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"The modern malady of love is nerves." -</p> - -<p>It is an incurable, a world-old malady; and, from Catullus, one of the -greatest of all poets, century after century, from the Latin poets of -the Middle Ages, from the poets of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan -Age, down to the modern Romantic Movement, no poet who was a passionate -lover of Woman has ever failed to sing for her and against her:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"I hate and I love: you ask me how I can do it?<br /> -I know not: I know that it hurts: I am going through it."<br /> -<br /> -<i>Odi et amo; quari id faciam, fortasse requiris.</i><br /> -<i>Nescio; sed fiere sentio, et excrucior.</i><br /> -<br /> -"Caelius, Lesbia mine, that Lesbia, that<br /> -Lesbia whom Catullus for love did rate<br /> -Higher than all himself and than all things, stands<br /> -Now at the cross-roads and the alleys to wait<br /> -For the lords of Rome, with public lips and hands."<br /> -<br /> -<i>Cœli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia,</i><br /> -<i>Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam</i><br /> -<i>Plus, quàm se, atque suos amavit omnes.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>Need I quote more than these three fines? These fines, and those -quoted above, are enough to show, for all time, that Catullus was -as passionate a lover and as passionate a hater of flesh as Villon. -Yet, if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even -<i>le grosse Margot</i> from her place in his life; who, to a certainty, -had not for one instant the place in his life that Lesbia had in the -life of Catullus. Villon was no dabbler in infamy, but one who liked -infamous things for their own sake.</p> - -<p>Nor must I forget John Donne, whose quality of passion is unique in -English poetry—a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of -actual violence: his senses speak with unparalleled directness: he can -exemplify every motion with an unluxurious explicitness which leaves -no doubt of his intentions. He suffers from all the fevers and colds -of love; and, in his finest poem—a hate poem—he gives expression -to a whole region of profound human sentiment which has never been -expressed, out of Catullus, with such intolerable truth:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"When, by thy scorn, O murdress, I am dead,<br /> -And that thou thinkest thee free<br /> -From all solicitations of me,<br /> -Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,<br /> -And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see:<br /> -Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,<br /> -And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,<br /> -Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think<br /> -Thou call'st for more,<br /> -And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;<br /> -And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou<br /> -Bathed in a cold, quick-silver sweat will lie<br /> -A verier ghost than I.<br /> -What I will say, I will not tell thee now,<br /> -Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,<br /> -I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent,<br /> -Than by my threatenings rest still innocent."<br /> -</p> - -<p>As for Baudelaire's adventures when he is sent, perhaps against his -will, in May, 1841, on a long voyage from Bordeaux to Calcutta, to -return to Paris in February, 1843, after six months' travel, it -is conjecturable that he might return a changed man. Certainly his -imagination found in the East a curious fascination, with an actual -reawakening of new instincts; and with that oppressive sense of extreme -heat, as intense, I suppose, as in Africa, which makes one suffer, -bodily and spiritually, and in ways more extraordinary than those who -have never endured those tropical heats can possibly conceive of. There -he may have abandoned himself to certain obscure rites that to him -might have been an initiation into the cults of the Black Venus. And, -with these hot suns, these burning midnoons, these animal passions, the -very seductiveness of the nakedness of bronze skin, what can I imagine -but this: that they lighted in his veins an intolerable flame, that -burned there ardently to the end?</p> - -<p>For in his <i>Wagner</i> (1861) he writes: "The radiant ancient Venus, -Aphrodite, born of white foam, has not imprudently traversed the -horrible darkness of the Middle Ages. She has retired to the depths of -a cavern, magnificently lighted by the fires that are not those of the -Sun. In her descent under earth, Venus has come near to hell's mouth, -and she goes, certainly, to many abominable solemnities, to render -homage to the Arch-demon, Prince of the Flesh and Lord of Sin." He -finds her in the music where Wagner has created a furious song of the -flesh, with an absolute knowledge of what in men is diabolical. "For -from the first measures, the nerves vibrate in unison with the melody; -one's flesh remembers itself and begins to tremble. <i>Tannhäuser</i> -represents the eternal combat between the two principles that have -chosen the human heart as battle-field, that is to say, of the flesh -with the spirit, of hell with heaven, of Satan with God."</p> - -<p>In January, 1843, Baudelaire finds himself in possession of a fortune -of seventy-five thousand francs. With his incurable restlessness, -his incurable desire of change, he is always moving from one place -to another. He takes rooms at Quai de Bethune, 10, Isle-Saint-Louis; -rue Vanneau, faubourg Saint-Germain; rue Varenne, quai d'Anjou; Hôtel -Pimodan, 17; Hôtel Corneille; Hôtel Folkestone, rue Lafitte; Avenue -de la République, 95; rue des Marais-du-Temple, 25; rue Mazarine; -rue de Babylone; rue de Seine, 57; rue Pigalle, 60; Hôtel Voltaire, -19 quai Voltaire; rue Beautrellis, 22; Cité d'Orléans, 15; rue -d'Angoulême-du-Temple, 18; Hôtel Dieppe, rue d'Amsterdam, 22; rue des -Ecuries-d'Artois, 6; rue de Seine, l'Hôtel du Maroc, 35.</p> - -<p>With a certain instinct for drawing Baudelaire haunts many painter's -studios: Delacroix's, whose genius he discovers, giving him much of -his fame, becoming his intimate friend; Manet's, whose genius he also -divines and discovers; Daumier's, to whom he attributes "the strange -and astonishing qualities of a great genius, sick of genius." So also, -from the beginning, Baudelaire's judgments are infallibly right; so -also his first book, <i>Le Salon de</i> 1845, has all the insolence of youth -and all the certitude of a youth of genius. But his fame is made, -that is to say, as an imaginative critic, with <i>Le Salon de</i> 1846; -for, after the prelude, the entire book is fascinating, paradoxical, -and essentially æsthetical; a wonderful book in which he reveals the -mysteries of colour, of form, of design, of technique, and of the -enigmas of creative works. Here he elaborates certain of his mature -theories, such as his exultant praise—in which he is one with Lamb -and with Swinburne; his just disdain, and his grave irony, in which -he is one with Swinburne; and, above all, that passionate love of all -forms of beauty, at once spiritual and absolute, which is part of the -quintessence of his genius.</p> - -<p>So, as Swinburne, in the fire of his youthful genius, was the first -to praise Baudelaire in English, I quote these sentences of his from -an essay on Tennyson and Musset: "I do not mean that the <i>Comédie de -la Mort</i> must be ranked with the <i>Imitation of Christ,</i> or that <i>Les -Fleurs du Mal</i> should be bound up with <i>The Christian Year.</i> But I do -say that no principle of art which does not exclude from its tolerance -the masterpieces of Titian can logically or consistently reject the -masterpieces of a poet who has paid to one of them the most costly -tribute of carven verse, in lines of chiselled ivory with rhymes of -ringing gold, that ever was laid by the high priest of one muse on the -high altar of another. And I must also maintain my opinion that the -pervading note of spiritual tragedy in the brooding verse of Baudelaire -dignifies and justifies at all points his treatment of his darkest and -strangest subjects. The atmosphere of his work is to the atmosphere -of Gautier's as the air of a gas-lit alcove is to the air of the -far-flowering meadows that make in April a natural Field of the Cloth -of Gold all round the happier poet's native town of Tarbes, radiant -as the open scroll of his writings with immeasurable wealth of youth -and sunlight and imperishable spring. The sombre starlight under which -Baudelaire nursed and cherished the strange melancholy of his tropical -home-sickness, with its lurid pageant of gorgeous or of ghastly dreams, -was perhaps equidistant from either of these, but assuredly had less in -common with the lamplight than the sunshine."</p> - -<p>To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, as Villon and his infamous -friends did on their wonderful winter nights, "where the wolves live -on wind," and where the gallows stands at street corners, ominously, -and one sees swing in the wind dead chained men; to haunt the strange -streets of cities, to know all the useless and improper and amusing, -the moral and the immoral people, who are alone worth knowing; to live, -as well as to observe; to be drawn out of the rapid current of life -into an exasperating inaction: it is such things as these that make -for poetry and for prose. Some make verse out of personal sensations, -verse which is half pathological, which is half physiological; some out -of colours and scents and crowds and ballets; some out of music, out -of the sea's passions; some simply out of rhythms that insist on being -used; a few out of the appreciation of the human comedy. The outcome of -many experiments, these must pass beyond that stage into the stage of -existence.</p> - -<p>So, in much of Baudelaire's verse I find not only the exotic -(rarely the erotic) but, in the peculiar technique of the lines, -certain andante movements, lingering subtleties of sound, colour, -and suggestion, with—at times, but never in the excessive sense -of Flaubert's—the almost medical curiosity of certain researches -into the stuff of dreams, the very fibre of life itself, which, -combined, certainly tend to produce a new thing in poetry. A new -order of phenomena absorbs his attention, which becomes more and more -externalized, more exclusively concerned with the phenomena of the -soul, with morbid sensation, with the curiosities of the mind and the -senses. Humanity is now apprehended in a more than ever generalized and -yet specialized way in its essence, when it becomes, if you will, an -abstraction; or, if you will, for the first time purely individual.</p> - -<p>In certain poets these have been foiled endeavours; in Baudelaire -never: for one must never go beyond the unrealizable, never lose -one's intensity of expression, never let go of the central threads of -one's spider's web. Still, in regard to certain direct pathological -qualities, there is a good deal of this to be found in much of the -best poetry—in Poe, in Rossetti, in Swinburne's earlier work, and -much in Baudelaire; only all these are moved by a fascination: in Poe -for the fantastically inhuman; in Rossetti for the inner life of the -imagination, for to him, as Pater said, "life is a crisis at every -moment;" in Swinburne for the arduous fulness of intricate harmony, -and for the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled -abundance.</p> - -<p>There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own -highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the -end of art, but the artist—whether he be Baudelaire or Verlaine— -should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is -not written by a man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but -rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing on impulse, -hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he -does not remember, in some "close corner of his brain," and exerts -the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the -medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some -obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what -it was, and, aiming at much more minor things in the world than pure -beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to -remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end must -be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the -purpose which it sought to serve, but by the success or failure in -one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise -consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a -precise consciousness of what he is doing.</p> - -<p>To Baudelaire as to Pater there were certain severe tests of the -effects made on us by works of genius. In both writers there is a -finality of creative criticism. For, to these, all works of art, all -forms of human life, were as powers and forces producing pleasurable -sensations. One can find them in a gem, a wine, a spoken word, a sudden -gesture, in anything, indeed, that strikes vividly or fundamentally the -senses, that acts instantaneously on one's perceptive passions. "What," -says Pater in his essay on Wordsworth, "are the peculiarities in things -and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can -convey to others, in an extraordinary way?"</p> - -<p>"The ultimate aim of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to -establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass -judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had -an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, -almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who -allowed himself to be a critic. Certainly, Baudelaire shared certain -of those qualities; indeed, almost all; even, in a sense, logic. His -genius was so great, and in its greatness so manysided, that for some -studious disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from -any possible point of view, have always some of his magic and of his -magnetism. The ardour, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute -desire to get at the root of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be, -will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper; -that is to say, those that are most morbid, most fond of imaginative -perversities.</p> - -<p>Prose, I have said, listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats -their speech almost in their own terms. But poetry (it is Baudelaire -who says it) "is akin to music through a prosody whose roots plunge -deeper in the human soul than any classical theory has defined." Poetry -begins where prose ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins -sooner. The one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I -can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse, out of -mere honour towards my material. The farther I can extend my prose, the -farther back do I set the limits of verse. The region of poetry will -thus be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible -chance of any confusion of territory.</p> - -<p>Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in -prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, -not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the -whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare -and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his -mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of -any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take -<i>King Lear</i> and take <i>Père Goriot.</i> Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he -suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear -grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument -of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, -wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that -he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his -crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well -enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In -that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and -material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose.</p> - -<p>So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem -of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of -the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of -every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets -become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are -guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual -life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out -their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have -produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine -purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious -for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to -contain a critic."</p> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"> -<img src="images/baud_duval.jpg" width="500" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Jeanne Duval by C. Baudelaire</p> -</div> - - - -<h4>II</h4> - - -<p>Has any writer ever explained the exact meaning of the word Style? -To me nothing is more difficult. Technique, that is quite a -different affair. The essence of good style might be, as Pater says, -"expressiveness," as, for instance, in Pascal's style, which—apart -from that—is the purest style of any French writer. It is no paradox -to state this fact: without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is -worth considering in any art; the violinist, the pianist, the painter, -the poet, the novelist, the rope-dancer, the acrobat—all, without -exception, if they lapse from technique lapse from perfection. I -have often taken Ysaye as the type of the artist, not because he is -faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the -point where faultless technique leaves off.</p> - -<p>Art, said Aristotle, should always have "a continual slight novelty," -and his meaning is that art should never astonish. Take, for instance, -Balzac, Villiers, Poe, and Baudelaire; only one part of their genius, -but a most sinister one, is the desire to astonish. There is, to -me, nothing more astonishing in prose fiction than <i>The Pit and the -Pendulum</i> and <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i> of Poe; they are more than -analysis, though this is pushed to the highest point of analysis; they -have in them a slow, poisonous and cruel logic; equalled only, and at -times surpassed in their imagination, by certain of Villiers' <i>Contes -Cruels,</i> such as his <i>Demoiselles de Bien Filâtre, L'Intersigne</i> and -<i>Les amants de Tolède.</i> And—what is more astonishing in his prose than -in any of the writers I have mentioned—is his satire; a satire which -is the revenge of beauty on ugliness; and therefore the only laughter -of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Rabelais -and of Swift.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire, when he astonishes, is never satirical: sardonical, -ironical, coldly cruel, irritating, and persistent. This form of -astonishment is an inveterate part of the man's sensitive and -susceptible nature. It is concentrated, inimical, a kind of juggling or -fencing; a form of contradiction, of mystification; and a deliberate -desire of causing bewilderment. The Philistine can never pardon a -mystification, and a fantastic genius—such as that of Baudelaire and -of Poe—can never resist it when opportunity offers.</p> - -<p>Had he but been one of those "elect souls, vessels of election, <i>épris -des hauteurs,</i> as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if led -on by a kind of thirst for God!" (I quote Pater's words on Pascal) his -sombre soul might have attained an ultimate peace; a peace beyond all -understanding. This was cruelly denied him. He, I imagine, believed -in God; thirsted for God: neither was his belief confirmed nor his -thirst assuaged. He might, for all I know, have thought himself a -reprobate—and so cast out of God's sight.</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"For, till the thunder in the trumpet be,<br /> -Soul may divide from body, but not we<br /> -One from another; I hold thee with my hand,<br /> -I let mine eyes have all their will of thee,<br /> -I seal myself upon thee with my might,<br /> -Abiding alway out of all men's sight<br /> -Until God loosen over sea and land<br /> -The thunder of the trumpets of the night."<br /> -</p> - -<p>I am certain Baudelaire must have read the poems of John Keats; for -there are certain characteristics in the versification, and in the -using of images of both poets. Keats had something feminine and twisted -in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves—which are utterly lacking -in Baudelaire—but which it is now the fashion to call decadent; Keats -being more than a decadent, but certainly decadent in such a line as—</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"One faint eternal eventide of gems,"<br /> -</p> - -<p>which might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. I -give one of his sonnets, a perverse and perverted one, made by a fine -technical feat out of two recurrent rhymes:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx,<br /> -L'angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadaphore,<br /> -Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix<br /> -Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore<br /> -<br /> -Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx<br /> -Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore,<br /> -(Car le maître est allé puiser des fleurs au Styx<br /> -Avec ce seul objet dont le néant s'honore.)<br /> -<br /> -Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or<br /> -Agonise selon peut-être le décor<br /> -Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,<br /> -<br /> -Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor<br /> -Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe<br /> -De scintillations sitôt le septuor."<br /> -</p> - -<p>Keats luxuriates; like Baudelaire, in the details of physical -discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as when, in -sleeplessness—how often these two overstrung and over-nervous poets -must have had sleepless nights!—</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,<br /> -And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil."<br /> -</p> - -<p>He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the -physical sensations of his lovers, the bodily translations of emotion. -In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes:</p> - -<p> -<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"When her lips and eyes</span><br /> -Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs<br /> -Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small."<br /> -</p> - -<p>And, in another line, he writes:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"By the moist languor of thy breathing face."<br /> -</p> - -<p>Lycius, in <i>Lamia:</i></p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"Sick to lose</span><br /> -The amorous promise of her lone complain,<br /> -Swooned murmuring of love, and pale with pain;"<br /> -</p> - -<p>and all that trembling and swooning of his lovers, which English -critics have found unmanly, would at all events be very much at home -in modern French poetry, where love is again, as it was to Catullus -and Propertius, a sickness, an entrancing madness, a poisoning. To -find anything like it, like this utter subtlety of expression, we -must go back to the Elizabethan Age, and then look forward, and find, -beyond Keats, traces of it in Rossetti and in Morris's <i>The Defence of -Guinevere;</i> as, for instance, in some of the Queen's lines:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Listen, suppose your turn were come to die,<br /> -And you were quite alone and very weak;<br /> -Yea, laid a dying while very mightily<br /> -<br /> -The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak<br /> -Of river through your broad lands running well;<br /> -Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:<br /> -<br /> -'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,<br /> -Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,<br /> -I shall not tell you, you must somehow tell<br /> -<br /> -Of your own strengths and mightiness; here, see!'<br /> -Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,<br /> -At foot of your familiar bed to see<br /> -<br /> -A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,<br /> -Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,<br /> -Hold out two ways, light from the inner skies<br /> -<br /> -Showing him well, and making his commands<br /> -Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,<br /> -Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;<br /> -<br /> -And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,<br /> -Wavy and long, and one cut short and red:<br /> -No man could tell the better of the two.<br /> -<br /> -After a shivering half-hour you said:<br /> -'God help! Heaven's colour, the blue'; and he said, 'Hell!'<br /> -Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,<br /> -<br /> -And cry to all good men that loved you well,<br /> -'Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known;'<br /> -Launcelot went away, then I could tell,<br /> -<br /> -Like wisest men, how all things would be, moan,<br /> -And roll and hurt myself, and long to die,<br /> -And yet fear much to die for what was sown.<br /> -<br /> -Nevertheless you, O Sir Gawaine, lie,<br /> -Whatever may have happened through these years,<br /> -God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie."<br /> -</p> - -<p>All these rough, harsh <i>terza-rime</i> lines are wonderful enough in their -nakedness of sensations—sensations of heat, of hell, of heaven, of -colours, of death, of life, of moans, and of lies. It is, in a sense, -as far as such experiments go, a return to the Middle Ages; to what was -exotic in them and strange and narcotic. Only here, as in <i>Les Litanies -de Satan</i> of Baudelaire—to which they have some remote likeness—there -are no interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, on these -hot, impassioned scenes.</p> - -<p>Rossetti says somewhere that no modern poet, and that few poets of any -century, ever compressed into so small a space so much imaginative -material as he himself always did; and this, I conceive, partly, -also, from that almost child-like imagination of his, for all its -intellectual subtlety, that dominated him to such an extent that to -tell him anything of a specially tragic or pathetic nature was cruel, -so vividly did he realize every situation; and also because of his -wonderful saying in regard to his own way of weaving an abominable line -at the end of one of his finest sonnets into a sublime one:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Life touching lips with Immortality:"<br /> -</p> - -<p>that the line he had used before belonged to the class of phrase -absolutely forbidden in poetry. "It is intellectually incestuous poetry -seeking to beget its emotional offspring on its own identity; whereas -the present line gives only the momentary contact with the immortal -which results from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-conscious -element of it."</p> - -<p>Now, to me, both Keats before him and Baudelaire in his own -generation, had the same excessive sense of, concentration. "To load -every rift with ore:" that, to Keats, was the essential thing; and it -meant to pack the verse with poetry so that every line should be heavy -with the stuff of the imagination: the phrase I have given being a -rebuke to Shelley, significant of the art of both poets. Fox as Keats, -almost in the same degree as Baudelaire, worked on every inch of his -surface, so perhaps no poets ever put so much poetic detail into so -small a space, with, as I have said, the exception of Rossetti. And, as -a matter of fact, when we examine the question with scrupulous care, -it must be said that both Baudelaire and Keats are often metrically -slipshod.</p> - -<p>One of Wagner's ideas, in regard to the artistic faculty was, -receptivity; the impulse to impart only what comes when these -impressions fill the mind "to an ecstatic excess;" and the two forms -of the artist: the feminine, who recoils from life, and the masculine, -who absorbs life. From this follows, in the case of creative artists -such as Baudelaire, the necessity to convey to others as vividly -and intelligibly, as far as possible, what his own mind's eye had -seen. Then one has to seize everything from which one can wring its -secret—its secret for us and for no one else. And all this, and in -fact the whole of our existence, is partly the conflict within us of -the man with the woman, the male and the female energies that strive -always:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Here nature is, alive and untamed,<br /> -Unafraid and unashamed;<br /> -Here man knows woman with the greed<br /> -Of Adam's wonder, the primal need."<br /> -</p> - -<p>And, in these fundamental lines of Blake:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"What is it men in women do require?<br /> -The lineaments of gratified Desire.<br /> -What is it women do in men require?<br /> -The lineaments of gratified Desire."<br /> -</p> - -<p>And, again, in these more primeval and more essentially animal lines of -Rossetti:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"O my love, O Love—snake of Eden!<br /> -(<i>And O the bower and the hour!</i>)<br /> -O to-day and the day to come after!<br /> -Loose me, love—give way to my laughter!<br /> -<br /> -Lo! two babes for Eve and for Adam!<br /> -(<i>And O the bower and the hour!</i>)<br /> -Lo, sweet snake, the travail and treasure—<br /> -Two men-children born for their pleasure!<br /> -<br /> -The first is Cain and the second Abel:<br /> -(<i>Eden bower's in flower</i>)<br /> -The soul of one shall be made thy brother,<br /> -And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other.<br /> -(<i>And O the bower and the hour!</i>)."<br /> -</p> - -<p>Baudelaire, in <i>De l'essence de rire,</i> wrote: "The Romantic School, -or, one might say in preference, the Satanical School, has certainly -understood the primordial law of laughter. All the melodramatic -villains, all those who are cursed, damned, fatally marked with a -rictus of the lips that extends to the ears, are in the pure orthodoxy -of laughter. For the rest, they are for the most part illegitimate -sons of the famous Melmoth the Wanderer, the great Satanic creation -of Maturin. What can one conceive of as greater, as more powerful, in -regard to our humanity than this pale and bored Melmoth? He is a living -contradiction; that is why his frozen laughter freezes and wrenches -the entrails."</p> - -<p>Distinctly the most remarkable of the British triumvirate which in the -early part of the century won a momentary fame as the school of horror, -Maturin is much less known to the readers of to-day than either Monk -Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe. Thanks to Balzac, who did <i>Melmoth</i> the honour -of a loan in <i>Melmoth réconcilié,</i> Maturin has attained a certain -fame in France—which, indeed, he still retains. <i>Melmoth</i> has to-day -in France something of that reputation which has kept alive another -English book, <i>Vathek.</i> Did not Balzac, in a moment of indiscriminating -enthusiasm, couple the <i>Melmoth</i> of Maturin with the <i>Don Juan</i> of -Molière, the <i>Faust</i> of Goethe, the <i>Manfred</i> of Byron—<i>grandes images -tracées par les plus grands génies de l'Europe?</i> In other words, -Maturin had his day of fame, in which even men like Scott and Byron -were led into a sympathetic exaggeration. There's one exception. That -Coleridge was hostile, possibly unjust, is likely enough. It should be -mentioned that in 1816 the Drury Lane Committee, who had, reasonably -enough, rejected a play by Coleridge, accepted a monstrous production -of Maturin's named <i>Bertram.</i> The <i>gros bon mélodrame,</i> as Balzac -calls it, was a great success. "It is all sound and fury, signifying -nothing," said Kean, who acted in it; and Kean, who knew his public, -realized that that was why it succeeded. The play was printed, and -ran through seven editions, sinking finally to the condition of a -chap-book, in which its horrors were to be had for sixpence. On this -pretentious work Coleridge—for what reasons we need not inquire—took -the trouble to write an article, or, as it was phrased, to make an -attack. To this Maturin wrote a violent reply, which the good advice -of Scott prevented him from publishing. It is curious at the present -day to read the letter in which Scott urges upon Maturin the wisdom of -silence—not because he is likely to get the worst of the battle, but, -among other reasons, because "Coleridge's work has been little read -or heard of, and has made no general impression whatever—certainly -no impression unfavourable to you or your play. In the opinion of -many, therefore, you will be resenting an injury of which they are -unacquainted with the existence."</p> - -<p>The episode is both comic and instructive. Coleridge and Maturin! Scott -urging on Maturin the charity of mercy to Coleridge, as—"Coleridge -has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust, -to continue to be a favourite with the public!" Poor Maturin, far -from continuing to be a favourite with the public, outlived his -reputation in the course of a somewhat short life. He died at the age -of forty-three. Like the hero of Baudelaire's whimsical and delicious -little tale <i>La Fanfarlo,</i> he preferred artifice to nature, especially -when it was unnecessary. Such is the significant gossip which we have -about the personality of Maturin—gossip which brings out clearly the -deliberate eccentricity which marks his work, which one sees also in -the foppish affected and lackadaisical creature who looks at the reader -as if he were admiring himself before his mirror.</p> - -<p>The word "genius," indeed, is too lofty an epithet to use regarding -a man of great talent certainly, but of nothing more than erratic -and melodramatic talent. <i>Melmoth the Wanderer</i> is in parts very -thrilling; its Elizabethan feast of horrors has a savour as of a lesser -Tourneur. But it is interesting only in parts, and at its best it -never comes near the effect which the great masters of the grotesque -and terrible—Hoffmann, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam—have known how -to produce. A freak of construction, which no artist could have been -guilty of, sends us wandering from story to story in a very maze of -underplots and episodes and interpolations. Six separate stories are -told—all in parenthesis—and the greater part of the book is contained -.within inverted commas. What is fine in it is the vivid, feverish -way in which, from time to time, some story of horror or mystery is -forced home to one's sensations. It is the art of the nightmare, and -it has none of the supremacy in that line of the <i>Contes Drolatiques</i> -of Balzac. But certain scenes in the monastery and in the prisons -of the Inquisition—an attempted escape, a scene where an immured -wretch fights the reptiles in the darkness—are full of a certain -kind of power. That escape, for instance, with its consequences, is -decidedly gruesome, decidedly exciting; but compare it with Dumas, -with the escape of Monte Cristo; compare it with the yet finer -narrative of Casanova—the unsurpassed model of all such narratives -in fiction. Where Casanova and Dumas produce their effect by a simple -statement—a record of external events from which one realizes, as -one could realize in no other way, all the emotions and sensations of -the persons who were undergoing such experiences—Maturin seeks his -effect, and produces it, but in a much lesser degree, by a sort of -excited psychology, an exclamatory insistence on sensation and emotion. -<i>Melmoth the Wanderer</i> is only the object of our historical curiosity. -We have, indeed, and shall always have, "lovers of dark romance."</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_self.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Baudelaire, designed by himself.</p> -</div> - -<h4>III</h4> - - -<h5>I</h5> - - -<p>Baudelaire's genius is satanical; he has in a sense the vision of -Satan. He sees in the past the lusts of the Borgias the sins and vices -of the Renaissance; the rare virtues that flourish like flowers and -weeds, in brothels and in garrets. He sees the vanity of the world with -finer modern tastes than Solomon; for his imagination is abnormal, and -divinely normal. In this age of infamous shames he has no shame. His -flesh endures, his intellect is flawless. He chooses his own pleasures -delicately, sensitively, as he gathers his exotic <i>Fleurs du Mal,</i> in -itself a world, neither a <i>Divina Commedia</i> nor <i>Une Comédie Humaine,</i> -but a world of his own fashioning.</p> - -<p>His vividly imaginative passion, with his instincts of inspiration, are -aided by a determined will, a selfreserve, an intensity of conception, -an implacable insolence, an accurate sense of the exact value of every -word. In the Biblical sense he might have said of his own verse: "It -is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh." The work, as the man, is -subtle, strange, complex, morbid, enigmatical, refined, paradoxical, -spiritual, animal. To him a scent means more than a sunset, a perfume -more than a flower, the tempting demons more than the unseductive -angels. He loves luxury as he loves wine; a picture of Manet's as a -woman's fan.</p> - -<p>Fascinated by sin, he is never the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as -the Original Sin; he studies sin as he studies evil, with a stem logic; -he finds in horror a kind of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; -rarely in hideous things, save when his sense of what I call a moralist -makes him moralize, as in his terrible poem, <i>Une Charogne.</i> He has -pity for misery, hate for progress. He is analytic, he is a learned -casuist, whom I can compare with the formidable Spanish Jesuit, Thomas -Sanchez, who wrote the Latin <i>Aphorismi Matrimonio</i> (1629).</p> - -<p>His soul swims on music played on no human instrument, but on strings -that the Devil pulls, to which certain living puppets dance in -grotesque fashion, to unheard-of rhythms, to the sound of violins -strummed on by evil spirits in Witches' Sabbats. Some swing in the -air, as hanged dead people on gallows, and, as their bones rattle in -the wind, one sees Judas Iscariot, risen out of Hell for an instant's -gratification, as he grimaces on these grimacing visages.</p> - -<p><i>Les fleurs du mal</i> is the most curious, subtle, fascinating, and -extraordinary creation of an entire world ever fashioned in modern -ages. Baudelaire paints vice and degradation of the utmost depth, with -cynicism and with pity, as in the poem I have referred to, where the -cult of the corpse is the sensuality of ascetism, or the ascetism of -sensuality: the mania of fakirs; material by passion, Christian by -perversity.</p> - -<p>And, in a sense, he is our modern Catullus; in his furies, his -negations, his outcries, his Paganism, his inconceivable passion for -woman's flesh; yet Lesbia is for ever Lesbia. Still, Baudelaire in -his <i>Franciscae meae</i> <i>Laudes,</i> and with less sting but with as much -sensual sense of the splendour of sex, gives a magnificent Latin eulogy -of a learned and pious modiste, that ends:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Patera gemmis corusca,<br /> -Panis salsus, mollis esca,<br /> -Divinum vinum, Francisca."<br /> -</p> - -<p>And he praises the Decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette -merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre -les négligences forcés d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des -règles."</p> - -<p><i>Don Juan aux enfers</i> is a perfect Delacroix. In <i>Danse macabre</i> -there is the universal swing of the dancers who dance the Dance of -Death. Death herself, in her extreme horror, ghastly, perfumed with -myrrh, mixes her irony with men's insanity as she dances the Sabbat -of Pleasure. He shows us the infamous menagerie of the vices in the -guise of reptiles; our chief enemy Ennui is <i>ce monstre délicat.</i> -There are Vampires, agonies of the damned alive; <i>Le possédé</i> with -his excruciating cry out of all his fibres: <i>O mon cher Belzébuth! je -t'adore!</i> And there are some, subtler and silent, that seem to move, -softly, as the feet of Night, to the sound of faint music, or under the -shroud of a sunset.</p> - -<p><i>Les fleurs du mal</i> are grown in Parisian soil, exotics that have -the strange, secretive, haunting touch and taint of the earth's or -of the body's corruption. In his sense of beauty there is a certain -revolt, a spiritual malady, which may bring with it the heated air -of an alcove or the intoxicating atmosphere of the East. Never -since Villon has the flesh of woman been more adored and abhorred. -Both aware of the original sin of <i>l'unique animál</i>—the seed of our -moral degradation—Villon creates his <i>Grosse Margot</i> and Baudelaire -<i>Delphine et Hippolyte.</i> Villon's is a scullion-wench, and in the -Ballad a Brothel as infamous, as foul, as abominable as a Roman Lupanar -surges before one's astonished vision. And this comes after his -supreme, his consummate praise of ruinous old age on a harlot's body: -<i>Les regrets de la Belle Heaulmière.</i> It is one of the immortal things -that exist in the world, that I can compare only with Rodin's statue in -bronze: both equal incarnations of the symbolical conception that sin -brought shame into the first woman's flesh.</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Que m'en reste-il? Honte et Péché:"<br /> -</p> - -<p>cries each mouth, cries to the end of earth's eternity.</p> - -<p>In Baudelaire's <i>Femmes damnées</i> there is the aching soul of the -spirit's fatal malady: that sexual malady for which there is no remedy: -the Lesbian sterile perilous divinisation of flesh for flesh, virginal -or unvirginal flesh <i>with</i> flesh. In vain desire, of that one desire -that exists beyond all possible satisfaction, the desire of an utter -annihilation of body with body in that ecstasy which can never be -absolutely achieved without man's flesh, they strive, unconsumed with -even the pangs of their fruitless desires. They live only with a life -of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome -bounds of nature into the violence of a perversity which is at times -almost insane. And all this sorrowful and tortured flesh is consumed -with that feverish desire that leaves them only a short space for their -desire's fruitions.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_cover_fleur.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Les fleurs du mal, 1857.</p> -</div> - -<h5>II</h5> - -<p>Certain of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the -hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a serpentine girl's skin; -some the odour of woman's flesh. Certain spirits are intoxicated by -these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of -their vices, from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a -cruel imagination has fashioned these naked images of the Seven Deadly -Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall; that smile not even in -Hell, in whose flames they writhe. One conceives them there and between -the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their -infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages; -they are incapable of imagining God's justice.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire dramatizes these living images of his spirit and of his -imagination, these fabulous creatures of his inspiration, these -macabre ghosts, in a fashion utterly different from that of other -tragedians—Shakespeare, and Aristophanes in his satirical Tragedies, -his lyrical Comedies; yet in the same sense of being the writer where -beauty marries unvirginally the sons of ancient Chaos.</p> - -<p>In these pages swarm (in his words) all the corruptions and all the -scepticisms; ignoble criminals without convictions, detestable hags -that gamble, the cats that are like men's mistresses; Harpagon; the -exquisite, barbarous, divine, implacable, mysterious Madonna of the -Spanish style; the old men; the drunkards, the assassins, the lovers -(their deaths and lives); the owls; the vampires whose kisses raise -from the grave the corpse of its own self; the Irremediable that -assails its origin: Conscience in Evil! There is an almost Christ-like -poem on his Passion, <i>Le reniement de Saint-Pierre,</i> an almost Satanic -denunciation of God in <i>Abel and Cain,</i> and with them the Evil Monk, -an enigmatical symbol of Baudelaire's soul, of his work, of all that -his eyes love and hate. Certain of these creatures play in travesties, -dance in ballets. For all the Arts are transformed, transfigured, -transplanted out of their natural forms to pass in magnificent state -across the stage: the stage with the abyss of Hell in front of it.</p> - -<p>"Sensualist" (I quote a critic), "but the most profound of sensualists, -and, furious of being no more than that, he goes, in his sensation, to -the extreme limit, to the mysterious gate of infinity against which he -knocks, yet knows not how to open, with rage he contracts his tongue -in the vain effort." Yet centuries before him Dante entered Hell, -traversed it in imagination from its endless beginning to its endless -end; returned to earth to write, for the spirit of Beatrice and for the -world, that <i>Divina Commedia,</i> of which in Verona certain women said:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Lo, he that strolls to Hell and back<br /> -At will I Behold him, how Hell's reek<br /> -Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek."<br /> -</p> - -<p>It is Baudelaire who, in Hell as in earth, finds a certain Satan in -such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essentially -demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily, -as if the Devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets. Here -in such satanic and romantic atmosphere one hears dissonances, the -discords of the instruments in the Sabbats, the howlings of irony, the -vengeance of the vanquished.</p> - -<p>I give one sentence of Gautier's on Baudelaire. "This poet of <i>Les -fleurs du mal</i> loved what one wrongly calls the style of decadence, -which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point -of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilizations -that aged: a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and -of rarities, turning for ever backward the limits of the language, -using technical vocabularies, taking colours from all the palettes, -notes from all the keyboards, striving to render one's thought in what -is most ineffable, and form in its most vague and evasive contours, -listening so as to translate them, the subtle confidences of neurosis, -the passionate confessions of ancient passions in their depravity and -the bizarre hallucinations of the fixed idea." He adds: "In regard to -his verse there is the language already veined in the greenness of -decomposition, the tainted language of the later Roman Empire, and the -complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek -art fallen in delinquencies." See how perfectly the phrase <i>la langue -de faisandée</i> suits the exotic style of Baudelaire!</p> - -<p>Yet, tainted as the style is from time to time, never was the man -himself tainted: he who in modern verse gave first of all an unknown -taste to sensations; he who painted vice in all its shame; whose most -savorous verses are perfumed as with subtle aromas; whose women are -bestial, rouged, sterile, bodies without souls; whose <i>Litanies de -Satan</i> have that cold irony which he alone possessed in its extremity, -in these so-called impious lines which reveal, under whatever disguise, -his belief in a mathematical superiority established by God from -all eternity, and whose least infraction is punished by certain -chastisements, in this world as in the next.</p> - -<p>I can imagine Baudelaire in his hours of nocturnal terrors, sleepless -in a hired woman's bed, saying to himself these words of Marlowe's -<i>Satan:</i></p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Why, this is Hell, nor can I out of it!"<br /> -</p> - -<p>in accents of eternal despair wrenched from the lips of the Arch Fiend. -And the genius of Baudelaire, I can but think, was as much haunted as -Marlowe's with, in Lamb's words, "a wandering in fields where curiosity -is forbidden to go, approaching the dark gulf near enough to look in."</p> - - -<h5>III</h5> - -<p>Has Baudelaire <i>l'amour du mal pour le mal?</i> In a certain sense, yes; -in a certain sense, no. He believes in evil as in Satan and God—the -primitive forces that govern worlds: the eternal enemies. He sees the -germs of evil everywhere, few of the seeds of virtue. He sees pass -before him the world's drama: he is one of the actors, he plays his -parts cynically, ironically. He speaks in rhythmic cadences.</p> - -<p>But, above all, he watches the dancers; these also are elemental; -and the tragic fact is that the dancers dance for their living. For -their living, for their pleasure, for the pleasure of pleasing others. -So passes the fantastic part of their existence, from the savage who -dances silent dances—for, indeed, all dancers are silent—but without -music, to the dancer who dances for us on the stage, who turns always -to the sound of music. There is an equal magic in the dance and in -song; both have their varied rhythms; both, to use an image, the -rhythmic beating of our hearts. It is imagined that dancing and music -were the oldest of the arts. Rhythm has rightly been called the soul of -dancing; both are instinctive.</p> - -<p>The greatest French poet after Villon, the most disreputable and -the most creative poet in French literature, the greatest artist in -French verse, and, after Verlaine, the most passionate, perverse, -lyrical, visionary, and intoxicating of modern poets, comes Baudelaire, -infinitely more perverse, morbid, exotic than these other poets. In -his verse there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity, which -has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with horror, -in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every -complication of taste, the exasperation of perfumes, the irritant of -cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption to the creation and -adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served -before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a -prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine, -however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length -sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady of -love.</p> - -<p>The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that -of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the -Goncourts, Zola, and Leconte de Lisle. Even Baudelaire, in whom the -spirit is always an uneasy guest at the orgy of life, had a certain -theory of Realism which tortures many of his poems into strange, -metallic shapes and fills them with irritative odours, and disturbs -them with a too deliberate rhetoric of the flesh. Flaubert, the -greatest novelist after Balzac, the only impeccable novelist who ever -lived, was resolute to be the creator of a world in which art—formal -art—was the only escape from the burden of reality. It was he who -wrote to Baudelaire, who had sent him <i>Les fleurs du mal</i>: "I devoured -your volume from one end to another, read it over and over again, verse -by verse, word by word, and all I can say is it pleases and enchants -me. You overwhelm me with your colours. What I admire most in your book -is its perfect art. You praise flesh without loving it."</p> - -<p>There is something Oriental in Baudelaire's genius; a nostalgia that -never left him after he had seen the East: there where one finds -hot-midnights, feverish days, strange sensations; for only the East, -when one has lived in it, can excite one's vision to a point of ardent -ecstasy. He is the first modern poet who gave to a calculated scheme of -versification a kind of secret and sacred joy. He is before all things -the artist, always sure of his form. And his rarefied imagination aided -him enormously not only in the perfecting of his verse and prose, but -in making him create the criticism of modern art.</p> - -<p>Next after Villon, Baudelaire is the poet of Paris. Like a damned soul -(to use one of his imaginary images) he wanders at nights, an actual -<i>noctambule,</i> alone or with Villiers, Gautier, in remote quarters, sits -in cafés, goes to casinos, the <i>Rat Mort.</i> "The Wind of Prostitution" -(I quote his words) torments him, the sight of hospitals, of gambling -houses, the miserable creatures one comes on in certain quarters, -even the fantastic glitter of lamplights. All this he needs: a kind -of intense curiosity, of excitement, in his fréquentation of these -streets, comes over him, like one who has taken opium. And this is only -one part of his life, he who lived and died solitary, a confessor of -sins who has never told the whole truth, <i>le mauvais moins</i> of his own -sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel.</p> - -<p>He is the first who ever related things in the modulated tone of the -confessional and never assumed an inspired air. The first also who -brings into modern literature the chagrin that bites at our existence -like serpents. He admits to his diabolical taste, not quite exceptional -in him; one finds it in Petronius, Rabelais, Balzac. In spite of his -magnificent <i>Litanies de Satan,</i> he is no more of the satanical school -than Byron. Yet both have the same sardonic irony, the delight of -mystification, of deliberately irritating solemn people's convictions. -Both, who died tragically young, had their hours of sadness, when -one doubts and denies everything; passionately regretting youth, -turning away, in sinister moods, in solitude, from that too intense -self-knowledge that, like a mirror, shows the wrinkles on our cheeks.</p> - - - -<h4>IV</h4> - - -<p>Baudelaire, whose acquaintance with English was perfect, was thrilled -in 1846 when he read certain pages of Poe; he seemed to see in his -prose a certain similarity in words and thoughts, even in ideas, as -if he himself had written some of them; these pages of a prose-writer -whom he named "the master of the horrible, the prince of mystery." -For four years he set himself to the arduous task of translating the -prose of a man of genius, whom he certainly discovered for France and -for French readers. And his translation is so wonderful that it is far -and away finer than a marvellous original. His first translation was -printed in <i>Le Liberté de Pensée</i> in July, 1848, and he only finished -his translations at the end of sixteen years. In 1852 the <i>Revue de -Paris</i> printed his <i>Edgar Allan Poe; sa vie et ses ouvrages.</i> His -translations came in this order: <i>Histoires extraordinaires</i> (1856, -which I have before me); <i>Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires</i> (1857, -which I also possess); <i>Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym</i> (1858); <i>Euréka</i> -(1864); <i>Histoires grotesques et sérieuses</i> (1865).</p> - -<p>One knows the fury with which (in 1855) he set himself the prodigious -task of translating one of Poe's stories every day; which, to one's -amazement, he actually did. Always he rages over his proofs, over -those printers' devils, an accursed race; every proof is sent back to -the printing press, revised; underlined, covered in the margins with -imperative objurgations, written with an angry hand and accentuated -with notes of exclamation. Swinburne shared the same fate. He writes -to Chatto a violent letter on the incompetence of printers: "their -scandalous negligence," "ruinous and really disgraceful blunders," -"numberless wilful errors," written in a state of perfect frenzy. -"These damned printers," he cries at them, as Baudelaire did; "who have -done their utmost to disfigure my book. The appearance of the pages is -disgraceful—a chaos." And he actually writes one letter to complain of -a dropped comma!</p> - -<p>The <i>Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe</i> of 1857 are infinitely finer than -those of 1856. He begins with: <i>Littérature de décadence!</i> and with -a paradox, of his invention, of the Sphynx without an enigma. <i>Genus -irritabile vatum!</i> a Latin phrase for the irritable race of artists, is -irrefutable, and certainly irrefutable are all Baudelaire's arguments, -divinations, revelations of Poe's genius and of Poe's defects.</p> - -<p>Poe's genius has been generally misunderstood. He gave himself to -many forms of misconception: by his eccentricities, his caprices, his -fantastic follies, his natural insolence, his passionate excitations -(mostly imaginary), his delinquencies in regard to morals, his -over-acute sensibility, his exasperating way of exasperating the -general public he hated, his analysing problems that had defied any -living writer's ingenuity to have compassed (as in his detective -stories); above all, his almost utter alienation from that world he -lived in, dreamed in, never worshipped, died in.</p> - -<p>And he remains still a kind of enigma; in spite of the fact that the -most minute details of his life are known, and that he never outlived -his reputation. Yes, enigmatical in various points: as to his not -giving even the breath of life to the few ghosts of women who cross -his pages; of never diving very deeply into any heart but his own. Are -not most of his men malign, perverse, atrocious, abnormal, never quite -normal, evocations of himself? From Dupin to Fortunato, from the Man in -the Crowd to the Man in the Pit, from Prince Prospero to Usher, are not -these <i>revenants,</i> in the French sense?</p> - -<p>There is something demoniacal in his imagination; for Poe never, I -might say, almost never, lets his readers have an instant's rest; any -more than the Devil lets his subjects have any actual surcease of -torment. Yet, as there is a gulf between Good and Evil, no one, by any -chance, falls into the abyss.</p> - -<p>Poe, of course, writes with his nerves, and therefore only nervous -writers have ever understood him. It is Baudelaire, the most nervous of -modern writers, who says of Poe that no one, before him, had affirmed -imperturbably the natural wickedness of man. Yet this statement is a -paradox; a lesser paradox is that man is originally perverse; for all -are not <i>nés marques pour le mal?</i></p> - -<p>Poe is not a great critic; he says certain unforgettable things, with -even an anticipation of the work of later writers. "<i>I know,</i>" he -says, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music—I mean of -the tme musical expression. Give it any undue decision—imbue it with -any very determinate tone—and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, -its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character" Where he is great -is where he writes: "I have a pure contempt for mere prejudice and -conventionality;" and mostly where he defines himself. "Nor is there an -instance to be discovered, among all I have published, of my having set -forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical -topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by -something that wore the semblance of a reason."</p> - -<p>His fault is that he is too lenient to woman poets who never merited -that name and to men of mere talent; yet he annihilates many undeserved -reputations; perhaps, after all, "thrice slain." No one pointed out -the errors in Mrs. Browning's verses as he did; her affectations such -as "God's possibles;" her often inefficient rhythm; her incredibly bad -rhymes. Yet, for all this, he, whose ear as a poet was almost perfect, -made the vile rhyme of "vista" with "sister," that raised the righteous -wrath of Rossetti.</p> - -<p>In his essay on Hawthorne, he warns one from a certain heresy. "The -deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as an -allegory, is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's -ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his -not having attempted to overcome." But it is on pages 196-198 of his -<i>Marginalia</i> that he gives his final statement in regard to Verse, -the Novel, and the Short Story; so far as these questions have any -finality. As, for instance, how the highest genius uses his powers in -"the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might -be perused in an hour." As for the Story, it has this immense advantage -over a novel that its brevity adds to the intensity of the effect; -that "Beauty can be better treated in the poem, but that one can use -terror and passion and horror as artistic means." Poe was a master of -the grotesque, of the extraordinary, never of the passionate.</p> - -<p>There is an unholy magic in some of his verse and prose; in his -hallucinations, so real and so unreal; his hysterics, his sense of the -contradiction between the nerves and the spirit; in his scientific -analyses of terrible, foreseen effects, where generally the man of whom -he writes is driven into evil ways. For did he not state this axiom: -"A good writer has always his last line in view when he has written -his first line?" This certainly was part of his <i>métier,</i> made of -combinations and of calculations.</p> - -<p>I read somewhere, "There is nothing wonderful in 'The Raven.'" It -is really a <i>tour de force;</i> even if the metre is not invented, he -invented the inner double rhymes, and the technique is flawless. It -has Black Magic in it; the unreality of an intoxication; a juggler's -skill; it will be always his most famous poem. In his analysis of these -verses, does not Poe undervalue the inspiration that created them? Yes, -by an amusing vanity. And, as Baudelaire says: "A little charlatanism -is always permitted to a man of genius, and it doesn't suit him badly. -It is like the rouge on the cheeks of a woman actually fair, a new form -of seasoning for the spirit."</p> - -<p>There was too much of the woman in the making of Poe, manly as he was -in every sense. He had no strength of will, was drawn from seduction -to seduction; had not enough grip on his constitution to live wisely, -to live well. He drifted, let himself be drifted. He had no intention -of ruining himself, yet ruined he was, and there was nothing that -could have saved him. Call it his fate or his evil star, he was -doomed inevitably to an early death. <i>Pas de chance!</i> Yes—let one -suppose—had he himself chosen the form of his death, he might have -desired to die like the sick women in his pages—<i>mourant de maux -bizarres.</i></p> - -<p>Baudelaire, the most scrupulous of the men of letters of our age, spent -his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French -poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose -becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and -surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better -than a marvellous original. Often an enigma to himself, much of his -life and of his adventures and of his experiences remain enigmatical. -I shall choose one instance out of many; that is to say, what was the -original of his dedication of <i>L'Heautimoromenos</i> in <i>Les Fleurs du -Mal</i>, and of his dedication of <i>Les paradis artificiels</i> to a woman -whose initials are J. G. F.?</p> - -<p>The poem was first printed in <i>L 'Artiste</i>, May 10, 1857, together with -two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical: -<i>Franciscae Meae Laudes,</i> and <i>L'Irrémédiable.</i> The Latin verses, -composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs -to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent -as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the -Dedication: <i>Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote.</i> The -verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who -absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has -spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his -hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine -wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its -name, on the comedy of Terence, <i>The Self-Tormentor,</i> where, in fact, -the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic -earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare's <i>Timon of -Athens.</i> Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest -confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women. -He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a -discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in -his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror. -He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his -own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal -laughter.</p> - -<p>The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall -into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with -reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases -on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable -fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he -intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the -Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes -with satanical glances and is: <i>La conscience dans le mal!</i></p> - -<p>In <i>Les fleurs du mal</i> (1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's -handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find -that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages -123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems -to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" with -<i>Piscina plena virtutis;</i> "Dans un Styx bourbeux" with <i>Sicat beneficum -Lethe;</i> "Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" with <i>Labris vocem redde -mutis!</i> "Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le -vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu -son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une -modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication of <i>Les paradis,</i> -"une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason -for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough: -a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry. -One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il -traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce -sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words, -taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming -uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman -Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes -that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which -seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -<i>In nocte mea taberna.</i><br /> -<i>Flambeau des grâces sataniques.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>I return to my copy of <i>Les paradis artificiels</i> (1860). The dedication -to J. G. F. begins: "<i>Ma chère amie,</i> Common-sense tells us that -terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality -is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives -with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the -imaginations that she haunts.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_front_paradis.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Les paradis artificiels, 1861.</p> -</div> - -<p>"Besides, it seems to me there is little enough reason why this -dedication should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the -writer's satisfaction, that any kind of book ought to be understood, -except by him or by her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed, -indispensable that it has been written for <i>any one?</i> I have, for my -part, so little taste for the living world that, like certain sensible -and stay-at-home women who send, I am told, their letters to imaginary -friends by the post, I would willingly write only for the dead.</p> - -<p>"But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it is -to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who now -turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many -transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a -living being enjoys the privilege of being able to draw new and subtle -pleasures even from sorrow, from catastrophe, and from fatality.</p> - -<p>"You will see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and -solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending -his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped -his sweating forehead and <i>refreshed his lips parched by fever;</i> and -you will divine the gratitude of another Orestes, whose nightmares -you have so often watched over, and whose unendurable slumbers you -dissipated, with a light and tender hand."</p> - -<p>I have to say that in the last sentences I have translated Baudelaire -uses "tu" instead of "vous," and that he does the same in his Latin -verses and in the verses next after it. The question still remains: who -was the woman of the initials?</p> - -<p>What is certainly not a solution of the unfathomable mystery of -this enigmatical woman, but which is, in a certain sense, a clue, -I find on pages 55-67 of the book I have referred to, a narrative -that seems more than likely to have been hers. He says this to make -one understand better the mixture of dreams and hallucinations in -haschisch, as having been sent him by a woman: "It is a woman, rather -a mature woman, curious, of an excitable spirit, who, having yielded -to the temptation of using the drug, describes her visions." These are -superb and fantastic visions, written by an imaginative, sensitive, -and suggestive woman. She begins: "However bizarre and astonishing are -these sensations that intoxicated my folly for twelve hours (twelve or -twenty? I don't know which) I shall never return to them. The spiritual -excitement is too vivid, the fatigue too much to endure, and, to say -all, in this childish enchantment I find something criminal." She adds: -"I have heard that the enthusiasm of poets and of creators is not -unlike what I have experienced, in spite of the fact that I have always -imagined that such men whose delight is to move us ought to be of a -really calm temperament; but if poetical delirium has any resemblance -with what a little teaspoon full of drugged jam has given me, I think -that all such pleasures cost dear to poets, and it is not without a -certain prosaic satisfaction that I return to real life."</p> - -<p>In these sentences Baudelaire gives one a certain clue as to the -identity of this woman. "But, above all, observe that in this woman's -story the hallucination is of a bastard kind, and whose reason of being -is to be an exterior spectacle; the mind is no more than a mirror -where the surrounding environment is transformed in an extraordinary -fashion. Besides, we see intervene what I must call the moral -hallucination: the subject believes he is subjected to an expiation, -but the feminine temperament, which is little accustomed to analysis, -does not permit itself to note the singularly optimistic character of -this hallucination. The benevolent regard of the Olympian Divinities -is poetized by a kind of varnish essentially <i>haschischin.</i> I cannot -say that this woman has escaped from the sense of remorse; but that -her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and of -regret, have returned to their former sensibility."</p> - -<p>I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical -casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but -not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra, -to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by -the same woman to whom <i>Le paradis</i> is dedicated. Like Orestes, he -might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered -father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words: -"And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now, -how I keep the watches of the night—how often I bewail my hapless -sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given -of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of -lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J. -G. F.'s?</p> - -<p>In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed: <i>Théophile Gautier, par Charles -Baudelaire;</i> a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as -only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was -capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier -asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant: -"Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French -language, even l'<i>Argot.</i></p> - -<p>Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he -ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave -it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac.</p> - -<p>"Not for the first," he says, in his <i>Study of Shakespeare,</i> "and -probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well -as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, -to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented -fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the -more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of -Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition -and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing -could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in -my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.</p> - -<p>"'I have been many a time astonished that to pass for an observer -should be Balzac's great title to fame. To me it had always seemed that -it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. -All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated -himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the -highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in -his <i>Human Comedy</i> are keener after living, more active and cunning in -their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous -in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real -world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the -very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle -with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all beings of the -outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in a strong relief -and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his -figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their fights. -Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate -ambition to see everything, to bring everything to fight, to guess -everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down -more forcibly the principal fines so as to preserve the perspective of -the whole. He reminds me of some fines of those etchers who are never -satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into -very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing -natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But -this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More -properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But -who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a -method which may permit him to invest—and that with a sure hand—what -is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? -Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.'"</p> - - - -<h4>V</h4> - - -<p>"T am far from sure," said Paul Verlaine to me in Paris, "that the -philosophy of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam will not one day become the -formula of our century." Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the -belief common to all Eastern mystics. And there is in everything he -wrote a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and deliberate, which -seems to me to be the natural consequences of his intellectual pride. -It is part of his curiosity in souls—as in the equally sinister -curiosity of Baudelaire—to prefer the complex to the simple, the -perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. His heroes -are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies are the shock -of spirit against matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. -They are on the margins of a wisdom too great for their capacity; they -are haunted by dark powers, instincts of ambiguous passions. And in the -women his genius created there is the immortal weariness of beauty; -they are enigmas to themselves; they desire, and know not why they -refrain; they do good and evil with the lifting of an eyelid, and are -guilty and innocent of all the sins of the earth.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_lettre_auto.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Autograph letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859.</p> -</div> - -<p>Villiers wrote these significant sentences in the preface to <i>La -Révolte</i> (1870): "One ought to write for the entire world. Besides, -what does justice matter to us? He who from his very birth does -not contain in himself his proper glory shall never know the -real significance of this word." In the literature of the fantastic -there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de -l'Isle-Adam—a writer whose singular personality and work render him -perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of -letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his -life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived, -as he says somewhere, "par politesse," ceaselessly experimenting -upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an -extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic -contrasts. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race, -a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more -especially, of the <i>bourgeois</i> multitude of letters and of life: it -is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look -for the source of that violent and <i>voulu</i> eccentricity which mars so -much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is -unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take -notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has -placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question -if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious, -impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers "les -gens de sens commun" are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of -his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface, -<i>Genus irritabile vatum.</i></p> - -<p>In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a -writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it -be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer -who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and -a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin -de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from -exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite -sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere -there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in -so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, -contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions.</p> - -<p>Villiers has written much. The volume of <i>Contes cruels</i> (published -in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains -specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind -the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, -and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no -other collection of tales in any language on which so various and -finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut -of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The -<i>Tales</i> of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the <i>Twice-Told -Tales</i> of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; -both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are -but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the -other volumes. <i>La révolte,</i> a drama in one act in prose, represented -at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of -certain <i>Contes cruels</i>; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place -near them. <i>L'Ève future</i> (1886), that most immense and ferocious -of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the -<i>Contes</i> swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of -plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale -<i>L'Amour suprême,</i> attempts to be a second set of <i>Contes Cruels;</i> it -has nothing of their distinction, except in <i>Akëdysséril. Tribulat -Bonhomet,</i> which appeared in 1887—"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, -couleur du siècle," as the author has called it—is largely made up of -an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes, -<i>Histoires insolites</i> (1888) and <i>Nouveaux contes cruels</i> (1889), there -are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating -horror of <i>La torture par l'espérance,</i> and the delicate cynicism -of <i>Les amies de pension.</i> As for the prose drama in five acts, <i>Le -Nouveau Monde</i> (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize—"une -médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres -seductions encore"—there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play -with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air; -but what would you have of a "prize poem"? It was acted at one of -the theatres at Paris in 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante -Comte d'Orsay, and it had a very gratifying "literary" success. Such, -omitting the early works, of which I have every first edition, and the -numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published, -are the works we have before us from which to study "peut-être le -seul des hommes de notre génération qui ait eu en lui l'étincelle du -génie"—as Catulle Mendès, ever generous in his literary appreciation -of friend and foe, has said in that charming book, <i>La légende du -Parnasse contemporaine.</i> I shall speak chiefly of the <i>Contes cruels,</i> -and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach -one after another the various sides of this multiform and manysided -genius.</p> - -<p>First and before all, Villiers is a humorist, and he is a humorist -who has no limitations, who has command of every style, who has -essayed every branch of the literature of the fantastic. There are -some halfdozen of tales—all contained in the <i>Contes cruels</i>—which, -for certain of the rarest qualities of writing—subtleties, delicate -perversities, exquisite complexities of irony essentially modern—can -be compared, so far as I know, with nothing outside the <i>Petits poèmes -en prose</i> of Baudelaire. <i>Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, Maryelle, -Sentimentalisme, Le convive des dernières fêtes, La Reine Ysabeau</i>—one -might add the solitary poem inserted, jewel amid jewels, amongst the -prose—these pieces, with which one or two others have affinities of -style though not of temper, constitute a distinct division of Villiers' -work. They are all, more or less, studies in modern love, supersubtie -and yet perfectly finished little studies, so light in touch, -manipulated with so delicate a finesse, so exquisite and unerring -in tact, that the most monstrous paradoxes, the most incredible -assumptions of cynicism, become possible, become acceptable. Of them -all I think the masterpiece is <i>Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre;</i> and -it is one of the most perfect little works of art in the world. The -mockery of the thing is elemental; cynicism touches its zenith. It -becomes tender, it becomes sublime. A perversion simply monstrous -appears, in the infantine simplicity of its presentment, touching, -credible, heroic. The edge of laughter is skirted by the finest -of inches; and, as a last charm, one perceives, through the irony -itself—the celestial, the elementary irony—a faint and sweet perfume -as of a perverted odour of sanctity. The style has the delicacy of the -etcher's needle. From beginning to end every word has been calculated, -and every word is an inspiration. No other tale quite equals this -supreme achievement; but in <i>Maryelle,</i> in <i>Sentimentalisme,</i> and -the others there is the same note, and a perfection often only less -absolute. <i>Maryelle</i> and <i>Sentimentalisme</i> are both studies in a -special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of -fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest -precision. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The -experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and -tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate -lightness of the style—the gentle, well-bred, <i>disengaged</i> tone of -a <i>raconteur</i> without reserve or after-thought, or with all that -scrupulously hid—there is a sort of double irony, a criss-cross and -intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in -spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other -side of cynicism. <i>La Reine Ysabeau</i> and <i>Le Convive des Dernières -Fêtes</i> sound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost -by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of -the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance, -and fatality is unrolled before our eyes—the something enigmatical -in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness. -Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this -incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis -of the first sentence to the "Priez pour eux," every touch tells, and -every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points -akin to it, is the strange tale of <i>Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes,</i> -perhaps, after the more epic chronicle of <i>La Reine Ysabeau,</i> the -finest of Villiers' tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale -is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying -episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It -is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive -shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the -same <i>frisson</i> in the latter part of <i>Tribulat Bonhomet,</i> and in the -marvellous little study in the supernatural <i>L'Intersigne,</i> one of the -most impressive of Villiers' works. But here the sensation is not due -to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror—distinct -and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind—is but one -among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a -whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the -same <i>bizarrerie</i>—the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendrée, Antoine -Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C., -and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged -with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the -touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric -light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves—scenes which -have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with -average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed -their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one -is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of -exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony -is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard -who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a -sarcastic smile.</p> - -<p>What is Villiers' view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on -the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer; -I have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the -fantastic edifice of his work.</p> - -<p>The group of tales I have been considering reveals the humorist in -his capacity of ironical observer: their wit is a purely impersonal -mockery, they deal with life from the point of view of the artist, -and they are pre-eminently artistic, free from any direct purpose or -preoccupation. In the pseudo-scientific burlesques, and the kindred -satires on ignorant and blatant mediocrity, the smile of the Comic -Muse has given place to "Laughter holding both his sides;" absurdity -caps absurdity, order and measure seem to be flung to the winds, and -in this new Masque of Anarchy sharp blows are given, the jests are -barbed, and they fly not quite at random. "L'Esprit du siècle," says -Villiers, "ne l'oublions pas, est aux machines." And it is in the -mechanical miracles of modern science that he has found a new and -unworked and inexhaustible field of satire. Jules Verne has used -these new discoveries with admirable skill in his tales of extravagant -wonder; Villiers seizes them as a weapon, and in his hands it becomes -deadly, and turns back upon the very age which forged it; as a means -of comedy, and the comedy becomes soberly Rabelaisian, boisterous and -bitter at once, sparing nothing, so that he can develop the deliberate -plan of "an apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last sigh," -make a sober proposal for the utilization of the sky as a means of -advertisement (<i>Affichage Céleste</i>), and describe in all its detail -and through all its branches the excellent invention of Bathybius -Bottom, <i>La machine à gloire,</i> a mechanical contrivance for obtaining -dramatic success with the expense and inconvenience of that important -institution, the Claque. In these wild and whirling satires, which are -at bottom as cold and biting as Swift, we have a quite new variety -of style, a style of patchwork and grimaces. Familiar words take new -meanings, and flash through all the transformations of the pantomime -before our eyes; strange words start up from forgotten corners; words -and thoughts, never brought together since Babel, clash and stumble -into a protesting combination; and in the very aspect of the page there -is something startling. The absurdity of these things is so extreme, -an absurdity so supremely serious, that we are carried almost beyond -laughter, and on what is by virtue of its length the most important of -the scientific burlesques, <i>L'Ève future,</i> it is almost impossible to -tell whether the author is really in sober earnest or whether the whole -thing is a colossal joke. Its 375 pages are devoted to a painfully -elaborate description of the manufacture, under the direction of the -"très-illustre inventeur américain, M. Edison," of an <i>artificial -woman!</i> No such fundamental satire, such ghastly exposure of "poor -humanity," has been conceived since Swift. The sweep of it covers human -nature, and its essential laughter breaks over the very elements of -man. Unfortunately the book is much too long; its own weight sinks it; -the details become wearisome, the seriousness of the absurdity palls.</p> - -<p>So far we have had the humorist, a humorist who appears to be cynic -to the backbone, cynic equally in the Parisian perversities of <i>Les -demoiselles de Bienfilâtre</i> and the scientific hilarity of <i>La machine -à gloire.</i> But we have now to take account of one of those "exceptions" -of which I spoke—work which has nothing of the humorist in it, work -in which there is not a trace of cynicism, work full of spirituality -and all the virtues. <i>Virginie et Paul</i> is a-story of young love -comparable only with that yet lovelier story, the magical chapter, in -<i>Richard Feverel.</i> This Romeo and Juliet are both fifteen, and their -little moment of lovers' chat, full of the poetry of the most homely -and natural things, is brought before us in a manner so exquisitely -true, so perfectly felt, that it is not even sentimental. Every -word is a note of music, a song of nightingales among the roses—; -<i>per amica silentia lunæ</i>—and there is not a wrong note in it, no -exaggeration, nothing but absolute truth and beauty. The strange and -charming little romance of <i>L'Inconnue</i> is another of these tales of -ingenuous love, full of poetry fresh from lovers' hearts, and with -a delicate rhythmical effect in its carefully modulated, style. -<i>L'Amour Suprême,</i> a less perfect work of art, exhales the same aroma -of tender and etherealized affection—an adoring and almost mystic -love of the ideal incarnated in woman. In the bizarre narrative of -<i>Véra,</i> which recalls the supernatural romances of Poe, there is again -this strange spirituality of tone; and in the dazzling prose poem -of <i>Akëdysséril</i>—transfigured prose glowing with Eastern colour, a -tale of old-world passion full of barbaric splendour, and touched, -for all its remoteness, with the human note—in this epic fragment, -considered in France, I believe, to be, in style at least, Villiers' -masterpiece, it is humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal that -we contemplate. Humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal!—think -for a moment of <i>Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre,</i> of <i>L'Analyse -chimique du dernier soupir!</i> What, then, are we to believe? Has -Villiers two natures, and can he reconcile irréconciliable opposites? -Or if one is the real man, which one? And what of the other? What, in -a word, is the true Villiers? "For, as he thinketh in his heart, so is -he."</p> - -<p>The question is not a difficult one to answer; it depends upon an -elementary knowledge of the nature of that perfectly intelligible -being, the cynic. The typical cynic is essentially a tender-hearted, -sensitive idealist; his cynicism is in the first instance a recoil, -then, very often, a disguise. Most of us come into the world without -any very great expectations, not looking for especial loftiness in -our neighbours, not very much shocked if every one's devotion to the -ideal is not on a level with, perhaps, ours. We go on our way, if not -exactly "rejoicing," at least without positive discomfort. Here and -there, however, a soul nurtured on dreams and nourished in the scorn -of compromise finds its way among men and demands of them perfection. -There is no response to the demand. Entranced by an inaccessible ideal, -the poor soul finds that its devotion poisons for it all the wells -of earth. And this is the birth of what we call a cynic. The cynic's -progress is various, and seldom in a straight fine. It is significant -to find that in <i>Révolte,</i> one of Villiers' comparatively early -works, the irony has a perfectly serious point, and aims directly at -social abuses. The tableau is a scene, an episode, taken straight -from life, a piece of the closest actuality; there is no display, no -exaggeration, all is simple and straightforward as truth. The laughter -in it is the broken-hearted laughter, sadder than tears, of the poet, -the dreamer, before the spectacle of the world. It is obviously -the work of one who is a mocker through his very passion for right -and good, his sense of the infinite disproportion of things. Less -obviously, but indeed quite really, is the enormous and almost aimless -mockery of some of these tales of his the reverse of a love of men -and a devotion to the good and the beautiful. Cynicism is a quality -that develops, and when we find it planted in the brain of a humorist -there is simply no accounting for the transformations through which -it may run. Thus the gulf which seems to separate <i>Les demoiselles de -Bienfilâtre</i> from <i>L'inconnue</i> is, after all, nothing but a series of -steps. Nor is it possible for one who judges art as art to regret this -series of steps; for it is precisely his cynicism that has become the -"note," the rarest quality, of this man of passionate and lofty genius; -it is as a cynic that he will live—a cynic who can be pitiless and -tender, Rabelaisian and Heinesque, but imaginative, but fantastically -poetical, always.</p> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"> -<img src="images/baud_courbet.jpg" width="500" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Gustave Courbet, 1848</p> -</div> - - -<p><i>Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch</i> (1860), which I have -before me, is the most wonderful book that Baudelaire ever wrote. -It has that astonishing logic which he possessed supremely, which -unravels, with infinite precautions, every spider's web of this -seductive drug, which enslaves the imagination, which changes the will, -which turns sounds into colours, colours into sounds; which annihilates -space and time; and, often at its crises, even one's own individuality. -To Baudelaire, as to me, it has, and had, the divinity of a sorcerous, -a dangerous, an insidious mistress. It produces morbid effects on one's -senses; wakens mysterious visions in our half-closed eyes. And this, -like every form of intoxication, is mysterious, malign, satanical, -diabolical. And, subjugated by it, part of oneself is dominated, so -that, in Baudelaire's words: <i>Il a vouloir faire l'ange, il est devenu -une bête.</i></p> - -<p>With some this poison carries them to the verge of the abyss, over -which one looks fascinated by the abrupt horror of the void. In some -their ideas congeal: even to the point of imagining oneself "a fragment -of thinking ice." One sits, as in a theatre, seeing a drama acted on -the stage, where one's senses perceive subtle impressions, but vague, -unreal, ghost-like; where at moments one's eyes envisage the infinite. -"Then," says Baudelaire, "the grammar, the arid grammar itself, -becomes something like an evoked sorcery, the words are alive again in -flesh and in blood, the substantive, in its substantial majesty, the -adjective, a transparent vestment that clothes it and colours it like -a glacis, and the verb, angel of movement, that gives the swing to the -phrase."</p> - -<p>With the hallucinations all exterior forms take on singular aspects; -are deformed and transformed. Then come the transpositions of ideas, -with unaccountable analogies that penetrate the spirit. Even music, -heard or unheard, can seem voluptuous and sensual. It is Baudelaire who -speaks now, evokes an enchantment: "The idea of an evaporation, slow, -successive, eternal, takes hold of your spirit, and you soon apply this -idea to' your proper thoughts, to your way of thinking. By a singular -equivocation, by a kind of transportation, or of an intellectual <i>quid -pro quo,</i> you find yourself evaporating, and you attribute to your pipe -(in which you feel yourself crouching and heaped together like tobacco) -the strange faculty of <i>smoking yourself</i>." The instant becomes -eternity; one is lucid at intervals; the hallucination is sudden, -perfect, and fatal. One feels an excessive thirst; one subsides into -that strange state that the Orientals call <i>Kief.</i></p> - -<p>Certainly haschisch has a more vehement effect on one than opium; it -is more troubling, more ecstatic, more malign, malignant, insinuating, -more evocative, more visionary, more unseizable; it lifts one across -infinite horizons, it carries us passionately over the passionate -waves of seas in storms—of unknown storms on unseen seas—into not -even eternities, nor into chaos, nor into Heaven nor into Hell -(though these may whirl before one's vision), but into incredible -existences, over which no magician rules, over which no witch presides. -It can separate ourselves from ourselves; change our very shapes into -shapeless images; drown us in the deep depths of annihilation, out of -which we slowly emerge; bury us under the oldest roots of the earth; -give us death in life and life in death; give us sleep that is not -sleep, and waking dreams that are not waking dreams. There is nothing, -human or inhuman, moral or immoral, that this drug cannot give us.</p> - -<p>Yet, all the time, we know not what it takes from us; nor what deadly -exchange we may have to give; nor what intoxication can be produced -beyond its intoxication; nor if, as with Coleridge, who took opium, it -might not become "almost a habit of the Soul."</p> - -<p>Imagine a universe in disorder, peopled by strange beings, that have -no relation with each other, whose speech one supposes is jargon; -where such houses as there are are built in different ways—none with -straight lines, many in triangles; where the animals are unlike ours, -some smaller than ants; where there are no churches, no apparent -streets; but innumerable brothels. When one sees fires the smoke goes -downward; flames leap out of the soil and turn into living serpents. -Now one sees a serpent return into his proper flame. There seem to be -no gods, nor idols nor priests nor shrines.</p> - -<p>The seas storm the skies and swallow up Hell; and all that lives and -all that dies seems indistinguishable. Suppose that—in an opium -dream—Satan turns God. The soil might wither at his touch; Lesbians -lament the loss of Lesbianism; and the word of God be abolished.</p> - -<p>I have used the word vehement in regard to Haschisch. It violates the -imagination, ravishes the senses; can disturb one physically; but -never, if taken in measure, prove destructive. This green drug can -create unheard-of excitations, exasperations; can create contagious -laughter, evoke comical images, supernatural and fantastic.</p> - -<p>Now take a world created by Opium. The soil wavers, moves always, -in void space; a soil in which no seed nor weed grows. The men and -women are veiled—none see their faces. There is light, but neither -sun nor stars nor night. The houses have no windows; inside are no -mirrors; but everywhere opium dens; everywhere the smoke—incessant—of -pipes; everywhere a stench produced by opium and by their moral -degradation. The streets are thick with grass; such animals as -there are are stupefied. In fact, this inexorably moving world that -has no foundations exhales—worse than pestilence—an inexplicable -stupefaction.</p> - -<p>And, symbolical as it must be, these excitable poisons are to a -certainty one of the most terrible means employed by the Prince of -the Powers of the Air to enslave deplorable humanity; but by no means -to give him, what the drug can give him, the monstrous sense of the -suddenness of space and time, as if one were hurled between them by two -opposing whirlwinds.</p> - -<p>Now appears suddenly the Women—furious, formidable—one calls -Mephistophila, who having gazed on the Medusa becomes Medusa; who, -rouged and pale as the dead, gives one the idea of that eternal minute -which must be hell. Her very name trails like a coffin-lid. Abnormal, -she is sinister. She is one of my hallucinations. Can she ever count -the countless sins she has committed? Occult, she adores the Arcana. -Her kisses on women's lips are cruel. Perhaps she is the modern -Messalina. <i>Elle est l'impératrice blême d'un macabre Lesbos.</i></p> - -<p>She admits—I give here simply her confessions—to no abominations, nor -does she specialize her vices. As certain of her damnation as of her -existence—real, imaginary—she lives and loves and lies and forgives. -She knows she has abandoned herself to all the impossible desires -endured by such souls as hers, who expect annihilation. <i>Elle est la -reine, pas présente, mais acceptée, de la cour des miracles femelles du -Mal.</i></p> - -<p>She is not of those the Furies hate eternally, nor has she knowledge -of man's mingled fates; yet certain Circes have shown her how to weave -webs of spiritual spiders; she knows not where those are that turn the -Wheels of Destiny. Whirlwinds have shaken her in her perfumed room as -she lies in perfumed garments, considering her nakedness as sacred: -she the impure, never the pure! She is so tired of having ravished -souls from bodies and bodies from souls, that all she desires is sleep, -sleep without dreams. Did sleep ever come to those who most desired it? -Messalina, Helen of Troy, Faustina knew this; dust has closed their -lips, the very dust they have trodden under foot, the dust that knows -not whither it is drifting: none thinking of the inevitable end.</p> - -<p>Has not this poisonous drug shown to me, as to her, shadows hot from -hell? Not the shadows the sun casts on our figures as we walk on -the grass; not the moon's shadows that make mockery of us; but the -veritable heat and fire and flame and fumes of uttermost hell.</p> - -<p>In her eyes persists an ardent and violent life, hateful and bestial. -Depraved by insensible sensations, she imagines Caligula before her -and maledictions not her own. I know her now in vision—she is more -insatiable than Death—more ravenous after ravishment than Life. No -vampire, no Lamia, she knows not that her body has been drenched with -so many poisons that her breath might poison a man with one kiss. And -now, now, her eyes are so weary, her eyeballs ache with such tortured -nerves, that she desires nothing—nothing at all.</p> - -<p>In the very essence of Haschisch I find a disordered Demon whose -insanities make one's very flesh ache. Under his power symbols -speak—you can become yourself a living symbol. Under its magic you can -imagine black magic, and music can speak your passion: for is not music -as passionate as man's love for woman, as a woman's love for a man? -It can turn your rhythm into its rhythm, can change every word into a -sound, a word into a note of music: it cannot change the substance of -your soul.</p> - -<p>Finally, the drugged man admires himself inordinately; he condemns -himself, he glorifies himself; he realizes his condemnation; he becomes -the centre of the universe, certain of his virtue as of his genius. -Then, in a stupendous irony, he cries: <i>Je suis devenu Dieu!</i> One -instant after he projects himself out of himself, as if the will of an -intoxicated man had an efficacious virtue, and cries, with a cry that -might strike down the scattered angels from the ways of the sky: <i>Je -suis un Dieu!</i></p> - -<p>One of Baudelaire's profoundest sayings is: "Every perfect debauch -has need of a perfect leisure: <i>Toute débauche parfaite a besoin d'un -parfait loisir"</i> He gives his definition of the magic that imposes -on haschisch its infernal stigmata; of the soul that sells itself in -detail; of the frantic taste for this adorable poison of the man whose -soul he had chosen for these experiments, his own soul; of how finally -this hazardous spirit, driven, without being aware of it, to the edge -of hell, testifies of its original grandeur.</p> - - - -<h4>VIII</h4> - - -<h5>I</h5> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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. <i>Men and Women</i> 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.</p> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_manet01.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Édouard Manet, 1862</p> -</div> - - -<p>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 <i>curé</i>; 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 <i>cure.</i> Think of the <i>curé</i> -burning the only copy of <i>Les Fleurs du Mal</i> that Baudelaire had left -in "papier d'Hollande," and the mother acquiescing.</p> - -<p>I give two quotations, which certainly explain themselves if they do -not explain Baudelaire:</p> - -<p>"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.</p> - -<p>"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."</p> - -<p>In a letter written in Brussels, March 9, 1868, he says: "I have -announced the publication of three fragments: <i>Chateaubriand et le -Dandysme littéraire, La Peinture didactique,</i> and <i>Les fleurs du mal -jugées par l'auteur lui-même.</i> I shall add to these a refutation of -an article of Janin, one on <i>Henri Heine et la jeunesse des poètes,</i> -and the refutation of <i>La Préface de la vie de Jules César par -Napoléon III.</i>" Besides these, on the cover of his <i>Salon de</i> 1848 -are announced: "<i>De la poésie moderne; David, Guérin et Gerodet; -Les Limbes, poésies; Catéchisme de la femme aimée.</i>" On the paper -cover of my copy of his <i>Théophile Gautier</i> (1861), under the title -of "<i>Sous Presse,</i>" are announced: <i>Opium et Haschisch, ou l'Idéal -Artificiel</i> (which was printed in 1860 as <i>Les paradis artificiels: -opium et haschisch), Curiosités esthétiques</i> (which were printed in -1868); <i>Notices littéraires;</i> and <i>Machiavel et Condorcet, dialogue -philosophique.</i> Of these, <i>Les Limbes</i> appeared as <i>Les fleurs du -mal</i> (1857); <i>Les Notices littéraires</i> at the end of <i>L'Art Romantique</i> -(1868); none of the others were printed, nor do I suppose he had even -the time to begin them.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>bête noire</i>—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.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire was inspired to begin <i>Mon cœur mis à nu</i> in 1863 by this -paragraph he had read in Poe's <i>Marginalia,</i> 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—<i>My Heart Laid Bare</i>."</p> - -<p>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 <i>could</i> write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and -blaze at every touch of the fiery pen."</p> - -<p>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 <i>ce livre tout rêvé sera un livre -de rancunes.</i> 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.</p> - -<p>In Baudelaire's notes there is something that reminds me of Browning's -lines:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Men's thoughts and loves and hates!<br /> -Earth is my vineyard, these grew there;<br /> -From grapes of the ground, I made or marred<br /> -My vintage."<br /> -</p> - -<p>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 <i>is</i> 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:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"One who was as a nerve over which do creep<br /> -The else unfelt oppressions of this earth."<br /> -</p> - -<p>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.</p> - - -<h5>II</h5> - -<p>How very commonly we hear it remarked that such and such thoughts -are beyond the compass of words. I do not believe that any thought, -properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather, -that where difficulty in expression is experienced, there is, in the -intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or of -method. For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not -set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which -I conceived it: for thought is logicalized by the effort at written -composition. There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite -delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it -absolutely impossible to adapt language. Yet, so entire is my faith in -the power of words, that at times I have believed it possible to embody -even the evanescences of fancies such as I have described. Could one -actually do so, which would be to have done an original thing, such -words might have compelled the heaven into the earth.</p> - -<p>Some of these qualities Baudelaire finds in Gautier; to my mind there -are many more of these strange and occult qualities to be found in -Baudelaire. I have said somewhere that there is no such thing, properly -speaking, as a "natural" style; and it is merely ignorance of the -mental process of writing which sometimes leads one to say that the -style of Swift is more natural than that of Ruskin. Pater said to me -at Oxford that his own <i>Imaginary Portraits</i> seemed to him the best -written of his books, which he qualified by adding: "It seems to be the -most <i>natural</i>." I think then he was beginning to forget that it was -not natural to him to be natural.</p> - -<p>Gautier had a way of using the world's dictionary, whose leaves, blown -by an unknown wind, always opened so as to let the exact word leap -out of the pages, adding the appropriate shades. Both writers had an -innate sense of "correspondences," and of a universal symbolism, where -the "sacredness" of every word defends one from using it in a profane -sense. To realize the central secret of the mystics, from Protagoras -onwards, the secret which the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes betrays in -its "As things are below, so are they above;" which Boehme has classed -in his teaching of "signatures;" and which Swedenborg has systematized -in his doctrine of "correspondences," one arrives at Gérard de Nerval, -whose cosmical visions are at times so magnificent that he seems to be -creating myths, as, after his descent into hell, he plays the part he -imagines assigned to him in his astral influences.</p> - -<p>Among these comes Hoffmann. In his <i>Kreislerione,</i> that Baudelaire read -in the French translation I have before me, printed in 1834, he says: -"The musician whose sense of music is conscious swims everywhere across -floods of harmony and melody. This is no vain image, nor an allegory -devoid of sense, such as composers use when they speak of colours, of -perfumes, of the rays of the sun that appear like concords." "Colour -speaks," says Baudelaire, "in a voice evocatory of sorcery; animals and -plants grimace; perfumes provoke correspondent thoughts and memories. -And when I think of Gautier's rapidity in solving all the problems of -style and of composition, I cannot help remembering a severe maxim that -he let fall before me in one of his conversations: 'Every writer who -fails to seize any idea, however subtle and unexpected he supposes it -to be, is not a writer. <i>L'Inexprimable n'existe pas.</i>'"</p> - -<p>It is either Delacroix or Baudelaire who wrote: "The writer who is -incapable of saying everything, who takes unawares and without having -enough material to give body to an idea, however subtle or strange or -unexpected he may suppose it to be, is not a writer." And one has to -beware of the sin of allegory, which spoils even Bunyan's prose. For -the deepest emotion raised in us by allegory is a very imperfectly -satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we -should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome.</p> - -<p>Then there is the heresy of instruction—<i>l'hérésie de -l'enseignement</i>—which Poe and Baudelaire and Swinburne consider -ruinous to art. Art for art's sake first of all; that a poem must be -written for the poem's sake simply, from whatever instinct we have -derived it; it matters nothing whether this be inspired by a prescient -ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, or by some of that loveliness -whose very elements appertain solely to eternity. Above all, Verlaine's -<i>Pas de couleur, rien que la nuance!</i></p> - -<p>The old war—not (as some would foolishly have it defined) a war -between facts and fancies, reason and romance, poetry and good sense, -but simply between imagination which apprehends the spirit of a thing -and the understanding which dissects the body of a fact—the strife -which can never be decided—was for Blake the most important question -possible. Poetry or art based on loyalty to science is exactly as -absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or poetry. Though, -indeed, Blake wrought his <i>Marriage of Heaven and Hell</i> into a form -of absolute magnificence, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine -thought and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which hells and -heavens change names and alternate through mutual annihilations, which -emit an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame, he never -actually attained the incomparable power of condensing vapour into -tangible and malleable form, of helping us to handle air and measure -mist, which is so instantly perceptible in Balzac's genius, he who was -not "a prose Shakespeare" merely, but rather perhaps a Shakespeare in -all but the lyrical faculty.</p> - -<p>Even when Baudelaire expresses his horror of life, of how abject the -world has become, how he himself is supposed to be "une anomalie," his -sense of his own superiority never leaves him. "Accursed," as I have -said, such abnormally gifted artists are, he declares his thirst of -glory, a diabolical thirst of fame and of all kinds of enjoyments—in -spite of his "awful temperament, all ruse and violence"—and can say: -"I desire to live and to have self-content. Something terrible says -to me <i>never,</i> and some other thing says to me <i>try. Moi-même, le -boulevard m'effraye</i>."</p> - -<p>Baudelaire's tragic sense of his isolation, of his intense misery, -of his series of failures, of his unendurable existence—it was and -was not life—in Brussels finds expression in this sentence, dated -September, 1865:</p> - -<p>"Les gens qui ne sont pas exilés ne savent pas ce que sont les nerfs de -ceux sont cloués à l'étranger, sans communications et sans nouvelles." -What he says is the inevitable that has no explanation: simply the -inevitable that no man can escape. To be exiled from Paris proves to -be, practically, his death-stroke. And, in the last letter he ever -wrote, March 5, 1866, there is a sense of irony, of vexation, of -wounded pride, and in the last "sting in the tail of the honey" he -hisses: -"There is enough talent in these young writers; but what absurdities, -what exaggerations, and what youthful infatuations! Curiously, only a -few years ago I perceived these imitators whose tendencies alarmed me. -I know nothing of a more compromising nature than these: as for me, I -love nothing more than being alone. But this is not possible for me, -<i>et il paraît que l'école Baudelaire existe</i>."</p> - -<p>And, to all appearances, it did; and what really annoyed Baudelaire was -the publication of Verlaine's <i>Poèmes saturniens</i> and their praise by -Leconte de l'Isle, Banville, and Hugo; Hugo, whom he had come to hate. -It is with irony that he says of Hugo: "Je n'accepterais ni son génie, -ni sa fortune, s'il me fallait au même temps posséder ses énormes -ridicules."</p> - - -<h5>III</h5> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>"I can't sleep much now," writes Baudelaire, "as I am always thinking. -<i>Quand je dis que je dormirai demain matin, vous devinerez de quel -sommeil je veux parler</i>." 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 <i>Poèmes en Prose,</i> addressed to Paris:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full,<br /> -Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand<br /> -In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,<br /> -<br /> -I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and<br /> -Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,<br /> -The vulgar herd can never understand."<br /> -</p> - -<p>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 <i>Modern Love,</i> 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:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"O thou Weed</span><br /> -Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet<br /> -That the sense aches at thee, would thou had'st ne'er been<br /> -born."<br /> -</p> - -<p>Another question arises: How can a man who wrote his letters in a -<i>café,</i> 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?</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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, <i>and if I had had more -fortune, I might have been rich"</i> 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!"</p> - - - -<h4>VIII</h4> - - -<p>In 1861 Poulet-Malassis showed Baudelaire the manuscript of <i>Les -Martyrs ridicules</i> of Léon Cladel, who was so excited as he read it, so -intrigued by his antithetical constructions and by the mere singularity -of the title, and so amazed by this writer's audacity, that he made his -acquaintance, went over his proofs, and helped to teach him the craft -of letters. So, in his sombre and tragic and passionate and feverish -novels, we see the inevitable growth out of the hard soil of Quercy, -and out of the fertilizing contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of this -whole literature, so filled with excitement, so nervous, so voluminous -and vehement, in whose pages speech is always out of breath. And one -finds splendid variations in his stories of peasants and wrestlers and -thieves and prostitutes: something at once epic and morbid.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire, in his preface, points out the solemn sadness and the -grim irony with which Cladel relates deplorably comic facts; the -fury with which he insists on painting his strange characters; the -fantastic fashion in which he handles sin with the intense curiosity -of a casuist, analysing evil and its inevitable consequences. He notes -"la puissance sinistrement caricatural de Cladel." But it is in these -two sentences that he sums up, supremely, the beginning and the end of -realistic and imaginative art. "The Poet, under his mask, still lets -himself be seen. But the supremacy of art had consisted in remaining -glacial and hermetically sealed, and in leaving to the reader all the -merit of indignation. (<i>Le poète, sous son masque, se laisse encore -voir. Le supreme de l'art eût consisté à rester glacial et fermé, et à -laisser au lecteur tout le mérite de l'indignation.</i>)"</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"> -<img src="images/baud_manet_02.jpg" width="450" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Édouard Manet, 1865.</p> -</div> - -<p>Certain of these pages are ironical and sinister and cynical; as, for -instance, in this sentence: "Quant aux insectes amoureux, je ne crois -pas que les figures de rhétorique dont ils se servent pour gémir leurs -passions soient mesquines; toutes les mansardes entendant tous les -soirs des tirades tragiques dont la Comédie Française ne pourra jamais -bénéficier." And it is in regard to this that I give certain details of -an anecdote related by Cladel of Baudelaire, which refers to the fatal -year when he left Paris for Brussels.</p> - -<p>Both often went to the Café de la Belle-Poule; and, one night, when -Cladel was waiting for Baudelaire, a very beautiful woman seated -opposite him asked him to present her to Baudelaire. He laughed and -they waited, and Baudelaire was presented, who, after giving them the -usual drinks, at the end of an hour went away. This went on for a -whole month; when Baudelaire, after her incessant assiduities to him, -brought her home with him, Cladel also. They talk. The woman becomes -lascivious. Baudelaire answers that he has a passion for beautiful -forms and does not wish to expose himself to a deception. She undresses -slowly. She is magnificent, and her tresses are so long that, with -leaning over a little, she could put her naked feet on the ends of -them. She assumes, being probably aware of it, the exact pose of -Mademoiselle de Maupin when she stands naked before d'Albert. Cladel -goes out. He has not quite closed the door when he hears Baudelaire, -prematurely old and worn out, say: "Rhabille-toi." Still vital, he -has no more the abstract heat of rapture of the passionate lover in -Gautier's famous self-confessions; for, in that wonderful book, there -is nothing besides a delicately depraved imagination and an extreme -ecstasy over the flesh and the senses. And he also realized, as -Baudelaire did not always, that the beauty of life was what he wanted, -and not the body, that frail and perishable thing, that has to be -pitied, that so many desire to perpetuate.</p> - -<p>Yet never in Baudelaire, as in Gautier, did the five senses become -articulate, as if they were made specially for him; for he speaks -for them with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are—never -Baudelaire's—in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have -no recollection. Yet neither were absolutely content with the beauty of -a woman's body: for the body must finally dwindle and expand to some -ignoble physical condition, and on certain women's necks wrinkles will -crawl, and the fire in one's blood sometimes loses some of its heat; -only, one wants to perpetuate the beauty of life itself, imperishable -at least in its recurrence.</p> - -<p>In his preface Baudelaire compares Murger with Musset, both Bohemian -classics, only one spoke of Bohemia with a bitter bantering, and the -poet, when he was not in his noble moods, had crises of fatuity. "All -this evil society, with its vile habits, its adventurous morals, was -painted by the vivid pencil-strokes of Murger; only he jested in his -relations of miserable things." Yes, Murger is a veracious historian; -believe him, if you do not know or have forgotten, that such are the -annals of Bohemia. There, people laugh just so lightly and sincerely, -weep and laugh just as freely, are really hungry, really have their -ambitions, and at times die of all these maladies. It is the gayest and -most melancholy country in the world. To have lived there too long, is -to find all the rest of the world in exile. But if you have been there -or not, read Murger's pages; there, perhaps, you will see more of the -country than anything less than a lifetime spent in it will show you.</p> - - - -<h4>IX</h4> - - -<p>In April, 1864, Baudelaire left Paris for Brussels, where he stayed in -the Hôtel du Grand-Miroir, rue de la Montagne. Before then his nerves -had begun to torment him; they played tricks with his very system; he -wrote very little prose and no verse. It was with a kind of desperate -obstination—a more than desperate obstinacy—that he strove to prevent -himself from giving way to his pessimistic conceptions of life, to his -morbid over-sensibility that ached as his flesh ached. Unsatiated, -unsatisfied, for once in his existence irresolute in regard to what he -wanted to do, watching himself with an almost casuistical casuistry, -alone and yet not alone in the streets of Paris, he wandered, a -<i>noctambule,</i> night after night, sombre and sinister. So a ghost -self-obsessed might wander in desolate cities seeing ever before him -the Angel of Destruction.</p> - -<p>Did he then know that he was becoming more and more abnormal? This I -ignore. This, I suppose, he alone knew; and hated too much knowledge of -his precarious condition. He was veritably more alone than ever, before -he plunged—as one who might see shipwreck before him—into that gulf -that is no gulf, that extends not between hell and heaven, but that one -names Brussels.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<img src="images/baud_lettre_auto_02.jpg" width="600" alt="" /> -<p class="caption">Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Charles Asselineau, 1865.</p> -</div> - -<p>Still he frequented his favourite haunts, the Moulin-Rouge, the Casino -de la rue Cadet, and other cabarets. He saw then, as I saw many -years afterwards, pass some of his Flowers of Evil—some who knew him -and had read his verses, most of whom he ignored—macabre, with hectic -cheeks and tortured eyes and painted faces; these strange nocturnal -birds of passage that flit to and fro, the dancers and the hired -women; always—so Latin an attitude of their traditional trade!—with -enquiring and sidelong glances at men and at women.</p> - -<p>I can see him now, as I write, sit in certain corners of the -Moulin-Rouge—as I did—drinking strange drinks and smoking cigarettes; -hearing with all his old sensuality that adorable and cynical and -perverse and fascinating <i>Valse des Roses</i> of Olivier Métra: a -maddening music to the soundless sound of the mad dances of the -<i>Chahut</i>—danced by dancers of both sexes, ambiguous and exotic and -neurotic—that, as the avid circle forms hastily around them, set their -fevers into our fevers, their nerves into our nerves.</p> - -<p>It was in May, 1892, that, having crossed the streets of Paris from -the hotel where I was staying, the Hôtel Corneille, in the Latin -Quarter (made famous by Balzac in his superb story, <i>Z. Marcas</i>,) I -found myself in Le Jardin de Paris, where I saw for the first time -La Mélinite. She danced in a quadrille: young and girlish, the more -provocative because she played as a prude, with an assumed modesty; -<i>décolletée</i> nearly to the waist, in the Oriental fashion. She had -long, black curls around her face; and had about her a depraved -virginity.</p> - -<p>And she caused in me, even then, a curious sense of depravity that -perhaps comes into the verses I wrote on her. There, certainly, on -the night of May 22nd, danced in her feverish, her perverse, her -enigmatical beauty, La Mélinite, to her own image in the mirror:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"A shadow smiling<br /> -Back to a shadow in the night,"<br /> -</p> - -<p>as she cadenced Olivier Métra's <i>Valse des Roses.</i></p> - -<p>It is a fact of curious interest that in 1864 Poulet-Malassis was -obliged to leave Paris—on account of his misfortunes as a publisher, -in regard to money, and for various other reasons—and to exile himself -in Brussels: still more curious that Baudelaire—drawn, perhaps, by -some kind of affinity in their natures—followed him sooner than he -had intended to go. Malassis lived in rue de Mercedes, 35 <i>bis,</i> -Faubourg d'Ixilles. In those years both saw a great deal of the famous, -perverse, macabre Félicien Rops.</p> - -<p>Malassis, naturally, was obliged, in his expedients for living as he -used to live, to publish privately printed obscene books; some no more -than erotic. As Baudelaire hated, with his Parisian refinement, that -kind of certainly objectionable literature, on May 4th, 1865, he writes -to Sainte-Beuve: "As for Malassis, his terrible affair arrives on the -12th. He believes he will be condemned for five years. What there -is grave in this is that that closes France for him for five years. -But that cuts him for a time from his ways of living. I see in it no -great evil. As for me, who am no fool, I have never possessed one of -these idiotic books, even printed in fine characters and with fine -engravings." As a matter of fact, Malassis was condemned in May, 1866, -to one year's imprisonment for having privately printed <i>Les Amies</i> of -Paul Verlaine—a book of sonnets, attributed to an imaginary Pablo de -Herlaguez.</p> - -<p>Baudelaire, as I have said, had many reasons for going to Brussels. -Among these was his urgent desire of finding a publisher to print his -collected works—having failed to find any publisher for them. Another -was that of giving lectures—a thing he was not made for—and for two -other reasons: one of making immediate money, one of adding to his fame -as a writer. Then, to write a book on Belgium.</p> - -<p>He writes to Manet (who has written to him: "Do return to Paris! No -happiness can come to you while you live in that damned country!"): -"As for finishing here <i>Pauvre Belgique,</i> I am incapable of it: I am -near on dead. I have quite a lot of <i>Poèmes en Prose</i> to get printed in -magazines. I can do no more than that. <i>Je souffre d'un mal qui je n'ai -pas, comme j'étais gamin, et que je vivais au bout du monde."</i></p> - -<p>His book was to have been humorous, mocking, and serious—his final -separation from modern stupidity. "People may understand me, perhaps, -then." "Nothing," he confesses, "can console me in my detestable -misery, in my humiliating situation, nor especially in my vices."</p> - -<p>In February, 1865, he writes: "As for my present state, it is an -absolute abdication of the will. (<i>C'est une parfaite abdication de la -volonté.</i>)" What reason, I wonder, was there for him to "abdicate" the -one element in our natures by which we live at our greatest, the very -root of our passions (as Balzac said), "nervous fluids and that unknown -substance which, in default of another term, we must call the will?" -Man has a given quality of energy; each man a different quality: how -will he spend it? That is Balzac's invariable question. All these -qualities were always in Baudelaire.</p> - -<p>Had he finally, after so many years in which his energy was supreme, -lost some of his energy, struggling, as he seems to do, against -insuperable difficulties that beset him on either side, like thieves -that follow men in the dark with the intention of stabbing you in the -back? Does he then try to conjecture what next year might bring him -of good or of evil? He has lived his life after his own will: what -shall the end be? He dares neither look backward nor forward. It might -be that he feels the earth crumbling under his feet; for how many -artists have had that fear—the fear that the earth under their feet -may no longer be solid? There is another step for him to take, a step -that frightens him; might it not be into another more painful kind of -oblivion? Has something of the man gone out of him: that is to say, the -power to live for himself?</p> - -<p>In the summer of 1865 Baudelaire spent several days in Paris, seeing -Banville and other friends of his. They found him unchanged; his eyes -clear; his voice musical; he talked as wonderfully as ever. They used -all their logic to persuade him to remain in Paris. He refused, even -after Gautier had said to him: "You are astonishing: can one conceive -your mania of eternalizing yourself in a land where one is only bored -to extinction?" He laughed; promised to return: he never did; it was -the last day when his friends possessed him entirely.</p> - -<p>In his years of exile he printed Poe's <i>Histoires grotesques et -sérieuses</i> (1864); <i>Les nouvelles fleurs du mal</i> in <i>La Parnasse -contemporaine</i> (1866). In 1865 Poulet-Malassis printed <i>Les épaves de -Charles Baudelaire.</i> Avec une eau-forte de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam. A -l'enseigne du Coq. 1865. 165 pages.</p> - -<p>"Avertissement de l'Éditeur.</p> - -<p>"Ce recueil est composé de morceaux poétiques, pour la plupart -condamnés ou inédits, auxquels M. Charles Baudelaire n'a pas cru devoir -faire place dans l'édition définitive des <i>Fleurs du mal.</i></p> - -<p>"Cela explique son titre.</p> - -<p>"M. Charles Baudelaire a fait don, sans réserve, de ces poëmes, à un -ami qui juge à propos de les publier, parce qu'il se flatte de les -goûter, et qu'il est à un âge où l'on aime encore à faire partager ses -sentiments à des amis auxquels on prête ses vertus.</p> - -<p>"L'auteur sera avisé de cette publication en même temps que les deux -cents soixantes lectures probables qui figurent—à peu près—pour son -éditeur bénévole, le public littéraire en France, depuis que les bêtes -y ont décidément usurpé la parole sur les hommes."</p> - -<p>I have before me two copies of this rare edition, printed on yellow -Holland paper; one numbered 100, the other 194. The second has -inscribed in ink: <i>A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de -l'auteur avec les civilités de l'éditeur A. P. Malassis.</i> This was sent -on the part of Baudelaire to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is superbly -bound in a kind of red-purple thick leather binding, with pale gold -squares, in the form of the frame of a picture; done, certainly, with -great taste.</p> - -<p>On January 3, 1865, Baudelaire writes a letter to his mother; a letter -that pains one as one reads it: so resigned he seems to be, yet never -in his life less resigned to his fate. He fears that God might deprive -him of even happiness; that it is more difficult to think than to write -a book; that if only he were certain of having five or six years before -him he might execute all that remained for him to do; that he has the -fixed idea of death; that he has suffered so much already that he -believes many things may be forgiven him (sins of concupiscence, sins -of conscience, sins one never forgets) as he has been punished so much.</p> - -<p>I pass from this to the beginning of March, 1866. He stays with Rops -at Namur, where (certainly by bad luck) he enters again l'Église -Saint-Loup, which he had spoken of as "this sinister marvel in the -interior of a catafalque—terrible and delicious—broidered with gold, -red, and silver." As he admires these richly sculptured confessionals, -as he speaks with Rops and Malassis, he stumbles, taken by a kind of -dizziness in the head, and sits down on a step in the church. They -lift him up; he feigns not to be frightened, says that his foot had -slipped accidentally. Next day he shows signs of a nervous trouble, not -a mental one; asking them in the train to Brussels to have the window -opened; it is open. That is the first sign of his loss of speech, and -the last letter that he ever wrote (dated March 30th, 1866), ends: <i>Je -ne puis pas bouger.</i> It is strange to set beside this Balzac's last -words, that end a letter written June 20th, 1856: <i>Je ne puis ni lire -ni écrire.</i> It is written to Théophile Gautier.</p> - -<p>Swinburne, having heard the fatal news in regard to Baudelaire, added -to his book on Blake these magnificent words: as pure, as fervent a -tribute to the memory of a fellow-artist as Baudelaire might have -wished to have been written on himself, as Swinburne might have desired -to have been written on himself: "I heard that a mortal illness had -indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the -fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more -of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of -Charles Baudelaire. We may see again as various a power as was his, -may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as tragic a manner -of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of -emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison -of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair -and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at -once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He -could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible -and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances -of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at -least in part expressed, brought him near to me by way of written or -transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, -and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal -words which too often return upon our lips:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -<i>Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!"</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>And I, who have transcribed these words, have before me a book that -Swinburne showed me, that he had richly bound in Paris, and that I -bought at the sale of his library on June 19th: <i>Richard Wagner et -Tannhäuser à Paris.</i> Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, 1861; with, -written in pencil, on the page before the title-page, these words:</p> - -<blockquote> -<p>"<i>A Mr. Algernon C. Swinburne. Bon Souvenir et mille Remerciements. C. -B.</i>"</p> -</blockquote> - -<p>From April 9, 1866, to August 31, 1867, Baudelaire endures the slow -tortures of a body and a soul condemned to go on living; living, what -else can it be called, than a kind of living death? To remain, in most -senses, himself; to be, as always, Charles Baudelaire; to have in his -mind one desire, the desire, the vain desire, of recovery; to be unable -to utter one word; to think, to sleep, to conceive imaginary projects, -for his near future, for his verse, for his prose: to walk, to eat, -to drink; to be terribly conscious of his dolorous situation; to be, -as ever, anxious for a new edition of <i>Les fleurs du mal;</i> to mark a -date in an almanac, counting three months, when he imagined he would -be in a state to superintend the impression of his final edition; to -have finally given up all hope, all illusion; to have gazed out of his -wonderful eyes, at his friend's faces, eyes shadowed by an expression -of infinite sadness, eyes that endured his last tragedy: that is how -Baudelaire survived himself to the end.</p> - -<p>He died on Saturday, August 31, 1867, at eleven o'clock in the morning, -at the age of forty-six and four months. So died, simply and without -any trace of suffering, this man of genius. Had he been thoroughly -understood by the age in which he lived? Blake, who said the final -truth on this question: "The ages are all equal; but genius is always -above the ages:" was not understood in his age.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h4><a name="BIBLIOGRAPHY_AND_NOTES" id="BIBLIOGRAPHY_AND_NOTES">BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES</a></h4> - - -<p>1. <i>Salon de</i> 1845. Pax Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Jules Labitte, 1845. -72 pp.</p> - -<p>2. <i>Salon de</i> 1846. Par Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1846. -132 pp.</p> - -<p>3. <i>Histoires extraordinaires.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de Charles -Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1856.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Edgar Poe, La vie et ses œuvres, pp. vii-xxxi. 2. -Translations, 323 pp.</p></blockquote> - -<p>4. <i>Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. Michel Lévy, 1857.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, pp. v-xxiv. 2. Translations, -288 pp.</p></blockquote> - -<p>5. <i>Les fleurs du mal.</i> Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis -et de Broise, 4 rue de Buci, 1857. 252 pp.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Dédicace. 2. Au Lecteur.</p> - - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">SPLEEN ET IDÉAL.</span>—1. Bénédiction. 2. Le Soleil. 3. Élévation. 4. -Correspondances. 5. <i>J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues.</i> 6. -Les Phares. 7. La Muse malade. 8. La Muse vénale. 9. Le Mauvais -Moine. 10. L'Ennemi. 11. Le Guignon. 12. La Vie intérieure. 13. -Bohémiens en voyage. 14. L'Homme et la mer. 15. Don Juan aux -enfers. 16. Châtiment de l'orgueil. 17. La Beauté. 18. L'Idéal. -19. La Géante. 20. Les Bijoux. 21. Parfum exotique. 22. <i>Je -t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne.</i> 23. <i>Tu mettre l'univers -entier dans ta ruelle.</i> 24. <i>Sed non satiata.</i> 25. <i>Avec ses -vêtements ondoyants et nacrés.</i> 26. Le Serpent qui danse. 27. -La Charogne. 28. <i>De profundis clamavi.</i> 29. Le Vampire. 30. -Le Léthé. 31. <i>Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive.</i> -32. Remords posthume. 33. Le Chat. 34. Le Balcon. 35. <i>Je te -donne ces vers afin que si mon nom.</i> 36. Tout entière. 37. <i>Que -diras-tu ce soir, pauvre âme solitaire.</i> 38. Le Flambeau vivant. -39. A Celle qui est trop gaie. 40. Réversibilité. 41. Confession. -42. L'Aube spirituelle. 43. Harmonie du soir. 44. Le Flacon. 45. -Le Poison. 46. Ciel brouillé. 47. Le Chat. 48. Le beau navire. -49. L'Invitation au voyage. 50. L'Irréparable. 51. Causerie. 52. -L'Héautontimouroménos. 53. Franciscae meae laudes. 54. A une -Dame Créole. 55. Moesta et Errabunda. 56. Les Chats. 57. Les -Hiboux. 58. La cloche fêlée. 59. Spleen. 60. Spleen. 61. Spleen. -62. Spleen. 63. Brumes et pluies. 64. L'Irrémédiable. 65. A une -mendiante rousse. 66. Le Jeu. 67. Le Crépuscule du soir. 68. Le -Crépuscule du matin. 69. <i>Le servante au grand cœur dont vous -étiez jaloux.</i> 70. <i>Je n'ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville.</i> 71. -Le Tonneau de la haine. 72. Le Revenant. 73. Le Mort joyeux. 74. -Sépulture. 75. Tristesses de la lune. 76. La Musique. 77. La Pipe.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">FLEURS DU MAL.</span>—78. La Destruction. 79. Une Martyr. 80. Lesbos. -81. Femmes damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte). 82. Femmes damnées. -83. Les deux bonnes sœurs. 84. La fontaine de sang. 85. -Allégorie. 86. La Beatrice. 87. Les métamorphoses du vampire. 88. -Un voyage à Cythère. 89. L'Amour et le crâne.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">RÉVOLTE.</span>—90. Le reniement de Saint Pierre. 91. Abel et Caïn. 92. -Les Litanies de Satan.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LE VIN.</span>—93. L'âme du vin. 94. Le vin des chiffonniers. 95. Le -vin de l'assassin. 96. Le vin du solitaire. 97. Le vin des amants.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LA MORT.</span>—98. La mort des amants. 99. La mort des pauvres. 100. -La mort des artistes.</p></blockquote> - -<p>6. <i>Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1858. 200 pp.</p> - -<p>7. <i>Théophile Gautier.</i> Par Charles Baudelaire. Notice littéraire -précédée d'une lettre de Victor Hugo. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de -Broise, 9 rue des Beaux-Arts, 1859.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. A M. Charles Baudelaire de Victor Hugo, pp. i, iii. 2. -Théophile Gautier, 68 pp.</p></blockquote> - -<p>8. <i>Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch.</i> Par Charles -Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 9 rue des Beaux-Arts, -1860.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Dédicace à J. G. F., pp. i-iv. 2. Le poème du haschisch, pp. -1-108. 3. Un mangeur d'opium, pp. 109-304.</p></blockquote> - -<p>On the back of the cover is this announcement:</p> - -<p>"Sous Presse, du même auteur: <i>Réflexions sur quelques-uns, de mes -Contemporains;</i> un volume contenant: Edgar Poe, Théophile Gautier, -Pierre Dupont, Richard Wagner, Auguste Barbier, Leconte de Lisle, -Hégésippe Moreau, Pétrus Borel, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gustave -le Vavasseur, Gustave Flaubert, Philibert Rouvière; la famille des -<i>Dandies,</i> ou Chateaubriand, de Custine, Paul de Molinès, and Barbey -d'Aurévilly."</p> - -<p>This volume appeared in part in <i>L'Art Romantique</i> (1868); several of -these essays were never written, such as the one on Barbey d'Aurévilly. -Seconde Édition, 1861.</p> - -<p>9. <i>Les Fleurs du Mal</i> de Charles Baudelaire.</p> - -<p>Seconde Édition augmentée de trente-cinq poëmes nouveaux et orné -d'un Portrait de l'Auteur dessiné et gravé par Bracquemond. Paris, -Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, Éditeurs, 97 rue de Richelieu et Passage -Mirés, 1861. 319 pp.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. L'Albatros. 2. Le Masque. Statue Allégorique dans le goût -de la Renaissance. 3. Hymne à la Beauté. 4. La Chevelure. 5. -Duellum. 6. Le Possédé. 7. Un Fantôme: (1) Les Ténèbres. (2) Le -Parfum. (3) Le Cadre. (4) Le Portrait. 8. Sempre eadem. 9. Chant -d'Automne. 10. A une Madone. Ex-Voto dans le goût Espagnol. 11. -Chanson d'Après-Midi. 12. Sisina. 13. Sonnet d'automne. 14. Une -Gravure fantastique. 15. Obsession. 16. Le Goût du néant. 17. -Alchimie de la Douleur. 18. Horreur Sympathique. 19. L'Horloge. -20. Un Paysage. 21. Le Cynge. 22. Les Sept Vieillards. 23. Les -Petites Vieilles. 24. Les Aveugles. 25. A une passante. 26. Le -Squelette laboureur. 27. Danse macabre. 28. L'Amour du mensonge. -29. Rêve Parisien. 30. La Fin de la journée. 31. Le Rêve d'un -curieux. 32. Le Voyage.</p></blockquote> - -<p>10. <i>Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser</i> à Paris. Par Charles Baudelaire. -Paris, E. Dentu, Palais-Royale, 13 et 17, Galerie d'Orléans, 1861. 70 -pp.</p> - -<p>11. <i>Euréka.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, -Michel Lévy, 1864. 252 pp.</p> - -<p>12. <i>Histoires Grotesques et Sérieuses.</i> Par Edgar Poe. Traduction par -Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1865. 372 pp.</p> - -<p>13. Les épaves de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte. Frontispiece -de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Avertissement de l'Éditeur, pp. i-iii. 2. Les épaves, 163 pp.</p></blockquote> - -<p>14. <i>Les épaves</i> de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte de Félicien -Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. Numéro 194.</p> - -<p>15. <i>Les épaves</i> de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une Eau-forte de Félicien -Rops. Amsterdam, à l'Enseigne du Coq, 1865. Numéro 100.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p><i>A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de l'auteur, -avec les civilités de l'Editeur. A. P. Malassis.</i></p></blockquote> - - - -<p>II</p> - - -<p><i>Édition Définitive des œuvres de Charles Baudelaire.</i> Paris, Michel -Lévy et Frères, Libraires Éditeurs, rue Vivienne, 2 <i>bis,</i> et Boulevard -des Italiens, 15. A la Librairie Nouvelle, 1868-1869.</p> - -<p>Volume <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">I. LES FLEURS DU MAL.</span> 414 pp.</p> - -<p>Volume <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">II. CURIOSITÉS ESTHÉTIQUES.</span> 440 pp.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Salon de 1845. 2. Salon de 1846. 3. Le Musée Classique -du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle (1846). 4. Exposition Universale de -1855. Beaux Arts (1855). 5. Salon de 1850? 6. De l'Essence du -Rire, et généralement du Comique dans les Arts Plastiques. 7. -Quelques Caricaturistes Français: Carle Vernet. Pigal. Charlet. -Daumier. Henri Monnier. Grandville. Gavami. Trimolet. Traviès. -Jacque (1857). 8. Quelques Caricaturistes Étrangers: Hogarth. -Cruikshank. Goya. Pinelli. Breughel (1857).</p></blockquote> - -<p>Volume <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">III. L'ART ROMANTIQUE.</span></p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. L'œuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix (1862). 2. Peintures -murales d'Eugène Delacroix à Saint-Sulpice (1861). 3. Le -Peintre de la Vie Moderne. Constantin Guys (1862). 4. Peintres -et Aqua-fortistes (1862). 5. Vente de le Collection de M. E. -Piot (1864). 6. L'Art Philosophique. 7. Morale des Joujou -(1854). 8. Théophile Gautier (1859-1861-1862). 9. Pierre Dupont -(1852-1861-1862). 10. Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris. -Encore quelques Mots (1861). u. Philibert Rouvière (1855). -12. Conseils aux jeunes Littérateurs (1846). 13. Les Drames -et les Romans honnêtes (1850). 14. L'École Païenne (1851). -15. <i>Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes Contemporaines:</i> (1) -Victor Hugo (1861). (2) Auguste Barbier (1861). (3) Marceline -Desbordes-Valmore (1861). (4) Théophile Gautier (1861). (5) -Pétrus Borel (1861). (6) Hégéssipe Moreau (1861). (7) Théodore de -Banville (1861). (8) Pierre Dupont (1852). (9) Leconte de Lisle -(1861). (10) Gustave Levavasseur (1861).</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">CRITIQUES LITTÉRAIRES.</span>—1. Les Misérables, par Victor Hugo -(1862). 2. Madame Bovary, par Gustave Flaubert. (1857). 3. -La double vie, par Charles Asselineau (1859). 4. Les martyrs -ridicules, par Léon Cladel (1861).</p></blockquote> - -<p>Volume <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">IV. 1. PETITS POEMES EN PROSE.</span></p> - -<blockquote> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">A ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE.</span>—1. L'Étranger (1862). 2. Le Désespoir de -la vieille (1862). 3. Le <i>Confiteor</i> de l'artiste (1862). 4. -Un Plaisant (1862). 5. Le Chambre double (1862). 6. Chacun sa -chimère (1862). 7. Le fou et la Vénus (1862). 8. Le Chien et le -Flacon (1862). 9. Le Mauvais Vitrier (1862). 10. A une heure du -matin (1862). 11. Le Femme sauvage et le Petite Maîtresse (1862). -12. Les Foules (1861). 13. Les Veuves (1861). 14. Le Vieux -Saltimbanque (1861). 15. Le Gâteau (1862). 16. L'Horloge (1857). -17. Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure (1857). 18. L'Invitation au -voyage (1857). 19. Le Joujou du pauvre (1862). 20. Les Dons des -fées (1862). 21. Les Tentations, ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire -(1863). 22. Le Crépuscule du Soir (1855). 23. La Solitude (1855). -24. Les Projets (1857). 25. La Belle Dorothée (1863). 26. Les -Yeux des Pauvres (1864). 27. Une Mort Héroïque (1863). 28. La -Fausse Monnaie (1864). 29. Le Joueur généreux (1864). 30. La -Corde, à Edouard Manet (1864). 31. Les Vocations (1864). 32. Le -Thyrse. A Franz Liszt (1863). 33. Enivrez-vous (1864). 34. Déjà! -(1863). 35. Les Fenêtres (1863). 36. Le Désir de peindre (1863). -37. Les Bienfaits de la lune (1863). 38. Laquelle est la vraie? -(1863). 39. Un Cheval de race (1864). 40. Le Miroir (1864). 41. -Le Port (1864). 42. Portraits de maîtresses (1867). 43. Le galant -Tireur (1867). 44. La Soupe et les Nuages (1864). 45. Le Tir et -la Cimetière (1867). 46. Porte d'Auréole (1867). 47. Mademoiselle -Bistouri (1867). 48. (Anywhere out of the world): N'importe où -hors du monde (1867). 49. Assommons les pauvres (1867). 50. Les -Bon Chiens à M. Joseph Stevens (1865). <i>Epilogue</i> (1860).</p></blockquote> - -<p>2. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LES PARADIS ARTIFICIELS.</span></p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">A. J. G. F. LE POÈME DU HASCHISCH.</span></p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Le Goût de l'Infini. 2. Qu'est-ce que le Haschisch? 3. Le -Théâtre du Séraphin. 4. L'Homme-Dieu. 5. Morale.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">UN MANGEUR D'OPIUM.</span>—1. Précautions oratoires. 2. Confessions -préliminaires. 3. Voluptés d'opium. 4. Tortures d'opium. 5. Un -Faux Dénouement. 6. Le Génie enfant. 7. Chagrins d'enfance. -8. Visions d'Oxford: (1) Le Palimpseste. (2) Levana et nos -Notre-Dame des Tristesses. (3) Le Spectre du Brocken. (4) -Savannah-la-Mer. 9. Conclusion.</p></blockquote> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">DU VIN ET DU HASCHISCH, COMPARÉS COMME MOYENS DE MULTIPLICATION DE -L'INDIVIDUALITÉ</span>, 1851, 1858.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1, 2, 3. Le Vin. 5, 6, 7. Le Haschisch.</p></blockquote> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LA FANFARLO</span>, 1847.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LE JEUNE ENCHANTEUR. HISTOIRE TIRÉE D'UN PALIMPSESTE DE POMPÉIA</span>, 1846.</p> - -<p>Volume V. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES</span>. Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de -Charles Baudelaire.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Edgar Poe: sa vie et ses œuvres. 2. Double assassinat dans la -rue Morgue. 3. La lettre volée. 4. Le scarabée d'or. 5. Le canard -au ballon. 6. Aventure sans pareille d'un certain Hans Pfaall. -7. Manuscrit trouvé dans une bouteille. 8. Une descente dans le -Maelstrom. 9. Le vérité sur le cas de M. Valdemar. 10. Révélation -magnétique, 11. Les souvenirs de M. Auguste Bedloe. 12. Morella. -13. Ligeia. 14. Metzengerstein. 15. Le Mystère de Marie Roget.</p></blockquote> - -<p>Volume VI. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">NOUVELLES HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES.</span> Par Edgar Poe. -Traduction de Charles Baudelaire.</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe. 2. Le Démon de la Perversité. -3. Le Chat noir. 4. William Wilson. 5. L'homme des foules. -6. Le cœur révélateur. 7. Bérénice. 8. La chute de la maison -Usher. 9. Le puits et la pendule. 10. Hop-Frog. 11. La Barrique -d'Amontillado. 12. Le Masque de la Mort rouge. 13. Le Roi Peste. -14. Le Diable dans le beffroi. 15. Lionnerie. 16. Quatre bêtes en -une. 17. Petite discussion avec une momie. 18. Puissance de la -Parole. 19. Colloque entre Monos et Una. 20. Conversation d'Eiros -avec Charmion. 21. Ombre. 22. Silence. 23. L'île de la Fée. 24. -Le Portrait Ovale.</p></blockquote> - -<p>Volume VII. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">AVENTURES D'ARTHUR GORDON PYM. EURÉKA.</span> Par Edgar Poe. -Traduction de Charles Baudelaire.</p> - - - -<p>III</p> - -<p>1. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">ESSAIS DE BIBLIOGRAPHIE CONTEMPORAINE: CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>. Par A. de -Fizelière et Georges Decaux. Paris, Académie des Bibliophiles, rue de -la Bourse, 10, 1868. Numéro 178.</p> - -<p>2. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SA VIE ET SON ŒUVRE</span>. Par Charles Asselineau. -Paris, Alphonse Lemerre, Editeur, Passage Choiseul, 47, 1869.</p> - -<p>3. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SOUVENIRS. CORRESPONDANCES</span>— -<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">BIBLIOGRAPHIE</span><i>—suivie de pièces inédités.</i> Par Charles Cousin. La -Bibliographie par le Vicomte Spoelberck de Lovenjoul. Paris, Chez René -Pincebourde, 14 rue de Beaume (quai Voltaire), 1872.</p> - -<p>4.<span style="font-size: 0.8em;"> CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: ŒUVRES POSTHUMES ET CORRESPONDANCE -INÉDITS</span><i>—précédée d'une Étude Biographique.</i> Par Eugène Crépet. Paris, -Maison Quantin, Compagnie-Générale d'impression et d'Édition, 7 rue -Benoît, 1887.</p> - -<p>5. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LE TOMBEAU DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>—<i>précédée d'une Étude sur les -Textes de les Fleurs du Mal, Commentaire et Variantes.</i> Par le Prince -Ourousof. Paris, Bibliothèque Artistique et Littéraire (<i>La Plume,</i>) -1896.</p> - -<p>6. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span> (1821-1867). Par Féli Gautier. Orné de 26 -Portraits différents du Poète et de 28 Gravures et Reproductions. -Bruxelles, E. Deman, 1904. Tirage à 150 Exemplaires numérotés. -Exemplaire No. 74.</p> - -<p>7. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">VERSIFICATION ET MÉTRIQUE DE BAUDELAIRE</span>. Par Albert Cassagne. Paris, -Hachette, 1906.</p> - -<p>8. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LETTRES</span> (1841-1866) <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>. Paris, Mercure de France, -1908.</p> - -<p>9. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">ŒUVRES POSTHUMES DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>. Paris, Mercure de France, -1908.</p> - -<p>10. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LE CARNET DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</span>. 1911.</p> - -<p>Publié avec une Introduction et des Notes par Féli Gautier et orné -d'un dessin inédité de Baudelaire. Paris, J. Chevrel, Libraire 29 rue -de Seine. Cette plaquette non mise dans le commerce à été tirée à cent -exemplaires sur papier velin d'arches. Numéro 27.</p> - -<p>This <i>petit carnot vert,</i> which contains seven quires of twenty-four -pages—the last two have been torn out—was used by Baudelaire for -noting down certain private details, details of almost every kind, -which he began in 1861 and ended in 1864. There are lists of his debts, -of his friends, of his enemies, of his projects, of his proofs, of his -books, of his articles, of the people he has to see and to write to, of -the etchings and drawings he buys or intends to buy, of the money he -owes and of the money he is in the utmost need of. On one page is the -original text of his dedication of the "Poems on Prose." On one page he -reckons forty days in which to execute some of his translations, his -prose, and his poems. On another page he gives a list of his hatreds, -underlining <i>Vilainies, Canailles</i>; then his plans for short stories -and dramas. These notes are of importance. "Faire en un an 2 vols, <i>de -Nouvelles</i> et <i>Mon cœur mis à nu.</i>" "<i>Tous les jours cinq poèmes et -autre chose.</i>" Then this sinister note: "Pour faire du neuf, quitter -Paris, ou je me meurs." After this come long lists of the women he -frequents and of their addresses, such as 29 rue Neuve Bréda, 36 rue -Cigalle. After this comes Swinburne's verses, with the list of the few -friends he possesses: Villiers, Noriac, Manet, Malassis, his mother; -together with Louise, Gabrielle, and Judith.</p> - -<p>11. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LETTRES INÉDITÉS A SA MÈRE</span> (1833-1866). Par Charles Baudelaire. -Louis Conard, Libraire Editeur, 6 Place de la Madeleine, Paris, 1918. -Numéro 182.</p> - -<p>12. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">JOURNEAUX INTIMES DE CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: TEXTE INTEGRAL</span>. Paris, -Georges Crès, 21 rue Hautefeuille, 1919.</p> - -<p>This edition is founded on the original manuscripts of Baudelaire, now -in the possession of Gabriel Thomas.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">FUSÉES</span>. A manuscript of fifteen pages, containing twenty-two sections -numbered in red ink; the pagination is also in red ink. The notes have, -often enough, the aspect of mere fragments, scrawled angrily. One of -them, numbered 53, and two paragraphs of another (the note 17: <i>Tantôt -il lui demandait; Minette</i>) are written in pencil; note 12 is written -in blue ink. Certain phrases in the text are used twice over.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">MON CŒUR MIS À NU</span>. A manuscript of 91 pages, containing 197 articles -numbered in red ink; the pagination used in the same way as in the -other. Every note is preceded with the autograph mention: <i>Mon Cœur mis -à nu.</i> The text is written rapidly; the notes numbered 26, 31, 44, 48, -51, 54, 60, 68, 69, 72, 75 (the last three in italics), 80 are written -with a black pencil, the note 62 with a black pencil on blue paper, and -the note 83 written with a red pencil.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h4><a name="NOTES" id="NOTES">NOTES</a></h4> - - -<p>Fascinated by sin, Baudelaire, as I have said in these pages, is never -the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as the original sin; he studies -sin as he studies evil, with a stern logic; he finds in horror a kind -of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; rarely in hideous things, save -when his sense of what I call a moralist makes him moralise, as in his -terrible poem, <i>Une Charogne.</i></p> - -<p>Baudelaire's original manuscript, that is to say, the copy he makes for -his final text, I have recently bought. It covers two and a half folio -pages, folded four times across, as if he had carried it about with -him; it is written on thin, half-yellow paper, yellowed with age, and -on both sides; it is copied at tremendous speed with a quill pen that -blots the dashes he puts under every stanza. The title is underlined; -the only revision is where he obliterates "comme une vague" (which he -had used in the first line) and changes it to "d'un souffle, vague." He -uses a tremendous amount of capital letters; as in the first stanza: -"L'Objet, Mon Cœur, Matin, Doux, Détour, d'un Sentier, Une Charogne, -Cailloux." In the next: "Femme Lubrique, Les Poisons, D'une Façon -Nonchalant et Cynique, Ventre, Exhalations." At the end of the last -stanza but one he writes:</p> - -<p> -"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses<br /> -Vivre parmi les monuments;"<br /> -</p> - -<p>which he changes in the text of his <i>Fleurs du mal</i> into:</p> - -<p> -"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses<br /> -Moisir parmi les ossements."<br /> -</p> - -<p>The change makes an enormous improvement to the stanza.</p> - -<p>To possess this manuscript written by Baudelaire is to possess one of -the most magnificent poems he ever wrote: the whole thing is copied in -a kind of unholy rapture, in a kind of evil perversion.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h5>I. AN ADVENTURE IN FIRST EDITIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS</h5> - - -<p>I am, fortunately, the possessor of a copy of the first edition of <i>Les -Fleurs du Mal.</i> The title-page is as follows: <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LES FLEURS DU MAL</span> || -par Charles Baudelaire. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de Broise: || -Libraire-Éditeurs. || 4 rue de Buci. || 1857.</p> - -<p>This copy is signed, in brown Parisian ink: <i>"à mon ami Champfleury, -Ch. Baudelaire</i>" His signature is fantastic: the B. curled backward -like a snake's tail in an Egyptian hieroglyphic, the straight line -like an enchanter's wand. It is "grand-12; 252 pages." It contains one -hundred poems, the perfect number. It is printed on <i>papier vergé.</i> It -is one of the twenty copies, thus specially printed, that Baudelaire -ordered for himself and for certain of his friends. The rest of the -edition was printed on common white paper. Taken as a whole, this is -certainly one of the most perfectly printed books done in France, or -anywhere, in the past century.</p> - -<p>Poulet-Malassis came from Alençon to Paris, and began by printing the -<i>Odes Funambulesques</i> of Théodore de Banville early in 1857, before he -completed the publication of <i>Les Fleurs du Mal</i> in July of that year. -Baudelaire wrote to him, saying that he did not want popularity, "<i>mais -un bel éreintage général qui attirera la curiosité."</i> He asked him to -be sparing in blank spaces on the pages; and to use certain archaisms -and touches of red. These touches of red are given on the title-page; -they have a decorative effect. He said that he had a natural horror -of the over-use of inverted commas, which have a way of spoiling the -text. He must have a unique system of his own. "I must have," he -insists, "in this kind of production, the one admissible thing, that -is, perfection." There one sees his unerring instinct; his sense of the -exact value of words. Yet he writes to his publisher, underlining the -phrase: "You know certain things better than I do, but whenever there -is, on my part, no radical repulsion, follow your taste." He rages -against de Broise's perpetual reproaches with regard to <i>les surcharges -de M. Baudelaire—</i>the "author's corrections." He points out certain -printer's mistakes, page 44 for page 45, and <i>guères</i> rhyming with -<i>vulgaire.</i> There was no time to correct these errors; they remain so -in the printed pages of my copy.</p> - -<p>It is interesting, in regard to this question, to find in the first -text of <i>Le Vin de l'Assassin</i> these lines:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Ma femme est morte, je suis libre!<br /> -Je puis donc boire tout mon saoul"<br /> -</p> - -<p>In the second edition one reads "soûl." I find in Brachet's -<i>Dictionnaire Étymologique</i> this definition of the word "<i>soûl,</i> ancien -français, <i>saoul.</i> Latin <i>satallus,</i> d'où l'ancien français <i>saoul.</i>" -Therefore Baudelaire was right, traditionally, in using the original -form of the word.</p> - -<p>His worst trouble is in getting the famous dedication to Gautier -printed and spaced as it had to be. It must be composed in a certain -solemn style. Then he writes: "The magician has made me abbreviate the -dedication; it must not be a profession of faith, which might have the -fault of attracting people's eyes '<i>sur le côté scabreux du volume.</i>'" -As it is, strangely enough for him, Baudelaire made a mistake in -syntax, using "<i>au magicien ès-langue française"</i> instead of "<i>au -parfait magicien ès-lettres françaises</i>," which he corrected in the -edition of 1861.</p> - -<p>On July 11, 1857, he writes to Malassis: "Quick, hide the edition, -the whole edition. I have saved fifty here. The mistake was in having -sent a copy to <i>Le Figaro</i>! As the edition was sold out in three weeks -we may have the glory of a trial, from which we can easily escape." -The trial came; he was obliged to suppress six poems (supposed to -contain "obscene and immoral passages"). Baudelaire never ceased to -protest against the infamy of this trial. A copy of the second edition -(not nearly so well printed as the first) is before me: <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LES FLEURS -DU MAL</span>. || Par Charles Baudelaire. || Seconde Edition. || Augmentée -de trente-cinq poèmes nouveaux || et ornée d'un portrait de l'auteur -dessiné et gravé par Bracquemont. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de -Broise. || Editeurs. || 97. Rue de Richelieu, et Beaux-Arts, 56. || -1861. || Tout droits réservés. || Paris: Imp. Simon Raçon et Comp. || -Rue d'Erfurth.</p> - -<p>In comparing the text of 1857 with that of 1861 I find several -revisions of certain verses, not always, I think, for the best. For -instance, in the <i>Préface,</i> the first edition is as follows:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Dans nos cervaux malsains, comme un million d'helminthes,<br /> -Grouille, chante et ripaille un peuple de Démons."<br /> -</p> - -<p>He changes this into "verre fourmillant;" "dans nos cervaux ribote." On -page 22, he writes:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme<br /> -A l'aspect du tableau plein d'épouvantement<br /> -Des monstruosités, que voile un vêtement;<br /> -Des visages masqués et plus laids que des masques."<br /> -</p> - -<p>In the later text he puts a full stop after "épouvantement," and -continues:</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"> -"O monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement!<br /> -O ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques."<br /> -</p> - -<p>This reading seems to me infinitely inferior to the reading of the -first version.</p> - -<p>Again, there are certain other changes, even less happy, such as -"<i>quadrature</i>" into "<i>nature</i>," "<i>divin élixir</i>" into "<i>comme un -élixir,</i>" "<i>Mon âme se balançait comme un ange joyeux,</i>" into "<i>Mon -cœur, comme un oiseau, voltigeant tout joyeux."</i> Baudelaire, in sending -a copy of <i>Les fleurs du mal</i> (1861) to Alfred de Vigny, wrote that he -had marked the new poems in pencil in the list at the end of the book. -In my copy—1857—he has marked, with infinite delicacy, in pencil, -only three poems: "Lesbos," "Femmes Damnées," "Les Métamorphoses du -Vampire." He underlines, in "Une Charogne," these words in the text: -"<i>charogne lubrique, cynique, ventre, d'exhalaisons."</i> At one side of -the prose note on "Franciscae meae laudes" he has made, on the margin, -a number of arrows.</p> - -<p>In <i>Le Corsaire-Satan,</i> January, 1848, Baudelaire reviewed three books -of short stories by Champfleury. On the first, <i>Chien-Caillou,</i> he -writes: "One day a quite small, quite simple volume, <i>Chien Caillou,</i> -was printed; the history simply, clearly, crudely related, of a poor -engraver, certainly original, but whose poverty was so extreme that -he lived on carrots, between a rabbit and a girl of the town; and -he made masterpieces," I have before me this book: "<i>Chien-Caillou, -fantaisies d'hiver.</i> Par Champfleury. Paris, A la Libraire Pittoresque -de Martinon, Rue du Coq-Saint-Martin, 1847," It is dedicated to Victor -Hugo. "I dedicate to you this work, in spite of the fact that I have -an absolute horror of dedications—because of the expression <i>young -man</i> that it leaves in readers' minds. But you have been the first to -signalize <i>Chien-Caillou</i> to your friends, and your luminous genius has -suddenly recognized the reality of the second title: <i>This is not a -Story."</i></p> - -<p>In the same year came out <i>Le Gâteau des rois.</i> Par M. Jules Janin. -Ouvrage entièrement inédit. Paris. Libraire d'Amyot, 6 rue de la Paix, -1847. I have my own copy of this edition, bound in pale yellow-paper -covers.</p> - -<p>On January 26th, 1917, there came to me from Paris an original -manuscript, written by Charles Baudelaire on three pages of note-paper, -concerning these two books of Champfleury and Jules Janin. Being -unfinished, it may have been the beginning of an essay which he never -completed. Certainly I find no trace of this prose in any of his -printed books. From the brown colour of the ink that he used I think it -was written in 1857, as the ink and the handwriting are absolutely the -same as in his signed <i>Fleurs du mal</i> sent to Champfleury. There are -several revisions and corrections in the text of the MS. that I possess.</p> - -<p>At the top of the first page are nearly obliterated the words: -<i>remplacez les blancs.</i> It begins: "Pour donner immédiatement au -lecteur non initié dans les dessous de la littérature, non instruit -dans les préliminaires des réputations, une idée première de -l'importance littéraire réille de ces petits livres, gros d'esprit, -de poésie et d'observations, qu'il sache que le premier d'entre nous, -<i>Chien-Caillou,</i> Fantaisies d'hiver, fut publié en même temps qu'un -petit livre d'un homme très célèbre, qui avait, en même temps que -Champfleury, l'idée de ces publications en trimestrielles." It ends: -"Où est le cœur? Où est l'âme, où est la raison?"</p> - -<p>Here is my translation:</p> - -<p>"To convey to the reader who has not penetrated into the back-parlours -of literature, who has not been instructed in the preliminaries of -reputations, an immediate idea of the real literary importance of -these little books, fat in wit, poetry, and observations, it should be -stated that the first among them, <i>Chien-Caillou.</i> Fantaisies d'hiver, -was published at the same time as another small book by a famous man -who had, simultaneously with Champfleury, started these quarterly -publications.</p> - -<p>"Now, for these people whose intelligence, daily applied to the -elaboration of books, is hardest to please, Champfleury's work absorbed -that of the famous man. All those of whom I speak have known <i>Le -Gâteau des rois.</i> Their profession is to know everything. <i>Le Gâteau -des rois,</i> a kind of Christmas book, or 'Livre de Noël,' showed above -all a clearly asserted pretention to draw from "the language, by -playing infinite variations on the dictionary, all the effects which -a transcendental instrumentalist draws from his chords. Shifting of -forces, error of an unballasted mind! The ideas in this strange book -follow each other in haste, dart with the swiftness of sound, leaning -at random on infinitely tenuous connections. Their association with one -another hangs by a thread according to a method of thought similar to -that of people in Bedlam.</p> - -<p>"Vast current of involuntary ideas, wild-goose chase, abnegation of -will! This singular feat of dexterity was accomplished by the man you -know, whose sole and special faculty consists in not being master of -himself, the man of encounters and good fortunes.</p> - -<p>"Assuredly there was talent. But what abuse! What debauchery! And, -besides, what fatigue and what pain!</p> - -<p>"No doubt some respect is due or, at least, some grateful compassion, -for the tireless writhing of an old dancing girl. But, alas! worn-out -attitudes, weak methods, boresome seductivities!</p> - -<p>"The ideas of our man are but old women driven crazy with too much -dancing, too much kicking off the ground. <i>Sustalerunt sæpius pedes.</i></p> - -<p>"Where is the heart? Where the soul? Where reason?"</p> - -<p>Here the manuscript comes to an abrupt end, and one is left to wonder -how much more Baudelaire had written; perhaps only one more page, as -he had a peculiar fashion of writing fragments on bits of note-paper. -Certainly this prose has the refinement, the satire, the exquisite use -of words, the inimitable charm and unerring instinct of a faultless -writer. Not only is there his passion for <i>les danseuses</i> and for the -exotic, but a sinister touch in <i>l'abdication de la volonté</i> which -recurs finally in a letter written February 8, 1865; for, when one -imagines himself capable of an absolute abdication of the will, it -means that something of the man has gone out of him.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h5>II. AN ADVENTURE IN IMAGES</h5> - - -<p>It is often said, not without a certain kind of truth, that the -likeness is precisely what matters least in a portrait. That is one of -the interesting heresies which Whistler did not learn from Velasquez. -Because a portrait which is a likeness, and nothing more than a -likeness, can often be done by a second-rate artist, by a kind of -sympathetic trick, it need not follow that likeness is in itself an -unimportant quality in a masterly portrait, nor will it be found that -likeness was ever disregarded by the greatest painters. But there are -many kinds of likenesses, among which we have to choose, as we have to -choose in all art which follows nature, between a realism of outward -circumstance and a realism of inner significance. Every individual face -has as many different expressions as the soul behind it has moods. -When we talk, currently, of a "good likeness," we mean, for the most -part, that a single, habitual expression, with which we are familiar, -as we are familiar with a frequently worn suit of clothes, has been -rendered; that we see a man as we imagine ourselves ordinarily to see -him. But, in the first place, most people see nothing with any sort of -precision; they cannot tell you the position and shape of the ears, or -the shape of the cheek-bones, of their most intimate friends. Their -mental vision is so feeble that they can call up only a blurred image, -a vague compromise between expressions, without any definite form at -all. Others have a mental vision so sharp, retentive, yet without -selection, that to think of a person is to call up a whole series -of precise images, each the image of a particular expression at a -particular moment; the whole series failing to coalesce into one really -typical likeness, the likeness of soul or body. Now it is the artist's -business to choose among these mental pictures; better still, to create -on paper, or on his canvas, the image which was none of these, but -which these helped to make in his own soul.</p> - -<p>The Manet portrait of Charles Baudelaire, dated 1862, is exquisite, -ironical, subtle, enigmatical, astonishing; He has arrested the head -and shoulders of the poet in an instant's vision; the outlines are -definite, clear, severe, and simple. One sees the eager head thrust -forward, as if the man were actually walking; the fine and delicate -nose, voluptuously dilated in the nostrils, seems to breathe in vague -perfumes; the mouth, half-seen, has a touch of his malicious irony; the -right eye shines vividly in a fixed glance, those eyes that had the -colour of Spanish tobacco. Over the long, waving hair, that seems to -be swept backward by the wind, is placed, with unerring skill, at the -exact angle, that top-hat that Baudelaire had to have expressly made to -fit the size of his head. Around his long neck is just seen the white -soft collar of his shirt, with a twisted tie in front. In this picture -one sees the inspired poet, with distinct touches of this strong piece -of thinking flesh and blood. And Manet indicates, I think, that glimpse -of the soul which one needs in a perfect likeness.</p> - -<p>In the one done in 1865, the pride of youth, the dandy, the vivid -profile, have disappeared. Here, as if in an eternal aspect, Baudelaire -is shown. There is his tragic mask; the glory of the eyes, that seem to -defy life, to defy death, seems enormous, almost monstrous. The lips -are closed tightly together, in their long, sinuous line, almost as if -Leonardo da Vinci had stamped them with his immortality. The genius -of Manet has shown the genius of Baudelaire in a gigantic shadow; the -whole face surging out of that dark shadow; and the soul is there!</p> - -<p>In the portrait by Carjat, his face and his eyes are contorted as if -in a terrible rage; the whole face seems drawn upward and downward in -a kind of convulsion; and the aspect, one confesses, shows a degraded -type, as if all the vices he had never committed looked out of his eyes -in a wild revolt.</p> - -<p>It is in the mask of Baudelaire done by Zachari Astruc that I find -almost the ethereal beauty, the sensitive nerves, the drawn lines, of -the death-mask of Keats; only, more tragic. It looks out on one as a -carved image, perfect in outline, implacable, restless, sensual; and, -in that agonized face, what imagination, what enormous vitality, what -strange subtlety, what devouring energy! It might be the face of a -Roman Emperor, refined, century by century, from the ghastly face of -Nero, the dissolute face of Caligula, to this most modern of poets.</p> - - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Charles Baudelaire, by Arthur Symons - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARLES BAUDELAIRE *** - -***** This file should be named 50488-h.htm or 50488-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/4/8/50488/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generpously made available by the Internet Archive.) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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