Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  his time - to assert its necessity.

  Baudelaire's morbidity of temperament cannot, of course, be

  ignored : and no one who has looked at the work of Crepet or the

  recent small biographical study of Fran�ois Porche can forget it.

  We should be misguided if we treated it as an unfortunate ailment

  which can be discounted or attempted to detach the sound from

  the unsound in his work. Without the morbidity none of his work

  would be possible or significant ; his weaknesses can be composed

  into a larger whole of strength, and this is implied in my assertion

  that neither the health of Goethe nor the malady of Baudelaire

  matters in itself: it is what both men made of their endowments

  that matters. To the eye of the world, and quite properly for all

  questions of private life, Baudelaire was thoroughly perverse and

  insufferable : a man with a talent for ingratitude and unsociability,

  intolerably irritable, and with a mulish determination to make the

  worst of everything ; if he had money, to squander it ; if he had

  friends, to alienate them ; if he had any good fortune, to disdain it.

  He had the pride of the man who feels in himself great weakness

  and great strength. Having great genius, he had neither the

  patience nor the inclination, had he had the power to overcome

  2.31

  APPREC I A T I ONS O F I N D I V I DUAL AUTHORS · 1 9 3 0- 1 96 5

  his weakness ; on the contrary, he exploited it for theoretical

  purposes. The morality of such a course may be a matter for

  endless dispute ; for Baudelaire, it was the way to liberate his mind

  and give us the legacy and lesson that he has left.

  He was one of those who have great strength, but strength

  merely to suffer. He could not escape suffering and could not

  transcend it, so he attracted pain to himself. But what he could

  do, with that immense passive strength and sensibilities which no

  pain could impair, was to study his suffering. And in this limitation he is wholly unlike Dante, not even like any character in Dante's Hell. But, on the other hand, such suffering as Baudelaire's implies the possibility of a positive state of beatitude.

  Indeed, in his way of suffering is already a kind of presence of the

  supernatural and of the superhuman. He rejects always the purely

  natural and the purely human ; in other words, he is neither

  'naturalist' or 'humanist'. Either because he cannot adjust himself

  to the actual world he has to reject it in favour of Heaven and

  Hell, or because he has the perception of Heaven and Hell he

  rejects the present world : both ways of putting it are tenable.

  There is in his statements a good deal of romantic detritus ; ses

  ai/es de giant /' empechent de marcher, he says of the Poet and of the

  Albatross, but not convincingly ; but there is also truth about

  himself and about the world. His ennui may of course be explained,

  as everything can be explained in psychological or pathological

  terms ; but it is also, from the opposite point of view, a true form

  of acedia, arising from the unsuccessful struggle towards the

  spiritual life.

  From the poems alone, I venture to think, we are not likely to

  grasp what seems to me the true sense and significance of

  Baudelaire's mind. Their excellence of form, their perfection of

  phrasing, and their superficial coherence, may give them the

  appearance of presenting a definite and final state of mind. In

  reality, they seem to me to have the external but not the internal

  form of classic art. One might even hazard the conjecture that the

  care for perfection of form, among some of the romantic poets of

  the nineteenth century, was an effort to support, or to conceal

  from view, an. inner disorder. Now the true claim of Baudelaire as

  an artist is not that he found a superficial form, but that he was

  searching for a form of life. In minor form he never indeed

  equalled Theophile Gautier, to whom he significantly dedicated

  his poems : in the best of the slight verse of Gautier there is a

  satisfaction, a balance of inwards and form, which we do not find

  in Baudelaire. He had a greater technical ability than Gautier, and

  2.32

  BAUDELA I R E

  yet the content o f feeling is constantly bursting the receptacle. His

  apparatus, by which I do not mean his command of words and

  rhythms, but his stock of imagery (and every poet's stock of

  imagery is circumscribed somewhere), is not wholly perdurable or

  adequate. His prostitutes, mulattoes, Jewesses, serpents, cats,

  corpses form a machinery which has not worn very well ; his Poet,

  or his Don Juan, has a romantic ancestry which is too clearly

  traceable. Compare with the costumery of Baudelaire the stock of

  imagery of the Vita Nuova, or of Cavalcanti, and you find

  Baudelaire's does not everywhere wear as well as that of several

  centuries earlier ; compare him with Dante or Shakespeare, for

  what such a comparison is worth, and he is found not only a

  much smaller poet, but one in whose work much more that is

  perishable has entered.

  To say this is only to say that Baudelaire belongs to a definite

  place in time. Inevitably the offspring of romanticism, and by his

  nature the first counter-romantic in poetry, he could, like anyone

  else, only work with the materials which were there. It must not

  be forgotten that a poet in a romantic age cannot be a· 'classical'

  poet except in tendency. If he is sincere, he must express with

  individual differences the general state of mind - not as a duty, but

  simply because he cannot help participating in it. For such poets, we

  may expect often to get much help from reading their prose works

  and even notes and diaries ; help in deciphering the discrepancies

  between head and heart, means and end, material and ideals.

  What preserves Baudelaire's poetry from the fate of most

  French poetry of the nineteenth century up to his time, and has

  made him, as M. Valery has said in a recent introduction to the

  Fleurs du Mal, the one modern French poet to be widely read

  abroad, is not quite easy to conclude. It is partly that technical

  mastery which can hardly be overpraised, and which has made his

  verse an inexhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own

  language. When we read

  Maint JoJ•au dort emeveli

  Dam les tenebres et l'oubli,

  Bim loin des pioches et des sondes;

  Mainte fleur epanche a regret

  Son parfum doux comme wz secret

  Dam les solitudes profondes,

  we might for a moment think it a more lucid bit of Mallarmc ; and

  so original is the arrangement of words that we might easily

  overlook its borrowing from Gray's Elel{Y· When we read

  Valse melancolique et langoureux vertige!

  233

  APPRECI A T I ONS O F I N D I V I DUAL A UTHORS

  1 9 3 0- 1 9 6 5

  '

  we are already in the Paris of Lafargue. Baudelaire gave to French

  poets as generously as he borrowed from English and American

  poets. The renovation of the versification of Racine has been

  mentioned often enough ;
quite genuine, but might be overemphasized, as it sometimes comes near to being a trick. But even without this, Baudelaire's variety and resourcefulness would still

  be immense.

  Furthermore, besides the stock of images which he used that

  seems already second-hand, he gave new possibilities to poetry in

  a new stock of imagery of contemporary life .

  . . . Au cC£ur d'un vieux faubourg, labyrinthe Jangeux

  Ou l'humaniti grouille en ferments orageux,

  On voit un vieux chiffonnier qui vient, hochant Ia tete,

  Buttant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poete.

  This introduces something new, and something universal in

  modern life. (The last line quoted, which in ironic terseness

  anticipates Corbiere, might be contrasted with the whole poem

  Benediction which begins the volume.) It is not merely in the use

  of imagery of common life, not merely in the use of imagery of the

  sordid life of a great metropolis, but in the elevation of such

  imagery to the first intensity - presenting it as it is, and yet making

  it represent something much more than itself - that Baudelaire

  has created a mode of release and expression for other men.

  This invention of language, at a moment when French poetry

  in particular was famishing for such invention, is enough to make

  of Baudelaire a great poet, a great landmark in poetry. Baudelaire

  is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language,

  for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete

  renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an

  attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important. In

  his verse, he is now less a model to be imitated or a source to be

  drained than a reminder of the duty, the consecrated task, of

  sincerity. From a fundamental sincerity he could not deviate. The

  superficies of sincerity (as I think has not always been remarked)

  is not always there. As I have suggested, many of his poems are

  insufficiently removed from their romantic origins, from Byronic

  paternity and Satanic fraternity. The 'satanism' of the Black Mass

  was very much in the air ; in exhibiting it Baudelaire is the voice

  of his time ; but I would observe that in Baudelaire, as in no one

  else, it is redeemed by meaning something else. He uses the same

  paraphernalia, but cannot limit its symbolism even to all that of

  which he is conscious. Compare him with Huysmans in A rebours,

  En route, and La-bas. Huysmans, who is a first-rate realist of his

  234

  BAUDELAIRE

  time, only succeeds in making his diabolism interesting when he

  treats it externally, when he is merely describing a manifestation

  of his period (if such it was). His own interest in such matters is,

  like his interest in Christianity, a petty affair. Huysmans merely

  provides a document. Baudelaire would not even provide that, if

  he had been really absorbed in that ridiculous hocus-pocus. But

  actually Baudelaire is concerned, not with demons, black masses,

  and romantic blasphemy, but with the real problem of good and

  evil. I t is hardly more than an accident of time that he uses the

  current imagery and vocabulary of blasphemy. In the middle

  nineteenth century, the age which (at its best) Goethe had prefigured, an age of bustle, programmes, platforms, scientific progress, humanitarianism and revolutions which improved

  nothing, an age of progressive degradation, Baudelaire perceived

  that what really matters is Sin and Redemption. It is a proof of

  his honesty that he went as far as he could honestly go and no

  further. To a mind observant of the post-Voltaire France

  (Voltaire . . . le pridicateur des concierges), a mind which saw the

  world of Napolion le petit more lucidly than did that of Victor

  Hugo, a mind which at the same time had no affinity for the Saint­

  Sulpicerie of the day, the recognition of the reality of Sin is a New

  Life ; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a

  world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress

  reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation -

  of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives

  some significance to living. I t is this, I believe, that Baudelaire is

  trying to express ; and it is this which separates him from the

  modernist Protestantism of Byron and Shelley. It is apparently

  Sin in the Swinburnian sense, but really Sin in the permanent

  Christian sense, that occupies the mind of Baudelaire.

  Yet, as I said, the sense of Evil implies the sense of good. Here

  too, as Baudelaire apparently confuses, and perhaps did confuse,

  Evil with its theatrical representations, Baudelaire is not always

  certain in his notion of the Good. The romantic idea of Love is

  never quite exorcized, but never quite surrendered to. In Le

  Balcon, which M. Valery considers, and I think rightly, one of

  Baudelaire's most beautiful poems, there is all the romantic idea,

  but something more : the reaching out towards something which

  cannot be had in, but which may be had partly through, personal

  relations. Indeed, in much romantic poetry· the sadness is due to

  the exploitation of the fact that no human relations are adequate

  to human desires, but also to the disbelief in any further object

  for human desires than that which, being human, fails to satisfy

  them. One of the unhappy necessities of human existence is that

  we have to 'find things out for ourselves'. If it were not so, the

  235

  APPREC I AT I ONS OF I N D I V I DUAL AUTHORS · 1 9 J o- I 96 5

  statement of Dante would, at teast for poets, have done once for

  all. Baudelaire has all the romantic sorrow, but invents a new kind

  of romantic nostalgia - a derivative of his nostalgia being the

  poesie des departs, the poesie des sa lies d' attente. In a beautiful paragraph of the volume in question, Mon creur mis a nu, he imagines the vessels lying in harbour as saying : Quand partons-nous vers le

  bonheur ? and his minor successor Laforgue exclaims : Comme ils

  sont beaux, les trains manques. The poetry of flight - which, in

  contemporary France, owes a great debt to the poems of the A. 0.

  Barna booth of Valery Larbaud - is, in its origin in this paragraph

  of Baudelaire, a dim recognition of the direction of beatitude.

  But in the adjustment of the natural to the spiritual, of the

  bestial to the human and the human to the supernatural, Baudelaire is a bungler compared with Dante ; the best that can be said, and that is a very great deal, is that what he knew he found out for

  himself. In his book, the Journaux lntimes, and especially in Mon

  creur mis a nu, he has a great deal to say of the love of man and

  woman. One aphorism which has been especially noticed is the

  following : Ia volupte unique et supreme de !'amour git dans Ia

  certitude de faire le mal. This means, I think, that Baudelaire has

  perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman

  from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil

  (of moral Good and Evil which are not natural Good and Bad or

  Puritan Right and Wrong). Having an imperfect, vague romantic

  conception of Good,
he was at least able to understand that the

  sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural,

  'life-giving', cheery automatism of the modern world. For

  Baudelaire, sexual operation is at least something not analogous

  to Kruschen Salts.

  So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or

  good ; 1 so far as we do evil or good, we are human ; and it is better,

  in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing : at least, we

  exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for

  salvation ; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for

  damnation. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors,

  from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be

  damned. Baudelaire was man enough for damnation : whether he

  is damned is, of course, another question, and we are not prevented from praying for his repose. In all his humiliating traffic with other beings, he walked secure in this high vocation, that he

  was capable of a damnation denied to the politicians and the

  newspaper editors of Paris . . . .

  1 'Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey,

  his servants ye are to whom ye obey ; whether of sin unto death, or of

  obedience unto righteousness ?' - Romans vi. 16.

  236

  from THE PENSEES OF PAS CA L

  . . . Pascal's interest in society did not distract him from scientific

  research ; nor did this period occupy much space in what is a very

  short and crowded life. Partly his natural dissatisfaction with such

  a life, once he had learned all it had to teach him, partly the

  influence of his saintly sister Jacqueline, partly increasing suffering as his health declined, directed him more and more out of the world and to thoughts of eternity. And in 1 654 occurs what is

  called his 'second conversion', but which might be called his

  conversion simply.

  He made a note of his mystical experience, which he kept

  always about him, and which was found, after his death, sewn into

  the coat which he was wearing. The experience occurred on

  23 November 1 654, and there is no reason to doubt its genuineness unless we choose to deny all mystical experience. Now, Pascal was not a mystic, and his works are not to be classified

  amongst mystical writings ; but what can only be called mystical

  experience happens to many men who do not become mystics.