Collected Poetical Works of Charles Baudelaire

by Charles Baudelaire

  “Descendes, descendes, lamentable victimes.”

  Or this, which might serve as a text for one of John Martin’s vast sinister mezzotints:

  J’ai vu parfois au fond d’un théâtre banal

  Qu’enflammait l’orchestre sonore,

  Une fée allumer dans un ciel infernal

  Une miraculeuse aurore;

  J’ai vu parfois au fond d’un théâtre banal

  Un être, qui n’était que lumière, or et gaze,

  Terrasser rénorme Satan;

  Mais mon cœur que jamais ne visite l’extase,

  Est un théâtre où l’on attend

  Toujours, toujours en vain l’Etre aux ailes de gaze.

  George Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and Baudelaire: “Both authors — Poe and De Quincey — fell short of Baudelaire himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have a superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperameut and affection for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror.” Poe is without passion, except a passion for the macabre; what Huysmans calls “The October of the sensations”; whereas, there is a gulf of despair and terror and humanity in Baudelaire, which shakes your nerves, yet stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a poet, he was no match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual prestidigitation. The mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious detective tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the Poe the prophet and mystic — in these the American was more versatile than his French translator. That Baudelaire said, “Evil be thou my good,” is doubtless true. He proved all things and found them vanity. He is the poet of original sin, a worshipper of Satan for the sake of paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish to us — in his heart he was a believer. His was “an infinite reverse aspiration,” and mixed up with his pose was a disgust for vice, for life itself. He was the last of the Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called him the Kamchatka of Romanticism; its remotest hyperborean peak. Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as Naturalism; but Baudelaire is alive, and read. His glistening phosphorescent trail is over French poetry and he is the begetter of a school: — Verlaine, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Gabriel D’Annunzio, Aubrey Beardsley, Verhaeren, and many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire’s motto might be the obverse of Browning’s lines: “The Devil is in heaven. All’s wrong with the world.”

  When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanticists that they came from Chateaubriand, he should have substituted the name of Rousseau— “Romanticism, it is Rousseau,” exclaims Pierre Lasserre. But there is more of Byron and Petrus Borel — a forgotten half-mad poet — in Baudelaire; though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau reactionary, sported the workingman’s blouse, cut his hair, shouldered a musket, went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling the proletarian “Brother!” (oh, Baudelaire!) and, as the Goncourts recorded in their diary, had the head of a maniac. How seriously we may take this swing of the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of the poet’s at the time of the Revolution: “Come,” he said, “let us go shoot General Aupick!” It was his stepfather that he thought of, not the eternal principles of Liberty. This may be a false anecdote; many such were foisted upon Baudelaire. For example, his exclamations at cafés or in public places, such as: “Have you ever eaten a baby? I find it pleasing to the palate!” or, “The night I killed my father!” Naturally, people stared and Baudelaire was happy — he had startled a bourgeois. The cannibalistic idea he may have borrowed from Swift’s amusing pamphlet, for this French poet knew English literature.

  Gautier compares the poems to a certain tale of Hawthorne’s in which there is a garden of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; he never descended into the mud and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged his soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France says, “a divine poet.” How childish, yet how touching is his resolution — he wrote in his diary of prayer’s dynamic force — when he was penniless, in debt, threatened with imprisonment, sick, nauseated with sin: “To make every morning my prayer to God, the reservoir of all force, and all justice; to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe as intercessors.” (Evidently, Maurice Barrès encountered here his theory of Intercessors.) Baudelaire loved the memory of his father as much as Stendhal hated his own. He became reconciled with his mother after the death of General Aupick, in 1857. He felt in 1862 that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for he wrote: “I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror. To-day imbecility’s wing fanned me as it passed.” The sense of the vertiginous gulf was abiding with him; read his poem, “Pascal avait son gouffre.”

  In preferring the Baudelaire translations of Poe to the original — and they give the impression of being original works — Stedman agreed with Asselineau that the French is more concise than the English. The prose of Poe and Baudelaire is clear, sober, rhythmic; Baudelaire’s is more lapidary, finer in contour, richer coloured, more supple, though without the “honey and tiger’s blood” of Barbey d’Aurevilly. Baudelaire’s soul was patiently built up as a fabulous bird might build its nest — bits of straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades of black stars, rags, leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a gleam of blue sky, arabesques of incense and verdigris, despairing hearts and music and the abomination of desolation, for its ground-tones. But this soul-nest is also a cemetery of the seven sorrows. He loves the clouds ... les nuages ... là bas.... It was là bas with him even in the tortures of his wretched love-life. Corruption and death were ever floating in his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who saw everywhere the hidden skeleton. Félicien Hops has best interpreted Baudelaire; the etcher and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too, is a Baudelarian. If there could be such an anomaly as a native wood-note wildly evil, it would be the lyric and astringent voice of this poet. His sensibility was both catholic and morbid, though he could be frigid in the face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a man for whom the invisible word existed; if Gautier was pagan, Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from mediæval days. The spirit rules, and, as Paul Bourget said, “he saw God.” A Manichean in his worship of evil, he nevertheless abased his soul: “Oh! Lord God! Give me the force and courage to contemplate my heart and my body without disgust,” he prays: but as some one remarked to Rochefoucauld, “Where you end, Christianity begins.”

  Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders of a poetic Maremma, which every miasma of the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and glow-worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire painted in his sultry music the profundities of abysms, the vastness of space. He painted, too, the great nocturnal silences of the soul.

  Pacem summum tenent! He never reached peace on the heights. Let us admit that souls of his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel is too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the enigma for us is none the less unfathomable. Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled delirium. To affiliate him with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffman, James Thomson, Coleridge, and the rest of the sombre choir does not explain him; he is, perhaps, nearer Donne and Villon than any of the others — strains of the metaphysical and sinister and supersubtle are to be discovered in him. The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bilocation, are only too easy to diagnose; but the remedy? Hypocrite lecteur — mon semblable — mon frère! When the subtlety, force, grandeur, of his poetic production be considered, together with its disquieting, nervous, vibrating qualities, it is not surprising that Victor Hugo wrote to the poet: “You invest the heaven of art with we know not what deadly rays; you create a new shudder.” Hugo might have said that he turned Art into an Inferno. Baudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry. In his heaven of fire, glass and ebony he is the blazing Lucifer. “A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, that did love beauty only...” once sang Tennyson, though not of the Fr
enchman.

  II

  As long ago as 1869, and in our “barbarous gas-lit country,” as Baudelaire named the land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which this poet was described as “unique and as interesting as Hamlet. He is that rare and unknown being, a genuine poet — a poet in the midst of things that have disordered his spirit — a poet excessively developed in his taste for and by beauty ... very responsive to the ideal, very greedy of sensation.” A better description of Baudelaire does not exist The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that sounded throughout the disordered symphony of the poet’s life.

  He was, later, revealed — also reviled — to American readers by Henry James, who completely missed his significance. This was in 1878, when appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists. Previous to that there had been some desultory discussion, a few essays in the magazines, and in 1875 a sympathetic paper by Professor James Albert Harrison of the University of Virginia. He denounced the Frenchman for his reprehensible taste, though he did not mention his beautiful verse nor his originality in the matter of criticism. Baudelaire, in his eyes, was not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of Sainte-Beuve, introduced Poe as a great man to the French nation. (See Baudelaire’s letter to Sainte-Beuve in the newly published Letters, 1841-1866.) Perhaps “Mr. Dick Minim” and his projected Academy of Criticism might make clear these devious problems.

  The Etudes Critiques of Edmond Schérer were collected in 1863. In them we find this unhappy, uncritical judgment: “Baudelaire, lui, n’a rien, ni le cœur, ni l’esprit, ni l’idée, ni le mot, ni la raison, ni la fantaisie, ni la verve, ni même la facture ... son unique titre c’est d’avoir contribué à créer l’esthétique de la débauche.” It is not our intention to dilate upon the injustice of this criticism. It is Baudelaire the critic of æsthetics in whom we are interested. Yet I cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of Schérer had been transformed into affirmations, only justice would have been accorded Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet, the most original of his century, but also a critic of the first rank, one who welcomed Richard Wagner when Paris hooted him and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, played the rôle of the envious; one who fought for Edouard Manet, Leconte de Lisle, Gustave Flaubert, Eugène Delacroix; fought with pen for the modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, Daumier, Félicien Rops, Gavarni, and Constantin Guys. He literally identified himself with De Quincey and Poe, translating them so wonderfully well that some unpatriotic persons like the French better than the originals. So much was Baudelaire absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted that the translator would meet the same fate as the American poet. A singular, vigorous spirit is Baudelaire’s, whose poetry with its “icy ecstasy” is profound and harmonious, whose criticism is penetrated by a catholic quality, who anticipated modern critics in his abhorrence of schools and environments, preferring to isolate the man and uniquely study him. He would have subscribed to Swinburne’s generous pronouncement: “I have never been able to see what should attract man to the profession of criticism but the noble pleasure of praising.” The Frenchman has said that it would be impossible for a critic to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic.

  Théophile Gautier’s study prefixed to the definitive edition of Les Fleurs du Mal is not only the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire as man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark of Gautier’s gifts as a critical essayist. We learn therein how the young Charles, an incorrigible dandy, came to visit Hôtel Pimodan about 1844. In this Hôtel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by the painters, poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day — that is, carefully selected ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Mérimée, and others whose verve or genius gave them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this cave of forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de Chagrin pictured the same sort of scenes which were supposed to occur weekly at the Pimodan. Gautier eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred artistic souls, where the beautiful Jewess, Maryx, who had posed for Ary Scheffer’s Mignon and for Paul Delaroche’s La Gloire, met the superb Madame Sabatier, the only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original of that extraordinary group of Clésinger’s — the sculptor and son-in-law of George Sand — la Femme au Serpent, a Salammbô à la mode in marble. Hasheesh was eaten, so Gautier writes, by Boissard and Baudelaire. As for the creator of Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust for such nonsense. He had to work for his living at journalism, and he died in harness, an irreproachable father, while the unhappy Baudelaire, the inheritor of an intense, unstable temperament, soon devoured his patrimony of 75,000 francs, and for the remaining years of his life was between the devil of his dusky Jenny Duval and the deep sea of hopeless debt.

  It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were no doubt much less wicked than the participants would have us believe, that Baudelaire encountered Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his portrait, and encouraged the fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We have seen an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray talent of about the same order as Thackeray’s, with a superadded note of the “horrific” — that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics. Baudelaire admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman praised the illustrations of Guys, he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the commonplaces of a painter’s technique; also how to compose a palette — a rather meaningless phrase nowadays. At least, he did not write of the arts without some technical experience. Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 1846, 1855, and 1859, the praise and blame they evoked were testimonies to the training and knowledge of their author. A new spirit had been born.

  The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are the production of a humanist. Some would put them above Diderot’s. Mr. Saintsbury, after Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire among the English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism observed too little and imagined too much. “In other words,” he adds, “to read a criticism of Baudelaire’s without the title affixed is by no means a sure method of recognizing the picture afterward.” Now, word-painting was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier, with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh impossible feat of competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of canvas and marble. And, if he with his verbal imagination did not entirely succeed, how could a less adept manipulator of the vocabulary? We do not agree with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine too much when the imagination is that of a poet. Baudelaire divined the work of the artist and set it down scrupulously in a prose of exceeding rectitude. He did not paint pictures in prose. He did not divagate. He did not overburden his pages with technical terms. But the spirit of his subject he did disengage in a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical schools were a cross for him to bear, and he wore his prejudices lightly. Like a true critic, he judged more by form than theme. There are no types; there is only life, he asserted, and long before Jules Laforgue. He was ever art-for-art, yet, having breadth of comprehension and a Heine-like capacity for seeing both sides of his own nature with its idiosyncrasies, he could write: “The puerile utopia of the school of art-for-art, in excluding morality, and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. All literature which refuses to advance fraternally between science and philosophy is a homicidal and a suicidal literature.”

  Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than of music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of democracy, of the democratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the Dresden uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary étude. Brave lads! Poets and musicians fight
their battles best in the region of the ideal. Baudelaire’s little attack of the equality-measles soon vanished. He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly and injustice of abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of paradox, he dedicated a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but he would not have contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that “in art the democrat is always reactionary. In 1830 the democrats were against Victor Hugo and Delacrois.” And Les Fleurs du Mal, that book of opals, blood, and evil swamp-flowers, will never be savoured by the mob.

  In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in the Louvre he enjoyed the company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of the poet’s preferences. He was also attracted by El Greco — not an unnatural admiration, considering the sombre extravagance of his own genius. Of Goya he has written in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his Derves ruined by abuse of drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination were more beautiful than Nature herself. The country itself, he declared, was odious. Like Whistler, whom he often met — see the Hommage à Delacrois by Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler, Baudelaire, Manet, Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacrois, Cordier, Duranty the critic, and De Balleroy — he could not help showing his aversion to “foolish sunsets.” In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain had entered too much moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of poetry, criticism and fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, is the literary progenitor of Jean, Duc d’Esseintes, in Huysmans’s A Rebours. Huysmans at first modelled himself upon Baudelaire. His Le Drageoir aux Epices is a continuation of Petits Poèmes en Prose. And to Baudelaire’s account must be laid much artificial morbid writing. Despite his pursuit of perfection in form, his influence has been too often baneful to impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of Gallic Byronism, and high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no extravagance, absurd or terrible, that he did not commit, from etching a four-part fugue on ice to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer. In his criticism alone was he the sane logical Frenchman. And while he did not live to see the success of the Impressionist group, he surely would have acclaimed their theory and practice. Was he not an impressionist himself?