Collected Poetical Works of Charles Baudelaire

by Charles Baudelaire

  “Dans l’île de Saint-Louis” (Consolations).

  “Le Creux de la Vallée,” . Here is much of Delorme!

  And “Rose” (Charming), .

  “Stances de Kirke White” .

  “La Plaine” (beautiful October landscape), .

  Heavens! I must stop. I seem to pay you compliments, and I have no right. It is impertinent.

  Baudelaire to Flaubert

  Tuesday, 25th August, 1857.

  Dear friend, I wrote you a hasty little note before five o’clock solely to prove to you my repentance at not having replied to your affectionate sentiments. But if you knew in what an abyss of puerile occupations I have been plunged! And the article on “Madame Bovary” is again deferred for some days! What an interruption in life is a ridiculous adventure!

  The comedy is played on Thursday; it has lasted a long time.

  Finally, three hundred francs fine, two hundred francs for the editors, suppression of numbers 20, 30, 39, 80, 81 and 87. I will write to you at length to-night.

  Yours always, as you know.

  Baudelaire to Flaubert

  26th June, 1860.

  MY DEAR FLAUBERT, I thank you very much for your excellent letter. I was struck by your observation, and, having fallen very severely in the memory of my dreams, I perceived that, all the time, I was beset by the impossibility of rendering an account of certain actions or sudden thoughts of man, without the hypothesis of the intervention of an evil force outside himself. Here is a great confession for which the whole confederated nineteenth century shall not make me blush. Mark well that I do not renounce the pleasure of changing my opinion or of contradicting myself.

  One of these days, if you permit it, in going to Honfleur I shall stop at Rouen; but, as I presume that you are like me and that you hate surprises, I shall warn you some time beforehand.

  You tell me that I work well. Is it a cruel mockery? Many people, not counting myself, think that I do not do anything very great.

  To work: that is to work without ceasing; that is to have no more feeling, no more dreaming; and it is to be pure volition always in action. I shall perhaps attain to it.

  Always your very devoted friend.

  I have always dreamed of reading (in its entirety) the “Tentation” and another strange book of which you have published no fragment (Novembre). And how goes Carthage?

  Baudelaire to Flaubert

  End of January, 1862.

  MY DEAR FLAUBERT, I have committed an act of desperation, a madness, that I am changing into an act of wisdom by my persistence. If I had time enough (it would take very long) I would amuse you greatly by recounting my academical visits to you.

  I am told that you are closely connected with Sandeau (who said, some time ago, to a friend of mine: “Oh, does M. Baudelaire write prose?”). I should be very much obliged if you would write to him what you think of me. I shall go and see him and will explain the meaning of this candidature which has surprised some of these gentlemen so much.

  For a very long time I have wished to send you a brochure on Wagner, beyond which I do not know what to send. But, what is very absurd for a candidate, I have not one of my books with me at home.

  On Monday last, in the “Constitutionnel” Sainte-Beuve wrote a masterly article, a pamphlet, enough to make one die with laughing, on the subject of candidates.

  Always yours devotedly.

  Baudelaire to Flaubert

  PARIS,

  31st January, 1862.

  MY DEAR FLAUBERT,

  You are a true warrior. You deserve to be in the Sacred Legions. You have the blind faith of friendship, which implies the true statesman (sic).

  But, good recluse, you have not read Sainte-Beuve’s famous article on the Academy and the candidateships. This has been the talk for a week, and of necessity it has re-echoed violently in the Academy.

  Maxime du Camp told me that I was disgraced, but I am persisting in paying my visits, although certain academicians have declared (can it be really true?) that they would not even receive me at their houses. I have committed a rash action of which I do not repent. Even if I should not obtain a single vote, I shall not repent of it. An election takes place on February 6th, but it is from the last one (Lacordaire, February 20th) that I shall try to snatch two or three votes. I think of myself alone (at least if it comes to a reasonable candidateship) in front of the ridiculous little Prince du Broglie, son of the duke, living academician. These people will end by electing their concierges, and those concierges are Orleanists.

  Doubtless, we shall see each other soon. I dream always of solitude, and if I go away before your return I will pay you a visit for some hours down there.

  How is it that you have not guessed that Baudelaire would rather be Auguste Barbier, Théophile Gautier, Banville, Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle — that is to say, pure literature? That was understood immediately by a few friends, and has gained me some sympathy.

  Thank you and yours always.

  Have you noticed that to write with a steel pen is like walking on unsteady stones with sabots?

  Baudelaire to Flaubert

  PARIS,

  3rd February, 1862.

  MY DEAR FRIEND,

  M. Sandeau was charming, his wife was charming, and I really believe that I was as charming as they were, since we all held a concert in your honour, so harmonious that it was like a veritable trio performed by consummate artists. As for my affairs, Sandeau reproached me for taking him unawares. I ought to have seen him sooner. However, he will speak for me to some of his friends at the Academy, “And perhaps — perhaps,” said he, “I shall be able to snatch some Protestant votes in the ballot for the Lacordaire chair.” It is everything I desire.

  Seriously, Mme. Sandeau’s enthusiasm is great, and in her you have an advocate, a more than zealous panegyrist. That greatly excited my rivalry, and I succeeded in finding some reasons for eulogy that she had forgotten.

  Here is Sandeau’s letter. Here is a little paper which will perhaps interest you.

  Yours always. Hope to see you soon.

  Mignon aspirant au Ciel.

  SOME REMARKS ON BAUDELAIRE’S INFLUENCE UPON MODERN POETRY AND THOUGHT

  In his essay called “Pen, Pencil, and Poison” Oscar Wilde remarks: “But had the man worn a costume and spoken a language different from our own, had he lived in Imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the seventeenth century, or in any land or in any century but this century and this land, we should be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position and value”; and he also says: “Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form any purely artistic judgment about him.”

  It was only a year after the death of Charles Baudelaire that Gautier wrote the magnificent life-study of the poet, the English translation of which forms part of this volume, and the monograph seems to give the lie direct to Wilde’s assertion. There is nothing finer in French literature, more delicately critical, more vivid in its personal pictures, more perfect in its prose. It is the triumph of a luminous brain, full of rays and ideas “whence images buzz forth like golden bees.”

  Yet it is just because there is some truth in Wilde’s plea, that there is still something to be said to-day of Baudelaire. The attempt to say it may seem presumptuous, and I am certain that no single word of Gautier could be altered or improved upon. Everything fitted the biographer for his task. He knew Charles Baudelaire intimately. He possessed an ear for rhythm unequalled in its kind; his fervent and romantic fancy rendered him peculiarly able to appreciate the most delicate of Baudelaire’s thoughts and tones of his music. Finally — a fact which has hitherto escaped notice in this connection — the “Mademoiselle de Maupin” of Gautier published in 1835 created much the same scandal and alarm as Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” did in 1857. Although Théophile Gautier himself escaped the fate of being publicly prosecuted for an offence against public morals, he knew what it w
as to suffer a literary martyrdom, and could feel for his younger friend when the author of “Une Charogne” was brought before the Court. Indeed, it was in the very year that “Les Fleurs du Mal” was issued that Flaubert was prosecuted on account of “Madame Bovary” and Gautier became in consequence the great novelist’s staunch friend and champion.

  Gautier, above all his contemporaries, was of precisely the temper of mind to appreciate Charles Baudelaire. Nothing was lacking in the man, his temperament or his opportunities, to produce a masterpiece which, ranking with the “Voltaire” of Lord Morley, or Walter Pater’s “Leonardo da Vinci” is almost unknown by the general English reader.

  Yet there is much to be said of Baudelaire that Gautier could not say. Gautier died in 1872. At that time Baudelaire’s work was only known to a distinguished literary coterie. In England it had hardly been heard of. Swinburne, in 1866, when “Poems and Ballads” appeared, was almost certainly the only English man of letters who understood the French poet.

  Recently a certain amount has been written about Baudelaire in England. Oscar Wilde constantly refers to his poems; there have been some review articles for the making of which the writers have drawn largely upon Gautier and Asselineau’s “Charles Baudelaire; sa vie et son œuvre.” Mr. F. P. Sturm (in 1905) made a fine study of the poet as an introduction to an English verse translation of “Les Fleurs du Mal,” published in the “Canterbury Poets” series. It is because I believe I have something new to say that I have dared to include a short study with my translations of Gautier’s jewelled prose and of Baudelaire’s poems.

  Only a very few years ago in England, it was thought, though quite wrongly thought, that the more eclectic literary artists of England and France would, and must always, remain the peculiar property of the leisured and cultured classes. It was not only because the books of such writers were difficult of access and costly in price. Men and women privileged to enjoy and appreciate the work of Baudelaire or Verlaine in France, Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde in England, honestly believed that the vast mass of readers were temperamentally and by training unable to understand these and other artists.

  The fact of compulsory education created a proletariat able and willing to read. Astute exploiters of popular necessity arose and began to supply cheap “reading matter” with all the aplomb and success that would have attended their efforts if they had been directed towards any other newly risen want. This happened a generation ago. Millions still feed upon the literary hogwash provided for them, but from among those millions a new class has arisen that asks for better fare, and does not ask in vain.

  To take a single instance. Ruskin’s works, in the “Everyman” library, are supplied at a shilling a volume. The demand has been enormous.

  Again, a paper like “T.P.’s Weekly,” costing a penny and dealing with the best things of literature, has an enormous circulation and a personal influence over hardworking middle-class men and women with little leisure for self-culture, that it is impossible to overrate.

  Moreover, the issue of Oscar Wilde’s finest work at a trifling price has been attended with a success that has startled no one more greatly than the adventurous publishers themselves.

  Now these things are signs of the times. If they show anything at all, they show that the work of writers which has been hitherto thought to be far above the head of the ordinary reader is really not so in the least. And because I am persuaded that opportunity alone has been wanting, I have ventured upon this book.

  Gautier’s immortal essay takes the first place. We have here a piece of criticism and explanation which, while never digressing from its subject — the personality and life of Charles Baudelaire — nevertheless takes it as the motif of a work of art in a way no less perfect than those of which it deals. Let me endeavour to resume the theme so that we may see the difference that more than forty years have made.

  Writers and readers of to-day must necessarily look at Baudelaire with very different eyes from those of Gautier. How, why, and in what degree?

  In 1857 Baudelaire published his greatest work, the volume of poems called “Les Fleurs du Mal.” The book stirred literary France to its depths, and shook bourgeoisie France with horror. To many people it seemed that a veritable apostle of Satan had risen up in their midst.

  In 1866 Charles Algernon Swinburne published “Poems and Ballads” and shocked literary England in precisely the same fashion, the middle classes remaining quite undisturbed and never hearing of this young man’s succès de scandale.

  The great and enduring beauty of the “Poems and Ballads,” the perfection of form, incomparable music, colour-of-dreams, and of dreams alone — all these were natural products of the greatest master of metrical music since Shelley. But the ideas behind expression, attitude, and outlook — haunted visions of sin, swayings towards the Satanic — all these were simply drawn from Baudelaire; as Baudelaire in his fashion had distilled them from Edgar Allan Poe.

  And this brings me to the point I wish to make. It is, to point out the immense influence of Baudelaire upon the literature, thought, and life of England at this very moment.

  This opium-taker, the eater of hashish; the rhapsodist of emotional life divorced from any moral or unmoral impulse; the man of good birth and fine social chances who died a general paralytic; the apologist of cosmetics, the lover of panther-women and the ultimate corruption of the grave, has made a definite change in English life.

  All great events happen within the mind. “Waterloo,” it used to be said, was “won upon the playing-fields of Eton” — just as Spion Kop was undoubtedly lost there.

  An English critic of Baudelaire has said:

  “The writing of a great book is the casting of a pebble into the pool of human thought; it gives rise to ever-widening circles that will reach we know not whither, and begins a chain of circumstances that may end in the destruction of kingdoms and religions and the awakening of new gods. The change wrought, directly or indirectly, by ‘The Flowers of Evil’ alone is almost too great to be properly understood. There is perhaps not a man in Europe to-day whose outlook on life would not have been different had ‘The Flowers of Evil’ never been written.

  “The first thing that happens after the publication of such a book is the theft of its ideas and the imitation of its style by the lesser writers who labour for the multitude, and so its teaching goes from book to book, from the greater to the lesser, as the divine hierarchies emanate from Divinity, until ideas that were once paradoxical, or even blasphemous and unholy, have become mere newspaper commonplaces adopted by the numberless thousands who do not think for themselves, and the world’s thought is changed completely, though by infinitely slow degrees.

  “The immediate result of Baudelaire’s work was the Decadent School in French literature. Then the influence spread across the Channel, and the English Æsthetes arose to preach the gospel of imagination to the unimaginative.”

  These passages are illuminating. They do not enunciate a new truth, but they insist upon one which is not sufficiently recognised. Gautier has pointed out how immensely Baudelaire was influenced by Thomas de Quincey, and, especially, by Edgar Allan Poe. To continue that line of thought is my purpose.

  It is impossible to mention all those French writers who are literal creations of Baudelaire, who would never have written a line had he not shown the way. Their name is Legion, and many of them do not merit the slightest attention. One great writer, however, who would never have been what he was save for Charles Baudelaire, is Verlaine.

  In England, although the imitators of Baudelaire and those who have drawn inspiration from him, are far fewer in number, their influence upon English thought can hardly be over-estimated.

  I do not propose to do more than outline the influence. It will be sufficient for my purpose if I take but four names; those of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the minor poet Ernest Dowson — who produced only one small volume of verses, but who, nevertheless, belongs directly to th
e school of Baudelaire, and whose work is tinging the attitude towards life of the present generation in a way very little suspected by most people.

  Baudelaire, when he wrote of love, invariably did so with the despair of satiety. It was always a vanished emotion that he recaptured and made beautiful in melodious verse; always the bitter taste left upon the lips of those who have kissed overmuch and overlong. The attitude is always that of the man who scourges himself, uses the rod of passion, the whip of lust, or the knout of unfulfilled desire to make some almost perfect madrigal.

  It must be remembered that we are dealing with a strange and esoteric personality. I have made it my method here to be concerned with facts alone, and those who would understand the poet must be content to draw their own deductions from these facts. It is no province of mine to pass any judgment, other than the pure æsthetic. Music has come from the experiments and agonies of genius. I analyse, that is all.

  The best and simplest way to make it clear how much Swinburne owed to Baudelaire is by means of parallel quotation.

  Let us take, for example, Baudelaire’s poem “Causerie.”

  “Vous êtes un beau ciel d’automne, clair et rose!

  Mais la tristesse en moi monte comme la mer,

  Et laisse, en refluant, sur ma lèvre morose

  Le souvenir cuisant de son limon amer.

  “ — Ta main se glisse en vain sur mon sein qui se pâme;

  Ce qu’elle cherche, amie, est un lieu saccagé

  Par la griffe et la dent féroce de la femme.

  Ne cherchez plus mon cœur; les bêtes l’ont mangé.

  “Mon cœur est un palais flétri par la cohue;

  On s’y soûle, on s’y tue, on s’y prend aux cheveux!

  — Un parfum nage autour de votre gorge nue!...