Charles Baudelaire : his life

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CHARLES
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CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

HIS LIFE

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH, WITH SELECTIONS

FROM HIS POEMS, "LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE,"

AND LETTERS TO SAINTE-BEUVE AND FLAUBERT

AND

AN ESSAY ON HIS INFLUENCE

BY

GUY THORNE

AUTHOR OF

" WHEN IT WA8 DAKK,'' " THE VINTAGE OF VICE

ETC.

WITH FOUR PHOTOGRAVURES

New York

BRENTANO'S

1915

PBINTEn IN GREAT BBITAIN

CONTENTS

The Life and Intimate Memoirs of Charles

Baudelaire. By Théophile Gautier
Selected Poems done into English Verse
By Guy Thorne
I. exotic perfume
II. the murderer's wine

III. music

IV. THE game
V. THE FALSE MONK
VI. AN IDEAL OF LOVE .

VII. THE SOUL OF WINE .

Vni. THE INVOCATION

IX. THE CAT

X. THE GHOST

XI. THE LITANIES OF SATAN

XII. ILL-STARRED ! .

Xm. LINES WRITTEN ON THE FLY-LEAF OF

AN EXECRATED BOOK

XIV. THE END OF THE DAY
V

93

95
97
101
103
105
106
108
110
111
112
113
116

118
119

VI

CONTENTS

Little Poems in Prose, done into English
By Guy Thorne
i. venus and the fool
ii. the desire to taint

III. EACH MAN HIS OWN CHIM.îlRA

iv. intoxication
v. the marksman .
Correspondence of Baudelaire :

letters to sainte-beuve (1856-1866)

letters to flaubert (1857-1862)

Some Remarks on Baudelaire's Influence

UPON Modern Poetry and Thought

By Guy Thorne

Appendix .....

Index ......

121
123
124
125
126
127
129
131
161

169
201
205

ILLUSTRATIONS

Charles Baudelaire .... Frontispiece

FACIXli PAGE

Théophile Gautier ...... 48

L'Auteur des Fleurs du Mal .... 96

A bitter caricature of Baudelaire, unsigned. Upon the original from
which this copy has been made the following line from " Les Litanies
de Satan " is scrawled :

" O Satan, prends pitié de ma ongue misère."

(From the collection of Ernest Taylor, Esq.)

Mignon Aspirant-au Ciel 168

vu

THE LIFE AND INTIMATE ME-
MOIRS OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

THE LIFE AND INTIMATE MEMOIRS
OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

By Théophile Gautier

The first time that we met Baudelaire was towards
the middle of the year 1849, at the Hôtel Pimodan,
where we occupied, near Fernand Boissard, a
strange apartment which communicated with his
by a private staircase hidden in the thickness of
the wall, and which was haunted by the spirits
of beautiful women loved long since by Lauzun.
The superb Maryx was to be found there who, in
her youth, had posed for " La Mignon "" of Schefïer,
and later, for "La Gloire distribuant des couronnes "
of Paul Delaroche ; and that other beauty, then in
all her splendour, from whom Clesinger modelled
" La Femme au serpent," that statue where grief
resembles a paroxysm of pleasure, and which
throbs with an intensity of life that the chisel has
never before attained and which can never be
surpassed.
1

2 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Charles Baudelaire was then an almost unknown
genius, preparing himself in the shadow for the
light to come, with that tenacity of purpose which,
in him, doubled inspiration ; but his name was
already becoming known amongst poets and
artists, who heard it with a quivering of expecta-
tion, the younger generation almost venerating
him. In the mysterious upper chamber where
the reputations of the future are in the making
he passed as the strongest. We had often heard
him spoken of, but none of his works were known
to us.

His appearance was striking : he had closely
shaved hair of a rich black, which fell over a fore-
head of extraordinary whiteness, giving his head
the appearance of a Saracen helmet. His eyes,
coloured like tobacco of Spain, had great depth
and spirituality about them, and a certain penetra-
tion which was, perhaps, a little too insistent.
As to the mouth, in which the teeth were white
and perfect, it was seen under a slight and silky
moustache which screened its contours. The mobile
curves, voluptuous and ironical as the lips in a face
painted by Leonardo da Vinci, the nose, fine and
delicate, somewhat curved, with quivering nostrils,
seemed ever to be scenting vague perfumes. A
large dimple accentuated the chin, like the finishing
touch of a sculptor's chisel on a statue ; the cheeks,
carefully shaved, with vermilion tints on the cheek-

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 3

bones ; the neck, of almost feminine elegance and
whiteness, showed plainly, as the collar of his shirt
was turned down with a Madras cravat.

His clothing consisted of a paletot of shining
black cloth, nut-coloured trousers, white stockings,
and patent leather shoes ; the whole fastidiously
correct, with a stamp of almost English simplicity,
intentionally adopted to distinguish himself from
the artistic folk with the soft felt hats, the velvet
waistcoats, red jackets, and strong, dishevelled
beards. Nothing was too new or elaborate about
him. Charles Baudelaire indulged in a certain
dandyism, but he would do anything to take from
his things the " Sunday clothes " appearance so
dear and important to the Philistine, but so
disagreeable to the true gentleman.

Later, he shaved off his moustache, finding that
it was the remains of an old picturesqueness which
it was both childish and bourgeois to retain. Thus,
relieved of all superfluous down, his head recalled
that of Lawrence Sterne ; a resemblance that was
augmented by Baudelaire's habit of leaning his
temple against his first finger, which is, as every
one knows, the attitude of the English humorist
in the portrait placed at the beginning of his books.

Such was the physical impression made on us
after our first meeting with the future author of
" The Flowers of Evil.''

We find in the " Nouveaux Camées parisiens "

4 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

of Théodore de Banville, one of the poet's best and
most constant friends whose loss we deplore, a
portrait of Baudelaire in his youth. We are per-
mitted to transcribe the lines here, prose equal in
perfection to the most beautiful verse. It portrays
Baudelaire as he is very little known, and as he was
only at that particular time.

" In a portrait painted by Emile Deroy, one of
the rarest works of art by modern painters, we see
Charles Baudelaire at twenty years of age, at a
time when, rich, happy, well-loved, already becom-
ing celebrated, he wrote his first verses which were
applauded by Paris, the literary leader of the
whole world ! 0 rare example of a divine face,
uniting all graces, power, and most irresistible
seductiveness ! The eyebrow well-marked and
curved like a bow, the eyelid warm and softly
coloured ; the eye, large, black, deep and of
unequalled fire, caressing and imperious, embraces,
interrogates and reflects all that surrounds it ; the
nose, beautifully chiselled, slightly curved, makes
us dream of the celebrated phrase of the poet :
* Mon âme voltige sur les parfums, comme Tâme
des autres hommes voltige sur la musique ! ' The
mouth is arched and refined by the mind, and at
the moment is of the delicate tint that reminds one
of the royal beauty of freshly plucked fruit. The
chin is rounded, but nevertheless haughty and
powerful as that of Balzac. The whole face is of a

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 5

warm pallor, under which the rose tints of beautiful
rich blood appear. A newly grown beard, like that
of a young god, decorates it. The forehead, high
and broad, magnificently drawn, is ornamented by
black, thick hair, naturally wavy and curly like
that of Paganini, which falls over a throat worthy
of Achilles or Antinous."

One must not take this portrait too literally. It
is seen through the medium of painting and poetry,
and embellished by a certain idealisation. Still,
it is no less sincere and faithful of Baudelaire as
he appeared at that time. Charles Baudelaire
had his hour of supreme beauty and perfect ex-
pansion, and we relate it after this faithful witness.
It is rare that a poet, an artist, is known in the
spring-time of his charm.

Reputation generally comes later, when the
fatigue of study, the struggles of life, and the
torture of passion have taken away youthfulness,
leaving only the mask, faded and altered, on which
each sorrow has made her impress. It is this last
picture, which also has beauty, that one remem-
bers. With his evasive singularity was mingled
a certain exotic odour like the distant perfume of
a country well loved of the sun. It is said that
Baudelaire travelled for some time in India, and
this fact explains much.

Contrary to the somewhat loose manners of
artists generally, Baudelaire prided himself upon

6 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

observing the most rigid convenances ; his courtesy-
was often excessive to the point of affectation.
He measured his phrases, using only the most
carefully selected terms, and pronounced certain
words in a particular manner, as though he wished
to underline them and give them a mysterious
signification. Italics and capital letters seemed
to be marked in his voice.

Exaggeration, much in honour at Pimodan's, he
disdained as theatrical and coarse, though he
allowed himself the use of paradox. With a very
simple, natural, and perfectly detached air, as
though retailing, à la Prudhomme, a newspaper
paragraph on the state of the weather, he would
advance monstrous axioms, or uphold with perfect
sang-froid some theory of mathematical extrava-
gance ; for he had method in the development
of his follies. His spirit was neither in words
nor traits ; he saw things from a particular point
of view which changed their outlines, as objects
seen in a bird's-eye view are changed from when
seen at their own elevation ; he perceived analogies,
inappreciable to others, the fantastic logic of which
was very striking.

His gestures were slow, sober, and rare ; for he
held southern gesticulation in horror. Neither did
he like volubility of speech, and British reserve
appealed to his sense of good form. One might
describe him asa dandy strayed into Bohemia ;

CHABLES BAUDELAIRE 7

but preserving there his rank, and that cult of self
which characterises a man imbued with the prin-
ciples of Brummel.

Such was our impression of Baudelaire at our
first meeting, the memory of which is as vivid as
though it had occurred yesterday.

We were in the big salon, decorated in the style
of Louis XIV, the wainscot enriched and set ofî
with dull gold of a perfect tone, projecting cornices,
on which some pupil of Lesueur or of Poussin,
having studied at the Hôtel Lambert, had painted
nymphs chased by satyrs through reed-grass,
according to the mythological taste of the period.
On the great marble chimney, veined with ver-
milion and white, was placed, in the guise of a
clock, a golden elephant, harnessed like the elephant
of Porus in the battle of Lebrun, supporting on its
back a tower with an inscribed dial-plate. The
chairs and settees were old and covered with
faded tapestry, representing subjects of the chase
by Oudry and Desportes.

It was in this salon, also, that the séances of the
club of hashish-eaters took place, a club to which
we belonged, the ecstasies, dreams, hallucinations
of which, followed by the deepest dejection, we
have described.

As was said above, the owner of this apartment
was Fernand Boissard, whose short, curly, fair
hair, white and vermilion complexion, grey eyes

8 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

scintillating with light and esprit, red lips and
pearly teeth, seemed to witness to the health and
exuberance of a Rubens, and to promise a life
more than usually long. But, alas, who is able
to foresee the fate of another ? Boissard, to whom
none of the conditions of happiness were lacking,
fell a victim to a malady much the same as that
which caused the death of Baudelaire.

No one was better equipped than Boissard. He
had the most open-minded intelligence ; he under-
stood painting, poetry, and music equally well ;
but, in him, the dilettante was stronger than the
artist. Admiration took up too much of his time ;
he exhausted himself in his enthusiasms. There is
no doubt that, had necessity wdth her iron hand
compelled him, he would have been an excellent
painter. The success that was obtained by the
" Episode de la retraite de Russie " w^ould have
been his sure guarantee. But, without abandoning
painting, he allowed himself to be diverted by other
arts. He played the violin, organised quartettes,
studied Bach, Beethoven, Meyerbeer, and Mendels-
sohn, learnt languages, wrote criticisms, and com-
posed some charming sonnets.

He was a voluptuary in Art, and no one enjoyed
real masterpieces with more refinement, passion,
and sensuousness than he did. From force of
admiring, he forgot to express beauty, and what
he felt so deeply he came to believe he had created.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 9

His conversation was charming, full of gaiety and
originality. He had a rare gift of inventing words
and phrases, and all sorts of bizarre expressions,
that linger in the mind.

Like Baudelaire, amorous of new and rare sensa-
tions, even when they were dangerous, he wished
to know those artificial paradises, which, later,
made him pay so dearly for their transient ecstasies.
It was the abuse of hashish that, undoubtedly,
undermined his constitution, formerly so robust
and strong.

This souvenir of a friend of our youth, with whom
we lived under the same roof, of a romantic to
whom fame did not come because he loved too
much the work of others to dream of his own, will
not be out of place here, in this introduction
destined to serve as a preface to the complete works
of a departed friend of us both.

On the day of our visit Jean Feuchères, the
sculptor, was there. Besides his talent in statuary,
Feuchères had a remarkable power of imitation,
such as no actor was able to compass. He was the
inventor of the comic dialogues between Sergeant
Bridais and gunner Pitou, which even to-day
provoke irresistible laughter. Feuchères died first,
and, of the four artists assembled on that day at
the Hôtel Pimodan, we only survive.

On the sofa, half recumbent, her elbow resting
on a cushion, with an immobility of pose she often

10 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

assumed, Maryx listened dreamily to Baudelaire's
paradoxes. No surprise was manifested on her
almost Oriental countenance. She wore a white
robe, oddly ornamented with red spots like tiny
drops of blood, and while Baudelaire talked she
lazily passed the rings from one hand to another —
hands as perfect as was her figure.

Near the window, the " Femme au serpent "
(it is not permitted to give her name) having
thrown back her lace wrap and delicate little green
hood, such as never adorned Lucy Hocquet or
Madame Baurand, over an arm-chair, shook out
her beautiful fawn-brown hair, for she had come
from the Swimming Baths, and, her person all
draped in muslin, exhaled, like a naiad, the fragrant
perfume of the bath. With her eyes and smile she
encouraged this tilt of words, and threw in, now
and again, her own remarks, sometimes mocking,
sometimes appreciative.

They have passed, those charming leisure hours,
when poets, artists, and beautiful women were
gathered together to talk of Art, literature, and
love, as the century of Boccaccio has passed.
Time, Death, the imperious necessities of life, have
dispersed this mutually sympathetic group ; but
the memory is dear to all those who had the good
fortune to be admitted to it. It is not without an
involuntary sigh that these lines are penned.

Shortly after this first meeting Baudelaire came

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 11

to see us and brought a volume of his verses. He
himself relates this visit in a literary article which
he wrote about us in terms of such admiration that
we dare not transcribe them.

From that moment a friendship was formed
between us, in which Baudelaire always wished to
conserve the attitude of favourite disciple to a
sympathetic master, although he owed his success
only to himself and his own originality. Never in
our greatest familiarity did he relax that deference
of manner which to us seemed excessive and with
which we would gladly have dispensed. He ac-
knowledged it à vive voix, and the dedication of
the " Flowers of Evil/' which is addressed to us,
consecrates in its lapidary form the absolute ex-
pression of his loving and poetical devotion.

If we insist on these details, it is not for their
actual worth, but solely because they portray an
unrecognised side of Baudelaire's character.

This poet, whom people try to describe as of so
Satanic a nature, smitten with evil and depravity
(literary, be it well understood), knew love and
admiration in the highest degree.

But the distinguishing feature of Satan is that
he is incapable of admiration or love. The light
wounds him, glory is a sight insupportable to hmi,
and makes him want to veil his eyes with his bat-
like wings. No one, even at the time of fervour for
romanticism, had more respect and adoration for

12 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

the great masters than Baudelaire. He was always
ready to pay his legitimate tribute of praise to
those who merited it, and that without the servility
of a disciple, without fanaticism ; for he himself
was a master, having his realm, his subjects, and
his coinage of gold.

It would perhaps be fitting, after having portrayed
Baudelaire in all the freshness of his youth and
in the fulness of his power, to present him as he
was during the later years of his life, before Death
stretched out his hand towards him, and sealed
the lips which will no longer speak here below.
His face was thin and spiritualised ; the eyes
seemed larger, the nose thinner ; the lips were
closed mysteriously, and seemed to guard ironical
secrets. The vermilion tints of the past had given
place to a swarthy, tired yellow. As to the fore-
head, it had gained in grandeur and solidity — so
to speak ; one would have said that it was carved
in some particularly durable marble. The fine
hair, silky and long, nearly white, falling round a
face which was young and old at the same time,
gave him an almost sacerdotal appearance.

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 21st,
1821, in an old turreted house, in the Rue Haute-
feuille. He was the son of M. Baudelaire, the old
friend of Condorcet and of Cabanis, a distinguished
and well-educated man who retained the polished
manners of the eighteenth century, which the

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 13

pretentious tastes of the Republican era had not
so entirely efïaced as is sometimes thought. This
characteristic was strong in the poet, who always
retained the outward forms of courtesy.

In his young days Baudelaire was in no way out
of the ordinary, and neither did he gain many
laurels at his college prize distributions. He even
found the B.A. examination a great difficulty, and
his degree was honorary. Troubled by abstract
questions, this boy, so fine of spirit and keen of
intelligence, appeared almost like an idiot. We
have no intention of declaring this inaptitude as
a sign of cleverness ; but, under the eye of the
pedagogue, often distrait and idle, or rather pre-
occupied, the real man is formed little by little,
unperceived by masters or parents.

M. Baudelaire died, and his wife, Charles's mother,
married General Aupick, who became Ambassador
to Constantinople. Dissension soon arose in the
family à propos of young Baudelaire's desire for a
literary career. We think it wrong to reproach
parents with the fears they manifest when the gift
of poetry develops in their offspring. Alas ! They
are right. To what sad, precarious, and miserable
existence does he vow himself — he who takes up a
literary career ? From that day he must consider
himself cut off from human beings, active life ; he
no longer lives — he is the spectator of life. All
sensation comes to him as motif for analysis. In-

14 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

voluntarily he develops two distinct personalities,
and, lacking other subjects, one becomes the spy
on the other. If he lack a corpse, he stretches
himself on the slab of black marble and buries the
scalpel deep in his own heart. And what desperate
struggles must he endure with the Idea, that
elusive Proteus, who takes all manner of forms to
escape captivity, and who will only deliver his
oracle when he has been forced to show himself
in his true aspect ! This Idea, when one holds
it, frightened, trembling, vanquished, one must
nourish, clothe, fold round in that robe so difficult
to weave, to colour and to arrange in graceful
curves. During this long-drawn-out task the
nerves become irritable, the brain on fire, the
sensibilities quickened, and then nervous disorder
comes with all its odd anxieties, its miconscious
hallucinations, its indefinable sulïerings, its morbid
capriciousness, its fantastic depravity, its infatua-
tions and motiveless dislikes, its mad energy and
nervous prostration, its searches for excitement
and its disgust for all healthy nourishment.

We do not exaggerate the picture ; but we have
before us only the talented poets, crowned with
glory, who have, at the last, succumbed on the
breast of their ideal. What would it be if we
went down into the Limbo where the shades of
still-born children are wailing, like those abortive
endeavours and larvae of thought which can achieve

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 15

neither wing nor form ? Yes ! Desire is not power,
nor is Love possession !

Faith is not enough. Another gift is necessary.
In literature, as in religion, work without grace
is futile.

Although they do not suspect this region of
anguish, for, to know it really, it is necessary to
go down oneself, not under the guidance of a Vergil
or a Dante, but under that of a Lousteau, of a
Lucien de Rubempré, parents instinctively display
the perils and suffering of the artistic life in the
endeavour to dissuade the children they love, and for
for whom they desire one more happy and ordin-
arily human.

Once only since the earth has revolved round the
sun have parents ardently wished to have a son's
life dedicated to poetry. The child received the
most brilliant literary education, and, with the
irony of Fate, became Chapelain, the author of
" La Pucelle " ! and this, one might even say,
was to play with sinister fortune !

To turn his stubborn ideas into another course,
Baudelaire was made to travel. He was sent a
great distance, embarking on a vessel, the captain
of which took him to the Indian seas. He visited
the Isles of Mauritius, Bourbon, Madagascar,
Ceylon perhaps, and some parts of the " Isle of the
Ganges " ; but he would not, for all that, give up
his intention of becoming a man of letters. They

16 CHAULES BAUDELAIRE

tried vainly to interest him in commerce, but a
trade in cattle to feed Anglo-Indians on beefsteak
had no attractions for him. All he retained of
this voyage was a memory of great splendour
which remained with him all his life. He gloried
in a sky where brilliant constellations, unknown in
Europe, were to be found ; the magnificent vegeta-
tion with the exotic perfumes, the elegantly odd
pagodas, the brown faces and the soft white
draperies — all that in Nature was so warm, power-
ful, and full of colour.

In his verses he was frequently led from the
mists and mud of Paris to the countries of light,
azure, and perfume. Between the lines of the most
sombre of his poems, a window is opened through
which can be seen, instead of the black chinmeys
and smoky roofs, the blue Indian seas, or a beach
of golden sand on which the slender figure of a
Malabaraise, half naked, carrying an amphora on
the head, is running. Without penetrating too
deeply into the private life of the poet, one can
imagine that it was during this voyage that Baude-
laire fell in love with the " Venus noire," of whom
he was a worshipper all his life.

When he returned from his distant travels he
had just attained his majority ; there was no
longer any reason — not even financial, for he was
rich for some time at least — to oppose Baudelaire's
choice of a vocation ; it was only strengthened by

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 17

meeting with obstacles, and nothing would deter
him.

Lodged in a little apartment under the roof of
the same Hôtel Pimodan where later we met him,
as has been related earlier in this introduction, he
commenced that life of work, interrupted and
resumed, of varied studies, of fruitful idleness,
which is that of each man of letters seeking his
particular field of labour. Baudelaire soon found
his. He conceived something beyond romanti-
cism— a land unexplored, a sort of rough and wild
Kamschatka ; and it was at the extreme verge
that he built for himself, as Sainte-Beuve, who
thoroughly appreciated him, said, a kiosque of
bizarre architecture.

Several of the poems which are to be found
amongst the *' Flowers of Evil '' were already
composed. Baudelaire, like all born poets, from
the start possessed a form and style of which he
was master ; it was more accentuated and polished
later, but still the same. Baudelaire has often
been accused of studied bizarrerie, of affected and
laboured originality, and especially of mannerisms.
This is a point at which it is necessary to pause
before going further. There are people who have
naturally an afîected manner. In them simplicity
would be pure affectation, a sort of inverted
mannerism. Long practice is necessary to be
naturally simple. The circumvolutions of the brain
2

18 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

twist themselves in such a manner that the ideas
get entangled and confused and go up in spirals
instead of following straight lines. The most
complicated, subtle, and intense thoughts are those
which present themselves first. They see things
from a peculiar angle which alters the aspect and
perspective. All fancies, the most odd, unusual,
and fantastically distant from the subject treated
of, strike them chiefly, and they know how to draw
them into their woof by mysterious threads.

Baudelaire had a brain like this, and where the
critic has tried to see labour, eflort, excess, there
is only the free and easy manifestation of indi-
viduality. These poems, of a savour so exquisitely
strange, cost him no more than any badly rhymed
commonplace.

Baudelaire, always possessed of great admiration
for the old masters, never felt it incumbent upon
him to take them for models ; they had had the
good fortune to arrive in the early days of the
world, at the dawn, so to speak, of humanity, when
nothing had been expressed yet, and each form,
each image, each senthnent, had the charm of
virginal novelty. The great commonplaces which
form the foundation of human thought were then
in all their glory and sufficed for simple geniuses,
speaking to simple people.

But, from force of repetition, these general
subjects of verse were used up like money which,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 19

from continual circulation, has lost its imprint ;
and, besides. Life had become more complex, fuller
of originality, and could no longer be represented
in the artificial spirit of another age.

As true innocence charms, so the trickery of
pretended innocence disgusts and displeases. The
quality of the nineteenth century is not precisely
naïveté, and it needs, to render its thoughts and
dreams explicit, idiom a little more composite than
that employed in the classics. Literature is like
a day ; it has its morning, noon, evening, and night.
Without vain expatiation as to whether one should
prefer dawn or twilight, one ought to paint the
hour which is at hand, and with a palette of all
the colours necessary to give it its full effect.
Has not sunset its beauty as well as dawn ?
The copper-reds, the bronze-golds, the turquoise
melting to sapphire, all the tints which blend
and pass away in the great final conflagration,
the light-pierced clouds which seem to take the
form of a falling aerial Babel — have they not
as much to offer to the poet as the rosy-fingered
Dawn ? But the time when the Hours preceded
the Chariot of Day is long since fled.

The poet of the " Flowers of Evil '' loved what
is unwisely known as the style of the decadence,
and which is no other thing than Art arrived at
that point of extreme maturity that determines
civilisations which have grown old ; ingenious.

20 CHARI.es BAUDELAIRE

complicated, clever, full of delicate tints and refine-
ments, gathering all the delicacies of speech, borrow-
ing from technical vocabularies, taking colour from
every palette, tones from all musical instruments,
forcing itself to the expression of the most elusive
thoughts, contours vague and fleeting, listening
to translate subtle confidences, confessions of
depraved passions and the odd hallucinations of a
fixed idea turning to madness.

This style of the decadence is the " dernier mot **
of Verbe, summoned to express all and to venture
to the very extremes. One can recall, à propos
of him, language already veined with the greenness
of decomposition, savouring of the Lower Roman
Empire and the complicated refinements of the
Byzantine School, the last form of Greek Art
fallen into deliquescence ; but such is the necessary
and fatal idiom of peoples and civilisations where
an artificial life has replaced a natural one and
developed in a man who does not know his own
needs. It is not easy, moreover, this style con-
demned by pedants, for it expresses new ideas in
new forms and words that have never been heard of
before. Contrary to the classical style, it admits
of backgrounds where the spectres of superstition,
the haggard phantoms of dreams, the terrors of
night, remorse which leaps out and falls back
noiselessly, obscure fantasies that astonish the day,
and all that the soul in its deepest depths and

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 21

innermost caverns conceals of darkness, deformity,
and horror, move together confusedly. One can
well imagine that the fourteen hundred words of
the dialect of Racine do not suffice an author who
is given the difficult task of rendering modern ideas
and things in all their infinite complexity and their
diversity of colour.

Thus Baudelaire, who, despite his ill success at
his baccalaureate examination, was a good Latinist,
preferred undoubtedly, to Vergil and to Cicero,
Apuleius, Juvenal, Saint Augustine, and Tertullian,
whose style has the black radiance of ebony. He
went even to the Latin of the Church, to hymns
and chants in which the rhyme represents the old
forgotten rhythm, and he has addressed, under
the title of " Franciscae mese Laudes," " To an
erudite and devotee,'' such are the terms of the
dedication, a Latin poem rhymed in the form
that Brizeux called ternary, which is composed
of three rhymes following one another, instead
of alternating as in the tiercet of Dante. To
this odd piece of work is joined a note no less
singular. We transcribe it here, for it explains
and corroborates what has just been said about
the idioms of the decadence :

" Does it not seem to the reader, as to me, that
the language of the last Latin decadence — the
supreme sigh of the strong man already trans-
formed and prepared for the spiritual life — is

22 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

singularly adequate to express the passion that
is comprised in, and felt by, the modern world ?
Mysticism is the opposite pole on the compass of
Catullus and his followers, purely cynical and
superficial poets, who have only known the pole
of sensuality. In this marvellous language, sole-
cism and barbarism seem to me to express the
negligences of a passion forgetful of itself and
regardless of conventionality. The words, taken
in a new acceptation, reveal the charming mala-
droitness of a northern barbarian kneeling before
a Roman beauty. The pun itself, when it crosses
pedantism, has it not the saving grace and irregu-
larity of infancy ? "

It is unnecessary to push this point further.
Baudelaire, when he had not to express some
curious deviation, some unknown side of the soul,
employed pure, clear language, so correct and
exact that even the most difficult to please would
find nothing to complain of. This is especially
noticeable in his prose writings, when he treats
of more general and less abstruse subjects than
in his verse.

With regard to his philosophical and literary
tenets, they were those of Edgar Allan Poe, whom
he had not then translated but whom he greatly
admired. One can apply to him the phrases that
he himself wrote of the American author in the
preface to the " Extraordinary Histories " : — ** He

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 23

considered progress, the great modern idea, as the
ecstasy of fools, and he called the perfectionings
of human habitations, scars and rectangular
abominations. He believed only in the Immu-
table, the Eternal, the self-same, and he was in
the possession of — cruel privilege! in a society
amorous only of itself — the great good sense of
a Machiavelli who marches before the wise as a
column of light across the desert of history."

Baudelaire had a perfect horror of philan-
thropists, progressionists, utilitarians, humani-
tarians, Utopians, and of all those who pretend
to reform things, contrary to nature and the
universal laws of society. He desired neither
the suppression of hell nor of the guillotine for
the disposal of sinners and assassins. He did not
believe that men were born good, and he admitted
original perversity as an element to be found in the
depths of the purest souls — perversity, that evil
counsellor who leads a man on to do what is fatal
to himself, precisely because it is fatal and for the
pleasure of acting contrary to law, without other
attraction than disobedience, outside of sensuality,
profit, or charm. This perversity he believes to be
in others as in hhnself ; therefore, when he finds
a servant in fault he refrains from scolding him,
for he regards it as an irremediable curse. It is,
then, very wrong of short-sighted critics to have
accused Baudelaire of immorality, an easy form

24 CHAKLES BAUDELAIRE

of evil-speaking for the mediocre and the jealous,
and always well taken up by the Pharisees and
J. Prudhommes. No one has professed greater
disgust for baseness of mind or unseemliness of
subject.

He hated evil as a mathematical deviation, and,
in his quality of a perfect gentleman, he scorned
it as unseemly, ridiculous, bourgeois and squalid.
If he has often treated of hideous, repugnant, and
unhealthy subjects, it is from that horror and
fascination which makes the magnetised bird go
down into the unclean mouth of the serpent ; but
more than once, with a vigorous flap of his wings,
he breaks the charm and flies upwards to bluer and
more spiritual regions. He should have engraved
on his seal as a device the words " Spleen et Idéal,"
which form the title of the first part of his book of
verse.

If his bouquet is composed of strange flowers,
of metallic colourings and exotic perfumes, the
calyx of which, instead of joy, contains bitter tears
and drops of aqua-tofana, he can reply that he
planted but a few into the black soil, saturating
them in putrefaction, as the soil of a cemetery
dissolves the corpses of preceding centuries among
mephitic miasmas. Undoubtedly roses, marguer-
ites, violets, are the more agreeable spring
flowers ; but he thinks little of them in the black
mud with which the pavements of the town are

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 25

covered. And, moreover, Baudelaire, if he under-
stands the great tropical landscapes where, as in
dreams, trees burst forth in strange and gigantic
elegance, is only little touched by the small rural
sites on the outskirts ; and it is not he who will
frolic like the Philistines of Heinrich Heine before
the romantic efflorescence of spring and faint
away at the song of the sparrows. He likes to
follow the pale, shrivelled, contorted man, con-
vulsed by passions, and actual modern ennui,
through the sinuosities of that great madrepore
of Paris — to surprise him in his difficulties, agonies,
miseries, prostrations, and excitements, his nervous-
ness and despair.

He watches the budding of evil instincts, the
ignoble habits idly acquired in degradation. And,
from this sight which attracts and repels him, he
becomes incurably melancholy ; for he thinks him-
self no better than others, and allows the pure
arc of the heavens and the brilliancy of the stars to
be veiled by impure mists.

With these ideas one can well understand that
Baudelaire believed in the absolute self-government
of Art, and that he would not admit that poetry
should have any end outside itself, or any mission
to fulfil other than that of exciting in the soul of
the reader the sensation of supreme beauty — beauty
in the absolute sense of the term. To this sensation
he liked to add a certain effect of surprise, astonish-

26 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

ment, and rarity. As much as possible he banished
from poetry a too realistic imitation of eloquence,
passion, and a too exact truth. As in statuary one
does not mould forms directly after Nature, so
he wished that, before entering the sphere of Art,
each object should be subjected to a metamor-
phosis that would adapt it to this subtle medium,
idealising it and abstracting it from trivial reality.

Such principles are apt to astonish us, when we
read certain of the poems of Baudelaire in which
horror seems to be sought like pleasure ; but that
we should not be deceived, this horror is always
transfigured by character and effect, by a ray of
Rembrandt, or a trait of Velasquez, who portrayed
the race under sordid deformity. In stirring up
in his cauldron all sorts of fantastically odd and
enormous ingredients, Baudelaire can say, with the
witches of Macbeth, " Fair is foul, and foul is fair.**
This sort of intentional ugliness is not, then, in
contradiction to the supreme aim of Art ; and the
poems, such as the " Sept Vieillards " and the
" Petits Vieilles,** have snatched from the poetical
Saint John who dreams in Patmos this phrase,
which characterises so well the author of the
** Flowers of Evil " : " You have endowed the
sky of Art with one knows not what macabre ray ;
you have created a new frisson."

But it is, so to speak, only the shadow of the
talent of Baudelaire, a shadow ardently fiery or

CHAELES BAUDELAIRE 27

coldly blue, which allows him to give the essential
and luminous touch. There is a serenity in his
nervous, febrile, and tormenting talent. On the
highest summits he is tranquil : facem summa
tenent.

But, instead of writing of the poet's ideas, it
would be infinitely better to allow him to speak
for himself : " Poetry, little as one wishes to
penetrate one's self, to question one's soul, to
recall the memories of past enthusiasm, has no other
end than itself ; it cannot have any other, and no
poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of
the name of poem, as that which is written purely
from the pleasure of writing.

" I do not say that poetry does not ennoble tastes
— be it well understood — that its final result is not
to raise men above vulgar interests. This would
be an obvious absurdity. I say that, if the poet
has followed a moral aim, he has diminished his
poetical power, and it would not be imprudent to
lay a wager that his work will be bad. Poetry is
unable, under pain of death or decay, to assimilate
itself to morals or science.

" It has not Truth as an object ; it has Itself.
The demonstration of Truth is elsewhere.

" Truth has only to do with songs ; all that gives
charm and grace to a song will give to Truth its
authority and power. Coldness, calmness, im-
passivity, drive back the diamonds and flowers of

28 CHAELES BAUDELAIRE

the Muse ; they are absolutely in opposition to
poetical humour.

** The Pure Intellect aspires to Truth, Taste
informs us of Beauty, and Moral Sense teaches us
Duty. It is true that the middle sense is intimately
connected with the other two, and is only separated
from the Moral Sense by very slight divergences,
so that Aristotle has not hesitated to place some
of its operations among the virtues themselves.
Also, that which especially exasperates the man of
Taste in the sight of Vice is its deformity and
disproportion. Vice outrages justice and truth,
revolts the Intellect and Conscience ; but, like an
outrage in harmony — a dissonance — it wounds
more particularly certain poetical natures, and I
do not believe it would be scandalous to consider
all infraction of moral, the beautiful moral, as a
fault against rhythm and universal prosody.

"It is this admirable, this immortal instinct of
Beauty which makes us consider the earth and all
its manifold forms, sounds, odours, sentiments, as
a hint of, and correspondence to. Heaven. The
insatiable thirst for that which is beyond and
which veils life, is the most lively proof of our
immortality. It is at once by and through poetry,
by and through music, that the soul gets a glimpse
of the splendours beyond the tomb. And, when
an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, these
tears are not the proof of an excess of joy, they are

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 29

the witness rather of an excited melancholy, an
intercession of the nerves, of a nature exiled in
imperfection wishing to possess itself, even on
this earth, of a revealed paradise.

" Thus, the principle of poetry is, strictly and
simply, the Human Aspiration towards Supreme
Beauty ; and the manifestation of this principle is
in the enthusiasm, the awakening of the soul, en-
thusiasm quite independent of that passion, which
is the intoxication of the heart, and of that Truth,
which is the Food of Reason. For passion is a
natural thing, too natural even not to introduce a
wounding note, discordant in the domain of un-
sullied Beauty ; too familiar and too violent not
to degrade pure Desires, gracious Melancholies and
noble Despairs, which inhabit the supernatural
regions of Poetry.''

Although few poets have a more spontaneously
sparkling inspiration and originality than Baude-
laire— doubtless through distaste for the false
poetic style which affects to believe in the descent
of a tongue of fire on the writer painfully rhyming
a strophe — he pretended that the true author
provoked, directed, and modified at will this
mysterious power of literary production ; and we
find in a very curious piece which precedes the
translation of Edgar Poe's celebrated poem " The
Raven," the following lines, half ironical, half
serious, in which Baudelaire's own opinion is set

30 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

down under the guise of an analysis of the famous
American author :

" The poetic principle, which makes the rules of
poetry, is formulated, it is said, and modelled after
the poems. Here is a poet who pretends that his
poems have been composed according to technique
or principle. He had certainly great genius and
more inspiration than is general, if by inspiration
one understands energy, intellectual enthusiasm,
and the power of keeping all his faculties on the
alert. He loved work more than anything else ;
he liked to repeat, he, the finished original, that
originality is something needing apprenticeship,
which does not necessarily mean to say that
it is a thing to be transmitted by instruction.
Chance and incomprehensibility were his two
great enemies. Has he willingly diminished that
faculty which was in him to take the most beautiful
part ? I should be inclined to think so ; however,
one must not forget that his genius, so ardent and
agile, was passionately fond of analysis, combina-
tion, and calculation. One of his favourite axioms
was the following : * Everything in a poem as in
a novel, everything in a sonnet as in a novelette,
ought to contribute to the dénouement. A good
writer has the last line already in his mind when he
writes the first.'

" Owing to this admirable method the writer was
able to begin even at the end, and work, when it

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 31

pleased him, at whatever part he liked. Amateurs
will perhaps sneer at these cynical maxims, but
each can learn from them what he wishes. It
would be useless to show them what Art has gained
from deliberation, and to make clear to the world
what exacting labour this object of luxury known
as poetry really is. After all, a little charlatanry
is permitted to genius. It is like the paint on the
cheeks of a naturally beautiful woman, a new
condition of the mind."

This last phrase is characteristic and betrays the
individual taste of the poet for artificiality. He,
moreover, does not hide this predilection. He
takes pleasure in this kind of composite beauty,
and now and then a little artificiality that elaborates
advanced and unsound civilisations. Let us say,
to take a concrete example, that he would prefer
to a simple young girl who used no other cosmetic
than water, a more mature woman employing all
the resources of the accomplished coquette, in front
of a dressing-table covered with bottles of essences,
de lait virginal, ivory brushes, and curling-tongs.
The sweet perfume of skin macerated in aromatics,
like that of Esther, who was steeped in oil of palms
for six months and six months in cinnamon, before
presentation to King Ahasuerus, had on him a
powerful effect. A light touch of rose or hortensia
on a fresh cheek, beauty-spots carefully and
provocatively placed at the corner of the mouth

32 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

or of the eye, eye-lashes burnished with kohl, hair
tinted with russet-brown and powdered with gold-
dust, neck and shoulders whitened with rice-
powder, lips and the tips of the fingers brightened
with carmine, did not in any way revolt him.

He liked these touches of Art upon Nature, the
high lights, the strong lights placed by a clever
hand to augment grace, charm and the character
of the face. It is not he who would '\^Tite virtuous
tirades against painting, rougeing, and the crinoline.
All that removed a man, and especially a woman,
from the natural state found favour in his eyes.
These tastes explain themselves and ought to be
understandable in a poet of the decadence, and the
author of the " Flowers of Evil."

We shall astonish no one if we add that he
preferred, to the simple perfmne of the rose or
violet, that of benzoin, amber, and even musk,
so little appreciated in our days, and also the
penetrating aroma of certain exotic flowers the
perfume of which is too strong for our moderate
climate. Baudelaire had, in the matter of perfumes,
a strangely subtle sensuality which is rarely to be
met with except amongst Orientals. He sought it
always, and the phrase cited by Banville and at the
commencement of this article may very justly be
said of him : " Mon âme voltige sur les parfums
comme l'âme des autres hommes voltige sur la
musique."

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 33

He loved also toilets of a bizarre elegance, a
capricious richness, striking fantasy, in which
something of the comedian and courtesan was
mingled, although he himself was severely con-
ventional in dress ; but this taste, excessive,
singular, anti-natural, nearly always opposed to
classical beauty, was for him the sign of the human
will correcting, to its taste, the forms and colours
furnished by matter.

Where the philosopher could only find a text for
declamation he found a proof of grandeur. De-
pravity— that is to say, a step aside from the normal
type — is impossible to the stupid. It is for the same
reason that inspired poets, not having the control
and direction of their works, caused him a sort of
aversion, and why he wished to introduce art and
technique even into originality.

So much for the metaphysical ; but Baudelaire
was of a subtle, complicated, reasoning, and para-
doxical nature, and had more philosophy than is
general amongst poets. The aesthetics of his art
occupied him much ; he abounded in systems
which he tried to realise, and all that he did was
first planned out. According to him, literature
ought to be interitional, and the accidental re-
strained as much as possible. This, however, did
not prevent him, in true poetical fashion, from
profiting by the happy chances of executing those
beauties which burst forth suddenly without
3

34 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

premeditation, like the little flowers accidentally
mixed with the grain chosen by the sower. Every
artist is somewhat like Lope de Vega, who, at the
moment of the composition of his comedies, locked
up his precepts under six keys — con seis claves.
In the ardour of his work, voluntarily or not, he
forgot systems and paradoxes.

II

Baudelaire's reputation, which during some
years had not extended beyond the limits of the
little circle who rallied round the new poet, widened
suddenly when he presented himself to the public
holding in his hand the bouquet of the " Flowers
of Evil," a bouquet which in no way resembled
the innocent posy of the débutante. Some of the
poems were so subtly suggestive, yet so abstruse
and enveloped with the forms and veils of Art,
that the authorities demanded that they should be
withdrawn and replaced by others of less dangerous
eccentricity, before the book could be comprised
in libraries. Ordinarily, there is no great excite-
ment about a book of verses ; they are born, live,
and die in silence ; for two or three poets suffice
for our intellectual consummation.

In the excitement, rumour, and allayed scandal
which surrounded Baudelaire, it was recognised
that he had given the public, which is a rare occur-
rence, original work of a peculiar savour. To

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 35

create in the public a new sensation is the greatest
joy that can happen to a writer, and especially to
a poet.

" Flowers of Evil " was one of those happy
titles that are more difficult to find than is generally
imagined. He summed up in a brief and poetical
form the general idea of the book and indicated
its tendencies. Although it was evidently romantic
in intention and composition, it was impossible,
by even ever so frail a thread, to connect Baudelaire
with any one of the great masters of that particular
school. His verses, refined and subtle in structure,
encasing the subjects dealt with so closely as to
resemble armour rather than clothing, at first
appeared difficult and obscure. This feeling was
caused, not through any fault of the author, but
from the novelty of the things he expressed —
things that had not before been made vocal. It
was part of Baudelaire's doctrine that, to attain
his end, a poet must invent language and rhythm
for himself. But he could not prevent surprise
on the part of the reader when confronted with
verse so different from any he had read before.
In painting the evils which horrified him, Baudelaire
knew how to find the morbidly rich tints of decom-
position, the tones of mother-of-pearl which freeze
stagnant waters, the roses of consumption, the
pallor of chlorosis, the hateful bilious yellows,
the leaden grey of pestilential fogs, the poisoned

36 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

and metallic greens smelling of sulphide of arsenic,
the blackness of smoke diluted by the rain on
plaster walls, the bitumens baked and browned
in the depths of hell ; and all that gamut of inten-
sified colours, correspondent to autumn, to the
setting of the sun, to over-ripe fruit, and the last
hours of civilisation.

The book is opened by a poem to the reader,
whom the poet does not attempt to cajole, as is
usual, and to whom he tells the absolute truth.
He accuses him, in spite of all his h3rpocrisy, of
having the vices for which he blames others, and
of nourishing in his own heart that great modern
monster. Ennui, who, with his bourgeois cowardice,
dreams of the ferocity and debauches of the
Romans, of bureaucrat Nero, and shop-keeper
Heliogabalus.

One other poem, of great beauty, and entitled,
undoubtedly by an ironical antiphrasis, " Bene-
diction,'' depicts the coming of the poet to the
world, an object of astonishment and aversion to
his mother as a shameful offspring. We see him
pursued by stupidity, envy, and sarcasm, a prey
to the perfidious cruelty of some Delilah, happy
in delivering him up to the Philistines, naked,
disarmed, after having expended on him all the
refinements of a ferocious coquetry. Then there
is his arrival, after insults, miseries, tortures,
purified in the crucible of sorrow, to eternal glory.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 37

to the crown of light destined for the heads of
the martyrs who have sufiered for Truth and
Beauty.

One little poem which follows later, and which
is entitled " Soleil/' closes with a sort of tacit
justification of the poet in his vagrant courses.
A bright ray shines on the muddy town ; the
author is going out and runs through the unclean
streets, the by-ways where the closed shutters
hide indications of secret luxuries ; all the black,
damp, dirty labyrinths of old streets to the houses
of the blind and leprous, where the light shines
here and there on some window, on a pot of flowers,
or on the head of a young girl. Is not the poet
like the sun which alone enters everywhere, in
the hospital as in the palace, in the hovel as in the
church, always divine, letting his golden radiance
fall on the carrion or on the rose ?

*' Elévation '' shows us the poet floating in the
sky, beyond the starry spheres ; in the luminous
ether ; on the confines of our universe ; disappear-
ing into the depths of infinity like a tiny cloud ;
intoxicating himself with that rare and salubrious
air where there are none of the miasmas pertaining
to the earth and only the pure ether breathed by
the angels. We must not forget that Baudelaire,
although he has often been accused of materialism,
and reproached for expending his talent upon
doubtful subjects, is, on the contrary, endowed

38 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

in a large degree with the great gift of S'pirituality ,
as Swedenborg said. He also possesses the power
of corres'pondence, to employ a mystical idiom ; that
is to say, he knows how to discover by secret in-
tuition the unexpressed feelings of others, and how
to approach them, by those unexpected analogies
that only the far-sighted are able to seize upon.
Each poet has this power more or less developed,
which is the very essence of his art.

Undoubtedly Baudelaire, in this book dedicated
to the painting of depravity and modern perversity,
has framed repugnant pictures, where vice is laid
bare to wallow in all the ugliness of its shame ;
but the poet, with supreme contempt, scornful
indignation, and a constant recurrence towards
the ideal which is so often lacking in satirical
writers, stigmatises and marks with an indelible
red iron the unhealthy flesh, plastered with
unguents and white lead.

In no part is the thirst for pure air, the immacu-
late whiteness of the Himalayan snows, the azure
without blot, the unfading light, more strong and
ardent than in the poems that have been termed
immoral, as if the flagellation of vice was vice itself,
and as if one is a poisoner for having written of
the poisonous pharmacy of the Borgia. This
method is by no means new, but it thrives always,
and certain people pretend to believe that one
cannot read the ** Flowers of Evil " except with a

CHAELES BAUDELAIRE 39

glass mask, such as Exili wore when he worked at
the famous powder of succession.

We have read Baudelaire's poems often, and
we are not struck dead with convulsed face and
blackened body, as though we had supped with
Vanozza in a vineyard of Pope Alexander VI.
All such foolishness — unfortunately detrimental,
for all the fools enthusiastically adopt that atti-
tude— would make any artist worthy of the name
but shrug his shoulders when told that blue is
moral and scarlet immoral. It is rather as if one
said : " The potato is virtuous, henbane is criminal."

A charming poem on perfumes classifies them,
rousing ideas, sensations, and memories. Some are
fresh, like the flesh of an infant, green like the
fields in spring, recalling the blush of dawn and
carrying with them the thoughts of innocence.
Others, like musk, amber, benzoin, nard, and
incense, are superb, triumphant, worldly, and
provoke coquetry, love, luxury, festivities, and
splendours. If one transposed them into the sphere
of colours, they would represent gold and purple.
The poet often recurs to this idea of the significance
of perfumes. Surrounding a tawny beauty from
the Cape, who seemed to have a mission for sleeping
off home sickness, he spoke of this mixed odour " of
musk and havana " which transported her soul to
the well-loved lands of the Sun, where the leaves
of the palm-trees make fans in the blue and tepid

40 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

air, where the masts of the ships sway harmoniously
to the roll of the sea, while the silent slaves try
to distract their young master from his languish-
ing melancholy. Further on, wondering what will
remain of his work, he compares himself to an old
flagon, forgotten amongst the spider-webs, at the
bottom of some cupboard in a deserted house.

From the open cupboard comes the mustiness of
the past, feeble perfumes of robes, laces, powder-
boxes, which revive memories of old loves and
antiquated elegance ; and, if by chance one uncorks
a rancid and sticky phial, an acrid smell of English
salts and vinegar escapes, a powerful antidote to
the modern pestilence.

In many a passage this preoccupation with
aroma appears, surrounding with a subtle cloud all
persons and things. In very few of the poets do
we find this care. Generally they are content with
putting light, colour, and music in their verses ;
but it is rare that they pour in that drop of pure
essence with which Baudelaire's muse never failed
to moisten the sponge or the cambric of his
handkerchief.

Since we are recounting the individual likings
and minor passions of the poet, let us say that he
adored cats — like him, amorous of perfumes, and
who are thrown into a sort of epileptical ecstasy
by the scent of valerian. He loved these charm-
ing, tranquil, mysterious, gentle animals, with their

CHARLES BAUDELAIEE 41

electrical shudders, whose favourite attitude is the
recumbent pose of the Sphinx, which seems to
have passed on to them its secret. They ramble
round the house with their velvet footfalls as the
genius of the place — genius loci — or come and seat
themselves on the table near the writer, keeping
company with his thoughts and watching him from
the depths of their sanded golden eyes with in-
telligent tenderness and magical penetration.

It is said that cats divine the thoughts which the
brain transmits to the pen, and that, stretching
out their paws, they wish to seize the written pas-
sage. They are happy in silence, order, and
quietude, and no place suits them better than the
study of a literary man. They wait patiently
until his task is done, all the time purring gently
and rhythmically in a sort of sotto voce accom-
paniment. Sometimes they gloss over with their
tongue some disordered fur ; for they are clean,
careful, coquettish, and will not allow of any
irregularity in their toilet, but all is done quietly
and discreetly as though they feared to distract or
hinder. Their caresses are tender, delicate, silent,
feminine, having nothing in common with the
clamorous, clumsy petulance that is found in dogs,
to whom all the sympathy of the vulgar is given.

All these merits were appreciated by Baudelaire,
who has more than once addressed beautiful poems
to cats — the " Flowers of Evil "" contain three — ■

42 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

where he celebrates their physical and moral virtues,
and often he makes them pass through his com-
positions as a sort of additional characteristic.
Cats abound in Baudelaire's verse, as dogs in the
pictures of Paul Veronese, and form there a kind of
signature.

It also must be added that in these sweet animals
there is a nocturnal side, mysterious and cabalistic,
which was very attractive to the poet. The cat,
with his phosphoric eyes, which are like lanterns
and stars to him, fearlessly haunts the darkness,
where he meets wandering phantoms, sorcerers,
alchemists, necromancers, resurrectionists, lovers,
pickpockets, assassins, grey patrols, and all the
obscene spectres of the night. He has the ap-
pearance of knowing the latest sabbatical chronicle,
and he will willingly rub himself against the lame
leg of Mephistopheles. His nocturnal serenades,
his loves on the tiles, accompanied by cries like
those of a child being murdered, give him a certain
satanical air which justifies up to a certain point
the repugnance of diurnal and practical minds, for
whom the mysteries of Erebus have not the slight-
est attraction. But a doctor Faustus, in his cell
littered with books and instruments of alchemy,
would love always to have a cat for a companion.

Baudelaire himself was a voluptuous, cajoling
cat, with just its velvety manners, alluring mys-
teries, instinct with power concealed in suppleness,

CHAELES BAUDELAIRE 43

fixing on things and men his penetrating look,
disquieting, eccentric, difficult to withstand, but
faithful and without perfidy.

Many women pass through the poems of Baude-
laire, some veiled, some half discernible, but to
whom it is impossible to attribute names. They
are rather types than individuals. They represent
l'éternel féminin, and the love that the poet ex-
presses for them is the love and not a love. We
have seen that in his theories he did not admit of
individual passion, finding it too masterful, too
familiar and violent.

Among these women some symbolise unconscious
and almost bestial prostitution, with plastered and
painted masks, eyes brightened with kohl, mouths
tinted with scarlet, seeming like open wounds,
false hair and jewels ; others, of a colder corrup-
tion, more clever and more perverse, like mar-
chionesses of Marteuil of the nineteenth century,
transpose the vice of the body to the soul. They
are haughty, icy, bitter, finding pleasure only in
wickedness ; insatiable as sterility, mournful as
ennui, having only hysterical and foolish fancies,
and deprived, like the devil, of the power of love.
Gifted with a dreadful beauty, almost spectral,
that does not animate life, they march to their
deaths, pale, insensible, superbly contemptuous,
on the hearts they have crushed under their heels.
From the departure of these amours, allied to hate,

44 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

from pleasures more wounding than sorrow, the
poet turns to his sad idol of exotic perfume, of
savage attire, supple and wheedling as the black
panther of Java, which remains always and com-
pensates him for the spiteful Parisian cats with
the pointed claws, playing with the heart of the
poet as with a mouse. But it is to none of
these creatures of plaster, marble, or ebony that
he gives his soul. Above this black heap of
leprous houses, this infectious labyrinth where the
spectres of pleasure circle, this impure tingling of
misery, of ugliness and perversity, far, far distant
in the unalterable azure floats the adorable spirit
of Beatrice, the ever-desired ideal, never attained ;
the supreme and divine beauty incarnated in
the form of an ethereal woman, spiritualised,
fashioned of light, fire, and perfume ; a vapour, a
dream, a reflection of the enchanted and seraphic
world, like the Sigeias, the Morellas, the Unas,
the Leonores of Edgar Poe, and the Seraphita-
Seraphitus of Balzac, that marvellous creation.

From the depths of his fall, his errors, and his
despairs, it is towards this celestial image, as
towards the Madonna of Bon-Secours, that he
extends his arms with cries, tears, and a profound
contempt for himself. In his hours of loving
melancholy it is always with her he wishes to fly
away and hide his perfect happiness in some
mysterious fairy refuge, some cottage of Gains-

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 45

borough, some home of Gerard. Dow, or, better
still, some marble palace of Benares or Hyderabad.
Never did his dreams lead him into other company.

Can one see in this Beatrice, this Laura whom
no name designates, a real young girl or woman,
passionately loved by the poet during his life-time ?
It would be romantic to suppose so, but it has not
been permitted to us to be intimate enough with
the secret life of his soul to answer this question
affirmatively or negatively.

In his metaphysical conversations, Baudelaire
spoke much of his ideas, little of his sentiments,
and never of his actions. As to the chapter of his
loves, he for ever placed a seal upon his fine and
disdainful lips. The safest plan would be to see
in this ideal love a pleading only of the soul, the
soaring of the unsatisfied heart, and the eternal
sigh of the imperfect aspiring to the absolute.

At the end of the " Flowers of Evil '' there is a
set of poems on " Wine,'' and the different intoxi-
cations that it produces, according to the brain
it attacks. It is unnecessary to say that they are
not Bacchic songs celebrating the juice of the
grape, or anything like it. They are hideous and
terrible paintings of drunkenness, but without the
morality of Hogarth. The picture has no need of
a legend and the " Wine of the Workman " makes
one shudder. The *' Litanies of Satan,'' god of
evil and prince of the world, are one of those cold,

46 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

familiar ironies of the author, in which one would
be wrong to see impiety. Impiety is not in the
nature of Baudelaire, who believed in the superior
law established by God for all eternity, the least
infraction of which is punished by the severest
chastisement, not only in this world, but in the
future.

If he has painted vice and shown Satan in all
his pomp, it is without the least complacence in
the task. He also had a singular prepossession
of the devil as a tempter in whom he saw a
dragon who hurried him into sin, infamy, crime,
and perversity. Fault in Baudelaire was always
followed by remorse, contempt, anguish, despair ;
and the punishment was far worse than any
corporal one could have been. But enough of
this subject ; we are critic, not theologian.

Let us point out, among the poems which
comprise the " Flowers of Evil,'* some of the
most remarkable ; amongst others, that which is
called, " Don Juan aux Enfers.'' It is a picture
of tragic grandeur, painted in sombre and magis-
terial colours on the fiery vault of hell. The
boat glides on the black waters, carrying Don
Juan and his cortège of victims. The beggar
whom he tried to make deny God, wretched
athlete, proud in his rags like Antisthenes, pad-
dles the oars to the domain of Charon. At the
stern, a man of stone, a discoloured phantom,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 47

with rigid and sculptural gestures, holds the
helm. The old Don Luis shows his whitened
locks, scorned by his hypocritically impious son.
Sganerelle demands the payment of his wages
from his henceforth insolvent master. Donna
Elvira tries to bring back the old smile of the lover
to the disdainful lips of her husband ; and the
pale lovers, brought to evil, abandoned, betrayed,
trampled under foot like flowers, expose the ever-
open wounds of their hearts. Under this passion
of tears, lamentations, and maledictions Don Juan
remains unmoved ; he has done what he has
wished. Heaven, hell, and the world judge him,
according to their understanding ; his pride knows
no remorse ; the shot has been able to kill, but not
to make him repent.

By its serene melancholy, its cheerful tranquillity,
and oriental kief the poem entitled " La Vie Anté-
rieure " contrasts happily with the sombre pictures
of monstrous modern Paris, and shows that the
artist has, on his palette, side by side with the
blacks, bitumens, umbers, and siennas, a whole
gamut of fresh tints : light, transparent, delicate
roses, ideal blues, like the far-away Breughal of
Paradise, with which to depict the Elysian Fields
and mirage of his dreams.

It is well to note particularly the sentiment to-
wards the artificial betrayed by the poet. By the
word artificial one must understand a creation

48 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

owing its existence entirely to Art, and from
which Nature is entirely absent. In an article
written during the life-time of Baudelaire, we
pointed out this odd tendency of which the poem
entitled " Rêve parisien " is a striking example.
Here are the lines which endeavoured to render
this splendid and sombre nightmare, worthy of
the engravings of Martynn : " Imagine a super-
natural landscape, or rather a perspective in metal,
marble, and water, from which all vegetation is
banished. All is rigid, polished, mirrored under
a sky without sun, without moon, without stars.
In the midst of the silence of eternity rise up,
artificially lit, palaces, colonnades, towers, stair-
cases, foimtains from which fall heavy cascades
like curtains of crystal. The blue waters are en-
circled, like the steel of antique mirrors, in quays,
basins of burnished gold, or run silently under
bridges of precious stones. The crystallised ray
enshrines the liquid, and the porphyry flagstones
of the terraces reflect the surrounding objects like
ice. The Queen of Sheba, walking there, would
lift up her robe, fearing to wet her feet, so glistening
is the surface. The style of this poem is brilliant,
like black, polished marble."

Is it not a strange fantasy, this composition
made from rigid elements, in which nothing lives,
throbs, breathes, and where not a blade of grass,
not a leaf, not a flower comes to derange the

y^

///','//////*' ' ^^f/f/^< 7

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 49

implacable symmetry of forms invented by Art ?
Does it not make one believe in the unblemished
Palmyra or the Palenqué remaining standing on
a dead planet bereft of its atmosphere ?

These are, undoubtedly, strange imaginings,
anti-natural, neighbours of hallucination and
expressions of a secret desire for unattainable
novelty ; but, for our part, we prefer them to the
insipid simplicity of the pretended poets who,
on the threadbare canvas of the commonplace,
embroider, with old wools faded in colour, designs
of bourgeois triviality or of foolish sentimentality :
crowns of roses, green leaves of cabbages, and doves
pecking one another. Sometimes we do not fear
to attain the rare at the expense of the shocking,
the fantastic, and the exaggerated. Barbarity of
language appeals to us more than platitude.
Baudelaire has this advantage : he can be bad,
but he is never common. His faults, like his good
qualities, are original, and, even when he has
displeased, he has, after long reasoning, willed it
so.

Let us bring this analysis, already rather too
long, however much we abridge it, to a close by a
few words on that poem which so astonished Victor
Hugo — " Petites Vieilles/' The poet, walking in
the streets of Paris, sees some little old women
with humble and sad gait pass by. He follows
them as one would pretty women, recognising from
4

50 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

the threadbare cashmere, worn out, mended a
hundred times, from the end of lace frayed and
yellow, the ring — sorrowful souvenir, disputed by
the pawn-broker and ready to leave the slender
finger of the pale hand — a past of happier fortune
and elegance : a life of love and devotion, perhaps ;
the remains of beauty under ruin and misery and
the devastations of age. He reanimates all these
trembling spectres, reclothes them, puts the flesh
of youth on these emaciated skeletons, revives in
these poor wounded hearts illusions of other days.
Nothing could be more ridiculous, nothing more
touching, than these Venuses of Père-Lachaise
and these Ninons of Petits-Ménages who file ofi
lamentably under the evocation of the master,
like a procession of ghosts surprised by the day.

Ill

The question of versification and scansion,
disdained by all those who have no appreciation
of form — and they are numerous to-day — has
been rightly judged by Baudelaire as one of the
utmost importance. Nothing is more common
now than to mistake technique in art for poetry
itself. These are things which have no relation.

Fénelon, J. J. Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint
Pierre, Chateaubriand, George Sand are poetic in
principle, but not poets — that is to say, they are

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 51

incapable of writing in verse, even mediocre verse,
a special faculty often possessed by people of
inferior merit to that of the great masters. To
wish to separate technique from poetry is a modern
folly which will lead to nothing but the annihilation
of Art itself. We encountered, in an excellent
article of Sainte-Beuve on Taine, à propos of Pope
and Boileau, lightly treated by the author of
** The History of English Literature,'' this clear
and judicial paragraph, where things are brought
to light by the great critic who was from the
beginning, and is always, a great poet.

" But, à propos of Boileau, must I then accept
this strange judgment of a man of es frit, this
contemptuous opinion that M. Taine takes of
him, and fear to endorse it in passing ? — ' There are
two sorts of verse in Boileau : the most numerous,
which are those of a pupil of the third form of
his school ; the less numerous, which are those
of a pupil of rhetoric' The man of letters who
speaks thus (Guillame Guizot) does not feel that
Boileau is a poet, and, I will go further, he ought
not to be sensible of poetry in such a poet. I
understand that one does not put all the poetry
into the metre ; but I cannot at all understand
that, when the point in question is Art, one takes
no account of Art itself, and depreciates the perfect
workers who excel in it. Suppress with a single
blow all the poetry in verse, or else speak with

52 ..^ CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

esteem of those who possess the secrets. Boileau
was of the small number of those ; Pope equally."
One could not express it better nor more justly.
When it is a question of a poet, the composition
of his verse is a considerable thing and worthy of
study, for it constitutes a great part of his in-
trinsic value. It is with this stamp his gold, his
silver, his copper are coined.

The verse of Baudelaire is wT-itten according to
modern methods and reform. The mobility of
the cesura, the use of the mot d'ordre, the freedom
of expression, the writing of a single Alexandrine,
the clever mechanism of prosody, the turn of
the stanza and the strophe — whatever its in-
dividual formula, its tabulated structure, its
secrets of metre — bear the stamp of Baudelaire's
sleight of hand, if one may express it thus. His
signature, C. B., claims each rhyme he has made.

Among his poems there are many pieces which
have the apparent disposition and exterior design
of a sonnet, though " sonnet " is not written
at the head of each of them. That undoubtedly
comes from a literary scruple, and a prosodical
conscience, the origin of which seems to us trace-
able to an article where he recounts his visit to
us and relates our conversation. It must not be
forgotten that he had just brought us a volume
of verses of two absent friends, that he was com-
missioned to make known, and we remarked these

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 53

lines in his narrative : " After having rapidly-
run through the volume, he remarked to me that
the poets in question allowed themselves too often
to write libertine sonnets, that is to say unorthodox,
willingly breaking through the rule of the quad-
ruple rhyme."

At this period the greater part of the " Flowers
of Evil " was already composed, and in it there
are to be found a large number of libertine sonnets,
which not only have the quadruple rhyme, but
in which also the rhymes are alternated in a
quite irregular manner.

The young scholar always allows himself a num-
ber of libertine sonnets, and we avow it is par-
ticularly disagreeable to us. Why, if one wishes
to be free and to arrange the rhyme according to
individual fancy, choose a fixed form which
admits of no digression, no caprice ? The irre-
gular in what should be regular, lack of form in
what should be symmetrical — what can be more
illogical and annoying ? Each infraction of a
rule disturbs us like a doubtful or a false note.
The sonnet is a sort of poetical fugue in which
the theme ought to pass and repass until its final
resolution in a given form. One must be abso-
lutely subservient to law, or else, if one finds these
laws antiquated, pedantic, cramping, not write
sonnets at all.

Baudelaire often sought musical efEect by one

54 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

or more particularly melodious lines recurring
alternately, as in the Italian strophe called sex-
tine, of which M. le Comte de Gramont offers
in his poetry several happy examples. He
applied this form, which has the vague, rocking
sound of a magical incantation half heard in a
dream, to the subjects of melancholy memory
and unhappy loves. The stanzas, with their mono-
tonous rustling, carry and express the thoughts,
balancing them as the waves carry on their crests
a drowning flower fallen from the shore.

Like Longfellow and Poe, Baudelaire sometimes
employed alliteration ; that is to say, the repetition
of a certain consonant to produce in the interior
of the verse a harmonious effect. Sainte-Beuve,
to whom none of these delicate touches is un-
known, and who continually practises them in
his exquisite art, has once said in an Italian sonnet
of deep gentleness : " Sorrente m'a rendu mon
doux rêve infini.'*

Any sensitive ear can understand the charm
of this liquid sound four times repeated, and
which seems to sweep one away to the infinity
of a dream, like the wing of a gull in the surging
blue of a Neapolitan sea. Alliteration is often
to be found in the prose of Beaumarchais, and the
Scandinavian poets make great use of it. These
trifles will undoubtedly appear frivolous to utili-
tarians, progressive and practical men who think,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 55

with Stendhal, that verse is a childish form, good
for primitive ages, and ask that poetry should
be written in prose to suit a reasonable age. Yet
all the same, these are details which make verse
good or bad, and which make a man a poet or
not.

Many-syllabled and full-sounding words pleased
Baudelaire, and, with three or four of these, he
often makes a line which seems immense, the
sound of which is vibrant and prolongs the metre.
For the poet, words have in themselves, and apart
from the meanings they express, intrinsic beauty
and value, like precious stones still uncut and not
set in bracelets, in necklaces or in rings. They
charm the connoisseur who watches and sorts
them in the little chalice where they are put in
reserve, as a goldsmith would his jewels. There
are words of diamond, ruby, sapphire, emerald,
and others which glisten phosphorescently when
struck.

The great Alexandrines of which we have spoken,
that come in times of lull and calm to die on the
shore in the tranquillity and gentle undulation
of the swelling surge, sometimes dash themselves
to pieces in the foam and throw up their white
spray against the sullen rocks, only to be tossed
back imediately into the salt sea.

The lines of eight feet are brisk, strong, striking,
like a cat-o'-nine-tails, lashing the shoulders of

56 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

those who, with a wicked conscience, perform
hypocritical actions. They also display strange
caprices ; the author encases in his metre, as in
a frame of ebony, the nightly sights of a cemetery
where the eyes of the owls shine in the shadows ;
and, behind the bronze-green curtains of the yew-
trees, slide, with spectral steps, pick-pockets,
devastators of tombs, thieves of the dead.

In these eight-feet lines he paints sinister skies
where, above the gibbet, rolls a moon, grown
sickly from the incantations of Canidies. He
describes the chill ennui of a dead person, who
has exchanged his bed of luxury for the cofiGm,
who dreams in his solitude, starting at each drop
of icy rain that filters through his coffin-lid. He
shows us, in his curiously disordered bouquet of
faded flowers, old letters, ribbons, miniatures,
pistols, daggers, and phials of laudanum. We
see the room of the coward gallant where, in his
absence, the ironical spectre of suicide comes,
for Death itself cannot quench the fires of lust.

IV

From the composition of the verses let us pass
to the style. Baudelaire intertwines his silken
and golden threads with strong, rude hemp, as
in a cloth worked by Orientals, at the same
time gorgeous and coarse, where the most delicate
ornamentations run in charming caprice on the

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 57

fine camers-hair, or on a cloth coarse to the touch
like the sail of a boat. The most delicate, the
most precious even, is hurled in with savage
brutalities ; and, from the scented boudoir and
voluptuously languorous conversations, one falls
into ignoble inns where drunkards, mixing blood
with wine, dispute at the point of their knives
for some Hélène from the streets.

" The Flowers of Evil " are the brightest gem
in Baudelaire's crown. In them he has given play-
to his originality, and shown that one is able, after
incalculable volumes of verse where every variety
of subject seems to be exhausted, to bring to light
something new and unexpected, without hauling
down the sun and the stars, or making universal
history file past as in a German fresco.

But what has especially made his name famous
is his translation of Edgar Poe ; for in France
little is read of the poet except his prose, and it
is the feuilletons that make the poems known.
Baudelaire has almost naturalised for us this
singular and rare individuality, so pregnant, so
exceptional, who at first rather scandalised than
charmed America. Not that his work is in any
way morally shocking — he is, on the contrary, of
virginal and seraphic chastity; but because he
disturbed accepted principles and practical common
sense, and, also, because there was no criterion by
which to judge him.

58 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Edgar Poe had none of the American ideas on
progress, perfectibility, democratic institutions,
and other subjects of declamation dear to the
Philistines of the two worlds. He was not a
worshipper of the god of gold ; he loved poetry for
itself and preferred beauty to utility — enormous
heresy ! Still, he had the good fortune to write
well things that made the hair of fools in all coun-
tries stand on end. A grave director of a review
or journal — a friend of Poe, moreover, and well-
intentioned — avowed that it was difficult to employ
him, and that one was obliged to pay him less
than others, because he wrote above the heads of
the vulgar — admirable reason !

The biographer of the author of the ** Raven "
and *' Eureka," said that Edgar Poe, if he had
regulated his genius and applied his creative powers
in a way more appropriate to America, would
have become a money-making author ; but he was
undisciplined, worked only when he liked, and on
what subjects he pleased. His roving disposition
made him roll like a comet out of its orbit from
Baltimore to New York, from New York to Phila-
delphia, from Philadelphia to Boston or Richmond,
without being able to settle anyw^here. In his
moments of ennui, distress, or breakdown, when
to excessive excitement, caused by some feverish
work, succeeded that despondency known to
authors, he drank brandy, a fault for which he has

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 59

been bitterly reproached by Americans, who, as
every one knows, are models of temperance.

He was not under any delusion as to the effects
of this disastrous vice, he who has written in the
** Black Cat " this prophetic phrase : " What
illness is comparable to alcohol ! " He drank
without drunkenness, just to forget, to find himself
in a happy mood in regard to his work, or even to
end an intolerable life in evading the scandal of
a direct suicide. Briefly, one day, seized in the
street by an attack of delirium tremens, he was
carried to the hospital where he died, still young
and with no signs of decaying power. The deplor-
able habit had had no influence on his intellect
or his manners, which remained always those of
an accomplished gentleman ; nor on his beauty,
which was remarkable to the end.

We indicate but rapidly some traits of Edgar
Poe, as we are not writing his life. The American
author held so high a place in the intellectual
esteem of Baudelaire that we must speak of him
in a more or less developed way, and give, if not
an account of his life, at least of his doctrines.
Edgar Poe has certainly influenced Baudelaire, his
translator, especially during the latter part of his
life, which was, alas ! so short.

*' The Extraordinary Histories,"" " The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym,"" *' The Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque,"" " Eureka,"" have been

60 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

translated by Baudelaire with so exact a correspond-
ence in style and thought, a freedom so faithful yet
so supple, that the translations produce the effect
of original work, and are ahnost perfect. " The
Extraordinary Histories " are preceded by a piece
of high criticism, in which the translator analyses
the eccentric and novel talent of Poe, which France,
with her utter heedlessness of the originalities of
foreigners, ignored profoundly till Baudelaire re-
vealed them. He brought to bear upon this work,
necessary to explain a nature so beyond the vulgar
idea, a metaphysical sagacity of the rarest delicacy.
The pages may be counted the most remarkable
he has ever written.

Great excitement was created by these histories,
so mathematically fantastic, deduced in algebraical
formulae, and in which the expositions resemble
some judiciary led by the most subtle and per-
spicacious magistrates.

''The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'' "The
Purloined Letter," " The Gold-Bug,'' enigmas
more difficult to divine than those of the Sphinx,
and in which the interest, sustained to the very
end, excites to delirium the public, surfeited with
romances and adventures. One feels deeply for
Auguste Dupin, with his strange, divinatory lu-
cidity, who seems to hold between his hands the
threads, drawing one to the other, of thoughts
most opposed, and who arrives at his conclusions

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 61

by deductions of a marvellous correctness. One
admires Legrand, cleverer still at deciphering
cryptograms than Claude Jacquet, employed by
the Ministry, who read to Desmarets, in the history
of the " 13/' the letter deciphered by Ferrango ;
and the result of this reading is the discovery of
the treasures of Captain Kidd ! Every one will
confess that he would have had to be very clear-
sighted to trace in the glimmer of the flame, in
the red characters on yellow parchment, the death's-
head, the kid, the lines and points, the cross, the
tree and its branches, and to guess where the cor-
sair had buried the coffer full of diamonds, jewels,
watches, golden chains, ounces, doubloons, dollars,
piastres, and money from ail countries, the discovery
of which recompensed the sagacity of Legrand.
The " Pit and the Pendulum " caused terror equal
to the blackest inventions of Anne Radclifîe, of
Lewis, and of the Rev. Father Mathurin, while one
gets giddy watching the tearing whirlpool of the
Maelstrom, colossal, funnel-like walls upon which
ships run like pieces of straw in a tempest.

"The Truth of the Case of M. Waldemar,"
shakes the nerves even of the most robust, and the
" Fall of the House of Usher " inspires profound
melancholy.

Imaginative natures were deeply touched by
the faces of women, so vaporous, transparent,
romantically pale, and of almost spiritual beauty,

62 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

that the poet named Morella, Ligeia, Lady Rowena,
Trevanion, de Tremaine, Lenore; but who are in
reality only the incarnations under different forms
of a unique love surviving the death of the adored
one.

Henceforth, in France, the name of Baudelaire
is inseparable from that of Edgar Poe, and the
memory of the one immediately awakes thoughts
of the other. It seems sometimes that the ideas
of the American were really of French origin.

Baudelaire, like the greater number of the
poets of his time, when the Arts, less separated
than they were formerly, mingled more one with
another and allowed of frequent transposition,
had the taste for, sentiment and knowledge of,
painting. He wrote noteworthy articles in the
"Salon,** and, amongst others, pamphlets on
Delacroix, which analysed with clear penetration
and subtlety the nature of a great romantic
painter. He thought deeply, and we find, in
some reflections on Edgar Poe, this significant
phrase : " Like our Delacroix, who has raised
his art to the height of great poetry, Edgar Poe
likes to place his subjects on violet and green
backgrounds which reveal the phosphorescence
and the fragrance of the storm." How just is
this sentiment, so simply phrased, incidental to
the passionate and feverish colour of the painter !
Delacroix, in effect, charmed Baudelaire by the

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 63

'* maladie " even of his talent, so troubled, restless,
nervous, excitable, and so tormented with un-
easiness, melancholy, febrile ardour, convulsive
efforts, and the vague dreams of modern times.

At one time, the realistic school believed it could
monopolise Baudelaire. Certain outrageously crude
and truthful pictures in the " Flowers of Evil,'"
pictures in which the poet had not hesitated before
any ugliness, might have made some superficial
minds think he leaned towards that doctrine. They
did not note that these pictures, so-called real,
were always ennobled by character, effect, or
colour, and also served as a contrast to the smooth
and idealistic work. Baudelaire, allowing himself
to be drawn by these realists, visited their studios
and was to have written an article on Courbet,
the painting-master of Ornans, which, however,
never appeared. Nevertheless, to one of the later
Salons, Fantin, in the odd frame where he united
round the medallion of Eugène Delacroix, like the
supernumeraries of an apotheosis, the painters,
and writers known as realists, placed Baudelaire
in a corner of it with his serious look and ironical
smile. Certainly Baudelaire, as an admirer of
Delacroix, had a right to be there. But did he
intellectually and sympathetically make a part
of this company, whose tendencies were not in
accord with his aristocratic tastes and aspirations
towards the beautiful ? In him, as we have

64 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

already said, the employment of trivial and
natural ugliness was only a sort of manifestation
and protestation of horror ; and we doubt if the
Venus de Courbet had ever much charm for
him, the amateur of exquisite elegance, refined
mannerisms, and mannered evasions. Not that
he was incapable of admiring grandiose beauty ;
he who has written *' La Géante " ought to love
" The Night " and the " Dawn,'' those magnificent
colossal females that Michelangelo has placed on
the voluta of the tombs of the Medici. Baudelaire
had, moreover, metaphysical and philosophical
tenets which could not but alienate him from this
school, to which he had no pretext for attaching
himself.

Far from being satisfied with reality, he sought
diligently for the bizarre, and, if he met with some
singular, original type, he followed it, studied it,
and learnt how to find the end of the thread on
the bobbin and so to unravel it. Thus he was
familiar with Guys, a mysterious individual, who
occupied his tune in going to all the odd corners
of the universe where anything was taking place
to obtain sketches for English illustrated journals.

This Guys, whom we knew, was at one time a
great traveller, a profound and quick observer,
and a perfect humorist. In the flash of an eye
he seized upon the characteristic side of men
and things ; in a few strokes of the pencil he

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 65

silhouetted them in his album, tracing the cursive
lines with the pen like a stenographer, and washing
them over with a flat tint to indicate the colour.

Guys was not what is properly called an artist,
but he had the particular gift of sketching the
chief points of things rapidly. In a flash of the
eye, with an unequalled clear-sightedness, he dis-
entangled from all the traits — ju^t the one. He
placed it in prominence, instinctively or designedly,
rejecting the merely complementary parts.

No one was more reproachful than he of a pose,
a " cassure,*' to use a vulgar word which exactly
expresses our thought, whether in a dandy or
in a voyou, in a great lady or in a daughter of the
people. He possessed in a rare degree the sense
of modern corruptions, in high as in low society,
and he also culled, under the form of sketches,
his flowers of evil. No one could render like Guys
the elegant slenderness and sleekness of the race-
horse, the dainty border on the skirt of a little
lady drawn by her ponies, the pose of the powdered
and befurred coachman on the box of a great
chariot, with panels emblazoned with the coat of
arms, going to a " drawing-room " accompanied by
three footmen. He seems, in this style of draw-
ing, fashionable and cursive, consecrated to the
scenes of high life, to have been the precursor
of the intelligent artists of "La Vie Parisienne/'
Marcelin, Hadol, Morin, Crafty. But, if Guys
5

66 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

expressed, according to the principles of Brunimel,
dandyism and the allurements of the ducJcery, he
excelled no less in portraying the venal nymphs
of Piccadilly and the Argyle Rooms with their
flash toilets and bold eyes. He was not afraid
to occupy hmiself with the deserted lanes, and
to sketch there, under the light of the moon or
in the flickering glimmer of a gas-jet, a silhouette
of one of the spectres of pleasure who haunt the
streets of London. If he found hmiself in Paris,
he followed the extreme fashions of the wicked
place and what is known as the " coquet erie du
ruisseau/' You can imagine that Guys sought
there only " character." It was his passion, and
he separated with astonishing certainty the pic-
turesque and singular side of the types from the
allurements and costume of the time. Talent of
this kind could not but charm Baudelaire, who,
in effect, greatly esteemed Guys. We possessed
about sixty drawings, sketches, aquarelles of this
humorist, and we gave some of them to the poet.
The present gave him great pleasure, and he
carried it joyfully away.

Certainly he realised all that was lacking in
these rough sketches, to which Guys himself
attached not the sHghtest importance once they
had been traced on wood by the clever engravers
of the " Illustrated London News." But Baude-
laire was struck by the spirit, the clear-sightedness,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 67

and powerful observation they displayed, literary
qualities graphically translated in the language
of line. He loved in these drawings the complete
absence of antiquity — that is to say, of classical
tradition — and the deep sentiment of what we
call " decadence,'^ for lack of a word more ex-
pressive of our meaning. But we know what
Baudelaire understood by " decadence.''* Did he
not say somewhere, à propos of these literary
distinctions : — " It seems to me that two women
are presented to me ; the one a rustic matron,
rude in health and virtue, without allurement
or worth ; briefly, owing nothing except to simple
nature ; the other, one of those beauties who
dominate and fascinate the mind, uniting, with
her powerful and original charm, all the eloquence
of the toilet, mistress of her bearing, conscious and
queen of herself, with a voice of harmonious melody,
and dreamy gaze allowed to travel whither it
will. My choice cannot be doubted, however many
pedagogues reproach me with lack of classical
honour ? "

This so original comprehension of modern beauty
turns the question, for it regards antique beauty
as prmiitive, coarse, barbarous ; a paradoxical
opinion undoubtedly, but one which can be upheld.
Balzac much preferred, to the Venus of Milo, a
Parisienne élégante, delicate, coquettish, draped
in cashmere, going furtively on foot to some

68 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

rendezvous, her chantilly violet held to her nose,
her head bent in such a way as to display, between
the brim of her hat and the last fold of her shawl,
the nape of a neck like a column of ivory, over
which some stray curl glistens in the sunlight.
This has its charms; but, for our part, we prefer
the Venus of Milo.

With such ideas as these one can imagine that
for some tune Baudelaire was inclined towards
the realistic school of which Courbet is the god
and Manet the high-priest. But if certain sides
of his nature were such as could be satisfied
by direct, and not traditional, representation of
ugliness, or at least of contemporary triviality, his
aspirations for Art, elegance, luxury, and beauty
led him towards a superior sphere. And Delacroix,
with his febrile passion, his stormy colours, his
poetical melancholy, his palette of the setting
sun, and his clever expression of the decadence,
was, and remained, his master by election.

We come now to a singular work of Baudelaire's,
half translation, half original, entitled, " The
artificial Paradises, Opium and Hashish,^' and at
which we must pause ; for it has contributed not
a little to the idea among the public, who are
always happy in spreading unfavourable reports
of authors, that the writer of the " Flowers of
Evil " was in the habit of seeking inspiration in
these stimulants. His death, following upon a

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 69

stroke of paralysis which made him powerless
to express the thoughts in his brain, only confirmed
this belief. This paralysis, so it was said, came
undoubtedly from excess in hashish or opium, to
which the poet first gave himself up out of love
of peculiarity, and then from that fatal craving
these drugs produce.

His illness was caused by nothing but the
fatigue, ennui, sorrow, and embarrassments in-
herent in literary people whose talent does not
admit of regular work, easy to sell, like jour-
nalism, and whose works, by their originality,
frighten the timid directors of reviews. Baude-
laire was as sober as all other workers, and,
while admitting a taste for the creation of an
" artificial paradise,'' by means of some stimulant,
opium, hashish, wine, alcohol, or tobacco, seems
to follow the nature of man — since one finds it
in all periods, in all conditions, in all countries,
barbarous or civilised — he saw in it the proof
of original perversity, a means of escaping neces-
sary sorrow, a satanical suggestion for usurping,
even in the present, the happiness reserved as a
recompense for resignation, virtue, and the per-
sistent efîort towards the good and the beautiful.
He thought that the devil said to the eaters of
hashish, the smokers of opium, as in the olden
times to our first parents, " If you taste of the
fruit you will be as the gods,*' and that he no more

70 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

kept his word than he did to Adam and Eve ; for,
the next day, the god, tempted, weakened, ener-
vated, descended lower than the beast and remained
isolated in an immense space, having no other
resource to escape himself than by recourse to his
poison, the doses of which he gradually increases.
That he once or twice tried hashish, as a psycho-
logical experience, is possible and even probable ;
but he did not make continuous use of it. This
happiness, bought at the chemist's and carried
in the pocket, was repugnant to him, and he
compared the ecstasy that it produced to that
of a maniac, for whom painted cloth and coarse
decorations replaced real furniture and the garden
enriched with living flowers. He came but rarely,
and then only as a spectator, to the séances at
the Hôtel Pimodan, where our circle met to take
the " dawamesk " ; séances that we have already
described in the " Review of the Two Worlds,"
under this title : " The Club of the Hashishins."
After some ten experiments we renounced once and
for all this intoxicating drug, not only because it
made us ill physically, but also because the true
littérateur has need only of natural dreams, and he
does not wish his thoughts to be influenced by any
outside agency.

Balzac came to one of these soirées, and Baude-
laire related his visit thus : " Balzac undoubtedly
thought that there is no greater shame or keener

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 71

suffering than the abdication of the will. I saw
him once at a reunion when he was contemplating
the prodigious effects of hashish. He listened and
questioned with attention and amusing vivacity.
People who knew him would guess that he was
bound to be interested. The idea shocked him in
spite of himself. Some one presented him with
the dawamesk. He examined it, smelt it, and
gave it back without touching it. The struggle
between his almost infantile curiosity and his
repugnance for the abdication, betrayed itself in
his expressive face ; love of dignity prevailed.
In effect, it is difficult to imagine the theorist of
* will,' the spiritual twin of Louis Lambert, con-
senting to lose even a particle of this precious
suhstance."

We were at the Hôtel Pimodan that evening, and
therefore can relate this little anecdote with perfect
accuracy. Only, we would add this characteristic
detail : in giving back the spoonful of hashish
that was offered him, Balzac only said that the
attempt would be useless, and that hashish, he was
sure, would have no action on his brain. That was
possible. This powerful brain, in which will power
was enthroned and fortified by study, saturated
with the subtle aroma of moka, and never obscured
by even a few bottles of the lightest of wine of
Vouvray, would perhaps have been capable of
resisting the passing intoxication of Indian hemp.

72 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

For hashish, or dawamesk, we have forgotten to
say, is only a concoction of cannabis indica, mixed
to a fleshy substance with honey and pistachio-nuts,
to give it the consistence of a paste or preserve.
The analysis of hashish is medically very well
done in the " Artificial Paradises," and science is
able to cull from them certain information ; for
Baudelaire prided himself on his accuracy, and
on no consideration whatever would he slur over
the least technical ornamentation of this habit
in which he had himself indulged. He specifies
perfectly the real character of the hallucinations
produced by hashish, which of itself creates nothing,
simply developing the particular disposition of the
individual, exaggerating it to the very last degree.
What one sees is oneself, aggrandised, made
sensitive, excited, immoderately outside time and
space, at one time real but soon deformed, accen-
tuated, enlarged, and in which each detail, with
extreme intensity, becomes of supernatural import-
ance. Yet all this is easily understandable to the
hashish-eater, who divines the mysterious corre-
spondence between the often incongruous images.
If you hear a piece of music which seems as though
performed by some celestial orchestra and a choir
of seraphim, compared to which the symphonies of
Haydn, of Mozart, and of Beethoven are no more
than aggravating clatter, you may believe that it
is only that a hand has skimmed over the keys of

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 73

a piano in some vague prelude, or that a distant
organ murmurs through the uproar of the streets
a well-known piece from the opera. If your eyes
are dazzled by blinding lights, scintillations, and
flames, assuredly it is only a certain number of
candles that burn in the torches and flambeaux.
As to the walls, ceasing to be opaque, sinking away
into vaporous perspective, deep, blue, like a window
opening on the infinite, it is but a glass mirror
opposite the dreamer with its mingled and trans-
parently fantastic shadows. The nymphs, the
goddesses, the gracious apparitions, burlesque or
terrible, come out of the pictures, the tapestries,
from the statues displaying their mythological
nudity in the niches, or from the grimacing
china figures on the shelves.

It is the same with the olfactory ecstasies
which transport one to the paradises of perfumes,
of marvellous flowers, balancing their calices
like censors which send out aromatic scents of
penetrating subtlety, recalling the memory of
former lives, of balsamic and distant shores and
primitive loves in some Tahiti of a dream. One
does not have to seek far in the room for a pot of
heliotrope or tuberose, a sachet of Spanish leather
or a cashmere shrawl impregnated with patchouli,
negligently thrown over the arm of a chair.

It is understood, then, if one wishes to enjoy to
the full the magic of hashish, it is necessary to

74 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

prepare in advance and furnish in some way the
rmtif to its extravagant variations and disorderly
fantasies. It is important to be in a tranquil frame
of mind and body, to have on this day neither
anxiety, duty, nor fixed time, and to find oneself
in such an apartment as Baudelaire and Edgar
Poe loved, a room furnished with poetical comfort,
bizarre luxury, and mysterious elegance ; a private
and hidden retreat which seems to await the be-
loved, the ideal feminine face that Chateaubriand,
in his noble language, calls the " sylphide." In
such circumstances, it is probable, and even almost
certain, that the naturally agreeable sensations
turn into ravishing blessings, ecstasies, inefïable
pleasure, much superior to the coarse joys promised
to the faithful in the paradise of Mahomet, too
easily comparable to a seraglio. The green, red,
and white houris coming out from the hollow pearl
that they inhabit and offering themselves to the
faithful, would appear as vulgar women compared
to the nymphs, angels, sylphides, perfumed va-
pours, ideal transparencies, forms of blue and rose
let loose on the disc of the sun and coming from
the depths of infinity with stellary transports, like
the silver globules on gaseous liquor, from the
bottom of the crystal chalice, that the hashish-
eater sees in innumerable legions in the dreams
he dreams while wide-awake.

Without these precautions the ecstasy is likely

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 75

to turn into nightmare. Pleasure changes to
suffering, joy to terror ; a terrible anguish seizes
one by the heart and breaks one with its fantas-
tically enormous weight, as though the sphinx of
the pyramids, or the elephant of the king of Siam,
had amused itself by flattening one out. At other
times an icy cold is felt making the victim seem
like marble up to the hips, like the king in the
"Thousand and One Nights,'' half changed to a
statue, whose wicked wife came every morning
to beat the still supple shoulders.

Baudelaire relates two or three hallucinations
of men of different temperaments, and one ex-
perienced by a woman in a small room hidden by
a gilt trellis and festooned with flowers, which is
easily recognised as the boudoir of the Hôtel
Pimodan. He accompanies each vision with an
analytical and moral commentary, through which
his unconquerable repugnance for happiness ob-
tained by such means is easily discernible. He
counts as nothing the consideration of the help
that genius can draw from the ideas suggested by
intoxication of hashish. Firstly, these ideas are
not so beautiful as one imagines, their charm comes
chiefly from the extreme excitement in which the
subject is. Then hashish, which produces these
ideas, destroys at the same time the power of using
them, for it reduces to nothing the will and plunges
its victims in an ennui in which the mind becomes

76 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

incapable of any efîort or work, and from which
it cannot escape except through the medium of
another dose. "Lastly," he adds, " admitting the
minute hypothesis of a temperament w^ell enough
balanced, strong enough to resist the evil effects of
this perfidious drug, it is necessary to consider
another fatal, terrible danger, which is that of habit.
Those who have recourse to a poison to make them
think, will soon find that they cannot think with-
out poison. Picture to yourself the terrible fate of
a man whose paralysed imagination no longer fulfils
its functions without the aid of hashish or opium.''

And, a little later, he makes his profession of
faith in these noble terms : " But man is not so
lacking in honest means of inspiration that he is
obliged to invite the aid of the pharmacy or of
sorcery ; he has no need to sell his soul to pay for
the intoxicating caresses and friendliness of the
houris. What is the paradise that one buys at
the price of eternal salvation ? '*

There follows the painting of a sort of Olympus
placed on the arduous mount of spirituality where
the muses of Raphael or of Mantegna, under
the guidance of Apollo, surround with their
rhythmical choirs the artist vowed to the cult
of beauty and recompense him for his continuous
efforts. " Beneath him," continues the author,
*' at the foot of the mountain, in the brambles
and mud, the troop of men, the band of helots,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 77

simulate the grimaces of enjoyment, and yell out
if the bite of poison is taken away from them ;
and the saddened poet says : ' These unfortunate
beings who have neither fasted nor prayed, and
who have refused to work out their own redemption,
demand from black magic the means of elevation,
with a sudden stroke, to a supernatural existence.
Magic dupes them and kindles in them false happi-
ness and light ; whilst we, poets and philosophers,
who have given new life to our souls by continued
work and thought, by the assiduous exercise of the
will and permanent nobility of intention, we have
created for our pleasure a garden of real beauty.
Confiding in the word which says faith can remove
mountains, we have accomplished the only miracle
which God has allowed/ *'

After such an expression of faith it is difficult
to believe that the author of the *' Flowers of Evil,"
in spite of his satanical leanings, has often visited
artificial paradises.

Succeeding the study on hashish is one on the
subject of opium. But here Baudelaire had for his
guidance a book, singularly celebrated in England,
" Confessions of an English Opium Eater," by De
Quincey, a distinguished Hellenist, a leading writer,
and a man of great respectability, who has dared,
with tragical candour, in a country the most har-
dened by cant in the world, to avow his passion
for opium, to describe this passion, representing

78 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

the phases, the intermittences, the relapses, the
combats, the enthusiasms, the prostrations, the
ecstasies and the phantasmagoria followed by
inexpressible anguish. De Quincey, incredible as
it may seem, had, augmenting little by little each
dose, come to taking eight thousand drops a day.
This, however, did not prevent him from living till
the age of seventy-five, for he only died in the
month of December 1859, making the doctors, to
whom, in a fit of humour, he had mockingly left
his corpse as a subject for scientific experiment,
wait a long time. This habit did not prevent him
from publishing a crowd of Hterary and learned
works in which nothing announced the fatal in-
fluence which he hmiself described as " the black
idol." The dénouement of the book leaves it under-
stood that only with superhuman efforts was the
author brought to the state of self -correction ; but
that could only have been a sacrifice to morals and
conventions, like the recompense of virtue and the
punishment of crime at the end of a melodrama,
final impenitence being a bad example. And De
Quincey pretends that, after seventeen years of
use and eight years of abuse of opium, he has
been able to renounce this dangerous substance !
It is unnecessary to discourage the theriakis of
good- will. But what of the love, however expressed,
in the lyrical invocation to the brown liqueur ?
" 0 just, subtle, and all-conquering opium ! thou

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 79

who, to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the
wounds that will never heal, and for the pangs of
grief that * tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an
assuaging bahii ; — eloquent opium ! that with thy
potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of
wrath, pleadest effectually for relenting pity, and
through one night's heavenly sleep callest back to
the guilty man the visions of his infancy, and hands
washed pure from blood ; — 0 just and righteous
opium ! that to the chancery of dreams summonest,
for the triumphs of despairing innocence, false
witnesses ; and confoundest perjury ; and dost
reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges ; —
thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of
the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and
temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles
— beyond the splendours of Babylon and Heka-
tompylos ; and, ' from the anarchy of dreaming
sleep,' callest into sunny light the faces of long-
buried beauties, and the blessed household coun-
tenances, cleansed from the ' dishonours of the
grave.' Thou only givest these gifts to man ;
and thou hast the keys of Paradise, 0 just, subtle,
and mighty opium ! "

Baudelaire does not translate De Quincey's book
entirely. He takes from it the most salient parts,
of which he writes in an analysis intermingled with
digressions and philosophical reflections, in such a
way that he presents the entire work in an

80 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

abridgment. Nothing is more curious than the
biographical details which open these confessions.
They show the flight of the scholar to escape from
the tyrannies of his tutors, his miserable and
starving life in the great desert of London, his
sojourn in the lodgings turned into a garret by the
negligence of the proprietor. We read of his
liaison with a little half-idiot servant, Ann, a poor
child, sad violet of the highways, innocent and
virginal so far ; his return in grace to his family
and his becoming possessed of a fortune, consider-
able enough to allow him to give himself up entirely
to his favourite studies in a charming cottage, in
company with a noble woman, whom this Orestes
of opium called his Electra. For, after his
neuralgic pains, he had got into that ineradicable
habit of taking the poison of which he absorbed,
without disastrous results, the enormous quantity
of forty grains a day.

To the most striking visions which shone with
the blue and silver of Paradise or Elysium suc-
ceeded others more sombre than Erebus, to which
one can apply the frightful lines of the poet :

" As when some great painter dips
His pen in gloom of earthquake and eclipse." ,

De Quincey, who was a precocious and distin-
guished humanist — he knew both Greek and Latin
at the age of ten — had always taken great pleasure

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 81

in reading Livy, and the words " Consul Romanus "
resounded in his ears like a magical and peremp-
torily irresistible formula. These five syllables
struck upon his ear like the blasts of trumpets,
sounding triumphal fanfares, and when, in his
dreams, multitudes of enemies struggled on a field
of battle lighted with livid glimmerings, with the
rattling of guns and heavy tramping, like the surge
of distant waters, suddenly a mysterious voice
would cry out these dominating words : " Consul
Romanus." A great silence would fall, oppressed
by anxious waiting, and the consul would appear
mounted on a white horse, in the midst of a great
crowd, like the Marius of the *' Batailles des
Cimbres " of Decamps, and, with a fatidical gesture,
decide the victory.

At other times, people seen in reality would
be mixed up in his dreams, and would haunt
them like obstinate spectres not to be chased
away by any formula of exorcism.

One day, in the year 1813, a Malay, of a yellow
and bilious colour, with sad, home-sick eyes, coming
from London and seeking some haven, knowing
not one word of any European language, knocked
to see if he could rest a while, at the door of the
cottage. Not wishing to fall short in the eyes of
his domestics and neighbours. De Quincey spoke
to him in Greek ; the Asiatic replied in Malay, and
his honour as a linguist was saved. After having
6

82 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

given him some money, the master of the cottage,
moved by the charity which causes a smoker to
ofîer a cigar to a poor devil whom he supposes has
long been without tobacco, gave the Malay a large
piece of opium, which the man swallowed in a
mouthful. There was enough to kill seven or eight
unaccustomed people, but the yellow-skinned man
was in the habit of taking it, for he went away
with signs of great satisfaction and gratitude.
He was not seen again, at least in the flesh, but
he became one of the most assiduous frequenters of
De Quincey's visions. The Malay of the saffron
face and the strangely black eyes was a kind of
genus of the extreme Orient who had the keys of
India, Japan, China, and other countries of repute
in a chimerical and impossible distance. As one
obeys a guide whom one has not called, but whom
one must follow by one of those fatalities that a
dream admits of. De Quincey, in the steps of the
Malay, plunged into regions of fabulous antiquity
and inexpressible strangeness that caused him the
profoundest terror. " I know not," says he in
his " Confessions," " if others share my feelings
on this point ; but I have often thought that, if
I were compelled to forgo England, and to live
in China, among Chinese manners and methods
and scenery, I should go mad. ... A young
Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed.
... In China, over and above what it has in

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 83

common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am
terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, by
the barrier of utter abhorrence placed between
myself and them, by counter-sympathies deeper
than I can analyse. I could sooner live with
lunatics, with vermin, with crocodiles or snakes/'

With malicious irony, the Malay, who seemed to
understand the repugnance of the opium-eater,
took care to lead him to the centre of great towns,
to the ivory towers, to rivers full of junks crossed
by bridges in the form of dragons, to streets
encumbered with an innumerable population of
baboons, lifting their heads with obliquely set
eyes, and moving their tails like rats, murmur-
ing, with forced reverence, complimentary mono-
syllables.

The third and last part of the dreams of an
opium-eater has a lamentable title, which, however,
is well justified, " Suspiria de profundis."' In one
of these visions appeared three imforgettable
figures, mysteriously terrible like the Grecian
"Moires" and the *' Mothers " of the second
"Faust." These are the followers of Levana,
the austere goddess who takes up the new-born
babe and perfects it by sorrow. As there were
three Graces, three Fates, three Furies, three
Muses in the primitive ages, so there were
three goddesses of sorrow ; they are our Notre-
Dame des Tristesses. The eldest of the three

84 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

sisters is called Mater lacrymarum, or Our Lady
of Tears ; the second Mater suspiriorum, Our
Lady of Sighs ; the third and youngest, Mater
tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness, the most
redoubtable of all, and of whom the strongest cannot
dream without a secret terror. These mournful
spectres do not speak the language of m.ortals ;
they weep, they sigh, and make terrible gestures
in the shadows. Thus they express their unknown
sorrows, their nameless anguish, the suggestions
of solitary despair, all that there is of suffering,
bitterness, and sorrow in the depths of the human
soul. Man ought to take warning from these
initiators : " Thus will he see things that ought
not to be seen, sights which are abominable, and
unspeakable secrets ; thus will he read the ancient
truths, the sad, great, and terrible truths.'"

One can imagine that Baudelaire did not spare
De Quincey the reproaches he addressed to all
those who sought to attain the supernatural by
material means ; but, in regard to the beauty of
the pictures painted by the illustrious and poeti-
cal dreamer, he showed him great good will and
admiration.

About this time Baudelaire left Paris and pitched
his tent in Brussels. One must not presume that
this journey was taken with any political idea,
but merely from the desire of a more tranquil
and reposeful life, far away from the distractions

CHARLES BAUDELAIEE 85

and excitements of Paris. This change does not
appear to have been a particularly profitable one
for him. He worked little at Brussels, and his
papers contain only sketchy notes, summaries
almost hieroglyphical, which he alone could resolve.
His health, instead of improving, was impaired,
more deeply than he himself was aware, as the
climate did not agree with him. The first symp-
toms manifested themselves in a certain slowness
of speech, and a more and more marked hesitation
in the choice of his words; but, as Baudelaire
often expressed himself in a solemn and sententious
way, one did not take much notice of this embar-
rassment in speech, which was the preface to the
terrible malady that carried him ofî.

The rumour of Baudelaire's death spread in
Paris with the winged rapidity of bad news, faster
than an electric current along its wire. Baudelaire
was still living, but the news, though false, was
only premature ; he could not recover from the
attack. Brought back from Brussels by his family
and friends, he lived some months, unable to
speak, unable to write, as paralysis had broken
the connecting thread between thought and speech.
Thought lived in him always — one could see that
from the expression of his eyes ; but it was a
prisoner, and dumb, without any means of com-
munication, in the dungeon of clay which would
only open in the tomb. What good is it to go

86 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

into the details of this sad end ? It is not a happy
way to die; it is sorrowful, for the survivors, to
see so fine and fruitful an intelligence pass away,
to lose in a more and more deserted path of life
a companion of youth.

Besides the " Flowers of Evil," translations of
Edgar Poe, the " Artificial Paradises," and art
criticisms, Baudelaire left a little book of " poems
in prose " inserted at various periods in journals
and reviews, which soon became without interest
for vulgar readers and forced the poet, in his noble
obstinacy, which would allow of no concession, to
take the series to a more enterprising or literary
paper. This is the first time that these pieces,
scattered and difficult to find, are bound in one
volume, nor will they be the least of the poet's
titles to the regard of posterity.

In the short Preface addressed to Arsène
Houssaye, which precedes the '* Petits poèmes
en prose," Baudelaire relates how the idea of
employing this hybrid form, floating between
verse and prose, came to him.

" I have a little confession to make to you. It
was in turning over, for the twentieth time, the
famous * Gaspard de la nuit ' of Aloysius Bertrand
(a book known to me, to you, and several of our
friends— has it not the right to be called famous ?)
that the idea came to me to attempt something
analogous and to apply to the description of modern

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 87

life, or rather to a modern and more abstract life,
the process that he has applied to the painting of
an ancient time, so strangely picturesque.

** Who among us, in these days of ambition, has
not dreamt of the miracle of poetical, musical
prose, without rhythm, without rhyme, supple
enough and apt enough to adapt itself to the
movements of the soul, to the swaying of a dream,
to the sudden throbs of conscience ? "

It is unnecessary to say that nothing resembles
" Gaspard de la nuit " less than the " Poems in
Prose/' Baudelaire himself saw this after he
commenced work, and he spoke of an accident^ of
which any other than he would have been proud,
but which only humiliated a mind which looked
upon the accomplishment of exactly what it had
intended as an honour.

We have seen that Baudelaire always claimed
to direct his inspiration according to his own will,
and to introduce infallible mathematics into his
art. He blamed himself for producing anything
but that upon which he had resolved, even though
it is, as in the present case, an original and
powerful work.

Our poetical language, it must be acknowledged,
in spite of the valiant effort of the new school to
render it flexible and malleable, hardly lends itself
to rare and subtle detail, especially when the subject
is la vie moderne, familiar or luxurious. Without

88 CHAELES BAUDELAIRE

having, as at one time, a horror for the calcu-
lated word and a love of circumlocution, French
verse, by its very construction, refuses particularly
significant expressions and if forced into direct
statement, immediately becomes hard, rugged,
and laborious. " The Poems in Prose "" came very
opportunely to supply this deficiency, and in this
form, which demands perfect art and where each
word must be thrown, before being employed,
into scales more easy to weigh down than those of
the " Peseurs d'or "" of Quint in Metsys — for it is
necessary to have the standard, the weights, and
the balance — Baudelaire has shown a precious side
of his delicate and bizarre talent. He has been
able to approach the almost inexpressible and to
render the fugitive nuances which float between
sound and colour, and those thoughts which
resemble arabesque motifs or themes of musical
phrases. It is not only to the physical nature, but
to the secret movements of the soul, to capricious
melancholy, to nervous hallucinations that this
form is aptly applied. The author of the " Flowers
of Evil " has drawn from it marvellous effects, and
one is sometimes surprised that the language carries
one through the transparencies of a dream, in the
blue distances, marks out a ruined tower, a clump
of trees, the summit of a mountain, and shows one
things impossible to describe, which, until now,
have never been expressed in words. This should

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 89

be one of the glories, if not the greatest, of Baude-
laire, to bring within the range of style a series of
things, sensations, and effects unnamed by Adam,
the great nomenclator. A writer can be ambitious
of no more beautiful title, and this the author of
the " Poems in prose " undoubtedly merits.

It is very difficult, without writing at great
length — and, even then, it is better to direct
the reader straight to the poems themselves — ^to
give a just idea of these compositions; pictures,
medallions, bas-reliefs, statuettes, enamels, pastels,
cameos which follow each other rather like the
vertebrae in the spine of a serpent. One is able
to pick out some of the rings, and the pieces join
themselves together, always living, having each
its own soul writhing convulsively towards an
inaccessible ideal.

Before closing this Introduction, which, although
already too long — for we have simply chased through
the work of the author and friend whose talent we
endeavour to explain — it is necessary to quote the
titles of the " Poems in Prose " — very superior in
intensity, concentration, profoundness, and elegance
to the delicate fantasies of " Gaspard de la nuit,"
which Baudelaire proposed to take as models.
Among the fifty pieces which comprise the collec-
tion, each different in tone and composition, we will
number "Le Gateau, "La Chambre double,*' "Le
Poules," "Les Veuves," "Le vieux saltimbanque,"

90 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

" Une Hémisphère dans une chevelure," " L'Invita-
tion au voyage/' " La Belle Dorothée," " Une Mort
héroïque," " Le Thyrse," " Portraits de maîtresses,"
** Le Désir de peindre," " Un Cheval de race," and
especially " Les Bienfaits de la lune," an adorable
poem in which the poet expresses, with magical
illumination, what the English painter Millais has
missed so completely in his " Eve of St. Agnes " —
the descent of the nocturnal star with its phosphoric
blue light, its grey of iridescent mother-of-pearl,
its mist traversed by rays in which atoms of silver
beat like moths. From the top of her stairway
of clouds, the Moon leans down over the cradle
of a sleeping child, bathing it in her baneful and
splendid light ; she dowers the sweet pale head
like a fairy god-mother, and murmurs in its ear :
*' Thou shalt submit eternally to the influence of
my kiss, thou shalt be beautiful after my fashion.
Thou shalt love what I love and those that love
me : the waters, the clouds, the silence, the night,
the great green sea, the shapeless and multiform
waters, the place where thou art not, the lover
whom thou knowest not, the prodigious flowers,
the perfumes that trouble the mind, the cats
which swoon and groan like women in hoarse or
gentle voices."

We know of no other analogy to this perfect
piece than the poetry of Li-tai-pe, so well translated
by Judith Walter, in which the Empress of China

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 91

draws, among the rays, on the stairway of jade
made brilliant by the moon, the folds of her white
satin robe. A lunatique only is able to under-
stand the moon and her mysterious charm.

When we listen to the music of Weber we
experience at first a sensation of magnetic sleep,
a sort of appeasement which separates us without
any shock from real life. Then in the distance
sounds a strange note which makes us listen
attentively. This note is like a sigh from the
supernatural world, like the voice of the invisi-
ble spirits which call us. Oberon just puts his
hunting-horn to his mouth and the magic forest
opens, stretching out into blue vistas peopled with
all the fantastic folk described by Shakespeare in
"A Midsummer Night's Dream/' Titania herself
appears in the transparent robe of silver gauze.

The reading of the " Poems in Prose " has often
produced in us these impressions ; a phrase, a
word — one only — bizarrely chosen and placed,
evoke for us an unknown world of forgotten and
yet friendly faces. They revive the memories
of early life, and present a mysterious choir of
vanished ideas, murmuring in undertones among
the phantoms of things apart from the realities of
life. Other phrases, of a morbid tenderness, seem
like music whispering consolation for unavowed
sorrows and irremediable despair. But it is neces-
sary to beware, for such things as these make us

92 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

homesick, like the " Ranz des vaches '* of the poor
Swiss lansquenet in the German ballad, in garrison
at Strasbourg, who swam across the Rhine, was
retaken and shot " for having listened too much
to the sound of the horn of the Alps."

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.

February 20^, 1868.

SELECTED POEMS OF CHARLES

BAUDELAIRE DONE INTO

ENGLISH VERSE

BY GUY THORNE

»s

SELECTED POEMS OF CHARLES

BAUDELAIRE DONE INTO

ENGLISH VERSE

BY GUY THORNE

EXOTIC PERFUME

{Parfum exotique)

With eve and Autumn in mine eyes confest,
I breathe an incense from thy heart of fire,
And happy hill-sides tired men desire
Unfold their glory in the weary West.

0 lazy Isle ! where each exotic tree
Is hung with delicate fruits, and slender boys
Mingle with maidens in a dance of joys
That knows not shame, where all are young and
free.

06

96 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Yes 1 thy most fragrant breasts have led me home
To this thronged harbour ; and at last I know
Why searching sailors venture on the foam. . . .

— 'Tis that they may to Tamarisk Island go.
For there old slumberous sea-chants fill the air
Laden with spices, and the world is fair.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 9?

THE MURDERER'S WINE

(Le vin de l'assassin)

My wife is stifîened into wax.

— Now I can drink my fill.
Her yellings tore my heart like hooks,

They were so keen and shrill.
'Tis a King's freedom that I know

Since that loud voice is still.

The day is tender blue and gold,

The sky is clear above . . .
Just such a summer as we had

When first I fell in love.
. . . I'm a King now ! Such royal thoughts

Within me stir and move !

Ô8 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

I killed her ; but I could not slake

My burning lava-wave
Of hideous thirst — far worse than that

Of some long-tortured slave —
If I had wine enough to fill

Her solitary, deep grave.

In slime and dark her body lies ;

It echoed as it fell.
(I will remember this no more.)

Her tomb no man can tell.
I cast great blocks of stone on her,

The curb-stones of the well.

We swore a thousand oaths of love ;

Absolved we cannot be
Nor ever reconciled, as when

We both lived happily ;
. . . 'ïwas evening on a darkling road

When the mad thing met rae.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 99

We all are mad, this I well think.

. . . The madness of my wife

Was to come, tired and beautiful,

To a madman with a knife !
I loved her far too much, 'twas why

I hurried her from life.

I am alone among my friends,

And of our sodden crowd
No single drunkard understands

I sit apart and vowed.
They do not weave all night, and throw

Wine-shuttles through a shroud !

True love has black enchantments ; chains

That rattle, and damp fears ;
Wan phials of poison, dead men's bones,

And horrible salt tears.
Of this the iron-bound drunkard knows

Nothing, nor nothing hears.

100 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

1 am alone. My wile is dead,
And dead-drunk will I be

This self-same night, a clod on earth
With naught to trouble me.

A dog I'll be, in a long dog-sleep,
Oblivious and free !

The chariot with heavy wheels

Comes rumbling through the night.

Crushed stones and mud are on its wheels,
It is a thing of might !

The wain of retribution moves
Slowly, as is most right.

It comes, to crack my guilty head
Or crush my belly through,

I care not who the driver is ;
God and the devil too

— Sitting side by side — can do no more
Than that they needs must do !

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 101

MUSIC

{La Musique)

Music can lead me far, and far

0*er mystical sad seas,
Where burns my pale, high-hanging star

Among the mysteries
Of Pleiades.

My lungs are taut of sweet salt air ;

The pregnant sail-cloths climb
The long, gloom-gathering ocean stair.

I don the chord-shot cloak of Time
While the waves chime !

Fierce winds and sombre tempests come

And bludgeon heavily
All our vibrating timbers . . . drum

Most passionately. 0 Sea !
Liberate me !

102 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

So shall thy mighty void express
Both depths and surface. There

Opens thy magic mirror ; men confess
To Thee their sick despair
... No otherwhere.

CHAELES BAUDELAIRE 103

THE GAME

(Le jeu)

In faded chairs old courtesans
With painted eyebrows leer.

The stones and metal rattle in
Each dry and withering ear,

As lackadaisical they loll,
And preen themselves, and peer.

Their mumbling gums and lipless masks
— Or lead- white lips — are prest

Around the table of green cloth ;
And withered hands, possest

Of Hell's own fever, vainly search
In empty purse or breast.

Beneath the low, stained ceiling hang
Enormous lamps, which shine

On the sad foreheads of great poets
Glutted with things divine.

Who throng this ante-room of hell
To find the anodyne.

104 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

I see these things as in a dream,
With the clairvoyant eye,

And in a corner of the den
A crouching man descry ;

A silent, cold, and envying man
Who watches. It is I !

I envy those old harlots' greed

And gloomy gaiety ;
The gripping passion of the game,

The fierce avidity
With which men stake their honour for

A ruined chastity.

I dare not envy many a man
Who runs his life-race well ;

Whose brave, undaunted peasant blood
Death's menace cannot quell.

Abhorring nothingness, and strong
Upon the lip of Hell.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 105

THE FALSE MONK

{Le mauvais moine)

Upon the tall old cloister walls there were
Some painted frescoes showing Truth ; so we,

Seeing them thus so holy and so fair,
Might for a space forget austerity.

For when the Lord Christ's seeds were blossoming,
Full many a simple, pious brother found

Death but a painted phantom with no sting,
— And took for studio a burial-ground.

But my soul is a sepulchre, where I,

A false Franciscan, dwell eternally,
And no walls glow with pictured mysteries.

When shall I rise from living death, to take

My pain as rich material, and make
Work for my hands, with pleasure for mine eyes ?

106 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

AN IDEAL OF LOVE

(Uldéal)

I HATE those beauties in old prints,
Those faded, simpering, slippered pets ;

Vignetted in a room of chintz.
And clacking siUy castanets.

I leave Gavarni all his dolls.
His sickly harems, pale and wan.

The beauties of the hospitals
I do not wish to look upon.

Red roses are the roses real !

Among the pale and virginal
Sad flowers, I find not my ideal

. . . Vermilion or cardinal !

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 107

The panther-women hold my heart —
Macbeth's dark wife, of men accurst,

... A dream of ^îlschylus thou art,
'Tis such as thou shall quench my thirst !

... Or Michelangelo's daughter, Night,
Who broods on her own beauty, she

For whose sweet mouth the Giants fight.
Queen of my ideal love shall be !

108 CHARLES BAUDELAIKE

THE SOUL OF WINE

{L'Ame du vin)

Vermilion the seals of my prison,

Cold crystal its walls, and my voice
Singeth loud through the evening ; a vision

That bid'st thee rejoice !
Disinherited ! outcast ! — I call thee

To pour, and my song in despite
Of the World shall enfold and enthrall thee

Pulsating with light !

Long labours, fierce ardours, and blazing

Of suns on far hill-sides, and strife
Of the toilers have gone to the raising

Of me into life !
I forget not their pains, for I render

Rewards ; yea ! in full-brimming bowl
To those who have helped to engender

My passionate soul !

My joys are unnumbered, unending,
When I rise from chill cellars to lave

The hot throat of Labour, ascending
As one from the grave.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 109

ïhe Sabbath refrains that thou hearest,
The whispering hope in my breast,

Shalt call thee, dishevelled and dearest !
To ultimate rest.

The woman thy youthfulness captured.

Who bore thee a son — this thy wife —
I will give back bright eyes, which enraptured

Shall see thee as Life !
Thy son, a frail athlete, I dower

With all my red strength, and the toil
Of his life shall be king-like in power,

. . . Anointed with oil!

To thee I will bow me, thou fairest

Gold grain from the Sower above.
Ambrosia I wedded, and rarest

The fruits of our love.
High God round His feet shall discover

The verses I made, in the hours
When I was thy slave and thy lover.

Press upwards like flowers !

no CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

THE INVOCATION

(Prière)

Glory to thee, Duke Satan. Reign
O'er kings and lordly state.

Prince of the Powers of the Air
And Hell ; most desolate,

Dreaming Thy long, remorseful dreams
And reveries of hate !

0 let me lie near thee, and sleep

Beneath the ancient Tree
Of Knowledge, which shall shadow thee

Beelzebub, and me !
While Temples of strange sins upon

Thy brows shall builded be.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 111

THE CAT

(Le Chat)

Most lovely, lie along my heart,
Within your paw your talons fold,
Let me find secrets in your eyes —
Your eyes of agate rimmed with gold !

For when my languid fingers move
Along your rippling back, and all
My senses tingle with deUght
In softness so electrical,

My wife's face flashes in my mind ;
Your cold, mysterious glances bring,
Sweet beast, strange memories of hers
That cut and flagellate and sting !

From head to foot a subtle air
Surrounds her body's dusky bloom,
And there attends her everywhere
A faint and dangerous perfume.

112 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

THE GHOST
{Le Revenant)

With some dark angel's flaming eyes
That through the shadows burn,

Gliding towards thee, noiselessly,
— 'Tis thus I shall return.

Such kisses thou shalt have of me
As the pale moon- rays give,

And cold caresses of the snakes,
That in the trenches live.

And when the livid morning comes.

All empty by thy side.
And bitter cold, thou'lt find my place ;

Yea, until eventide.

Others young love to their embrace
By tenderness constrain.

But over all thy youth and love
I will by terror reign.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 113

LES LITANIES DE SATAN

0 Satan, most wise and beautiful of all the angels,
God, betrayed by destiny and bereft of praise,
Have fity on my long misery !

Prince of Exile, who hast been trodden down and

vanquished.
But who ever risest up again more strong,

0 Satan, have fity on my long misery !

Thou who knowest all ; Emperor of the Kingdoms

that are below the earth,
Healer of human afflictions,

Have pity on my long misery !

Thou who in love givest the taste of Paradise

To the Leper, the Outcast and those who are

accursed,
0 Satan, have pity on my long misery !

8

114 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

0 thou who, of Death, thy strong old mistress,
Hast begotten the sweet madness of Hope,
Have pity on my long misery !

Thou who givest outlaws serenity, and the pride
Which damns a whole people thronging round the
scafiold,

0 Satan, have fity on my long misery !

Thou who knowest in what corners of the envious

earth
The jealous God hath hidden the precious stones,
Have fity on my long misery !

Thou whose clear eye knoweth the deep arsenals
Wherein the buried metals are sleeping,

0 Satan, have fity 07i my long misery !

Thou whose great hand hideth the precipice
And concealeth the abyss from those who walk in
sleep.

Have pity on my long misery !

Thou who by enchantment makest supple the bones

of the drunkard
When he falleth under the feet of the horses,
0 Satan, have pity on my long misery !

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 115

Thou who didst teach weak men and those who

sufier
To mix saltpetre and sulphur,

Have pity on my long misery !

Thou, 0 subtle of thought ! who settest thy mask
Upon the brow of the merciless rich man,

0 Satan, have fity on my long misery !

Thou who fillest the eyes and hearts of maidens
With longing for trifles and the love of forbidden
things.

Have pity on my long misery !

Staff of those in exile, beacon of those who contrive

strange matters,
Confessor of conspirators and those who are hanged,
0 Satan, have pity on my long misery !

Sire by adoption of those whom God the Father
Has hunted in anger from terrestrial paradise.
Have pity on my long misery !

116 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

ILL-STARRED !

{Le Giiignon)

To raise this dreadful burden as I ought

It needs thy courage, Sisyphus, for I

Well know how long is Art, and Life how short.

— My soul is willing, but the moments fly.

Towards some remote churchyard without a name
In forced funereal marches my steps come ;
Far from the storied sepulchres of fame.
— My heart is beating like a muffled drum.

Full many a flaming jewel shrouded deep

In shadow and oblivion, lies asleep,

Safe from the toiling mattocks of mankind.

Sad faery blossoms secret scents distil
In trackless solitudes ; nor ever will
The lone anemone her lover find !

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 117

Note. — It seems fairly obvious — and perhaps this is a discovery
— that Baudelaire must have read Gray's " Elegy." As we know,
he was a first-class English scholar, and whether he plagiarised
or unconsciously remembered the most perfect stanza that Gray
ever wrote, one can hardly doubt that the gracious music of the
French was borrowed from or influenced by the no less splendid
rhythm of —

" Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear :
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

118 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

LINES WRITTEN ON THE FLY-LEAF OF AN
EXECRATED BOOK

{Épigraphe pour un livre condamné)

Sober, simple, artless man,

In these pages do not look.
Melancholy lurks within,

Sad and saturnine the book.

Cast it from thee. If thou know'st

Not of that dark learned band.
Whom wise Satan rules as Dean ;

Throw ! Thou would'st not understand.

Yet, if unperturbed thou canst,

Standing on the heights above,
Plunge thy vision in the abyss

— Read in me and learn to love.

If thy soul hath suffered, friend,

And for Paradise thou thirst,
Ponder my devil-ridden song

And pity me . . . or be accurst !

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 119

THE END OF THE DAY

{La Fin de la journée)

Beneath a wan and sickly light
Life, impudent and noisy, sways ;
Most meaningless in all her ways.
She dances like a bedlamite,

Until the far horizon grows
Big with sweet night, at last ! whose name
Appeases hunger, soothes the shame
And sorrow that the poet knows.

My very bones seem on the rack ;

My spirit wails aloud ; meseems

My heart is thronged with funeral dreams.

I will lie down and round me wrap
The cool, black curtains of the gloom
That night hath woven in her loom.

LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE

121

VENUS AND THE FOOL

How glorious the day ! The great park swoons
beneath the Sun's burning eye, as youth beneath
the Lordship of Love.

Earth's ecstasy is all around, the waters are
drifting into sleep. Silence reigns in nature's
revel, as sound does in human joy. The waning
light casts a glamour over the world. The sun-
kissed flowers plume the day with colour, and
fling incense to the winds. They desire to rival
the painted sky.

Yet, amidst the rout, I see one sore afflicted
thing. A motley fool, a willing clown who brings
laughter to the lips of kings when weariness and
remorse oppress them ; a fool in a gaudy dress,
coiffed in cap and bells, huddles at the foot of
a huge Venus. His eyes are full of tears, and
raised to the goddess they seem to say :

" I am the last and most alone of mortals, inferior
to the meanest animal, in that I am denied either
love or friendship. Yet I, even I, am made for
human sympathy and the adoration of immortal
Beauty. 0 Goddess, have pity, have mercy on
my sadness and despair."

128

124 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

But the implacable Venus stares through the
world with her steady marble eyes.

THE DESIRE TO PAINT

Unhappy is the man, but happy the artist, to whom
this desire comes.

I long to paint one woman. She has come to
me but seldom, swiftly passing from my sight, as
some beautiful, unforgettable object the traveller
leaves behind him in the night. It is long ago
since I saw her.

She is lovely, far more than that ; she is all-
sufficing. She is a study in black : all that she
inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are
two deep pools wherein mystery vaguely coils and
stirs ; her glance is phosphorescent ; it is like
lightning on a summer night of black velvet.

She is comparable to a great black Sun, if one
could imagine a dark star brimming over with
happiness and light. She stirs within one dreams
of the moon. Night's Queen who casts spells upon
her — not the white moon, that cold bride of summer
idylls, but the sinister, intoxicating moon which
hangs in the leaden vault of storm, among the driven
clouds ; not the pale, peaceful moon who visits
the sleep of the pure ; but the fiery moon, torn
from the conquered heavens, before whom dance
the witches of Thessaly.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 125

Upon the brow determination sits ; she is ever
seeking whom she may enthrall. Her delicately
curved and quivering nostrils breathe incense from
unknown lands ; a haunting smile lingers on
her subtle lips — lips softer than sleep-laden poppy
petals, kissed by the suns of tropic lands.

There are women who inspire one with the desire
to woo and win. She makes me long to fall asleep
at her feet, beneath her slow and steady gaze.

EACH MAN HIS OWN CHIMERA

Beneath a vault of livid sky, upon a far-flung
and dusty plain where no grass grew, where not a
nettle or a thistle dared raise its head, men passed
me bowed down to the ground.

Each bore upon his back a great Chimsera, heavy
as a sack of coal, or as the equipment of a foot-
soldier of Rome.

But the monster was no dead weight. With
her all-powerful and elastic muscles she encircled
and oppressed her mount, clawing with two great
talons at his breast. Her fabulous head reposed
upon his brow, like a casque of ancient days
whereby warriors struck fear to the hearts of their
foes.

I questioned one of the wayfarers, asking why
they walked thus. He replied that he knew
nothing, neither he nor his companions, but that

126 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

they moved towards an unknown land, urged on
by irresistible impulse.

None of the wayfarers was discomforted by the
foul thing which hung upon his neck. One said
that it was part of himself.

Beneath the lowering dome of sky they journeyed
on. They trod the dust-strewn earth — earth as
desolate as the dusty sky. Their weary faces bore
no witness to despair; they were condemned to
hope for ever. So the pilgrimage passed and
faded into the mist of the horizon, where the planet
unveils itself to the human eye.

For some moments I tried to solve this mystery ;
but unconquerable Indifierence fell upon me. And
I was no more dejected by my burden than they
by their crushing Chimseras.

INTOXICATION

To be drunken for ever : that is the only thing
which matters ! If you would escape Time's bruises
and his heavy burdens which weigh you to the
earth, you must be drunken.

But how ? With the fruit of the wine, with
poetry, with virtue, with what you will. But be
drunken. And if, sometime, at the gates of a
palace, on the green banks of a river, or in the
shadowed loneliness of your own room, you should
awake and find intoxication lessened or passed

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 127

away, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of
the bird, of the timepiece ; ask all that flies, all
that sighs, all that revolves, all that sings, all
that speaks — ask of these the hour. And the wind,
the wave, the star, the bird, and the timepiece
will answer you : " It is the hour to be drunken !
Lest you be martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate
yourselves, be drunken without cease ! With wine,
with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will.'*

•

THE MARKSMAN

As the carriage passed through the wood he told
the driver to halt at a shooting-gallery, saying
that he wished to have a few shots to kill time.

Is not the slaying of the monster Time the most
usual and legitimate occupation of man ?

So he graciously offered his hand to his dear,
adorable, accursed wife ; the mysterious woman
who was his inspiration, to whom he owed many
of his sorrows, many of his joys.

Several bullets went wide of the mark ; one flew
far away into the distance. His charming wife
laughed deliriously, mocking at his clumsiness.
Turning to her, he said brusquely :

" Look at that doll yonder, on your right, with
its nose turned up and so supercilious an air.
Think, sweet angel, I will picture to myself that it
is you.''

128 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

He closed his eyes, he pulled the trigger. The
doll's head fell upon the ground.

Then, bending over his dear, adorable, accursed
wife, his inevitable and merciless muse, he kissed
her hand respectfully, and said : " Ah, sweet Angel,
how I thank you for my skill ! "

CORRESPONDENCE OF
BAUDELAIRE

9 129

COREESPONDENCE OF BAUDELAIRE

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

19th March, 1856.

Here, my dear patron, is a kind of literature which
will not, perhaps, inspire you with as much en-
thusiasm as it does me, but which will most surely
interest you. It is necessary — that is to say that
I desire, that Edgar Poe, who is not very great
in America, should become a great man in France.
Knowing how brave you are and what a lover of
novelty, I have boldly promised your support to
Michel Levy.

Can you write me a line telling me if you will
do something in the " Athenaeum " or elsewhere ?
Because, in that case, I would write to M. Lalanne
not to entrust this to any one else — your pen having
a peculiar authority of which I am in need.

You will see at the end of the Notice (which
contradicts all the current opinions in the United
States) that I announce new studies. I shall speak
of the opinions of this singular man later, in the
matter of sciences, philosophy, and literature.

I deliver my always troubled soul into your hands.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

Wednesday, 2Qth March, 1856.

You well knew that this scrap of good news
would enchant me. Lalanne had been warned by

131

132 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Asselineau, and it would have been necessary for
the book to have been given to another person
if you had not been able to write the article.
Lalanne has received a volume.

I can, with respect to the remainder of your
letter, give you some details which will perhaps
interest you.

There will be a second volume and a second
preface. The first volume is written to draw the
Public : " Juggling, hypotheses, false rumours,"
etc. " Ligeia " is the only important piece which
is morally connected with the second volume.

The second volume is more markedly fantastic :
'' Hallucinations, mental maladies, pure grotesque-
ness, the supernatural,'' etc.

The second Preface will contain the analysis of
the words that I shall not translate, and, above all,
the statement of the scientific and literary opinions
of the author. It is even necessary that I should
write to M. de Humboldt on this subject to ask him
his opinion on a little book which is dedicated to
him ; it is " Eureka."

The first preface, that you have seen and in which
I have tried to comprise a lively protestation against
Americanism, is almost complete from the bio-
graphical point of view. We shall pretend to wish
to consider Poe only as a juggler, but I shall come
back at the finish to the supernatural character of
his poetry and his stories. He is only American in

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 133

so far as he is a juggler. Beyond that, the thought
is almost anti-Anierican. Besides, he has made
fun of his compatriots as much as he could.

Now, the piece to which you allude makes part
of the second volume. It is a dialogue between
two souls, after the destruction of the earth. There
are three dialogues of this kind that I shall be happy
to lend you at the end of the month, before deliver-
ing my second volume to the printer.

Now, I thank you with all my heart ; but you
are so kind that you run risks with me. After
the Poe will come two volumes of mine, one of
critical articles and the other of poems. Thus, I
make my excuses to you beforehand ; and, besides,
I fear that when I shall no longer speak with the
voice of a great poet, I shall be for you a brawling
and disagreeable being.

Yours ever.

At the end of the second volume of Poe I shall
put some specimens of poetry.

I am persuaded that a man so careful as yourself
would not wish me to ask him to take note of the
orthography of the name [Edgar Poe]. No " d,"'
no diaeresis, no accent.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

9th March, 1857.

My dear friend, you are too indulgent to have
taken exception to the impertinent point of in-

134 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

terrogation that I have put after the word ** sou-
venir " on the copy of the " Nouvelles histoires
extraordinaires/* that I laid aside for you yesterday
at the " Moniteur/* If you can be pleased, I shall
think it very natural : you have spoilt me. If you
cannot, I shall still find it very natural.

This second volume is of a higher and more poetic
nature than two-thirds of the first. The third
volume (in process of publication in the " Moniteur")
will be preceded by a third notice.

The tale of the end of the world is called " Con-
versation of Eiros with Charmion."

A new pull has just been made of the first volume,
in which the principal faults are corrected. Michel
knows that he must keep a copy for you. If I have
not the time to bring it to you, I shall have it sent
to you.

Your afiectionate.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

Wednesday, \Uh Augmt, 1857.

Ah ! dear friend, I have something very serious,
something very awkward to ask you. I wished to
write to you, and then I would rather tell you.
For a fortnight my ideas on this subject have been
changing ; but my lawyer (Chaix d'Est-Ange fils)
insists that I talk to you about it, and I should be
very happy if you could grant me a little conversa-
tion of three minutes to-day wherever you like, at

CHARLES BAUDELAIEE 135

your house or elsewhere. I did not wish to call
on you unexpectedly. It always seems to me,
when I take my way towards the rue Montparnasse,
that I am going to visit that wonderful wise man,
seated in a golden tulip, whose voice speaks to
intruders with the resounding echo of a trumpet.

This morning I am awaiting some copies of my
brochure ; I will send you one at the same time.

Your very affectionate.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

Tuesday, 18th May, 1858.

I think that I drop in upon you as inconveniently

as possible, do I not ? You are engaged to-day ;

but, by coming to see you after four o'clock I shall

perhaps be able to find you. In any case, whether

I deceive myself or not, if you are busy this evening

with your affairs, put me to the door like a true

friend.

Yours always.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

Uth June, 1868.

Dear Friend,

I have just read your work on "Fanny."
Is there any need for me to tell you how
charming it is and how surprising it is to see a
mind at once so full of health, of herculean health,
and at the same time most delicate, most subtle,
most femininely fine ! (On the subject of feminine

136 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

fineness I wanted to obey you and to read the
work of the stoic. In spite of the respect I ought
to have for your authority, I decidedly do not wish
that gallantry, chivalry, mysticism, heroism, in
fact exuberance and excess, which are what is most
charming even in honesty, should be suppressed.)

With you, it is necessary to be cynical ; for you
are too shrewd for deceit not to be dangerous.
Ah well, this article has inspired me with terrible
jealousy. So much has been said about Loëve-
Weimars and of the service he has rendered to
French literature ! Shall I not find a champion
who will say as much of me ?

By some cajolery, most powerful friend, shall I
obtain this from you ? However, what I ask of
you is not an injustice. Did you not offer it to me
at first ? Are not the ** Adventures of Pym "
an excellent pretext for a general sketch ? You,
who love to amuse yourself in all depths, will you
not make an excursion into the depths of Edgar
Poe ? You guess that the request for this service
is connected in my mind with the visit I must pay
to M. Pelletier. When one has a little money and
goes to dine with a former mistress one forgets
everything. But there are days when the curses
of all the fools mount to one's brain, and then one
implores one's old friend, Sainte-Beuve.

Now, truly, of late I have been literally dragged
in the mud, and (pity me, it is the first time that

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 137

I have lacked dignity), I have had the weakness to
reply.

I know how busy you are and how full of applica-
tion for all your lessons, for all your work and
duties, etc. But if, sometimes, a little strain were
not put on friendliness, on kindness, where would
the hero of friendliness be ? And if one did not
say too much good about brave men, how would
they be consoled for the curses of those who only
wish to say too much evil ?

Finally, I will say to you, as usual, that all that
you wish will be good.

Yours ever.

I like you more than I like your books.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

\Wh August, 1858.

Is it permitted to come and warm and fortify
oneself a little by contact with you ? You know
what I think of men who are depressants and men
who have a tonic influence. If, then, I unsettle
you, you must blame your qualification, still more
my weakness. I have need of you as of a douche.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

2,\st February, 1859.

My dear friend, I do not know if you take in the
" Revue française." But, for fear that you should
read it, I protest against a certain line (on the

138 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

subject of " The Flowers of Evil "), page 171, in
which the author — who, however, is very intelligent
— is guilty of some injustice towards you.

Once, in a newspaper, I have been accused of
ingratitude towards two chiefs of ancient roman-
ticism to whom I owe all ; it spoke, besides, with
a judicial air, of this infamous trash.

This time, in reading this unfortunate line, I
said to myself : " Mon Dieu ! Sainte-Beuve, who
knows my fidelity, but who knows that I am con-
nected with the author, will perhaps believe that
I have been capable of prompting this passage.'*
It is exactly the contrary ; I have quarrelled with
Babou many a time in order to persuade him that
you would always do everything you ought and
could do.

A short time ago I was talking to Malassis of
this great friendship, which does me honour and
to which I owe so much good advice. The monster
left me no peace until I gave him the long letter
that you sent me at the time of my lawsuit, and
which will serve, perhaps, as a plan for the making
of a Preface. New " Flowers " are done, and pass-
ably out of the ordinary. Here, in repose, fluency
has come back to me. There is one of them
(" Danse macabre *') which ought to have appeared
on the 15th, in the " Revue contemporaine. . . /'

I have not forgotten your Coleridge, but I have
been a month without receiving any books, and to

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 139

run through the 2,400 pages of Poe is some small
labour.

Sincerely yours, and write to me if you have
time,

Honfleur, Calvados (this address is sufficient).

What has become of the old rascal ? (d'Aurevilly).

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

28th February, 1859.

My dear friend, I learn that you have asked
Malassis to communicate to you what you wrote
to me on the subject of the " Flowers.'* Malassis
is a little astounded ; furthermore, he is ill. There
were two letters ; one, a friendly, complimentary
letter ; the other, a scheme of the address that you
gave to me on the eve of my lawsuit. As, one day,
I was classifying papers with Malassis, he begged
me to give him that, and when I told him I intended
to make use of it (not by copying but by paraphras-
ing and developing it) he said to me : " All the more
reason. You will always find it again at my house.
If your printer had it, it could not get lost."

I even think I remember having said to Malassis :
*' If I had pleaded my cause myself and if I had
known how to develop this thesis, that a lawyer
could not understand, I should doubtless have
been acquitted.'*

I understand absolutely nothing of this nonsense
in the " Revue française." The manager, however,

140 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

seems to be a very well-bred young man. Every
one knows that you have rendered many services

to men younger than yourself. How has M. M

printed this without making representations to
Babou and without finding out what prejudice he
had towards me ?

Malassis, on whom I had not counted at all, has
also seen the passage, and his letter is still more
severe than yours.

I am going to Paris on the 4th or 5th. It
would be very kind of you to write a word to
Mme. Duval, 22, rue Beautreillis, to let me know
if and when you wish to see me. I shall stay
at her house.

Yours sincerely.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

3rd or ith March, 1859.

A thousand thanks for your excellent letter. It
has reassured me, but I think you are too sensitive.
If ever I attain as good a position as yours, I shall
be a man of stone. I have just read a very funny
article of the " rascal '" on Chateaubriand and
M. de Marcellus, his critic. He has not missed the
over easy witticism : "Tu Marcellus eris ! "

In replying to Babou (what was important to
me was to assure myself that you did not believe
me capable of a meanness) I think that you attribute
too much importance to him. He gives me the

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 141

impression of being one of those people who
believe that the pen is made to play tricks with.
Boys' tricks, school hoaxes.

Yours sincerely.

Batdelaire to Sainte-Beuve

I860.

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you beforehand, for pre-
caution, because I have so strong a presentiment
that I shall not have the pleasure of finding you.

I wrote recently to M. Dalloz a letter couched as
nearly as possible like the following :

" Render account of the ' Paradis artificiels ' !
I know Messrs. So-and-so, So-and-so, etc., on the
' Moniteur.' "

Reply of Dalloz :

" The book is worthy of Sainte-Beuve. (It is
not I speaking.) Pay a visit to M. Sainte-Beuve
about it."

I should not have dared to think so. Numerous
reasons, of which I guess part, perhaps estrange you
from it, and perhaps also the book does not please
you.

However, I have more than ever need of being
upheld, and I ought to have given you an account
of my perplexity.

All that has been said about this essay has not
any common sense, absolutely none.

142 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

P.S. — A few days ago, but then for the pure need
of seeing you, as Antseus had need of the Earth,
I went to the rue Montparnasse. On the way I
passed a gingerbread shop, and the fixed idea took
hold of me that you must like gingerbread. Note
that nothing is better in wine at dessert ; and I
felt that I was going to drop in on you at dinner-
time.

I sincerely hope that you will not have taken the
piece of gingerbread, encrusted with angelica, for
an idle joke, and that you will have eaten it in all
simplicity.

If you share my taste, I recommend you, when
you can get it, English gingerbread, very thick,
very black, so close that it has neither holes nor
pores, full of ginger and aniseed. It is cut in slices
as thin as roast beef, and can be spread with butter
or preserve. Yours always. Love me well. . . .
I am passing through a great crisis.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

End of January, 1862.

Still another service that I owe you ! When
will this end ? And how shall I thank you ?

The article had escaped me. That explains to
you the delay before beginning to write to you.

A few words, my dear friend, to paint for you the
peculiar kind of pleasure that you have obtained
for me. Many years ago 1 was very much wounded

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 143

(but I said nothing) to hear myself spoken of as
a churl, an impossible and crabbed man. Once,
in a wicked journal, I read some lines about my
repulsive ugliness, well designed to alienate all
sympathy (it was hard for a man who has loved
the perfume of woman so well). One day a woman
said to me : *' It is curious, you are very pre-
sentable ; I thought that you were always drunk
and that you smelt evilly/' She spoke according
to the tale.

Now, my friend, you have put all that right, and
I am very grateful to you for it — I, who have
always said that it was not sufficient to be wise,
but that above all it was necessary to be agreeable.

As for what you call my Kamtschatka, if I often
received encouragements as vigorous as that, I
believe that I should have the strength to make
an immense Siberia of it, but a warm and populous
one. When I see your activity, your vitality, I am
quite ashamed ; happily, I have sudden leaps and
crises in my character which replace, though very
inadequately, the action of sustained willingness.

Must I, the incorrigible lover of the " Rayons
jaunes " and of " Volupté," of Sainte-Beuve the
poet and novelist, now compliment the journalist ?
How do you arrive at this certainty of pen which
allows you to say everything and makes a game of
every difficulty for you ? This article is not a
pamphlet, for it is a righteousness. One thing

144 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

struck me, and that is that I found again there all
your eloquence in conversation, with its good sense
and its petulances.

Really, I should have liked to collaborate in it a
little — forgive this pride — I should have been able
to give you two or three enormities that you have
omitted through ignorance. I will tell you all
this in a good gossip.

Ah, and your Utopia ! the great way of driving
the " vague, so dear to great nobles," from elec-
tions ! Your Utopia has given me a new pride.
I, also, have done it, Utopia, reform ; — is it an old
revolutionary movement that drove me, also, long
ago, to make schemes for a constitution ? There
is this great difïerence, that yours is quite viable
and that perhaps the day is not far off when it
will be adopted.

Poulet-Malassis is burning to make a pamphlet
of your admirable article. . . .

I ask you to promise to find some minutes to
reply to the following :

Great trouble, the necessity of working, physical
ills, have interfered with my proceedings.

At last I have fifteen examples of my principal
books. My very restricted distribution list is
made.

I think it is good policy to put up for the Lacor-
daire chair. There are no literary men there. It
was first of all my own design, and, if I had not

CHAELES BAUDELAIRE 145

done so, it was not to disobey you and not to appear
too eccentric. If you think my idea good, I will
write a letter to M. Villemain before next Wednes-
day, in which I will briefly say that it seems to
me that the choice of a candidate must not only
be directed by the desire of success, but must also
be a sympathetic homage to the memory of the
deceased. Besides, Lacordaire is a romantic priest,
and I love him. Perhaps I shall slur over the
word " romantic " in the letter, but not without
consulting you.

It is imperative that this terrible rhetorician,
this so grave and unkindly man, should read my
letter ; this man who preaches while he talks, with
the expression and the solemnity (but not with the
good faith) of Mile. Lenormand. I have seen
this lady in the robe of a professor, set in her chair,
like a Quasimodo, and she had over M. Villemain
the advantage of a very sympathetic voice.

If, by chance, M. Villemain is dear to you, I at
once take back all that I have just said ; and, for
love of you, I shall do my best to find him lovable.

However, I cannot help thinking that, as a
papist, I am worth more than him . . . even
though I am a very-much-suspected Catholic.

I want, in spite of my tonsure and my white

hairs, to speak to you as a little boy. My mother,

who is very much bored, is continually asking

me for novelties. I have sent her your article.

10

146 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

I know what maternal pleasure she will draw
from it. Thank you for me and for her.

Your very devoted.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

Monday evening , 3rd Februury, 1862.

My dear friend, I am trying hard to guess those
hours which are your leisure hours, and I cannot
succeed. I have not written a word, in accordance
with your advice ; but I am patiently continuing
my visits, in order to let it be well understood that
I want, with regard to the election in replacement
of Father Lacordaire, to gather some votes from
men of letters. I think that Jules Sandeau will
speak to you about me ; he has said to me very
graciously : " You catch me too late, but I will
go and find out if there is anything to be done for
you."

Twice I have seen Alfred de Vigny, who has kept
me three hours each time. He is an admirable
and delightful man, but not fitted for action, and
even dissuading from action. However, he has
shown me the warmest sympathy.

You do not know that the month of January
has been a month of fretfulness and neuralgia
for me. ... I say this in order to explain the
interruption in my proceedings.

I have seen Lamartine, Patin, Viennet, Legouvé,
de Vigny, Villemain (horror !), Sandeau. Really,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 147

I do not remember any others. I have not been
able to find either Ponsard, or M. Saint-Marc
Girardin, or de Sacy.

At last I have sent a few copies of some books to
ten of those whose works I know. This week I
shall see some of these gentlemen.

I have written an analysis, such as it is, of your
excellent article (without signing it ; but my
conduct is infamous, is it not ?) in the " Revue
anecdotique.^' As for the article itself, I have
sent it to M. de Vigny, who did not know it, and
who showed me that he wished to read it.

As for the talkers of politics, among whom I
shall not be able to find any pleasure, I shall go
the round of them in a carriage. They shall have
only my card and not my face.

This evening I have read your " Pontmartin."
Pardon me for saying to you, " What lost
talent ! " In your prodigality there is at times
something which scandalises me. It seems to me
that I, after having said, " The most noble
causes are sometimes upheld by bumpkins,^' I
should have considered my work finished. But
you have particular talents for suggestion and
divination. Even towards the most culpable beasts
you are delightfully polished. This Monsieur Pont-
martin is a great hater of literature. . . .

I have sent you a little parcel of sonnets. I will
next send you several packets of reveries in prose,

148 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

without counting a huge work on the " Painters
of Morals " (crayon, water-colour, printing, en-
graving).

I do not ask you if you are well. That is suffi-
ciently apparent.

I embrace you and shake you by the hands. —
I leave your house.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

15th March, 1865.

Dear friend, I take advantage of the ** Histoires
grotesques et sérieuses " to remind myself of you.
Sometimes, in the mornings, I talk about you with
M. Muller, of Liege, by whose side I take luncheon,
— and in the evening, after dinner, I am re-reading
" Joseph Delorme " with Malassis. Decidedly,
you are right ; *' Joseph Delorme " is the old
woman's " Flowers of Evil.'' The comparison is
glorious for me. Have the goodness not to find it
ofiensive to yourself.

And the Preface of the " Vie de César ? " Is it
predestinarian enough ?

Yours always.

Bbttxelles, rue de la Montagne, 28.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

Thunday, 30th March, 1865.

My dear friend, I thank you for your excellent
letter ; can you write any which are not excellent ?

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 149

When you call me " My dear son," you touch me
and make me laugh at the same time. In spite of
my many white hairs, which make me look (to
the stranger) like an academician, I have great
need of some one who loves me enough to call me
his " son " ; but I cannot help thinking of that
burgrave of 120 years of age who, speaking to a
burgrave of eighty, said to him : " Young man,
be silent ! '* (In parentheses — and let this be be-
tween us — if I wrote a tragedy I should be afraid
of letting fly some shafts of this energy and of
hitting another target than that at which I had
aimed.)

Only, I observe that in your letter there is no
allusion to the copy of " Histoires grotesques et
sérieuses "" that I asked Michel Levy to send you.
I swear to you, besides, that I have no intention
whatever of getting the least advertisement for
this book out of you. My only aim was, knowing
as you well know how to distribute your time, to
provide you with an occasion for enjoying once
more an amazing subtlety of logic and sensations.
There are people who will find that the fifth volume
is inferior to the preceding ones ; but that is of no
consequence to me.

We are not as bored as you think, Malassis and
I. We have learnt to go without everything, in
a country where there is nothing, and we have
understood that certain pleasures (those of con-

150 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

versation, for example) grow in proportion as
certain needs diminish.

On the subject of Malassis, I will tell you that
I marvel at his courage, at his activity, and his
incorrigible gaiety. He has arrived at a very
surprising erudition in point of books and prints.
Everything amuses him and everything teaches
him. One of our chief amusements is when he
pretends to play the atheist and when I try to play
the Jesuit. You know that I can become religious
by contradiction (above all here) so that, to make
me impious, it would be sufficient to put me in
contact with a slovenly curé (slovenly of body and
soul). As for the publication of some humorous
books which it has pleased him to amend with
the same piety that he would have put at the
service of Bossuet or Loyola, even I have drawn
from them a little, little unexpected gain: it is
a clearer understanding of the French Revolution.
When people amuse themselves in a certain way,
it is a good diagnosis of revolution.

Alexander Dumas has just left us. This fine
man has come to show himself with his ordinary
candour. In flocking round him to get a shake of
the hand, the Belgians made fun of him. . . . That
is unworthy. A man can be worthy of respect
for his vitality. Vitality of the negro, it is true.
But I think that many others, besides myself,
lovers of the serious, have been carried away by

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 151

" La Dame de Montsoreau " and by " Bal-
samo."

As I am very impatient to return to France, I
have written to J. L. to commission him with
my small affairs. I would like to collect, in three
or four volumes, the best of my articles on the
" Stimulants,'' the '' Painters," and the " Poets,"
adding thereto a series of " Observations on
Belgium." If, in one of your rare strolls, you go
along the boulevard de Gand, stir up his good
feeling a little and exaggerate what you think of me.
I must own that three important fragments are
lacking, one on Didactic Painting (Cornélius,
Kaulbach, Chenavard, Alfred Réthel), another,
'* Biography of the Flowers of Evil," and then
a last : " Chateaubriand and his Family." You
know that my passion for this old dandy is in-
corrigible. To sum up, little work ; ten days
perhaps. I am rich in notes.

Pardon me if I intrude in a delicate question ;
my excuse is my desire to see you content (supposing
that certain things would content you) and to see
every one do you justice. I hear many people
saying, " What ! Sainte-Beuve is not yet a
senator ? " Many years ago I said to E. Delacroix,
to whom I could speak my mind, that many young
men preferred to see him remaining in the state
of an outcast and rebel. (I alluded to his stubborn-
ness in presenting himself at the Institute.) He

152 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

replied : " My dear sir, if my right arm was struck
by paralysis, my capacity as member of the In-
stitute would give me the right of teaching, and
if I always keep well the Institute can serve to pay
my cofiee and cigars. In two words, I think that,
with regard to you, it resolves itself into a certain
accusation of ingratitude against the government
of Napoleon, in many other minds besides mine.
You forgive me, do you not ? for violating the limits
of discretion ; you know how much I love you ;
and then I chatter like some one who rarely has an
opportunity for talking.

I have just read Emile Ollivier's long discourse.
It is very extraordinary. He speaks, it seems, with
the authority of a man who has a great secret in
his pocket.

Have you read Janin's abominable article against
melancholy and mocking poets ? And Viennet,
quoted amongst the great poets of France ! And a
fortnight after, an article in favour of Cicero !
Do they take Cicero for an Orleanist or an acade-
mician ? M. de Sacy says : " Cicero is our Caesar,
ours ! " Oh no, he is not, is he ?

Your very afîectionate.

Without any transition, I will tell you that I
have just found an admirable melancholy ode by
Shelley, composed on the shores of the Gulf of
Naples, and which ends with these words :

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 153

" I know that I am one of those whom men do
not love ; but I am one of those whom they
remember/' Very good ! this is poetry !

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

Thursday, éth May, 1865.

My dear Sainte-Beuve, — As I take up a pen
to write you some words of congratulation on your
nomination, I find a letter that I wrote you on
March 31st which has not yet gone, probably
because of stupidity on my part or on the part of
the hotel people.

I have read it again. I find it boyish, childish.
But I send it to you just the same. If it makes
you laugh, I shall not say " So much the worse,"
but " So much the better.'' I am not at all afraid,
knowing your indulgence, to strip myself before
you.

To the passage which treats of J. L. I shall add
that I have finished the fragments in question
(except the book on Belgium, which I have not the
courage to finish here) and that, obliged to go to
Honfleur to seek all the other pieces composing
the books announced to L . . . , I shall doubtless
go on to Paris on the 15th, in order to torment
him a little. If, by chance, you see him, you can
tell him.

As for Malassis, his terrible afïair happens on
the 12th. He thinks he is sure to be condemned

154 CHAKLES BAUDELAIRE

to five years. The serious thing is that this closes
France to him for five years. That this momen-
tarily cuts off supplies, I do not think so great an
evil. He will be constrained to do other things.
It is more to count on the universal mind than to
brave compulsory public decency. As for me, who
am not a prude, I have never possessed one of these
silly books, even printed in beautiful characters
and with beautiful illustrations.

Alas ! the " Poems in Prose," to which you
have again sent a recent encouragement, are much
delayed. I am always giving myself difficult
work. To make a hundred laborious trifles which
demand unfailing good-humour (good-humour
necessary even to treat of sad subjects), a strange
stimulant which needs sights, crowds, music, even
street-lamps, that is what I wanted to do ! I am
only at sixty and I can go no further. I need this
famous '' bath of the multitude,'' of which the
error has justly shocked you.

M. has come here. I have read your article.
I have admired your suppleness and your aptitude
to enter into the soul of all the talents. But to
this talent there is something lacking which I
cannot define. M. has gone to Anvers, where
there are magnificent things — above all, examples
of this monstrous, Jesuitical style which pleases
Tne so much, and which I hardly know except
from the chapel of the college at Lyons, which is

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 155

made with different coloured marbles. Anvers has
a museum of a very special kind, full of unexpected
things, even for those who can put the Flemish
school in its true place. Finally, this town has
the grand, solemn air of an old capital, accentuated
by a great river. I believe that this fine fellow
has seen nothing of all this. He has only seen a
fat fry that he has gone from the other side of the
Escaut to eat. He is, nevertheless, a charming
man.

Decidedly, I congratulate you with all my heart.
You are now the equal (officially) of many mediocre
people. That matters little. You wished it, did
you not ? need, perhaps ? You are content, then
I am happy.

Yours always.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

nth July, 1865.

Very dear friend, I could not cross Paris without
coming to shake you by the hand. Very soon,
probably in a month.

I saw J. L . . . three days ago, when I was
making for Honfleur. L. pretended that he was
going to undertake some important business for
me with MM. G. ... If you could intervene in my
favour with one or two authoritative words, you
would make me happy. You do not wish my

156 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

awkward compliments on the subject of the Senate,
do you ?

Your very devoted friend.

I start again for the infernal regions to-morrow
evening. Till then, I am at the Hôtel du chemin
du fer du Nord. Place de Nord.

Bbtjxelles,
Tuesday, 2nd January, 1866.

My good Friend,

I have just seen that, for the first time in
your life, you have delivered your physical person
to the public. I allude to a portrait of you pub-
lished by " L'Illustration.'" It really is very like
you ! The familiar, mocking, and rather concen-
trated expression, and the little calotte itself is
not hidden. Shall I tell you I am so bored that
this simple image has done me good ? The phrase
has an impertinent air. It means simply that, in
the loneliness in which some old Paris friends have
left me (J. L. in particular), your image has been
enough to divert me from my weariness. What
would I not give to go, in five minutes, to the
rue Mont-Parnasse, to talk with you for an hour on
your articles on Proudhon ; with you who know
how to listen even to men younger than yourself !

Believe me, it is not that I find the reaction in
his favour illegitimate. I have read him a good

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 157

deal and known him a little. Pen in hand, he was
a hon hougre ; but he was not, and would never
have been, even on paper, a dandy. For that I
shall never pardon him. And it is that that I shall
express, were I to excite the ill-humour of all the
great beasts, right-thinking, of the " Universe.'*

Of your work I say nothing to you. More than
ever you have the air of a confessor and accoitcheur
of souls. They said the same thing of Socrates,
I think ; but Messrs. Baillarger and Lélut have
declared, on their conscience, that he was mad.

This is the commencement of a year that will
doubtless be as boring, as stupid, as criminal as
all the preceding ones. What good can I wish you ?
You are virtuous and lovable, and (extraordinary
thing !) they are beginning to do you justice ! . . .

I chatter far too much, like a nervous man who
is tired. Do not reply to me if you have not five
minutes of leisure.

Your very affectionate.

Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve

15th January, 1866.

My dear friend, I do not know how to thank you
enough for your good letters. It is really all the
kinder of you because I know you are very busy.
If I am sometimes long in replying it is on the score
of health, which prevents me and even sends me
to bed for many days.

158 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

I shall follow your advice : I shall go to Paris
and I shall see the G ... s myself. Then, per-
haps, I shall commit the indiscretion of asking you
to give me a helping hand. But when ? For six
weeks I have been immersed in a chemist's shop.
If it should be necessary to give up beer, I do not
ask anything better. Tea and cofîee, that is more
serious ; but will pass. Wine ? the devil ! it is
cruel. But here is a still harder creature who says
I must neither read nor study. What a strange
medicine is that which prohibits the principal
function ! Another tells me for all consolation
that I am hysterical. Do you admire, like me,
the elastic usage of these fine words, well chosen to
cloak our ignorance of everything ?

I have tried to plunge again into the " Spleen
de Paris " [" Poems in Prose "1, for that was not
finished. Finally, I hope to be able to show, one
of these days, a new Joseph Delorme, grappling
with his rhapsodic thought at each incident in his
stroll and drawing from each object a disagreeable
moral. But how difficult it is to make nonsense
when one wishes to express it in a manner at the
same time impressive and light !

Joseph Delorme has arrived there quite natur-
ally. I have taken up the reading of your poems
again ah ovo. I saw with pleasure that at each
turn of the page I recognised verses which are old
friends. It appears that, when I was a boy, I had

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 159

not such very bad taste. (The same thing hap-
pened to me in December with Lucain. " Pharsale/*
always ghttering, melancholy, lacerating, stoical,
has consoled my neuralgia. And this pleasure has
led me to think that in reality we change very little.
That is to say, that there is something invariable
in us.)

Since you own that it does not displease you to
hear your works spoken of, I am much tempted to
write you thirty pages of confidences on this sub-
ject ; but I think I should do better to write them
first in good French for myself, and then to send
them to a paper, if there still exists a journal in
which one can talk poetry.

However, here are some suggestions of the book
which came to me by chance.

I have understood, much better than heretofore,
the " Consolations " and the " Pensées d'août.*'

I have noted as more brilliant the following
pieces : " Sonnet a Mad. G. . .," page 225.

Then you knew Mme. Grimblot, that tall and
elegant Russian for whom the word *' désinvolture "
was made and who had the hoarse, or rather the
deep and sympathetic voice of some Parisian
comediennes ? I have often had the pleasure of
hearing Mme. de Mirbel lecture her and it was very
comical. (After all, perhaps I am deceiving my-
self ; perhaps it is another Mme. G. . . . These
collections of poetry are not only of poetry and

160 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

psychology, but are also annals.) " Tu te révoltes "
..." Dans ce cabriolet " . . . "En revenant
du Convoi ^' ..." La voilà." . . .

Page 235, I was a little shocked to see you
desiring the approbation of MM. Thiers, Berryer,
Thierry, Villemain. Do these gentlemen really
feel the thunderclap or the enchantment of an
object of art ? And are you then very much
afraid of not being appreciated to have accu-
mulated so many justificatory documents ? To
admire you, do I need the permission of M. de
Béranger ?

Good Heavens ! I nearly forgot the " Joueur
d'orgue," page 242. I have grasped much better
than formerly the object and the art of narra-
tives such as " Doudun," "Marèze," "Ramon,"
"M. Jean," etc. The word "analytical energy"
applies to you much more than to André
Chénier.

There is still one piece that I find marvellous :
it is the account of a watch-night, by the side of
an unknown corpse, addressed to Victor Hugo at
the time of the birth of one of his sons.

What I call the decoration (landscape or furni-
ture) is always perfect.

In certain places of " Joseph Delorme " I find a
little too much of lutes, lyres, harps, and Jehovahs.
This is a blemish in the Parisian poems. Besides,
you have come to destroy all that.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 161

Indeed, pardon me ! I ramble on ! I should
never have dared to talk to you so long about it.

I have found the pieces that I know by heart
again. (Why should one reread, with pleasure,
in printed characters, that which memory could
recite ?)

** Dans Tile de Saint-Louis " (Consolations).

" Le Creux de la Vallée," p. 113. Here is much
of Delorme !

And " Rose " (Charming), p. 127.

" Stances de Kirke White," p. 139. V

" La Plaine " (beautiful October landscape),
p. 138.

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

Baudelaire to Flaubert

Tuesday, 25th August, 1867.

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 senti-
ments. 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.
11

162 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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 ;

CHAELES BAUDELAIRE 163

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 candi-
dature 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

164 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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

Pakis,
31a< 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

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 165

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 acade-
mician. 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 Baude-
laire would rather be Auguste Barbier, Théophile
Gautier, Banville, Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle —
that is to say, pure literature ? That was under-
stood 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

Pabis,
3rd February, 1862.

My dear Friend,

M. Sandeau was charming, his wife was
charming, and I really believe that I was as charm-
ing 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.

166 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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.

SOME REMARKS ON BAUDELAIRE'S

INFLUENCE UPON MODERN

POETRY AND THOUGHT

167

^/^y///'// f/.)/// 'f// /// /r/^ 1^//'/

SOME REMARKS ON BAUDELAIRE'S IN-
FLUENCE 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 judg-
ment 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

169

170 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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 im-
proved upon. Everything fitted the biographer
for his task. He knew Charles Baudelaire intim-
ately. 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 pro-
secuted for an offence against public morals, he
knew what it was 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

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 171

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 con-
stantly 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 " Canter-
bury 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

172 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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 genera-
tion 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 litera-
ture, has an enormous circulation and a personal

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 173

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 diflerence that more than
forty years have made.

Writers and readers of to-day must necessarily
look at Baudelaire with very diflerent 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

174 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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 Eng-
land 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 smiply drawn from Baude-
laire ; 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 Baude-
laire 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.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 175

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 publica-
tion 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 news-
paper 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.

176 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

" The immediate result of Baudelaire's work
was the Decadent School in French literature.
Then the influence spread across the Channel, and
the English ^Esthetes 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 in-
fluenced 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 in-
fluence. 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,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 177

belongs directly to the 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 unful-
filled 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 aesthetic. 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,

12

178 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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 ! . . .

" O Beauté, dur fléau des âmes, tu le veux !
Avec tes yeux de feu, brillants comme des fêtes,
Calcine ces lambeaux qu'ont épargnés les bêtes ! "

I have not included the poem in my own trans-
lations. But for those who find that French verse
still presents some difficulty, I give an English
version of *' Causerie/' It is fairly literal, it is
more or less melodious in English. That it quite
achieves the atmosphere of Baudelaire's poem I can
hardly think. I have taken it from the little
volume issued by the " Walter Scott " Publishing
Company, in which, for some reason, it is called
" The Eyes of Beauty."

" You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose ;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and, ebbing, leaves my lips morose.
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.

" In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
By woman's tooth and talon ! ah ; no more
Seek in mo for a heart which those dogs ate.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 179

" It is a ruin where the jackala rest,
And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay —
A perfume swims about your naked breast !

" Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way !
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared ! "

Now let us come to Swinburne. If the following
verses of " Laus Veneris "" in " Ballads and Poems '"
are not directly derived from Baudelaire, I ask
who indeed influenced the young Oxford poet in
1886 ?

" Me, most forsaken of all souls that fell ;
Me, satiated with things insatiable ;

Me, for whose sake the extreme hell makes mirth.
Yea, laughter kindles at the heart of hell.

" Alas thy beauty ! for thy mouth's sweet sake
My soul is bitter to me, my limbs quake

As water, as the flesh of men that weep,.
As their heart's vein whose heart goes nigh to break.

" Ah God, that sleep with flower-sweet finger-tips
Would crush the fruit of death upon my lips ;
Ah God, that death would tread the grapes of sleep
And wring their juice upon me as it drips.

" There is no change of cheer for many days,
But change of chimes high up in the air, that sways

Rung by the running fingers of the wind ;
And singing sorrows heard on hidden ways."

" I dare not always touch her, lest the kiss
Leave my lips charred. Yea, Lord, a little bliss,

Brief, bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin ;
Natheless thou knowest how sweet a thing it is."

180 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

The verse of Swinburne is more musical, and has
a wider range of imagery. But the passion is the
same, the method is the same, and, for those who
understand French as a Frenchman understands it,
the ** atmosphere " fails in the magic intensity
that Baudelaire achieves.

This is one single instance. Those who are
interested can pursue these comparisons between
the two poets for themselves. They will be richly
rewarded.

I have mentioned Walter Pater, that great artist
in English who may be said to have succeeded
Ruskin as the exponent of the most critical and
refined thought of our time. When I say that he
succeeded Ruskin I do not mean to imply that he
has the slightest œsihetic affinity with the author
of ** Modern Painters." I only speak of him as
having had as strong an influence upon later
thought as Ruskin had upon his.

Pater was curious of everjrthing in life and Art
that ojSered a new sensation — that should enable
men to realise themselves in the completest and
most varied way. Baudelaire was certainly not
Walter Pater's master in the same degree that he
was the master of Swinburne and of Wilde. Yet,
none the less certainly, the Frenchman's work
made expression possible to the recluse of Ox-
ford.

Hellenic thought, with its dangerous conclusions,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 181

was restated by Pater because " Les fleurs du Mal "
had paved the way.

Here again, within the compass of a brief essay it
is impossible to set forth these contentions in detail.
But those who have read Baudelaire, and what
Gautier says about him — those who have studied
contemporary thought and contemporary literature
when Pater began to weave his magical prose —
will confirm what is no discovery of mine, but a fact
of literature. They will recognise that, in the
** Conclusion " of Walter Pater's "Renaissance,"
the following words could hardly have been written
had it not been for the daring expression of the
poet whom Frenchmen admit to be second to
Hugo alone.

" The service of philosophy, of speculative
culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to
startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.
Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or
face ; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer
than the rest ; some mood of passion or insight
or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and
attractive for us — for that moment only. Not
the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the
end. A counted number of pulses only is given to
us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we
see in them all that is to be seen in them by the
finest senses ? How shall we pass most swiftly
from point to point, and be present always at the

182 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

focus where the greatest number of vital forces
unite in their purest energy ?

"To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame,
to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a
sense it might even be said that our failure is to
form habits ; for, after all, habit is relative to a
stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the
roughness of the eye that makes any two persons,
things, situations, seem alike. While all melts
under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite
passion, or any contribution to know^ledge that
seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for
a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange
dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work
of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.
Not to discriminate every moment some passionate
attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy
of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on
their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun,
to sleep before evening. With this sense of the
splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity,
gathering all we are into one desperate effort to
see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make
theories about the things we see and touch. What
we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing
new opinions and courting new impressions, never
acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of
Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or
ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism,

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 183

may help us to gather up what otherwise might
pass unregarded by us. ' Philosophy is the
microscope of thought/ The theory or idea or
system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part
of this experience, in consideration of some interest
into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory
we have not identified with ourselves, or what is
only conventional, has no real claim upon us."

What is this most perfect piece of prose but
an expansion of Baudelaire^s poem ** Correspon-
dances "" ?

" La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles ;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

" Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent,

" Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

" Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies.
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens."

In the temple of night rise vast living pillars,
and there those who worship murmur words that
man has never yet been able to understand. The
worshippers in this temple of night wander through
a huge and tangled wood of symbols, while on

184 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

every side they feel that inexplicable yet friendly
eyes regard them.

Far-off and dim long-drawn echoes are heard.
They shiver through the forest, coming together
in one deep mingled sound like that of a gong.
The sound reverberates and dies away.

Vast as the night and more brilliant than the
day, colour, sound, sweet odours speak to the
worshippers in this temple. They are all infinitely
varied. There are sounds as fragrant as childhood
itself. There are others as beautiful as the sound
of hautboys, and the sound itself is a colour which
is like green corn.

The forest is full of magic odours. The odour of
amber and incense, the scent of benzoin and musk,
the perfumes form themselves into one harmonic
chord in which the enraptured senses and that
throbbing exaltation which is of the soul, fuse into
a triumphant hinting of sense and sound.

If this is not gathering the conflicting claims,
bewildering experiences, the entangled interests
of modern life into one receptive cistern of the
brain where consciousness stands tasting all that
comes, then the poem of Baudelaire means nothing,
and the beautiful prose of Pater has drawn nothing
from it.

" We shall see him no more " ; " This is the end
of the man and his work *' — remarks like these
only faintly indicate what was said of Oscar Wilde

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 185

when he was sent to prison. When Wilde was in
prison in 1896 " Salome "' was produced by Lugne
Poë at the Théâtre de Louvre in Paris. England
was affronted and offended. When the play of
" Salome " was produced in England for the first
time it was at a private performance at the New
Stage Club. The critics did their best to howl it
down. It was as though a ghost, a revenant^ had
appeared. Meanwhile the play had been produced
in Berlin, and from that moment it held the
European stage. It ran for a longer consecutive
period in Germany than any play by any English-
man— not excepting Shakespeare. Its popularity ex-
tended to all countries where it was not prohibited.
It was performed throughout Europe, Asia, and
America. It was even played in Yiddish . . .
that was the beginning. At the present moment
the works of Oscar Wilde are being sold in enormous
quantities and in many editions. You can buy
" Intentions '' or " Dorian Gray " for one shilling.
The influence that Oscar Wilde is having upon a
generation of readers which has risen since he died
is incalculable. Hardly an article in the daily press
would be written as it is written if it were not for
the posthumous prosperity of the poet whose work
has risen like the Phoenix from the ashes of his
personal reputation.

It was Baudelaire who provided that attitude
towards life which Wilde made his own. Baude-

186 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

laire gave Wilde — or rather Wilde took from
Baudelaire — some of the jewels which the latter
had snatched from the classic diadem of Poe.

** And if we grow tired of an antique time, and
desire to realise our own age in all its weariness
and sin, are there not books that can make us live
more in one single hour than life can make us live
in a score of shameful years ? Close to your hand
lies a little volume, bound in some Nile-green skin
that has been powdered with gilded nenuphars and
smoothed with hard ivory. It is the book that
Gautier loved; it is Baudelaire's masterpiece.
Open it at that sad madrigal that begins

" * Que m'importe que tu sois sage ?
Sois belle ! et sois triste ! '

and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as
you have never worshipped joy. Pass on to the
poem on the man who tortures himself ; let its subtle
music steal into your brain and colour your
thoughts, and you will become for a moment what
he was who wrote it ; nay, not for a moment only,
but for many barren, moonlit nights and sunless,
sterile days will a despair that is not your own make
its dwelling within you, and the misery of another
gnaw your heart away. Read the whole book,
suffer it to tell even one of its secrets to your soul,
and your soul will grow eager to know more, and
will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent
of strange crimes of which it is guiltless, and to

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 187

make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has
never known.'*

Thus Wilde in " Intentions." It is not an
acknowledgment of what he himself owed to Baude-
laire, but it is a perfectly phrased, if veiled, recog-
nition of his debt.

The cadences of the *' Madrigal Triste " are
heard over and over again in the poems of Oscar
Wilde. We find them in " True Knowledge,'* in
the *' New Remorse," and in '* Désespoir."

In the stanzas of the *' Ballad of Reading Gaol "
there is much that could never have been written
had it not been that Wilde was saturated with the
sombre melodies of such poems as " Le Vin de
TAssassin," and " Le Vin des Chiffonniers.*' It
was Baudelaire who suggested a literary form in
which such things as were said in " Reading Gaol "
could be said.

Wilde, in his earlier days, when he was writing
that extraordinary poem "The Sphinx," always
used to express himself as a great admirer of " Une
Charogne." Mr. Sherard, Wilde's biographer, says
that in his opinion the poet's admiration for that
frightful and distorted work of genius was merely
assumed. But Mr. Sherard tells us also that the
" Flowers of Evil " exercised a great influence
over Wilde's mind during the earlier period of his
artistic life. And in the " Sphinx " it is most
marked.

188 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Allowing for the difference of metre and the
divergence of language, the two verses from Baude-
laire's poem " Le Chat/' which I am about to
quote, are identical in thought and feeling with
the opening stanzas of " The Sphinx." It is
impossible not to believe — not to feel certain indeed
— that when Wilde wrote —

" In a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting
gloom,"

he had not, consciously or unconsciously, in mind —

" Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon cœur amoureux ;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte.
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux.
Mêlés de métal et d'agate."

Or—

" Upon the mat she lies and leers, and on the tawny throat of her
Flutters the soft and silky fur, or ripples to her pointed ears."

and —

" Et, des pieds jusque à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum.
Nagent autour de son corps brun."

This should be sufficient proof in itself, but there
is evidence which is absolutely conclusive. In all
the criticism of Wilde's work, I do not think that
any one has taken the trouble to trace these origins.

I am as certain as I am certain of anything that
Wilde's poem " The Sphinx " was primarily in-

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 189

spired by the poem of Baudelaire in that section of
" Les Fleurs du Mal " entitled " Spleen et Idéal,"
called ** Les Chats/' I have already pointed out
how certain images were taken from another poem
of Baudelaire, but now we are coming to the
original fountain.

In the few translations I ofEer of Baudelaire's
poems I have chosen representative verses which
seem to me to express Baudelaire at his best.
The poem " Les Chats " has been translated by
Mr. Cyril Scott in a little volume of selections
pubHshed by Mr. Elkin Mathews. Here is " Les
Chats " of Baudelaire :

" Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères
Aiment également, dans leur mûre saison,
Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison.
Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sédentaires.

" Amis de la science et de la volupté.
Ils cherchent le silence et l'horreur des ténèbres ;
L'Erèbe les eût pris pour ses coursiers funèbres,
S'ils pouvaient au servage incliner leur fierté.

" Ils prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes
Des grands sphinx allongés au fond des solitudes.
Qui semblent s'endormir dans un rêve sans fin ;

" Leurs reins féconds sont pleins d'étincelles magiques,
Et des parcelles d'or, ainsi qu'un sable fin,
Etoilent vaguement leurs prunelles mystiques."

And here is Mr. Scott's rendering :

" AU ardent lovers and all sages prize.
As ripening years incline upon their brows —
The mild and mighty cats — pride of the house —
That like unto them are indolent, stern, and wise.

190 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

" The friends of Learning and of Ecstasy,
They search for silence and the horrors of gloom ;
The devil had used them for his steeds of Doom,
Could he alone have bent their pride to slavery.

" When musing, they display those outlines chaste,
Of the great sphinxes — stretched o'er the sandy waste,
That seem to slumber deep in a dream without end :

" From out their loins a fountainous furnace flies.
And grains of sparkling gold, as fine as sand,
Bestar the mystic pupils of their eyes."

I don't in the least like this translation, but the
reader has only to turn to the poems of Oscar Wilde
in the collected edition, issued by Messrs. Methuen
— and he will find an sesthetic perspective of which
the words of Baudelaire form the foreground.

Let him open the page where the reverberating
words of the Sphinx begin, and it will be enough.

I shall only write a very few words about the last
name on my list — that of Ernest Dowson.

This true poet, king of the minor poets as he has
been called, was influenced by Baudelaire through
Verlaine. As all students of modern poetry know,
Ernest Dowson died a few years ago and left very
little to the world — though what he left was almost
perfect within its scope and purpose. I knew
Dowson well, and he has often told me the debt he
owed to Baudelaire. One can see it in such poems
as " Cynara," which Mr. Arthur Symons says (and
I thoroughly agree with him) is one of the imperish-
able lyrics of our literature.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 191

And surely these two verses of " Impenitentia

Ultima "—

" Before my light goes out for ever, if God should give me a choice
of graces,
I would not reck of length of days, nor crave for things to be ;
But cry : ' One day of the great lost days, one face of all the
faces.
Grant me to see and touch once more and nothing more to see.

" ' For, Lord, I was free of all Thy flowers, but I chose the world's
sad roses,
And that is why my feet are torn and mine eyes are blind
with sweat.
But at Thy terrible judgment-seat, when this my tired life closes
I am ready to reap whereof I sowed, and pay my righteous
debt ' "—

have all the weary hunger, satiety, and unconquer-
able desire that over and over again glow out in
such sad beauty upon the petals of the "Fleurs
du Mal/'

Readers who have followed me so far will observe
that I have attempted hardly any criticism of
Baudelaire's work. I have translated Gautier —
that was the task that I set out to do. In this essay
I have only endeavoured to show how Baudelaire
has influenced modern English poets, who, in their
turn, have made a lasting impression upon con-
temporary thought. I have definitely restricted
the scope of my endeavour.

But I have still something to say, something
concerned with the few translations I have made

192 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

of Baudelaire's poems and some of the *' Petits
Poëmes en prose."

The prose of a French author — such is my behef
— can be translated into a fair equivalent. It is
a sort of commonplace for people to say that you
cannot translate a foreign author into English.
I feel sure that this is imtrue. One cannot, of
course, translate a perfect piece of French or
German prose into English which has quite the
same subtle charm of the original. Nevertheless,
translation from foreign prose can be literal and
delightful — but only when it is translated by a
writer of English prose.

The reason that so many people believe, and say
with some measure of justice, that French or
German prose cannot be adequately translated
is because they do not understand the commercial
conditions which govern such work.

It is very rarely indeed that a master of English
prose can find time to translate from the foreign.
He is occupied entirely with his own creations.
Translation, to him, would be a labour of love ;
the financial reward would be infinitesimal. This
being so, the English public must depend upon
inferior translations made by people who under-
stand French, but are often incapable of literary
appreciation, of reproducing the " atmosphere "
of the authors they translate.

If Oscar Wilde had translated the French verse

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 193

of Baudelaire into English verse, for example, then
Baudelaire would by now be a household word.
If any well-known stylist and novelist of to-day
would spend a year over translating Flaubert's
" Salammbô,'' then that masterpiece would rank
with " Esmond " or " The Cloister and the Hearth "
in the minds of Englishmen.

But this is too much to expect. Great creative
artists are busily engaged in doing their own work,
and French classics must remain more or less hidden
from those lovers of literature who are not in-
timately conversant with the language.

We are a commercial race. Successful writers
do not care to explain writers of other countries
to their own countrymen. English men of letters
have a deep love for English letters, but very
few of them carry their amourettes over the
Channel. Yet if any one doubts my contention
that foreign work can be translated almost flaw-
lessly let me remind him of John Addington
Symonds' " Life of Benvenuto Cellini " ; the
Count Stenbock's rendering of Balzac's " Shorter
Stories " ; Rossetti's " La Vita Nuova " of Dante,
or the translations of Maeterlinck by Mr. Teixeira
de Mattos.

Charles Baudelaire, when once he had found
work that appealed to him enormously, proceeded
to translate it into his own language. His render-
ings of Poe have not only introduced Poe to the
13

194 CHAULES BAUDELAIRE

public of France, but have even improved upon
the work of the American.

And Baudelaire says of his master :

" Ce n'est pas, par ces miracles matériels, qui
pourtant ont fait sa renommée, qu'il lui sera donné
de conquérir Tadmiration des gens qui pensent,
c'est par son amour du beau, par sa connaissance
des conditions harmoniques de la beauté, par sa
poésie profonde et plaintive, ouvragée néanmoins,
transparente et correcte comme un bijou de cristal,
— par son admirable style, pur et bizarre, — serré
comme les mailles d'une armure, — complaisant et
minutieux, — et dont la plus légère intention sert à
pousser doucement le lecteur vers un but voulu, —
et enfin surtout par ce génie tout spécial, par ce
tempérament unique qui lui a permis de peindre
et d'expliquer, d'une manière impeccable, saisis-
sante, terrible, Vexceftion dans l'ordre moral. —
Diderot, pour prendre un example entre cent, est
un auteur sanguin ; Poe est l'écrivain des nerfs, et
même de quelque chose de plus — et le meilleur que
je connaisse."

This, of course, is only a paragraph taken from a
considerable essay. But with what insight and
esj}rit is it not said ! There is all the breadth and
generality which comes from a culture, minute,
severe, constantly renewed, rectifying and con-
centrating his impressions in a few pregnant words.

It is as well, also, that Baudelaire's marvellous

CHAELES BAUDELAIRE

195

flair for translation should be illustrated in this
book. I have had some difficulty in making choice
of an example, in gathering a flower from a garden
so rich in blooms. I think, however, that the
following parallel excerpts from ** Ligeia " exhibit
Poe in his most characteristic style and Baudelaire
at his best in translation. For purposes of com-
parison the English and the French are printed in
parallel columns.

" There is one topic, however,
•on which my memory fails me
not. It is the person of Ligeia.
In stature she was tall, some-
what slender, and, in her latter
days, even emaciated. I would
in vain attempt to portray the
majesty, the quiet ease of her
demeanour, or the incompre-
hensible lightness and elasticity
of her footfall. She came and
departed as a shadow. I was
never made aware of her en-
trance into my closed study,
save by the dear music of her
low sweet voice, as she placed
her marble hand upon my
shoulder. In beauty of face no
maiden ever equalled her. It
was the radiance of an opium
dream, an airy and spirit-lifting
vision more wildly divine than
the phantasies which hovered
about the slumbering souls of
the daughters of Delos. Yet
her features were not of that
regular mould which we have
'been falsely taught to worship in

" II est néanmoins un sujet
très cher sur lequel ma mémoire
n'est pas en défaut. C'est la
personne de Ligeia. Elle était
d'une grande taille, un peu
mince, et même, dans les der-
niers jours, très amaigrie. J'es-
sayerais en vain de dépeindre la
majesté, l'aisance tranquille de
sa démarche, et l'incompréhen-
sible légèreté, l'élasticité de son
pas. Elle venait et s'en allait
comme une ombre. Je ne
m'apercevais jamais de son
entrée dans mon cabinet de
travail que par la chère musique
de sa voix douce et profonde,
quand elle posait sa main de
marbre sur mon épaule. Quant
à la beauté de la figure, aucune
femme ne l'a jamais égalée.
C'était l'éclat d'un rêve d'opium
— une vision aérienne et ravis-
sante, plus étrangement céleste
que les rêveries qui voltigent
dans les âmes assoupies des
filles de Délos. Cependant ses
traits n'étaient pas jetés dans

196

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

the classical labours of the
heathen. ' There is no exquisite
beauty,' says Bacon, Lord Veru-
lam, speaking truly of all
forms and genera of beauty,
' without some strangeness in
the proportion.' Yet, although
I saw that the features of
Ligeia were not of a classic
regularity, although I perceived
that her loveliness was indeed
' exquisite,' and felt that there
was much of ' strangeness '
pervading it, I have tried in
vain to detect the irregularity
and to trace home my own
perception of the ' strange.' I
examined the contour of the
lofty and pale forehead — it was
faultless ; how cold indeed that
word when applied to a majesty
so divine ! the skin rivalling
the purest ivory, the com-
manding extent and repose, the
gentle prominence of the regions
above the temples ; and then
the raven-black, the glossy, the
luxuriant and naturally curling
tresses, setting forth the full
force of the Homeric epithet,
' hyacinthine ' ! I looked at the
delicate outlines of the nose,
and nowhere but in the graceful
medallions of the Hebrews had
I beheld a similar perfection.
There were the same luxurious
smoothness of surface, the same
scarcely perceptible tendency
to the aquiline, the same har-
moniously curved nostrils speak-
ing the free spirit. I regarded

ce moule régulier qu'on nous a
faussement enseigné à révérer
dans les ouvrages classiques du
paganisme. ' Il n'y a pas de
beauté exquise,' dit lord Veru-
lam, parlant avec justesse de
toutes les formes et de tous les
genres de beauté, ' sans une cer-
taine étrangeté dans les propor-
tions.' Toutefois, bien que je
visse que les traits de Ligeia
n'étaient pas d'une régularité
classique — quoique je sentisse
que sa beauté était véritable-
ment ' exquise,' et fortement
pénétrée de cette ' étrangeté,'
je me suis efforcé en vain de
découvrir cette irrégularité et
de poursuivre jusqu'en son gîte
ma perception de ' l'étrange.'
J'examinais le contour de front
haut et pâle — un front irré-
prochable— combien ce mot est
froid appliqué à une majesté
aussi divine ! — la peau rivalisant
avec le plus pur ivoire, la largeur
imposante, le calme, la gracieuse
proéminence des régions au-'
dessus des tempes, et puis cette
chevelure d'un noir de corbeau,
lustrée, luxuriante, naturelle-
ment bouclée, et démontrant
toute la force de l'expression
homérique : ' chevelure d'hya-
cinthe.' Je considérais les lignes
délicates du nez — et nulle autre
part que dans les gracieux me-
dallions hébraïques je n'avais
contemplé une semblable per-
fection. C'était ce même jet,
cette même surface unie et

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

197

siiperbe, cette même tendance
presque imperceptible à l'aqui-
lin, ces mêmes narines harmoni-
eusement arrondies et révélant
un esprit libre. Je regardais la
charmante bouche. C'était là
qu'était le triomphe de toutes
les choses célestes : la tour
glorieux de la lèvre supérieure,
un peu courte, l'air doucement,
voluptueusement reposé de l'in-
férieure,— les fossettes qui se
jouaient et la couleur qui parlait,
— les dents réfléchissant comme
une espèce d'éclair chaque rayon
de la lumière bénie qui tombait
sur elles dans ses sourires
sereins et placides, mais tou-
jours radieux et triomphants.
J'analysais la forme du menton,
et là aussi je trouvais le grâce
dans la largeur, la douceur et
la majesté, la plénitude et la
spiritualité grecques — ce con-
tour que le dieu Apollon ne
révéla qu'en rêve à Cléomène,
fils de Cléomène d'Athènes. Et
puis je regardais dans les grands
yeux de Ligeia."

I have said, and I thoroughly believe, that it is
possible for a great writer to translate the prose
of another country into fine and almost literal prose
of his own.

It is, however, when we come to verse that we find
the literal translation inadequate. A verse trans-
lation, by the very necessity of the limits within
which the artist works — that of metre and cadence

the sweet mouth. Here was in-
deed the triumph of all things
heavenly, the magnificent turn
of the short upper lip, the soft,
voluptuous slumber of the un-
der, the dimples which sported,
and the colour which spoke, the
teeth glancing back, with a
brilliancy almost startling, every
ray of the holy light which fell
upon them in her serene and
placid, yet most exultingly
radiant of all smiles. I scruti-
nised the formation of the chin
— and here, too, I found the
gentleness of breadth, the soft-
ness and the majesty, the fulness
and the spirituality of the
Greek — the contour which the
god Apollo revealed but in a
dream to Cleomenes, the son
of the Athenian. And then I
peered into the large eyes of
Ligeia,"

198 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

— must necessarily have a large amount of freedom.
The translator has first to study the poem with a
care that directs itself to the dissecting, analysing
and saturating himself with what the poet means
to œnvey, rather than the actual words in which he
conveys it. One does not translate ventre à terre
as " belly to the earth/^ but as " at full gallop.""
The translator must have a kind of loving clair-
voyance, an apprehension of inner beauty, if he i&
to explain another mind in the medium of poetry.

It seems unkind to instance what I mean by
quoting a translation of some lines of Baudelaire
which, while literally accurate, fail to give the
English reader the least hinting of an atmosphere
profoundly wonderful in the original.

I need not mention names, however, but will
contrast the following lines —

" A languorous island, where Nature abounds
With exotic trees and luscious fruit ;
And with men whose bodies are slim and astute,
And with women whose frankness delights and astounds " —

with Baudelaire's own corresponding verse from
that lovely poem " Parfum exotique."

" Une île paresseuse où la nature donne
Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux ;
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,
Et des femmes dont l'œil par sa franchise étonne."

Voltaire once said of Dante that his reputation
would go on growing because he was so little

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 199

read. That was a satire, not upon Dante, but upon
humanity.

Baudelaire has a great reputation, but is still
comparatively little known to English readers.

It is my hope that this translation of Gautier,
and the small attempts at rendering Baudelaire,
may serve as hors d'œuvre to a magic feast which
awaits any one who cares to wander through the
gates of the garden where flowers of unexampled
beauty blow . . . and not only Flowers of Evil.

G. T.

APPENDIX

Letter from M. Sainte-Beuve

1857.

My dear Friend,

I have received your beautiful volume, and first
I have to thank you for the kind words with which it
was accompanied ; for a long time you have accustomed
me to your good and loyal sentiments towards me.
I knew some of your verses from having read them in
other selections ; collected together, they have quite a
diâerent effect. To say to you that this general effect
is sad would not astonish you ; it is what you wanted.
To tell you that you have not hesitated in gathering
your flowers together for any sort of image and colour,
terrible and distressing though it might be, you know
it better than I do ; again, it is what you have wished.
You are a true poet of the school of " art," and if we
could talk to each other on the subject of this book,
there would be much to say. You, also, are of those
who look for poetry everywhere ; and because, before
you, others have sought it in all the easily accessible
places, because you have been left little room, because
the earthly and the celestial fields were rather too
heavily harvested, and that for thirty years and more
lyrics of all kinds have been written, because you have
come so late and the last, you have said to yourself,
I imagine: ''Ah. well, I shall still find poetry, and
I shall find it where no one else has thought of

201

202 APPENDIX

gathering and extracting it," and j^ou have taken
Hell, you have made yourself devil. You wanted to
wrest their secrets from the demons of the night. In
doing this with subtilty, with refinement, with a care-
ful talent, and an almost meticulous surrender of
expression, in stringing the detail, in playing upon
what is horrible, you seem to have been amusing
yourself. You have suffered, however, you have
tormented yourself to display your wearinesses, your
nightmares, your moral tortures ; you must have
suffered much, my dear fellow. This particular sad-
ness that shows itself in your pages, and in which I
recognise the last symptom of a sick generation of whom
the seniors are well known to us, is also that which you
will have experienced.

You say somewhere, in marking the spiritual awaken-
ing which comes after ill-spent nights, that, when " the
white and rosy dawn," appearing suddenly, comes in
company with " the tormenting Ideal," at that moment,
by a sort of avenging expiation —

" Dans la brute assoupie un ange se réveille ! "

It is this angel that I invoke in you and that must
be cultivated. If only you had let it intervene a
little oftener in two or three separate places, that
would have been sufficient to have disentangled your
thought, so that all these dreams of evil, all these
obscure forms, and all these outlandish interweavings
wherein your imagination has wearied itseK would
have appeared in their true guise — that is to say
half scattered, ready and waiting to flee before the
light. Your book, then, would have yielded, hke a
" Temptation of St. Antony," at the moment when
dawn draws near and one feels that it is about to
break.

APPENDIX 203

It is thus that I picture and that I understand it.
One must quote oneself as an example as little as
possible. But we also, thirty years ago, have sought
poetry where we could. Many fields were ah'eady
reaped, and the most beautiful laurels cut. I
remember in what melancholy state of mind and soul
I wrote " Joseph Delorme," and I am still astonished
when I happen (which is rarely) to reopen this little
volume, at what I have dared to say, to express in it.
But, in obedience to the impulse and natural progress
of my sentiments, I wrote a selection the following year,
still very imperfect, but animated by a gentler, purer
inspiration, " Les Consolations," and, thanks to this
simple development towards good, I have been almost
pardoned. Let me give you some advice which would
surprise those who do not know you. You mistrust
passion too much ; with you it is a theory. You accord
too much to the mind, to combination. Let yourself
alone, do not be afraid to feel too much hke others.
Never fear to be common ; you will always have
enough in your delicacy of expression to make you
distinguished.

I do not wish any longer to appear more prudish in
your eyes than I am. I like more than one part of your
volume — those " Tristesses de la Lune," for example,
a delightful sonnet that seems like some English poet
contemporary with Shakespeare's youth. It is not up
to these stanzas, " A celle qui est trop gaie," which
seem to me exquisitely done. Why is this piece not
in Latin, or rather in Greek, and included in the sec-
tion of the " Erotica " of the " Anthology " ? The
savant, Brunck, would have gathered it into the
" Analecta veterum poet arum " ; President Bouhier
and La Monnoye — that is to say, men of authority
and sober habits — castissimce vitœ morumqne integerri-

204 APPENDIX

morum, would have expounded it without shame
and we should put on it the sign of the lovers. Tange
Chloen semel arrogantem. . . .

But, once again, it is not a question of that nor of
comphments. I would rather grumble, and, if I were
walking with you by the side of the sea, along a clifE,
without pretending to play the mentor, I should try
to trip you up, mj'^ dear friend, and throw you roughly
into the water, so that you, who can swim, would go
straightway under the sun in full course.

Yours always,

Sainte-Beuve.

INDEX

" Artificial Paradises," 72

Babou, 140

Baudelaire, Charles, born, 12 ;
takes up a literary career, 13 ;
visits Mauritius, Madagascar,
etc., 15 ; his style, 19 ; his
reputation, 34 ; translation of
Edgar Poe's works, 57 ; stroke
of paralysis, 69 ; death, 86

" Benediction," 36

Boileau, 51

Boissard, Fernand, 7

Dalloz, 141

De Quincey, 78

Delacroix, Eugène, 63

" Don Juan aux Enfers," 46

Dumas, Alexander, 150

" Élévation," 37

Feuchères, Jean, 9

Flaubert, 161

" Flowers of Evil," 11

Gautier, Théophile, 170

Grimblot, Mme., 159
Guys, 64

Lenormand, Mile., 145

Levy, Michel, 131

" Litanies of Satan," 45

Malassis, 138, 150

" Petites Vieilles," 49
Pimodan, Hôtel, 1
Poe, Edgar, 29, 57, 131

" Rêve parisien," 48

Sainte-Beuve, 131
Sandeau, Mme., 166
Sandeau, Jules, 146
" Soleil," 37

Swinburne, Charles Algernon,
174, 179

" Vie Antérieure, La," 47
Vigny, Alfred de, 146
Villemain, 145

Wilde, Oscar, 169

" Wine of the Workman," 45

206

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