Skip to main content

Full text of "Charles Baudelaire : a study"

See other formats 


ioo 
=00 
ico 


'CD 


BY   THE   SAME   WRITER 


Study  of  Browning. 
Days  and  Nights. 
Silhouettes. 
London  Nights. 
Amoris  Victima. 
Studies  in  Two  L 
Symbolist  Movem 

ture. 

Images  of  Good  ; 
Collected  Poems. 
Plays,  Acting,  an< 
Cities. 

Studies  in  Prose  a 
Spiritual  Adventures. 


»g. 

1886 

The  Fool  of  the  World. 

1906 

1889 

Studies  in  Seven  Arts. 

1906 

1892 

William  Blake. 

1907 

1895 

Cities  of  Italy. 

1907 

1897 

Romantic  Movement  in  English 

iteratures. 

1897 

Poetry. 

1909 

ent  in  Litera- 

Knave  of  Hearts. 

1913 

1899 

Figures  of  Several  Centuries. 

1915 

ind  Evil. 

1900 

Tragedies. 

1916 

1901 

Tristan  and  Iseult. 

1917 

d  Music. 

1903 

Cities,  Sea-Coasts,  and  Islands. 

1918 

1903 

Colour  Studies  in  Paris. 

1918 

ind  Verse. 

1904 

The  Toy  Cart. 

1919 

res. 

1905 

Studies    in    the     Elizabethan 

ty  Songs. 

I90S 

Drama. 

1920 

CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE 


EMILE  DE  ROY,  1844 


CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE 

A   STUDY 


BY 

ARTHUR  SYMONS 


LONDON 

ELKIN   MATHEWS 

CORK  STREET 
MCMXX 


COP 


rights  reserved 


TO 
JOHN   QUINN 


CONTENTS 

CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE:  A  STUDY. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY  AND  NOTES. 
NOTES. 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Emile  de  Roy,   1844.  Frontispiece 

FACING  PAGE 

I.     Jeanne  Duval :  Drawing  by  Baudelaire,  1860.  17 

II.     Baudelaire,  designed  by  himself,  1848.  31 

III.  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai,  1857.  35 

IV.  Les  Paradis  Artificiels,  1861.  49 

V.     Autograph  Letter  of  Baudelaire  to  Monsieur  de 

Broise,  1859.  55 

VI.     Gustave  Courbet,  1848.  67 

VII.     Edouard  Manet,  1862.  74 

VIII.     Edouard  Manet,  1865.  91 

IX.     Autograph    Letter    of     Baudelaire    to    Charles 

Asselineau,  1865.  95 


BAUDELAIRE :  A  STUDY 


WHEN  Baudelaire  is  great,  when  his  genius  is 
at  its  highest  point  of  imaginative  creation, 
of  imaginative  criticism,  it  is  never  when  he  works  by 
implication — as  the  great  men  who  are  pure  artists 
(for  instance,  Shakespeare)  work  by  implication  only 
— but  always  from  his  personal  point  of  view  being 
simply  infallible  and  impeccable.  The  pure  artist, 
it  has  been  said,  never  asserts  :  and  the  instances 
are  far  from  being  numerous  ;  Balzac  asserts,  and 
Balzac  is  always  absolutely  just  in  all  his  assertions  : 
he  whose  analysis  of  modern  Society — La  Comedie 
Humaine — verges  almost  always  on  creation  ;  and 
despite  certain  deficiencies  in  technique  and  in  style, 
he  remains  the  greatest  of  all  novelists.  As  for  Baude- 
laire, he  rarely  asserts  ;  he  more  often  suggests  or 
divines — with  that  exquisite  desire  of  perfect  and  just 
work  that  is  always  in  him.  With  his  keen  vision  he 
rarely  misses  the  essential ;  with  his  subtle  and 
sifted  prose  he  rarely  fails  in  characterizing  the  right 
man  in  the  right  way  and  the  wrong  man — the  man 
who  is  not  an  artist — in  forms  of  ironical  condemna- 
tion. Shelley  in  his  time  and  Blake  in  his  time  gave 


2  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

grave  enough  offence  and  perplexity ;  so  did  Baude- 
laire, so  did  Poe,  so  did  Swinburne,  so  did  Rossetti, 
so  did  Beardsley.  All  had  their  intervals  of  revolt — 
spiritual  or  unspiritual,  according  to  the  particular 
trend  of  their  genius  ;'  some  destroy  mendacious  idols, 
some  change  images  into  symbols  ;  some  are  supposed 
to  be  obscurely  original.  All  had  to  apprehend, 
as  Browning  declared  in  regard  to  his  readers  and 
critics  in  one  of  his  Prefaces,  "  charges  of  being  wil- 
fully obscure,  unconscientiously  careless,  or  perversely 
harsh."  And  all  these  might  have  said  as  he  said  : 
"  I  blame  nobody,  least  of  all  myself,  who  did  my 
best  then  and  since." 

In  our  approach  to  the  poetry,  or  to  the  prose,  of 
any  famous  writer,  with  whom  we  are  concerned,  we 
must  necessarily  approach  his  personality ;  in  appre- 
hending it  we  apprehend  him,  and  certainly  we  cannot 
love  it  without  loving  him.  As  for  Baudelaire,  I  must 
confess  that,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  one  might  hate 
or  love  the  man  according  to  the  judgment  of  the  wise 
or  of  the  unwise,  I  find  him  more  lovable  than  hateful. 
That  he  failed  in  trying  to  love  one  woman  is  as 
certain  as  his  disillusion  after  he  had  possessed  her ; 
that,  in  regard  to  Jeanne  Duval,  she  was  to  him 
simply  a  silent  instrument  that,  by  touching  all  the 
living  strings  of  it,  he  awakened  to  a  music  that  is 
all  his  own  ;  that  whether  this  "  masterpiece  of  flesh  " 
meant  more  to  him  than  certain  other  women  who 
inspired  him  in  different  ways  ;  whether  he  thirsted 
to  drain  her  "  empty  kiss  "  or  the  "  empty  kiss  "  of 
Rachel,  of  Marguerite,  of  Gabrielle,  of  Judith,  is  a 
matter  of  but  little  significance.  A  man's  life  such  as 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  3 

his  is  a  man's  own  property  and  the  property  of  no 
one  else.  And  Baudelaire's  conclusion  as  to  any  of 
these  might  be,  perhaps,  summed  up  in  this  stanza  : 

"  Your  sweet,  scarce  lost  estate 

Of  innocence,  the  candour  of  your  eyes, 

Your  child-like,  pleased  surprise, 

Your  patience  :   these  afflict  me  with  a  weight 

As  of  some  heavy  wrong  that  I  must  share 

With  God  who  made,  with  man  who  found  you,  fair." 

"  In  more  ways  than  one  do  men  sacrifice  to  the 
rebellious  angels,"  says  Saint  Augustine  ;  and  Beards- 
ley's  sacrifice,  along  with  that  of  all  great  decadent 
-art,  the  art  of  Rops  or  of  Baudelaire,  is  really  a  sacrifice 
to  the  eternal  beauty,  and  only  seemingly  to  the 
powers  of  evil.  And  here  let  me  say  that  I  have  no 
concern  with  what  neither  he  nor  I  could  have  had 
absolute  knowledge  of,  his  own  intention  in  his  work. 
A  man's  intention,  it  must  be  remembered — and 
equally  in  the  case  of  much  of  the  work  of  Poe  and 
of  Baudelaire,  much  less  so  in  the  case  of  Balzac  and 
Verlaine — from  the  very  fact  that  it  is  conscious,  is 
much  less  intimately  himself  than  the  sentiment  which 
his  work  conveys  to  me. 

Baudelaire's  figures,  exactly  like  those  designed  by 
Beardsley  and  by  Rodin,  have  the  sensitiveness  of  the 
spirit  and  that  bodily  sensitiveness  which  wastes  their 
veins  and  imprisons  them  in  the  attitude  of  their 
luxurious  meditation.  They  have  nothing  that  is 
merely  "  animal  "  in  their  downright  course  towards 
repentance  ;  no  overwhelming  passion  hurries  them 
beyond  themselves  ;  they  do  not  capitulate  to  an  open 
assault  of  the  enemy  of  souls.  It  is  the  soul  in  them 


4  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

that  sins,  sorrowfully,  without  reluctance,  inevitably. 
Their  bodies  are  eager  and  faint  with  wantonness  ; 
they  desire  fiercer  and  more  exquisite  pains,  a  more 
intolerable  suspense  than  there  is  in  the  world. 

Beardsley  is  the  satirist  of  an  age  without  convic- 
tions, and  he  can  but  paint  hell  as  Baudelaire  did, 
without  pointing  for  contrast  to  any  actual  paradise. 
He  employs  the  same  rhetoric  as  Baudelaire  —  a 
method  of  emphasis  which  it  is  uncritical  to  think 
insincere.  In  the  terrible  annunciation  of  evil  which  he 
called  The  Mysterious  Rose-Garden,  the  lantern-bearing 
angel  with  winged  sandals  whispers,  from  among  the 
falling  roses,  tidings  of  more  than  "  pleasant  sins." 
And  in  Baudelaire,  as  in  Beardsley,  the  peculiar  efficacy 
of  their  §atire  is  that  it  is  so  much  the  satire  of  desire 
returning  on  itself,  the  mockery  of  desire  enjoyed,  the 
mockery  of  desire  denied.  It  is  because  these  love 
beauty  that  beauty's  degradation  obsesses  them  ;  it 
is  because  they  are  supremely  conscious  of  virtue  that 
vice  has  power  to  lay  hold  on  them.  And  with  these — 
unlike  other  satirists  of  our  day — it  is  always  the  soul, 
and  not  the  body's  discontent  only,  which  cries  out 
of  these  insatiable  eyes,  that  have  looked  on  all  their 
lusts  ;  and  out  of  these  bitter  mouths,  that  have  eaten 
the  dust  of  all  their  sweetnesses  ;  and  out  of  these 
hands,  that  have  laboured  delicately  for  nothing  ;  and 
out  of  their  feet,  that  have  run  after  vanities. 

The  body,  in  the  arms  of  death,  the  soul,  in  the 
arms  of  the  naked  body  :  these  are  the  strangest 
symbolical  images  of  Life  and  of  Death.  So,  as 
Flaubert's  devotion  to  art  seemed  to  have  had  about  it 
something  of  the  "  seriousness  and  passion  that  are  like 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  5 

a  consecration,"  I  give  this  one  sentence  on  the  death 
of  Emma  Bo  vary  :  "  Ensuite  il  recita  le  Miser  eatur 
et  I'Indulgentiam,  trempa  son  pouce  droit  dans 
1'huile  et  commenc,a  les  onctions  :  d'abord  sur  les  yeux, 
qui  avaient  tant  convoite  toutes  les  somptuosite's  ter- 
restres  ;  puis  sur  les  narines,  friandes  de  brises  tildes 
et  de  senteurs  amoureuses  ;'  puis  sur  la  bouche,  qui 
s'etait  ouverte  pour  le  mensonge,  qui  avait  g6mi 
d'orgueil  et  crie  dans  la  luxure  ;  puis  sur  les  mains, 
qui  se  delectaient  au  contacts  suaves,  et  enfin  sur  la 
plante  des  pieds,  si  rapides  autrefois  quand  elle  courait 
a  1'assouvissance  de  ses  de"sirs  et  qui  maintenant  ne 
marcheraient  plus." 

Charles  Baudelaire  was  born  April  gth,  1821,  in 
la  rue  Saint  Augustin,  8  ;  he  was  baptized  at  Saint- 
Sulpice.  His  father,  Fran$ois,  who  had  married  Mile 
Janin  in  1803,  married,  after  her  death,  Caroline 
Archimbaut-Dufays,  born  in  London,  September  27th, 
1793,  Fran£ois  Baudelaire's  father,  named  Claude, 
married  Marie-Charlotte  Die'u,  February  loth,  1738, 
at  Neuville-au-Port,  in  the  Department  of  Marne. 

From  1838  to  1842  (when  Baudelaire  attains  his 
majority)  there  is  a  family  crisis  in  a  certainly  impos- 
sible family  circle.  These  years  he  spends  in  vaga- 
bonding at  his  own  will :  living  a  deliciously  depraved 
life  ;  diving,  perhaps,  into  depths  of  impurity  ;  haunt- 
ing the  night  resorts  that  one  finds  in  the  most  curious 
quarters  of  Paris — the  cafes,  the  theatres,  la  Rue  de 
Breda.  He  amuses  himself  enormously  :  even  in  "  the 
expense  of  spirit  in  a  waste  of  shame  ;  "  he  lives  then, 
as  always,  by  his  sensitive  nerves,  by  his  inexhaustible 
curiosity.  He  is  devoured  then,  as  always,  by  the 


6  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

inner  fires  of  his  genius  and  of  his  sensuality  ;  and  is, 
certainly,  a  quite  naturally  immoral  man  in  his  relations 
with  women. 

He  lives,  as  I  have  said;  he  feeds  himself  on  his 
nerves : 

"  The  modern  malady  of  love  is  nerves." 

It  is  an  incurable,  a  world-old  malady  ;  and,  from 
Catullus,  one  of  the  greatest  of  all  poets,  century  after 
century,  from  the  Latin  poets  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
from  the  poets  of  the  Renaissance,  of  the  Elizabethan 
Age,  down  to  the  modern  Romantic  Movement,  no 
poet  who  was  a  passionate  lover  of  Woman  has  ever 
failed  to  sing  for  her  and  against  her  : 

"  I  hate  and  I  love  :  you  ask  me  how  I  can  do  it  ? 
I  know  not :  I  know  that  it  hurts  :  I  am  going  through  it." 

Odi  et  amo  ;   quari  id  faciam,  fortasse  requiris. 
Nescio  ;   sed  fiere  sentio,  et  excrucior. 

"  Caelius,  Lesbia  mine,  that  Lesbia,  that 
Lesbia  whom  Catullus  for  love  did  rate 
Higher  than  all  himself  and  than  all  things,  stands 
Now  at  the  cross-roads  and  the  alleys  to  wait 
For  the  lords  of  Rome,  with  public  lips  and  hands." 

Coeli,  Lesbia  nostra,  Lesbia  ilia, 
Ilia  Lesbia,  quam  Catullus  unam 
Plus,  quam  se,  atque  suos  amavit  omnes. 

Need  I  quote  more  than  these  three  lines  ?  These 
lines,  and  those  quoted  above,  are  enough  to  show, 
for  all  time,  that  Catullus  was  as  passionate  a  lover 
and  as  passionate  a  hater  of  flesh  as  Villon.  Yet,  if 
we  are  to  understand  Villon  rightly,  we  must  not  re- 
ject even  le  grosse  M argot  from  her  place  in  his  life ;  who, 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  7 

to  a  certainty,  had  not  for  one  instant  the  place  in  his 
life  that  Lesbia  had  in  the  life  of  Catullus.  Villon  was 
no  dabbler  in  infamy,  but  one  who  liked  infamous 
things  for  their  own  sake. 

Nor  must  I  forget  John  D.onne,  whose  quality  of 
passion  is  unique  in  English  poetry — a  reasonable 
rapture,  and  yet  carried  to  a  pitch  of  actual  violence  : 
his  senses  speak  with  ^unparalleled  flgMtlP**  I  ne  can 
"exemplify  every  motion  with  an  unluxurious  explicit- 
ness  which  leaves  no  doubt  of  his  intentions.  He 
suffers  from  all  the  fevers  and  colds  of  love  ;  and,  in 
his  finest  poem — a  hate  poem — he  gives  expression  to 
a  whole  region  of  profound  human  sentiment  which 
has  never  been  expressed,  out  of  Catullus,  with  such 
intolerable  truth  : 

"  When,  by  thy  scorn,  O  murdress,  I  am  dead, 
And  that  thou  thinkest  thee  free 
From  all  solicitations  of  me, 
Then  shall  my  ghost  come  to  thy  bed, 
And  thee,  feigned  vestal,  in  worse  arms  shall  see  : 
Then  thy  sick  taper  will  begin  to  wink, 
And  he,  whose  thou  art  then,  being  tired  before, 
Will,  if  thou  stir,  or  pinch  to  wake  him,  think 
Thou  call'st  for  more, 
And,  in  false  sleep,  will  from  thee  shrink ; 
And  then,  poor  aspen  wretch,  neglected  thou 
Bathed  in  a  cold,  quick-silver  sweat  will  lie 
A  verier  ghost  than  I. 
What  I  will  say,  I  will  not  tell  thee  now, 
Lest  that  preserve  thee  ;   and  since  my  love  is  spent, 
I'd  rather  thou  shouldst  painfully  repent, 
Than  by  my  threatenings  rest  still  innocent." 

As  for  Baudelaire's  adventures  when  he  is  sent, 
perhaps  against  his  will,  in  May,  1841,  on  a  long 
voyage  from  Bordeaux  to  Calcutta,  to  return  to  Paris 


8  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

in  February,  1843,  after  six  months'  travel,  it  is  con- 
jecturable  that  he  might  return  a  changed  man.  Cer- 
tainly his  imagination  found  in  the  East  a  curious 
fascination,  with  an  actual  reawakening  of  new  in- 
stincts ;  and  with  that  oppressive  sense  of  extreme 
heat,  as  intense,  I  suppose,  as  in  Africa,  which  makes 
one  suffer,  bodily  and  spiritually,  and  in  ways  more 
extraordinary  than  those  who  have  never  endured 
those  tropical  heats  can  possibly  conceive  of.  There 
he  may  have  abandoned  himself  to  certain  obscure 
rites  that  to  him  might  have  been  an  initiation  into 
the  cults  of  the  Black  Venus.  And,  with  these -hot 
suns,  these  burning  midnoons,  these  animal  passions, 
the  very  seductiveness  of  the  nakedness  of  bronze  skin, 
what  can  I  imagine  but  this  :  that  they  lighted  in  his 
veins  an  intolerable  flame,  that  burned  there  ardently 
to  the  end  ? 

•For  in  his  Wagner  (1861)  he  writes  :  "  The  radiant 
ancient  Venus,  Aphrodite,  born  of  white  foam,  has  not 
imprudently  traversed  the  horrible  darkness  of  the 
Middle  Ages.  She  has  retired  to  the  depths  of  a 
cavern,  magnificently  lighted  by  the  fires  that  are  not 
those  of  the  Sun.  In  her  descent  under  earth,  Venus 
has  come  near  to  hell's  mouth,  and  she  goes,  certainly, 
to  many  abominable  solemnities,  to  render  homage  to 
the  Arch-demon,  Prince  of  the  Flesh  and  Lord  of  Sin." 
He  finds  her  in  the  music  ^where  Wagner  has  created 
a  furious  song  of  the  flesh,  with  an  absolute  knowledge 
of  what  in  men  is  diabolical.  "  For  from  the  first 
measures,  the  nerves  vibrate  in  unison  with  the 
melody  ;  one's  flesh  remembers  itself  and  begins  to 
tremble.  Tannhduser  represents  the  eternal  combat 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  9 

between  the  two  principles  that  have  chosen  the 
human  heart  as  battle-field,  that  is  to  say,  of  the  flesh 
with  the  spirit,  of  hell  with  heaven,  of  Satan  with 
God." 

In  January,  1843,  Baudelaire  finds  himself  in  pos- 
session of  a  fortune  of  seventy-five  thousand  francs. 
With  his  incurable  restlessness,  his  incurable  desire  of 
change,  he  is  always  moving  from  one  place  to  another. 
He  takes  rooms  at  Quai  de  Bethune,  10,  Isle-Saint- 
Louis  ;  rue  Vanneau,  faubourg  Saint-Germain  ;  rue 
Varenne,  quai  d'Anjou  ;  Hotel  Pimodan,  17  ;  Hotel 
Corneille  ;  Hotel  Folkestone,  rue  Lafitte  ;  Avenue  de 
la  Republique,  95  ;  rue  des  Marais-du-Temple,  25  ; 
rue  Mazarine  ;  rue  de  Babylone  ;  rue  de  Seine,  57  ; 
rue  Pigalle,  60  ;  Hotel  Voltaire,  19  quai  Voltaire  ;  rue 
Beautrellis,  22  ;  Cite  d' Orleans,  15  ;  rue  d'Angouleme- 
du-Temple,  18  ;  Hotel  Dieppe,  rue  d'Amsterdam,  22  ; 
rue  des  Ecuries-d'Artois,  6 ;  rue  de  Seine,  1'Hotel  du 
Maroc,  35. 

With  a  certain  instinct  for  drawing  Baudelaire 
haunts  many  painter's  studios  :  Delacroix's,  whose 
genius  he  discovers,  giving  him  much  of  his  fame,  be- 
coming his  intimate  friend  ;  Manet's,  whose  genius  he 
also  divines  and  discovers  ;  Daumier's,  to  whom  he 
attributes  "  the  strange  and  astonishing  qualities  of  a 
great  genius,  sick  of  genius."  So  also,  from  the»  be- 
ginning, Baudelaire's  judgments  are  infallibly  right ; 
so  also  his  first  book,  Le  Salon  de  1845,  has  all  the 
insolence  of  youth  and  all  the  certitude  of  a  youth  of 
genius.  But  his  fame  is  made,  that  is  to  say,  as  an 
imaginative  critic,  with  Le  Salon  de  1846  ;  for,  after 
the  prelude,  the  entire  book  is  fascinating,  paradoxical, 


io  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

and  essentially  aesthetical ;  a  wonderful  book  in  which 
he  reveals  the  mysteries  of  colour,  of  form,  of  design, 
of  technique,  and  of  the  enigmas  of  creative  works. 
Here  he  elaborates  certain  of  his  mature  theories,  such 
as  his  exultant  praise — in  which  he  is  one  with  Lamb 
and  with  Swinburne  ;  his  just  disdain,  and  his  grave 
irony,  in  which  he  is  one  with  Swinburne  ;  and,  above 
all,  that  passionate  love  of  all  forms  of  beauty,  at  once 
spiritual  and  absolute,  which  is  part  of  the  quintes- 
sence of  his  genius. 

So,  as  Swinburne,  in  the  fire  of  his  youthful  genius, 
was  the  first  to  praise  Baudelaire  in  English,  I  quote 
these  sentences  of  his  from  an  essay  on  Tennyson  and 
Musset  :  "  I  do  not  mean  that  the  Comedie  de  It^Mort 
must  be  ranked  with  the  Imitation  of  Christ,  or  that 
Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  should  be  bound  up  with  The  Chris- 
tian Year.  But  I  do  say  that  no  principle  of  art  which 
does  not  exclude  from  its  tolerance  the  masterpieces 
of  Titian  can  logically  or  consistently  reject  the  master- 
pieces of  a  poet  who  has  paid  to  one  of  them  the  most 
costly  tribute  of  carven  verse,  in  lines  of  chiselled  ivory 
with  rhymes  of  ringing  gold,  that  ever  was  laid  by  the 
high  priest  of  one  muse  on  the  high  altar  of  another. 
And  I  must  also  maintain  my  opinion  that  the  per- 
vading note  of  spiritual  tragedy  in  the  brooding  verse 
of  Baudelaire  dignifies  and  justifies  at  all  points  his 
treatment  of  his  darkest  and  strangest  subjects.  The 
atmosphere  of  his  work  is  to  the  atmosphere  of 
Gautier's  as  the  air  of  a  gas-lit  alcove  is  to  the  air  of 
the  far-flowering  meadows  that  make  in  April  a  natural 
Field  of  the  Cloth  of  Gold  all  round  the  happier  poet's 
native  town  of  Tarbes,  radiant  as  the  open  scroll  of 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  n 

his  writings  with  immeasurable  wealth  of  youth  and 
sunlight  and  imperishable  spring.  The  sombre  star- 
light under  which  Baudelaire  nursed  and  cherished  the 
strange  melancholy  of  his  tropical  home-sickness,  with 
its  lurid  pageant  of  gorgeous  or  of  ghastly  dreams,  was 
perhaps  equidistant  from  either  of  these,  but  assuredly 
had  less  in  common  with  the  lamplight  than  the  sun- 
shine." 

To  roam  in  the  sun  and  air  with  vagabonds,  as 
Villon  and  his  infamous  friends  did  on  their  wonderful 
winter  nights,  "  where  the  wolves  live  on  wind,"  and 
where  the  gallows  stands  at  street  corners,  ominously, 
and  one  sees  swing  in  the  wind  dead  chained  men  ;  to 
haunt  the  strange  streets  of  cities,  to  know  all  the 
useless  and  improper  and  amusing,  the  moral  and  the 
immoral  people,  who  are  alone  worth  knowing  ;  to 
live,  as  well  as  to  observe  ;  to  be  drawn  out  of  the 
rapid  current  of  life  into  an  exasperating  inaction  :  it 
is  such  things  as  these  that  make  for  poetry  and  for 
prose.  Some  make  verse  out  of  personal  sensations, 
verse  which  is  half  pathological,  which  is  half  physio- 
logical ;  some  out  of  colours  and  scents  and  crowds 
and  ballets  ;  some  out  of  music,  out  of  the  sea's 
passions  ;  some  simply  out  of  rhythms  that  insist  on 
being  used  ;  a  few  out  of  the  appreciation  of  the 
human  comedy.  The  outcome  of  many  experiments, 
these  must  pass  beyond  that  stage  into  the  stage  of 
existence. 

So,  in  much  of  Baudelaire's  verse  I  find  not  only  the 
exotic  (rarely  the  erotic)  but,  in  the  peculiar  technique 
of  the  lines,  certain  andante  movements,  lingering 
subtleties  of  sound,  colour,  and  suggestion,  with — at 


12  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

times,  but  never  in  the'  excessive  sense  of  Flaubert's — 
the  almost  medical  curiosity  of  certain  researches  into 
the  stuff  of  dreams,  the  very  fibre  of  life  itself,  which, 
combined,  certainly  tend  to  produce  a  new  thing  in 
poetry.  A  new  order  of  phenomena  absorbs  his  atten- 
tion, which  becomes  more  and  more  externalized,  more 
exclusively  concerned  with  the  phenomena  of  the  soul, 
with  morbid  sensation,  with  the  curiosities  of  the  mind 
and  the  senses.  Humanity  is  now  apprehended  in  a 
more  than  ever  generalized  and  yet  specialized  way 
in  its  essence,  when  it  becomes,  if  you  will,  an  ab- 
straction ;  or,  if  you  will,  for  the  first  time  purely 
individual. 

In  certain  poets  these  have  been  foiled  endeavours  ; 
in  Baudelaire  never  :  for  one  must  never  go  beyond 
the  unrealizable,  never  lose  one's  intensity  of  expres- 
sion, never  let  go  of  the  central  threads  of  one's 
spider's. web.  Still,  in  regard  to  certain  direct  patho- 
logical qualities,  there  is  a  good  deal  of  this  to  be 
found  in  much  of  the  best  poetry — in  Poe,  in  Rossetti, 
in  Swinburne's  earlier  work,  and  much  in  Baudelaire  ; 
only  all  these  are  moved  by  a  fascination  :  in  Poe  for 
the  fantastically  inhuman  ;  in  Rossetti  for  the  inner 
life  of  the  imagination,  for  to  him,  as  Pater  said,  "  life 
is  a  crisis  at  every  moment ;  "  in  Swinburne  for  the 
arduous  fulness  of  intricate  harmony,  and  for  the 
essentially  lyric  quality,  joy,  in  almost  unparalleled 
abundance. 

There  can  hardly  be  a  poet  who  is  not  conscious  of 
how  little  his  own  highest  powers  are  under  his  own 
control.  The  creation  of  beauty  is  the  end  of  art,  but 
the  artist — whether  he  be  Baudelaire  or  Verlaine — 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  13 

should  rarely  admit  to  himself  that  such  is  his  pur- 
pose. A  poem  is  not  written  by  a  man  who  says  : 
I  will  sit  down  and  write  a  poem  ;  but  rather  by  the 
man  who,  captured  by  rather  than  capturing  on  im- 
pulse, hears  a  tune  which  he  does  not  recognize,  or 
sees  a  sight  which  he  does  not  remember,  in  some 
"  close  corner  of  his  brain,"  -and  exerts  the  only  energy 
at  his  disposal  in  recording  it  faithfully,  in  the  medium 
of  his  particular  art.  And  so  in  every  creation  of 
beauty,  some  obscure  desire  stirred  in  the  soul,  not 
realized  by  the  mind  for  what  it  was,  and,  aiming  at 
much  more  minor  things  in  the  world  than  pure 
beauty,  produced  it.  Now,  to  the  critic  this  is  not 
more  important  to  remember  than  it  is  for  him  to 
remember  that  the  result,  the  end,,  must  be  judged, 
not  by  the  impulse  which  brought  it  into  being,  nor 
by  the  purpose  which  it  sought  to  serve,  but  by  the 
success  or  failure  in  one  thing  :  the  creation  of  beauty. 
To  the  artist  himself  this  precise  consciousness  of  what 
he  has  done  is  not  always  given,  any  more  than  a 
precise  consciousness  of  what  he  is  doing. 

To  Baudelaire  as  to  Pater  there  were  certain  severe 
tests  of  the  effects  made  on  us  by  works  of  genius.  In 
both  writers  there  is  a  finality  of  creative  criticism. 
For,  to  these,  all  works  of  art,  all  forms  of  human  life, 
were  as  powers  and  forces  producing  pleasurable  sen- 
sations. One  can  find  them  in  a  gem,  a  wine,  a  spoken 
word,  a  sudden  gesture,  in  anything,  indeed,  that 
strikes  vividly  or  fundamentally  the  senses,  that  acts 
instantaneously  on  one's  perceptive  passions.  "  What," 
says  Pater  in  his  essay  on  Wordsworth,  "  are  the  pecu- 
liarities in  things  and  persons  which  he  values,  the 


14  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

impression  and  sense  of  which  he  can  convey  to  others, 
in  an  extraordinary  way  ?  " 

"  The  ultimate  aim  of  criticism,"  said  Coleridge,  "  is 
much  more  to  establish  the  principles  of  writing  than 
to  furnish  rules  how  to  pass  judgment  on  what  has 
been  written  by  others."  And  for  this  task  he  had 
an  incomparable  foundation  :  imagination,  insight, 
logic,  learning,  almost  every  critical  quality  united  in 
one ;  and  he  was  a  poet  who  allowed  himself  to  be  a 
critic.  Certainly,  Baudelaire  shared  certain  of  those 
qualities  ;  indeed,  almost  all ;  even,  in  a  sense,  logic. 
His  genius  was  so  great,  and  in  its  greatness  so  many- 
sided,  that  for  some  studious  disciples  of  the  rarer  kind 
he  will  doubtless,  seen  from  any  possible  point  of  view, 
have  always  some  of  his  magic  and  of  his  magnetism. 
The  ardour,  delicacy,  energy  of  his  intellect,  his  resolute 
desire  to  get  at  the  root  of  things  and  deeper  yet,  if 
deeper  might  be,  will  always  enchant  and  attract  all 
spirits  of  like  mould  and  temper  ;  that  is  to  say,  those 
that  are  most  morbid,  most  fond  of  imaginative  per- 
versities. 

Prose,  I  have  said,  listens  at  the  doors  of  all  the 
senses,  and  repeats  their  speech  almost  in  their  own 
terms.  But  poetry  (it  is  Baudelaire  who  says  it)  "  is 
akin  to  music  through  a  prosody  whose  roots  plunge 
deeper  in  the  human  soul  than  any  classical  theory 
has  denned."  Poetry  begins  where  prose  ends,  and  it 
is  at  its  chief  peril  that  it  begins  sooner.  The  one  safe- 
guard for  the  poet  is  to  say  to  himself  :  What  I  can 
write  in  prose  I  will  not  allow  myself  to  write  in  verse, 
out  of  mere  honour  towards  my  material.  The  farther 
I  can  extend  my  prose,  the  farther  back  do  I  set  the 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  15 

limits  of  verse.  The  region  of  poetry  will  thus  be 
always  the  beyond,  the  ultimate,  and  with  the  least 
possible  chance  of  any  confusion  of  territory. 

Prose  is  the  language  of  what  we  call  real  life,  and 
it  is  only  in  prose  that  an  illusion  of  external  reality 
can  be  given.  Compare,  not  only  the  surroundings, 
the  sense  of  time,  and  locality,  but  the  whole  process 
and  existence  of  character,  in  a  play  of  Shakespeare 
and  in  a  novel  of  Balzac.  I  choose  Balzac  among 
novelists  because  his  mind  is  nearer  to  what  is  creative 
in  the  poet's  mind  than  that  of  any  novelist,  and  his 
method  nearer  to  the  method  of  the  poets.  Taks 
King  Lear  and  take  Pere  Goriot.  Goriot  is  a  Lear  at 
heart ;  and  he  suffers  the  same  tortures  and  humilia- 
tions. But  precisely  when  Lear  grows  up  before  the 
mind's  eye  into  a  vast  cloud  and  shadowy  monument 
of  trouble,  Goriot  grows  downward  into  the  earth  and 
takes  root  there,  wrapping  the  dust  about  all  his  fibres. 
It  is  part  of  his  novelty  that  he  comes  so  close  to  us 
and  is  so  recognizable.  Lear  may  exchange  his  crown 
for  a  fool's  bauble,  knowing  nothing  of  it ;  but  Goriot 
knows  well  enough  the  value  of  every  bank-note  that 
his  daughter  robs  him  of.  In  that  definiteness,  that 
new  power  of  "  stationary "  emotion  in  a  firm  and 
material  way,  lies  one  of  the  great  opportunities  of 
prose. 

So  it  is  Baudelaire  who  has  said  this  fundamental 
thing  on  the  problem  of  artist  and  critic  :  "It  would 
be  a  wholly  new  event  in  the  history  of  the  arts  if  a 
critic  were  to  turn  himself  into  a  poet,  a  reversal  of 
every  psychic  law,  a  monstrosity  ;  on  the  other  hand, 
all  great  poets  become  naturally,  inevitably,  critics. 


16  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

I  pity  the  critics  who  are  guided  solely  by  instinct ; 
they  seem  to  me  incomplete.  In  the  spiritual  life  of 
the  former  there  must  be  a  crisis  when  they  would 
think  out  their  art,  discover  the  obscure  laws  in  con- 
sequence of  which  they  have  produced,  and  draw  from 
this  study  a  series  of  precepts  whose  divine  purpose  is 
infallibility  in  poetic  construction.  It  would  be  pro- 
digious for  a  critic  to  become  a  poet,  and  it  is  impossible 
for  a  poet  not  to  contain  a  critic." 


II 

HAS  any  writer  ever  explained  the  exact  meaning 
of  the  word  Style  ?  To  me  nothing  is  more 
difficult.  Technique,  that  is  quite  a  different  affair. 
The  essence  of  good  style  might  be,  as  Pater  says, 
"  expressiveness,"  as,  for  instance,  in  Pascal's  style, 
which — apart  from  that — is  the  purest  style  of  any 
French  writer.  It  is  no  paradox  to  state  this  fact  : 
without  technique,  perfect  of  its  kind,  no  one  is  worth 
considering  in  any  art ;  the  violinist,  the  pianist,  the 
painter,  the  poet,  the  novelist,  the  rope-dancer,  the 
acrobat — all,  without  exception,  if  they  lapse  from 
technique  lapse  from  perfection.  I  have  often  taken 
Ysaye  as  the  type  of  the  artist,  not  because  he  is  fault- 
less in  technique,  but  because  he  begins  to  create 
his  art  at  the  point  where  faultless  technique  leaves  off. 
Art,  said  Aristotle,  should  always  have  "  a  con- 
tinual slight  novelty,"  and  his  meaning  is  that  art 
should  never  astonish.  Take,  for  instance,  Balzac, 
Villiers,  Poe,  and  Baudelaire  ;  only  one  part  of  their 
genius,  but  a  most  sinister  one,  is  the  desire  to  astonish. 
There  is,  to  me,  nothing  more  astonishing  in  prose 
fiction  than  The  Pit  and  the  Pendulum  and  The  Cask 
of  Amontillado  of  Poe  ;  they  are  more  than  analysis, 
though  this  is  pushed  to  the  highest  point  of  analysis  ; 
they  have  in  them  a  slow,  poisonous  and  cruel  logic  ; 
equalled  only,  and  at  times  surpassed  in  their  imagi- 

17 


i8  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

nation,  by  certain  of  Villiers'  Contes  Cruels,  such  as 
his  Demoiselles  de  Bien  Fildtre,  L'Intersigne  and  Les 
Amants  de  Tolede.  And — what  is  more  astonishing  in 
his  prose  than  in  any  of  the  writers  I  have  mentioned 
— is  his  satire  ;  a  satire  which  is  the  revenge  of  beauty 
on  ugliness  ;  and  therefore  the  only  laughter  of  our 
time  which  is  fundamental,  as  fundamental  as  that  of 
Rabelais  and  of  Swift. 

Baudelaire,  when  he  astonishes,  is  never  satirical : 
sardonical,  ironical,  coldly  cruel,  irritating,  and  per- 
sistent. This  form  of  astonishment  is  an  inveterate 
part  of  the  man's  sensitive  and  susceptible  nature.  It 
is  concentrated,  inimical,  a  kind  of  juggling  or  fencing  ; 
a  form  of  contradiction,  of  mystification  ;  and  a  de- 
liberate desire  of  causing  bewilderment.  The  Philistine 
can  never  pardon  a  mystification,  and  a  fantastic 
genius — such  as  that  of  Baudelaire  and  of  Poe — can 
never  resist  it  when  opportunity  offers. 

Had  he  but  been  one  of  those  "  elect  souls,  vessels 
of  election,  epris  des  hauteurs,  as  we  see  them  pass 
across  the  world's  stage,  as  if  led  on  by  a  kind  of 
thirst  for  God  !  "  (I  quote  Pater's  words  on  Pascal) 
his  sombre  soul  might  have  attained  an  ultimate  peace  ; 
a  peace  beyond  all  understanding.  This  was  cruelly 
denied  him.  He,  I  imagine,  believed  in  God  ;  thirsted 
for  God  :  neither  was  his  belief  confirmed  nor  his 
thirst  assuaged.  He  might,  for  all  I  know,  have 
thought  himself  a  reprobate — and  so  cast  out  of  God's 
sight. 

"  For,  till  the  thunder  in  the  trumpet  be, 
Soul  may  divide  from  body,  but  not  we 
One  from  another  ;   I  hold  thee  with  my  hand, 
I  let  mine  eyes  have  all  their  will  of  thee, 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  19 

I  seal  myself  upon  thee  with  my  might, 
Abiding  alway  out  of  all  men's  sight 
Until  God  loosen  over  sea  and  land 
The  thunder  of  the  trumpets  of  the  night." 

I  am  certain  Baudelaire  must  have  read  the  poems 
of  John  Keats ;  for  there  are  certain  characteristics 
in  the  versification  and  in  the  using  of  images  of  both 
poets.  Keats  had  something  feminine  and  twisted  in 
his  mind,  made  up  out  of  unhealthy  nerves — which 
are  utterly  lacking  in  Baudelaire — but  which  it  is  now 
the  fashion  to  call  decadent ;  Keats  being  more  than 
a  decadent,  but  certainly  decadent  in  such  a  line 

cLfc5"~~~ 

"  One  faint  eternal  eventide  of  gems," 

which  might  have  been  written,  in  jewelled  French, 
by  Mallarme.  I  give  one  of  his  sonnets,  a  perverse 
and  perverted  one,  made  by  a  fine  technical  feat  out 
of  two  recurrent  rhymes  : 

"  Ses  purs  ongles  tres-haut  d^diant  leur  onyx, 
L'angoisse,  ce  minuit,  soutient,  lampadaphore, 
Maint  reve  vesperal  brule  par  le  Phenix 
Que  ne  recueille  pas  de  cin6raire  amphore 

Sur  les  credences,  au  salon  vide  :   nul  ptyx 
Aboli  bibelot  d'inanit6  sonore, 
(Car  le  maitre  est  alle  puiser  des  fleurs  au  Styx 
Avec  ce  seul  objet  dont  le  n6ant  s'honore.) 

Mais  proche  la  croisee  au  nord  vacante,  un  or 

Agonise  selon  peut-etre  le  decor 

Des  licornes  ruant  du  feu  centre  une  nixe, 

Elle,  d6funte  nue  en  le  miroir,  encor 

Que,  dans  1'oubli  forme  par  le  cadre,  se  fixe 

De  scintillations  sitot  le  septuor." 


20  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

Keats  luxuriates,  like  Baudelaire,  in  the  details  of 
physical  discomfort,  in  all  their  grotesque  horror,  as 
when,  in  sleeplessness — how  often  these  two  over- 
strung and  over-nervous  poets  must  have  had  sleepless 
nights ! — 

"  We  put  our  eyes  into  a  pillowy  cleft, 
And  see  the  spangly  gloom  froth  up  and  boil." 

He  is  neo-Latin,  again  like  Baudelaire,  in  his  in- 
sistence on  the  physical  sensations  of  his  lovers,  the 
bodily  translations  of  emotion.  In  Venus,  leaning 
over  Adonis,  he  notes  : 

"  When  her  lips  and  eyes 

Were  closed  in  sullen  moisture,  and  quick  sighs 
Came  vexed  and  panting  through  her  nostrils  small," 

And,  in  another  line,  he  writes  : 

"  By  the  moist  languor  of  thy  breathing  face." 

Lycius,  in  Lamia: 

"  Sick  to  lose 

The  amorous  promise  of  her  lone  complain, 
Swooned  murmuring  of  love,  and  pale  with  pain ;  " 

and  all  that  trembling  and  swooning  of  his  lovers, 
which  English  critics  have  found  unmanly,  would  at 
all  events  be  very  much  at  home  in  modern  French 
poetry,  where  love  is  again,  as  it  was  to  Catullus  and 
Propertius,  a  sickness,  an  entrancing  madness,  a 
poisoning.  To  find  anything  like  it,  like  this  utter 
subtlety  of  expression,  we  must  go  back  to  the  Eliza- 
bethan Age,  and  then  look  forward,  and  find,  beyond 
Keats,  traces  of  it  in  Rossetti  and  in  Morris's  The 
Defence  of  Guinevere  ;  as,  for  instance,  in  some  of  the 
Queen's  lines : 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  21 

Listen,  suppose  your  turn  were  come  to  die,        Ou 
And  you  were  quite  alone  and  very  weak ;    ^ 
Yea,  laid  a  dying  while  very  mightily        ,>. 

The  wind  was  ruffling  up  the  narrow  streak    &    ^ 
Of  river  through  your  broad  lands  running  well ; "     i 
Suppose  a  hush  should  come,  then  some  one  speak  :  * 

'  One  of  these  cloths  is  heaven,  and  one  is  hell,  C 
Now  choose  one  cloth  for  ever,  which  they  be,  ^ 
I  shall  not  tell  you,  you  must  somehow  tell 

Of  your  own  strengths  and  mightiness  ;   here,  see  !  ' 
Yea,  yea,  my  lord,  and  you  to  ope  your  eyes, 
At  foot  of  your  familiar  bed  to  see 

A  great  God's  angel  standing,  with  such  dyes, 

Not  known  on  earth,  on  his  great  wings,  and  hands, 

Hold  out  two  ways,  light  from  the  inner  skies 

Showing  him  well,  and  making  his  commands 
Seem  to  be  God's  commands,  moreover,  too, 
Holding  within  his  hands  the  cloths  on  wands ; 

And  one  of  these  strange  choosing  cloths  was  blue, 
Wavy  and  long,  and  one  cut  short  and  red  : 
No  man  could  tell  the  better  of  the  two. 

After  a  shivering  half-hour  you  said  : 

'  God  help !   Heaven's  colour,  the  blue ' ;  and  he  said, '  Hell ! ' 

Perhaps  you  then  would  roll  upon  your  bed, 

And  cry  to  all  good  men  that  loved  you  well, 

'  Ah,  Christ !    If  only  I  had  known,  known,  known  ;  ' 

Launcelot  went  away,  then  I  could  tell, 

Like  wisest  men,  how  all  things  would  be,  moan, 
And  roll  and  hurt  myself,  and  long  to  die, 
And  yet  fear  much  to  die  for  what  was  sown. 

Nevertheless  you,  O  Sir  Gawaine,  lie, 

Whatever  may  have  happened  through  these  years, 

God  knows  I  speak  truth,  saying  that  you  lie." 


22  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

All  these  rough,  harsh  terza-rime  lines  are  wonderful 
enough  in  their  nakedness  of  sensations — sensations  of 
heat,  of  hell,  of  heaven,  of  colours,  of  death,  of  life, 
of  moans,  and  of  lies.  It  is,  in  a  sense,  as  far  as  such 
experiments  go,  a  return  to  the  Middle  Ages  ;  to  what 
was  exotic  in  them  and  strange  and  narcotic.  Only 
here,  as  in  Les  Litanies  de  Satan  of  Baudelaire — to 
which  they  have  some  remote  likeness — there  are  no 
interludes  of  wholesome  air,  as  through  open  doors,  on 
these  hot,  impassioned  scenes. 

Rossetti  says  somewhere  that  no  modern  poet,  and 
that  few  poets  of  any  century,  ever  compressed  into 
so  small  a  space  so  much  imaginative  material  as  he 
himself  always  did  ;  and  this,  I  conceive,  partly,  also, 
from  that  almost  child-like  imagination  of  his,  for  all 
its  intellectual  subtlety,  that  dominated  him  to  such 
an  extent  that  to  tell  him  anything  of  a  specially  tragic 
or  pathetic  nature  was  cruel,  so  vividly  did  he  realize 
every  situation  ;  and  also  because  of  his  wonderful 
saying  in  regard  to  his  own  way  of  weaving  an 
abominable  line  at  the  end  of  one  of  his  finest  sonnets 
into  a  sublime  one : 

"  Life  touching  lips  with  Immortality  :  " 

that  the  line  he  had  used  before  belonged  to  the  class 
of  phrase  absolutely  forbidden  in  poetry.  "It  is  in- 
tellectually incestuous  poetry  seeking  to  beget  its 
emotional  offspring  on  its  own  identity  ;  whereas  the 
present  line  gives  only  the  momentary  contact  with 
the  immortal  which  results  from  sensuous  culmination, 
and  is  always  a  half -conscious  element  of  it." 

Now,  to  me,  both  Keats  before  him  and  Baudelaire 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  23 

in  his  own  generation,  had  the  same  excessive  sense  of 
concentration.  "  To  load  every  rift  with  ore  :  "  that, 
to  Keats,  was  the  essential  thing  ;  and  it  meant  to 
pack  the  verse  with  poetry  so  that  every  line  should 
be  heavy  with  the  stuff  of  the  imagination  :  the  phrase 
I  have  given  being  a  rebuke  to  Shelley,  significant  of 
the  art  of  both  poets.  For  as  Keats,  almost  in  the 
same  degree  as  Baudelaire,  worked  on  every  inch  of 
his  surface,  so  perhaps  no  poets  ever  put  so  much 
poetic  detail  into  so  small  a  space,  with,  as  I  have  said, 
the  exception  of  Rossetti.  And,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
when  we  examine  the  question  with  scrupulous  care, 
it  must  be  said  that  both  Baudelaire  and  Keats  are 
"often  metrically  slipshod. 

One  of  Wagner's  ideas,  in  regard  to  the  artistic 
faculty  was,  receptivity  ;  the  impulse  to  impart  only 
what  comes  when  these  impressions  fill  the  mind  "  to  an 
ecstatic  excess  ;  "  and  the  two  forms  of  the  artist  :  the 
feminine,  who  recoils  from  life,  and  the  masculine,  who 
absorbs  life.  From  this  follows,  in  the  case  of  creative 
artists  such  as  Baudelaire,  the  necessity  to  convey  to 
others  as  vividly  and  intelligibly,  as  far  as  possible,  what 
his  own  mind's  eye  had  seen.  Then  one  has  to  seize 
everything  from  which  one  can  wring  its  secret — its 
secret  for  us  and  for  no  one  else.  And  all  this,  and  in 
fact  the  whole  of  our  existence,  is  partly  the  conflict 
within  us  of  the  man  with  the  woman,  the  male  and 
the  female  energies  that  strive  always  : 

"  Here  nature  is,  alive  and  untamed, 
Unafraid  and  unashamed  ; 
Here  man  knows  woman  with  the  greed 
Of  Adam's  wonder,  the  primal  need." 


24  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

And,  in  these  fundamental  lines  of  Blake  : 

"  What  is  it  men  in  women  do  require  ? 
The  lineaments  of  gratified  Desire. 
What  is  it  women  do  in  men  require  ? 
The  lineaments  of  gratified  Desire." 

And,  again,  in  these  more  primeval  and  more  essen- 
tially animal  lines  of  Rossetti : 

"  O  my  love,  O  Love — snake  of  Eden  ! 
(And  O  the  bower  and  the  hour  /) 
O  to-day  and  the  day  to  come  after  ! 
Loose  me,  love — give  way  to  my  laughter  ! 

Lo  I   two  babes  for  Eve  and  for  Adam  ! 
(And  O  the  bower  and  the  hour  /) 
Lo,  sweet  snake,  the  travail  and  treasure — 
Two  men-children  born  for  their  pleasure  I 

The  first  is  Cain  and  the  second  Abel : 

(Eden  bower's  in  flower) 

The  soul  of  one  shall  be  made  thy  brother, 

And  thy  tongue  shall  lap  the  blood  of  the  other. 

(And  O  the  bower  and  the  hour  /)." 

Baudelaire,  in  De  V Essence  de  Rire,  wrote  :  "  The 
Romantic  School,  or,  one  might  say  in  preference,  the 
Satanical  School,  has  certainly  understood  the  primor- 
dial law  of  laughter.  All  the  melodramatic  villains,  all 
those  who  are  cursed,  damned,  fatally  marked  with  a 
rictus  of  the  lips  that  extends  to  the  ears,  are  in  the 
pure  orthodoxy  of  laughter.  For  the  rest,  they  are 
for  the  most  part  illegitimate  sons  of  the  famous  Mel- 
moth  the  Wanderer,  the  great  Satanic  creation  of 
Maturin.  What  can  one  conceive  of  as  greater,  as 
more  powerful,  in  regard  to  our  humanity  than  this 
pale  and  bored  Melmoth  ?  He  is  a  living  contradic- 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  25 

tion  ;    that  is  why  his  frozen  laughter  freezes  and 
wrenches  the  entrails." 

Distinctly  the  most  remarkable  of  the  British  trium- 
virate which  in  the  early  part  of  the  century  won  a 
momentary  fame  as  the  school  of  horror,  Maturin  is 
much  less  known  to  the  readers  of  to-day  than  either 
Monk  Lewis  or  Mrs.  Radcliffe.  Thanks  to  Balzac,  who 
did  Melmoth  the  honour  of  a  loan  in  Melmoth  Reconcilie, 
Maturin  has  attained  a  certain  fame  in  France — which, 
indeed,  he  still  retains.  Melmoth  has  to-day  in  France 
something  of  that  reputation  which  has  kept  alive 
another  English  book,  Vathek.  Did  not  Balzac,  in  a 
moment  of  indiscriminating  enthusiasm,  couple  the 
Melmoth  of  Maturin  with  the  Don  Juan  of  Moliere,  the 
Faust  of  Goethe,  the  Manfred  of  Byron — grandes  images 
tracees  par  les  plus  grands  genies  de  I' Europe  ?  In  other 
words,  Maturin  had  his  day  of  fame,  in  which  even  men 
like  Scott  and  Byron  were  led  into  a  sympathetic  ex- 
aggeration. There's  one  exception.  That  Coleridge 
was  hostile,  possibly  unjust,  is  likely  enough.  It 
should  be  mentioned  that  in  1816  the  Drury  Lane 
Committee,  who  had,  reasonably  enough,  rejected  a 
play  by  Coleridge,  accepted  a  monstrous  production 
of  Maturin's  named  Bertram.  The  gros  bon  melodrame, 
as  Balzac  calls  it,  was  a  great  success.  "It  is  all 
sound  and  fury,  signifying  nothing,"  said  Kean,  who 
acted  in  it ;  and  Kean,  who  knew  his  public,  realized 
that  that  was  why  it  succeeded.  The  play  was  printed, 
and  ran  through  seven  editions,  sinking  finally  to  the 
condition  of  a  chap-book,  in  which  its  horrors  were  to 
be  had  for  sixpence.  On  this  pretentious  work  Cole- 
ridge— for  what  reasons  we  need  not  inquire — took  the 


26  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

trouble  to  write  an  article,  or,  as  it  was  phrased,  to 
make  an  attack.  To  this  Maturin  wrote  a  violent  reply, 
which  the  good  advice  of  Scott  prevented  him  from 
publishing.  It  is  curious  at  the  present  day  to  read 
the  letter  in  which  Scott  urges  upon  Maturin  the 
wisdom  of  silence — not  because  he  is  likely  to  get  the 
worst  of  the  battle,  but,  among  other  reasons,  because 
"  Coleridge's  work  has  been  little  read  or  heard  of,  and 
has  made  no  general  impression  whatever — certainly 
no  impression  unfavourable  to  you  or  your  play.  In 
the  opinion  of  many,  therefore,  you  will  be  resenting 
an  injury  of  which  they  are  unacquainted  with  the 
existence." 

The  episode  is  both  comic  and  instructive.  Coleridge 
and  Maturin  !  Scott  urging  on  Maturin  the  charity  of 
mercy  to  Coleridge,  as — "  Coleridge  has  had  some 
room  to  be  spite.d  at  the  world,  and  you  are,  I  trust, 
to  continue  to  be  a  favourite  with  the  public  !  " 
Poor  Maturin,  far  from  continuing  to  be  a  favourite 
with  the  public,  outlived  his  reputation  in  the  course 
of  a  somewhat  short  life.  He  died  at  the  age  of  forty- 
three.  Like  the  hero  of  Baudelaire's  whimsical  and 
delicious  little  tale  La  Fanfarlo,  he  preferred  artifice 
to  nature,  especially  when  it  was  unnecessary.  Such 
is  the  significant  gossip  which  we  have  about 
the  personality  of  Maturin — gossip  which  brings  out 
clearly  the  deliberate  eccentricity  which  marks  his 
work,  which  one  sees  also  in  the  foppish  affected  and 
lackadaisical  creature  who  looks  at  the  reader  as  if  he 
were  admiring  himself  before  his  mirror. 

The  word  "  genius,"  indeed,  is  too  lofty  an  epithet 
to  use  regarding  a  man  of  great  talent  certainly,  but 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  27 

of  nothing  more  than  erratic  and  melodramatic  talent. 
Melmoth  the  Wanderer  is  in  parts  very  thrilling ;  its 
Elizabethan  feast  of  horrors  has  a  savour  as  of  a  lesser 
Tourneur.  But  it  is  interesting  only  in  parts,  and  at 
its  best  it  never  comes  near  the  effect  which  the  great 
masters  of  the  grotesque  and  terrible — Hoffmann,  Poe, 
Villiers  de  I'lsle-Adam — have  known  how  to  produce. 
A  freak  of  construction,  which  no  artist  could  have 
been  guilty  of,  sends  us  wandering  from  story  to  story 
in  a  very  maze  of  underplots  and  episodes  and  inter- 
polations. Six  separate  stories  are  told — all  in  paren- 
thesis— and  the  greater  part  of  the  book  is  contained 
.within  inverted  commas.  What  is  fine  in  it  is  the 
vivid,  feverish  way  in  which,  from  time  to  time,  some 
story  of  horror  or  mystery  is  forced  home  to  one's 
sensations.  It  is  the  art  of  the  nightmare,  and  it  has 
none  of  the  supremacy  in  that  line  of  the  Contes  Drola- 
tiques  of  Balzac.  But  certain  scenes  in  the  monastery 
and  in  the  prisons  of  the  Inquisition — an  attempted 
escape,  a  scene  where  an  immured  wretch  fights  the 
reptiles  in  the  darkness — are  full  of  a  certain  kind  of 
power.  That  escape,  for  instance,  with  its  conse- 
quences, is  decidedly  gruesome,  decidedly  exciting  ; 
but  compare  it  with  Dumas,  with  the  escape  of  Monte 
Cristo  ;  compare  it  with  the  yet  finer  narrative  of 
Casanova — the  unsurpassed  model  of  all  such  narra- 
tives in  fiction.  Where  Casanova  and  Dumas  produce 
their  effect  by  a  simple  statement — a  record  of  external 
events  from  which  one  realizes,  as  one  could  realize  in 
no  other  way,  all  the  emotions  and  sensations  of  the 
persons  who  were  undergoing  such  experiences — 
Maturin  seeks  his  effect,  and  produces  it,  but  in  a  much 


28  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

lesser  degree,  by  a  sort  of  excited  psychology,  an  ex- 
clamatory insistence  on  sensation  and  emotion. 
Melmoth  the  Wanderer  is  only  the  object  of  our  his- 
torical curiosity.  We  have,  indeed,  and  shall  always 
have,  "  lovers  of  dark  romance." 


T3  AUDELAIRE'S  genius  is  satanical ;  he  has  in  a 
£D  sense  the  vision  of  Satan.  He  sees  in  the  past 
the  lusts  of  the  Borgias^the  sins  and  vices  of  the 
Renaissance ;  the  rare  virtues  that  flourish  like 
flowers  and  weeds,  in  brothels  and  in  garrets.  He  sees 
the  vanity  of  the  world  with  finer  modern  tastes  than 
Solomon ;  for  his  imagination  is  abnormal,  and 
divinely  normal.  In  this  age  of  infamous  shames  he 
has  no  shame.  His  flesh  endures,  his  intellect  is  flaw- 
less. He  chooses  his  own  pleasures  delicately,  sensi- 
tively, as  he  gathers  his  exotic  Fleurs  du  Mai,  in  itself 
a  world,  neither  a  Divina  Commedia  nor  Une  Comedie 
Humaine,  but  a  world  of  his  own  fashioning. 

His  vividly  imaginative  passion,  with  his  instincts 
of  inspiration,  are  aided  by  a  determined  will,  a  self- 
reserve,  an  intensity  of  conception,  an  implacable  in- 
solence, an  accurate  sense  of  the  exact  value  of  every 
word.  In  the  Biblical  sense  he  might  have  said  of  his 
own  verse  :  "  It  is  bone  of  my  bone,  and  flesh  of  my 
flesh."  The  work,  as  the  man,  is  subtle,  strange, 
complex,  morbid,  enigmatical,  refined,  paradoxical, 
spiritual,  animal.  To  him  a  scent  means  more  than  a 
sunset,  a  perfume  more  than  a  flower,  the  tempting 
demons  more  than  the  unseductive  angels.  He  loves 

29 


BAUDELAIRE,  DESIGNED  BY  HIMSELF,  1848 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  31 

luxury  as  he  loves  wine  ;  a  picture  of  Manet's  as  a 
woman's  fan. 

Fascinated  by  sin,  he  is  never  the  dupe  of  his 
emotions  ;  he  sees  sin  as  the  Original  Sin  ;  he  studies 
sin  as  he  studies  evil,  with  a  stern  logic  ;  he  finds  in 
horror  a  kind  of  attractiveness,  as  Poe  had  found  it ; 
rarely  in  hideous  things,  save  when  his  sense  of  what 
I  call  a  moralist  makes  him  moralize,  as  in  his  terrible 
poem,  Une  Charogne.  He  has  pity  for  misery,  hate 
for  progress.  He  is  analytic,  he  is  a  learned  casuist, 
whom  I  can  compare  with  the  formidable  Spanish 
Jesuit,  Thomas  Sanchez,  who  wrote  the  Latin  Aphor- 
ismi  Matrimonio  (1629). 

His  soul  swims  on  music  played  on  no  human  in- 
strument, but  on  strings  that  the  Devil  pulls,  to  which 
certain  living  puppets  dance  in  grotesque  fashion,  to 
unheard-of  rhythms,  to  the  sound  of  violins  strummed 
on  by  evil  spirits  in  Witches'  Sabbats.  Some  swing 
in  the  air,  as  hanged  dead  people  on  gallows,  and,  as 
their  bones  rattle  in  the  wind,  one  sees  Judas  Iscariot, 
risen  out  of  Hell  for  an  instant's  gratification,  as  he 
grimaces  on  these  grimacing  visages. 

Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  is  the  most  curious,  subtle,  fasci- 
nating, and  extraordinary  creation  of  an  entire  world 
ever  fashioned  in  modern  ages.  Baudelaire  paints 
vice  and  degradation  of  the  utmost  depth,  with 
cynicism  and  with  pity,  as  in  the  poem  I  have  referred 
to,  where  the  cult  of  the  corpse  is  the  sensuality  of 
ascetism,  or  the  ascetism  of  sensuality  :  the  mania  of 
fakirs  ;  material  by  passion,  Christian  by  perversity. 

And,  in  a  sense,  he  is  our  modern  Catullus  ;  in  his 
furies,  his  negations,  his  outcries,  his  Paganism,  his 


32  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

inconceivable  passion  for  woman's  flesh  ;  yet  Lesbia 
is  for  ever  Lesbia.  Still,  Baudelaire  in  his  Franciscae 
meae  Laudes,  and  with  less  sting  but  with  as  much 
sensual  sense  of  the  splendour  of  sex,  gives  a  mag- 
nificent Latin  eulogy  of  a  learned  and  pious  modiste, 
that  ends  : 

"  Patera  gemmis  corusca, 
Panis  salsus,  mollis  esca, 
Divinum  vinum,  Francisca." 

And  he  praises  the  Decadent  Latin  language  in  these 
words  :  "  Dans  cette  merveilleuse  langue,  le  solecisme 
et  le  barbarisme  me  paraissent  rendre  les  negligences 
forces  d'une  passion  qui  s'oublie  et  se  moque  des  regies." 

Don  Juan  aux  Enfers  is  a  perfect  Delacroix.  In 
Danse  Macabre  there  is  the  universal  swing  of  the 
dancers  who  dance  the  Dance  of  Death.  Death  her- 
self, in  her  extreme  horror,  ghastly,  perfumed  with 
myrrh,  mixes  her  irony  with  men's  insanity  as  she 
dances  the  Sabbat  of  Pleasure.  He  shows  us  the  in- 
famous menagerie  of  the  vices  in  the  guise  of  reptiles  ; 
our  chief  enemy  Ennui  is  ce  monstre  delicat.  There  are 
Vampires,  agonies  of  the  damned  alive  ;  Le  Possede 
with  his  excruciating  cry  out  of  all  his  fibres  :  0  mon 
cher  Belzebuth !  je  i 'adore  I  And  there  are  some, 
subtler  and  silent,  that  seem  to  move,  softly,  as  the 
feet  of  Night,  to  the  sound  of  faint  music,  or  under 
the  shroud  of  a  sunset. 

Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  are  grown  in  Parisian  soil,  exotics 
that  have  the  strange,  secretive,  haunting  touch  and 
taint  of  the  earth's  or  of  the  body's  corruption.  In 
his  sense  of  beauty  there  is  a  certain  revolt,  a  spiritual 
malady,  which  may  bring  with  it  the  heated  air  of  an 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  33 

alcove  or  the  intoxicating  atmosphere  of  the  East. 
Never  since  Villon  has  the  flesh  of  woman  been  more 
adored  and  abhorred.  Both  aware  of  the  original  sin 
of  I 'unique  animal — the  seed  of  our  moral  degradation 
— Villon  creates  his  Grosse  Margot  and  Baudelaire 
Delphine  et  Hippolyte.  Villon's  is  a  scullion-wench, 
and  in  the  Ballad  a  Brothel  as  infamous,  as  foul,  as 
abominable  as  a  Roman  Lupanar  surges  before  one's 
astonished  vision.  And  this  comes  after  his  supreme, 
his  consummate  praise  of  ruinous  old  age  on  a  harlot's 
body  :  Les  Regrets  de  la  Belle  Heaulmiere.  It  is  one 
of  the  immortal  things  that  exist  in  the  world,  that  I 
can  compare  only  with  Rodin's  statue  in  bronze  :  both 
equal  incarnations  of  the  symbolical  conception  that 
sin  brought  shame  into  the  first  woman's  flesh. 

"  Que  m'en  reste-il  ?    Honte  et  Peche  :  " 

cries  each  mouth,  cries  to  the  end  of  earth's  eternity. 
In  Baudelaire's  Femmes  Damnees  there  is  the  aching 
soul  of  the  spirit's  fatal  malady  :  that  sexual  malady 
for  which  there  is  no  remedy  :  the  Lesbian  sterile 
perilous  divinisation  of  flesh  for  flesh,  virginal  or  un- 
virginal  flesh  with  flesh.  In  vain  desire,  of  that  one 
desire  that  exists  beyond  all  possible  satisfaction,  the 
desire  of  an  utter  annihilation  of  body  with  body  in 
that  ecstasy  which  can  never  be  absolutely  achieved 
without  man's  flesh,  they  strive,  unconsumed  with 
even  the  pangs  of  their  fruitless  desires.  They  live 
only  with  a  life  of  desire,  and  that  obsession  has  carried 
them  beyond  the  wholesome  bounds  of  nature  into  the 
violence  of  a  perversity  which  is  at  times  almost  insane. 
And  all  this  sorrowful  and  tortured  flesh  is  consumed 


34  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

with  that  feverish  desire  that  leaves  them  only  a  short 
space  for  their  desire's  fruitions. 

ii 

Certain  of  these  Flowers  of  Evil  are  poisonous  ;  some 
are  grown  in  the  hotbeds  of  Hell ;  some  have  the  per- 
fume of  a  serpentine  girl's  skin  ;  some  the  odour  of 
woman's  flesh.  Certain  spirits  are  intoxicated  by  these 
accursed  flowers,  to  save  themselves  from  the  too  much 
horror  of  their  vices,  from  the  worse  torture  of  their 
violated  virtues.  And  a  cruel  imagination  has  fash- 
ioned these  naked  images  of  the  Seven  Deadly  Sins, 
eternally  regretful  of  their  first  fall ;  that  smile  not 
even  in  Hell,  in  whose  flames  they  writhe.  One  con- 
ceives them  there  and  between  the  sun  and  the  earth  ; 
in  the  air,  carried  by  the  winds  ;  aware  of  their  infernal 
inheritance.  They  surge  like  demons  out  of  the  Middle 
Ages  ;  they  are  incapable  of  imagining  God's  justice. 

Baudelaire  dramatizes  these  living  images  of  his 
spirit  and  of  his  imagination,  these  fabulous  creatures 
of  his  inspiration,  these  macabre  ghosts,  in  a  fashion 
utterly  different  from  that  of  other  tragedians — Shake- 
speare, and  Aristophanes  in  his  satirical  Tragedies,  his 
lyrical  Comedies  ;  yet  in  the  same  sense  of  being  the 
writer  where  beauty  marries  unvirginally  the  sons  of 
ancient  Chaos. 

In  these  pages  swarm  (in  his  words)  all  the  corrup- 
tions and  all  the  scepticisms  ;  ignoble  criminals  with- 
out convictions,  detestable  hags  that  gamble,  the  cats 
that  are  like  men's  mistresses  ;  Harpagon  ;  the  ex- 
quisite, barbarous,  divine,  implacable,  mysterious 
Madonna  of  the  Spanish  style ;  the  old  men  ;  the 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  35 

drunkards,  the  assassins,  the  lovers  (their  deaths  and 
lives)  ;  the  owls  ;  the  vampires  whose  kisses  raise 
from  the  grave  the  corpse  of  its  own  self  ;  the  Irreme- 
diable that  assails  its  origin  :  Conscience  in  Evil ! 
There  is  an  almost  Christ-like  poem  on  his  Passion, 
Le  Reniement  de  Saint-Pierre,  an  almost  Satanic  de- 
nunciation of  God  in  Abel  and  Cain,  and  with  them 
the  Evil  Monk,  an  enigmatical  symbol  of  Baudelaire's)  # 
soul,  of  his  work,  of  all  that  his  eyes  love  and  hate.j 
Certain  of  these  creatures  play  in  travesties,  dance  in 
ballets.  For  all  the  Arts  are  transformed,  transfigured, 
transplanted  out  of  their  natural  forms  to  pass  in 
magnificent  state  across  the  stage  :  the  stage  with  the 
abyss  of  Hell  in  front  of  it. 

"  Sensualist  "  (I  quote  a  critic),  "  but  the  most  pro- 
found of  sensualists,  and,  furious  of  being  no  more 
than  that,  he  goes,  in  his  sensation,  to  the  extreme 
limit,  to  the  mysterious  gate  of  infinity  against  which 
he  knocks,  yet  knows  not  how  to  open,  with  rage  he 
contracts  his  tongue  in  the  vain  effort."  Yet  centuries 
before  him  Dante  entered  Hell,  traversed  it  in  imagina- 
tion from  its  endless  beginning  to  its  endless  end  ;  re- 
turned to  earth  to  write,  for  the  spirit  of  Beatrice  and 
for  the  world,  that  Divina  Commedia,  of  which  in 
Verona  certain  women  said  : 

"  Lo,  he  that  strolls  to  Hell  and  back 
At  will  !    Behold  him,  how  Hell's  reek 
Has  crisped  his  beard  and  singed  his  cheek." 

It  is  Baudelaire  who,  in  Hell  as  in  earth,  finds  a 
certain  Satan  in  such  modern  hearts  as  his  ;  that  even 
modern  art  has  an  essentially  demoniacal  tendency ; 


36  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

that  the  infernal  pact  of  man  increases  daily,  as  if  the 
Devil  whispered  in  his  ear  certain  sardonic  secrets. 
Here  in  such  satanic  and  romantic  atmosphere  one 
hears  dissonances,  the  discords  of  the  instruments  in 
the  Sabbats,  the  howlings  of  irony,  the  vengeance  of 
the  vanquished. 

I  give  one  sentence  of  Gautier's  on  Baudelaire. 
"  This  poet  of  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  loved  what  one 
wrongly  calls  the  style  of  decadence,  which  is  no  other 
thing  than  the  arrival  of  art  at  this  extreme  point  of 
maturity  that  determined  in  their  oblique  suns  the 
civilizations  that  aged  :  a  style  ingenious,  complicated, 
learned,  full  of  shades  and  of  rarities,  turning  for  ever 
backward  the  limits  of  the  language,  using  technical 
vocabularies,  taking  colours  from  all  the  palettes,  notes 
from  all  the  keyboards,  striving  to  render  one's  thought 
in  what  is  most  ineffable,  and  form  in  its  most  vague 
and  evasive  contours,  listening  so  as  to  translate  them, 
the  subtle  confidences  of  neurosis,  the  passionate  con- 
fessions of  ancient  passions  in  their  depravity  and  the 
bizarre  hallucinations  of  the  fixed  idea."  He  adds  : 
"  In  regard  to  his  verse  there  is  the  language  already 
veined  in  the  greenness  of  decomposition,  the  tainted 
language  of  the  later  Roman  Empire,  and  the  compli- 
cated refinements  of  the  Byzantine  School,  the  last 
form  of  Greek  art  fallen  in  delinquencies."  See  how 
perfectly  the  phrase  la  langue  de  faisandee  suits  the 
exotic  style  of  Baudelaire  ! 

Yet,  tainted  as  the  style  is  from  time  to  time,  never 
was  the  man  himself  tainted  :  he  who  in  modern  verse 
gave  first  of  all  an  unknown  taste  to  sensations  ;  he 
who  painted  vice  in  all  its  shame  ;  whose  most  savor- 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  37 

cms  verses  are  perfumed  as  with  subtle  aromas  ;  whose 
women  are  bestial,  rouged,  sterile,  bodies  without 
souls  ;  whose  Litanies  de  Satan  have  that  cold  irony 
which  he  alone  possessed  in  its  extremity,  in  these  so- 
called  impious  lines  which  reveal,  under  whatever 
disguise,  his  belief  in  a  mathematical  superiority  estab- 
lished by  God  from  all  eternity,  and  whose  least  in- 
fraction is  punished  by  certain  chastisements,  in  this 
world  as  in  the  next. 

I  can  imagine  Baudelaire  in  his  hours  of  nocturnal 
terrors,  sleepless  in  a  hired  woman's  bed,  saying  to 
himself  these  words  of  Marlowe's  Satan  : 

"  Why,  this  is  Hell,  nor  can  I  out  of  it ! " 

in  accents  of  eternal  despair  wrenched  from  the  lips 
of  the  Arch  Fiend.  And  the  genius  of  Baudelaire,  I 
can  but  think,  was  as  much  haunted  as  Marlowe's  with, 
in  Lamb's  words,  "  a  wandering  in  fields  where  curio- 
sity is  forbidden  to  go,  approaching  the  dark  gulf  near 
enough  to  look  in." 

in 

Has  Baudelaire  I' amour  du  mal  pour  le  mat  ?  In  a 
certain  sense,  yes  ;  in  a  certain  sense,  no.  He  believes 
in  evil  as  in  Satan  and  God — the  primitive  forces  that 
govern  worlds  :  the  eternal  enemies.  He  sees  the 
germs  of  evil  everywhere,  few  of  the  seeds  of  virtue. 
He  sees  pass  before  him  the  world's  drama  :  he  is  one 
of  the  actors,  he  plays  his  parts  cynically,  ironically. 
He  speaks  in  rhythmic  cadences. 

But,  above  all,  he  watches  the  dancers  ;  these  also 
are  elemental ;  and  the  tragic  fact  is  that  the  dancers 


38  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

dance  for  their  living.  For  their  living,  for  their  plea- 
sure, for  the  pleasure  of  pleasing  others.  So  passes  the 
fantastic  part  of  their  existence,  from  the  savage  who 
dances  silent  dances — for,  indeed,  all  dancers  are  silent 
— but  without  music,  to  the  dancer  who  dances  for  us 
on  the  stage,  who  turns  always  to  the  sound  of  music. 
There  is  an  equal  magic  in  the  dance  and  in  song  ;  both 
have  their  varied  rhythms  ;  both,  to  use  an  image,  the 
rhythmic  beating  of  our  hearts.  It  is  imagined  that 
dancing  and  music  were  the  oldest  of  the  arts.  Rhythm 
has  rightly  been  called  the  soul  of  dancing  ;  both  are 
instinctive. 

The  greatest  French  poet  after  Villon,  the  most  dis- 
reputable and  the  most  creative  poet  in  French 
literature,  the  greatest  artist  in  French  verse,  and, 
after  Verlaine,  the  most  passionate,  perverse,  lyrical, 
visionary,  and  intoxicating  of  modern  poets,  comes 
Baudelaire,  infinitely  more  perverse,  morbid,  exotic 
than  these  other  poets.  In  his  verse  there  is  a  delibe- 
rate science  of  sensual  perversity,  which  has  something 
almost  monachal  in  its  accentuation  of  vice  with 
horror,  in  its  passionate  devotion  to  passions.  Baude- 
laire brings  every  complication  of  taste,  the  exaspera- 
tion of  perfumes,  the  irritant  of  cruelty,  the  very 
odours  and  colours  of  corruption  to  the  creation  and 
adornment  of  a  sort  of  religion,  in  which  an  eternal 
mass  is  served  before  a  veiled  altar.  There  is  no  con- 
fession, no  absolution,  not  a  prayer  is  permitted  which 
is  not  set  down  in  the  ritual.  With  Verlaine,  however 
often  love  may  pass  into  sensuality,  to  whatever 
length  sensuality  may  be  hurried,  sensuality  is  never 
more  than  the  malady  of  love. 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  39 

The  great  epoch  in  French  literature  which  preceded 
this  epoch  was  that  of  the  offshoot  of  Romanticism 
which  produced  Baudelaire,  Flaubert,  the  Goncourts, 
Zola,  and  Leconte  de  Lisle.  Even  Baudelaire,  in  whom 
the  spirit  is  always  an  uneasy  guest  at  the  orgy  of  life, 
had  a  certain  theory  of  Realism  which  tortures  many 
of  his  poems  into  strange,  metallic  shapes  and  fills  them 
with  irritative  odours,  and  disturbs  them  with  a  too 
deliberate  rhetoric  of  the  flesh.  Flaubert,  the  greatest 
novelist  after  Balzac,  the  only  impeccable  novelist 
who  ever  lived,  was  resolute  to  be  the  creator  of  a 
world  in  which  art — formal  art — was  the  only  escape 
from  the  burden  of  reality.  It  was  he  who  wrote  to 
Baudelaire,  who  had  sent  him  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  : 
"  I  devoured  your  volume  from  one  end  to  another, 
read  it  over  and  over  again,  verse  by  verse,  word  by 
word,  and  all  I  can  say  is  it  pleases  and  enchants  me. 
You  overwhelm  me  with  your  colours.  What  I  admire 
most  in  your  book  is  its  perfect  art.  You  praise  flesh 
without  loving  it." 

There  is  something  Oriental  in  Baudelaire's  genius  ; 
a  nostalgia  that  never  left  him  after  he  had  seen  the 
East :  there  where  one  finds  hot  midnights,  feverish 
days,  strange  sensations  ;  for  only  the  East,  when  one 
has  lived  in  it,  can  excite  one's  vision  to  a  point  of 
ardent  ecstasy.  He  is  the  first  modern  poet  who  gave 
to  a  calculated  scheme  of  versification  a  kind  of  secret 
and  sacred  joy.  He  is  before  all  things  the  artist, 
always  sure  of  his  form.  And  his  rarefied  imagination 
aided  him  enormously  not  only  in  the  perfecting  of 
his  verse  and  prose,  but  in  making  him  create  the 
criticism  of  modern  art. 


40  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

Next  after  Villon,  Baudelaire  is  the  poet  of  Paris. 
Like  a  damned  soul  (to  use  one  of  his  imaginary 
images)  he  wanders  at  nights,  an  actual  noctambule, 
alone  or  with  Villiers,  Gautier,  in  remote  quarters,  sits 
in  cafes,  goes  to  casinos,  the  Rat  Mort.  "  The  Wind  of 
Prostitution  "  (I  quote  his  words)  torments  him,  the 
sight  of  hospitals,  of  gambling  houses,  the  miserable 
creatures  one  comes  on  in  certain  quarters,  even  the 
fantastic  glitter  of  lamplights.  All  this  he  needs  :  a 
kind  of  intense  curiosity,  of  excitement,  in  his  fre- 
quentation  of  these  streets,  comes  over  him,  like  one 
who  has  taken  opium.  And  this  is  only  one  part  of 
his  life,  he  who  lived  and  died  solitary,  a  confessor  of 
sins  who  has  never  told  the  whole  truth,  le  mauvais 
moins  of  his  own  sonnet,  an  ascetic  of  passion,  a  hermit 
of  the  brothel. 

He  is  the  first  who  ever  related  things  in  the  modu- 
lated tone  of  the  confessional  and  never  assumed  an 
inspired  air.  The  first  also  who  brings  into  modern 
literature  the  chagrin  that  bites  at  our  existence  like 
serpents.  He  admits  to  his  diabolical  taste,  not  quite 
exceptional  in  him  ;  one  finds  it  in  Petronius,  Rabelais, 
Balzac.  In  spite  of  his  magnificent  Litanies  de  Satan, 
he  is  no  more  of  the  satanical  school  than  Byron. 
Yet  both  have  the  same  sardonic  irony,  the  delight  of 
mystification,  of  deliberately  irritating  solemn  people's 
convictions.  Both,  who  died  tragically  young,  had 
their  hours  of  sadness,  when  one  doubts  and  denies 
everything ;  passionately  regretting  youth,  turning 
away,  in  sinister  moods,  in  solitude,  from  that  too 
intense  self-knowledge  that,  like  a  mirror,  shows  the 
wrinkles  on  our  cheeks. 


IV 


T  BAUDELAIRE,  whose  acquaintance  with  English 
JL-)  was  perfect,  was  thrilled  in  1846  when  he  read 
certain  pages  of  Poe  ;  he  seemed  to  see  in  his  prose  a 
certain  similarity  in  words  and  thoughts,  even  in  ideas, 
as  if  he  himself  had  written  some  of  them  ;  these  pages 
of  a  prose-writer  whom  he  named  "  the  master  of  the 
horrible,  the  prince  of  mystery."  For  four  years  he 
set  himself  to  the  arduous  task  of  translating  the  prose 
of  a  man  of  genius,  whom  he  certainly  discovered  for 
France  and  for  French  readers.  And  his  translation 
is  so  wonderful  that  it  is  far  and  away  finer  than  a 
marvellous  original.  His  first  translation  was  printed 
in  Le  Liberte  de  Pensee  in  July,  1848,  and  he  only 
finished  his  translations  at  the  end  of  sixteen  years.  In 
1852  the  Revue  de  Paris  printed  his  Edgar  Allan  Poe  ;  sa 
Vie  et  ses  Ouvrages.  His  translations  came  in  this  order  : 
Histoires  Extraordinaires  (1856,  which  I  have  before 
me) ;  Nouvelles  Histoires  Extraordinaires  (1857,  which  I 
also  possess)  ;  Aventures  d' Arthur  Gordon  Pym  (1858) ; 
Eureka  (1864)  ;  Histoires  Grotesques  et  Serieuses  (1865). 
One  knows  the  fury  with  which  (in  1855)  he  set 
himself  the  prodigious  task  of  translating  one  of  Poe's 
stories  every  day ;  which,  to  one's  amazement,  he 
actually  did.  Always  he  rages  over  his  proofs,  over 
those  printers'  devils,  an  accursed  race  ;  every  proof 
is  sent  back  to  the  printing  press,  revised  ;  underlined, 
covered  in  the  margins  with  imperative  objurgations, 

41 


42  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

written  with  an  angry  hand  and  accentuated  with 
notes  of  exclamation.  Swinburne  shared  the  same 
fate.  He  writes  to  Chatto  a  violent  letter  on  the  in- 
competence of  printers  :  "  their  scandalous  negli- 
gence," "  ruinous  and  really  disgraceful  blunders," 
"  numberless  wilful  errors,"  written  in  a  state  of  per- 
fect frenzy.  "  These  damned  printers,"  he  cries  at 
them,  as  Baudelaire  did  ;  "  who  have  done  their 
utmost  to  disfigure  my  book.  The  appearance  of  the 
pages  is  disgraceful — a  chaos."  And  he  actually  writes 
one  letter  to  complain  of  a  dropped  comma  ! 

The  Notes  Nouvelles  sur  Edgar  Poe  of  1857  are  in- 
finitely finer  than  those  of  1856.  He  begins  with  : 
Litter ature  de  decadence  !  and  with  a  paradox,  of  his 
invention,  of  the  Sphynx  without  an  enigma.  Genus 
irritabile  vatum !  a  Latin  phrase  for  the  irritable  race 
of  artists,  is  irrefutable,  and  certainly  irrefutable  are 
all  Baudelaire's  arguments,  divinations,  revelations  of 
Poe's  genius  and  of  Poe's  defects. 

Poe's  genius  has  been  generally  misunderstood.  He 
gave  himself  to  many  forms  of  misconception  :  by  his 
eccentricities,  his  caprices,  his  fantastic  follies,  his 
natural  insolence,  his  passionate  excitations  (mostly 
imaginary),  his  delinquencies  in  regard  to  morals,  his 
over-acute  sensibility,  his  exasperating  way  of  exas- 
perating the  general  public  he  hated,  his  analysing 
problems  that  had  defied  any  living  writer's  ingenuity 
to  have  compassed  (as  in  his  detective  stories)  ;  above 
all,  his  almost  utter  alienation  from  that  world  he 
lived  in,  dreamed  in,  never  worshipped,  died  in. 

And  he  remains  still  a  kind  of  enigma ;  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  the  most  minute  details  of  his  life  are 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  43 

known,  and  that  he  never  outlived  his  reputation. 
Yes,  enigmatical  in  various  points  :  as  to  his  not  giving 
even  the  breath  of  life  to  the  few  ghosts  of  women 
who  cross  his  pages  ;  of  never  diving  very  deeply  into 
any  heart  but  his  own.  Are  not  most  of  his  men 
malign,  perverse,  atrocious,  abnormal,  never  quite 
normal,  evocations  of  himself  ?  From  Dupin  to  For- 
tunato,  from  the  Man  in  the  Crowd  to  the  Man  in  the 
Pit,  from  Prince  Prospero  to  Usher,  are  not  these 
revenants,  in  the  French  sense  ? 

There  is  something  demoniacal  in  his  imagination  ; 
for  Poe  never,  I  might  say,  almost  never,  lets  his 
readers  have  an  instant's  rest  ;  any  more  than  the 
Devil  lets  his  subjects  have  any  actual  surcease  of 
torment.  Yet,  as  there  is  a  gulf  between  Good  and 
Evil,  no  one,  by  any  chance,  falls  into  the  abyss. 

Poe,  of  course,  writes  with  his  nerves,  and  therefore 
only  nervous  writers  have  ever  understood  him.  It  is 
Baudelaire,  the  most  nervous  of  modern  writers,  who 
says  of  Poe  that  no  one,  before  him,  had  affirmed 
imperturbably  the  natural  wickedness  of  man.  Yet 
this  statement  is  a  paradox  ;  a  lesser  paradox  is  that 
man  is  originally  perverse  ;  for  all  are  not  nes  marques 
pour  le  mat  ? 

Poe  is  not  a  great  critic  ;  he  says  certain  unforget- 
table things,  with  even  an  anticipation  of  the  work  of 
later  writers.  "  /  know,"  he  says,  "  that  indefiniteness 
is  an  element  of  the  true  music — I  mean  of  the  true 
musical  expression.  Give  it  any  undue  decision — 
imbue  it  with  any  very  determinate  tone — and  you 
deprive  it  at  once  of  its  ethereal,  its  ideal,  its  intrinsic 
and  essential  character  "  Where  he  is  great  is  where 


44  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

he  writes  :  "I  have  a  pure  contempt  for  mere  preju- 
dice and  conventionality ;  "  and  mostly  where  he 
defines  himself.  "  Nor  is  there  an  instance  to  be  dis- 
covered, among  all  I  have  published,  of  my  having 
set  forth,  either  in  praise  or  censure,  a  single  opinion 
upon  any  critical  topic  of  moment,  without  attempting, 
at  least,  to  give  it  authority  by  something  that  wore 
the  semblance  of  a  reason." 

His  fault  is  that  he  is  too  lenient  to  woman  poets 
who  never  merited  that  name  and  to  men  of  mere 
talent ;  yet  he  annihilates  many  undeserved  reputa- 
tions ;  perhaps,  after  all,  "  thrice  slain."  No  one 
I  ointed  out  the  errors  in  Mrs.  Browning's  verses  as  he 
did  ;  her  affectations  such  as  "  God's  possibles  ;  "  her 
often  inefficient  rhythm  ;  her  incredibly  bad  rhymes. 
Yet,  for  all  this,  he,  whose  ear  as  a  poet  was  almost 
perfect,  made  the  vile  rhyme  of  "  vista  "  with  "sister," 
that  raised  the  righteous  wrath  of  Rossetti. 

In  his  essay  on  Hawthorne,  he  warns  one  from  a 
certain  heresy.  "  The  deepest  emotion  aroused  within 
us  by  the  happiest  allegory,  as  an  allegory,  is  a  very 
imperfectly  satisfied  sense  of  the  writer's  ingenuity  in 
overcoming  a  difficulty  we  should  have  preferred  his 
not  having  attempted  to  overcome."  But  it  is  on 
pages  196-198  of  his  Marginalia  that  he  gives  his  final 
statement  in  regard  to  Verse,  the  Novel,  and  the  Short 
Story  ;  so  far  as  these  questions  have  any  finality. 
As,  for  instance,  how  the  highest  genius  uses  his  powers 
in  "  the  composition  of  a  rhymed  poem,  not  to  exceed 
in  length  what  might  be  perused  in  an  hour."  As  for 
the  Story,  it  has  this  immense  advantage  over  a  novel 
that  its  brevity  adds  to  the  intensity  of  the  effect ; 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  45 

that  "  Beauty  can  be  better  treated  in  the  poem,  but 
that  one  can  use  terror  and  passion  and  horror  as 
artistic  means."  Poe  was  a  master  of  the  grotesque, 
of  the  extraordinary,  never  of  the  passionate. 

There  is  an  unholy  magic  in  some  of  his  verse  and 
prose  ;  in  his  hallucinations,  so  real  and  so  unreal ; 
his  hysterics,  his  sense  of  the  contradiction  between 
the  nerves  and  the  spirit ;  in  his  scientific  analyses  of 
terrible,  foreseen  effects,  where  generally  the  man  of 
whom  he  writes  is  driven  into  evil  ways.  For  did  he 
not  state  this  axiom  :  "A  good  writer  has  always  his 
last  line  in  view  when  he  has  written  his  first  line  ?  " 
This  certainly  was  part  of  his  metier,  made  of  com- 
binations and  of  calculations. 

I  read  somewhere,  "  There  is  nothing  wonderful 
in  '  The  Raven.'  '  It  is  really  a  tour  de  force  ;  even  if 
the  metre  is  not  invented,  he  invented  the  inner  double 
rhymes,  and  the  technique  is  flawless.  It  has  Black 
Magic  in  it ;  the  unreality  of  an  intoxication  ;  a 
juggler's  skill ;  it  will  be  always  his  most  famous  poem. 
In  his  analysis  of  these  verses,  does  not  Poe  under- 
value the  inspiration  that  created  thsm  ?  Yes,  by  an 
amusing  vanity.  And,  as  Baudelaire  says  :  "A  little 
charlatanism  is  always  permitted  to  a  man  of  genius, 
and  it  doesn't  suit  him  badly.  It  is  like  the  rouge  on 
the  cheeks  of  a  woman  actually  fair,  a  new  form  of 
seasoning  for  the  spirit." 

There  was  too  much  of  the  woman  in  the  making 
of  Poe,  manly  as  he  was  in  every  sense.  He  had  no 
strength  of  will,  was  drawn  from  seduction  to  seduc- 
tion ;  had  not  enough  grip  on  his  constitution  to  live 
wisely,  to  live  well.  He  drifted,  let  himself  be  drifted. 


46  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

He  had  no  intention  of  ruining  himself,  yet  ruined  he 
was,  and  there  was  nothing  that  could  have  saved  him. 
Call  it  his  fate  or  his  evil  star,  he  was  doomed  inevi- 
tably to  an  early  death.  Pas  de  chance  !  Yes — let  one 
suppose — had  he  himself  chosen  the  form  of  his  death, 
he  might  have  desired  to  die  like  the  sick  women  in 
his  pages — mourant  de  maux  bizarres. 

Baudelaire,  the  most  scrupulous  of  the  men  of  letters 
of  our  age,  spent  his  whole  life  in  writing  one  book  of 
verse  (out  of  which  all  French  poetry  has  come  since 
his  time),  one  book  of  prose  in  which  prose  becomes  a 
fine  art,  some  criticism  which  is  the  sanest,  subtlest, 
and  surest  which  his  generation  produced,  and  a  trans- 
lation which  is  better  than  a  marvellous  original.  Often 
an  enigma  to  himself,  much  of  his  life  and  of  his  adven- 
tures and  of  liis  experiences  remain  enigmatical.  I 
shall  choose  one  instance  out  of  many  ;  that  is  to  say, 
what  was  the  original  of  his  dedication  of  L'Heau- 
timoromenos  in  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai,  and  of  his  dedica- 
tion of  Les  Paradis  Artificiels  to  a  woman  whose 
initials  are  J.  G.  F.  ? 

The  poem  was  first  printed  in  L  'Artiste,  May  10, 
1857,  together  with  two  other  poems,  all  equally 
strange,  extraordinary,  and  enigmatical :  Franciscae 
Meae  Laudes,  and  L  Irremediable.  The  Latin  verses, 
composed,  not  in  the  manner  of  Catullus,  but  in  a 
metre  that  belongs  to  the  late  Decadent  poets  of 
the  Middle  Ages,  are  as  magnificent  as  inspired,  and 
are  written  really  in  modern  Latin.  This  is  the 
Dedication  :  Vers  composes  pour  une  modiste  erudite  et 
devote.  The  verses  are  musical  and  luxurious.  He 
sings  of  this  delicious  woman  who  absolves  one's  sins, 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  47 

who  has  drunk  of  the  waters  of  Lethe,  who  has  spoken 
as  a  star,  who  has  learned  what  is  vile,  who  has  been 
in  his  hunger  an  hostel,  in  his  night  a  torch,  and  who 
has  given  him  divine  wine.  The  second,  that  has  the 
woman's  initials,  is  founded,  as  to  its  name,  on  the 
comedy  of  Terence,  The  Self -Tormentor,  where,  in  fact, 
the  part  of  Menedemas,  the  self-tormentor,  rises  to 
almost  tragic  earnestness,  and  reminds  one  occasion- 
ally of  Shakespeare's  Timon  of  Athens.  Nor  are 
Baudelaire's  verses  less  tragic.  It  is  the  fiercest  con- 
fession in  the  whole  of  his  poems  in  regard  to  himself 
and  to  women.  He  strikes  her  with  hate,  cannot 
.  satiate  his  thirst  of  her  lips  ;  is  a  discord  in  her  vora- 
cious irony  that  bites  and  shakes  himself ;  she  is  in 
his  voice,  in  his  blood  (like  poison),  and  he  is  her  sinister 
mirror.  He  is  the  wound  and  the  knife,  the  limbs,  and 
the  wheel ;  he  is  of  his  own  heart  the  vampire  con- 
demned in  utter  abandonment  to  an  eternal  laughter. 
The  third  is  a  hideous  nightmare  when  Idea  and 
Form  and  Being  fall  into  the  Styx,  where  a  bewitched 
wretch  fumbles  in  a  place  filled  with  reptiles  ;  where 
a  damned  man  descends  without  a  lamp  eternal  stair- 
cases on  which  he  has  no  hold  ;  and  these  are  symbols 
of  an  irremediable  fortune  which  makes  one  think  that 
the  Devil  always  does  whatever  he  intends  to  do.  At 
the  end  a  heart  becomes  his  mirror  ;  and  before  the 
Pit  of  Truth  shines  an  infernal  and  ironical  lighthouse, 
that  flashes  with  satanical  glances  and  is  :  La  Con- 
science dans  le  Mai ! 

In  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  (1857),  a  copy  of  which,  signed 
in  Baudelaire's  handwriting,  is  before  me  on  the  desk 
where  I  write  these  lines,  I  find  that  the  two  first  poems 


48  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

I  have  mentioned  follow  each  other  in  pages  123-127, 
and  I  feel  certainly  inclined  to  attribute  those  three 
poems  to  the  same  inspiration.  Compare,  for  example, 
"  Puits  de  Verite  "  with  Piscina  plena  virtutis  ;  "  Dans 
un  Styx  bourbeux "  with  Sicat  beneficum  Lethe ; 
"  Tailler  les  eaux  de  la  souffrance  "  with  Labris  vocem 
redde  mutis !  "  Au  fond  d'un  cauchemar  enorme  " 
with  "  Je  suis  de  mon  coeur  le  vampire."  And,  "  Je 
suis  le  sinister  miroir  "  with  "  Qu'un  cceur  devenu  son 
miroir."  Compare  also  the  dedication  to  the  Latin 
verses  "  A  une  modiste  erudite  et  devote  "  with,  in 
the  dedication  of  Les  Paradis,  "  une  qui  tourne  main- 
tenant  tous  ses  regards  vers  le  ciel."  His  reason  for 
writing  Latin  verses  for  and  to  a  dressmaker  is  evident 
enough  :  a  deliberate  deviation  from  the  truth,  a  piece 
of  sublime  casuistry.  One  must  also  note  this  sen- 
tence :  "  Le  calembour  lui-meme,  quand  il  traverse  ces 
pedantesques  begaiements,  ne  joue-t-il  pas  la  grace 
sauvage  et  baroque  de  1'enfance  ?  "  And  again,  when 
he  writes  :  "  Words,  taken  in  quite  a  n^w  acceptation 
of  their  meaning,  reveal  the  charming  uneasiness  of 
the  Barbarian  of  the  North  who  kneels  before  a  Roman 
Beauty  ;  "  this  sentence  certainly  is  only  comprehen- 
sible if  one  realizes  that  it  was  written  for  J.  G.  F. 
Finally,  take  these  two  lines,  which  seem  to  prove 
satisfactorily  the  truth  of  my  attribution  : 

In  node  mea  taberna. 
Flambeau  des  graces  sataniques. 

I  return  to  my  copy  of  Les  Paradis  Artificiels  (1860). 
The  dedication  to  J.  G.  F.  begins  :  "Ma  chere  amie, 
Common-sense  tells  us  that  terrestrial  things  have  but 
a  faint  existence,  and  that  actual  reality  is  found 


PARADIS 

ARTIFICIELS 

OPIUM  ET  HASGHISCH 


CHARLES   BAUDELAIRE 


PAHIS 
POULET-MALA8SIS  ET  DE  BROISK 

LIBRAIHES-EDITEUKS 

97,  rue  Richelieu  el  passage  Hii  J* 

4861 
Traduction  el  reproduction  then-its. 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  49 

only  in  dreams.  Woman  is  fatally  suggestive  ;  she 
lives  with  another  life  than  her  proper  one  ;  she  lives 
spiritually  in  the  imaginations  that  she  haunts. 

"  Besides,  it  seems  to  me  there  is  little  enough  reason 
why  this  dedication  should  be  understood.  Is  it  even 
necessary,  for  the  writer's  satisfaction,  that  any  kind 
of  book  ought  to  be  understood,  except  by  him  or  by 
her  for  whom  it  has  been  composed  ?  Is  it,  indeed, 
indispensable  that  it  has  been  written  for  any  one  ? 
I  have,  for  my  part,  so  little  taste  for  the  living  world 
that,  like  certain  sensible  and  stay-at-home  women 
who  send,  I  am  told,  their  letters  to  imaginary  friends 
by  the  post,  I  would  willingly  write  only  for  the  dead. 

"  But  it  is  not  to  a  dead  woman  that  I  dedicate  this 
little  book  ;  it  is  to  one  who,  though  ill,  is  always 
active  and  living  in  me,  and  who  now  turns  her  eyes 
in  the  direction  of  the  skies,  that  realm  of  so  many 
transfigurations.  For,  just  as  in  the  case  of  a  redoubt- 
able drug,  a  living  being  enjoys  the  privilege  of  being 
able  to  draw  new  and  subtle  pleasures  even  from 
sorrow,  from  catastrophe,  and  from  fatality. 

'  You  will  see  in  this  narrative  a  man  who  walks  in 
a  sombre  and  solitary  fashion,  plunged  in  the  moving 
flood  of  multitudes,  sending  his  heart  and  his  thoughts 
to  a  far-off  Electra  who  so  long  ago  wiped  his 
sweating  forehead  and  refreshed  his  lips  parched  by 
fever;  and  you  will  divine  the  gratitude  of  another 
Orestes,  whose  nightmares  you  have  so  often  watched 
over,  and  whose  unendurable  slumbers  you  dissipated, 
with  a  light  and  tender  hand." 

I  have  to  say  that  in  the  last  sentences  I  have  trans- 
lated Baudelaire  uses  "  tu  "  instead  of  "  vous,"  and 


50  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

that  he  does  the  same  in  his  Latin  verses  and  in  the 
verses  next  after  it.  The  question  still  remains  :  who 
was  the  woman  of  the  initials  ? 

What  is  certainly  not  a  solution  of  the  unfathom- 
able mystery  of  this  enigmatical  woman,  but  which  is, 
in  a  certain  sense,  a  clue,  I  find  on  pages  55-67  of  the 
book  I  have  referred  to,  a  narrative  that  seems  more 
than  likely  to  have  been  hers.  He  says  this  to  make 
one  understand  better  the  mixture  of  dreams  and 
hallucinations  in  haschisch,  as  having  been  sent  him 
by  a  woman  :  "  It  is  a  woman,  rather  a  mature  woman, 
curious,  of  an  excitable  spirit,  who,  having  yielded  to 
the  temptation  of  using  the  drug,  describes  her  visions." 
These  are  superb  and  fantastic  visions,  written  by  an 
imaginative,  sensitive,  and  suggestive  woman.  She 
begins  :  "  However  bizarre  and  astonishing  are  these 
sensations  that  intoxicated  my  folly  for  twelve  hours 
(twelve  or  twenty  ?  I  don't  know  which)  I  shall  never 
return  to  them.  The  spiritual  excitement  is  too  vivid, 
the  fatigue  too  much  to  endure,  and,  to  say  all,  in  this 
childish  enchantment  I  find  something  criminal."  She 
adds  :  "I  have  heard  that  the  enthusiasm  of  poets 
and  of  creators  is  not  unlike  what  I  have  experienced, 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  I  have  always  imagined  that 
such  men  whose  delight  is  to  move  us  ought  to  be  of  a 
really  calm  temperament ;  but  if  poetical  delirium  has 
any  resemblance  with  what  a  little  teaspoon  full  of 
drugged  jam  has  given  me,  I  think  that  all  such  plea- 
sures cost  dear  to  poets,  and  it  is  not  without  a  certain 
prosaic  satisfaction  that  I  return  to  real  life." 

In  these  sentences  Baudelaire  gives  one  a  certain 
clue  as  to  the  identity  of  this  woman.  "  But,  above 


BAUDELAIRE:   A' STUDY  51 

i 

all,  observe  that  in  this  woman's  story  the  hallucina- 
tion is  of  a  bastard  kind,  and  whose  reason  of  being 
is  to  be  an  exterior  spectacle  ;  the  mind  is  no  more 
than  a  mirror  where  the  surrounding  environment  is 
transformed  in  an  extraordinary  fashion.  Besides,  we 
see  intervene  what  I  must  call  the  moral  hallucination  : 
the  subject  believes  he  is  subjected  to  an  expiation, 
but  the  feminine  temperament,  which  is  little  accus- 
tomed to  analysis,  does  not  permit  itself  to  note  the 
singularly  optimistic  character  of  this  hallucination. 
The  benevolent  regard  of  the  Olympian  Divinities  is 
poetized  by  a  kind  of  varnish  essentially  haschischin. 
I  cannot  say  that  this  woman  has  escaped  from  the 
sense  of  remorse  ;  but  that  her  thoughts,  momentarily 
turned  in  the  direction  of  melancholy  and  of  regret, 
have  returned  to  their  former  sensibility." 

I  need  not  take  into  account  his  Latin  learning,  his 
Jesuitical  casuistry,  his  erudite  reference  to  Electra  ; 
nor  his  ambiguous  but  not  enigmatical  linking  together 
of  the  names  of  Orestes  and  Electra,  to  make  it  posi- 
tively certain  that  the  three  poems  were  inspired  by 
the  same  woman  to  whom  Le  Paradis  is  dedicated. 
Like  Orestes,  he  might  have  desired  vengeance,  as  the 
fugitive  did  for  his  murdered  father  ;  she,  like  Electra, 
might  have  said,  in  Sophocles'  words  :  "  And  my 
.wretched  couch  in  yonder  house  of  woe  knows  well, 
ere  now,  how  I  keep  the  watches  of  the  night — how 
often  I  bewail  my  hapless  sin."  I  find  exactly  the 
same  feeling  in  the  sentences  I  have  given  of  the  dedica- 
tion as  in  Electra's  speech  :  nights  of  weariness  and  of 
lamentation.  And  Orestes  exiled  is  ever  in  her 
thoughts.  Why  not  in  J.  G.  F.'s  ? 


52  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

In  1859  Poulet-Malassis  printed  :  Theophile  Gautier, 
par  Charles  Baudelaire  ;  a  book  of  68  pages  ;  certainly 
full  of  perfect  praise,  as  only  one  so  infinitely  greater 
than  the  writer  he  writes  about  was  capable  of  giving. 
The  first  question  the  oriental-looking  Gautier  asked 
him  was  :  "  Do  you  love  dictionaries  ?  "  The  reply 
was  instant :  "  Yes  !  "  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Gautier 
knew  every  word  in  the  French  language,  even  I' Argot. 

Now,  as  Baudelaire  defines  the  genius  of  Balzac 
supremely  (more  than  he  ever  could  have  defined  the 
incomparable  talents  of  Gautier),  I  leave  it  to  Swin- 
burne to  speak  for  me  of  Baudelaire  and  of  Balzac. 

"  Not  for  the  first,"  he  says,  in  his  Study  of  Shakes- 
peare, "  and  probably  not  for  the  last  time  I  turn,  with 
all  confidence,  as  well  as  with  reverence,  for  illustra- 
tion and  confirmation  of  my  own  words,  to  the  ex- 
quisite critical  genius  of  a  long  honoured  and  long 
lamented  fellow-craftsman.  The  following  admirable 
and  final  estimate  of  the  more  special  element  or 
peculiar  quality  in  the  intellectual  force  of  Honore  de 
Balzac  could  only  have  been  taken  by  the  inevitable 
intuition  and  rendered  by  the  subtlest  eloquence  of 
Charles  Baudelaire.  Nothing  could  more  aptly  and 
perfectly  illustrate  the  definition  indicated  in  my  text 
between  unimaginative  realism  and  imaginative  reality. 

"  '  I  have  been  many  a  time  astonished  that  to  pass 
for  an  observer  should  be  Balzac's  great  title  to  fame. 
To  me  it  had  always  seemed  that  it  was  his  chief  merit 
to  be  a  visionary,  and  a  passionate  visionary.  All  his 
characters  are  gifted  with  the  ardour  of  life  which 
animated  himself.  All  his  fictions  are  as  deeply 
coloured  as  dreams.  From  the  highest  of  the  aris- 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  53 

tocracy  to  the  lowest  of  the  mob,  all  the  actors  in  his 
Human  Comedy  are  keener  after  living,  more  active 
and  cunning  in  their  struggles,  more  staunch  in  en- 
durance of  misfortune,  more  ravenous  in  enjoyment, 
more  angelic  in  devotion,  than  the  comedy  of  the  real 
world  shows  them  to  us.  In  a  word,  every  one  in 
Balzac,  down  to  the  very  scullions,  has  genius.  Every 
mind  is  a  weapon  loaded  to  the  muzzle  with  will.  It 
is  actually  Balzac  himself.  And  as  all  beings  of  the 
outer  world  presented  themselves  to  his  mind's  eye  in 
a  strong  relief  and  with  a  telling  expression,  he  has 
given  a  convulsive  action  to  his  figures  ;  he  has 
blackened  their  shadows  and  intensified  their  lights. 
Besides,  his  prodigious  love  of  detail,  the  outcome  of 
an  immoderate  ambition  to  see  everything,  to  bring 
everything  to  light,  to  guess  everything,  to  make 
others  guess  everything,  obliged  him  to  set  down  more 
forcibly  the  principal  lines  so  as  to  preserve  the  per- 
spective of  the  whole.  He  reminds  me  of  some  lines 
of  those  etchers  who  are  never  satisfied  with  the  biting- 
in  of  their  outlines,  and  transform  into  very  ravines 
the  main  scratches  of  the  plate.  From  this  astonishing 
natural  disposition  of  mind  wonderful  results  have 
been  produced.  But  this  disposition  is  generally 
defined  as  Balzac's  great  fault.  More  properly  speak- 
ing, it  is  exactly  his  great  distinctive  quality.  But 
who  can  boast  of  being  so  happily  gifted,  and  of  being 
able  to  apply  a  method  which  may  permit  him  to 
invest — and  that  with  a  sure  hand — what  is  purely 
trivial  with  splendour  and  imperial  purple  ?  Who  can 
do  this  ?  Now,  he  who  does  not,  to  speak  the  truth, 
does  no  great  thing.'  " 


"  T  AM  far  from  sure,"  said  Paul  Verlaine  to  me  in 
1  Paris,  "  that  the  philosophy  of  Villiers  de  1' Isle- 
Adam  will  not  one  day  become  the  formula  of  our 
century."  Fundamentally,  the  belief  of  Villiers  is  the 
belief  common  to  all  Eastern  mystics.  And  there  is  in 
everything  he  wrote  a  strangeness,  certainly  both  in- 
stinctive and  deliberate,  which  seems  to  me  to  be  the 
natural  consequences  of  his  intellectual  pride.  It  is 
part  of  his  curiosity  in  souls — as  in  the  equally  sinister 
curiosity  of  Baudelaire — to  prefer  the  complex  to  the 
simple,  the  perverse  to  the  straightforward,  the 
ambiguous  to  either.  His  heroes  are  incarnations  of 
spiritual  pride,  and  their  tragedies  are  the  shock  of 
spirit  against  matter,  the  temptation  of  spirit  by 
spiritual  evil.  They  are  on  the  margins  of  a  wisdom 
too  great  for  their  capacity  ;  they  are  haunted  by  dark 
powers,  instincts  of  ambiguous  passions.  And  in  the 
women  his  genius  created  there  is  the  immortal  weari- 
ness of  beauty  ;  they  are  enigmas  to  themselves  ;  they 
desire,  and  know  not  why  they  refrain  ;  they  do  good 
and  evil  with  the  lifting  of  an  eyelid,  and  are  guilty 
and  innocent  of  all  the  sins  of  the  earth. 

Villiers  wrote  these  significant  sentences  in  the  pre- 
face to  La  Revolte  (1870)  :  "  One  ought  to  write  for 
the  entire  world.  Besides,  what  does  justice  matter 
to  us  ?  He  who  from  his  very  birth  does  not  contain 

54 


*<>_      ^     &4.<i/ai,,^         ^TtJ 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  55 

in  himself  his  proper  glory  shall  never  know  the  real 
significance  of  this  word."  In  the  literature  of  the 
fantastic  there  are  few  higher  names  than  that  of  the 
Comte  de  Villiers  de  1' Isle- Adam — a  writer  whose 
singular  personality  and  work  render  him  perhaps  the 
most  extraordinary  figure  in  the  contemporary  world 
of  letters.  The  descendant  of  a  Breton  house  of 
fabulous  antiquity,  his  life  has  been,  like  his  works,  a 
paradox,  and  an  enigma.  He  has  lived,  as  he  says 
somewhere,  "  par  politesse,"  ceaselessly  experimenting 
upon  life,  perhaps  a  little  too  consciously,  with  too 
studied  an  extravagance  of  attitude,  but  at  least 
brilliantty,  and  with  dramatic  contrasts.  An  immense 
consciousness  of  his  own  genius,  a  pride  of  race,  a 
contempt,  artistic  and  aristocratic,  of  the  common 
herd,  and,  more  especially,  of  the  bourgeois  multitude 
of  letters  and  of  life  :  it  is  to  moods  of  mind  like  these, 
permanent  with  him,  that  we  must  look  for  the  source 
of  that  violent  and  voulu  eccentricity  which  mars  so 
much  of  his  work,  and  gives  to  all  of  it  so  disdainful 
an  air.  It  is  unfortunate,  I  think,  when  an  artist 
condescends  so  far  as  to  take  notice  of  the  Philistine 
element  in  which  an  impartial  Providence  has  placed 
him.  These  good  people  we  have  always  with  us,  and 
I  question  if  any  spiritual  arms  are  of  avail  against 
them.  They  are  impervious,  impalpable  ;  they  do  not 
know  when  they  are  hit.  But  to  Villiers  "  les  gens  de 
sens  commun  "  are  an  incessant  preoccupation.  He  is 
aware  of  his  failure  of  temper,  and  writes  at  the  head 
of  a  polemical  preface,  Genus  irritabile  vatum. 

In  considering  the  work  of  Villiers  I  am  brought 
face  to  face  with  a  writer  who  seems  to  be  made  up 


56  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

of  contradictions.  Any  theory,  if  it  be  at  all  precise, 
must  proceed  by  making  exceptions.  Here  is  a  writer 
who  is  at  once  a  transcendentalist  and  a  man  of  the 
world,  a  cynic  and  a  believer  in  the  things  of  the  spirit. 
He  is  now  Swift,  now  Bernadin  de  St.  Pierre,  now 
Baudelaire  or  Heine.  In  reading  him  you  pass  from 
exaltation  to  buffoonery  with  the  turn  of  a  page,  and 
are  never  quite  sure  whether  he  is  speaking  seriously 
or  in  jest.  Above  all,  everywhere  there  is  irony  ;  and 
the  irony  is  of  so  fine  a  point,  and  glances  in  so  many 
directions,  that  your  judgment  is  distracted,  inter- 
rupted, contradicted,  and  confused  in  a  whirlwind  of 
conflicting  impressions. 

Villiers  has  written  much.  The  volume  of  Conies 
Cruels  (published  in  1880)  includes,  I  believe,  work  of 
many  periods  ;  it  contains  specimens  of  every  style  its 
author  has  attempted,  and  in  every  kind  the  best  work 
that  he  has  done.  The  book  as  a  whole  is  a  master- 
piece, and  almost  every  separate  tale  is  a  masterpiece. 
I  can  think  of  no  other  collection  of  tales  in  any  lan- 
guage on  which  so  various  and  finely  gifted  a  nature 
has  lavished  itself  ;  none  with  so  wide  a  gamut  of 
feeling,  none  which  is  so  Protean  a  manifestation  of 
genius.  The  Tales  of  Edgar  Poe  alone  surpass  it  in 
sheer  effect,  the  Twice-Told  Tales  of  Hawthorne  alone 
approach  it  in  variety  of  delicate  sensation  ;  both, 
compared  with  its  shifting  and  iridescent  play  of 
colours,  are  but  studies  in  monochrome.  Around  this 
supreme  work  we  may  group  the  other  volumes.  La 
Revolte,  a  drama  in  one  act  in  prose,  represented  at  the 
Vaudeville,  May  6th,  1870,  has  something  of  the  touch 
of  certain  Contes  Cruels  ;  it  is,  at  least,  not  unworthy 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  57 

of  a  place  near  them.  L'Eve  Future  (1886),  that  most 
immense  and  ferocious  of  pleasantries,  is  simply  one 
of  the  scientific  burlesques  of  the  Contes  swollen  out 
into  a  huge  volume,  where  it  is  likely  to  die  of  plethora. 
The  volume  of  the  same  year,  called  after  its  first  tale 
L' Amour  Supreme,  attempts  to  be  a  second  set  of 
Contes  Cruets ;  it  has  nothing  of  their  distinction, 
except  in  Akedysseril.  Tribulat  Bonhomet,  which 
appeared  in  1887 — "  une  bouffonnerie  enorme  et  som- 
bre, couleur  du  siecle,"  as  the  author  has  called  it — 
is  largely  made  up  of  an  "  fitude  physiologique  " 
published  in  1867.  In  the  two  later  volumes,  His- 
toires  Insolites  (1888)  and  Nouveaux  Contes  Cruets 
(1889),  there  are  occasional  glimpses  of  the  early  mas- 
tery, as  in  the  fascinating  horror  of  La  Torture  par 
I'Experance,  and  the  delicate  cynicism  of  Les  Amies 
de  Pension.  As  for  the  prose  drama  in  five  acts, 
Le  Nouveau  Monde  (1876),  which  had  the  honour  of 
gaining  a  prize — "  une  medaille  honorifique,  une  somme 
de  dix  mille  francs  meme,  d'autres  seductions  encore  " 
— there  is  little  in  it  of  the  true  Villiers  ;  a  play  with 
striking  effects,  no  doubt,  movement,  surprises,  a 
grandiose  air  ;  but  what  would  you  have  of  a  "  prize 
poem  "  ?  It  was  acted  at  one  of  the  theatres  at  Paris 
in  1883,  under  the  auspices  of  the  dilettante  Comte 
d'Orsay,  and  it  had  a  very  gratifying  "  literary  " 
success.  Such,  omitting  the  early  works,  of  which  I 
have  every  first  edition,  and  the  numerous  volumes  of 
which  the  titles  and  no  more  have  been  published,  are 
the  works  we  have  before  us  from  which  to  study 
"  peut-etre  le  seul  des  hommes  de  notre  generation 
qui  ait  eu  en  lui  Fetincelle  du  genie  " — as  Catulle 


58  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

Mendes,  ever  generous  in  his  literary  appreciation  of 
friend  and  foe,  has  said  in  that  charming  book,  La 
Legende  du  Parnasse  Contemporaine.  I  shall  speak 
chiefly  of  the  Conies  Cruels,  and  I  shall  try  to  classify 
them  after  a  fashion,  in  order  to  approach  one  after 
another  the  various  sides  of  this  multiform  and  many- 
sided  genius. 

First  and  before  all,  Villiers  is  a  humorist,  and  he 
is  a  humorist  who  has  no  limitations,  who  has  com- 
mand of  every  style,  who  has  essayed  every  branch  of 
the  literature  of  the  fantastic.  There  are  some  half- 
dozen  of  tales — all  contained  in  the  Contes  Cruels — 
which,  for  certain  of  the  rarest  qualities  of  writing- 
subtleties,  delicate  perversities,  exquisite  complexities 
of  irony  essentially  modern — can  be  compared,  so  far 
as  I  know,  with  nothing  outside  the  Petits  Poemes  en 
Prose  of  Baudelaire.  Les  Demoiselles  de  Bienfildtre, 
Maryelle,  Sentimentalisme,  Le  Convive  des  Dernieres 
Fetes,  La  Reine  Ysabeau — one  might  add  the  solitary 
poem  inserted,  jewel  amid  jewels,  amongst  the  prose — 
these  pieces,  with  which  one  or  two  others  have  affini- 
ties of  style  though  not  of  temper,  constitute  a  distinct 
division  of  Villiers'  work.  They  are  all,  more  or  less, 
studies  in  modern  love,  supersubtle  and  yet  perfectly 
finished  little  studies,  so  light  in  touch,  manipulated 
with  so  delicate  a  finesse,  so  exquisite  and  unerring  in 
tact,  that  the  most  monstrous  paradoxes,  the  most 
incredible  assumptions  of  cynicism,  become  possible, 
become  acceptable.  Of  them  all  I  think  the  master- 
piece is  Les  Demoiselles  de  Bienfildtre  ;  and  it  is  one 
of  the  most  perfect  little  works  of  art  in  the  world. 
The  mockery  of  the  thing  is  elemental ;  cynicism 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  59 

touches  its  zenith.  It  becomes  tender,  it  becomes 
sublime.  A  perversion  simply  monstrous  appears,  in 
the  infantine  simplicity  of  its  presentment,  touching, 
credible,  heroic.  The  edge  of  laughter  is  skirted  by  the 
finest  of  inches  ;  and,  as  a  last  charm,  one  perceives, 
through  the  irony  itself — the  celestial,  the  elementary 
irony — a  faint  and  sweet  perfume  as  of  a  perverted 
odour  of  sanctity.  The  style  has  the  delicacy  of  the 
etcher's  needle.  From  beginning  to  end  every  word 
has  been  calculated,  and  every  word  is  an  inspiration. 
No  other  tale  quite  equals  this  supreme  achievement ; 
but  in  Maryelle,  in  Sentimentalisme,  and  the  others 
there  is  the  same  note,  and  a  perfection  often  only  less 
absolute.  Maryelle  and  Sentimentalisme  are  both 
studies  in  a  special  type  of  woman,  speculations  round 
a  certain  strange  point  of  fascination  ;  and  they  render 
that  particular  type  with  the  finest  precision.  The 
one  may  be  called  a  comedy,  the  other  a  tragedy.  The 
experiences  they  record  are  comic  (in  the  broad  sense) , 
certainly,  and  tragic  to  the  men  who  undergo  them  ; 
and  in  both,  under  the  delicate  lightness  of  the  styb — 
the  gentle,  well-bred,  disengaged  tone  of  a  raconteur 
without  reserve  or  after-thought,  or  with  all  that 
scrupulously  hid — there  is  a  sort  of  double  irony,  a 
criss-cross  and  intertexture  of  meanings  and  sugges- 
tions, a  cynicism  whicn  turns,  in  spite  of  itself,  to 
poetry,  or  a  poetry  which  is  really  the  other  side  of 
cynicism.  La  Reine  Ysabeau  and  Le  Convive  des 
Dernieres  Fetes  sound  a  new  note,  the  note  of  horror. 
The  former  stands  almost  by  itself  in  the  calm  cruelty 
of  its  style,  the  singular  precision  of  the  manner  in 
which  its  atrocious  complication  of  love,  vengeance, 


60  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

and  fatality  is  unrolled  before  our  eyes — the  something 
enigmatical  in  the  march  of  the  horrible  narrative  told 
almost  with  tenderness.  Its  serenity  is  the  last  refine- 
ment of  the  irony  with  which  this  incredible  episode 
arraigns  the  justice  of  things.  From  the  parenthesis 
of  the  first  sentence  "to  the  "  Priez  pour  eux,"  every 
touch  tells,  and  every  touch  is  a  surprise.  Very 
different,  and  yet  in  certain  points  akin  to  it,  is  the 
strange  tale  of  Le  Convive  des  Dernier es  Fetes,  perhaps, 
after  the  more  epic  chronicle  of  La  Reine  Ysabeau,  the 
finest  of  Villiers'  tales  of  enigmatical  horror.  Quietly 
as  the  tale  is  told,  full  as  it  is  of  complications,  and 
developed  through  varying  episodes,  it  holds  us  as  the 
Ancient  Mariner  held  the  wedding  guest.  It  is  with  a 
positive  physical  sensation  that  we  read  it,  an  instinc- 
tive shiver  of-  fascinated  and  terrified  suspense.  There 
is  something  of  the  same  frisson  in  the  latter  part  of 
Tribulat  Bonhomet,  and  in  the  marvellous  little  study 
in  the  supernatural  L'Intersigne,  one  of  the  most  im- 
pressive of  Villiers'  works.  But  here  the  sensation  is 
not  due  to  effects  really  out  of  nature  ;  and  the  element 
of  horror — distinct  and  peculiar  as  is  the  impression  it 
leaves  upon  the  mind — is  but  one  among  the  many 
elements  of  the  piece.  In  these  thirty  pages  we  have 
a  whole  romance,  definitely  outlined  characters,  all 
touched  with  the  same  bizarrerie — the  execution-mad 
Baron,  Clio  la  Cendree,  Antoine  Chantilly,  and 
Susannah  Jackson  ;  the  teller  of  the  tale,  the  vague 
C.,  and  the  fantastic  Doctor.  Narrow  as  is  the  space, 
it  is  surcharged  with  emotion  ;  a  word,  a  look,  a  smile, 
a  personal  taste,  is  like  the  touching  of  an  electric 
button  ;  and,  indeed,  it  is  under  the  electric  light  that 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  61 

one  fancies  these  scenes  to  enact  themselves — scenes 
which  have  as  little  in  common  with  mere  daylight 
as  their  personages  with  average  humanity.  It  is  a 
world  in  which  the  virtues  have  changed  their  names, 
and  coquette  with  the  vices  ;  and  in  masque  and 
domino  one  is  puzzled  to  distinguish  the  one  from  the 
other.  It  is  a  world  of  exquisite,  delicately  depraved 
beings  trembling  with  sensibility.  Irony  is  their 
breath  of  life,  paradox  their  common  speech.  And  the 
wizard  who  has  raised  these  ghosts  seems  to  stand 
aside  and  regard  them  with  a  sarcastic  smile. 

What  is  Villiers'  view  of  life  ?  it  may  occur  to  us  to 
ask  ;  is  he  on  the  side  of  the  angels  ?  That  is  a  ques- 
tion it  is  premature  to  answer ;  I  have  to  look  next 
on  another  and  a  widely  different  aspect  of  the  fan- 
tastic edifice  of  his  work. 

The  group  of  tales  I  have  been  considering  reveals 
the  humorist  in  his  capacity  of  ironical  observer  : 
their  wit  is  a  purely  impersonal  mockery,  they  deal 
with  life  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  artist,  and  they 
are  pre-eminently  artistic,  free  from  any  direct  purpose 
or  preoccupation.  In  the  pseudo-scientific  burlesques, 
and  the  kindred  satires  on  ignorant  and  blatant 
mediocrity,  the  smile  of  the  Comic  Muse  has  given 
place  to  "  Laughter  holding  both  his  sides  ;  "  absur- 
dity caps  absurdity,  order  and  measure  seem  to  be 
flung  to  the  winds,  and  in  this  new  Masque  of  Anarchy 
sharp  blows  are  given,  the  jests  are  barbed,  and  they 
fly  not  quite  at  random.  "  L' Esprit  du  siecle,"  says 
Villiers,  "  ne  Foublions  pas,  est  aux  machines."  And 
it  is  in  the  mechanical  miracles  of  modern  science  that 
he  has  found  a  new  and  unworked  and  inexhaustible 


62  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

field  of  satire.  Jules  Verne  has  used  these  new  dis- 
coveries with  admirable  skill  in  his  tales  of  extravagant 
wonder  ;  Villiers  seizes  them  as  a  weapon,  and  in  his 
hands  it  becomes  deadly,  and  turns  back  upon  the 
very  age  which  forged  it ;  as  a  means  of  comedy,  and 
the  comedy  becomes  soberly  Rabelaisian,  boisterous 
and  bitter  at  once,  sparing  nothing,  so  that  he  can 
develop  the  deliberate  plan  of  "an  apparatus  for  the 
chemical  analysis  of  the  last  sigh,"  make  a  sober  pro- 
posal for  the  utilization  of  the  sky  as  a  means  of 
advertisement  (Affichage  Celeste],  and  describe  in  all  its 
detail  and  through  all  its  branches  the  excellent  in- 
vention of  Bathybius  Bottom,  La  Machine  a  Gloire, 
a  mechanical  contrivance  for  obtaining  dramatic 
success  with  the  expense  and  inconvenience  of  that 
important  institution,  the  Claque.  In  these  wild  and 
whirling  satires,  which  are  at  bottom  as  cold  and 
biting  as  Swift,  we  have  a  quite  new  variety  of  style, 
a  style  of  patchwork  and  grimaces.  Familiar  words 
take  new  meanings,  and  flash  through  all  the  trans- 
formations of  the  pantomime  before  our  eyes  ;  strange 
words  start  up  from  forgotten  corners  ;  words  and 
thoughts,  never  brought  together  since  Babel,  clash 
and  stumble  into  a  protesting  combination  ;  and  in 
the  very  aspect  of  the  page  there  is  something  startling. 
The  absurdity  of  these  things  is  so  extreme,  an  absur- 
dity so  supremely  serious,  that  we  are  carried  almost 
beyond  laughter,  and  on  what  is  by  virtue  of  its 
length  the  most  important  of  the  scientific  burlesques, 
L'Eve  Future,  it  is  almost  impossible  to  tell  whether 
the  author  is  really  in  sober  earnest  or  whether  the 
whole  thing  is  a  colossal  joke.  Its  375  pages  are 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  63 

devoted  to  a  painfully  elaborate  description  of  the 
manufacture,  under  the  direction  of  the  "  tres-illustre 
inventeur  americain,  M.  Edison,"  of  an  artificial 
woman  I  No  such  fundamental  satire,  such  ghastly 
exposure  of  "  poor  humanity,"  has  been  conceived 
since  Swift.  The  sweep  of  it  covers  human  nature, 
and  its  essential  laughter  breaks  over  the  very  elements 
of  man.  Unfortunately  the  book  is  much  too  long  ; 
its  own  weight  sinks  it ;  the  details  become  wearisome, 
the  seriousness  of  the  absurdity  palls. 

So  far  we  have  had  the  humorist,  a  humorist  who 
appears  to  be  cynic  to  the  backbone,  cynic  equally  in 
the  Parisian  perversities  of  Les  Demoiselles  de  Bien- 
fildtre  and  the  scientific  hilarity  of  La  Machine  a  Gloire. 
But  we  have  now  to  take  account  of  one  of  those 
"  exceptions "  of  which  I  spoke — work  which  has 
nothing  of  the  humorist  in  it,  work  in  which  there  is 
not  a  trace  of  cynicism,  work  full  of  spirituality  and 
all  the  virtues.  Virginie  et  Paul  is  a-story  of  young 
love  comparable  only  with  that  yet  lovelier  story,  the 
magical  chapter,  in  Richard  Feverel.  This  Romeo  and 
Juliet  are  both  fifteen,  and  their  little  moment  of 
lovers'  chat,  full  of  the  poetry  of  the  most  homely  and 
natural  things,  is  brought  before  us  in  a  manner  so 
exquisitely  true,  so  perfectly  felt,  that  it  is  not  even 
sentimental.  Every  word  is  a  note  of  music,  a  song 
of  nightingales  among  the  roses — for  arnica  silentia 
lunce — and  there  is  not  a  wrong  note  in  it,  no  exaggera- 
tion, nothing  but  absolute  truth  and  beauty.  The 
strange  and  charming  little  romance  of  L'Inconnue  is 
another  of  these  tales  of  ingenuous  love,  full  of  poetry 
fresh  from  lovers'  hearts,  and  with  a  delicate  rhythmical 


64  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

effect  in  its  carefully  modulated,  style.  L' Amour 
Supreme,  a  less  perfect  work  of  art,  exhales  the  same 
aroma  of  tender  and  etherealized  affection — an  adoring 
and  almost  mystic  love  of  the  ideal  incarnated  in 
woman.  In  the  bizarre  narrative  of  Vera,  which  re- 
calls the  supernatural  romances  of  Poe,  there  is  again 
this  strange  spirituality  of  tone  ;  and  in  the  dazzling 
prose  poem  of  Akedysseril — transfigured  prose  glowing 
with  Eastern  colour,  a  tale  of  old-world  passion  full  of 
barbaric  splendour,  and  touched,  for  all  its  remoteness, 
with  the  human  note — in  this  epic  fragment,  considered 
in  France,  I  believe,  to  be,  in  style  at  least,  Villiers' 
masterpiece,  it  is  humanity  transfigured  in  the  light  of 
the  ideal  that  we  contemplate.  Humanity  transfigured 
in  the  light  of  the  ideal ! — think  for  a  moment  of  Les 
Demoiselles  de  Bienfildtre,  of  L' Analyse  chimique  du 
Dernier  Soupir !  What,  then,  are  we  to  believe  ?  Has 
Villiers  two  natures,  and  can  he  reconcile  irreconciliable 
opposites  ?  Or  if  one  is  the  real  man,  which  one  ? 
And  what  of  the  other  ?  What,  in  a  word,  is  the  true 
Villiers  ?  "  For,  as  he  thinketh  in  his  heart,  so  is 
he." 

The  question  is  not  a  difficult  one  to  answer  ;  it 
depends  upon  an  elementary  knowledge  of  the  nature 
of  that  perfectly  intelligible  being,  the  cynic.  The 
typical  cynic  is  essentially  a  tender-hearted,  sensitive 
idealist ;  his  cynicism  is  in  the  first  instance  a  recoil, 
then,  very  often,  a  disguise.  Most  of  us  come  into  the 
world  without  any  very  great  expectations,  not  look- 
ing for  especial  loftiness  in  our  neighbours,  not  very 
much  shocked  if  every  one's  devotion  to  the  ideal  is 
not  on  a  level  with,  perhaps,  ours.  We  go  on  our  way, 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  65 

if  not  exactly  "  rejoicing,"  at  least  without  positive 
discomfort.  Here  and  there,  however,  a  soul  nurtured 
on  dreams  and  nourished  in  the  scorn  of  compromise 
finds  its  way  among  men  and  demands  of  them  per- 
fection. There  is  no  response  to  the  demand.  En- 
tranced by  an  inaccessible  ideal,  the  poor  soul  finds 
that  its  devotion  poisons  for  it  all  the  wells  of  earth. 
And  this  is  the  birth  of  what  we  call  a  cynic.  The 
cynic's  progress  is  various,  and  seldom  in  a  straight 
line.  It  is  significant  to  find  that  in  La  Revolte,  one 
of  Villiers'  comparatively  early  works,  the  irony  has  a 
perfectly  serious  point,  and  aims  directly  at  social 
abuses.  The  tableau  is  a  scene,  an  episode,  taken 
straight  from  life,  a  piece  of  the  closest  actuality  ; 
there  is  no  display,  no  exaggeration,  all  is  simple  and 
straightforward  as  truth.  The  laughter  in  it  is  the 
broken-hearted  laughter,  sadder  than  tears,  of  the 
poet,  the  dreamer,  before  the  spectacle  of  the  world. 
It  is  obviously  the  work  of  one  who  is  a  mocker  through 
his  very  passion  for  right  and  good,  his  sense  of  the 
infinite  disproportion  of  things.  Less  obviously,  but 
indeed  quite  really,  is  the  enormous  and  almost  aim- 
less mockery  of  some  of  these  tales  of  his  the  reverse 
of  a  love  of  men  and  a  devotion  to  the  good  and  the 
beautiful.  Cynicism  is  a  quality  that  develops,  and 
when  we  find  it  planted  in  the  brain  of  a  humorist 
there  is  simply  no  accounting  for  the  transformations 
through  which  it  may  run.  Thus  the  gulf  which  seems 
to  separate  Les  Demoiselles  de  Bienfildtre  from  L'ln- 
connue  is,  after  all,  nothing  but  a  series  of  steps.  Nor 
is  it  possible  for  one  who  judges  art  as  art  to  regret 
this  series  of  steps  ;  for  it  is  precisely  his  cynicism  that 


66  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

has  become  the  "  note,"  the  rarest  quality,  of  this  man 
of  passionate  and  lofty  genius  ;  it  is  as  a  cynic  that 
he  will  live — a  cynic  who  can  be  pitiless  and  tender, 
Rabelaisian  and  Heinesque,  but  imaginative,  but  fan- 
tastically poetical,  always. 


GUSTAVE   COURBET,    1848 


VI 


T  ES  Paradis  Artificiels  :  Opium  et  Haschisch  (1860), 
^*  which  I  have  before  me,  is  the  most  wonderful 
book  that  Baudelaire  ever  wrote.  It  has  that  aston- 
ishing logic  which  he  possessed  supremely,  which 
unravels,  with  infinite  precautions,  every  spider's  web 
of  this  seductive  drug,  which  enslaves  the  imagination, 
which  changes  the  will,  which  turns  sounds  into 
colours,  colours  into  sounds  ;  which  annihilates  space 
and  time  ;  and,  often  at  its  crises,  even  one's  own 
individuality.  To  Baudelaire,  as  to  me,  it  has,  and 
had,  the  divinity  of  a  sorcerous,  a  dangerous,  an  in- 
sidious mistress.  It  produces  morbid  effects  on  one's 
senses  ;  wakens  mysterious  visions  in  our  half-closed 
eyes.  And  this,  like  every  form  of  intoxication,  is 
mysterious,  malign,  satanical,  diabolical.  And,  sub- 
jugated by  it,  part  of  oneself  is  dominated,  so  that,  in 
Baudelaire's  words  :  //  a  vouloir  faire  I'ange,  il  est 
devenu  une  bete. 

With  some  this  poison  carries  them  to  the  verge  of 
the  abyss,  over  which  one  looks  fascinated  by  the 
abrupt  horror  of  the  void.  In  some  their  ideas  congeal : 
even  to  the  point  of  imagining  oneself  "  a  fragment  of 
thinking  ice."  One  sits,  as  in  a  theatre,  seeing  a  drama 
acted  on  the  stage,  where  one's  senses  perceive  subtle 
impressions,  but  vague,  unreal,  ghost-like  ;  where  at 
moments  one's  eyes  envisage  the  infinite.  "  Then," 

67 


68  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

says  Baudelaire,  "  the  grammar,  the  arid  grammar 
itself,  becomes  something  like  an  evoked  sorcery,  the 
words  are  alive  again  in  flesh  and  in  blood,  the  sub- 
stantive, in  its  substantial  majesty,  the  adjective,  a 
transparent  vestment  that  clothes  it  and  colours  it 
like  a  glacis,  and  the  verb,  angel  of  movement,  that 
gives  the  swing  to  the  phrase." 

With  the  hallucinations  all  exterior  forms  take  on 
singular  aspects ;  are  deformed  and  transformed. 
Then  come  the  transpositions  of  ideas,  with  unaccount- 
able analogies  that  penetrate  the  spirit.  Even  music, 
heard  or  unheard,  can  seem  voluptuous  and  sensual. 
It  is  Baudelaire  who  speaks  now,  evokes  an  enchant- 
ment :  "  The  idea  of  an  evaporation,  slow,  successive, 
eternal,  takes  hold  of  your  spirit,  and  you  soon  apply 
this  idea  to'  your  proper  thoughts,  to  your  way  of 
thinking.  By  a  singular  equivocation,  by  a  kind  of 
transportation,  or  of  an  intellectual  quid  pro  quo,  you 
find  yourself  evaporating,  and  you  attribute  to  your 
pipe  (in  which  you  feel  yourself  crouching  and  heaped 
together  like  tobacco)  the  strange  faculty  of  smoking 
yourself."  The  instant  becomes  eternity  ;  one  is  lucid 
at  intervals  ;  the  hallucination  is  sudden,  perfect,  and 
fatal.  One  feels  an  excessive  thirst ;  one  subsides  into 
that  strange  state  that  the  Orientals  call  Kief. 

Certainly  haschisch  has  a  more  vehement  effect  on 
one  than  opium  ;  it  is  more  troubling,  more  ecstatic, 
more  malign,  malignant,  insinuating,  more  evocative, 
more  visionary,  more  unseizable  ;  it  lifts  one  across 
infinite  horizons,  it  carries  us  passionately  over  the 
passionate  waves  of  seas  in  storms — of  unknown 
storms  on  unseen  seas — into  not  even  eternities,  nor 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  69 

into  chaos,  nor  into  Heaven  nor  into  Hell  (though 
these  may  whirl  before  one's  vision),  but  into  incredible 
existences,  over  which  no  magician  rules,  over  which 
no  witch  presides.  It  can  separate  ourselves  from  our- 
selves ;  change  our  very  shapes  into  shapeless  images  ; 
drown  us  in  the  deep  depths  of  annihilation,  out  of 
which  we  slowly  emerge  ;  bury  us  under  the  oldest 
roots  of  the  earth  ;  give  us  death  in  life  and  life  in 
death  ;  give  us  sleep  that  is  not  sleep,  and  waking 
dreams  that  are  not  waking  dreams.  There  is  nothing, 
human  or  inhuman,  moral  or  immoral,  that  this  drug 
cannot  give  us. 

Yet,  all  the  time,  we  know  not  what  it  takes  from 
us,"  nor  what  deadly  exchange  we  may  have  to  give  ; 
nor  what  intoxication  can  be  produced  beyond  its 
intoxication  ;  nor  if,  as  with  Coleridge,  who  took 
opium,  it  might  not  become  "  almost  a  habit  of  the 
Soul." 

Imagine  a  universe  in  disorder,  peopled  by  strange 
beings,  that  have  no  relation  with  each  other,  whose 
speech  one  supposes  is  jargon  ;  where  such  houses  as 
there  are  are  built  in  different  ways — none  with 
straight  lines,  many  in  triangles  ;  where  the  animals 
are  unlike  ours,  some  smaller  than  ants  ;  where  there 
are  no  churches,  no  apparent  streets  ;  but  innumerable 
brothels.  When  one  sees  fires  the  smoke  goes  down- 
ward ;  flames  leap  out  of  the  soil  and  turn  into  living 
serpents.  Now  one  sees  a  serpent  return  into  his 
proper  flame.  There  seem  to  be  no  gods,  nor  idols  nor 
priests  nor  shrines. 

The  seas  storm  the  skies  and  swallow  up  Hell ;  and 
all  that  lives  and  all  that  dies  seems  indistinguishable. 


70  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

Suppose  that — in  an  opium  dream — Satan  turns  God. 
The  soil  might  wither  at  his  touch  ;  Lesbians  lament 
the  loss  of  Lesbianism  ;  and  the  word  of  God  be 
abolished. 

I  have  used  the  word  vehement  in  regard  to  Has- 
chisch.  It  violates  the  imagination,  ravishes  the 
senses  ;  can  disturb  one  physically  ;  but  never,  if 
taken  in  measure,  prove  destructive.  This  green  drug 
can  create  unheard-of  excitations,  exasperations  ;  can 
create  contagious  laughter,  evoke  comical  images, 
supernatural  and  fantastic. 

Now  take  a  world  created  by  Opium.  The  soil 
wavers,  moves  always,  in  void  space  ;  a  soil  in  which 
no  seed  nor  weed  grows.  The  men  and  women  are 
veiled — none  see  their  faces.  There  is  light,  but  neither 
sun  nor  stars  nor  night.  The  houses  have  no  windows  ; 
inside  are  no  mirrors  ;  but  everywhere  opium  dens  ; 
everywhere  the  smoke — incessant — of  pipes  ;  every- 
where a  stench  produced  by  opium  and  by  their  moral 
degradation.  The  streets  are  thick  with  grass  ;  such 
animals  as  there  are  are  stupefied.  In  fact,  this  in- 
exorably moving  world  that  has  no  foundations  exhales 
— worse  than  pestilence — an  inexplicable  stupefaction. 

And,  symbolical  as  it  must  be,  these  excitable  poisons 
are  to  a  certainty  one  of  the  most  terrible  means  em- 
ployed by  the  Prince  of  the  Powers  of  the  Air  to  enslave 
deplorable  humanity  ;  but  by  no  means  to  give  him, 
what  the  drug  can  give  him,  the  monstrous  sense  of  the 
suddenness  of  space  and  time,  as  if  one  were  hurled 
between  them  by  two  opposing  whirlwinds. 

Now  appears  suddenly  the  Women — furious,  for- 
midable— one  calls  Mephistophila,  who  having  gazed 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  71 

on  the  Medusa  becomes  Medusa  ;  who,  rouged  and 
pale  as  the  dead,  gives  one  the  idea  of  that  eternal 
minute  which  must  be  hell.  Her  very  name  trails  like 
a  coffin-lid.  Abnormal,  she  is  sinister.  She  is  one  of 
my  hallucinations.  Can  she  ever  count  the  countless 
sins  she  has  committed  ?  Occult,  she  adores  the 
Arcana.  Her  kisses  on  women's  lips  are  cruel.  Perhaps 
she  is  the  modern  Messalina.  Elle  est  I'imperatrice 
bleme  d'un  macabre  Lesbos. 

She  admits — I  give  here  simply  her  confessions — to 
no  abominations,  nor  does  she  specialize  her  vices.  As 
certain  of  her  damnation  as  of  her  existence — real, 
imaginary — she  lives  and  loves  and  lies  and  forgives. 
She  knows  she  has  abandoned  herself  to  all  the  im- 
possible desires  endured  by  such  souls  as  hers,  who 
expect  annihilation.  Elle  est  la  reine,  pas  presente, 
mais  acceptee,  de  la  cour  des  miracles  femelles  du  Mai. 

She  is  not  of  those  the  Furies  hate  eternally,  nor  has 
she  knowledge  of  man's  mingled  fates  ;  yet  certain 
Circes  have  shown  her  how  to  weave  webs  of  spiritual 
spiders  ;  she  knows  not  where  those  are  that  turn  the 
Wheels  of  Destiny.  Whirlwinds  have  shaken  her  in 
her  perfumed  room  as  she  lies  in  .perfumed  garments, 
considering  her  nakedness  as  sacred  :  she  the  impure, 
never  the  pure  !  She  is  so  tired  of  having  ravished 
souls  from  bodies  and  bodies  from  souls,  that  all  she 
desires  is  sleep,  sleep  without  dreams.  Did  sleep  ever 
come  to  those  who  most  desired  it  ?  Messalina,  Helen 
of  Troy,  Faustina  knew  this  ;  dust  has  closed  their 
lips,  the  very  dust  they  have  trodden  under  foot,  the 
dust  that  knows  not  whither  it  is  drifting  :  none 
thinking  of  the  inevitable  end. 


72  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

Has  not  this  poisonous  drug  shown  to  me,  as  to  her, 
shadows  hot  from  hell  ?  Not  the  shadows  the  sun 
casts  on  our  figures  as  we  walk  on  the  grass  ;  not  the 
moon's  shadows  that  make  mockery  of  us ;  but  the 
veritable  heat  and  fire  and  flame  and  fumes  of  utter- 
most hell. 

In  her  eyes  persists  an  ardent  and  violent  life,  hateful 
and  bestial.  Depraved  by  insensible  sensations,  she 
imagines  Caligula  before  her  and  maledictions  not  her 
own.  I  know  her  now  in  vision — she  is  more  insatiable 
than  Death — more  ravenous  after  ravishment  than 
Life.  No  vampire,  no  Lamia,  she  knows  not  that  her 
body  has  been  drenched  with  so  many  poisons  that 
her  breath  might  poison  a  man  with  one  kiss.  And 
now,  now,  her  eyes  are  so  weary,  her  eyeballs  ache  with 
such  tortured  nerves,  that  she  desires  nothing — 
nothing  at  all. 

In  the  very  essence  of  Haschisch  I  find  a  disordered 
Demon  whose  insanities  make  one's  very  flesh  ache. 
Under  his  power  symbols  speak — you  can  become 
yourself  a  living  symbol.  Under  its  magic  you  can 
imagine  black  magic,  and  music  can  speak  your  pas- 
sion :  for  is  not  music  as  passionate  as  man's  love  for 
woman,  as  a  woman's  love  for  a  man  ?  It  can  turn 
your  rhythm  into  its  rhythm,  can  change  every  word 
into  a  sound,  a  word  into  a  note  of  music  :  it  cannot 
change  the  substance  of  your  soul. 

Finally,  the  drugged  man  admires  himself  inordi- 
nately ;  he  condemns  himself,  he  glorifies  himself  ;  he 
realizes  his  condemnation  ;  he  becomes  the  centre  of 
the  universe,  certain  of  his  virtue  as  of  his  genius. 
Then,  in  a  stupendous  irony,  he  cries  :  ]e  suis  devenu 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  73 

Dieu !  One  instant  after  he  projects  himself  out  of 
himself,  as  if  the  will  of  an  intoxicated  man  had  an 
efficacious  virtue,  and  cries,  with  a  cry  that  might 
strike  down  the  scattered  angels  from  the  ways  of  the 
sky  :  Je  suis  un  Dieu  ! 

One  of  Baudelaire's  profoundest  sayings  is  :  "  Every 
perfect  debauch  has  need  of  a  perfect  leisure  :  Toute 
debauche  parfaite  a  besoin  d'un  par  fait  loisir."  He  gives 
his  definition  of  the  magic  that  imposes  on  haschisch 
its  infernal  stigmata  ;  of  the  soul  that  sells  itself  in 
detail ;  of  the  frantic  taste  for  this  adorable  poison  of 
the  man  whose  soul  he  had  chosen  for  these  experi- 
ments, his  own  soul ;  of  how  finally  this  hazardous 
spirit,  driven,  without  being  aware  of  it,  to  the  edge  of 
hell,  testifies  of  its  original  grandeur. 


VII 


IN  their  later  work  all  great  poets  use  foreshorten- 
ing. They  get  greater  subtlety  by  what  they 
omit  and  suggest  to  the  imagination.  Browning,  in 
his  later  period,  suggests  to  the  intellect,  and  to  that 
only.  Hence  his  difficulty,  which  is  not  a  poetic  diffi- 
culty ;  not  a  cunning  simplification  of  method  like 
Shakespeare's,  who  gives -us  no  long  speeches  of  un- 
diluted undramatic  poetry,  but  poetry  everywhere  like 
life-blood. 

Browning's  whole  life  was  divided  equally  be- 
tween two  things :  love  and  art.  He  subtracted 
nothing  from  the  one  by  which  to  increase  the  other  ; 
between  them  they  occupied  his  whole  nature  ;  in 
each  he  was  equally  supreme.  Men  and  Women  and 
the  love-letters  are  the  double  swing  of  the  same 
pendulum  ;  at  the  centre  sits  the  soul,  impelled  and 
impelling.  Outside  these  two  forms  of  his  greatness 
Browning  had  none,  and  one  he  concealed  from  the 
world.  It  satisfied  him  to  exist  as  he  did,  knowing 
what  he  was,  and  showing  no  more  of  himself  to  those 
about  him  than  the  outside  of  a  courteous  gentleman. 
Nothing  in  him  blazed  through,  in  the  uncontrollable 
manner  of  those  who  are  most  easily  recognized  as 
great  men.  His  secret  was  his  own,  and  still,  to  many, 
remains  so. 

74 


MANET,  1862 


76  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

I  have  said  above,  of  Browning  :  "  His  secret  was 
his  own,  and  still,  to  many,  remains  so."  Exactly  the 
same  thing  must  be  said  of  Baudelaire.  He  lived,  and 
died,  secret ;  and  the  man  remains  baffling,  and  will 
probably  never  be  discovered.  But,  in  most  of  his 
printed  letters,  he  shows  only  what  he  cares  to  reveal 
of  himself  at  a  given  moment.  In  the  letters,  printed 
in  book  form,  that  I  have  before  me,  there  is  much 
more  of  the  nature  of  confessions.  Several  of  his 
letters  to  his  mother  are  heart-breaking  ;  as  in  his 
agonized  effort  to  be  intelligible  to  her  ;  his  horror  of 
her  cure ;  his  shame  in  pawning  her  Indian  shawl ; 
his  obscure  certainty  that  the  work  he  is  doing  is  of 
value,  and  that  he  ought  not  to  feel  shame.  Then 
comes  his  suggestion  that  society  should  adjust  these 
difficult  balances.  Again,  in  his  ghastly  confession 
that  he  has  only  sent  Jeanne  seven  francs  in  three 
months  ;  that  he  is  as  tired  of  her  as  of  his  own  life  : 
there  is  shown  a  tragic  gift  for  self-observation  and 
humble  truthfulness.  It  would  have  taken  a  very  pro- 
found experience  of  life  to  have  been  a  good  mother 
to  Baudelaire  :  or  she  should  have  had  a  wiser  cure. 
Think  of  the  cure  burning  the  only  copy  of  Les  Fleurs 
du  Mai  that  Baudelaire  had  left  in  "  papier  d'Hol- 
lande,"  and  the  mother  acquiescing. 

I  give  two  quotations,  which  certainly  explain  them- 
selves if  they  do  not  explain  Baudelaire  : 

"  I  must  leave  home  and  not  return  there,  except 
in  a  more  natural  state  of  mind.  I  have  just  been  re- 
writing an  article.  The  affair  kept  me  so  long  that 
when  I  went  out  I  had  not  even  the  courage  to  return, 
and  so  the  day  was  lost.  Last  week  I  had  to  go  out 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  77 

and  sleep  for  two  days  and  nights  in  a  hideous  little 
hotel  because  I  was  spied  on.  I  went  out  without  any 
money  for  the  simple  reason  that  I  had  none. 

"  Imagine  my  perpetual  laziness,  which  I  hate  pro- 
foundly, and  the  impossibility  of  going  out  on  account 
of  my  perpetual  want  of  money.  After  I  had  been 
seeking  money  for  three  days,  on  Monday  night,  ex- 
hausted with  fatigue,  with  weariness  and  with  hunger, 
I  went  into  the  first  hotel  I  came  on,  and  since  then  I 
have  had  to  remain  there,  and  for  certain  reasons.  I 
am  nearly  devoured,  eaten  by  this  enforced  idle- 
ness." 

In  a  letter  written  in  Brussels,  March  9,  1868,  he 
says  :  "I  have  announced  the  publication  of  three 
fragments  :  Chateaubriand  et  Tfc.  Dandy  sme  litteraire, 
La  Peinture  didactique,  and  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  jugees 
par  I'auteur  lui-meme.  I  shall  add  to  these  a  refutation 
of  an  article  of  Janin,  one  on  Henri  Heine  et  lajeunesse 
des  poetes,  and  the  refutation  of  La  Preface  de  la  vie 
de  Jules  Cesar  par  Napoleon  III."  Besides  these,  on 
the  cover  of  his  Salon  de  1848  are  announced  :  "De  la 
poesie  moderne  ;  David,  Guerin  et  Gerodet ;  Les  Limbes, 
poesies;  Catechisme  delafemme  aimee."  On  the  paper 
cover  of  my  copy  of  his  Theophile  Gautier  (1861),  under 
the  title  of  "  Sous  Presse,"  are  announced  :  Opium  et 
Haschisch,  ou  I' I  deal  Artificiel  (which  was  printed  in 
1860  as  Les  Paradis  Artificiels  :  Opium  et  Haschisch), 
Curio  sites  Esthetiques  (which  were  printed  in  1868)  ; 
Notices  litteraires  ;  and  Machiavel  et  Condorcet,  dialogue 
philosophique.  Of  these,  Les  Limbes  appeared  as  Les 
Fleurs  du  Mai  (1857)  ;  Les  Notices  litteraires  at  the 
end  of  L'Art  Romantique  (1868)  ;  none  of  the  others 


78  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

were  printed,  nor  do  I  suppose  he  had  even  the  time 
to  begin  them. 

He  might  have  written  on  Machiavelli  a  prose  dia- 
logue as  original,  from  the  French  point  of  view,  as 
one  of  Lan dor's  Imaginary  Conversations,  such  as 
those  between  Plato  and  Diogenes,  the  two  Ciceros, 
Leonora  d'Este  with  Father  Panigarole.  Both  had 
that  satirical  touch  which  can  embody  the  spirit  of  an 
age  or  of  two  men  in  conversation.  Both  had  a 
creative  power  and  insight  equal  to  that  of  the  very 
greatest  masters  ;  both  had  the  power  of  using  prose 
with  a  perfection  which  no  stress  of  emotion  i-  allowed 
to  discompose.  Only  it  seems  to  me  that  Baudelaire 
might  have  made  the  sinister  genius,  the  calculating, 
cold  observation  of  Machiavelli,  who  wrote  so  splen- 
didly on  Ces'are  Borgia,  give  vent  to  a  tremendous 
satire  on  priests  and  Kings  and  Popes  after  the  manner 
of  Rabelais  or  of  Aristophanes  ;  certainly  not  in  the 
base  and  ignoble  manner  of  Aretino. 

It  is  lamentable  to  think  how  many  things  Baude- 
laire never  did  or  never  finished.  One  reason  might 
have  been  his  laziness,  his  sense  of  luxury,  and,  above 
all,  his  dissatisfaction  with  certain  things  he  had  hoped 
to  do,  and  which  likely  enough  a  combination  of 
poverty  and  of  nerves  prevented  him  from  achieving. 
And  as  he  looks  back  on  the  general  folly  incident  to 
all  mankind — his  bete  noire — on  his  lost  opportunities, 
on  his  failures,  a  sack  of  cobwebs,  a  pack  of  gossamers, 
wave  in  the  air  before  his  vision  ;  and  he  wonders  why 
he  himself  has  not  carved  his  life  as  those  fanciful 
things  have  their  own  peculiar  way  of  doing. 

Baudelaire  was  inspired  to  begin  Mon  Cceur  mis  d  nu 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  79 

in  1863  by  this  paragraph  he  had  read  in  Poe's  Mar- 
ginalia, printed  in  New  York  in  1856  :  "If  an  ambitious 
man  have  a  fancy  to  revolutionize,  at  one  effort,  the 
universal  world  of  human  thought,  human  opinion, 
and  human  sentiment,  the  opportunity  is  his  own — 
the  road  to  immortal  renown  lies  straight  open  and 
unencumbered  before  him.  .All  that  he  has  to  do  is 
to  write  and  publish  a  very  little  book.  Its  title 
should  be  simple — a  few  plain  words — My  Heart  Laid 
Bare." 

With  all  his  genius,  Poe  was  never  able  to  write  a 
book  of  Confessions,  nor  was  Baudelaire  ever  able  to 
finish  his.  Poe,  who  also  died  tragically  young,  throws 
out  a  sinister  hint  in  these  last  words  :  "No  man 
could  write  it,  even  if  he  dared.  The  paper  would 
shrivel  and  blaze  at  every  touch  of  the  fiery 
pen." 

Baudelaire's  Confessions  are  meant  to  express  his 
inmost  convictions,  his  most  sacred  memories,  his 
hates  and  rages,  the  manner  in  which  his  sensations 
and  emotions  have  fashioned  themselves  in  his  waking 
self  ;  to  express  that  he  is  a  stranger  to  the  world  and 
to  the  world's  cults  ;  to  express,  also,  as  he  says,  that 
ce  livre  tout  reve  sera  un  lime  de  rancunes.  It  cannot 
in  any  sense  be  compared  with  the  Confessions  of  Saint 
Augustine,  of  Rousseau,  of  Cellini,  of  Casanova.  Still, 
Baudelaire  had  none  of  Rousseau's  cowardice,  none  of 
Cellini's  violent  exultations  over  himself  and  the  things 
he  created  :  none  of  Casanova's  looking  back  over  his 
past  life  and  his  adventures  :  those  of  a  man  who  did 
not  live  to  write,  but  wrote  because  he  had  lived  and 
when  he  could  live  no  longer. 


8o  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

In  Baudelaire's  notes  there  is  something  that  re- 
minds me  of  Browning's  lines  : 

"  Men's  thoughts  and  loves  and  hates  ! 
Earth  is  my  vineyard,  these  grew  there  ; 
From  grapes  of  the  ground,  I  made  or  marred 
My  vintage." 

For  so  much  in  these  studies  in  sensations  are  the  pro- 
duct of  a  man  who  has  both  made  and  marred  his 
prose  and  poetical  vintage.  He  analyses  some  of  his 
hideous  pains  ;  and  I  cannot  but  believe — I  quote 
these  words  from  a  letter  I  have  received  from  a  man 
of  sensitive  nerves — that  he  may  have  felt  :  "It  is  so 
beautiful  to  emerge  after  the  bad  days  that  one  is 
almost  glad  to  have  been  through  them,  and  I  can 
quite  truthfully  say  I  am  glad  to  have  pain — it  makes 
one  a  connoisseur  in  sensations,  and  we  only  call  it 
pain  because  it  is  something  that  we  don't  understand." 
Without  having  suffered  intensely  no  poet  can  be  a 
real  poet ;  and  without  passion  no  poet  is  supreme. 
And  these  lines  of  Shelley  are  not  only  meant  for  him- 
self, but  for  most  of  us  who  are  artists  : 

"  One  who  was  as  a  nerve  over  which  do  creep 
The  else  unfelt  oppressions  of  this  earth." 

There  is  also  something  Browning  says  of  Shelley 
which  might  be  applied  to  Baudelaire's  later  years  : 
"  The  body,  enduring  tortures,  refusing  to  give  repose 
to  the  bewildered  soul,  and  the  laudanum  bottle 
making  but  a  perilous  and  pitiful  truce  between  these 
two."  He  was  also  subject  to  that  state  of  mind  in 
which  ideas  may  be  supposed  to  assume  the  force  of 
sensations,  through  the  confusion  of  thought  with  the 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  Si 

objects  of  thought,  and  excess  of  passion  animating 
the  creations  of  the  imagination. 

ii 

How  very  commonly  we  hear  it  remarked  that  such 
and  such  thoughts  are  beyond  the  compass  of  words. 
I  do  not  believe  that  any  thought,  properly  so  called, 
is  out  of  the  reach  of  language.  I  fancy,  rather,  that 
where  difficulty  in  expression  is  experienced,  there  is, 
in  the  intellect  which  experiences  it,  a  want  either  of 
deliberateness  or  of  method.  For  my  own  part,  I  have 
never  had  a  thought  which  I  could  not  set  down  in 
words  with  even  more  distinctness  than  that  with 
which  I  conceived  it  :  for  thought  is  logicalized  by  the 
effort  at  written  composition.  There  is,  however,  a 
class  of  fancies,  of  exquisite  delicacy,  which  are  not 
thoughts,  and  to  which,  as  yet,  I  have  found  it  abso- 
lutely impossible  to  adapt  language.  Yet,  so  entire  is 
my  faith  in  the  power  of  words,  that  at  times  I  have 
believed  it  possible  to  embody  even  the  evanescences 
of  fancies  such  as  I  have  described.  Could  one  actually 
do  so,  which  would  be  to  have  done  an  original  thing, 
such  words  might  have  compelled  the  heaven  into  the 
earth. 

Some  of  these  qualities  Baudelaire  finds  in  Gautier  ; 
to  my  mind  there  are  many  more  of  these  strange  and 
occult  qualities  to  be  found  in  Baudelaire.  I  have  said 
somewhere  that  there  is  no  such  thing,  properly  speak- 
ing, as  a  "  natural  "  style  ;  and  it  is  merely  ignorance 
of  the  mental  process  of  writing  which  sometimes  leads 
one  to  say  that  the  style  of  Swift  is  more  natural  than 
that  of  Ruskin.  Pater  said  to  me  at  Oxford  that  his 


82  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

own  Imaginary  Portraits  seemed  to  him  the  best 
written  of  his  books,  which  he  qualified  by  adding  : 
"  It  seems  to  be  the  most  natural."  I  think  then  he 
was  beginning  to  forget  that  it  was  not  natural  to  him 
to  be  natural. 

Gautier  had  a  way  of  using  the  world's  dictionary, 
whose  leaves,  blown  by  an  unknown  wind,  always 
opened  so  as  to  let  the  exact  word  leap  out  of  the 
pages,  adding  the  appropriate  shades.  Both  writers 
had  an  innate  sense  of  "  correspondences,"  and  of  a 
universal  symbolism,  where  the  "  sacredness  "  of  every 
word  defends  one  from  using  it  in  a  profane  sense. 
To  realize  the  central  secret  of  the  mystics,  from 
Protagoras  onwards,  the  secret  which  the  Smaragdine 
Tablet  of  Hermes  betrays  in  its  "  As  things  are  below, 
so  are  they  above  ;  "  which  Boehme  has  classed  in  his 
teaching  of  "  signatures  ;  "  and  which  Swedenborg 
has  systematized  in  his  doctrine  of  "  correspondences," 
one  arrives  at  Gerard  de  Nerval,  whose  cosmical  visions 
are  at  times  so  magnificent  that  he  seems  to  be  creating 
myths,  as,  after  his  descent  into  hell,  he  plays  the  part 
he  imagines  assigned  to  him  in  his  astral  influences. 

Among  these  comes  Hoffman.  In  his  Kreislerione, 
that  Baudelaire  read  in  the  French  translation  I  have 
before  me,  printed  in  1834,  he  says  :  "  The  musician 
whose  sense  of  music  is  conscious  swims  everywhere 
across  floods  of  harmony  and  melody.  This  is  no  vain 
image,  nor  an  allegory  devoid  of  sense,  such  as  com- 
posers use  when  they  speak  of  colours,  of  perfumes,  of 
the  rays  of  the  sun  that  appear  like  concords." 
"  Colour  speaks,"  says  Baudelaire,  "  in  a  voice  evoca- 
tory  of  sorcery ;  animals  and  plants  grimace  ;  per- 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  83 

fumes  provoke  correspondent  thoughts  and  memories. 
And  when  I  think  of  Gautier's  rapidity  in  solving  all 
the  problems  of  style  and  of  composition,  I  cannot 
help  remembering  a  severe  maxim  that  he  let  fall 
before  me  in  one  of  his  conversations  :  '  Every  writer 
who  fails  to  seize  any  idea,  however  subtle  and  un- 
expected he  supposes  it  to  be,  is  not  a  writer.  L'lnex- 
primable  n'existe  pas.'  ' 

It  is  either  Delacroix  or  Baudelaire  who  wrote  : 
"  The  writer  who  is  incapable  of  saying  everything, 
who  takes  unawares  and  without  having  enough 
material  to  give  body  to  an  idea,  however  subtle  or 
strange  or  unexpected  he  may  suppose  it  to  be,  is  not 
a  writer."  And  one  has  to  beware  of  the  sin  of  allegory, 
which  spoils  even  Bunyan's  prose.  For  the  deepest 
emotion  raised  in  us  by  allegory  is  a  very  imperfectly 
satisfied  sense  of  the  writer's  ingenuity  in  overcoming 
a  difficulty  we  should  have  preferred  his  not  having 
attempted  to  overcome. 

Then  there  is  the  heresy  of  instruction — I'heresie  de 
I' enseignement — which  Poe  and  Baudelaire  and  Swin- 
burne consider  ruinous  to  art.  Art  for  art's  sake  first 
of  all ;  that  a  poem  must  be  written  for  the  poem's 
sake  simply,  from  whatever  instinct  we  have  derived 
it ;  it  matters  nothing  whether  this  be  inspired  by  a 
prescient  ecstasy  of  the  beauty  beyond  the  grave,  or 
by  some  of  that  loveliness  whose  very  elements  apper- 
tain solely  to  eternity.  Above  all,  Verlaine's  Pas  de 
couleur,  rien  que  la  nuance  ! 

The  old  war — not  (as  some  would  foolishly  have  it 
defined)  a  war  between  facts  and  fancies,  reason  and 
romance,  poetry  and  good  sense,  but  simply  between 


84  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

imagination  which  apprehends  the  spirit  of  a  thing 
and  the  understanding  which  dissects  the  body  of  a 
fact — the  strife  which  can  never  be  decided — was  for 
Blake  the  most  important  question  possible.  Poetry 
or  art  based  on  loyalty  to  science  is  exactly  as  absurd 
(and  no  more)  as  science  guided  by  art  or  poetry. 
Though,  indeed,  Blake  wrought  his  Marriage  of  Heaven 
and  Hell  into  a  form  of  absolute  magnificence,  a  prose 
fantasy  full  of  splendid  masculine  thought  and  of  a 
diabolical  or  infernal  humour,  in  which  hells  and 
heavens  change  names  and  alternate  through  mutual 
annihilations,  which  emit  an  illuminating,  devouring, 
and  unquenchable  flame,  he  never  actually  attained 
the  incomparable  power  of  condensing  vapour  into 
tangible  and  malleable  form,  of  helping  us  to  handle 
air  and  measure  mist,  which  is  so  instantly  perceptible 
in  Balzac's  genius,  he  who  was  not  "  a  prose  Shake- 
speare "  merely,  but  rather  perhaps  a  Shakespeare  in 
all  but  the  lyrical  faculty. 

Even  when  Baudelaire  expresses  his  horror  of  life, 
of  how  abject  the  world  has  become,  how  he  himself 
is  supposed  to  be  "  une  anomalie,"  his  sense  of  his  own 
superiority  never  leaves  him.  "  Accursed,"  as  I  have 
said,  such  abnormally  gifted  artists  are,  he  declares 
his  thirst  of  glory,  a  diabolical  thirst  of  fame  and  of 
all  kinds  of  enjoyments — in  spite  of  his  "  awful  tem- 
perament, all  ruse  and  violence  " — and  can  say  :  "I 
desire  to  live  and  to  have  self-content.  Something 
terrible  says  to  me  never,  and  some  other  thing  says 
to  me  try.  Moi-meme,  le  boulevard  m'effraye." 

Baudelaire's  tragic  sense  of  his  isolation,  of  his  in- 
tense misery,  of  his  series  of  failures,  of  his  unendurable 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  85 

existence — it  was  and  was  not  life — in  Brussels  finds 
expression  in  this  sentence,  dated  September,  1865  : 
"  Les  gens  qui  ne  sont  pas  exiles  ne  savent  pas  ce  que 
sont  les  nerfs  de  ceux  sont  cloues  a  1'etranger,  sans 
communications  et  sans  nouvelles."  What  he  says  is 
the  inevitable  that  ^as  no  explanation  :  simply  the 
inevitable  that  no  man  can  escape.  To  be  exiled  from 
Paris  proves  to  be,  practically,  his  death-stroke.  And, 
in  the  last  letter  he  ever  wrote,  March  5,  1866,  there 
is  a  sense  of  irony,  of  vexation,  of  wounded  pride,  and 
in  the  last  "  sting  in  the  tail  of  the  honey  "  he  hisses  : 
"  There  is  enough  talent  in  these  young  writers  ;  but 
what  absurdities,  what  exaggerations,  and  what  youth- 
ful infatuations  !  Curiously,  only  a  few  years  ago  I 
perceived  these  imitators  whose  tendencies  alarmed  me. 
I  know  nothing  of  a  more  compromising  nature  than 
these  :  as  for  me,  I  love  nothing  more  than  being  alone. 
But  this  is  not  possible  for  me,  et  il  parait  que  I'ecole 
Baudelaire  existe." 

And,  to  all  appearances,  it  did  ;  and  what  really 
annoyed  Baudelaire  was  the  publication  of  Verlaine's 
Poemes  Saturniens  and  their  praise  by  Leconte  de 
ITsle,  Banville,  and  Hugo  ;  Hugo,  whom  he  had  come 
to  hate.  It  is  with  irony  that  he  says  of  Hugo  :  "  Je 
n'accepterais  ni  son  genie,  ni  sa  fortune,  s'il  me  fallait 
au  meme  temps  posseder  ses  enormes  ridiculeo." 


in 

Here  are  certain  chosen  confessions  of  Baudelaire. 
"  For  my  misery  I  am  not  made  like  other  men.    I  am 
in  a  state  of  spiritual  revolt ;  I  feel  as  if  a  wheel  turns 
G 


86  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

in  my  head.  To  write  a  letter  costs  me  more  time 
than  in  writing  a  volume.  My  desire  of  travelling  re- 
turns on  me  furiously.  When  I  listen  to  the  tingling 
in  my  ears  that  causes  me  such  trouble,  I  can't  help 
admiring  with  what  diabolical  care  imaginative  men 
amuse  themselves  in  multiplying  their  embarrass- 
ments. One  of  my  chief  preoccupations  is  to  get  the 
Manager  of  the  Theatre  Porte-Saint-Martin  to  tak? 
back  an  actress  execrated  by  his  own  wife — despite 
another  actress  who  is  employed  in  the  theatre."  It 
is  amusing  to  note  that  the  same  desire  takes  hold  of 
Gautier,  who  writes  to  Ars6ne  Houssaye,  the  Director 
of  the  Comedie-Fran9aise,  imploring  him  to  take  back 
a  certain  Louise  if  there  is  a  place  vacant  for  her. 

"  I  can't  sleep  much  now,"  writes  Baudelaire,  "  as  I 
am  always"  thinking.  Quand  je  dis  que  je  dormirai  de- 
main  matin,  vous  devinerez  de  quel  sommeil  je  veux 
parler."  This  certainly  makes  me  wonder  what  sort 
of  sodden  sleep  he  means.  Probably  the  kind  of  sleep 
he  refers  to  in  his  Epilogue  to  the  Poemes  en  Prose, 
addressed  to  Paris  : 

"  Whether  thou  sleep,  with  heavy  vapours  full. 
Sodden  with  day,  or,  new  apparelled,  stand 
In  gold-laced  veils  of  evening  beautiful, 

I  love  thee,  infamous  city  1    Harlots  and 
Hunted  have  pleasures  of  their  own  to  give, 
The  vulgar  herd  can  never  understand." 

The  question  comes  here  :  How  much  does  Baude- 
laire give  of  himself  in  his  letters  ?  Some  of  his  inner, 
some  of  his  outer  life ;  but,  for  the  most  part,  "  in 
tragic  hints."  Yet  in  the  whole  of  his  letters  he  never 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  87 

gives  one  what  Meredith  does  in  Modern  Love,  which, 
published  in  1862,  remains  his  masterpiece,  and  it  will 
always  remain,  beside  certain  things  of  Donne  and  of 
Browning,  an  astonishing  feat  in  the  vivisection  of  the 
heart  in  verse.  It  is  packed  with  imagination,  but 
with  imagination  of  so  nakedly  human  a  kind  that 
there  is  hardly  an  ornament,  hardly  an  image,  in  the 
verse  :  it  is  like  scraps  of  broken — of  heart-broken — 
talk,  overheard  and  jotted  down  at  random.  These 
cruel  and  self-torturing  lovers  have  no  illusions,  and 
their  tragic  hints  are  like  a  fine,  pained  mockery  of 
love  itself  as  they  struggle  open-eyed  against  the 
blindness  of  passion.  The  poem  laughs  while  it  cries, 
with  a  double-mindedness  more  constant  than  that  of 
Heine  ;  with,  at  times,  an  acuteness  of  sensation 
carried  to  the  point  of  agony  at  which  Othello  sweats 
words  like  these  : 

"  O  thou  Weed 

Who  art  so  lovely  fair,  and  smell'st  so  sweet 
That  the  sense  aches  at  thee,  would  thou  had'st  ne'er  been 
born." 

Another  question  arises  :  How  can  a  man  who 
wrote  his  letters  in  a  cafe,  anywhere,  do  more  than 
jot  down  whatever  came  into  his  head  ?  Has  he  ever 
given  an  account  of  one  day  in  his  life — eventful  or 
uneventful  ?  You  might  as  well  try  to  count  the 
seconds  of  your  watch  as  try  to  write  for  yourself  your 
sensations  during  one  day.  What  seems  terrible  is  the 
rapidity  of  our  thoughts  :  yet,  fortunately,  one  is  not 
always  thinking.  "  Books  think  for  me ;  I  don't 
think,"  says  Lamb  in  one  of  his  paradoxes.  There  is 
not  much  thought  in  his  prose  :  imagination,  humour, 


88  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

salt  and  sting,  tragical  emotions,  and,  on  the  whole, 
not  quite  normal.  How  can  any  man  of  genius  be 
entirely  normal  ? 

The  most  wonderful  letters  ever  written  are  Lamb's. 
Yet,  as  in  Balzac's,  in  Baudelaire's,  in  Browning's,  so 
few  of  Lamb's  letters,  those  works  of  nature,  and 
almost  more  wonderful  than  works  of  art,  are  to  be 
taken  on  oath.  Those  elaborate  lies,  which  ramify 
through  them  into  patterns  of  sober-seeming  truth, 
are  in  anticipation,  and  were  of  the  nature  of  a  pre- 
liminary practice  for  the  innocent  and  avowed  fiction 
of  the  essays.  What  began  in  mischief  ends  in  art. 

The  life  of  Baudelaire,  like  the  lives  of  Balzac  and 
of  Villiers  and  of  Verlaine,  was  one  long  labour,  in 
which  time,  money,  and  circumstances  were  all  against 
him.  "  Sometimes,"  Balzac  cries,  "  it  seems  to  me 
that  my  brain  is  on  fire.  I  shall  die  in  the  trenches  of 
the  intellect."  It  is  his  genius,  his  imagination,  that 
are  on  fire,  not  so  much  as  his  sleepless  brain.  This 
certainly  Baudelaire  never  felt.  Yet,  in  one  sentence 
written  in  1861,  I  find  an  agony  not  unlike  Balzac's, 
but  more  material,  more  morbid  :  "La  plupart  des 
temps  je  me  dis  :  si  je  vis,  je  vivrai  toujours  de  meme, 
en  damne,  et  quand  la  mort  naturelle  viendra,  je  serai 
vieux,  use,  passe  de  mode,  crible  de  dettes  ;  ajoute  a 
cela  que  je  trouve  sou  vent  qu'on  ne  me  rend  pas 
justice,  et  que  je  vois  que  tout  reussit  a  souhait  pour 
les  sots."  This,  with  his  perpetual  nervous  terrors, 
his  hallucinations,  his  drugs,  his  miseries,  his  women, 
his  wine,  his  good  and  bad  nights,  his  sense  of  poison- 
ous people,  his  disorders,  his  excitability,  his  imagina- 
tion that  rarely  leaves  him,  his  inspiration  that  often 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  89 

varies,  his  phrase,  after  a  certain  despair  :  "  Je  me 
suis  precipite  dans  le  travail :  alors  j'ai  reconnu  que 
je  n'avais  perdu  aucune  faculte  ;  "  his  discourage- 
ments, his  sudden  rages,  not  only  against  fame,  but 
when  he  just  refrains  from  hitting  a  man's  face  with 
his  stick  ;  after  all  this,  and  after  much  more  than 
this,  I  have  to  take  his  word. when  he  says — not  think- 
ing of  these  impediments  in  his  way — "  What  poets 
ought  to  do  is  to  know  how  to  escape  from  themselves." 
In  1861  he  writes  :  "As  my  literary  situation  is 
more  than  good,  I  can  do  all  I  want,  I  can  get  all  my 
books  printed  ;  yet,  as  I  have  the  misfortune  in  pos- 
sessing a  kind  of  unpopular  spirit,  I  shall  not  make 
much  money,  but  I  shall  leave  a  great  fame  behind 
me — provided  I  have  the  courage  to  live."  "  Pro- 
vided !  "  That  word  sounds  a  note  of  nervous  distress. 
He  continues  :  "I  have  made  a  certain  amount  of 
money ;  if  I  had  not  had  so  many  debts,  and  if  I  had 
had  more  fortune,  I  might  have  been  rich."  The  last 
five  words  he  writes  in  small  capitals.  And  this 
lamentable  refrain  is  part  of  his  obsession  ;  wonder- 
ing, as  we  all  do,  why  we  have  never  been  rich.  Then 
comes  this  curious  statement  :  "  What  exasperates  me 
is  when  I  think  of  what  I  have  received  this  year  ;  it 
is  enormous  ;  certainly  I  have  lived  on  this  money 
like  a  ferocious  beast ;  and  yet  how  often  I  spend 
much  less  than  that  in  sheer  waste  !  " 


VIII 

IN  1861  Poulet-Malassis  showed  Baudelaire  the 
manuscript  of  Les  Martyrs  Ridicules  of  Leon 
Cladel,  who  was  so  excited  as  he  read  it,  so  intrigued 
by  his  antithetical  constructions  and  by  the  mere  singu- 
larity of  the  title,  and  so  amazed  by  this  writer's 
audacity,  that  he  made  his  acquaintance,  went  over 
his  proofs,  and  helped  to  teach  him  the  craft  of  letters. 
So,  in  his  sombre  and  tragic  and  passionate  and 
feverish  novels,  we  see  the  inevitable  growth  out  of 
the  hard  soil  of  Quercy,  and  out  of  the  fertilizing  con- 
tact of  Paris  and  Baudelaire,  of  this  whole  literature, 
so  filled  with  excitement,  so  nervous,  so  voluminous 
and  vehement,  in  whose  pages  speech  is  always  out 
of  breath.  And  one  finds  splendid  variations  in  his 
stories  of  peasants  and  wrestlers  and  thieves  and 
prostitutes  :  something  at  once  epic  and  morbid. 

Baudelaire,  in  his  preface,  points  out  the  solemn 
sadness  and  the  grim  irony  with  which  Cladel  relates 
deplorably  comic  facts  ;  the  fury  with  which  he  insists 
on  painting  his  strange  characters ;  the  fantastic 
fashion  in  which  he  handles  sin  with  the  intense 
curiosity  of  a  casuist,  analysing  evil  and  its  inevitable 
consequences.  He  notes  "  la  puissance  sinistrement 
caricatural  de  Cladel."  But  it  is  in  these  two  sentences 
that  he  sums  up,  supremely,  the  beginning  and  the 
end  of  realistic  and  imaginative  art.  "  The  Poet, 

90 


i'eint  et  Crave  par-  Manet  if!65 


Imp.  A.  S»imon. 


BAUDELAIRE  :  A  STUDY  91 

under  his  mask,  still  lets  himself  be  seen.  But  the 
supremacy  of  art  had  consisted  in  remaining  glacial 
and  hermetically  sealed,  and  in  leaving  to  the  reader 
all  the  merit  of  indignation.  (Le  poete,  sous  son  masque, 
se  laisse  encore  voir.  Le  supreme  de  I' art  cut  consiste  $ 
rester  glacial  et  ferme,  et  a  laisser  au  lecteur  tout  le 
merite  de  V indignation.}" 

Certain  of  these  pages  are  ironical  and  sinister  and 
cynical ;  as,  for  instance,  in  this  sentence  :  "  Quant 
aux  insectes  amoreux,  je  ne  crois  pas  que  les  figures 
de  rhetorique  dont  ils  se  servent  pour  ge"mir  leurs 
passions  soient  mesquines ;  toutes  les  mansardes  en- 
tendant  tous  les  soirs  des  tirades  tragiques  dont  la 
Come" die  Frangaise  ne  pourra  jamais  beneficier."  And 
it  is  in  regard  to  this  that  I  give  certain  details  of  an 
anecdote  related  by  Cladel  of  Baudelaire,  which  refers 
to  the  fatal  year  when  he  left  Paris  for  Brussels. 

Both  often  went  to  the  Cafe  de  la  Belle-Poule  ;  and, 
one  night,  when  Cladel  was  waiting  for  Baudelaire,  a 
very  beautiful  woman  seated  opposite  him  asked  him 
to  present  her  to  Baudelaire.  He  laughed  and  they 
waited,  and  Baudelaire  was  presented,  who,  after 
giving  them  the  usual  drinks,  at  the  end  of  an  hour 
went  away.  This  went  on  for  a  whole  month  ;  when 
Baudelaire,  after  her  incessant  assiduities  to  him, 
brought  her  home  with  him,  Cladel  also.  They  talk. 
The  woman  becomes  lascivious.  Baudelaire  answers 
tiiat  he  has  a  passion  for  beautiful  forms  and  does  not 
wish  to  expose  himself  to  a  deception.  She  undresses 
slowly.  She  is  magnificent,  and  her  tresses  are  so  long 
that,  with  leaning  over  a  little,  she  could  put  her  naked 
feet  on  the  ends  of  them.  She  assumes,  being  probably 


92  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

aware  of  it,  the  exact  pose  of  Mademoiselle  de  Maupin 
when  she  stands  naked  before  d' Albert.  Cladel  goes 
out.  He  has  not  quite  closed  the  door  when  he  hears 
Baudelaire,  prematurely  old  and  worn  out,  say : 
"  Rhabille-toi."  Still  vital,  he  has  no  more  the 
abstract  heat  of  rapture  of  the  passionate  lover  in 
Gautier's  famous  self-confessions  ;  for,  in  that  won- 
derful book,  there  is  nothing  besides  a  delicately 
depraved  imagination  and  an  extreme  ecstasy  over 
the  flesh  and  the  senses.  And  he  also  realized,  as 
Baudelaire  did  not  always,  that  the  beauty  of  life  was 
what  he  wanted,  and  not  the  body,  that  frail  and 
perishable  thing,  that  has  to  be  pitied,  that  so  many 
desire  to  perpetuate. 

Yet  never  in  Baudelaire,  as  in  Gautier,  did  the  five 
senses  become  articulate,  as  if  they  were  made  specially 
for  him  ;  for  he  speaks  for  them  with  a  dreadful  un- 
concern. All  his  words  are — never  Baudelaire's — in 
love  with  matter,  and  they  enjoy  their  lust  and  have 
no  recollection.  Yet  neither  were  absolutely  content 
with  the  beauty  of  a  woman's  body  :  for  the  body 
must  finally  dwindle  and  expand  to  some  ignoble 
physical  condition,  and  on  certain  women's  necks 
wrinkles  will  crawl,  and  the  fire  in  one's  blood  some- 
times loses  some  of  its  heat ;  only,  one  wants  to  per- 
petuate the  beauty  of  life  itself,  imperishable  at  least 
in  its  recurrence. 

In  his  preface  Baudelaire  compares  Murger  with 
Musset,  both  Bohemian  classics,  only  one  spoke  of 
Bohemia  with  a  bitter  bantering,  and  the  poet,  when 
he  was  not  in  his  noble  moods,  had  crises  of  fatuity. 
"  All  this  evil  society,  with  its  vile  habits,  its  adven- 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  93 

turous  morals,  was  painted  by  the  vivid  pencil-strokes 
of  Murger  ;  only  he  jested  in  his  relations  of  miserable 
things."  Yes,  Murger  is  a  veracious  historian  ;  believe 
him,  if  you  do  not  know  or  have  forgotten,  that  such 
are  the  annals  of  Bohemia.  There,  people  laugh  just 
so  lightly  and  sincerely,  weep  and  laugh  just  as  freely, 
are  really  hungry,  really  have  their  ambitions,  and  at 
times  die  of  all  these  maladies.  It  is  the  gayest  and 
most  melancholy  country  in  the  world.  To  have  lived 
there  too  long,  is  to  find  all  the  rest  of  the  world  in 
exile.  But  if  you  have  been  there  or  not,  read  Murger's 
pages  ;  there,  perhaps,  you  will  see  more  of  the  country 
than  anything  less  than  a  lifetime  spent  in  it  will  show 
you. 


IX 

IN  April,  1864,  Baudelaire  left  Paris  for  Brussels, 
where  he  stayed  in  the  Hotel  du  Grand-Miroir, 
rue  de  la  Montagne.  Before  then  his  nerves  had  begun 
to  torment  him  ;  they  played  tricks  with  his  very 
system  ;  he  wrote  very  little  prose  and  no  verse.  It 
was  with  a  kind  of  desperate  obstination — a  more  than 
desperate  obstinacy — that  he  strove  to  prevent  him- 
self from  giving  way  to  his  pessimistic  conceptions  of 
life,  to  his  morbid  over-sensibility  that  ached  as  his 
flesh  ached.  Unsatiated,  unsatisfied,  for  once  in  his 
existence  irresolute  in  regard  to  what  he  wanted  to  do, 
watching  himself  with  an  almost  casuistical  casuistry, 
alone  and  yet  not  alone  in  the  streets  of  Paris,  he 
wandered,  a  noctambule,  night  after  night,  sombre  and 
sinister.  So  a  ghost  self-obsessed  might  wander  in 
desolate  cities  seeing  ever  before  him  the  Angel  of 
Destruction. 

Did  he  then  know  that  he  was  becoming  more  and 
more  abnormal  ?  This  I  ignore.  This,  I  suppose,  he 
alone  knew  ;  and  hated  too  much  knowledge  of  his 
precarious  condition.  He  was  veritably  more  alone 
than  ever,  before  he  plunged — as  one  who  might  see 
shipwreck  before  him — into  that  gulf  that  is  no  gulf, 
that  extends  not  between  hell  and  heaven,  but  that 
one  names  Brussels. 

Still  he  frequented  his  favourite  haunts,  the  Moulin- 
Rouge,  the  Casino  de  la  rue  Cadet,  and  other  cabarets. 

94 


BAUDELAIRE  :  A  STUDY  95 

He  saw  then,  as  I  saw  many  years  afterwards,  pass 
some  of  his  Flowers  of  Evil — some  who  knew  him  and 
had  read  his  verses,  most  of  whom  he  ignored — 
macabre,  with  hectic  cheeks  and  tortured  eyes  and 
painted  faces  ;  these  strange  nocturnal  birds  of  passage 
that  flit  to  and  fro,  the  dancers  and  the  hired  women  ; 
always — so  Latin  an  attitude  of  their  traditional  trade  ! 
— with  enquiring  and  sidelong  glances  at  men  and  at 
women. 

I  can  see  him  now,  as  I  write,  sit  in  certain  corners 
of  the  Moulin-Rouge — as  I  did — drinking  strange 
drinks  and  smoking  cigarettes  ;  hearing  with  all  his 
old  sensuality  that  adorable  and  cynical  and  perverse 
and  fascinating  Valse  des  Roses  of  Olivier  Metra  :  a 
maddening  music  to  the  soundless  sound  of  the  mad 
dances  of  the  Chahut — danced  by  dancers  of  both 
sexes,  ambiguous  and  exotic  and  neurotic — that,  as 
the  avid  circle  forms  hastily  around  them,  set  their 
fevers  into  our  fevers,  their  nerves  into  our  nerves. 

It  was  in  May,  1892,  that,  having  crossed  the  streets 
of  Paris  from  the  hotel  where  I  was  staying,  the  Hotel 
Corneille,  in  the  Latin  Quarter  (made  famous  by 
Balzac  in  his  superb  story,  Z.  M areas),  I  found  myself 
in  Le  Jardin  de  Paris,  where  I  saw  for  the  first  time 
La  Melinite.  She  danced  in  a  quadrille  :  young  and 
girlish,  the  more  provocative  because  she  played  as  a 
prude,  with  an  assumed  modesty  ;  decolletee  nearly  to 
the  waist,  in  the  Oriental  fashion.  She  had  long,  black 
curls  around  her  face  ;  and  had  about  her  a  depraved 
virginity. 

And  she  caused  in  me,  even  then,  a  curious  sense  of 
depravity  that  perhaps  comes  into  the  verses  I  wrote 


96  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

on  her.  There,  certainly,  on  the  night  of  May  22nd, 
danced  in  her  feverish,  her  perverse,  her  enigmatical 
beauty,  La  Melinite,  to  her  own  image  in  the  mirror  : 

"  A  shadow  smiling 
Back  to  a  shadow  in  the  night," 

as  she  cadenced  Olivier  Metra's  Valse  des  Roses. 

It  is  a  fact  of  curious  interest  that  in  1864  Poulet- 
Malassis  was  obliged  to  leave  Paris — on  account  of  his 
misfortunes  as  a  publisher,  in  regard  to  money,  and  for 
various  other  reasons — and  to  exile  himself  in  Brussels  : 
still  more  curious  that  Baudelaire — drawn,  perhaps,  by 
some  kind  of  affinity  in  their  natures — followed  him 
sooner  than  he  had  intended  to  go.  Malassis  lived  in 
rue  de  Mercedes,  35  bis,  Faubourg  d'lxilles.  In  those 
years  both  saw  a  great  deal  of  the  famous,  perverse, 
macabre  Felicien  Rops. 

Malassis,  naturally,  was  obliged,  in  his  expedients 
for  living  as  he  used  to  live,  to  publish  privately  printed 
obscene  books  ;  some  no  more  than  erotic.  As  Baude- 
laire hated,  with  his  Parisian  refinement,  that  kind  of 
certainly  objectionable  literature,  on  May  4th,  1865, 
he  writes  to  Sainte-Beuve  :  "As  for  Malassis,  his 
terrible  affair  arrives  on  the  I2th.  He  believes  he  will 
be  condemned  for  five  years.  What  there  is  grave  in 
this  is  that  that  closes  France  for  him  for  five  years. 
But  that  cuts  him  for  a  time  from  his  ways  of  living. 
I  see  in  it  no  great  evil.  As  for  me,  who  am  no  fool, 
I  have  never  possessed  one  of  these  idiotic  books,  even 
printed  in  fine  characters  and  with  fine  engravings." 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  Malassis  was  condemned  in  May, 
1866,  to  one  year's  imprisonment  for  having  privately 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  97 

printed  Les  Amies  of  Paul  Verlaine — a  book  of  sonnets, 
attributed  to  an  imaginary  Pablo  de  Herlaguez. 

Baudelaire,  as  I  have  said,  had  many  reasons  for 
going  to  Brussels.  Among  these  was  his  urgent  desire 
of  finding  a  publisher  to  print  his  collected  works — 
having  failed  to  find  any  publisher  for  them.  Another 
was  that  of  giving  lectures — a  thing  he  was  not  made 
for — and  for  two  other  reasons  :  one  of  making  imme- 
diate money,  one  of  adding  to  his  fame  as  a  writer. 
Then,  to  write  a  book  on  Belgium. 

He  writes  to  Manet  (who  has  written  to  him  :  "Do 
return  to  Paris  !  No  happiness  can  come  to  you  while 
you  live  in  that  damned  country  !  ")  :  "As  for  finish- 
ing here  Pauvre  Belgique,  I  am  incapable  of  it  :  I  am 
near  on  dead.  I  have  quite  a  lot  of  Poemes  en  Prose 
to  get  printed  in  magazines.  I  can  do  no  more  than 
that.  Je  souffre  d'un  mal  qui  je  riai  pas,  comme 
j'etais  gamin,  et  que  je  vivais  au  bout  du  monde," 

His  book  was  to  have  been  humorous,  mocking, 
and  serious  —  his  final  separation  from  modern 
stupidity.  "  People  may  understand  me,  perhaps, 
then."  "  Nothing,"  he  confesses,  "  can  console  me  in 
my  detestable  misery,  in  my  humiliating  situation,  nor 
especially  in  my  vices." 

In  February,  1865,  he  writes  :  "As  for  my  present 
state,  it  is  an  absolute  abdication  of  the  will.  (C'est  une 
parfaite  abdication  de  la  volonte.}"  What  reason,  I 
wonder,  was  there  for  him  to  "  abdicate  "  the  one 
element  in  our  natures  by  which  we  live  at  our  greatest, 
the  very  root  of  our  passions  (as  Balzac  said),  "  nervous 
fluids  and  that  unknown  substance  which,  in  default 
of  another  term,  we  must  call  the  will  ?  "  Man  has  a 


98  BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

given  quality  of  energy  ;  each  man  a  different  quality  : 
how  will  he  spend  it  ?  That  is  Balzac's  invariable 
question.  All  these  qualities  were  always  in  Baudelaire. 

Had  he  finally,  after  so  many  years  in  which  his 
energy  was  supreme,  lost  some  of  his  energy,  struggling, 
as  he  seems  to  do,  against  insuperable  difficulties  that 
beset  him  on  either  side,  like  thieves  that  follow  men 
in  the  dark  with  the  intention  of  stabbing  you  in  the 
back  ?  Does  he  then  try  to  conjecture  what  next  year 
might  bring  him  of  good  or  of  evil  ?  He  has  lived  his 
life  after  his  own  will :  what  shall  the  end  be  ?  He 
dares  neither  look  backward  nor  forward.  It  might  be 
that  he  feels  the  earth  crumbling  under  his  feet  ;  for 
how  many  artists  have  had  that  fear — the  fear  that 
the  earth  under  their  feet  may  no  longer  be  solid  ? 
There  is  another  step  for  him  to  take,  a  step  that 
frightens  him  ;  might  it  not  be  into  another  more  pain- 
ful kind  of  oblivion  ?  Has  something  of  the  man  gone 
out  of  him :  that  is  to  say,  the  power  to  live  for  himself  ? 

In  the  summer  of  1865  Baudelaire  spent  several  days 
in  Paris,  seeing  Banville  and  other  friends  of  his.  They 
found  him  unchanged ;  his  eyes  clear ;  his  voice 
musical ;  he  talked  as  wonderfully  as  ever.  They  used 
all  their  logic  to  persuade  him  to  remain  in  Paris.  He 
refused,  even  after  Gautier  had  said  to  him  :  '  You 
are  astonishing  :  can  one  conceive  your  mania  of 
eternalizing  yourself  in  a  land  where  one  is  only  bored 
to  extinction  ?  "  He  laughed  ;  promised  to  return  : 
he  never  did ;  it  was  the  last  day  when  his  friends 
possessed  him  entirely. 

In  his  years  of  exile  he  printed  Poe's  Histoires 
Grotesques  et  Serieuses  (1864)  ;  Les  Nouvelles  Fleurs  du 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY  99 

Mai  in  La  Parnasse  Contemporaine  (1866).  In  1865 
Poulet-Malassis  printed  Les  Epaves  de  Charles  Baude- 
laire. Avec  une  eau-forte  de  Felicien  Rops.  Amster- 
dam. A  1'enseigne  du  Coq.  1865.  165  pages. 

"  Avertissement  de  F  Editeur. 

"  Ce  recueil  est  compost  de  morceaux  poetiques, 
pour  la  plupart  condamnes  ou  ine'dits,  auxquels  M. 
Charles  Baudelaire  n'a  pas  cru  devoir  faire  place  dans 
F  edition  definitive  des  Fleurs  du  Mai. 

"  Cela  explique  son  title. 

<"  M.  Charles  Baudelaire  a  fait  don,  sans  reserve,  de 
ces  po ernes,  a  un  ami  qui  juge  a  propos  de  les  publier, 
parce  qu'il  se  flatte  de  les  gouter,  et  qu'il  est  a  un  age 
ou  Ton  aime  encore  a  faire  partager  ses  sentiments  a 
des  amis  auxquels  on  prete  ses  vertus. 

"  L'auteurrf  sera  a  vise  de  cette  publication  en  meme 
temps  que  les  deux  cents  soixantes  lectures  probables 
qui  figurent — a  peu  pres — pour  son  editeur  benevole, 
le  public  litteraire  en  France,  depuis  que  les  betes  y 
ont  decidement  usurpe  la  parole  sur  les  hommes." 

I  have  before  me  two  copies  of  this  rare  edition, 
printed  on  yellow  Holland  paper  ;  one  numbered  100, 
the  other  194.  The  second  has  inscribed  in  ink  : 
A  Monsieur  Rossetti  pour  remplir  les  intentions  de 
I'auteur  avec  les  civilites  de  I' editeur  A.  P.  Malassis. 
This  was  sent  on  the  part  of  Baudelaire  to  Dante 
Gabriel  Rossetti.  It  is  superbly  bound  in  a  kind  of 
red-purple  thick  leather  binding,  with  pale  gold 
squares,  in  the  form  of  the  frame  of  a  picture  ;  done, 
certainly,  with  great  taste. 

On  January  3,  1865,  Baudelaire  writes  a  letter  to 
his  mother ;  a  letter  that  pains  one  as  one  reads  it  : 


ioo          BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

so  resigned  he  seems  to  be,  yet  never  in  his  life  less 
resigned  to  his  fate.  He  fears  that  God  might  deprive 
him  of  even  happiness  ;  that  it  is  more  difficult  to 
think  than  to  write  a  book ;  that  if  only  he  were 
certain  of  having  five  or  six  years  before  him  he  might 
execute  all  that  remained  for  him  to  do  ;  that  he  has 
the  fixed  idea  of  death  ;  that  he  has  suffered  so  much 
already  that  he  believes  many  things  may  be  forgiven 
him  (sins  of  concupiscence,  sins  of  conscience,  sins  one 
never  forgets)  as  he  has  been  punished  so  much. 

I  pass  from  this  to  the  beginning  of  March,  1866. 
He  stays  with  Rops  at  Namur,  where  (certainly  by  bad 
luck)  he  enters  again  1'Eglise  Saint-Loup,  which  he  had 
spoken  of  as  "  this  sinister  marvel  in  the  interior  of  a 
catafalque — terrible  and  delicious — broidered  with 
gold,  red,  and  silver."  As  he  admires  these  richly 
sculptured  confessionals,  as  he  speaks  with  Rops  and 
Malassis,  he  stumbles,  taken  by  a  kind  of  dizziness  in 
the  head,  and  sits  down  on  a  step  in  the  church.  They 
lift  him  up  ;  he  feigns  not  to  be  frightened,  says  that 
his  foot  had  slipped  accidentally.  Next  day  he  shows 
signs  of  a  nervous  trouble,  not  a  mental  one  ;  asking 
them  in  the  train  to  Brussels  to  have  the  window 
opened ;  it  is  open.  That  is  the  first  sign  of  his  loss 
of  speech,  and  the  last  letter  that  he  ever  wrote  (dated 
March  30th,  1866),  ends  :  Je  ne  puis  pas  bouger.  It  is 
strange  to  set  beside  this  Balzac's  last  words,  that  end 
a  letter  written  June  20th,  1856 :  Je  ne  puis  ni  lire 
ni  ecrire.  It  is  written  to  Theophile  Gautier. 

Swinburne,  having  heard  the  fatal  news  in  regard 
to  Baudelaire,  added  to  his  book  on  Blake  these  mag- 
nificent words  :  as  pure,  as  fervent  a  tribute  to  the 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY          101 

memory  of  a  fellow-artist  as  Baudelaire  might  have 
wished  to  have  been  written  on  himself,  as  Swinburne 
might  have  desired  to  have  been  written  on  himself  : 
"  I  heard  that  a  mortal  illness  had  indeed  stricken  the 
illustrious  poet,  the  faultless  critic,  the  fearless  artist ; 
that  no  more  of  fervent  yet  of  perfect  verse,  no  more 
of  subtle  yet  of  sensitive  comment,  will  be  granted  us 
at  the  hands  of  Charles  Baudelaire.  We  may  see  again 
as  various  a  power  as  was  his,  may  feel  again  as  fiery 
a  sympathy,  may  hear  again  as  tragic  a  manner  of 
revelation,  as  sad  a  whisper  of  knowledge,  as  mysteri- 
ous a  music  of  emotion  ;  we  shall  never  find  so  keen, 
so  delicate,  so  deep  an  unison  of  sense  and  spirit. 
What  verse  he  could  make,  how  he  loved  all  fair  and 
felt  all  strange  things,  with  what  infallible  taste  he 
knew  at  once  the  limit  and  the  licence  of  his  art,  all 
may  see  at  a  glance.  He  could  give  beauty  to  the 
form,  expression  to  the  feeling,  most  horrible  and  most 
obscure  to  the  senses  or  souls  of  lesser  men.  The  chances 
of  things  parted  us  once  and  again  ;  the  admiration  of 
some  years,  at  least  in  part  expressed,  brought  him 
near  to  me  by  way  of  written  or  transmitted  word ; 
let  it  be  an  excuse  for  the  insertion  of  this  note,  and 
for  a  desire,  if  so  it  must  be,  to  repeat  for  once  the 
immortal  words  which  too  often  return  upon  our  lips : 

Atque  in  perpetmim,  f rater,  ave  atque  vale  !  " 

And  I,  who  have  transcribed  these  words,  have 
before  me  a  book  that  Swinburne  showed  me,  that  he 
had  richly  bound  in  Paris,  and  that  I  bought  at  the 
sale  of  his  library  on  June  igth  :  Richard  Wagner  et 
Tannhduser  a  Paris.  Par  Charles  Baudelaire.  Paris, 

H 


102          BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

1861 ;   with,  written  in  pencil,  on  the  page  before  the 
title-page,  these  words  : 

"A  Mr.  Algernon  C.  Swinburne.    Bon  Souvenir 
et  mille  Remerciements.    C.  B." 

From  April  9,  1866,  to  August  31,  1867,  Baudelaire 
endures  the  slow  tortures  of  a  body  and  a  soul  con- 
demned to  go  on  living ;  living,  what  else  can  it  be 
called,  than  a  kind  of  living  death  ?  To  remain,  in 
most  senses,  himself  ;  to  be,  as  always,  Charles  Baude- 
laire ;  to  have  in  his  mind  one  desire,  the  desire,  the 
vain  desire,  of  recovery  ;  to  be  unable  to  utter  one 
word  ;  to  think,  to  sleep,  to  conceive  imaginary  pro- 
jects, for  his  near  future,  for  his  verse,  for  his  prose  : 
to  walk,  to  eat,  to  drink ;  to  be  terribly  conscious  of 
his  dolorous  situation  ;  to  be,  as  ever,  anxious  for  a 
new  edition  of  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai ;  to  mark  a  date  in 
an  almanac,  counting  three  months,  when  he  imagined 
he  would  be  in  a  state  to  superintend  the  impression 
of  his  final  edition  ;  to  have  finally  given  up  all  hope, 
all  illusion  ;  to  have  gazed  out  of  his  wonderful  eyes, 
at  his  friend's  faces,  eyes  shadowed  by  an  expression 
of  infinite  sadness,  eyes  that  endured  his  last  tragedy  : 
that  is  how  Baudelaire  survived  himself  to  the  end. 

He  died  on  Saturday,  August  31,  1867,  at  eleven 
o'clock  in  the  morning,  at  the  age  of  forty-six  and  four 
months.  So  died,  simply  and  without  any  trace  of 
suffering,  this  man  of  genius.  Had  he  been  thoroughly 
understood  by  the  age  in  which  he  lived  ?  Blake,  who 
said  the  final  truth  on  this  question  :  "  The  ages  are 
all  equal ;  but  genius  is  always  above  the  ages  :  " 
was  not  understood  in  his  age. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  AND  NOTES 


Par  Baudelaire-Dufays.     Paris,  Jules  Labitte, 
Par  Baudelaire-Dufays.     Paris,  Michel  Levy, 


1  Salon  de  1845. 

1845.  72  pp. 

2  Salon  de  1846. 

1846.  132  pp. 

3.  Histoires   Extraordinaires .      Par   Edgar   Poe.      Traduction   de 
Charles  Baudelaire.    Paris,  Michel  Levy,  1856. 

I.    Edgar  Poe,  La  Vie  et  Ses  (Euvres,  pp.  vii-xxxi.     2.  Translations,  323  pp. 

4.  Nouvelles  Histoires  Extraordinaires.     Par  Edgar  Poe.     Traduc- 
-     tion  de  Charles  Baudelaire.    Michel  Levy,  1857. 

i.  Notes  nouvelles  sur  Edgar  Poe,  pp.  v-xxiv.     2.  Translations,  288  pp. 

5.  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai.    Par  Charles  Baudelaire.     Paris,   Poulet- 
Malassis  et  de  Broise,  4  rue  de  Buci,  1857.    252  pp. 

i.  Dedicace.     2.  Au  Lecteur. 

SPLEEN  ET  IDEAL. — i.  Benediction.  2.  Le  Soleil.  3.  Eldvation.  4.  Corre- 
spondances.  5.  J'aime  le  souvenir  de  ces  epoques  nues.  6.  Les  Phares. 
7.  La  Muse  Malade.  8.  La  Muse  Venale.  9.  Le  Mauvais  Moine.  10.  L'En- 
nemi.  n.  Le  Guignon.  12.  La  Vie  Interieure.  13.  Bohemiens  en  Voyage. 
14.  L'Homme  et  la  Mer.  15.  Don  Juan  aux  Enfers.  16.  Chatiment  de 
1'Orgueil.  17.  La  Beaut6.  18.  L'Ideal.  19.  La  Geante.  20.  Les  Bijoux. 
21.  Parfum  Exotique.  22.  Je  t'adore  d  I'egal  de  la  voute  nocturne.  23.  Tu 
mettre  I'univers  entier  dans  to,  ruelle.  24.  Sed  non  Satiata.  25.  Avec  ses  vete- 
ments  ondoyants  et  nacrts.  26.  Le  Serpent  qui  danse.  27.  La  Charogne. 
28.  De  Profundis  Clamavis.  29.  Le  Vampire.  30.  Le  Leth4.  31.  Une  nuit 
que  j'etais  pres  d'une  affreuse  Juive.  32.  Remords  posthume.  33.  Le  Chat. 
34.  Le  Balcon.  35.  Je  te  donne  ces  vers  afin  que  si  mon  nom.  36.  Tout 
entiere.  37.  Que  diras-tu  ce  soir,  pauvre  Ame  solitaire.  38.  Le  Flambeau 
vivant.  39.  A  Celle  qui  est  trop  gaie.  40.  Reversibilit6.  41.  Confession. 
42.  L'Aube  Spirituelle.  43.  Harmonic  du  Soir.  44.  Le  Flacon.  45.  Le 
Poison.  46.  Ciel  brouille.  47.  Le  Chat.  48.  Le  Beau  Navire.  49.  L'lnvi- 
tation  au  Voyage.  50.  L' Irreparable.  51.  Causerie.  52.  L'Heautontim- 
ouromenos.  53.  Franciscae  meae  laudes.  54.  A  une  Dame  Creole.  55. 
Moesta  et  Errabunda.  56.  Les  Chats.  57.  Les  Hiboux.  58.  La  Cloche 
Fel^e.  59.  Spleen.  60.  Spleen.  61.  Spleen.  62.  Spleen.  63.  Brumes  et 
Pluies.  64.  L'lrremediable.  65.  A  une  Mendiante  rousse.  66.  Le  Jeu. 
67.  Le  Crepuscule  du  Soir.  68.  Le  Crepuscule  du  Matin.  69.  Le  servante 
au  grand  cceur  dont  vous  etiez  jaloux.  70.  Je  n'ai  pas  oublie,  voisine  de  la 
ville.  71.  Le  Tonneau  de  la  Haine.  72.  Le  Revenant.  73.  Le  Mort  Joyeux. 
74.  Sepulture.  75.  Tristesses  de  la  Lune.  76.  La  Musique.  77.  La  Pipe. 

FLEURS  DU  MAL. — 78.  La  Destruction.  79.  Une  Martyr.  80.  Lesbos.  81. 
Femmes  damnees  (Delphine  et  Hippolyte).  82.  Femmes  damnees.  83.  Les 
Deux  bonnes  Soeurs.  84.  La  Fontaine  de  Sang.  85.  Allegorie.  86.  La 
Beatrice.  87.  Les  Metamorphoses  du  Vampire.  88.  Un  Voyage  &  Cythere. 
89.  L* Amour  et  le  CrSne. 

103 


104          BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

R6voi/rE. — 90.  Le  Reniement  de  Saint  Pierre.    91.  Abel  et   Cain.    92.  Les 

Litanies  de  Satan. 
LE  VIN.— 93.  L'ame  du  Vin.     94.  Le  Vin  des  Chiffonniers.     95.  Le  Vin  de 

1'Assassin.    96.  Le  Vin  du  Solitaire.    97.  Le  Vin  des  Amants. 
LA  MORT. — 98.  La  Mort  des  amants.    99.  La  Mort  des  Pauvres.    100.  La  Mort 

des  Artistes. 

6.  Aventurcs  d' Arthur  Gordon  Pym.    Par  Edgar  Poe.    Traduction 
de  Charles  Baudelaire.    Paris,  Michel  Levy,  1858.    200  pp. 

7.  Theophile  Gautier.     Par  Charles  Baudelaire.     Notice  Litteraire 
precedee  d'une  lettre  de  Victor  Hugo.     Paris,  Poulet-Malassis 
et  de  Broise,  9  rue  des  Beaux-Arts,  1859. 

i.  A  M.  Charles  Baudelaire  de  Victor  Hugo,  pp.  i,  iii.  2.  Theophile  Gautier, 
68  pp. 

8.  Les   Paradis   Artificiels  :    Opium   et  Haschisch.      Par   Charles 
Baudelaire.     Paris,   Poulet-Malassis  et  de  Broise,   9  rue  des 
Beaux-Arts,   1860. 

i.  D6dicace  a  J.  G.  F.,  pp.  i-iv.  2.  Le  PoSme  du  Haschisch,  pp.  1-108.  3.  Un 
Mangeur  d'Opium,  pp.  109-304. 

On  the  back  of  the  cover  is  this  announcement : 
"  Sous  Presse,  du  meme  auteur  :  Reflexions  sur  quelques-uns,  de 
mes  Contempor-ains  ;  un  volume  contenant  :  Edgar  Poe,  Theophile 
Gautier,  Pierre  Dupont,  Richard  Wagner,  Auguste  Barbier,  Leconte 
de  Lisle,  Hegisippe  Moreau,  Petrus  Borel,  Marceline  Desbordes- 
Valmore,  Gustave  le  Vavasseur,  Gustave  Flaubert,  Philibert 
Rouviere  ;  la  famille  des  Dandies,  ou  Chateaubriand,  de  Custine, 
Paul  de  Molin^s,  and  Barbey  d'Aurevilly." 

This  volume  appeared  in  part  in  L'Art  Romantique  (1868)  ; 
several  of  these  essays  were  never  written,  such  as  the  one  on 
Barbey  d'Aurevilly. 

Seconde  Edition,  1861. 

9.  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  de  Charles  Baudelaire. 

Seconde  Edition  augmentee  de  trente-cinq  poemes  nouveaux 
et  orne  d'un  Portrait  de  1'Auteur  dessine  et  grave  par  Brac- 
quemond.  Paris,  Poulet-Malassis  et  de  Broise,  Editeurs,  97  rue 
de  Richelieu  et  Passage  Mir6s,  1861.  319  pp. 

i.  L'Albatros.  2.  Le  Masque.  Statue  Altegorique  dans  le  gout  de  la  Renais- 
sance. 3.  Hymne  a  la  Beaut^.  4.  La  Chevelure.  5.  Duellum.  6.  Le 
Possede.  7.  Un  Fantome :  (i)  Les  Tenebres.  (2)  Le  Parfum.  (3)  Le  Cadre. 
(4)  Le  Portrait.  8.  Sempre  Eadem.  9.  Chant  d'Automne.  10.  A  Une 
Madone.  Ex-Voto  dans  le  gout  Espagnol.  n.  Chanson  d'Apres-Midi.  12. 
Sisine.  13.  Sonnet  d'Automne.  14.  Une  Gravure  Fantastique.  15.  Ob- 
session. 16.  Le  Gout  du  Neant.  17.  Alchimie  de  la  Douleur.  18.  Horreur 
Sympathique.  19.  L'Horloge.  20.  Un  Paysage.  21.  Le  Cynge.  22.  Les 
Sept  Vieillards.  23.  Les  Petites  Vieilles.  24.  Les  Aveugles.  25.  A  une 
Passante.  26.  Le  Squelette  Laboureux.  27.  Danse  Macabre.  28.  L'Amour 
du  Mensonge.  29.  Reve  Parisien.  30.  La  Fin  de  la  Journ6e.  31.  Le  RSve 
d'un  Curieux.  '32.  Le  Voyage. 


BAUDELAIRE  :  A  STUDY          105 

10.  Richard  Wagner  et  Tannhauser  a  Paris.    Par  Charles  Baudelaire. 
Paris,  E.  Dentu,  Palais-Royale,   13  et  17,  Galerie  d'Orleans, 
1861.     70  pp. 

11.  Eureka.     Par  Edgar  Poe.     Traduction  par  Charles  Baudelaire. 
Paris,  Michel  Levy,  1864.    252  pp. 

12.  Histoires  Grotesques  et  Serieuses.    Par  Edgar  Poe.    Traduction 
par  Charles  Baudelaire.    Paris,  Michel  Levy,  1865.    372  pp. 

13.  Les  Epaves  de  Charles  Baudelaire.    Avec  une  Eau-forte.    Fron- 
tispiece de  Felicien  Rops.     Amsterdam,  a  1'Enseigne  du  Coq, 
1865. 

i.  Avertissement  de  PEditeur,  pp.  i-iii.    2.  Les  Epaves,  163  pp. 

14.  Les  Epaves  de  Charles  Baudelaire.     Avec  une  Eau-forte  de 
Felicien  Rops.    Amsterdam,  a  1'Enseigne  du  Coq,  1865.     Nu- 
mero  194. 

15.  Les  Epaves  de  Charles  Baudelaire.     Avec  une  Eau-forte  de 
Felicien  Rops.    Amsterdam,  a  1'Enseigne  du  Coq,  1865.     Nu- 
mero  100. 

A  Monsieur  Rossetti  pour  remplir  les  intentions  de  I'auteur, 
avec  les  civilites  de  I'Editeur.    A .  P.  Malassis. 


II 

Edition  Definitive  des  (Euvres  de  Charles  Baudelaire.  Paris,  Michel 
Levy  et  Freres,  Libraires  Editeurs,  rue  Vivienne,  2  bis,  et  Boulevard 
des  Italiens,  15.  A  la  Librairie  Nouvelle,  1868-1869. 

Volume  I.     LES  FLEURS  DU  MAL.    414  pp. 
Volume  II.     CURIOSITES  ESTHETIQUES.    440  pp. 

i.  Salon  de  1845.  2.  Salon  de  1846.  3.  Le  Musee  Classique  du  Bazar  Bonne 
Nouvelle  (1846).  4.  Exposition  Universale  de  1855.  Beaux  Arts  (1855). 
5.  Salon  de  1850:  6.  De  1'Essence  du  Rire,  et  gineralement  du  Comique 
dans  les  Arts  Plastiques.  7.  Quelques  Caricaturistes  Francais  :  Carle  Vernet. 
Pigal.  Charlet.  Daumier.  Henri  Monnier.  Grandville.  Gavarni.  Trimo- 
let.  Travies.  Jacque  (1857).  8.  Quelques  Caricaturistes  Etrangers: 
Hogarth.  Cruikshank.  Goya.  Pinelli.  Breughel  (1857). 

Volume  III.     L'ART  ROMANTIQUE. 

i.  L'GJuvre  et  la  Vie  d'EugSne  Delacroix  (1862).  2.  Peihtures  murales  d'Eu- 
gene  Delacroix  £  Saint-Sulpice  (1861).  3.  Le  Peintre  de  la  Vie  Moderne. 
Constantin  Guys  (1862).  4.  Peintres  et  Aqua-fortistes  (1862).  5.  Vente  de 
le  Collection  de  M.  E.  Piot  (1864).  6.  L'Art  Philosophique.  7.  Morale  des 
Joujou  (1854).  8.  Theophile  Gautier  (1859-1861-1862).  9.  Pierre  Dupont 
(1852-1861-1862).  10.  Richard  Wagner  et  Tannhauser  a  Paris.  Encore 


106          BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

quelques  Mots  (1861).  n.  Philibert  Rouviere  (1855).  12.  Conseils  aux 
jeunes  Litterateurs  (1846).  13.  Les  Drames  et  les  Romans  honnStes  (1850). 
14.  L'Ecole  Paienne  (1851).  15.  Reflexions  sur  quelques -uns  de  mes  Contem- 
poraines  :  (i)  Victor  Hugo  (1861).  (2)  Auguste  Barbier  (1861).  (3)  Marce- 
line  Desbordes-Valmore  (1861).  (4)  Theophile  Gautier  (1861).  (5)  Petrus 
Borel  (1861).  (6)  Hegessipe  Moreau  (1861).  (7)  Theodore  de  Banville  (1861). 
(8)  Pierre  Dupont  (1852).  (9)  Leconte  de  Lisle  (1861).  (10)  Gustave  Leva- 
vasseur  (1861). 

CRITIQUES  LITTERAIRES. — I.  Les  Mis^rables,  par  Victor  Hugo  (1862).  2. 
Madame  Bovary,  par  Gustave  Flaubert.  (1857).  3.  La  Double  Vie,  par 
Charles  Asselineau  (1859).  4.  Les  Martyrs  Ridicules,  par  Leon  Cladel  (1861). 

Volume  IV.         i.  PETITS  POEMES  EN  PROSE. 

A  ARSENE  HOUSSAYE. — i.  L'Etranger  (1862).  2.  Le  D6sespoir  de  la  Vieille 
(1862).  3.  Le  Confiteor  de  1'Artiste  (1862).  4.  Un  Plaisant  (1862).  5.  Le 
Chambre  Double  (1862).  6.  Chacun  sa  chimere  (1862).  7.  Le  fou  et  la 
V6nus(i862).  8.  LeChienet  le  Flacon  (1862).  9.  LeMauvais  Vitrier  (1862). 
10.  A  Une  Heure  du  Matin  (1862).  n.  Le  Femme  Sauvage  et  le  Petite 
Maitresse  (1862).  12.  Les  Foules  (1861).  13.  Les  Veuves  (1861).  14.  Le 
Vieux  Saltimbanque  (1861).  15.  Le  Gateau  (1862).  16.  L'Horloge  (1857). 
17.  Un  Hemisphere  dans  une  Chevelure  (1857).  18.  L'Invitation  au  Voyage 
(1857).  19.  Le  Joujou  du  Pauvre  (1862).  20.  Les  Dons  des  F6es  (1862). 
21.  LesTentations,  ou  Eros,  Plutuset  la  Gloire  (1863).  22.  Le  Crepuscule  du 
Soir  (1855).  23.  La  Solitude  (1855).  24.  Les  Projets  (1857).  25.  La  Belle 
Dorothee  (1863).  26.  Les  Yeux  des  Pauvres  (1864).  27.  Une  Mort  Heroique 
(1863).  28.  La  Fausse  Monnaie  (1864).  29.  Le  Jouer  genereux  (1864).  30. 
La  Corde,  a  Edouard  Manet  (1864).  31.  Les  Vocations  (1864).  32.  Le 
Thyrse.  A  Franz  Liszt  (1863).  33.  Enivrez-vous  (1864).  34.  D6ja  ! 
(1863).  35.  Les  Fenetres  (1863).  36.  Le  Desir  de  Peindre  (1863).  37.  Les 
Bienfaits  de  la  Lune  (1863).  38.  Laquelle  est  la  Vraie  ?  (1863).  39.  Un 
Cheval  de  Race  (1864).  40.  Le  Miroir  (1864).  41.  Le  Port  (1864).  42.  Por- 
traits de  maitresses  (1867).  43.  Le  galant  Tireur  (1867).  44.  La  Soupe  et 
les  Nuages  (1864).  45.  Le  Tir  et  la  Cimetiere  (1867).  46.  Porte  d'Aurdole 
(1867).  47.  Mademoiselle  Bistouri  (1867).  48.  (Anywhere  out  of  the  world) : 
N'importe  ou  hors  du  monde  (1867).  49.  Assommons  les  Pauvres  (1867). 
50.  Les  Bon  Chiens  a  M.  Joseph  Stevens  (1865).  Epilogue  (1860). 

2.  LES  PARADIS  ARTIFICIELS. 
A.  J.  G.  F.     LE  PofcME  DU  HASCHISCH. 

i.  Le  Goflt  de  1'Infini.  2.  Qu'est-ce  que  le  Haschisch  ?  3.  Le  Theatre  du 
S^raphin.  4.  L'Homme-Dieu.  5.  Morale. 

UN  MANGEUR  D'OPIUM. — i.  Precautions  oratoires.  2.  Confessions  preliml- 
haires.  3.  Volupt^s  d'opium.  4.  Tortures  d'Opium.  5.  Un  Faux  Denoue- 
ment. 6.  Le  G6nie  enfant.  7.  Chagrins  d'enfance.  8.  Visions  d'Oxford: 
(i)  Le  Palimpseste.  (2)  Levana  et  nos  Notre-Dame  des  Tristesses.  (3)  Le 
Spectre  du  Brocken.  (4)  Savannah-la-Mer.  9.  Conclusion. 

Du  VIN  ET  Du  HASCHISCH,  COMPARES  COMME  MOYENS  DE  MULTI- 
PLICATION DE  L'lNDIVIDUALITE,   1851,   1858. 

i,  2,  3.  Le  Vin.      5,  6,  7.  Le  Haschisch. 

LA  FANFARLO,  1847. 

LE  JEUNE  ENCHANTEUR.     HISTOIRE  TIREE  D'UN  PALIMPSESTE  DE 
POMPEIA,  1846. 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY          107 

Volume  V.    HISTOIRES  EXTRAORDINAIRES.    Par  Edgar  Poe.    Tra- 
duction  de  Charles  Baudelaire. 

I.  Edgar  Poe:  Sa  Vie  et  ses  CEuvres.  2.  Double  Assassinat  dans  la  rue  Morgue. 
3.  La  Lettre  volee.  4.  Le  Scarabee  d'Or.  5.  La  Canard  au  Ballon.  6. 
Aventure  sans  pareille  d'un  certain  Hans  Pfaall.  7.  Manuscrit  trouve  dans 
une  bouteille.  8.  Une  Descente  dans  le  Maelstrom.  9.  Le  Veritd  sur  le  Cas 
de  M.  Valdemar.  10.  Revelation  Mystique,  n.  Les  Souvenirs  de  M.  Au- 
guste  Bedloe.  12.  Morella.  13.  Ligeia.  14.  Metzengerstein.  15.  Le 
Mystdre  de  Marie  Roget. 

Volume  VI.    NOUVELLES  HISTOIRES  EXTRAORDINAIRES.    Par  Edgar 
Poe.    Traduction  de  Charles  Baudelaire. 

i.  Notes  nouvelles  sur  Edgar  Poe.  2:  Le  Demon  de  la  Perversitd.  3.  Le  Chat 
Noir.  4.  William  Wilson.  5.  L'homme  des  Foules.  6.  Le  Coeur  revelateur. 
7.  Berenice.  8.  La  Chute  de  la  Maison  Usher.  9.  Le  Puits  et  la  Pendule. 
ro.  Hop-Frog,  n.  La  Barrique  d' Amontillado.  12.  Le  Masque  de  la  Mort 
Rouge.  13.  Le  Roi  Peste.  14.  Le  Diable  dans  le  Befiroi.  15.  Lionneric. 
16.  Quatre  Betes  en  Une.  17.  Petite  discussion  avec  une  Momie.  18.  Puis- 
sance de  la  Parole.  19.  Colloque  entre  Monos  et  Una.  20.  Conversation 
d'Eiros  avec  Charmion.  21.  Ombre.  22.  Silence.  23.  L'lle  de  la  Fee. 
24.  Le  Portrait  Ovale. 

Volume  VII.     AVENTURES  D'ARTHUR   GORDON   PYM.     EUREKA. 
Par  Edgar  Poe.    Traduction  de  Charles  Baudelaire. 


Ill 

1 .  ESSAIS  DE  BlBLIOGRAPHIE  CONTEMPORAINE  :    CHARLES  BAUDE- 
LAIRE.   Par  A.  de  Fizeliere  et  Georges  Decaux.    Paris,  Academic 
des  Bibliophiles,  rue  de  la  Bourse,  10,  1868.    Numero  178. 

2.  CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE  :   SA  VIE  ET  SON  CEuvRE.    Par  Charles 
Asselineau.     Paris,  Alphonse  Lemerre,  Editeur,  Passage  Choi- 
seul,  47,  1869. 

3.  CHARLES    BAUDELAIRE  :     SOUVENIRS.      CORRESPOND ANCES — 
BIBLIOGRAPHIE — suivie  de  pieces  inedites.     Par  Charles  Cousin. 
La  Bibliographic  par  le  .Vicomte  Spoelberck  de  Lovenjoul. 
Paris,  Chez  Rene  Pincebourde,  14  rue  de  Beaume  (quai  Vol- 
taire), 1872. 

4.  CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE  :    CEUVRES  POSTHUMES  ET  CORRESPON- 
DANCE  INEDITS — pr6ced6e  d'une  £tude  Biographique.  Par  Eugene 
Crepet.    Paris,  Maison  Quantin,  Compagnie-Generale  d'lmpres- 
sion  et  d'Edition,  7  rue  Benoit,  1887. 

5.  LE  TOMBEAU  DE  CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE — precid&e  d'une  £tude 
sur  Us  Textes  de  les  Fleurs  du  Mai,  Commentaire  et  Variantes. 
Par  le  Prince  Ourousof .    Paris,  Bibliotheque  Artistique  et  Litte- 
raire  (La  Plume),  1896. 


io8          BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

6.  CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE  (1821-1867).     Par  Fell  Gautier.     Orne 
de  26  Portraits  differents  du  Poete  et  de  28  Gravures  et  Repro- 
ductions.    Bruxelles,  E.  Deman,   1904.     Tirage  a  150  Exem- 
plaires  numerates.     Exemplaire  No.  74. 

7.  VERSIFICATION  ET  METRIQUE  DE  BAUDELAIRE.     Par  Albert 
Cassagne.    Paris,  Hachette,  1906. 

8.  LETTRES( 1 841-1 866)  DE  CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE.    Paris,  Mercure 
de  France,  1908. 

9.  CEUVRES  POSTHUMES  DE  CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE.    Paris,  Mercure 
de  France,  1908. 

10.   LE  GARNET  DE  CHARLES  BAUDELAIRE.     1911. 

Public  avec  une  Introduction  et  des  Notes  par  Feli  Gautier 
et  orne  d'un  dessin  inedite  de  Baudelaire.  Paris,  J.  Chevrel, 
Libraire  29  rue  de  Seine.  Cette  plaquette  non  mise  dans  le 
commerce  a  etc  tiree  a  cent  exemplaires  sur  papier  velin 
d' arches.  Numero  27. 

This  petit  carnot  vert,  which  contains  seven  quires  of  twenty-four 
pages — the  last  two  have  been  torn  out — was  used  by  Baudelaire 
for  noting  down  certain  private  details,  details  of  almost  every  kind, 
which  he  began  in  1861  and  ended  in  1864.  There  are  lists  of  his 
debts,  of  his  friends,  of  his  enemies,  of  his  projects,  of  his  proofs,  of 
his  books,  of  his  articles,  of  the  people  he  has  to  see  and  to  write 
to,  of  the  etchings  and  drawings  he  buys  or  intends  to  buy,  of  the 
money  he  owes  and  of  the  money  he  is  in  the  utmost  need  of.  On 
one  page  is  the  original  text  of  his  dedication  of  the  "  Poems  on 
Prose."  On  one  page  he  reckons  forty  days  in  which  to  execute 
some  of  his  translations,  his  prose,  and  his  poems.  On  another  page 
he  gives  a  list  of  his  hatreds,  underlining  V ilainies ,  Canailles  ;  then 
his  plans  for  short  stories  and  dramas.  These  notes  are  of  import- 
ance. "  Faire  en  un  an  2  vols.  de  Nouvelles  et  Mon  Cceur  mis  d  nu." 
"  Tous  les  jours  cinq  poemes  et  autre  chose."  Then  this  sinister  note  : 
"  Pour  faire  du  neuf,  quitter  Paris,  ou  je  me  meurs."  After  this 
come  long  lists  of  the  women  he  frequents  and  of  their  addresses, 
such  as  29  rue  Neuve  Breda,  36  rue  Cigalle.  After  this  comes  Swin- 
burne's verses,  with  the  list  of  the  few  friends  he  possesses  :  Villiers, 
Noriac,  Manet,  Malassis,  his  mother  ;  together  with  Louise,  Gabri- 
elle,  and  Judith. 

11.  LETTRES  INEDITES  A  SA  M&RE  (1833-1866).    Par  Charles  Baude- 
laire.   Louis  Conard,  Libraire  Editeur,  6  Place  de  la  Madeleine, 
Paris,  1918.    Numero  182. 

12.  JOURNEAUX   INTIMES  DE  CHARLES     BAUDELAIRE  :     TEXTE     IN- 
TEGRAL.   Paris,  Georges  Cres,  21  rue  Hautefeuille,  1919. 

This  edition  is  founded  on  the  original  manuscripts  of  Baudelaire, 
now  in  the  possession  of  Gabriel  Thomas. 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY          109 

FUSEES.  A  manuscript  of  fifteen  pages,  containing  twenty-two 
sections  numbered  in  red  ink  ;  the  pagination  is  also  in  red  ink. 
The  notes  have,  often  enough,  the  aspect  of  mere  fragments,  scrawled 
angrily.  One  of  them,  numbered  53,  and  two  paragraphs  of  another 
(the  note  17:  Tantdt  il  lui  demandait ;  Minette)  are  written  in 
pencil  ;  note  12  is  written  in  blue  ink.  Certain  phrases  in  the  text 
are  used  twice  over. 

MON  CCEUR  MIS  A  NU.  A  manuscript  of  91  pages,  containing 
197  articles  numbered  in  red  ink  ;  the  pagination  used  in  the  same 
way  as  in  the  other.  Every  note  is  preceded  with  the  autograph 
mention  :  Mon  Cceur  mis  A  nu.  The  text  is  written  rapidly  ;  the 
notes  numbered  26,  31,  44,  48,  51,  54,  60,  68,  69,  72,  75  (the  last 
three  in  italics),  80  are  written  with  a  black  pencil,  the  note  62 
with  a  black  pencil  on  blue  paper,  and  the  note  83  written  with  a 
red  pencil. 


NOTES 

FASCINATED  by  sin,  Baudelaire,  as  I  have  said  in  these  pages,  is 
never  the  dupe  of  his  emotions  ;  he  sees  sin  as  the  original  sin  ;  he 
studies  sin  as  he  studies  evil,  with  a  stern  logic  ;  he  finds  in  horror 
a  kind  of  attractiveness,  as  Poe  had  found  it  ;  rarely  in  hideous 
things,  save  when  his  sense  of  what  I  call  a  moralist  makes  him 
moralise,  as  in  his  terrible  poem,  Une  Charogne. 

Baudelaire's  original  manuscript,  that  is  to  say,  the  copy  he 
makes  for  his  final  text,  I  have  recently  bought.  It  covers  two  and 
a  half  folio  pages,  folded  four  times  across,  as  if  he  had  carried  it 
about  with  him  ;  it  is  written  on  thin,  half-yellow  paper,  yellowed 
with  age,  and  on  both  sides  ;  it  is  copied  at  tremendous  speed  with 
a  quill  pen  that  blots  the  dashes  he  puts  under  every  stanza.  The 
title  is  underlined  ;  the  only  revision  is  where  he  obliterates  "  comme 
une  vague  "  (which  he  had  used  in  the  first  line)  and  changes  it  to 
"  d'un  souffle,  vague."  He  uses  a  tremendous  amount  of  capital 
letters  ;  as  in  the  first  stanza  :  "  L'Objet,  Mon  Coeur,  Matin,  Doux, 
Detour,  d'un  Sentier,  Une  Charogne,  Cailloux."  In  the  next : 
"  Femme  Lubrique,  Les  Poisons,  D'une  Fa9on  Nonchalant  et 
Cynique,  Ventre,  Exhalations."  At  the  end  of  the  last  stanza  but 
one  he  writes  : 

"  Quand  vous  irez  sous  1'herbe  et  les  floralsons  grasses 
Vivre  parmi  les  monuments  ;  " 

which  he  changes  in  the  text  of  his  Fleurs  du  Mai  into  : 

"  Quand  vous  irez  sous  1'herbe  et  les  floraisons  grasses 
Moisir  parmi  les  ossements." 

The  change  makes  an  enormous  improvement  to  the  stanza. 

To  possess  this  manuscript  written  by  Baudelaire  is  to  possess 
one  of  the  most  magnificent  poems  he  ever  wrote  :  the  whole  thing 
is  copied  in  a  kind  of  unholy  rapture,  in  a  kind  of  evil  perversion. 


I.    AN  ADVENTURE   IN   FIRST   EDITIONS   AND 
MANUSCRIPTS 

I  AM,  fortunately,  the  possessor  of  a  copy  of  the  first  edition  of 
Les  Fleurs  du  Mai.  The  title-page  is  as  follows  :  LES  FLEURS  DU 
MAL  ||  par  Charles  Baudelaire.  ||  Paris  :  ||  Poulet-Malassis  et  de 
Broise  :  ||  Libraire-Editeurs.  ||  4  rue  de  Buci.  ||  1857. 

no 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY          in 

This  copy  is  signed,  in  brown  Parisian  ink  :  "a  man  ami  Champ- 
fleury,  Ch.  Baudelaire."  His  signature  is  fantastic  :  the  B.  curled 
backward  like  a  snake's  tail  in  an  Egyptian  hieroglyphic,  the 
straight  line  like  an  enchanter's  wand.  It  is  "  grand-i2  ;  252  pages." 
It  contains  one  hundred  poems,  the  perfect  number.  It  is  printed 
on  papier  verge.  It  is  one  of  the  twenty  copies,  thus  specially 
printed,  that  Baudelaire  ordered  for  himself  and  for  certain  of  his 
friends.  The  rest  of  the  edition  was  printed  on  common  white 
paper.  Taken  as  a  whole,  this  is  certainly  one  of  the  most  perfectly 
printed  books  done  in  France,  or  anywhere,  in  the  past  century. 

Poulet-Malassis  came  from  Alen9qn  to  Paris,  and  began  by  printing 
the  Odes  Funambulesques  of  Theodore  de  Banville  early  in  1 8  5  7 ,  before 
he  completed  the  publication  of  LesFleurs  duMal  in  July  of  that  year. 
Baudelaire  wrote  to  him,  saying  that  he  did  not  want  popularity, 
"  mais  un  bel  ereintage  general  qui  attirera  la  curiositd."  He  asked 
him  to  be  sparing  in  blank  spaces  on  the  pages  ;  and  to  use  certain 
archaisms  and  touches  of  red.  These  touches  of  red  are  given  on 
the  title-page  ;  they  have  a  decorative  effect.  He  said  that  he  had 
a  natural  horror  of  the  over-use  of  inverted  commas,  which  have  a 
way  of  spoiling  the  text.  He  must  have  a  unique  system  of  his 
own.  "  I  must  have,"  he  insists,  "  in  this  kind  of  production,  the 
one  admissible  thing,  that  is,  perfection."  There  one  sees  his  un- 
erring instinct ;  his  sense  of  the  exact  value  of  words.  Yet  he 
writes  to  his  publisher,  underlining  the  phrase  :  "  You  know  certain 
things  better  than  I  do,  but  whenever  there  is,  on  my  part,  no 
radical  repulsion,  follow  your  taste."  He  rages  against  de  Broise's 
perpetual  reproaches  with  regard  to  Us  surcharges  de  M.  Baudelaire 
— -the  "  author's  corrections."  He  points  out  certain  printer's  mis- 
takes, page  44  for  page  45,  and  gueres  rhyming  with  vulgaire.  There 
was  no  time  to  correct  these  errors  ;  they  remain  so  in  the  printed 
pages  of  my  copy. 

It  is  interesting,  in  regard  to  this  question,  to  find  in  the  first 
text  of  Le  Vin  de  FA  ssassin  these  lines  : 

"  Ma  femme  est  morte,  je  suis  libre  ! 
Je  puis  done  boire  tout  mon  saoul" 

In  the  second  edition  one  reads  "  soul."  I  find  in  Brachet's  Diction- 
naire  Etymologique  this  definition  of  the  word  "  soul,  ancien  fran9ais, 
saoul.  Latin  satallus,  d'ou  1'ancien  fran9ais  saoul."  Therefore 
Baudelaire  was  right,  traditionally,  in  using  the  original  form  of 
the  word. 

His  worst  trouble  is  in  getting  the  famous  dedication  to  Gautier 
printed  and  spaced  as  it  had  to  be.  It  must  be  composed  in  a 
certain  solemn  style.  Then  he  writes  :  "  The  magician  has  made 
me  abbreviate  the  dedication  ;  it  must  not  be  a  profession  of  faith, 
which  might  have  the  fault  of  attracting  people's  eyes  '  sur  le  c6te 
scabreux  du  volume.'  "  As  it  is,  strangely  enough  for  him,  Baude- 
laire made  a  mistake  in  syntax,  using  "  au  magicien  es-langue  fran- 


H2          BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY 

caise  "  instead  of  "  au  parfait  magicien  es-lettr&s  francaises"  which 
he  corrected  in  the  edition  of  1861. 

On  July  ii,  1857,  he  writes  to  Malassis  :  "Quick,  hide  the 
edition,  the  whole  edition.  I  have  saved  fifty  here.  The  mistake 
was  in  having  sent  a  copy  to  Le  Figaro  I  As  the  edition  was  sold 
out  in  three  weeks  we  may  have  the  glory  of  a  trial,  from  which  we 
can  easily  escape."  The  trial  came  ;  he  was  obliged  to  suppress 
six  poems  (supposed  to  contain  "  obscene  and  immoral  passages  "). 
Baudelaire  never  ceased  to  protest  against  the  infamy  of  this  trial. 
A  copy  of  the  second  edition  (not  nearly  so  well  printed  as  the  first) 
is  before  me  :  LES  FLEURS  DU  MAL.  ||  Par  Charles  Baudelaire.  || 
Seconde  Edition.  ||  Augmentee  de  trente-cinq  poemes  nouveaux  || 
et  ornee  d'un  portrait  de  1'auteur  dessine  et  grave  par  Bracque- 
mont.  ||  Paris  :  ||  Poulet-Malassis  et  de  Broise.  ||  Editeurs.  ||  97. 
Rue  de  Richelieu,  et  Beaux- Arts,  56.  ||  1861.  ||  Tout  droits  reserves. 
||  Paris  :  Imp.  Simon  Ra$on  et  Comp.  ||  Rue  d'Erfurth. 

In  comparing  the  text  of  1857  with  that  of  1861  I  find  several 
revisions  of  certain  verses,  not  always,  I  think,  for  the  best.  For 
instance,  in  the  Preface,  the  first  edition  is  as  follows  : 

"  Dans  nos  cervaux  malsains,  comme  un  million  d'hclminthes, 
Grouille,  chante  et  ripaille  un  peuple  de  Demons." 

He  changes  this  into  "  verre  fourmillant ;  "  "  dans  nos  cervaux 
ribote."  On  page  22,  he  writes  : 

"  Sent  un  froid  tendbreux  envelopper  son  ame 
A  1'aspect  du  tableau  plein  d'dpouvantement 
Des  monstruositds,  que  voile  un  vetement ; 
Des  visages  masques  et  plus  laids  que  des  masques." 

In  the  later  text  he  puts  a  full  stop  after  "  epouvantement,"  and 
continues  : 

"  O  monstruositds  pleurant  leur  vetement ! 
O  ridicules  troncs  !   torses  dignes  des  masques." 

This  reading  seems  to  me  infinitely  inferior  to  the  reading  of  the 
first  version. 

Again,  there  are  certain  other  changes,  even  less  happy,  such  as 
"quadrature"  into  "  nature,"  "  divin  elixir"  into  "comme  un 
elixir,"  "Man  ame  se  balancait  comme  un  ange  joyeux,"  into  "Mon 
cceur,  comme  un  oiseau,  voltigeant  tout  joyeux."  Baudelaire,  in  send- 
ing a  copy  of  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai  (1861)  to  Alfred  de  Vigny,  wrote 
that  he  had  marked  the  new  poems  in  pencil  in  the  list  at  the  end 
of  the  book.  In  my  copy — 1857 — he  has  marked,  with  infinite 
delicacy,  in  pencil,  only  three  poems  :  "  Lesbos,"  "  Femmes  Dam- 
mees,"  "  Les  Metamorphoses  du  Vampire."  He  underlines,  in 
"  Une  Charogne,"  these  words  in  the  text  :  "  charogne  lubrique, 
cynique,  venire,  d' exhalaisons ."  At  one  side  of  the  prose  note  on 
"  Franciscae  meae  laudes  "  he  has  made,  on  the  margin,  a  number 
of  arrows. 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY          113 

ii 

IN  Le  Corsaire-Satan,  January,  1848,  Baudelaire  reviewed  three 
books  of  short  stories  by  Champfleury.  On  the  first,  Chien-Caillou, 
he  writes  :  "  One  day  a  quite  small,  quite  simple  volume,  Chien- 
Caillou,  was  printed  ;  the  history  simply,  clearly,  crudely  related, 
of  a  poor  engraver,  certainly  original,  but  whose  poverty  was  so 
extreme  that  he  lived  on  carrots,  between  a  rabbit  and  a  girl  of  the 
town  ;  and  he  made  masterpieces."  I  "have  before  me  this  book  : 
"  Chien-Caillou,  Fantasies  d'Hiver.  Par  Champfleury.  Paris.  A  la 
Libraire  Pittoresque  de  Martinon.  Rue  du  Coq-Saint-Martin,  1 847." 
It  is  dedicated  to  Victor  Hugo.  "  I  dedicate  to  you  this  work,  in 
spite  of  the  fact  that  I  have  an  absolute  horror  of  dedications — 
because  of  the  expression  young  man  that  it  leaves  in  readers'  minds. 
But  you  have  been  the  first  to  signalize  Chien-Caillou  to  your 
friends,  and  your  luminous  genius  has  suddenly  recognized  the 
reality  of  the  second  title  :  This  is  not  a  Story." 

In  the  same  year  came  out  La  Gdteau  des  Rois.  Par  M.  Jules 
Janin.  Ouvrage  entidrement  inedit.  Paris.  Libraire  d'Amyot, 
6  rue  de  la  Paix,  1847.  I  have  my  own  copy  of  this  edition,  bound 
in  pale  yellow-paper  covers. 

On  January  26th,  1917,  there  came  to  me  from  Paris  an  original 
manuscript,  written  by  Charles  Baudelaire  on  three  pages  of  note- 
paper,  concerning  these  two  books  of  Champfleury  and  Jules  Janin. 
Being  unfinished,  it  may  have  been  the  beginning  of  an  essay  which 
he  never  completed.  Certainly  I  find  no  trace  of  this  prose  in  any 
of  his  printed  books.  From  the  brown  colour  of  the  ink  that  he 
used  I  think  it  was  written  in  1857,  as  the  ink  and  the  handwriting 
are  absolutely  the  same  as  in  his  signed  Fleurs  du  Mai  sent  to 
Champfleury.  There  are  several  revisions  and  corrections  in  the 
text  of  the  MS.  that  I  possess. 

At  the  top  of  the  first  page  are  nearly  obliterated  the  words  : 
remplacez  les  blancs.  It  begins  :  "  Pour  donner  immediatement  au 
lecteur  non  initie  dans  les  dessous  de  la  litterature,  non  instruit  dans 
les  preliminaires  des  reputations,  une  idee  premiere  de  I'importance 
litteraire  reille  de  ces  petits  livres,  gros  d'esprit,  de  poesie  et  d'obser- 
vations,  qu'il  sache  que  le  premier  d'entre  nous,  Chien-Caillou, 
Fantasies  d'Hiver,  fut  public  en  meme  temps  qu'un  petit  livre  d'un 
homme  tres  celebre,  qui  avait,  en  meme  temps  que  Champfleury, 
1'idee  de  ces  publications  en  trimestrielles."  It  ends  :  "  Ofc  est  le 
C03ur  ?  Ou  est  Tame,  ou  est  la  raison  ?  " 

Here  is  my  translation  : 

"  To  convey  to  the  reader  who  has  not  penetrated  into  the  back- 
parlours  of  literature,  who  has  not  been  instructed  in  the  prelimi- 
naries of  reputations,  an  immediate  idea  of  the  real  literary  import- 
ance of  these  little  books,  fat  in  wit,  poetry,  and  observations,  it 
should  be  stated  that  the  first  among  them,  Chien-Caillou,  Fantasies 
d'Hiver,  was  published  at  the  same  time  as  another  small  book  by 


H4          BAUDELAIRE  :  A  STUDY 

a  famous  man  who  had,  simultaneously  with  Champfleury,  started 
these  quarterly  publications. 

"  Now,  for  these  people  whose  intelligence,  daily  applied  to  the 
elaboration  of  books,  is  hardest  to  please,  Champfleury's  work 
absorbed  that  of  the  famous  man.  All  those  of  whom  I  speak  have 
known  Le  Gdteau  des  Rois.  Their  profession  is  to  know  everything. 
Le  Gdteau  des  Rois,  a  kind  of  Christmas  book,  or  '  Livre  de  1^-el,' 
showed  above  all  a  clearly  asserted  pretention  to  draw  from  the 
language,  by  playing  infinite  variations  on  the  dictionary,  all  the 
effects  which  a  transcendental  instrumentalist  draws  from  his 
chords.  Shifting  of  forces,  error  of  an  unballasted  mind  !  The  ideas 
in  this  strange  book  follow  each  other  in  haste,  dart  with  the  swift- 
ness of  sound,  leaning  at  random  on  infinitely  tenuous  connections. 
Their  association  with  one  another  hangs  by  a  thread  according  to 
a  method  of  thought  similar  to  that  of  people  in  Bedlam. 

"  Vast  current  of  involuntary  ideas,  wild-goose  chase,  abnegation 
of  will  !  This  singular  feat  of  dexterity  was  accomplished  by  the 
man  you  know,  whose  sole  and  special  faculty  consists  in  not  being 
master  of  himself,  the  man  of  encounters  and  good  fortunes. 

"  Assuredly  there  was  talent.  But  what  abuse  !  What  de- 
bauchery !  And,  besides,  what  fatigue  and  what  pain  ! 

"  No  doubt  some  respect  is  due  or,  at  least,  some  grateful  com- 
passion, for  the  tireless  writhing  of  an  old  dancing  girl.  But,  alas  ! 
worn-out  attitudes,  weak  methods,  boresome  seductivities  ! 

"  The  ideas  of  our  man  are  but  old  women  driven  crazy  with  too 
much  dancing,  too  much  kicking  off  the  ground.  Sustalerunt 
scepius  pedes. 

"  Where  is  the  heart  ?    Where  the  soul  ?    Where  reason  ?  " 

Here  the  manuscript  comes  to  an  abrupt  end,  and  one  is  left  to 
wonder  how  much  more  Baudelaire  had  written  ;  perhaps  only  one 
more  page,  as  he  had  a  peculiar  fashion  of  writing  fragments  on 
bits  of  note-paper.  Certainly  this  prose  has  the  refinement,  the 
satire,  the  exquisite  use  of  words,  the  inimitable  charm  and  un- 
erring instinct  of  a  faultless  writer.  Not  only  is  there  his  passion 
for  les  danseuses  and  for  the  exotic,  but  a  sinister  touch  in  I' abdication 
de  la  volonte  which  recurs  finally  in  a  letter  written  February  8, 
1865  ;  for,  when  one  imagines  himself  capable  of  an  absolute  abdi- 
cation of  the  will,  it  means  that  something  of  the  man  has  gone 
out  of  him. 


III.      AN   ADVENTURE   IN   IMAGES 

IT  is  often  said,  not  without  a  certain  kind  of  truth,  that  the  like- 
ness is  precisely  what  matters  least  in  a  portrait.  That  is  one  of 
the  interesting  heresies  which  Whistler  did  not  learn  from  Velasquez. 
Because  a  portrait  which  is  a  likeness,  and  nothing  more  than  a 
likeness,  can  often  be  done  by  a  second-rate  artist,  by  a  kind  of 


BAUDELAIRE  :   A  STUDY          115 

sympathetic  trick,  it  need  not  follow  that  likeness  is  in  itself  an 
unimportant  quality  in  a  masterly  portrait,  nor  will  it  be  found 
that  likeness  was  ever  disregarded  by  the  greatest  painters.  But 
there  are  many  kinds  of  likenesses,  among  which  we  have  to  choose, 
as  we  have  to  choose  in  all  art  which  follows  nature,  between  a 
realism  of  outward  circumstance  and  a  realism  of  inner  significance. 
Every  individual  face  has  as  many  different  expressions  as  the  soul 
behind  it  has  moods.  When  we  talk,  currently,  of  a  "  good  like- 
ness," we  mean,  for  the  most  part,  that  a  single,  habitual  expression, 
with  which  we  are  familiar,  as  we  are  familiar  with  a  frequently 
worn  suit  of  clothes,  has  been  rendered  ;  that  we  see  a  man  as  we 
imagine  ourselves  ordinarily  to  see  him.  But,  in  the  first  place, 
most  people  see  nothing  with  any  sort  of  precision  ;  they  cannot 
tell  you  the  position  and  shape  of  the  ears,  or  the  shape  of  the 
cheek-bones,  of  their  most  intimate  friends.  Their  mental  vision 
is  so  feeble  that  they  can  call  up  only  a  blurred  image,  a  vague 
compromise  between  expressions,  without  any  definite  form  at  all. 
Others  have  a  mental  vision  so  sharp,  retentive,  yet  without  selec- 
tion, that  to  think  of  a  person  is  to  call  up  a  whole  series  of  precise 
images,  each  the  image  of  a  particular  expression  at  a  particular 
moment  ;  the  whole  series  failing  to  coalesce  into  one  really  typical 
likeness,  the  likeness  of  soul  or  body.  Now  it  is  the  artist's  business 
to  choose  among  these  mental  pictures  ;  better  still,  to  create  on 
paper,  or  on  his  canvas,  the  image  which  was  none  of  these,  but 
which  these  helped  to  make  in  his  own  soul. 

The  Manet  portrait  of  Charles  Baudelaire,  dated  1862,  is  exquisite, 
ironical,  subtle,  enigmatical,  astonishing;  He  has  arrested  the  head 
and  shoulders  of  the  poet  in  an  instant's  vision  ;  the  outlines  are 
definite,  clear,  severe,  and  simple.  One  sees  the  eager  head  thrust 
forward,  as  if  the  man  were  actually  walking  ;  the  fine  and  delicate 
nose,  voluptuously  dilated  in  the  nostrils,  seems  to  breathe  in  vague 
perfumes  ;  the  mouth,  half-seen,  has  a  touch  of  his  malicious  irony  ; 
the  right  eye  shines  vividly  in  a  fixed  glance,  those  eyes  that  had 
the  colour  of  Spanish  tobacco.  Over  the  long,  waving  hair,  that 
seems  to  be  swept  backward  by  the  wind,  is  placed,  with  unerring 
skill,  at  the  exact  angle,  that  top-hat  that  Baudelaire  had  to  have 
expressly  made  to  fit  the  size  of  his  head.  Around  his  long  neck 
is  just  seen  the  white  soft  collar  of  his  shirt,  with  a  twisted  tie  in 
front.  In  this  picture  one  sees  the  inspired  poet,  with  distinct 
touches  of  this  strong  piece  of  thinking  flesh  and  blood.  And  Manet 
indicates,  I  think,  that  glimpse  of  the  soul  which  one  needs  in  a 
perfect  likeness. 

In  the  one  done  in  1865,  the  pride  of  youth,  the  dandy,  the  vivid 
profile,  have  disappeared.  Here,  as  if  in  an  eternal  aspect,  Baude- 
laire is  shown.  There  is  his  tragic  mask  ;  the  glory  of  the  eyes,  that 
seem  to  defy  life,  to  defy  death,  seems  enormous,  almost  monstrous. 
The  lips  are  closed  tightly  together,  in  their  long,  sinuous  line, 
almost  as  if  Leonardo  da  Vinci  had  stamped  them  with  his  immor- 


n6          BAUDELAIRE  :  A  STUDY 

tality.  The  genius  of  Manet  has  shown  the  genius  of  Baudelaire  in 
a  gigantic  shadow  ;  the  whole  face  surging  out  of  that  dark  shadow  ; 
and  the  soul  is  there  ! 

In  the  portrait  by  Car j  at,  his  face  and  his  eyes  are  contorted  as 
if  in  a  terrible  rage  ;  the  whole  face  seems  drawn  upward  and  down- 
ward in  a  kind  of  convulsion  ;  and  the  aspect,  one  confesses,  shows 
a  degraded  type,  as  if  all  the  vices  he  had  never  committed  looked 
out  of  his  eyes  in  a  wild  revolt. 

It  is  in  the  mask  of  Baudelaire  done  by  Zachari  Astruc  that  I 
find  almost  the  ethereal  beauty,  the  sensitive  nerves,  the  drawn 
lines,  of  the  death-mask  of  Keats  ;  only,  more  tragic.  It  looks  out 
on  one  as  a  carved  image,  perfect  in  outline,  implacable,  restless, 
sensual  ;  and,  in  that  agonized  face,  what  imagination,  what 
enormous  vitality,  what  strange  subtlety,  what  devouring  energy  ! 
It  might  be  the  face  of  a  Roman  Emperor,  refined,  century  by 
century,  from  the  ghastly  face  of  Nero,  the  dissolute  face  of  Caligula, 
to  this  most  modern  of  poets. 


The  Mayflower  Press,  Plymouth,  England. 
William  Brendon  &  Son,  Ltd. 


*?•  • 


PQ 
2191 
Z5S9 
cop.  2 


Symons,  Arthur 

Charles  Baudelaire 


PLEASE  DO  NOT  REMOVE 
CARDS  OR  SLIPS  FROM  THIS  POCKET 


UNIVERSITY  OF  TORONTO  LIBRARY 


&BSr        '