As he grew older he seemed to hunt for more acrid
odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase the carving of
which transports us, but from which the head is quickly averted.
odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase the carving of
which transports us, but from which the head is quickly averted.
Baudelaire - Poems and Prose Poems
It is
Baudelaire the critic of aesthetics in whom we are interested. Yet I
cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of Scherer had been
transformed into affirmations, only justice would have been accorded
Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet, the most original of his century,
but also a critic of the first rank, one who welcomed Richard Wagner
when Paris hooted him and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, played
the role of the envious; one who fought for Edouard Manet, Leconte de
Lisle, Gustave Flaubert, Eugene Delacroix; fought with pen for the
modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, Daumier, Felicien Rops, Gavarni,
and Constantin Guys. He literally identified himself with De Quincey and
Poe, translating them so wonderfully well that some unpatriotic persons
like the French better than the originals. So much was Baudelaire
absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted that the translator
would meet the same fate as the American poet. A singular, vigorous
spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry with its "icy ecstasy" is profound
and harmonious, whose criticism is penetrated by a catholic quality, who
anticipated modern critics in his abhorrence of schools and
environments, preferring to isolate the man and uniquely study him. He
would have subscribed to Swinburne's generous pronouncement: "I have
never been able to see what should attract man to the profession of
criticism but the noble pleasure of praising. " The Frenchman has said
that it would be impossible for a critic to become a poet; and it is
impossible for a poet not to contain a critic.
Theophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition of Les
Fleurs du Mal is not only the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire
as man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark of Gautier's gifts
as a critical essayist. We learn therein how the young Charles, an
incorrigible dandy, came to visit Hotel Pimodan about 1844. In this
Hotel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His
fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by the painters,
poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day--that is, carefully selected
ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Merimee, and others whose verve or
genius gave them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this cave of
forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de Chagrin pictured the same sort
of scenes which were supposed to occur weekly at the Pimodan. Gautier
eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred artistic souls, where
the beautiful Jewess, Maryx, who had posed for Ary Scheffer's Mignon
and for Paul Delaroche's La Gloire, met the superb Madame Sabatier, the
only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original of that extraordinary
group of Clesinger's--the sculptor and son-in-law of George Sand--la
Femme au Serpent, a Salammbo a la mode in marble. Hasheesh was eaten, so
Gautier writes, by Boissard and Baudelaire. As for the creator of
Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust for such nonsense. He had to work
for his living at journalism, and he died in harness, an irreproachable
father, while the unhappy Baudelaire, the inheritor of an intense,
unstable temperament, soon devoured his patrimony of 75,000 francs, and
for the remaining years of his life was between the devil of his dusky
Jenny Duval and the deep sea of hopeless debt.
It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were no doubt much less wicked
than the participants would have us believe, that Baudelaire encountered
Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his portrait, and encouraged
the fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We have seen
an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray talent of about
the same order as Thackeray's, with a superadded note of the
"horrific"--that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics. Baudelaire
admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman praised the illustrations of
Guys, he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the commonplaces of a
painter's technique; also how to compose a palette--a rather meaningless
phrase nowadays. At least, he did not write of the arts without some
technical experience. Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and
when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 1846, 1855, and 1859,
the praise and blame they evoked were testimonies to the training and
knowledge of their author. A new spirit had been born.
The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor
spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are
the production of a humanist. Some would put them above Diderot's. Mr.
Saintsbury, after Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire among the
English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism observed
too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds, "to read a
criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by no means a
sure method of recognizing the picture afterward. " Now, word-painting
was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier,
with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh impossible feat of
competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of canvas and
marble. And, if he with his verbal imagination did not entirely succeed,
how could a less adept manipulator of the vocabulary? We do not agree
with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine too much when the imagination is
that of a poet. Baudelaire divined the work of the artist and set it
down scrupulously in a prose of exceeding rectitude. He did not paint
pictures in prose. He did not divagate. He did not overburden his pages
with technical terms. But the spirit of his subject he did disengage in
a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical schools were a cross for
him to bear, and he wore his prejudices lightly. Like a true critic, he
judged more by form than theme. There are no types; there is only life,
he asserted, and long before Jules Laforgue. He was ever art-for-art,
yet, having breadth of comprehension and a Heine-like capacity for
seeing both sides of his own nature with its idiosyncrasies, he could
write: "The puerile utopia of the school of art-for-art, in excluding
morality, and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. All
literature which refuses to advance fraternally between science and
philosophy is a homicidal and a suicidal literature. "
Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than of
music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of
democracy, of the democratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental
fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation
the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those
things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the Dresden
uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary etude. Brave
lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the region of the
ideal. Baudelaire's little attack of the equality-measles soon vanished.
He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly and injustice of
abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of paradox, he dedicated
a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but he would not have
contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that "in art the democrat
is always reactionary. In 1830 the democrats were against Victor Hugo
and Delacrois. " And Les Fleurs du Mal, that book of opals, blood, and
evil swamp-flowers, will never be savoured by the mob.
In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in
the Louvre he enjoyed the company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of
the poet's preferences. He was also attracted by El Greco--not an
unnatural admiration, considering the sombre extravagance of his own
genius. Of Goya he has written in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his
touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his Derves ruined by abuse of
drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination were more beautiful
than Nature herself. The country itself, he declared, was odious. Like
Whistler, whom he often met--see the Hommage a Delacrois by
Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler, Baudelaire, Manet,
Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacrois, Cordier, Duranty the critic,
and De Balleroy--he could not help showing his aversion to "foolish
sunsets. " In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain had entered too much
moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of poetry, criticism and
fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, is the literary progenitor
of Jean, Duc d'Esseintes, in Huysmans's _A Rebours_. Huysmans at first
modelled himself upon Baudelaire. His Le Drageoir aux Epices is a
continuation of Petits Poemes en Prose. And to Baudelaire's account must
be laid much artificial morbid writing. Despite his pursuit of
perfection in form, his influence has been too often baneful to
impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of Gallic Byronism, and
high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no extravagance, absurd or
terrible, that he did not commit, from etching a four-part fugue on ice
to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer. In his criticism alone was he the
sane logical Frenchman. And while he did not live to see the success of
the Impressionist group, he surely would have acclaimed their theory and
practice. Was he not an impressionist himself?
As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so Delacroix quite overflowed
his aesthetic consciousness. Read Volume II of his collected works,
_Curiosites Esthetiques_, which contains his Salons; also his essay, _De
l'Essence du Rire_ (worthy to be placed side by side with George
Meredith's essay on Comedy). Caricaturists, French and foreign, are
considered in two chapters at the close of the volume. Baudelaire was as
conscientious as Gautier. He trotted around miles of mediocre canvas,
saying an encouraging word to the less talented, boiling over with holy
indignation or indulging in glacial irony, before the rash usurpers
occupying the seats of the mighty, and pouncing on new genius with
promptitude. Upon Delacroix he lavished the largesse of his admiration.
He smiled at the platitudes of Horace Vernet, and only shook his head
over the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed William
Hausollier, now so little known. He praised Deveria, Chasseriau--who
waited years before he came into his own; his preferred landscapists
were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke of Ary Scheffer and
the "apes of sentiment"; while his discussions of Hogarth, Cruikshank,
Pinelli and Breughel proclaims his versatility of vision. In his essay
Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne he was the first among critics to recognize
the peculiar quality called "modernity," that naked vibration which
informs the novels of Goncourt, Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale,
and the pictures of Manet, Monet, Degas and Raffaelli with their
evocations of a new, nervous Paris. It is in his Volume III, entitled
L'Art Romantique, that so many things dear to the new century were then
subjects of furious quarrels. This book contains much just and brilliant
writing. It was easy for Nietzsche to praise Wagner in Germany in 1876,
but dangerous at Paris in 1861 to declare war on Wagner's adverse
critics. This Baudelaire did.
The relations of Baudelaire and Edouard Manet were exceedingly cordial.
In a letter to Theophile Thore, the art critic (Letters, p. 361), we
find Baudelaire defending his friend from the accusation that his
pictures were pastiches of Goya. He wrote: "Manet has never seen Goya,
never El Greco; he was never in the Pourtales Gallery. " Which may have
been true at the time, 1864, nevertheless Manet had visited Madrid and
spent much time studying Velasquez and abusing Spanish cookery.
(Consider, too, Goya's Balcony with Girls and Manet's famous Balcony. )
Raging at the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this same epistle:
"They accuse even me of imitating Edgar Poe. . . . Do you know why I so
patiently translated Poe? Because he resembled me. " The poet italicized
these words. With stupefaction, therefore, he admired the mysterious
coincidences of Manet's work with that of Goya and El Greco.
He took Manet seriously. He wrote to him in a paternal and severe tone.
Recall his reproof when urging the painter to exhibit his work. "You
complain about attacks, but are you the first to endure them? Have you
more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by
derision. And in order not to make you too proud I must tell you that
they are models, each in his way, and in a very rich world, while you
are only the first in the decrepitude of your art. " (Letters, p. 436. )
Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words if he were able to revisit
the glimpses of the Champs Elysees at the Autumn Salons? What would he
think of Cezanne? Odilon Redon he would understand, for he is the
transposer of Baudelairianism to terms of design and colour. And perhaps
the poet whose verse is saturated with tropical hues--he, when young,
sailed in southern seas--might appreciate the monstrous debauch of form
and colour in the Tahitian canvases of Paul Gauguin.
Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his
verse. He is par excellence the poet of aesthetics. To Daumier he
inscribed a poem; and to the sculptor Ernest Christophe, to Delacroix
(Sur Tasse en Prison), to Manet, to Guys (Reve Parisien), to an unknown
master (Une Martyre); and Watteau, a Watteau a rebours, is seen in Un
Voyage a Cythere; while in Les Phares this poet of the ideal, spleen
music, and perfume, shows his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Puget, Goya, Delacroix--"Delacroix, lac de sang
hante des mauvais anges. " And what is more exquisite than his quatrain
to Lola de Valence, a poetic inscription for the picture of Edouard
Manet, with its last line as vaporous, as subtle as Verlaine: "Le charme
inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir! " Heine called himself the last of the
Romantics. The first of the "Moderns" and the last of the Romantics was
the many-sided Charles Baudelaire.
III
He was born at Paris, April 9, 1821 (Flaubert's birth year), and not
April 21, as Gautier has it. His father was Joseph Francis Baudelaire,
or Baudelaire, who occupied a government position. A cultivated art
lover, his taste was apparent in the home he made for his second wife,
Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, an orphan and the daughter of a military
officer. There was a considerable difference in the years of this pair;
the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, at the birth of their
only child. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son,
Claude, who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paralysis, though a
steady man of business. That great modern neurosis, called Commerce, has
its mental wrecks, too, and no one pays attention; but when a poet falls
by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and other soul-hunters
seeking victims. After the death of Baudelaire's father, the widow,
within a year, married the handsome, ambitious Aupick, then chef de
bataillon, lieutenant-colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and
later general and ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and London.
Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but unlike most children of genius,
he was a scholar and won brilliant honours at school. His stepfather was
proud of him. From the Royal College of Lyons, Charles went to the Lycee
Louis-le-Grand, Paris, but was expelled in 1839, on various
discreditable charges. Troubles soon began at home. He was irascible,
vain, precocious, and given to dissipation. He quarreled with General
Aupick, and disdained his mother. But she was to blame, she has
confessed; she had quite forgotten the boy in the flush of her second
love. He could not forget, or forgive what he called her infidelity to
the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The good
Bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said that Charles was a
little crazy--second marriages usually bring woe in their train. "When a
mother has such a son, she doesn't re-marry," said the young poet
Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes Dufais. He wrote
in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or maniacs . . . all victims of
terrible passions"; which was one of his exaggerations. His grandfather
on the paternal side was a Champenois peasant, his mother's family
presumably Norman, but not much is known of her forbears. Charles
believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken. He
also believed that his instability of temperament--and he studied his
"case" as would a surgeon--was the result of his parents' disparity in
years.
After his return from the East, where he did not learn English as has
been said--his mother taught him as a boy to converse in and write the
language--he came into his little inheritance, about fifteen thousand
dollars. Two years later he was so heavily in debt that his family asked
for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had been swindled,
being young and green. How had he squandered his money? Not exactly on
opera-glasses, like Gerard de Nerval, but on clothes, pictures,
furniture, books. The remnant was set aside to pay his debts. Charles
would be both poet and dandy. He dressed expensively but soberly, in the
English fashion; his linen dazzling, the prevailing hue of his
habiliments black. In height he was medium, his eyes brown, searching,
luminous, the eye of a nyctalops, "eyes like ravens"; nostrils
palpitating, cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual jaw, strong and
square. His hair was black, curly, glossy, his forehead high, square and
white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is there what Catulle
Mendes nicknamed him: "His Excellence, Monseigneur Brummel! " Later he
was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de N. S. le Diable; or
the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the clean-shaven face of the mock
priest, the slow cold eyes and the sharp cunning sneer of the cynical
libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness
of temptation. " In the heyday of his blood he was perverse and
deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting the Byronic notion that
ennui could best be cured by dissipation; in sin Baudelaire found the
saddest of all consolations. Mendes laughs at the legend of Baudelaire's
violence, of his being given to explosive phrases. Despite Gautier's
stories about the Hotel Pimodan and its club of hasheesh-eaters, M.
Mendes denies that Baudelaire was a victim of the hemp. What the
majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of literary
workers is this prime fact: men who work hard, writing verse--and there
is no mental toil comparable to it--cannot drink, or indulge in opium,
without inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of "inspiration,"
spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden bolt from heaven, are
delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed
at his music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy forged his
thunderbolts by the sweat of his brow, that Manet toiled like a
labourer on the dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion
to poetic work, that Gautier was a hard-working journalist, are
disillusions for the sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged from
Jupiter's skull to the desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but Balsac
and Flaubert did not encourage this fancy. Work literally killed Poe, as
it killed Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert and Daudet. Maupassant went insane
because he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked
and worried. His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was
flawed--Sainte-Beuve told him that he had worn out his nerves--from the
start, he was detraque; but that his entire life was one huge debauch is
a nightmare of the moral police in some red cotton nightcap country.
His period of mental production was not brief nor barren. He was a
student. Du Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved by
the variety and quality of his published work. His range of sympathies
was large. His mistake, in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write so
well about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its real
name--which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was one of the elect, an
aristocrat, who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate air of
a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated voice, aroused unusual
interest and admiration. He was a humanist of distinction; he has left a
hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Baudelaire, like
Chopin, made more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity the
expressiveness of art.
Women played a commanding role in his life. They always do with any poet
worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging this
as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with Woman than the individual.
The legend of the beautiful creature he brought from the East resolves
itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne Duval. He met her in Paris,
after he had been in the East. She sang at a cafe concert in Paris. She
was more brown than black. She was not handsome, not intelligent, not
good; yet he idealized her, for she was the source of half his
inspiration. To her were addressed those marvellous evocations of the
Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious dawns on strange far-away seas
and "superb Byzant," domes that devils built. Baudelaire is the poet of
perfumes; he is also the patron saint of ennui. No one has so chanted
the praise of odours. His soul swims on perfume as do other souls on
music, he has sung.
As he grew older he seemed to hunt for more acrid
odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase the carving of
which transports us, but from which the head is quickly averted. Jeanne,
whom he never loved, no matter what may be said, was a sorceress. But
she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; he left her a dozen times
only to return. He was a capital draughtsman with a strong nervous line
and made many pen-and-ink drawings of her. They are not prepossessing.
In her rapid decline she was not allowed to want. Madame Aupick paid her
expenses in the hospital. A sordid history. She was a veritable flower
of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like music, would be colourless,
scentless, if it sounded no dissonances. Fancy art reduced to the
beatific and banal chord of C major!
He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier, a reigning beauty,
at whose salon artistic Paris assembled. She had been christened by
Gautier Madame la Presidente, and her sumptuous beauty was portrayed by
Ricard in his La Femme au Chien. She returned Baudelaire's love. They
soon parted. Again a riddle which the published letters hardly solve.
One letter, however, does show that Baudelaire had tried to be faithful,
and failed. He could not extort from his exhausted soul the sentiment;
but he put its music on paper. His most seductive lyrics were addressed
to Madame Sabatier: "A la tres chere, a la tres-belle," a hymn saturated
with love. Music, spleen, perfumes--"colour, sound, perfumes call to
each other as deep to deep; perfumes like the flesh of children, soft as
hautboys, green as the meadows"--criminals, outcasts, the charm of
childhood, the horrors of love, pride, and rebellion, Eastern
landscapes, cats, soothing and false; cats, the true companions of
lonely poets; haunted clocks, shivering dusks, and gloomier
dawns--Paris in a hundred phases--these and many other themes this
strange-souled poet, this "Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris has
celebrated in finely wrought verse and profound phrases. In a single
line he contrives atmosphere; the very shape of his sentence, the ring
of the syllables, arouse the deepest emotion. A master of harmonic
undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in making
their music more fluid, more lyrical, more vapourous--many young French
poets pass through their Baudelarian green-sickness--but he alone knows
the secrets of moulding those metallic, free sonnets, which have the
resistance of bronze; and of the despairing music that flames from the
mouths of lost souls trembling on the wharves of hell. He is the supreme
master of irony and troubled voluptuousness.
Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved rather than sang; the plastic
arts spoke to his soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, his
emotions transformed themselves into ideas. Bourget classified him as
mystic, libertine, and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul, to
use the phrase of Pere Lacordaire. (Curiously enough, he actually
contemplated, in 1861, becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant seat
in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve dissuaded him from this folly. )
Recall Baudelaire's prayer: "Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me the grace to
produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that I am not the
last of men, that I am not inferior to those I contemn. " Individualist,
egoist, anarchist, his only thought was letters. Jules Laforgue thus
described Baudelaire: "Cat, Hindoo, Yankee, Episcopal, Alchemist. " Yes,
an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes he created. He was of Gothic
imagination, and could have said with Rolla: "Je suis venu trop tard
dans un monde trop vieux. " He had an unassuaged thirst for the absolute.
The human soul was his stage, he its interpreting orchestra.
In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by Poulet-Malassis, who
afterward went into bankruptcy--a warning to publishers with a taste for
fine literature. The titles contemplated were Limbes, or Lesbiennes.
Hippolyte Babou suggested the one we know. These poems were suppressed
on account of six, and poet and publisher summoned. As the municipal
government had made a particular ass of itself in the prosecution of
Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovary, the Baudelaire matter was
disposed of in haste. He was condemned to a fine of three hundred
francs, a fine which was never paid, as the objectionable poems were
removed. They were printed in the Belgian edition, and may be read in
the new volume, OEuvres. Posthumes.
Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, for he knew that his book
was dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge
from the trial with flying colours; therefore to be classed as one who
wrote objectionable literature was a shock. "Flaubert had the Empress
back of him," he complained; which was true; the Empress Eugenie, also
the Princess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put forth those
polished intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of which he had
taken a hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this
form with a new content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be found
in those miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject
and lowly, a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who
had discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one of his poems
he described a landscape of metal, of marble and water; a babel of
staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by the silence
of eternity. This depressing yet magical dream was utilized by Huysmans
in his A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the Prose Poems there is
nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude of
artificiality is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep fundamental
note of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the eternal diapason is
there even when least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than Poe. His
range of sympathy is wider. In this he transcends him as a poet, though
his subject-matter often issues from the very dregs of life. Brother to
pitiable wanderers, there are, nevertheless, no traces of cant, no
"Russian pity" a la Dostoievsky, no humanitarian or socialistic
rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist He hated the sentimental
sapping of altruism. His prose-poem, Crowds, with its "bath of
multitude," may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles Lamb we find
the idea: "Are there no solitudes out of caves and the desert? or
cannot the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully alone? "
His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhauser, as
significant an essay as Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. And
Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in Wagner's
career. Wagner sent a brief hearty letter of thanks to the critic, and
later made his acquaintance. To Wagner, Baudelaire introduced a young
Wagnerian, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. This Wagner letter is included in
the volume of Crepet; but there are no letters published from Baudelaire
to Franz Liszt, though they were friends. In Weimar I saw at the Liszt
Museum several from Baudelaire which should have been included in the
Letters. The poet understood Liszt and his reforms as he understood
Wagner. The German composer admired the French poet, and his Kundry, in
the sultry second act of Parsifal, has a Baudelairian hue, especially in
the temptation scene.
The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been steadily, rather, unsteadily,
going downhill; a desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He went
out only after dark, he haunted the exterior boulevards, associated
with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst, ate without
hunger, as he has said. A woeful decadence for this aristocrat of life
and letters. Most sorrowful of sinners, a morose delectation scourged
his nerves and extorted the darkest music from his lyre. He fled to
Brussels, there to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. He gave a few
lectures, and met Rops, Lemonnier, drank to forget, and forgot to work.
He abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A country, he cried, where the
trees are black, the flowers without odour, and where there is no
conversation! He, the brilliant causeur, the chief blaguer of a circle
in which young James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the role of a
listener--this most spiritual among artists, found himself a failure in
the Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind ourselves that
Baudelaire was the creator of many of the paradoxes attributed, not only
to Whistler, but to an entire school--if one may employ such a phrase.
The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his cutting enunciation, his
power of blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his love of the artificial,
have been copied by the aesthetic blades of our day. He it was who first
taunted Nature with being an imitator of art, with always being the
same. Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the quotidian eating and drinking!
And as pessimist, too, he led the mode. Baudelaire, like Flaubert,
grasped the murky torch of pessimism once held by Chateaubriand,
Benjamin Constant, and Senancour. Doubtless, all this stemmed from
Byronism. And now it is as stale as Byronism.
His health failed, and he lacked money enough to pay for doctor's
prescriptions; he even owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur, where
he was visiting the father-in-law of Felician Rops (March, 1866), he
suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels. His
mother, who lived at Honneur, in mourning for her husband, came to his
aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia set in. He
could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight of himself in
the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger. His friends
rallied, and they were among the most distinguished people in Paris, the
elite of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two playing Wagner on the
piano--which must have added a fresh nuance to death--and they brought
him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers and music to the last. He
could not bear the sight of his mother; she revived in him some painful
memories, but that passed, and he clamoured for her when she was absent.
If anyone mentioned the names of Wagner or Manet, he smiled. And with a
fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon
eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.
Barbey d'Aurevilly himself a Satanist and dandy (oh, those comical old
attitudes of literature), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du
Mal would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of
the cross. (Later he said the same of Huysmans. ) Baudelaire had the
alternative course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted
spiritual suicide for how many years? (He once tried actual suicide, but
the slight cut in his throat looked so ugly to him that he went no
farther. ) His soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and
evil. That at the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his
God should not be a subject for comment. He was an extraordinary poet
with a bad conscience, who lived miserably and was buried with honours.
Then it was that his worth was discovered (funeral orations over a
genius are a species of public staircase-wit). His reputation waxes with
the years. He is an exotic gem in the crown of French poetry. Of him
Swinburne has chanted Ave Atque Vale:
Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
* * * * *
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
THE DANCE OF DEATH.
Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
With all the careless and high-stepping grace,
And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.
Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?
Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,
Palls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod
With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.
The swarms that hum about her collar-bones
As the lascivious streams caress the stones,
Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,
Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes
Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays
Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,
Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebrae.
O charm of nothing decked in folly! they
Who laugh and name you a Caricature,
They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,
The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone
That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!
Come you to trouble with your potent sneer
The feast of Life! or are you driven here,
To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir
And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?
Or do you hope, when sing the violins,
And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,
To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,
And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?
Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!
Eternal alembic of antique distress!
Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides
The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.
And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,
Among us here, no lover to your mind;
Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?
The charms of horror please none but the brave.
Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir,
Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller
Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath,
The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.
For he who has not folded in his arms
A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,
Recks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,
When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.
O irresistible, with fleshless face,
Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:
"Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,
Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!
Withered Antinous, dandies with plump faces,
Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,
Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,
Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.
From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,
The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;
They do not see, within the opened sky,
The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.
In every clime and under every sun,
Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;
And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye
And mingles with your madness, irony! "
THE BEACONS.
RUBENS, oblivious garden of indolence,
Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,
Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,
As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move,
LEONARD DA VINCI, sombre and fathomless glass,
Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile,
Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass,
Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.
REMBRANDT, sad hospital that a murmuring fills,
Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,
Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils,
And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.
Strong MICHELANGELO, a vague far place
Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;
Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,
And tear their shroud with clenched hands void of ease.
The fighter's anger, the faun's impudence,
Thou makest of all these a lovely thing;
Proud heart, sick body, mind's magnificence:
PUGET, the convict's melancholy king.
WATTEAU, the carnival of illustrious hearts,
Fluttering like moths upon the wings of chance;
Bright lustres light the silk that flames and darts,
And pour down folly on the whirling dance.
GOYA, a nightmare full of things unknown;
The foetus witches broil on Sabbath night;
Old women at the mirror; children lone
Who tempt old demons with their limbs delight.
DELACROIX, lake of blood ill angels haunt,
Where ever-green, o'ershadowing woods arise;
Under the surly heaven strange fanfares chaunt
And pass, like one of Weber's strangled sighs.
And malediction, blasphemy and groan,
Ecstasies, cries, Te Deums, and tears of brine,
Are echoes through a thousand labyrinths flown;
For mortal hearts an opiate divine;
A shout cried by a thousand sentinels,
An order from a thousand bugles tossed,
A beacon o'er a thousand citadels,
A call to huntsmen in deep woodlands lost.
It is the mightiest witness that could rise
To prove our dignity, O Lord, to Thee;
This sob that rolls from age to age, and dies
Upon the verge of Thy Eternity!
THE SADNESS OF THE MOON.
The Moon more indolently dreams to-night
Than a fair woman on her couch at rest.
Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.
Upon her silken avalanche of down,
Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
And watches the white visions past her flown,
Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.
And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,
Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,
And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.
EXOTIC PERFUME.
When with closed eyes in autumn's eves of gold
I breathe the burning odours of your breast,
Before my eyes the hills of happy rest
Bathed in the sun's monotonous fires, unfold.
Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs
Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down.
Where men are upright, maids have never grown
Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows.
Led by that perfume to these lands of ease,
I see a port where many ships have flown
With sails outwearied of the wandering seas;
While the faint odours from green tamarisks blown,
Float to my soul and in my senses throng,
And mingle vaguely with the sailor's song.
BEAUTY. r
I am as lovely as a dream in stone,
And this my heart where each finds death in turn,
Inspires the poet with a love as lone
As clay eternal and as taciturn.
Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,
My throne is in the heaven's azure deep;
I hate all movements that disturb my pose,
I smile not ever, neither do I weep.
Before my monumental attitudes,
That breathe a soul into the plastic arts,
My poets pray in austere studious moods,
For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,
Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,
The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.
THE BALCONY.
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,
Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,
The charm of evenings by the gentle fire,
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!
The eves illumined by the burning coal,
The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings--
How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul!
Ah, and we said imperishable things,
Those eves illumined by the burning coal.
Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm,
And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood,
In bending o'er you, queen of every charm,
I thought I breathed the perfume in your blood.
The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm.
The film of night flowed round and over us,
And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet;
I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous,
And in my hands fraternal slept your feet--
Night, like a film, flowed round and over us.
I can recall those happy days forgot,
And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past.
Your languid beauties now would move me not
Did not your gentle heart and body cast
The old spell of those happy days forgot.
Can vows and perfumes, kisses infinite,
Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound;
As rise to heaven suns once again made bright
After being plunged in deep seas and profound?
Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!
THE SICK MUSE.
Poor Muse, alas, what ails thee, then, to-day?
Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,
Upon thy brow in alternation play,
Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn.
Have the green lemure and the goblin red,
Poured on thee love and terror from their urn?
Or with despotic hand the nightmare dread
Deep plunged thee in some fabulous Minturne?
Would that thy breast where so deep thoughts arise,
Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs;
Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by wave
In rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave,
When Phoebus shared his alternating reign
With mighty Pan, lord of the ripening grain.
THE VENAL MUSE.
Muse of my heart, lover of palaces,
When January comes with wind and sleet,
During the snowy eve's long wearinesses,
Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet?
Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders
In the moon-beams that through the window fly?
Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders,
Reap the far star-gold of the vaulted sky?
For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul,
Must swing a censer, wear a holy stole,
And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between.
Or, like a starving mountebank, expose
Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those
Who wait thy jeste to drive away thy spleen.
THE EVIL MONK.
The ancient cloisters on their lofty walls
Had holy Truth in painted frescoes shown,
And, seeing these, the pious in those halls
Felt their cold, lone austereness less alone.
At that time when Christ's seed flowered all around,
More than one monk, forgotten in his hour,
Taking for studio the burial-ground,
Glorified Death with simple faith and power.
And my soul is a sepulchre where I,
Ill cenobite, have spent eternity:
On the vile cloister walls no pictures rise.
O when may I cast off this weariness,
And make the pageant of my old distress
For these hands labour, pleasure for these eyes?
THE TEMPTATION.
The Demon, in my chamber high.
This morning came to visit me,
And, thinking he would find some fault,
He whispered: "I would know of thee
Among the many lovely things
That make the magic of her face,
Among the beauties, black and rose,
That make her body's charm and grace,
Which is most fair? " Thou didst reply
To the Abhorred, O soul of mine:
"No single beauty is the best
When she is all one flower divine.
When all things charm me I ignore
Which one alone brings most delight;
She shines before me like the dawn,
And she consoles me like the night.
The harmony is far too great,
That governs all her body fair,
For impotence to analyse
And say which note is sweetest there.
O mystic metamorphosis!
My senses into one sense flow--
Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
Her breath is music faint and low! "
THE IRREPARABLE.
Baudelaire the critic of aesthetics in whom we are interested. Yet I
cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of Scherer had been
transformed into affirmations, only justice would have been accorded
Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet, the most original of his century,
but also a critic of the first rank, one who welcomed Richard Wagner
when Paris hooted him and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, played
the role of the envious; one who fought for Edouard Manet, Leconte de
Lisle, Gustave Flaubert, Eugene Delacroix; fought with pen for the
modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, Daumier, Felicien Rops, Gavarni,
and Constantin Guys. He literally identified himself with De Quincey and
Poe, translating them so wonderfully well that some unpatriotic persons
like the French better than the originals. So much was Baudelaire
absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted that the translator
would meet the same fate as the American poet. A singular, vigorous
spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry with its "icy ecstasy" is profound
and harmonious, whose criticism is penetrated by a catholic quality, who
anticipated modern critics in his abhorrence of schools and
environments, preferring to isolate the man and uniquely study him. He
would have subscribed to Swinburne's generous pronouncement: "I have
never been able to see what should attract man to the profession of
criticism but the noble pleasure of praising. " The Frenchman has said
that it would be impossible for a critic to become a poet; and it is
impossible for a poet not to contain a critic.
Theophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition of Les
Fleurs du Mal is not only the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire
as man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark of Gautier's gifts
as a critical essayist. We learn therein how the young Charles, an
incorrigible dandy, came to visit Hotel Pimodan about 1844. In this
Hotel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His
fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by the painters,
poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day--that is, carefully selected
ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Merimee, and others whose verve or
genius gave them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this cave of
forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de Chagrin pictured the same sort
of scenes which were supposed to occur weekly at the Pimodan. Gautier
eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred artistic souls, where
the beautiful Jewess, Maryx, who had posed for Ary Scheffer's Mignon
and for Paul Delaroche's La Gloire, met the superb Madame Sabatier, the
only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original of that extraordinary
group of Clesinger's--the sculptor and son-in-law of George Sand--la
Femme au Serpent, a Salammbo a la mode in marble. Hasheesh was eaten, so
Gautier writes, by Boissard and Baudelaire. As for the creator of
Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust for such nonsense. He had to work
for his living at journalism, and he died in harness, an irreproachable
father, while the unhappy Baudelaire, the inheritor of an intense,
unstable temperament, soon devoured his patrimony of 75,000 francs, and
for the remaining years of his life was between the devil of his dusky
Jenny Duval and the deep sea of hopeless debt.
It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were no doubt much less wicked
than the participants would have us believe, that Baudelaire encountered
Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his portrait, and encouraged
the fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We have seen
an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray talent of about
the same order as Thackeray's, with a superadded note of the
"horrific"--that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics. Baudelaire
admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman praised the illustrations of
Guys, he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the commonplaces of a
painter's technique; also how to compose a palette--a rather meaningless
phrase nowadays. At least, he did not write of the arts without some
technical experience. Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and
when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 1846, 1855, and 1859,
the praise and blame they evoked were testimonies to the training and
knowledge of their author. A new spirit had been born.
The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor
spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are
the production of a humanist. Some would put them above Diderot's. Mr.
Saintsbury, after Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire among the
English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism observed
too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds, "to read a
criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by no means a
sure method of recognizing the picture afterward. " Now, word-painting
was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier,
with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh impossible feat of
competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of canvas and
marble. And, if he with his verbal imagination did not entirely succeed,
how could a less adept manipulator of the vocabulary? We do not agree
with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine too much when the imagination is
that of a poet. Baudelaire divined the work of the artist and set it
down scrupulously in a prose of exceeding rectitude. He did not paint
pictures in prose. He did not divagate. He did not overburden his pages
with technical terms. But the spirit of his subject he did disengage in
a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical schools were a cross for
him to bear, and he wore his prejudices lightly. Like a true critic, he
judged more by form than theme. There are no types; there is only life,
he asserted, and long before Jules Laforgue. He was ever art-for-art,
yet, having breadth of comprehension and a Heine-like capacity for
seeing both sides of his own nature with its idiosyncrasies, he could
write: "The puerile utopia of the school of art-for-art, in excluding
morality, and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. All
literature which refuses to advance fraternally between science and
philosophy is a homicidal and a suicidal literature. "
Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than of
music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of
democracy, of the democratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental
fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation
the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those
things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the Dresden
uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary etude. Brave
lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the region of the
ideal. Baudelaire's little attack of the equality-measles soon vanished.
He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly and injustice of
abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of paradox, he dedicated
a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but he would not have
contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that "in art the democrat
is always reactionary. In 1830 the democrats were against Victor Hugo
and Delacrois. " And Les Fleurs du Mal, that book of opals, blood, and
evil swamp-flowers, will never be savoured by the mob.
In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in
the Louvre he enjoyed the company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of
the poet's preferences. He was also attracted by El Greco--not an
unnatural admiration, considering the sombre extravagance of his own
genius. Of Goya he has written in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his
touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his Derves ruined by abuse of
drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination were more beautiful
than Nature herself. The country itself, he declared, was odious. Like
Whistler, whom he often met--see the Hommage a Delacrois by
Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler, Baudelaire, Manet,
Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacrois, Cordier, Duranty the critic,
and De Balleroy--he could not help showing his aversion to "foolish
sunsets. " In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain had entered too much
moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of poetry, criticism and
fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, is the literary progenitor
of Jean, Duc d'Esseintes, in Huysmans's _A Rebours_. Huysmans at first
modelled himself upon Baudelaire. His Le Drageoir aux Epices is a
continuation of Petits Poemes en Prose. And to Baudelaire's account must
be laid much artificial morbid writing. Despite his pursuit of
perfection in form, his influence has been too often baneful to
impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of Gallic Byronism, and
high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no extravagance, absurd or
terrible, that he did not commit, from etching a four-part fugue on ice
to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer. In his criticism alone was he the
sane logical Frenchman. And while he did not live to see the success of
the Impressionist group, he surely would have acclaimed their theory and
practice. Was he not an impressionist himself?
As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so Delacroix quite overflowed
his aesthetic consciousness. Read Volume II of his collected works,
_Curiosites Esthetiques_, which contains his Salons; also his essay, _De
l'Essence du Rire_ (worthy to be placed side by side with George
Meredith's essay on Comedy). Caricaturists, French and foreign, are
considered in two chapters at the close of the volume. Baudelaire was as
conscientious as Gautier. He trotted around miles of mediocre canvas,
saying an encouraging word to the less talented, boiling over with holy
indignation or indulging in glacial irony, before the rash usurpers
occupying the seats of the mighty, and pouncing on new genius with
promptitude. Upon Delacroix he lavished the largesse of his admiration.
He smiled at the platitudes of Horace Vernet, and only shook his head
over the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed William
Hausollier, now so little known. He praised Deveria, Chasseriau--who
waited years before he came into his own; his preferred landscapists
were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke of Ary Scheffer and
the "apes of sentiment"; while his discussions of Hogarth, Cruikshank,
Pinelli and Breughel proclaims his versatility of vision. In his essay
Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne he was the first among critics to recognize
the peculiar quality called "modernity," that naked vibration which
informs the novels of Goncourt, Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale,
and the pictures of Manet, Monet, Degas and Raffaelli with their
evocations of a new, nervous Paris. It is in his Volume III, entitled
L'Art Romantique, that so many things dear to the new century were then
subjects of furious quarrels. This book contains much just and brilliant
writing. It was easy for Nietzsche to praise Wagner in Germany in 1876,
but dangerous at Paris in 1861 to declare war on Wagner's adverse
critics. This Baudelaire did.
The relations of Baudelaire and Edouard Manet were exceedingly cordial.
In a letter to Theophile Thore, the art critic (Letters, p. 361), we
find Baudelaire defending his friend from the accusation that his
pictures were pastiches of Goya. He wrote: "Manet has never seen Goya,
never El Greco; he was never in the Pourtales Gallery. " Which may have
been true at the time, 1864, nevertheless Manet had visited Madrid and
spent much time studying Velasquez and abusing Spanish cookery.
(Consider, too, Goya's Balcony with Girls and Manet's famous Balcony. )
Raging at the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this same epistle:
"They accuse even me of imitating Edgar Poe. . . . Do you know why I so
patiently translated Poe? Because he resembled me. " The poet italicized
these words. With stupefaction, therefore, he admired the mysterious
coincidences of Manet's work with that of Goya and El Greco.
He took Manet seriously. He wrote to him in a paternal and severe tone.
Recall his reproof when urging the painter to exhibit his work. "You
complain about attacks, but are you the first to endure them? Have you
more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by
derision. And in order not to make you too proud I must tell you that
they are models, each in his way, and in a very rich world, while you
are only the first in the decrepitude of your art. " (Letters, p. 436. )
Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words if he were able to revisit
the glimpses of the Champs Elysees at the Autumn Salons? What would he
think of Cezanne? Odilon Redon he would understand, for he is the
transposer of Baudelairianism to terms of design and colour. And perhaps
the poet whose verse is saturated with tropical hues--he, when young,
sailed in southern seas--might appreciate the monstrous debauch of form
and colour in the Tahitian canvases of Paul Gauguin.
Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his
verse. He is par excellence the poet of aesthetics. To Daumier he
inscribed a poem; and to the sculptor Ernest Christophe, to Delacroix
(Sur Tasse en Prison), to Manet, to Guys (Reve Parisien), to an unknown
master (Une Martyre); and Watteau, a Watteau a rebours, is seen in Un
Voyage a Cythere; while in Les Phares this poet of the ideal, spleen
music, and perfume, shows his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Puget, Goya, Delacroix--"Delacroix, lac de sang
hante des mauvais anges. " And what is more exquisite than his quatrain
to Lola de Valence, a poetic inscription for the picture of Edouard
Manet, with its last line as vaporous, as subtle as Verlaine: "Le charme
inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir! " Heine called himself the last of the
Romantics. The first of the "Moderns" and the last of the Romantics was
the many-sided Charles Baudelaire.
III
He was born at Paris, April 9, 1821 (Flaubert's birth year), and not
April 21, as Gautier has it. His father was Joseph Francis Baudelaire,
or Baudelaire, who occupied a government position. A cultivated art
lover, his taste was apparent in the home he made for his second wife,
Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, an orphan and the daughter of a military
officer. There was a considerable difference in the years of this pair;
the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, at the birth of their
only child. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son,
Claude, who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paralysis, though a
steady man of business. That great modern neurosis, called Commerce, has
its mental wrecks, too, and no one pays attention; but when a poet falls
by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and other soul-hunters
seeking victims. After the death of Baudelaire's father, the widow,
within a year, married the handsome, ambitious Aupick, then chef de
bataillon, lieutenant-colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and
later general and ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and London.
Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but unlike most children of genius,
he was a scholar and won brilliant honours at school. His stepfather was
proud of him. From the Royal College of Lyons, Charles went to the Lycee
Louis-le-Grand, Paris, but was expelled in 1839, on various
discreditable charges. Troubles soon began at home. He was irascible,
vain, precocious, and given to dissipation. He quarreled with General
Aupick, and disdained his mother. But she was to blame, she has
confessed; she had quite forgotten the boy in the flush of her second
love. He could not forget, or forgive what he called her infidelity to
the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The good
Bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said that Charles was a
little crazy--second marriages usually bring woe in their train. "When a
mother has such a son, she doesn't re-marry," said the young poet
Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes Dufais. He wrote
in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or maniacs . . . all victims of
terrible passions"; which was one of his exaggerations. His grandfather
on the paternal side was a Champenois peasant, his mother's family
presumably Norman, but not much is known of her forbears. Charles
believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken. He
also believed that his instability of temperament--and he studied his
"case" as would a surgeon--was the result of his parents' disparity in
years.
After his return from the East, where he did not learn English as has
been said--his mother taught him as a boy to converse in and write the
language--he came into his little inheritance, about fifteen thousand
dollars. Two years later he was so heavily in debt that his family asked
for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had been swindled,
being young and green. How had he squandered his money? Not exactly on
opera-glasses, like Gerard de Nerval, but on clothes, pictures,
furniture, books. The remnant was set aside to pay his debts. Charles
would be both poet and dandy. He dressed expensively but soberly, in the
English fashion; his linen dazzling, the prevailing hue of his
habiliments black. In height he was medium, his eyes brown, searching,
luminous, the eye of a nyctalops, "eyes like ravens"; nostrils
palpitating, cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual jaw, strong and
square. His hair was black, curly, glossy, his forehead high, square and
white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is there what Catulle
Mendes nicknamed him: "His Excellence, Monseigneur Brummel! " Later he
was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de N. S. le Diable; or
the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the clean-shaven face of the mock
priest, the slow cold eyes and the sharp cunning sneer of the cynical
libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness
of temptation. " In the heyday of his blood he was perverse and
deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting the Byronic notion that
ennui could best be cured by dissipation; in sin Baudelaire found the
saddest of all consolations. Mendes laughs at the legend of Baudelaire's
violence, of his being given to explosive phrases. Despite Gautier's
stories about the Hotel Pimodan and its club of hasheesh-eaters, M.
Mendes denies that Baudelaire was a victim of the hemp. What the
majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of literary
workers is this prime fact: men who work hard, writing verse--and there
is no mental toil comparable to it--cannot drink, or indulge in opium,
without inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of "inspiration,"
spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden bolt from heaven, are
delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed
at his music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy forged his
thunderbolts by the sweat of his brow, that Manet toiled like a
labourer on the dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion
to poetic work, that Gautier was a hard-working journalist, are
disillusions for the sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged from
Jupiter's skull to the desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but Balsac
and Flaubert did not encourage this fancy. Work literally killed Poe, as
it killed Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert and Daudet. Maupassant went insane
because he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked
and worried. His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was
flawed--Sainte-Beuve told him that he had worn out his nerves--from the
start, he was detraque; but that his entire life was one huge debauch is
a nightmare of the moral police in some red cotton nightcap country.
His period of mental production was not brief nor barren. He was a
student. Du Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved by
the variety and quality of his published work. His range of sympathies
was large. His mistake, in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write so
well about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its real
name--which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was one of the elect, an
aristocrat, who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate air of
a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated voice, aroused unusual
interest and admiration. He was a humanist of distinction; he has left a
hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Baudelaire, like
Chopin, made more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity the
expressiveness of art.
Women played a commanding role in his life. They always do with any poet
worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging this
as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with Woman than the individual.
The legend of the beautiful creature he brought from the East resolves
itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne Duval. He met her in Paris,
after he had been in the East. She sang at a cafe concert in Paris. She
was more brown than black. She was not handsome, not intelligent, not
good; yet he idealized her, for she was the source of half his
inspiration. To her were addressed those marvellous evocations of the
Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious dawns on strange far-away seas
and "superb Byzant," domes that devils built. Baudelaire is the poet of
perfumes; he is also the patron saint of ennui. No one has so chanted
the praise of odours. His soul swims on perfume as do other souls on
music, he has sung.
As he grew older he seemed to hunt for more acrid
odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase the carving of
which transports us, but from which the head is quickly averted. Jeanne,
whom he never loved, no matter what may be said, was a sorceress. But
she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; he left her a dozen times
only to return. He was a capital draughtsman with a strong nervous line
and made many pen-and-ink drawings of her. They are not prepossessing.
In her rapid decline she was not allowed to want. Madame Aupick paid her
expenses in the hospital. A sordid history. She was a veritable flower
of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like music, would be colourless,
scentless, if it sounded no dissonances. Fancy art reduced to the
beatific and banal chord of C major!
He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier, a reigning beauty,
at whose salon artistic Paris assembled. She had been christened by
Gautier Madame la Presidente, and her sumptuous beauty was portrayed by
Ricard in his La Femme au Chien. She returned Baudelaire's love. They
soon parted. Again a riddle which the published letters hardly solve.
One letter, however, does show that Baudelaire had tried to be faithful,
and failed. He could not extort from his exhausted soul the sentiment;
but he put its music on paper. His most seductive lyrics were addressed
to Madame Sabatier: "A la tres chere, a la tres-belle," a hymn saturated
with love. Music, spleen, perfumes--"colour, sound, perfumes call to
each other as deep to deep; perfumes like the flesh of children, soft as
hautboys, green as the meadows"--criminals, outcasts, the charm of
childhood, the horrors of love, pride, and rebellion, Eastern
landscapes, cats, soothing and false; cats, the true companions of
lonely poets; haunted clocks, shivering dusks, and gloomier
dawns--Paris in a hundred phases--these and many other themes this
strange-souled poet, this "Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris has
celebrated in finely wrought verse and profound phrases. In a single
line he contrives atmosphere; the very shape of his sentence, the ring
of the syllables, arouse the deepest emotion. A master of harmonic
undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in making
their music more fluid, more lyrical, more vapourous--many young French
poets pass through their Baudelarian green-sickness--but he alone knows
the secrets of moulding those metallic, free sonnets, which have the
resistance of bronze; and of the despairing music that flames from the
mouths of lost souls trembling on the wharves of hell. He is the supreme
master of irony and troubled voluptuousness.
Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved rather than sang; the plastic
arts spoke to his soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, his
emotions transformed themselves into ideas. Bourget classified him as
mystic, libertine, and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul, to
use the phrase of Pere Lacordaire. (Curiously enough, he actually
contemplated, in 1861, becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant seat
in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve dissuaded him from this folly. )
Recall Baudelaire's prayer: "Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me the grace to
produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that I am not the
last of men, that I am not inferior to those I contemn. " Individualist,
egoist, anarchist, his only thought was letters. Jules Laforgue thus
described Baudelaire: "Cat, Hindoo, Yankee, Episcopal, Alchemist. " Yes,
an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes he created. He was of Gothic
imagination, and could have said with Rolla: "Je suis venu trop tard
dans un monde trop vieux. " He had an unassuaged thirst for the absolute.
The human soul was his stage, he its interpreting orchestra.
In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by Poulet-Malassis, who
afterward went into bankruptcy--a warning to publishers with a taste for
fine literature. The titles contemplated were Limbes, or Lesbiennes.
Hippolyte Babou suggested the one we know. These poems were suppressed
on account of six, and poet and publisher summoned. As the municipal
government had made a particular ass of itself in the prosecution of
Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovary, the Baudelaire matter was
disposed of in haste. He was condemned to a fine of three hundred
francs, a fine which was never paid, as the objectionable poems were
removed. They were printed in the Belgian edition, and may be read in
the new volume, OEuvres. Posthumes.
Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, for he knew that his book
was dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge
from the trial with flying colours; therefore to be classed as one who
wrote objectionable literature was a shock. "Flaubert had the Empress
back of him," he complained; which was true; the Empress Eugenie, also
the Princess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put forth those
polished intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of which he had
taken a hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this
form with a new content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be found
in those miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject
and lowly, a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who
had discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one of his poems
he described a landscape of metal, of marble and water; a babel of
staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by the silence
of eternity. This depressing yet magical dream was utilized by Huysmans
in his A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the Prose Poems there is
nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude of
artificiality is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep fundamental
note of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the eternal diapason is
there even when least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than Poe. His
range of sympathy is wider. In this he transcends him as a poet, though
his subject-matter often issues from the very dregs of life. Brother to
pitiable wanderers, there are, nevertheless, no traces of cant, no
"Russian pity" a la Dostoievsky, no humanitarian or socialistic
rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist He hated the sentimental
sapping of altruism. His prose-poem, Crowds, with its "bath of
multitude," may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles Lamb we find
the idea: "Are there no solitudes out of caves and the desert? or
cannot the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully alone? "
His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhauser, as
significant an essay as Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. And
Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in Wagner's
career. Wagner sent a brief hearty letter of thanks to the critic, and
later made his acquaintance. To Wagner, Baudelaire introduced a young
Wagnerian, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. This Wagner letter is included in
the volume of Crepet; but there are no letters published from Baudelaire
to Franz Liszt, though they were friends. In Weimar I saw at the Liszt
Museum several from Baudelaire which should have been included in the
Letters. The poet understood Liszt and his reforms as he understood
Wagner. The German composer admired the French poet, and his Kundry, in
the sultry second act of Parsifal, has a Baudelairian hue, especially in
the temptation scene.
The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been steadily, rather, unsteadily,
going downhill; a desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He went
out only after dark, he haunted the exterior boulevards, associated
with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst, ate without
hunger, as he has said. A woeful decadence for this aristocrat of life
and letters. Most sorrowful of sinners, a morose delectation scourged
his nerves and extorted the darkest music from his lyre. He fled to
Brussels, there to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. He gave a few
lectures, and met Rops, Lemonnier, drank to forget, and forgot to work.
He abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A country, he cried, where the
trees are black, the flowers without odour, and where there is no
conversation! He, the brilliant causeur, the chief blaguer of a circle
in which young James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the role of a
listener--this most spiritual among artists, found himself a failure in
the Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind ourselves that
Baudelaire was the creator of many of the paradoxes attributed, not only
to Whistler, but to an entire school--if one may employ such a phrase.
The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his cutting enunciation, his
power of blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his love of the artificial,
have been copied by the aesthetic blades of our day. He it was who first
taunted Nature with being an imitator of art, with always being the
same. Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the quotidian eating and drinking!
And as pessimist, too, he led the mode. Baudelaire, like Flaubert,
grasped the murky torch of pessimism once held by Chateaubriand,
Benjamin Constant, and Senancour. Doubtless, all this stemmed from
Byronism. And now it is as stale as Byronism.
His health failed, and he lacked money enough to pay for doctor's
prescriptions; he even owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur, where
he was visiting the father-in-law of Felician Rops (March, 1866), he
suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels. His
mother, who lived at Honneur, in mourning for her husband, came to his
aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia set in. He
could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight of himself in
the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger. His friends
rallied, and they were among the most distinguished people in Paris, the
elite of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two playing Wagner on the
piano--which must have added a fresh nuance to death--and they brought
him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers and music to the last. He
could not bear the sight of his mother; she revived in him some painful
memories, but that passed, and he clamoured for her when she was absent.
If anyone mentioned the names of Wagner or Manet, he smiled. And with a
fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon
eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.
Barbey d'Aurevilly himself a Satanist and dandy (oh, those comical old
attitudes of literature), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du
Mal would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of
the cross. (Later he said the same of Huysmans. ) Baudelaire had the
alternative course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted
spiritual suicide for how many years? (He once tried actual suicide, but
the slight cut in his throat looked so ugly to him that he went no
farther. ) His soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and
evil. That at the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his
God should not be a subject for comment. He was an extraordinary poet
with a bad conscience, who lived miserably and was buried with honours.
Then it was that his worth was discovered (funeral orations over a
genius are a species of public staircase-wit). His reputation waxes with
the years. He is an exotic gem in the crown of French poetry. Of him
Swinburne has chanted Ave Atque Vale:
Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
* * * * *
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
THE DANCE OF DEATH.
Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
With all the careless and high-stepping grace,
And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.
Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?
Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,
Palls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod
With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.
The swarms that hum about her collar-bones
As the lascivious streams caress the stones,
Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,
Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes
Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays
Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,
Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebrae.
O charm of nothing decked in folly! they
Who laugh and name you a Caricature,
They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,
The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone
That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!
Come you to trouble with your potent sneer
The feast of Life! or are you driven here,
To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir
And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?
Or do you hope, when sing the violins,
And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,
To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,
And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?
Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!
Eternal alembic of antique distress!
Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides
The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.
And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,
Among us here, no lover to your mind;
Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?
The charms of horror please none but the brave.
Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir,
Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller
Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath,
The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.
For he who has not folded in his arms
A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,
Recks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,
When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.
O irresistible, with fleshless face,
Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:
"Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,
Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!
Withered Antinous, dandies with plump faces,
Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,
Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,
Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.
From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,
The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;
They do not see, within the opened sky,
The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.
In every clime and under every sun,
Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;
And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye
And mingles with your madness, irony! "
THE BEACONS.
RUBENS, oblivious garden of indolence,
Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,
Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,
As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move,
LEONARD DA VINCI, sombre and fathomless glass,
Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile,
Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass,
Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.
REMBRANDT, sad hospital that a murmuring fills,
Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,
Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils,
And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.
Strong MICHELANGELO, a vague far place
Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;
Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,
And tear their shroud with clenched hands void of ease.
The fighter's anger, the faun's impudence,
Thou makest of all these a lovely thing;
Proud heart, sick body, mind's magnificence:
PUGET, the convict's melancholy king.
WATTEAU, the carnival of illustrious hearts,
Fluttering like moths upon the wings of chance;
Bright lustres light the silk that flames and darts,
And pour down folly on the whirling dance.
GOYA, a nightmare full of things unknown;
The foetus witches broil on Sabbath night;
Old women at the mirror; children lone
Who tempt old demons with their limbs delight.
DELACROIX, lake of blood ill angels haunt,
Where ever-green, o'ershadowing woods arise;
Under the surly heaven strange fanfares chaunt
And pass, like one of Weber's strangled sighs.
And malediction, blasphemy and groan,
Ecstasies, cries, Te Deums, and tears of brine,
Are echoes through a thousand labyrinths flown;
For mortal hearts an opiate divine;
A shout cried by a thousand sentinels,
An order from a thousand bugles tossed,
A beacon o'er a thousand citadels,
A call to huntsmen in deep woodlands lost.
It is the mightiest witness that could rise
To prove our dignity, O Lord, to Thee;
This sob that rolls from age to age, and dies
Upon the verge of Thy Eternity!
THE SADNESS OF THE MOON.
The Moon more indolently dreams to-night
Than a fair woman on her couch at rest.
Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.
Upon her silken avalanche of down,
Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
And watches the white visions past her flown,
Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.
And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,
Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,
And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.
EXOTIC PERFUME.
When with closed eyes in autumn's eves of gold
I breathe the burning odours of your breast,
Before my eyes the hills of happy rest
Bathed in the sun's monotonous fires, unfold.
Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs
Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down.
Where men are upright, maids have never grown
Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows.
Led by that perfume to these lands of ease,
I see a port where many ships have flown
With sails outwearied of the wandering seas;
While the faint odours from green tamarisks blown,
Float to my soul and in my senses throng,
And mingle vaguely with the sailor's song.
BEAUTY. r
I am as lovely as a dream in stone,
And this my heart where each finds death in turn,
Inspires the poet with a love as lone
As clay eternal and as taciturn.
Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,
My throne is in the heaven's azure deep;
I hate all movements that disturb my pose,
I smile not ever, neither do I weep.
Before my monumental attitudes,
That breathe a soul into the plastic arts,
My poets pray in austere studious moods,
For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,
Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,
The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.
THE BALCONY.
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,
Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,
The charm of evenings by the gentle fire,
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!
The eves illumined by the burning coal,
The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings--
How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul!
Ah, and we said imperishable things,
Those eves illumined by the burning coal.
Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm,
And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood,
In bending o'er you, queen of every charm,
I thought I breathed the perfume in your blood.
The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm.
The film of night flowed round and over us,
And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet;
I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous,
And in my hands fraternal slept your feet--
Night, like a film, flowed round and over us.
I can recall those happy days forgot,
And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past.
Your languid beauties now would move me not
Did not your gentle heart and body cast
The old spell of those happy days forgot.
Can vows and perfumes, kisses infinite,
Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound;
As rise to heaven suns once again made bright
After being plunged in deep seas and profound?
Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!
THE SICK MUSE.
Poor Muse, alas, what ails thee, then, to-day?
Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,
Upon thy brow in alternation play,
Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn.
Have the green lemure and the goblin red,
Poured on thee love and terror from their urn?
Or with despotic hand the nightmare dread
Deep plunged thee in some fabulous Minturne?
Would that thy breast where so deep thoughts arise,
Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs;
Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by wave
In rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave,
When Phoebus shared his alternating reign
With mighty Pan, lord of the ripening grain.
THE VENAL MUSE.
Muse of my heart, lover of palaces,
When January comes with wind and sleet,
During the snowy eve's long wearinesses,
Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet?
Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders
In the moon-beams that through the window fly?
Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders,
Reap the far star-gold of the vaulted sky?
For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul,
Must swing a censer, wear a holy stole,
And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between.
Or, like a starving mountebank, expose
Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those
Who wait thy jeste to drive away thy spleen.
THE EVIL MONK.
The ancient cloisters on their lofty walls
Had holy Truth in painted frescoes shown,
And, seeing these, the pious in those halls
Felt their cold, lone austereness less alone.
At that time when Christ's seed flowered all around,
More than one monk, forgotten in his hour,
Taking for studio the burial-ground,
Glorified Death with simple faith and power.
And my soul is a sepulchre where I,
Ill cenobite, have spent eternity:
On the vile cloister walls no pictures rise.
O when may I cast off this weariness,
And make the pageant of my old distress
For these hands labour, pleasure for these eyes?
THE TEMPTATION.
The Demon, in my chamber high.
This morning came to visit me,
And, thinking he would find some fault,
He whispered: "I would know of thee
Among the many lovely things
That make the magic of her face,
Among the beauties, black and rose,
That make her body's charm and grace,
Which is most fair? " Thou didst reply
To the Abhorred, O soul of mine:
"No single beauty is the best
When she is all one flower divine.
When all things charm me I ignore
Which one alone brings most delight;
She shines before me like the dawn,
And she consoles me like the night.
The harmony is far too great,
That governs all her body fair,
For impotence to analyse
And say which note is sweetest there.
O mystic metamorphosis!
My senses into one sense flow--
Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
Her breath is music faint and low! "
THE IRREPARABLE.
