Charles Baudelaire, His Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An English critic of Baudelaire has said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us take, for example, Baudelaire's poem "Causerie."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hellenic thought, with its dangerous conclusions, was restated by Pater because "Les fleurs du Mal" had paved the way.

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

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

"To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits; for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what otherwise might pass unregarded by us. 'Philosophy is the microscope of thought' The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us." What is this most perfect piece of prose but an expansion of Baudelaire's poem "Correspondances"?

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

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

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

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

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

"We shall see him no more"; "This is the end of the man and his work" – remarks like these only faintly indicate what was said of Oscar Wilde when he was sent to prison. When Wilde was in prison in 1896 "Salomé" was produced by Lugne Poë at the Théâtre de Louvre in Paris. England was affronted and offended. When the play of "Salomé" was produced in England for the first time it was at a private performance at the New Stage Club. The critics did their best to howl it down. It was as though a ghost, a revenant, had appeared. Meanwhile the play had been produced in Berlin, and from that moment it held the European stage. It ran for a longer consecutive period in Germany than any play by any Englishman – not excepting Shakespeare. Its popularity extended to all countries where it was not prohibited. It was performed throughout Europe, Asia, and America. It was even played in Yiddish … that was the beginning. At the present moment the works of Oscar Wilde are being sold in enormous quantities and in many editions. You can buy "Intentions" or "Dorian Gray" for one shilling. The influence that Oscar Wilde is having upon a generation of readers which has risen since he died is incalculable. Hardly an article in the daily press would be written as it is written if it were not for the posthumous prosperity of the poet whose work has risen like the Phœnix from the ashes of his personal reputation.

It was Baudelaire who provided that attitude towards life which Wilde made his own. Baudelaire gave Wilde – or rather Wilde took from Baudelaire – some of the jewels which the latter had snatched from the classic diadem of Poe.

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

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