Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry
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Labor, progressive and accumulative force, bearing interest like capital, in faculties as in results.
Play, intermittent energy, even though guided by science, will be conquered, fruitful as it may be, by labor, slight as it may be, but sustained.
If a poet asked the state for the right to have a few bourgeois in his stable, there would be considerable surprise; while, if a bourgeois asked for roast poet, it would seem quite natural.
"Kitten, puss, pussy, my cat, my wolf, my little monkey, big monkey, big serpent, my little melancholy monkey." Such freaks of too often repeated terms, too frequent bestial appellations, reveal a satanic side in love. Have not the devils the forms of beasts? The Camel of Cazotte, camel, devil, and woman.
XVIII
A man went to a shooting gallery, accompanied by his wife. He selected a puppet, and said to his wife: "I imagine that's you." He closed his eyes and beheaded the puppet. Then he said, kissing his companion's hand: "Dear angel, how I thank you for my skill."
When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I shall have won solitude.
This book is not made for my wives, my daughters or my sisters. I have few of such things.
God is a scandal, a scandal that rebounds.
XIX
Do not scorn any one's sensibility. One's sensibility, that is one's genius.
By an ardent concubinage, one can imagine the joys of a young household.
The precocious taste for women. I used to confuse the odor of fur with the odor of woman. I remember… Finally, I loved my mother for her elegance. Thus I was a precocious dandy.
The Protestant countries lack two elements essential to the happiness of a well-bred man: gallantry and devotion.
The mingling of the grotesque and the tragic is pleasing to the mind, as discords to blasé ears.
What is intoxicating in bad taste, is the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing.
Germany expresses meditation by line, as England by perspective.
There is, in the birth of every sublime thought, a nervous shock that is felt in the cerebellum.
Spain puts into its religion the ferocity natural to love.
STYLE. – The eternal note, the eternal and cosmopolitan style. Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe.
Why democrats do not love cats is easy to determine. The cat is beautiful; it awakens ideas of luxury, of cleanliness, of voluptuousness, etc.
XX
A little labor, repeated three hundred and sixty-five times, yields three hundred and sixty-five times a little money, that is, an enormous sum. At the same time fame is won.
To create a pounced drawing is genius. I ought to create a pounced drawing.
My mother is fantastic; one must fear her and please her.
XXI
To give one's self over to Satan, what does that mean?
What more absurd than progress since man, as is proven by everyday fact, is always like and equal to man, that is to say, always in the savage state! What are the perils of the forest and the prairie beside the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether man ensnare his dupe on the boulevard, or pierce his prey in unknown forests, is he not eternal man, i.e., the most perfect beast of pray?
They say I am thirty years of age; but if I have lived three minutes in one… am I not ninety?
… Work, is it not the salt that preserves embalmed souls?
XXII
I think that the infinite and mysterious charm that rests in the contemplation of a ship, especially of a vessel in motion, springs, in the first place, from regularity and symmetry (which are of the primordial needs of the human mind, as much as complexity and harmony) – and, secondly, from the successive multiplication and generation of all the curves and imaginary figures cut in space by the real elements of the object.
The poetic idea which this movement in lines produces is the hypothesis of a vast, immense, complex but eurythmic being, of a creature full of genius, suffering and sighing all human sighs and all human ambitions.
Civilized races, that always speak so stupidly of savages and barbarians, soon, as d'Aurevilly says, you will no longer be good enough to be idolaters. Stoicism, religion that has but one sacrament: suicide!
Conceive a canvas for a lyric or fairy buffoonery, for a pantomime, and transplant it into a serious novel. Bathe the whole in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, – in the atmosphere of the great days. Let there be something soothing, – something even serene, in passion. Regions of pure poetry.
XXIII
What is not a priesthood nowadays? Youth itself is a priesthood – so youth tells us.
Man, i.e., every one, is so naturally depraved that he suffers less from the universal abasement than from the establishment of a sensible hierarchy.
XXIV
The world is coming to an end. The only reason for which it can continue is that it exists. How weak that reason is, compared to all that announce the opposite, particularly to this: What has the world henceforth to do beneath the sky? For, supposing that it continue to exist materially, would it be an existence worthy of the name and of the Historical Dictionary? I do not say that the world will be reduced to the expedients and the comic disorder of the South American Republics, that perhaps we shall return to the savage state, and that we shall go, across the grassy ruins of our civilization, seeking our pasture, gun in hand. No; for these adventures presuppose a remnant of vital energy, echo of the earliest ages. New example and new victims of the inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by that through which we thought to live. The mechanical will so have Americanized us, progress will so have atrophied all our spiritual side, that naught, in the sanguine, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the Utopians can be compared to the actual outcome. I ask every thinking man to show me what of life remains. Of religion, I believe it useless to speak and to seek the remnants, since to take the trouble to deny God is the only scandal in that field. Property virtually disappeared with the suppression of the right of the first-born; but the time will come when humanity, like an avenging ogre, will snatch their last morsel from those who think they are the legitimate heirs of the revolutions. Still, that will not be the supreme ill.
The human imagination can conceive, without too much trouble, republics or other community states, worthy of some glory, if directed by consecrated men, by definite aristocrats. But it is not particularly in political institutions that there will be manifest the universal ruin, or the universal progress; for the name matters little. It will be in the debasement of the heart. Need I say that the little of the political remaining will writhe painfully in the embrace of the general bestiality, and that governments will be forced, in order to maintain themselves and to create a phantom of order, to revert to means which will make our actual humanity shudder, although so hardened? Then, the son will flee from his family not at eighteen years, but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will flee, not in search of heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner in a tower, not to immortalize a garret by sublime thoughts, but to establish a trade, to amass wealth, and to compete with his infamous papa, founder and stockholder of a journal which will spread the light and which will cause the century to be looked upon as an abettor of superstition. Then, the wanderers, the outcasts, those who have had several lovers, and who were once called angels, in recognition of the heedlessness which shines, light of luck, in their existence logical as evil – then these, I say, will be no more than a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom that will condemn all, lacking money, all, even the faults of the senses! Then, that which will resemble virtue, what do I say? – all that is not ardor toward Plutus will be considered enormously ridiculous. Justice, if in that fortunate period justice can still exist, will interdict all citizens who cannot make a fortune. Your wife, O Bourgeois! your chaste partner, whose legitimacy is the poetry of your existence, thenceforth, introducing into legality an irreproachable infamy, zealous and loving guardian of your strongbox, will be no more than the ideal of the kept woman. Your daughter, with infantile hopes of marriage, will dream in her cradle of selling herself for a million, and you yourself, O Bourgeois, still less poet than you are to-day, you will see nothing amiss; you will regret naught. For there are things in men that strengthen and prosper as others weaken and decline; and, thanks to the progress of the times, you will have left of your entrails only the viscera! These times are perhaps quite near; who knows even that they have not come, and that the thickness of our skins is not the only obstacle that prevents us from appreciating the environment in which we breathe?
As for me, who sometimes feel in me the ridicule of a prophet, I know that I shall never find in myself the charity of a doctor. Lost in this vile world, jostled by the crowds, I am as a tired man who sees behind him, in the depths of the years, only disillusion and bitterness and ahead, only a storm that carries nothing new, neither knowledge nor grief. The evening that man Stole from fate a few hours of pleasure, cradled in his digestion, forgetful – as far as possible – of the past, content with the present and resigned to the future, intoxicated with his sangfroid and his dandyism, proud of being less base than those who passed, he said, watching the smoke of his cigar: "What does it matter to me where these consciences are going?"
I think I have achieved what mechanics call an extra. However, I shall retain these pages, – because I want to date my sadness.
MY HEART LAID BARE
I
Of the vaporization and the centralization of the ego. All lies in that.
Of a certain sensual joy in the society of extravagants.
(I plan to begin My Heart Laid Bare at any point, in any way, and to continue it from day to day, following the inspiration of the occasion and the moment, provided that the inspiration be vivid.)
II
The first comer, if he can entertain, has the right to speak of himself.
III
I understand that some people desert a cause to discover what they can experience in serving another.
It might be pleasant to bet alternately victim and executioner.
IV
Woman is the opposite of the dandy. Thus she must inspire horror. Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat, thirsty, and she wants to drink. She is proud, and she, wants to be…
True merit!
Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.
Also, she is always vulgar, that is, the opposite of the dandy.
In regard to the Legion of Honor. He who seeks the cross seems to say: "If I am not decorated for having done my duty, I shall not go ahead."
If a man has merit, what is the good in decorating him? If he has not, then he can be decorated, since that will give him a lustre.
To consent to be decorated, is to recognize that the state has the right to judge you, to adorn you, et cetera.
Furthermore, if not pride, Christian humility should defend the cross.
Calculation in favor of God. Nothing exists without an end. Hence my existence has an end. What end? I do not know. Hence it is not I that have marked it. Hence it is some one wiser than I. Hence I must pray to some one to enlighten me. That is the wisest part.
The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.
V
Analysis of counter-religions; example: sacred prostitution.
What is sacred prostitution? Nervous excitation. Pagan mysticism. Mysticism, link between paganism and Christianity. Paganism and Christianity are reciprocal proofs.
Revolution and the worship of Reason prove the concept of Sacrifice.
Superstition is the reservoir of all truths.
VI
There is in all change something at once agreeable and infamous, something that smacks of infidelity and of moving day. That is enough to explain the French Revolution.
VII
My intoxication in 1848. Of what sort was that intoxication? Desire of vengeance. Natural pleasure in demolishing. Literary drunkenness; memories of reading.
The 15th of May. Ever the desire of destruction. Legitimate desire, if all that is natural is legitimate.
The horrors of June. Madness of the people and madness of the bourgeoisie. Natural love of crime.
My fury at the coup d'état. How many gunshots sustained! Another Buonaparte! What a disgrace!
Still, all is quieted. Has not the President the right to invoke?
What Emperor Napoleon III is? What he is worth?
To find the explanation of his nature, and of his providentially.
VIII
To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.
1848 was amusing only because every one was building Utopias like castles in Spain.
1848 was charming only by the very excess of the ridiculous.
Robespierre is estimable only because he has made some fine phrases.
IX
The Revolution, by sacrifice, confirmed superstition.
X
Politique. I have no convictions, as the men of my age understand the term, because I have no ambition.
There is no basis in me for conviction.
There is a certain cowardice, or rather a certain softness, in honest men.
The brigands alone are convinced – of what? That they must succeed. Therefore, they succeed.
Why should I succeed, when I haven't even the desire to try?
Glorious empires can be founded on crime, and noble religions on imposture.
However, I have some convictions, in a higher sense, that cannot be understood by the men of my day.
Feeling of solitude, from my childhood. Despite my family, and in the midst of my comrades above all, – feeling of an eternally solitary destiny.
Withal, an intense desire for life and for pleasure.
Almost all our life is spent in idle curiosity. In revenge, there are things which ought to rouse human curiosity to the highest degree, and which, to judge by their commonplace activity, inspire it in no one!
Where are our dead friends? Why are we here? Do we come from somewhere? What is liberty? Can it harmonize with providential law? Is the number of souls finite or infinite? And the number of habitable worlds? etc., etc.
XI
Nations have great men only in spite of themselves. Hence the great man is the conqueror of all his nation.
The modern ridiculous religions: Molière, Béranger, Garibaldi.
XII
Belief in progress is a doctrine of the slothful, a doctrine of the Belgians. It is the individual who relies on his neighbors to tend to his affairs. There can be no progress (true, that is, moral) save in the individual and by the individual himself. But the world is composed of folks who can think only in common, in bands. Thus the Belgian societies. There are also folks who can amuse themselves only in droves. The true hero finds his pleasure alone.
Eternal superiority of the dandy. What is the dandy?
XIII
My opinions on the theatre. What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still to-day, is lustre, – a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline; complex, circular, symmetrical.
However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones; finally, I should like the female parts to be played by men.
After all, lustre has always seemed to me the principal actor, seen through the large or the small end of the glass.
XIV
One must work, if not through desire, at least in despair, since, as is well established, to work is less boring than to seek amusement.
XV
There are in every man, at every moment, two simultaneous postulations, one toward God, the other toward Satan.
The invocation of God, or spirituality, is a desire to rise; that of Satan, or bestiality, is a joy in descent. To the latter should be attributed love for women.
The joys which spring from these two loves conform to their two natures.
XVI
Intoxication of humanity; great picture to be made, in the sense of charity, in the sense of libertinage, in the literary or dramaturgic sense.
XVII
Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.
Capital punishment is the result of a mystic idea, totally misunderstood to-day. The death penalty has not as its object to preserve society, materially at least. Its object is the preservation (spiritually) of society and the guilty one. In order that the sacrifice be perfect, there must be assent and joy on the part of the victim. To give chloroform to one condemned to death would be an impiety, for it would be to wipe out the consciousness of his grandeur as victim and to destroy his chance of gaining paradise.
As to torture, it is born of the infamous side of the heart of man, athirst for voluptuousness. Cruelty and voluptuousness, identical sensations, like extreme heat and extreme cold.
XVIII
A dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a dandy talking to the people, save to scoff at them?
There is no reasonable, stable government save the aristocratic.
Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd.
Immense nausea of placards.
There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.
Other men are serfs or slaves, created for the stable, that is, to exercise what are called professions.
XIX
Observe that those who advocate the abolition of capital punishment are more or less interested in its abolishment. Often, they are executioners. The matter may be summarized thus: "I wish to be able to cut off your head, but you shall not touch mine."
Those who abolish souls (materialists) necessarily abolish hell; they are, beyond all doubt, interested.
At the least, they are men that are afraid to live again, slothful ones.
XX
Mme. de Metternich, although a princess, has forgotten to answer me, in regard to what I said of her and of Wagner. Manners of the Nineteenth Century.
XXII
The woman Sand is the Prudhomme of immorality. She has always been a moralist. Only formerly she practiced amorality. Also she has never been an artist. She has the famous fluent style, dear to the bourgeois.
She is stupid, she is heavy, she is a chatterbox. She has, in moral matters, the same depth of judgment and the same delicacy of feeling as innkeepers and kept women. What she has said of her mother; what she has said of poetry. Her love for the workingman.
George Sand is one of those old ingenues who do not wish to quit the boards.
See the preface to Mlle. La Quintinie, where she claims that true Christians do not believe in hell. Sand is for the God of good folks, the god of innkeepers and of domestic sharpers.
She has good reason to wish to wipe out hell.
XXIII
It must not be thought that the devil tempts only men of genius. He doubtless scorns imbeciles, but he does not disdain their assistance. Quite the contrary, he founds great hopes on them.
Take George Sand. She is especially, and above all things, a great blockhead; but she is possessed. It is the devil who has persuaded her to trust in her good heart and her good sense, so that she might persuade all other great blockheads to trust in their good heart and their good sense.
I cannot think of that stupid creature without a shudder of horror. If I were to meet her, I could not keep myself from hurling a basin of holy water at her.
XXIV
I am bored in France, especially as every one resembles Voltaire.
Emerson forgot Voltaire in his "Representative Men." He could have made a fine chapter entitled Voltaire or The Antipoet, the king of boobies, the prince of the shallow, the anti-artist, the preacher of innkeepers, the father who "lived in a shoe" of the editors of the century.
XXV
In the "Ears of the Earl of Chesterfield," Voltaire jokes at the expense of that immortal soul which resided, for nine months, in the midst of excrement and urine. Voltaire, like all the slothful, hates mystery.
(At least, he might have divined in that environment the malice or satire of Providence against love, and, in the process of generation, a sign of original sin. In fact, we can make love only with excretory organs.)
Unable to suppress love, the Church wished at least to disinfect it, and created marriage.
XXVI
Portrait of the literary riff-raff. Doctor Tavernus Crapulosus Pedantissimus. His portrait in the manner of Praxiteles. His pipe, his opinions, his Hegelianism, his filth, his ideas of art, his spleen, his jealousy. A fine picture of modern youth.
XXVII
Theology. What is the fall? If it is unity become duality, it is God who has fallen. In other words, is not creation the fall of God?
Dandyism. What is the superior man? It is not the specialist. It is the man of leisure and broad education. To be rich and to love labor.
XXVIII
Why does the man of parts prefer maidens to women of the world, though they are equally stupid? Find this out.
XXIX
There are women who are like the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. They are wanted no more, because they have been sullied by certain men. Just as I would not put on the breeches of a mangy fellow.
What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice.
XXX
Study of the great disease of horror of the home. Reasons for the disease.
Indignation at the universal fatuity of all classes, of all beings, of both sexes, of every age.
Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.
XXXI
Of love, of the predilection of the French for military metaphors. Here every metaphor wears a moustache.
Militant literature. – To man the breach. – To bear the standard aloft. – To maintain the standard high and firm. – To hurl oneself into the thick of the fight. – One of the veterans. All these fine phrases apply generally to the college scouts and to the do-nothings of the coffee-house.
XXXII
To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The littérateurs of the advance guard. This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated, Belgian minds, which can think only in society.
XXXIII
Desire of pleasure binds us to the present. Care for our health suspends us on the future.
He who attaches himself to pleasure, that is, to the present, is to me as one who, rolling down an incline, and trying to cling to the shrubs, uproots them and bears them away in his fall.
Before all to be a great man and a saint for one's self.
XXXV
In the end, before all history and before the French people, the great glory of Napoleon III will have been to prove that the first comer, by seizing the telegraph and the national press, can govern a great nation.