Charles Baudelaire: A Study

Émile De Roy, 1844
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Émile de Roy, 1844. Frontispiece
When Baudelaire is great, when his genius is at its highest point of imaginative creation, of imaginative criticism, it is never when he works by implication—as the great men who are pure artists (for instance, Shakespeare) work by implication only—but always from his personal point of view being simply infallible and impeccable. The pure artist, it has been said, never asserts: and the instances are far from being numerous; Balzac asserts, and Balzac is always absolutely just in all his assertions: he whose analysis of modern Society— La Comédie Humaine —verges almost always on creation; and despite certain deficiencies in technique and in style, he remains the greatest of all novelists. As for Baudelaire, he rarely asserts; he more often suggests or divines—with that exquisite desire of perfect and just work that is always in him. With his keen vision he rarely misses the essential; with his subtle and sifted prose he rarely fails in characterizing the right man in the right way and the wrong man—the man who is not an artist—in forms of ironical condemnation. Shelley in his time and Blake in his time gave grave enough offence and perplexity; so did Baudelaire, so did Poe, so did Swinburne, so did Rossetti, so did Beardsley. All had their intervals of revolt—spiritual or unspiritual, according to the particular trend of their genius; some destroy mendacious idols, some change images into symbols; some are supposed to be obscurely original. All had to apprehend, as Browning declared in regard to his readers and critics in one of his Prefaces, charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh. And all these might have said as he said: I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since.
In our approach to the poetry, or to the prose, of any famous writer, with whom we are concerned, we must necessarily approach his personality; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him. As for Baudelaire, I must confess that, in spite of the fact that one might hate or love the man according to the judgment of the wise or of the unwise, I find him more lovable than hateful. That he failed in trying to love one woman is as certain as his disillusion after he had possessed her; that, in regard to Jeanne Duval, she was to him simply a silent instrument that, by touching all the living strings of it, he awakened to a music that is all his own; that whether this masterpiece of flesh meant more to him than certain other women who inspired him in different ways; whether he thirsted to drain her empty kiss or the empty kiss of Rachel, of Marguerite, of Gabrielle, of Judith, is a matter of but little significance. A man's life such as his is a man's own property and the property of no one else. And Baudelaire's conclusion as to any of these might be, perhaps, summed up in this stanza: