CORRESPONDENCE OF BAUDELAIRE
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
19th March, 1856.
Here, my dear patron, is a kind of literature which will not, perhaps, inspire you with as much enthusiasm as it does me, but which will most surely interest you. It is necessary—that is to say that I desire, that Edgar Poe, who is not very great in America, should become a great man in France. Knowing how brave you are and what a lover of novelty, I have boldly promised your support to Michel Lévy.
Can you write me a line telling me if you will do something in the "Athenæum" or elsewhere? Because, in that case, I would write to M. Lalanne not to entrust this to any one else—your pen having a peculiar authority of which I am in need.
You will see at the end of the Notice (which contradicts all the current opinions in the United States) that I announce new studies. I shall speak of the opinions of this singular man later, in the matter of sciences, philosophy, and literature.
I deliver my always troubled soul into your hands.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
Wednesday, 26th March, 1856.
You well knew that this scrap of good news would enchant me. Lalanne had been warned by Asselineau, and it would have been necessary for the book to have been given to another person if you had not been able to write the article. Lalanne has received a volume.
I can, with respect to the remainder of your letter, give you some details which will perhaps interest you.
There will be a second volume and a second preface. The first volume is written to draw the Public: "Juggling, hypotheses, false rumours," etc. "Ligeia" is the only important piece which is morally connected with the second volume.
The second volume is more markedly fantastic: "Hallucinations, mental maladies, pure grotesqueness, the supernatural," etc.
The second Preface will contain the analysis of the words that I shall not translate, and, above all, the statement of the scientific and literary opinions of the author. It is even necessary that I should write to M. de Humboldt on this subject to ask him his opinion on a little book which is dedicated to him; it is "Eureka."
The first preface, that you have seen and in which I have tried to comprise a lively protestation against Americanism, is almost complete from the biographical point of view. We shall pretend to wish to consider Poe only as a juggler, but I shall come back at the finish to the supernatural character of his poetry and his stories. He is only American in so far as he is a juggler. Beyond that, the thought is almost anti-American. Besides, he has made fun of his compatriots as much as he could.
Now, the piece to which you allude makes part of the second volume. It is a dialogue between two souls, after the destruction of the earth. There are three dialogues of this kind that I shall be happy to lend you at the end of the month, before delivering my second volume to the printer.
Now, I thank you with all my heart; but you are so kind that you run risks with me. After the Poe will come two volumes of mine, one of critical articles and the other of poems. Thus, I make my excuses to you beforehand; and, besides, I fear that when I shall no longer speak with the voice of a great poet, I shall be for you a brawling and disagreeable being.
Yours ever.
At the end of the second volume of Poe I shall put some specimens of poetry.
I am persuaded that a man so careful as yourself would not wish me to ask him to take note of the orthography of the name [Edgar Poe]. No "d," no diæresis, no accent.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
9th March, 1857.
My dear friend, you are too indulgent to have taken exception to the impertinent point of interrogation that I have put after the word "souvenir" on the copy of the "Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires," that I laid aside for you yesterday at the "Moniteur." If you can be pleased, I shall think it very natural: you have spoilt me. If you cannot, I shall still find it very natural.
This second volume is of a higher and more poetic nature than two-thirds of the first. The third volume (in process of publication in the "Moniteur") will be preceded by a third notice.
The tale of the end of the world is called "Conversation of Eiros with Charmion."
A new pull has just been made of the first volume, in which the principal faults are corrected. Michel knows that he must keep a copy for you. If I have not the time to bring it to you, I shall have it sent to you.
Your affectionate.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
Wednesday, 18th August, 1857.
Ah! dear friend, I have something very serious, something very awkward to ask you. I wished to write to you, and then I would rather tell you. For a fortnight my ideas on this subject have been changing; but my lawyer (Chaix d'Est-Ange fils) insists that I talk to you about it, and I should be very happy if you could grant me a little conversation of three minutes to-day wherever you like, at your house or elsewhere. I did not wish to call on you unexpectedly. It always seems to me, when I take my way towards the rue Montparnasse, that I am going to visit that wonderful wise man, seated in a golden tulip, whose voice speaks to intruders with the resounding echo of a trumpet.
This morning I am awaiting some copies of my brochure; I will send you one at the same time.
Your very affectionate.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
Tuesday, 18th May, 1858.
I think that I drop in upon you as inconveniently as possible, do I not? You are engaged to-day; but, by coming to see you after four o'clock I shall perhaps be able to find you. In any case, whether I deceive myself or not, if you are busy this evening with your affairs, put me to the door like a true friend.
Yours always.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
14th June, 1858.
DEAR FRIEND,
I have just read your work on "Fanny." Is there any need for me to tell you how charming it is and how surprising it is to see a mind at once so full of health, of herculean health, and at the same time most delicate, most subtle, most femininely fine! (On the subject of feminine fineness I wanted to obey you and to read the work of the stoic. In spite of the respect I ought to have for your authority, I decidedly do not wish that gallantry, chivalry, mysticism, heroism, in fact exuberance and excess, which are what is most charming even in honesty, should be suppressed.)
With you, it is necessary to be cynical; for you are too shrewd for deceit not to be dangerous. Ah well, this article has inspired me with terrible jealousy. So much has been said about Loëve-Weimars and of the service he has rendered to French literature! Shall I not find a champion who will say as much of me?
By some cajolery, most powerful friend, shall I obtain this from you? However, what I ask of you is not an injustice. Did you not offer it to me at first? Are not the "Adventures of Pym" an excellent pretext for a general sketch? You, who love to amuse yourself in all depths, will you not make an excursion into the depths of Edgar Poe? You guess that the request for this service is connected in my mind with the visit I must pay to M. Pelletier. When one has a little money and goes to dine with a former mistress one forgets everything. But there are days when the curses of all the fools mount to one's brain, and then one implores one's old friend, Sainte-Beuve.
Now, truly, of late I have been literally dragged in the mud, and (pity me, it is the first time that I have lacked dignity), I have had the weakness to reply.
I know how busy you are and how full of application for all your lessons, for all your work and duties, etc. But if, sometimes, a little strain were not put on friendliness, on kindness, where would the hero of friendliness be? And if one did not say too much good about brave men, how would they be consoled for the curses of those who only wish to say too much evil?
Finally, I will say to you, as usual, that all that you wish will be good.
Yours ever.
I like you more than I like your books.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
14th August, 1858.
Is it permitted to come and warm and fortify oneself a little by contact with you? You know what I think of men who are depressants and men who have a tonic influence. If, then, I unsettle you, you must blame your qualification, still more my weakness. I have need of you as of a douche.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
21st February, 1859.
My dear friend, I do not know if you take in the "Revue française." But, for fear that you should read it, I protest against a certain line (on the subject of "The Flowers of Evil"), page 171, in which the author—who, however, is very intelligent—is guilty of some injustice towards you.
Once, in a newspaper, I have been accused of ingratitude towards two chiefs of ancient romanticism to whom I owe all; it spoke, besides, with a judicial air, of this infamous trash.
This time, in reading this unfortunate line, I said to myself: "Mon Dieu! Sainte-Beuve, who knows my fidelity, but who knows that I am connected with the author, will perhaps believe that I have been capable of prompting this passage." It is exactly the contrary; I have quarrelled with Babou many a time in order to persuade him that you would always do everything you ought and could do.
A short time ago I was talking to Malassis of this great friendship, which does me honour and to which I owe so much good advice. The monster left me no peace until I gave him the long letter that you sent me at the time of my lawsuit, and which will serve, perhaps, as a plan for the making of a Preface. New "Flowers" are done, and passably out of the ordinary. Here, in repose, fluency has come back to me. There is one of them ("Danse macabre") which ought to have appeared on the 15th, in the "Revue contemporaine...."
I have not forgotten your Coleridge, but I have been a month without receiving any books, and to run through the 2,400 pages of Poe is some small labour.
Sincerely yours, and write to me if you have time.
Honfleur, Calvados (this address is sufficient).
What has become of the old rascal? (d'Aurevilly).
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
28th February, 1859.
My dear friend, I learn that you have asked Malassis to communicate to you what you wrote to me on the subject of the "Flowers." Malassis is a little astounded; furthermore, he is ill. There were two letters; one, a friendly, complimentary letter; the other, a scheme of the address that you gave to me on the eve of my lawsuit. As, one day, I was classifying papers with Malassis, he begged me to give him that, and when I told him I intended to make use of it (not by copying but by paraphrasing and developing it) he said to me: "All the more reason. You will always find it again at my house. If your printer had it, it could not get lost."
I even think I remember having said to Malassis: "If I had pleaded my cause myself and if I had known how to develop this thesis, that a lawyer could not understand, I should doubtless have been acquitted."
I understand absolutely nothing of this nonsense in the "Revue française." The manager, however, seems to be a very well-bred young man. Every one knows that you have rendered many services to men younger than yourself. How has M. M—— printed this without making representations to Babou and without finding out what prejudice he had towards me?
Malassis, on whom I had not counted at all, has also seen the passage, and his letter is still more severe than yours.
I am going to Paris on the 4th or 5th. It would be very kind of you to write a word to Mme. Duval, 22, rue Beautreillis, to let me know if and when you wish to see me. I shall stay at her house.
Yours sincerely.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
3rd or 4th March, 1859.
A thousand thanks for your excellent letter. It has reassured me, but I think you are too sensitive. If ever I attain as good a position as yours, I shall be a man of stone. I have just read a very funny article of the "rascal" on Chateaubriand and M. de Marcellus, his critic. He has not missed the over easy witticism: "Tu Marcellus eris!"
In replying to Babou (what was important to me was to assure myself that you did not believe me capable of a meanness) I think that you attribute too much importance to him. He gives me the impression of being one of those people who believe that the pen is made to play tricks with. Boys' tricks, school hoaxes.
Yours sincerely.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
1860.
DEAR FRIEND,
I am writing to you beforehand, for precaution, because I have so strong a presentiment that I shall not have the pleasure of finding you.
I wrote recently to M. Dalloz a letter couched as nearly as possible like the following:
"Render account of the 'Paradis artificiels'! I know Messrs. So-and-so, So-and-so, etc., on the 'Moniteur.'"
Reply of Dalloz:
"The book is worthy of Sainte-Beuve. (It is not I speaking.) Pay a visit to M. Sainte-Beuve about it."
I should not have dared to think so. Numerous reasons, of which I guess part, perhaps estrange you from it, and perhaps also the book does not please you.
However, I have more than ever need of being upheld, and I ought to have given you an account of my perplexity.
All that has been said about this essay has not any common sense, absolutely none.
P.S.—A few days ago, but then for the pure need of seeing you, as Antæus had need of the Earth, I went to the rue Montparnasse. On the way I passed a gingerbread shop, and the fixed idea took hold of me that you must like gingerbread. Note that nothing is better in wine at dessert; and I felt that I was going to drop in on you at dinner-time.
I sincerely hope that you will not have taken the piece of gingerbread, encrusted with angelica, for an idle joke, and that you will have eaten it in all simplicity.
If you share my taste, I recommend you, when you can get it, English gingerbread, very thick, very black, so close that it has neither holes nor pores, full of ginger and aniseed. It is cut in slices as thin as roast beef, and can be spread with butter or preserve. Yours always. Love me well.... I am passing through a great crisis.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
End of January, 1862.
Still another service that I owe you! When will this end? And how shall I thank you?
The article had escaped me. That explains to you the delay before beginning to write to you.
A few words, my dear friend, to paint for you the peculiar kind of pleasure that you have obtained for me. Many years ago I was very much wounded (but I said nothing) to hear myself spoken of as a churl, an impossible and crabbed man. Once, in a wicked journal, I read some lines about my repulsive ugliness, well designed to alienate all sympathy (it was hard for a man who has loved the perfume of woman so well). One day a woman said to me: "It is curious, you are very presentable; I thought that you were always drunk and that you smelt evilly." She spoke according to the tale.
Now, my friend, you have put all that right, and I am very grateful to you for it—I, who have always said that it was not sufficient to be wise, but that above all it was necessary to be agreeable.
As for what you call my Kamtschatka, if I often received encouragements as vigorous as that, I believe that I should have the strength to make an immense Siberia of it, but a warm and populous one. When I see your activity, your vitality, I am quite ashamed; happily, I have sudden leaps and crises in my character which replace, though very inadequately, the action of sustained willingness.
Must I, the incorrigible lover of the "Rayons jaunes" and of "Volupté," of Sainte-Beuve the poet and novelist, now compliment the journalist? How do you arrive at this certainty of pen which allows you to say everything and makes a game of every difficulty for you? This article is not a pamphlet, for it is a righteousness. One thing struck me, and that is that I found again there all your eloquence in conversation, with its good sense and its petulances.
Really, I should have liked to collaborate in it a little—forgive this pride—I should have been able to give you two or three enormities that you have omitted through ignorance. I will tell you all this in a good gossip.
Ah, and your Utopia! the great way of driving the "vague, so dear to great nobles," from elections! Your Utopia has given me a new pride. I, also, have done it, Utopia, reform;—is it an old revolutionary movement that drove me, also, long ago, to make schemes for a constitution? There is this great difference, that yours is quite viable and that perhaps the day is not far off when it will be adopted.
Poulet-Malassis is burning to make a pamphlet of your admirable article....
I ask you to promise to find some minutes to reply to the following:
Great trouble, the necessity of working, physical ills, have interfered with my proceedings.
At last I have fifteen examples of my principal books. My very restricted distribution list is made.
I think it is good policy to put up for the Lacordaire chair. There are no literary men there. It was first of all my own design, and, if I had not done so, it was not to disobey you and not to appear too eccentric. If you think my idea good, I will write a letter to M. Villemain before next Wednesday, in which I will briefly say that it seems to me that the choice of a candidate must not only be directed by the desire of success, but must also be a sympathetic homage to the memory of the deceased. Besides, Lacordaire is a romantic priest, and I love him. Perhaps I shall slur over the word "romantic" in the letter, but not without consulting you.
It is imperative that this terrible rhetorician, this so grave and unkindly man, should read my letter; this man who preaches while he talks, with the expression and the solemnity (but not with the good faith) of Mlle. Lenormand. I have seen this lady in the robe of a professor, set in her chair, like a Quasimodo, and she had over M. Villemain the advantage of a very sympathetic voice.
If, by chance, M. Villemain is dear to you, I at once take back all that I have just said; and, for love of you, I shall do my best to find him lovable.
However, I cannot help thinking that, as a papist, I am worth more than him ... even though I am a very-much-suspected Catholic.
I want, in spite of my tonsure and my white hairs, to speak to you as a little boy. My mother, who is very much bored, is continually asking me for novelties. I have sent her your article. I know what maternal pleasure she will draw from it. Thank you for me and for her.
Your very devoted.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
Monday evening, 3rd February, 1862.
My dear friend, I am trying hard to guess those hours which are your leisure hours, and I cannot succeed. I have not written a word, in accordance with your advice; but I am patiently continuing my visits, in order to let it be well understood that I want, with regard to the election in replacement of Father Lacordaire, to gather some votes from men of letters. I think that Jules Sandeau will speak to you about me; he has said to me very graciously: "You catch me too late, but I will go and find out if there is anything to be done for you."
Twice I have seen Alfred de Vigny, who has kept me three hours each time. He is an admirable and delightful man, but not fitted for action, and even dissuading from action. However, he has shown me the warmest sympathy.
You do not know that the month of January has been a month of fretfulness and neuralgia for me.... I say this in order to explain the interruption in my proceedings.
I have seen Lamartine, Patin, Viennet, Legouvé, de Vigny, Villemain (horror!), Sandeau. Really, I do not remember any others. I have not been able to find either Ponsard, or M. Saint-Marc Girardin, or de Sacy.
At last I have sent a few copies of some books to ten of those whose works I know. This week I shall see some of these gentlemen.
I have written an analysis, such as it is, of your excellent article (without signing it; but my conduct is infamous, is it not?) in the "Revue anecdotique" As for the article itself, I have sent it to M. de Vigny, who did not know it, and who showed me that he wished to read it.
As for the talkers of politics, among whom I shall not be able to find any pleasure, I shall go the round of them in a carriage. They shall have only my card and not my face.
This evening I have read your "Pontmartin." Pardon me for saying to you, "What lost talent!" In your prodigality there is at times something which scandalises me. It seems to me that I, after having said, "The most noble causes are sometimes upheld by bumpkins," I should have considered my work finished. But you have particular talents for suggestion and divination. Even towards the most culpable beasts you are delightfully polished. This Monsieur Pontmartin is a great hater of literature....
I have sent you a little parcel of sonnets. I will next send you several packets of reveries in prose, without counting a huge work on the "Painters of Morals" (crayon, water-colour, printing, engraving).
I do not ask you if you are well. That is sufficiently apparent.
I embrace you and shake you by the hands.—I leave your house.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
15th March, 1865.
Dear friend, I take advantage of the "Histoires grotesques et sérieuses" to remind myself of you. Sometimes, in the mornings, I talk about you with M. Muller, of Liège, by whose side I take luncheon, —and in the evening, after dinner, I am re-reading "Joseph Delorme" with Malassis. Decidedly, you are right; "Joseph Delorme" is the old woman's "Flowers of Evil." The comparison is glorious for me. Have the goodness not to find it offensive to yourself.
And the Preface of the "Vie de César?" Is it predestinarian enough?
Yours always.
BRUXELLES, RUE DE LA MONTAGNE, 28.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
Thursday, 30th March, 1865.
My dear friend, I thank you for your excellent letter; can you write any which are not excellent? When you call me "My dear son," you touch me and make me laugh at the same time. In spite of my many white hairs, which make me look (to the stranger) like an academician, I have great need of some one who loves me enough to call me his "son"; but I cannot help thinking of that burgrave of 120 years of age who, speaking to a burgrave of eighty, said to him: "Young man, be silent!" (In parentheses—and let this be between us—if I wrote a tragedy I should be afraid of letting fly some shafts of this energy and of hitting another target than that at which I had aimed.)
Only, I observe that in your letter there is no allusion to the copy of "Histoires grotesques et sérieuses" that I asked Michel Lévy to send you. I swear to you, besides, that I have no intention whatever of getting the least advertisement for this book out of you. My only aim was, knowing as you well know how to distribute your time, to provide you with an occasion for enjoying once more an amazing subtlety of logic and sensations. There are people who will find that the fifth volume is inferior to the preceding ones; but that is of no consequence to me.
We are not as bored as you think, Malassis and I. We have learnt to go without everything, in a country where there is nothing, and we have understood that certain pleasures (those of conversation, for example) grow in proportion as certain needs diminish.
On the subject of Malassis, I will tell you that I marvel at his courage, at his activity, and his incorrigible gaiety. He has arrived at a very surprising erudition in point of books and prints. Everything amuses him and everything teaches him. One of our chief amusements is when he pretends to play the atheist and when I try to play the Jesuit. You know that I can become religious by contradiction (above all here) so that, to make me impious, it would be sufficient to put me in contact with a slovenly curé (slovenly of body and soul). As for the publication of some humorous books which it has pleased him to amend with the same piety that he would have put at the service of Bossuet or Loyola, even I have drawn from them a little, little unexpected gain: it is a clearer understanding of the French Revolution. When people amuse themselves in a certain way, it is a good diagnosis of revolution.
Alexander Dumas has just left us. This fine man has come to show himself with his ordinary candour. In flocking round him to get a shake of the hand, the Belgians made fun of him.... That is unworthy. A man can be worthy of respect for his vitality. Vitality of the negro, it is true. But I think that many others, besides myself, lovers of the serious, have been carried away by "La Dame de Montsoreau" and by "Balsamo."
As I am very impatient to return to France, I have written to J. L. to commission him with my small affairs. I would like to collect, in three or four volumes, the best of my articles on the "Stimulants," the "Painters," and the "Poets," adding thereto a series of "Observations on Belgium." If, in one of your rare strolls, you go along the boulevard de Gand, stir up his good feeling a little and exaggerate what you think of me.
I must own that three important fragments are lacking, one on Didactic Painting (Cornélius, Kaulbach, Chenavard, Alfred Réthel), another, "Biography of the Flowers of Evil," and then a last: "Chateaubriand and his Family." You know that my passion for this old dandy is incorrigible. To sum up, little work; ten days perhaps. I am rich in notes.
Pardon me if I intrude in a delicate question; my excuse is my desire to see you content (supposing that certain things would content you) and to see every one do you justice. I hear many people saying, "What! Sainte-Beuve is not yet a senator?" Many years ago I said to E. Delacroix, to whom I could speak my mind, that many young men preferred to see him remaining in the state of an outcast and rebel. (I alluded to his stubbornness in presenting himself at the Institute.) He replied: "My dear sir, if my right arm was struck by paralysis, my capacity as member of the Institute would give me the right of teaching, and if I always keep well the Institute can serve to pay my coffee and cigars. In two words, I think that, with regard to you, it resolves itself into a certain accusation of ingratitude against the government of Napoleon, in many other minds besides mine." You forgive me, do you not? for violating the limits of discretion; you know how much I love you; and then I chatter like some one who rarely has an opportunity for talking.
I have just read Émile Ollivier's long discourse. It is very extraordinary. He speaks, it seems, with the authority of a man who has a great secret in his pocket.
Have you read Janin's abominable article against melancholy and mocking poets? And Viennet, quoted amongst the great poets of France! And a fortnight after, an article in favour of Cicero! Do they take Cicero for an Orleanist or an academician? M. de Sacy says: "Cicero is our Cæsar, ours!" Oh no, he is not, is he?
Your very affectionate.
Without any transition, I will tell you that I have just found an admirable melancholy ode by Shelley, composed on the shores of the Gulf of Naples, and which ends with these words:
"I know that I am one of those whom men do not love; but I am one of those whom they remember." Very good! this is poetry!
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
Thursday 4th May, 1865.
MY DEAR SAINTE-BEUVE,—As I take up a pen to write you some words of congratulation on your nomination, I find a letter that I wrote you on March 31st which has not yet gone, probably because of stupidity on my part or on the part of the hotel people.
I have read it again. I find it boyish, childish. But I send it to you just the same. If it makes you laugh, I shall not say "So much the worse," but "So much the better." I am not at all afraid, knowing your indulgence, to strip myself before you.
To the passage which treats of J. L. I shall add that I have finished the fragments in question (except the book on Belgium, which I have not the courage to finish here) and that, obliged to go to Honfleur to seek all the other pieces composing the books announced to L..., I shall doubtless go on to Paris on the 15th, in order to torment him a little. If, by chance, you see him, you can tell him.
As for Malassis, his terrible affair happens on the 12th, He thinks he is sure to be condemned to five years. The serious thing is that this closes France to him for five years. That this momentarily cuts off supplies, I do not think so great an evil. He will be constrained to do other things. It is more to count on the universal mind than to brave compulsory public decency. As for me, who am not a prude, I have never possessed one of these silly books, even printed in beautiful characters and with beautiful illustrations.
Alas! the "Poems in Prose" to which you have again sent a recent encouragement, are much delayed. I am always giving myself difficult work. To make a hundred laborious trifles which demand unfailing good-humour (good-humour necessary even to treat of sad subjects), a strange stimulant which needs sights, crowds, music, even street-lamps, that is what I wanted to do! I am only at sixty and I can go no further. I need this famous "bath of the multitude" of which the error has justly shocked you.
M. has come here. I have read your article. I have admired your suppleness and your aptitude to enter into the soul of all the talents. But to this talent there is something lacking which I cannot define. M. has gone to Anvers, where there are magnificent things—above all, examples of this monstrous, Jesuitical style which pleases me so much, and which I hardly know except from the chapel of the college at Lyons, which is made with different coloured marbles. Anvers has a museum of a very special kind, full of unexpected things, even for those who can put the Flemish school in its true place. Finally, this town has the grand, solemn air of an old capital, accentuated by a great river. I believe that this fine fellow has seen nothing of all this. He has only seen a fat fry that he has gone from the other side of the Escaut to eat. He is, nevertheless, a charming man.
Decidedly, I congratulate you with all my heart. You are now the equal (officially) of many mediocre people. That matters little. You wished it, did you not? need, perhaps? You are content, then I am happy.
Yours always.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
11th July, 1865.
Very dear friend, I could not cross Paris without coming to shake you by the hand. Very soon, probably in a month.
I saw J. L... three days ago, when I was making for Honfleur. L. pretended that he was going to undertake some important business for me with MM. G.... If you could intervene in my favour with one or two authoritative words, you would make me happy. You do not wish my awkward compliments on the subject of the Senate, do you?
Your very devoted friend.
I start again for the infernal regions to-morrow evening. Till then, I am at the Hôtel du chemin de fer du Nord. Place de Nord.
BRUXELLES,
Tuesday, 2nd January, 1866.
MY GOOD FRIEND,
I have just seen that, for the first time in your life, you have delivered your physical person to the public. I allude to a portrait of you published by "L'Illustration." It really is very like you! The familiar, mocking, and rather concentrated expression, and the little calotte itself is not hidden. Shall I tell you I am so bored that this simple image has done me good? The phrase has an impertinent air. It means simply that, in the loneliness in which some old Paris friends have left me (J. L. in particular), your image has been enough to divert me from my weariness. What would I not give to go, in five minutes, to the rue Mont-Parnasse, to talk with you for an hour on your articles on Proudhon; with you who know how to listen even to men younger than yourself!
Believe me, it is not that I find the reaction in his favour illegitimate. I have read him a good deal and known him a little. Pen in hand, he was a bon bougre; but he was not, and would never have been, even on paper, a dandy. For that I shall never pardon him. And it is that that I shall express, were I to excite the ill-humour of all the great beasts, right-thinking, of the "Universe."
Of your work I say nothing to you. More than ever you have the air of a confessor and accoucheur of souls. They said the same thing of Socrates, I think; but Messrs. Baillarger and Lélut have declared, on their conscience, that he was mad.
This is the commencement of a year that will doubtless be as boring, as stupid, as criminal as all the preceding ones. What good can I wish you? You are virtuous and lovable, and (extraordinary thing!) they are beginning to do you justice!...
I chatter far too much, like a nervous man who is tired. Do not reply to me if you have not five minutes of leisure.
Your very affectionate.
Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
15th January, 1866.
My dear friend, I do not know how to thank you enough for your good letters. It is really all the kinder of you because I know you are very busy. If I am sometimes long in replying it is on the score of health, which prevents me and even sends me to bed for many days.
I shall follow your advice: I shall go to Paris and I shall see the G...s myself. Then, perhaps, I shall commit the indiscretion of asking you to give me a helping hand. But when? For six weeks I have been immersed in a chemist's shop. If it should be necessary to give up beer, I do not ask anything better. Tea and coffee, that is more serious; but will pass. Wine? the devil! it is cruel. But here is a still harder creature who says I must neither read nor study. What a strange medicine is that which prohibits the principal function! Another tells me for all consolation that I am hysterical. Do you admire, like me, the elastic usage of these fine words, well chosen to cloak our ignorance of everything?
I have tried to plunge again into the "Spleen de Paris" ["Poems in Prose">[, for that was not finished. Finally, I hope to be able to show, one of these days, a new Joseph Delorme, grappling with his rhapsodic thought at each incident in his stroll and drawing from each object a disagreeable moral. But how difficult it is to make nonsense when one wishes to express it in a manner at the same time impressive and light!
Joseph Delorme has arrived there quite naturally. I have taken up the reading of your poems again ab ovo. I saw with pleasure that at each turn of the page I recognised verses which are old friends. It appears that, when I was a boy, I had not such very bad taste. (The same thing happened to me in December with Lucain. "Pharsale," always glittering, melancholy, lacerating, stoical, has consoled my neuralgia. And this pleasure has led me to think that in reality we change very little. That is to say, that there is something invariable in us.)
Since you own that it does not displease you to hear your works spoken of, I am much tempted to write you thirty pages of confidences on this subject; but I think I should do better to write them first in good French for myself, and then to send them to a paper, if there still exists a journal in which one can talk poetry.
However, here are some suggestions of the book which came to me by chance.
I have understood, much better than heretofore, the "Consolations" and the "Pensées d'août."
I have noted as more brilliant the following pieces: "Sonnet à Mad. G...," page 225.
Then you knew Mme. Grimblot, that tall and elegant Russian for whom the word "désinvolture" was made and who had the hoarse, or rather the deep and sympathetic voice of some Parisian comediennes? I have often had the pleasure of hearing Mme. de Mirbel lecture her and it was very comical. (After all, perhaps I am deceiving myself; perhaps it is another Mme. G.... These collections of poetry are not only of poetry and psychology, but are also annals.) "Tu te révoltes" ... "Dans ce cabriolet" ... "En revenant du Convoi" ... "La voilà."...
Page 235, I was a little shocked to see you desiring the approbation of MM. Thiers, Berryer, Thierry, Villemain. Do these gentlemen really feel the thunderclap or the enchantment of an object of art? And are you then very much afraid of not being appreciated to have accumulated so many justificatory documents? To admire you, do I need the permission of M. de Béranger?
Good Heavens! I nearly forgot the "Joueur d'orgue," page 242. I have grasped much better than formerly the object and the art of narratives such as "Doudun," "Marèze," "Ramon," "M. Jean," etc. The word "analytical energy" applies to you much more than to André Chénier.
There is still one piece that I find marvellous: it is the account of a watch-night, by the side of an unknown corpse, addressed to Victor Hugo at the time of the birth of one of his sons.
What I call the decoration (landscape or furniture) is always perfect.
In certain places of "Joseph Delorme" I find a little too much of lutes, lyres, harps, and Jehovahs. This is a blemish in the Parisian poems. Besides, you have come to destroy all that.
Indeed, pardon me! I ramble on! I should never have dared to talk to you so long about it.
I have found the pieces that I know by heart again. (Why should one reread, with pleasure, in printed characters, that which memory could recite?)
"Dans l'île de Saint-Louis" (Consolations).
"Le Creux de la Vallée," p. 113. Here is much of Delorme!
And "Rose" (Charming), p. 127.
"Stances de Kirke White" p. 139.
"La Plaine" (beautiful October landscape), p. 138.
Heavens! I must stop. I seem to pay you compliments, and I have no right. It is impertinent.
Baudelaire to Flaubert
Tuesday, 25th August, 1857.
Dear friend, I wrote you a hasty little note before five o'clock solely to prove to you my repentance at not having replied to your affectionate sentiments. But if you knew in what an abyss of puerile occupations I have been plunged! And the article on "Madame Bovary" is again deferred for some days! What an interruption in life is a ridiculous adventure!
The comedy is played on Thursday; it has lasted a long time.
Finally, three hundred francs fine, two hundred francs for the editors, suppression of numbers 20, 30, 39, 80, 81 and 87. I will write to you at length to-night.
Yours always, as you know.
Baudelaire to Flaubert
26th June, 1860.
MY DEAR FLAUBERT, I thank you very much for your excellent letter. I was struck by your observation, and, having fallen very severely in the memory of my dreams, I perceived that, all the time, I was beset by the impossibility of rendering an account of certain actions or sudden thoughts of man, without the hypothesis of the intervention of an evil force outside himself. Here is a great confession for which the whole confederated nineteenth century shall not make me blush. Mark well that I do not renounce the pleasure of changing my opinion or of contradicting myself.
One of these days, if you permit it, in going to Honfleur I shall stop at Rouen; but, as I presume that you are like me and that you hate surprises, I shall warn you some time beforehand.
You tell me that I work well. Is it a cruel mockery? Many people, not counting myself, think that I do not do anything very great.
To work: that is to work without ceasing; that is to have no more feeling, no more dreaming; and it is to be pure volition always in action. I shall perhaps attain to it.
Always your very devoted friend.
I have always dreamed of reading (in its entirety) the "Tentation" and another strange book of which you have published no fragment (Novembre). And how goes Carthage?
Baudelaire to Flaubert
End of January, 1862.
MY DEAR FLAUBERT, I have committed an act of desperation, a madness, that I am changing into an act of wisdom by my persistence. If I had time enough (it would take very long) I would amuse you greatly by recounting my academical visits to you.
I am told that you are closely connected with Sandeau (who said, some time ago, to a friend of mine: "Oh, does M. Baudelaire write prose?"). I should be very much obliged if you would write to him what you think of me. I shall go and see him and will explain the meaning of this candidature which has surprised some of these gentlemen so much.
For a very long time I have wished to send you a brochure on Wagner, beyond which I do not know what to send. But, what is very absurd for a candidate, I have not one of my books with me at home.
On Monday last, in the "Constitutionnel" Sainte-Beuve wrote a masterly article, a pamphlet, enough to make one die with laughing, on the subject of candidates.
Always yours devotedly.
Baudelaire to Flaubert
PARIS,
31st January, 1862.
MY DEAR FLAUBERT,
You are a true warrior. You deserve to be in the Sacred Legions. You have the blind faith of friendship, which implies the true statesman (sic).
But, good recluse, you have not read Sainte-Beuve's famous article on the Academy and the candidateships. This has been the talk for a week, and of necessity it has re-echoed violently in the Academy.
Maxime du Camp told me that I was disgraced, but I am persisting in paying my visits, although certain academicians have declared (can it be really true?) that they would not even receive me at their houses. I have committed a rash action of which I do not repent. Even if I should not obtain a single vote, I shall not repent of it. An election takes place on February 6th, but it is from the last one (Lacordaire, February 20th) that I shall try to snatch two or three votes. I think of myself alone (at least if it comes to a reasonable candidateship) in front of the ridiculous little Prince du Broglie, son of the duke, living academician. These people will end by electing their concierges, and those concierges are Orleanists.
Doubtless, we shall see each other soon. I dream always of solitude, and if I go away before your return I will pay you a visit for some hours down there.
How is it that you have not guessed that Baudelaire would rather be Auguste Barbier, Théophile Gautier, Banville, Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle—that is to say, pure literature? That was understood immediately by a few friends, and has gained me some sympathy.
Thank you and yours always.
Have you noticed that to write with a steel pen is like walking on unsteady stones with sabots?
Baudelaire to Flaubert
PARIS,
3rd February, 1862.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
M. Sandeau was charming, his wife was charming, and I really believe that I was as charming as they were, since we all held a concert in your honour, so harmonious that it was like a veritable trio performed by consummate artists. As for my affairs, Sandeau reproached me for taking him unawares. I ought to have seen him sooner. However, he will speak for me to some of his friends at the Academy, "And perhaps— perhaps," said he, "I shall be able to snatch some Protestant votes in the ballot for the Lacordaire chair." It is everything I desire.
Seriously, Mme. Sandeau's enthusiasm is great, and in her you have an advocate, a more than zealous panegyrist. That greatly excited my rivalry, and I succeeded in finding some reasons for eulogy that she had forgotten.
Here is Sandeau's letter. Here is a little paper which will perhaps interest you.
Yours always. Hope to see you soon.
Mignon aspirant au Ciel.
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."
"Vous êtes un beau ciel d'automne, clair et rose!
Mais la tristesse en moi monte comme la mer,
Et laisse, en refluant, sur ma lèvre morose
Le souvenir cuisant de son limon amer.
"—Ta main se glisse en vain sur mon sein qui se pâme;
Ce qu'elle cherche, amie, est un lieu saccagé
Par la griffe et la dent féroce de la femme.
Ne cherchez plus mon cœur; les bêtes l'ont mangé.
"Mon cœur est un palais flétri par la cohue;
On s'y soûle, on s'y tue, on s'y prend aux cheveux!
—Un parfum nage autour de votre gorge nue!...
"O Beauté, dur fléau des âmes, tu le veux!
Avec tes yeux de feu, brillants comme des fêtes,
Calcine ces lambeaux qu'ont épargnés les bêtes!"
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."
"You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and, ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
"In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
By woman's tooth and talon! ah; no more
Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.
"It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay—
A perfume swims about your naked breast!
"Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
Bum up these tatters that the beasts have spared!"
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?
"Me, most forsaken of all souls that fell;
Me, satiated with things insatiable;
Me, for whose sake the extreme hell makes mirth,
Yea, laughter kindles at the heart of hell.
"Alas thy beauty! for thy mouth's sweet sake
My soul is bitter to me, my limbs quake
As water, as the flesh of men that weep,
As their heart's vein whose heart goes nigh to break.
"Ah God, that sleep with flower-sweet finger-tips
Would crush the fruit of death upon my lips;
Ah God, that death would tread the grapes of sleep
And wring their juice upon me as it drips.
"There is no change of cheer for many days,
But change of chimes high up in the air, that sways
Rung by the running fingers of the wind;
And singing sorrows heard on hidden ways."
"I dare not always touch her, lest the kiss
Leave my lips charred. Yea, Lord, a little bliss,
Brief, bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin;
Natheless thou knowest how sweet a thing it is."
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"?
"La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
"Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent,
"Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
—Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
"Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens."
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
"'Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
Sois belle! et sois triste!'
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."
Thus Wilde in "Intentions." It is not an acknowledgment of what he himself owed to Baudelaire, but it is a perfectly phrased, if veiled, recognition of his debt.
The cadences of the "Madrigal Triste" are heard over and over again in the poems of Oscar Wilde. We find them in "True Knowledge," in the "New Remorse," and in "Désespoir."
In the stanzas of the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" there is much that could never have been written had it not been that Wilde was saturated with the sombre melodies of such poems as "Le Vin de l'Assassin," and "Le Vin des Chiffonniers." It was Baudelaire who suggested a literary form in which such things as were said in "Reading Gaol" could be said.
Wilde, in his earlier days, when he was writing that extraordinary poem "The Sphinx," always used to express himself as a great admirer of "Une Charogne." Mr. Sherard, Wilde's biographer, says that in his opinion the poet's admiration for that frightful and distorted work of genius was merely assumed. But Mr. Sherard tells us also that the "Flowers of Evil" exercised a great influence over Wilde's mind during the earlier period of his artistic life. And in the "Sphinx" it is most marked.
Allowing for the difference of metre and the divergence of language, the two verses from Baudelaire's poem "Le Chat," which I am about to quote, are identical in thought and feeling with the opening stanzas of "The Sphinx." It is impossible not to believe—not to feel certain indeed—that when Wilde wrote—
"In a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting
gloom,"
he had not, consciously or unconsciously, in mind—
"Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon cœur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate."
Or—
"Upon the mat she lies and leers, and on the tawny throat of her
Flutters the soft and silky fur, or ripples to her pointed ears."
and—
"Et, des pieds jusque à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum,
Nagent autour de son corps brun."
This should be sufficient proof in itself, but there is evidence which is absolutely conclusive. In all the criticism of Wilde's work, I do not think that any one has taken the trouble to trace these origins.
I am as certain as I am certain of anything that Wilde's poem "The Sphinx" was primarily inspired by the poem of Baudelaire in that section of "Les Fleurs du Mal" entitled "Spleen et Idéal," called "Les Chats." I have already pointed out how certain images were taken from another poem of Baudelaire, but now we are coming to the original fountain.
In the few translations I offer of Baudelaire's poems I have chosen representative verses which seem to me to express Baudelaire at his best. The poem "Les Chats" has been translated by Mr. Cyril Scott in a little volume of selections published by Mr. Elkin Mathews. Here is "Les Chats" of Baudelaire:
"Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères
Aiment également, dans leur mûre saison,
Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison,
Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sédentaires.
"Amis de la science et de la volupté,
Ils cherchent le silence et l'horreur des ténèbres;
L'Érèbe les eût pris pour ses coursiers funèbres,
S'ils pouvaient au servage incliner leur fierté.
"Ils prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes
Des grands sphinx allongés au fond des solitudes,
Qui semblent s'endormir dans un rêve sans fin;
"Leurs reins féconds sont pleins d'étincelles magiques,
Et des parcelles d'or, ainsi qu'un sable fin,
Étoilent vaguement leurs prunelles mystiques."
And here is Mr. Scott's rendering:
"All ardent lovers and all sages prize,
As ripening years incline upon their brows—
The mild and mighty cats—pride of the house—
That likeunto them are indolent, stern, and wise.
"The friends of Learning and of Ecstasy,
They search for silence and the horrors of gloom;
The devil had used them for his steeds of Doom,
Could he alone have bent their pride to slavery.
"When musing, they display those outlines chaste,
Of the great sphinxes—stretched o'er the sandy waste,
That seem to slumber deep in a dream without end:
"From out their loins a fountainous furnace flies,
And grains of sparkling gold, as fine as sand,
Bestar the mystic pupils of theireyes."
I don't in the least like this translation, but the reader has only to turn to the poems of Oscar Wilde in the collected edition, issued by Messrs. Methuen—and he will find an æsthetic perspective of which the words of Baudelaire form the foreground.
Let him open the page where the reverberating words of the Sphinx begin, and it will be enough.
I shall only write a very few words about the last name on my list—that of Ernest Dowson.
This true poet, king of the minor poets as he has been called, was influenced by Baudelaire through Verlaine. As all students of modern poetry know, Ernest Dowson died a few years ago and left very little to the world—though what he left was almost perfect within its scope and purpose. I knew Dowson well, and he has often told me the debt he owed to Baudelaire. One can see it in such poems as "Cynara," which Mr. Arthur Symons says (and I thoroughly agree with him) is one of the imperishable lyrics of our literature.
And surely these two verses of "Impenitentia Ultima "—
"Before my light goes out for ever, if God should give me a choice
of graces,
I would not reck of length of days, nor crave for things to be;
But cry: 'One day of the great lost days, one face of all the
faces,
Grant me to see and touch once more and nothing more to see.
"'For, Lord, I was free of all Thy flowers, but I chose the world's
sad roses,
And that is why my feet are torn and mine eyes are blind
with sweat,
But at Thy terrible judgment-seat, when this my tired life closes,
I am ready to reap whereof I sowed, and pay my righteous
debt'"—
have all the weary hunger, satiety, and unconquerable desire that over and over again glow out in such sad beauty upon the petals of the "Fleurs du Mal."
Readers who have followed me so far will observe that I have attempted hardly any criticism of Baudelaire's work. I have translated Gautier— that was the task that I set out to do. In this essay I have only endeavoured to show how Baudelaire has influenced modern English poets, who, in their turn, have made a lasting impression upon contemporary thought. I have definitely restricted the scope of my endeavour.
But I have still something to say, something concerned with the few translations I have made of Baudelaire's poems and some of the "Petits Poëmes en prose."
The prose of a French author—such is my belief—can be translated into a fair equivalent. It is a sort of commonplace for people to say that you cannot translate a foreign author into English. I feel sure that this is untrue. One cannot, of course, translate a perfect piece of French or German prose into English which has quite the same subtle charm of the original. Nevertheless, translation from foreign prose can be literal and delightful—but only when it is translated by a writer of English prose.
The reason that so many people believe, and say with some measure of justice, that French or German prose cannot be adequately translated is because they do not understand the commercial conditions which govern such work.
It is very rarely indeed that a master of English prose can find time to translate from the foreign. He is occupied entirely with his own creations. Translation, to him, would be a labour of love; the financial reward would be infinitesimal. This being so, the English public must depend upon inferior translations made by people who understand French, but are often incapable of literary appreciation, of reproducing the "atmosphere" of the authors they translate.
If Oscar Wilde had translated the French verse of Baudelaire into English verse, for example, then Baudelaire would by now be a household word. If any well-known stylist and novelist of to-day would spend a year over translating Flaubert's "Salammbô" then that masterpiece would rank with "Esmond" or "The Cloister and the Hearth" in the minds of Englishmen.
But this is too much to expect. Great creative artists are busily engaged in doing their own work, and French classics must remain more or less hidden from those lovers of literature who are not intimately conversant with the language.
We are a commercial race. Successful writers do not care to explain writers of other countries to their own countrymen. English men of letters have a deep love for English letters, but very few of them carry their amourettes over the Channel. Yet if any one doubts my contention that foreign work can be translated almost flawlessly let me remind him of John Addington Symonds' "Life of Benvenuto Cellini"; the Count Stenbock's rendering of Balzac's "Shorter Stories"; Rossetti's "La Vita Nuova" of Dante, or the translations of Maeterlinck by Mr. Teixeira de Mattos.
Charles Baudelaire, when once he had found work that appealed to him enormously, proceeded to translate it into his own language. His renderings of Poe have not only introduced Poe to the public of France, but have even improved upon the work of the American.
And Baudelaire says of his master:
"Ce n'est pas, par ces miracles matériels, qui pourtant ont fait sa renommée, qu'il lui sera donné de conquérir l'admiration des gens qui pensent, c'est par son amour du beau, par sa connaissance des conditions harmoniques de la beauté, par sa poésie profonde et plaintive, ouvragée néanmoins, transparente et correcte comme un bijou de cristal,—par son admirable style, pur et bizarre,—serré comme les mailles d'une armure,—complaisant et minutieux,—et dont la plus légère intention sert à pousser doucement le lecteur vers un but voulu,—et enfin surtout par ce génie tout spécial, par ce tempérament unique qui lui a permis de peindre et d'expliquer, d'une manière impeccable, saisissante, terrible, l'exception dans l'ordre moral. —Diderot, pour prendre un example entre cent, est un auteur sanguin; Poe est l'écrivain des nerfs, et même de quelque chose de plus—et le meilleur que je connaisse."
This, of course, is only a paragraph taken from a considerable essay. But with what insight and esprit is it not said! There is all the breadth and generality which comes from a culture, minute, severe, constantly renewed, rectifying and concentrating his impressions in a few pregnant words.
It is as well, also, that Baudelaire's marvellous flair for translation should be illustrated in this book. I have had some difficulty in making choice of an example, in gathering a flower from a garden so rich in blooms. I think, however, that the following parallel excerpts from "Ligeia" exhibit Poe in his most characteristic style and Baudelaire at his best in translation. (For purposes of comparison the English and the French are printed in parallel columns.)
"There is one topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease of her demeanour, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study, save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium dream, an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labours of the heathen.
"Il est néanmoins un sujet très cher sur lequel ma mémoire n'est pas en défaut. C'est la personne de Ligeia. Elle était d'une grande taille, un peu mince, et même, dans les derniers jours, très amaigrie. J'essayerais en vain de dépeindre la majesté, l'aisance tranquille de sa démarche, et l'incompréhensible légèreté, l'élasticité de son pas. Elle venait et s'en allait comme une ombre. Je ne m'apercevais jamais de son entrée dans mon cabinet de travail que par la chère musique de sa voix douce et profonde, quand elle posait sa main de marbre sur mon épaule. Quant à la beauté de la figure, aucune femme ne l'a jamais égalée. C'était l'éclat d'un rêve d'opium—une vision aérienne et ravissante, plus étrangement céleste que les rêveries qui voltigent dans les âmes assoupies des filles de Délos. Cependant ses traits n'étaient pas jetés dans ce moule régulier qu'on nous a faussement enseigné à révérer dans les ouvrages classiques du paganisme.
'There is no exquisite beauty,' says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all forms and genera of beauty, 'without some strangeness in the proportion.' Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity, although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed 'exquisite,' and felt that there was much of 'strangeness' pervading it, I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of the 'strange.' I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead—it was faultless; how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine! the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, 'hyacinthine'! I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose, and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth.
'Il n'y a pas de beauté exquise,' dit lord Verulam, parlant avec justesse de toutes les formes et de tous les genres de beauté, 'sans une certaine étrangeté, dans les proportions.' Toutefois, bien que je visse que les traits de Ligeia n'étaient pas d'une régularité classique—quoique je sentisse que sa beauté était véritablement 'exquise,' et fortement pénétrée de cette 'étrangeté,' je me suis efforcé en vain de découvrir cette irrégularité et de poursuivre jusqu'en son gîte ma perception de 'l'étrange.' J'examinais le contour de front haut et pâle—un front irréprochable—combien ce mot est froid appliqué à une majesté aussi divine!—la peau rivalisant avec le plus pur ivoire, la largeur imposante, le calme, la gracieuse proéminence des régions au-dessus des tempes et puis cette chevelure d'un noir de corbeau, lustrée, luxuriante, naturellement bouclée, et démontrant toute la force de l'expression homérique: 'chevelure d'hyacinthe.' Je considérais les lignes délicates du nez—et nulle autre part que dans les gracieux médallions hébraïques je n'avais contemplé une semblable perfection. C'était ce même jet, cette même surface unie et superbe, cette même tendance presque imperceptible à l'aquilin, ces mêmes narines harmonieusement arrondies et révélant un esprit libre. Je regardais la charmante bouche.
Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly, the magnificent turn of the short upper lip, the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under, the dimples which sported, and the colour which spoke, the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinised the formation of the chin —and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fulness and the spirituality of the Greek—the contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligeia."
C'était là qu'était le triomphe de toutes les choses célestes: la tour glorieux de la lèvre supérieure, un peu courte, l'air doucement, voluptueusement reposé de l'inférieure,—les fossettes qui se jouaient et la couleur qui parlait,—les dents réfléchissant comme une espèce d'éclair chaque rayon de la lumière bénie qui tombait sur elles dans ses sourires sereins et placides, mais toujours radieux et triomphants. J'analysais la forme du menton, et là aussi je trouvais le grâce dans la largeur, la douceur et la majesté, la plénitude et la spiritualité grecques—ce contour que le dieu Apollon ne révéla qu'en rêve à Cléomène, fils de Cléomène d'Athènes. Et puis je regardais dans les grands yeux de Ligeia."
I have said, and I thoroughly believe, that it is possible for a great writer to translate the prose of another country into fine and almost literal prose of his own.
It is, however, when we come to verse that we find the literal translation inadequate. A verse translation, by the very necessity of the limits within which the artist works—that of metre and cadence —must necessarily have a large amount of freedom. The translator has first to study the poem with a care that directs itself to the dissecting, analysing and saturating himself with what the poet means to convey, rather than the actual words in which he conveys it. One does not translate ventre à terre as "belly to the earth" but as "at full gallop." The translator must have a kind of loving clairvoyance, an apprehension of inner beauty, if he is to explain another mind in the medium of poetry.
It seems unkind to instance what I mean by quoting a translation of some lines of Baudelaire which, while literally accurate, fail to give the English reader the least hinting of an atmosphere profoundly wonderful in the original.
I need not mention names, however, but will contrast the following lines—
"A languorous island, where Nature abounds
With exotic trees and luscious fruit;
And with men whose bodies are slim and astute,
And with women whose frankness delights and astounds"—
with Baudelaire's own corresponding verse from that lovely poem "Parfum exotique."
"Une île paresseuse où la nature donne
Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux;
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,
Et des femmes dont l'œil par sa franchise étonne."
Voltaire once said of Dante that his reputation would go on growing because he was so little read. That was a satire, not upon Dante, but upon humanity.
Baudelaire has a great reputation, but is still comparatively little known to English readers.
It is my hope that this translation of Gautier, and the small attempts at rendering Baudelaire, may serve as hors d'œuvre to a magic feast which awaits any one who cares to wander through the gates of the garden where flowers of unexampled beauty blow ... and not only Flowers of Evil.
G. T.