I read somewhere, "There is nothing wonderful in 'The Raven.'" It is really a tour de force; even if the metre is not invented, he invented the inner double rhymes, and the technique is flawless. It has Black Magic in it; the unreality of an intoxication; a juggler's skill; it will be always his most famous poem. In his analysis of these verses, does not Poe undervalue the inspiration that created them? Yes, by an amusing vanity. And, as Baudelaire says: "A little charlatanism is always permitted to a man of genius, and it doesn't suit him badly. It is like the rouge on the cheeks of a woman actually fair, a new form of seasoning for the spirit."
There was too much of the woman in the making of Poe, manly as he was in every sense. He had no strength of will, was drawn from seduction to seduction; had not enough grip on his constitution to live wisely, to live well. He drifted, let himself be drifted. He had no intention of ruining himself, yet ruined he was, and there was nothing that could have saved him. Call it his fate or his evil star, he was doomed inevitably to an early death. Pas de chance! Yes—let one suppose—had he himself chosen the form of his death, he might have desired to die like the sick women in his pages—mourant de maux bizarres.
Baudelaire, the most scrupulous of the men of letters of our age, spent his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a marvellous original. Often an enigma to himself, much of his life and of his adventures and of his experiences remain enigmatical. I shall choose one instance out of many; that is to say, what was the original of his dedication of L'Heautimoromenos in Les Fleurs du Mal, and of his dedication of Les paradis artificiels to a woman whose initials are J. G. F.?
The poem was first printed in L 'Artiste, May 10, 1857, together with two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical: Franciscae Meae Laudes, and L'Irrémédiable. The Latin verses, composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the Dedication: Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote. The verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its name, on the comedy of Terence, The Self-Tormentor, where, in fact, the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women. He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror. He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal laughter.
The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes with satanical glances and is: La conscience dans le mal!
In Les fleurs du mal (1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages 123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" with Piscina plena virtutis; "Dans un Styx bourbeux" with Sicat beneficum Lethe; "Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" with Labris vocem redde mutis! "Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication of Les paradis, "une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough: a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry. One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words, taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution:
In nocte mea taberna.
Flambeau des grâces sataniques.
I return to my copy of Les paradis artificiels (1860). The dedication to J. G. F. begins: "Ma chère amie, Common-sense tells us that terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the imaginations that she haunts.
Les paradis artificiels, 1861.