Charles Baudelaire: A Study

by Arthur Symons

"'I have been many a time astonished that to pass for an observer should be Balzac's great title to fame. To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his Human Comedy are keener after living, more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all beings of the outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in a strong relief and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their fights. Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see everything, to bring everything to fight, to guess everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the principal fines so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. He reminds me of some fines of those etchers who are never satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him to invest—and that with a sure hand—what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.'"

V

"T am far from sure," said Paul Verlaine to me in Paris, "that the philosophy of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam will not one day become the formula of our century." Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the belief common to all Eastern mystics. And there is in everything he wrote a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and deliberate, which seems to me to be the natural consequences of his intellectual pride. It is part of his curiosity in souls—as in the equally sinister curiosity of Baudelaire—to prefer the complex to the simple, the perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. His heroes are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies are the shock of spirit against matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. They are on the margins of a wisdom too great for their capacity; they are haunted by dark powers, instincts of ambiguous passions. And in the women his genius created there is the immortal weariness of beauty; they are enigmas to themselves; they desire, and know not why they refrain; they do good and evil with the lifting of an eyelid, and are guilty and innocent of all the sins of the earth.

Autograph letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859.

Villiers wrote these significant sentences in the preface to La Révolte (1870): "One ought to write for the entire world. Besides, what does justice matter to us? He who from his very birth does not contain in himself his proper glory shall never know the real significance of this word." In the literature of the fantastic there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam—a writer whose singular personality and work render him perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived, as he says somewhere, "par politesse," ceaselessly experimenting upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic contrasts. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race, a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more especially, of the bourgeois multitude of letters and of life: it is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look for the source of that violent and voulu eccentricity which mars so much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious, impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers "les gens de sens commun" are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface, Genus irritabile vatum.

In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions.

Villiers has written much. The volume of Contes cruels (published in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no other collection of tales in any language on which so various and finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The Tales of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the Twice-Told Tales of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the other volumes. La révolte, a drama in one act in prose, represented at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of certain Contes cruels; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place near them. L'Ève future (1886), that most immense and ferocious of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the Contes swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale L'Amour suprême, attempts to be a second set of Contes Cruels; it has nothing of their distinction, except in Akëdysséril. Tribulat Bonhomet, which appeared in 1887—"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, couleur du siècle," as the author has called it—is largely made up of an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes, Histoires insolites (1888) and Nouveaux contes cruels (1889), there are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating horror of La torture par l'espérance, and the delicate cynicism of Les amies de pension. As for the prose drama in five acts, Le Nouveau Monde (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize—"une médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres seductions encore"—there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air; but what would you have of a "prize poem"? It was acted at one of the theatres at Paris in 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante Comte d'Orsay, and it had a very gratifying "literary" success. Such, omitting the early works, of which I have every first edition, and the numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published, are the works we have before us from which to study "peut-être le seul des hommes de notre génération qui ait eu en lui l'étincelle du génie"—as Catulle Mendès, ever generous in his literary appreciation of friend and foe, has said in that charming book, La légende du Parnasse contemporaine. I shall speak chiefly of the Contes cruels, and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach one after another the various sides of this multiform and manysided genius.

First and before all, Villiers is a humorist, and he is a humorist who has no limitations, who has command of every style, who has essayed every branch of the literature of the fantastic. There are some halfdozen of tales—all contained in the Contes cruels—which, for certain of the rarest qualities of writing—subtleties, delicate perversities, exquisite complexities of irony essentially modern—can be compared, so far as I know, with nothing outside the Petits poèmes en prose of Baudelaire. Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, Maryelle, Sentimentalisme, Le convive des dernières fêtes, La Reine Ysabeau—one might add the solitary poem inserted, jewel amid jewels, amongst the prose—these pieces, with which one or two others have affinities of style though not of temper, constitute a distinct division of Villiers' work. They are all, more or less, studies in modern love, supersubtie and yet perfectly finished little studies, so light in touch, manipulated with so delicate a finesse, so exquisite and unerring in tact, that the most monstrous paradoxes, the most incredible assumptions of cynicism, become possible, become acceptable. Of them all I think the masterpiece is Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre; and it is one of the most perfect little works of art in the world. The mockery of the thing is elemental; cynicism touches its zenith. It becomes tender, it becomes sublime. A perversion simply monstrous appears, in the infantine simplicity of its presentment, touching, credible, heroic. The edge of laughter is skirted by the finest of inches; and, as a last charm, one perceives, through the irony itself—the celestial, the elementary irony—a faint and sweet perfume as of a perverted odour of sanctity. The style has the delicacy of the etcher's needle. From beginning to end every word has been calculated, and every word is an inspiration. No other tale quite equals this supreme achievement; but in Maryelle, in Sentimentalisme, and the others there is the same note, and a perfection often only less absolute. Maryelle and Sentimentalisme are both studies in a special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest precision. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate lightness of the style—the gentle, well-bred, disengaged tone of a raconteur without reserve or after-thought, or with all that scrupulously hid—there is a sort of double irony, a criss-cross and intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other side of cynicism. La Reine Ysabeau and Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes sound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance, and fatality is unrolled before our eyes—the something enigmatical in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness. Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis of the first sentence to the "Priez pour eux," every touch tells, and every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points akin to it, is the strange tale of Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes, perhaps, after the more epic chronicle of La Reine Ysabeau, the finest of Villiers' tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the same frisson in the latter part of Tribulat Bonhomet, and in the marvellous little study in the supernatural L'Intersigne, one of the most impressive of Villiers' works. But here the sensation is not due to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror—distinct and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind—is but one among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the same bizarrerie—the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendrée, Antoine Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C., and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves—scenes which have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a sarcastic smile.

What is Villiers' view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer; I have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the fantastic edifice of his work.