I give two quotations, which certainly explain themselves if they do not explain Baudelaire:
"I must leave home and not return there, except in a more natural state of mind. I have just been rewriting an article. The affair kept me so long that when I went out I had not even the courage to return, and so the day was lost. Last week I had to go out and sleep for two days and nights in a hideous little hotel because I was spied on. I went out without any money for the simple reason that I had none.
"Imagine my perpetual laziness, which I hate profoundly, and the impossibility of going out on account of my perpetual want of money. After I had been seeking money for three days, on Monday night, exhausted with fatigue, with weariness and with hunger, I went into the first hotel I came on, and since then I have had to remain there, and for certain reasons. I am nearly devoured, eaten by this enforced idleness."
In a letter written in Brussels, March 9, 1868, he says: "I have announced the publication of three fragments: Chateaubriand et le Dandysme littéraire, La Peinture didactique, and Les fleurs du mal jugées par l'auteur lui-même. I shall add to these a refutation of an article of Janin, one on Henri Heine et la jeunesse des poètes, and the refutation of La Préface de la vie de Jules César par Napoléon III." Besides these, on the cover of his Salon de 1848 are announced: "De la poésie moderne; David, Guérin et Gerodet; Les Limbes, poésies; Catéchisme de la femme aimée." On the paper cover of my copy of his Théophile Gautier (1861), under the title of "Sous Presse," are announced: Opium et Haschisch, ou l'Idéal Artificiel (which was printed in 1860 as Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch), Curiosités esthétiques (which were printed in 1868); Notices littéraires; and Machiavel et Condorcet, dialogue philosophique. Of these, Les Limbes appeared as Les fleurs du mal (1857); Les Notices littéraires at the end of L'Art Romantique (1868); none of the others were printed, nor do I suppose he had even the time to begin them.
He might have written on Machiavelli a prose dialogue as original, from the French point of view, as one of Landor's Imaginary Conversations, such as those between Plato and Diogenes, the two Ciceros, Leonora d'Este with Father Panigarole. Both had that satirical touch which can embody the spirit of an age or of two men in conversation. Both had a creative power and insight equal to that of the very greatest masters; both had the power of using prose with a perfection which no stress of emotion is allowed to discompose. Only it seems to me that Baudelaire might have made the sinister genius, the calculating, cold observation of Machiavelli, who wrote so splendidly on Cesare Borgia, give vent to a tremendous satire on priests and Kings and Popes after the manner of Rabelais or of Aristophanes; certainly not in the base and ignoble manner of Aretino.
It is lamentable to think how many things Baudelaire never did or never finished. One reason might have been his laziness, his sense of luxury, and, above all, his dissatisfaction with certain things he had hoped to do, and which likely enough a combination of poverty and of nerves prevented him from achieving. And as he looks back on the general folly incident to all mankind—his bête noire—on his lost opportunities, on his failures, a sack of cobwebs, a pack of gossamers, wave in the air before his vision; and he wonders why he himself has not carved his life as those fanciful things have their own peculiar way of doing.
Baudelaire was inspired to begin Mon cœur mis à nu in 1863 by this paragraph he had read in Poe's Marginalia, printed in New York in 1856: "If an ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight open and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—My Heart Laid Bare."
With all his genius, Poe was never able to write a book of Confessions, nor was Baudelaire ever able to finish his. Poe, who also died tragically young, throws out a sinister hint in these last words: "No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen."
Baudelaire's Confessions are meant to express his inmost convictions, his most sacred memories, his hates and rages, the manner in which his sensations and emotions have fashioned themselves in his waking self; to express that he is a stranger to the world and to the world's cults; to express, also, as he says, that ce livre tout rêvé sera un livre de rancunes. It cannot in any sense be compared with the Confessions of Saint Augustine, of Rousseau, of Cellini, of Casanova. Still, Baudelaire had none of Rousseau's cowardice, none of Cellini's violent exultations over himself and the things he created: none of Casanova's looking back over his past life and his adventures: those of a man who did not live to write, but wrote because he had lived and when he could live no longer.
In Baudelaire's notes there is something that reminds me of Browning's lines: