Then there is the heresy of instruction—l'hérésie de l'enseignement—which Poe and Baudelaire and Swinburne consider ruinous to art. Art for art's sake first of all; that a poem must be written for the poem's sake simply, from whatever instinct we have derived it; it matters nothing whether this be inspired by a prescient ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, or by some of that loveliness whose very elements appertain solely to eternity. Above all, Verlaine's Pas de couleur, rien que la nuance!
The old war—not (as some would foolishly have it defined) a war between facts and fancies, reason and romance, poetry and good sense, but simply between imagination which apprehends the spirit of a thing and the understanding which dissects the body of a fact—the strife which can never be decided—was for Blake the most important question possible. Poetry or art based on loyalty to science is exactly as absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or poetry. Though, indeed, Blake wrought his Marriage of Heaven and Hell into a form of absolute magnificence, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine thought and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which hells and heavens change names and alternate through mutual annihilations, which emit an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame, he never actually attained the incomparable power of condensing vapour into tangible and malleable form, of helping us to handle air and measure mist, which is so instantly perceptible in Balzac's genius, he who was not "a prose Shakespeare" merely, but rather perhaps a Shakespeare in all but the lyrical faculty.
Even when Baudelaire expresses his horror of life, of how abject the world has become, how he himself is supposed to be "une anomalie," his sense of his own superiority never leaves him. "Accursed," as I have said, such abnormally gifted artists are, he declares his thirst of glory, a diabolical thirst of fame and of all kinds of enjoyments—in spite of his "awful temperament, all ruse and violence"—and can say: "I desire to live and to have self-content. Something terrible says to me never, and some other thing says to me try. Moi-même, le boulevard m'effraye."
Baudelaire's tragic sense of his isolation, of his intense misery, of his series of failures, of his unendurable existence—it was and was not life—in Brussels finds expression in this sentence, dated September, 1865:
"Les gens qui ne sont pas exilés ne savent pas ce que sont les nerfs de ceux sont cloués à l'étranger, sans communications et sans nouvelles." What he says is the inevitable that has no explanation: simply the inevitable that no man can escape. To be exiled from Paris proves to be, practically, his death-stroke. And, in the last letter he ever wrote, March 5, 1866, there is a sense of irony, of vexation, of wounded pride, and in the last "sting in the tail of the honey" he hisses: "There is enough talent in these young writers; but what absurdities, what exaggerations, and what youthful infatuations! Curiously, only a few years ago I perceived these imitators whose tendencies alarmed me. I know nothing of a more compromising nature than these: as for me, I love nothing more than being alone. But this is not possible for me, et il paraît que l'école Baudelaire existe."
And, to all appearances, it did; and what really annoyed Baudelaire was the publication of Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens and their praise by Leconte de l'Isle, Banville, and Hugo; Hugo, whom he had come to hate. It is with irony that he says of Hugo: "Je n'accepterais ni son génie, ni sa fortune, s'il me fallait au même temps posséder ses énormes ridicules."
III
Here are certain chosen confessions of Baudelaire. "For my misery I am not made like other men. I am in a state of spiritual revolt; I feel as if a wheel turns in my head. To write a letter costs me more time than in writing a volume. My desire of travelling returns on me furiously. When I listen to the tingling in my ears that causes me such trouble, I can't help admiring with what diabolical care imaginative men amuse themselves in multiplying their embarrassments. One of my chief preoccupations is to get the Manager of the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin to take back an actress execrated by his own wife—despite another actress who is employed in the theatre." It is amusing to note that the same desire takes hold of Gautier, who writes to Arsène Houssaye, the Director of the Comédie-Française, imploring him to take back a certain Louise if there is a place vacant for her.
"I can't sleep much now," writes Baudelaire, "as I am always thinking. Quand je dis que je dormirai demain matin, vous devinerez de quel sommeil je veux parler." This certainly makes me wonder what sort of sodden sleep he means. Probably the kind of sleep he refers to in his Epilogue to the Poèmes en Prose, addressed to Paris:
"Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full,
Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand."