The question comes here: How much does Baudelaire give of himself in his letters? Some of his inner, some of his outer life; but, for the most part, "in tragic hints." Yet in the whole of his letters he never gives one what Meredith does in Modern Love, which, published in 1862, remains his masterpiece, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and of Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse. It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly human a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse: it is like scraps of broken—of heart-broken—talk, overheard and jotted down at random. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no illusions, and their tragic hints "are like a fine, pained mockery of love itself as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more constant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation carried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:
"O thou Weed
Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou had'st ne'er been
born."
Another question arises: How can a man who wrote his letters in a café, anywhere, do more than jot down whatever came into his head? Has he ever given an account of one day in his life—eventful or uneventful? You might as well try to count the seconds of your watch as try to write for yourself your sensations during one day. What seems terrible is the rapidity of our thoughts: yet, fortunately, one is not always thinking. "Books think for me; I don't think," says Lamb in one of his paradoxes. There is not much thought in his prose: imagination, humour, salt and sting, tragical emotions, and, on the whole, not quite normal. How can any man of genius be entirely normal?
The most wonderful letters ever written are Lamb's. Yet, as in Balzac's, in Baudelaire's, in Browning's, so few of Lamb's letters, those works of nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays. What began in mischief ends in art.
The life of Baudelaire, like the lives of Balzac and of Villiers and of Verlaine, was one long labour, in which time, money, and circumstances were all against him. "Sometimes," Balzac cries, "it seems to me that my brain is on fire. I shall die in the trenches of the intellect." It is his genius, his imagination, that are on fire, not so much as his sleepless brain. This certainly Baudelaire never felt. Yet, in one sentence written in 1861, I find an agony not unlike Balzac's, but more material, more morbid: "La plupart des temps je me dis: si je vis, je vivrai toujours de même, en damné, et quand la mort naturelle viendra, je serai vieux, usé, passé de mode, criblé de dettes; ajoute à cela que je trouve souvent qu'on ne me rend pas justice, et que je vois que tout réussit à souhait pour les sots." This, with his perpetual nervous terrors, his hallucinations, his drugs, his miseries, his women, his wine, his good and bad nights, his sense of poisonous people, his disorders, his excitability, his imagination that rarely leaves him, his inspiration that often varies, his phrase, after a certain despair: "Je me suis précipité dans le travail: alors j'ai reconnu que je n'avais perdu aucune faculté;" his discouragements, his sudden rages, not only against fame, but when he just refrains from hitting a man's face with his stick; after all this, and after much more than this, I have to take his word, when he says—not thinking of these impediments in his way—"What poets ought to do is to know how to escape from themselves." In 1861 he writes: "As my literary situation is more than good, I can do all I want, I can get all my books printed; yet, as I have the misfortune in possessing a kind of unpopular spirit, I shall not make much money, but I shall leave a great fame behind me—provided I have the courage to live." "Provided "That word sounds a note of nervous distress. He continues: "I have made a certain amount of money; if I had not had so many debts, and if I had had more fortune, I might have been rich" The last five words he writes in small capitals. And this lamentable refrain is part of his obsession; wondering, as we all do, why we have never been rich. Then comes this curious statement: "What exasperates me is when I think of what I have received this year; it is enormous; certainly I have lived on this money like a ferocious beast; and yet how often I spend much less than that in sheer waste!"
VIII
In 1861 Poulet-Malassis showed Baudelaire the manuscript of Les Martyrs ridicules of Léon Cladel, who was so excited as he read it, so intrigued by his antithetical constructions and by the mere singularity of the title, and so amazed by this writer's audacity, that he made his acquaintance, went over his proofs, and helped to teach him the craft of letters. So, in his sombre and tragic and passionate and feverish novels, we see the inevitable growth out of the hard soil of Quercy, and out of the fertilizing contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of this whole literature, so filled with excitement, so nervous, so voluminous and vehement, in whose pages speech is always out of breath. And one finds splendid variations in his stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes: something at once epic and morbid.
Baudelaire, in his preface, points out the solemn sadness and the grim irony with which Cladel relates deplorably comic facts; the fury with which he insists on painting his strange characters; the fantastic fashion in which he handles sin with the intense curiosity of a casuist, analysing evil and its inevitable consequences. He notes "la puissance sinistrement caricatural de Cladel." But it is in these two sentences that he sums up, supremely, the beginning and the end of realistic and imaginative art. "The Poet, under his mask, still lets himself be seen. But the supremacy of art had consisted in remaining glacial and hermetically sealed, and in leaving to the reader all the merit of indignation. (Le poète, sous son masque, se laisse encore voir. Le supreme de l'art eût consisté à rester glacial et fermé, et à laisser au lecteur tout le mérite de l'indignation.)"
Édouard Manet, 1865.