From 1838 to 1842 (when Baudelaire attains his majority) there is a family crisis in a certainly impossible family circle. These years he spends in vagabonding at his own will: living a deliciously depraved life; diving, perhaps, into depths of impurity; haunting the night resorts that one finds in the most curious quarters of Paris—the cafés, the theatres, la Rue de Bréda. He amuses himself enormously: even in "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame;" he lives then, as always, by his sensitive nerves, by his inexhaustible curiosity. He is devoured then, as always, by the inner fires of his genius and of his sensuality; and is, certainly, a quite naturally immoral man in his relations with women.
He lives, as I have said; he feeds himself on his nerves:
"The modern malady of love is nerves."
It is an incurable, a world-old malady; and, from Catullus, one of the greatest of all poets, century after century, from the Latin poets of the Middle Ages, from the poets of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan Age, down to the modern Romantic Movement, no poet who was a passionate lover of Woman has ever failed to sing for her and against her:
"I hate and I love: you ask me how I can do it?
I know not: I know that it hurts: I am going through it."
Odi et amo; quari id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio; sed fiere sentio, et excrucior.
"Caelius, Lesbia mine, that Lesbia, that
Lesbia whom Catullus for love did rate
Higher than all himself and than all things, stands
Now at the cross-roads and the alleys to wait
For the lords of Rome, with public lips and hands."
Cœli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia,
Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
Plus, quàm se, atque suos amavit omnes.
Need I quote more than these three fines? These fines, and those quoted above, are enough to show, for all time, that Catullus was as passionate a lover and as passionate a hater of flesh as Villon. Yet, if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even le grosse Margot from her place in his life; who, to a certainty, had not for one instant the place in his life that Lesbia had in the life of Catullus. Villon was no dabbler in infamy, but one who liked infamous things for their own sake.
Nor must I forget John Donne, whose quality of passion is unique in English poetry—a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of actual violence: his senses speak with unparalleled directness: he can exemplify every motion with an unluxurious explicitness which leaves no doubt of his intentions. He suffers from all the fevers and colds of love; and, in his finest poem—a hate poem—he gives expression to a whole region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out of Catullus, with such intolerable truth:
"When, by thy scorn, O murdress, I am dead,
And that thou thinkest thee free
From all solicitations of me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see:
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call'st for more,
And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold, quick-silver sweat will lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent."
As for Baudelaire's adventures when he is sent, perhaps against his will, in May, 1841, on a long voyage from Bordeaux to Calcutta, to return to Paris in February, 1843, after six months' travel, it is conjecturable that he might return a changed man. Certainly his imagination found in the East a curious fascination, with an actual reawakening of new instincts; and with that oppressive sense of extreme heat, as intense, I suppose, as in Africa, which makes one suffer, bodily and spiritually, and in ways more extraordinary than those who have never endured those tropical heats can possibly conceive of. There he may have abandoned himself to certain obscure rites that to him might have been an initiation into the cults of the Black Venus. And, with these hot suns, these burning midnoons, these animal passions, the very seductiveness of the nakedness of bronze skin, what can I imagine but this: that they lighted in his veins an intolerable flame, that burned there ardently to the end?
For in his Wagner (1861) he writes: "The radiant ancient Venus, Aphrodite, born of white foam, has not imprudently traversed the horrible darkness of the Middle Ages. She has retired to the depths of a cavern, magnificently lighted by the fires that are not those of the Sun. In her descent under earth, Venus has come near to hell's mouth, and she goes, certainly, to many abominable solemnities, to render homage to the Arch-demon, Prince of the Flesh and Lord of Sin." He finds her in the music where Wagner has created a furious song of the flesh, with an absolute knowledge of what in men is diabolical. "For from the first measures, the nerves vibrate in unison with the melody; one's flesh remembers itself and begins to tremble. Tannhäuser represents the eternal combat between the two principles that have chosen the human heart as battle-field, that is to say, of the flesh with the spirit, of hell with heaven, of Satan with God."