Charles Baudelaire: A Study

by Arthur Symons

In January, 1843, Baudelaire finds himself in possession of a fortune of seventy-five thousand francs. With his incurable restlessness, his incurable desire of change, he is always moving from one place to another. He takes rooms at Quai de Bethune, 10, Isle-Saint-Louis; rue Vanneau, faubourg Saint-Germain; rue Varenne, quai d'Anjou; Hôtel Pimodan, 17; Hôtel Corneille; Hôtel Folkestone, rue Lafitte; Avenue de la République, 95; rue des Marais-du-Temple, 25; rue Mazarine; rue de Babylone; rue de Seine, 57; rue Pigalle, 60; Hôtel Voltaire, 19 quai Voltaire; rue Beautrellis, 22; Cité d'Orléans, 15; rue d'Angoulême-du-Temple, 18; Hôtel Dieppe, rue d'Amsterdam, 22; rue des Ecuries-d'Artois, 6; rue de Seine, l'Hôtel du Maroc, 35.

With a certain instinct for drawing Baudelaire haunts many painter's studios: Delacroix's, whose genius he discovers, giving him much of his fame, becoming his intimate friend; Manet's, whose genius he also divines and discovers; Daumier's, to whom he attributes "the strange and astonishing qualities of a great genius, sick of genius." So also, from the beginning, Baudelaire's judgments are infallibly right; so also his first book, Le Salon de 1845, has all the insolence of youth and all the certitude of a youth of genius. But his fame is made, that is to say, as an imaginative critic, with Le Salon de 1846; for, after the prelude, the entire book is fascinating, paradoxical, and essentially æsthetical; a wonderful book in which he reveals the mysteries of colour, of form, of design, of technique, and of the enigmas of creative works. Here he elaborates certain of his mature theories, such as his exultant praise—in which he is one with Lamb and with Swinburne; his just disdain, and his grave irony, in which he is one with Swinburne; and, above all, that passionate love of all forms of beauty, at once spiritual and absolute, which is part of the quintessence of his genius.

So, as Swinburne, in the fire of his youthful genius, was the first to praise Baudelaire in English, I quote these sentences of his from an essay on Tennyson and Musset: "I do not mean that the Comédie de la Mort must be ranked with the Imitation of Christ, or that Les Fleurs du Mal should be bound up with The Christian Year. But I do say that no principle of art which does not exclude from its tolerance the masterpieces of Titian can logically or consistently reject the masterpieces of a poet who has paid to one of them the most costly tribute of carven verse, in lines of chiselled ivory with rhymes of ringing gold, that ever was laid by the high priest of one muse on the high altar of another. And I must also maintain my opinion that the pervading note of spiritual tragedy in the brooding verse of Baudelaire dignifies and justifies at all points his treatment of his darkest and strangest subjects. The atmosphere of his work is to the atmosphere of Gautier's as the air of a gas-lit alcove is to the air of the far-flowering meadows that make in April a natural Field of the Cloth of Gold all round the happier poet's native town of Tarbes, radiant as the open scroll of his writings with immeasurable wealth of youth and sunlight and imperishable spring. The sombre starlight under which Baudelaire nursed and cherished the strange melancholy of his tropical home-sickness, with its lurid pageant of gorgeous or of ghastly dreams, was perhaps equidistant from either of these, but assuredly had less in common with the lamplight than the sunshine."

To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, as Villon and his infamous friends did on their wonderful winter nights, "where the wolves live on wind," and where the gallows stands at street corners, ominously, and one sees swing in the wind dead chained men; to haunt the strange streets of cities, to know all the useless and improper and amusing, the moral and the immoral people, who are alone worth knowing; to live, as well as to observe; to be drawn out of the rapid current of life into an exasperating inaction: it is such things as these that make for poetry and for prose. Some make verse out of personal sensations, verse which is half pathological, which is half physiological; some out of colours and scents and crowds and ballets; some out of music, out of the sea's passions; some simply out of rhythms that insist on being used; a few out of the appreciation of the human comedy. The outcome of many experiments, these must pass beyond that stage into the stage of existence.

So, in much of Baudelaire's verse I find not only the exotic (rarely the erotic) but, in the peculiar technique of the lines, certain andante movements, lingering subtleties of sound, colour, and suggestion, with—at times, but never in the excessive sense of Flaubert's—the almost medical curiosity of certain researches into the stuff of dreams, the very fibre of life itself, which, combined, certainly tend to produce a new thing in poetry. A new order of phenomena absorbs his attention, which becomes more and more externalized, more exclusively concerned with the phenomena of the soul, with morbid sensation, with the curiosities of the mind and the senses. Humanity is now apprehended in a more than ever generalized and yet specialized way in its essence, when it becomes, if you will, an abstraction; or, if you will, for the first time purely individual.

In certain poets these have been foiled endeavours; in Baudelaire never: for one must never go beyond the unrealizable, never lose one's intensity of expression, never let go of the central threads of one's spider's web. Still, in regard to certain direct pathological qualities, there is a good deal of this to be found in much of the best poetry—in Poe, in Rossetti, in Swinburne's earlier work, and much in Baudelaire; only all these are moved by a fascination: in Poe for the fantastically inhuman; in Rossetti for the inner life of the imagination, for to him, as Pater said, "life is a crisis at every moment;" in Swinburne for the arduous fulness of intricate harmony, and for the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled abundance.

There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the end of art, but the artist—whether he be Baudelaire or Verlaine— should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is not written by a man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing on impulse, hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he does not remember, in some "close corner of his brain," and exerts the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what it was, and, aiming at much more minor things in the world than pure beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end must be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the purpose which it sought to serve, but by the success or failure in one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a precise consciousness of what he is doing.

To Baudelaire as to Pater there were certain severe tests of the effects made on us by works of genius. In both writers there is a finality of creative criticism. For, to these, all works of art, all forms of human life, were as powers and forces producing pleasurable sensations. One can find them in a gem, a wine, a spoken word, a sudden gesture, in anything, indeed, that strikes vividly or fundamentally the senses, that acts instantaneously on one's perceptive passions. "What," says Pater in his essay on Wordsworth, "are the peculiarities in things and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to others, in an extraordinary way?"

"The ultimate aim of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a critic. Certainly, Baudelaire shared certain of those qualities; indeed, almost all; even, in a sense, logic. His genius was so great, and in its greatness so manysided, that for some studious disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from any possible point of view, have always some of his magic and of his magnetism. The ardour, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute desire to get at the root of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be, will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper; that is to say, those that are most morbid, most fond of imaginative perversities.

Prose, I have said, listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats their speech almost in their own terms. But poetry (it is Baudelaire who says it) "is akin to music through a prosody whose roots plunge deeper in the human soul than any classical theory has defined." Poetry begins where prose ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins sooner. The one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse, out of mere honour towards my material. The farther I can extend my prose, the farther back do I set the limits of verse. The region of poetry will thus be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible chance of any confusion of territory.