Charles Baudelaire: A Study

by Arthur Symons

Lycius, in Lamia:

"Sick to lose
The amorous promise of her lone complain,
Swooned murmuring of love, and pale with pain;"

and all that trembling and swooning of his lovers, which English critics have found unmanly, would at all events be very much at home in modern French poetry, where love is again, as it was to Catullus and Propertius, a sickness, an entrancing madness, a poisoning. To find anything like it, like this utter subtlety of expression, we must go back to the Elizabethan Age, and then look forward, and find, beyond Keats, traces of it in Rossetti and in Morris's The Defence of Guinevere; as, for instance, in some of the Queen's lines:

"Listen, suppose your turn were come to die,
And you were quite alone and very weak;
Yea, laid a dying while very mightily
The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
Of river through your broad lands running well;
Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:
'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
I shall not tell you, you must somehow tell
Of your own strengths and mightiness; here, see!'
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
At foot of your familiar bed to see
A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,
Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
Hold out two ways, light from the inner skies
Showing him well, and making his commands
Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,
Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;
And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,
Wavy and long, and one cut short and red:
No man could tell the better of the two.
After a shivering half-hour you said:
'God help! Heaven's colour, the blue'; and he said, 'Hell!'
Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,
And cry to all good men that loved you well,
'Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known;'
Launcelot went away, then I could tell,
Like wisest men, how all things would be, moan,
And roll and hurt myself, and long to die,
And yet fear much to die for what was sown.
Nevertheless you, O Sir Gawaine, lie,
Whatever may have happened through these years,
God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie."

All these rough, harsh terza-rime lines are wonderful enough in their nakedness of sensations—sensations of heat, of hell, of heaven, of colours, of death, of life, of moans, and of lies. It is, in a sense, as far as such experiments go, a return to the Middle Ages; to what was exotic in them and strange and narcotic. Only here, as in Les Litanies de Satan of Baudelaire—to which they have some remote likeness—there are no interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, on these hot, impassioned scenes.

Rossetti says somewhere that no modern poet, and that few poets of any century, ever compressed into so small a space so much imaginative material as he himself always did; and this, I conceive, partly, also, from that almost child-like imagination of his, for all its intellectual subtlety, that dominated him to such an extent that to tell him anything of a specially tragic or pathetic nature was cruel, so vividly did he realize every situation; and also because of his wonderful saying in regard to his own way of weaving an abominable line at the end of one of his finest sonnets into a sublime one:

"Life touching lips with Immortality:"

that the line he had used before belonged to the class of phrase absolutely forbidden in poetry. "It is intellectually incestuous poetry seeking to beget its emotional offspring on its own identity; whereas the present line gives only the momentary contact with the immortal which results from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-conscious element of it."

Now, to me, both Keats before him and Baudelaire in his own generation, had the same excessive sense of, concentration. "To load every rift with ore:" that, to Keats, was the essential thing; and it meant to pack the verse with poetry so that every line should be heavy with the stuff of the imagination: the phrase I have given being a rebuke to Shelley, significant of the art of both poets. Fox as Keats, almost in the same degree as Baudelaire, worked on every inch of his surface, so perhaps no poets ever put so much poetic detail into so small a space, with, as I have said, the exception of Rossetti. And, as a matter of fact, when we examine the question with scrupulous care, it must be said that both Baudelaire and Keats are often metrically slipshod.

One of Wagner's ideas, in regard to the artistic faculty was, receptivity; the impulse to impart only what comes when these impressions fill the mind "to an ecstatic excess;" and the two forms of the artist: the feminine, who recoils from life, and the masculine, who absorbs life. From this follows, in the case of creative artists such as Baudelaire, the necessity to convey to others as vividly and intelligibly, as far as possible, what his own mind's eye had seen. Then one has to seize everything from which one can wring its secret—its secret for us and for no one else. And all this, and in fact the whole of our existence, is partly the conflict within us of the man with the woman, the male and the female energies that strive always: