Charles Baudelaire: A Study

by Arthur Symons

"Here nature is, alive and untamed,
Unafraid and unashamed;
Here man knows woman with the greed
Of Adam's wonder, the primal need."

And, in these fundamental lines of Blake:

"What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified Desire."

And, again, in these more primeval and more essentially animal lines of Rossetti:

"O my love, O Love—snake of Eden!
(And O the bower and the hour!)
O to-day and the day to come after!
Loose me, love—give way to my laughter!
Lo! two babes for Eve and for Adam!
(And O the bower and the hour!)
Lo, sweet snake, the travail and treasure—
Two men-children born for their pleasure!
The first is Cain and the second Abel:
(Eden bower's in flower)
The soul of one shall be made thy brother,
And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other.
(And O the bower and the hour!)."

Baudelaire, in De l'essence de rire, wrote: "The Romantic School, or, one might say in preference, the Satanical School, has certainly understood the primordial law of laughter. All the melodramatic villains, all those who are cursed, damned, fatally marked with a rictus of the lips that extends to the ears, are in the pure orthodoxy of laughter. For the rest, they are for the most part illegitimate sons of the famous Melmoth the Wanderer, the great Satanic creation of Maturin. What can one conceive of as greater, as more powerful, in regard to our humanity than this pale and bored Melmoth? He is a living contradiction; that is why his frozen laughter freezes and wrenches the entrails."

Distinctly the most remarkable of the British triumvirate which in the early part of the century won a momentary fame as the school of horror, Maturin is much less known to the readers of to-day than either Monk Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe. Thanks to Balzac, who did Melmoth the honour of a loan in Melmoth réconcilié, Maturin has attained a certain fame in France—which, indeed, he still retains. Melmoth has to-day in France something of that reputation which has kept alive another English book, Vathek. Did not Balzac, in a moment of indiscriminating enthusiasm, couple the Melmoth of Maturin with the Don Juan of Molière, the Faust of Goethe, the Manfred of Byron—grandes images tracées par les plus grands génies de l'Europe? In other words, Maturin had his day of fame, in which even men like Scott and Byron were led into a sympathetic exaggeration. There's one exception. That Coleridge was hostile, possibly unjust, is likely enough. It should be mentioned that in 1816 the Drury Lane Committee, who had, reasonably enough, rejected a play by Coleridge, accepted a monstrous production of Maturin's named Bertram. The gros bon mélodrame, as Balzac calls it, was a great success. "It is all sound and fury, signifying nothing," said Kean, who acted in it; and Kean, who knew his public, realized that that was why it succeeded. The play was printed, and ran through seven editions, sinking finally to the condition of a chap-book, in which its horrors were to be had for sixpence. On this pretentious work Coleridge—for what reasons we need not inquire—took the trouble to write an article, or, as it was phrased, to make an attack. To this Maturin wrote a violent reply, which the good advice of Scott prevented him from publishing. It is curious at the present day to read the letter in which Scott urges upon Maturin the wisdom of silence—not because he is likely to get the worst of the battle, but, among other reasons, because "Coleridge's work has been little read or heard of, and has made no general impression whatever—certainly no impression unfavourable to you or your play. In the opinion of many, therefore, you will be resenting an injury of which they are unacquainted with the existence."

The episode is both comic and instructive. Coleridge and Maturin! Scott urging on Maturin the charity of mercy to Coleridge, as—"Coleridge has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust, to continue to be a favourite with the public!" Poor Maturin, far from continuing to be a favourite with the public, outlived his reputation in the course of a somewhat short life. He died at the age of forty-three. Like the hero of Baudelaire's whimsical and delicious little tale La Fanfarlo, he preferred artifice to nature, especially when it was unnecessary. Such is the significant gossip which we have about the personality of Maturin—gossip which brings out clearly the deliberate eccentricity which marks his work, which one sees also in the foppish affected and lackadaisical creature who looks at the reader as if he were admiring himself before his mirror.

The word "genius," indeed, is too lofty an epithet to use regarding a man of great talent certainly, but of nothing more than erratic and melodramatic talent. Melmoth the Wanderer is in parts very thrilling; its Elizabethan feast of horrors has a savour as of a lesser Tourneur. But it is interesting only in parts, and at its best it never comes near the effect which the great masters of the grotesque and terrible—Hoffmann, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam—have known how to produce. A freak of construction, which no artist could have been guilty of, sends us wandering from story to story in a very maze of underplots and episodes and interpolations. Six separate stories are told—all in parenthesis—and the greater part of the book is contained .within inverted commas. What is fine in it is the vivid, feverish way in which, from time to time, some story of horror or mystery is forced home to one's sensations. It is the art of the nightmare, and it has none of the supremacy in that line of the Contes Drolatiques of Balzac. But certain scenes in the monastery and in the prisons of the Inquisition—an attempted escape, a scene where an immured wretch fights the reptiles in the darkness—are full of a certain kind of power. That escape, for instance, with its consequences, is decidedly gruesome, decidedly exciting; but compare it with Dumas, with the escape of Monte Cristo; compare it with the yet finer narrative of Casanova—the unsurpassed model of all such narratives in fiction. Where Casanova and Dumas produce their effect by a simple statement—a record of external events from which one realizes, as one could realize in no other way, all the emotions and sensations of the persons who were undergoing such experiences—Maturin seeks his effect, and produces it, but in a much lesser degree, by a sort of excited psychology, an exclamatory insistence on sensation and emotion. Melmoth the Wanderer is only the object of our historical curiosity. We have, indeed, and shall always have, "lovers of dark romance."