The nature of Baudelaire's malady and death was, by the public at large, accepted as confirmation of the suspicion that he was in the habit of seeking his inspiration in the excitation of hashish and opium. His friends, however, recall the fact of his incessant work, and intense striving after his ideal in art; his fatigue of body and mind, and his increasing weariness of spirit under the accumulating worries and griefs of a life for which his very genius unfitted him. He was also known to be sober in his tastes, as all great workers are. That he had lent himself more than once to the physiological and psychological experiment of hashish was admitted; but he was a rare visitor at the séances in the saloon of the Hotel Pimodau, and came as a simple observer of others. His masterly description of the hallucinations produced by hashish is accompanied by analytical and moral commentaries which unmistakably express repugnance to and condemnation of the drug:--
"Admitting for the moment," he writes, "the hypothesis of a constitution tempered enough and strong enough to resist the evil effects of the perfidious drug, another, a fatal and terrible danger, must be thought of,--that of habit. He who has recourse to a poison to enable him to think, will soon not be able to think without the poison. Imagine the horrible fate of a man whose paralyzed imagination is unable to work without the aid of hashish or opium.... But man is not so deprived of honest means of gaining heaven, that he is obliged to invoke the aid of pharmacy or witchcraft; he need not sell his soul in order to pay for the intoxicating caresses and the love of houris. What is a paradise that one purchases at the expense of one's own soul?... Unfortunate wretches who have neither fasted nor prayed, and who have refused the redemption of labor, ask from black magic the means to elevate themselves at a single stroke to a supernatural existence. Magic dupes them, and lights for them a false happiness and a false light; while we, poets and philosophers, who have regenerated our souls by incessant work and contemplation, by the assiduous exercise of the will and permanent nobility of intention, we have created for our use a garden of true beauty. Confiding in the words that 'faith will remove mountains,' we have accomplished the one miracle for which God has given us license."
The perfect art-form of Baudelaire's poems makes translation of them indeed a literal impossibility. The 'Little Old Women,' 'The Voyage,' 'The Voyage to Cytherea,' 'A Red-haired Beggar-girl,' 'The Seven Old Men,' and sonnet after sonnet in 'Spleen and Ideal,' seem to rise only more and more ineffable from every attempt to filter them through another language, or through another mind than that of their original, and, it would seem, one possible creator.
MEDITATION
Be pitiful, my sorrow--be thou still:
For night thy thirst was--lo, it falleth down,
Slowly darkening it veils the town,
Bringing its peace to some, to some its ill.
While the dull herd in its mad career
Under the pitiless scourge, the lash of unclean desire,
Goes culling remorse with fingers that never tire:--
My sorrow,--thy hand! Come, sit thou by me here.
Here, far from them all. From heaven's high balconies
See! in their threadbare robes the dead years cast their eyes:
And from the depths below regret's wan smiles appear.
The sun, about to set, under the arch sinks low,
Trailing its weltering pall far through the East aglow.
Hark, dear one, hark! Sweet night's approach is near.
Translated for the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.'
THE DEATH OF THE POOR
This is death the consoler--death that bids live again;
Here life its aim: here is our hope to be found,
Making, like magic elixir, our poor weak heads to swim round,
And giving us heart for the struggle till night makes end of the pain.
Athwart the hurricane--athwart the snow and the sleet,
Afar there twinkles over the black earth's waste,
The light of the Scriptural inn where the weary and the faint may taste
The sweets of welcome, the plenteous feast and the secure retreat.
It is an angel, in whose soothing palms
Are held the boon of sleep and dreamy balms,
Who makes a bed for poor unclothèd men;
It is the pride of the gods--the all-mysterious room,
The pauper's purse--this fatherland of gloom,
The open gate to heaven, and heavens beyond our ken.
Translated for the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.'
