BAUDELAIRE

nything lus.ca just appreciation of Baudelaire has

£Ji been slow to arrive in England, and still is defective
JL _HL.or partial even in France. There are, I think, special
reasons for the difficulty in estimating his worth and find-
ing his place. For one thing, Baudelaire was in some ways
far in advance of the point of view of his own time, and
yet was very much of it, very largely partook of its limited
merits, faults, and fashions. For another thing, he had a
great part in forming a generation of poets after him; and
m England he had what is in a way the misfortune to be first
and extravagantly advertised by Swinburne, and taken up by
the followers of Swinburne. He was umversal, and at the
same ume confined by a fashion which he himself did most
to create. To dissociate the permanent from the temporary,
to distinguish the man from his influence, and finally to
detach him from the associations of those English poets who
first admired him, is no small task. His comprehensiveness
itself makes difficulty, for it tempts the partisan critic, even
now, to adopt Baudelaire as the patron of his own behefs.
It is the purpose of this essay to affirm the importance of
Baudelaire’s prose works, a purpose justified by the trans-
lation of one of those works which is indispensable for any
student ofhis poetry1 This is to see Baudelaire as something
.

more than the author of the Fleurs chi Mai, and conse-
quently to revise somewhat our estimate of that book.
Baudelaire came into vogue at a time when ‘Art for Art’s
Jourmux Intimes, translated by Christopher Isherwood, and published
r

by the Blackamore Press.

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 BAUDELAIRE
sake’ was dogma. The care which he took over his poems
a
and the fact that, contrary to the fluency of his time, both
in France and England he restricted himself to this one
volume, encouraged the opinion that Baudelaire was an
artist exclusively for art’s sake. The doctrine does not, of
course, really apply to anybody; no one apphed it less than
Pater, who spent many years, not so much in illustrating
it, as in expounding it of life, which is not the
as a theory
same thing at all. But it was a doctrine which did affect
criticism and appreciation, and which did obstruct a proper
judgment of Baudelaire. He is in fact a greater man than
was imagined, though perhaps not such a perfect poet.
Baudelaire has, I believe, been called a fragmentary
Dante, for what that description is worth. It is true that
many people who enjoy Dante enjoy Baudelaire; but the
differences are as important as the similarities. Baudelaire’s
inferno is very different in quality and significance from
that of Dante. Truer, I think, would be the description of
Baudelaire as a later and more limited Goethe. As we begin
to see him now, he represents his own age in somewhat
the same way as that in which Goethe represents an earher
age. As a critic of the present generation, Mr. Peter Quennell
has recently said m
his book, Baudelaire and the Symbolists :

‘He had enjoyed a sense of his own age , had recognized its
pattern while the pattern was yet incomplete, and be- —
cause it is only our misapprehension of the present which
prevents our looking mto the immediate future, our ignor-
ance of to-day and of its real as apart from its spurious
—
tendencies and requirements had anticipated many prob-
lems, both on the aesthetic and on the moral plane, in
which the fate of modem poetry is still concerned.’
Now the man who has this sense of his age is hard to
analyse. He is exposed to its follies as well as sensitive to
its inventions; and in Baudelaire, as well as in Goethe, is
some of the out-moded nonsense of his time. The parallel
between the German poet who has always been the symbol
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of perfect ‘health’ in every sense, as well as of universal
curiosity, and the French poet who has been the symbol of
morbidity in mind and concentrated mterests in work,
may seem paradoxical. But after this lapse of time the dif-
ference between ‘health’ and ‘morbidity’ in the two men
becomes more negligible; there is something artificial and
even priggish about Goethe’s healthiness, as there is about
Baudelaire’s unhealthiness; we have passed beyond both
fashions, of health or malady, and they are both merely
men with resdess, critical, curious minds and the ‘sense of
the age’»; both men who understood and foresaw a great
deal. Goethe, it is true, was interested in many subjects
which Baudelaire left alone; but by Baudelaire’s time it was
no longer necessary for a man to embrace such varied in-
terests in order to have the sense of the age, and in retro-
spect some of Goethe’s studies seem to us (not altogether
jusdy) to have been merely dilettante hobbies. The most
of Baudelaire’s prose writings (with the exception of the
translations from Poe, which are of less interest to an
English reader) are as important as the most of Goethe.
They throw hght on the Fleurs du Mai certainly, but they
also expand immensely our appreciation of their author.
It was once the mode to take Baudelaire’s Satanism seri-
ously, as it is now the tendency to present Baudelaire as a
serious and Catholic Christian. Especially as a prelude to
the Journaux Intimes this diversity of opinion needs some
—
discussion. I think that the latter view that Baudelaire is
essentially Chnsuan — is nearer the truth than the former,
but it needs considerable reservation. "When Baudelaire’s
Satanism is dissociated from its less creditable parapher-
nalia, it amounts to a dim intuition of a part, but a very
important part, of Chrisnamty. Satanism itself, so far as not
merely an affectation, was an attempt to get into Chris-
tianity by the back door. Genuine blasphemy, genuine in
spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of parn^l belief,
and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect
Christian. It is a way of affirming belief. This state of partial
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BAUDELAIRE
belief is manifest throughout the Journaux Intimes. What is
significant about Baudelaire is his theological innocence.
He is dis covering Christianity for himself; he is not assum-
ing it as a fashion or weighing social or political reasons, or
any other accidents. He is beginning, in a way, at the be-
ginning; and, being a discoverer, is not altogether certain
what he is exploring and to what it leads; he might almost
be said to be making again, as one man, the effort of
5
scores of generations. His Christianity is rudimentary or
embryonic; at best, he has the excesses of a Tertullian (and
even Tertullian is not considered wholly orthodox and
well balanced). His business was not to practise Christian-
ity, but —what was much more important for his time
to assert its necessity.
Baudelaire’s morbidity of temperament cannot, of
course, be ignored: and no one who has looked at the work
of Crepet or the recent small biographical study of Fran-
cois Porche can forget it. We should be misguided if we
treated it as an unfortunate ailment which can be dis-
counted or attempted to detach the sound from the un-
sound m his work. Without the morbidity none of his
work would be possible or significant; his weaknesses can
be composed into a larger whole of strength, and this is
implied m my
assertion that neither the health of Goethe nor
the malady of Baudelaire matters in itself: it is what both
men made of their endowments that matters. To the eye
of the world, and quite properly for all questions of private
hfe, Baudelaire was thoroughly perverse and insufferable:
a man with a talent for ingratitude and unsociability, in-
tolerably irritable, and with a mulish determination to
make the worst of everything; if he had money, to
squander it; if he had friends, to alienate them; if he had
any good fortune; to disdain it. He had the pride of the
m
man who feels himself great weakness and great strength.
Having, great genius, he had neither the patience nor the
inclination, had he had the power, to overcome his weak-
ness; on the contrary, he exploited it for theoretical pur-
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 BAUDELAIRE
poses. The morality of such a course may be a matter for
endless dispute; for Baudelaire, it was the way to liberate
his mind and give us the legacy and lesson that he has left.
He was one of those who have great strength, but
strength merely to suffer. He could not escape suffering
and could not transcend it, so he attracted pain to himself.
But what he could do, with that immense passive strength
and sensibihties which no pain could impair, was to study
his suffering. Ahd m this limitation he is wholly unlike
Dante, not even like any character m Dante’s Hell. But, on
the other hand, such suffering as Baudelaire’s implies the
possibility of a positive state of beatitude. Indeed, m his
way of suffering is already a kind of presence of the super-
natural and of the superhuman. He rejects always the
purely natural and the purely human; in other words, he
is neither ‘naturalist’ nor ‘humanist’. Either because he can-
not adjust himself to the actual world he has to reject it in
favour of Heaven and Hell, or because he has the percep-
tion of Heaven and Hell he rejects the present world: both
ways of putting it are tenable. There is m his statements a
good deal of romantic detritus; ses ailes de ge ant V empechent
de marcher, he says of the Poet and of the Albatross, but not
convincingly; but there is also truth about himself and
about the world. His ennui may of course be explained, as
everything can be explamed in psychological or patho-
logical terms; but it is also, from the opposite point of
view, a true form of acedia, arising from the unsuccessful
struggle towards the spiritual hfe.

II

From the poems alone, I venture to think, we are not

likely to grasp what seems to me the true sense and signi-
ficance of Baudelaire’s mind. Their excellence of form,
their perfection of phrasing, and their superficial coherence,
may give them the appearancte of presenting a definite and
final state of mind. In reality, they seem to me to have the
a b 385 E.S E.
 BAUDELAIRE
external but not the internal form of classic art. One might
even hazard the conjecture that the care for perfection of
form, among some of the romantic poets of the nineteenth
century, was an effort to support, or to conceal from view,
an inner disorder. Now the true claim of Baudelaire as an
arnst is not that he found a superficial form, but that he
was searching for a form of hfe. In minor form he never
indeed equalled Theophile Gautier, to whom he signifi-
cantly dedicated his poems: in the best of the slight verse of
Gautier there is a satisfaction, a balance of inwards and
form, which we do not find in Baudelaire. He had a
greater technical ability than Gautier, and yet the content
of feeling is constantly bursting the receptacle. His appar-
atus, by which I do not mean his command of words and
rhythms, but his stock of imagery (and every poet’s stock
of imagery is circumscribed somewhere), is not wholly
perdurable or adequate. His prosututes, mulattoes, Jew-
corpses form a machinery which has
esses, serpents, cats,
notworn very well; his Poet, or his Don Juan, has a ro-
mannc ancestry which is too clearly traceable. Compare
with the costumery of Baudelaire the stock of imagery of
the Vita Nuova, or of Cavalcanti, and you find Baudelaire’s
does not everywhere wear as well as that of several cen-
turies earlier; compare him with Dante or Shakespeare, for
what such a comparison is worth, and he is found not only
a much smaller poet, but one in whose work much more
that is perishable has entered.
To say this is only to say that Baudelaire belongs to a
definite place in time. Inevitably the offspring of roman-
ticism, and by his nature the first counter-romantic in
poetry, he could, like anyone else, only work with the
materials which were there. It must not be forgotten that
a poet ma romantic age cannot be a ‘classical’ poet except
m tendency. If he is sincere, he must express with indivi-
—
dual differences the general state of mind not as a duty,
but simply because he cannot help participating in it. For
such poets, we may expect often to get much help from
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BAUDELAIRE
reading their prose works and even notes and diaries; help
in deciphering the discrepancies between head and heart,
means and end, material and ideals
What preserves Baudelaire’s poetry from the fate of
most French poetry of the nineteenth century up to his
time, and has made him, as M. Valery has said a recent m
introduction to the Fleurs du Mai, the one modern French
poet to be widely read abroad, is not quite easy to con-
clude. It is pardy that technical mastery which can hardly
be overpraised, and which has made his verse an in-
exhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own lan-
guage. When we read
Maintjoyau dort enseveli
Dans les tenebres et Voubli,
Bien loin despioches et des sondes;
Maintefieur epanche a regret
Sonparfum doux comme un secret
Dans les solitudes profondes
we might for a moment
think it a more lucid bit of Mal-
larme; and so ongmal
the arrangement of words that
is

we might easily overlook its borrowing from Gray’s

Elegy. When we read
Valse melancolique et langoureux vertige!

we are already m the Paris of Laforgue. Baudelaire gave to

French poets generously as he borrowed from Enghsh
as
and American poets. The renovation of the versification of
Racine has been mentioned often enough; quite genuine,
but might be overemphasized, as it sometimes comes
near to being a trick. But even without this, Baudelaire’s
variety and resourcefulness would still be immense.
Furthermore, besides the stock of images which he used
that seems already second-hand, he gave new possibilities
to poetry in a new stock of imagery of contemporary hfe.
. . . Au cceur d’un vieux faubourg, labyrinthefangeux
Ou rhumani tegro uille enferments orageux
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 BAUDELAIRE
On voit un vieux chiffonnier qui vient , hochant le tete,

Buttant, et se cogncmt aux murs comme un poete.

This introduces something new, and something universal

in modem life. (The last line quoted, which in ironic terse-
ness anticipates Corbiere, might be contrasted with the
whole poem Benediction which begins the volume.) It is not
merely in the use of imagery of common hfe, not merely
in the use of imagery of the sordid life of a great metro-
polis, but in the elevation of such imagery to the first in-
tensity— presenting it as it is, and yet making it represent
—
something much more than itself that Baudelaire has
created a mode of release and expression for other men.
This invention of language, at a moment when French
poetry in particular was famishing for such invention, is
enough to make of Baudelaire a great poet, a great land-
mark in poetry. Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar
in modern poetry m any language, for his verse and language
is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have

experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life

is no less radical and no less important. In his verse, he is

now less a model to be imitated or a source to be drained

than a reminder of the duty, the consecrated task, of sin-
cerity. From a fundamental sincenty he could not deviate.
The superficies of sincenty (as I think has not always been
remarked) is not always there. As I have suggested, many
of his poems are insufficiently removed from their roman-
tic origins, from Byronic paternity and Satanic fraternity.
The ‘satanism’ of the Black Mass was very much in the air;
m exhibiting it Baudelaire is the voice of his time; but I
would observe that in Baudelaire, as in no one else, it is
redeemed by meaning something else. He uses the same para-
phernalia, but cannpt limit its symbolism even to all that
of which he is conscious. Compare him with Huysmans in
A rehours, En route, and La-has. Huysmans, who is a first-
rate realiSt of his time, only succeeds in making his diabol-
ism interesting when he treats it externally, when he is

388
 BAUDELAIRE
merely describing a manifestation of his period (if such, it
was). His own interest in such matters is, like his interest
m Christianity, a petty affair. Huysmans merely provides
a document. Baudelaire would not even provide that, if he
had been really absorbed in that ridiculous hocus-pocus.
But actually Baudelaire is concerned, not with demons,
black masses, and romanuc blasphemy, but with the real
problem of good and evil. It is hardly more than an acci-
dent of time that he uses the current imagery and vocabu-
lary of blasphemy. In the middle nineteenth century, the age
which {at its best) Goethe had prefigured, an age of bustle,
programmes, platforms, scientific progress, humanitarian-
ism and revolutions winch improved nothing, an age of
progressive degradation, Baudelaire perceived that what
really matters is Sin and Redempuon. It is a proof of his
honesty that he went as far as he could honestly go and no
further. To a mind observant of the post-Voltaire France
(Voltaire . . . le preaicateur des concierges), a mind which saw
the world of Napoleon le petit more lucidly than did that
of Victor Hugo, a mind which at the same time had no
affinity for the Saint-Sulpicerie of the day, the recognition
of the reality of Sin is a New Life; and the possibility of
damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral
reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that
damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation —of
salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last
gives somesignificance to living. It is this, I beheve, that
Baudelaire is trying to express; and which sepa-
it is this

rates him from the modernist Protestantism of Byron and

Shelley. It is apparendy Sin in the Swinbumian sense, but
really Sin in the permanent Christian sense, that occupies
the mind of Baudelaire.
Yet, as I said, the sense of Evil implies the sense of good.
Here too, as Baudelaire apparendy confuses, and perhaps
did confuse. Evil with its theatrical representations, Baude-
laire is not always certain in his notion of the Good. The
romantic idea of Love is never quite exorcized, but never
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BAUDELAIRE
quite surrendered to. In Le Balcon, which M. Valery con-
siders, and I think rightly, one of Baudelaire’s most beau-
tiful poems, there is all the romantic idea, but something
more: the reaching out towards something which cannot
be had in, but which may be had partly through, personal
relations. Indeed, in much romantic poetry the sadness
is due to the exploitation of the fact that no human

relations are adequate to human desires, but also to the

disbelief in any further object for human "desires than that
which, being human, fails to satisfy them. One of -the
unhappy necessities of human existence is that we have
to ‘find things out for ourselves’. If it were not so, the
statement of Dante would, at least for poets, have
done once for all. Baudelaire has all the romantic sorrow,
—
but invents a new kind of romantic nostalgia a derivative
of his nostalgia being the poesie des departs the poesie des
,

salles d’attente. In a beautiful paragraph of the volume in

question, Mon occur mis a nu, he imagines the vessels lying
m harbour as saying: Quand partons-nous vers le bonheur and
his minor successor Laforgue exclaims: Comme ils sont
beaux, les trains manques. The poetry of flight which, — m
contemporary France, owes a great debt to the poems of
—
the A. O. Bamabooth of Valery Larbaud is, in its origin
m this paragraph of Baudelaire, a dim recognition of the
direction of beatitude.
But m the adjustment of the natural to the spiritual, of
the bestial to the human and the human to the super-
natural, Baudelaire is a bungler compared with Dante; the
best that can be said, and that is a very great deal, is that
what he knew he found out for himself. In his book, the
Journaux Intimes, and especially in Mon cceur mis a nu, he
has a great deal to say of the love of man and woman. One
aphorism which has been especially noticed is the follow-
ing: la volupte unique et suprime de V amour git dans la certi-
tude de Jaire le mal. This means, I think, that Baudelaire has
perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and
woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of
390
 BAUDELAIRE
Good and Evil (of moral Good and Evil which are not
Good and Bad or Puritan Right and Wrong).
natural
Having an imperfect, vague romantic conception of Good,
he was at least able to understand that the sexual act as
evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural,
‘life-giving’, cheery automatism of the modem world. For
Baudelaire, sexual operation is at least something not
analogous to Kruschen Salts.
So far as we -are human, what we do must be either evil
1
or good ; so far aswe do evil or good, we are human; and
it is better, m
a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do
nothing: at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory
of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say
that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst
that can be said of most of our malefactors, from states-
men to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be
damned. Baudelaire was man enough for damnation:
whether he is damned is, of course, another question, and
we are not prevented from praying for his repose. In all
his humiliating traffic with other beings, he walked secure
in this high vocation, that he was capable of a damnation
denied to the politicians and the newspaper editors of Paris.

Ill

Baudelaire’s notion of beatitude certainly tended to the

wishy-washy; and even in one of the most beautiful of his
poems, L’ Invitation au voyage, he hardly exceeds the poesie
des departs. And because his vision is here so restricted, there
is for him a gap between human love and divine love. His
human love is definite and positive, his divine love vague
and uncertain: hence his insistence upon the evil of love,
hence his constant vituperations of the female. In this there
is no need to pry for psychopathological causes, which would

1 ‘Know ye not, that towhom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his

servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death, ot of obedience
unto righteousness?’ —Romans vi. 1 6.

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 BAUDELAIRE
be irrelevant at best; for his attitude towards women is con-
sistent with the pomt of view which he had reached. Had
he been a woman he would, no doubt, have held the same
views about men. He has arrived at the perception that a
woman must be to some extent a symbol; he did not
arrive at the point of harmonizing his experience with his
ideal needs. The complement, and the correction to the
Journaux Intimes, so far as they deal with the relations of
man and woman, is the Vita Nuova, and th crDivine Comedy.
— —
But I cannot assert it too strongly Baudelaire’s view, of
life, such as it objectively apprehensible, that is 4:o say,
is, is

his idiosyncrasies can partly explam his view of life, but

they cannot explain it away. And this view of life is one
which has grandeur and which exhibits heroism; it was an
evangel to his time and to ours. La vraie civilisation , he
wrote, nest pas dans le gaz, ni dans la vapeur, ni dans les
tables tournantes. Elle est dans la diminution des traces du peche
originel. It is not quite clear exactly what diminution here
imphes, but the tendency of his thought is clear, and the
message is still accepted by but few. More than half a

century later T. E. Hulme left behind him a paragraph

which Baudelaire would have approved:
hght of these absolute values, man himself is
‘In the
judged be essentially limited and imperfect. He is en-
to
dowed with Original Sin. While he can occasionally
accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he can never
himself be perfect. Certain secondary results in regard to
ordinary human action m
society follow from this. A
man
is essentially bad, he can only accomplish anything of

—
value by discipline ethical and political. Order is thus not
merely negative, but creative and liberating. Institutions
are necessary.’

392