No More Learning

He was a half-charlatan as was Baudelaire. In
both the sublime and the sickly were never far asunder. The pair loved
to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries. Both were implacable
pessimists. Both were educated in affluence, and both had to face
unprepared the hardships of life. The hastiest comparison of their
poetic work will show that their only common ideal was the worship of an
exotic beauty. Their artistic methods of expression were totally
dissimilar. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like temperament which
vibrated in the presence of strange subjects. Above all, he was obsessed
by sex. Women, as angel of destruction, is the keynote of his poems. Poe
was almost sexless. His aerial creatures never footed the dusty highways
of the world. His lovely lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me," could
never have been written by Baudelaire; while Poe would never have
pardoned the "fulgurant" grandeur, the Beethoven-like harmonies, the
Dantesque horrors of that "deep wide music of lost souls" in "Femmes
Damnees":

"Descendes, descendes, lamentable victimes. "

Or this, which might serve as a text for one of John Martin's vast
sinister mezzotints:

J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un theatre banal
Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore,
Une fee allumer dans un ciel infernal
Une miraculeuse aurore;

J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un theatre banal
Un etre, qui n'etait que lumiere, or et gaze,
Terrasser renorme Satan;
Mais mon coeur que jamais ne visite l'extase,
Est un theatre ou l'on attend
Toujours, toujours en vain l'Etre aux ailes de gaze.

George Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and
Baudelaire: "Both authors--Poe and De Quincey--fell short of Baudelaire
himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have a
superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperameut and affection
for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror.
" Poe is without
passion, except a passion for the macabre; what Huysmans calls "The
October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a gulf of despair and
terror and humanity in Baudelaire, which shakes your nerves, yet
stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a poet, he was no
match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual prestidigitation. The
mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious detective tales, tales
extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the
Poe the prophet and mystic--in these the American was more versatile
than his French translator. That Baudelaire said, "Evil be thou my
good," is doubtless true. He proved all things and found them vanity. He
is the poet of original sin, a worshipper of Satan for the sake of
paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish to us--in his heart he was
a believer. His was "an infinite reverse aspiration," and mixed up with
his pose was a disgust for vice, for life itself. He was the last of the
Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called him the Kamchatka of Romanticism; its
remotest hyperborean peak. Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as
Naturalism; but Baudelaire is alive, and read. His glistening
phosphorescent trail is over French poetry and he is the begetter of a
school:--Verlaine, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud,
Jules Laforgue, Gabriel D'Annunzio, Aubrey Beardsley, Verhaeren, and
many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who
was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be
the obverse of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong
with the world. "

When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanticists that they came
from Chateaubriand, he should have substituted the name of
Rousseau--"Romanticism, it is Rousseau," exclaims Pierre Lasserre. But
there is more of Byron and Petrus Borel--a forgotten half-mad poet--in
Baudelaire; though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau
reactionary, sported the workingman's blouse, cut his hair, shouldered a
musket, went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling
the proletarian "Brother! " (oh, Baudelaire!