No More Learning

In height he was medium, his eyes brown, searching,
luminous, the eye of a nyctalops, "eyes like ravens"; nostrils
palpitating, cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual jaw, strong and
square. His hair was black, curly, glossy, his forehead high, square and
white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is there what Catulle
Mendes nicknamed him: "His Excellence, Monseigneur Brummel! " Later he
was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de N. S. le Diable; or
the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the clean-shaven face of the mock
priest, the slow cold eyes and the sharp cunning sneer of the cynical
libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness
of temptation. " In the heyday of his blood he was perverse and
deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting the Byronic notion that
ennui could best be cured by dissipation; in sin Baudelaire found the
saddest of all consolations. Mendes laughs at the legend of Baudelaire's
violence, of his being given to explosive phrases. Despite Gautier's
stories about the Hotel Pimodan and its club of hasheesh-eaters, M.
Mendes denies that Baudelaire was a victim of the hemp. What the
majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of literary
workers is this prime fact: men who work hard, writing verse--and there
is no mental toil comparable to it--cannot drink, or indulge in opium,
without inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of "inspiration,"
spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden bolt from heaven, are
delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed
at his music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy forged his
thunderbolts by the sweat of his brow, that Manet toiled like a
labourer on the dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion
to poetic work, that Gautier was a hard-working journalist, are
disillusions for the sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged from
Jupiter's skull to the desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but Balsac
and Flaubert did not encourage this fancy.
Work literally killed Poe, as
it killed Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert and Daudet. Maupassant went insane
because he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked
and worried. His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was
flawed--Sainte-Beuve told him that he had worn out his nerves--from the
start, he was detraque; but that his entire life was one huge debauch is
a nightmare of the moral police in some red cotton nightcap country.

His period of mental production was not brief nor barren. He was a
student. Du Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved by
the variety and quality of his published work. His range of sympathies
was large. His mistake, in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write so
well about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its real
name--which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was one of the elect, an
aristocrat, who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate air of
a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated voice, aroused unusual
interest and admiration. He was a humanist of distinction; he has left a
hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Baudelaire, like
Chopin, made more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity the
expressiveness of art.

Women played a commanding role in his life. They always do with any poet
worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging this
as Baudelaire.