No More Learning

And perhaps
the poet whose verse is saturated with tropical hues--he, when young,
sailed in southern seas--might appreciate the monstrous debauch of form
and colour in the Tahitian canvases of Paul Gauguin.

Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his
verse. He is par excellence the poet of aesthetics. To Daumier he
inscribed a poem; and to the sculptor Ernest Christophe, to Delacroix
(Sur Tasse en Prison), to Manet, to Guys (Reve Parisien), to an unknown
master (Une Martyre); and Watteau, a Watteau a rebours, is seen in Un
Voyage a Cythere; while in Les Phares this poet of the ideal, spleen
music, and perfume, shows his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Puget, Goya, Delacroix--"Delacroix, lac de sang
hante des mauvais anges. " And what is more exquisite than his quatrain
to Lola de Valence, a poetic inscription for the picture of Edouard
Manet, with its last line as vaporous, as subtle as Verlaine: "Le charme
inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir! " Heine called himself the last of the
Romantics. The first of the "Moderns" and the last of the Romantics was
the many-sided Charles Baudelaire.




III


He was born at Paris, April 9, 1821 (Flaubert's birth year), and not
April 21, as Gautier has it. His father was Joseph Francis Baudelaire,
or Baudelaire, who occupied a government position. A cultivated art
lover, his taste was apparent in the home he made for his second wife,
Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, an orphan and the daughter of a military
officer. There was a considerable difference in the years of this pair;
the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, at the birth of their
only child. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son,
Claude, who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paralysis, though a
steady man of business. That great modern neurosis, called Commerce, has
its mental wrecks, too, and no one pays attention; but when a poet falls
by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and other soul-hunters
seeking victims. After the death of Baudelaire's father, the widow,
within a year, married the handsome, ambitious Aupick, then chef de
bataillon, lieutenant-colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and
later general and ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and London.
Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but unlike most children of genius,
he was a scholar and won brilliant honours at school.
His stepfather was
proud of him. From the Royal College of Lyons, Charles went to the Lycee
Louis-le-Grand, Paris, but was expelled in 1839, on various
discreditable charges. Troubles soon began at home. He was irascible,
vain, precocious, and given to dissipation. He quarreled with General
Aupick, and disdained his mother. But she was to blame, she has
confessed; she had quite forgotten the boy in the flush of her second
love. He could not forget, or forgive what he called her infidelity to
the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The good
Bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said that Charles was a
little crazy--second marriages usually bring woe in their train. "When a
mother has such a son, she doesn't re-marry," said the young poet
Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes Dufais. He wrote
in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or maniacs . . . all victims of
terrible passions"; which was one of his exaggerations. His grandfather
on the paternal side was a Champenois peasant, his mother's family
presumably Norman, but not much is known of her forbears. Charles
believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken.