Felicien
Hops has best interpreted
Baudelaire; the etcher and poet were closely knit spirits.
Baudelaire; the etcher and poet were closely knit spirits.
Baudelaire - Poems and Prose Poems
Baudelaire's soul
was patiently built up as a fabulous bird might build its nest--bits of
straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades of black stars, rags,
leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray of roses, a sparkle of
pebble, a gleam of blue sky, arabesques of incense and verdigris,
despairing hearts and music and the abomination of desolation, for its
ground-tones. But this soul-nest is also a cemetery of the seven
sorrows. He loves the clouds . . . les nuages . . . la bas. . . . It was la bas
with him even in the tortures of his wretched love-life. Corruption and
death were ever floating in his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who
saw everywhere the hidden skeleton.
Felicien Hops has best interpreted
Baudelaire; the etcher and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too,
is a Baudelarian. If there could be such an anomaly as a native
wood-note wildly evil, it would be the lyric and astringent voice of
this poet. His sensibility was both catholic and morbid, though he could
be frigid in the face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a
man for whom the invisible word existed; if Gautier was pagan,
Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from mediaeval days. The spirit rules,
and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw God. " A Manichean in his worship of
evil, he nevertheless abased his soul: "Oh! Lord God! Give me the force
and courage to contemplate my heart and my body without disgust," he
prays: but as some one remarked to Rochefoucauld, "Where you end,
Christianity begins. "
Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders of a poetic Maremma,
which every miasma of the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and
glow-worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire painted in his sultry music
the profundities of abysms, the vastness of space. He painted, too, the
great nocturnal silences of the soul.
Pacem summum tenent! He never reached peace on the heights. Let us
admit that souls of his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel is
too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the enigma for us is none the less
unfathomable. Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled delirium.
was patiently built up as a fabulous bird might build its nest--bits of
straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades of black stars, rags,
leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray of roses, a sparkle of
pebble, a gleam of blue sky, arabesques of incense and verdigris,
despairing hearts and music and the abomination of desolation, for its
ground-tones. But this soul-nest is also a cemetery of the seven
sorrows. He loves the clouds . . . les nuages . . . la bas. . . . It was la bas
with him even in the tortures of his wretched love-life. Corruption and
death were ever floating in his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who
saw everywhere the hidden skeleton.
Felicien Hops has best interpreted
Baudelaire; the etcher and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too,
is a Baudelarian. If there could be such an anomaly as a native
wood-note wildly evil, it would be the lyric and astringent voice of
this poet. His sensibility was both catholic and morbid, though he could
be frigid in the face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a
man for whom the invisible word existed; if Gautier was pagan,
Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from mediaeval days. The spirit rules,
and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw God. " A Manichean in his worship of
evil, he nevertheless abased his soul: "Oh! Lord God! Give me the force
and courage to contemplate my heart and my body without disgust," he
prays: but as some one remarked to Rochefoucauld, "Where you end,
Christianity begins. "
Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders of a poetic Maremma,
which every miasma of the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and
glow-worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire painted in his sultry music
the profundities of abysms, the vastness of space. He painted, too, the
great nocturnal silences of the soul.
Pacem summum tenent! He never reached peace on the heights. Let us
admit that souls of his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel is
too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the enigma for us is none the less
unfathomable. Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled delirium.
