No More Learning

I


For the sentimental no greater foe exists than the iconoclast who
dissipates literary legends. And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden
times when they gossiped of De Quincey's enormous opium consumption, of
the gin absorbed by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways,
Byron's escapades, and Shelley's atheism--alas! into what faded limbo
have they vanished. Poe, too, whom we saw in fancy reeling from Richmond
to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New York. Those
familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the way of all such jerry-built
spooks. We now know Poe to have been a man suffering at the time of his
death from cerebral lesion, a man who drank at intervals and little. Dr.
Guerrier of Paris has exploded a darling superstition about De Quincey's
opium-eating. He has demonstrated that no man could have lived so
long--De Quincey was nearly seventy-five at his death--and worked so
hard, if he had consumed twelve thousand drops of laudanum as often as
he said he did. Furthermore, the English essayist's description of the
drug's effects is inexact. He was seldom sleepy--a sure sign, asserts
Dr. Guerrier, that he was not altogether enslaved by the drug habit.
Sprightly in old age, his powers of labour were prolonged until past
three-score and ten. His imagination needed little opium to produce the
famous Confessions.
Even Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at
the premiere of Hernani was, according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And
Rousseau has been whitewashed. So they are disappearing, those literary
legends, until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear,
old-fashioned, disreputable men of genius!

But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This
French poet has suffered more from the friendly malignant biographer and
chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the curs out of the cemetery?
asked Baudelaire after he had read Griswold on Poe. A few years later
his own cemetery was invaded and the world was put into possession of
the Baudelaire legend; that legend of the atrabilious, irritable poet,
dandy, maniac, his hair dyed green, spouting blasphemies; that grim,
despairing image of a diabolic, a libertine, saint, and drunkard. Maxime
du Camp was much to blame for the promulgation of these tales--witness
his Souvenirs litteraires. However, it may be confessed that part of the
Baudelaire legend was created by Charles Baudelaire. In the history of
literature it is difficult to parallel such a deliberate piece of
self-stultification. Not Villon, who preceded him, not Verlaine, who
imitated him, drew for the astonishment or disedification of the world a
like unflattering portrait. Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered
at times from acute cortical irritation. And, notwithstanding his
desperate effort to realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, who
had said that no man can bare his heart quite naked; there always will
be something held back, something false ostentatiously thrust forward.
The grimace, the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers
between the soul of man and the sharp reality of published confessions.
Baudelaire was no more exception to this rule than St.