"A
glorious
devil, large in heart
and brain, that did love beauty only.
and brain, that did love beauty only.
Baudelaire - Poems and Prose Poems
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.
To affiliate him with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffman, James Thomson,
Coleridge, and the rest of the sombre choir does not explain him; he is,
perhaps, nearer Donne and Villon than any of the others--strains of the
metaphysical and sinister and supersubtle are to be discovered in him.
The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bilocation, are only too
easy to diagnose; but the remedy? Hypocrite lecteur--mon semblable--mon
frere! When the subtlety, force, grandeur, of his poetic production be
considered, together with its disquieting, nervous, vibrating qualities,
it is not surprising that Victor Hugo wrote to the poet: "You invest the
heaven of art with we know not what deadly rays; you create a new
shudder. " Hugo might have said that he turned Art into an Inferno.
Baudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry. In his heaven of fire, glass
and ebony he is the blazing Lucifer.
"A glorious devil, large in heart
and brain, that did love beauty only. . . " once sang Tennyson, though not
of the Frenchman.
II
As long ago as 1869, and in our "barbarous gas-lit country," as
Baudelaire named the land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which
this poet was described as "unique and as interesting as Hamlet. He is
that rare and unknown being, a genuine poet--a poet in the midst of
things that have disordered his spirit--a poet excessively developed in
his taste for and by beauty . . . very responsive to the ideal, very
greedy of sensation. " A better description of Baudelaire does not exist
The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that sounded throughout the
disordered symphony of the poet's life.
He was, later, revealed--also reviled--to American readers by Henry
James, who completely missed his significance. This was in 1878, when
appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists. Previous to
that there had been some desultory discussion, a few essays in the
magazines, and in 1875 a sympathetic paper by Professor James Albert
Harrison of the University of Virginia. He denounced the Frenchman for
his reprehensible taste, though he did not mention his beautiful verse
nor his originality in the matter of criticism. Baudelaire, in his eyes,
was not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of Sainte-Beuve,
introduced Poe as a great man to the French nation. (See Baudelaire's
letter to Sainte-Beuve in the newly published Letters, 1841-1866.
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.
To affiliate him with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffman, James Thomson,
Coleridge, and the rest of the sombre choir does not explain him; he is,
perhaps, nearer Donne and Villon than any of the others--strains of the
metaphysical and sinister and supersubtle are to be discovered in him.
The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bilocation, are only too
easy to diagnose; but the remedy? Hypocrite lecteur--mon semblable--mon
frere! When the subtlety, force, grandeur, of his poetic production be
considered, together with its disquieting, nervous, vibrating qualities,
it is not surprising that Victor Hugo wrote to the poet: "You invest the
heaven of art with we know not what deadly rays; you create a new
shudder. " Hugo might have said that he turned Art into an Inferno.
Baudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry. In his heaven of fire, glass
and ebony he is the blazing Lucifer.
"A glorious devil, large in heart
and brain, that did love beauty only. . . " once sang Tennyson, though not
of the Frenchman.
II
As long ago as 1869, and in our "barbarous gas-lit country," as
Baudelaire named the land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which
this poet was described as "unique and as interesting as Hamlet. He is
that rare and unknown being, a genuine poet--a poet in the midst of
things that have disordered his spirit--a poet excessively developed in
his taste for and by beauty . . . very responsive to the ideal, very
greedy of sensation. " A better description of Baudelaire does not exist
The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that sounded throughout the
disordered symphony of the poet's life.
He was, later, revealed--also reviled--to American readers by Henry
James, who completely missed his significance. This was in 1878, when
appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists. Previous to
that there had been some desultory discussion, a few essays in the
magazines, and in 1875 a sympathetic paper by Professor James Albert
Harrison of the University of Virginia. He denounced the Frenchman for
his reprehensible taste, though he did not mention his beautiful verse
nor his originality in the matter of criticism. Baudelaire, in his eyes,
was not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of Sainte-Beuve,
introduced Poe as a great man to the French nation. (See Baudelaire's
letter to Sainte-Beuve in the newly published Letters, 1841-1866.
