No More Learning

The
mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious detective tales, tales
extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the
Poe the prophet and mystic--in these the American was more versatile
than his French translator. That Baudelaire said, "Evil be thou my
good," is doubtless true. He proved all things and found them vanity. He
is the poet of original sin, a worshipper of Satan for the sake of
paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish to us--in his heart he was
a believer. His was "an infinite reverse aspiration," and mixed up with
his pose was a disgust for vice, for life itself. He was the last of the
Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called him the Kamchatka of Romanticism; its
remotest hyperborean peak. Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as
Naturalism; but Baudelaire is alive, and read. His glistening
phosphorescent trail is over French poetry and he is the begetter of a
school:--Verlaine, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud,
Jules Laforgue, Gabriel D'Annunzio, Aubrey Beardsley, Verhaeren, and
many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who
was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be
the obverse of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong
with the world. "

When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanticists that they came
from Chateaubriand, he should have substituted the name of
Rousseau--"Romanticism, it is Rousseau," exclaims Pierre Lasserre. But
there is more of Byron and Petrus Borel--a forgotten half-mad poet--in
Baudelaire; though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau
reactionary, sported the workingman's blouse, cut his hair, shouldered a
musket, went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling
the proletarian "Brother! " (oh, Baudelaire! ) and, as the Goncourts
recorded in their diary, had the head of a maniac.
How seriously we may
take this swing of the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of the poet's
at the time of the Revolution: "Come," he said, "let us go shoot General
Aupick! " It was his stepfather that he thought of, not the eternal
principles of Liberty. This may be a false anecdote; many such were
foisted upon Baudelaire. For example, his exclamations at cafes or in
public places, such as: "Have you ever eaten a baby? I find it pleasing
to the palate! " or, "The night I killed my father! " Naturally, people
stared and Baudelaire was happy--he had startled a bourgeois. The
cannibalistic idea he may have borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet,
for this French poet knew English literature.

Gautier compares the poems to a certain tale of Hawthorne's in which
there is a garden of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his
laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; he never descended into the
mud and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged his
soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France says, "a divine poet. " How
childish, yet how touching is his resolution--he wrote in his diary of
prayer's dynamic force--when he was penniless, in debt, threatened with
imprisonment, sick, nauseated with sin: "To make every morning my prayer
to God, the reservoir of all force, and all justice; to my father, to
Mariette, and to Poe as intercessors. " (Evidently, Maurice Barres
encountered here his theory of Intercessors. ) Baudelaire loved the
memory of his father as much as Stendhal hated his own. He became
reconciled with his mother after the death of General Aupick, in 1857.
He felt in 1862 that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for
he wrote: "I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.