No More Learning

The human soul was his stage, he its interpreting orchestra.

In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by Poulet-Malassis, who
afterward went into bankruptcy--a warning to publishers with a taste for
fine literature. The titles contemplated were Limbes, or Lesbiennes.
Hippolyte Babou suggested the one we know. These poems were suppressed
on account of six, and poet and publisher summoned. As the municipal
government had made a particular ass of itself in the prosecution of
Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovary, the Baudelaire matter was
disposed of in haste. He was condemned to a fine of three hundred
francs, a fine which was never paid, as the objectionable poems were
removed. They were printed in the Belgian edition, and may be read in
the new volume, OEuvres. Posthumes.

Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, for he knew that his book
was dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge
from the trial with flying colours; therefore to be classed as one who
wrote objectionable literature was a shock. "Flaubert had the Empress
back of him," he complained; which was true; the Empress Eugenie, also
the Princess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put forth those
polished intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of which he had
taken a hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this
form with a new content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be found
in those miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject
and lowly, a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who
had discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil.
In one of his poems
he described a landscape of metal, of marble and water; a babel of
staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by the silence
of eternity. This depressing yet magical dream was utilized by Huysmans
in his A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the Prose Poems there is
nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude of
artificiality is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep fundamental
note of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the eternal diapason is
there even when least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than Poe. His
range of sympathy is wider. In this he transcends him as a poet, though
his subject-matter often issues from the very dregs of life. Brother to
pitiable wanderers, there are, nevertheless, no traces of cant, no
"Russian pity" a la Dostoievsky, no humanitarian or socialistic
rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist He hated the sentimental
sapping of altruism. His prose-poem, Crowds, with its "bath of
multitude," may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles Lamb we find
the idea: "Are there no solitudes out of caves and the desert? or
cannot the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully alone? "

His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhauser, as
significant an essay as Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. And
Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in Wagner's
career. Wagner sent a brief hearty letter of thanks to the critic, and
later made his acquaintance.