No More Learning

He abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A country, he cried, where the
trees are black, the flowers without odour, and where there is no
conversation! He, the brilliant causeur, the chief blaguer of a circle
in which young James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the role of a
listener--this most spiritual among artists, found himself a failure in
the Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind ourselves that
Baudelaire was the creator of many of the paradoxes attributed, not only
to Whistler, but to an entire school--if one may employ such a phrase.
The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his cutting enunciation, his
power of blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his love of the artificial,
have been copied by the aesthetic blades of our day. He it was who first
taunted Nature with being an imitator of art, with always being the
same. Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the quotidian eating and drinking!
And as pessimist, too, he led the mode. Baudelaire, like Flaubert,
grasped the murky torch of pessimism once held by Chateaubriand,
Benjamin Constant, and Senancour. Doubtless, all this stemmed from
Byronism. And now it is as stale as Byronism.

His health failed, and he lacked money enough to pay for doctor's
prescriptions; he even owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur, where
he was visiting the father-in-law of Felician Rops (March, 1866), he
suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels.
His
mother, who lived at Honneur, in mourning for her husband, came to his
aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia set in. He
could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight of himself in
the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger. His friends
rallied, and they were among the most distinguished people in Paris, the
elite of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two playing Wagner on the
piano--which must have added a fresh nuance to death--and they brought
him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers and music to the last. He
could not bear the sight of his mother; she revived in him some painful
memories, but that passed, and he clamoured for her when she was absent.
If anyone mentioned the names of Wagner or Manet, he smiled. And with a
fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon
eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.

Barbey d'Aurevilly himself a Satanist and dandy (oh, those comical old
attitudes of literature), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du
Mal would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of
the cross. (Later he said the same of Huysmans. ) Baudelaire had the
alternative course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted
spiritual suicide for how many years? (He once tried actual suicide, but
the slight cut in his throat looked so ugly to him that he went no
farther. ) His soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and
evil. That at the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his
God should not be a subject for comment.