" A Manichean in his worship of
evil, he nevertheless abased his soul: "Oh!
evil, he nevertheless abased his soul: "Oh!
Baudelaire - Poems and Prose Poems
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la bas.
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It was la bas
with him even in the tortures of his wretched love-life. Corruption and
death were ever floating in his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who
saw everywhere the hidden skeleton. Felicien Hops has best interpreted
Baudelaire; the etcher and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too,
is a Baudelarian. If there could be such an anomaly as a native
wood-note wildly evil, it would be the lyric and astringent voice of
this poet. His sensibility was both catholic and morbid, though he could
be frigid in the face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a
man for whom the invisible word existed; if Gautier was pagan,
Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from mediaeval days. The spirit rules,
and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw God.
" A Manichean in his worship of
evil, he nevertheless abased his soul: "Oh! Lord God! 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.
with him even in the tortures of his wretched love-life. Corruption and
death were ever floating in his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who
saw everywhere the hidden skeleton. Felicien Hops has best interpreted
Baudelaire; the etcher and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too,
is a Baudelarian. If there could be such an anomaly as a native
wood-note wildly evil, it would be the lyric and astringent voice of
this poet. His sensibility was both catholic and morbid, though he could
be frigid in the face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a
man for whom the invisible word existed; if Gautier was pagan,
Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from mediaeval days. The spirit rules,
and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw God.
" A Manichean in his worship of
evil, he nevertheless abased his soul: "Oh! Lord God! 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.
