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CHAPTER 2

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The Politics of Appreciation

Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire

I know of no sentiment more perplexing than admiration.

—Charles Baudelaire, “Théophile Gautier”

The Precursor

In the introduction to his section on the decadents and aesthetes in Degeneration, Max Nordau offers a suggestive analogy for Baudelaire’s influence over later writers in the decadent movement. “As on the death of Alexander the Great,” he writes, “his generals fell on the conqueror’s empire, and each one seized a portion of land, so did the imitators that Baudelaire numbered among his contemporaries and the generation following—many even without waiting for his madness and death—take possession of some one of his peculiarities for literary exploitation.”¹ With his typical blend of blindness and surprising insight, Nordau here identifies the remarkable extent to which the decadent movement defined itself through its reception of Baudelaire. For Nordau, Baudelaire’s less talented imitators merely pillage his works for their themes, rather than following their own talents (or lack thereof): Catulle Mendès takes his lasciviousness; the Symbolists develop his mystical theories; Paul Verlaine borrows his mixture of sensuality and pietism; Algernon Charles Swinburne appropriates his Sadism. Denigrating the originality of decadent writers is a veritable cottage industry in critical writings on the period. Decadence, as Arthur Symons—surely no ally of Nordau’s—writes in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), is the work of “lesser men,” whose celebration of vice is a sheer pose.² But imitation is also the sincerest form of flattery, and even the most servile expressions of admiration for Baudelaire, I argue in this chapter, are really forms of creative reception, the means by which later writers import the French poet’s vision of aesthetic community and the politics of taste into new national and sociohistorical contexts.

Baudelaire’s rhetorical construction of an aesthetic elite united by taste and a devotion to beauty gives later writers a powerful heuristic for thinking about the political functions of artistic production and consumption. As we saw in the last chapter, Baudelaire argues that taste is a fundamentally political concept, evocative of the classical republican tradition of civic humanism. Beauty contributes to the life of the polis and provides new models of communal affiliation and political participation. Unlike the private interests that drive obviously public formations like laws and constitutions, beauty exists only for itself and thus serves the public good. Art is the true res publica of modernity. The decadent movement makes this claim about taste, beauty, and aesthetic sociability central to its reception of Baudelaire—no less so than it does his strikingly original poetic vision. Baudelaire, to adapt Nordau’s image, left behind a vast, ungovernable poetic territory, informed by a utopian vision of aesthetic community and sociality. Later writers developed this vision into an expansive critique of contemporary politics in large part by imitating and expressing admiration for Baudelaire himself.

No figure was more widely imitated by later decadent writers than Baudelaire. They refer to him as master, father, progenitor, precursor, “Our Baptist”; he is apostrophized, plagiarized, made the subject of fulsome tributes and numberless purple patches; writers of all stripes claim to have found themselves through reading him. As Patricia Clements has observed, Baudelaire’s influence readily crosses national boundaries, offering writers a potent alternative to native literary traditions.³ Beyond providing the decadent movement with many of its major themes and critical principles, Baudelaire also influences through his powerfully original relationship to the writers and artists who influenced him. He provides a model for being influenced, functioning as what Catherine Coquio calls an “accelerant,” whose expressions of appreciation allow other writers to find themselves in his works and in the works that influenced him, much as he found himself in the work of Poe.⁴ Declaring their discipleship to Baudelaire places his followers within a circle of admiration, a community of writers bound together by a chain of reciprocal influences. Writers who admire Baudelaire in turn admire Poe, Wagner, Gautier, and others, borrowing from them as well as from Baudelaire himself. The chain extends beyond those writers Baudelaire actually admired to those Baudelaire’s admirers admire, on the more or less explicit presumption that Baudelaire would have appreciated them were he alive to read their works.⁵

The two most important early admirers of Baudelaire were Gautier and Swinburne, and their epideictic strategies would help to define the rhetoric of decadence. This chapter documents the ways in which their major tributes published in the immediate wake of Baudelaire’s death—Gautier’s “Notice” to Les Fleurs du mal and Swinburne’s pastoral elegy “Ave atque Vale,” both from 1868—shape the reception of Baudelaire through appreciation. Defining him as at once a quintessential decadent poet and as a model for understanding the politics of taste, these tributes make Baudelaire legible for the incipient decadent movement in much the same way that Baudelaire made Poe legible as a model for his own project. Gautier and Swinburne first define decadence as a project, as a cultural and political stance organized around judgments of taste and expressions of appreciation. This project finds its origin not only in Baudelaire’s works but also in the complicated network of tribute and imitation that formed around them. The “Notice” and “Ave atque Vale” were written out of admiration for Baudelaire, but they are also manifestos that make admiration itself a central preoccupation for the decadent movement.

As we saw in the last chapter, Baudelaire casts Poe as a Mastrian sacrificial figure who suffered abuse and neglect from the public but produced works that spoke to a select few who were willing to listen. Rejected by his age, Poe was accepted by an elite (and elitist) “family” of sympathetic strangers. Both Gautier and Swinburne apply much the same paradigm in their reception of Baudelaire. Largely ignoring the specific political theories that motivated Baudelaire, they strategically adapt his critique of bourgeois liberalism and his evocations of civic humanism to the particular social and political contexts in which they found themselves. For both writers, Baudelaire is an avatar of classical republican ideals, a citizen-warrior whose writings serve not the patria but an emerging bohemian subculture of artistic, sexual, and intellectual outcasts—an aesthetic republic in exile from the decadent empire of mass modernity. Traditional republican historiography, as I noted in the last chapter, associates cultural decline with precisely those vices decadence celebrates: luxury, sexual dissidence, pleasure, and above all corruption. Decadence is a sign that the virtues of civic humanism have broken down.⁶ Nineteenth-century critics of decadence like Nisard and Bourget appeal to this historiography in their recurrent characterization of modern decadence as a fetishism of the detail that reflects the atomization of society. For Gautier and Swinburne, Baudelaire’s literary decadence is a source of political revival, a form of sacrifice that parallels the classical warrior ideal rather than epitomizing its decay.

The Poetics of Sacrifice

Théophile Gautier’s “Notice” to the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du mal is the single most important posthumous tribute to Baudelaire and, as P. E. Tennant writes, “was almost entirely responsible for Baudelaire’s reputation as the father-founder of decadence.”⁷ Most often cited for its seminal definition of decadent style, the “Notice” praises Baudelaire much as Baudelaire had praised Poe: as a martyr for literature and for the generation of writers and artists that emerges out of the ruins of the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. Gautier was asked to read the eulogy at Baudelaire’s funeral but was away from Paris when the poet was buried, leading to some grumbling among Baudelaire’s friends.⁸ The “Notice” serves as a belated substitute for this missed opportunity for appreciation. It is at once eulogy and critical study, and performs the important work of framing Baudelaire as a decadent writer, piecing together elements of his work and reversing traditional critical judgments to make decadence available as a purposive literary stance rather than a terminal condition. Gautier’s crucial innovation is to define Baudelaire as a loyalist, a warrior for the poetic ideal, who experienced the extremes of literary life not only out of devotion to his craft but also in the service of an emerging dissident community. In this regard, Gautier, not Baudelaire, is the John the Baptist of the decadent movement; and like the Baptist, his most recognizable gesture is pointing to the true messiah, the sacrificial lamb of the decadent communion. Baudelaire’s sacrificial rhetoric echoes throughout the piece, though with a significantly redirected political thrust.

Although the “Notice” seems on a first reading to be rather diffuse, personal, and rambling, it alludes with surprising rigor to the Athenian epideictic genre of the funeral oration, which, as Nicole Loraux notes in The Invention of Athens, was undergoing an important revival in the political rhetoric of the nineteenth century. The funeral oration is defined by the praise of patriotic sacrifice, and scholars and politicians of many stripes laid claim in the period to the republican lineage of idealized citizenship the genre both lauds and epitomizes.⁹ Gautier uses the familiar topoi of the funeral oration to treat Baudelaire’s life and work as a form of sacrifice, but he systematically overturns the expectations of the genre. For Gautier, Baudelaire’s sacrifice is literary, not military. He presents Baudelaire as a classically stoic warrior, whose fascination with death and sacrifice becomes a form of political critique that places the poet at the head of society. Baudelaire is a figure of internal exile, a critical witness to modernity, who fulfills the vision of outsider sociality he himself had discerned in Poe’s sad fate, and maintains in his artistic practice the civic virtues that have fallen into decay in the larger society. Drawing on the canonically republican tradition of the funeral oration, Gautier memorializes a community of outsiders and exceptions. This society is not the Athenian polis of the Periclean idiom but the bohemian counterculture, composed of the very figures Baudelaire identified as ill at ease in the nineteenth century: artists, dandies, writers, lovers, ragmen, and so forth. They form a polity apart—a decadent republic of letters—devoted at once to pleasure and to self-preservation.

Gautier’s idiosyncratic allusions to the funeral oration underlie the most significant rhetorical choices in the “Notice.” Although the piece was published more than six months after Baudelaire’s death, appeared serially before it was printed as the preface to Baudelaire’s collection, and is far too long to have been composed in one sitting, Gautier dates it 20 February 1868, lending it an oratorical air. Rather than recording the day of composition or completion, the date stresses the occasional nature of the “Notice,” and its implicit address to a community. Gautier strays most notably from the model of the funeral oration, which always praised the dead as a group, in his focus on a single individual. In other respects, he sticks closely to the conventions of the genre: the piece enumerates the poet’s major achievements, casts his death as a sacrifice for the community, and toward its conclusion seeks to console those left behind: “It is sorrowful, for the survivors, to see so fine and fruitful an intelligence pass away, to lose in a more and more deserted path of life a companion of youth” (F 164; E 86). He slyly plays on the traditional oratorical promise of the city to care for war orphans by closing his essay with a discussion of the prose poems, Baudelaire’s orphan texts, which were first collected in the same complete works edition for which the “Notice” was commissioned. The only prose poem Gautier discusses at any length, “Les Bienfaits de la lune [The Moon’s Favors],” tells of a sleeping child visited at night by the moon, as if by “a mother’s careful tenderness,” and brought under its influence.¹⁰ The moon becomes a foster parent, much like the city in ancient Athens.

Gautier also follows the form of the funeral oration by defining Baudelaire’s artistic achievement in terms of violence and sacrifice. The essay lingers on images of death and loss, reading the themes of Baudelaire’s poetry as evidence of the poet’s warrior spirit. Gautier’s description of Baudelaire as a young man is especially telling. With black hair and prominent white brow, his head resembles a “Saracen helmet” (F 113–14; E 2–3). This idiosyncratic martial trait foreshadows Baudelaire’s destiny. The literary life is a kind of violence done to self and others in pursuit of beauty, a “sad, precarious, and miserable” existence, made up of bloody “battles [luttes]” to achieve an ideal from which most writers never return intact; in effect, the writer “no longer lives” (F 121; E 13). Even successful poets die as martyrs, “crowned with glory” and sinking into the “breast of their ideal” (F 121; E 14). When Gautier describes Baudelaire’s appearance as a mature man—the poet wore only black after 1851, as I noted in the last chapter—the warrior becomes a kind of saint, reinforcing the connection between poetry and martyrdom. His hair is now white, and his face “thin and spiritualized.” His lips “were closed mysteriously, and seemed to guard ironical secrets”; he has overall “an almost sacerdotal appearance” (F 120; E 12).

Gautier’s comparison of writing and warfare is not wholly fanciful. Although the essay does not explicitly mention the Revolutions of 1848, the event shadows its account of Baudelaire’s legend. Here again, the use of dates in the essay is significant. Gautier claims that he first met Baudelaire in 1849, when the latter was still unpublished and obscure, though clearly marked for greatness. This chronology is almost certainly incorrect: by 1849, Baudelaire had published two Salons, several critical articles, Le Fanfarlo, his first Poe translation, and numerous individual poems. His talent, if not his lasting fame, was well established, at least in the literary circles Gautier frequented, where the various pseudonyms under which Baudelaire published his early works would not have been a mystery. It is more likely that Gautier first met Baudelaire in 1845.¹¹ Gautier’s apparent error in dating is best understood not as a mistake but as a creative elaboration, which traces Baudelaire’s influence on his generation to the Revolution of 1848 and its chaotic aftermath: the fleeting establishment of the Second Republic and the conservative counterrevolution that culminated in Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851. Gautier does not mention Baudelaire’s revolutionary activity—he surely knew of it— but it is suggested throughout the “Notice” in his characterization of the poet’s work and influence. Writing during the waning days of the Second Empire, Gautier reads Baudelaire’s poetry as an anticipatory response to the disorder that Louis Napoleon sought to contain with the virtual police state he instituted soon after assuming power. Baudelaire is an avatar of classical republican virtue in an age of political chaos who documents the underbelly of a decadent modern empire.

Gautier’s famous definition of decadent style should be read in the light of this historical context. Decadence, as Gautier describes it, is a self-conscious stance, which historicizes decay rather than celebrating it. Baudelaire challenges the nineteenth-century’s claims of progress by challenging its choice of historical analogies.¹² Praising Baudelaire in the language of the classical funeral oration, Gautier appropriates the republican imaginary of classical Athens and the Roman Republic for the modern poet; the Second Empire with its social controls and displays of wealth and power resembles the decadent Roman Empire. Gautier discerns in Baudelaire a taste for social fragmentation and political disorder, and this taste allows him to document the aftermath of 1848 in ways unavailable to other writers:

The poet of Les Fleurs du mal loved what is inaccurately called the style of decadence, which is nothing more than art arrived at that point of extreme maturity induced by the slanting suns of civilizations that have grown old. It is an ingenious style, complicated, wise, full of nuances and research, always pushing back the frontiers of speech [reculant … les bornes de la langue], taking color from every palette, notes from all keyboards, forcing itself to the expression of the most elusive thoughts, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate the subtle confidences of neurosis, confessions of senile passions becoming depraved and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness. This style of decadence is the last word on the Word [le dernier mot du Verbe], summoned to express all and push to the utmost extreme. One can recall, à propos of him, language already veined with the greenness of decomposition, savoring the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek art fallen into deliquescence. (F 124–25; E 19–20; trans. modified)

Gautier borrows from and radically transforms the prevailing nineteenth-century definition of decadent style. Like Nisard and other neoclassical critics, who saw in decadent style the evidence of social and political breakdown, Gautier associates Baudelaire’s love of decadence with the end of empire. Yet the poet is a witness to decadence, not a victim of it—a researcher or explorer, who pushes back the boundaries of language and draws deliberately from the other arts and sciences to describe his political moment. Gautier plays on the language and imagery of extremes. From the Latin exter, meaning outward, foreign, or strange, the word names both spatial (as in the French extrême Orient, Far East) and conceptual limits. Decadence is an index of extreme maturity, extremes of language, of imperial dominion in extremis. But the word also describes Baudelaire’s stance as an outsider, an observer, and a translator.¹³ He is closer in spirit to the barbarians and Christians who take down the Roman Empire than to its doomed citizens. Gautier notes that Baudelaire’s favorite Latin writers are not high imperial figures like Horace and Virgil but social and territorial outsiders, whose language “has the black radiance of ebony”: the African Apuleius; the satirist Juvenal; and the provincial Christians Augustine and Tertullian, both also Africans (F 125; E 21). Rather than succumbing to decadence, Baudelaire is an outsider stoically anatomizing the fall of the empire.

Gautier was by no means a political radical—quite the contrary, in fact, by 1868. Although he became famous for his flamboyant advocacy of l’art pour l’art in the 1830s and the sexual daring of novels such as Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), he disdained the revolutionary acts of 1848 and made himself comfortable in the Second Empire. Much to the chagrin of younger writers who admired his works, he was employed by the regime’s official newspaper, Le Moniteur universel, and later served as the librarian for Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Louis Napoleon. He remained critical of the bourgeois Philistinism that marked the Second Empire, but he never seriously challenged the legitimacy of the regime, and there is little reason to believe that he sympathized with or genuinely comprehended either Baudelaire’s early radicalism or his later turn to the work of Maistre. Indeed, the invocation of 1848 in the “Notice” arguably depoliticizes Baudelaire’s work by reducing revolution to a signifier for generalized social disorder. And yet Gautier’s use of the funeral oration deliberately connects Baudelaire and the revolutions with the idealized political model of Periclean Athens, an example radically at odds in its valorization of active citizenship with the purely formal manner of political participation afforded the populace during the Second Empire. Baudelaire here is at once an artistic and a political model, the epitome of the decadent poet and an avatar of republican virtue in the midst of what Gautier clearly perceived was a declining empire. Gautier’s dating of his first meeting with Baudelaire has yet another resonance: 1849 was the year Poe died. Baudelaire inherits the role he apportions to Poe: critic of and eventual sacrifice to a decadent mass modernity and the tottering empire that fosters it.

Seen in this light, Gautier’s account of Baudelaire’s critical detachment takes on a significant political edge. With his hair resembling a “Saracen helmet” and a willingness to sacrifice himself for his art, Baudelaire models an aesthetic politics of internal exile. He depicts France itself as if through foreign eyes, conceiving “a land unexplored, a sort of rough and wild Kamschatka” (F 123; E 17) from within the heart of his native country.¹⁴ In a seemingly casual allusion with wide-ranging significance for his argument, Gautier connects Baudelaire with the legendary seventeenth-century Italian alchemist and court poisoner for the Borgias, Exili, who wore a “glass mask [masque de verre]” when preparing his “powder of succession” (F 135; E 40). The allusion compares Baudelaire’s contemporary readers to Exili, mocking them for their fear that the poems are somehow “poisonous” and need to be held at a distance. Earlier in the essay, Gautier had compared these poems to poison and disease, but he refers to the palette Baudelaire draws upon to describe his world, not to the nature of the poems themselves: “the roses of consumption, the pallor of chlorosis, the hateful bilious yellows, the leaden grey of pestilential fogs, the poisoned and metallic greens smelling of sulphide of arsenic, the blackness of smoke diluted by the rain on plaster walls” (F 133; E 36). These are the colors produced by the industrialized modernity Baudelaire’s poems document; the poet is only being true to his time in painting with them. Yet playing on the homophony of verre (glass) and vers (verse), Gautier suggests that Baudelaire and Exili do have something important in common. As if donning a protective glass mask, Baudelaire writes about the poisonous remainders of modernity; the homophony of Exili’s name with the act of exile (in French, exil) defines his chosen response.¹⁵

For Gautier, Baudelaire epitomizes this detached but critical relationship to his decadent age. He stresses the poet’s “British” reserve and formalized, almost aristocratic manners, and observes the same kind of detachment in the poetry and critical writings (F 120; E 13). The formal perfection of Baudelaire’s verse is a kind of “armour” distancing the poet from what he describes (F 133; E 35). He approaches evil like a “magnetised bird”: drawn into the “unclean mouth of the serpent,” he always escapes at the last moment to “bluer and more spiritual regions” (F 127; E 24). Many of the relatively few poems Gautier chooses to discuss in the “Notice” describe or epitomize the poet’s stoic detachment. He groups two poems—“Élévation [Elevation]” and “Le Soleil [The Sun]”—which are widely separated in the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but which both imagine the poet soaring above the everyday world. Gautier praises the dandaical hero of “Don Juan aux Enfers [Don Juan in Hell]” for his refusal of emotion. The most significant poem Gautier discusses in this regard is “Bénédiction,” the opening poem of Les Fleurs du mal proper. In line with Gautier’s larger argument in the “Notice,” “Bénédiction” casts the poet’s life as a form of martyrdom. Scorned by his mother and his family, tormented by his lover, and overseen by a guardian angel who can only weep ineffectually over his charge’s sad “pilgrimage” on earth, the young poet dreams that literary glory will sanctify his suffering. In his commentary on the poem, Gautier describes the lover who tortures the poet as a Delilah, “happy in delivering him up to the Philistines” (F 134; E 36). This detail is nowhere in Baudelaire’s poem. Gautier’s elaboration makes plain his interpretation of Baudelaire’s life: suffering for Truth and Beauty, the poet sacrifices himself on the altar of a Philistine readership that cares only about money and outward propriety, not the Ideal. Baudelaire’s torment is part of a larger cultural conflict between artists and their bourgeois public, his critical detachment from modernity a mode of resistance as well as a defense.

Gautier opens the “Notice” with an extended recollection, incorrectly dated, as I noted above, of his first meeting with Baudelaire among the small circle of artists, poets, and models who congregated in and around Gautier’s rooms at the Hôtel Pimodan in Paris. The “strange apartment” Gautier occupies “communicated” with that of Ferdinand Boissard by a private hidden staircase not to be seen from outside. This image of a social group circulating and “communicating” outside the view of the public aptly figures the counter-cultural sociality and practice of internal exile that defines Baudelaire’s contribution to modern poetry. When Gautier first met him, he recognized that Baudelaire was destined for leadership. Acknowledged by artists and writers, he remains, at this time, a mystery to the larger public: “Charles Baudelaire was then an almost unknown genius, preparing himself in the shadow for the light to come … his name was already becoming known amongst poets and artists, who heard it with a quivering of expectation, the younger generation, coming after the great generation of 1830, seemed to be looking to him a great deal. In the mysterious upper chamber where the reputations of the future are sketched out [s’ébauchent] he passed as the strongest” (F 113; E 2; trans. modified). Baudelaire’s talent marks him as not merely a great poet but also as a kind of secular messiah-in-waiting, the harbinger of a new post-Romantic generation. Gautier’s images blend the typological with the aesthetic. Baudelaire’s future is “sketched out” like a drawing; shadow and light are figures for fame as well as the medium of painting.¹⁶ Gautier notes that the artist’s model Maryx (Joséphine Bloch), who was present at this fateful meeting, later became famous for depicting the allegorical figure of Glory in Paul Delaroche’s 1855 mural, “The Hemicycle.” In the mural, Glory hands laurel crowns to the legendary Greek painters Phidias, Apelles, and Ictinus, who are flanked by modern masters. In the scene Gautier describes, she figuratively hands the crown to Baudelaire. Awarded to victorious poets and generals alike, the wreath signifies Baudelaire’s posthumous role as the unofficial and subversive poet laureate. Rather than singing the praises of the empire, he inspires a small group of internal exiles during a moment of great disorder.

The laurel wreath is also present in another allusion in the opening paragraphs of the “Notice.” Regretting the lost sense of community he felt at the time of his first meeting with Baudelaire, Gautier looks back to a crucial moment in the classical republican imaginary: the Florentine city-state of the Renaissance. “They have passed,” he writes, “those charming leisure hours, where coteries [décamérons] of poets, artists, and beautiful women were gathered together to talk of art, literature, and love, as in the century of Boccaccio. Time, death, and the imperious necessities of life, have dispersed these free and sympathetic groups; but the memory is dear to all those who had the good fortune to be admitted to them” (F 118–19; E 10; trans. modified). The tone of this passage is elegiac, but the allusion is cutting. In The Decameron, the group of Florentine young people who tell one another stories is trying to escape the plague and the social breakdown that follows in its wake. In his introduction to the collection, Boccaccio stresses the plague’s corrosive influence on social, political, and familial order. Having come from the East, the plague manifests itself in Italy as a disorder of sociality. It spreads by contiguity, infecting healthy persons “who conversed or had any dealings with the sick.”¹⁷ Yet it also divides, separating the sick from the healthy, parents from children, husbands from wives, citizens from their city. Having all lost their families to the plague, Boccaccio’s storytellers leave the city seeking refuge in a series of country estates. But their escape is not merely escapist: in place of the old order they fashion a new imaginary republic, with a rotating leadership signified by a laurel crown, “the outward symbol of sovereign power and authority” for the group.¹⁸ Out of the ashes of one society, they form a new society based on art, complete with laws, sovereignty, and an orderly succession. Like Gautier’s bohemian counterculture, they constitute a polity apart, devoted to pleasure and self-preservation.