Читать книгу Charles Baudelaire: A Study - Symons Arthur - Страница 3

When Baudelaire is great, when his genius is at its highest point of imaginative creation, of imaginative criticism, it is never when he works by implication—as the great men who are pure artists (for instance, Shakespeare) work by implication only—but always from his personal point of view being simply infallible and impeccable. The pure artist, it has been said, never asserts: and the instances are far from being numerous; Balzac asserts, and Balzac is always absolutely just in all his assertions: he whose analysis of modern Society—La Comédie Humaine—verges almost always on creation; and despite certain deficiencies in technique and in style, he remains the greatest of all novelists. As for Baudelaire, he rarely asserts; he more often suggests or divines—with that exquisite desire of perfect and just work that is always in him. With his keen vision he rarely misses the essential; with his subtle and sifted prose he rarely fails in characterizing the right man in the right way and the wrong man—the man who is not an artist—in forms of ironical condemnation. Shelley in his time and Blake in his time gave grave enough offence and perplexity; so did Baudelaire, so did Poe, so did Swinburne, so did Rossetti, so did Beardsley. All had their intervals of revolt—spiritual or unspiritual, according to the particular trend of their genius; some destroy mendacious idols, some change images into symbols; some are supposed to be obscurely original. All had to apprehend, as Browning declared in regard to his readers and critics in one of his Prefaces, "charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh." And all these might have said as he said: "I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since."

In our approach to the poetry, or to the prose, of any famous writer, with whom we are concerned, we must necessarily approach his personality; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him. As for Baudelaire, I must confess that, in spite of the fact that one might hate or love the man according to the judgment of the wise or of the unwise, I find him more lovable than hateful. That he failed in trying to love one woman is as certain as his disillusion after he had possessed her; that, in regard to Jeanne Duval, she was to him simply a silent instrument that, by touching all the living strings of it, he awakened to a music that is all his own; that whether this "masterpiece of flesh" meant more to him than certain other women who inspired him in different ways; whether he thirsted to drain her "empty kiss" or the "empty kiss" of Rachel, of Marguerite, of Gabrielle, of Judith, is a matter of but little significance. A man's life such as his is a man's own property and the property of no one else. And Baudelaire's conclusion as to any of these might be, perhaps, summed up in this stanza:

"Your sweet, scarce lost estate

Of innocence, the candour of your eyes,

Your child-like, pleased surprise,

Your patience: these afflict me with a weight

As of some heavy wrong that I must share

With God who made, with man who found you, fair."

"In more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels," says Saint Augustine; and Beardsley's sacrifice, along with that of all great decadent art, the art of Rops or of Baudelaire, is really a sacrifice to the eternal beauty, and only seemingly to the powers of evil. And here let me say that I have no concern with what neither he nor I could have had absolute knowledge of, his own intention in his work. A man's intention, it must be remembered—and equally in the case of much of the work of Poe and of Baudelaire, much less so in the case of Balzac and Verlaine—from the very fact that it is conscious, is much less intimately himself than the sentiment which his work conveys to me.

Baudelaire's figures, exactly like those designed by Beardsley and by Rodin, have the sensitiveness of the spirit and that bodily sensitiveness which wastes their veins and imprisons them in the attitude of their luxurious meditation. They have nothing that is merely "animal" in their downright course towards repentance; no overwhelming passion hurries them beyond themselves; they do not capitulate to an open assault of the enemy of souls. It is the soul in them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. Their bodies are eager and faint with wantonness; they desire fiercer and more exquisite pains, a more intolerable suspense than there is in the world.

Beardsley is the satirist of an age without convictions, and he can but paint hell as Baudelaire did, without pointing for contrast to any actual paradise. He employs the same rhetoric as Baudelaire—a method of emphasis which it is uncritical to think insincere. In the terrible annunciation of evil which he called The Mysterious Rose-Garden, the lantern-bearing angel with winged sandals whispers, from among the falling roses, tidings of more than "pleasant sins." And in Baudelaire, as in Beardsley, the peculiar efficacy of their satire is that it is so much the satire of desire returning on itself, the mockery of desire enjoyed, the mockery of desire denied. It is because these love beauty that beauty's degradation obsesses them; it is because they are supremely conscious of virtue that vice has power to lay hold on them. And with these—unlike other satirists of our day—it is always the soul, and not the body's discontent only, which cries out of these insatiable eyes, that have looked on all their lusts; and out of these bitter mouths, that have eaten the dust of all their sweetnesses; and out of these hands, that have laboured delicately for nothing; and out of their feet, that have run after vanities.

The body, in the arms of death, the soul, in the arms of the naked body: these are the strangest symbolical images of Life and of Death. So, as Flaubert's devotion to art seemed to have had about it something of the "seriousness and passion that are like a consecration," I give this one sentence on the death of Emma Bovary: "Ensuite il recita le Misereatur et l'Indulgentiam, trempa son pouce droit dans l'huile et commença les onctions: d'abord sur les yeux, qui avaient tant convoité toutes les somptuosités terrestres; puis sur les narines, friandes de brises tièdes et de senteurs amoureuses; puis sur la bouche, qui s'était ouverte pour le mensonge, qui avait gémi d'orgueil et crié dans la luxure; puis sur les mains, qui se delectaient au contacts suaves, et enfin sur la plante des pieds, si rapides autrefois quand elle courait à l'assouvissance de ses désirs et qui maintenant ne marcheraient plus."

Charles Baudelaire was born April 9th, 1821, in la rue Saint Augustin, 8; he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice. His father, François, who had married Mile Janin in 1803, married, after her death, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, born in London, September 27th, 1793. François Baudelaire's father, named Claude, married Marie-Charlotte Dieu, February 10th, 1738, at Neuville-au-Port, in the Department of Marne.

From 1838 to 1842 (when Baudelaire attains his majority) there is a family crisis in a certainly impossible family circle. These years he spends in vagabonding at his own will: living a deliciously depraved life; diving, perhaps, into depths of impurity; haunting the night resorts that one finds in the most curious quarters of Paris—the cafés, the theatres, la Rue de Bréda. He amuses himself enormously: even in "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame;" he lives then, as always, by his sensitive nerves, by his inexhaustible curiosity. He is devoured then, as always, by the inner fires of his genius and of his sensuality; and is, certainly, a quite naturally immoral man in his relations with women.

He lives, as I have said; he feeds himself on his nerves:

"The modern malady of love is nerves."

It is an incurable, a world-old malady; and, from Catullus, one of the greatest of all poets, century after century, from the Latin poets of the Middle Ages, from the poets of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan Age, down to the modern Romantic Movement, no poet who was a passionate lover of Woman has ever failed to sing for her and against her:

"I hate and I love: you ask me how I can do it?

I know not: I know that it hurts: I am going through it."

Odi et amo; quari id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio; sed fiere sentio, et excrucior. "Caelius, Lesbia mine, that Lesbia, that Lesbia whom Catullus for love did rate Higher than all himself and than all things, stands Now at the cross-roads and the alleys to wait For the lords of Rome, with public lips and hands." Cœli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia, Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam Plus, quàm se, atque suos amavit omnes.

Need I quote more than these three fines? These fines, and those quoted above, are enough to show, for all time, that Catullus was as passionate a lover and as passionate a hater of flesh as Villon. Yet, if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even le grosse Margot from her place in his life; who, to a certainty, had not for one instant the place in his life that Lesbia had in the life of Catullus. Villon was no dabbler in infamy, but one who liked infamous things for their own sake.

Nor must I forget John Donne, whose quality of passion is unique in English poetry—a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of actual violence: his senses speak with unparalleled directness: he can exemplify every motion with an unluxurious explicitness which leaves no doubt of his intentions. He suffers from all the fevers and colds of love; and, in his finest poem—a hate poem—he gives expression to a whole region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out of Catullus, with such intolerable truth:

"When, by thy scorn, O murdress, I am dead,

And that thou thinkest thee free

From all solicitations of me,

Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,

And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see:

Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,

And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,

Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think

Thou call'st for more,

And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;

And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou

Bathed in a cold, quick-silver sweat will lie

A verier ghost than I.

What I will say, I will not tell thee now,

Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,

I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent,

Than by my threatenings rest still innocent."

As for Baudelaire's adventures when he is sent, perhaps against his will, in May, 1841, on a long voyage from Bordeaux to Calcutta, to return to Paris in February, 1843, after six months' travel, it is conjecturable that he might return a changed man. Certainly his imagination found in the East a curious fascination, with an actual reawakening of new instincts; and with that oppressive sense of extreme heat, as intense, I suppose, as in Africa, which makes one suffer, bodily and spiritually, and in ways more extraordinary than those who have never endured those tropical heats can possibly conceive of. There he may have abandoned himself to certain obscure rites that to him might have been an initiation into the cults of the Black Venus. And, with these hot suns, these burning midnoons, these animal passions, the very seductiveness of the nakedness of bronze skin, what can I imagine but this: that they lighted in his veins an intolerable flame, that burned there ardently to the end?

For in his Wagner (1861) he writes: "The radiant ancient Venus, Aphrodite, born of white foam, has not imprudently traversed the horrible darkness of the Middle Ages. She has retired to the depths of a cavern, magnificently lighted by the fires that are not those of the Sun. In her descent under earth, Venus has come near to hell's mouth, and she goes, certainly, to many abominable solemnities, to render homage to the Arch-demon, Prince of the Flesh and Lord of Sin." He finds her in the music where Wagner has created a furious song of the flesh, with an absolute knowledge of what in men is diabolical. "For from the first measures, the nerves vibrate in unison with the melody; one's flesh remembers itself and begins to tremble. Tannhäuser represents the eternal combat between the two principles that have chosen the human heart as battle-field, that is to say, of the flesh with the spirit, of hell with heaven, of Satan with God."

In January, 1843, Baudelaire finds himself in possession of a fortune of seventy-five thousand francs. With his incurable restlessness, his incurable desire of change, he is always moving from one place to another. He takes rooms at Quai de Bethune, 10, Isle-Saint-Louis; rue Vanneau, faubourg Saint-Germain; rue Varenne, quai d'Anjou; Hôtel Pimodan, 17; Hôtel Corneille; Hôtel Folkestone, rue Lafitte; Avenue de la République, 95; rue des Marais-du-Temple, 25; rue Mazarine; rue de Babylone; rue de Seine, 57; rue Pigalle, 60; Hôtel Voltaire, 19 quai Voltaire; rue Beautrellis, 22; Cité d'Orléans, 15; rue d'Angoulême-du-Temple, 18; Hôtel Dieppe, rue d'Amsterdam, 22; rue des Ecuries-d'Artois, 6; rue de Seine, l'Hôtel du Maroc, 35.

With a certain instinct for drawing Baudelaire haunts many painter's studios: Delacroix's, whose genius he discovers, giving him much of his fame, becoming his intimate friend; Manet's, whose genius he also divines and discovers; Daumier's, to whom he attributes "the strange and astonishing qualities of a great genius, sick of genius." So also, from the beginning, Baudelaire's judgments are infallibly right; so also his first book, Le Salon de 1845, has all the insolence of youth and all the certitude of a youth of genius. But his fame is made, that is to say, as an imaginative critic, with Le Salon de 1846; for, after the prelude, the entire book is fascinating, paradoxical, and essentially æsthetical; a wonderful book in which he reveals the mysteries of colour, of form, of design, of technique, and of the enigmas of creative works. Here he elaborates certain of his mature theories, such as his exultant praise—in which he is one with Lamb and with Swinburne; his just disdain, and his grave irony, in which he is one with Swinburne; and, above all, that passionate love of all forms of beauty, at once spiritual and absolute, which is part of the quintessence of his genius.

So, as Swinburne, in the fire of his youthful genius, was the first to praise Baudelaire in English, I quote these sentences of his from an essay on Tennyson and Musset: "I do not mean that the Comédie de la Mort must be ranked with the Imitation of Christ, or that Les Fleurs du Mal should be bound up with The Christian Year. But I do say that no principle of art which does not exclude from its tolerance the masterpieces of Titian can logically or consistently reject the masterpieces of a poet who has paid to one of them the most costly tribute of carven verse, in lines of chiselled ivory with rhymes of ringing gold, that ever was laid by the high priest of one muse on the high altar of another. And I must also maintain my opinion that the pervading note of spiritual tragedy in the brooding verse of Baudelaire dignifies and justifies at all points his treatment of his darkest and strangest subjects. The atmosphere of his work is to the atmosphere of Gautier's as the air of a gas-lit alcove is to the air of the far-flowering meadows that make in April a natural Field of the Cloth of Gold all round the happier poet's native town of Tarbes, radiant as the open scroll of his writings with immeasurable wealth of youth and sunlight and imperishable spring. The sombre starlight under which Baudelaire nursed and cherished the strange melancholy of his tropical home-sickness, with its lurid pageant of gorgeous or of ghastly dreams, was perhaps equidistant from either of these, but assuredly had less in common with the lamplight than the sunshine."

To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, as Villon and his infamous friends did on their wonderful winter nights, "where the wolves live on wind," and where the gallows stands at street corners, ominously, and one sees swing in the wind dead chained men; to haunt the strange streets of cities, to know all the useless and improper and amusing, the moral and the immoral people, who are alone worth knowing; to live, as well as to observe; to be drawn out of the rapid current of life into an exasperating inaction: it is such things as these that make for poetry and for prose. Some make verse out of personal sensations, verse which is half pathological, which is half physiological; some out of colours and scents and crowds and ballets; some out of music, out of the sea's passions; some simply out of rhythms that insist on being used; a few out of the appreciation of the human comedy. The outcome of many experiments, these must pass beyond that stage into the stage of existence.

So, in much of Baudelaire's verse I find not only the exotic (rarely the erotic) but, in the peculiar technique of the lines, certain andante movements, lingering subtleties of sound, colour, and suggestion, with—at times, but never in the excessive sense of Flaubert's—the almost medical curiosity of certain researches into the stuff of dreams, the very fibre of life itself, which, combined, certainly tend to produce a new thing in poetry. A new order of phenomena absorbs his attention, which becomes more and more externalized, more exclusively concerned with the phenomena of the soul, with morbid sensation, with the curiosities of the mind and the senses. Humanity is now apprehended in a more than ever generalized and yet specialized way in its essence, when it becomes, if you will, an abstraction; or, if you will, for the first time purely individual.

In certain poets these have been foiled endeavours; in Baudelaire never: for one must never go beyond the unrealizable, never lose one's intensity of expression, never let go of the central threads of one's spider's web. Still, in regard to certain direct pathological qualities, there is a good deal of this to be found in much of the best poetry—in Poe, in Rossetti, in Swinburne's earlier work, and much in Baudelaire; only all these are moved by a fascination: in Poe for the fantastically inhuman; in Rossetti for the inner life of the imagination, for to him, as Pater said, "life is a crisis at every moment;" in Swinburne for the arduous fulness of intricate harmony, and for the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled abundance.

There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the end of art, but the artist—whether he be Baudelaire or Verlaine— should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is not written by a man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing on impulse, hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he does not remember, in some "close corner of his brain," and exerts the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what it was, and, aiming at much more minor things in the world than pure beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end must be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the purpose which it sought to serve, but by the success or failure in one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a precise consciousness of what he is doing.

To Baudelaire as to Pater there were certain severe tests of the effects made on us by works of genius. In both writers there is a finality of creative criticism. For, to these, all works of art, all forms of human life, were as powers and forces producing pleasurable sensations. One can find them in a gem, a wine, a spoken word, a sudden gesture, in anything, indeed, that strikes vividly or fundamentally the senses, that acts instantaneously on one's perceptive passions. "What," says Pater in his essay on Wordsworth, "are the peculiarities in things and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to others, in an extraordinary way?"

"The ultimate aim of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a critic. Certainly, Baudelaire shared certain of those qualities; indeed, almost all; even, in a sense, logic. His genius was so great, and in its greatness so manysided, that for some studious disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from any possible point of view, have always some of his magic and of his magnetism. The ardour, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute desire to get at the root of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be, will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper; that is to say, those that are most morbid, most fond of imaginative perversities.

Prose, I have said, listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats their speech almost in their own terms. But poetry (it is Baudelaire who says it) "is akin to music through a prosody whose roots plunge deeper in the human soul than any classical theory has defined." Poetry begins where prose ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins sooner. The one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse, out of mere honour towards my material. The farther I can extend my prose, the farther back do I set the limits of verse. The region of poetry will thus be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible chance of any confusion of territory.

Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take King Lear and take Père Goriot. Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose.

So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic."

Jeanne Duval by C. Baudelaire