The Genius of Baudelaire

The Satanical Vision of the Great Student of Sin

ARTHUR SYMONS

BAUDELAIRE'S genius is Satanical; he has in a sense the vision of Satan. He sees in the past the lusts of the Borgias, the sins and vices of the Renaissance; the rare virtues that flourish like flowers and weeds, in brothels and in garrets. He sees the vanity of the world with finer modern tastes than Solomon; for his imagination is abnormal, and divinely normal. In this age of infamous shames, he has no shame. His flesh endures; his intellect is flawless. He chooses his own pleasures delicately, sensitively, as he gathers his exotic "Fleurs du Mal," in itself a world, neither a "Divina Commedia" nor Une Comedie Humaine, but a world of his own fashioning.

His vividly imaginative passion, with his instincts of inspiration, are aided by a determined will, a self-reserve, an intensity of conception, an implacable insolence, an accurate sense of the exact value of every word. In the Biblical sense he might have said of his own verse: "It is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh." The work, as the man, is subtle, strange, complex, morbid, enigmatical, refined, paradoxical, spiritual, animal. To him a scent means more than a sunset, a perfume more than a flower; the tempting demons more than the unseductive angels. He loves luxury as he loves wine; a picture of Manet's as a woman's fan.

FASCINATED by sin, he is never the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as the Original Sin; he studies sin as he studies evil, with a stern logic; he finds in horror a kind of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; rarely in hideous things, save when his sense of what I call a moralist makes him moralise, as in his terrible poem, "Une Charoque." He has pity for misery, hate for progress. He is analytic, he is a learned casuist; whom I can compare with -the formidable Spanish Jesuit, Thomas Sanchez, who wrote the Latin "Aphorismi Matrimonio" (1629).

His soul swims on music played on no human instrument; but on strings that the Devil pulls, to which certain living puppets dance in grotesque fashions, to unheard of rhythms, to the sound of violins strummed on by evil spirits in Witches' Sabbaths. Some swing in the air, as hanged dead people on gallows, and, astheir bones rattle in the wind, one sees Judas Iscariot, risen out of Hell for an instant's gratification, as he grimaces on these grimacing visages.

"LES Fleurs du Mai" is the most curious, subtle fascinating and extraordinary creation of an entire world ever fashioned in modern ages. Baudelaire paints vice and degradation of the utmost depth, with cynicism and with pity, as in the poem I have referred to, where we are made to feel the sensuality of ascetism, or the ascetism of sensuality: the mania of fakirs; material by passion, Christian by perversity.

And, in a sense, he is our modem Catullus; in his furies, his negations, his outcries, his Paganism, his inconceivable passion for, and interest in the love of woman. Baudelaire in his "Francisca mea Laudes,"—with very little sting but with much sensual sense of the splendor of. sex—gives a magnificent Latin eulogy of a learned and pious modiste, that ends:

Patera gemmis corusca,

Panis salsus, mollis esca,

Divinium vinum, Francisca.

And he praises the decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre les negligence forcees d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des regies."

"Don Juan aux Enfer" is a perfect Delacroix. In "Danse Macabre" there is the universal swing of the dancers who dance the Dance of Death. Death herself, in her extreme horror, ghastly, perfumed with myrrh, mixes her irony with men's insanity as she dances the Sabbat of Pleasure. He shows us the infamous menagerie of the vices in the guise of reptiles; our chief enemy Ennui is ce monstre delicat. There are Vampires, agonies of the damned alive; Le Possede with his excruciating cry out of all his fibres: "O, mon cher Belzbuth, je t'adore!" And there are some, subtler and silent, that seem to move, softly, as the feet of Night, to the sound of faint music, or under the shroud of a sunset.

"Les Fleurs du Mai" are grown in Parisian soil, exotics that have the strange, secretive, haunting touch and taint of the earth's or of the body's corruption. In his sense of beauty, there is a certain revolt, a spiritual malady, which may bring with it the heated air of an alcove or the intoxicating atmosphere of the East. Never since Villon has the love of woman been more adored and abhorred. Both aware of the original sin of "L'unique animal" —the seed of our moral degradation—Villon creates his "Grosse Margot" and Baudelaire "Delphine et Hippolyte." Baudelaire's "Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmiere" is one of the immortal things that exists in the world, that I can compare only with some of Rodin's statues in bronze: both equal incarnations of the symbolical conception that sin brought shame into the first woman's flesh.

CERTAIN of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a lily or an orchid, some the odour of women's hair. Certain spirits are intoxicated by these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of their vices; from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a cruel imagination has fashioned these images of the Seven Deadly Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall. One conceives them there and between the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages: they are incapable of imagining God's mercy and justice.

Baudelaire dramatizes these living images of his spirit and of his imagination, these fabulous creatures of his inspiration, these macabre ghosts, in a fashion utterly different from that of other tragedians—Shakespeare or Aristophanes.

In these pages swarm (in his words) all the corruptions and all the sceptisms; ignoble criminals without convictions, detestable hags that gamble, the cats that are like men's mistresses; Harpagon; the exquisite, barbarous, divine, implacable, mysterious Madonna of the Spanish Style; the old men; the drunkards; the assassins, the lovers (their deaths and lives); the owls; the vampire whose kisses raise from the grave the corpse of its own self. Certain of these creatures play in travesties, dance in ballets. For all the Arts are transformed, transfigured, transplanted out of their natural forms, to pass in magnificent and mysterious state across the stage.

"SENSUALIST," (I quote a critic) "but the most profound of sensualists, and furious of being no more than that, he goes, in his sensation, to the extreme limit, to the mysterious gate of infinity against which he knocks, yet knows not how to open; with rage he contracts his tongue in the vain effort." Yet, centuries before him, Dante entered Hell, traversed it in imagination from its endless beginning to its endless end; returned to earth, to write, for the spirit of Beatrice and for the world, that Divina Commedia, of which in Verona certain women said:— It was Baudelaire who, in hell as in earth, finds a certain Satan in such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essentially demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily, as if the devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets. Here, in such Satanic and Romantic atmosphere, one hears dissonances, the discords of the instruments in the Sabbats, the howlings of irony, the vengeance of the vanquished.

Continued on page 88

Continued from page 49

"Lo, he that strolls to Hell and back At will! Behold him, how Hell's reek Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek''

I give one sentence of Gautier's on Baudelaire. "This poet of 'Les Fleurs du Mai' loved what one. wrongly calls the style of decadence, which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilisations that aged: a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and of rarities, turning forever backward the limits of the language, using technical vocabularies, taking colours from all the palettes, notes from all the keyboards, striving to render one's thought in what is most ineffable."

Yet, tainted as tiie style is from time to time, never was the man himself tainted: he, who in modem verse, gave first of all an unknown taste to sensations; he who painted vice in all its shame; whose most savorous verses are perfumed, as with subtle aromas; whose women are bestial, rouged, sterile, bodies without souls; whose "Litanies de Satan" have that cold heat, which he alone possessed in its extremity, these so-called impious lines which reveal, under whatever disguise, his belief in a mathematical superiority established by God from all eternity and whose least infraction is punished by certain chastisements, in this world as in the next.

I can imagine Baudelaire in his hours of nocturnal terrors, saying to himself these words of Marlowe's Satan: "Why, this is Hell, nor can I out of it!" in accents of eternal despair wrenched from the lips of the Archfiend. And the genius of Baudelaire, I can but think, was as much haunted as Marlowe's, with, in Lamb's words, "a wandering in fields where curiosity is 'forbidden to go, approaching the dark gulf near enough to look in."