Charles Baudelaire, His Life

Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.

"It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay —
A perfume swims about your naked breast!

"Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
Bum up these tatters that the beasts have spared!"

Now let us come to Swinburne. If the following verses of "Laus Veneris" in "Ballads and Poems" are not directly derived from Baudelaire, I ask who indeed influenced the young Oxford poet in 1886?

"Me, most forsaken of all souls that fell;
Me, satiated with things insatiable;
Me, for whose sake the extreme hell makes mirth,
Yea, laughter kindles at the heart of hell.

"Alas thy beauty! for thy mouth's sweet sake
My soul is bitter to me, my limbs quake
As water, as the flesh of men that weep,
As their heart's vein whose heart goes nigh to break.

"Ah God, that sleep with flower-sweet finger-tips
Would crush the fruit of death upon my lips;
Ah God, that death would tread the grapes of sleep
And wring their juice upon me as it drips.

"There is no change of cheer for many days,
But change of chimes high up in the air, that sways
Rung by the running fingers of the wind;
And singing sorrows heard on hidden ways."

"I dare not always touch her, lest the kiss
Leave my lips charred. Yea, Lord, a little bliss,
Brief, bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin;
Natheless thou knowest how sweet a thing it is."

The verse of Swinburne is more musical, and has a wider range of imagery. But the passion is the same, the method is the same, and, for those who understand French as a Frenchman understands it, the "atmosphere" fails in the magic intensity that Baudelaire achieves.

This is one single instance. Those who are interested can pursue these comparisons between the two poets for themselves. They will be richly rewarded.

I have mentioned Walter Pater, that great artist in English who may be said to have succeeded Ruskin as the exponent of the most critical and refined thought of our time. When I say that he succeeded Ruskin I do not mean to imply that he has the slightest æsthetic affinity with the author of "Modern Painters." I only speak of him as having had as strong an influence upon later thought as Ruskin had upon his.

Pater was curious of everything in life and Art that offered a new sensation – that should enable men to realise themselves in the completest and most varied way. Baudelaire was certainly not Walter Pater's master in the same degree that he was the master of Swinburne and of Wilde. Yet, none the less certainly, the Frenchman's work made expression possible to the recluse of Oxford.

Hellenic thought, with its dangerous conclusions, was restated by Pater because "Les fleurs du Mal" had paved the way.

Here again, within the compass of a brief essay it is impossible to set forth these contentions in detail. But those who have read Baudelaire, and what Gautier says about him – those who have studied contemporary thought and contemporary literature when Pater began to weave his magical prose – will confirm what is no discovery of mine, but a fact of literature. They will recognise that, in the "Conclusion" of Walter Pater's "Renaissance" the following words could hardly have been written had it not been for the daring expression of the poet whom Frenchmen admit to be second to. Hugo alone.

"The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us – for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

"To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits; for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what otherwise might pass unregarded by us. 'Philosophy is the microscope of thought' The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us." What is this most perfect piece of prose but an expansion of Baudelaire's poem "Correspondances"?

"La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

"Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent,

"Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
– Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

"Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens."

In the temple of night rise vast living pillars, and there those who worship murmur words that man has never yet been able to understand. The worshippers in this temple of night wander through a huge and tangled wood of symbols, while on every side they feel that inexplicable yet friendly eyes regard them.

Far-off and dim long-drawn echoes are heard. They shiver through the forest, coming together in one deep mingled sound like that of a gong. The sound reverberates and dies away.

Vast as the night and more brilliant than the day, colour, sound, sweet odours speak to the worshippers in this temple. They are all infinitely varied. There are sounds as fragrant as childhood itself. There are others as beautiful as the sound of hautbois, and the sound itself is a colour which is like green corn.

The forest is full of magic odours. The odour of amber and incense, the scent of benzoin and musk, the perfumes form themselves into one harmonic chord in which the enraptured senses and that throbbing exaltation which is of the soul, fuse into a triumphant hinting of sense and sound.

If this is not gathering the conflicting claims, bewildering experiences, the entangled interests of modern life into one receptive cistern of the brain where consciousness stands tasting all that comes, then the poem of Baudelaire means nothing, and the beautiful prose of Pater has drawn nothing from it.

"We shall see him no more"; "This is the end of the man and his work" – remarks like these only faintly indicate what was said of Oscar Wilde when he was sent to prison. When Wilde was in prison in 1896 "Salomé" was produced by Lugne Poë at the Théâtre de Louvre in Paris. England was affronted and offended. When the play of "Salomé" was produced in England for the first time it was at a private performance at the New Stage Club. The critics did their best to howl it down. It was as though a ghost, a revenant, had appeared. Meanwhile the play had been produced in Berlin, and from that moment it held the European stage. It ran for a longer consecutive period in Germany than any play by any Englishman – not excepting Shakespeare. Its popularity extended to all countries where it was not prohibited. It was performed throughout Europe, Asia, and America. It was even played in Yiddish … that was the beginning. At the present moment the works of Oscar Wilde are being sold in enormous quantities and in many editions. You can buy "Intentions" or "Dorian Gray" for one shilling. The influence that Oscar Wilde is having upon a generation of readers which has risen since he died is incalculable. Hardly an article in the daily press would be written as it is written if it were not for the posthumous prosperity of the poet whose work has risen like the Phœnix from the ashes of his personal reputation.

It was Baudelaire who provided that attitude towards life which Wilde made his own. Baudelaire gave Wilde – or rather Wilde took from Baudelaire – some of the jewels which the latter had snatched from the classic diadem of Poe.

"And if we grow tired of an antique time, and desire to realise our own age in all its weariness and sin, are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years? Close to your hand lies a little volume, bound in some Nile-green skin that has been powdered with gilded nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory. It is the book that Gautier loved; it is Baudelaire's masterpiece. Open it at that sad madrigal that begins

"'Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
Sois belle! et sois triste!'

and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never worshipped joy. Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures himself; let its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts, and you will become for a moment what he was who wrote it; nay, not for a moment only, but for many barren, moonlit nights and sunless, sterile days will a despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you, and the misery of another gnaw your heart away. Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one of its secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent of strange crimes of which it is guiltless, and to make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never known."

Thus Wilde in "Intentions." It is not an acknowledgment of what he himself owed to Baudelaire, but it is a perfectly phrased, if veiled, recognition of his debt.

The cadences of the "Madrigal Triste" are heard over and over again in the poems of Oscar Wilde. We find them in "True Knowledge," in the "New Remorse," and in "Désespoir."

In the stanzas of the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" there is much that could never have been written had it not been that Wilde was saturated with the sombre melodies of such poems as "Le Vin de l'Assassin," and "Le Vin des Chiffonniers." It was Baudelaire who suggested a literary form in which such things as were said in "Reading Gaol" could be said.

Wilde, in his earlier days, when he was writing that extraordinary poem "The Sphinx," always used to express himself as a great admirer of "Une Charogne." Mr. Sherard, Wilde's biographer, says that in his opinion the poet's admiration for that frightful and distorted work of genius was merely assumed. But Mr. Sherard tells us also that the "Flowers of Evil" exercised a great influence over Wilde's mind during the earlier period of his artistic life. And in the "Sphinx" it is most marked.